Twelve movies

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

The Shadow on the Window (dir. William Asher, 1957). An unusual dramatic role for Betty Garrett as Linda Atlas, a freelance secretary, held captive by thugs in the farmhouse where she’s gone to do some work. Her son Petey (Jerry Mathers) looks in a window, sees what’s happening, and runs off, traumatized into muteness. Linda’s estranged husband Tony (Phil Carey) is a police detective: can he find his wife before it’s too late? Genuinely suspenseful and sometimes brutal, with John Barrymore Jr. as the thugs’ ringleader, and Corey Allen (Buzz from Rebel Without a Cause) as an obedient second. ★★★★

*

When Tomorrow Comes (dir. John M. Stahl, 1939). Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne are ill-fated lovers: he is a concert pianist, internationally known; she, a waitress dedicated to union organizing. Their relationship can only be a brief encounter — but why? The story is told with an understated tact that respects each character’s truth. My favorite scenes: the organ loft, and the final seconds. ★★★★

*

Interlude (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1957). A remake of When Tomorrow Comes, with a German-Italian orchestra conductor (Rossano Brazzi) and an American in Munich (June Allyson). I’d dare anyone to watch both movies and prefer this one. It’s partly the dopey ending, and it’s partly the landscapes and gaudy interiors, which swamp the human element, but it’s also partly the human element itself: June Allyson’s character seems like a dull (English-only!) naïf abroad; it’s difficult to understand what a big-time conductor might see in her beyond a malleable fan. Look for Jane Wyatt as a hyper officer manager. ★★

*

Crack-Up (dir. Irving Reis, 1946). “All right, all right, I’m psychopathic!” A storyline that baffles almost to the end, with Pat O’Brien oddly cast as a museum curator who gives folksy, friendly lectures on art. His life begins to go wrong when he’s in a horrific train wreck. But was he even on the train? With Ray Collins, Herbert Marshall, Erskine Sanford, and Claire Trevor, and, in my imagination, perhaps Basil Rathbone in the starring role. ★★★

*

Broken Strings (dir. Bernard B. Ray, 1940). Clarence Muse stars as Arthur Williams, an acclaimed classical violinist with contempt for all things swing. When his left hand is injured in an auto accident, his children take to the stage in a nightspot playing — gasp — swing music to raise money for an operation. The movie shows an all-Black world of accomplished, sophisticated men and women: executives, secretaries, booking agents, radio producers, and, above all, musicians. Watch for Matthew “Stymie” Beard as a crafty young violinist and Elliott Carpenter, an extraordinary pianist and, here, emcee. ★★★

[Clarence Muse, a star here, plays a Pullman porter in the early minutes of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt.]

*

The Longest Night (dir. Errol Taggart, 1936). With a running time of fifty-six minutes, it’s not the longest night, but it is a slog. Robert Young is the heir to a department store that employs two lovely sisters played by Florence Rice and Eve Sutton. There’s something funny going on with stolen goods, and all sorts of other funny stuff too. The best thing about this movie: the chance to see a studio recreation of a 1930s department store. ★★

*

Sweet Smell of Success (dir. Alexander Mackendrick, 1957). For anyone who’s never seen it: a press agent is given the job of breaking up the relationship between a newspaper columnist’s sister (Susan Harrison) and a rising jazz musician (Martin Milner). Tony Curtis as press agent Sidney Falco and Burt Lancaster as columnist J.J. Hunsecker are outstanding, the one a sycophantic Michael Cohen, the other a Donald Trump** plotting to destroy anyone in his way. “Tell him that, like yourself, he’s got the scruples of a guinea pig and the morals of a gangster,” another columnist says to Falco. Great Manhattan street scenes, a great score by Elmer Bernstein and Fred Katz, and great cinematography by James Wong Howe. ★★★★

*

Dementia (dir. John Parker, 1955). No dialogue, just music, sound effects, occasional screams, and maniacal laughter. A young woman, the Gamin (Adrienne Barrett) wanders through a nightmarish world of mean streets, threatened by a wino and a lecher, seduced by a rich man, terrifed by a scene of childhood trauma. I’m subtracting a star for the loss of momentum when Shorty Rogers and His Giants take over for an extended interlude of West Coast jazz. This Criterion Channel offering would pair well with Carnival of Souls (dir. Herk Harvey, 1962) for stylish low-budget strangeness. ★★★

*

Cast a Dark Shadow (dir. Lewis Gilbert, 1955). Everything about this movie (from the play Murder Mistaken by Janet Green) is meant to make its viewer profoundly uneasy. Dirk Bogarde plays Edward “Teddy” Bare, a louche young man married to a much older woman (Mona Washburne). Enter a feisty wealthy widow (Margaret Lockwood) and a househunter (Kay Walsh), each of whom brings complications to the story. It’s more drawing-room drama than film noir, with further complications that the movie only hints at: why is Edward reading a muscle magazine while sitting in a café? ★★★★

