Joan Crawford at the Automat

From Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). Alone in the city and down on her luck, Sadie (Joan Crawford) visits the Automat. Click any image for a larger view.

[Unless you have the free time and financial wherewithal to track down an original, this is as close as you’ll ever get to an Automat coffee spigot.]

[Coffee cost a nickel.]

[And the twin spigots dispensed both coffee and cream.]

[Civilization = cup and saucer.]

[I like that lettering. And I like the pedestals. I think that they were still around when I made what I remember as my one and only visit to an Automat, in the early 1980s with my friend Aldo Carrasco.]

This scene comes to a bitter end: Sadie sees a half-eaten piece of pie — food! — and the man who’s leaving it behind crushes out his cigarette in it. Is he nasty, or merely oblivious? Hard to say.


Related reading
All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard)

Thirteen movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

From the Criterion Channel feature Rebels at the Typewriter: Women Screenwriters of the 1930s

Working Girls (dir. Dorothy Azner, 1931). Sisters Mae and Hune (Dorothy Hall and Judith Wood) arrive in New York City, take up residence in a home for homeless young women, and seek work and romance. Paul Lukas plays a scientist in need of a secretary and a wife; Charles “Buddy” Rogers plays a lawyer in love with a socialite — at least for a while he is. Rigid class distinctions, enforced and overcome. Screenplay by Zoë Akins (friend of Willa Cather). ★★★

*

What Price Hollywood? (dir. George Cukor, 1932). The rise of Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) from waitress to movie star, “America’s Pal,” and the fall of Maximilian Carey (Lowell Sherman, who reminds me of Nathan Lane) from witty director to destitute drunk. This movie must have thrilled contemporary audiences with its scenes of work on movie sets. Some remarkable cinematography by Charles Rosher of Sunrise, particularly the desperate montage that comes late in the story. Screenplay by Jane Murfin, Ben Markson, and Allen Rivkin. ★★★★

*

Bed of Roses (dir. Gregory LaCava, 1933). Constance Bennett stars as Lorry Evans, a prostitute on parole who poses as a journalist in order to seduce a wealthy bachelor (Stephen Paige) and get herself set up in her own apartment, sleeping in, yes, a bed adorned with roses. But Lorry’s heart belongs to a lower-level capitalist, a cotton-barge owner (Joel McCrea), to whom she is afraid to reveal her past. A remarkably frank pre-Code story about sexual autonomy and class, with Pert Kelton (the first Alice Kramden) as Lorry’s sidekick and Franklin Pangborn as a floorwalker. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, Gregory LaCava, and Eugene Thackrey. ★★★★

*

Finishing School (dir. George Nicholls Jr. and Wanda Tuchock, 1934). Frances Dee is Virginia Radcliff, of the New York Radcliffs don’t you know, dumped by her mother (Billie Burke) at Crockett Hall Finishing School in New Jersey, where free-spirited roommate Pony (Ginger Rogers) revels in booze, cigarettes, and city weekends with louche Ivy League men. On one of those weekends, meek Virginia meets and falls for Ralph McFarland (Bruce Cabot), an interning doctor and all-around good guy who’s supporting himself as a hotel waiter. The relationship (which includes a night together in a boathouse) meets with the disapproval of mother Radcliff and the witch who runs Crockett (Beulah Bondi), but Virginia rebels, and Ralph tells off the classist authorities with the movie’s best line: “Maybe you don’t realize that the world’s too busy earning its three squares a day to worry about what fork to eat ’em with.” Screenplay by Laird Doyle and Wanda Tuchock. ★★★★

*

Rockabye (dir. George Cukor, 1932). Stage star Judy Carroll (Constance Bennett) is beset by trouble: with a former lover, an adopted toddler, an alcoholic mother, an agent who’s in love with her (Paul Lukas), and a married man she loves (Joel McCrea). A few moments of pre-Code eros, many moments of comedy (mostly via Jobyna Howland as Judy’s mother Snooks) and many moments of great pathos and stoic strength. This movie tears one’s heart out and then plays keepaway with it — just when it seems within reach, it’s gone again. Screenplay by Jane Murfin, from a play by Lucia Bronder. ★★★★

*

Midnight Mary (dir. William A. Wellman, 1933). Loretta Young as Mary Martin, a woman who from her orphan childhood has had nothing but bad breaks, with her life told in one long flashback as she awaits the jury’s verdict in her trial for murder. Ricardo Cortez and Franchot Tone appear as polar-opposite love interests in a pre-Code story full of mayhem and sex. Best scene: the dead body against the rattling door. Screenplay by Anita Loos, Gene Markey, and Kathryn Scola. ★★★★

