Eleven movies, one partial series

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

Tall Story (dir. Joshua Logan, 1960). Jane Fonda’s movie debut: she plays June Ryder, a home ec major who’s transferred to a four-year school from a community college, set on landing Ray Blent (Anthony Perkins), a star basketball player whom she’s never met, as a husband (finding a husband, she tells us, is the reason young women go to college). It’s amusing to see the depiction of academic life (no reading, no writing, for faculty or students), less amusing to soak in coy sexual politics for an hour and a half. From a novel by Howard Nemerov, with a screenplay by Julius J. Epstein (as in Casablanca). Bonus factors: Marc Connelly and Ray Walston as professors, and Fonda and Perkins crammed (fully clothed) into a tiny shower stall, not long before Psycho. ★★ (TCM)

*

Twentieth Century (dir. Howard Hawks, 1934). John Barrymore is great as a manic Broadway director; Carole Lombard (I’m sorry to say) shows less of a gift for comedy. The rehearsal scenes are hilarious, with chalk lines criss-crossing the stage. The train scenes are less wonderful, with interminable comic antics from supporting players. It may be that our household is just not a fan of screwball comedies — too broad, too forced, and too much shouting. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Track the Man Down (dir. R.G. Springsteen, 1955). Mediocre imitation Hitchcock, a variation on The Lady Vanishes, with an American newspaper man in London (Kent Taylor) and the sister (Petula Clark) of a criminal’s girlfriend thrown together with an assortment of characters — a merry drunk, a mother and infant, a Bette Davis-like star, her meek husband. First they’re all on a bus; then they’re all in a boathouse, held as prisoners by the criminal, who’ll stop at nothing — nothing. I’m adding a star for Basil Emmett’s cinematography. ★★★ (YT)

*

Succession (created by Jesse Armstrong, 2018–2021). We binged the first three seasons and have watched what’s available of season four, with (ahem) diminishing returns. The Lear-like and Murdoch-like premise, for anyone who hasn’t watched: a media-empire patriarch, Logan Roy (Brian Cox), is contemplating the future of his company when he finally steps down. His four children battle him, one another, outside attempts at takeovers, and the gummint, on and on and on. It’s well-made television, with staggeringly beautiful locations, and endless helicopters, endless profanity, endless improbably spontaneous insults, and characters who are both loathsome and inane, and whose pasts (which the opening credits hint at, and which might make them appear more than merely loathsome and inane) are, as of last night’s episode, still largely unexplored. ★★★ (HBO)

[I’m thinking especially of two enigmatic images in the opening credits: one, of a woman, shot from behind, looking across a lawn at Logan; the other, of young Siobhan looking across a lawn at Logan and a woman. Who?]

*

Your Witness (dir. Robert Montgomery, 1950). A New York lawyer, Adam Hayward (Montgomery, in his final film), travels to an English village to help the war buddy who saved his life, and who’s now accused of murdering the village Casanova. The movie looks back to Hitchcock, with an everyman sleuth, eccentric minor characters, and wonderful moments of comedy (Hayward explaining American idioms to the locals). And it looks ahead to every Murder, She Wrote episode ever made. Most unusual moment: Montgomery reads a D.H. Lawrence poem aloud and saves his friend’s life. ★★★ (YT)

*

Grissly’s Millions (dir. John English, 1945). It’s hard to go wrong with a B-movie from Republic Pictures, especially one that stars Paul Kelly and Virginia Grey. Here Kelly plays a detective, stern but kind, on the trail of a gangster; Grey is a granddaughter whose grandfather’s money keeps her stuck in a hick town. A pair of corpses leads to great complications. Clem Bevans, Byron Foulger, Eily Malyon, Louis Mason, Addison Richards, and Will Wright are among the likely unfamiliar names but likely familiar faces who provide support. ★★★ (YT)

*

If I Had a Million (dir. James Cruze, H. Bruce Humberstone, Ernst Lubitsch, Norman Z. McLeod, Lothar Mendes, Stephen Roberts, William A. Seiter, Norman Taurog, 1932). An anthology, with eight stories of an eccentric dying industrialist (Lionel Barrymore) giving million-dollar checks to people chosen at random from a city directory. The weakest story is the one with the most recognizable faces, Seiter’s “The Three Marines,” with Gary Cooper, Roscoe Karns, and Jack Oakie. The most succinct: Lubitsch’s “The Clerk,” with Charles Laughton walking through door after door to give the boss the raspberry. The strongest: McLeod’s “Road Hogs,” with W.C. Fields and Alison Skipworth as a happy couple bent on automotive destruction, and “Grandma,” in which the residents of a “rest home” establish a new order of things. ★★★★ (CC)

[In 2023, one million equals twenty-two.]

