Heather Cox Richardson’s latest

In the April 19 installment of Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson writes about gun violence, Brown v. Board of Education, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and cowboys, real and imaginary.

Letters from an American is invaluable. Also free.

Walter Mondale (1928–2021)

The New York Times has a lengthy obituary.

I remember riding in an elevator in 1984 with a clean-cut collegian wearing an orange button on his jacket. In black letters on an orange background: FRITZ IS A WIMP. I think that moment must have been my first awareness of toxic masculinity at work in politics.

*

Here, from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, is a transcript of a Reagan speech from October 1984, with the crowd chanting the words on the button.

Twelve movies

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

Treasure Island (dir. Victor Fleming, 1934). I hadn’t seen this film since boyhood and did not remember how genuinely good it is. Jackie Cooper as young Jim Hawkins is a great asset here: listen to his voice and you’ll hear him as a plaintive boy version of Shirley Temple. But it’s the pirates that make the movie, a collection of grotesques, above all, Lionel Barrymore’s delirious Billy Bones and Wallace Beery’s conniving Long John Silver. Were Robert Louis Stevenson and Victor Fleming, like Blake’s Milton, of the Devil’s party without knowing it? ★★★★

*

Johnny Allegro (dir. Ted Tetzlaff, 1949). As a florist, George Raft is John Allegro (yes, George Raft, a florist). But as a fellow with a criminal past, he’s Johnny. His past gets him entangled in a criminal enterprise with the desirable Glenda Chapman (Nina Foch) and the unhinged Morgan Vallin (George Macready). Foch and Macready, the one understated, the other over the top, help to compensate for Raft’s trademark stiffness. ★★★

*

Two by Vincent Minnelli

The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). A movie producer (Walter Pidgeon) conducts a Socratic dialogue about exploitative movie producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) with three of the people whose lives Shields ruined: an actress (Lana Turner), a director (Barry Sullivan), and a writer (Dick Powell). Or were they ruined? Great acting, great storytelling via flashbacks, great black and white cinematography by Robert Surtees, a great score by David Raksin, and Gloria Grahame in an Academy Award-winning performance as a southern lady. It’s “the movies,” and even in 2021, it’s fairly easy to figure out at least some of the real-life models for the characters. ★★★★

Two Weeks in Another Town (1962). Not a sequel but a companion, with Douglas as a washed-up actor and Edward G. Robinson as a washed-up director, each holding on to meager career prospects in Rome. Cyd Charisse, George Hamilton, Dahlia Lavi, and Claire Trevor complicate the actor-director dynamic. I prefer the sharp and snappy 1952 world; too many outbursts make this movie campy by comparison. Best scene: Douglas’s character watching “himself” in The Bad and the Beautiful; worst: the car. ★★★

*

Salesman (dir. Albert Maysles and David Maysles, 1969). Four salesmen — the Badger, the Gipper, the Rabbit, and the Bull — travel from door to door (“I’m from the church”), pushing enormous illustrated Bibles on Catholic households. There’s something hilarious and repulsive about the use of the most hackneyed, high-pressure sales tactics to push these behemoths ($49.95 for the base model, $357.97 in today’s money) on households of modest means. And there’s something immensely sad about this documentary, particularly in the person of the bitter, hapless, wise-cracking monologist Paul Brennan, the Badger, who emerges as the star. Best and worst scene: Charles McDevitt, the Gipper, trying to “spark up” the Badger. ★★★★

*

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life (dir. Ric Burns, 2020). I’m a fan: I admire the neurologist Oliver Sacks for his eccentric humanity and his ability to identify with and celebrate the humanity of others. This documentary is a fan too, a beautifully made account of Sacks’s life, made in the last months of his life. Anyone who knows Sacks only as a writer of curious case histories (or as the doctor played by Robin Williams in Awakenings) will learn of his painful family background (a schizophrenic brother, a mother who calls Oliver an “abomination” when she learns he’s gay), drug use, frequent professional rejection, profound shyness, and, in the end, a six-year loving relationship with a partner. In lieu of a fourth sentence, I’ll point the reader to a short essay Sacks wrote for The New York Times after receiving a terminal diagnosis: “My Own Life.” ★★★★

*

The Mark (dir. Guy Green, 1961). A compassionate, deeply unnerving (because compassionate) portrait of a man who’s served time for “child seduction,” now attempting to make a new life for himself. Jim Fuller (Stuart Whitman) is an American in Manchester, England, working in accountancy thanks to a benevolent boss and a group that helps released prisoners. Complications develop when he begins a relationship with the firm’s secretary (Maria Schell). Rod Steiger, blessedly understated here, plays the psychiatrist who serves as Fuller’s lifeline. ★★★★

*

Two by Joseph Losey

The Servant (1963). From a novel by Robin Maugham, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. A drama of host and parasite, with a manservant (Dirk Bogarde) taking over the household of a boozy aristocrat (James Fox). Sarah Miles and Wendy Craig provide various forms of support. One of the darkest films I’ve seen. ★★★★