*

You and Me (dir. Fritz Lang, 1938). A charmingly loopy effort, with Harry Carey is a department-store owner and altruist who employs ex-convicts, among them, one Joe (George Raft), who falls for shopgirl Helen (Sylvia Sidney). All’s well until the old gang wants to bring Joe in on a plan to rob the store. With familiar faces old and new: Roscoe Karns, Barton MacLane, George E. Stone, and a young Bob Cummings, who might have been good for a mystery-actor post, save that he already looks like Bob Cummings. Screenplay by Virginia Van Upp, Norman Krasna, and Jack Moffitt. ★★★★

*

Blondie of the Follies (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1932). Marion Davies stars as Blondie McClune, who rises from a three-generation-crowded Brooklyn apartment to a Broadway career and swank Manhattan digs. There’s one problem: Blondie and her best pal Lottie Callahan (Billie Dove) are both after the same fellow, Larry Belmont (Robert Montgomery), and as with Betty and Veronica, the rivalry goes on and on and on, and on. Weirdest moment, Davies and Jimmy Durante spoofing Grand Hotel (which Goulding directed). Screenplay by Frances Marion, Anita Loos, and Ralph Spence. ★★

*

Hold Your Man (dir. Sam Wood, 1933). Ruby (Jean Harlow) and Eddie (Clark Gable) meet when he ducks into her apartment and bathtub to avoid the cops. Ruby and Eddie are instantly attracted to one another, though many complications will follow, and Ruby will be sent off to a reformatory before the story comes to its end. Wildly funny, with poignant moments, slaps and punches, and plenty of snappy dialogue: “I got two rules I always stick to when I’m out visitin’: keep away from couches, and stay on your feet.” Screenplay by Anita Loos and Howard Emmett Rogers. ★★★★

*

Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). “Every gal has her price, and mine’s high”: so says Sadie McKee (Joan Crawford), daughter of a maid to wealthy business owners, one of whom, lawyer Michael (Franchot Tone) has been Sadie’s pal from childhood. When Michael fires Sadie’s boyfriend Tommy (Gene Raymond), the young couple flee to New York City, where many challenges await. Wealth comes back into the picture when Sadie meets the kind, shambling alcoholic Brennan (Edward Arnold, in a brilliant performance), but the lasting images in this movie are of deprivation and want: a miserable furnished room for rent, an abandoned piece of Automat pie rendered inedible with a cigarette butt. Screenplay by John Meehan, Viña Delmar, and Carey Wilson. ★★★★

*

Hallelujah (dir. King Vidor, 1929). An all-Black cast in a story of transgression and redemption: Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes, in a role meant for Paul Robeson), the oldest son in a family of sharecroppers, falls in with bad company in the form of Chick (Nina Mae McKinney), shoots his own brother in a barroom fracas, and finds redemption as the preacher Brother Ezekiel — though only for a while. As a story, it’s hackneyed, full of stereotypes and improbability (two stars), but as a record of folk forms on film and with sound, it’s invaluable (four stars): we see dancing, dicing, praying, preaching, mourning, and baptisms. The best scene: the train to hell. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, Richard Schayer, and Ransom Rideout. ★★/★★★★

*

Tugboat Annie (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery are Annie and Terry, operators of the tugboat Narcissus; she, a dedicated captain; he, a hapless alcoholic. Their son Alec (Robert Young) grows up to be a dashing young captain, engaged to the pretty cipher Pat (Maureen O’Sullivan). The comedy here is very thin — seeing someone drink hair tonic and stumble just isn’t funny — but the movie is partly redeemed by an exciting ending, when a storm rages and Terry risks his life to make repairs to the Narcissus. Screenplay by Norman Reilly Raine, Zelda Sears, and Eve Greene. ★★

*

Dinner at Eight (dir. George Cukor, 1933). It’s a big picture, à la Grand Hotel: “MORE STARS THAN HAVE EVER BEEN IN ANY PICTURE BEFORE,” screamed an advertisement, with John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Billie Burke, Marie Dressier, Jean Harlow, and many others on hand. But I found it dreadfully dull: a strained, stagey examination of the problems of the rich and the formerly rich, with some bright moments from John Barrymore, Dressler, and Harlow. Sometimes I felt that I was watching a 111-minute-long New Yorker cartoon: “I particularly wanted the aspic — it’s so dressy!” Screenplay by Frances Marion, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and George S. Kaufman. ★★

*

The other movies in this feature: ‌Back Street (dir. John M. Stahl, 1932), Make Way for Tomorrow (dir. Leo McCarey, 1937), and Red-Headed Woman (dir. Jack Conway, 1932). I’ve seen and can recommend them all. Make Way for Tomorrow is the movie that Orson Welles said “would make a stone cry.”

