Telephone exchange names on screen: Side Street

[The Moving Finger looks up an address; and, having looked up an address, moves on.]

I sat down to watch Side Street (dir. Anthony Mann, 1949) expecting a so-so thriller and was surprised to discover a great film. The premise is deeply noir: an everyday Joe (literally: letter-carrier Joe Norson, played by Farley Granger) makes a mistake and finds himself in way over his head. The film has strong overtones of The Naked City (dir. Jules Dassin, 1948): aerial views of New York City; a street-level montage of city life; a Tiresias-like narrator meditating on the lives of city dwellers and Joe’s plight; a blackmail racket; brief moments of brutal, intimate violence; a chase through lower Manhattan. There are fine performances by Granger (bruised and sweaty), Harry Bellaver (a cab-driving thug), Whit Bissell (a skinny bank-teller with a fluffy dog), Jean Hagen (an alcoholic nightclub singer), and Paul Kelly (the police-captain narrator, in a performance that is a model of economy and understatement). It was Cathy O’Donnell’s name that made me curious about this film: O’Donnell’s stagey performance as Wilma Cameron (the girl next door) in The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946) has long seemed to me to be the one false note in that film. As Ellen Norson, Joe’s wife, O’Donnell has little to do here, and her New York accent fades in and out. Her finest moment — no spoilers here — comes when she has almost disappeared from the film. It’s entirely unexpected.

The real stars of Side Street are its New York streetscapes and the cinematography of Joseph Ruttenberg. Ruttenberg is said to have disliked fellow cinematographer Gregg Toland's deep-focus effect, but many of the shots in Side Street are strongly evocative of Toland’s work in Citizen Kane: unusual angles, oddly-placed objects, strong contrasts of light and dark. This shot of Farley Granger is my favorite:



The film’s final chase is a marvel of camerawork, alternating between aerial views (tiny cars moving through impossibly narrow streets) and the interior of a cab. One moment you’re watching from on high; the next, you too have a gun at the back of your neck. Thank goodness the narrator steps in one last time to tell us what to make of it all.

Side Street is available on DVD with They Live by Night (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1949), also starring Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell. (Good, but it’s no Side Street.)

[29 W. Eighth Street, the address of the Village Beauty Salon, is now home to Smoke Express and Cafe Underground. Upstairs is L’impasse, selling what one guide to the area calls “quality slutwear.” It’s a pity that the telephone listings in Side Street have only a “BUtterfield 4”: Joseph Ruttenberg was to work on BUtterfield 8 (dir. Daniel Mann, 1960) a decade later. “The Moving Finger” comes from the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, as translated by Edward FitzGerald: “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, / Moves on.”]

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy

A tree (E.B. White’s) grows in Brooklyn

Recent visits from someone at the New York Times to my post on E.B. White’s willow tree have had me wondering about the tree’s fate. Today’s Times has the news: the tree, “thoroughly bald and rotted,” was cut down in 2009. But the arborist who supervised the work took two cuttings, and one is growing, still, in Brooklyn. Read more:

For Willow in E.B. White Book, One Chapter Ends (New York Times)

Labor Day

[“C. & N.W. R.R., Mrs. Dorothy Lucke, employed as a wiper at the roundhouse, Clinton, Iowa.” April 1943. Photograph by Jack Delano (1914–1997).]

C. & N.W. R.R.: Chicago & North Western Railway Company. The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Newsletter (Autumn 2003) tells us something of Dorothy Lucke’s life:

The Chicago & North Western hired Dorothy Lucke (1909–1986) and other women as “engine wipers” in Clinton, Iowa, during World War II. That was her only railroad employment. After her husband, Albert Lucke, died in 1948, she went back to work, first at a toy factory and then for 25 years at the Clinton Garment Company, according to her daughter, Diane Johnson, Clinton. Later, she married Isaac Leslie.

The Library of Congress has made this photograph available via Flickr.

Manson H. Whitlock, typewriter repairman

Manson H. Whitlock is a ninety-four-year-old typewriter repairman in New Haven, Connecticut. He has noticed business picking up:

“It’s been the last few years. I guess they’re listed on computers. I don’t know what you call it when they’re listed on computers, and I haven’t seen it — but they buy them that way and then come in and have them repaired here.”

The oldest typewriter repairman in New Haven (Yale Daily News)

A related post
Martin Tytell, typewriter man

Alan Wilson

[“20. Four great musicians. Left to right, Fahey, Rev. Rube Lacy (P.M. 12696), Blind Aouhl Krishnawhilsan, David (etc.) Evans, in front of Rev. Lacy’s church in Ridgecrest, California.”]

Singer, guitarist, harmonica player Alan Wilson of Canned Heat, third from the left in the above photograph, died forty years ago today. Like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin (both of whom soon followed), he was twenty-seven.

