Sardines in the news

From Christie’s, a Picasso ceramic, now sold: Trois sardines.

In The New York Times, “How TikTok Fueled the Tinned Fish Trend.” With a dazzling photograph of the Times Square store The Fantastic World of the Portuguese Sardine.

Thanks to Chris at Dreamers Rise and Stephen at pencil talk for catching these items.

A thingy

[“Such Language!” Zippy, September 27, 2023. Click for a larger view.]

In today’s Zippy, Mr. Toad tells Claude Funston that th’ thingy has no name. But what does th’ toad know? It’s called a bread clip, among other things. My dad once repurposed one that gave us a happy surprise.

Merriam-Webster traces thingy (“something that is hard to classify or whose name is unknown or forgotten : thing, thingamajig”) to 1927. The OED has it as “originally and chiefly Scottish” for “a little thing. Also more generally: a thing (usually with some suggestion of small size).” Its first citation, from 1787: “In Scotlands familliar diccion evvery littel thing iz a thingy, annimate or inannimate.” The OED traces a colloquial meaning (“= thingummy”) to 1927: “Today the fairy hand of Judith burst the wood thingy that runs along under the sink.”

*

One’s attention goes where it goes. I got so caught up in thingy that I read right past dingus. Merriam-Webster: “an often small article whose common name is unknown or forgotten : gadget, doodad,” with a first appearance in 1873. And a later American slang meaning: “a dim-witted, silly, or foolish person ➝ often used in a joking or friendly way.” M-W has the word coming from Dutch and German: “Dutch dinges, probably from German Dings, from genitive of Ding thing, from Old High German.”

And now I recall the hilarity that Ding an sich brought to my grad-school days.

The OED definition:

colloquial (chiefly North American and South African). A thing, esp. a gadget or contraption, or (less commonly) a person, whose name the speaker or writer does not know, cannot remember, or does not care to specify precisely; a ”thingummy.”

Other meanings: “the penis,” “a silly or inept person.” The OED suggests multiple origins: “Partly a borrowing from Dutch. Probably also partly a borrowing from Afrikaans.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang takes the word further.

I would like to have seen a Dashiell Hammett citation in the OED. But M-W has it covered, with a citation from Mark McGurl:

In his [Dashiell Hammett’s] writings of the period from 1924 to 1952, “dingus” signifies, variously, a magician’s prop, a typewriter, a short story, a novel, and an elusive artifact, a black bird better known as the Maltese Falcon.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

A pocket notebook sighting

[From Ivy (dir. Sam Wood, 1947). Click for a larger view.]

Police Inspector Orpington (Cedric Hardwicke) and his pocket notebook mean business.

More notebook sightings
All the King’s Men : Angels with Dirty Faces : The Bad and the Beautiful : Ball of Fire : The Big Clock : Bombshell : The Brasher Doubloon : The Case of the Howling Dog : Cat People : Caught : City Girl : Crossing Delancey : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Deep Valley : The Devil and Miss Jones : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : The Face Behind the Mask : The Fearmakers : The Flight That Disappeared : A Foreign Affair : Foreign Correspondent : Four in a Jeep : Fury : The Girl in Black Stockings : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : I See a Dark Stranger : If I Had a Million : L’Innocent : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Lost Horizon : M : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Mr. Klein : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : Now, Voyager : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Portland Exposé : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Scarlet Claw : Sleeping Car to Trieste : The Small Back Room : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Stranger Things : Sweet Smell of Success : Time Table : T-Men : To the Ends of the Earth : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Vice Squad : Walk East on Beacon! : What Happened Was . . . : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window : You Only Live Once : Young and Innocent

Uh-oh, a Marxist

From today’s decision in Donald Trump’s bank-fraud case, page 21:

As detailed infra , the documents here clearly contain fraudulent valuations that defendants used in business, satisfying OAG’s burden to establish liability as a matter of law against defendants. Defendants’ respond that: the documents do not say what they say; that there is no such thing as “objective” value; and that, essentially, the Court should not believe its own eyes.⁹

And the footnote:

⁹ As Chico Marx, playing Chicolini, says to Margaret Dumont, playing Mrs. Gloria Teasdale, in “Duck Soup,” “well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

[Chico is at YouTube.]

Phone etiquette

[Ann Rutherford and Tom Conway in Two O’Clock Courage (dir. Anthony Mann, 1945. Click for a larger view.]

The Washington Post has tips about phone etiquette in our times (gift link). Useful stuff.

I’m not sure about the suggestion to stay still for video calls: “When people, especially kids, move around during a video call, it can be disorienting for the person on the other end.” It can also be charming, if, say, a grandchild is carrying the phone while walking from room to room to show you stuff. But the Post makes allowances: “The closer you are to someone, the less the rules apply.”