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Some Automats

[155 W. 33rd Street, 250 W. 42nd Street, 611 W. 181st Street, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click any image for a much, much, much larger view.]

There are thirty-eight Horn and Hardart Automats in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory. This has been some of them.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[“There are thirty-eight”: I’m channeling The Naked City and Naked City. There were also eighteen Horn and Hardart retail outlets in Manhattan, one Automat and two retail outlets in Brooklyn, eight retail outlets in the Bronx, and “some” (three) retail outlets in Queens.]

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVD, HBO Max, TCM, YouTube.]

The Glass Key (dir. Stuart Heisler, 1942). Gangsters and politicians compete for power in an unnamed American city. I like all the principals — Brian Donlevy, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake — but I didn’t like the movie, which mixes gangsters and politicians with an improbable love story. I appreciated two unusually vulgar moments of spitting: once on a carpeted floor, once into a sink after toothbrushing (you don’t see much of that in ’40s movies). Look for Margaret Hayes (the lonely seductress of The Blackboard Jungle) as a lonely seductress. ★★ (CC)

*

City of Fear (dir. Irving Lerner, 1959). I’d think of it as a low-key Kiss Me Deadly. Here “the great whatsit” is a container of Cobalt-60 in the hands of an escaped con (Vince Edwards) who thinks he’s holding a million dollars’ worth of heroin. Much attention to police procedure and technology, with Lyle Talbot, some interchangeable detectives, and Geiger counters. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard, editing by Robert Lawrence, and a score by Jerry Goldsmith add considerable value to a predictable story. ★★★ (YT)

*

Dust Be My Destiny (dir. Lewis Seiler, 1939). Good Warner Brothers stuff that looks forward to They Live by Night. John Garfield and Priscilla Lane play a couple on the run: he’s a fugitive who didn’t kill the boss at a work farm; she’s the boss’s daughter. As one would expect, the movie’s sympathies are with the runaways. Henry Armetta adds considerable humanity to the story as a café owner who’s willing to protect a young couple from the law. ★★★ (CC)

*

The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946). I’d encourage anyone who hasn’t watched it not to fall for the claim that it’s a tidy, sentimentalized story of homecoming from the Second World War. To the contrary: the movie presents the struggles of returning veterans with great frankness and pathos, examining alcoholism, infidelity, fear of intimacy, meager employment opportunities, physical disability, and post-traumatic stress. Every time I watch I notice a detail I’ve missed: this time it was drugstore clerk Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) ducking as a toy plane flies through the store and Peggy Stephenson (Teresa Wright) catches it. The plane provides a nice way for Fred and Peggy to meet cute, but now I wonder if we’re meant to see Fred’s response as that of a bombardier who’s seen one too many enemy planes coming at him. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Seconds (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1966). This extraordinary film, which we’d never heard of until Elaine noticed it at the Criterion Channel, is unmistakably from the director of The Manchurian Candidate. Briefly: a mysterious company has developed procedures to allow tired, disaffected middle-aged men to fake their deaths and gain new (second) lives, with new faces, new fingerprints, and new identities. It’s the American male dream of freedom from responsibility, as described by a company executive: “In short, you are alone in the world, absolved of all responsibility except to your own interest.” Starring Rock Hudson and Salome Jens, and filmed in sinister black and white by James Wong Howe. ★★★★ (CC)

[A bit of lore: Seconds is the movie that freaked out Brian Wilson when he entered a showing late and heard a character say “Come in, Mr. Wilson.”]

