M’sieur Pierre’s cell

Welcome to M’sieur Pierre’s cell. He keeps it tidy and decorates as best he can. And now the narrator decorates with a passage of description:


Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Vladmir Nabokov (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959).

As the reader will later discover, M’sieur Pierre is no common prisoner.

Fresca recently mentioned Martha Stewart’s adventures in cell decor. M’sieur Pierre would be a worthy competitor.

Related reading
All OCA Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Ben Leddy hosts The Rewind

Here’s the latest installment of WGBH’s The Rewind, “Gwen Ifill, Ferguson, and Race in America,” hosted by our son Ben. You can find all episodes of The Rewind at YouTube.

A related post
Gwen Ifill (1955-2016)

More war

What European goods will be affected by Trump’s new tariffs?

Some of the most beloved — and delicious — European imports are on the list, which reads like the menu for a fancy dinner party. French wine. Olives, virgin olive oil, cherries, oranges and lemons from Spain. Pork sausages and roasted coffee from Germany. Italian cheeses like pecorino, Parmesan and provolone. Stilton cheese, sweet biscuits and Scotch whiskies from Britain.

This means Aldi’s (excellent and inexpensive) German-roasted coffee. This means Glenmorangie (excellent and not at all inexpensive) single malt Scotch. This means all the Parmigiano-Reggiano in the world. This means war.

War on books

In The New York Times Duncan White writes about a global war on books:

Around the world, many authoritarian regimes — having largely corralled the internet — now have declared war on the written world, their oldest enemy. The received wisdom after the close of the Cold War was that physical books were outdated, soon to be swept aside in the digital age; and that the internet was instead the real threat to governments seeking to repress provocative thinking. A generation later, the opposite may be true.

Notice that while our own authoritarian-in-chief rails against “the media,” book publishers, like books themselves, or at least books not about him, are pretty much off his radar — at least so far.

Sharpening

Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Vladmir Nabokov (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959).

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All OCA Nabokov and pencil posts (Pinboard)

Pencil Town

Variety reports on a movie in the works: Pencil Town, directed by Jay Silverman:

The feature film is based on a true story about a ruthless corporate raider on the verge of making partner at his private equity firm, when he is forced to return to his small town roots after he suddenly inherits his father’s nearly bankrupt pencil factory — the heart and soul of the depressed community. He must decide to either join the fight to save the factory, or let it close and relocate to China.

Gosh, I wonder how it’ll turn out. Hallmark values!

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

Nineteen Eighty-Four (dir. Michael Radford, 1984). Hacking coughs, cheap gin, state propaganda, televised executions, and surveillance by screen and helicopter. John Hurt and Suzanna Hamilton are perfectly mismatched as transgressive lovers; Richard Burton is an especially terrifying O’Brien. Watching this film in 2019 is especially unnverving. 2 + 2 = ? ★★★★

*

So Big! (dir. William A. Wellman, 1932). “Edna Ferber’s Epic of American Womanhood,” said the poster. It’s the story of a lifetime, starring Barbara Stanwyck as Selina Peake, later De Jong, a young woman who takes up the life of a teacher, marries a farmer, and devotes herself to the farm and her son Dirk, known as So Big. The film is pre-Code, but that means little here: So Big! is a story of quiet comedy, deep humanity, and asparagus. With Bette Davis as a dazzling free-spirited artist. ★★★★

*

Out of the Past (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1947). I’ve come to love this film, for many reasons: Marney’s Café, the swank Reno house, the murky streets and cab rides, the slightly spooky Kid (Dickie Moore), the cabin in the woods, the meeting in some other woods, the Heart of Darkness lie, and the dangerous Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer). As gas-station owner Jeff Bailey, Robert Mitchum trades in his work clothes for a trenchcoat and fedora, and he’s right back at home in the detective business, working for Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). I’m still not sure I understand what unfolds in the film’s present, but what happens overall is something like a cross between The Maltese Falcon and The Killers. “All I can see is the frame.” ★★★★