*

The Steamroller and the Violin (dir. Andrei Tarkovksy, 1961). The title suggests, to me, anyway, a moment of grotesque slapstick destruction, but there’s nothing like that at all. This short student film from a renowned director (whose work I don’t know at all) shows the unlikely friendship of a fatherless boy violinist and a steamroller operator. Around the edges: a mother, a would-be girlfriend, a music teacher, and feral bullies. Some beautiful moments of filmmaking: reflections on water, the steamroller rolling across a nearly empty screen. ★★★★

*

Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (dir. Albert Lewin, 1951). As weird as it gets: on the Spanish coast, a beautiful woman from Indianapolis, Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner), meets Hendrik van der Zee (James Mason), the Flying Dutchman (a man, not a ship), condemned to sail the world until he finds a woman who will die for him. Dazzling Technicolor scenery on the coast of Spain adds value, and a bullfighting subplot makes the story something of a bizarre cross between ancient myth, modern legend, and The Sun Also Rises. My greatest difficulty amid all the weirdness: Ava Gardner is not an especially good actor, certainly not good enough to sustain the weight of this story. ★★

*

Killer’s Kiss (dir Stanley Kubrick, 1955). So artful, so stylized, right down to the last minutes in Penn Station. A triangle of love, sex, and violence, with a washed-up fighter, Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith); the taxi-dancer who lives across the courtyard; Gloria Price (Irene Kane); and a brutal dancehall owner, Vinnie Rapallo (Frank Silvera). Eddie Muller calls the movie disjointed, but I prefer to think of it in terms of Umberto Eco’s characterization of a cult object: “one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole.” Thus Gloria at the mirror, Davey in the dark with a can of beer, the ballet story, Vinnie watching the fights on TV as he mauls Gloria, the prankish Shiners, the long staircase, the gladiators in the mannequin factory. ★★★★

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Euphemism in higher ed

From NBC News, the evasive version:

Administrators at Duke University ordered all undergraduate students to stay in place for one week to contain a growing coronavirus outbreak connected to “recruitment parties for selective living groups,” according to an all-campus communication.

From The Washington Post, a franker version:

School spokesman Michael Schoenfeld said in a statement that the new cases “are almost all linked to unsanctioned fraternity recruitment events that took place off campus” and are “the direct result of individual behavior in violation of Duke’s requirements for in-person activity.”

“Selective living groups,” sheesh. But even the franker version is a tad evasive, substituting events for parties. O colledge.

DST Proust

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

As I began reading this sentence, I wondered if I was about to read about DST, which, to my surprise, did exist in Proust’s lifetime.

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[DST is a dodge, so that I don’t have to write daylight-saving time and look like a pedant because of the hyphen.]

Inside

On Friday, March 13, 2020, my life on pause began. Elaine and I went out to eat at our favorite restaurant that night (Thai food) and made a quick run to the supermarket, where I took a photo of an aisle emptied of paper towels and toilet paper. I remember that empty aisle as a sign of strange times. We then drove to play music for services at the Jewish community center (I’m just a fellow traveler) and made a fast exit before the oneg. These were pre-mask times, and I remember how uneasy I felt that night sitting in a restaurant and looking around at the other tables. I remember how uneasy I felt everywhere.

On March 14 I wrote in my datebook: “Inside the house as of today.” Well, more or less. One or the other of us has gone to get take-out from our Thai restaurant every Friday (minus the weeks when they’ve closed for holidays). We’ve shopped for groceries every two weeks, or, now, every three. We’ve made three stocking-up trips to our nearby “beverage depot” (read liquor store). And thank goodness for beverage depots. We played music for friends on Play on Your Porch Day (everyone masked and distanced). We marched in a Black Lives Matter march. We made an urgent, unexpected day-long drive to New Jersey to bring my mom to Illinois to move into an assisted-living residence and did all the necessary legwork to make that move happen. And we’ve taken a walk nearly every day, weather permitting.

It’s been a year of without: without bookstores, without concerts, without movies, without museums, and, most acutely, without our children and grandchildren in three dimensions. But we have ourselves and we have our lives. When we were walking today, I was listening to a This American Life segment about vaccination, and I thought about how many people aren’t here now, as I am, waiting for a shot.

On March 13 last year we made it home a little after 9:00. Now, as then, I am inside in the house.

Give ’em an inch . . .

. . . and they’ll take a foot.

[As seen on Twitter.]

It’s a Los Angeles thing. Specifically, a Silver Lake thing. It has to do with feet, or a foot, not guns.

Thanks, Rachel.

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The Foot Clinic sign (With in-person photos) : Leaving Silver Lake : A new home

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword, by Greg Johnson, is not quite a Stumper, but it’s a satisfying puzzle. A distinctive feature: a pair of fifteen-letter answers, 7-D and 34-A, both clued as “Start of some feedback loops.” That’s delightful, and it’s appropriate that getting one of these answers gets you the other.

