A lost art

From Till the End of Time (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1946). A cowboy, Bill Tabeshaw (Robert Mitchum), opines:

“I thought letter writing was a lost art, like steer milking.”

Related reading
All OCA letter posts (Pinboard)

Pluto again

A New York Times interactive feature: “Is Pluto a Planet?”

Orange Crate Art has always been in Pluto’s corner, small as that corner may be.

Related reading
All OCA Pluto posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Professor gone wild The professor who called his students “vectors of disease” is threatening to sue his school.

EXchange names on screen

Cliff Harper (Guy Madison) is home, courtesy of MAdison 1234. And he will soon see more exchange names in his family’s telephone directory.

[From Till the End of Time (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1946). Click either image for a larger view.]

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Black Widow : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Craig’s Wife : 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 : Escape in the Fog : Fallen Angel : Framed : Hollywood Story: 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 : Nocturne : Old Acquaintance : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : This Gun for Hire : The Unfaithful : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Getting free COVID tests via USPS

WNYC reports that people who live at an address not registered with the USPS as a multi-unit dwelling have been unable to order free COVID tests if someone from the same address has already ordered them. What to do: fill out this form, or call 1-800-ASK-USPS.

And if you havent yet requested free COVID tests: here’s the sign-up page.

Fantastic voyage

Michael Steele (the political commentator, not the ex-Bangle), on MSNBC just now, describing his fellow Republicans:

“They’re so far up Trump’s behind they have no idea where they are.”

Phew.

EXchange names on the screen

Kit Marlowe (Bette Davis) needs to pay a visit to no-good Lucien Grant. He’s been messing around with Kit’s best friend’s daughter. Now, where does he live? Ah — there’s his address. Better take it with you. Rrrrip.

[From Old Acquaintance (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1943). Click either image for a larger view.]

It’s not uncommon in old movies for someone to tear a page from a public telephone directory. Tearing a page from your own directory — that’s another story. Kit Marlowe is angry, so angry that she doesn’t even notice the glitch in this directory’s alphabetizing.

More EXchange names on screen
Act of Violence : The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Black Widow : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Blue Gardenia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Brasher Doubloon : The Brothers Rico : The Case Against Brooklyn : Chinatown : Craig’s Wife : 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 : Escape in the Fog : Fallen Angel : Framed : Hollywood Story: 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 : Nocturne : Out of the Past : Perry Mason : Pitfall : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Red Light : Side Street : The Slender Thread : Stage Fright : Sweet Smell of Success (1) : Sweet Smell of Success (2) : Tension : This Gun for Hire : The Unfaithful : Vice Squad : Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Beard pencils

There is something called a beard pencil. Who knew? Not me.

Related reading
All OCA beard posts (Pinboard)

Good going, Carhartt

A notable development at the intersection of COVID-19 and culture: Carhartt is requiring that its employees be vaccinated (Detroit Metro Times). Customers who tilt to the right are already tweeting about boycotting the company.

Indeed, the Carhartt brand is often seen on people who tilt to the right. (Look at photographs from January 6.) But both Sarah Palin and Barack Obama have been photographed wearing Carhartt.

The Metro Times says the brand is beloved of “both blue-collar workers and hipsters.” I’m neither — I just like good pants. I’ve been wearing Carhartt B18 jeans and B324 carpenter pants for many years. They’re both amazingly durable, and the B324’s right-leg pocket solves the perennial question of where to put my phone.

I hope that those who are planning to boycott Carhartt because of the company’s stand on vaccination will soon need to boycott all consumer goods.

Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, DVDs, TCM, YouTube.]

