The Best American Poetry

"What Hath Gable Got?" Rhett Butler in "It Happened One Night" [by David Lehman]

I could have called it "Hail to the King" or "Odysseus Hitches a Ride," but I went with "What Hath Gable Got?" for my American Scholar piece on the actor who played Rhett Butler & won Claudete Colbert's heart in "It Happened One Night":

As a college student, I watched Gone with the Wind at a Times Square theater where the 1939 film was enjoying a revival. At the first appearance of Clark Gable-as-Rhett Butler standing at the base of a spiral staircase and looking up, the woman sitting next to me, who was old enough to be my mother, blurted out, “God bless him.” At one of the film’s climactic moments, Rhett Butler mounts that spiral staircase with the indomitable Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh at her most ravishing) in his arms.

No male actor exuded as much confidence and devilish sex appeal as this six-foot-one fellow with the best pencil mustache in the business. In his other movies, Gable frequently plays a variation of Rhett Butler. He is the take-charge guy, the born winner, whom it is impossible to dislike—unless you’re Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who characterized Gable as a “well-tailored roughneck.”

Gable is the American male as he would like to be: crafty, capable, sure of himself, equal to any situation. Born and raised in Ohio, he loved literature and used to recite Shakespeare’s sonnets to friends. Devastated by the loss of his wife, the actress Carole Lombard, who died in a plane crash, he joined the U. S. Air Force in World II and flew operational missions over Europe in B-17s. Undershirts went out of style when Gable took off his shirt to reveal a bare chest in Frank Capra’s sublime 1934 comedy, It Happened One Night, in which Gable plays a brash newspaperman who wins runaway heiress Claudette Colbert’s heart—much to his surprise, and hers.

It was in It Happened One Night that Gable established what we today would call his brand. When we first encounter him, he is on a public phone, getting fired, and his boss hangs up on him. Several of his journalist pals are listening, and Gable doesn’t let on that he has lost the phone connection, let alone his job. With a show of bravado, he declares that he wouldn’t come back even if his boss begged him to, “and let that be a lesson to you.” He hangs up, and his chums hail him as “the almighty king.” The character’s real name is ordinary, Peter Warne, but he is more kingly than the patrician “King” Westley (Jameson Thomas), a stuffed shirt to whom the mixed-up Ellen Andrews (Colbert) is engaged. Ellen expresses her ambivalence about the nuptials by running away from her upper-crust home to the buses and trailer parks of the common folk.

Gable is a hero on the model of Odysseus. Luck favors him. On the bus from Florida to New York in It Happened One Night, he takes the one available seat, which happens to be the seat next to Ellen. She wants nothing to do with Peter, but after much disputation, they join forces. To scare the dickens out of a pest who has recognized Ellen from a newspaper photo, Peter assumes the identity of a gangster. As if to proclaim his destiny, he presents himself at a motor lodge as the husband of this chic woman with the wide eyes, the semi-circle eyebrows, and effortless charm.

For the rest of this piece, click here to reach the current "Talking Pictures" column on the web site of The American Scholar.

Homage to "Laura" [by John Harbourne]

Diptych by John Harbourne. Copyright (c) 2022 by John Harbourne. All rights reserved.
John Harbourne has made similar drawings of many other noir figures. www.johnharbourneartist.com

Laura

Then the doorbell rang.
Time for one more cigarette.
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
He is not in love with a corpse

Time for one more cigarette.
The venomous drama critic insinuates
He is in love with a corpse.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.

The venomous drama critic knows
He is sane.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.
He thinks she is dead and she thinks he is rude.

Is he sane?
Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
He thinks she is a ghost and she thinks he is rude
When the picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman.

Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
It hasn’t stopped raining.
The picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman:
Gene Tierney in Laura.

It hasn’t stopped raining.
“Dames are always pulling a switch on you,”
"Dana Andrews says in Laura.
There was something he was forgetting.

“Dames are always pulling a switch on you.”
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
There was something he was forgetting.
Then the doorbell rang.

-- David Lehman

"Laura" is taken from David Lehman's book The Mysterious Romance of Murder, pubished by Cornell University Press in 2022. Copyright (c) 2022 by David Lehman.

Andrzej Wajda: Ashes and Diamonds (1958) [by Lewis Saul]

Creeping authoritarianism. Teetering democracy. Dangerous political leadership.

No, I'm not talking about the U.S. of A. but the centuries of sadness which is synonymous with the historically chopped-up country of POLAND.

Specifically, the 24-hour period (May 8-9, 1945) during which this film takes place and the year it was made -- 1958.

**

Josef Stalin's death in 1953 ushered in a period which is sometimes referred to as the "Stalinist thaw." The ground was still pretty frozen, but a few sprigs were sprouting up in both the Soviet Union and its satellites. Shostakovich enraged the dictator with his Ninth Symphony (1945) which -- instead of a paean to the glorious victory of The Patriotic War -- was a lighthearted, short jokey affair. He saved the good stuff for his Tenth (1953), which at the same time as dealing with the tragedy of the war, also included a biting satirical portrait of the madman.

The Polish October (1956) ushered in a period of astonishing artistic freedom for Polish artists -- a mere three years after the death of Josef Stalin -- we get the outrageously cutting-edge music of Penderecki and Lutoslawski, and a trilogy of war films from the young Andrzej Wajda. [The first two were A Generation (1955) and Kanal (1957), about the Warsaw resistance.]

**

Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) have made a big mistake. In one of the many striking scenes in this film (influenced by Citizen Kane), Andrzej is on the phone with his superior -- Major Florian (Ignacy Machowski). The mistake must be corrected, but not before Wajda shows us the three important characters in deep focus -- Andrzej in the foreground on the phone; Maciek desperately trying to get Andrzej's attention and the survivor of the mistake in the far background, Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzezynski).


Maciek -- looking so cool in his sunglasses (a result of spending so much time in the Warsaw sewers, he casually informs us) -- is the central character. He represents the anti-Communist freedom fighter, but Communism and the Communists (along with the aristocracy) all saddle up to the bar together. [Wajda had the censors so confused that they passed the film (to much subsequent consternation) after a few rounds of vodka.]

Drewnowski (Bogumil Kobiela) -- the aide to the mayor, Swiecki (Aleksander Sewruk) -- seems to be swinging on the hinges of the door between the two sides. He had big prospects for advancement with the Communists, but blows it all by purposefully getting stinking drunk at the big banquet he was supposed to be organizing. His transformation of a fire extinguisher to a gun is one of the more hilarious moments in the film.

Last, but certainly not least, is the gorgeous Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska). She is all women, confounding the men's political work by intense, focused love. In the end, Maciek is obviously much more interested in her than any political theatre.

But alas ...

Cybulski

Hail Kelly Full of Grace [by David Lehman]

Born today, Grace Kelly was twenty-six when she married Prince Ranier and became the princess of Monaco. Thus ended a brief but magnificent cinematic career. Astrologically, her charm, beauty, and royalty are all prefigured in her chart: Scorpio is not only her birth sign but also her rising sign! Born on Philadelphia on November 11, 1929 -- on Veterans' Day, just two weeks after the stock market crashed -- Grace had the perfect first name, face, height (5'7), and acting chops. Her status as an Earth Snake (in Chinese astrology) with a magic number of 8 prefigured her fate. If only her moon had not been in OPisces, she might have lived a longer life; she died in a car crash in 1982, months shy of her fifty-third birthday. "I can't see myself as an old woman," she confided. "I will always be the model on the cover of Harper's Bazaar." Gracve Kelly shares her birthday with Demi Moore, Leonardo Di Caprio, and Dostoyevsky.

