A Gamewell close-up

[From Shadow of a Doubt (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1943). Click for a larger view.]

Like the mail chute in When Strangers Marry, this Gamewell fire alarm, too, was ready for its close-up. A bunch of actors were standing in the way, but they walked off, and for less than a second the alarm had the screen to itself.

Perhaps this alarm is still attached to a pole in Santa Rosa. See also this Gamewell alarm, manufactured between 1938 and 1950, removed sometime after October 2018.

A consequential chute

When I wrote four sentences about When Strangers Marry (dir. William Castle, 1944), I suggested that the movie has the most consequential mail chute in all film. I wouldn’t mind being proved wrong though.

I’m not enlarging the image: that’s the camera closing in on a chute that must have long been ready for its close-up. As the camera closes in, let us pause to ponder a world with five daily mail collections, six days a week. Click any image for a larger view.


And down in the lobby, Lt. Blake (later the police commissioner in another city), is curious: “Do you have a letter there addressed to Fred Graham, Atlanta, Georgia?”


Uh, no. That letter is stuck in the chute. An obliging figurant steps in to propel the Graham letter (in fact an envelope stuffed with money) on its way.


And whoomp, there it is, its contents spilling all over the collection box.


This post is for my friend Diane, who has great photographs of chutes and collection boxes. I have a small number of chutes and boxes in these pages.

Twelve movies

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

Two Trains Runnin’ (dir. Sam Pollard, 2016). This documentary looks back at events in Mississippi in the summer of 1964: the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, and the efforts of two trios of white blues fanatics to find Son House and Skip James. The two trains, or narrative threads — racist brutality and music — never quite come together, despite a coda about the relationship between music and political change. And the contemporary performances that crop up between interviews and documentary footage ring painfully false: musicians in costume (hats, overalls) offering sad approximations of music they no doubt love (“Freight Train” is the worst). Best moments: Mississippi Fred McDowell at the Newport Folk Festival, playing “Shake ’Em On Down” as dancers move about him; Skip James, also at Newport, unfilmed but caught in photographs, singing “Devil Got My Woman” — a moment of high art that the filmmakers treat with the reverence it merits. ★★★ (YT)

[Gotta point out: Henry Vestine and Alan Wilson, both of whom figure in the story, were founding members of Canned Heat. Why’d they leave that out?]

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Gothic Noir feature

When Strangers Marry (dir. William Castle, 1944). Elaine thinks parts must have been left on the cutting-room floor; I think this B-noir is more subtly constructed than we first suspected. It’s the story of an Ohio waitress, Millie (Kim Hunter), who marries a salesman (Dean Jagger) after three dates and follows him to the big city (New York), only to find that he’s not in town and that she doesn’t really know what he’s all about. Robert Mitchum plays another salesman, a former suitor eager to lend Millie a hand. Strong overtones of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, and a bonus: what must be the most consequential mail chute in all film. ★★★★

The Sign of the Ram (dir. John Sturges, 1948). Intense psychodrama in a big old house, and something of a twin to Guest in the House (dir. John Brahm, 1944), in which a newcomer to a family undermines relationships. Here it’s a second wife, Leah St. Aubyn (Susan Peters), who does the damage: paralyzed from the waist down after saving two step-children from drowning, she mistrusts her husband (Alexander Knox), fears the imagined wiles of her new secretary (Phyllis Thaxter), undermines her older step-children’s romances with appalling lies (thereby keeping the children from leaving her), and gets a steady narcissistic supply from her youngest step-child, all while writing sentimental verse for newspaper publication. This movie was Susan Peters’s first and last after the hunting accident that left her paralyzed. Her performance here suggests a great loss to film. ★★★★

Lightning Strikes Twice (dir. King Vidor, 1951). Actress Shelley Carnes (Ruth Roman) travels to a dude ranch for her health and falls in love with local rancher Richard Trevelyan (Richard Todd), just acquitted of murdering his wife. But if he didn’t do it, who did? Zachary Scott plays Trev’s lecherous friend; Mercedes McCambridge does lots of emoting as the co-owner of the dude ranch. The confusing directions for driving to the ranch suggest to me the problem with the movie: too many odd, puzzling points — why, for instance, does an old ranching couple have an enormous portrait of Trev above their fireplace? ★★★

*

The Holdovers (dir. Alexander Payne, 2023). It’s 1970, and Paul Giamatti is Paul Hunham, a teacher of classics at a Massachusetts boarding school, bowtied, lazyeyed, pedantic, pompous, and punished by being assigned to watch over the small band of students stuck at the school over the Christmas and New Year’s break. One of them: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a smart, rebellious student beset by family woes. Also wintering over: Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), head cook, and the mother of a recent graduate. All I’ll say is that The Hoidovers is the kind of movie that I’m willing to follow wherever it goes — it’s just that good, and I suspect it might be the best new movie I see all year. ★★★★ (DVD)