Repeat Performance (dir. Alfred L. Werker, 1947). Our household’s favorite movie-year comes through for us again. Eddie Muller, who’s responsible for rescuing this movie from oblivion, describes it as a film noir version of It’s a Wonderful Life. Or think of it as Groundhog Year : actress Sheila Page (Joan Leslie) finds her life gone wrong on New Year’s Eve and gets the chance to relive the dying year. Also present: Louis Hayward as Sheila’s jealous but faithless alcoholic playwright husband; Tom Conway (who resembles George Sanders because — guess what? — they were brothers) as a suave producer; Richard Basehart as a rhyming poet and hanger-on named William Williams; and Natalie Schaefer as a patron of the arts in search of young male talent. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Old Acquaintance (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1943). Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins play friends-from-childhood whose lives move in different directions. As Kit Marlowe (heh), Davis is a writer of literary fiction whose work inspires college women to form clubs devoted to her ideas. As Millie Drake, Hopkins is a writer of junk novels who rises in popularity as Kit struggles. John Loder and Gig Young make things complicated, but I would have liked melodramatic complications without the inapt moments of comic relief. ★★★ (TCM)

*

From the Criterion Channel: Starring Sterling Hayden

Crime Wave (dir. Andre De Toth, 1954). A hugely satisfying B picture, with locations by Los Angeles, cinematography by Bert Glennon, and strong performances from Hayden (Sims, a mean cop), Gene Nelson (Steve Lacey, an ex-con going straight), and Ted de Corsia (“Doc” Penny, the escaped con who forces Steve back into crime). Truly unnerving, with every ring of a telephone and every knock at the door putting Steve and his wife Ellen (Peggy Kirk) on alert. Hayden is at least as scary as any of the criminals, speaking at high speed while looking semi-conscious. Watch also for Charles Bronson, ultra-creepy Timothy Carey, and Jay Novello. ★★★★

Crime of Passion (dir. Gerd Oswald, 1956). “I hope all your socks have holes in them, and I can sit for hours and hours darning them.” Barbara Stanwyck plays Kathy Ferguson, an advice columnist who breaks her vow to nevermarry and leaves her job after meeting handsome LAPD detective Bill Doyle (Hayden). But Kathy finds her new life stifling, and she wants better prospects for her husband than his position offers — thus the title. With Fay Wray and a highly sinister Raymond Burr. ★★★★

Terror in a Texas Town (dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1958). Film noir comes to Prairie City. A venture capitalist (Sebastian Cabot) has hired a gunman named Crale (Nedrick Young) to force farmers from their (oil-rich) properties, but when George Hansen (Sterling Hayden), the son of a murdered farmer, comes to town for a visit, there’ll be trouble, signaled in the film’s opening, when George walks into town carrying a harpoon (yes, really). The screenplay, by Dalton Trumbo (as “Ben L. Perry”), has important things to say about fear, obedience, and resistance. Hayden is the nominal star, but the movie belongs to Young (another blacklistee) and Victor Millan, who plays José Mirada, a young farmer who refuses to move. ★★★★

Johnny Guitar (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1954). Sterling Hayden is Johnny Guitar (née Logan), and just the mention of his birth name is enough to frighten those who hear it. Joan Crawford is Vienna, proprietor of a hotel-bar-gambling joint, determined to cash in when the railroad tracks are laid. A shady fellow called the Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady) and a vengeful, conflicted townswoman named Emma Small (Mercedes McCambridge) complicate things for all. We see Vienna in men’s clothes, men showing their prowess in shooting, a waterfall pouring as Johnny and Vienna kiss: Johnny Guitar is so insanely over the top that — that — that I can’t find a way to end this sentence. But now I understand why Pedro Almodóvar pays homage to the movie in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. ★★★★

*

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (fir. Pedro Almodóvar, 1988). A deliriously funny film about fear, desire, gazpacho, and revenge. At the beginning, a scene from Johnny Guitar is being dubbed into Spanish, and one could say that if a scene from Johnny Guitar is being dubbed into Spanish in Act One, someone will be shot in Act Three. Deftly plotted, with all desires tied together in one apartment. Based on Cocteau’s ‌La voix humaine, as I now understand having seen Almodóvar’s 2020 short film The Human Voice.★★★★ (DVD)

