Shameless fambly promotion:
The New Grown-Ups (our son Ben and friends) have a six-track digital release available from Bandcamp. It’s called Treehopper. As the group describes their music,
The New Grown-Ups blend traditional folk, country, blues, Celtic, old time, originals, and bluegrass into a snafu of contemporary acoustic music.They sound great. Free to listen, $5 to buy, or more if you like.
[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, TCM, YouTube.]
Hi-Jacked (dir. Sam Newfield, 1950). A truckdriver on parole finds himself under suspicion when his cargo of mink coats is hijacked. As trucker Joe Harper, Jim Davis (later of Dallas) looks like a cross between Burt Lancaster and Elvis Presley, but he unmemorable on the screen. Sid Melton provides odd comic moments in a movie that ends up with four or five people dead. What keeps this movie from a one-star rating: diner scenes with Iris Adrian as a waitress with an endless supply of snappy patter. ★★ (YT)
*
From the Criterion Channel’s Method Acting feature
The Pawnbroker (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1964). “Sol Nazerman, the walking dead,” shouts a fellow Holocaust survivor. Nazerman lost his wife, his children, his friends, and his ability to feel for anyone, as his management of his East Harlem pawnshop makes clear. His life in the present is mostly a matter of his dealings with a lone employee (Jaime Sánchez), who sees him as a mentor, and a crime king (Brock Peters), who uses the pawnshop for money laundering. Into this present comes the insistent intrusion of the past, in brief or not-so-brief flashes on the screen, all of which make me think that post-traumatic stress is never truly post. ★★★★ (CC)
*
Strongroom (dir. Vernon Sewell, 1962). Relatively short and totally gripping: three aspiring young criminals lock over a just-closed bank and lock the manager and secretary into a strongroom. One of the robbers is supposed to leave the keys in a phone booth and notify the police, but something goes wrong, leaving the victims to be found — somehow — or else die a slow death over a holiday weekend. There’s meaningful dialogue between manager and secretary (the locked-in-a-room trope), but the real story here is that of the keys, with strong elements of due diligence and devotion to duty. ★★★★ (YT)
*
Outside the Wall (dir. Crane Wilbur, 1950). Richard Basehart is an interesting player in the world of noir: he didn’t have the looks for it, and here, as in Tension (1949), he plays something of a sad sack who rises to the noirish occasion. As Larry Nelson, he’s a man of thirty, pardoned after fifteen years in prison, inexperienced in all ways of the world outside prison. He seeks tranquility in a low-paying job at a sanitarium but finds himself in complicated trouble with vicious gangsters (Harry Morgan, for one) and beautiful nurses (Dorothy Hart and Marilyn Maxwell). Some great on-location footage makes the movie, here and there, a Philadelphia version of The Naked City. ★★★★ (YT)
*
The Sin of Nora Moran (dir. Phil Goldstone, 1933). Pre-Code in its frankness, but postmodern in its structure. Nora (Zita Johann) is sentenced to be executed for a murder she did not commit. The interest here comes from the narrative, which presents the movie’s story via montages and flashbacks that make it difficult to know what has happened when. This obscure (I think) movie deserves to be better known. ★★★★ (YT)
*
Blind Date, aka Chance Meeting (dir. Joseph Losey, 1959). An affair between a young painter (Hardy Krüger) and an older married woman (Micheline Presle) goes wrong, and the painter finds himself the prime suspect in a murder. If it had been made a steamy quarter-century later, it might have been an erotic thriller. But it’s just fine as is, though a bit slow-moving. There’s a Hitchcock connection, a strong one, but I can’t name the movie without giving everything away. ★★★ (YT)
*
The Unseen (dir. Lewis Allen, 1945). What a difference a year makes: this movie is a sequel of sorts to Allen’s The Uninvited, but it’s not nearly as good. Here we have a young governess (Gail Russell of The Uninvited) caring for the young children of a grumpy windower (Joel McCrea) in a big old house right next to a big old closed-up house with mysterious goings-on. I appreciated the overtones of The Turn of the Screw, but there are zero chills, zero thrills, and the story is painfully implausible. ★★ (YT)
