Eleven movies, one mini-series

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

All My Sons (dir. Irving Reis, 1948). From the Arthur Miller play. Wartime manufacturer Joe Keller (Edward G. Robinson) has let his business partner take the rap and go to prison for okaying defective plane parts, parts that led to the deaths of twenty-one pilots. That revelation, withheld until late in the story, is meant to be a surprise, but it isn’t, because without it, the story would be pointless. Robinson and Burt Lancaster (as Joe’s son!) do well, but the story is contrived, and the production is painfully stagy. ★★ (TCM)

*

A Hatful of Rain (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1957). From the Michael Gazzo play. A Korean war vet (Don Murray) struggles to hide his morphine addiction from his wife (Eva Marie Saint) and father (Lloyd Nolan) as he’s repeatedly saved from his dealer’s vengeance by his sad-sack brother (Anthony Franciosa). Saint, as a neglected partner who’s almost ready to quit, is the most persuasive of the principals; Murray is plausible as an addict almost ready to commit robbery to fund a fix; Franciosa and Nolan are loud in a way that suits a stage, not a screen. As the dealer and his henchman, Henry Silva and William Hickey are chilling. ★★★ (TCM)

*

A Touch of Love, aka Thank You All Very Much (dir. Waris Hussein, 1969). Rosamond Stacey (Sandy Dennis), a London doctoral student, is a magnet for men but avoids relationships — she’s sworn off men, she tells a friend. And then she finds that she’s pregnant. A deeply bittersweet story, with an actor whose expressive face was made for it: Dennis’s smile never seems far from tears. WIth Ian McKellen in his first film appearance. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Emile (dir. Carl Bessai, 2003). Ian McKellen stars as a celebrated academic returning to his native Canada to receive an honorary degree. There he attempts to establish some relationship with his sole surviving family members, a niece, Nadia (Deborah Kara Unger), and great-niece, Maria (Theo Crane). An understated, highly Proustian story, as Emile confronts things done and not done in his earlier life, with many matters left to the viewer to notice and figure out. Try to count the clocks. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Narrow Margin (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1952). Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor star in a suspenseful story with a simple premise: a police detective is hiding and protecting a mob boss’s widow on a train from Chicago to Los Angeles, where she will name names at a trial. Two thugs looking to prevent her from testifying are also on the train. A long game of cat and mouse ensues. One of the great train movies, and I cannot understand why it hasn’t already shown up in these pages. ★★★★ (F)

*

Trio (dir. Ken Annakin and Harold French, 1950). I’m not sure about W. Somerset Maugham’s ability as a novelist (I’ve never read him), but he was certainly a fine storymaker. “The Verger” is an O. Henry-like tale of an illiterate man’s (James Hayter) surprising good fortune. In “Mr. Know-All,” a jewelry dealer (Nigel Patrick) swallows his pride and tells a lie to preserve a relationship. “Sanatorium,” the longest of these stories, dwells on the lives of tuberculosis patients, with special attention to two (Michael Rennie and Jean Simmons) who fall in love. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Teen Torture, Inc. (dir. Tara Malone, 2024). A thoughtful three-part documentary about the “troubled teens” industry — the multi-billion-dollar array of residential facilities where young people (as young as ten), having been separated from the families and communities, are subject to various forms of psychological, physical, and, sometimes, sexual abuse. These facilities, often unregulated due to religious exemptions, are schools in name only: not one of the ex-inmates interviewed mentions a book or a classroom. Perhaps the most compelling story: a young woman who hid extra underwear under the insoles of her shoes when she attempted an escape. Two well-known faces in this documentary: the television personality Phil McGraw, who profited mightily from his relationship with one of these facilities, and Mitt Romney, co-founder of Bain Capital, a prominent firm in the industry. ★★★★ (M)