Whether playing a quaker lady dressed in virginal white in the Wild West (High Noon), or lounging amid the leading luminaries of Newport society while Louis Armstrong plays his trumpet (High Society), Grace Kelly was one of the most glamorous of all the screen queens of the 1950s, a Harper's Bazaar cover girl who enjoys dinners at 21, vacations in St. Tropez, and knows how to plan a picnic or stand up to a killer. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra sang to her. Did Cary Grant prefer her (in To Catch a Thief) to Ingrid Bergman (in Notorious)? Did Hitchcock? In Mogambo (1953), she competes with Ava Gardner for Clark Gable's affections. Little-known fact: Bennington College rejected her application because her mathematics scores were not up to snuff. Given the choice of playing against James Stewart in Rear Window or Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, she chose the former. That may be all ye know of her, and all ye need to know.   --DL

Krzysztof Kiešlowski: Three Colors Trilogy

Krzysztof Kiešlowski was born in Warsaw, Poland on June 27, 1941. After two attempts and two rejections, he was finally admitted to the Łódź Film School on his third try. His first major success came in 1989, when he made the stunningly brilliant  Dekalog, a series of ten films made for Polish television – each film a cinematic comment on the Ten Commandments. 

The next year, he formed a partnership with the Romanian producer Marin Karmitz, with whom he made his last four magnificent films. 

The Double Life of Véronique (1990) was a success, and Kiešlowski immediately began planning his final three films -- the trilogy, Three Colors. All three films are scored by Zbigniew Preisner, but Kiešlowski used a different cinematographer for each film. 
 
It is important to watch these three films in the correct order (as in the French flag) -- otherwise one will miss important segues and sequences (and spoilers!) which will lessen the impact of these three films – perhaps the most brilliant trilogy of 20th-century filmmaking.

Blue (1993) 

The first shot in Blue is a rush of high-speed traffic, filmed from the bottom of a car, at wheel level. One immediately notices how the color blue is reflecting off every surface, and indeed the color will permeate the film, obsessively built into its fabric, as a matter of design. (On my Criterion Blog review, I detail all the spots throughout the film where blue is prominent.) 
 
We are in Paris. Juliette Binoche is Julie Vignon, her husband is Patrice de Courcy (Hugues Quester), a well-respected composer tasked with writing a grand cantata to celebrate the unification of Europe, aka the newly-founded European Union. 

Other important characters are Olivier (Benoit Régent), Sandrine (Florence Pernel), and Lucille – a prostitute – played by Charlotte Véry. 

The music composed by de Courcy (Preisner) is tonal, with a chorus singing the text of 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 (“Love is patient”) in Greek. (Greek chorus?) Kiešlowski uses many close-ups of the actual manuscript paper, panning the written notes as the score plays. 

Look for an extreme-close-up (ECU) of a sugar cube turning brown as it’s dipped into some coffee! 

White (1994) 

A new cinematographer is on board to capture the frozen white tundra of post-Soviet Poland – Edward Klosinski -- in this anti-comedy or anti-love story ... 

A suitcase clunks along an airport conveyor belt, under the opening credits: Cut to Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski)’s feet. He slows down and stops next to two pairs of feet. The camera pans up and we see his face, confused. He starts to walk again – the attentive viewer will notice that the other feet belong to a couple, kissing. We are still in Paris. 

We meet Karol’s French wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy), and later, when Karol is in the Metro playing an old Polish song on comb-and-paper, he meets a fellow Pole, Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos). 
 
The film then moves to Warsaw, as Karol finds himself in a bleak, desolate landscape – a garbage dump. His first words speak volumes: 

“Jesus, home at last” 

The filmmaker drags us along on a strange, but exciting adventure which can only end one way. He leaves the viewer hanging a bit, as it is necessary to see Red to find out how things ultimately resolve … 

Red (1994) 

A third cinematographer – Piotr Sobocinski … 

The opening scene completes Kiešlowski’s subterranean triplet (in Blue, under a car, in White, underground conveyor belt, and here, underground telephone lines). In a tour-de-force montage, the filmmaker takes us on a breathtaking voyage from telephone to telephone. (Pre-cell phone) … 

We are in Geneva now, and Irène Jacob is Valentine, a model. She accidentally hits a dog with her car, and tracks down the owner – a retired judge, Joseph Kern (a magnificent Jean-Louis Trintignant). 
 
Valentine: “Excuse me … the door was open. I’m sorry, I think I ran over your dog. Rita. A German Shepherd.
Judge Kern: [displaying little interest]: “It’s possible. She disappeared yesterday.” 
Valentine: “She’s in my car. Alive. I don’t know what to do.” [no response from the Judge] … “Would you like me to take her to a vet?” 
Judge [still displaying no interest]: “As you wish.” 
Valentine: “If I ran over your daughter, would you react the same way?” 
Judge [displaying no emotion]: “I don’t have a daughter, miss.” 

A deeply thought-out cinematic reverie on life, love, relationships, emotions, consequences, Kiešlowski pulls out all the stops, using his polished technique to film scenes taking place in physically distinct spaces by using crane shots, and thrilling pans and push-ins. The technique never shows, however, as the director always keeps the story – particularly the interior aspects of the characters’ lives and actions – at the forefront.

See "Picnic" on Labor Day [by DL]

Hal Carter (William Holden), a football star in college and a failure at everything since, hops off a freight train with nothing but the ragged shirt on his back. He arrives at a last resort: the small town in Kansas where his fraternity mate, Alan Benson (Cliff Robertson), the well-to-do son of an industrialist, lives. It is Labor Day, 1955, and everyone has the day off, but Hal offers to do back-yard work for Mrs. Potts (Verna Felton), the kindly old lady who feeds him and obligingly offers to wash his shirt, thus giving us a look at his buff, shaven chest.

The “us” in that last sentence includes Benson’s girlfriend, Madge Owens (Kim Novak at her most stunning). At the town’s annual Labor Day picnic, Madge will be crowned the Queen of the Neewollah (Halloween spelled backwards). Many, including Millie (Susan Strasberg), Madge’s young sister, drink too much at the picnic, and Hal gets blamed for everything that goes wrong.

Neither Holden nor Novak is a natural dancer, but when they dance at the picnic to the tune of “Moonglow,” the sparks fly. Whereas Novak and James Stewart play out a passionate romance on the interior level of the psyche in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the physical attraction between Novak and Holden is electric. Benson castigates the “same old Hal” to whom he had earlier promised a job, albeit as a “wheat scooper” rather than the executive positon Hal had unrealistically hoped for. Hal leaves town the same way he arrived, only this time, Madge packs a suitcase and plans to take a bus to meet him in Tulsa.

Rosalind Russell and Arthur O’Connell give outstanding performances as the town’s frustrated schoolmarm and her reluctant suitor, who must settle for what small-town life can give them. Joshua Logan directed this film adaptation of William Inge’s Broadway play. See Picnic on Labor Day weekend if you can. It’s hot.

For recommendations on movies for Halloween (Aresenic and Old Lace) and Thanksgiving (Hannah and Her Sisters), click here here for my "Talking Pictures" feature that appeared in The American Scholar of August 28, 2021.

