Eleven movies, one season

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

A Place in the Sun (dir. George Stevens, 1951). From Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. With different leads, the story might be insufferable, but Montgomery Clift’s shiftiness, Elizabeth Taylor’s breathiness, and Shelley Winters’s neediness make for compelling drama — or, well, melodrama. Charlie Chaplin called it “the greatest movie ever made about America,” and by America, I think he meant class. Would pair well with Room at the Top or Strangers on a Train. ★★★★ (TCM)

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Crime against Joe (dir. Lee Sholem, 1956). It feels like dollar-store Hitchcock: a wrong man scenario, in which Joe Manning (John Bromfield), Korean War vet, frequent drunk, painter manqué, is suspected of killing a barroom singer. Julie London is “Slacks” Bennett, a carhop and “nice girl” who’s helping Joe find the real killer. (Joe’s mother has encouraged him to find “a nice girl.”) A class pin is the only thing that can establish Joe’s innocence — but where is it? ★★★ (YT)

*

Three Bad Sisters (dir. Gilbert Kay, 1956). One bad movie, from Bel-Air Productions, who gave us Crime Against Joe. Here John Bromfield plays Jim Norton, a pilot caught in the schemes of three sisters whose millionaire father died in a plane piloted by Norton himself. Two sisters are bad — murderous Valerie (Kathleen Hughes) and man-eating Vicki (Marla English), who says she graduated “magna cum laude from Embraceable U.” Good sister Lorna (Sara Shane) is merely desparate, as is the movie itself. ★★ (YT)

*

Flamingo Road (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1949). Joan Crawford is Lane Bellamy, a carnival dancer who ends up stranded in a southern town. Three men take an interest in her presence: an evil sheriff (Sydney Greenstreet, sweating, guzzling milk, dressed all in white), a badgered deputy sheriff (Zachary Scott), and a rich businessman (David Brian). I think of this movie as a variation on Nightmare Alley, with a carny rising in the world, only to — I’ll stop there. Great atmospherics (Ted McCord’s cinematography is a wow), but the story slides into mediocre melodrama. ★★★ (TCM)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Myrna Loy feature

Whipsaw (dir. Sam Wood, 1935). Myrna Loy is Vivian Palmer, a jewel thief, one among many (it’s complicated). Spencer Tracy (in a role marked for William Powell) is Ross McBride, an undercover lawman who hopes that Vivian will lead him to the other thieves. The best part of this movie: a Hitchcockian interlude with Vivian and Ross posing as a married couple seeking shelter from a storm at a farmhouse, where John Qualen is a nervous father-to-be and Vivian is pressed into service as a doctor’s assistant. The banter is the closing scene is a delight, moreso because there’s no Thin Man baggage to clutter the stage. ★★★★

*

The Dropout (created by Elizabeth Meriwether, 2022). Except for William H. Macy’s fake forehead, everything about this mini-series is brilliant. As Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani, Amdanda Seyfried are a toxic power-couple, running a company built on lies, and then more lies to cover earlier lies. The human cost is staggering. The difference between Steve Jobs’s reality-distortion field and Holmes’s: Jobs made people believe they could do hard things; Holmes made people believe she was doing hard things. ★★★★ (Hulu)

*

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (dir. Alex GIbney, 2019). Every minute is compelling, and watching this documentary about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos deepens my admiration for The Dropout, which gets everything right. An extraordinary story about credulity, delusion, greed, and lies. “You want it to be true, so badly”: Tyler Shultz, Theranos employee, whistleblower, and grandson of board member George Shultz. “This was lunacy”: Roger Parloff, journalist. ★★★★ (HBO)

*

The Secret Ways (dir. Phil Karlson and Richard Widmark (uncredited), 1965). Confusing from the get-go: in Vienna, an American mercenary of sorts, Mike Reynolds (Richard Widmark) is hired to get a Hungarian professor/revolutionary out of Hungary, but by whom? And the screen titles say “1961,” but it’s supposed to be 1956. Widmark does a fine job save for a dubious attempt at Rat Pack comedy. The atmospherics — dark streets, cavernous interiors, subterranean meeting places — add greatly, and the camerawork (Mutz Greenbaum) shows the influence of The Third Man. ★★★ (YT)

