John Mulaney, sardinista

John Mulaney travels with three cans of King Oscar sardines. Says Mulaney, “You don’t know what you’re gonna encounter out there.”

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All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)

In Esperantoville

Conspiracy (dir. Lew Landers, 1939) is set in an unnamed European nation whose language is Esperanto.

[“By the day, week, or month.” Nedra Carlson (Linda Hayes) looks anxious. Click any image for a larger view.]

[Tio means that in Esperanto, but Tio in this movie is a person. That’s the Café Tio.]

[“Harbor Police.” I can’t decipher what’s beneath. The barrel says “Fire Use.”]

As I wrote in my four sentences about this movie, “This low-budget effort prefigures Casablanca in a number of ways.” That in itself is a good reason to watch. Recently available at TCM, but also at YouTube.

What is a little deuce coupe?

I’m glad I asked.

[“Just a little deuce coupe with a flathead mill, but she’ll walk a Thunderbird like she’s standing still.”]

“Adoration” (Price, arr. Fine)

[Florence Price, “Adoration,” arranged by Elaine Fine. MAP String Ensemble. Catherine Birke, conductor. Alice Tully Hall, New York. May 4, 2024.]

Happily, there’s an audience video of a beautiful, deeply moving performance.

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A handful of “Adoration” posts

How to improve writing (no. 121)

From NBC Nightly News:

If convicted, Mr. Trump could face anywhere from four years in prison to just probation.

It makes better sense to arrange the elements in order of their severity:

If convicted, Mr. Trump could face anywhere from probation to four years in prison.

Or a little more gracefully, avoiding the slack anywhere:

If Mr. Trump is convicted, his punishment could range from probation to four years in prison.

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All OCA How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 121 in a series dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

One series, eleven movies

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

Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV (dir. Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz, 2024). A documentary series, five episodes, about the world of Nickelodeon in the 1990s and early 2000s. The central figure in this toxic environment is Dan Schenider, a celebrated showrunner whose bullying, sense of entitlement, and contempt for women in the workplace seem to have been unbounded (an anonymous costumer calls him a case of arrested development). But there’s more: TV skits with astonishingly crude sexual innuendo, and pedophiles on the set. Watching this documentary makes me happy that our kids lived their childhoods without cable: they watched PBS and videotapes, and for a long time we paid them not to watch TV at all. ★★★★ (M)

*

Railroaded! (dir. Anthony Mann, 1947). “Don’t give me that love stuff”: one of the more sordid noirs of my acquaintance: alcoholism, domestic violence, point-blank killings with a “belly gun,” a body weighted and thrown in a river, a criminal partner left for dead in a laundry truck, and cops who seek to pin a murder on a most unlikely suspect. Good performances from John Ireland as a thug and Jane Randolph as his desperate girlfriend. And Hugh Beaumont does a convincing job as a police detective and the hero of the piece. Anthony Mann and our favorite household’s favorite year in movies come through again. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Black Tuesday (dir. Hugo Fregonese, 1954). A bold escape from Death Row (where executions are scheduled for Tuesdays) gives criminal boss Vincent Canelli (Edward G. Robinson), bank robber Peter Manning (Peter Graves), and assorted others a chance to live. They take along hostages, who may have already lost their chance: a guard, a doctor, a reporter, another guard’s daughter, a priest (Milburn Stone of Gunsmoke ). It’s a brutal movie, with Robinson offering an even darker version of his murderous Johnny Rocco (Key Largo). Cinematography by Stanley Cortez, in super-stark black and white. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Conspiracy (dir. Lew Landers, 1939). Intrigue, on ship and on land, in an unnamed European fascist state, with an American radio officer (Allan Lane) on the run from the police and from the resistance (who fear that “the boy,” as they call him, will endanger their efforts). But one member of the resistance (Linda Hayes) is determined to help him. An inventive bit: all the signage in this country is in Esperanto. An odd point: this low-budget effort prefigures Casablanca in a number of ways — but no spoilers. ★★ (TCM)