The Allure of the Enigmatic: Antonioni's "Blow-Up" [by David Lehman]

From The American Scholar (August 25, 2022). Here are the opening paragraphs of my latest "Talking Features" piece:

<<<<

When it was released in 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up blew the minds of student cineastes and literary intellectuals at Columbia University—including me. Having just entered the college as a freshman, I sat at the feet of the elders at The Columbia Review and King’s Crown Essays and took a crash course in cinema as an art form.

In avant-garde circles in general, there was a cult around such European directors as Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Agnès Varda. Antonioni’s Italian-language movies—L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’Eclisse (1962)— offered an attractive blend of enigma, ennui, eros, existential fatigue, and Monica Vitti.

L’Avventura has a beginning and middle, but no true end. The character played by Lea Massari disappears; her disaffected lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend (Vitti) try to find her, and the film arrives at no resolution. It would be as if, having done away with his heroine 45 minutes into Psycho, Hitchcock failed to provide an explanation and a compensatory story to make up for her absence. The ambiguity in L’Avventura goes up a notch in Blow Up.

Antonioni based Blow-Up, his first English-language feature, on a story by the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar. He set the film in London, “mod” headquarters in the heyday of the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and psychedelic nightclubs. David Hemmings plays Thomas, a nervy fashion photographer with artistic instincts. Besides taking pictures of professional models who resemble heavily made-up mannequins, he spends his time fending off wannabe models, visiting an antiques dealer, and going to pubs and clubs.

There’s a very hot scene featuring Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills trying on clothes and playing sex games with the photographer. In an American movie, such scenes would have a bearing on the plot. Here they are all red herrings, though they do contribute to the movie’s powerful atmospheric effects.

When Thomas ducks out on a photo session, he takes his camera with him to a park. There, in an otherwise unpeopled patch of meadow, he clicks away at a man and a woman in a clandestine embrace. When Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), the woman in the scene, becomes aware of what he is doing, she hurries over to confront him. She demands the roll of film. She even follows him back to his studio, evidently prepared to go to any length to recover the photos. After shaking Jane off by giving her a false roll, Thomas develops the film, makes enlargements, and lo, there is a gun in the bushes.

Is there also a corpse? Has Thomas inadvertently photographed a murder? What should he do about it? Hemmings hems and haws, which the soundtrack anticipates: The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” plays in the background earlier in the film.

There are elements of the classic murder mystery in Blow-Up. A dead body is there, and then it isn’t. The incriminating photos are there, and then, because the photographer’s studio with the incriminating enlargements has been ransacked, they’re gone. The effect is less a matter of suspense than of paranoia and perplexity. If the film has an allegorical dimension, it is that great shibboleth of the ’60s: “Nothing is real”—or, more exactly, nothing can stand the test of empirical existence unless it is recorded. To an extent, then, the movie is about movies, what we see versus what we think we see.

Besides the cunning ambiguity of the plot, I would single out two other elements that distinguish this major movie: Blow-Up offers a beguiling snapshot of the Zeitgeist, and it ends marvelously, with an unforgettable final sequence.

The spirit of London’s Swinging Sixties pervades the movie. It is as if everyone is high. In a club, the Yardbirds—a popular band, with Jeff Beck on guitar—perform their song “Stroll On.” When Beck smashes his guitar on stage and throws the neck of the instrument into the crowd, a frenzied fight for the souvenir ensues. Thomas gets into the thick of it and emerges triumphant. Leaving the club with his trophy, he soon throws it away. And when a passerby picks it up, looks it over, and discards it, the parable on what constitutes value is complete.

At a party for which jazz pianist Herbie Hancock provides the score, Thomas encounters the beautiful German model Verushka. “I thought you were supposed to be in Paris,” he says. “I am in Paris,” she replies, puffing on a joint. Before the evening is over, Thomas will take LSD with his agent, Ron.  At dawn he returns to the park, expecting to find the corpse he saw earlier, only it is no longer there.

Going home, Thomas comes across mimes at a tennis court, playing with invisible balls and rackets. They gesture to show that their ball is lost and ask Thomas to retrieve it. He does as instructed, miming the action, and then the camera pulls back, Thomas vanishes, and the inevitable murmur from the audience tells us that we have seen something extraordinary, the allure of the enigmatic.
>>>>

For more, click here. https://theamericanscholar.org/the-allure-of-the-enigmatic/

Alfred Hitchcock's Fate Was In His Stars [by David Lehman]

At 3:15 in the morning, in London, England, one hundred and twenty-something years ago today, the great film director Alfred Hitchcock was born, a solid Leo with a macabre imagination (moon in Scorpio). When August 13 falls on a Friday, as in 1993, 1999, and 2021,you may expect bats to fly in through the slightest opening in the bathroom window, and the phone will ring at 11 PM and it will be someone you have never met, who asks you for a job and sounds drunk. Hitchcock was short (5'5) and stout and perhaps unaware that he shared his birthday with both Annie Oakley and Fidel Castro.

There is a tremendous amount of fire in his natal chart (see below): more than 50%. This accounts for his energy, drive, ambition. The water in his chart, topping 18%, indicates a man of subtlety and sensitivity. He has three times as much yang as yin in his personality, and no one should be surprised to learn that a man whose dominant planets are the sun, Venus, and Mars may luxuriate in bathtubs in the English manner and have an almost phobic distrust of showers, which comes through in such movies as "Vertigo" (in which Kim Novak does not drown in the Pacific Ocean) and "Pyscho" (in which Janet Leigh meets her shocking fate behind a torn curtain). Leo, Sagittarius, and Scorpio are the predominant signs of a man whose self-confidence can lead him to commit the sin of pride. I hear that Janet Leigh greatly prefers baths to showers and has ever since working with Hitch.

A picture of the master of suspense emerges from a study of Hitchcock's chart. He is a Roman Catholic; a lover of blondes (especially American blondes); and a prankster of the imagination who knows that a straight face is best for effects either comic or scary and that the best way to get an actor and an actress to understand their parts as quarreling lovers is to handcuff them together and lock them in a room overnight, as in the filming of "The 39 Steps."

When he was a boy, Hitchcock's dad sent him to the local police constabulary with a note instructing the officer on duty to lock the boy in jail for a few hours. This experience had the desired effect on the lad, who worked out his guilt complex by dispatching heroes, heroines, and villains to their deaths from the top of a church tower or the Statue of Liberty; from a moving train, or in a wood stove, or by an attack of killer birds, or in an out-of-control merry-go-round at an amusement park, or by a nasty piece of goods who uses his necktie as a strangling device, or sometimes with a gun, a knife, or a pair of handy scissors. The leonine Hitchock had his sun and his Venus in Leo. This makes him a most logical man, a constant man, generous in his affections but domineering, and almost tyrannically loyal to his lovers and friends.

Given this man's stellar combination of assertive confidence and deep-seated guilt, it comes as no surprise to students of the great man's chart that (1) the great Hitchcock actors (male) tend to be old-fashioned types (James Stewart, Cary Grant) rather than the method-trained new breed; (2) in some (not all) of the best Hitchcock movies, the villain is either more interesting than the hero (Robert Walker versus Farley Granger in "Strangers on a Train"), suave and attractive(James Mason in "North by Northwest," Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder") or exceptionally complicated in an attractive way (e.g., Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt,"  the birds in "The Birds," the real imposter in "Spellbound")); and (3) the perfect Hitchcock heroines are Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Teresa Wright, and Tippi Hedren. Hitch shows us the craziness inside every man and his (almost invariably) blonde fantasy lady.

