Thirteen movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers.]

From the Criterion Channel feature Rebels at the Typewriter: Women Screenwriters of the 1930s

Working Girls (dir. Dorothy Azner, 1931). Sisters Mae and Hune (Dorothy Hall and Judith Wood) arrive in New York City, take up residence in a home for homeless young women, and seek work and romance. Paul Lukas plays a scientist in need of a secretary and a wife; Charles “Buddy” Rogers plays a lawyer in love with a socialite — at least for a while he is. Rigid class distinctions, enforced and overcome. Screenplay by Zoë Akins (friend of Willa Cather). ★★★

*

What Price Hollywood? (dir. George Cukor, 1932). The rise of Mary Evans (Constance Bennett) from waitress to movie star, “America’s Pal,” and the fall of Maximilian Carey (Lowell Sherman, who reminds me of Nathan Lane) from witty director to destitute drunk. This movie must have thrilled contemporary audiences with its scenes of work on movie sets. Some remarkable cinematography by Charles Rosher of Sunrise, particularly the desperate montage that comes late in the story. Screenplay by Jane Murfin, Ben Markson, and Allen Rivkin. ★★★★

*

Bed of Roses (dir. Gregory LaCava, 1933). Constance Bennett stars as Lorry Evans, a prostitute on parole who poses as a journalist in order to seduce a wealthy bachelor (Stephen Paige) and get herself set up in her own apartment, sleeping in, yes, a bed adorned with roses. But Lorry’s heart belongs to a lower-level capitalist, a cotton-barge owner (Joel McCrea), to whom she is afraid to reveal her past. A remarkably frank pre-Code story about sexual autonomy and class, with Pert Kelton (the first Alice Kramden) as Lorry’s sidekick and Franklin Pangborn as a floorwalker. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, Gregory LaCava, and Eugene Thackrey. ★★★★

*

Finishing School (dir. George Nicholls Jr. and Wanda Tuchock, 1934). Frances Dee is Virginia Radcliff, of the New York Radcliffs don’t you know, dumped by her mother (Billie Burke) at Crockett Hall Finishing School in New Jersey, where free-spirited roommate Pony (Ginger Rogers) revels in booze, cigarettes, and city weekends with louche Ivy League men. On one of those weekends, meek Virginia meets and falls for Ralph McFarland (Bruce Cabot), an interning doctor and all-around good guy who’s supporting himself as a hotel waiter. The relationship (which includes a night together in a boathouse) meets with the disapproval of mother Radcliff and the witch who runs Crockett (Beulah Bondi), but Virginia rebels, and Ralph tells off the classist authorities with the movie’s best line: “Maybe you don’t realize that the world’s too busy earning its three squares a day to worry about what fork to eat ’em with.” Screenplay by Laird Doyle and Wanda Tuchock. ★★★★

*

Rockabye (dir. George Cukor, 1932). Stage star Judy Carroll (Constance Bennett) is beset by trouble: with a former lover, an adopted toddler, an alcoholic mother, an agent who’s in love with her (Paul Lukas), and a married man she loves (Joel McCrea). A few moments of pre-Code eros, many moments of comedy (mostly via Jobyna Howland as Judy’s mother Snooks) and many moments of great pathos and stoic strength. This movie tears one’s heart out and then plays keepaway with it — just when it seems within reach, it’s gone again. Screenplay by Jane Murfin, from a play by Lucia Bronder. ★★★★

*

Midnight Mary (dir. William A. Wellman, 1933). Loretta Young as Mary Martin, a woman who from her orphan childhood has had nothing but bad breaks, with her life told in one long flashback as she awaits the jury’s verdict in her trial for murder. Ricardo Cortez and Franchot Tone appear as polar-opposite love interests in a pre-Code story full of mayhem and sex. Best scene: the dead body against the rattling door. Screenplay by Anita Loos, Gene Markey, and Kathryn Scola. ★★★★

*

You and Me (dir. Fritz Lang, 1938). A charmingly loopy effort, with Harry Carey is a department-store owner and altruist who employs ex-convicts, among them, one Joe (George Raft), who falls for shopgirl Helen (Sylvia Sidney). All’s well until the old gang wants to bring Joe in on a plan to rob the store. With familiar faces old and new: Roscoe Karns, Barton MacLane, George E. Stone, and a young Bob Cummings, who might have been good for a mystery-actor post, save that he already looks like Bob Cummings. Screenplay by Virginia Van Upp, Norman Krasna, and Jack Moffitt. ★★★★