*

Y tu mamá también (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2001). It’s like an Almodóvar movie with another director. A great road movie, with Julio and Tenoch, two male adolescents (Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna) inviting an attractive young married woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdú), on a trip to Boca del Cielo (Heaven’s Mouth), a non-existent beach (Luisa’s husband is away). The three protagonists test the boundaries of friendship and sexuality, with moments of awkward intimacy, pleasure, and recrimination. Watching the movie a second time, I understand the narrator’s role more clearly: he’s an all-knowing voice that sees the present moment in a much larger context, and I’m afraid that’s all I can say. ★★★★ (DVD)

*

Beyond This Place, aka Web of Evidence (dir. Jack Cardiff, 1959). A father-son romp in a park, then a scene from Liverpool during the Blitz, and then twenty years later, the boy of that first scene, Paul Mathry (Van Johnson), has returned to Liverpool from the States. And the question to answer: what became of his father Patrick (Bernard Lee, 007’s “M”)? A darkly quiet story of research and love, both familial and romantic. Lee and Vera Miles (as Lena Anderson) turn in great performances. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Night People (dir. Nunnally Johnson, 1954). A GI is kidnapped from postwar Berlin and held to be traded for two West Berliners — and I can’t help but think of Brittney Griner’s plight. The plot becomes tricky, but I found little excitement or suspense in its unfolding. Gregory Peck and Broderick Crawford are one-dimensional here: Peck as the mumbly lieutenant colonel in charge of the American zone; Broderick Crawford as the GI’s angry well-connected father. The title is misleading: there’s little noir in this CinemaScope production. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Automat (dir. Lisa Hurwitz, 2021). Long before its invention, the slogan “All Are Welcome” might have served as the motto of Horn and Hardart’s Automats, which served wonderful food to all comers for a handful of nickels. This deeply appreciative non-ironic documentary tells the story of the Automat’s rise and fall, as urbanites left for the suburbs and the restaurants grew emptier at dinnertime and on weekends. With a fine array of nostalgic eaters, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell, and Mel Brooks, who describes the restaurants as “insane centers of paradise.” I ate at an Automat just once, in the 1980s, with my friend Aldo Carrasco, probably after a visit to the Gotham Book Mart, probably just pie and coffee — and I didn’t know enough to appreciate the place (which was, I admit, depressing), and now I wish I had had a meal, including creamed spinach. ★★★★ (HBO)


*

The Tattered Dress (dir. Jack Arnold, 1957). James Blane (Jeff Chandler), a “New York lawyer” known for representing mobsters, comes to a Nevada town to defend a wealthy man charged with murdering the star athlete with whom his wife was having an affair. When the jury votes for acquittal, the local sheriff (Jack Carson), a friend of the murdered man, decides to exact revenge. Chandler does well as a suave servant of wealth, and Elaine Stewart as the philandering spouse adds more than a touch of lurid glamor. But the real star of the movie is Jack Carson, playing against type, and his easy cheerfulness marks his character as a true sociopath. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Screaming Mimi (dir. Gerd Oswald, 1958). Anita Ekberg stars as a dancer under the spell of a mad psychiatrist. We see her solo act, with ropes and chains and much writhing, twice, in a club called the El Madhouse, run by Gypsy Rose Lee. Nothing about this film makes sense: the background music is recycled from Leonard Bernstein’s score for On the Waterfront, and the Red Norvo Trio, another El Madhouse act, billed as a trio, is in fact a quartet. Preposterous film noir, with a star added for Burnett Guffey’s excellent cinematography.★★ (YT)

*

The Long Haul (dir. Ken Hughes, 1957). Post-WWII Liverpool, with Victor Mature as Harry Miller, an American ex-serviceman driving long-distance truck routes for his British wife’s uncle. Harry’s wife Connie (Gene Anderson) is cold and critical, and Harry falls into a relationship with Lynn (Diana Dors), the girlfriend of Joe Easy (Patrick Allen), the Johnny Friendly-like head of a trucking company and criminal enterprise. A long sequence devoted to getting a truckload of stolen furs across dangerous terrain is as suspenseful in its own way as the struggles in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear. Mature and Dors are terrific, the one conflicted, the other desperate, in a movie that is, finally, in unexpected ways, about loss and betrayal and forgiveness. ★★★★ (YT)

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)

The Automat on TCM

Lisa Hurwitz’s documentary The Automat (2021) airs on TCM, November 22, in the company of several movies with Automat scenes. The Automat is also now streaming at HBO Max.

The documentary is deep nostalgia, and it makes me feel grateful to have eaten at the Automat, even if only once, even if it was only coffee and a piece of cake or pie, even if the place was wildly depressing — nearly empty, with a few old people sitting alone at tables.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard)

[The documentary cites the rise of Chock full o’Nuts as one factor in the Automat’s decline and fall.]