*
Circle of Danger (dir. Jacques Tourneur, 1951). This movie would seem to have every advantage: a great director, fine writing and cinematography (Philip MacDonald, Oswald Morris), a capable cast, led by Ray Milland, and a title that promises (à la Ministry of Fear) some satisfying noir. But where is the danger? The story is reminiscent of The Third Man: an American (Milland) comes to post-war England to find out the truth about what happened to his brother, a volunteer with British forces who was shot in the head, apparently by one of his fellow soldiers. On the way to the quick, anti-climactic ending, too much time is devoted to a baffling courtship that pairs Milland and a writer of children’s books (Patricia Roc) who’s always put out about his showing up late and who really needs to get over herself. ★★ (YT)
*
The Seventh Veil (dir. Compton Bennett, 1945). First there was The Seventh Victim (1943), then The Seventh Cross (1944). This film is far less compelling, the story of a concert pianist, Francesca (Ann Todd) controlled by her second cousin, Nicholas (James Mason). When Francesca attempts suicide, a psychiatrist (Herbert Lom) steps in to plumb her past with the aid of narcosis and remove the veils that hide the secrets of the mind. Some great concert scenes (I watched always afraid that something would go wrong), but the pace is slow and the movie doesn’t even try to justify its ending — an ending that made us yell at the TV. ★★ (YT)
*
Spy Hunt (dr. George Sherman, 1950). A crazy premise: a vital piece of microfilm is hidden in the collar of one of two black panthers on a train traveling from from Milan to Paris. When the train is sabotaged and the freight car derails in the Alps, the panthers escape, the hunt is on, and a small group gathers in an Alpine inn run by a kindly doctor (Walter Slezak): the animals’ handler (Howard Duff), a journalist who wants a story (Märta Torén), a big-game hunter, an artist who wants to sketch the panthers, and another journalist. But how many of these folks are enemy agents? Torén’s coolness under pressure, Irving Glassberg’s cinematography, two truly menacing beasts, and a suspenseful scene with gunpowder make for a superior film. ★★★★ (YT)
*
The Catered Affair (dir. Richard Brooks, 1956). It’s a Marty world, with a family living in a Bronx apartment: a cabdriver father (Tom Hurley), his wife Aggie (Bette Davis), children Jane and Eddie (Debbie Reynolds, Ray Stricklyn), and Aggie’s brother Uncle Jack (Barry Fitzgerald). The problem at hand: Jane is marrying a fellow (Rod Taylor) from a family a greater means, and the young people want a simple wedding, but Aggie is determined that it be a grand affair. I wanted to like this movie much more than I did: Borgnine, Davis, and Reynolds are fine (even if Reynolds makes an improbable daughter), but Gore Vidal’s screenplay (from Paddy Chayefsky’s play) is condescendin’, Barry Fitzgerald’s Irish shtick is insufferable, and the saccharine ending makes me squirm. ★★ (TCM)
*
One Way Street (dir. Hugo Fregonese, 1950). The film begins with lines from an unidentified “Song of a Fatalist”:
Waste no moment, nor a single breathThe plot is simple and compelling: a doctor (James Mason) serving a crime boss (Dan Duryea) and his henchmen makes off with the boss’s girlfriend (Märta Torén) and loot. The couple flee to rural Mexico and make a new life, with the doctor as a venerated healer of humans and horses — but there’ll be trouble ahead, or behind. Overtones of “The Appointment in Samarra,” Out of the Past, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre run through the story. ★★★★ (YT)
In fearful flight from Death;
For no matter the tears that may be wept,
The appointment will be kept.
[406 Third Avenue, Gowanus, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]
Those were some mean streets in Gowanus. But the restaurant on the corner abided. From 1913 to 1951, Ralph Bozzo ran that restaurant/coffeehouse. I puzzled over the name on the awning until I searched Brooklyn Newsstand for this Third Avenue address.
