Ten movies, two seasons

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

From the Criterion Channel’s Ida Lupino feature
The Hard Way (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1943). Reportedly based on the life of Ginger Rogers, with Lupino as “Mrs. Helen Chernen,” determined to make a star of her kid sister Katie Blaine (Joan Leslie), with predictably destructive results. I wonder what would a contemporary audience would have made of Katie’s singing and dancing and acting. I think it’s only passable, and that might be the point, because the movie is full of the sadness of being not good enough: a hokey vaudeville act (Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan), a faded star who seems to be further fading with every moment of rehearsal (Gladys George, who nearly steals the movie). It’s true: “The world’s full of murderers.” ★★★★

The Man I Love (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1946). How could I not love a movie that begins with Ida Lupino “singing” (dubbed) “The Man I Love” in an after-hours jam session? That’s in New York, but everything else happens out in Long Beach, where that singer, Petey Brown, visits her sisters and brother (Andrea King, Martha Vickers, Warren Douglas) and finds problems galore, including a brother-in-law with PTSD (John Ridgely) and a neighbor (Dolores Moran) who forsakes her husband and children for a gangster and nightclub-owner (Robert Alda). A further complication is the presence of San Thomas (Bruce Bennett), a tormented jazz pianist whose presence helps explain the title. Too easy a resolution, but great atmospherics in nightclubs and a crowded post-war apartment. ★★★★

Lust for Gold (dir. S. Sylvan Simon, 1949). Two quests for gold, present and past, with the present search framing the past. Lupino is at the center of things, a baker in the Old West who betrays her husband (Gig Young) for a man (Glenn Ford) who’s driven to uncover a fabled cache of gold hidden in Superstition Mountain. In the present, a young adventurer (William Price) has taken up the search. A powerful, unusual story, with origins in Arizona legend, overtones of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Double Indemnity, and gripping scenes of hand-to-hand combat on cliff edges. ★★★★

Woman in Hiding (dir. Michael Gordon, 1950). All noir, all the time: Lupino plays Deborah Chandler Clark, the heir to a sawmill, presumed dead by everyone except her husband (Stephen McNally), who knows that his attempt to kill her failed. Deborah asks a genial newsstand clerk (Howard Duff) to help her — but can he be trusted? And can Selden’s ex (Peggy Dow) be trusted? The final five-minute sequence in the dark empty mill (cinematography by William Daniels) is worth waiting for. ★★★★

Women’s Prison (dir. Lewis Seiler, 1955). Lupino here is the sadistic warden of the women’s side of a co-ed prison; Howard Duff (now Lupino’s real-life husband) is a compassionate doctor; Cleo Moore, Jan Sterling, Phyllis Thaxter, and Audrey Totter are the principal inmates. Much better than the title might suggest. My favorite moment: Vivian Marshall impersonating Lupino — or is that just a dubbed voice? My favorite line: “You’re the psychopath, Amelia, believe me.” ★★★★

While the City Sleeps (dir. Fritz Lang, 1956). Here’s the one I was waiting for, but I was disappointed. It’s like Executive Suite crossed with a hunt for a psychokiller, with the indolent heir to the Kyne media empire (Vincent Price) offering a plum position to the underling (James Craig, Thomas Mitchell, George Sanders) who gets the killer’s identity first. Dana Andrews is a Kyne television commentator with no interest in advancement; Lupino, a writer (for the Kyne newspaper’s women’s page?). The messy lives of the Kyne men (one of whom, Craig, is barely present), their significant others, and Lupino exhausted my interest well before the movie’s end. ★★★

[The Criterion Channel has another four Lupino movies already familiar to our household: They Drive by Night, High Sierra, Moontide, The Big Knife. For Peter Ibbetson, Out of the Fog, and The Sea Wolf, see this post.]