An Automat ad

A ghost ad in the Garment District.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard)

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, TCM, YouTube.]

Five Easy Pieces (dir. Bob Rafelson, 1970). Jack Nicholson plays Robert Dupea, an oil-rig worker who visits the family compound, a Chekhovian world of classical music and idleness. Robert once studied piano — thus the title — but now finds himself alienated from his family’s high-minded pursuits, alienated from his Tammy Wynette-singing girlfriend (Karen Black), alienated from everyone. I think watching movies mostly from the 1940s and ’50s makes me an unfit audience for this one. With Karen Black, Lois Smith, and Ralph Waite. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Without Warning! (dir. Arnold Laven, 1952). Adam Williams (Valerian in North by Northwest ) plays an unassuming gardener who kills blonde women with garden shears. Much better than that grim synopsis might suggest, with stylish cinematography by Joseph F. Biroc, a fresh-sounding score by Herschel Burke Gilbert, and great location shots of Chavez Ravine and the Los Angeles River. Though the outcome is never in doubt, there’s genuine suspense as the story nears its end. One great unnecessary bit: the lab analyst preparing coffee. ★★★ (YT)

*

Conflict (dir. Curtis Bernhardt, 1945). I was surprised to see this title — a Humphrey Bogart movie I’d never heard of. Deeply weird and disturbing, with Bogart as Richard Mason, an unhappily married man openly pining for his wife’s sister (Alexis Smith). Mason kills his wife (Rose Hobart) — or thinks he has — but signs that she’s still alive begin to appear — jewelry, a handkerchief, the scent of her perfume. With Sydney Greenstreet as a jovial bachelor psychologist. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Janes (dir. Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes, 2022). In the pre-Roe world, a small group of Chicago women established “Call Jane,” a service providing safe and affordable (or free) abortions. And the service flourished for years. I learned a lot — especially about how organized crime profited from illegal abortions. I wish that this film weren’t so timely. ★★★★ (HBO)

*

The Gospel of Eureka (dir. Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri, 2018). Eureka Springs, Arkansas is home to an enormous Christ of the Ozarks statue, a summertime Passion Play (both the work of the Christian nationalist and anti-Semite Gerald L.K. Smith, whose views are no longer reflected in the play), and a flourishing LGBTQ community. We see both the play’s cast and drag performers making up and getting in costume, and the filmmakers seem to be trying to convince the viewer that these endeavors are not so different, and that everyone in Eureka Springs just gets along. But basic questions — population size, whether the drag performers live locally and are known to their neighbors, whether they always lip-sync to religious tunes, what Passion Play audiences might say about the LGBQT community, how that community established itself in Eureka Springs, whether anyone ever gets harassed — never get answers. This CNN story does a better job than the documentary. ★★ (CC)

*

21 Days (dir. Basil Dean, 1940). The premise is established with Hitchcockian economy and speed: Larry Durrant (Laurence Olivier), the ne’er-do-well brother of a judge (Leslie Banks, the father in The Man Who Knew Too Much), returns to London and begins a romance with the beautiful Wanda Wallen (Vivien Leigh, who would soon marry Olivier). When a man who claims to be Wanda’s husband shows up, there’s a struggle, the man ends up dead, and Larry is faced with the choice of turning himself in or letting an indigent suspect hang for murder. Larry has twenty-one days in which to decide. “Murder is promises.” ★★★★ (CC)

*

Death in Small Doses (dir. Joseph M. Newman, 1957). The doses: amphetamine, known to truckers (at least in 1957) as bennies, co-pilots, and stay-awakes. Peter Graves plays a federal agent who goes undercover as a novice driver to find the source of distribution in Los Angeles. Romance is in the air at his boarding house (with landlady Mala Powers). Mostly predictable, but the ending took naive me by surprise. Merry Anders has a good turn as a waitress, and Chuck Connors steals the movie as a pill-popping truckdriver. ★★★ (YT)

*

Joy in the Morning (dir. Alex Segal, 1965). From the novel by Betty Smith. Richard Chamberlain and Yvette Mimieux play a young married couple, Carl and Annie, struggling with multiple challenges: jealousy, fear of intimacy, parental disapproval, and the burdens of study and side jobs (Carl is in law school). There’s little chemistry between the principals, and too many exclamations: “Oh, Carl! Carl!” The most compelling character in the movie is Anthony (Donald Davis), a gay florist who befriends Annie and gives her crucial advice about life and love: his story would make a good movie. ★★ (TCM)