A tip of the fedora to Bernard Herrmann, a June Cancer, who wrote the music of Hitchcock's mind as well as soundtracks for such movies as "Citizen Kane" and Brian de Palma's  underrated "Obsession." -- DL

Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.

from the archive; first published August 13, 2015

"The Prophecy of an Assassination": On "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) [by David Lehman]

When The Manchurian Candidate, based on the novel by Richard Condon, was released in 1962, Pauline Kael called it “the most sophisticated political satire ever to come out of Hollywood.” Six decades on, the judgment holds, and I’ll go further. With its mind-bending plot, its celebrated brainwashing sequence, and stellar performances from a cast led by Frank Sinatra, Angela Lansbury, Laurence Harvey, and Janet Leigh, director John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece remains supreme in the field of conspiracy-theory celluloid.

An honorable but inevitably lesser effort, Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake starring Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep, lacks the air of Cold War menace, not to mention the queen of diamonds in a game of solitaire as the trigger for a sleeper agent. Also lost is the cinematic magic of the original. Frankenheimer makes exemplary use of montage dissolve techniques to convey altered states of consciousness and depict the experience of hypnotic mind control. And, in retrospect, his 1962 movie seems almost to have anticipated either the earth-shaking events of November 22, 1963, or their interpretation.

Political scientists used to define politics as the art of the possible. If it has morphed into the craft of manipulative paranoia, the change dates back to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission’s report satisfied few skeptics, journalists, or serious historians, and the credibility of politicians (who used to be called “statesmen”) keeps ebbing.

The Manchurian Candidate, which presaged the change, presents a plot to assassinate a presidential candidate by long-range rifle during his party’s nominating convention in Madison Square Garden. The movie’s conceit was so scary that studio executives at United Artists felt the project had to be cleared with the White House. Frank Sinatra dutifully called JFK, who greenlit the film, which Sinatra believed in so strongly that he volunteered the use of his private plane for an early scene in the movie.

Talk about serendipity: On October 22, 1962, only two days before the picture’s release, President Kennedy announced to the nation that he had ordered a naval blockade to repulse Russian ships, equipped with missiles, heading to the Caribbean. The Cuban Missile Crisis has been seen ever since as the tensest moment in the 45-year Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and here was a movie advancing the thesis that a Communist assassination plan was in the works.

The Manchurian Candidate is wickedly satirical. Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a demagogue in the manner of Joe McCarthy, is revealed to be an imbecile under the thumb of his ambitious, intellectually superior wife, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury at her best). What happened to her first husband? The movie, mum on the point, offers an Oedipal triangle in which Mrs. Iselin controls her war hero son, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), and gets him to eliminate her rival, his bride (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of Senator Iselin’s fiercest, most principled opponent (John McGiver). Lansbury was less than three years older than Harvey. In the novel, she seduces him; in the film, just a kiss on the lips, but it’s enough.

What most distinguishes The Manchurian Candidate is its opening. If you miss the first five minutes of Hamlet, you can catch up (at the cost of some excellent verse), because the ghost does not appear to Hamlet until act I, scene 4 and doesn’t speak to him until scene 5. But, as the movie’s theatrical release poster accurately proclaimed, “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about.” The film begins in Korea, 1952. Betrayed by a guide, an American army unit is ambushed. After Saul Bass’s marvelous title credits, featuring the queen of diamonds on an oversize political campaign button, we go to an American airport, where Sergeant Shaw, survivor of the ambush, is honored with hoopla for the valor he is said to have displayed under fire.

In the following scene, the camera slowly approaches Shaw’s commanding officer, Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra), asleep beside an insomniac’s paradise of books, among them The Trial, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Ulysses. Marco, who nominated Shaw for his medal, slides into a recurring nightmare of what really happened in Korea.

The brainwashing sequence begins with the captive GIs in their army fatigues on a stage. The audience appears to the men, in their trance, to consist of dowagers in sunhats who have gathered to talk about hydrangeas at a suburban garden party in New Jersey. In fact, the ladies in the audience are Russian and Chinese bigwigs, and Frankenheimer switches us back and forth between alternating versions, the harmless old women and the malevolent Communists in suits or uniforms. Then we watch in horror as, under orders, Shaw kills two of his fellow POWs while the other soldiers look on, affectless.

Like Major Marco, Corporal Al Melvin (James Edwards) has recurrent nightmares culminating in a public murder committed by Shaw. And, like Major Marco, he is programmed to say, when asked, that “‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Everyone says so, and it’s odd, because Raymond is a singularly cold, humorless fellow whom the men dislike..

The buried truth—that the recipient of a Congressional Medal of Honor, feted with fanfare, is a secret, trigger-ready weapon concocted by the enemy—created a mental shock to anyone who saw The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. (I was 14 years old, and amazed.) The plot: to engineer the nomination of the clownish Senator Iselin for the position of vice president, then to kill the man at the head of the ticket, paving the way for Iselin’s rise to that position. The paranoid paradox: the extreme right-wing John Iselin is really a clueless Communist placeholder. The brains of the operation: Eleanor Iselin, as icily ruthless as Lady MacBeth.

Marco, the veteran suffering from PTSD who tries to save Shaw from his predestined fate, looks like a man having a nervous breakdown, but he must have something going for him, because the glamorous and beautiful Rosie Cheyney (Janet Leigh) is willing to break her engagement to her fiancé on the basis of a shared cigarette with Marco on the train between Washington, D. C. and New York City. Although Leigh is extraneous to the plot, I have published a poem contending that the only justification needed for Janet Leigh’s presence in the movie is that she is Janet Leigh. More creatively, Roger Ebert argues that in the paranoid universe of The Manchurian Candidate, Leigh may secretly be Sinatra’s controller.

I will not give away other surprises and speculations except to say that the guises assumed by the queen of diamonds will endow that particular card with a rare significance if you are a part-time poker player. An amusing scene takes place in Jilly’s, Sinatra’s favorite New York hangout. When the bartender, telling a story, says, “Go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake,” Raymond—a solitaire addict who has just encountered the trigger card—does as told. Marco has to fish him out.

The Manchurian Candidate has altered political discourse, and the very word brainwashing has acquired a stink. The evil mesmerist-in-chief, Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), crows that Raymond Shaw’s “brain has not only been washed, as they say; it’s been dry-cleaned.” In 1967, George Romney shot his presidential candidacy in the foot when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because US generals had “brainwashed” him. Recently, Donald Trump has been depicted as a “Manchurian candidate,” allegedly willing to favor the Russians in exchange for lucrative real-estate deals.

But The Manchurian Candidate offers more than a linguistic afterlife, thrilling paranoia, and the cunning of Eleanor Iselin. It succeeds as well as it does because of the strong sense of the uncanny that informs it, as if we were watching our own history rendered as a spooky hallucination, delivered with the plausibility of a newsreel.

Click here for the "Talking Pictures" column on The American Scholar, January 22, 2022.