In 1940, Ralph and Jennie Bozzo were living with three daughters at 153 86th Street, in the Fort Hamilton section of Brooklyn — quite a contrast to the mean streets of Gowanus. Ralph is the only Bozzo in the 1940 Brooklyn telephone directory.
In the news: In September 1915, George Bozzo, eighteen, most likely Ralph’s son, was fined $10 for violating a liquor tax law at the Third Avenue address. In August 1918, Dominick Bozzo, also at that address, most likely another son, went off to fight in the Great War. I’ll guess that the family was living upstairs. Is this Dominick Bozzo the one Dominick Bozzo (1894–1985) listed in the Social Security Death Index? Perhaps. In 1940 a Dominick Bozzo lived in Manhattan and ran a fruit and vegetable store on Madison Avenue. But that Dominick, whose age as given in the 1940 census (forty-five) fits, was born in Italy. George isn’t listed in the SSDI, and no sons are mentioned in Ralph’s obituary. Some mysteries are meant to remain mysteries.
It appears that Ralph wasn’t easily gulled, or mulcted. From a 1920 news item, mostly about Leroy W. Ross, the Brooklyn DA, urging residents to visit saloons, order drinks, and report those who served them. This bit at the end is about phony Revenue agents scamming those selling liquor:
[“Urges Citizens to Buy Drinks: Ross Then Would Have Public Report Success to Dry Forces.” Brooklyn Citizen, November 19, 1920. Click for a larger view.]
And here’s an obituary:
[The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 28, 1951. Click for a larger view.]
Today, 406 is home to Halyards, which describes itself as “your neighborhood cocktail bar and oasis among the gritty Gowanus industrial streets.” I think they mean mean streets, or formerly mean.
I had planned to post nothing more than a Hopperesque street scene this morning, but pulling on one thread — in this case, the street address — opened up a rabbit hole, as well as a mixed metaphor.
Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)
From Gothamist:
Nearly every Sunday morning for four years, residents of a quiet block in Greenpoint, Brooklyn woke up to reams of paper dumped on their street. A serial litterer was precisely slicing pages from old Reader’s Digests, Bibles, junk mail and 1970s porn magazines before dumping them on tree-lined Noble Street between Manhattan Avenue and Franklin Street. Surveillance videos captured the driver tossing the pages from his car before sunrise.Who? Why? You’ll have to click through for an answer to, at least, the first question.
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski. I started with 1-D, four letters, “Small row” and 14-A, five letters, “Artistic lamentation.” The puzzle soon grew more difficult, and one clue gave me fits.
Some clue-and-answer pairs of note, including the fit one:
5-D, fourteen letters, “Steamers, for instance.” Wow, or whoa. I was thinking clams.
16-D, fourteen letters, “Expression of lost love lamentation.” Wow again. I loved seeing the answer in a crossword.
19-A, seven letters, “Overemotional oratory.” The form of the answer makes the clue tricky.
22-A, five letters, “Name on the ACC member list.” Perversely trivial. And is the answer even a name? I don’t think so.
33-A, nine letters, “Haydn opera.” The clue that gave me fits. Even if the answer is correct — and Elaine says it’s not — the clue is just ridic. More in the comments.
35-A, fifteen letters, “Symbol of proletarian solidarity.” If you say so. But I don’t think many working people would recognize it as such.
41-D, three letters, “With 42 Down, Palme d’Or winner for 1993.” Random trivia, which I hugely dislike in crosswords. Ah, yes, the ’93 winner, not ’92 or ’94. Who knows this, and who’ll remember it a week from now? And I always dislike common words clued as trivia.
43-A, five letters, “Evidence of encryption.” I am happy to say I knew it.
49-A, seven letters, “Onetime big name in beverages.” Onetime? I have a bottle of their gin (cheap!) in the kitchen. But the clue might have more to do with corporate history than with a name present on store shelves.
My favorite in this puzzle: 45-D, five letters, “What a loud barker might be called.” Just plain clever.
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments, along with more about 33-A.
Tony Bennett has died at the age of ninety-six. The New York Times has an obituary (gift link).
