Twelve more movies

[No spoilers.]

Sour Grapes (dir. Reuben Atlas and Jerry Rothwell, 2016). A documentary about a con artist in the world of high-end wine. Two elements stood out for me: the collaboration between the con artist and his marks (who really, really want to believe that they’re getting their hands on rare wines) and the lawyerly effort to cast the con artist’s efforts as relatively benign.

*

Plunder Road (dir. Hubert Cornfield, 1957). In the tradition of The Asphalt Jungle (dir. John Huston, 1950) and The Killing (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1956): five men execute a perfectly plotted heist, and then everything goes wrong. Much of the story happens via radio: after the five split up to drive three trucks to California, it’s the radio that brings the news as things go wrong. And at one point a radio makes things go wrong. Now playing at at YouTube.

*

Edge of Doom (dir. Mark Robson, 1950). An odd, unnerving movie, with a crucifix as a murder weapon, and every human relationship slightly off. Dana Andrews plays a priest — an unfathomable casting choice. Farley Granger plays a desperate young man — a more fathomable casting choice. Paul Stewart (Raymond the butler in Citizen Kane) is a downstairs neighbor. At YouTube.

*

Chinatown (dir. Roman Polanski, 1974). Los Angeles, water rights, family dysfunction, plot convolutions, private detection, a generous application of Raymond Chandler. Watching again after many years, I realized that all I remembered of this film was water, a fence, and Jack Nicholson’s nose.

*

Behind Locked Doors (dir. Oscar Boetticher, 1948). A private investigator feigns mental illness to get inside a sanitarium where a crooked judge may be hiding to avoid arrest. Douglas Fowley is a fine sadistic orderly. The real treat: Tor Johnson (of Plan 9 from Outer Space) as “The Champ,” an ex-fighter and inmate. At YouTube.

*

Million Dollar Weekend (dir. Gene Raymond, 1948). Shouldn’t that be Million-Dollar? But this film is so low-budget that they probably couldn’t afford the hyphen. A stockbroker (Gene Raymond) skips town for Shanghai and promptly becomes involved in other people’s problems. Alternative description: an embezzler, a maybe-murderer (Osa Massen), and a blackmailer (Francis Lederer) walk onto a plane. At YouTube.

*

Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal (dir. Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville, 2015). In 1968, ABC News attempted to generate interest in its condensed coverage of the Republican and Democratic conventions by including mini-debates — which weren’t debates at all — between Willam F. Buckley and Gore Vidal. I avoided this documentary after seeing a trailer: its claim for the importance of these few minutes of television theatrics seemed far out of proportion to reality. What most struck me: the modest production values of 1968 news, the cattiness of Messrs. B. and V., and the way their insults and name-calling seem to foretell all that’s horrid in cable news.

*

Fort Tilden (dir. Sarah-Violet Bliss and Charles Rogers, 2014). Would-be adults, adrift in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg, trying to get to Fort Tilden, a beach in Queens — by bike, by borrowed car, by car service, on foot. Wonderful social satire. As someone in the film might say, ”I’d love to see more of your work!” But I mean it. My favorite moment: Infinite Jest taken down from a shelf to serve as a seductive prop.

*

The Exiles (dir. Kent Mackenzie, 1961). The lives of young Native Americans adrift in Los Angeles: exiles from the reservation, exiles from the city itself. Comic books, cigarettes, beer, Thunderbird wine, cards, jukeboxes, and, even in these surroundings, tradition. Los Angeles neo-realism, with beautiful black-and-white cinematography and strong overtones of Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery (1956). (That I could recognize that connection tells me that I must really watch a lot of films.) More about The Exiles here.


[Exiles, the morning after.]

*

The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne (dir. Matthew Pond and Kirk Marcolina, 2013). Doris Payne, jewel thief of many years’ experience, was recently in the news once again, at the age of eighty-six, after stealing a diamond necklace from a store in Georgia. This documentary presents Payne as a charming, elegant, incisive fabulator, a woman who has turned her life into a story (complete with The First Time I Stole, and Why) and who will prop herself up with the flimsiest logic: “My being a thief has nothing to do with my moral fiber. It has to do with my behavior.” See also: the difference between stealing and not giving back what someone gave you.

*

Shock Corridor (dir. Samuel Fuller, 1963). A reporter feigns an incestuous obsession with his “sister” (she’s really his girlfriend) to get inside a mental institution and solve a patient’s murder. The premise recalls Behind Locked Doors, but this film is a world apart. The three witnesses to the murder, all patients, have been made mad by racism, war, and the threat of nuclear annihilation. American culture, on this film’s account, is no Great Society: it’s sick. Gripping scenes of violence and of “Main Street,” the long corridor where men act out their delusions or stand and stare inertly.