*

Murder Most Foul (dir. George Pollock, 1964). Loosely based on an Agatha Christie novel, it replaces Hercule Poirot with Miss Jane Marple (Margaret Rutherford), here the lone holdout on a jury. Ever skeptical, she begins her own investigation of the murder case, joining an amateur theater company to do so. Two more murders follow. DNA analysis of this movie suggests that it’s a not-distant ancestor of Murder, She Wrote: amateur female investigator, male sidekick (played by Rutherford’s husband Stringer Davis), clues galore, suspects galore, investigator in danger, touches of whimsy here and there. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Luzhin Defense (dir. Marleen Gorris, 2000). From the Nabokov novel. John Turturro is Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin, a shabby chess master covered in cigarette ashes and sweat. Arriving in an Italian city to play a championship match, he meets and immediately falls for Natalia Katkov (Emily Watson), a wealthy woman who also somehow falls for him. Their relationship and the evil doings of Luzhin’s former tutor Valentinov (Stuart Wilson) form the stuff of the movie, which spreads itself thin trying to be a chess story (with multiple chess errors), a love story, a study of an obsessive mind, and a tour of opulent early-twentieth-century houses. ★★ (TCM)

*

Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird (dir. Steven-Charles Jaffe, 2013). The cartoonist Gahan Wilson was indeed born dead and brought to life by a persevering doctor, but there’s nothing particularly weird here: this documentary shows Wilson to be a hardworking artist, though I wish there were more about the artist, either talking about his art or doing the work. Instead we get brief commentaries from an array of artists and celebrity fans. My favorite scene: cartoonists having lunch on the day they come to Manhattan to pitch cartoons to Bob Mankoff, then comics editor at The New Yorker. My least favorite scene: cartoonists showing their work to Bob Mankoff, which is like watching students fail an oral exam. ★★ (CC)

*

Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy‌ (dir. Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones, 2024). A documentary urgently worth watching. I’ve written about it in a previous post. All I’ll add here is that every reference to a Democratic candidate as “demonic” or “evil” is wholly literal for some Trump voters. And every reference to a coming civil war in wholly literal too. ★★★★ (T)

*

The Commandant’s Shadow (dir. Daniela Volker, 2024). A reckoning with the past: in this documentary we meet Hans-Jürgen Höss, the son of Rudolf Höss, the camp commandant of Auschwitz, whose family life is dramatized in The Zone of Interest (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2023). We also meet Hans’s sister Brigitte (still given largely to rationalizations and denials about her father’s actions) and Hans’s son Kai, a minister perhaps more tormented by the past than his father. The documentary reaches a high point when Hans (who early on says “I had a really lovely and idyllic childhood in Auschwitz”) and Kai visit Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of Auschwitz, and her daughter Maya. Anita: “It’s very important to talk about these things.” ★★★★ (M)

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

Mitt Romney marching

The world may not be upside down, but it’s certainly tilting a bit more. Mitt Romney is marching in Washington. His words, my punctuation:

“We need a voice against racism — we need many voices against racism and against brutality. We need to stand up and say that black lives matter.”

No bottom

In The New York Times tonight:

A video depicting a macabre scene of a fake President Trump shooting, stabbing and brutally assaulting members of the news media and his political opponents was shown at a conference for his supporters at his Miami resort last week, according to footage obtained by The New York Times.

Several of Mr. Trump’s top surrogates — including his son Donald Trump Jr., his former spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis — were scheduled to speak at the three-day conference, which was held by a pro-Trump group, American Priority, at Trump National Doral Miami. Ms. Sanders and a person close Mr. Trump’s son said on Sunday that they did not see the video at the conference.

The video, which includes the logo for Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, comprises a series of internet memes. The most violent clip shows Mr. Trump’s head superimposed on the body of a man opening fire inside the “Church of Fake News” on parishioners who have the faces of his critics or the logos of media organizations superimposed on their bodies.

Among the “parishioners” in this video: Bill and Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Bernie Sanders. One the Times doesn’t mention: Barack Obama. Also: a figure with the Obama campaign logo for a face.

To adapt a possibly apocryphal Gertrude Stein: There ain’t no bottom. There ain’t gonna be any bottom.

