Eleven movies, one series

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Classic Film Time, Criterion Channel, DVD, Max, a theater (imagine!), YouTube.]

The House of Fear (dir. Roy William Neill, 1945). Sherlock Holmes (Basil Rathbone) and Doctor Watson (Nigel Bruce) are off to Scotland to investigate the strange doings at Drearcliffe House, the castle home of seven unmarried men who call themselves the Good Comrades. One by one they’re being killed, each receiving an envelope containing orange seeds — seven, then six, and so on. I always find the logic at work in a Holmes story hilariously improbable. And I must wonder how useful Holmes is anyway: his presence at Drearcliffe does nothing to prevent the Comrades from being knocked off one by one though no one seems to have a problem with that. ★★ (YT)

*

He Who Dances on Wood (dir. Jessica Beshir, 2016). A short portrait of Fred Nelson, a man who tap dances on a wooden slab under a Central Park bridge. (He likes the sound.) A lovely portrait of a man for all seasons (literally, dancing in all weathers), doing what he does for the happiness of it, no money invited. Here is the Manhattan I’d like to visit again. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Hair Wolf (dir. Mariama Diallo, 2018). A satiric commentary on cultural appropriation, with white women coming to a Black salon in search of dreads. The twist: the women are quasi-zombies, sucking the life out of Black culture. What’s a stylist to do? Another of the many short, easy-to-overlook movies at the Criterion Channel, and one that won a host of awards. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Daughter of Darkness (dir. Lance Comfort, 1948). Emily (Siobhan McKenna) is a meek, virginal Irish servant-girl working on an English family’s farm. But she has a past — and when that past shows up in England, murder is in the air. A spectacularly creepy Gothic story, with a burning barn, a church organ playing in the middle of the night, and a vicious dog wandering in the rain. Look for Honor Blackman (Goldfinger ) as a farm daughter. (CFT) ★★★★

*

The Man in Grey (dir. Leslie Arliss, 1943). It’s a Gainsborough melodrama, beginning in a London auction house in 1943 and moving back to the nineteenth century to tell the story of two girlhood friends, Hesther and Clarissa (Margaret Lockwood and Phyllis Calvert), the first of whom runs away from school for love, the second of whom enters into a loveless marriage with “the man in grey” (as a portrait will depict him), the Marquess of Rohan (James Mason), who was seeking a partner to serve as his “brood sow.” A fortune teller warned Clarissa in girlhood not to trust in the friendship of women, but when she and Hesther cross paths in adulthood at a performance of Othello (Hesther playing Desdemona to Stewart Granger’s Othello), the friendship is rekindled, with complications to follow. A lavish production that moves awfully slowly. Hint: look closely at the actors in the opening auction-house scene. ★★★ (CC)

*

The Violent Years (dir. William Morgan, 1956). A quartet of high-school girls start by robbing gas stations, and things get much worse from there. The screenplay is by Ed Wood, which helps explain the heavyhanded screenplay (a judge lecturing parents) and general weirdness (the scene with the couple in the car). As a movie, it’s hilariously bad, so bad that as trash cinema, it deserves four stars, one for each villainess. My favorite line: “These aren’t kids; these are morons.” ★★★★ (YT)

*

Tender Comrade (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1943). Four defense-plant workers with husbands and a son in military service pool their resources to rent a house and pay a live-in housekeeper (a German immigrant whose husband, too, is also fighting the Nazis). Ginger Rogers and Robert Ryan star, with Madys Christians, Patricia Collinge, Kim Hunter, and Ruth Hussey as the house’s other occupants. Highly uneven, with hokey dialogue, stretches of dismal propaganda, and moments of utter pathos — and I shudder to think how the moments of pathos must have struck audiences in 1943. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, with a title not from Communism but from Robert Louis Stevenson. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Song of Love (dir. Clarence Brown, 1947). A love triangle with music: Robert Schumann (Paul Henreid), Clara Schumann (Katharine Hepburn), and Johannes Brahms (Robert Walker). Great music (with Arthur Rubinstein filling in at the piano), great costumes and sets. It’s difficult for me to imagine the emotions on display here making the right impression on at least some 2024 moviegoers (I recall some of my students laughing during the Homer-Wilma bedroom scene in The Best Years of Our Lives.) A great thing about this movie: it manages to suggest — on film — the magic that sometimes happens with live performance, as when Clara plays a final “Träumerei.” ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Wes Ball, 2024). An extended struggle between rival ape clans, with the occasional human being to complicate matters. So many overtones: from the Iliad, with the cry “For Caesar” echoing “For Patroclus,” to On the Waterfront, with a hero battered as his comrades look on. Visually stunning, incoherent at times, far too long, and screaming sequel as it ends. The best scene, for me: not one of the many spectacular chases or fights but the discovery of the reading primer. ★★★ (T)

*

The Walls Came Tumbling Down (dir. Lothar Mendes, 1946). It’s The Maltese Falcon on the cheap. A priest dies, and a newspaper columnist (Lee Bowman), a semi-mysterious woman (Marguerite Chapman), and several bad guys (George Macready) search for the Bibles that hold the answer to the whereabouts of a missing Leonardo painting of Joshua at the battle of Jericho. Yet another movie billed as film noir in which everything is bright as day. One surprising plus: the use of a dictionary to disarm a gunman. ★★★ (YT)

*

Mind Over Murder (dir. Nanfu Wang, 2022). A six-part documentary series about the Beatrice (Nebraska) Six, three men and three women wrongly convicted in 1989 of the rape and murder of an elderly widow, Helen Wilson. Five of the six charged believed that they had participated. The story that unfolds features a self-styled local hero, a sheriff’s department psychologist, a craven district attorney, a shoddy laboratory analyst, the six men and women convicted, and family members of the victim. What most struck me: a dramatization of the case, staged by a community theater group with a script drawn from official transcripts, seems at first an unnecessary distraction, but it proves to be the emotional high point of the movie, a living lesson in the power of tragic drama to produce catharsis. ★★★★ (M)

*

Crashout (dir. Lewis R. Foster, 1955). An ensemble movie, with a motley group of escaped convicts, the six of thirty-eight who have survived a prison break: an autocratic leader (William Bendix), a wise guy (Arthur Kennedy), a religious fanatic (William Talman), a self-styled ladies’ man (Luther Adler), a basic brute (Gene Evans), and a younger man convicted of murder for what he says was an accident (Marshall Thompson). Their travels — away from prison, but never to true freedom — bring them into contact with a country doctor (Percy Helton), roadhouse denizens, cops, a railroad conductor, and two women who complicate their lives, a failed music student (Gloria Talbott), and a farm woman (Barbara Michaels) with a child out of wedlock. It’s a brutal movie, even by modern standards, and never less than compelling. My favorite scene: the train, with sandwiches. ★★★★ (YT)

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

Word of the day: ekphrasis

The word of the day at Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day is ekphrasis: “A description of or commentary on a work of visual art.”

I’ll borrow Merriam-Webster’s etymology:

borrowed from New Latin ecphrasis, borrowed from Greek ékphrasis “description,” from ekphrad-, stem of ekphrázein “to tell over, recount, describe” (from ek- EC- + phrázein “to point out, show, tell, explain,” of uncertain origin) + -sis -SIS .

I recall sitting in an NEH seminar and being told that if one wanted to befuddle colleagues, all that was necessary was to speak the word ekphrasis. Well, maybe. I’m not so sure. At any rate, the idea of ekphrasis is hardly obscure. Think of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Or Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Or back to the beginning: Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield, which you might want to seek out on your own (Iliad 18).