*

The Great Lie (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1941). Mary Astor, George Brent, and Bette Davis in a love triangle that turns into a quadrilateral — or a pentagon, if you include the piano. If the utter implausibility of the storyline is too much, just press the SD button on your remote.

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 : Twelve or thirteen more

[The SD button activates the suspension of disbelief for those who cannot activate it for themselves.]

Christmas 1916

[“Many Gifts for Convicts: One Anonymous Donor Sends 1,600 Mince Pies to Sing Sing.” The New York Times, December 25, 1916.]

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.

A song for these times

In The New York Times, Bruce Handy writes about “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”: “if any single tune reflects the miseries of 2016, and the anxious uncertainty with which we greet 2017, it is this 72-year-old holiday chestnut.”

We will have to muddle through somehow.

Caroline, no!

Billboard reports that the Beach Boys are considering an invitation to perform at an upcoming presidential inauguration. This photograph and some recent history make me think that the response to this invitation will be yes we will Yes. And I suspect that members of Mike Love and Bruce Johnston’s supporting cast will not be allowed to opt out. They are not Rockettes.

I long ago learned, with some exceptions, to separate the art from the artist. So I won’t be burning my LPs and CDs. But this news is just one more dab of awful in awful times.

I’m dreaming of a liverwurst sandwich

Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby) explains his theory of dreams to Betty Haynes (Rosemary Clooney). From White Christmas (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1954):

“I got a whole big theory about it, you know — different kinds of food make for different kinds of dreams. Now if I have a ham and cheese on rye like that, I dream about a tall cool blonde, sort of a first-sack attack, you know. Turkey, I dream about a brunette, a little on the scatback side, but oh, sexy, sexy.”

“What about liverwurst?”

“I dream about liverwurst.”

A truly weird moment, whose weirdness is compounded by the Crosby affect, a fleeting German accent, and a pitcher of buttermilk, which Crosby calls “the cow.” (And why buttermilk and not just milk?) That Vera-Ellen and Danny Kaye are in the film doesn’t help. I don’t get Bing Crosby. I don’t get Vera-Ellen. And I don’t get Danny Kaye. But Rosemary Clooney, boy, could she sing.

You can relive this strange scene, as often as you like, at YouTube.

[Scatback: “an offensive back in football who is an especially fast and elusive ballcarrier.” So the brunette is hard to get? And the blonde is easily tackled? Bob, why are you talking so rudely to Betty?]

“Hypothesis Song”

Ben Leddy is at it again. With illustrations and hands-on experiments by Ben and Alison Slate.

More songs at Ben’s YouTube channel.

Relativity: LPs

Walking past a stand of vinyl in Barnes and Noble, I realized how large LPs now look: they’re easily mistaken for wall calendars. CDs have changed my sense of scale. And it doesn’t help that the LPs I most often see are the ones on my shelves, just spines, 1/8″ or 3/16″ or so wide.

The LP’s size has always been to its advantage: front and back covers and the occasional gatefold invite and reward attention, before, during, and after listening. No background music: only background looking and reading.

Related reading
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John Ashbery, New Collages

At the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Manhattan, an exhibit of art by John Ashbery, New Collages. Sixteen collages are on view via the link. Here is a work in which old masters meet:


John Ashbery, Storm at Castelfranco. Collage on paper. 2016. 12 1/4 x 8 3/4 inches.

Previous exhibits of Ashbery’s collages at Tibor de Nagy: 2011 and 2008. Thanks to the gallery for permission to reproduce this collage.

Bob Dylan, and not John Ashbery? Krazy.

Related reading
All OCA Ashbery posts (Pinboard)

[The collage places George Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Offissa Bull Pupp in a detail of the Giorgione (Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco) painting The Tempest. “Storm at Castelfranco” is the title of a poem by Chester Kallman (and, later, the title of a book of poems). Some Ashbery and Kallman history here.]

From an old notebook

Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Click for a larger view. Nabokov wrote out his lectures: “meticulously chosen words” indeed.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Other bits from an old notebook
Alfalfa, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, metaphors : Alfred Appel Jr. on twentieth-century art and literature : Barney : Beauty and the Beast and kid talk : Eleanor Roosevelt : Halloween observations : John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch : Plato, Shirley Temple, vulgarity, wisdom, Stan Laurel : Square dancing, poetry, criticism, slang

“Missile Mail”

“Missile Mail: Regulus Scores Historic First” (1959). From British Pathé. Found via Sidedoor.

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