*

EO (dir. Jerzy Skolimowski, 2022). I knew only that it’s about a donkey and that the Criterion Channel has it in its selection of Isabelle Huppert movies (though her role, like all the human roles, is exceedingly minor). The movie shows (not tells) the story of a donkey, EO, who is removed from a circus (where a young woman gives him loving care) and who then travels through a series of encounters other animals, some of them human. Unnecessary special effects — red filters, thrashing metal music — are distractions, but they don’t in the end distract from the movie’s presentation of the beauty, strength, and selfhood of EO and other creatures. Inspired by Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), which is still, to my mind, the better movie. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Man Bait (dir. Terence Fisher, 1952). Blackmail and murder in a London rare-book store? I’m in. As store manager, George Brent gets himself into hard-to-explain circumstances and finds himself in great difficulty. But the real star is Diana Dors as one of his employees, chronically late, a bad girl among the bookish. With Marguerite Chapman as a loyal secretary and Peter Reynolds as a criminal and ladies’ man. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Strangers When We Meet (dir. Richard Quine, 1960). Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak are partners in suburban SoCal adultery: he’s Larry, an architect, full of himself, always pressing his standoffish neighbor Maggie (Margaret, but he insists on calling her Maggie) to drive with him to a construction site — and soon they’re driving elsewhere too. Larry’s wife (Barbara Rush) is critical, controlling, and unattuned to her husband’s dreams of great things; Maggie’s husband (John Bryant) is a sex-averse workaholic: thus the movie presents the affair as an understandable interlude, a more-than-brief encounter. A question our household is split on: would contemporary audiences have seen Larry as toxic, or as just plain manly? With Ernie Kovac as a full-of-himself writer and Walter Matthau as a sleazy but truthful neighbor. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Man with My Face (dir. Edward Montagne, 1951). The only film noir filmed in Puerto Rico. It’s the story of Chick Graham, a mild-mannered accountant (Barry Nelson) who finds himself accused of impersonating a man (also Barry Nelson) who is his double. An elaborate, preposterous scheme, four years in the making, accounts for what’s going on. The redeeming qualities here: a killer Doberman and an exciting chase sequence at Fort Morro Castle. ★★ (YT)

*

Ruthless: Monopoly’s Secret History (dir. Stephen Ives, 2023). I hate Monopoly — the dumb tokens, the convoluted procedures and tedious pace (bidding on every property a player doesn’t buy? really?) — and I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a game that was played through to a genuine conclusion. This well-paced documentary explores the game’s origins, which have nothing to do with the claims of its purported inventor. Irony of ironies: the real origin story became clear when Parker Brothers sued a professor of economics who created a game called Anti-Monopoly. Stephen Ives has made a noble effort to tell a factual story of Davids and a Goliath. ★★★★ (PBS)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Reading as a civil-rights issue

From The New York Times: “Fed up parents, civil rights activists, newly awakened educators and lawmakers are crusading for ‘the science of reading.‘ Can they get results?” With news about a new documentary, The Right to Read. From the trailer: “This is a civil-rights issue.” LeVar Burton is the executive producer. We’ve asked a newly elected member of our school board to request a screening.

The shot already heard round the world: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong, a podcast series by Emily Hanford (American Public Media).

Related posts
Education and freedom : Learning to read : To: Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell

Daylight and shadows

[6119 New Utrecht Avenue, Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I can’t tell you anything about the Daylight Cafeteria, except that the proprietor chose an appropriate name for an establishment that must have spent at least some of each day free of the El’s shadow. I can’t even tell you the cafeteria’s address: 6119 New Utrecht is the address of the large building on the other side of 62nd Street, which now houses a pre-K. And there are no tax photos for whatever followed the cafeteria up the avenue.

