Twelve movies

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

The Unknown (dir. Tod Browning, 1927). Lon Chaney is an armless knife thrower in a gypsy circus. Joan Crawford is his assistant. Norman Kerry is the circus strongman. Yes, it’s a love triangle, with a startling surprise, a grotesque plot twist, and a suspenseful ending. ★★★★

*

Miss Annie Rooney (dir. Edwin L. Marin, 1942). How sad to be fourteen and making a comeback in the movies. But here’s Shirley Temple as Little Annie Rooney, a teenager in modest circumstances, hep to the jive and up on the latest records, suddenly finding herself in the swank world of wealthy nerdish Marty White (Dickie Moore), his snooty friends, and his family. Will jitterbug lessons and a process to produce artificial rubber triumph over rigid class distinctions? You get just one guess. ★★

*

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (dir. George C. Wolfe, 2020). Though I was put off by the trailer, whose bits of music have little to do with Ma Rainey, I wanted to like this movie, and I really tried. But what I see is an ensemble of fine actors lost to an overwrought stage-bound script, a computer-generated Chicago, and pointless distractions (the mysterious door, sex on an upright piano). Chadwick Boseman gives a powerful performance as a cornetist who speaks of new directions in music and last things; Viola Davis as Rainey is sometimes imposing, sometimes comical, but often absent from the story that takes its title from one of her songs. My favorite scene is a quiet one in which Rainey and trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo) talk about the value of music: “The more music you have in the world, the fuller it is.” ★★★

*

The Old Dark House (dir. James Whale, 1932). Less than a minute in, and it’s clear we’re watching a precursor of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We shift between genuine scares and laughs, as two cars’ worth of sophisticated travelers spend a stormy night with the (ahem) Femm family. Horace F. (Ernest Thesiger), Rebecca F. (Eva Moore), Sir Roderick F. (Elspeth Dudgeon, a female actor), and Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) add an unmistakable queer subtext to the proceedings. Morgan (Boris Karloff) and Saul F. (Brember Wills) made me think of the great documentary Brother’s Keeper (dir. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, 1992). ★★★★

*

The Black Cat (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1934). Massively bizarre: another stormy night with travelers taking refuge in an isolated house, this one designed and furnished in an ultramodern manner. Boris Karloff, its owner, is an architect and Satanist; Bela Lugosi is a psychiatrist and his antagonist. The bizarreness — a flaying, an attempted human sacrifice, bodies in suspended animation — makes up for the incoherence of the plot. Edgar Allan Poe, whose name appears in the credits (“suggested by”), had nothing to do with this effort. ★★★★

*

Detour (dir. Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945). In the trenches of academia, faculty and staff are forever exhorted to do more with less. Few directors did more with less with Edgar G. Ulmer. Dig the silence as Al (Tom Neal) does virtuoso work at the piano; dig the nonexistent cityscape as he walks in the fog; and dig the light on his face in the diner. My favorite creepy image: Vera’s (Ann Savage) frozen profile as she rides with the man whose life she’ll destroy. ★★★★

*

The Apartment (dir. Billy Wilder, 1960). I’m proud of TCM for recognizing that The Apartment is indeed a Christmas movie. Overtones of Huck and Jim: Mr. Baxter (Jack Lemmon) is going to save Miss Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine), and returning the washroom key is his “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” The raft of the Baxter apartment will be a refuge, at least for a while. Hard to fathom that Fred MacMurray stepped into the dreck of My Three Sons mere months after his great performance here as a glib, heartless fraud. ★★★★

*

The World of Henry Orient (dir. George Roy Hill, 1964). I’ve long thought of this movie in the company of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and A Thousand Clowns: Manhattan as a playground for free spirits, with dark clouds here and there. Peter Sellers stars as Henry Orient, a pianist and ladies’ man whose foreign accent slips again and again back to Brooklyn. But the movie belongs to his young stalkers, Val and Gil (Elizabeth Walker and Merrie Spaeth), whose imaginative flights turn Orient into a figure of innocent, comically cult-like devotion — until innocence gives way to painful realizations. With Tom Bosley, Angela Lansbury, Bibi Osterwald, Paula Prentiss, Phyllis Thaxter, and Central Park in winter. ★★★★

*

The Shop at Sly Corner (dir. George King, 1947). Oskar Homolka stars as an antiques dealer, doing business on a sinisterly dark and narrow London street. He appears at first to be an old-world widower, all cigars and pince-nez, doting on his daughter (Muriel Pavlow), a rising violinist. But there’s more to his shop than we might at first suspect — if that sinister darkness didn’t tip us off. Understated but gripping suspense. ★★★★

*

Three by Robert Siodmak

Christmas Holiday (1944). The title points in one direction, but the director’s name points in another. A noirish story of lost souls in New Orleans, as a singer (Deanna Durbin) tells her life story to a serviceman (Dean Harens) stuck in town because of bad weather. The villain of the piece: Gene Kelly (really). The most remarkable scenes: the concert hall, the church on Christmas Eve. ★★★★

