COVID-19 in Douglas County

From a CDC report:

Forty-six cases of COVID-19 were linked to an indoor bar opening event that occurred during February 2021 in a rural Illinois county. Event patrons were linked to secondary cases among household, long-term care facility, and school contacts, resulting in one hospitalization and one school closure affecting 650 students.

This story is now everywhere, with “rural Illinois” or, at best, Douglas County given as the location. A local news source has identified the bar in question. The owner denies responsibility for the outbreak: “No one that owns or works at this bar transmitted Covid to anyone.”

Perhaps not. But as the CDC reports, one patron in attendance had tested positive for COVID-19 the day before the event, and four more patrons had symptoms on the day they went to the bar. And there’s the usual masks-were-available disclaimer, which doesn’t mean that people were using them.

Douglas County is one county over from me.

Twelve movies

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

The Glass Wall (dir. Maxwell Shane, 1953). A Hungarian survivor of Nazi camps, Peter Kaban (Vittorio Gassman) arrives in New York as a stowaway, where his sole hope of not being deported is to jump ship and find the American serviceman whose life he saved and can vouch for him, a guy who said he played clarinet in Times Square. A gripping story of life on the run, with Kaban as both the hunter and the hunted. There’s a touching moment with a Hungarian burlesque dancer (Robin Raymond), and Gloria Grahame gives a great performance as a coat-thief and unexpected love interest: dig her monologue about working in a shoelace factory. You’ll have to watch to the end to understand the title. ★★★★

*

99 River Street (dir. Phil Karlson, 1953). A superior noir, whose events play out in a single night. John Payne plays an ex-fighter who drives a cab and hopes to own a gas station someday. When his life spins out of control, a dispatcher pal (Frank Faylen) and an aspiring actress (Evelyn Keyes) help him put things together. Brutal fight scenes, in and out of the ring, and a host of shady characters: Jay Adler, Peggie Castle, Brad Dexter, and the feral Jack Lambert. ★★★★

*

The Scarf (dir. E.A. Dupont, 1951). An escapee from an asylum for the criminally insane (John Ireland) seeks to figure out if he committed the crime for which he was convicted. This ambitious effort scatters in several directions, from a philosophical dialogue between the escapee and a learned desert recluse (James Barton, in a great role) to a sojourn in the desert with a singing waitress (Mercedes McCambridge) to a slapstick fight in a bar. The story becomes, finally, about choosing between heteronormative desire and intergenerational desert bromance (yes, really). Best scene: the ultra-creepy psychiatrist (Emlyn Williams) meets the waitress. ★★★

*

Sudden Fear (dir. David Miller, 1952). A famous playwright (Joan Crawford) and an aspiring actor (Jack Palance) marry, and already I’m afraid. The couple’s happy life in San Francisco is complicated by the unexpected arrival of the past, in the form of Gloria Grahame. Great suspense, with steep staircases, a little mechanical dog, and lots to think about regarding plots and scripts and performances (great ones). Would pair well with Cast a Dark Shadow (dir. Lewis Gilbert, 1955). ★★★★

*

Midnight Lace (dir. David Miller, 1960). Dumb luck: we didn’t know we were about to watch another movie from the director of Sudden Fear, with strong overtones of that movie and Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder. Doris Day and Rex Harrison are Kit and Anthony Preston, a power couple in London, she an heiress, he a corporate executive. Someone is telephoning and threatening to kill Kit, but who, and why? A great performance from Day as an increasingly desperate but resourceful victim-to-be, and fine supporting performances from Myrna Loy as Kit’s feisty Aunt Bea, and John Williams (from Dial M) representing Scotland Yard. ★★★★

*

Julie (dir. Andrew L. Stone, 1956). More dumb luck: we didn’t know that we were going to be watching another movie with Doris Day as a woman in danger. No mystery here: the danger to Julie Benton comes from her obsessively jealous, violent husband (Louis Jourdan). At times the movie feels like a prescient PSA in its explication of the realities of domestic violence: the law, as a police detective says, can do little in the absence of evidence. The ending has become the stuff of spoof, but considered on its own terms, it’s wildly suspenseful and ahead of its time. ★★★★

