Phi Better Whatchamacallit

From Chicago Syndicate (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1955). Some hoods are giving undercover agent Barry Amsterdam (Dennis O’Keefe) a hard time:

“A philosopher.”

“College man.”

“Must be Phi Better Whatchamacallit.”

“Kappa.”

“Kappa — or copper.”

Twelve movies

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

Chicago Syndicate (dir. Fred F. Sears, 1955). Another movie with a highly improbable premise: an accountant with a military background (Dennis O’Keefe) is persuaded to go undercover to expose the racketeer who has just ordered the murder of his accountant. What makes this movie worth watching: Paul Stewart as a misogynist racketeer, Abbe Lane as a nightclub singer and racketeer’s moll, Xavier Cugat as a bandleader on the edges of the criminal world, and Allison Hayes as a wrench in the mob’s works. A bonus: lots of Chicago streets, and a visit to the Field Museum. An extra bonus: the Chicago freight tunnels. ★★★★ (YT)

*

Cash on Demand (dir. Quentin Lawrence, 1961). A duet, with Peter Cushing as priggish bank manager Harry Fordyce, and André Morell as “Colonel Gore Hepburn,” a bank thief posing as an insurance investigator. The colonel’s fiendish scheme has elements that compel Fordyce to become an accomplice in crime. Suspense abounds as the two open a safe and load suitcases with money. I won’t say how the movie ends, but I will point out that Fordyce more than slightly resembles Scrooge and that the events of the movie take place right before Christmas. ★★★★ (YT)

*

The Dark Tower (dir. John Harlow, 1943). Three nominal stars, but the movie belongs to the fourth-billed Herbert Lom as Torg, a swarthy fellow who materializes at a traveling circus and talks the manager (Ben Lyon) into a job hypnotizing star aerialist Mary (Anne Crawford) into performing sans a balancing prop. And yes, Torg has designs on Mary, which doesn’t please her partner Tom (David Farrar). Considerable circus atmosphere, with real performers. The story seems to me to take place in the weird imaginary Europe of, say, The Lady Vanishes. ★★★ (YT)

*

A little Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti festival

Sideways (2004). From a fambly discussion, 2010:

“Wait till you’re older. Then you might like it.”

“I am older.”

I wrote in a 2010 post that you have to be at least forty to like Sideways, but now I think that thirty-five is right. ★★★★ (DVD)

The Holdovers (2023). I wrote four sentences about this movie earlier this year. All I want to add here is that the movie’s sentimentality, even corniness (as in the candlepin bowling scene), merits appreciation. The sadness and snow might make The Holdovers my favorite Christmas movie. And as I noticed once again, there’s even an homage to A Charlie Brown Christmas (no kidding). ★★★★ (F)

*

Among the Living (dir. Stuart Heisler, 1941). We watched because it’s a movie with Frances Farmer, who made only sixteen film appearances. But she’s hardly on screen here. The real interest comes from Albert Dekker in a double role (mad twin, sane twin), Harry Carey as a doctor with dubious ethics and a hilarious accent, and Susan Hayward as a boarding-house owner’s daughter who doesn’t realize it’s the mad twin who’s buying her gifts and stealing her heart. Dekker is disturbingly (insanely?) convincing: it’s sometimes difficult to believe the same actor is playing both his roles. ★★★ (YT)

*

Jack Goes Boating (dir. Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2010). Hoffman’s only directing effort, from a play by Robert Glaudini. It’s the story of two couples: Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega) are in a relationship whose foundation has sustained considerable damage; Jack (Hoffman) and Connie (Amy Ryan) are naifs barely getting started. Their tentative beginning looks back to Delbert Mann’s Marty and perhaps served to influence Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves. Alas, the movie jumps a big shark in the dinner scene and never quite recovers. ★★★ (CC)

*

The Price of the Ticket (dir. Karen Thorsen, 1989). A documentary about James Baldwin, with archival footage in abundance, and Baldwin speaking truth with a fierce hope about human possibility: “the bottom line,” he says, is that all men are brothers. Considerable commentary from Maya Angelou, Baldwin’s bother David, and others. The most unexpected moments: David and Bobby Short singing spirituals, as they once did with James. This documentary aired as an episode of the PBS series American Masters. ★★★★ (PBS)

