No bottom

Jesus Mary and Joseph: Donald Trump* just removed his mask before entering the White House.

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.

Watch a closeup and you can see gasping.

And then he came back out, no mask, to be filmed telling people not to be afraid of COVID-19. And that maybe he’s immune. Seems like a good time to revisit Nicholas Ray’s 1956 film Bigger Than Life.

Help Don Jr.

Vanity Fair reports on a rift in the Trump* family:

According to sources, Don Jr. has told friends that he tried lobbying Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Jared Kushner to convince the president that he needs to stop acting unstable. “Don Jr. has said he wants to stage an intervention, but Jared and Ivanka keep telling Trump how great he’s doing,” a source said.

Don Jr., please know that you are not alone. Millions of people are staging an intervention right now, in person and by mail.

[P.S. to Don Jr.: Your father isn’t acting.]

Twelve movies

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

Festival (dir. Murray Lerner, 1967). Scenes fom the Newport Folk Festival, 1963 to 1966. The crowds are young, earnest, and almost entirely white. The greatest shares of screen time go to the big names: Joan Baez (relentless vibrato), Bob Dylan (wheezy harmonica and raggedy going-electric), and Peter, Paul, and Mary (guitars hoisted high in a choreographed gesture as songs end). The most exciting moments for me: Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, and Mississippi Fred McDowell, seen in truncated performances. ★★★★

The Window (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). A boy given to telling tall tales sees a murder through a apartment window — and no one, not even his father or his mother, believes him. Bobby Driscoll is brave and resourceful. Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman are the unsavory people one flight up. An unanswered question that hints at the sordidness upstairs: what was the victim doing in that apartment anyway? ★★★★

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (dir. Fritz Lang, 1956). A newspaper editor opposed to capital punishment cooks up a scheme with his future son-in-law (Dana Andrews) to have said son-in-law convicted of murder on specious circumstantial evidence, after which all will be revealed. And things begin to go wrong. The bizarre plot — bizarre in a good way — is helped by the lack of chemistry between Andrews and Joan Fontaine. My favorite line: “That’s a weird, crazy idea, but maybe that’s the reason it intrigues me.” ★★★

Night Editor (dir. Henry Levin, 1946). A perfect B picture, with an atmospheric frame story — newspapermen in near darkness, smoking, playing cards, and listening to the editor’s tale — and a satisfying twist that joins the tale to its frame. William Gargan is credible as a cop who witnesses a murder that he cannot talk about, but Janis Carter, with her booze and ice pick (shades of Basic Instinct), steals the show. This movie, which was to be the first in a series, is based on a long-running radio serial that became the basis for a short-lived television series. I wish there had been more movies. ★★★★

Art and Craft (dir. Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, and Mark Becker, 2014). A documentary about Mark Landis, a forger and self-styled philanthropist who travels to museums (on “philanthropic binges”) to donate his creations and share backstories of imaginary dead relations and their art collections. Landis, who looks like a ghostlier John Malkovich, works with the television on (often TCM), in a house that he shared and, one might say, still shares with his mother. In his self-knowledge and self-deprecation (and mental illness), Landis reminded me at many points of R. Crumb’s brother Charles. But Landis appears to be flourishing, filled with purpose and engaged in the world, making a wholly original life by means of imitation, and now by making original portraits from photographs. ★★★★

The Green Glove (dir. Rudolph Maté, 1952). Mix one part The Maltese Falcon to three or four parts The 39 Steps to get what happens here. Glenn Ford plays an ex-GI searching for a lost religious relic; George Macready is the Nazi collaborator after the same relic. The real treasure here is Geraldine Brooks, a smart, saucy partner to Ford — and it’s not surprising to learn that they had an affair while making this movie. I wonder if the dizzying footchase on mountains might have helped inspire the ending of North by Northwest. ★★★

Never Trust a Gambler (dir. Ralph Murphy, 1951). An ex-husband shows up at his ex-wife’s house, looking for a place to hide so that he won’t have to implicate his best friend and employer by testifying in a murder trial. When a lecherous cop barges in with a bottle in his pocket, complications ensue. Dane Clark and Cathy O’Donnell are credible as mismatched exes finding, at least for a while, common cause. With a great final sequence at the Los Angeles shipyards, wherever they are. ★★★★

Bunny Lake Is Missing (dir. Otto Preminger, 1965). I’ve now seen Carol Lynley in two films — Once You Kiss a Stranger. . . and this one. Yes, she was beautiful, or beyond beautiful, but she was also a eminently capable actress. Here, by turns fierce, fragile, desperate, and resolved, she plays a young mother whose daughter goes missing — but there’s some doubt about whether that daughter in fact exists. This exceedingly disturbing family romance also stars Keir Dullea and Laurence Olivier. ★★★★