*

The Verdict (dir. Don Siegel, 1946). After sending an innocent man to his execution, a police inspector (Sydney Greenstreet) is determined to show up the colleague who has taken his place in Scotland Yard (George Coulouris, with an improbable mustache). Set in 1890s London, the story is ostensibly a vehicle for Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, but there’s little chemistry between them in this locked-room murder mystery. Greenstreet looks tired, and Lorre skirts around the edges of the story, out late, drunk. The solution to the mystery requires that disbelief be hung by its thumbs. ★★

*

Don’t Blink – Robert Frank (dir. Laura Israel, 2015). I greatly admire Robert Frank’s photography — my copy of The Americans is many years old. But I found this documentary exhausting and unsatisfying, with fleeting image after fleeting image, all to the accompaniment of a largely irrelevant musical soundtrack. Frank is a benign but curmudgeonly presence, living with enormous personal loss, giving up little to the filmmaker’s camera. This documentary made me miss the patient close-reading of photographs typical of a Ken Burns project, and that’s saying something. ★★

*

My Favorite Year (dir. Richard Benjamin, 1982). “I’m not an actor; I’m a movie star!” It’s 1954, and a hard-drinking, swashbuckling Errol Flynn type, Alan Swann (Peter O’Toole), is to appear on King Kaiser’s Comedy Cavalcade (i.e., Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows). Young Benjy Stone (Mark Linn-Baker), who idolizes Swann, vows to keep the errant star on the straight and narrow. The bromance and feel-goodism that take over the movie leave me cold, but the scenes of writers and actors at work are a delight. Watch that cable. ★★★

*

Dangerous Crossing (dir. Joseph M. Newman, 1953). Meet the Bowmans, Ruth and John (Jeanne Crain and Carl Betz), newlyweds on an ocean liner. Mr. B. disappears, and no one can attest that he was ever on board. So think of this movie as as variation on The Lady Vanishes. Its strong point: the way it plausibly places everyone, from a fellow passenger to the ship’s doctor, under suspicion. ★★★★

*

The Whistler (dir. William Castle, 1944). A wealthy executive pays for a hit man to “remove” someone but soon has to reconsider the deal. This low-budget movie (based on a radio show) has vaguely acceptable acting, bare-bones sets, and a clever but ridiculous plot whose twists come via telegrams. One surprising moment: when the camera pulls back, a little corner that looks like a cheap stand-in for a restaurant turns out to be a little corner in a larger set. Watch for Gloria Stuart, Old Rose in Titanic. ★★

*

Road House (dir. Jean Negulesco, 1948). What a road house: it has living quarters for its manager, a bowling alley, and a bar and grille (sic) named Spare Room. The owner, Jefty Robbins (Richard Widmark), has hired Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino) as a singer-pianist, but she has eyes for Jefty’s pal, road house manager Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde), who’s had eyes for Susie the cashier (Celeste Holm). The movie looks at first like a conventional love triangle (or rectangle), but don’t forget — it has Richard Widmark. My favorite moment: Ida Lupino sing-speaks “One for My Baby (And One More for the Road”). ★★★★

[Sources: the Criterion Channel, TCM, and YouTube.]

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

Small pleasures

We were texting about Boston’s Kenmore Square, the Hoodoo Barbecue, and the Rathskeller, aka “the Rat.” And the iOS dictation service turned Rathskeller into wrath scholar.

Oh well. If dictation is to mess things up, at least it can do so in an amusing way. That’s a small pleasure.

Wrath scholars though are no pleasure, and they are amusing only at a safe distance, if at all. I have known but one — an alpha for sure. Beware of Prof!

More dictation mishaps
Boogie-woogie : Derrida : Edifice and Courson Blatz : Folk music

[No. 8 in a series of small pleasures. Rathskeller is an interesting word to look up.]

A painting rediscovered

“Alice Neel painted two neighborhood boys in her studio in the 1960s. Fifty years later, the mystery of what happened to the picture has been solved”: a bittersweet story from The New York Times.

Grifters gonna grift

A story with pre-checked boxes and a “money bomb”: “How Trump Steered Supporters into Unwitting Donations” (The New York Times). Unfreakingconscionable.

Today’s Newsday Saturday

Today’s Newsday  Saturday crossword, by S.N., Stan Newman, feels a lot like a Saturday Stumper. The puzzle took me twenty-two minutes. As Zippy would say, Yow!