[No, the people in the movie are not talking to one another on pay phones. That would be, as they say, childish and immature, and best reserved for kids.]

James Joyce holiday cards

The Reader’s Catalog, a New York Review of Books enterprise, is offering James Joyce holiday cards, six for $29.95. The card has an illustration of a man in suspenders looking dreamily at the night sky. Next to the picture, a partial sentence from “The Dead,” source unidentified:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe.

So cozy. But look at the entire (final) sentence of “The Dead”:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Not cozy. Not cozy at all!

Random House’s Proust gift tags and note cards (no longer available) also took statements out of context and wildly distorted their meanings.

Awkward metaphor of the day

“Nikki Haley has tried to straddle it, and all she’s gotten is strained muscles”: Claire McCaskill on MSNBC just now.

Related reading
All OCA metaphor posts (Pinboard)

[“It”: the line between Trumpism and conservatism.]

Charlie Watts: Literature and Jazz

A Christie’s auction: Charlie Watts: Literature and Jazz, Part I, Part II. Amazing browsing awaits. One detail: Watts owned a cigarette holder, lighter, and pocket ashtray that belonged to Art Tatum. The only word that goes with that? Reverence.

Ellington Live has a post that collects all the Duke Ellington material.

Mr. Parrish and Mrs. Cameron

[Walter Baldwin and Dorothy Adams in The Jackpot (dir. Walter Lang, 1950). Click for a larger view.]

It’s just a brief scene with bit players: a customer looking to buy a watch, a salesclerk trying to find something he’ll like. But there must have been someone in a 1950 audience who appreciated the pairing of Walter Baldwin and Dorothy Adams in this scene. They appeared as next-door neighbors in The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946). Baldwin played Homer Parrish’s father, “Mr. Parrish”; Adams played Wilma Cameron’s mother, “Mrs. Cameron.” That was back when lifelong neighbors might address one another by surname.

[Homer: Harold Russell. Wilma: Cathy O’Donnell.]

Eleven movies, one mini-series

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

The Jackpot (dir. Walter Lang, 1950). Elaine found it, a movie with a screenplay by Henry Ephron and Phoebe Efron (Nora and Delia’s parents) from a story by the New Yorker writer John McNulty. Jimmy Stewart and Barbara Hale star as a canasta-playing suburban couple suddenly drowning in canned soup, meat, trees, and countless other prizes from a radio quiz show (totaling $24,000, or $304,000 today). They not only have to find space for their new stuff; they have to figure out how to pax taxes, which leads to various crazy harebrained schemes. It’s all as corny as downstate Illinois, with a few bright moments, and a chance to see Barbara Hale (Della Street) in a comic role. ★★ (YT)

*

Telemarketers (dir. Sam Lipman-Stern and Adam Bhala Lough, 2023). A documenttary exposé of fundraising for police, firefighters, and PACs, with Sam Lipman-Stern and Pat Pespas, two men who know the world well. The business model is, no surprise, shady, but in so many ways: fifty shades of shady, with false claims and crafty dodges abounding. Pat, a now-recovering addict, is something of a more genuine (and far less affluent) Michael Moore, speaking to people in high places, some of whom receive him with genuine interest, some of whom are merely patronizing (I’m looking at you, Senator Richard Blumenthal). This three-part series makes me feel good about all the times I hung up on yet another solicitation; it makes me feel even better about having ditched our landline and the distractions it brought our household. ★★★★ (M)

*

The Night Runner (dir. Abner Biberman, 1957). Truly, deeply strange: Roy Turner (Ray Danton), a mental patient with a propensity for sudden violence, is released from a institution (they need the space) and finds refuge at a small roadside motel, where he readies himself to reenter the working world as a draftsman. A romance develops with the motel owner’s daughter (Colleen Miller), and all goes well until her father learns about Roy’s past. Some genuinely suspenseful moments as Roy (no mere maniac) tries to avert suspicion. Hey, watch out for that nail polish. ★★★ (YT)

*

A Woman’s Vengeance (dir. Zoltan Korda, 1948). “You seem to think this business is like something in the movies, or in a novel,” says one character to another. Well, yes: when a wealthy, unhappy, sickly woman (Rachel Kempson) dies, suspicion falls on her nurse (Mildred Natwick), her oldest friend (Jessica Tandy), and her philandering husband (Charles Boyer), who has recently taken up with a teenager (Ann Blyth). Was it murder, or was it a suicide designed to look like murder? The herring here is bright red, but the movie is, still, melodrama of a high order, with strong performances from Boyer, Tandy, and Cedric Hardwicke as a doctor who makes house calls. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Keep Sweet (dir. Don Argott, 2021). A documentary about the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, whose members follow the teachings of their prophet Warren Jeffs, who advises women and girls to keep sweet, pray, and obey. It’s fascinating to hear women of this community speak: they sound smart and self-aware, at least until one remembers that they follow a leader who arranges marriages between girls and men, sends boys into exile to ensure enough girls for the menfolk, and takes wives from husbands and reassigns them to other men. The documentary goes off the rails in its second half, with the filmmaker expressing greater and greater sympathy for the beleaguered faithful (there’s a murky property dispute) and declaring that they‘re ”pretty amazing people,“ that he likes everyone he’s met, and that no one has told the story from ”both sides.“ Dangerously delusional if you ask me. ★ (M)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s Noir by Gaslight feature