Russia and Rex

The March 12 issue of The New Yorker arrived in our mailbox yesterday. About a fifth of this issue’s pages are devoted to Jane Mayer’s article “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier.” One stunning excerpt:

One subject that Steele is believed to have discussed with Mueller’s investigators is a memo that he wrote in late November, 2016, after his contract with Fusion had ended. This memo, which did not surface publicly with the others, is shorter than the rest, and is based on one source, described as “a senior Russian official.” The official said that he was merely relaying talk circulating in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but what he’d heard was astonishing: people were saying that the Kremlin had intervened to block Trump’s initial choice for Secretary of State, Mitt Romney. (During Romney’s run for the White House in 2012, he was notably hawkish on Russia, calling it the single greatest threat to the U.S.) The memo said that the Kremlin, through unspecified channels, had asked Trump to appoint someone who would be prepared to lift Ukraine-related sanctions, and who would coöperate on security issues of interest to Russia, such as the conflict in Syria. If what the source heard was true, then a foreign power was exercising pivotal influence over U.S. foreign policy — and an incoming President.

As fantastical as the memo sounds, subsequent events could be said to support it. In a humiliating public spectacle, Trump dangled the post before Romney until early December, then rejected him. There are plenty of domestic political reasons that Trump may have turned against Romney. Trump loyalists, for instance, noted Romney’s public opposition to Trump during the campaign. Roger Stone, the longtime Trump aide, has suggested that Trump was vengefully tormenting Romney, and had never seriously considered him. (Romney declined to comment. The White House said that he was never a first choice for the role and declined to comment about any communications that the Trump team may have had with Russia on the subject.) In any case, on December 13, 2016, Trump gave Rex Tillerson, the C.E.O. of ExxonMobil, the job. The choice was a surprise to most, and a happy one in Moscow, because Tillerson’s business ties with the Kremlin were long-standing and warm. (In 2011, he brokered a historic partnership between ExxonMobil and Rosneft.) After the election, Congress imposed additional sanctions on Russia, in retaliation for its interference, but Trump and Tillerson have resisted enacting them.

In the news yesterday (I know it was in there somewhere): sanctions are supposed to be coming soon. “In the next several weeks,” according to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Check’s in the mail.

[And now I wonder if Sam Nunberg’s media tour was timed to deflect attention from Mayer’s article. A search of the CNN website suggests that the network has left the article untouched. Mayer has appeared on two MSNBC shows, Morning Joe and The Rachel Maddow Show.]

“Such is the future of education”

From a new novel of academic life, Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members :

Alex Ruefle has prevailed upon me to support his teaching application to your department, which I gather is hiring adjunct faculty members exclusively, bypassing the tenure track with its attendant health benefits, job security, and salaries on which a human being might reasonably live. Perhaps your institution should cut to the chase and put its entire curriculum online, thereby sparing Ruefle the need to move. . . .  You could prop him up in a broom closet in his apartment, poke him with the butt end of a mop when you need him to cough up a lecture on Caribbean fiction or the passive voice, and then charge your students a thousand dollars each to correct the essays their classmates have downloaded from a website. Such is the future of education.

Maureen Corrigan talked about the novel on NPR’s Fresh Air. Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for sending the link and this excerpt.

As I’ve often written in these pages, I think real college will continue to be available for a fortunate few. Malia and Sasha Obama and Mitt Romney’s grandchildren will no doubt go to college, the real thing. But for the rest of us, the prospects are likely to be different. The great democratization of American higher education in the aftermath of the Second World War begins to look like a glorious, sadly short-lived experiment.

[Pop quiz: Dear Committee Members is written as a series of recommendation letters. What other novel of the teaching life takes the form of letters, memos, and notes?]

A poem for the day, sort of

Elaine and I went to the store, and on the way home we began talking about the plural forms of beef — beefs and beeves. And then this happened:



As Yeats once wrote, “There is always a phantasmagoria.” Always! Happy Valentine’s Day to all.

