Twelve movies

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

Scandal Sheet (dir. Phil Karlson, 1952). I’m always thankful to film fans who upload movies (no doubt only those in the public domain) to YouTube. Here’s an example: a not especially celebrated story of tabloid journalism and murder, with Broderick Crawford as the ethically challenged editor of the lurid New York Express, John Derek as an ethically challenged reporter, and Donna Reed as a plucky sidekick. It’s something of a cross between Double Indemnity and The Big Clock. Watch for Harry Morgan as an unmistakably Weegee-like photographer. ★★★★

*

The Case Against Brooklyn (dir. Paul Wendkos, 1958). Another YouTube find: a police procedural that follows an undercover investigation of Brooklyn “horse rooms.” Darren McGavin is the Glenn Ford-like rookie cop who risks everything to bring down the syndicate. Maggie Hayes (the lonely teacher in The Blackboard Jungle) complicates his investigation, with unforeseen consequences. With noir-like cinematography by Fred Jackman Jr. and a great final sequence in an industrial laundry. ★★★★

*

Mysterious Intruder (dir. William Castle, 1946). And here the streak ended, with something from a movie series inspired by the radio serial The Whistler. Things start out well, with a courtly old-world music-store owner hiring a sketchy private detective to find a young woman who disappeared from the neighborhood seven years earlier. And then fiendish Mike Mazurki shows up in the music store, a low-budget affair made from a few guitars, some sheet music, and brilliant composition and lighting. But when the interesting characters are killed and the plot abandons plausibility, this movie turns into a dud. ★★

*

Violent Saturday (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1955). Many stories: that of a trio of bank robbers, and those of the disparate residents of a mining town and its environs whose lives are changed one Saturday morning. The movie takes a long time to get going, but the wait is worth it. Standouts: Margaret (Maggie) Hayes as a wife and self-styled “tramp,” Virginia Leith as an object of the male gaze, Lee Marvin as a feral criminal, J. Carrol Naish as a bespectacled criminal (reminiscent of Sam Jaffe in The Asphalt Jungle), Tommy Noonan as a Prufrockian bank manager, and Sylvia Sidney as a librarian in money trouble. Watch also for Ernest Borgnine as an Amish farmer. ★★★★

*

Little Fugitive (dir. Ray Ashley, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, 1953). I didn’t think when we watched this movie three months ago that we’d be we watching it again with my mom, who saw it back in 1953 and remembered it as both happy and sad. Says my mom, “Nothing bad happened to the boy, and he ended up back with his family, so that was good. But to me it was very sad.” Thank you, Criterion Channel, for making it possible to discover or rediscover this film. ★★★★

*

The Fallen Sparrow (dir. Richard Wallace, 1943). My dad used to amuse us by dragging his foot around like a character in this movie, so I thought I should finally watch and find out what it’s all about. It’s about Kit McKittrick (John Garfield), a Spanish Civil War vet whose investigation of the death of a friend brings him into contact with society swells and eminent refugees, some of whom might spell trouble. Garfield is excellent in scenes in which he describes and relives his experiences being tortured. But it’s never clear just who McKittrick is (a swell himself? someone who just happens to own evening clothes?), and the plot is wildly improbable. ★★

*

It Happened One Night (dir. Frank Capra, 1934). It has to be my favorite Capra film, cutting the Americana with plenty of eros, courtesy of Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. It didn’t occur to me until this viewing that it’s really two movies: one of daylight scenes on roads and in offices, and one of nights on snug buses, in cozy cabins, or outside in luminous, misty darkness. Oh, to eat a hamburger and ride the night bus to New York, even without Colbert and Gable aboard. My favorite moments: hitchhiking, “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” ★★★★

*

Now, Voyager (dir. Irving Rapper, 1942). How could I have missed this film? Well, as I used to tell my students, we come to things when we come to them. Better late than never — no shame. Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, Claude Rains, many cigarettes, and an ending that suggests an imperfect happiness as enough happiness. ★★★★

*

Only Angels Have Wings (dir. Howard Hawks, 1939). Cary Grant is Geoff Carter, aka Papa or Pop, manager of an air freight company flying mail through the dangerous Andes. The outside air is thick with fog; the air inside the hotel/bar/restaurant where most of the movie takes place is thick with bromance, particularly between Papa and the Kid (Thomas Mitchell, born twelve years earlier than Grant). Enter singer Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), pilot Bat McPherson (Richard Barthlemess), and McPherson’s wife Judy (Rita Hayworth), each of whom complicates the bromance. Spectacular flying scenes, and a farewell scene with Papa and the Kid that recalls William Wellman’s Wings. ★★★★

*

Phantom Lady (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1944). From a novel by Cornell Woolrich. Ella Raines is a loyal secretary trying to clear her boss of a murder charge by tracking down a mysterious woman in a strange hat. Elisha Cook Jr. steals a scene as a manic drummer. Franchot Tone steals the movie as a twitchy killer. ★★★

*

Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (dir. Les Blank, 1980). Do you remember the cookbooks of times past that suggested rubbing a clove of garlic around a wooden salad bowl, presumably because no one would want any more garlic flavor than that? Hahahahaha, and sheesh. I love garlic. This documentary has lots of garlic, lots of cooking and eating, lots of music — in other words, lots of life. ★★★★

*

The Lonedale Operator (dir. Michael Almereyda, 2018). John Ashbery, three-and-a-half months before his death, talking about his childhood, his love of movies, and his poetry. In an interview for the Criterion Collection, Almereyda (the director of the great, strange 2000 film adaptation of Hamlet ) explains how he came to make this short film. You can read Ashbery’s poem “The Lonedale Operator” here. Thank you, Criterion Channel. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

23C and 23D

Safe to say that the intended audience for today’s George Bodmer cartoon includes me.