*

The Last of Sheila (dir. Herbert Ross, 1973). A mystery of bewildering complexity: one year after his wife Sheila was killed by a hit-and-run driver, a wealthy man (James Coburn) devises a game for six of his friends (Richard Benjamin, Dyan Cannon, Joan Hackett, James Mason, Ian McShane, Raquel Welch) to play as they travel the French Riviera on his yacht (named Sheila). Each friend is given a card with a secret, and the object of the game is to figure out whose secret is whose. Harmless enough, right? The screenplay, by Anthony Perkins and Stephen Sondheim, is filled with delights and meta jokes about storytelling and moviemaking, but damn if I understand the plot. ★★★★ (CC)

*

The Public Eye (dir. Howard Franklin, 1992). Joe Pesci stars as Leon Bernstein, The Great Bernzini, a photographer of New York City crime scenes and street life, loosely based on Weegee (Arthur Fellig). Barbara Hershey stars as Kay Levitz, a nightclub owner in difficulty with the mob who looks to Bernzini for help. The plot seems beside the point, everything here being a matter of atmosphere, with an extraordinary degree of attention to sets and furnishings. The only character who’s not merely a type is Bernzini himself, though he is of course a type of Weegee. ★★★ (CC)

*

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (dir. Carl Reiner, 1982). It’s a simple, deftly managed premise: scenes from black-and-white noirs mixed into the (also black-and-white) story of a private eye (Steve Martin) and his client (Rachel Ward). Thus we get what might be called cameo appearances by (in order) Alan Ladd, Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Edward Arnold, Kirk Douglas, Fred MacMurray, and James Cagney. It’s fun, but the novelty wears off, and the juxtapositions aren’t especially funny. I would like to have seen the intertextuality extend to the older movies themselves, with, say, Ray Milland talking to Lana Turner. ★★★ (F)

*

Female on the Beach (dir. Jodrph Pevney, 1955). A wildly melodramatic, campy delight. Joan Crawford plays Lynn Markham, a recently widowed woman who moves into her late husband’s beach house. She just wants to be alone (that’s how she likes her coffee: alone!), but odd neighbors Osbert and Queenie Sorenson (Cecil Kellaway and Natalie Schafer) and their protégé of sorts, Drummond Hall (Jeff Chandler) make that difficult. The relationship that develops between Lynn and Drummy is, at every turn, bizarre, and why Drummy is the way he is, why he cannot “change,” and how Osbert and Queenie so quickly find another protégé are questions left unexplored — and maybe I’m reading too much into the movie. ★★★★ (CC)

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

NPR, sheesh

From a Consider This story. The subject is Kamala Harris’s effort to align herself with popular Biden administration policies while establishing her own candidacy:

“How is she walking that needle, and how are you going to look for that, particularly in the debate coming up?”

Maybe just listen for the screams?

You can walk a line. You can thread a needle. You can walk the line if you’re Johnny Cash. But you cannot walk a needle. Ouch.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)

[Know your clichés!]

Moleskine: seventy-five words

From Roland Allen’s “Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era” (The Walrus ), a brief commentary on the the prose in the little leaflet that comes with every Moleskine — which apparently ran to seventy-five words in the original Italian. The leaflet’s prose, in translation:

The Moleskine is an exact reproduction of the legendary notebook of Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse. Anonymous custodian of an extraordinary tradition, the Moleskine is a distillation of function and an accumulator of emotions that releases its charge over time. From the original notebook a family of essential and trusted pocket books was born. Hard cover covered in moleskine, elastic closure, thread binding. Internal bellowed pocket in cardboard and canvas. Removable leaflet with the history of Moleskine. Format 9 x 14 cm.

Allen’s commentary:

The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not “exact reproductions of the old”) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter. Pound for pound, those seventy-five words proved themselves among the most effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the product’s intangible qualities — usefulness and emotion — to its material specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. [Maria] Sebregondi and [Francesco] Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an Englishman, an American, and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations. “Made in China,” on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.