Accident (1967). From a novel by Nicholas Mosley, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. Silences, miscues, non sequiturs, and ominous tension, with an Oxford philosophy prof (Dirk Bogarde), an academic rival (Stanley Baker), and an aristocratic student (Michael York) all under the spell of an Austrian student and princess (Jacqueline Sassard). But it would be misleading to say that the movie is “about” that. Better, perhaps: it’s about the ways in which people step on one another, figuratively and literally. ★★★★

*

FBI Girl (dir. William A. Berke, 1951). Cesar Romero and George Brent star as agents investigating the murder of an FBI clerk; Audrey Totter is the late clerk’s roommate; and Raymond Burr lurks as a sinister figure on the payroll of a shady governor. So far so good, but this movie has nothing compelling in its action. Just wait for the scene in which the characters watch TV (and look for a young Peter Marshall on the small screen). This movie puts the udg in low-budget. ★

*

Little Caesar (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1931). The rise and fall of Caesar Enrico Bandello (Edward G. Robinson), a small-time hood determined to be “somebody.” Robinson is great, of course. I paid attention to the movie’s atmosphere: the lonely diner, serving spaghetti and coffee at midnight; the enormous interiors, some modernist, some weirdly baroque. And I was impressed by the economy and speed of the storytelling: a car, filmed from a distance, pulls up at a gas station, the doors open, the station’s lights go out, shots are fired, a cash register dings — and then we’re having spaghetti and coffee. ★★★★

*

That’s Life! (dir. Blake Edwards, 1986). Featured in the Criterion Channel’s collection Close to Home: How to Make a Movie Without Leaving the House — here, the house of Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, filled with glitzy people, some played by family members, all gathering for a birthday party. Andrews plays a singer married to the birthday boy, a kvetching architect about to turn sixty (Jack Lemmon almost parodying Jack Lemmon). Sex jokes, prostate jokes, and bowel jokes are all on the menu. Andrews’s character’s stoicism as she waits through a weekend for biopsy results was, for me, the movie’s one virtue. ★★

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

Related reading
All OCA film posts (Pinboard)

“Too small”

Jerry Blackwell, Special Assistant Attorney General, in his final words for the prosecution in Derek Chauvin’s murder trial, speaking of the defense’s greatest shading of the truth or departure from the evidence:

“You were told, for example, that Mr. Floyd died, that Mr. Floyd died because his heart was too big. You heard that testimony. And now having seen all the evidence, having heard all the evidence, you know the truth. And the truth of the matter is that the reason George Floyd is dead is because Mr. Chauvin’s heart was too small.”

The prosecution has done an excellent job of making its case with memorable bits of language: “calling the police on the police,” “let up or get up,” “common sense” and “nonsense,” and this final contrast.

You can hear these final words at C-SPAN, at the 6:42:13 mark.

How to improve writing (no. 92)

I had to read the sentence a second time:

A couple of weeks ago around dinnertime, neither my husband nor I were in the cooking mood.

Jeez, that’s in The New Yorker, in print, for crying out loud. I’ll fix it:

A couple of weeks ago around dinnertime, neither my husband nor I was in the cooking mood.

Every writer slips up. I speak from experience. But see the sentence above, beginning Jeez.

Garner’s Modern English Usage on neither . . . nor : “This construction takes a singular verb when the alternatives are singular or when the second alternative is singular.”

Related reading
All OCA “How to improve writing” posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 92 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

“Fending,” &c.

Roz Chast catalogs words for opening the refrigerator and having whatever for dinner. In her household it’s called “fending.” Among the other terms she’s collected: “California plate,” “spa plate,” and “eek.”

My favorite term for such stuff (not in her catalog) comes from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s “Many Wonders,” which endnote 319 glosses as “Incandenza family term for leftovers.” Avril Incandenza to her son Mario:

“Will you eat with us? I hadn’t even thought of dinner until I saw you. I don’t even know what there might be for dinner. Many Wonders. Turkey cartilage.”

I’m convinced that the Incandenzas’ source is a celebrated choral poem from Sophocles’s Antigone, known as the Ode to Man. It begins:

Many wonders, many terrors
But none more wonderful than the human race
    Or more dangerous.

In our house it’s called “parade of leftovers.”

[Translation by Peter Meineck, from Theban Plays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003).]

In search of lost hair

I was standing with my daughter kitty-corner across from a Carhartt store. We were selling candy and leading cheers to raise money for her high school. The year was 1980, years before she was born.

But then I realized that I was watching a videotape of my daughter and me, standing kitty-corner across from a Carhartt store, &c. It was still 1980, years before she was born. Gee, my hair looked so good on videotape. So I thought, “Maybe I should grow it longer.” And then I thought, “No, wait, that was forty-two years ago, when I had a full head of hair.”

Yes, forty-two. Arithmetic doesn’t always work properly in dreams.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

Mutts and Peanuts

Today’s Mutts is a nice homage.

Venn reading
All OCA Mutts posts : Mutts and Peanuts posts : Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

Seven vs. eight

Jon Gruber juxtaposes events:

So seven people get blood clots after getting the J&J vaccine and we pull it, but eight people get killed by a crazed gun owner and it’s just another Friday in America. Makes sense.

“Have loved”

“I have loved every minute of being a police officer”: a close reading of Kim Potter’s letter of resignation, by Lauren Michele Jackson (The New Yorker ).