[Hi and Lois, February 2, 2021.]
[Hi and Lois revised, February 2, 2021. Click either image for a larger view.]
In the spirit of Harold Ramis’s movie, I am trying to get Groundhog Day right. I think snow is much more appropriate than bright green grass. Besides, snow in the comics always looks beautiful, so clean and bright.
Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)
[I do like that tree as is.]
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
Hi and Lois watch
“Write that letter now”
[Sid Bennet (Whit Bissell) is surprised to see his sister Sheila (Evelyn Keyes). From The Killer That Stalked New York (dir. Earl McEvoy, 1950). Click for a larger view.]
Sid Bennet manages The Moon, a Third Avenue flophouse. His sister Sheila has shown up looking for a place to stay. I noticed that sign to Sid’s left: “Write that letter now.” A hangover from the war? I think so.
From a record review in Billboard (October 30, 1943): “The Hill Toppers remind us to write that letter now and send it to your soldier boy tonight.” A snippet of something in Collier’s (October 1944): “Write that letter now. Write it V-mail.”
The sign to Sid’s right: “Have you forgotten any personal property?”
Have you forgotten any personal property? If so, go back and get it. And then write someone a letter.
A movie to watch right now
Made for these times: The Killer That Stalked New York (dir. Earl McEvoy, 1950), a fictionalized semi-documentary treatment of the 1947 smallpox outbreak in New York City. A nightclub singer and diamond smuggler (Evelyn Keyes) returns to the city from Cuba, and as a T-man tries to track her down, she unwittingly spreads disease. She tips a porter; she comforts a child; her huband (Charles Korvin) talks to the milkman; and smallpox travels, first through a neighborhood, then through the city.
What most strikes me about the response to the threat of a pandemic here: it is swift and overwhelming. The word comes down: “Vaccinate the whole city.” If that takes hundreds of clinics? “Get them.” And doctors? “We’ll draft them.” Police stations, clinics, firehouses all become vaccination sites. Hospitals and their staffs are on call around the clock. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are told that they must come through. When needles run short, a sewing-machine company is pressed into action.
Then, as now, there are vaccine skeptics: a crowd scene shows a sign declaring VACCINE IS POISON, and a householder declares that “Nobody’s gonna put no germs into me or my family.” But social pressure is subtle and effective: our narrator (Reed Hadley) tells us that anyone who didn’t get the vaccine was “out of fashion, not in style.” A sore arm “told your neighbor you had good sense.” The slogan that carried the day in 1947, and again on screen: “Be safe. Be sure. Be vaccinated.” More than six million adults and children were vaccinated, five million of them in two weeks. A six-year-old Brooklyn boy, Anthony Fauci, was one vaccine recipient.
The Killer That Stalked New York will air on TCM’s Noir Alley, February 6 or 7 (depending on time zone). But you can watch right now a YouTube.
More on the 1947 smallpox outbreak
1947 New York City smallpox outbreak (Wikipedia) : An interview with Anthony Fauci (ABC News)
[One telling point: We’re told that Washington, London, and Paris are waiting to see what happens in New York. But there’s not a word about Cuba. In 1947, smallpox came to New York in a Mainer returning from Mexico City.]
Monday, February 1, 2021
Thirteen movies
[One to four stars. Four sentences each. One mild spoiler.]
Elaine said in passing that 1947 might be our ideal year for movies. It’s the year of The Lady from Shanghai, Nightmare Alley, and Out of the Past. So we decided to watch a dozen of the year’s movies, a somewhat random assortment with an emphasis on film noir. But I miscounted, and we ended up watching thirteen.