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Breakfast with William B. and Edna St. V.
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Mitt Romney: the soul of a poet

The Adjunct Project

The Chronicle of Higher Education has created a website for The Adjunct Project, which collects information from instructors on adjunct salaries in American higher education. Some adjunct teaching pays well: at Harvard, the salaries reported are $9,500 to $12,575 per course. But the national average, according to the project’s data thus far, is $2,987 per course. And adjuncts at sixteen schools report salaries of less than $1,000 per course. Notice, whatever the amount of money involved, how the language of adjunct teaching echoes the language of migrant labor, where workers are paid by the bucket. Adjunct faculty who travel from campus to campus to put together a living indeed form something of a migrant community within higher education. (The Chronicle reports on one instructor who left Vermont for California in search of better pay — shades of the Joads.)

Think about the numbers: $1,000 to teach a fifteen-week course — really a sixteen-week course, if we include a final examination. That’s $62.50 a week, fifty cents more than Ralph Kramden made driving a bus in 1955. Even if one underestimates the time required to do the weekly work of a course — three hours in the classroom, perhaps one talking to students outside class, perhaps four of preparation, perhaps another four grading papers or exams — that work comes out to $5.20 an hour, far less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. Subtract Social Security and taxes, and the numbers are even more dire.

The exploitation of adjunct labor is the shame and scandal of American higher education. If Frank Donoghue is right, college faculty of my generation may well be “the last professors.” I don’t mean to suggest that “college” itself will disappear. But tenured and tenure-track faculty form a smaller and smaller percentage of teaching personnel, and I suspect that the four-year residential experience will be available to fewer and fewer students. Mitt Romney’s grandchildren will “go to college,” of course. So too, for that matter, will Malia and Sasha Obama. As less fortunate students turn to so-called massive open online courses (MOOCs) — courses soon to be “monetized,” the possibilities of teaching even as an adjunct will be fewer and fewer.

Faculty sometimes joke — cruelly — that college would be a great place without the students. Now, I think, administrators are beginning to see it the other way around.

[In The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), Frank Donoghue noted that tenured and tenure-track professors then composed only 35% of college teaching personnel in the United States. The percentage continues to drop.]

Stepping in it

Talking with Rolling Stone, Barack Obama used a bad word with reference to “the other guy,” one Mitt Romney:

“You know, kids have good instincts,” Obama offered. “They look at the other guy and say, ‘Well, that’s a bullshitter, I can tell.’”

Here’s a passage that I posted without comment in August, from a philosopher’s consideration of bullshit:

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Romney’s willingness to say anything, take any position, to suit his purpose makes him, in my eyes, a bullshitter. I can tell. Score a hit for Obama.

A related post
Mitt Incandenza

The New Yorker endorses Obama

The editors of the New Yorker have endorsed Barack Obama. An excerpt:

The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney — a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America — one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality — represents the future that this country deserves.

Watching last night’s debate (or most of it — I had to miss the first twenty minutes) confirmed for me that Mitt Romney is the political version of Infinite Jest’s Orin Incandenza, the pick-up artist who says, “Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.” I am hoping that American voters won’t get fooled.

[Notice the New Yorker umlaut dieresis: reëlection.]

Live-blogging the debate

Barack Obama just characterized Mitt Romney’s mysterious tax-proposal as “a sketchy deal.” Too true. I am delighted to hear sketchy in its slang sense in a presidential debate.

[The post-title is mock-serious. I’m offering one observation, not a running commentary.]

Mitt Trail arrives for the debate

[Mark Trail, October 16, 2012. Click for a larger view.]

As dedicated Mark Trail readers know, facial hair is the mark of a villain. Long sideburns and a mustache are dead giveaways. (Guns are another clue.) The man in red must be a rogue town-haller who insists on doing things his way. Things do not look good for Mitt Trail in tonight’s debate.

As dedicated Orange Crate Art readers know, I have long suspected that D-list comic-strip hero Mark Trail and Mitt Romney are the same (two-dimensional) person. If you need more proof: more Mitt Trail posts.

