An EXchange name on screen

[Murder by Contract (dir. Irving Lerner, 1958. Click for a larger view.]

Murder by Contract is a two-fer, with a pocket notebook and an exchange name. Value-added viewing.

Could there be a cooler telephone exchange than YO (York)? “What’s your number?” “Yo, twenty-five thousand.”

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Dream House : East Side, West Side : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire

Pocket notebook sighting

[Murder by Contract (dir. Irving Lerner, 1958). Click for a larger view.]

Claude (Vince Edwards) is an up-and-coming hit man and careful record-keeper. Cost of his dream house: $28,000. In the bank: $523.71.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dragnet : Extras : Foreign Correspondent : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The Last Laugh : The Lodger : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

Twelve or thirteen more movies

[No spoilers.]

The Amazing Mr. X (dir. Bernard Vorhaus, 1948). He’s a California psychic (played by Turhan Bey), with two sisters under his spell. A B-movie, now in the public domain, available as a murky blur at YouTube. It’s sobering to see Cathy O’Donnell in these low-budget surroundings, just two years after The Best Years of Lives. Cinematography by the great John Alton.

*

A Taste of Honey (dir. Tony Richardson, 1961). Resolution, independence, and codependence. Rita Tushingham as an ill-mothered teenager is a delight — she looks vulnerable and tough, sparkly and wised up, like a cross between Audrey Hepburn and Mick Jagger. Whatever will become of her? This film must have been a major influence on Mike Leigh. The best line: “Who’s happy?”


[Rita Tushingham as Jo. Can her Dickensian name be mere coincidence? Click for a larger view.]

*

Mascots (dir. Christopher Guest, 2016). As you might have guessed, a faux documentary. As in Best of Show , a variety of characters come together in a competition. Most of the usual suspects are present (Michael McKean is missing), along with several newcomers. Harry Shearer is heard but not seen. Especially delightful are Parker Posey and Susan Yeagley as the Babineaux sisters, Cindi and Laci. Guest himself has an improbable but welcome cameo.

*

A Face in the Crowd (dir. Elia Kazan, 1957). The prophetic power of this film, in which a cocky vagrant becomes a charismatic everyman, media sensation, and aspiring demagogue, cannot be overestimated. And the heck with Lee Remick: it’s Griffith and Patricia Neal who provide the truly compelling eroticism here. You’ll never see The Andy Griffith Show in the same way again.

*

La Chienne (dir. Jean Renoir, 1931). From Georges de La Fouchardière’s novel of the same name. Minutes in, we realized that this film is from the same source as Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street . But Renoir’s film evinces much greater compassion for the participants in the lovers’ triangle, each hapless and frail in her or his own way, each subject to a cruel fate. The last scene, filmed on a Parisian avenue, is extraordinary.


[Looking at a Renoir. Click for a larger view.]

*

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the “National Lampoon” (dir. Douglas Tirola, 2015). My acquaintance with the Lampoon began with the August 1971 issue, whose cover showed an Alfred E. Neumanesque William Calley above the tagline “What, My Lai?” To a fourteen-year-old, that made Mad seem like kid stuff. But looking through a gallery of Lampoon covers, I recognize nothing past 1975: I outgrew the Lampoon much earlier than I would have imagined. This documentary, a celebration of humor that often did little more than attempt to shock, is too affectionate, too self-congratulatory, and too dull.

*

Gentleman Jim (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1942). One of those films that make me wonder: how did this get into the queue? Because I added it, though I have no idea why. Maybe I was looking to see more of Ward Bond. “Gentleman Jim” (Errol Flynn) is the boxer James J. Corbett. Every trope of Irishness is on display in this story— drink, fisticuffs, the old songs, priestliness. But there’s nothing to explain how Corbett developed a new approach to boxing. Best scene: John L. Sullivan (Ward Bond) turning the future over to Corbett. And it’s fun to see William Frawley in his pre-landlord days.

*

The Mask You Live In (dir. Jennifer Siebel Newsom, 2015). An exploration of masculinity. What does it mean to be a man, and what expectations does the unholy command “Be a man” place upon boys and young men? Especially important viewing in what threatens to be the age of Trump. Where did Dunning K. Trump get his idea of what it means to be a man? The most interesting figure among the film’s speakers: former NFLer Joe Ehrmann.

*

The Fly (dir. Kurt Neumann, 1958). Here’s the real reason we shouldn’t try for GMOs. Herbert Marshall and Vincent Price lend some high seriousness to a premise that could easily become laughable but instead remains compelling. The special effects are blessedly few, and the best one is gruesomely ordinary: a mechanical press. My favorite moment: the writing on the blackboard. The best lines: “Inspector, what does all this mean?” “I have no idea.”

*

A Life at Stake (dir. Paul Guilfoyle, 1954). Lust and life insurance: a variation on Double Indemnity , with Angela Lansbury and Keith Andes. Lansbury’s character here seems to look forward to Isabel Boyd in The World of Henry Orient and Eleanor Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate . (We’re a long way from Cabot Cove.) Yet another excellent B-movie found at YouTube.