The Flame (dir. John H. Auer). Two brothers; one, a scheming rat (John Carroll), the other, a goody-two-shoes (Robert Paige); one vacillating girlfriend/wife (Vera Ralston); and a blackmail scheme. The real standouts here are Broderick Crawford as the blackmailer and Constance Dowling as a louche nightclub singer. Best scenes: “Love Me or Leave Me” and the overheard soliloquy. Goofiest: Goody-two-shoes at the organ. ★★★
*
Dear Murderer (dir. Arthur Crabtree). A story of infidelity and, uh, murder, with many surprises. Eric Portman is a jealous husband; Greta Gynt, whom I’d never seen before, is a philandering wife. As always happens, a perfectly plotted crime goes awry. It’s the kind of plot that reminds me of how every short trip begins with a neatly packed suitcase and ends with everything in a mess. ★★★★
*
Bury Me Dead (dir. Bernard Vorhaus). Well, not every movie from 1947 is a good one. This one, a whodunit (and to whom?), is marred by a bizarre script that keeps turning to improbable comic bits (including, yes, a discussion of who and whom). But any movie starring June Lockhart and Hugh Beaumont is one I have to see — and Cathy O’Donnell (from The Best Years of Our Lives) is here too, still with her studio-provided stage diction, and now as a teenager reading psychology textbooks to figure out what’s wrong with her. Things improve considerably toward the movie’s end, when fear and pity take over with the help of John Alton’s spooky interiors. ★★
*
A Double Life (dir. George Cukor). Ronald Colman stars as a stage actor whose long run in Othello begins to alter his character. I can imagine Orson Welles in this role: indeed, the movie has the grandeur and strangeness of a Welles effort. The depiction of theater as theater, letting us see audience, stage, and backstage, is remarkable, as are the contrasts between stage acting and film acting, as are scenes in which Colman, offstage and partly in costume, walks a line between life and art. With Signe Hasso, Edmond O’Brien, Shelley Winters, and, ever so briefly, Betsy Blair. ★★★★
*
Secret Beyond the Door (dir. Fritz Lang). A new bride (Joan Bennett) comes to her husband’s (Michael Redgrave) large maze-like house and finds that it holds many secrets, past and present. I’d describe this movie as a cross between the Bluebeard story and Rebecca, and trust me — that description gives away little. Stanley Cortez’s cinematography adds plenty of atmosphere: dark and still darker rooms, flashlit hallways, and fog-bound grounds. Watch for Natalie Schafer already playing a version of Lovey Howell. ★★★★
*
The Red House (dir. Delmer Daves). Gangster, attorney, professor, Nazi hunter: Edward G. Robinson could play anything, couldn’t he? Here he’s a farmer, living in a claustrophobic farmhouse with his sister (Judith Anderson), an orphaned teenager (Allene Roberts), and many secrets. Lon McAllister is the stranger from the daylight world determined to explore the darkness. Bert Glennon’s cinematography makes this film a satisfyingly disturbing treat. ★★★★
*
Body and Soul (dir. Robert Rossen). John Garfield as a fighter torn between money and honor. Fine performances from all involved: Anne Revere as a loyal, suffering mother, Lilli Palmer and Hazel Brooks as magnetic poles, William Conrad and Lloyd Gough as promoters, Canada Lee as a fighter and trainer. And great work by cinematographer James Wong Howe. It was more disturbing than I could have imagined to hear an amoral promoter sounding like William Barr: “Everybody dies.” ★★★★
*
Whispering City (dir. Fedor Ozep). A melodrama set in Québec City, with a plucky reporter (Mary Anderson), a tormented composer (Helmut Dantine), and a sinister patron of the arts (Paul Lukas). The reporter’s interview of a dying actress lead her to investigates two other — are they murders? The plot is holey, the resolution too sudden. But there’s an excellent score, a foreshadowing of Strangers on a Train, eerie atmosphere in the newspaper office, and Paul Lukas. ★★★
*
The Unsuspected (dir. Michael Curtiz). Claude Rains is Victor Gadison, “writer, art collector, and teller of strange tales,” owner of a great estate, and host of the mysterious radio show The Unsuspected. Strong echoes of Laura, but the plot here defies comprehension, and when things begin to make sense, you realize that the plot (with bodies piling up) never mattered much to begin with. The actors and the atmosphere are all. Constance Bennett and Audrey Totter shine, and Woody Bredell’s cinematography is brilliant. ★★★★
*
Night Song (dir. John Cromwell). An improbable variation on City Lights, with Merle Oberon as Cathy Mallory, a socialite smitten with recently blind pianist and composer manqué Dan Evans (Dana Andrews), whom she meets in a nightclub while slumming with friends. To help bring Dan back to his composing, Cathy pretends to be blind (and a non-socialite). Ethel Barrymore is terrific as Cathy’s wise-cracking, mystery-reading aunt; likewise Hoagy Carmichael as Dan’s cigarette-lighting, beer-fetching pal. Dan’s music is by Leith Stevens, and though derivative (Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Gershwin), it’s good enough for Eugene Ormandy and Artur Rubinstein — oops, that’s the one spoiler. ★★★
*
Heartaches (dir. Basil Wrangell). Little more than a quick effort to cash in on “Heartaches,” the 1933 Ted Weems recording that became an improbable hit in 1947. A crooner (Kenneth Farrell) with a dark secret, his sidekick (Chill Wills), and death threats. An interesting start, with the viewer watching a movie audience watching a trailer for the crooner’s latest feature. But the story is inane; the acting, wooden; and the crooner, or “crooner,” lacks the presence that would make it possible to imagine his having a screen career. ★
*
The Guilt of Janet Ames (dir. Henry Levin). Post-war catharsis, for a public needing to work through painful questions about life and death in battle. It’s difficult to say much about this film without giving everything away. The ending might be considered a cop-out, but I prefer to see it as the only way to address a dilemma for which there is no satisfactory resolution. With Rosalind Russell, Melvyn Douglas and a surprising array of supporting players, including High Beaumont, Betsy Blair, Sid Caesar, and Nina Foch. ★★★★
*
13 Rue Madeleine (dir. Henry Hathaway). From the director of The House on 92nd Street, another semi-documentary — and it had me at “semi-documentary.” James Cagney is Bob Sharkey, an American espionage instructor who learns that one of his trainees is a Nazi agent. Sharkey’s decision to feed the agent false information and drop him into Holland leads to unforeseen complications. Suspense, suspense, and more suspense, with Annabella, Richard Conte, and Sam Jaffe. ★★★★
Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)
Rep. Mary Miller in The New Yorker
In The New Yorker, Nathan Heller offers “tips for the congresswoman Mary Miller and anyone who might drop an accidental ‘Sieg heil!’ on the lecture circuit”: “You Praised Hitler in a Speech? How to Avoid Those ‘Oops’ Moments.”