I started by taking a guess at 3-D, eight letters, “Purple-haired star with an ‘Ab Fab’ film cameo,” which gave me 1-A, four letters, “39 Down’s evildoer,” which in turn gave me 39-D, three letters, “Much-translated author, initially.” And I was off. The sticky wicket for me was 15-A, six letters, “Guinea pig resembler.” Those critters must be really good spellers.

Along with 7-D and 34-A, I found many delightful clues and novel (in my experience) answers. Some of what I especially liked:

21-D, eight letters, “Homemade Philly sandwich slice.” I haven’t thought of it, or them, in years. Surprisingly tasty, at least in memory.

22-A, four letters, “Guy in Parliament.” Not Fawkes.

24-A, nine letters, “Flee.” Nicely dowdy.

36-D, eight letters, “Hotel management figure.” The misdirection worked.

38-D, eight letters, “‘Look here.’” I first heard these words as argumentative, but I had misdirected myself.

42-A, three letters, “HAPPIER TO SEE ___ (POPEYE THE SAILOR anagram).” Crazy! I can imagine Popeye saying “You compleek me.” Or something like that.

51-D, five letters, “_____ a good one!’ (playwright pun).” It’s a good one, and a good way to redeem a bit of crosswordese.

54-D, four letters, “Inedible waffle.” Food for thought.

My favorite clue in this puzzle: 64-A, six letters, “Distance between landings at Heathrow.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

FML in colledge

A student at my university attended a party in violation of COVID-19 protocols, an unmasked off-campus party to mark “Unofficial” — that is, Unofficial Saint Patrick’s Day. After testing positive for COVID-19, he posted a photograph of his test result to Snapchat with the caption “FML” — that is, “Fuck My Life.”

What a perfect me-centric way of seeing the situation. Never mind the friends or housemates or family members or community members he may have already infected. Never mind that he may have been the student who brought the virus to the party and infected others.

Well, that’s life in colledge.

Related posts
College, anyone? : Colledge signage : Homeric blindness in colledge

[I’m revealing nothing private here; this incident is public news. And colledge is not a typo.]

Hamlet, revised

Robert Saint-Loup has no interest in meeting M. and Mme Verdurin and company: “I find that kind of clerical circle exasperating,” he tells the narrator. Saint-Loup sees the Verdurins and company as “a small sect,” kind to those on the inside, contemptuous of everyone else. An apt comparision, as the Verdurins refer to their salon regulars as “the faithful.”

Listen to Saint-Loup, unnamed narrator:

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

Anyone in academia has known such sects. They may be found in the ranks of both grad students and faculty. Sometimes they think of themselves not as a sect but as a “set.” I tend to call them “the anointed.” I never was one of them, nor was meant to be.

My friend Aldo Carrasco once mocked a grad school “set” in a letter: “They’re all too busy buying Entenmann’s cake for each other to read anything aloud.” Sometimes it was cookies.

Related reading
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[“Kind to those on the inside”: and even that’s not true. Ask M. Saniette.]

Signed today

President Joe Biden has signed the American Rescue Plan into law. Some context from Heather Cox Richardson:

Rather than focusing on dismantling the federal government and turning individuals loose to act as they wish, Congress has returned to the principles of the nation before 1981, using the federal government to support ordinary Americans. With its expansion of the child tax credit, the bill is projected to reach about 27 million children and to cut child poverty in half.

The bill, which President Biden is expected to sign Friday, is a landmark piece of legislation, reversing the trend of American government since Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Rather than funneling money upward in the belief that those at the top will invest in the economy and thus create jobs for poorer Americans, the Democrats are returning to the idea that using the government to put money into the hands of ordinary Americans will rebuild the economy from the bottom up. This was the argument for the very first expansion of the American government—during Abraham Lincoln’s administration — and it was the belief on which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the New Deal.

Unlike the previous implementations of this theory, though, Biden’s version, embodied in the American Rescue Plan, does not privilege white men (who in Lincoln and Roosevelt’s day were presumed to be family breadwinners). It moves money to low-wage earners generally, especially to women and to people of color. Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) called the child tax credit “a new lifeline to the middle class.” “Franklin Roosevelt lifted seniors out of poverty, 90 percent of them with Social Security, and with the stroke of a pen,” she said. “President Biden is going to lift millions and millions of children out of poverty in this country.”

It’s a good day.

A missing person

Yet another social gathering, this time at Mme Verdurin’s salon, home of “the faithful,” “the little clan,” and occasional visitors.

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2005).

The Norwegian philosopher, we are told, speaks French very well but very slowly. He also knows how to leave a gathering of some size: “The fact was that he had vanished without anyone having had the time to notice, like a god.” I’d say that he had the good sense to get out. Perhaps the narrator will follow his example.

I have long thought of such a departure as an Irish goodbye. I had wanted to make a joke about the philosopher being fluent in French and Irish, but I just learned that the Irish goodbye is also known as the Dutch leave, the French exit, and French leave. And in French, one might filer à l’anglaise.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[One reason the philosopher appears in the novel, aside from the comedy of his disappearance: he’s described as having recounted to the narrator, perhaps reliably, Henri Bergson’s thinking about memory and hypnotics.]