*

One Girl’s Confession (dir. Hugo Haas, 1953). Having seen three Haas movies — 1, 2, 3 — we thought we should add another and become the Center for Haas Cinema Studies. One Girl’s Confession is another weirdly good B-movie, with Cleo Moore as the blandly named Mary Adams, a bad girl who steals thousands, almost commits murder, and nevertheless wins the affection of café owner Damitrof (Hass) and fisherman Johnny (Glenn Langan). Haas’s bother Pavel was a composer (killed in Auschwitz), so it seems no coincidence that this low-budget effort has a superior musical score, by one Václav Divina. An oddly touching scene with Burt Mustin helps the viewer to understand tree roots. ★★★ (YT)

*

Lou Grant (created by James L. Brooks, Allan Burns, and Gene Reynolds, 1978–1979). In the second season things get better still, with greater character development and storylines that remain contemporary: prescription-drug abuse, Latin American dictators, the murder of sex workers, racial disparities in crime coverage (consider Gabby Petito), racial disparities in school funding, veterans and PTSD, a Ponzi investment scheme, and the persecution of illegal immigrants. The strongest episodes: “Hit,” with Allyn Ann McLerie as a mother trying to track down the driver who killed her son, and “Skids,” with Lou encountering an old friend now on Skid Row. Most touching moment: Billie and Rossi sharing a bed and talking (and that’s all they do). With Ed Asner, Mason Adams, Daryl Anderson, Jack Bannon, Linda Kelsey, Nancy Marchand, and Robert Walden. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Lou Grant (1979–1980). More great TV, though the show’s conscience becomes wearisome, with a social issue as the flavor of the week (captured in a one-word episode title), taken up and then forgotten: job discrimination against gay men, prisoners’ rights, children’s rights, corporate takeovers of newspapers, the lives of urban Native Americans, access to mental-health care, wildfires. The most disturbing episode is “Censored,” in which a town censors and burns library books and textbooks because “They’re experimenting with our kids”: but here it’s one town, and in 2022 it’s entire states at work. The best episode of the season is an anomaly: “Hollywood,” a faux film-noir with George Chandler, Laraine Day, Howard Duff, Nina Foch, Margaret Hamilton, John Larch, Paul Stewart, and Marie Windsor. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Don’t Be a Sucker (1945). A short film from the Department of Defense. After a man addresses a streetside crowd, railing against “Negroes,” Catholics, Masons, and “alien foreigners,” a Hungarian-born listener (Paul Lukas) explains to another man what he witnessed as a professor in Berlin: “I’ve heard this kind of talk before, but I never expected to hear it in America.” A moving and eeerily relevant defense of cultural pluralism. Felix Bressart and George E. Stone make brief appearances, and Lloyd Nolan narrates. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Killer Is Loose (dir. Budd Boetticher, 1956). The bank robbery is an inside job, and suspicion falls on mild-mannered teller Leon Poole (Wendell Corey). When his wife is killed in a police raid of his apartment, Poole vows to kill Lila Wagner (Rhonda Fleming), the wife of the detective who fired the fatal shot, Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotten). Cotten is undistinguished here, but Corey, the archetypal beta male, has his finest hour as a psychokiller. My favorite moments: the milk, the bathrobe and boots. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

The Long Wait (dir. Victor Saville, 1954). From a Mickey Spillane novel. For anyone who remembers the short, sometimes snarky comments that accompanied movie listings in the New York Times TV listings: a comment on this movie might read “Too long.” Anthony Quinn plays an amnesiac bank teller, wanted for murder, searching for the real killer, and trying to figure out which of four women is his now-unrecognizable wife (she’s had plastic surgery). One of the least coherent movies I’ve ever seen, though there is, I’ll admit, something worth waiting for: a striking scene near the end, utterly different from the rest of the movie, courtesy of cinematographer Frank Planer. ★ (YT)

Related reading
All OCA movie posts (Pinboard)

Mystery actor

[Click either image for a larger view.]

The sunglasses make him look a lot like George Shearing, but I think he’s still recognizably himself, sort of. What do you think?

Leave a guess, or several, in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if it might help.

*

A hint: In a long career, this actor played a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher. Also a bartender.

*

It’s a tough one. The name is now in the comments, but you’re still welcome to guess.

More mystery actors
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SMASH

The latest episode of the BBC podcast Just One Thing encourages the listener to “Enjoy Oily Fish.” I learned an acronym from this episode: SMASH, for salmon, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, and herring.

Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

“Tenants”

America is suffering because the left spent decades attacking the role of God in our society, attacking the church, attacking the nuclear family & the importance of fathers raising their sons. We need to reject the atheist mission of the left & embrace the tenants of our faith!