*

Outside the Law (dir. Jack Arnold, 1956). This year I’ve seen movies about Johnnies: Johnny Saxon, Johnny Eager, and here’s Johnny Salvo (Ray Danton), a paroled con and war hero, up for a pardon if he helps catch a gang of counterfeiters. Nothing much to see here, but son-father conflict (Danton and Judson Pratt) and a love-hate triangle add some interest, and the musical score — from five composers, including Henry Mancini — is consistently interesting. But for a story focused on tracking down the sources for the counterfeiters’ materials, there’s mighty little on the screen about paper. My favorite line: “Come on, Bormann, firms twice your size don’t use half the stationery you do!” ★★ (YT)

*

Shadow of a Doubt (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1943). The story of a serial killer, Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten), paying a visit to his sister’s family in Santa Rosa, the Newtons: Joe (Henry Travers), Emma (Patricia Collinge), and their three children, most especially, young Charlie (Teresa Wright), the namesake who shares a deep bond with her glamorous uncle. I never tire of this movie. Watching it this time, I paid attention to the ways in which Thornton Wilder’s screenplay keeps the viewer off balance, making it possible to forget now and then that Uncle Charlie is — hey, wait a minute! — a serial killer. My favorite scene, forever: the library at closing time. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Steel Trap (dir. Andrew Stone, 1952). Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright as a married couple, Jim and Laurie Osborne, with the weirdness factor lessened by Wright’s changed appearance (her hair is blonde) and her minimal role. It’s really a one-actor movie, with Cotten as an assistant bank manager whose interior monologue lets us into his plan to make off to Brazil (no extradition) with his wife and a heavy suitcase of cash from the vault. He has one weekend to pull it off before the bank switches to its winter hours: he must develop a persuasive story to tell his wife (a weekend getaway to manage a big bank deal), arrange care for his young daughter (who is supposed to follow), and obtain passports and schedule flights, with contingencies complicating his scheme at every turn. The movie has lots of suspense (certainly at least a four-dollar-rental’s worth) and strongly suggests that anyone is capable of becoming a criminal: “We have only so many days, so many hours, so many minutes to live, and we’re suckers if we don’t cram into them all the happiness we can get away with, regardless of how we do it.” ★★★ (V)

[I learned about this movie from Jerome Wesselberry’s review of Shadow of a Doubt. Jerome, whoever she is (the name is an alias), is a very smart watcher of movies. Thanks, Steven, for recommending her channel.]

*

The Bottom of the Bottle (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1956). Joseph Cotten as Pat Martin, “P.M.,” an Arizona attorney and rancher. He’s stuck in a loveless (and likely sexless) marriage to Nora (Ruth Roman), and he’s now confronted with the unexpected arrival of his brother Donald (Van Johnson), a convict and recovering alcoholic who’s escaped from Joliet (which everyone pronounces as Jolly-ette). Too many histrionic moments, but strong performances from Johnson and Roman. Cotten does a good job of suggesting just how much of his family history he’s been trying to forget: “Spend your life building up something worthwhile, and along comes the past.” ★★★ (YT)

*

Come Live with Me (dir. Clarence Brown, 1941). Modern marriage: a publisher and his wife are both having affairs — he with Johnny Jones (Hedy Lamarr), a Viennese emigre about to be deported unless she marries. Enter Bill Smith (Jimmy Stewart), a down-and-out writer willing to marry Johnny in exchange for a chunk of money. But can these two ever really fall in love? Yes, Hedy Lamarr is astonishingly beautiful, as Bill points out, but walking away with the movie is Adeline De Walt Reynolds as Bill’s wise old grandmother, who makes everything come out right, and it’s in her pastoral world that Bill recites, sort of, a bit of Christopher Marlowe’s poem. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Four Daughters (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1938). Sweet nonsense, mostly, with Claude Rains as a music master with four unmarried musical daughters (Lola Lane, Priscilla Lane, Rosemary Lane, and Gale Page). A variety of eligible men are on and off the premises, the most charming of whom is a composer (Jeffrey Lynn), the most interesting of whom is an embittered pianist and orchestrator (John Garfield, in his first film role) who grows fond of the pluckiest sister, Emma (Priscilla Lane). Things get surprisingly dark as the movie nears its end, before everything turns to sweet nonsense once again. A bonus: lots of Gershwinesque music at the piano, the work (I think) of Max Rabinowitz and Heinz Roemheld. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Razor’s Edge (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1946). “The road to salvation is difficult to pass through, as difficult as the sharp edge of a razor”: so says an anonymous Indian holy man (Cecil Humphreys), paraphrasing the Upanishads, in this adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel. There, and here, a traumatized WWI veteran, Larry Darrell (Tyrone Power) sets out in search of the meaning of life, working as a laborer yet hobnobbing with a wealthy set (Anne Baxter, John Payne, Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, with Herbert Marshall as Maugham, a wise elder passing through now and then). Tragedies befall the set, as Larry keeps his eye on the prize — which is what, exactly? On the one hand this movie feels like sheer malarkey; on the other it’s an assembling of great performances, particularly from Baxter and Tierney. ★★★★ (TCM)

[The movie’s themes were timely: “There was a surge of American GIs joining monasteries after the end of the Second World War, seeking solace and refuge in a violent and increasingly complicated world.” Here’s a short film about the last days of an American Trappist monastery founded by 1947 as a daughter house of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani (where Thomas Merton was a monk).]