"Our Love Affair": Which one? [by David Lehman]

Unsung heroes Arthur Freed (left; who produced The Wizard of Oz and rescued "Over the Rainbow" from extinction) and Roger Edens (who composed the "Dear Mr Gable" intro to "You Made Me Love You" for Judy Garland) teamed up to write the "Love Affair" that I prefer of the two great contenders in movie history. The rival, composed by Harry Warren, orchestrates the 1957 Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr tear-jeker,An Affair to Remember. That one has its appeal, god knows; I believe Nora Ephron regards the film and everything about it as the epitome of romance, and it's great for the string section.

But the one I vote for is the musical emblem of Strike Up the Band (1940) -- a movie directed by Busby Berkeley, in which, in one show-within-a-show scene, "demi-tasse" is the unlikely euphemism for hanky-panky. "Our Love Affair" carries the overture beyond the Gershwin title track, is sung thirteen minutes into the movie by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, and recurs throughout as background music for the young romantics. I love Freed's lyrics in general -- he also wrote the songs in "Singin' in the Rain." I will write more about him some other time -- about Roger Edens, too, who, according to reliable sources, shared a birthday (November 9) with Kay Thompson. From 1942 through 1957 they gave joint birthday parties during which each presented a surprise production number using special material featuring their friends— Garland, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly, Dorothy Dandridge, Maureen O'Hara, Ray Bolger, Ann Sothern, Danny Kaye, Charles Walters, Cole Porter, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane — with secret rehearsals, and neither telling the other what to expect.  Anyway -- See Strike Up the Band once and you'll know "Our Love Affair" forever.

The tenderness here coexists with brass. The song can be done in swing time or full of the most wistful longing. If you get a chance listen to the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra with the Sentimental Gentleman himself on the 'bone and boy singer Sinatra (24 or 25).  crooning the words.

https://youtu.be/sy_A62FKpbE?t=1

  -- DL

The Importance of Martin Guerre -- Part One [by Joe Lehman]

"Martin Guerre: Now and Then; Then and Now" [by Joe Lehman]

PART ONE

“Land to last, as it's passed, man to son, when it's done as planned. Then we'll pray it will stay as good Catholic land.”

After the experience of living through the past four years, this lyric sounds a lot like Make America Great Again. At least, that was the thought that came to mind when I listened to the music of Martin Guerre in the summer of 2018.

I had the privilege of attending one of the original performances of the short-lived musical Martin Guerre when visiting London, England, in late December 1997-early January 1998, when I was fourteen. It has had a troubled existence; rarely has it been revived. I don’t believe it has ever opened on Broadway. As I was so young when I saw Martin Guerre, I didn’t appreciate its meaning. Twenty years went by, and in a dream one night, the memory of the musical came to me. The next morning, I purchased the soundtrack of the original cast recording. The musical, and the story behind it, has held a great significance for me ever since.

The tale of the sixteenth century French peasant Martin Guerre and the imposture conducted by his army buddy Arnaud du Thil was resurrected in the 1982 French-language film The Return of Martin Guerre, as well as in a nonfiction book with the same title by historian Natalie Zemon Davis. Subsequently, the story has been immortalized as a continuing trope in many incarnations, including the 1993 movie Sommersby, starring Richard Gere and Jodie Foster, where the story is transported to post-Civil War and Reconstruction-era Tennessee, and the titular character and his imposter are veterans of the Confederate Army. It has even taken the form of satire in an episode of TV’s “The Simpsons,” where the Vietnam veteran Principal Skinner is revealed to be an imposter, a former comrade-in-arms of the ‘real’ Skinner.

It is in Martin Guerre the musical that the story is placed most prominently in the context of bigotry, nativism, and religious intolerance. The history of Catholic persecution of the Protestant Huguenots figures heavily. The setting is the provincial village of Artigat. Strangely, for reasons unknown to me, the word “Huguenot” is never uttered in the show. What is known is that Artigat is populated by a Catholic majority and a Protestant minority. Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols are betrothed to marry at an adolescent age, so that their families will merge in attempt to keep their shared land under Catholic ownership. But Martin is unable to perform sexually and in a fit of wanderlust, finds the only way available for French peasant to gain upward mobility: He leaves the village and Bertrande, and joins the Catholic army.

Seven years pass and when Martin is seemingly felled in battle, Arnaud du Thil travels to Artigat and almost accidentally assumes his identity, his land, and his wife Bertrande, who, despite being the one who knows about the fraud, falls in love with Arnaud, and together they clandestinely convert to Protestantism. Guillaume, an anti-Protestant fanatic who is also a jealous former suitor of Bertrande’s, discovers the truth and becomes Arnaud’s main accuser. Arnaud is arrested, brought to trial, where he continues relentlessly to insist he is the real Martin Guerre. The members of the courtroom are divided across Catholic and Protestant lines, in Arnaud’s favor and against it. The surprise witness who is able to provide the ultimate evidence of Arnaud’s imposture is Martin Guerre himself, who reappears to testify to his true identity. The musical sees Artigat burn down in an orgy of violence and Arnaud murdered at Guillaume’s hands. This version differs from the historical record. In fact, Arnaud’s case was tried, appealed, and tried again before he was found guilty and executed by hanging, while Bertrande was returned to her legal husband’s custody. I can only surmise that this modification was made for dramatic purposes. The show ends with the villagers contemplating the consequences of their hateful actions and praying for forgiveness.

French historian Philippe Erlanger in his book St. Bartholomew’s Night chronicles the bloody history of France during the turbulent century of the Protestant Reformation:

The world was changing at a bewildering pace. The old order was giving way. Men had once placed all their hopes in heaven: now they were beginning to look for happiness here on earth again.

 Erlanger describes the atmosphere of the Reformation and the Renaissance:

A society which for a great while had been preoccupied with local quarrels suddenly beheld the horizon torn wide open before it; and at the same time, it became conscious of curiosities, doubts, and wild irrational beliefs.

It seems to be a constant throughout history that with the coming of liberalization and modernization of people and civilization, comes a reactionary backlash equal in force. Erlanger writes:

Intolerance bred intolerance. Fanaticism increased in the same measure as the struggle for liberation of the minds of men.

Erlanger could very well have been describing the political and racial tribalism and its ensuing chaos that exists in present-day America, where the Proud Boys battle Antifa and Black Lives Matter in vicious street confrontations.

Ed note: this is part one of a two-part article. For part two, click here.
from the archive; first posted February 12, 2021.

"Martin Guerre: Now and Then; Then and Now" [by Joe Lehman]

PART ONE

“Land to last, as it's passed, man to son, when it's done as planned. Then we'll pray it will stay as good Catholic land.”

After the experience of living through the past four years, this lyric sounds a lot like Make America Great Again. At least, that was the thought that came to mind when I listened to the music of Martin Guerre in the summer of 2018.

I had the privilege of attending one of the original performances of the short-lived musical Martin Guerre when visiting London, England, in late December 1997-early January 1998, when I was fourteen. It has had a troubled existence; rarely has it been revived. I don’t believe it has ever opened on Broadway. As I was so young when I saw Martin Guerre, I didn’t appreciate its meaning. Twenty years went by, and in a dream one night, the memory of the musical came to me. The next morning, I purchased the soundtrack of the original cast recording. The musical, and the story behind it, has held a great significance for me ever since.