Related posts
Art into words : Erasmus ekphrasis : Robert Walser, Looking at Pictures

Fish and Florida

The New York Times reports that academics — at least those who are able — are fleeing Florida (gift link).

But guess who’s signed up to teach at Florida’s New College: Stanley Fish. Len Gutkin of the The Chronicle of Higher Education asked him about it. A sample:

Given how controversial New College is, why do you want to teach there now?

Well, the simple nitty gritty reason is that I’m 85 years old, and someone who asks me to teach courses is a godsend. So I responded affirmatively.

Do you worry at all that, given that something like a third of faculty members have left New College following the new administration, you’ll be taken to be making a statement about New College or about DeSantis?

Taken by whom?

Observers in academe who might feel that your prominence as a scholar and an administrator is being used to ratify the political project that New College has become.

Yeah, I can see that as a possible way of viewing this appointment. But such matters go under the general category of consequences that I can neither predict nor control. What I can control is the kind of teaching I do, and of course I wouldn’t want to get engaged in a classroom experience if I felt that that classroom was being monitored for political or ideological reasons. But I’ve had no hint of any such monitoring in my discussions.

Russell Jacoby’s 2013 take on Stanley Fish still holds: “He has always bravely defended self-interest. With friends like him, the humanities needs no enemies.”

The Chronicle interview contains many remarkable statements. Just one: Fish, who cheerfully admits that he long ago forgot whatever Greek he learned, claims that at Ralston University, the start-up “traditional” college he’s associated with, students with just six months of Greek were reading — and discussing — the Iliad in Greek. Gutkin, who studied Greek as an undergrad, says that seems “almost impossible.”

No, no, says Fish. The discussion, he claims, “was very precise about details of the verse and how it worked, and how various words interacted with one another or were opposed to one another.” But wait a minute, wait a minute:

How did you know, if it was in Greek?

Oh, I could tell that much. There’s a certain kind of gesturing with respect to texts that is known to any of us who have worked with texts for a while.

I am now thinking about a certain kind of gesturing.

Two more Fish posts
Fish on Strunk and White : Review of Fish’s How to Write a Sentence

[Fish was previously the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law at Florida International University.]

Veterans Day

The Great War ended on November 11, 1918. Armistice Day was observed the next year. In the United Kingdom Armistice Day is now Remembrance Day. In the United States, Armistice Day is now Veterans Day.

In 1923 Armistice Day fell on a Sunday.

[“A Woman’s Plea.” Brooklyn Standard Union, November 10, 1923.]

Like Lysistrata, the speaker of these words reverses Hector’s declaration in Iliad 6: war shall be — already is — the concern of women. The key passage, if the text above is difficult to read:

Nations to-day still compete in preparing for war. Not only is war a bitter fruit of the tree of violence and hate but also a root which strikes deep down into the soil of a competitive and unfriendly world.

In this world-problem and world-task none are more deeply concerned than women. It is we who supremely suffer and mourn when wars rage and sudden death destroys our youth.

But we are not without hope.

Followed by a plea for letters urging that the United States join the Permanent Court of International Justice, also known as the World Court. The United States never did.

[Hector to his wife Andromache: “War is the work of men, / Of all the Trojan men, and mine especially” (trans. Stanley Lombardo, 1997.]

Eleven movies, one series

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

Flaxy Martin (dir. Richard L. Bare, 1949). A lawyer, Walter Colby (Zachary Scott), serves a crime boss and falls for his girlfriend Flaxy (Virginia Mayo), with many complications ensuing. Flaxy is missing for much of the movie, literally out of the picture, as Walter spends time in the company of, and for a while handcuffed to, plucky librarian Nora Carson (Dorothy Malone). As in The Best Years of Our Lives and White Heat, Mayo is a long way from light comedy, and she does very well. Watch for Elisha Cook Jr. as a cliché-spouting gunman and Tom D’Andrea (the goldfish-soliloquy cabbie in Dark Passage) as a mechanic who appears to live in his garage. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Black Glove, aka Face the Music (dir. Terence Fisher, 1954). Alex Nichol plays an American jazz trumpeter touring England. When a singer he’s just met (Ann Haslip) is murdered, he finds himself the prime suspect. Musically, things are off here: our hero steps into someone else’s rehearsal, begins blowing, uninvited, at top volume, and everyone’s cool with that. And the police appear to be cool with leaving him to solve the crime himself. ★★ (YT)

*

The Big Caper (dir. Robert Stevens, 1957). If you’re a crime boss (James Gregory) looking to pull off a payroll heist, what do you do? Why, of course: have an underling (Rory Calhoun) and your own girl (Mary Costa) pose as a married couple buying a gas station in the town where the heist is to take place. What results is a surprisingly good movie with Asphalt Jungle overtones (and Florenz Ames as a Sam Jaffe-like safecracker). Best scenes: the “couple” at home and at a barbecue, talking with neighbors and pretending to be ordinary suburbanites. ★★★ (YT)

*

Bullets for O’Hara (dir. William K. Howard, 1941). We watched thinking that this movie might have been Anthony Quinn’s first, but he had already appeared in thirty of ’em (he’s up to third billing here). Completely forgettable, aside from the ridiculous premise: a newly married man robs his wife’s wealthy friends before revealing to her that he’s a gangster. A police detective then hatches a plot. Quinn has something of a Mike Mazurki vibe here — there’s no sign of what would come later in his career. ★★ (TCM)

*

Godland (dir. Hlynur Pálmason, 2022). A new movie, streaming at Criterion, so I know I’m supposed to like it, and I did, to a point. This story of a young (presumably Lutheran) priest traveling from Denmark to and across Iceland to serve a village is visually compelling: Maria von Hausswolff’s cinematography held my attention at every moment of the movie’s 142 minutes. The themes in play are hard to miss: faith and doubt, impermanence, selfhood and community, a beautiful and unforgiving natural world, the languages of colonizer and colonized (it’s the nineteenth century, and Iceland was under Danish rule). But characterization and plot are thin, and when I learned that the title Godland is a distortion of the movie’s Danish and Icelandic titles, and that the photographs described in the preamble are a fiction, I felt at least slightly cheated. ★★★ (CC)

[Vanskabte land (Danish): Disfigured land. Volaða land: Volcanic land? Volatile land? Miserable land?]

*

Paris Underground, aka Madame Pimpernel (dir. Gregory Ratoff, 1945). Just a few minutes in, and this movie was acing the Bechdel test. It’s Paris, 1940, and two friends have fled Paris: Constance Bennett is an indolent American, Kitty de Mornay; Gracie Fields is her stout-hearted English friend Emmeline Quayle. Their plans change with the discovery of a downed British pilot. Based on Etta Shiber’s memoir Paris Underground, with strong touches of Hitchcockian comedy. ★★★★ (YT)

*

A four-part series

Merpeople (dir. Cynthia Wade, 2023). In a memoir of life with agoraphobia, Allen Shawn writes that the world needs all kinds of people: athletes, philosophers, sex symbols, and worriers, people ”who can design air conditioners” and people ”who can inspire joy.” So I suppose it must need people who want to perform as professional mermaids and mermen — the audiences on view in this documentary series certainly appear to be happy. As do the performers, all of whom have chosen a life of burning eyes, meager pay, ungainly fish bodies (pulled into place with the help of personal lubricant), and the constant danger of hypothermia (the mantra “No dead mermaids” runs through the series). The Blixunami, the Mertailor, and Sparkles are three of the more compelling personalities here. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s British Noir feature