*

Bull Durham (dir. Ron Shelton, 1988). I have good excuses for not being especially strong on movies from the 1980s: I was a grad student living within walking distance of a revival house, and then I was a new professor, and then I was a new father. So seeing Bull Durham for the first time was something of a crash course in movies with awkward serio-comic sex scenes and non-diegetic rock ’n’ roll. The triangle — Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins — felt too much like an R-rated version of Cheers, but the line between two points — Robbins’s erratic hotshot pitcher and Costner’s veteran minor-league catcher — held a lot more interest. My favorite moment: a discussion of wedding gifts on the pitcher’s mound. ★★★

*

Dawson City: Frozen Time (dir. Bill Morrison, 2016). Save for the musical score, it’s a nearly silent documentary about movies, history, and permafrost, focusing on the Dawson City Film Find — the discovery, in 1978, of hundreds of reels of silent film in a Yukon town that flourished in the Gold Rush and stood at the end of the line for film distribution. A surprising array of familiar names appear: Sid Grauman, Alex Pantages, Frederick Trump (proprietor of brothels and restaurants), and the 1919 Chicago White — or Black — Sox. Brief excerpts from silent films, printed on highly volatile nitrocellulose, virtually all suffering from water damage, put me in mind of Sappho’s fragments: the wonder is that they survived at all. The most remarkable feature of the documentary: fragments from the Find are paired with whatever historical or contemporary events the screen titles describe, in an extraordinary effort of imagination and editing. ★★★★


[Pathé Weekly (1914). From Dawson City: Frozen Time. Click for a larger view.]

*

The Gold Rush (dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1925). A reconstruction of the 1925 film from various sources, with a new recording of Chaplin’s 1942 musical score added. Brilliant pathos, brilliant fun, and a Lone Prospector who never loses his dignity. The dance of the rolls is worth the price of admission, or the price of a subscription to the Criterion Channel. But then you also get a room full of feathers and a teetering cabin at no extra cost. ★★★★

*

The House on 92nd Street (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1945). I’ve written about this movie’s supplies — Dixon Ticonderoga pencils and a pocket notebook — but not about stuff like plot and character, the stuff people usually think about with movies. This semi-documentary tells the story of the FBI’s infiltration of a Nazi spy ring. As double agent Bill Dietrich, William Eythe is a fairly bland lead, though then again, “bland” might be just what you want in a double agent. Watching once again, I was especially struck by the great Manhattan location shots, the calm, reassuring presence of Lloyd Nolan (as FBI Inspector George A. Briggs), and the unsavoriness of the spy ring’s minions — Harry Bellaver, Alfred Linder, and Lydia St. Clair. ★★★

*

Jane Eyre (dir. Robert Stevenson, 1943). Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles as Miss Eyre and Mr. Rochester. I kept finding other films in this one: the stark close-ups and moody scenic shots look so much like Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, and Bernard Herrmann’s music suggests Vertigo. Welles as a man with a dark secret suggests Charles Rankin in The Stranger; Fontaine as the newcomer to a strange house of secrets suggests Rebecca; and Agnes Moorehead as a severe relation takes us back, again, to Kane. Jane Eyre turned out, for me at least, to be “the movies,” in wonderful ways. ★★★★


[From Jane Eyre. Click for a larger view.]

*

All Night Long (dir. Basil Dearden, 1962). We saw this reimagining of Othello only last month but watched again with friends. I looked past the music this time and watched more for character: the seemingly composed but insecure Aurelius Rex (Paul Harris), the cheerful, good Delia Lane (Marti Stevens), the younger, hotheaded Cass Michael (Keith Michell), and, of course, the impossibly suave and quickwitted Johnny Cousin (Patrick McGoohan). I wonder now if this film served to influence Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000), which also uses a recording device in its reimagining of Shakespeare. My only complaint: we should get to see the complete Dave Brubeck/Charles Mingus performance. ★★★★

