Domestic comedy

“Do we really ‘take in’ exhibits?”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

“Also like a metaphor”

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

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All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

Amazon’s counterfeits

From Jorge Luis Borges to The Linux Command Line: Amazon’s counterfeit-books problem (The New York Times).

Twelve movies

[One to four stars each. No spoilers.]

The Man Who Laughs (dir. Paul Leni, 1928). This film, from a Victor Hugo novel, has everything one might want from a silent. There’s a pathos-filled backstory of a child mutilated, his mouth turned into a perpetually leering grin; another child, blind, whose mother dies in a snowstorm; and a crazed-looking “professor” who takes both children into a traveling wagon. As Gwynplaine and Dea, Conrad Veidt and Mary Philbin play out a touching love story. And for good measure, there’s a jaded, trouble-making aristocrat, the Duchess Josiana, played by Olga Vladimirovna Baklanova, perhaps best known as the evil Cleopatra in Freaks. ★★★★

*

The Magnificent Ambersons (dir. Orson Welles, 1942). This adaptation of a Booth Tarkington novel appears to be a model for every television saga of a wealthy, messy family. But wealthy TV families stay wealthy; this film tells the story of the fall of the house of Amberson. The film is also the story of a city (Indianapolis) and of changes wrought by technology, present here by way of the automotive entrepreneur Eugene Morgan (Joseph Cotten). Told with great imagination, with narration by Welles and beautiful cinematography by Stanley Cortez, whose stark closeups and shadowy edges give the viewer the feeling of observing a lost world. ★★★★

*

The Children Act (dir. Richard Eyre, 2017). From Ian McEwan’s novel. Emma Thompson is such a good actor: here she plays a judge who must rule whether a minor (almost eighteen) can be compelled to receive a blood transfusion despite his religious objections. But things happen abruptly and oddly: we’re just minutes into the film when the judge’s husband (Stanley Tucci) announces that he wants to have an affair. Further developments in the judge’s public and private lives are both improbable and predictable. ★★★

*

Escape (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1940). Robert Taylor, Norma Shearer, and Conrad Veidt star in the story of a visiting American trying to rescue his mother (Alla Nazimova) from a concentration camp in pre-war Germany. The escape plot demands and rewards suspension of belief. Greater interest lies in the Taylor-Shearer-Veidt love triangle, or something triangle. I suspect I’m not the first viewer to suspect that this film had some influence on Casablanca. ★★★★

*

Mr. Skeffington (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1944). I haven’t seen that many Bette Davis films, but right now I’m thinking of this one as her finest. Here she plays Fanny Trellis, a beautiful woman with a social register’s worth of suitors. She marries the beta-male Job Skeffington (Claude Rains) and remains stuck in that marriage, then unstuck, before finally discovering, decades later, what real love is. An unusual element in this film: Skeffington is Jewish, and anti-Semitism, at home and abroad, is a significant element in the plot. ★★★★

*

Somewhere in the Night (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946). The plot becomes a little muddled, but who cares? John Hodiak and Nancy Guild (rhymes with wild) star in a superior noir story: GI returning from the war, amnesia, steam baths, train station, night club, duplicitous bartender, police lieutenant who jokes about not wearing a hat when everyone in the movies does, mysterious dangerous woman, less mysterious but at least equally attractive (if not more attractive) helpfui woman, wisecracks and retorts, nightclub owner, fortune-telling gimmick, mental institution, lonely pier, mission house, and honest, I haven’t given away a thing. One of the film’s strengths is a supporting cast full of memorable actors: Whit Bissell, Richard Conte, Fritz Kortner (Pandora’s Box), Sheldon Leonard, Harry Morgan, Louis Mason (the unnamed man in The Grapes of Wrath who’s going back home to starve), Lloyd Nolan, and Houseley Stevenson (the surgeon in Dark Passage). A second strength: John Hodiak’s performance as a man who, like Oedipus, is determined to uncover the truth of his identity, whatever the cost. And a third strength: Nancy Guild’s nightclub singer/caregiver, a cross between Lauren Bacall and Teresa Wright. ★★★★

*

The Brasher Doubloon (dir. John Brahm, 1947). Films made from Raymond Chandler novels remind me of what it must be like to be caught in a three-card monte game: things start out slowly; you can follow the action; and then you’re lost. As I was here. No matter: George Montgomery’s Philip Marlowe is a cocky boor; Nancy Guild as Merle Davis is a private secretary who can’t stand to be touched until Marlowe wins her over. With support from Conrad Janis, Fritz Kortner, Houseley Stevenson. ★★★

*

Young Törless (dir. Volker Schlöndorff, 1966). From Robert Musil’s novel The Confusions of Young Törless, a story of brutalization and sexual humiliation at an Austrian boarding school for boys. The novel (1906) seems to anticipate later historical consequences of indifference and obedience in the face of cruelty. Sixty years later, the film makes one wonder what the boys of this story grew up to become. With a compelling score by Hans Werner Henze. ★★★★

*

The Scapegoat (dir. Robert Hamer, 1959). From the novel by Daphne du Maurier. Alec Guinness in a dual role as a man who finds himself in a new role in life. The twist, which arrives late in the story, is the why. Would pair well with My Name Is Julia Ross. ★★★★