It Always Rains on Sunday (dir. Robert Hamer, 1947). An extraordinary piece of filmmaking about family life and its discontents in London’s East End: Rose Sandigate, a former barmaid, now a wife and stepmother (Googie Withers), two resentful stepdaughters, one son, and a kind but obtuse husband (Edward Chapman) who seems more interested in darts than in his wife. Other families and complications abound in this world of crime, poverty, and seduction. Into the uneasy Sandigate situation comes a man from the past, an escaped convict (John McCallum) whom Rose once loved — it’s a bit like a lower-class Brief Encounter, compressed to a single day but moving to a very different end. Don’t miss the closing credits: they tell an interesting story. ★★★★

Pool of London (dir. Basil Dearden, 1951). Merchant seamen, one American, one Jamaican (Bonar Colleano, Earl Cameron) on a weekend’s shore leave in London. Minor and major crime, an interracial almost-relationship (Cameron and Susan Shaw), and a gripping chase to end the story. But until that chase, the movie meanders. Filmed on location, and looking as if it took inspiration from It Always Rains and Naked City. ★★★

Yield to the Night (dir. J. Lee Thompson, 1956). A movie with a title from Homer (Iliad 7, when a herald urges Ajax and Hector to cease their single combat), a recitation of “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now,” and Diana Dors as a murderer awaiting execution: I’m there. Having seen Man Bait and The Long Haul, I knew that Dors was a highly capable actor, and this movie must be her finest moment, as we watch her character change from platinum-haired glamour girl (scenes in flashback) to a glassy-eyed, pallid woman in a prison jumpsuit. The prison scenes are noteworthy for the small kindnesses offered by both the convict and her keepers. The opening credits make a point worth thinking about, with second billing going not to Michael Craig, who plays Dors’s lover, but to Yvonne Mitchell, who plays a prison matron: there’s a clear, albeit one-sided, lesbian subtext here. ★★★★

Hell Drivers (dir. Cy Endfield, 1957). An ex-con (Stanley Baker) takes a job at a trucking firm transporting loads of gravel, with the drivers expected to move at terrifying speed to make their daily quota. The film focuses on corrupt business practices, friendship, romantic love, and male rivalry, with extended and, finally, boring displays of toxic masculinity on the road and in a roadside restaurant — it’s like a cross between On the Waterfront and Rebel Without a Cause. It doesn’t help that the scenes of breakneck driving are so obviously speeded up. With Peggy Cummin, Herbert Lom, Patrick McGoohan, and a young Sean Connery. ★★

[The other films in this feature: All Night Long, Green for Danger, Night and the City, Obsession, Odd Man Out, The Small Back Room, Time Without Pity, The Woman in Question. Our household has already seen them, and they’re all worth seeing.]

*

Showgirls (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1995). It’s the story of an aspiring dancer (Elizabeth Berkley) who professes no formal training, aspires to a career in Las Vegas, and spends much of her screentime naked or barely clothed. Rivalries, friendships, threats, and leering looks from all directions make up the thin, predictable plot, supplemented by copious use of the word “darlin’” and dance sequences that look like debased versions of Metropolis and The Rite of Spring. As a movie, it’s merely bad; as a bad movie, it’s not bad enough to be good. Best/worst scene: the pool, which had us laughing from the moment the electric palm trees light up. As a movie: ★ / As a bad movie: ★★ (CC).

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

Homer in four translations

In The New York Times, Emily Wilson, who has now translated both the Iliad and the Odyssey, writes about four translations of a speech by Hector from Iliad 6.

When I taught Homer and other ancient writers in translation, I was very fond of bringing in multiple versions of a passage. Reading across translations and exploring the source text via the Perseus Digital Library is a great way to get closer to the poetry. When I was preparing to interview the classicist Stanley Lombardo in 2003, I sat in the library with the Lattimore, Fitzgerald, Fagles, and Lombardo translations of the Iliad and Odyssey and the Loeb texts of the poems, scanning every line in each translation for items of possible interest. As the poet said, you can observe a lot by just watching.

*

One point in Wilson’s commentary that complicates things greatly:

Wilson writes that Hector “is a deeply loving father and husband who makes the choice to leave his family to almost-certain enslavement and death” by fighting on the Trojan plain. “His death,” she writes, “will entail his wife’s rape and enslavement, their baby’s violent death and the sack of their city.”

I have to disagree. These events won’t come about because of Hector’s death in battle. They’ll come about because Troy is doomed. As Hector says earlier in his meeting with his wife Andromache in this episode:

Deep in my heart, I know too well
There will come a day when holy Ilion [Troy] will
    perish,
And Priam and the people under Priam’s ash spear.

Hector imagines the pain he will feel — he’ll be alive — as his wife is taken by the Greeks, and as he goes on to say, he hopes to be dead, “the earth heaped up above me,” before it happens.

Related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard) : Aeschylus in three translations : Homer in four translations : More Homer : Sappho in two translations : Virgil in three tranlations : More Virgil

[Lines from the Iliad are in Stanley Lombardo’s translation (1997).]

Twelve movies

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

Big Eyes (dir. Tim Burton, 2014). Amy Adams as the mid-century American artist Margaret Keane, whose husband Walter Keane took credit for her paintings of children with big, sad eyes. The lie, with Margaret complicit, ran for years. Adams gives a great performance as a woman with and without agency, sitting (like Rapunzel) in a locked room, cranking out paintings for which she can take no credit — until she does. As Walter Keane, Christoph Waltz is all charm, deception, desperation, and, finally, rage. ★★★★ (N)

[If you’d like to see the Life magazine article seen in the movie, it’s here.]

*

The Depraved (dir. Paul Dickson, 1957). To say that it’s more than slightly reminiscent of Double Indemnity is no spoiler: you can see where the story is headed from its first minutes. As a U.S. Army captain stationed in England, Robert Arden has the advantage of even looking as bit like Fred MacMurray; as the calm, cool Laura Wilton, Anne Heywood makes a marked contrast to the weird glamour of Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson. The most interesting performances are those of Basil Dignam (nasty, domineering Tom Wilton) and Denis Shaw (an implacable inspector). Only seventy-one minutes, so the thought of murder comes up as soon as the principals meet — there’s no time to lose. ★★★ (YT)

*

Hunted (dir. Charles Crichton, 1952). A man, Chris (Dirk Bogarde), and boy, Robbie (Jon Whiteley), no relation, fleeing London and the authorities, civil and parental. Overtones of Huck and Jim; much stronger overtones of Alfred (Hitchcock), with bumbling policemen, rural innkeepers, and danger in every circumstance. As almost-seven Robbie, Jon Whiteley has little to say, but his silent sorrow and his devotion to Chris are the moral center of the movie. We know what’ll happen to Chris, but what will become of this poor boy? ★★★★ (YT)

*

Room 222, first season (created by James L. Brooks, 1969–1970). I think I owe some explanation of how this viewing effort (twenty-six episodes!) came about: program notes for an orchestral work by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson mentioned that he wrote the Room 222 theme. No, that was Jerry Goldsmith (Perkinson wrote some incidental music for the series), but the mistake was enough to get our household watching. This series was well ahead of its time, depicting life in a multicultural Los Angeles high school and touching on a wide array of topics (though not, at least in this first season, the war in Vietnam): overcrowded classrooms, outdated pedagogy, economic disparity, global warming, the exploitation of college athletes. History teacher Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes), guidance counselor Liz McIntyre (Denise Nicholas), principal Seymour Kaufman (Michael Constantine), student teacher Alice Johnson (Karen Valentine), and student regulars (Heshimu as Jason Allen, Howard Rice as Richie Lane, Judy Strangis as Helen Loomis) make up an earnest, endearing, sometimes contentious, mostly groovy bunch. ★★★★ (YT)