The tale of the sixteenth century French peasant Martin Guerre and the imposture conducted by his army buddy Arnaud du Thil was resurrected in the 1982 French-language film The Return of Martin Guerre, as well as in a nonfiction book with the same title by historian Natalie Zemon Davis. Subsequently, the story has been immortalized as a continuing trope in many incarnations, including the 1993 movie Sommersby, starring Richard Gere and Jodie Foster, where the story is transported to post-Civil War and Reconstruction-era Tennessee, and the titular character and his imposter are veterans of the Confederate Army. It has even taken the form of satire in an episode of TV’s “The Simpsons,” where the Vietnam veteran Principal Skinner is revealed to be an imposter, a former comrade-in-arms of the ‘real’ Skinner.

It is in Martin Guerre the musical that the story is placed most prominently in the context of bigotry, nativism, and religious intolerance. The history of Catholic persecution of the Protestant Huguenots figures heavily. The setting is the provincial village of Artigat. Strangely, for reasons unknown to me, the word “Huguenot” is never uttered in the show. What is known is that Artigat is populated by a Catholic majority and a Protestant minority. Martin Guerre and Bertrande de Rols are betrothed to marry at an adolescent age, so that their families will merge in attempt to keep their shared land under Catholic ownership. But Martin is unable to perform sexually and in a fit of wanderlust, finds the only way available for French peasant to gain upward mobility: He leaves the village and Bertrande, and joins the Catholic army.

Seven years pass and when Martin is seemingly felled in battle, Arnaud du Thil travels to Artigat and almost accidentally assumes his identity, his land, and his wife Bertrande, who, despite being the one who knows about the fraud, falls in love with Arnaud, and together they clandestinely convert to Protestantism. Guillaume, an anti-Protestant fanatic who is also a jealous former suitor of Bertrande’s, discovers the truth and becomes Arnaud’s main accuser. Arnaud is arrested, brought to trial, where he continues relentlessly to insist he is the real Martin Guerre. The members of the courtroom are divided across Catholic and Protestant lines, in Arnaud’s favor and against it. The surprise witness who is able to provide the ultimate evidence of Arnaud’s imposture is Martin Guerre himself, who reappears to testify to his true identity. The musical sees Artigat burn down in an orgy of violence and Arnaud murdered at Guillaume’s hands. This version differs from the historical record. In fact, Arnaud’s case was tried, appealed, and tried again before he was found guilty and executed by hanging, while Bertrande was returned to her legal husband’s custody. I can only surmise that this modification was made for dramatic purposes. The show ends with the villagers contemplating the consequences of their hateful actions and praying for forgiveness.

French historian Philippe Erlanger in his book St. Bartholomew’s Night chronicles the bloody history of France during the turbulent century of the Protestant Reformation:

The world was changing at a bewildering pace. The old order was giving way. Men had once placed all their hopes in heaven: now they were beginning to look for happiness here on earth again.

 Erlanger describes the atmosphere of the Reformation and the Renaissance:

A society which for a great while had been preoccupied with local quarrels suddenly beheld the horizon torn wide open before it; and at the same time, it became conscious of curiosities, doubts, and wild irrational beliefs.

It seems to be a constant throughout history that with the coming of liberalization and modernization of people and civilization, comes a reactionary backlash equal in force. Erlanger writes:

Intolerance bred intolerance. Fanaticism increased in the same measure as the struggle for liberation of the minds of men.

Erlanger could very well have been describing the political and racial tribalism and its ensuing chaos that exists in present-day America, where the Proud Boys battle Antifa and Black Lives Matter in vicious street confrontations.

Ed note: this is part one of a two-part article. For part two, click here.
from the archive; first posted February 12, 2021.

"Famous Last Lines" [by David Lehman]

from The American Scholar, today's "Talking Pictures" post features a quiz -- with clues and answers -- having to do with memorable conclusions of movies. For extra credit, who in the picture on the left, is the blonde situated between Anne Baxter and Bette Davis?:

<<<
Nearly all classic movies end on a note of exceptional pathos, irony, or humor.  Take “there’s no place like home,” “tomorrow is another day,” and “nobody’s perfect,” which perfectly match the movies they conclude: The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Some Like It Hot. The first of these concluding lines states the moral of Dorothy’s story, the second sums up the indomitable character of Scarlett O’Hara, and the third is the perfect punchline for a joke that’s gone as far as it could go.

Below is a list of 10 other terrific last lines. Test your knowledge using only the hints provided below—then read on for the answers and explanations.

1. “Hello, America, hang on to your lights; they’re the only lights in the world.”

Hint: Windmills.

2. Miss Harrington knows all about it.”

Hint: The drama critic can help make it happen.

3. Always the same. People come. People go. Nothing ever happens.”

Hint: Revolving door. >>>

For the other seven, please click here.

To Independence (Steve McQueen) and some prose in favor of peace [by David Lehman]

It is July 4th in The Great Escape, and in the POW camp dominated by Brits, the Americans on hand gather to celebrate the day. Steve McQueen lifts his glass of homemade rotgut and says "Independence." In one word he characterizes an entire way of life. We observe the privileges of freedom and independence on a day when we must also remember that the fruits of freedom begin with peace and that a hallmark of peace is civility in discourse and an agreement to respect ourselves by respecting each other. 

The great music in The Great Escape was written by Elmer Bernstein.

<<
Poets tend to be more in love with love, with ideas, with death, or with the details of their own autobiographies-in-progress than in peace, or health, or well-being as a subject in its own right. Peace in poetry is the necessary but only implied backdrop for all productive human endeavors. I sometimes think of William Carlos Williams as the one modern poet whose collected works seem a hymn to peace as the ground condition that makes all else possible, beauty included. I have wondered whether this may be because he preferred things to ideas. He captures fragments of being: plums in a paper bag or in the ice-box, a young housewife, flowers and farm implements, people at a ballgame, rain, a cat in its stealth, an eight-foot strip of copper, the “rank odor of a passing springtime.” But before I get carried away, Bob Hass reminds me that Williams could also be warlike; he wrote enthusiastically about the cleansing blaze of violence in “Burning the Christmas Greens” (1944).  In the poem, green turns into ash, and we stand there “breathless to be witnesses, / as if we stood / ourselves refreshed among / the shining fauna of that fire.”

Poems of war announce themselves as such; poems of peace do not invariably do so. An exception is Kenneth Koch’s long poem “The Pleasures of Peace,” which he wrote in the late 1960s when the Vietnam War was raging and poets felt a tremendous pressure to write anti-war poems or take part in protest rallies. Many bad antiwar poems were written at this time. Political urgency leads often to poetical triteness. Koch’s solution to the problem was to write a joyful poem not an angry one, radiating pleasure, not scorn or detestation. The madcap poem affirms that the natural state of man is peace, not war. In a last,valedictory stanza, boats sail and apes run and the sun shines for peace, and monkeys climb for peace, and serpents writhe for peace, and “the Alps, Mount Vesuvius, all the really big important mountains / Are rising for peace.” The poem reaches its highest level of pathos when the poet punctuates his closing peroration with a plea, not a prediction: “Surely it won’t be long.”
>>>

For more of the essay "Peace and War in American Poetry," written at the behest of the Library of Congress, click here.
https://blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2019/11/david-lehmans-peace-and-war-in-american-poetry/

The title sequence of "Ocean's 11" (1960) by Saul Bass

 

The greatest title sequence by the master, Saul Bass.

 

"Noir City" on William Holden, "Noir's Reluctant Hero"

NOIR CITY Magazine No. 34

 <<<<< Our cover story for NOIR CITY Magazine's latest issue offers a unique portrait of actor William Holden, an actor not synonymous with film noir. Yet, writer Rachel Walther shows how the actor "brought a brooding restlessness to his characters that distanced them from the mainstream—and sometimes thrust them into the realm of darkness we hold so dear."

