Twelve movies

[Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Nancy Drew, Detective (dir. William Clemens, 1938). Well, it was on TCM. Silly nonsense, but Bonita Granville as Nancy shows luck, pluck, quick thinking, and comedic skills. Her boyfriend Ted (Frankie Thomas) is just a second banana, even if he can rig an X-ray machine to send a message in Morse code to the River Heights radio station. “Ted Nickerson, what are you doing in my flower bed?”

*

Nightfall (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1957). On the run from murderous bad guys (Brian Keith, Rudy Bond), innocent James Vanning (Aldo Ray) teams up with Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft) to form an unlikely couple. Stirling Silliphant’s screenplay and Burnett Guffey’s cinematography make for a superior chase movie. I suspect the fashion-show scene as an influence on North by Northwest, other elements as an influence on the Coens’ Fargo. “Why me?”

*

Wonderstruck (dir. Todd Haynes, 2017). Two stories, one set in 1927, the other in 1977, of a child searching for a parent. Deafness, a bookstore, the American Museum of Natural History, and parallel lines converging. A kids’ movie that should also appeal to grown-ups. “How do you know my name?”

*

RBG (dir. Julie Cohen and Betsy West, 2018). A lively, quick-moving documentary. Did you know that when Ruth Bader Ginsburg began her studies at Harvard Law School she was the mother of a fourteen-month-old child? Ginsburg’s intelligence, determination, good humor, and loyalty to conscience make her a model human being. “She changed everything.”

*

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (dir. Alexandra Dean 2017). She was the actress typecast as “the Ecstasy Girl.” And she was an inventor, who, with George Antheil, developed and patented a “Secret Communications System” that made use of frequency hopping. “The brains of people are more interesting than the looks, I think,” Hedy Lamarr told an interviewer. Alas, this routine documentary is not equal to its subject.

*

The Hitch-Hiker (dir. Ida Lupino, 1953). There was a lot more to William Talman than his work as Perry Mason’s adversary Hamilton Burger. In this film, his finest hour, he plays a psychokiller who hitches a ride, pulls a gun, and takes the car’s occupants (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy) on a days-long drive through Mexico to escape the law. “Loco,” says a local. Modestly made and relentlessly compelling.

*

Darkest Hour (dir. Joe Wright, 2017). Gary Oldman gives an extraordinary performance as Winston Churchill. But a ridiculously contrived (and wholly fictional) scene of Churchill going to the Underground to sample public opinion made me suspicious of other contrivances, starting with the blue and brown palette that signifies The Past. “It must be late there.” “In more ways than you could possibly know.”

*

The Invisible Man (dir. James Whale, 1933). The special effects are nifty, but the human stuff is more interesting, particularly the conflict between two scientists (invisible Claude Rains and William Harrigan) as rivals for the hand of the white-goddess daughter (Gloria Stuart) of their scientist boss (Henry Travers). Remarkable to find oneself rooting for the pointlessly destructive and utterly murderous Invisible One. “The drugs I took seemed to light up my brain.” Thank goodness this movie was pre-Code.

*

The Unknown Girl (dir. Luc Dardenne and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, 2016). As in Two Days, One Night (the only other film I’ve seen by these directors), the emphasis is on work and moral responsibilities. A young doctor (Adèle Haenel), still in her clinic an hour past closing time, refuses to answer the door and later discovers that the young woman who had been seeking admission has been found dead. Figuring out the unknown girl’s identity and story becomes the doctor’s purpose. “If she was dead, she wouldn’t be in our heads.”

*

White Material (dir. Claire Denis, 2009). Colonialism and its discontents, with Isabelle Hupert as Maria Vail, whose family owns and lives on a coffee plantation in an African nation. Civil war breaks out; the French military flees; bands of child soldiers roam the countryside; and Maria is determined to finish the harvest, whatever the danger, whatever the cost. I thought of this sometimes confusing film as a variation on Brecht’s Mother Courage. “How could I show courage in France?”

*

The Other Side of Hope (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2017). Like Le Havre (2011), it’s a film about exile: a Syrian refugee, trying to make a new life in Helsinki, meets up with the owner and employees of an unlucky little restaurant. Lots of Kaurismäki’s deadpan comedy, lots of human goodness and hospitality. Kaurismäki has said that his intention in telling this story was to change Finland first, then the world: no film could be more timely. “I was lost, but good people helped me.”