Context: this past Saturday’s Newsday Saturday Stumper.

Thank you, George, for brightening the corner where I am.

Free Jazz Against Paludan

“We’re fighting noise with noise”: in Denmark, musicians play to drown out a far-right politician.

Nancy old and new

Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy is back at GoComics. And today Olivia Jaimes continues the Bushmiller tradition of taking off on holidays. See also Jaimes’s 2019 Labor Day strip.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Labor Day

[“Welder making boilers for a ship, Combustion Engineering Co., Chattanooga, Tenn.” Photograph by Alfred T. Palmer. June 1942. From the Library of Congress Flickr account. Click for a larger view.]

The Rabin Glove Company (“Jersey City Pride”) is now Rabin Glove & Safety Company, in Newark, New Jersey, offering “a full line of high quality work gloves, work clothing and personal protection equipment.”

An M-W Word of the Day: heyday

I’ve been meaning to write about the word heyday for months now. Too late: Merriam-Webster has done the work for me. Heyday, “the period of one’s greatest popularity, vigor, or prosperity,” was yesterday’s M-W Word of the Day:

In its earliest appearances in English, in the 16th century, heyday was used as an interjection that expressed elation or wonder (similar to our word hey, from which it derives). Within a few decades, heyday was seeing use as a noun meaning “high spirits.” This sense can be seen in Act III, scene 4 of Hamlet, when the Prince of Denmark tells his mother, “You cannot call it love; for at your age / The heyday in the blood is tame. . . .” The word’s second syllable is not thought to be borne of the modern word day (or any of its ancestors), but in the 18th century the syllable’s resemblance to that word likely influenced the development of the now-familiar use referring to the period when one’s achievement or popularity has reached its zenith.

My hopeful guess was that heyday had something to do with reaping: “Yay, it’s hay day, what a big deal, everybody’s out there going full force!” Nope.

“Suckers”

From The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946).]

Dana Andrews is Fred Derry, counterman. Harold Russell is Homer Parrish, fellow veteran. I’m unable to identify the man in the hat.

The language in this clip is of its time and ours. Racial slurs: “Japs” then; “China virus” now. “Plain old-fashioned Americanism” then; “America first” now (and then). But I never could have imagined that an American president would join the man in the hat in characterizing service members killed in war as “suckers.”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Anna Stiga, or Stan Again, the puzzle’s editor Stan Newman. Not an especially difficult puzzle, but a satisfying one, with some surprising content. I believe the technical term for such a puzzle is “crunchy.”

Clues and answers I found to like:

4-D, eight letters, “Venerable wind instruments.” A novel answer, at least in my experience. Crunch. I have one of these instruments but never thought it venerable until now.

12-D, seven letters, “Oscar winner portraying Romeo.” I dunno — Olivier? Crunch.

16-A, six letters, “Slip stream?” The answer seems to be showing up often in crosswords these days. But this clue makes it new.

29-A, four letters, “Assumed name's assumed name.” I find this kind of clue a bit painful, but I have to admit that the phrasing is clever.

33-A, four letters, “Farewell interrupter.” I take inordinate glee in having seen this answer straight off.

37-A, nine letters, “It can roll down while rolling.” A little awkward, as it isn’t rolling, but clever.

38-D, seven letters, “Orajel alternative.” I haven’t thought of this stuff in years. Crunch.

44-D, six letters, “They’ve come a long way in anime.” Okay, that’s cute.

51-D, five letters, “It's often between 23C and 23D.” There must be more to the number 23 than I know. No, wait — 23 is just misdirection.

60-A, six letters, “Whom Rocky named his restaurant for.” Bullwinkle? Gideon? Magill? Oops, wrong Rockies. Easy to guess, but still crunchy, I’d say, and a surprise, at least for me, to learn that Rocky had (or has?) a restaurant. I’ve seen about five minutes of anything Balboa.

Yo, no spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Beware of user error

Last night I wrote a cranky post about trying to obtain two (of three) 13mm × 10mm cam lock fasteners from Wayfair in a timely fashion. Twenty-four larger fasteners were all there.

This morning Elaine asked if I might have used two small fasteners in place of larger ones. I looked carefully. Yes, I had. The larger fasteners are 15mm × 12mm (I think). Whatever their size, they’re virtually indistinguishable from the smaller ones. I called Wayfair today to explain what happened, to apologize for wasting so much of their time, and to cancel the complete hardware set they were planning to send from a warehouse.

My cranky post (now removed) was titled “Beware of Wayfair.” I still think that the Wayfair business model, one of selling stuff from “the warehouse,” with no ready access to a supply of extra hardware for the furniture sold, is a lousy business model. No one can pick out a fastener or screw or knob or bolt and send it out. “The warehouse” does not send parts, much less send them in a timely way. Thus the complete hardware set that was due to arrive a week from today.

As I mentioned in my now-removed post, I ended up ordering 13mm × 10mm cam lock fasteners from Amazon. Not sold in any store! At least not in our town’s incredible Ace, an unabridged dictionary of hardware, nor in a nearby Home Depot. The fasteners have already shipped, and they’re scheduled to arrive tomorrow. Anyone need some cam lock fasteners?

“Losers,” “suckers,” and Trump*

In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg reports on Donald Trump*’s contempt for service members killed in battle:

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Also, no amputees in military parades: “Nobody wants to see that.”

Trump* says in an angry tweet that he “never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES.” Of course that’s the same Donald Trump* who said publicly that he likes people who don’t get captured.

To paraphrase (once again) something Gertrude Stein may have said, There ain’t any bottom, there ain’t going to be any bottom, there never has been any bottom, that’s the bottom.