*

Since You Went Away (dir. John Cromwell, 1944). Jonathan Shay, who works with and on behalf of veterans living with post-traumatic stress, speaks of the importance of the communalization of grief — the urgent need to mourn the sorrows of war with others. I can only imagine how this movie, a look at life on the home front in World War II, made that possible for audiences in 1944. The story veers again and again from bittersweet nostalgia to quiet happiness to joyful abandon to heartbreak: it’s life in wartime, utterly unpredictable, with the possibility of a sudden shock around every corner. With an all-star cast — Claudette Colbert, Joseph Cotten, Jennifer Jones, Robert Walker, a deep bench, and many moments of brief conversation in nightspots and train stations. ★★★★

*

The Scarlet Claw (dir. Roy William Neill, 1944). You know how every so often a movie that you cannot account for rises to the top of your Netflix queue? So it was here. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (Basil Rathbone and NIgel Bruce, who else?), in Quebec for a conference on occult phenomena, end up solving a series of murders committed with a repurposed garden tool. The plot is tired, and Holmes seems ready to break up with his slow-witted partner, but some eerie phosphorescence and Ian Wolfe’s presence as a shady butler enliven the proceedings. ★★★

*

No Greater Glory (dir. Frank Borzage, 1934). An adaptation of Ferenc Molnár’s novel The Paul Street Boys, offering a powerful allegory of war, as two bands of boys fight for control of a vacant lot. This Criterion Channel find borrows from All Quiet on the Western Front and Frankenstein and must have influenced West Side Story. But this film’s ending undercuts any easy sentimentality about lessons learned: as in the Iliad or Mother Courage, war will go on. You might recognize Frankie Darro from Wild Boys of the Road; George Breakston, who stars as the doomed Nemeecsek, is the boy who cries on the bus in It Happened One Night. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

Missouri?

From Bryan Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day: is it /mi-zuur-ee/ or /mi-zuur-ә/?

The pronunciation of this state name has provoked much strife. Although most Americans say /mi-zuur-ee/, many Missourians say /mi-zuur-ә/. In and around St. Louis, many say /ee/, but /ә/ has traditionally predominated in other parts of the state. Both pronunciations are standard. Yet it is a telling point that politicians running for statewide office are careful to say /ә/ — to seem folksy and avoid sounding like an auslander. But interestingly, the final-syllable /ә/ pronunciation seems to be for insiders only — all non-Missourians being expected to say /ee/. . . .

An early commentator, the noted linguist E.H. Sturtevant, attributed the final-syllable /-ә/ to hypercorrection. It’s a surprising but quite plausible argument: “In the dialect of Missouri and the neighboring states, final a in such words as ‘America,’ ‘Arizona,’ ‘Nevada,’ becomes y —‘Americy,’ ‘Arizony,’ ‘Nevady.’ All educated people in that region carefully correct this vulgarism out of their speech; and many of them carry the correction too far and say ‘Missoura,’ ‘praira,’ etc.” E.H. Sturtevant, Linguistic Change 79 (1917).

In Illinois we have /lәr-nee/ (Lerna) and /lox-ee/ (Loxa) and no doubt /meh-nee/ others.

You can subscribe to the Usage Tip of the Day here.

A [need + past participle] day

A bank’s LED sign: “Mortagage need refinanced?”

An invoice: “Tech was called out for water heater. Found needed reset.”

A localite, noticing some Asian honeysuckle that ought to be cut back: “It needs done!”

[Need + past participle] is a regionalism, found in many places, including downstate Illinois.

Related posts
“Need rescued” : “Needs studied” : “Need worked”

Mystery actor

[“Uh, I ain’t got no change.” Click for a larger view.]

That cabbie just received a mighty big tip. You might suss out his identity by recognizing some of the other faces and doing some crafty searching, but the real question is: do you recognize him? I did, right away, which makes me think that this mystery will be a tough one. Leave your best guess in the comments. I’ll drop one or more hints if necessary.

*

Here’s a hint: this actor is probably best known for playing an avuncular fellow with a mustache.

*

Oh well. This actor’s identity is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all!)
? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ? : ?