*

Le Plaisir (dir. Max Ophuls, 1952). From three Maupassant stories, with the author present as a voice in the dark. On screen, all is light and movement, with the camera moving from room to room, window to window, up and down staircases. Plot is of minimal importance here; the first and third stories are anecdotal. In the middle, a warm, funny story of a Parisian madame traveling with her ladies to the countryside for her niece’s first communion. ★★★★

*

L'École des facteurs (dir. Jacques Tati, 1947). A short film with Tati as an indefatigible novice postman. Wonderful physical comedy and sight gags, reminiscent of Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy. I must admit: I found my one try at a full-length Tati (Jour de fête) less than satisfying. But this short film is just right. ★★★★

*

Routine Pleasures (dir. Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1986). Partly an exploration of the world of model-train enthusiasts, partly an exploration of the world of film critic and painter Manny Farber. The link between the two worlds seems to be Farber’s idea of “termite art,” though that link is left largely unexplained. The train guys are a delight: rising through hidden doors to survey their layout, descending from on high to touch up land masses, they are as gods. But the film (just eighty minutes) feels interminable. ★★


[Click for a larger god.]

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“Laurie, powl ’em”

Sundry stories:

A many Idle tales are told of Sterne in the Country. Once it is said that as he was going over the Fields on a sunday to preach at Stillington it happened that his Pointer Dog sprung a Covey of Partridges, when he went directly home for his Gun and left his Flock that was waiting for him in the Church, in the lurch.

Another time when he was skaiting on the Car at Stillington, the Ice broke in with him in the middle of the Pond, and none of the Parishioners wou’d assist to extricate him, as they were at variance. Another time a Flock of Geese assembled in the Church Yard at Sutton, when his Wife bawl’d out, “Laurie, powl ’em,” i.e. pluck the quills, on which they were ready to riot and mob Laurie.

*

Sterne’e Popularity at one time arose to that pitch, that on a Wager laid in London that a Letter addressed to Tristram Shandy in Europe shou’d reach him when luckily the Letter came down into Yorkshire and the Post Boy meeting Sterne on the road to Sutton pulled off his hatt and gave it him.

From “Yorkshire Anecdotes,” in The Complete Works and Life of Laurence Sterne (1904).

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“Political Teamsmanship”

“Even if we were all, as Americans, very, very similar people, which we’re not — but even if were, it would be possible for us to see a lot of hatred and animosity between our political teams, simply because they’re teams.” A dispiriting story from WGBH’s Innovation Hub: “Political Teamsmanship.”

Concentration camps

At The New Yorker, Masha Gessen writes about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s characterization of detention facilities for migrants as concentration camps:

It is the choice between thinking that whatever is happening in reality is, by definition, acceptable, and thinking that some actual events in our current reality are fundamentally incompatible with our concept of ourselves — not just as Americans but as human beings — and therefore unimaginable. The latter position is immeasurably more difficult to hold — not so much because it is contentious and politically risky, as attacks on Ocasio-Cortez continue to demonstrate, but because it is cognitively strenuous. It makes one’s brain implode. It will always be a minority position.

As I read only yesterday in The Washington Post, detained migrant children are being held without soap, without toothbrushes, without adequate food, in conditions that make sleep impossible. Those conditions should make sleep impossible for all Americans.

*

Later the same day: The New Yorker has an interview with Warren Binford, a lawyer and law professor who has interviewed children at a Border Patrol “facility” in Texas. An excerpt:

“They told us that they were hungry. They told us that some of them had not showered or had not showered until the day or two days before we arrived. Many of them described that they only brushed their teeth once. This facility knew last week that we were coming. The government knew three weeks ago that we were coming.”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

If I were using the Romper Room magic mirror with today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, I’d say “I see Walt” (16-A, five letters, “Whitman's Civil War job”). And “I see Edie” (40-A, five letters, “Birth name of Mrs. Soprano’s portrayer”). And then I’d have to ask, “Can I say ‘Mister’ on Romper Room”? That’d be 25-A, five letters, “Sotomayor’s TV inspiration.” I guess I just did.

I liked this puzzle, a lot. Short on names, short on trivia, big on words. Clue and answer pairs I especially liked:

The dowdy 21-D, ten letters, “Campfire entertainment.”

The I-never-heard-of-it 28-D, ten letters, “Encouragement for a homer hitter.”

The homey 36-A, ten letters, “Caruso, by birth.”

The very clever 51-A, five letters, “Totally blocked?”

The clever 52-A, five letters, “Two-way address.”

And the kind of obvious but still clever 56-A, three letters, “Size or three sizes, briefly.”

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

“As if a person had suddenly materialized”

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Musil’s understanding of contingency and the formation of an adult identity is eerily similar to Willa Cather’s: see The Professor’s House. The difference is that Cather’s protagonist, Godfrey St. Peter, notices — and in so doing, undoes his life.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)
Fluke life (My story of contingency)

50 Things: “Pencil”

From the BBC: the latest episode of Tim Harford’s podcast 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy: “Pencil.” Nothing here that a pencil-lover won’t already know. And the episode treats the pencil not as something that helped make the economy but as something made. But still worth a listen.

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