*

Baby God (dir. Hannah Olson, 2020). A documentary about the career and offspring of Quincy Fortier, a Las Vegas doctor (and Nevada’s 1991 Doctor of the Year) who used his own semen in the work of his fertility clinic, fathering an unknown number of children over four decades. Women he impregnated and their children speak to the camera, trying to think through a baffling narrative of betrayal — and there are even darker stories from the doctor’s own family life. Fortier, who died at the age of ninety-four in 2006, remains an enigma (“I’m just helpin’ out,” he told his son). Two flaws: the pace is slow, and there’s little context about the practice of insemination fraud, aside from a statement in the closing credits that Fortier is hardly a lone case. ★★★ (M)

*

Desperate Journey (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1942). An RAF plane is shot over Germany, and its surviving crew members must make their way to Holland, but not before doing all kinds of damage to the enemy war effort, even as a Nazi officer (Raymond Massey) hunts them down. Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan lead the RAF men, with Alan Hale providing endless comic relief, and therein lies the problem: the movie is an awkward mix of serious suspense and high jinks. Nazis, slapstick, wisecracks, a doubletalk routine: I’m reminded of All Through the Night, but that movie takes place in the safety of New York City, not in enemy territory, where the RAF men at times resemble the Bowery Boys, ready to pull off Routine Nine or some such on the enemy. Best elements: Flynn, Nancy Coleman, the fake parents, the Casablanca-like (and Conspiracy-like) speech about duty, Bert Glennon’s cinematography, Max Steiner’s music, and travel by map. ★★★ (TCM)

*

The Spiral Staircase (dir. Robert SIodmak, 1946). If I had to choose one movie to illustrate the idea of Gothic noir, it’d be this one. In a turn-of-the-century New England town, someone is killing women with disabilities, and a mute maid (Dorothy McGuire) to a wealthy family in a big old house (Ethel Barrymore, George Brent, and others) is in danger. The movie does a fine job is casting suspicion on a range of characters. But the most striking thing here is Nicholas Musaraca’s cinematography: darkness galore, scenes shot from great heights, perspectives that suggest a killer tracking a victim, and long stretches that turn into silent film — and the movie begins with an audience watching one. ★★★★ (YT)

*

A Patch of Blue (dir. Guy Green, 1965). Blind since childhood, Selina D’Arcey (Elizabeth Hartman) lives in a dump of an apartment with her grandfather Ole Pa (Wallace Ford), whom she calls a bastard, and her mother Rose-Anne (Shelley Winters), whom she calls a whore — and that’s literal. Uneducated, battered by her mother, Selina finds a world apart when she sits in a park and a young urban professional, Gordon Ralfe (Sidney Poitier), removes a caterpillar that has fallen down the back of her blouse. A frank, tender story about desire, deprivation, and different forms of love, though the dialogue in the D’Arcey apartment (screenplay by the director) is sometimes hopelessly stagey, and the Gordon’s cheerful selflessness (the supermarket games) is a bit much. Bonus: a beautiful score (harmonica, harp, marimba, piano, strings, vibraphone) by Jerry Goldsmith. ★★★ (TCM)

*

From the Criterion Channel’s 1950: Peak Noir feature

Born to Be Bad (dir. Nicholas Ray, 1950).Christabel (Joan Fontaine), the niece of a prominent publisher, comes to live with her uncle’s assistant Donna Foster (Joan Leslie) while attending business school, and soon begins a careful campaign to destroy Donna’s relationship with ultra-rich fiancé Curtis Carey’s (Zachary Scott) while starting up her own relationship with writer Nick Bradley (Robert Ryan). Christabel wants Nick but wants to marry Curtis, and as Donna says, “Christabel will take care of Christabel — every time.” In 1950 the movie may have looked like cheap melodrama, but it now looks like an exploration of the dark triad. Darker than All About Eve, released later than year, but not as dark as the 1944 Guest in the House. ★★★★

