Wilheminia Wiggins Fernandez (1949–2024)

“A soprano who rose from South Philadelphia to the opera houses of Europe, she was memorably seen and heard in a 1981 film considered a paragon of cinematic style”: from the New York Times obituary for Wilheminia Wiggins Fernandez, who sang “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” from Alfredo Catalani’s opera La Wally in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 film Diva. The opening scene, in which Cynthia Hawkins (Fenandez) sings and Jules (Frédéric Andréi) covertly records, is still electrifying.

As a rookie called up to teach in a summer program for incoming college students, I scored a class’s worth of free tickets for Diva and Raiders of the Lost Ark — both about the hunt for a lost treasure — and took my students on field trips. We then thought and wrote and talked about similarities and differences between the two movies, one French, one American. What was I thinking in giving such an assignment? I was thinking originally.

Struggling to read

Adam Kotsko writes about the decline in college students’ reading ability:

Yes, there were always students who skipped the readings, but we are in new territory when even highly motivated honors students struggle to grasp the basic argument of a 20-page article. Yes, professors never feel satisfied that high school teachers have done enough, but not every generation of professors has had to deal with the fallout of No Child Left Behind and Common Core. Finally, yes, every generation thinks the younger generation is failing to make the grade — except for the current cohort of professors, who are by and large more invested in their students’ success and mental health and more responsive to student needs than any group of educators in human history. We are not complaining about our students. We are complaining about what has been taken from them.

Read it all: “The Loss of Things I Took for Granted” (Slate ).

The “we” means something: Kotsko says that he’s never met a college prof who didn’t share his sense of things. I‘ll quote from a post of mine that reproduced an e-mail that I sent in 2022 to three architects of the “balanced literacy” approach to teaching reading:

I wonder in retrospect about so many elements of college life. I wonder about the extent to which the dreary professorial practice of outlining the textbook on “the board” is not merely a matter of professorial laziness but a way to compensate, consciously or unconsciously, for students’ weaknesses as readers. I wonder about the extent to which the decline of interest in the humanities might be explained at least in part by the difficulty so many college students have with the mechanics of reading. Figuring out the words is, for many college students, just plain hard — because they were never properly taught how.

The decline is real, and it’s everywhere — even at Harvard, where in 2023 a professor reported that her students struggled to figure out subjects and verbs in the sentences of The Scarlet Letter.

Which reminds me to ask, whither grammar?

Thanks, Kirsten.

WATCH YOUR STEP

[From The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946). Click for a larger view.]

As Lieutenant Lubinsky (Sam Levene) watches, “The Swede” (Burt Lancaster) walks into the light. On the big screen, the words above the doorway are easier to read: “WATCH YOUR STEP,” good advice for film noir generally, if only someone would heed it.

Cinematography by Elwood Bredell.

[I don’t get it: Criterion Channel on the television, the words are visible; Criterion Channel in the app or a browser, the words disappear.]

Twelve movies

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

Convicted Woman (dir. Nick Grinde, 1940). Poor Betty Andrews (Rochelle Hudson): though innocent of wrongdoing and aided by a lawyer with impeccable diction (Frieda Inescort), Betty is found guilty of stealing from a department store and is sentenced to a year in prison. A mean matron and even meaner inmates run the joint — at least until a boyish reporter (Glenn Ford) writes an exposé and Betty’s lawyer steps in to institute reforms. But the meanest inmates (June Lang and Lorna Gray) have it in for Betty. The reason to watch this movie is to see a young Glenn Ford channel his inner Jimmy Stewart. ★★ (TCM)

*

It’s a Big Country (dir. Clarence Brown, Don Hartman, John Sturges, Richard Thorpe, Charles Vidor, Don Weis, William A. Wellman, 1951). Eight vignettes, beginning with one that poses a question about the greatness of America: Which America? A big one, with a widow who wants only to be counted in the census, Black men and women in every field of accomplishment, ethnic hostilities and anti-Semitism, an Italian-American patriarch who doesn’t want his son to wear glasses — and more. It’s a Big Country is very much of its time, with Black Americans relegated to their own vignette of still photographs and archival footage (to be cut from distribution to southern audiences?), and yet the movie seeks to affirm the idea of America as a pluralist culture. With Ethel Barrymore, Van Johnson, Gene Kelly, Janet Leigh, Marjorie Main, Fredric March, S.Z. Sakall, and other MGM stars. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Crip Camp (dir. James Lebrecht and Nicole Newnham, 2020). The life and afterlife of Camp Jened, a Catskills camp for teenagers with disabilities, with hippiesque counselors and an ethos of acceptance and freedom, celebrated in countless ways and, fortunately, preserved on film. When alums, Judith Heumann among them, found their way to Berkeley, a disability-rights movement was born, with protest marches, sit-ins, and an agonizing crawl up the steps of the U.S. Capitol. The most moving moment: a camper speaks, with great difficulty, her words more or less unintelligible, and no other camper responds, until one explains, also with great difficulty, what he thinks she’s saying — that she’s been deprived of a right to privacy — and asks, “Is that it?” “Yeah.” ★★★★ (N)

[Netflix has this movie streaming for free at YouTube].