*

Blondie of the Follies (dir. Edmund Goulding, 1932). Marion Davies stars as Blondie McClune, who rises from a three-generation-crowded Brooklyn apartment to a Broadway career and swank Manhattan digs. There’s one problem: Blondie and her best pal Lottie Callahan (Billie Dove) are both after the same fellow, Larry Belmont (Robert Montgomery), and as with Betty and Veronica, the rivalry goes on and on and on, and on. Weirdest moment, Davies and Jimmy Durante spoofing Grand Hotel (which Goulding directed). Screenplay by Frances Marion, Anita Loos, and Ralph Spence. ★★

*

Hold Your Man (dir. Sam Wood, 1933). Ruby (Jean Harlow) and Eddie (Clark Gable) meet when he ducks into her apartment and bathtub to avoid the cops. Ruby and Eddie are instantly attracted to one another, though many complications will follow, and Ruby will be sent off to a reformatory before the story comes to its end. Wildly funny, with poignant moments, slaps and punches, and plenty of snappy dialogue: “I got two rules I always stick to when I’m out visitin’: keep away from couches, and stay on your feet.” Screenplay by Anita Loos and Howard Emmett Rogers. ★★★★

*

Sadie McKee (dir. Clarence Brown, 1934). “Every gal has her price, and mine’s high”: so says Sadie McKee (Joan Crawford), daughter of a maid to wealthy business owners, one of whom, lawyer Michael (Franchot Tone) has been Sadie’s pal from childhood. When Michael fires Sadie’s boyfriend Tommy (Gene Raymond), the young couple flee to New York City, where many challenges await. Wealth comes back into the picture when Sadie meets the kind, shambling alcoholic Brennan (Edward Arnold, in a brilliant performance), but the lasting images in this movie are of deprivation and want: a miserable furnished room for rent, an abandoned piece of Automat pie rendered inedible with a cigarette butt. Screenplay by John Meehan, Viña Delmar, and Carey Wilson. ★★★★

*

Hallelujah (dir. King Vidor, 1929). An all-Black cast in a story of transgression and redemption: Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes, in a role meant for Paul Robeson), the oldest son in a family of sharecroppers, falls in with bad company in the form of Chick (Nina Mae McKinney), shoots his own brother in a barroom fracas, and finds redemption as the preacher Brother Ezekiel — though only for a while. As a story, it’s hackneyed, full of stereotypes and improbability (two stars), but as a record of folk forms on film and with sound, it’s invaluable (four stars): we see dancing, dicing, praying, preaching, mourning, and baptisms. The best scene: the train to hell. Screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, Richard Schayer, and Ransom Rideout. ★★/★★★★

*

Tugboat Annie (dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1932). Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery are Annie and Terry, operators of the tugboat Narcissus; she, a dedicated captain; he, a hapless alcoholic. Their son Alec (Robert Young) grows up to be a dashing young captain, engaged to the pretty cipher Pat (Maureen O’Sullivan). The comedy here is very thin — seeing someone drink hair tonic and stumble just isn’t funny — but the movie is partly redeemed by an exciting ending, when a storm rages and Terry risks his life to make repairs to the Narcissus. Screenplay by Norman Reilly Raine, Zelda Sears, and Eve Greene. ★★

*

Dinner at Eight (dir. George Cukor, 1933). It’s a big picture, à la Grand Hotel: “MORE STARS THAN HAVE EVER BEEN IN ANY PICTURE BEFORE,” screamed an advertisement, with John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Billie Burke, Marie Dressier, Jean Harlow, and many others on hand. But I found it dreadfully dull: a strained, stagey examination of the problems of the rich and the formerly rich, with some bright moments from John Barrymore, Dressler, and Harlow. Sometimes I felt that I was watching a 111-minute-long New Yorker cartoon: “I particularly wanted the aspic — it’s so dressy!” Screenplay by Frances Marion, Herman J. Mankiewicz, and George S. Kaufman. ★★

*

The other movies in this feature: ‌Back Street (dir. John M. Stahl, 1932), Make Way for Tomorrow (dir. Leo McCarey, 1937), and Red-Headed Woman (dir. Jack Conway, 1932). I’ve seen and can recommend them all. Make Way for Tomorrow is the movie that Orson Welles said “would make a stone cry.”