*

A Damsel in Distress (dir. George Stevens, 1937). Story by P.G. Wodehouse, music by George and Ira Gershwin, with Fred Astaire as an American entertainer (what else?) in London. There’s a love interest (Joan Fontaine), who has just one, barely one, dance with Fred. The fireworks kick in when Astaire dances with his press agent and his secretary, George Burns and Gracie Allen, first in a manor house (“Put Me to the Test”), then in a fun house (“Stiff Upper Lip”). The grand finale: “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” with Astaire dancing and playing a drum kit (with both hands and feet). ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Flight That Disappeared (dir.Reginald Le Borg, 1961). “This whole business has a strange, abnormal ring,” says an airline exec. Indeed, it has the feel of a Twlight Zone effort, with a Rod Serling-like nobility of purpose: to warn against the peril of nuclear weapons. The acting is passable; the sets are low-budget; but the story is imaginative, even daring. And now I know that men’s hats went on the shelf above the seats, where the pillows were kept: “May I take your hat?” asks a flight attendant. ★★★ (YT)

*

I’ve Lived Before (dir. Richard Bartlett, 1956). First it’s 1918; then it’s 1931; then it’s modern times: and it’s all about a commercial pilot who’s convinced he’s the reincarnation of a WWI pilot. Jock Mahoney is the pilot; John McIntire is the psychiatrist presiding over his care; their exchanges are soporific. The big flaw: there’s no sense of eerieness here, just too many dull conversations. Ann Harding’s dignified, understated performance as the WWI pilot’s sweetheart walks away with the movie. ★★ (YT)

*

It Happens Every Thursday (dir. Joseph Pevney, 1953). Capraesque comedy: a New York couple, Jane and Bob MacAvoy (Loretta Young and John Forsythe) buy a dinky newspaper in Eden, California, and wouldn’t you know it, lots of things go wrong — one of which is that the press breaks down every Thursday. Jane is plucky and quick-thinking; Bob is hardworking and cheerful. A great number of familiar faces make for an appealing cast: Edgar Buchanan, Jimmy Conlin, Jane Darwell, Gladys George, Frank McHugh, Regis Toomey, Willard Waterman, Eddy Waller (yes, we watch a lot of older movies). I reached a Capracorn breaking point seeing Jane and Bob’s new baby, “Sister,” nestled in an open file cabinet, and I watched in fear that the movie would end with Jane and Bob realizing — gosh! — that they had forgotten to give her a name. ★★★ (YT)

*

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (dir. Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022). A writer and editor, talking about and working out their almost-fifty-year collaboration. Wonderful stuff: a search for a pencil, a search in a margin for the best word, arguments about semicolons, a tower of manuscript pages, a brief discourse about the catalogue of ships in the Iliad (which inspired a passage in The Power Broker ), a visit to the daunting archives of the LBJ Presidential Library, a massive multipage outline thumbtacked to a corkboard that fills a wall. The best moment: writer and editor at work, with mics off — because the work is private. A bonus: music by Olivier and Clare Machon (both formerly of Clare and the Reasons). ★★★★ (YT)

*

Modern Romance (dir. Albert Brooks, 1981). Albert Brooks is Robert Cole, a film editor whose major professional accomplishment in the movie’s 133 minutes is dubbing louder footsteps as George Kennedy runs through the corridor of a spaceship. The movie charts the course of Robert’s relationship with Mary Harvard (Kathryn Harrold), a bank executive who seems to be miles ahead of him in maturity. A funny, sad picture of male insecurity and mistrust. As Elaine wondered, is this what men are really like? ★★★★ (CC)

*

Conspirator (dir. Victor Saville, 1949). It’s like a cross between Jane Austen and Alfred Hitchcock: Melinda Greyton (Elizabeth Taylor), a young American abroad, sits at a London gathering, waiting to be asked to dance; a dashing somewhat older man, Michael Curran (Robert Taylor), a major in the British army, steps into the room; and marriage follows. In the Austen world, that would be the end of the story, but here it’s the beginning, with Melinda’s playful spirit coming up against her husband’s odd absences and unpredictable moments of anger. As the movie’s title suggests, this major harbors a dark secret. Strong overtones of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, with discovery, danger, and a lie to preserve a status quo. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Crime Unlimited (dir. Ralph Ince, 1935). A new recruit to Scotland Yard (Esmond Knight) goes undercover to infiltrate the Maddick gang, jewel thieves flourishing in London. Nothing especially original in the story, but there’s atmosphere abounding, with dark rooms, glaring lights, odd camera angles, a glamorous Russian (Lili Palmer) who may or may not be trustworthy, and a criminal mastermind seen only as a hand over a chessboard. When the mastermind reveals himself, it’s like seeing Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse. But it’s the Hitchcock influence that carries the day and makes the movie watching. ★★★ (TCM)

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

Siren eyes

New directions in makeup: siren eyes. (JSTOR Daily). Good grief.

It’s worth pointing out that in the Odyssey, the seduction of the Sirens has little to do with sexual allure. What the Sirens promise is the full truth of the Trojan War. They claim to know “everything / that the Greeks and Trojans / Suffered in wide Troy.”

Jonathan Shay, in Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002):

In the language of metaphor, Homer shows us that returning veterans face a characteristic peril, a risk of dying from the obsession to know the complete and final truth of what they and the enemy did and suffered in their war and why. In part, this may be another expression of the visceral commandment to keep faith with the dead. Complete and final truth is an unachievable, toxic quest, which is different from the quest to create meaning for one's experience in a coherent narrative. Veterans can and do achieve the latter.

And:

The "voice“ of the Sirens, scholars tell us, is the "voice“ of the Iliad, the voice of a wartime past experienced as more real and meaningful than the present.

And to be captured by that song is to lose one’s homecoming.

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[The lines from Homer are in Stanley Lombardo’s translation.]

Going to a conference

I was heading off to a conference to present a paper — one of my least favorite things to do. Elaine and I were standing at the baggage carousel of a bus station, trying to figure out how to get to the airport. It was six o’clock at night. My plane was leaving at seven thirty.

I was still packing for the trip, packing very lightly. I had a cheap briefcase of the kind once sold in discount department stores, with a black papery covering over masonite or plywood. The briefcase held the paper I was presenting, a Lands’ End squall jacket, and Stanley Lombardo’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. No meds, no extra clothes, no umbrella, no pens or pencils. I noticed a cup of pencils atop an upright piano and took a couple to bring with me.

We spotted a scientist entering the terminal, a tall man with red hair. He wore a college sweatshirt over his lab coat. We asked him how to get to the airport, and he pointed us to a bus-company employee in uniform. And we began to consider which route would be best to get to the airport on time.

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[Three possible sources, from yesterday: reading Jerry Craft’s graphic novel New Kid (with a two-bus commute to a posh day school), learning about Steinway’s Victory Vertical pianos, recommending Alan Alda’s Science Clear + Vivid to a friend. I think the dream is about impostor syndrome. Elaine thinks it’s about aging. I think she’s right.]