Mary Miller (R, Illinois-15), a newcomer to the House of Representatives, has not received the attention given to more overtly unhinged members. I think that makes her even more dangerous. Like Marjorie Taylor Greene, she has been appointed to the House Committee on Education and Labor.
Representative Miller is a disgrace to our district. A petition calling for her resignation has 26,000+ signatures.
Related posts
January 5 and 6 in D.C., with Mary Miller : The objectors included Mary Miller : A letter to Mary Miller : Mary Miller, with no mask : Mary Miller, still in trouble
Sunday, January 31, 2021
Stumper redux
Good news for Newsday Saturday Stumper fans, in an e-mail from crossword editor Stan Newman:
Beginning in late spring there’ll be an occasional Saturday with “the ‘good old meanness’ of before.” Stan is also thinking about creating a weekly non-Newsday puzzle of Stumper difficulty.
And if enough people are interested, he’ll create
Stumpers of the Year collections as .puz files, $14.88 a year. The explanation of the price: Stan began with Newsday in 1988; the collections will begin with 2014. If you’re interested, send an e-mail to with “Stumpers of the Year” in the subject line.
[E-mail address encoded with email-encoder.com.]
“A marvelous Rembrandt”
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Today’s Newsday Saturday
Today’s Newsday Saturday crossword, by Stan Newman, is a tough puzzle. As I worked at it, I though, Wait a minute, this puzzle is supposed to be easier than a Saturday Stumper. But this puzzle was comparable to a Stumper in difficulty. Not a lot of trickiness, but an awful lot of indirection. 20-D, five letters, “Official endorsements”? 25-A, four letters, “Office initials”? I had no idea, until I did.
Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:
9-D, five letters, “Soprano line opener.” Clever.
17-A, eight letters, “Flag-capturing game.” I am surprised to see that this game is still around — the answer feels dowdy to me. Quick, to the rec room!
22-A, three letters, “‘Inside‘ amenity.” I was thinking it must be something for A-listers. Silly me.
55-D, four letters, “In the bag, perhaps.” The clue redeems the answer.
61-D, three letters, “He’s old-fashioned, ultimately.” Shades of the Stumper!
And my three favorites:
8-D, fifteen letters, “Diner menu listing that can’t be ordered.” Maybe obvious to some, but new to me. And I like anything with a diner in it.
35-A, “Theft insurance of a sort.” The other fifteen-letter answer in the puzzle. A useful reminder for those who need one.
58-A, eight letters, “Naval enlistee.” I admit it: I had to do some rethinking to see the plainly obvious answer.
One clue-and-answer I have to take issue with: 44-D, six letters, “Stradivari, secondarily.” No, he was not.
January 31: Good news: the Stumper is not gone forever. See this post.
Friday, January 29, 2021
Deadpan reportage
From a New York Times article about Lenka Perron, a one-time believer who found her way out of QAnon:
Mr. Trump himself was a source of doubt. Q presented him as a brilliant mastermind, and for a while she accepted that. But it became harder to reconcile that persona with what she observed in real life.
Sonny Fox (1925–2021)
Newsday has an obituary. And from last year, a brief interview. And here, from Montclair State University, is an extended look at Sonny Fox’s life and work, which included much more than Wonderama.
Raise your hand if you remember Wonderama.
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