*

Smooth as Silk (dir. Charles Barton, 1946). Virginia Grey plays a rising Broadway star, engaged to a criminal-defense lawyer (Kent Taylor) and aiming for a starring role in a new play. Her attentions turn to her fiancé’s just-acquitted client, a hapless young drunk whose uncle is producing the play in which she wants to star. The bewildering thing: Grey’s character is at the center of things, but she disappears from the movie well before its end. My favorite bits: Harry Cheshire (the minister in The Best Years of Our Lives) as a loyal butler and astute drama critic. ★★ (YT)

*

The Strip (dir. László Kardos, 1951). The reason to watch this movie: great music from Louis Armstrong and and three of the All-Stars: Jack Teagarden, Barney Bigard, and Earl Hines (sorry, IMDb, Arvell Shaw and Cozy Cole are never on the bandstand). Mickey Rooney, playing a drummer accused of murder, tells his story in a long flashback, which fortunately includes several complete musical numbers from Armstrong, the All-Stars, and Rooney. Rooney’s approach to the drums — playing over the other musicians, not with them or under them — marks him as something of a poor man’s Buddy Rich. With William Demarest as a nightclub owner and Sally Forrest as a cigarette girl/dancer. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Fire Music: The Story of Free Jazz (dir. Tom Surgal, 2021). A compilation of archival and contemporary interviews, performance footage, photographs, and hokey visual effects. The interview segments are invaluable: Bobby Bradford’s comments on difficulty in music, for instance, or Anthony Braxton’s account of leaving for Paris with fifty dollars in his pocket and the resolve to “Play, or die.” But this documentary wanders and wanders, from one topic to another, and so many musicians are heard speaking but not playing. No Julius Hemphill, no Henry Threadgill, and the musicians of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians are given relatively little attention. ★★★ (CC)

*

Come Back, Little Sheba (dir. Daniel Mann, 1952). If all you (like me) know of Shirley Booth is television’s Hazel Burke (a character Booth called her insurance policy), this movie will be a revelation. Booth and Burt Lancaster play the Delaneys: Lola, frumpy and desperately cheerful, and Doc, a chiropractor and recovering alcoholic, partners in a dead marriage burdened with a painful history, burdened further by the arrival of a boarder, Marie (Terry Moore), college student and wild child. A poignant picture of lives in decline and the effort to make something of them still. As for the title: you’ll have to watch. ★★★★ (CC)

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)

Creative Black Music at the Walker

From the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis): Creative Black Music, an online archive of audio, video, photographs, ephemera, and correspondence. With the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Amiri Baraka, Anthony Braxton, Betty Carter, Ornette Coleman, Julius Eastman, Wadada Leo Smith, Cecil Taylor, and Henry Threadgill.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

In childhood, I would have called today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Brad Wilber, “medium.” Not too difficult, not too easy. “How was the test, Michael?” “Medium.” But wait a sec — in childhood I wouldn’t have been venturing anyway near this crossword.

Today’s puzzle has a number of surprising answers. They go with these clues:

1-A, 8 letters, “Bring pressure to bear.” I can’t recall seeing the answer in a puzzle before.

1-D, five letters, “Biggest performing rights group.” I’m married to a member.

11-D, eleven letters, “Efficient clamps.” Yow!

12-D, four letters, “One in an Old Time Radio lineup.” Clever stuff.

21-D, six letters, “Period of petitioning.” Something to do with an election year? No. A really smart clue and an unusual answer.

24-D, eleven letters, “British dessert.” I was hoping for SPOTTEDDICK, which I know about from a Henry Threadgill tune.

41-A, ten letters, “Attired, as circus chimps.” Wonderfully weird.

45-A, eight letters, “Diligent.” This answer strikes me as a word one might see in a dowdy academic’s letter of recommendation.