Twelve movies

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

Nocturne (dir. Edward L. Marin, 1946). George Raft plays Joe Warne, a LAPD detective doggedly investigating the death of a songwriter: was it really suicide? The movie flies off in many directions: it starts with Laura-like sophistication, moves to the details of police work, visits a nightclub with a pianist on wheels, adds some silly comedy with Joe’s mother and another oldster, throws in some romance and a fistfight, and briefly turns meta when Joe stumbles through a dance lesson (Raft had worked as a professional dancer). Look for Janet Shaw (Louise Finch in Shadow of Doubt) as the dance teacher. And enjoy the glimpses of Los Angeles: a Brown Derby, the Pantages. ★★★ (YT)

*

Promising Young Woman (dir. Emerald Fennell, 2020). Carey Mulligan plays Cassie Thomas, a woman of a thousand faces: a med-school dropout, working in a coffeeshop, living with trauma and rage, seeking revenge. I thought about the Iliad while watching this film: here, as there, exacting revenge takes a very high toll when a loss is unredeemable. It gives little away to say that the shadow of Brett Kavanaugh seems to hang over the movie. Bo Burnham is the standout among the supporting players. ★★★★ (HBO Max)

*

Two by Alfred Hitchcock

Young and Innocent (1937). Delightful early Hitchcock. Derrick De Marney is an accused murderer on the run; Nova Pilbeam (young Betty in The Man Who Knew Too Much) is the police constable’s daughter who runs with him. Echoes of The 39 Steps, and anticipations of Saboteur and North by Northwest. Wonderfully episodic, with the children’s birthday party and the hotel dance as standout moments of strangeness. ★★★★ (CC)

The Paradine Case (1947). London: Gregory Peck is a barrister, Anthony Keane, married to a beautiful woman, Gay (Ann Todd), defending another beautiful woman, Maddalena Anna Paradine (Alida Valli), who is charged with murdering her much older husband. The contrast between Gay and Maddalena anticipates the contrast between Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) and Madeleine (Kim Novak) in Vertigo — and you can already guess that Keane, like Scottie Ferguson, will be going over to the dark side (here represented by a brunette, not a blonde). Can Keane return to the daylight world? Capable acting by all, but the movie feels long and talky, talky and long. ★★★ (YT)

*

Step Down to Terror (dir. Harry Keller, 1958). A low-budget, surprisingly good remake of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). The family dynamics are simpler and only slightly less creepy. Johnny Walters (Charles Drake), serial killer on the run, visits the folks, but there’s no niece in the family: here the relative who suspects something is the killer’s brother’s widow, Helen Walters (Colleen Miller), whom Johnny — eww — finds appealing. There’s nothing here to approach the strength of Thornton Wilder’s screenplay, nothing to intensify the incongruity of a psychokiller in Our Town. But it’s fascinating to see a director take up Gordon McDonnell’s short story “Uncle Charlie” and avoid mere repetition of what Hitchcock made. ★★★ (YT)

*

Too Late for Tears (dir. Byron Haskin, 1949). A story of contingency. After Alan and Jane Palmer (Arthur Kennedy and Lizabeth Scott) make a U-turn to skip out on a party, a fellow motorist throws a bag into their convertible, and Jane insists on keeping what’s in it: $60,000. When the money’s claimant, brutal Danny Fuller (Dan Duryea), comes calling at the Palmer household, Jane’s character comes into clear focus, and a battle of criminal wits begins. With Don DeFore (Mr. B. from Hazel) being enigmatic, and Dead End Kid Billy Halop renting boats. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Strange Victory (dir. Leo Hurwitz, 1948). A post-war semi-documentary that’s disturbingly apt for our time. In the words of one of its narrators: “We live like a man holding his breath against what may happen tomorrow.” Hurwitz cuts from image to image, juxtaposing horrifying war footage with scenes from American life. At home: anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, war talk. Thank you, Criterion Channel, for bringing this neglected filmmaker into view. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Remember the Night (dir. Mitchell Leisen, 1940). My idea of a Christmas film, with sharp wit and much tenderness via a Preston Sturges screenplay. You can’t go home again, at least not happily, as career shoplifter Barbara Stanwyck learns, but you can spend Christmas with your handsome, single prosecutor (Fred MacMurray) and his family. It’s always instructive to see MacMurray as a real actor and not as the pipe-smoking, sweatered zombie of My Three Sons. And Barbara Stanwyck — well, she’s Barbara Stanwyck. ★★★★ (TCM)

Listening to Kenny G (dir. Penny Lane, 2021). Kenny G(orelick) is to music what Thomas Kinkade is to painting: a brand with mass appeal and little substance. The saxophonist presents as both preposterously egomaniacal and charmingly self-effacing: see for instance his idle pronouncement that he might get into writing classical music, so that people will wonder if a piece is by Bach, Beethoven, or G. This well-made documentary is filled with clips from G’s career (gee, he can do circular breathing), lengthy monologues for the camera, and commentary from music critics who explain why G is so awful — and yet, like spoons in Uri Geller’s hands, the critics begin to bend, which I guess is the magic of Kenny G. Now it’s time for HBO to offer documentaries about, oh, say, Albert Ayler, Sidney Bechet, Benny Carter, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Stan Getz, Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Steve Lacy, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, Zoot Sims, Lester Young, Ben Webster — but I’m not holding my breath. ★★★★ (HBO Max)

*

Saturday Night Fever (dir. John Badham, 1977). I never once thought about watching, but after learning that one scene takes place a block from my child home, I had to. I loved the Brooklyn-ness of it, especially the coffeeshop conversation between dance partners Tony (John Travolta) and Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), a little like a latter-day Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. Tony’s confidence and cluelessness, the meager rewards of his work (a four-dollar raise), the boiling-over hostilities of his family life, Stephanie’s aspirations (two courses at the New School next semester): it all makes for a poignant story of limited means and long odds. Oh, and there’s also dancing. ★★★★ (H)

*

Park Row (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1952). Newspaper wars in 1880s New York, with the principled editor of an upstart paper (Gene Evans) at war with the unprincipled (yet still attractive to him) owner of an established paper (Mary Welch). The circulation war and the love-hate story are secondary here. This movie’s real appeal is in its depiction of the workings of print — paper, ink, type, and jargon (“printer’s devil,” “hellbox,” “30”). It must be the only movie in history in which Ottmar Mergenthaler’s invention of the Linotype machine is fictionalized into a plot point. ★★★★ (TMC)

*

Original Cast Album: “Company” (dir. D.A. Pennebaker, 1970). It was supposed to be the first of a series of documentaries about the making of albums, but it turned out to be the first and last. The recording session (nearly nineteen hours, according to Criterion) runs into the early morning, and what we see is a model of intense effort and generosity among singers, musicians, the recording engineers, and the composer (Stephen Sondheim, of course). I’m not especially attuned to musical theater, so I found it instructive to see Barbara Barrie, Beth Howland, Dean Jones, and Charles Kimbrough, all of whom I know from movies and television, in the Sondheim world. The highlight is Elaine Stritch’s attempt (at least eight takes) to get “The Ladies Who Lunch” right: weariness, frustration, and then, at a later session, she nails it, and for all time. ★★★★ (CC)

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Simone Weil on force

I started thinking about these sentences this afternoon:

To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.

Simone Weil, The “Iliad,” or the Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1956).

Force can take the form of a knee on a neck or a vehicle aimed at human beings in uniform. It can be directed against a person or a community. It can be the work of a lone wolf, as we now say, or a larger group, or the state.

One need not be a believer to be thinking these thoughts on Good Friday.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Anna Stiga, Anna Stiga, Stan has named you. Her name (“Stan again”) is the pseudonym for easier Newsday Saturday Stumpers by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman.

