Chuck McCann (1934–2018)

The actor, comedian, and television host Chuck McCann has died at the age of eighty-three. The Daily News has an obituary.

I haven’t thought of Chuck McCann in many years. But for city kids like me, he was one of the faces of TV. I think of them now: Sandy Becker, Officer Joe Bolton, Sonny Fox, Miss Louise, Chuck McCann, Cap’n Jack McCarthy, and Soupy Sales. O local television!

Here’s a seven-part McCann sampler from YouTube: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Don’t miss the typewriter sketch (at 3:48 in part one).

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April 10: The New York Times now has an obituary.

Twelve movies

[No spoilers.]

La Bête Humaine (dir. Jean Renoir, 1938). Jean Gabin (of Grand Illusion) as Jacques Lantier, a railroad engineer whose genetic inheritance causes him to suffer moments of murderous rage. He is one figure in a tangle of relationships, murderous and otherwise, that play out against an exhilarating backdrop of trains and more trains.

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I'll Be Seeing You (dir. William Dieterle, 1944). As my mom would say, "I never heard of it." It was in our Netflix queue because Joseph Cotten stars. A surprisingly frank movie about a guarded romance between people with secrets. Cotten is a veteran suffering from what we can recognize as PTSD; Ginger Rogers is a woman who — well, you'll have to watch. Shirley Temple provides comic relief and creates complications as Rogers’s teenaged cousin. I especially liked the scenes of the dowdy world: a soda fountain, a train-station newsstand, a kitchen with white enamel cookware. Please pass the mashed potatoes.

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Undertow (dir. William Castle, 1949). An ex-mobster (Scott Brady) travels home to Chicago, where he’s promptly framed for murder. A detective friend (Bruce Bennett) and a plucky schoolteacher (Peggy Dow) help him to see his way clear. Surprisingly good, with some scenes shot in Chicago. At YouTube.

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Please Murder Me (dir. Peter Godfrey, 1956). Angela Lansbury as an unhappily married woman, Raymond Burr as her lawyer, in a story that owes everything but a couple of plot twists to Double Indemnity. Crazy good to see Burr’s character with the same courtroom manner as Perry Mason. And fun to see Dick Foran (Ed Washburne of the Lassie world) in film noir. Indeed, this film puts the noir in film noir: just one scene, in a painter’s studio, has any daylight, and that light becomes a subject of conversation. Got meta? At YouTube.

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Harry and Tonto (dir.Paul Mazursky, 1974). Art Carney’s shining hour, as Harry Coombes, a retired teacher displaced when his Manhattan apartment building is torn down to make way for a parking lot. Where to go? On a journey, with his cat Tonto. Two things strike me about the United States depicted in this film: the variety of its inhabitants, and the way a three-TV-network world provided some semblance of a shared culture. Say, did you watch Ironside last night? Harry and Tonto would pair well with De Sica’s Umberto D.

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I, Daniel Blake (dir. Ken Loach, 2016). A widowed Newcastle carpenter (Dave Johns), still recovering from a heart attack, navigates a bureaucratic maze to attain his Employment and Support Allowance. Along the way, he befriends a young single mother (Hayley Squires) and her two children. Often funny, often infuriating, and always deeply moving. Most heartbreaking scene: the food bank. This film too would pair well with Umberto D. or Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man.

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Wonder (dir. Stephen Chbosky, 2017). R.J. Palacio’s 2012 novel (recommended to me by my daughter) is a beautiful and moving narrative for young readers — with multiple narrators, no less. The film version simplifies and sweetens and upscales the novel, which tells the story of August Pullman, a boy with facial differences who enters the fifth grade after a childhood of home schooling. I’ll quote another fifth-grader, Sol Ah, who appears in the documentary The Hobart Shakespeareans: “Even if the movies they make are good, they won’t be as good as the book.” The elementary and high-school kids in this film are impossibly, annoyingly photogenic. Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson seem utterly miscast as Auggie’s parents. Read the novel instead.