Bombardier (dir. Richard Wallace, 1943). In childhood, Elaine watched this movie with friends again and again on Saturday afternoons — even singing along to “Song of the Bombardiers.” So we had to watch, and we were impressed by some edge-of-seat aerial sequences. But a wealth of acting talent (Pat O’Brien, Randolph Scott, Anne Shirley, Robert Ryan) is herein used for little more than propaganda. I suppose this movie could serve our president’s newfound cause of “patriotic education.” ★★

Cry of the City (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1948). Two guys from the same neighborhood: Marty Rome (Richard Conte), a cocky hood who slips through the hands of the law, and Lieutenant Candella (Victor Mature), determined to grab him back. The movie is surprisingly inert, as there seems to be nothing between Rome and Candella but mutual contempt. I liked the seedy streets, the all-night diner, and Mama Rome’s kitchen. The best scenes: Rome’s encounters with a crooked lawyer (Barry Kroeger) and a murderous masseuse (Hope Emerson). ★★

Coney Island (dir. Valentine Shevy, 1952). A perfect prelude to follow-up to Little Fugitive: Henry Morgan narrates a short documentary of a day and night at Coney Island. Crowds, a freak show, rides, and some remarkable abstractions made of lights in the dark. The real star of the movie: Albert Hague’s score, which to my ears suggests Gershwin and Poulenc. As a one-time regular at Coney Island, I can’t help realizing in retrospect how squalid it all was — all those bodies, all that sand, yuck. ★★★★

Nightmare Alley (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1947). A weird and wonderful film from William Lindsay Gresham’s weird and wonderful novel. Tyrone Power captures the clueless hubris of Stanton Carlisle, carny and aspiring showman. Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, and Helen Walker are the women he takes or is taken by (and/or with). Ian Keith has a brilliant turn as a gentleman carny turned hapless alcoholic: watch his body language; when he collapses, he looks as if his body is missing a skeleton. The best scene: “Dory!” ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

Real leaders take risks, continued

They eschew protective coverings: masks, condoms, eclipse glasses.

A related post
Real leaders take risks

Real leaders take risks

Real leaders take risks: that appears to be the line with which Donald Trump*’s COVID infection is now being marketed to a gullible audience. “Real leaders” is of course just a step away from “real men.” It’s the language of toxic masculinity, inflated to executive proportions.

Real leaders do take risks, by making difficult choices and asking those they lead to do the same. Donald Trump*’s reckless disregard for human life should never be mistaken for the risk-taking of a genuine leader.

[Posted before Trump*’s Walter Reed drive-by with masked Secret Service agents in a hermetically sealed SUV. See this tweet quoting a former Secret Service agent.]

NPR, sheesh

Heard a few minutes ago, concerning events in Belarus:

“Several protestors were attacked by onlookers.”

Onlookers? If you’re attacking, you’re not looking on.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

Sean Conley, MD

“It came off that we were trying to hide something, which wasn’t necessarily true”: Sean Conley, MD.

Necessarily ?

MD = Medical Dissembler.

“Poor Moon”

I think I’d like it even if it weren’t a cover of a Canned Heat tune.


[The Green Child, “Poor Moon” (Alan Wilson).]

For the fanatics among us: Canned Heat released “Poor Moon” on July 15, 1969, one day before the Apollo 11 launch. The song borrows from Garfield Akers’s “Dough Roller Blues” (1930) and Charlie Patton’s “Jesus Is a Dying Bed Maker” (1930). See also Blind Willie Johnson’s “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed” (1928).

The Green Child (Mikey Young and Raven Mahon) appear to take their name from a 1924 Herbert Read novel. So there’s almost a century’s worth of culture behind this cover.

Here’s the 1969 Canned Heat recording. As you can hear, the trippiness of The Green Child’s version is built into the original.

Harrison FTW

I caught a half-hour of the Lindsey Graham–Jamie Harrison debate tonight on C-SPAN. Harrison is an impressive candidate — a plainspoken truthteller. I can easily imagine him running for president in the not-distant future.

“Self-dealing malevolence”

“Self-dealing malevolence”: on CNN a few minutes ago, Walter Shaub, senior advisor to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, tossed off this charged, memorable phrase.

Shaub was characterizing Donald Trump*’s decision to hold a fundraising event knowing that he had been exposed to someone who had tested positive for COVID-19 and possibly having already tested positive himself. As Shaub added, the phrase applies to the Trump* presidency in its entirety.

Trump* really, literally, equals death.

[And if the “someone,” Hope Hicks, caught it from Trump, even more so. Note: “Not present at the [Amy Coney] Barrett events [last Saturday] was Ms. Hicks.”]