Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Lester Ruff,” or Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, offering an easier puzzle. Yes, this one’s easier. For instance: 47-A, seven letters, “Liked by a lot.” That’s as straightforward as it gets. The dazzling parts of the puzzle: horizontal and vertical stacks of twelve-, fifteen-, and twelve-letter answers.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, six letters, “Image enhancers.” A far less straightforward answer than 47-A.

5-D, twelve letters, “What might hold the mayo.” A stack begins. REFRIGERATOR would be far too straightforward.

6-D, fifteen letters, “They’re behind the wheel.” A stack continues. Not CASINOEMPLOYEES.

19-D, twelve letters, “‘How are you?’ ‘_____’.” A stack concludes. Nicely colloquial.

24-D, seven letters, “Author named for Emerson.” Yep.

29-A, twelve letters, “Spearmint or citronella.” A stack begins.

31-D, three letters, “One of DC's 35-Across (first spelled with its third letter moved to first).” The one awkward spot in the puzzle. The answer is out of the way but unavoidable, given the stack of Across answers. The parenthetical bit seems unnecessary. 35-A should be allowed to fend for itself.

32-A, fifteen letters, “Funds needed for ongoing costs.” A stack continues.

32-D, eight letters, “Film first called The Concert Feature.” Such a strange title.

35-A, twelve letters, “JFK and relatives.” A stack concludes. A really inventive clue.

39-D, six letters, “Its origin story is told in The Man Who Made Lists.” I’m tempted to look at it and the book about it.

48-D, four letters, “Colleague of Queen Bey.” I'm not sure how I know it, but I do.

49-A, three letters, “Caviar on a canapé.” A little tricky.

My favorite in this puzzle: 21-A, four letters, “Nonclassified letters.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Notebook and pencil sighting

[The FBI Story (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1959). Click for a much larger view.]

That’s an FBI agent questioning a clothes presser about a hollow coin found in a pants pocket. I thought that the pencil might be a Blackwing, but no — it’s a mechanical pencil. Perhaps a Scripto, perhaps a Skilcraft.

See also: FBI agents and Dixon Ticonderogas.

Related reading
All OCA pocket notebook sightings (Pinboard)

Ship, plane, or call center

A recorded voice, as heard on the phone:

“Please wait while I connect you with a crew member.”

It’s raining

[Nancy, July 21, 1955.]

We went for almost a month without having to mow our lawn, so a little rain is a welcome thing. And a dark and rainy morning seems appropriate on this Fourth of July.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Jim’s question

Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/1885).

The question is timely.

[UK publication: 1884. US publication: 1885.]

Eleven movies, one series

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

Live Fast, Die Young (dir. Paul Henreid, 1958). No one dies, and the movie is far better than the lurid title suggests. Kim (Mary Murphy) and Jill Winters (Norma Eberhardt), a hashslinger and a high-school senior, are sisters living with their unemployed drunk of a father (Gordon Jones, Mike the cop of the Abbott and Costello world). When Kim leaves home for a career of petty and more serious crime (lived to a jazz and rock ‘n’ roll score and featuring Mike Connors), Mary follows to search for her sister and bring her back. Eberhardt, who affects a breathy Marilyn Monroe voice, has the best line: “Nothing’s against anything until you’re caught!” ★★★★ (YT)

*

So Young, So Bad (dir. Bernard Vorhaus, 1950). Life at a “corrective school” for girls, with a know-nothing administrator, a sadistic matron, and Dr. John Jason (Paul Henreid), a newly hired psychiatrist intent on making a better life for the school’s inmates, who spend their days doing laundry and tending potato fields. A second administrator (Catherine McLeod) doubts he can make any changes. Sparks fly. Three actors make their first major appearance in movies here: Anne Francis as an unmarried mother, Anne Jackson as a butch gal, and Rosita (Rita) Moreno as a social isolate who finds refuge in dreams of escape. ★★★ (YT)

*

Lonelyhearts (dir. Vincent J. Donehue, 1958). A loose adaptation of Nathanael West’s novella Miss Lonelyhearts. Montgomery Clift is Adam White, Miss Lonelyhearts, writing an advice column for a big-city newspaper; Robert Ryan is Shrike, the paper’s editor-in-chief, a man given to tormenting and tempting Adam; Myrna Loy is Mrs. Shrike, an alienated wife who likes the company of younger men (including Adam). Maureen Stapleton seems terribly miscast as a newspaper reader intent on seducing Adam. Adam’s backstory and the movie’s happy ending would have been enough to make West say “Look what they’ve done to my novella, ma.” ★★★ (YT)