Experiment Perilous (dir. Jacques Tourneur 1944). Released almost seven months after George Cukor’s much better known Gaslight, this movie too is about a psyop, with a wealthy older man (Paul Lukas) making his young wife (Hedy Lamarr) believe that she’s mad. As the doctor determined to free young Allida from her domestic prison, George Brent is not especially convincing: even when he runs through a house, he looks like a man pretending to run. Lamarr is fragile, soft-spoken, barely there, which leaves Lukas in control of the movie. The final moments, with exploding fishtanks and a fight on a spiral staircase, are worth waiting for. ★★★★

Ivy (dir. Sam Wood, 1947). Ivy Lexton (Joan Fontaine) is a Edwardian schemer: married to an unsuspecting ne’er-do-well (Richard Ney), she’s dallied with a lover (Patric Knowles) and is now interested in a much wealthier third man (Herbert Marshall). So how might she kill those first two birds with one stone? It’ll take the detective smarts of Cedric Hardwicke to tease out the truth. Little bits of Double Indemnity and Laura inform this satisfying story. ★★★★

Blanche Fury (dir. Marc Allégret, 1948). It plays like a mix of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Double Indemnity. Blanche Fullerton (Valerie Hobson) takes a position as governess and soon marries her cousin/employer Laurence Fury (Michael Gough), becoming the mistress of his great estate. But she has eyes for stableman Philip Thorn (Stewart Granger), the illegitimate son of the dead Fury patriarch. “You are out of your mind!” ★★★★

Corridor of Mirrors (dir. Terence Young, 1948). A bizarre tale that looks forward to Vertigo: a wealthy artist (Eric Portman) is convinced that he once lived in Renaissance Italy, where he loved a woman who betrayed him. He keeps a massive portrait of her behind a curtain. Visiting a nightclub, he spies a woman (Edana Romney) who’s the exact image of his portrait. Complications follow, with great scenes of a costume party, a room of mirrors, and Madame Tussaud’s. ★★★★

So Evil My Love (dir. Lewis Allen 1948). On board a ship sailing back to England from the West Indies, scoundrel Mark Bellis (Ray Milland), meets and charms a widowed missionary, Olivia Harwood (Ann Todd). Olivia is soon involved in Mark’s criminal schemes, which culminate in a desperate ploy to blackmail the husband of her old friend Susan Courtney (Geraldine Fitzgerald) with Susan’s youthful (naughty) correspondence. And then things really get wild. The final scene in a hansom cab, though easy to anticipate, is shocking. ★★★★

So Long at the Fair (dir. Terence Fisher and Antony Darnborough, 1950). Hard to see it as noir, but it’s certainly the most Hitchcockian movie in this Criterion feature, a variation on The Lady Vanishes. When brother and sister Johnny (David Tomlinson) and Victoria (Jean Simmons) arrive in Paris for the 1889 Exposition, Johnny disappears from their hotel; his name cannot be found in the register; what Victoria thinks is his room turns out to be a bathroom; and no one recalls ever having seen him. It’s left to plucky amateurs Victoria and George (Dirk Bogarde) to join forces and solve the mystery. Cathleen Nesbit gives a great performance as the scary omnipresent hotel proprietor. ★★★★

Madeleine (dir. David Lean, 1950). Based on the true story of Madeleine Smith (Ann Todd), a respectable Glaswegian in her parents’ household, in love with Émile L’Angelier (Ivan Desny), a French clerk whose lower status requires that Madeleine keep their relationship a secret from her parents, who are pressing their daughter to marry a suitable man. When Émile is found dead, suspicion falls on Madeleine, who made a recent purchase of arsenic. The plot is more than a little murky, and the movie never calls attention to what the patriarchy demands of daughters (after all, it’s 1950). The best moment comes from neither of the stars: it’s from André Morell as the defending counsel, speaking on behalf of his client. ★★★

[The other movies in this Criterion feature: Ladies in Retirement, Gaslight, The Suspect, Hangover Square, Dragonwyck, Moss Rose. All worth seeing, and our household has seen them all.]

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