*

Oleanna (dir. David Mamet, 1994). A professor (William H. Macy), a student (Debra Eisenstadt), conversations behind a closed door, a charge of sexual harassment. Stagy dialogue, improbability, and sheer human ugliness abounding. And who would ever refer to their tenure committee as “good men and true”? This nightmare just doesn’t ring true.

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

Pencils and missing pencils

The Crow writes about pencils and missing pencils. What would you write with the last pencil on earth?

[Me, a love letter to my fambly.]

Nancy, philosophe

[Nancy, June 24, 2018.]

Nancy is right there with Blaise Pascal: “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” [The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me]. She wonders, “Does anything really matter when you’re this small?” before looking at her phone for “something to get mad about on the Internet.” And thus lose “this unbearable sense of perspective.”

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

From the Saturday Stumper

My three favorite clues from today’s challenging-at-first-but-surprisingly-doable-after-all Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell:

27-Across, eight letters: “Turkey dinner.”

59-Across, ten letters: “One in a string band?”

23-Down, eleven letters: “Group outside the class system.” HOMESCHOOLS? No.

Oh — and did you know there was a REESE?

No spoilers, aside from the REESE, which may spoil your appetite. The answers are in the comments.

Stanley Cavell (1926–2018)

Stanley Cavell on watching tragic drama:

Now I can give one answer to the question: Why do I do nothing, faced with tragic events? If I do nothing because I am distracted by the pleasures of witnessing this folly, or out of my knowledge of the proprieties of the place I am in, or because I think there will be some more appropriate time in which to act, or because I feel helpless to un-do events of such proportion, then I continue my sponsorship of evil in the world, its sway waiting upon these forms of inaction. I exit running. But if I do nothing because there is nothing to do, where that means that I have given over the time and space in which action is mine and consequently that I am in awe before the fact that I cannot do and suffer what it is another’s to do and suffer, then I confirm the final fact of our separateness. And that is the unity of our condition.

The only essential difference between them and me is that they are there and I am not.

“The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

Stanley Cavell, philosopher, died earlier this week. The New York Times has an obituary.

[I can’t help reading this passage — which, again, is about watching a play — in light of what it feels like to watch “the news.”]

A misspelling in the news

It’s rhythem.

N.B.: no misspelling can be called “minor” when it’s on a thirty-foot-tall guitar. Or, for that matter, on any guitar.

Related reading
All OCA spelling and misspelling posts (Pinboard)

“Pepper sardines”

Sardines are not a reason to watch The Other Side of Hope (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2017). There are many others. The story, which brings together a Syrian refugee and the owner and employees of a little restaurant in Helsinki, is an exceptionally timely reminder about the possibilities of human goodness and hospitality. Not that such things figure in this scene. Click any image for a larger view:





I especially like the non sequitir “We serve fusion cuisine.” But I think I like the pepper shaker more.

Related reading
All OCA Aki Kaurismäki posts
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

“Against aspiring authoritarians, and wolves of all kinds”

Cass Sustein, writing about accounts of “ordinary life under Nazism”:

Nearly two centuries ago, James Madison warned: “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.” Haffner offered something like a corollary, which is that the ultimate safeguard against aspiring authoritarians, and wolves of all kinds, lies in individual conscience: in “decisions taken individually and almost unconsciously by the population at large.”

[Sebastian Haffner: pen name of Raimund Pretzel, journalist and writer. His memoir Defying Hitler (1939) is an eyewitness account of Hitler’s rise to power.]

Two words

Definitions from Merriam-Webster:

migrant: one that migrates: such as
a : a person who moves regularly in order to find work especially in harvesting crops
b : an animal that shifts from one habitat to another

refugee: one that flees; especially : a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution

Which word more accurately characterizes people leaving Central America and seeking asylum in the United States?

I started to type fleeing for leaving before realizing that I was giving away my answer to the question. We are prosecuting refugees.

20,000 children

From The New York Times:

The Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday asked the Pentagon to make preparations to house as many as 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children on American military bases, a United States official said.

“Zero-tolerance” policies never work well. These preparations bode a humanitarian nightmare — something like a junior version of Guantanamo Bay.

*

June 22: For clarity: these children will be “unaccompanied” because they will have been separated from their parents.