*

Hitler’s Hollywood: German Cinema in the Age of Propaganda: 1933–1945 (dir. Rüdiger Suchsland, 2017). Did you know that Josef Goebbels was in charge of film production in Nazi Germany? Did you know that Nazi cinema included a remake of It Happened One Night? Did you know that Ingrid Bergman made a film in Nazi Germany (The Four Companions, just four years before Casablanca)? A fascinating, appalling survey of a largely unknown world of directors and stars, with short clips abounding: anti-Semitic propaganda, comedies, detective stories, melodramas, musicals, period pieces, sports, and war stories in which men in uniform laugh heartily or die beautifully for the nation. ★★★★ (DVD)

*

Sun Valley Serenade (dir. H. Bruce Humberstone, 1941). We watched this bright, shiny musical (set at a real-world ski resort) because it was one of three movies at the Criterion Channel with the Nicholas Brothers, who share one spectacular number with Dorothy Dandridge and the Dartmouth Troubadours (the Glenn Miller Orchestra). That number and all the musical numbers are terrific, but the story line is another matter. Sonja Henie (a skating star with, it turns out, a Hitler connection) plays Karen Benson, a giggly, calculating refugee skater who uses devious means to pull her sponsor, the Troubadours’ pianist Ted Scott (John Payne), away from his singer-fiancée Vivian Dawn (Lynn Bari) — and the movie lets her succeed. Our household hated Karen for her wiles, and we hated Ted for his dumbness, and if we had paid more attention to the credits, we would have realized that those two, who received top billing, were always going to end up together. ★★★★ (music) / ★ (story) (CC)

*

The Saxon Charm (dir. Claude Binyon, 1948). Robert Montgomery is Matt Saxon, a Broadway producer working with Eric Busch (John Payne), a successful novelist who’s written a first play. Saxon (based, it seems, on the unloved producer Jed Harris, whose name rings no bell for me) takes over Busch’s life, calling for meetings at all hours and demanding endless cuts and additions, as Busch’s confidence and his relationship with his wife Janet (Susan Hayward) die. Not film noir, despite online claims, nor is it a satisfying psychological drama, as too many odd comic touches soften Saxon’s will to power. But good work by Montgomery, Payne, Hayward, and Audrey Totter. ★★★ (YT)

*

Night Unto Night (dir. Don Siegel, 1949). They sure made strange ones back then: John Galen (Ronald Reagan), a biochemist with a secret illness and wooden personality, rents an enormous old house from Ann Gracie (Viveca Lindfors), a widow whose dead husband speaks to her. Yes, it’ll be a love story, one with an inexplicable start (what is Galen doing here?) and, finally, a pretty pat ending. Broderick Crawford is surprising as a painter and man of ideas (art vs. science and all that). Stealing the movie is Osa Massen as Lisa (just Lisa), Ann’s jealous, spiteful sister from hell. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Till the End of Time (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1946). Released before The Best Years of Our Lives, it’s the story of three returned Marines, Cliff (Guy Madison), Bill (Robert Mitchum), and Perry (Bill Williams) as they readjust to civilian life, or try to. The movie offers brief splashes of fun — iceskating, jitterbugging — but focuses on pain and pathos: PTSD (here known as “the shakes”), physical disability and pain, family members’ unwillingness to listen, the overtures of xenophobic “patriot” groups, the feeling that years have been stolen by war. What is most remarkable: the movie also dwells on the grief of a young war widow, Pat (Dorothy McGuire, in a beautifully understated performance), who receives from Cliff the kind of care that the men of The Best Years receive from women (you’ll have to watch both movies to understand). The strongest scenes: a serviceman shakes uncontrollably as he sits at a snack bar; Pat breaks down as she talks about her husband’s dream of home. ★★★★ (TCM)

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)

[The title of Philip Wylie’s novel Night Unto Night comes from Psalms 19:2: “Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.”]