[Peggy Nash (Ann Sheridan) and Danny Kelly (James Cagney). Peggy: “Boy, was it crowded tonight on the subway. Talk about sardines. They got it easy. At least they’re floatin’ in olive oil.”]
Watching City for Conquest (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1940), I wondered how its contents were ever packed into a 104-minute can. This movie has everything: a scene of the principals’ childhoods in old New York (à la Angels with Dirty Faces), boxing, ballroom dancing, composing, brotherly love, jitterbugs, a swank party, a gangland murder, a symphony at Carnegie Hall, an “Old Timer” (a shabby Everyman-observer), and sardines. And four montages — of New York, Coney Island, dancing, and boxing. Danny Kelly (aka Young Samson) is a reluctant fighter, a former Golden Gloves champ who returns to the ring to help pay his composer-brother Eddie’s tuition. Peggy Nash is a dancer whose rise to success with partner Murray Burns (Anthony Quinn) pulls her away from the city and Danny. Yes, that Anthony Quinn, who turns out to have been a good dancer. (Sheridan’s a good dancer too. That Cagney barely dances in the film must have amused moviegoers.) Another unexpected element: Elia Kazan as crime boss “Googi,” who at the swank party introduces Eddie as “a composer of real class.” Yes, that Elia Kazan.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
City for Conquest (and sardines)
Monday, May 24, 2010
Cambridge Classics misspelling
The Telegraph reports that the Cambridge University Classics Department “is facing embarrassment after misspelling a quote from Aristotle on the doors of a new £1.3 million extension”:
Academics chose the line “all men by nature desiring to know” but spelt the word “phusei,” “by nature,” with an English S rather than the Greek letter sigma. . . .A related post
Professor of Classics Mary Beard, 55, a member of the department, expressed her dissatisfaction in a blog posting about the 5,500sq ft extension which was completed in March.
“Even the gods have shown their disapproval in their own inimitable way,” she wrote.
“Collage” (Another Cambridge misspelling)
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Gummies for grown-ups
Infantilization alert: One A Day VitaCraves Complete Adult Multivitamin Gummies. “Available in both fruit and sour fruit flavors!”
I’m reminded of the V8 commercial targeting people who “don’t always like the taste of vegetables.” Grown-ups, eat your spinach!
Hank Jones and the New York Times
New York Times reporters Corey Kilgannon and Andy Newman accompanied a landlord as he bashed a hole in a door. Behind the door, the room in which pianist Hank Jones lived (when not on the road) in the last year and a half of his life.
This shoddy — and perhaps illegal — invasion of privacy has yielded a maudlin, uninformed piece of reportage: A Jazzman’s Final Refuge. If you read it, read too the comments, in which Jones’s manager, family members, and fellow musicians offer their comments on Corey Kilgannon, Andy Newman, and Hank Jones’s life and art.
A related post
Hank Jones (1918–2010)
Friday, May 21, 2010
How to pronounce “Zooey”
Aaron Cohen poses the question. J.D. Salinger’s literary agency has already answered: “zoh-ee.” I will continue to think that “zoo-ee” makes better sense.
Three Franny and Zooey posts
A Salinger catalogue
Another Salinger catalogue
“[D]ark, wordy, academic deaths”
Google!
Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde: Google today celebrates a thirty-year anniversary. Go to Google and see.
Now if only they could fix FeedBurner.
[May 25, 2010: FeedBurner has been fixed, and the game is here.]
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Adam Wheeler’s résumé
Simulacrum alert
The New York Times reports today on recreations of lost New York City restaurants and nightspots. Here are descriptions of the real things, two of them, circa 1964:
From Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964). Illustration by Ruby Davidson.
“Risqué palaver” and what looks like a three- or four-drink minimum: that must have been quite a scene.
Also from Hart’s Guide
Chock full o’Nuts
Greenwich Village and coffee house
Mayflower Coffee Shop(pe)
Record stores
Schrafft’s