Highlights in this issue include profiles of two actors – one classic, one contemporary: Stanley Baker/Loving a Thieving Boy by Ray Banks and J.T. Walsh/Solid Cold by Steve Kronenberg. And, for anyone who has followed the FNF's interest in Argentine restorations, particularly The Beast Must Die (1952) and El vampiro negro (1953), Imogen Sara Smith's in-depth article Down in the Depths/Román Viñoly Barreto and Argentinian Noir is a must-read! And there's plenty more, including Brian Light's Book vs. Film essay on the 1948 film Moonrise. >>>

https://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/noircitymagazine.html

 

Happy birthday, Dean Martin

"I couldn't feel any better or I'd be sick
Tell me quick ain't love a kick in the head. . ."

"The Mysterious Romance of Murder": "Noir is the paradise of the damned. . ."

On Saturday May 14th The American Scholar posted my essay "The Last Cigarette," adapted from a chapter in my new book, THE MYSTERIOUS ROMANCE OF MURDER. Here's an excerpt -- and a link. --DL

<<<<
In the first sentence of Too Many Cooks (1938), Rex Stout’s narrator, Archie Goodwin, says that he “lit a cigarette with the feeling that after it had calmed my nerves a little, I would be prepared to submit bids for a contract to move the Pyramid of Cheops from Egypt to the top of the Empire State Building with my bare hands, in a swimming-suit.” That’s quite a lift to be gotten from a smoke.

Leave aside the rush of nicotine. Forget the ritual of opening a pack of unfiltered Luckies, Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls, tamping them down, pulling one out, lighting it, discarding the match, taking the first, satisfying long drag. Cigarettes are the greatest prop of all time: puffing, taking in the smoke, drawing in a deep lungful and slowly expelling it, holding the cigarette between your index and middle fingers, motioning with that hand to underscore a point.

“Cigarettes are sublime,” Richard Klein asserts in a book he wrote to console himself when trying to quit smoking.^[1] Sublime, maybe; sexy, for sure. “Cigarettes had to go,” the poet and noir connoisseur Suzanne Lummis concedes. “But the cinema lost a language. Aside from the smoking, the lighting of the cigarette could be handled so many ways with such different effects. Richard Conte, Robert Mitchum, all those guys—in two smooth gestures they’ll slide out that silver lighter and make the flame leap up, and we get the message—this is what unflappable cool looks like, virile confidence.”

There is the cigarette of loneliness, the  cigarette of desperation: Jean Gabin holed up in his attic room, chain-smoking his last Gauloises, as the police close in on him in Le Jour se lève. There is the cigarette of heartbreak, the chain of cigarettes that won’t help you “forget her, or the way that you love her,” with all the force Sinatra can put into the singular female pronoun in “Learnin’ the Blues.” And there is the cigarette of intense nervousness, jeopardy, and fear smoked by Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, stunning in black cap and veil with black dots. When with a shaky hand Dunaway lights up, Jack Nicholson points out that she already has a cigarette going, and says: “Does my talking about your father make you nervous?”

Lighting somebody’s cigarette is a powerful gesture, suggesting intimacy or the desire for the same. “If you’re going to smoke, you gotta learn to carry matches,” Dix (Sterling Hayden) says when he lights up Doll (Jean Hagen) in The Asphalt Jungle. Aldo Ray does it for Anne Bancroft at the bar in Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall, and Glenn Ford performs the gallantry for Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s Human Desire. When Lana Turner falters trying to light her cigarette, John Garfield does the honors, foreshadowing the adultery and murder in The Postman Always Rings Twice. The movie producer played by Kirk Douglas teaches the self-same Lana Turner how to smoke sexily in The Bad and the Beautiful, while Dick Powell has the flame Claire Trevor needs in Murder, My Sweet.

In her discussion of smoking, Suzanne Lummis also cites In a Lonely Place. Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) sit at a piano with other couples, listening to the silky-smooth rendition of the lounge singer, vocalist and pianist Hadda Brooks: I was a lonely one, till you. “He lights a cigarette for her, and she takes it in her mouth, such an intimate gesture,” Loomis writes. “He whispers to her. They are so in love. And it will never be that good again. Nothing is going to be that good again, for either of them. If these characters had lives beyond the credits at the end, we know that each on their dying bed looked back and thought, ‘that’s what happiness felt like.’ And because someone who unsettles their composure enters the club, that happiness didn’t even last the length of the song. That’s noir.”

There is the cigarette of combat: According to Roger Ebert, Out of the Past (1947) is “the greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time.” Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas wage war by cigarette proxy. “The trick, as demonstrated by [director] Jacques Tourneur and his cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca,” Ebert writes, “is to throw a lot of light into the empty space where the characters are going to exhale. When they do, they produce great white clouds of smoke, which express their moods, their personalities and their energy levels. There were guns in Out of the Past, but the real hostility came when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoked at each other.”^[3]

The cigarette as a prize: In The Snake Pit (1948), a so-called “problem picture” dramatizing the plight of the mentally ill, Dr. Kik (Leo Genn) wants to reward Virginia Stuart Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) for the progress she has made. On the wall, a framed photograph of a severe Sigmund Freud looks on as the doctor kindly says, “What about a cigarette now?”

The romantic cigarette, in defeat: On television in the late ’50s, Sinatra in fedora and raincoat, with a cigarette in his hand, takes his seat at the bar. It’s nearly three in the morning, and he begins to sing “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” with only Bill Miller’s piano accompaniment. There’s a glass, an ashtray, and an open pack of smokes on the bar. Joe the bartender pours whiskey into the glass when the singer tells him to “set ‘em up,” and Sinatra strikes a match, keeps it lit, stares at the flame, while telling his new pal Joe that tonight he is drinking “to the end of a brief episode.” Only then does he bring the flame to the cigarette and take a puff. He keeps the cigarette between fingers, or taps the ashes into the tray, and holds the glass of whiskey while singing. The song as written ends with “the long, long road,” but Sinatra never reaches the period at the end of the line. After “the long,” he pauses, takes a drag of his cigarette, repeats “the long,” and lets the music drift off like smoke.

The cigarette of melancholia: A triptych of Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd—World War II army buddies who reunite 10 years later and realize that they loathe themselves and one another—shows the guys smoking and singing “Once I had a dream, what a joke / Gone is that dream, up in smoke” in It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), the most underrated of the Kelly and Stanley Donen movie musicals, with wonderful lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

The macho cigarette, cool under pressure: In The Godfather (1972), Michael Corleone is standing in front of the hospital where his wounded father lies unprotected. Enzo, the baker, has chosen this moment to visit with flowers, and Michael enlists him to help stand guard. The two men are to stand there, impersonating gun men, in an effort to deter the hit men driving by. Enzo, understandably nervous, needs a cigarette. Hand goes to pocket, pulls out cigarette. But his hands shake, he can’t work his lighter. Michael calmly takes the Zippo and lights him up. The ruse works. Michael has displayed initiative and imagination, and the signature of that moment is his icy demeanor when firing up Enzo’s lighter. By contrast, the unfiltered Camel that Michael smokes at the end of The Godfather II (1974) is a mark of his aloneness. The cigarette is his only friend as he sits and broods on the end of an ethic, a family, a film.