This piece is an excerpt from a new book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . I’m looking forward to reading it.

As I have confessed in these pages, I am a prisoner of Moleskine.

Related reading
All OCA Moleskine posts : notebook posts (Pinboard)

Labor Day

[“Commuters, who have just come off the train, waiting for the bus to go home, Lowell, Mass.” Photograph by Jack Delano. January 1941. From the Library of Congress Flickr pages. Click for a larger view.]

They also work who only stand and wait.

That’s Union Station, “Lowell’s main railroad station from 1894 to the 1950s.”

[“They also serve who only stand and wait”: John Milton, sonnet 19.]

“False balance” in the NYT

Margaret Sullivan, a former public editor of The New York Times, writes about “an ugly case of ‘false balance’” in that newspaper. It’s in a story about Kamala Harris’s and Donald Trump’s plans to increase afforable housing:

The story takes seriously Trump’s plan for the mass deportation of immigrants as part of his supposed “affordable housing” agenda.

Here’s some both-sidesing for you, as the paper of record describes Harris’s tax cuts to spur construction and grants to first-time home buyers, and Trump’s deportation scheme....

Stories like this run rampant in the Times, and far beyond. It matters more in the Times because — even in this supposed “post-media era” — the country’s biggest newspaper still sets the tone and wields tremendous influence. And, of course, the Times has tremendous resources, a huge newsroom and the ability to hire the best in the business. Undeniably, it does a lot of excellent work.

But its politics coverage often seems broken and clueless — or even blatantly pro-Trump.

When crosswords try to do jazz

I saw the answer coming Caleb Madison’s Atlantic crossword, but I couldn’t believe it: 8-D, eleven letters, “Basie handle.” Answer: KINGOFSWING.

Count Basie was was known as the Kid from Red Bank. But it was Benny Goodman who was known as the King of Swing.

See also the Los Angeles Times crossword and Duke Ellington, the New Yorker crossword and Jelly Roll Morton, and the New York Times crossword and Mel Tormé.

Empire of signs

[8 Columbus Circle, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

Can you spot the wingback chair?

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

[Post title borrowed from Roland Barthes’s book about Japan. La Marseillaise (dir. Jean Renoir) was released in 1938. I don’t know when it arrived in the States. Swanee River (dir. Sidney Lanfield) was released on December 30, 1939.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by the puzzle’s editor, Stan Newman. Its distinctive feature: five (count ’em, five) fifteen-letter answers. Yow!

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note, including those five:

2-D, fifteen letters, “Graze, say.” Hilarious, at least to me.

3-D, five letters, “King’s claim to musical fame.” I like that.

6-D, three letters, “Tall character in Son of Godzilla.” Quite a stretch.

11-D, fifteen letters, “‘Finally...’” I imagine a meeting going on and on. And on.

12-D, six letters, “Becomes a waiter, with ‘up.’” Didn’t fool me.

16-A, fifteen letters, “Kicks back, as boxes.” The first two words misdirect nicely.

21-A, four letters, “Capital consonants resembling two vowels.” I got it, but I need an explanation.

22-A, five letters, “Where rock bands hang out.” See 12-D.

26-A, five letters, “Multination org. named for its first five members (its ’23 summit included da Silva, Lavrov, Modi, Xi, and the ANC leader).” I suspect that the prolix clue is an acknowledgement that most solvers will have no idea what the answer is.

31-A, fifteen letters, “PVC product.” I didn’t see this answer coming.

34-D, eight letters, “Candide’s mentor.” I hadn’t thought of him in years.

49-A, fifteen letters, “‘Old Ironsides’ is the Army’s oldest.” Note: Army.

My favorite in this puzzle: 27-A, five letters, “Possible response to ‘Don’t know.’” Coming after 26-A, it’s appropriate.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Bacon, wind

[The Guardian, August 30, 2024. Click for a larger view.]

This headline alone makes me think that I should be supporting The Guardian.