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

Review: The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (New York: Biblioasis, 2024). 416 pp. $19.95 paper.

        Cognitive processes ain’t (all) in the head!

        Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended
        Mind”

The philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers, quoted in the final pages of The Notebook, have made a compelling case that the materials of our thinking — say, a calcuator, or a Filofax — are rightfully considered parts of our cognitive processes, parts of an extended mind. Ludwig Wittgenstein offered a similar conclusion sans analytical argument:

“Thinking takes place in the head” really means only “the head is connected with thinking.” — Of course one says also “I think with my pen” and this localisation is at least as good.

And, of course, a pen needs something to think on, or in — say, a notebook.

Roland Allen’s The Notebook is a briskly paced, deeply researched, endlessly surprising account of the ways in which humankind has thought in notebooks. The story begins circa 1305 BCE with a beeswax diptych, and moves to the technologies of codex and paper and what their meeting (in Baghdad, circa 800 CE) made possible: many kinds of notebooks for many uses. Allen’s history includes accounting ledgers, sketchbooks, the bewildering variety of specific-use notebooks found in Renaissance Italy — ricordanzi (home account books), libri di segreti (for confidential business), libri di ricordi (memoirs), libri di famiglia (family books), and zibaldoni (personal miscellanies) — portolans (handbooks for navigators), musical treatises, commonplace books, travel journals, Stammbücher (autograph books), memory-tables (pocket-sized whiteboards), dated diaries (thanks to John Letts, 1811), police notebooks (often used for fiction, not fact), patient diaries (first used in Sweden, written by nurses and family members for those in intensive care, att ge tillbaka förlorad tid, “to give back lost time”), bullet journals, and now-mythologized Moleskines.

Along the way we encounter a variety of unusual characters, both unfamed and famed: among them, Michalli da Ruoda, or Michael of Rhodes, a fifteenth-century mariner who enlisted in the Venetian navy as an oarsman, rose through the ranks, and compiled a 400-page notebook of shipbuilding, navigation, mathematics, astrology, and heraldry; Adriaen Coenen, a sixteenth-century Dutch fish merchant who created an 800-page Visboek, or fishbook, with watercolors depicting aquatic life; and Isaac Newton, whose youthful notebooks included magic tricks and how-tos (e.g., how to make birds drunk), and whose later Waste Book held the seeds of his mathematical thinking. Most endearing is Bob Graham, one-time governor of and senator for Florida, whose habit of recording more or less everything in little spiral-bound notebooks (4,000 in all) became the subject of mockery when he was considered as a vice presidential pick. Most moving is Michael Rosen, the writer and broadcaster, who offers his eloquent gratitude to the medical staff who wrote his patient diary during his long ICU ordeal with COVID.

I find three people conspicuously missing from this book — and yes, I think there should be room for them: Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), whose notebooks of aphorisms, Pensées, are well known; Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1798), whose “waste books” or ‌Sudelbücher are also celebrated; and Arthur Inman (1895–1963), mediocre poet and maker of one of the strangest and longest diaries known. I jotted their names in my notebook while reading this Notebook.

Related reading
All OCA notebook posts : Twenty-two Joubert posts : Two Lichtenberg posts (Pinboard)

[“The Extended Mind” appeared in Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): 7–19. The Wittgenstein sentences are from Philosophical Grammar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Wittgenstein makes a number of similar statements elsewhere. Allen explains “waste book”: “for bookkeepers, and therefore for all writers of the period, a ‘waste book’ was the place where you made your first notes, on the fly. Later you would extract what you needed and copy it into the formal ledger.”]

Meta detective

One of several meta moments in this detective story.

Leonardo Sciascia, Equal Danger. 1971. Trans. Adrienne Foulke (New York: New York Review Books, 2003).

Two more Sciascia posts
From The Day of the Owl : From To Each His Own

Ladies & Gents Restaurant

[56 3rd Avenue, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

On the Lower East Side, another 56 3rd Avenue. I was ready to write that as in Brooklyn, a large building now bears the 56, but this Manhattan building and its neighbors are still standing. At no. 56 today (or at least recently), Saki, a “sushi restaurant in minimalist digs.” They’d be unlikely to offer the sauerkraut cocktail that William Lins, successor to L. Reinken, offered. (Look closely.)

