Word of the day: emeritus

When I was a college student, I would occasionally notice the word emeritus next to a faculty name in the course catalogue. I thought it meant “really old but somehow, God knows how, still teaching,” or something like that. I didn’t know what it meant. Here is a definition, from what might be called a dictionary emeritus, Webster’s New International Dictionary, second edition:

adj . [L., past past. of emerere , emereri , to obtain by service, serve out one’s term, fr. e out + merere , mermeri , to merit, earn, serve. See MERIT.] Retired from office or active duty on account of age, infirmity, or long and faithful service, and honored with a nonofficial position and title corresponding to those held in active service; — esp. of a clergyman or college professor.

Yes, merit, and all that. But I like the awkward overtone of penal life in “serve out one’s term.” A professor emeritus has done the time.

A phone call yesterday prompted me to write this post: a friend called, and Elaine asked if she would like to speak to the professor emeritus. Who? Me! I mean I .

Side Street in a Naked City

When I first saw Anthony Mann’s film Side Street (1949), I hadn’t yet seen the television series Naked City. Seeing Side Street again, I’m excited to realize that its last shot must be the inspiration for the last shot of the last Naked City episode, “Barefoot on a Bed of Coals” (1963). The view in each shot is from inside an ambulance, with a woman standing and watching as her wounded man is taken to a hospital. Here, from Side Street, is Ellen Norson (Cathy O’Donnell), watching as the ambulance drives off with her husband Joe (Farley Granger). Click on any image for a larger view:



And here is the much longer closing shot from “Barefoot on a Bed of Coals.” It’s very difficult to see the resemblance as a coincidence.

The resemblance may be a matter of Naked City ’s director of photography Andrew Laszlo paying tribute to Side Street ’s cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg. Or the resemblance may be meant as a larger tribute to a film shot on location in Manhattan, a film whose style influenced the series.¹ Or perhaps Harry Bellaver (Naked City ’s Detective Frank Arcaro), who played a cabdriver in Side Street, remembered the closing shot and made a suggestion. Who knows? Not I.


[Harry Bellaver as cabdriver Larry Giff.]

Side Street and the first Granger-O’Donnell film, They Live by Night, are available as a two-fer DVD.

¹ Though Naked City takes its name from Jules Dassin’s film The Naked City (1948), the series plays more like Side Street: the emphasis is not on the cops but on guest-star protagonists. And speaking of cops, Naked City ’s Lieutenant Mike Parker (Horace McMahon) bears a greater resemblance to Side Street ’s terse Captain Walter Anderson (Paul Kelly) than to The Naked City ’s elfin Detective Lieutenant Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald).

Related reading
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)
Side Street, locations
They Live by Night

SafariSort

I noticed yesterday that my Safari bookmarks had grown into a long, increasingly unalphabetical list. And then I discovered that Safari still lacks the option to sort bookmarks in alphabetical order. (Apple, WTF?) SafariSort, a successor to James Howard’s apparently defunct Sortosaurus, is a tiny free app that does the job. I know the developer’s name as Sully. Thank you, Sully.

Being persnickety about icons, I replaced SafariSort’s icon with a Scrabble tile. A + 1 seems to me a good enough suggestion of alphabetical order. I used the free app LiteIcon to make the change. And now I’m all CamelCased out.

 

Rowhouses and monstrosities

From The New York Times, “On a Block of Single-Story Homes, a ‘Monstrosity’ in Queens Draws Ire”:

The preservationists argue that single-family rowhouses imbue some neighborhoods — particularly in Queens — with their essential character. But under existing zoning laws, there is no specific designation for single-family rowhouses that provides protection against increasing the number of units, or against out-of-scale and out-of-character expansions.

“It’s an absolute disgrace,” said Richard Hellenbrecht, the vice president of the Queens Civic Congress, an umbrella association of more than 100 community groups. “Lovely, affordable homes being squeezed out by monstrosities.”

I’ve seen it happen on my old block in Brooklyn and in my parents’ town in New Jersey: modest, beautiful older houses destroyed, with outsized structures taking their place. In Brooklyn, as in Queens, some residents now live in permanent shadow. The Times photographs show what’s happened.

A related post
Some have gone and some remain

They Live by Night

[Sandwiches and sodas. Click any image for a larger view.]


[On the road, again.]