Today’s Stumper, by Ms. Stiga, is pretty easy as Stumpers go. A distinctive feature: it’s totally symmetrical. That’s the technical term, isn’t it? As in, “Man, this puzzle is, like, totally symmetrical.” The puzzle takes shape as four hearts. Top and bottom, easy. The sides were tougher. I found the real difficulties on the right.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

1-D, three letters, “Whom Emerson called ’the jingle-man.’” It’s possible to appreciate one writer sneering at another without participating in the sneer.

11-D, thirteen letters, “Youngsters’ support group.” Probably not meant as a tricky clue, but having the first two and last three letters of the answer made it tricky for me.

13-D, eleven letters, “Agent’s quest.” What kind of agent?

16-A, three letters, “Iliad mischief maker.” It’s always someone else’s fault. Right, Agamemnon?

25-D, five letters, “Board.” A nice reminder of what the word can mean.

30-A, five letters, “Sandwiches since the 1600s.” PBJS — no, doesn’t work.

40-A, four letters, “Collector’s item.” The joy of a mild pun.

51-A, eleven letters, “They’re not serious.” Google shows the singular form peaking in American English in 1932. Clearly, we need to get more serious about criticizing others engaged in their harmless endeavors.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

“The man of action”

“The world belongs to those who don’t feel,” says Bernardo Soares:


Fernando Pessoa, from text 303, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

When I read this passage a few weeks ago, I thought of a certain politician who seems to regard other people as things. This morning I’m seeing it in a new way.

Simone Weil called the Iliad the poem of force, force being that which turns a human being into a thing. Pessoa’s man of action is the figure of force, one who treats people as things.

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The Idiod

This bit from Stephen Colbert’s monologue last night delighted me:

“In the end Trump may be defeated by his greatest weakness — his Achilles mouth. It's all detailed in the epic poem The Idiod. It’s The Idiod and The Oddity.”

And this black-figure-pottery cover appeared on the screen:



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Twelve movies

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

Nineteen Eighty-Four (dir. Michael Radford, 1984). Hacking coughs, cheap gin, state propaganda, televised executions, and surveillance by screen and helicopter. John Hurt and Suzanna Hamilton are perfectly mismatched as transgressive lovers; Richard Burton is an especially terrifying O’Brien. Watching this film in 2019 is especially unnverving. 2 + 2 = ? ★★★★

*

So Big! (dir. William A. Wellman, 1932). “Edna Ferber’s Epic of American Womanhood,” said the poster. It’s the story of a lifetime, starring Barbara Stanwyck as Selina Peake, later De Jong, a young woman who takes up the life of a teacher, marries a farmer, and devotes herself to the farm and her son Dirk, known as So Big. The film is pre-Code, but that means little here: So Big! is a story of quiet comedy, deep humanity, and asparagus. With Bette Davis as a dazzling free-spirited artist. ★★★★

*

Out of the Past (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1947). I’ve come to love this film, for many reasons: Marney’s Café, the swank Reno house, the murky streets and cab rides, the slightly spooky Kid (Dickie Moore), the cabin in the woods, the meeting in some other woods, the Heart of Darkness lie, and the dangerous Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer). As gas-station owner Jeff Bailey, Robert Mitchum trades in his work clothes for a trenchcoat and fedora, and he’s right back at home in the detective business, working for Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). I’m still not sure I understand what unfolds in the film’s present, but what happens overall is something like a cross between The Maltese Falcon and The Killers. “All I can see is the frame.” ★★★★

*

Bull Durham (dir. Ron Shelton, 1988). I have good excuses for not being especially strong on movies from the 1980s: I was a grad student living within walking distance of a revival house, and then I was a new professor, and then I was a new father. So seeing Bull Durham for the first time was something of a crash course in movies with awkward serio-comic sex scenes and non-diegetic rock ’n’ roll. The triangle — Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins — felt too much like an R-rated version of Cheers, but the line between two points — Robbins’s erratic hotshot pitcher and Costner’s veteran minor-league catcher — held a lot more interest. My favorite moment: a discussion of wedding gifts on the pitcher’s mound. ★★★

*

Dawson City: Frozen Time (dir. Bill Morrison, 2016). Save for the musical score, it’s a nearly silent documentary about movies, history, and permafrost, focusing on the Dawson City Film Find — the discovery, in 1978, of hundreds of reels of silent film in a Yukon town that flourished in the Gold Rush and stood at the end of the line for film distribution. A surprising array of familiar names appear: Sid Grauman, Alex Pantages, Frederick Trump (proprietor of brothels and restaurants), and the 1919 Chicago White — or Black — Sox. Brief excerpts from silent films, printed on highly volatile nitrocellulose, virtually all suffering from water damage, put me in mind of Sappho’s fragments: the wonder is that they survived at all. The most remarkable feature of the documentary: fragments from the Find are paired with whatever historical or contemporary events the screen titles describe, in an extraordinary effort of imagination and editing. ★★★★


[Pathé Weekly (1914). From Dawson City: Frozen Time. Click for a larger view.]

*

The Gold Rush (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1925). A reconstruction of the 1925 film from various sources, with a new recording of Chaplin’s 1942 musical score added. Brilliant pathos, brilliant fun, and a Lone Prospector who never loses his dignity. The dance of the rolls is worth the price of admission, or the price of a subscription to the Criterion Channel. But then you also get a room full of feathers and a teetering cabin at no extra cost. ★★★★

*

The House on 92nd Street (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1945). I’ve written about this movie’s supplies — Dixon Ticonderoga pencils and a pocket notebook — but not about stuff like plot and character, the stuff people usually think about with movies. This semi-documentary tells the story of the FBI’s infiltration of a Nazi spy ring. As double agent Bill Dietrich, William Eythe is a fairly bland lead, though then again, “bland” might be just what you want in a double agent. Watching once again, I was especially struck by the great Manhattan location shots, the calm, reassuring presence of Lloyd Nolan (as FBI Inspector George A. Briggs), and the unsavoriness of the spy ring’s minions — Harry Bellaver, Alfred Linder, and Lydia St. Clair. ★★★

*

Jane Eyre (dir. Robert Stevenson, 1943). Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles as Miss Eyre and Mr. Rochester. I kept finding other films in this one: the stark close-ups and moody scenic shots look so much like Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and Bernard Herrmann’s music suggests Vertigo. Welles as a man with a dark secret suggests Charles Rankin in The Stranger; Fontaine as the newcomer to a strange house of secrets suggests Rebecca; and Agnes Moorehead as a severe relation takes us back, again, to Kane. Jane Eyre turned out, for me at least, to be “the movies,” in wonderful ways. ★★★★


[From Jane Eyre. Click for a larger view.]