65-A, six letters, What Every Mother Should Know author (1914). I guessed right.

And now back to words from my childhood.

“Medium” is not a synonym for Goldilocks’s “just right.” Indeed, there’s a crossing in this puzzle which seems to me ridiculous: 14-D, four letters, “Forest*A*__ (online woods management guide)” and 16-A, six letters, “Like tangerines.” The problem, as I see it: 14-D is painfully obscure. And because that’s the case, an apt answer for 16-A is not likely to look like a wrong answer. Indeed, that wrong answer, to my eyes, is a better answer, a cleverer answer, than the correct one. Caution: if you plan to do the puzzle, stop reading here.

To the left, the original. To the right, my suggested alterations:

G E C K O S     G E C K O S
O R A N G Y     O R A N G E
T E N O R S     T E N O R A
    I B E T         I T E R

I’ll grant that TENORA (clued perhaps as “Voice of Catalonia”) and ITER (“Brainy passage”) are a bit out of the way. But ORANGE, noun and adjective, is wittier than the variant spelling ORANGY, and as for Forest*A*SYST — jeepers.

No other spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Mongol Profile

[Disclaimer: This is not an advertisement.]

I had to do it. The 1988 Dewar’s advertisement I’ve spoofed appears in this post.

Related reading
All OCA Henry Threadgill posts
All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)

[Don’t miss the revised text, bottom right column.]

Martinis or cheap cigars

Henry Threadgill, on the importance of adjusting to the economic difficulties of life as an artist, filmmaker, musician, writer:

“You won’t feel like you’re being tossed around in life because, you know, you’re not able to have martinis every day at two. So stop it. Get a cheap cigar and be happy.” [Laughs.]

From a 2009 interview with Phoebe Legere for Roulette TV.

A related post
Henry Threadgill in a 1998 Dewar’s advertisement

Henry Threadgill and Dewar’s

[New York, June 20, 1988. Click for a larger view.]

I happened to think of this Dewar’s advertisement yesterday. It’s from a series that began in 1969. I was delighted when I first saw it: Henry Threadgill! In 1988, I knew his music from his Sextet and Sextett and the trio Air. Seeing Threadgill, an AACM musician, in a Dewar’s ad was beyond my imagining. I’m not sure what might be comparable: Ted Berrigan in an advertisement for Pepsi?

But then Ted Berrigan really liked Pepsi. It doesn’t surprise me to learn that Threadgill was not particularly devoted to Scotch. As he told the Los Angeles Times in 1989, “People often come up to me in bars and want to buy me a shot of Dewar’s. Frankly, I’m partial to a cup of coffee or some seltzer or some beer.”

Looking at this advertisement in 2015, I have noticed, maybe for the first time, the pencil in the scene. It’s a Mongol, with the identifying words removed. By their ferrules ye shall know them: that’s the Mongol’s distinctive ferrule on display.



Here is one of my favorite Threadgill recordings, “When Was That?,” the title track from a 1982 About Time LP. It appears that this recording never made it to CD. I’m being very careful with my LP.

*

Two years after posting this advertisement, I turned it into one for Mongol pencils.

A related post
Jack DeJohnette in Chicago (With Henry Threadgill)

[The musicians: Henry Threadgill, alto; Craig Harris, trombone; Olu Dara, cornet; Fred Hopkins, bass; Brian Smith, piccolo bass; Pheeroan Aklaff, drums; John Betsch, drums.]

Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams

Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams:

“He was always telling us, ‘Go to the library.’ Practicing every day wasn’t enough; he wanted us to be serious. ‘Go get books — you don’t need a lot of money,’ he told us. He’d already taught himself orchestration and how to play clarinet; he had studied all the piano players. And yet he still has the child-like attitude toward things — he was full of wonder. Around the piano, even today, you get the sense that he’s still a kid.”

Quoted in the liner notes for the ECM disc Made in Chicago, the recording of an August 2013 Chicago Jazz Festival concert by DeJohnette’s Special Legends Edition Chicago: Muhal Richard Abrams, Larry Gray, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill. I wrote about the concert in 2013. The recording was released this week, and it’s a killer.