At no. 52, Sig. Klein’s Fat Men’s Shop. Could this be where Ed Norton bought the spats he gives Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners episode “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”?

[Click for a larger view.]

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

Who uses libraries most?

From the Washington Post Department of Data (gift link): “Who uses public libraries the most?”

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by “Anna Stiga,” Stan Again, Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, offering an easier Stumper of his own making. Easier it was. I took me twenty-odd minutes, with some difficulty in the northwest that cleared up with 4-D, three letters, “Traffic stopper.” Note to self: read every clue.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-D, six letters, “Go downhill fast.” Wonderful word.

9-D, five letters, “Tried to keep one’s seat.” Stumper-y.

14-A, eight letters, “One-third power.” POSEIDON would fit (sharing rule with Zeus and Hades).

24-D, seven letters, “Verb coined by Lewis Carroll.” A gift.

26-D, seven letters, “Silhouette border.” I kept thinking of the people with scissors who appear at old-timey recreations.

30-A, five letters, “Pajama-clad title character of a ’51 film.” And look what follows.

31-A, three letters, “Big ape.” Ha!

40-A, eight letters, “Batcave facility.” But of course.

63-A, eight letters, “Sarcastic show of support.” New to me. I’ve seen it but didn’t know the name.

My favorite in this puzzle: 3-D, six letters, “Instrument made from bamboo.” SHAKUHACHI just wouldn’t fit.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Der Deppenapostroph

From The Guardian, “Germans decry influence of English as ‘idiot’s apostrophe’ gets official approval”:

A relaxation of official rules around the correct use of apostrophes in German has not only irritated grammar sticklers but triggered existential fears around the pervasive influence of English.

Establishments that feature their owners’ names, with signs like “Rosi’s Bar” or “Kati’s Kiosk” are a common sight around German towns and cities, but strictly speaking they are wrong: unlike English, German does not traditionally use apostrophes to indicate the genitive case or possession....

However, guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography have clarified that the use of the punctuation mark colloquially known as the Deppenapostroph (“idiot’s apostrophe”) has become so widespread that it is permissible – as long as it separates the genitive ‘s’ within a proper name.

The article notes that a spelling guide used in schools and public institutions gives “Eva’s Blumenladen” (Eva’s Flower Shop) and “Peter’s Taverne” (Peter’s Tavern) as acceptable spellings but proscribes “Eva’s Brille” (“Eva’s glasses”). Because Brille is plural?

*

October 12: There’s now an explanation in the comments that seems right: “Eva’s Blumenladen” is a proper noun, the name of a particular shop, but “Eva’s Brille” isn’t. Thanks to Cassidy Napoli for bringing things into focus.

[And it has to be said: the apostrophe is not a matter of grammar. I agree with Geoffrey Pullum that it’s not even a matter of punctuation. It’s a matter of spelling.]

ColorNoise

As I discovered this morning, the Background Sounds feature in macOS Sequoia shuts off for no apparent reason. At least I know it’s not just my problem.

An alternative: the free app ColorNoise: white, pink, and brown noise, available from the menu bar. But you won’t see that Neapolitan ice-cream icon in the menu bar: up there it’s just in black and white.

Note: this app works only from the menu bar. The icon in the dock won’t do a thing. So add the app to your login items and you can then run ColorNoise (and hide the dock icon) via the menu bar.

Thank you, Peter Hafner!

A related post
Noisy macOS, noisy iOS

Overheard

[In a grocery aisle.]

“I’ve heard of those Oreos.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

The Guardian on Milton

From an editorial:

What marks Florida out is the disparity between the concern rightly given to the consequences of the storms and the widespread unwillingness of many there to acknowledge the causes of extreme weather – still less the role in it that the US plays. It has the greatest planet-heating emissions per capita of the top 10 emitters. Global heating makes preparing for such events, and recovering from their consequences, more essential than ever. But it is ludicrous to take such steps without also addressing what is making them more extreme and more frequent.

Clarity itself. Nothing yet from The New York Times editorial board.