*

All Night Long (dir. Basil Dearden, 1962). We saw this reimagining of Othello only last month but watched again with friends. I looked past the music this time and watched more for character: the seemingly composed but insecure Aurelius Rex (Paul Harris), the cheerful, good Delia Lane (Marti Stevens), the younger, hotheaded Cass Michael (Keith Michell), and, of course, the impossibly suave and quickwitted Johnny Cousin (Patrick McGoohan). I wonder now if this film served to influence Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), which also uses a recording device in its reimagining of Shakespeare. My only complaint: we should get to see the complete Dave Brubeck/Charles Mingus performance. ★★★★

*

Since You Went Away (dir. John Cromwell, 1944). Jonathan Shay, who works with and on behalf of veterans living with post-traumatic stress, speaks of the importance of the communalization of grief — the urgent need to mourn the sorrows of war with others. I can only imagine how this movie, a look at life on the home front in World War II, made that possible for audiences in 1944. The story veers again and again from bittersweet nostalgia to quiet happiness to joyful abandon to heartbreak: it’s life in wartime, utterly unpredictable, with the possibility of a sudden shock around every corner. With an all-star cast — Claudette Colbert, Joseph Cotten, Jennifer Jones, Robert Walker, a deep bench, and many moments of brief conversation in nightspots and train stations. ★★★★

*

The Scarlet Claw (dir. Roy William Neill, 1944). You know how every so often a movie that you cannot account for rises to the top of your Netflix queue? So it was here. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (Basil Rathbone and NIgel Bruce, who else?), in Quebec for a conference on occult phenomena, end up solving a series of murders committed with a repurposed garden tool. The plot is tired, and Holmes seems ready to break up with his slow-witted partner, but some eerie phosphorescence and Ian Wolfe’s presence as a shady butler enliven the proceedings. ★★★

*

No Greater Glory (dir. Frank Borzage, 1934). An adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s novel The Paul Street Boys, offering a powerful allegory of war, as two bands of boys fight for control of a vacant lot. This Criterion Channel find borrows from All Quiet on the Western Front and Frankenstein and must have influenced West Side Story. But this film’s ending undercuts any easy sentimentality about lessons learned: as in the Iliad or Mother Courage, war will go on. You might recognize Frankie Darro from Wild Boys of the Road; George Breakston, who stars as the doomed Nemeecsek, is the boy who cries on the bus in It Happened One Night. ★★★★

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Twelve movies

[Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

The Lost Moment (dir. Martin Gabel, 1947). Gothic noir, from Henry James’s The Aspern Papers. A scheming publisher (too-bland Robert Cummings) in search of a dead Shelley-like poet’s love letters wangles his way into a house of the poet’s 105-year-old beloved (Agnes Moorehead). A niece (Susan Hayward) provides romantic interest in the present. Eeriest moment: the hand on the arm of the chair. ★★★

*

Shadow on the Wall (dir. Pat Jackson, 1950). A satisfying thriller, in which a young girl (Gigi Perreau) is the key to solving a murder. Can a kind psychiatrist (Nancy Davis) unlock the child’s memory? Perreau and Davis are both excellent, as is Ann Sothern, cast in an unusual role. This noirish film is unusual in a more important respect: a girl and two women are front and center, with male characters entirely secondary. ★★★★

*

The Last Wave (dir. Peter Weir, 1977). A clash — or merger — of cultures, as a Sydney lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) defends a group of Aboriginal men accused of murder and begins to experience troubling visions. Everything here is suffused with dread: the most ordinary domestic interior seems to portend doom. And it’s doom on a grand scale: the vision of tidal apocalypse seems more timely now than ever. This film would pair well with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. ★★★★

*

The Face Behind the Mask (dir. Robert Florey, 1941). Chameleonic Peter Lorre: think of how much his appearance changes just in his earlier years, from the killer in M to Dr. Gogol in Mad Love to Mr. Moto to Joel Cairo to Ugarte. Here he plays Janos Szabo, an immigrant who turns to a life of crime after being horribly disfigured in a fire (thus the mask). Don Beddoe and Evelyn Keyes are strong in supporting roles. The plot is sometimes wobbly, but the bizarro ending almost makes up for it. ★★★

*

A Man Called Ove (dir. Hannes Holm, 2015). Ove is an elderly curmudgeon and recent widower whose attempts to end his life go wrong as the world around him intrudes. Everything in his story, told in a series of flashbacks, is predictable, as is the revelation that the curmudgeon has a softer side. But it’s all pleasant enough, in a better-than-Hallmark way. My favorite line: “Antingen dör vi — eller så lever vi” [Either we die — or we live]. ★★★

[I will add a sentence that has closed many New York Times articles: If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.]

*

Ida Lupino, Ida Lupino, Ida Lupino

Not Wanted (dir. Elmer Clifton and Ida Lupino, 1949). Between 1949 and 1953, Ida Lupino wrote and/or directed several socially conscious films. This one follows the plight of Sally Kelton. a young unmarried woman (Sally Forrest), pregnant after a brief encounter with sketchy pianist Steve Ryan (Leo Penn). Drew Baxter is the good guy (Keefe Brasselle) who’s crazy about Sally and finds her in a home for unwed mothers. The film reaches a resolution that had our household in tears. ★★★★

Never Fear (dir. Ida Lupino, 1950). Forrest and Brasselle as a dance team whose female member contracts polio. The film then moves from nightclubs to the Kabat-Kaiser Institute and intensive physical therapy. Making this film must have been deeply important to Lupino, who contracted polio in 1934. Two extraordinary dance sequences (one with Forrest and Brasselle, one with a group in wheelchairs), but the chemistry between the leads isn’t nearly as strong here as in Not Wanted. ★★★

[Remarkable: in neither film is there a question of how someone will pay for care. It’s just there, as health care should be.]

The Trouble with Angels (dir. Ida Lupino, 1966). Well, this film too is Ida Lupino. Rosalind Russell is the no-nonsense Mother Superior at a boarding school for girls; Hayley Mills and June Harding are the new arrivals who break the rules again and again. Good performances all around, though the pranks and punishments get a bit tiresome, and there’s very little of “school” to be seen. Is it a spoiler to say that I called the ending well in advance? ★★★

*

They Shall Not Grow Old (dir. Peter Jackson, 2018). The Great War from a British perspective: archival footage, restored and colored, with the recorded voices of veterans describing their experiences from enlistment to war’s end. The film gives the viewer not the story of a particular battle but the story of battle, in all particulars — what men wore, what they ate, how they trained, how they fought, how they died. If I were still teaching, I’d show this film alongside the Iliad. An extraordinary labor of love and respect. ★★★★

*

This Ain’t No Mouse Music! (dir. Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon, 2014). The story of Chris Strachwitz, the German immigrant who fell in love with indigenous American musics and founded Arhoolie Records. The documentary tracks five of Strachwitz’s varied musical interests: blues, bluegrass, norteño, Cajun music, and New Orleans jazz. Strachwitz: “I was not conscious that this was any kind of cultural preservation; I just dove into this like a guy diving into a swimming pool, having a great adventure underwater or whatever, or going to paradise without having to suffer death.” My favorite moment: Ry Cooder talking about hearing, as a fourteen year-old, BIg Joe Williams’s “Sloppy Drunk Blues” (an Arhoolie recording) and realizing there was a lot in the world that he, Cooder, didn’t understand. ★★★★

*

Monrovia, Indiana (dir. Frederick Wiseman, 2018). This meandering portrait of a tiny rural town is certainly the most beautiful Wiseman documentary I’ve seen, full of bluer-than-blue skies and green corn, and minus what I call the Midwestern Sublime of dead fields and sheer emptiness. And because it’s a Wiseman film, without voiceover, without intertitles, much more is missing: any sense of the town’s economic well-being, its employment opportunities (I’d love to hear a young adult’s take), the meaning of what residents call “Homestead” (a subdivision? a subsidized-housing development?), the effect of the town’s proximity to Bloomington and Indianapolis, the town’s overwhelming support for Donald Trump in 2016, which can be inferred from the decals for sale in a street vendor’s display. The film’s purpose, as a blurb on the distributor’s website suggests, is to show big-city types just how good these people in the heartland are. Some scenes of life without irony — the basketball lecture, the Masonic ritual, the bench and hydrant debates — seem straight from a Christopher Guest film. ★★

*

Girlfriends (dir. Claudia Weill, 1978). A freelance photographer (Melanie Mayron) is trying to make it, as they said, and still say, in New York City. But it’s the 1970s, and it’s possible for a freelance photographer and her aspiring writer friend (Anita Skinner) to afford a two-bedroom apartment as they navigate young adulthood. The dialogue is sometimes stilted; the acting, sometimes wooden; but the movie is — somehow — an affecting picture of life in that time and place. Watch for Christopher Guest as a creepy boyfriend. ★★★

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Puzzled about nepenthe

An answer in this morning’s Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle, “Power of the Pen,” started me thinking. Will Shortz’s puzzle asked for words containing the accented syllable pen. Terrific? StuPENdous. Got it.