Here, from ECM, is a short film about Made in Chicago.

[“Still a kid”: In August 2013, Muhal Richard Abrams was almost eighty-three.]

Jack DeJohnette, Made in Chicago

Coming in January on ECM, Made in Chicago, a recording of a 2013 Chicago Jazz Festival concert with Jack DeJohnette, Muhal Richard Abrams, Larry Gray, Roscoe Mitchell, and Henry Threadgill. I’m excited to hear this music again: I’ve never before attended a performance that made it to disc.

Correction: I don’t know that I’ve ever attended a performance that made it to disc. I may have been in the audience for one or more of the tracks on Miles Davis’s We Want Miles. Not remembering which night of Miles’s three-night Boston 1981 run I was there for, I’ve never been able to figure it out. And besides, there were two shows each night —

But I know I was at the Jack DeJohnette concert.

How about you? Have you ever attended a performance that ended up on disc?

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January 13, 2015: The release date has been reset as March 10.

A related post
Jack DeJohnette in Chicago

Jack DeJohnette in Chicago

Jack DeJohnette
Special Legends Edition Chicago
Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park
Chicago Jazz Festival
August 29, 2013

Roscoe Mitchell, soprano and sopranino
    saxophones, baroque flute, bass recorder
Henry Threadgill, alto saxophone, bass flute
Muhal Richard Abrams, piano
Larry Gray, bass and cello
Jack DeJohnette, percussion

“Chant” (Mitchell)
“Jack Five” (Abrams)
[Unidentified composition]
“The Museum of Time” (DeJohnette)
“Leave, Don’t Go Away” (Threadgill)
[Unidentified composition]

Jack DeJohnette has long been leading groups under the Special Edition name. For this year’s Chicago Jazz Festival, he assembled an Edition with an AACM slant: Muhal Richard Abrams is a co-founder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, established in Chicago in 1965; Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill are both founding members of the group, which might be described as an effort in musical self-determination and self-sufficiency. Last night’s performance was far from what a tradition-minded listener might call “jazz”: the music was often atonal; solos were almost non-existent. The music might be better understood as a set of dialogues and interludes: piano accompanying drums; saxophone accompanying saxophone; one instrument giving way to another. Where was the beat? It was everywhere, pulsing and shifting and changing colors.

The most compelling moments in last night’s music, for me: the two-saxophone intensity and swirling piano of “Chant,” whose repeated scalar figures sounded like calls to prayer or dark omens; the bass flute/bass recorder/cello chamber music of the third, unannounced composition; the Ellington and Mingus overtones and exotica in “The Museum of Time”; and the raucous encore, with Mitchell lifting his soprano almost straight above his head. DeJohnette was endlessly responsive to his fellow musicians. To use an Ellington phrase, he put the pots and pans on, all of them, coloring and commenting with sticks and mallets and even a microphone (held above and below cymbals to produce a raspy hum). But the secret hero of the night was Larry Gray, the one musician without an AACM connection, who is as capable on cello as on bass, and who locked eyes and minds with DeJohnette to create the most solid of foundations. Gray’s authority made me think of Malachi Favors, bassist for the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and that’s as great a compliment as I can offer.

A note on production values: A video screen behind and above musicians evidently makes it impossible for me to pay attention to musicians. I felt like an idiot watching them on the screen, yet there I was, watching the screen. The sad part: one couldn’t not watch the screen, which overpowered the human beings on the stage. It was impossible to look at them without seeing it.

Icing on the last night’s cake — or, really, a second cake: Elaine and I met up with the owner and sole proprietor of Music Clip of the Day for conversation and coffee and tea. He’s added some music to many of my days.

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January 20, 2015: Made in Chicago, a recording of this perfomance, is scheduled for March 10 release on ECM.

Related reading and viewing
Jack DeJohnette on Muhal Richard Abrams
Jumbotron Jam (Elaine’s take)
Photographs of last night’s concert, by Robert Loerzel