Clouzot, Le salaire de la peur

Next in our Henri-Georges Clouzot spree: the 1953 film Le salaire de la peur [The wages of fear]. The premise is simple: somewhere in South America, the American-owned Southern Oil Company signs up four unemployed Europeans to drive two truckloads of nitroglycerin to the scene of an oilfield fire. The route is primitive and exceedingly dangerous: the slightest mishap can cause the cargo to explode. Minute for minute, Le salaire de la peur is one of the most nerve-wracking films I’ve seen. The above still is one small bit of evidence: each truck must back onto this partly rotted platform to make a sharp turn.

Le salaire de la peur made me think at many points of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (dir. John Huston, 1948), another film in which desperate men try to find their way out of the misery in which they’re stuck. Clouzot’s film also made me think of Homer’s Odyssey, another story of skillful intelligence applied to unforeseen challenges. Here though it seems that all gods, not just Poseidon, are angry.

Le salaire de la peur is available, beautifully restored, from the Criterion Collection. With Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Peter Van Eyck, and Folco Lulli as the drivers, and Véra Clouzot as a cantina worker.

More Clouzot
Le Corbeau
Quai des Orfèvres
Le mystère Picasso (Elaine’s post)

[My choice for most nerve-wracking film: probably Inglourious Basterds (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2009). Yours?]

On an Austerlitz photograph

Rick Poynor on the source of a photograph in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz: On the Threshold of Sebald’s Room.

[I’m making my way through Austerlitz.]

Pocket notebook sighting

The second film in our Henri-Georges Clouzot spree: Quai des Orfèvres (1947). It’s partly a story of desire and jealousy, and partly a police procedural. In the above scene, Inspector Antoine (Louis Jouvet) takes notes as he questions Jenny Lamour (Suzy Delair) and Maurice Martineau (Bernard Blier): “Do you mind? I have a memory like a sieve.”

Quai des Orfèvres is out of print at the Criterion Collection.

More Clouzot
Le Corbeau

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Union Station

Pinboard is down

The bookmarking service Pinboard is down, and is keeping its users posted on the problem via Twitter: “Errors with our ISP seem ongoing despite sweet promises.” Before the site went down completely, I managed to catch this page:

[Muhammad Ali v. Sonny Liston, May 25, 1965.]

A service that respects its users and has a sense of humor about itself is a service I’m happy to support.

2:57 p.m.: Pinboard is back. The status page reports that “the site is running on a backup server with reduced capabilities . . . . All bookmarks are intact.”

8:25 p.m.: The circumstances behind the outage are the subject of a New York Times article.

Clouzot, Le Corbeau

Elaine and I are on a spree, watching films by Henri-Georges Clouzot, a director neither of us knew of a week or so ago. The 1943 film Le Courbeau is the story of a little French town whose residents begin receiving anonymous accusatory letters signed by The Raven. Who can trust whom: that is the question. Above, three residents, Denise Saillens (Ginette Leclerc), Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay), and Laura Vorzet (Micheline Francey), eye a fourth with suspicion.

Made during the occupation, for the German-controlled Continental-Films, Le Corbeau was criticized by the Vichy regime, the Resistance, and the Roman Catholic Church. After liberation, the film was banned in France, and Clouzot was banned from the French film industry. Both bans were lifted in 1947.

Le Courbeau is out of print at the Criterion Collection.

Bob Slate, Stationer

I just learned that Bob Slate, Stationer, a Cambridge, Massachusetts institution, closed this spring, after seventy-eight years in business. In 1984, when Elaine and I decided to marry, Bob Slate was the obvious choice for our wedding invitations. On recent summer visits to Cambridge, my family would indulge me while I went slightly bonkers buying stuff at Bob Slate. Elaine would go slightly bonkers buying stuff too. Bob Slate’s three stores were a stationery dream: notebooks, paper, pens, pencils, and supplies galore.¹

The reasons for the stores’ demise are the obvious ones: aging owners (sons Justin and Mallory Slate), declining sales, and no buyer in sight. Mallory Slate’s observation is telling: “People spend an hour looking at every fountain pen we have, then they go home and buy it on the Internet.” The moral of the story: paying more at a local store is often in the customer’s long-term interest. If you want, say, a bookstore to browse in, buy your books from that store. That might not be enough to keep the store going, but at least you won’t be helping to bring about its demise.

¹ Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items.

Happy Father’s Day

[Photograph by Louise Leddy, November 28, 1957.]

That’s my dad, James Leddy, and me, in Union City, New Jersey, in front of my grandparents’ apartment building (i.e., the building where my grandparents rented an apartment and where my dad grew up). The tree is now gone, but Google Maps shows the little brick walls still guarding the steps to the entrance, same as they ever were.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day to all.

“ProcrastiNation”

From January 2011, a good episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge: “ProcrastiNation.”

A related post
Advice for procrastinators

Chris Matthews explains it all for you

During an MSNBC Hardball discussion of the Anthony Weiner scandal:

“Sex is generally between two people in private, you know, in some room somewhere.”

No Sleep

Adam Mansbach’s Go the Fuck to Sleep (pictures by Ricardo Cortés) is a joke in the form of a book, a dull and repetitive and vulgar joke, and a dull and repetitive and vulgar book, one that commodifies snark and makes a pretense of transgression. Note the coy cover, dodging the forbidden word, the better to display the book in stores. How edgy.

As a parent who was sometimes up at all hours, and who read and made up many stories to induce sleep (sometimes conking out while so doing), I never felt the impulse to say or think anything even close to what this book’s title says. (Honest.) My interest, 2:00 p.m. or 2:00 a.m., was in caring for someone who needed all the care I could offer. That’s what being a parent often calls for: selflessness. It comes with the territory.

The title Go the Fuck to Sleep might prompt the perennial child-question: “Why?” We never hear a child ask that question in the book, but the answer is clear: because mommy and daddy want to do what they want to do (“We’re finally watching our movie”). To which one might say, in the spirit of the book: please grow the fuck up.