Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Steve Mossberg. It sparked, for me, no joy, and I did not finish. I got about a third of the puzzle done before I 51-A, eight letters, “Couldn’t go on,” and I ended up revealing letters one by one on the way to an unhappy ending. A few nits to pick:
10-D, four letters, “Sci-fi word Merriam-Webster is watching (but ‘No robes required’)”: as of January 2021, the word was added to the dictionary.
28-A, twelve letters, “Snarky greeting comeback”: I’m not sure it’s meant to be snarky. Maybe in the movies?
The clue that really made me balk: 25-D, ten letters, “Green beverage brand.” Well, no.
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
Saturday, June 4, 2022
Today’s Saturday Stumper
Friday, June 3, 2022
Domestic comedy
“I don't like the way you imitate him. It's more annoying than he is.”
Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
[We get a lot of mileage out of Dan Duryea in our house.]
“Workers preparing coffee”
But not just any coffee.
[“Workers preparing coffee.” A photograph from the WPA Federal Writers’ Project, n.d. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
Thanks, Brian.
Related reading
All OCA Chock full o’Nuts posts (Pinboard)
Thursday, June 2, 2022
Jungle music
Helga Crane has gone to a Harlem nightclub with friends. There’s a band, and a floorshow.
Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928).
Here’s an unmistakable suggestion of the “jungle music” of the early Duke Ellington. (One of the many pseudonyms under which the Ellington band recorded in the 1920s and ’30s: The Jungle Band.) But the scene here can’t be the Cotton Club: the people in Helga’s crowd are black, and the Cotton Club was limited to white patrons (with rare exceptions for celebrities of color). Helga is the child of a Danish mother and Black American father: the ambivalence that marks her brief time in “the jungle” markes every episode of her life. As the novel will later ask, “Why couldn’t she have two lives, or why couldn’t she be satisfied in one place?”
I recommend Quicksand with great enthusiasm. It's not as artful or modern as Passing in its approach to narrative, but it’s a compelling novel that spirals down to a stark, abrupt end.
Also from Quicksand
“Ten hours to Chicago”
The Far Side minus Garfield
As the title says, The Far Side minus Garfield.
Garfield minus Garfield
Thoughtless : “Look at me” : Odie with sunglasses : Sofa, Jon’s back : Minus everything
Wednesday, June 1, 2022
In the dark and the light
From The Long Wait (dir. Victor Saville, 1954), cinematography by Franz Planer. I won’t attempt an explanation of how the story reaches this point. I’m just glad that it does, as these striking compositions of light and dark add some redeeming value to a mediocre film.
[Click either image for a larger view.]
In the dark
From Woman in Hiding (dir. Michael Gordon, 1950), cinematography by William Daniels. A mill is the setting for this extended scene in the dark. If you look closely, you can see Ida Lupino climbing steps in the first image. Howard Duff and Stephen McNally (or two stunt doubles) are fighting in the second. Non-spoiler spoiler: no one falls to his death there. That’s Lupino and McNally in the third image.
[Click any image for a larger view.]
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Masking, still masking
An item of interest:
Are you still masking? If you are, please tell me so I don't feel so much like a fucking alien freak. I was called 'hysterical' today because I am still concerned about COVID. That was fun.
— Mask and Vax, please!🌵 (@J__Possum) May 28, 2022
As Boing Boing reports, this tweet resonated with many readers. (Look at the numbers.) With me too, but I’m not worried about feeling like “a fucking alien freak.” I don’t care what anyone thinks. I give no fucks. Or rather, I do give a fuck — about not getting COVID-19 or giving it to someone else.
When Elaine and I went shopping today, we saw, for the first time, no one else wearing a mask. And we live in a county in which only 45.2% of the population is vaxxed. And only half of those people are boosted. And I should care that someone thinks it’s strange to be wearing a mask?
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)
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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