The word that started me thinking: nepenthe, which Shortz clued as “drug of forgetfulness in the Odyssey.” The word in the Odyssey is νηπενθής [nēpenthes] which means “banishing pain and sorrow.” The word joins νη- [nē-], meaning “not,” and πένθος [penthos], meaning “grief, sorrow.” The word νηπενθής appears in Odyssey 4, line 221, where it describes a substance that Helen places in the wine as her husband Menelaus, Odysseus’s son Telemachus, and Nestor’s son Peisistratus weep for the lives lost in the Trojan War. What Helen places in the wine though is a drug: a φάρμακον [pharmakon].

Today’s contestant, who said he’d read the Odyssey, did not know nepenthe. Nor did it come to my mind as the name of a substance. The drugs named in the Odyssey are magical plants: lotus and moly. None of the Big Four translations of the Odyssey include nepenthe as a name:

Robert Fitzgerald (1961): Helen drops into the wine “an anodyne, mild magic of forgetfulness.”

Richmond Lattimore (1967): Helen casts into the wine “a medicine / of heartsease, free of gall, to make one forget all sorrows.” (Hearts ease, or heart’s ease, is a traditional medicinal flower.)

Robert Fagles (1996): Helen slips in “a drug, heart’s-ease, dissolving anger, / magic to make us forget all our pains.”

Stanley Lombardo (2000): Helen throws into the wine “a drug / That stilled all pain, quieted all anger, / And brought forgetfulness of every ill.”

How did nepenthe make its way into today’s Sunday Puzzle? My guess is that Will Shortz has many lists of words, searchable in many ways, and thus found this word. I suspect that what’s at work here is the kind of out-of-one’s-element moment that turned Mel Tormé into a “cool jazz pioneer.” I doubt that someone better acquainted with the Odyssey would have chosen nepenthe for today’s puzzle. But I could be wrong.

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[The Big Four: my term for recent American translators of both the Iliad and the Odyssey. I’ll add that nepenthe does not appear in Peter Green’s and Emily Wilson’s 2018 translations of the Odyssey. In writing this post I relied upon the Perseus Digital Library’s text of Lidell and Scott’s A Greek–English Lexicon.]

Victor Davis Hanson on Ajax, Achilles, and Trump

The New Yorker has an interview with Victor Davis Hanson, classicist, military historian, and Donald Trump supporter. The interview covers touches on many subjects in a short space: “anchor babies,” the travel ban, the statue-loving demonstrators in Charlottesville, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and when it’s appropriate to mock a woman as unattractive: “There are certain women that may be homely,” Hanson declares. It’s like watching an interview from The Colbert Report.

And of course, Hanson talks about his forthcoming book, The Case for Trump, in which he likens Donald Trump, in passing, to the Greek heroes Achilles and Ajax. As he does in the interview:

“You have a neurotic hero [Ajax] who cannot get over the fact that he was by all standards the successor to Achilles and deserves Achilles’s armor, and yet he was outsmarted by this wily, lesser Odysseus, who rigged the contest and got the armor. All he does is say, ‘This wasn’t fair. I’m better. Doesn’t anybody know this?’ It’s true, but you want to say to Ajax, ‘Shut up and just take it.’ Achilles has elements of a tragic hero. He says, at the beginning of the Iliad, ‘I do all the work. I kill all the Trojans. But when it comes to assigning booty, you always give it to mediocrities — deep-state, administrative nothings.’ So he stalks off. And the gods tell him, ‘If you come back in, you will win fame, but you are going to end up dead.’ So he makes a tragic, heroic decision that he is going to do that.

“I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve. Maybe in a naïve fashion. But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it.”

These comparisons are bonkers. Let’s not forget: Trump, unlike Ajax, won the big prize, with, it seems, considerable help from outside actors who worked to rig the outcome — Russians, not Greeks. The Ajax of Sophocles’s tragedy Ajax (the work Hanson is referencing) does more than say “This wasn’t fair”: having planned to kill Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus, he is deluded by Athena into slaughtering cattle instead. And he then realizes what he has done: “Now I stand here / Disgraced.” What distinguishes Sophocles’s Ajax is his profound shame, an emotion Donald Trump seems incapable of feeling.

As for Achilles: he returns to battle out of a deep sense of loyalty to his beloved Patroclus, willing to sacrifice himself to avenge his comrade. Loyalty, self-sacrifice: further elements of human experience that seem foreign to Trump, except insofar as he demands them of others.

If Trump resembles anyone in the Iliad, it’s Agamemnon, the leader who is at a loss in a true crisis and claims Achilles’s prize of war (the enslaved Briseis) to assert his own greater authority. It’s the preening, self-aggrandizing Agamemnon who complains of fake news, dismissing the prophet Calchas’s explanation of a plague: “Not a single favorable omen ever!”

And it must be said: Ajax, Achilles, and even Agamemnon fight valiantly. None of them claimed to have bone spurs. The best comparison there would be to Odysseus, who feigned madness to avoid conscription. But once at Troy, he too fought valiantly.

In 2017 I wrote a post about Trump, Agamemnon, Oedipus, and Creon: We three kings. Or, really, one king and two tyrants.

Other related reading
All OCA Homer posts (Pinboard)

[Amazon’s Look Inside feature lets me see that the references to Ajax and Achilles are as cursory in Hanson’s book as they are in this interview. I’ve quoted from Peter Meineck’s translation of Ajax, in Four Tragedies (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), and Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997).]

We three kings

Donald Trump reminds me of three kings, or one king and two tyrants, really: he combines Agamemnon’s contempt for truth (“Fake news!” Trump would have told the seer Calchas), Oedipus’s egomania (“I alone can fix it,” Trump would have said of the Sphinx’s curse), and Creon’s strutting authoritarianism (“I’m president, and you’re not,” Trump would have told Oedipus when ordering him back in the house).

But unlike Oedipus, Trump has no interest in the pursuit of truth: he would have fired Tiresias and ended the investigation of the murder of Laertes. Oedipus chose to pursue that investigation, wherever it might lead. But of course he had no idea where it would lead.

Also unlike Oedipus: Trump would never have solved the Sphinx’s riddle to begin with.

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Word of the day: tyrant

[In Iliad 1, when Calchas tells Agamemnon why the Achaean forces have been hit by a plague and what to do to remove it, Agamemnon complains that Calchas never gives him any good omens. Agamemon’s the king; Oedipus and Creon, tyrants.]

“That is what happens”

Juliet has been trying to recall a word that describes Briseis and Chryseis in the Iliad — kallipareos, of the lovely cheeks. Juliet hasn’t been teaching Greek, and she realizes that it’s as if her knowledge of the language has been ”put in a closet for nearly six months now”:


Alice Munro, “Chance,” in Runaway (New York: Vintage, 2005).

Juliet goes on to consider that even if you make your living from your knowledge of a language, the language is not necessarily your treasure: “Few people, very few, have a treasure, and if you do you must hang on to it. You must not let yourself be waylaid, and have it taken from you.”

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One Munro sentence