Mitt Incandenza

The New York Times has a good editorial commentary today on the “moderate Mitt myth.” Quoth the Times:

The way a presidential candidate campaigns for office matters to the country. A campaign should demonstrate seriousness of purpose and a set of core beliefs, and it should signal to voters whether a candidate shows trustworthiness and judgment. Those things don’t seem to matter to Mitt Romney.

From the beginning of his run for the Republican nomination, Mr. Romney has offered to transfigure himself into any shape desired by an audience in order to achieve power.

Yep, Proteus. But Proteus didn’t aim to please an audience. I’m reminded less of the ancient shapeshifter and more of Orin Incandenza, the tireless seducer of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In a letter that forms the content of a long endnote, a former friend describes one of Orin’s pick-up strategies: Orin would approach a woman in a bar or at a dance and say, “Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.” The difference between Governor Romney and Orin Incandenza: Orin acknowledges that it’s an act.

The strangest part: the name of Orin’s former friend is Marlon Bain.

Mitt Romney debates himself

Yes, the candidates disagree: Mitt Romney debates himself.

A tip for debate-watching

I will quote advice that I offered on October 2, 2008:

The best choice for watching a presidential or vice-presidential debate is C-SPAN. Why? C-SPAN’s continuous split-screen lets you see both participants at all times, allowing for all sorts of observations about body language and facial expression.

I hope this advice still holds.

Some expect very little from Mitt Romney tonight. Not me. I expect both body language and facial expressions, visible at all times on a split-screen. And I expect that Governor Romney will deliver his “zingers” in a way that makes clear the month-plus of rehearsal he has put into them.

[From the New York Times: “Mr. Romney’s team has concluded that debates are about creating moments and has equipped him with a series of zingers that he has memorized and has been practicing on aides since August.”]

Yes, we can

UNKNOWN CALLER called last night with a recorded message from a group looking “to defeat Barack Obama.” Sorry, wrong number. But I listened out of morbid curiosity, and when the invitation came to speak to a person about donating, I pressed “1.” The reading-from-a-script began immediately: “Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan,” &c. I jumped in: “Could you please remove me from your lists and not call again?” The reply: “Yes, we can.”

The reply was most likely automatic. But if I were working in telemarketing and had to field calls for Romney and Ryan, that’s exactly the secret message I’d give a fellow Obama supporter.

Related posts
New directions in nuisance calls
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[UNKNOWN CALLER’s number is listed as belonging to a Washington, D. C. architectural firm. But the number has been disconnected. Caller-ID spoofing, I suppose.]

Happy harvest

At Mother Jones, a 1985 clip in which Mitt Romney speaks of the work of Bain Capital as a matter of investing in and managing companies before “harvest[ing] them at a significant profit.” If companies, like corporations, are people, my friend, this metaphor is one bloody mess.

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Other posts mit Mitt

Now the other foot

This zillionaire doofus doesn’t need a Reverend Wright. He seems to be his own worst enemy.

Related reading
All OCA Mitt Romney posts
The Bain of My Existence (Elaine’s account of life at Bain & Co.)

Mitt Romney, soaking in it

Mitt Romney, earlier today: “No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate.” No doubt. It’s called white privilege, and Governor Romney, you’re soaking in it.

[With apologies to Madge.]

Mark Trail, remember?

[Mark Trail, August 8 and 15, 2012.]

The art has suffered, or the hair stylist has gone on break. But a memory card has replaced the “chip,” and that’s a good thing. If there were a report card, I’d be torn between Needs Improvement and Shows Improvement. But not yet Satisfactory.

“Remember, we took the memory card out”: remember, the memory card? Like Mitt Romney, I live for laughter. Hahaha.

Related reading
Earlier Mark Trail posts

The grizzly, friend to man

[Mark Trail, June 23, 2012.]

There’s probably a Mitt Romney joke in here somewhere — Sarah Palin, “mama grizzly,” all that — but I’ve chosen to post this panel for the sheer lunacy of outdoorsman Mark Trail’s thought process. Kids, don’t try this at home, or in someone else’s home.