*

Abandoned (dir. Joe Newman, 1949). A glib but ultimately earnest reporter, Mark (Dennis O’Keefe), teams up with Paula (Gale Storm), who’s come to Los Angeles to search for her missing sister. Risking great danger, Mark and Paula uncover a baby-selling racket. At times a procedural, with the chief of police (Jeff Chandler) assisting the searchers; at times a noir, with shadowy corners (courtesy of cinematographer William Daniels) and implications of sadistic brutality. Look for Raymond Burr as a sketchy detective. ★★★ (YT)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Noir in Color collection

Desert Fury (dir. Lewis Allen, 1947). A love pentagon, I’d call it, with Mary Astor, Wendell Corey, John Hodiak, Burt Lancaster, and Lizabeth Scott all furious and desiring in the desert. Criterion notes the gay subtext that joins criminal partners Eddie (Hodiak) and Johnny (Corey), but it’s a text, really, written in all caps. Johnny’s account of how he and Eddie got together is an extraordinary thing to appear in 1947: they met in an Automat at two in the morning, and, Johnny says, “I went home with him that night.” The movie though is inert until its last twenty minutes or so, and then the pentagon begins to wobble and spin. ★★

Inferno (dir. Roy Ward Baker, 1953). There is no backstory: we begin with a dissolute millionaire, Donald Whitley Carson III (Robert Ryan), one leg broken, left by his wife Geraldine (Rhonda Fleming) and her lover Joseph Duncan (William Lundigan) to die in the desert. Determined to survive and exact revenge, Carson becomes self-reliant, splinting his leg, fashioning ropes with which to navigate rock formations, discovering a spring, fashioning a crutch, and avoiding discovery by the treacherous couple, who now need to make sure that he’s dead. Every minute of this movie is intensely watchable, and the outcome is never certain. My favorite moment: money in a cabin. ★★★★

[Inferno was a 3-D movie with stereo sound; thus the objects thrown at or falling toward the viewer and the slightly blurred dialogue.]

I Died a Thousand Times (dir. Stuart Heisler, 1955). It’s a scene-by-scene remake of High Sierra (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1941), with Jack Palance and Shelley Winters taking the roles of Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) and Marie Garson (Ida Lupino), and it doesn’t come close to the original. Palance and Winters are fine actors, but the Roy–Marie relationship here lacks the desperation and pathos of the original. (I for one can’t watch Lupino’s final minutes in the original without some added tears.) And there’s too much mambo music: mambo, mambo, mambo. ★★

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)

Automat redux?

The Washington Post wonders if COVID might revive Automat-style dining.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts (Pinboard)

An Automat documentary

The Automat, a documentary film, directed by Lisa Hurwitz. With Mel Brooks, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell, and other fans. Here’s the trailer.

Someday, I hope.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts

How to Automat

Let Richard Conte and Coleen Gray demonstrate:

[From The Sleeping City (dir. George Sherman, 1950). Click any image for a larger view.]

Much of The Sleeping City was filmed at Bellevue Hospital, so I think it’s safe to assume that the setting here is a genuine Automat. Note the array of extras: salt and pepper, sugar, ketchup, mustard (I think), and honey or syrup.

Here’s a spectacular compilation of the Automat on film. It’s missing the scene from That Girl in which Ann Marie (Marlo Thomas) makes ketchup soup in an Automat. But was that a real Automat?

In its heyday, the Automat was all over New York. Advertisements in the 1940 Manhattan telephone directory announce forty-five cafeterias and thirty-two retail shops: “Take home Pies, Cakes, Breads, Rolls, Cooked Foods same as served at Automats. ‘Less Work for Mother.’”

*

Here, thanks to a thoughtful reader, is a menu of sorts in photos. The roll Ann Marie eats indeed resembles the top-right rolls in the first photo.

Related reading
All OCA Automat posts

Lighted squares

Stefan Zweig, Diaries (1931–1940). Trans. from the German by Ediciones 98 (Madrid: Ediciones 98, 2021).

A 1935 visit to New York lets us see Stefan Zweig as a spectator-tourist, visiting Radio City, the Savoy Ballroom, and “a self-service café” — no doubt the Automat. This passage’s description of “a geometric composition of lighted squares” made me think of the miniature cityscape in a 1947 film noir.