*

The Vow (dir. Karim Amer, Omar Mullick, Jehane Noujaim, 2020–2022). The Vow is the darkest cult documentary I’ve watched, and as it moves to the trial, conviction, and imprisonment of self-styled philosopher/scientist (and multi-level-marketing veteran) Keith Raniere, this sixteen-part exploration of NXIVM gets darker with each episode. One especially valuable element is the documentary’s depiction of Raniere’s victims becoming victimizers, eager to participate in utterly irrational and horrific acts; another is its depiction of the difficulty of breaking away — not to freedom but to loss, grief, and, finally, a resolve to speak out and strike back. Raniere, who looks like a stocky, schlubby version of David Foster Wallace, is a mindfucker of extraordinary ability, selling acronyms and gibberish (e.g., ESP, EM, intensives, modules, technologies), flattering and demeaning his marks, and getting them to do the unthinkable. As we see the members of Raniere’s inner circle take guilty pleas and leave him to face justice alone, I cannot help thinking of a disgraced former president and his woes. ★★★★ (M)

*

The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946). It’s streaming in the Criterion Channel’s Ava Gardner feature, though Gardner’s Kitty Collins is less a character than a plot device. The movie treats Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” as an overture of sorts (diner scene, rooming house scene) before getting to the main matter, an invented backstory in flashbacks that explains the Swede’s (Burt Lancaster) cryptic comment “Once I did something wrong” (or in the story, “I got in wrong”). As in film noir generally, contingency is key, with a chance encounter at a gas station presaging the Swede’s demise. With Edmond O’Brien (for once not jittery and sweaty) as an insurance investigator, Sam Levine (looking like an Abstract Expressionist) as a police detective, and beautiful cinematography by Elwood Bredell. ★★★★ (CC)

*

Barbie (dir. Greta Herwig, 2023). I have never before seen a movie that begins with the logo of a toy company (Mattel), and though I expect I’ll never see another such movie, I’m glad I saw this one. Barbie is pop cultural commentary at its best, cheerfully knowing and subversive. Strong mythic vibes (Edenic innocence and ignorance), and strong movie vibes (The Purple Rose of Cairo and Pleasantville) when the membrane (yes, that’s the movie’s word) between Barbieland and reality is torn. Margot Robbie and all the other Barbies of this movie prove that you can smash the patriarchy and still have fun and look great while doing so. ★★★★ (M)

*

Two shorts from the Crime Does Not Pay series

Dark Shadows (dir. Paul Bunford and Walter Hart, 1944). Some entries in this series — for instance Joseph Losey’s A Gun in His Hand and Jacques Tourneur’s Think It Over — are solidly good, but not this one. It focuses on a police psychiatrist (Henry O’Neill) who gives a room of murder suspects a word-association test and comes to a snappy conclusion about who’s guilty. The only good reason to watch this short is the chance to see Arthur Space — good old Doc Weaver of the Lassie television world — as a serial killer. And if you really consider that a spoiler, please step to the customer service desk and our cashier will cheerfully refund your money. ★★ (TCM)

Jack Pot (dir. Roy Rowland, 1940). Nickel slot machines are everywhere in the city, and all that change is amounting to big money for organized crime. When creepy-looking but clean-living Frank Watson (Tom Neal of Detour) refuses to allow a machine in his dry-cleaning establishment, trouble follows in a particularly gruesome form. Look for Lloyd Corrigan as a concerned-looking fellow and Reed Hadley as a lawyer working for the mob — in the mayor’s office. And in his first screen appearance, Hugh Beamont (the Beaver’s dad) as a mechanic. (TCM) ★★★

*

A Stolen Life (dir. Curtis Bernhardt, 1946). Bette Davis as New England twins Kate and Pat Bosworth, the one a lonely painter, the other a devil-may-care party girl (with excellent special effects in their scenes together). And between them, Bill Emerson (Glenn Ford), a lonely, soft-spoken lighthouse keeper. To understand what the title means and how this triangle loses one of its sides, you’ll just have to watch. An unexpected highlight: Dane Clark as Karnock, “a Rasputin of the paint pots,” a proto-Beat painter. ★★★★ (TCM)