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California Typewriter (dir. Doug Nichol, 2016). A then-struggling typewriter shop in Berkeley gives this documentary its name. But the scope is wider, bringing in an artist, a streetside poet, a singer-songwriter, well-known writers, a collector of nineteenth-century machines, and a Hollywood mega-star who owns hundreds of typewriters. That would be Tom Hanks. The claims we hear some of these people make — that the typewriter is magical, that it allows the perfect emotional distance from words, that the text it produces has a permanence that other written text lacks — are, plainly, the claims of lovers who have lost all objectivity about the objects of their desire. And it’s wonderful, even if trying out your old machine leaves you wondering what all the fuss is about.

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Batman & Bill (dir. Don Argott and Sheena N. Joyce, 2017). The life, death, and posthumous story of Bill Finger, the comics writer who devised many crucial elements of the Batman story, a story long credited to Bob Kane alone. Among Finger’s contributions: Batman’s costume, the names Bruce Wayne and Gotham City, the characters of the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, and more. “Bill was Batman’s secret identity,” children’s author Marc Tyler Nobleman says, and this documentary follows his efforts to get Finger’s contributions known and credited. A heroic story of creativity, business ethics, familial struggles, and the sleuthing that the Internet makes possible. Nobleman is aptly named.

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Elevator to the Gallows (dir. Louis Malle, 1958). Malle’s first film follows the unexpected consequences of a murder plot gone awry. Julien (Maurice Ronet) spends most of the film attempting to escape from a stuck elevator. Florence (Jeanne Moreau) is a spoof existentialist, interior monologuing as she wanders through the Paris night. Louis (Georges Poujoly, from Forbidden Games) and Véronique (Yori Bertin) seem to have watched Gun Crazy one too many times. The plot is both wobbly and clever, the characters’ plights both amusing and suspenseful. A Hitchcock-like delight. Music by Miles Davis.

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Freaks (dir. Tod Browning, 1932). Moviegoers of a certain age may recall seeing Freaks in the form of a “midnight show.” Now the movie plays on TCM. What makes the film bizarre is not the cast of sideshow performers but the scarcity of plot, which surfaces here and there between vignettes of circus life and has its violent conclusion off-screen. The most compelling scenes are those in which the so-called freaks, those at whom others stare, turn their gaze on those others — in particular the scenes in which Angeleno (Angelo Rossitto) peers through a window and Johnny Eck and company watch and wait beneath a circus wagon’s steps. “One of us! One of us!”

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Shattered Glass (dir. Billy Ray, 2003). The short unhappy career of the journalist Stephen Glass, who created fake article after fake article for The New Republic from what seem to have been considerable imaginative resources. As Glass, Hayden Christensen is a brilliant chameleon, cocky, concerned, defensive, contrite, either playing to his editors and fellow writers or playing the one group against the other. And he is quick-thinking, always, inventing fresh explanations each time one of his falsehoods is exposed. I think what explains Glass is what explains those who engage in academic misconduct: they count on getting away with it.

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

New Nancy

[Zippy, April 9, 2018.]

A panel from Olivia Jaimes’s first Nancy strip. Nancy is a sweet girl. Also a salt girl. And butter: that is a stick of butter in her hand, yes? It’s all a welcome change from the work of Nancy‘s most recent caregiver.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

A new Nancy

From The Washington Post, exciting news in comics:

For more than eight decades, Nancy, the bushy-haired, red-bowed comic character, has been rendered by a man. This week, Nancy’s syndicate will change that.

On Monday, Andrews McMeel Syndication will announce that the cartoonist Olivia Jaimes has inherited the iconic strip and will provide a “21st-century female perspective,” says John Glynn, Andrews McMeel’s president and editorial director.

The first strip by Jaimes — the female cartoonist’s “nom de toon” — runs Monday.

“Nancy has been my favorite sassy grouch for a long time,” Jaimes says in a syndicate statement. “I’m excited to be sassy and grouchy through her voice instead of just mine, and I can complain to the whole world about things that bother me instead of just my friends and family.”

I’ve never been a fan of Guy Gilchrist’s Nancy — too much color, too much cuteness, too much religiosity, too many positive messages. I’m hoping for much better things from Olivia James. You can read new Nancy and Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy at GoComics.