Elsewhere the diary entries veer from everyday details — letters, reviews, visits with friends and publishers — to an everpresent dread, as Zweig, the citizen of the world, watches the rise of totalitarianism: “I am sure there’s another coup brewing, and I think it will be successful.”

But I think of what our friend Eva Kor said: “Never give up.”

Related reading
All OCA Zweig posts (Pinboard)

[I’m glad that I got a copy of this book when I did: it has already disappeared from Amazon’s listings. Also available from Ediciones 98, in Spanish: Diarios (1931–1940) and Diarios (1912–1914).]

The last Automat

[Zippy, March 4, 2019.]

The Automat appears again and again in Zippy. Here, type automat into the search box and you’ll see. Today’s strip repurposes art from a 2014 visit to the Dingburg Automat.

I have a vague memory of sitting in an Automat with a friend in the 1980s. And I have a vague nostalgia for the Automat. The Automat appears in a handful of OCA posts.

Automat, archived

[Horn & Hardart Automat Cafeteria. From the NYC Municipal Archives Online Gallery. Click for a larger view.]

There it is, or was, at 1557 Broadway. Convicted Woman, playing next door, was released on January 31, 1940. The Diamond Horseshoe, Billy Rose’s nightclub, advertised on the barely readable sign, could be found in the basement of the Paramount Hotel, around the corner on West 46th.

The Automat appears in a handful of OCA posts. This one has a great photograph of a the Automat sign.

“It’s Automatic”

[Zippy, March 7, 2018.]

Today’s Zippy, “It’s Automatic,” channels a postcard explanation of what to do in a Horn & Hardart Automat. In 2017 Zippy himself was patronizing an Automat.

I have a dim memory of sitting in an Automat with my friend Aldo Carrasco, sometime in the early 1980s, having cake and coffee. Or pie and coffee. Or something. The Automat felt as depressing as hell. I don’t think I knew enough then to appreciate the place.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard) : Automat beverage section : New York, 1964: Automat : One more Automat

Zippy Automat

[Zippy, July 28, 2017.]

Related posts
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
Automat, a 1964 guidebook entry
Automat beverage section
Automat sign, 1943

Ratner’s (Naked City)

[“The Face of the Enemy,” Naked City, January 3, 1962.]

I like the awning: “1½ HOUR FREE PARKING.” Very practical: two hours would be way too much for a meal.

Ratner’s was a celebrated dairy restaurant. That is, no meat:


[From Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964).]

The theater next door was to become the Fillmore East. Here’s a photograph of worlds colliding, or merging.

There are eight million screenshots in the naked city. This has been one of them.

Also from Hart’s Guide
Automat
Chock full o’Nuts
Greenwich Village and coffee house
King Karol Records and The Record Hunter
Le Steak de Paris
Mayflower Coffee Shop(pe)
Minetta Tavern and Monkey Bar
Schrafft’s

How to draw a duck

[Cigarette card, “How to draw a duck without pencil leaving the paper,” c. 1908–1919. From the George Arents Collection, via the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.]

I want to say that it was a simpler time, but I think it was in truth a more complicated time. That’s one elaborate duck.

Also from the NYPL Gallery
A 1914 telephone call : The Automat : Benny Goodman : A cigarette card of mystery : Inspector Bucket : Invisible ink : The NYPL Stereograminator : Whelan’s Drug Store

Telegram (Easy Living)

A telegram, as seen in Easy Living (dir. Mitchell Leisen, 1937). You either find this sort of thing inspired and funny or you don’t. I do. Easy Living has a great Automat scene with Jean Arthur and Ray Milland. The screenplay is by Preston Sturges.

Thanks to Paul Harrington for recommending this film.

Related posts
Automat beverage section
How to send telegrams
“Lunch Hour NYC”
New York, 1964: Automat
One more Automat

[725 West 112th Street? Somewhere in the Hudson River.]

New York in fifty objects

From the New York Times, a history of New York in fifty objects. No I♥NY logo, no subway token, but many welcome choices, including the Anthora and the Automat.

September 25, 2012: The Times has added fifteen more, including the subway token.

One more Automat

[“Horn & Harda[r]t’s Automat sign blacked out re New York City’s ‘browned out’ or dimmed lights, a wartime defensive measure against enemy attack.” Photograph by Andreas Feininger. New York, New York, 1943. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Other Automat posts
Automat beverage section
“Lunch Hour NYC”
New York, 1964: Automat