Alan Wilson, or the Blind Owl, as he was called, was a brilliant musician. His Skip James-influenced singing is immediately recognizable (you may know it from “Going Up the Country”), and his reedy timbre is a reminder that blues voices come in many sizes. As a guitarist, Wilson brought the fingerpicking idioms of pre-WWII acoustic blues to electric music. (Who else could take a rhythmic motif from Garfield Akers and a melody from Blind Willie Johnson and turn them into a song of lunar devastation?) Listen to any number of Canned Heat recordings, and you can hear how Wilson’s creativity as a rhythm guitarist shapes and reshapes a tune. As a blues harmonica player, Wilson is unsurpassed. The strongest evidence: his duets with John Lee Hooker on the double-album Hooker ’n Heat, masterworks of musical empathy. (Try “Burning Hell.”) Hooker called Wilson “the greatest harmonica player ever.” Hooker was right.

I remember as a much younger person thinking of Alan Wilson as a kindred spirit. He was a geeky guy: awkward-looking, glasses-wearing, obviously quite shy. I still think of Alan Wilson as a kindred spirit. How I wish he had had many more years in which to grow as a man and musician.

I chose the above photograph for (what I think is) its obscurity. It appears in the liner notes of guitarist John Fahey’s 1967 LP The Voice of the Turtle (Takoma). Also in the photograph: ex-blues guitarist and singer Reverend Rubin “Rube” Lacy and musicologist David Evans. P.M. refers to the Paramount master-number for Lacy’s only released blues recording, the 1928 “Mississippi Jail House Groan” and “Ham Hound Crave.” The photograph is most likely from 1966, the year that Evans located Lacy in California. Evans, Fahey, and the Blind Owl all recorded with Lacy that year.

Related posts
Canned Heat
Hooker ’n Heat

Tracts, tides, and drunks

Mel Tormé on the vagaries of performance:

“Performing is very tricky,” Tormé said after the set. “It is a good idea to allow some small piece of unhappiness from your life to be a part of your work every night. It gives your singing depth. Standing ovations don’t impress me. I can sing badly and get one. When that happens, I can walk offstage in a deep depression that may last several days. Other times, I get apathetic reactions when I know I have been great. Once in a while, though, that strange silver cord that goes between me and the audience grows taut, and it’s — well, exhilarating. You learn in time that each performance is not the end of the world, that things can go awry because of — what? A faulty digestive tract, a moon tide, a drunk in the house.”

Quoted in Whitney Balliett’s American Singers: Twenty-Seven Portraits in Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

(Thanks for the book, Susan!)

Recently updated

Roger Ebert, telling it like it is (Ebert clarifies his meaning in a coda)

Old and unimproved (on life online)

Changing the language of business

“Accelerated emergence of high maturity behaviors” = “faster results.”

“Challenge” = “problem.”

Unsuck It offers alternatives to the jargon and clichés of business-speak.

Yes, “accelerated emergence of high maturity behaviors” is for real.

(Via Coudal.)

Roger Ebert, telling it like it is

Rogert Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times:

Our political immune system has only one antibody, and that is the truth.

The time is here for responsible Americans to put up or shut up. I refer specifically to those who have credibility among the guileless and credulous citizens who have been infected with notions so carefully nurtured. We cannot afford to allow the next election to proceed under a cloud of falsehood and delusion.

We know, because they’ve said so publicly, that George W. Bush, his father and Sen. John McCain do not believe Obama is a Muslim. This is the time — now, not later — for them to repeat that belief in a joint statement. Other prominent Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul also certainly do not believe it. They have a responsibility to make that clear by subscribing to the statement. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh must join, or let their silence indict them. Limbaugh in particular must cease his innuendos and say, flat out, whether he believes the President is a Muslim or not. Yes or no. Does he have evidence, or does he have none? Yes or no.

To do anything less at this troubled time in our history would be a crime against America.

Update, September 2, 2010: Ebert has appended a brief coda, to leave no question about his meaning:

Many readers have made the same point: What if Obama were a Muslim? What would be wrong with that? There would be nothing wrong. There is no religious test in this nation for holders of office. This is not a “Christian nation,” although you often hear that, because of what is specified in the Constitution. America was founded by refugees from religious persecution, and the Founding Fathers deliberately wrote in safeguards to prevent an Established Religion.

Related posts
Barack Obama on facts
Timothy Egan and Leonard Pitts, Jr. on American ignorance

The Lonely Phone Booth

The Lonely Phone Booth is a book by Peter Ackerman, with illustrations by Max Dalton (Boston: David R. Godine, 2010). The Phone Booth (yes, a proper name) stands at the corner of West End Avenue and 100th Street. It is one of the last outdoor phone booths in Manhattan. From Peter Ackerman’s website:

Kept clean and polished, the Phone Booth was proud and happy . . . until, the day a businessman strode by and shouted into a shiny silver object, “I’ll be there in ten minutes!” Soon everyone was talking into these shiny silver things, and the Phone Booth stood alone and empty, unused and dejected.

The intended audience is four- to eight-year-olds, preternaturally wistful four- to eight-year-olds perhaps. In truth, I think the intended audience is me.