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945). At the center of the film: the remnants of an old New Hampshire textile family, unassuming brother Harry (George Sanders) and his sisters Lettie and Hester (Geraldine Fitzgerald, Moyna MacGill). Into this celibate world steps a glamorous visitor from the New York office (Ella Raines), and her relationship with Harry threatens to upend the siblings’ house. Suggestions of incestuous desire are unmistakable here. The conclusion, even if dictated by a censor, is still compelling in its suggestion of what could — and why not? — have happened. ★★★★

The Dark Mirror (1946). A tour de force for Olivia de Havilland. Did she or didn’t she kill a doctor found dead in his apartment? It’s complicated. With Lew Ayres as a dapper psychiatrist and James Mitchell as a rumbled police lieutenant. ★★★★

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

A pocket notebook sighting (with EXchange names)

[William Woodson as “Dave.” From Vice Squad (dir. Arnold Laven, 1953). Click either image for a larger view.]

Here a police officer poses as a telephone repairman so as to snoop. And he finds a six-ring pocket notebook with a whole bunch of “clients.” And their telephone numbers. And a misspelled state name: Arizonia.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Danger Zone : The Dark Corner : Dark Passage : Deception : Deux hommes dans Manhattan : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Down Three Dark Streets : Dream House : East Side, West Side : Fallen Angel : Framed : The Little Giant : Loophole : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Naked City (8) : Naked City (9) : Nightfall : Nightmare Alley : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : Cat People : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Walk East on Beacon! : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once

Bottle-nose, black goatee

At a luncheon given by Mme Swann, the narrator sees, for the first time, M. Bergotte, his favorite writer. But Bergotte is not the “soft-voiced bard with the white hair” of the narrator’s imagination. No, he is “a stocky, coarse, thick-set, short-sighted man, quite young, with a red bottle-nose and a black goatee.”

Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, trans. James Grieve (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“Give me a break”

“So what are we gonna do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break”: Donald Trump* to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. Listen to the call. Or at least read the transcript (The Washington Post ). It’s our president playing Mafia boss as the country burns. He needs you to find him some votes though. Or what? “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s, you know, that’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”

[I changed “going to” in the Post transcript to “gonna” and made minor changes for accuracy. Also for accuracy: as Trump* says at other points, he needs 11,780 votes, which would give him the state by one vote. Which of course would look legit to anyone, right?]

Dizzy fingers

[Bettle Bailey, January 3, 2020. Click for a larger view.]

Yes, I read Beetle Bailey. And now I have to read it more closely. Because the number of fingers on its characters’ hands varies, from person to person, from panel to panel. This panel from today’s strip is just one example.

A cartoonist’s joke? Mere sloppiness? Hard to say.

Those symbols, by the way, are called grawlixes, a Mort Walker coinage.

[Post title with apologies to Zez Confrey.]

“Yet another baseless investigation”

“The attempt of these Trump Republicans to launch yet another baseless investigation is in keeping with their use of investigations to discredit Democrats since at least the 2012 attack on two U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans”: Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent installment of Letters from an American is exceptionally good. Richardson was the subject of a recent New York Times piece.

Small pleasures

Buying toothpaste because the gauge is pointing to E, and then getting at least another two weeks' worth of paste from the old tube. Squeeze!

[No. 1 in what I think will be a series.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is another 2010 repeat. It’s by “Anna Stiga,” Stan Again, a pseudonym Stan Newman uses for easier Stumpers. I found it an easy puzzle, even by Stiga standards. One sign that Newman has, as Newsday points out, updated the puzzles running during his vacation: 38-A, nine letters, “Odin’s wife in 2011's Thor.”

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

11-A, three letters, “US stamp series subject of 1945–46.” The rules about this stuff have changed, as I realized from the answer.

24-A, nine letters, “Plenty of nothing.” I was thinking of hot air and windbags. I suspect the answer comes from the world of sport. (It does.)

29-A, six letters, “Havana? No.” A blast from the past.

29-D, three letters, “HHH successor as VP.” Who’d have thought the name would be back in the air now?

32-D, eight letters, “Shakespearean title character.” Gotta reach a bit here, or at least I did.

43-D, six letters, “Tot’s coat attachment.” Aww.

51-A, six letters, “Marimba mallet material.” Huh. This clue made me think about how many musical instruments I’ve never tried.

An odd word, for me: the answer to 48-A, nine letters, “Hall of Famer, by definition.” But I see that in a certain discourse, yes, that’s the word.

My favorite answer in today’s puzzle, 32-A, fifteen letters, “Second-string players?” Though I’d hardly call them second-stringers.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

A Berger’s Deli menu

I looked through my modest folder of menus, and there it was, circa 2002, a menu from Berger’s Deli:

  
  
[Click any image for a larger view.]

I look forward to the time when it’s possible to walk into a restaurant, sit down, and order anything on the menu. And this is quite a menu. Enjoy, vicariously. And don’t miss the H&H bagels.

[The colors are not consistent from page to page. Blame the lighting crew, all on vacation.]

Sort of quixotic

Donald Trump*’s effort to overturn the result of the presidential election is not quixotic. But Donald has one thing in common with the Don: they both tilt at windmills.