From Whitney Balliett’s American Singers: Twenty-Seven Portraits in Song (1988):
Alec Wilder, who has known Bennett for many years, once wrote, “The list of ’believers’ isn’t very long. But those who are on it are very special people. Among them, certainly, is Tony Bennett. But first I should say what I mean by a believer. He is one whose sights stay high, who makes as few concessions as he can, whose ideals will not permit him to follow false trails or fashions for notoriety’s or security’s sake, who takes chances, who seeks to convey, by whatever means, his affections and convictions, and who has faith in the power of beauty to survive, no matter how much squalor and ugliness seek to suppress it. I am close enough to him to know that his insistence on maintaining his musical convictions has been far from easy. His effervescent delight in bringing to his audiences the best songs, the best musicians, the best of his singing and showmanship is apparent to anyone who has the good sense to listen to him in person or on records.”Here are just two samples of Tony Bennett with Bill Evans, both from On the Town, words by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, music by Leonard Bernstein: “Lucky to Be Me” and “Some Other Time.”
On the PBS NewsHour last night, Lisa Desjardins examined Robert F. Kennedy’s claims about vaccinations and COVID-19, and Geoff Bennett interviewed Dr. Paul Offitt, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Just one excerpt, with a story that‘s new to me:
Bennett: You also point to one episode where he spoke out against the measles vaccine. What was the impact of that?Here’s a BBC report on what happened in Samoa.
Offitt: In Samoa [in 2018], there were two children that died immediately following receipt of a measles vaccine. And the way it works into Samoa is, they have a MMR vaccine in powdered form. It needs to be diluted in water. Two nurses made a mistake. Instead of diluting it in water, they diluted it in a muscle relaxant. Those children stopped breathing and died immediately. Now, very quickly, within two weeks, it was realized what that mistake was. It was a nursing error.
But, nonetheless, RFK Jr. seized on that. He flooded Facebook with information that measles vaccine is killing children in Samoa. He went to Samoa. He met with anti-vaccine activists. He met with senior officials in Samoa and kept the drumbeat alive that measles vaccine was killing children in Samoa. As a consequence, vaccination rates fell from 70 percent to 30 percent. And between September and December of 2019, there was a massive measles epidemic.
In this island nation of 200,000 people, there were 57,000 cases of measles and 83 deaths. Most of those deaths were in children less than four years of age. And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had everything to do with that. And that shows you how disinformation can kill.
Here’s a recipe for sardine paste. Paste? As Steven points out, pâté would sound far more appetizing. Thanks, Steven.
And here’s a description of Nigella Lawson’s sardines and spaghetti, heralded as “the dish of summer.”
I know that when it comes to cooking, there is very little that’s new under the sun. In 2015 The Crow wrote about a then-forty-year-old memory of sardines and cavatini. And shortly thereafter, Chris at Dreamers Rise left a comment on this blog about making sardines with linguine. Which in turn inspired me to try sardines with capellini. Mangia.
Related reading
All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)
[The article about the Lawson recipe describes a “tomatoey” dish, but there are no tomatoes in the recipe.]
“At its best when it limns the gap between the seemingly straightforward advice of Strunk and White (use active voice, avoid needless words) with [and?] the messiness of the ensemble’s lived experiences”: from a Chicago Reader review of the Neo-Futurist stage show Elements of Style.
I can’t claim to understand what this show is about, but I at least know it’s there.
Related posts
The Elements on the stage : All OCA Strunk and White posts (Pinboard)
[Click for a larger stand.]
When we were out in Los Angeles for a few days, our daughter Rachel gave us each an Ikea phone stand. A nifty gift for those who have traveled with just a backpack apiece.
There’s just one problem with these stands: they don’t accommodate a phone in a case, at least not our phones. But the stands make great index-card holders. I’m very happy to have repurposed another household item for stationery purposes.
Thank you, Rachel.
More repurposing
Cooling rack : Dish drainer : Doorstop : Shaving-cream caps : Tea tin : More tea tins : Yogurt jar