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

A mail chute in the movies

[From Nazi Agent (dir. Jules Dassin, 1942). Click for a larger view.]

This mail chute filled the screen. The florid handwriting, which belongs to a courtly stamp and rare-book dealer, fits.

This post is for my friend Diane, who has quite a (virtual) collection of mail chutes from real life. Diane’s attention to mail chutes got me looking at them too.

A Naked City mail chute

[While we are waiting.]

That’s a pretty spiffy mailbox. Detective Arcaro, could you step away so we can get a good look? Please?

[A hotel manager (Charles Tyner), Detective Adam Flint (Paul Burke), Detective Frank Arcaro (Harry Bellaver), and Lieutenant Mike Parker (Horace McMahon). From the Naked City episode “C3H5(NO3)3,” May 10, 1961. Click any image for a larger view.]

Here’s the one good glimpse of the box:

[Flint and mailbox.]

I don’t see the name, but I’m assuming it’s a Cutler Mailing System. Notice the pre-ZIP Delivery Zone label. I spotted one of those in 2013, on a visit to the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. The gallery’s address was 724 Fifth Avenue, in Zone 19. The ZIP Code for that address: 10019. The hotel in this Naked City episode was the Spencer Arms Hotel, 140 West 69th Street. The ZIP Code for that address: 10023. See? The world makes sense: 19, 10019; 23, 10023. Elaine remembers seeing the hotel when was a Juilliard student living on the Upper West Side. In 1986 the building became a co-op.

One more glimpse before parting, with a good view of the chute:

[Flint and Parker with Jack Lubin of the bomb squad (Terry Carter). Carter, by the way, was the first Black actor to appear in the series.]

Looking through the Spencer Arms’ lobby windows in Google Maps’ Street View leads me to believe that the Cutler Mailing System has left the building.

This post is for my friend Diane Schirf, who likes Cutler Mailing Systems.

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

The Maltese mailbox

[Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) and a mailbox. Union Bus Station, San Francisco. The Maltese Falcon (dir. John HUston, 1941. Click for a larger view.]

Spade has to borrow a pencil from the clerk to address the envelope. What kind of detective doesn’t carry a writing instrument? One as confident as Sam Spade. He knows that he can always borrow a pen or pencil from a friendly clerk. And he knows that when he needs to keep a claim check safe, he can trust the United States Postal Service.

Diane Schirf has written about lobby boxes and mail chutes. No chute here, but it’s an impressive mailbox.

SOUSPS.

Related reading
All OCA mail posts (Pinboard)

[I like the idea of a city in which you can address mail to “City.”]

Peanuts chute

[Peanuts, February 2, 1972. Click for a larger view.]

There must be a chute. Sally has written to a pen pal — that’s why “a letter” is something that flies over the ocean.

See also: Slywy’s collection of mail chutes.

[Yesteryear’s Peanuts is this year’s Peanuts.]

New York 19

Postal zone numbers for large American cities were first used in 1943. ZIP Codes were first used in July 1963. This broken label is affixed to a mail chute in the stairwell of 724 Fifth Avenue, New York 19, N.Y., the home of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

Other postal posts
Letter box and lock
A mail box in Naked City
A mail chute In Molly Dodd’s building
Mail chutes and phone booths
Snail Mail


[Life, November 9, 1959.]

Letter box and lock

We were taking a walk before buying tickets to see Monsieur Lazhar. For some reason or no reason, we decided to look into a former department store that’s been turned into office space. The back entrance was unlocked on a Sunday afternoon: an invitation to adventure.

We followed the obtuse angles of a long hallway, which brought us to the front of the building. Along the way, we saw no sign of activity. But we did see this mail chute and letter box in the lobby.


[O dowdy world, that had such boxes in it.]

The box’s lock seems to have grown soft and luminous with age. I wonder how long it’s been working.

Related reading
Diane Schirf on mail chutes
Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd (with a mail chute)
Monsieur Lazhar

Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd, Molly Dodd

“Are you ever gonna learn how to land this machine?”

“Oh, don’t transfer your anger — it’s immature. Just bend your knees.”

At YouTube, all five seasons of The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (1987–1991), starring Blair Brown as a beautiful soul lost in New York. Elaine and I share a great affection for this television show, which captures like no other the lonely pathos and sudden surrealism of life in the city. The uploader, who seems to be in a position to know, writes that “the corporate stars and legal planets have aligned to keep Miss Dodd out of the digital age.” Perhaps someday that will change: we have been waiting for years for the series to appear on DVD. The YouTube transfers are from videotape, tracking problems and all. I’m not complaining, only stating a fact. I’m grateful as all get-out for the chance to see this show once more.

Above, Miss Dodd and Davey McQuinn (James Greene) discuss elevator operation. Davey has just offered a frank appraisal of Miss Dodd’s latest poetic effort, which she has described as “part one of a trilogy, tentatively entitled ‘Empty Rooms.’”

I adore Miss Dodd, though she is a lousy, lousy poet.

*

November 2016: The show is long gone from YouTube.

[Note to Slywy: this series affords many opportunities to see a mail chute.]