*

Murder by Contract (dir. Irving Lerner, 1958). An obsessively orderly young man named Claude (Vince Edwards) aspires to work as a hit man. He achieves considerable success. This story has deeply existential overtones. The handheld camera work, tight closeups, quick pace, implied violence, and odd musical score lift this film into greatness. (I thought of The Third Man and Breathless .) Herschel Bernardi and Phillip Pine add an element of comedy, at least for a while, as Claude’s handlers, hapless middlemen both. Martin Scorsese cites this film as a major influence (he dedicated New York, New York to Lerner). Now playing at YouTube.

*

City of Fear (dir. Irving Lerner, 1959). Another YouTube find. We didn’t realize that we had picked another Irving Lerner/Vince Edwards film until the credits began to run. Edwards plays an escaped convict carrying a steel canister that he thinks holds a fortune in heroin. The canister in truth contains Cobalt-60. This film recalls the dangers of Panic in the Streets and Kiss Me Deadly , pneumonic plague and “the great whatsit.” I especially liked this film’s depiction of unglamorous Los Angeles: endless wide avenues of auto-repair shops and billboards.

We didn’t know while watching, but we’ve seen at least one more Lerner film: To Hear Your Banjo Sing (1947).

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Fourteen more : Thirteen more : Twelve more : Another thirteen more : Another dozen : Yet another dozen : Another twelve : And another twelve : Still another twelve : Oh wait, twelve more

Stranded by the State

Stranded by the State , a video series from In These Times and Kartemquin Films, examines the effects of Illinois’s budget crisis on the state’s people. The first episode comes out today. Watch at YouTube.

Related reading
All OCA Illinois budget crisis posts (Pinboard)

[It bears repeating: the crisis is a manufactured one. Our governor insists on tying any budget to “reforms” designed to destroy state-employee unions.]

“Brr-r”

[Nancy , November 18, 1949.]

Nancy is right.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Orange Trek art

Fresca at l’astronave (one of the funnest people I’ve ever met online) has created two great, witty examples of Star Trek orange crate art. Investigate and report back to Starfleet Command.

Best years, given or given up

I was browsing a biography of Teresa Wright in the library, looking first at the pages about Shadow of a Doubt (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1943) and The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946). And my confidence in the writer began to drop. Here is his discussion of the title of Wyler’s film:

“The best years” cannot refer to the time of the war, nor to what preceded it — that would be too cynical and would reduce the significance of the heroic exploits of these men. Nor can the title refer to what is in the future — that would be hypothetical and, from a narrative standpoint, a cheat. Nor can the best years indicate what we see in the present, which is obviously a time of disillusionment and disappointment.

The title makes sense only if we understand it not literally but ironically. That is certainly the impact of the only moment in the picture when the phrase is spoken: when the character played by Virginia Mayo complains loudly to her husband (Dana Andrews), “I’ve given you the best years of my life!" In fact, she’s given him nothing of the kind: she married him less than three weeks before he went off to war, and he has returned to find her frivolous, avaricious and adulterous.

Donald Spoto, A Girl’s Got to Breathe: The Life of Teresa Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016).

But that’s not what “the character played by Virginia Mayo,” otherwise known as Marie Derry, says to husband Fred. What she does say:

“I’ve given you every chance to make something of yourself. I gave up my own job when you asked me. I gave up the best years of my life! And what have you done? You've flopped.”

Selfish Marie doesn’t claim to have given Fred anything — except chances. But she has given up , given up what belonged to her — the time that has been lost to war, time that can never be regained. In an earlier scene, when Marie speaks of being “right back where [we] started,” “just as if nothing had ever happened,” Fred tells her, “We can never be back there. We never want to be back there.”

I suspect that the title of Wyler’s film lurks behind a passage in Robert Fitzgerald’s 1961 translation of the Odyssey . In book 23, Penelope speaks to Odysseus of their twenty years apart:

                                                      “Think
what difficulty the gods gave: they denied
    us
life together in our prime and flowering
    years,
kept us from crossing into age together.”

“Our prime and flowering years” — or the best years of our lives.

[Fitzgerald served in the U.S. Navy in the Second War. He writes about that in the postscript to his translation of the Aeneid .]

What made Billy Wilder cry

Billy Wilder, speaking of The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946):

“I cried through the whole picture, and I am not a pushover — I laugh at Hamlet .”

From Directed by William Wyler (dir. Aviva Slesin, 1986). Quoted in Donald Spoto’s A Girl’s Got to Breathe: The Life of Teresa Wright (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016).

Somewhat related posts
Harold Russell : Teresa Wright, Teresa Wright

“The Right Way to Resist Trump”

Luigi Zingales, an observer of Italian politics, writing in The New York Times about “The Right Way to Resist Trump”: “The news that Chelsea Clinton is considering running for office is the worst possible. If the Democratic Party is turning into a monarchy, how can it fight the autocratic tendencies in Mr. Trump?”

[No arguments here, please. I’m sharing this link because I think it’s good food for thought.]

“The Rot of Fake News”

“Doc, you’re gargling with Coke. And it’s bad for you”: “The Rot of Fake News,” an essay by Todd Zwillich (WNYC).

A related post
The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year: post-truth