Orange Crate Art

Monday, June 29, 2020

Milton Glaser (1929–2020)

The graphic designer who gave us I♥︎NY. The New York Times has an obituary.

I almost forgot: Milton Glaser’s “The Things I Have Learned,” a 2001, is useful reading. Et

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

Black Legion (dir. Archie Mayo, 1937). Humphrey Bogart plays a machinist, embittered when a promotion he thinks should be his goes to a “foreigner.” And so he joins up with the hoods and robes of the Black Legion. Based on contemporary events and disturbingly of our own time, with warnings about “anarchists” and cries of “America for Americans.” The supporting cast includes Dick Foran (later a regular on Lassie), Charles Halton, Samuel Hinds, Ann Sheridan, each of whom, I have to say, is a better actor than Bogart. ★★★

*

Fright (dir. W. Lee Wilder, 1956). A chance YouTube find that we had to watch, because Nancy Malone. It’s her first movie role, and she does just fine in a bizarro story of past lives and hypnosis. Other viewers might want to watch to see Eric Fleming, who would soon star in Rawhide. A bonus: fans of The Honeymooners should watch for Frank Marth, branching out to play a serial killer. ★★

*

Night Must Fall (dir. Richard Thorpe, 1937). Look past the staginess (it’s from a play by Emlyn Williams) and you’ll find a deeply suspenseful story of a young psychopath (Robert Montgomery) who ingratiates himself with a wealthy invalid (Dame May Whitty) and her niece (Rosalind Russell). The principals are excellent, and if you know Whitty only as Hitchcock’s Mrs. Froy, you’ll be surprised by her performance here. And speaking of Hitchcock: this film would pair well with Shadow of a Doubt. There’s even a hint of the twinning that unites Uncle Charlie and his niece Charlie. ★★★★

*

[Source: IMDb.]

Devotion (dir. Curtis Bernhardt, 1947). Incredible: a movie about the Brontës that seems not to have mentioned the Brontës in its American advertising. Charlotte (Olivia de Havilland) and Emily (Ida Lupino) form an improbable love triangle with a fusty cleric (Paul Henreid, complete with his accent), as Anne (Nancy Coleman) is kept off to the side, her writing coming in for no attention. Branwell Brontë (Arthur Kennedy) is here in all his dissoluteness, and there’s an inchoate but unmistakable suggestion of incestuous desire at work in this reclusive family. Lupino to my mind is the star (her Emily is the ur emo-kid), but Sydney Greenstreet as William Makepeace Thackeray threatens to steal the show. ★★★

*

Riffraff (dir. J. Walter Ruben, 1936.) Love, labor trouble, and canned fish. Spencer Tracy and Jean Harlow play Dutch and Hattie, fisherman and cannery worker. At key points the story requires the suspension of disbelief — painfully so. Joseph Calleia, Una Merkel, and Mickey Rooney provide some comic relief. The best performance by an actor I’d never heard of goes to J. Farrell MacDonald as a wise, compassionate fisherman known, rightly so, as Brains. ★★★

*

A Man Called Adam (dir. Leo Penn, 1966). Sammy Davis Jr. as Adam Johnson, a Miles-like musician (cornet, not trumpet, solos by Nat Adderley) living with a massive burden of grief, guilt, and racism. There’s a fair amount of malarkey here: Louis Armstrong has a small role as a has-been purveyor of “true jazz” who’ll soon be going back to “the rice fields” (what?); Cicely Tyson is a civil rights activist but seems to have nothing to do except hang out with Adam; and Frank Sinatra Jr. is a young wannabe following in Adam’s footsteps. I found more to appreciate in the moments between Adam and his pianist (Johnny Brown). Look too for Ja ’Net DuBois, Lola Falana, and Kai Winding — and Mel Tormé, who gets the last word. ★★★

*

The Devil and Miss Jones (dir. Sam Wood, 1941). A Capraesque fairy tale of happy times for labor and management. Charles Coburn shines as a cranky department-store owner who goes undercover in the shoe department to root out union organizers. Jean Arthur shines as a clerk who takes for him a fellow without money enough to afford lunch. Spring Byington, Bob Cummings, Edmund Gwenn, and S.Z. Sakall shine — and these working folks, they’re not so bad after all, eh, Mr. Capitalist Big Shot? ★★★★

*

Illegal (dir. Lewis Allen, 1955). I’m impressed again and again by Edward G. Robinson’s range as an actor. Here he plays a DA who unknowingly sends an innocent man to the chair, falls apart, quits, and ends up working for the mob, with startling results. Nina Foch plays Robinson’s prosecutorial mentee, in what might be her best role. Television fans will like seeing DeForest Kelley and Edward Platt. ★★★★

*

Fear in the Night (dir. Maxwell Shane, 1947). And speaking of DeForest Kelley, this film is his feature-length debut, with a strong assist from Paul Kelly. The premise: a man dreams he’s committed a murder and wakes up with objects from the scene of the crime in his possession. Two crucial questions: did he really kill someone, and more importantly, had we seen this film before? Alas, the eeriness diminishes as the story develops and we figured out that yes, we’d seen it before. ★★