Nancy is having a moment.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Not exactly a profile in courage

Our representative in Congress, John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), commenting on the possibility of Chinese tariffs on soybeans and other crops: “I’m just a legislator.”

And: “I think what I can do is publicly talk about, which I do, that there is a dilemma here that we’re facing.”

And: “I don’t think anyone wins a trade war. Maybe Trump thinks he can. But we have to try to get him to be more targeted on these things.”

Shimkus is in a sticky situation: his gerrymandered district (whose shape suggests a dancing dinosaur or feeble rooster) is the reddest congressional district in Illinois. (In the 2016 presidential election: 71% R, 24% D.) That stunning disavowal of agency — “I’m just a legislator” (not a member of a co-equal branch of government?) — makes it clear that Shimkus is unwilling to cross the boss. I wonder though how many voters in the 15th District have begun to regret their choice for president.

Related reading
All OCA John Shimkus posts

From the Saturday Stumper

A cleverer than clever clue from the Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Frank Longo, 53-Down, four letters: “Compliment that some complain about.” The answer: KUDO. I thought, Wait, that can’t be right. And then I read the clue again.

We get kudos from the Greek κῦδος, a singular noun meaning “glory, renown.” As Garner’s Modern English Usage explains, kudos “is sometimes erroneously thought to be a plural.” Thus kudo, a false singular, and a compliment that some people complain about.

I think the Saturday Stumper is getting easier. I’m not sure that makes me happy. No kudos for finishing. But I’m not complaining.

A related post
Word of the day: kudos

Beginning with say

“Say, did you ever see a bellhop that didn’t want to be a fighter?” Spoken in Kid Galahad (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1937), back when people prefaced all kinds of utterances with say.

Say, why not write this down and turn it into a short post?

The real fake news in Illinois

The Chicago Tribune reports on Liberty Principles and Think Freely Media: “Conservative Illinois publications blur lines between journalism, politics.” Issues of one of these pseudo-newspapers, the East Central Reporter, went from our mailbox to our garbage can in 2016.

Barnum and Dennison

[Catching up on podcasts.]

At Innovation Hub, Kara Miller talks about P.T. Barnum with Stephen Mihm, editor of a new edition of Barnum’s autobiography. The conversation touches briefly on similarities and differences between Barnum and Dunning K. Dennison. Thr IH website pointed me to Mihm’s 2017 New York Times opinion piece “No, Trump Is Not P.T. Barnum.” A sample:

Barnum would have recoiled from Mr. Trump, especially from his cynicism about principles and truth. In a widely read exposé of swindles, quack medicines and other “humbugs,” Barnum declared that the “greatest humbug of all” was the individual “who believes — or pretends to believe — that everything and everybody are humbugs.” This person, Barnum observed, “professes that there is no virtue; that every man has his price, and every woman hers; that any statement from anybody is just as likely to be false as true; and that the only way to decide which is to consider whether truth or a lie was likely to have paid best in that particular case.”

Barnum was a consummate American: a fast talker, a self-promoter and a relentless striver. He also exemplified many of the qualities that have long made America great in the eyes of the world: generosity, humor, optimism and a willingness, in the end, to do the right thing.

Mr. Trump represents something different. Indeed, if Barnum were alive today, he might be interested in exhibiting Mr. Trump: not as a paragon of business acumen, political prowess or any of the other main attractions in the circus of contemporary life, but as an extreme embodiment of humbug — worthy of a sideshow, perhaps, but nothing more.

Cecil Taylor (1929–2018)

The pianist and composer Cecil Taylor has died at the age of eighty-nine. In the absence of an obituary, here is an appreciation from his fellow pianist and composer Ethan Iverson.

When I think of Taylor’s music, I think of words from David Bowie’s “Modern Love”: I try. I try. I recognize that a genius is at work and want to engage what’s happening. Sometimes I can. Two performances I’ve listened to again and again: the two versions of “After All” on the 1974 concert recording Silent Tongues (Arista). (It’s a Taylor composition, not Billy Strayhorn’s composition of the same name.) Start with the short encore. Then try the longer version. See what you hear.

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The New York Times has an obituary.