*

Gun Crazy (dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1950). I’ll watch this movie whenever it shows up. A delirious crime spree, with Bart Tare (John Dall), an army vet fascinated by guns but horrified by killing, and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) a sideshow sharpshooter who’s even crazier than Bart. Dominance, submission, and weirdness abounding. Look at Bart and Laurie lying next to each other after making an escape: they’re panting like partners who have just made love. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Beach Boys (dir. Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny, 2024). This documentary is most valuable as a visual history, with photographs, news footage, and what look like home movies. It’s telling that the first member of the group seen and heard in a non-archival interview is Mike Love, who’s given considerable screen time to talk (about how he was not given enough credit and how Murry Wilson sold the rights to his songs) and to choke up about what he would like to say to Brian Wilson (“I’ll see you in court”?). The documentary omits the deaths of Dennis Wilson and Carl Wilson, Brian’s late-career renaissance, the completed SMiLE, and much more, and things end on a strange note: an intertitle reports Pet Sounds going gold and platinum in 2000 as “Kokomo” (gah!) begins to play over the credits. Endless Harmony (dir. Alan Boyd, 1998) is a much better introduction to the group’s history. ★★ (D)

*

Touch (dir. Paul Schrader, 1997). An American story of commerce and religion, from a novel by Elmore Leonard. Juvenal (Skeet Ulrich) is an ex-monk and stigmatic whose touch heals people. Bill Hill (Christopher Walken) is an ex-evangelist who sees Juvenal as a potential star and gets Lynn Faulkner (Bridget Fonda) to push him in that direction, even as a religious fanatic (Tom Arnold) is enraged by Juvenal and Lynn’s relationship. “Juvenal”: yes, it’s satire, but it’s meandering and sleepy. ★★ (CC)

*

The FBI Story (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1959). It starts out well, as a police procedural, with file cabinets, magnifying glasses, and switchboards, but it slowly goes downhill. James Stewart is FBI agent Chip Hardesty, whose peripatetic career finds him investigating Klan violence, murders of Native Americans, famous gangsters, a mass murder, Nazi conspirators, and Communist agents. It’s all set against a Capraesque story of marriage and family, with Stewart and Vera Miles as George and Mary Bailey 2.0, trading lines of creaky, corny dialogue. Best segment: the story of the hollow coin. ★★ (TCM)

*

Hilda Crane (dir. Philip Dunne, 1956). “In case you didn’t know, courtesan is a fancy word for tramp !”: so says Hilda Crane (Jean Simmons), back home with her mother (Judith Evelyn, Miss Lonelyhearts in Rear Window) after being let go from a job in New York. Hilda, whose years away include a spell of cohabitation and two divorces, finds herself pursued by two men: the louche professor (Jean-Pierre Aumont) who has pronounced her a courtesan, and a noble architect (Guy Madison) whose mother (Evelyn Varden, Icey Spoon in The Night of the Hunter) has definite ideas about her son’s future. But what does Hilda want as her future? Stagey in the extreme (from a play by Samuel Raphaelson), loopy in its lurch to a conclusion, and highly revealing of at least some people’s ideas about gender and sexuality at mid-century. ★★★ (YT)

*

The Human Comedy (dir. Clarence Brown, 1943). It began as a screenplay by William Saroyan that proved far too long for a movie. Life in wartime in the fictional Ithaca, California, with a high-school student, Homer (!) Macauley (Mickey Rooney), who works nights as a postal-telegram delivery boy to help his widowed mother get by. The movie moves from vignette to vignette, taking in the Macauley family (Ray Collins is the spirit of the dead father; Fay Bainter is the mother; Donna Reed is their daughter), the telegraph office (Frank Morgan is a hard-drinking but indefatigable operator), townspeople young and old, and visiting servicemen, with shifts now and then to Homer’s elder brother Marcus (Van Johnson), already away from home in military service and preparing to go overseas. For all its unabashed sentimentality, this human comedy makes considerable room for tragedy, and I can only imagine what it must have felt like to watch in 1943. ★★★★ (TCM)

[A well-known leading man made his uncredited debut in this movie.]