*

Two from the Criterion Channel’s Cat Movies

The Cat Creeps (dir. Eric C. Kenton, 1946). It’s 1947-adjacent, but it’s a waste if time. In this search for a hidden treasure on a mysterious island, someone enters a house through a cellar door, while someone else sneaks in with a secret key, while someone else pokes around with a flashlight, while someone else is mysteriously killed, while a black cat creeps around, and so on, and so on. Noah Beery Jr. provides some comic relief — or is it pain? — as a wisecracking newspaper photographer; Paul Kelly is his usual suave, terse self as a detective. One niche reason to see this movie: it has Rose Hobart, who became the “star” of Joseph Cornell’s short film Rose Hobart. ★

The Long Goodbye (dir. Robert Altman, 1973). What a delight: a tongue-in-cheek noir, with Elliott Gould as Phliip Marlowe, a private detective in 1970s Los Angeles, driving a 1940s car, chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes lit with strike-anywhere matches (which indeed he strikes everywhere), and trying to dupe his cat into eating the inferior food he was able to find in the supermarket by putting it into an empty can of the cat’s preferred brand. The plot — a murder, a missing novelist, a bag of money — is beside the point; what makes the movie compelling are its comic touches and surprising cast, which includes former New York Yankee Jim Bouton, Laugh-In’s Henry Gibson, Sterling Hayden (in a role written for Dan Blocker), Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Nina van Pallandt. The screenplay is by Leigh Brackett, who co-wrote the screenplay of The Big Sleep. A bonus: scenes at Los Angeles’s High Tower Court, where Marlowe tries to dupe his cat. ★★★★

*

The Other Love (dir. André De Toth, 1947). Haute melodrama, with Barbara Stanwyck as Karen Duncan, a concert pianist convalescing at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, with what a 1947 audience would immediately recognize as tuberculosis. The doctor in charge of Karen’s care, Tony Stanton (David Niven) seems unnecessarily controlling: “You haven’t got a free will anymore,” he tells her, and he forbids piano playing, smoking, trips to the village, even, when a gong sounds, talking. A chance meeting with a dashing auto racer, Paul Clermont (Richard Conte), offers the escape that Karen seeks: “I’m trying to smash the face of the clock,” she declares. Will she live the time remaining to her with Paul, or with Tony? ★★★★ (YT)

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

“The hash of that Paul Pry”

Emily Vanderpool, ten, needs a quiet place to read.

Jean Stafford, “A Reading Problem” (1956), in Collected Stories (1969).

This story is so reminiscent of Eudora Welty’s 1941 story “Why I Live at the P.O.” In each, an institution of sorts — a post office, a jail — becomes a home away from home for a young family-beset narrator. (Welty’s narrator, known only as Sister, has a sister named Stella-Rondo.) It turns out that Stafford and Welty corresponded, met occasionally in New York, and admired each other’s writing. Stafford, writing in 1975: “Just about every word Eudora Welty puts to paper delights me.”

Related reading
All OCA Jean Stafford posts (Pinboard)

[Paul Pry: “an excessively inquisitive person,” after the hero of Paul Pry (1825), a play by John Poole.” Stafford on Welty: from Charlotte Margolis Goodman’s Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart (1990).]

Valentine’s Day

[Green stone heart amulet. From Egypt, 26th–29th Dynasty, ca. 664–30 BCE. 3 cm × 2.1 cm. (1 3/16″ × 13/16″.) Gift of Helen Miller Gould, 1910. Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the online collection. Click for a larger view.]

A note from the Met:

Egyptian physicians usually did not practice internal surgery, and detailed knowledge of the human body’s interior was generally limited to embalmers. Although intended to represent a human heart, this small sculpture is bovine rather than human in form.

More about amulets and the heart, or ib, at this museum page.

Nancy en español

Aquí está Nancy — o Periquita — en español. Y una imitadora: Mafalda. Y una estatua de Mafalda. Nancy se pondría furiosa. ¡Furiosa!

Gracias de Stephen de pencil talk por los enlaces.

[Periquita : parakeet.]

Yamandu Costa, coming to New Jersey

On June 8, 2024, Yamandu Costa will perform at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. Will this performance turn out to be one of a number of North American appearances? Time will tell.

I was hugely fortunate to hear Yamandu this past September in Illinois. He’s the greatest guitarist I’ve ever heard.

Related reading
Four Yamandu Costa posts

Recently updated

Billie Holiday’s residence Now with an apartment number and the 1940 census.

“The five-and-dime !”

Jean Stafford, “Bad Characters” (1954), in Collected Stories (1969).

The names for such stores have been a matter for scholarly inquiry.

Related reading
All OCA Jean Stafford posts (Pinboard)