The Damned Don’t Cry (dir. Vincent Sherman, 1950). “I want something more than what I’ve had out of life, and I’m gonna get it”: Joan Crawford rises from life as impoverished Ethel Whitehead to become the glamorous, pseudonymous Lorna Harrison Forbes, relying on and betraying men — a meek accountant (Kent Smith), an aesthete-crime boss (David Brian), a tough underboss (Steve Cochran) — as the circumstances demand. Like Christabel, Ethel is out for herself, always. A posh noir, with a snappy screenplay by Harold Medford and Jerome Weidman, from a story by Gertrude Walker, with contributions of some sort by Crawford. My favorite line: “What kind of self-respect is there in living on aspirin tablets and chicken salad sandwiches?” ★★★★

Night and the City (dir. Jules Dassin, 1950). “I just wanna be somebody,” says Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark), a minor American in a post-war British underworld who devises a scheme to control all-in wrestling in London. What makes this noir particularly compelling is character: Harry, running like a rat in a maze as he tries to manage the art of the deal; saintly Mary (Gene Tierney), whose happier days with Harry are summed up in a photograph of the two in a canoe; Philip Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan), a nightclub owner whose “bought and paid for” wife Helen (Googie Withers) finds him repulsive and has saved up to make a life apart; Figler (James Hayter), a figure out of Dickens who manages a group of sham beggars; Gregorius Kristo (Stanislaus Zbyszko), an aging Greco-Roman wrestler who finds all-in wrestling repulsive; and on, and on. Max Greene’s (Mutz Greenbaum) cinematography places them all in a world of shadows — before the story ends in early morning light. My favorite moments: Harry trying to get a refund, the ink smearing. ★★★★

[“Remember them, Harry? Nice people. Nice people to know and be with.”]

Where the Sidewalk Ends (dir. Otto Preminger, 1950). A Laura reunion: Preminger, Dana Andrews, and Gene Tierney, with Andrews as Mark Dixon, a rogue cop with a dark secret, and Tierney as Morgan Taylor, a model and the daughter of a cabdriver (Tom Tully) wrongfully accused of murder. Atmosphere is everything here: the dingy Pike Street apartment, with the Manhattan Bridge in the distance, the dingy police station, Martha’s Café, the parking garage, Dixon’s hotel apartment, and the constant strains of Cyril Mockridge’s variations on Alfred Newman’s “Street Scene.” My favorite moments: Mrs. Tribaum (Grace Mills) seen through her basement window, so spooky, so city. ★★★★

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

Laptop speaking

I opened my laptop and a message in the center of the screen began reading itself aloud: “Hello, Michael. Mr. Eisenhower” — or was it Adenauer? — “has been waiting patiently for you. He is interested not in injecting the incredible but in removing it.”

In other words, Mr. E. or A. was interested in bringing about a return to (so-called) normalcy.

A likely source for this dream: Saturday night’s movie, Pretty Poison (dir. Noel Black, 1968), now streaming as part of the Criterion Channel feature Hollywood Crack-Up: The Decade American Cinema Lost Its Mind. The character Morton Azenauer (John Randolph) is a parole officer supervising a newly released arsonist.

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All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

Apostrophes, missing

From the BBC: “North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs.” Some residents are displeased:

Resident Anne Keywood did not think the changes were worthwhile.

She said: “I think we should be using apostrophes.

“If you start losing things like that[,] then everything goes downhill[,] doesn’t it?”

So too with commas.

Related reading
All OCA apostrophe and punctuation posts (Pinboard) : Apostrophe Protection Society

[Hard to decide if the BBC was having a laugh here or just being sloppy. The missing quotation mark is fine, but it seems mighty strange to break up that quotation over two paragraphs.]

Sluggo’s perspective

In Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy, Sluggo draws with perspective.

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All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Car trouble

[1701 Madison Avenue, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Car trouble in East Harlem, found by chance. Is the man looking under the car wearing a hat? Hard to say, but I’m sure he owns at least one. Is that a Wonder Bread delivery truck? Hard to say.

What I do know: that’s a flower shop across the street. And those buildings are now gone.

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