The royalty of cigarette smokers are Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The Big Sleep (1946) ends with the two of them in a car. She “guesses” that she’s in love with him, and he “guesses” that he’s in love with her. Says he: “What’s wrong with you?” She: “Nothing you can’t fix.” And next to the words THE END, there is an ashtray with two smoldering cigarettes in it.

Ah, cigarettes. What a wonderful prop. So sexy! Too bad they cause cancer.
>>>>
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-last-cigarette/

Today is the official publication date of THE MYSTERIOUS ROMANCE OF MURDER: CRIME, DETECTION, AND THE SPIRIT OF NOIR. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda writes:

<<<
David Lehman’s “The Mysterious Romance of Murder” surveys “crime, detection and the Spirit of the Noir” in fiction, film, poetry and music. As one might expect from this distinguished poet and versatile man of letters, his sprightly new book isn’t just deeply knowledgeable, it’s also a lot of fun. >>>

-- Washington Post, May 5, 2022

It's not in my book, but I just remembered that James Merrill once told me that he thought smoking was "a form of suicidal yoga." This item also recenblky surfaced. From Margaret Talbot, "The Retiring Sort," in The New Yorker, December 13, 2021: " 'Flesh and the Devil' also features some of the most erotic scenes I've ever encountered on film. There's one, in a nighttime garden, in which Garbo rolls a cigarette between her lips, then puts it between [John] Gilbert's, her eyes never leaving his, as he strikes a match and illuminates their gorgeous, besotted faces."

Listening to "The Man from Laramie" [by Elizabeth Samet]

The first thing you have to know is that the opinions I express as a guest blogger on the Best American Poetry site are my own and do not reflect those of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense. The second thing you have to know is that I've been teaching a film course this semester. One of my favorite things about this class is that it allows me to see old films in new ways. One of the several films my students and I screened together was Anthony Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955), with James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, and Donald Crisp. David Thomson is exactly right when he suggests in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film that what fuels The Man from Laramie as well as the other Westerns Stewart did with Mann are “the suppressed neuroses” of “the adventurer hero.” Some of my students were a bit surprised at Stewart's anguished character and at the film’s open-endedness. They expected less ambiguity in a movie from the 1950s. Perhaps part of what helped to create that expectation was the obligatory title song, “The Man from Laramie,” which, like the songs that begin High Noon and so many other Westerns of the period, digests the whole messy business into a straightforward ballad. The experience of seeing Laramie again got me thinking about music in Westerns in general and about the music from a very different kind of Western: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Jonny Greenwood’s score for that recent film is a world away from “The Man from Laramie.” Blood, however, like certain older films, is as remarkable for its silences as for its sounds. I admire Anderson’s willingness to let the picture speak for itself. He clearly trusted the image (and the acting of Daniel Day Lewis). Today going to the movies can be a deafening experience--especially the previews. Quiet movies are increasingly rare, as are filmmakers who permit long periods of silence. Remember the prairie bus stop scene in North by Northwest? Silence on the screen; I’d like to hear a little more of that.

from the archive; first posted May 19, 2008

Here's to Crime!

Night and the city. Dark alleys, rain-drenched streets, silhouettes at windows, blinking neon. Welcome to Saturday Night Noir, a one-way trip into the doom-laden heart of a new kind of American cinema featuring life-beaten men and dangerously seductive women, born of the expressionistic camera-work of German and Austrian emigres, and the pulp imaginations of the great Hammett, Chandler, Cain and their siblings.

We offer five greats from the U.S., one per year from 1944–1948, four enrolled in the National Film Registry. And a bonus: two screenings of 1949’s great British noir, The Third Man (moved from its original Saturday night slot to accommodate our revised February 7 opening for in-person screenings!). Noir enthusiasts can finally see a restored print of Detour, in which “B auteur Edgar G. Ulmer turned threadbare production values and seedy, low-rent atmosphere into indelible pulp poetry.” (Janus Films)

The series wraps with Billy Wilder’s classic Double Indemnity, introduced by local author David Lehman on Thursday, May 5, 2022, at 7 PM at Willard Straight Hall on the Cornell University campus. Copies of his book The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir, published by Cornell University Press, will be available for sale at the screening.

"Double Indemnity" on Cinqo de Mayo at Cornell Cinema, May 5

<<< Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity defined the noir genre with its calculated coolness and eerily familiar scenes of suburban LA.

Barbara Stanwyck plays the ultimate femme fatale: a woman who lures a hapless insurance salesman (MacMurray in a handsome suit) into a complex murder scheme. The electricity between the killer couple is palpable and Edward G. Robinson (as MacMurray’s emasculated boss) crackles each time he steps into the frame.

Local author David Lehman will introduce the film, which is featured in his forthcoming book, The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir, published by Cornell University Press. Copies of the book will be available for sale at the screening. >>

Thursday, 05/05/2022 at 7:00pm.  Willard Straight Theatre, Cornell University. "The space features the largest screen in Ithaca, Dolby Digital Surround Sound and the best projection in the area." For more information, click here. 

For what it's worth, I do not concur with the notion that Edward G. Robinson's character is "emasculated."

From "Just a Couple of Mugs" [by David Lehman]

From The Common, this section of "Just a Couple of Mugs," a five-part prose poem from David Lehman's new book The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir (Cornell University Press). Here's one section:

<<<
Dana Andrews and Linda Darnell hate each other in a hotel room with sink in San Francisco. They have just had a fight or gone to bed; maybe both. “I’m waiting for something to happen,” he says. Then: “Nothing’s going to happen.” He takes off, goes to the Blue Gardenia, and catches the bartender’s eye. “What’ll it be?” “I’ll have a double scotch.” (Pause). “Make that a single scotch.” (Pause).  “I’ll settle for a beer.” Those are the best lines he gets.

In the Blue Gardenia, Nat Cole sings and Jean Hagen recites a poem by Robert Burns. She can sing, too. “You’re hired.” “I get forty dollars a week plus bail money.”
>>>

For the rest of the poem as posted today on The Common, click here.

On The Mysterious Romance of Murder:

"Do yourself a favor and follow Lehman's lead on this idiosyncratic tour through the noir ethos in literature, poetry, music, and film. He's an erudite, insightful, and amusing tour guide, whether you're new to the terrain or a habitué."

-- Eddie Muller, host of Turner Classic Movies' Noir Alley and author of Dark City

"Books or films? Until now, travelers to the land of noir have tended to confine themselves to one province or the other, whereas veteran explorer David Lehman has mastered the language of both territories. His field report slides back and forth between page and screen with joyful confidence, offering sharp insights throughout and giving us not only the full picture but the full story as well. I am especially grateful to him for his delightful remarks on the importance of cigarettes, music, and wisecracks in these classic films, which only seem to get better as the years go on."

-- Paul Auster

"This is a masterwork in which Lehman's encyclopedic knowledge of film, literature, and cultural history is synthesized by way of lively exegesis, quotes, poems (his own), catalogs, mini-biographies, and eclectic, brilliantly illuminated byways, both classical and pulp. His vivid, chromatic style is what one expects from a poet and critic of Lehman's stature. The Mysterious Romance of Murder must take a prominent place, stylistically and critically, alongside Luc Sante's Low Life, Julian Symons's Bloody Murder, and Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave. As with the very best mysteries?of the heart and the intellect?you can't put it down."

-- Nicholas Christopher, author of Somewhere in the Night