— Mary Miller (@Miller_Congress) May 26, 2022

Is it Christian nationalism yet? By Jove, it is.

Samuel L. Perry, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma, has a helpful checklist.

Come November, I hope Mary Miller gets an eviction notice.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

Memorial Day 1922

[“Whole City to Pay Honor to War Dead: Ceremonies Planned Today for Every Part of New York, with Fair Weather Predicted.” The New York Times, May 30, 1922.]

Another Times article (May 28, 1922) notes that forty-nine widows of men who fought in the War of 1812 were still then living, as were seventy-three veterans of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848).

A Brooklyn public library

A few years ago, when I was asking my mom for memories of her Brooklyn childhood, I wrote this down:

As a girl, Mom walked to the Boro Park library on Saturday mornings. It was on 13th Avenue, toward the higher street numbers.

And there it was, between 52nd and 53rd Streets:

[Brooklyn Public Library, Boro Park branch, 5211 13th Avenue, Brooklyn, New York, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

The 1940 telephone directory gave me an address. The Archives gave me the photograph. Should you need to call the library c. 1939–1941, the number was WIndsor 6-7050. The library’s double-wide storefront is now split betweeen Lane Card and Gift Shop and Hoffy’s (computers, electronics, &c.)

When we were kids in Brooklyn, the Boro Park branch of the Brooklyn Public Library was here. And still is. But the Boro Park branch no longer has its copy of Alvin’s Secret Code.

Related posts
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Matthew Sewell, his second Stumper this month. I found it exceedingly difficult — opacity and misdirection afoot — which means I enjoyed it immensely. I began with 19-A, eight letters, “Pianist’s flourish.” And that gave me 8-D, four letters, Macbeth excerpt. (I’m wise to that trick.) And then I struggled. I worked out the northeast corner first; the southeast, last. Oh, that southeast corner.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, nine letters, “De-stress.” The hyphen may be meant to help, but I doubt it.

9-D, five letters, “They’re not square.” OWERS? No.

10-D, nine letters, “The Rock and Hulk Hogan.” They’re not persons!

13-A, ten letters, “Woolgathering.” A beautiful answer.

25-A, six letters, “Stateless?” A bit strained.

26-A, five letters, “Snaps.” The answer makes me think of the New York Daily News. Got a cigaret?

31-A, nine letters, “The Wizard of Oz, for one.” I can think of others.

36-A, three letters, “Pater Noster pronoun.” Did anyone else think the answer would be in Latin?

38-D, eight letters, “Loire Valley wine.” The big snag in the southeast. Is this name common knowledge?

40-A, ten letters, “Hot dipping sauce.” I think the clue is meant to misdirect, but I may be wrong.

50-D, five letters, “City in Germany.” Really sneaky.

59-D, three letters, “Funny.” So you think funny is an adjective?

63-A, nine letters, “Packing slip reviewers.” I overthought slip.

My favorites in this puzzle:

7-D, three letters, “Dose folks.” I missed its cleverness while solving, having gotten the answer on crosses.

54-A, letters, “Minimizer in music.” The clue suggests at least two other plausible answers and freshens a familiar crossword answer.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Mary Miller, lying

Congresswoman Mary Miller (R, IL-15) questioned (context unknown) Dr. Miguel Cardona, Secretary of Education. I assume their conversation followed the massacre in Uvalde, Texas. Miller shared an excerpt from the conversation on Twitter, so she must think it went well. But all I see in it is a crazy quilt of lies and irrelevancies ending in a self-own: “Right.” I am willing to go into detail:

For 2 years, Democrats Defunded The Police and kicked police out of schools. Today, I pushed Biden's Education Secretary to support police in schools. School resource officers are critical to keeping schools safe, but the Defund The Police movement did lasting damage. pic.twitter.com/qNKHfr5t3p

— Rep. Mary Miller (@RepMaryMiller) May 26, 2022

My transcription of the exchange:

Miller: The Democrats definitely supported defunding the police for two years. They painted it on the sidewalks of burning cities. They shouted it while burning down police stations in Minneapolis. Vice President Harris herself raised money to bail out the rioters. And your favorite leftist TV stations have covered it all. All Americans saw it. And so now, what I want to know: You represent the Biden administration. Has the Biden administration changed their stance? Do they still support defunding the police, or do they now say school resource officers belong in the schools? We would like to know.