*

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, second season (dir. Andrew Jarecki, 2024). The second (final?) season of the The Jinx covers Robert Durst’s trial, conviction, and sentencing in the murder of his friend Susan Berman and his death four months later. The people on camera are an array of heroes and villains: a dedicated cold-case prosecutor, long-suffering members of Durst’s first wife’s family, Durst family members who did nothing when Durst’s first wife disappeared, friends who display a bewildering allegiance to a killer, and a second wife of convenience determined to keep Durst’s assets from going to his first wife’s family. And above all, Durst himself, quick and conniving on telephone calls, whiny and defiant in the courtroom, avoiding justice again and again (remind you of anyone?). As the credits for the final episode roll, the Jeff Beck/Joss Stone cover of “I Put a Spell on You” plays — aptly, aptly. ★★★★ (M)

*

Wicked Little Letters (dir. Thea Sharrock, 2023). Post-Great War in Sussex, with pious unmarried Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) receiving bizarrely obscene anonymous letters. Suspicion falls on her free-spirit neighbor Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), and an arrest and trial follow. An assiduous constable, Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan), has doubts about Rose’s guilt and enlists the help of other neighborhood women to set things straight. Wonderfully comic, at times suspenseful, with handwriting at the center of things, and based on a true story that seems like something out of Dickens. ★★★★ (N)

*

Inside Out 2 (dir. Kelsey Mann, 2024). Late in the film, we heard a young audience member ask a grown-up, “Why is Riley sad?” In this (not really for kids) sequel, Riley Andersen, now thirteen, is beset by Puberty, which arrives in the form of a wrecking ball that destroys her Sense of Self (capitals are fitting for this allegorical tale), after which a new array of emotions take control: Anxiety, Embarrassment, Ennui, and Envy. That old Sense of Self was a beautiful, symmetrical, silver structure, the work of a mind that could say “Mom and Dad are proud of me” and “I’m a good person”; the new one is a jagged, asymmetrical, fiery mess, whose main theme is “I’m not good enough.” But — and because it’s a Disney movie, it’s no spoiler — the kid is going to be all right, and more complicated. ★★★★ (T)

Related reading
All OCA “12 movies” posts (Pinboard)

Ruth Martin, stickler

From the Lassie episode “The Ring” (January 19, 1958). Ruth Martin (Cloris Leachman) has invited Uncle Petrie (George Chandler) to come work on the farm. Timmy (Jon Provost) takes an instant dislike to the newcomer. Ruth and Paul Martin (John Sheppod) are arguing:

“Who called Uncle Petrie in the first place? Not me.”

“Fine grammar for a college graduate – ‘not me.’”

“Don't change the subject.”

The original Ruth Martin is not an especially likable character. She’s snippy, fretful, and prone to drama. And she’s always correcting pronouns. Ruth Two (June Lockhart) was a much steadier sort. Impossible to imagine Ruth One keeping her wits about her when threatened by a mountain lion. Ruth Two, too, corrects pronouns, but only those spoken by her son Timmy.

Related reading
All OCA Lassie posts (Pinboard)

[I watch Lassie when I fold laundry. Come at me.]

HCR on Donald J. Trump v. United States

Heather Cox Richardson, in the July 1 installment of Letters from an American :

At his confirmation hearing in 2005, now–Chief Justice John Roberts said: “I believe that no one is above the law under our system and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law, the Constitution, and statutes.”

In his 2006 confirmation hearings, Samuel Alito said: “There is nothing that is more important for our republic than the rule of law. No person in this country, no matter how high or powerful, is above the law.”

And in 2018, Brett Kavanaugh told the Senate: “No one’s above the law in the United States, that’s a foundational principle…. We’re all equal before the law…. The foundation of our Constitution was that … the presidency would not be a monarchy…. [T]he president is not above the law, no one is above the law.”

Now they have changed that foundational principle for a man who, according to White House officials during his term, called for the execution of people who upset him and who has vowed to exact vengeance on those he now thinks have wronged him.

Geoffrey Pullum explains it all

Geoffrey Pullum has a new book, The Truth About English Grammar. From a Guardian review:

Pullum constantly insists that all modern lexicographers, as well as all grammarians not called Pullum, are wrong about everything, which lends his book a slightly crazed tone of “Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying dictionaries?”

Related posts
Pullum on Strunk and White : Pullum on Strunk and White and adjectives and adverbs : Pullum and the passive voice : More on Pullum, Strunk, and White : Pullum on On Writing Well

[Tooting my horn: Pullum on Strunk and White is one of the most widely read posts in these pages.]

Music, worsening

Too easy to make and too easy to consume: Rick Beato explains “The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse.”

Thanks, Elaine and Kirsten.