This photograph is here because I like the cafeteria’s name, and because the arrangement of lines and surfaces makes me think of the paintings of Charles Sheeler. For instance.

Here’s a 1919 view of the intersection. In 2023 the El still runs above New Utrecht. And one more thing, which I didn’t realize until after I’d chosen this photograph: the 62nd Street station is where Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) catches up with and kills Pierre Nicoli (Marcel Bozzuffi) at the end of the spectacular chase scene in The French Connection (dir. William Friedkin, 1971).

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Edward Koren (1935–2023)

Cartoonist extraordinaire. The New York Times has an obituary. At The New Yorker, Emma Allen, cartoon and humor editor, has an appreciation.

Some rocks in our heads

From The New York Times (gift link): “Virginia Fifth Grader Is Celebrated for Spotting Textbook’s Error.” Liam Squires noticed that igneous rock and sedimentary rock were out of place in a diagram of the rock cycle. The publisher acknowledged the mistake. The Times quotes Serena Porter, Liam’s teacher:

“We’re all human, and whether it’s an adult or a child, we all make mistakes,” Ms. Porter said. “You don’t want to roll around pointing out everyone’s little mistakes, but you should be proud that you caught something like this.”

Liam received buttons, sticker, and a handwritten letter from the publisher.

Here, from the the University of California Museum of Paleontology, is an explanation of the rock cycle. This post is for my children, who knew, and, I trust, still know their igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Steve Mossberg, is not that difficult by Stumper standards, but it’s full of surprising stuff. I like it.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, nine letters, “Green sauce for osso buco.” Osso oscuro, at least for me.

2-D, four letters, “St. Paul and St. Denis, north of New York.” When I see “New York,” I think “City.” At first I thought they must be somewhere upstate.

5-D, seven letters and 40-A, five letters, “Request to keep playing.”

6-D, twelve letters, “When miniskirts were in again.” I think the answer is at least debatable.

16-A, five letters, “Show with projectors.” I thought not of MOVIE but of planetariums and Pink Floyd — though not from personal experience.

21-D, twelve letters, “Frequent player in the 6 Down.” Yes, this puzzle is full of surprising stuff.

29-D, ten letters, “Aviation adjective.” See the comment on the previous clue.

32-A, four letters, “Memorable count.” I don’t get it. Why memorable?

34-D, five letters, “Spring thing.” Not necessarily seasonal.

36-A, four letters, “Occasional sportscast coverage.” A nifty clue.

43-A, ten letters, “Tangible trifles.” Fun to say. Fun to try to spell.

48-A, three letters, “Send up.” A dictionary will okay the answer.

62-A, nine letters, “Potential power under the hood.” Under, indeed.

67-A, five letters, “Plumbers often work on them.” Tile contractors too.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

In beta

A typo in a post? I have always blamed carelessness and haste. But now I have an all-purpose excuse explanation, which hit me yesterday afternoon: the post is in beta.

Mack McCormick’s Robert Johnsons

Biography of a Phantom, an edited version of Mack McCormick’s never-finished biography of Robert Johnson, is now in print. Here’s an account of McCormick’s work by Michael Hall: “Hellhounds on His Trail: Mack McCormick’s Long, Tortured Quest to Find the Real Robert Johnson” (Texas Monthly ).

The strangest result of McCormick’s efforts: his contention that everyone has been looking at the wrong man, that the musician who recorded in 1936 and 1937 was a different Robert Johnson.

I will soon have the book in hand, and I’m sure I won’t know what to make of it then either.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Johnson posts (Pinboard)

A dictionary and a prison

The guy who made violent threats against Merriam-Webster last year over its definitions of female and girl has been sentenced to a year in prison.

Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)

“All-In”

A look at the conditions of teaching and striking at a regional university in Illinois: “All-In.” It’s a point of view, of course, but it’s one that grounded in fact.

Our household is supporting the strike by picketing and by contributing to a fund to help strikers in need. And I’m now able to add the noise of my Metropolitan Police Whistle to the picket-line din. (It took me three days to find it.)

5:48 p.m.: The strike has been suspended.

[When I began keeping a blog in 2004, I made a decision never to mention my university by name. I wanted to keep this work separate. And now I’m retired, and I still do.]