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially liked:

3-D, ten letters, “Stand-up comic’s bane.” I like the colloquial answer. I sometimes thought of it when teaching.

4-D, three letters, “Garden party.” The clue improves the answer.

18-A, six letters, “Commercial preparation.” ELIXIR? PATENT? I could see this answer only from crosses.

24-D, three letters, “Short alternative to 8.” The answer looks obvious now, but didn’t when I was solving.

29-A, six letters, “Nightmarish visions.” Grateful not to have them, but after reading a bit, I see they’d have no interest in me.

31-A, eight letters, “Undemanding listening.” Another colloquial answer. I remember in my twenties being startled by someone of my age saying that she liked “easy listening” music. She was not being ironic.

33-D, five letters, “Betray overeagerness.” I usually prefer to champ at the bit.

36-A, eight letters, “When ‘I Will Survive’ got a Grammy.” Funny to see this answer under 31-A.

41-D, three letters, “Base’s not-very-high figure.” Another clue that improves an answer. I thought at first that the context was chemistry or paychecks.

45-A, six letters, “Stick-y snack.” I was thinking JERKY. It often helps to reread a clue.

69-A, eight letters, “About 75 ml of a cup’s hot stuff.” I like the defamiliarization here.

One clue that didn’t convince me: 21-D, four letters, “Tangy takeout.” The word tang can be applied to many kinds of food, including this kind. I’ve just never thought of this kind in relation to the word tangy, which for me evokes barbecue sauce, or Kraft French dressing, “glowing weirdly orange”. Elaine, thinking dynastically, suggests the answer CHINESE.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Simone Weil on force

I started thinking about these sentences this afternoon:

To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.

Simone Weil, The “Iliad,” or the Poem of Force, trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1956).

Force can take the form of a knee on a neck or a vehicle aimed at human beings in uniform. It can be directed against a person or a community. It can be the work of a lone wolf, as we now say, or a larger group, or the state.

One need not be a believer to be thinking these thoughts on Good Friday.

Imaginary word of the day

It came to me in a dream, in the form of an illustration of usage. I wrote the entry this morning:

winch∙ing \ˈwinch-iŋ\ n [prob. fr. Walter Winchell †1972 Am. newspaper columnist] (2021) : the public disclosure, as by a gossip columnist or other media personality, of an unfounded accusation, typically salacious or otherwise damaging, against a public figure <The jazz musician’s prospects were damaged by the ⁓ he received in the newspapers>

The arrival of this dream word is no doubt influenced by my watching the 1957 film Sweet Smell of Success, whose gossip columnist and destroyer of lives, J. J. Hunsecker, is modeled on Walter Winchell. The word lynching probably plays a part too. The murder of George Floyd: that was a lynching.

Other dream words
Alecry : Fequid : Misinflame : Skeptiphobia

“A dream sofa”

The narrator recognizes pieces of furniture from La Raspelière, the Verdurins’ rented country house in Douville. (Before that the furniture was with the Verdurins in rue Montalivet). He sees these pieces as “almost unreal,” bringing parts of the old salon into the present one, evoking “fragments of a destroyed world which seemed to be existing elsewhere.”

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003).

If this were an episode of Perry Mason, I’d now stand up in the visitors’ gallery and confess, “Yes, I posted those sentences. Yes, two long sentences, in a single day. I tried to stop myself. But don’t you see? I love that passage” — and then we’d break for a commercial. After which, I’d go back to reading Proust.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

“That unreal part”

M. Brichot is a member of the Verdurins’ little clan of salonistes. The Verdurins, “the Patrons,” lived in the rue Montalivet until an accident (fire?) destroyed their house. They later rented a country place, La Raspelière, in Douville. Now back in Paris, they live in a townhouse on the Quai Conti. Brichot points the narrator to the far end of a room in the townhouse: “That might just give you an idea of what the rue Montalivet house was like twenty-five years ago.”

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003).

And now I’m thinking of places I can see again only in memory.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)

[Fire is my informed guess. Mme Verdurin to a guest: “I don’t mind your smoking, of course, if it weren’t for the carpet, which is a very fine one. Not that that matters either, but it would catch fire very easily, I’m terribly afraid of fire and I wouldn’t want you all to be roasted alive just because somebody dropped a cigarette end.”]