Cardona: I’m not sure if you were present at the State of the Union [she wasn’t ], but the president said we need to fund the police more, not defund the police. I recall that, sitting there, and it felt pretty strongly that there was a clear message there.

Miller: Right. I call that hypocrisy. I taught my children that, uhm, you know, what you do is more important than what you say.

A few observations:

~ It is simply untrue for two years Democrats as a group “definitely” supported defunding police and that they “kicked police out of schools.” Miller doesn’t acknowledge a police presence at the elementary school in Uvalde.

~ It is simply untrue that “they” — Democrats — painted slogans and burned down police stations.

~ The slogan Defund the Police did appear on streets in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C. — and in Hamilton, Ontario, and perhaps elsewhere. But the more memorable and visible slogan by far, painted on streets, not sidewalks: Black Lives Matter. The context for both slogans — the police murder of George Floyd — is interestingly absent from Miller’s narrative.

~ “Vice President Harris herself raised money to bail out the rioters”: Snopes rates the claim that Harris bailed out rioters as “mostly false.”

~ All cable news covered the protests, non-violent and otherwise, that followed George Floyd’s murder. If “leftist” TV stations alone (she must mean CNN and MSNBC) had covered protests, “all Americans” wouldn’t have seen them.

~ Miller’s response to Cardona — “Right” — is a self-own to remember. Faced with an assertion that she’s wrong about the facts, all she can do is say “Right” and keep going.

~ About actions and words: What you do and what you say are both important, and as any student of speech-act theory knows, to say often is to do. What Miller says here is dishonest nonsense, painting all members of a political party with a broad brush, attributing to them actions they had no part in. (I recall Bob Dole’s characterization of World War II as a “Democrat war.”) What Miller has done during her time in Washington: nothing of substance for her district or her country. She pushes The Big Lie, engages in stunts (refusing to wear a mask, signing on to ludicrous legislation that goes nowhere), foments against trans kids in the “wrong” bathrooms, and votes consistently on the wrong side of every issue: against aid to Ukraine, against money for infant formula, against a bill to stop price-gouging for fuel, against the Congressional Gold Medal for police who defended the Capitol on January. I could go on, but I already have in a May 2021 post.

~ What Miller refuses to say anything about is the need for legislation to limit access to guns. She touts her support for the Second Amendment, which she regards as permitting unimpeded access to firearms for all. When I called her office today, I asked the fellow who answered the phone (who, I suspected, was getting many calls) what Miller would say about portable nuclear weapons (a hypothetical I’ve borrowed from Bryan Garner). Would they be permitted under the Second Amendment? The fellow on the phone said that he couldn’t speak for the congresswoman. Nor was it professional for him to give an opinion, he said. “I hope you get a shitload of calls today,” I said. “Please don’t say that,” said he.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

[Derek Chauvin’s attorney Eric Nelson had that same odd habit of saying “Right” after a witness contradicted him.]

Aaron Rupar collecting

On Twitter, Aaron Rupar has collected today a number of Republican comments on the latest school massacre. The comments are either absurd (“When 9/11 happened, we didn’t ban planes”) or wholly evasive.

Elsewhere, there’s Ted Cruz’s non-response. And Mary Miller’s idiotic, mendacious self-own, not that anyone beyond IL-15 cares enough about Mary Miller to be appalled by anything she says.

“Better than the one that I’m in”

Donald Evans, talking to the Paris Review about his postage-stamp art (creating stamps from imaginary countries):

“It was vicarious travelling for me to a made-up world that I liked better than the one I was in. I’m doing that now too. No catastrophes occur. There are no generals or battles or warplanes on my stamps. The countries are innocent, peaceful, composed. Sometimes I get so concentrated in these worlds 1 get confused . . . it’s hard to get out.”

The blurred scans accompanying the text are a disappointment. You can browse the full-color pages of Willy Eisenhart’s The World of Donald Evans, which approximately quotes this passage, at the Internet Archive. Or visit (even if only online) the current Tibor de Nagy exhibit of Evans’s work.

And here is an extended introduction to postage-stamp art: What Is Faux Postage? (Read, Seen Heard).

[Re: catastrophes: Donald Evans (1945–1977) died in an apartment-building fire.]