They Live by Night (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1948) seems ahead of its time. The film’s brief prologue tells us that the young couple at the center of the story, Bowie Bowers (Farley Granger) and Keechie Mobley (Cathy O’Donnell), “were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” They are in flight: he, as an escaped convict; she, as a daughter, niece, gas-station attendant, and maid of all work who runs from her family of thieves. The premise might suggest High Sierra (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1949), but Bowie is no criminal: he was wrongly convicted after falling in with bad company. As Keechie tells it, “He’s just a kid.” It seems that neither she nor he has ever danced or kissed. They are absolute beginners. All they know is their mutual devotion.

They Live by Night has been repackaged for DVD as film noir, but I’m not sure the description fits: there are too many moments of comedy (Ian Wolfe as the proprietor of an all-night marriage chapel, Byron Foulger as a manager of rental cabins), too many scenes of domestic happiness. But happiness for Bowie and Keechie is always fleeting: just as a cop in the film predicts, every knock on the door sets their hearts pounding. Thus they are again and again on the move, by day, by night, one or the other driving. And then there are Howard Da Silva and Jay C. Flippen as Chickamaw and T-Dub Mobley, Keechie’s brutal uncles, determined to make Bowie the third man in their criminal schemes. (It takes, T-Dub explains, three men to knock over a bank, “the three mosquitoes.”) Perhaps it’s noir after all. But I prefer to think of the film as the prelude to Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955): the real story here is one of young lovers attempting to flee the world. Leigh Harline’s score — made largely of variations on “I Know Where I’m Going” — underscores the pathos of their journey.

For me the great revelation of this film is Cathy O’Donnell. She has always seemed to me the one false note in The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946): as girl-next-door Wilma Cameron, she speaks with a stagey voice that seems wildly out of place — courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn, who arranged for diction lessons to remove O’Donnell’s southern accent. Here O’Donnell is a far more natural actor, and the difference is extraordinary. No wonder Granger recommended her for the film. The two have a genuine, sweetly erotic chemistry on screen. Granger and O’Donnell co-starred again in Side Street (dir. Anthony Mann, 1949), but there O’Donnell has relatively little to do. My guess is that They Live by Night is her shining moment in film.

They Live by Night is adapted from Edward Anderson’s novel Thieves Like Us (1937). A copy sits somewhere in our house, in the stacks of books waiting for shelves not yet built.


[In a bus depot. Keechie skips the nickel candy bars and chooses the cheapest option, “Delicious Fresh Nuts,” 1¢. I like vending machines with mirrors, artifacts of the dowdy world. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.]

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Will Lee (Mr. Hooper) in They Live by Night

Cartoon plagiarism

The cartoonist Jeff Parker, a recent victim of plagiarism by one “William Charles”: “How bad are you at editing that you couldn’t notice your ‘cartoonist’ has been wildly swinging from one style to another, like Tarzan on Red Bull?” “Cartoon plagiarism and the case of the unknown Maryland cartoonist” (The Washington Post ).

The strangely mild attitude of Montgomery Sentinel editor Brian Karem toward his pseudonymous serial plagiarist (“that’s two strikes against him”) is appalling. I’d say that the plagiarist has already struck out — and that he should be thrown off the team.

Recently updated

Name that actor Mystery solved.

A joke in the traditional manner

Did you hear about the cow coloratura?

No spoilers. The punchline is in the comments.

More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?

[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He must take credit for all but the squirrel-doctor, Santa Claus, and this one, which won his approval this past Saturday.]

Name the actor

He’s playing a bit part here. He went on to play a character known to millions. Can you name him?

First prize: an all-expenses-paid round-trip ticket to 1947, the year this scene was filmed.

Take your best shot in the comments. I‘ll drop hints if needed.

*

11:46 a.m.: This post has had a fair number of visits but only one guess. Here’s a hint: notice that the character is working in a store.

1:12 p.m.: Another hint: he went on to play a character known to millions, both young and old, but especially young.

*

The Crow called it: it’s Will Lee (1908–1982), Sesame Street ’s Mr. Hooper. For comparison purposes:

 

The 1947 Lee is from They Live by Night (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1949). No date for the other photograph.

And for the record, I would never have figured it out without clues.

A related post
Review: They Live by Night

How to improve writing (no. 59)

From the national news, about a crane-and-building accident in Manhattan: “Luckily, the situation could have been far worse.” What’s lucky though is not that things could have been worse; it’s that things were not worse.

Better: The situation could have been far worse. But fortunately , &c.

Related reading
All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 59 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]