*

Politics (dir. Charles F. Reiser, 1931). Wives and mothers take action to combat gangsters and bootlegging. I saw a few minutes on TCM and mistook the movie for a variation on Lysistrata, but the women’s strike — an effort to withhold “everything,” meaning “Yes, everything, parlor, bedroom, and bath” — is but a small element in the story. What’s here, really, is a vehicle for two great comediennes I’d never seen before: Marie Dressler as a mayoral candidate, Polly Moran as her pal and supporter. Another welcome presence: Karen Morley, whom I think I know only from King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread. ★★★

*

Mystery House (dir. Noel M. Smith, 1938). Ann Sheridan and William Hopper (Perry Mason’s Paul Drake) brighten this movie, in which one person after another dies in or near a hunting lodge. If you discovered that someone in your company had embezzled a fortune, you’d invite all suspects to a remote gun-filled lodge and promise to reveal the culprit’s identity there, wouldn’t you? What, you think that’s improbable? My favorite element in the film: the eerie motto above the fireplace, which comes from the novel that is film’s source. ★★

[“The End of all Good Hunting is Nearer than you Dream.” Mignon G. Eberhart, The Mystery of Hunting’s End. 1930. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.) William Hopper played clean, well-soaped Lal Killian.]

*

The Haunting (dir. Robert Wise, 1963). Based on Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House, in which a small team of psychic researchers seeks the truth about a haunted house. Julie Harris and Claire Bloom (the latter in a Mary Quant wardrobe) give great performances as young recruits; Russ Tamblyn as heir to the house provides comic relief and a dash of sanity; Richard Johnson as team leader is a bit of a bore with his clipboard and pipe and talk about “man” and his superstitions. Davis Boulton’s cinematography adds all sorts of fear and uncertainty to the proceedings. Here’s a real mystery house, in an ultra-scary film that looks back to Poe and ahead to Stranger Things. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

Some trees

Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849).

Also from Charlotte Brontë
A word : Three words : Jane Eyre, descriptivist : Bumps on the head : “In all quarters of the sky” : Small things

[“Some rocks” are an abiding preoccupation of these pages.]

“Existential”

“Efforts to stem the pandemic have squeezed local economies across the nation, but the threat is starting to look existential in college towns”: The New York Times reports on college towns in the time of the coronavirus.

A related post
College, anyone?

Sunday, June 28, 2020

Alexander, not great

Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) is not exactly a profile in courage. Here’s what he suggests about mask-wearing:

“It would help if from time to time the President would wear one to help us get rid of this political debate that says if you’re for Trump, you don’t wear a mask, if you’re against Trump, you do.”

“From time to time”: so bold. No, all the time. Wearing a mask from time to time is analogous to wearing a seat belt from time to time to advocate for safety in vehicles. Or wearing a condom from time to time to — you get the idea.

But also: there is no “political debate” about masks. No one who wears a mask does so to oppose Donald Trump*. You wear a mask to reduce the chance of spreading the coronavirus. It’s Trump* and his followers who regard masks as a political statement. And it’s Lamar Alexander who just framed that lunacy as one side of a “debate.”

See also #WearAFuckingMask.

マンホール蓋

[Zippy, June 28, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

Today’s Zippy takes us to Japan, where manhole covers are things of beauty. See Griffy’s book? There are indeed books about Japanese manhole covers. For now, here’s a large collection of photographs. And a Flickr pool. Paying attention to manhole covers is (at least sometimes) called drainspotting.

マンホール蓋 [manhōru futa] is the Japanese for manhole cover.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Saturday, June 27, 2020

Death wishes

An effort to end the Affordable Care Act. Apparent indifference to a Russian effort to pay bounties to the Taliban for killing American troops. And now a report of sticker removal in Tulsa.

That’s just some news from Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. And, as always, there’s the denigrating of masks and tests.

Donald Trump* expresses more interest in preserving “beautiful monuments” than in preserving American lives. Truly, Trump* equals death.

[I should add that Trump*’s professed devotion to “monuments” and “statues” and “heritage” is itself, as Joe Biden would say, malarkey.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman, constructing under the pen name Lester Ruff. In other words, an easier puzzle. But also Lester Wrightabout. Just not very much oof, pow, and sizzle.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of interest:

11-D, seven letters, “Game Goldfinger cheats at.” A weird factoid. I guessed (correctly) from a couple of crosses. My awareness of the game is due to — spoiler alert — a 2018 Lester Ruff Stumper.

15-A, eight letters, “Toll road alternative.” I’ve seen the answer in crosswords, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard the word in non-crossword life.

22-A, six letters, “Nearly all bananas, to botanists.” Weird. I’ll never look at a banana in the same way again. But first I’ll have to figure out what that way has been. And then I’ll have to figure out something new.

25-D, six letters, “Opening announcement.” Clever.

26-D, five letters, “Product name not derived from 56 Down.” Someone seems preoccupied with this product: the answer also appeared in the June 13 Stumper. The clue for 56-D, three letters: “pH adjuster in cosmetics.”

31-A, fourteen letters, “Accidental.” The answer sounds so dowdy.

46-A, five letters, “‘The __ Administration’ (Hamilton tune).” It’s good to see names from American history clued to this musical.

55-A, six letters, “eBook ancestor.” Well, I guess so.

57-D, three letters, “Test in a tube.” A nice way to muddle what might be a commonplace answer.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.