The Best American Poetry

A Culture in Crisis: Jason Shinder on "Howl" [film by Bill Hayward]

"A culture in crisis..." from bill hayward on Vimeo.

"Hamlet versus the Nazis" [by David Lehman]

Ed note: I write the "Talking Pictures" monthly column on movies for The American Scholar. My latest deals with Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 masterpiece, "To Be or Not to Be," with Carole Lombard and Jack Benny. Here is my opening and a link to the post:
                            Carole Lombard, Maude Eburne, and Jack Benny in To Be or Not to Be, 1942

A master of the slow burn and the exaggerated double take, Jack Benny may have been the greatest of all persona comedians on radio and television. The persona was preposterously vain. He played the violin, badly. He would never admit to being older than 39. Above all else, he was cheap.

In his most celebrated radio routine, Jack is walking along carrying a borrowed Oscar award. A mugger stops him, asks him for a light, and then demands: “Your money or your life.” There ensues a lengthy silence. Finally the mugger says “Look, bud! I said your money or your life!” And Benny replies: “I’m thinking, I’m thinking!”

Benny plays five roles in Ernst Lubitsch’s comic masterpiece, To Be or Not To Be (1942), and in each of them, he is Jack Benny. We are in Warsaw in August 1939, and Benny is an actor in a troupe—in his own words, “that great, great actor Josef Tura,” whose ambition is to play Hamlet. Behind the scenes, he is the jealous husband of actress Maria Tura (the charming and justly acclaimed Carole Lombard, in her last film appearance), afraid he is being cuckolded. During the course of the film, he also plays a fictional Nazi colonel on stage, impersonates a real Nazi colonel, albeit badly, and impersonates a bewhiskered Professor Siletski (Stanley Ridges), who has passed himself off as a Polish resistance leader but is actually a Nazi spy.

to read the rest of this piece, please click here: 
https://theamericanscholar.org/hamlet-vs-the-nazis/

Rogues' Gallery [by David Lehman]

From The American Scholar:

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There’s a special onus on the villains in crime dramas. They have to be wicked, but they also have to make that wickedness interesting. Whether by being singular in some way, or by virtue of fine acting, or because what they do is so despicable, they offend even those of us who might ordinarily root for the scoundrel. Then again, some of them simply impress us with their roguish charm or sharp-toothed wit.

Who are the greatest rogues, then? Many can be found in Hitchcock’s thrillers, in which the culprit can be two people, himself and his murderous mother (Anthony Perkins in Psycho). Or there is madness in the man’s method, and he steals every scene he’s in (Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train). Or the villains are forces of nature wreaking havoc on humanity, which has mistreated them along with the rest of the planet (the birds in The Birds). But let’s omit Hitchcock’s bad guys, as well as the homicidal freaks in movies starring Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson, who might otherwise dominate the list.
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From “Rogues Gallery” by David Lehman in The American Scholar. Click here for the article, which includes a list of some of my favorite miscreants, with links to the films’ trailers. The picture above is of Charles Boyer tormenting Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight (1944), which donated a word to the language. Did I leave out your favorite culprits? Charles Laughton in The Big Clock maybe, or Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil? As with all of my Talking Pictures columns, comments and suggestions are welcome.

"French Movie" [poem by David Lehman, movie by Scott Wenner]

Scott Wenner made this terrific movie of David Lehman's poem "French Movie" for Motionpoems in Fall 2011.

French Movie

I was in a French movie
and had only nine hours to live
and I knew it
not because I planned to take my life
or swallowed a lethal but slow-working
potion meant for a juror
in a mob-related murder trial,
nor did I expect to be assassinated
like a chemical engineer mistaken
for someone important in Milan
or a Jew journalist kidnapped in Pakistan;
no, none of that; no grounds for
suspicion, no murderous plots
centering on me with cryptic phone
messages and clues like a scarf or
lipstick left in the front seat of a car;
and yet I knew I would die
by the end of that day
and I knew it with a dreadful certainty,
and when I walked in the street
and looked in the eyes of the woman
walking toward me I knew that
she knew it, too,
and though I had never seen her before,
I knew she would spend the rest of that day
with me, those nine hours walking,
searching, going into a bookstore in Rome,
smoking a Gitane, and walking,
walking in London, taking the train
to Oxford from Paddington or Cambridge
from Liverpool Street and walking
along the river and across the bridges,
walking, talking, until my nine hours
were up and the black-and-white movie
ended with the single word FIN
in big white letters on a bare black screen.

9 / 6 / 06

<<<
A poem from Yeshiva Boys (Scribner, 2009), produced to honor the general editor of the Best American Poems series at Motionpoems‘ first screening of films produced for this year’s anthology:

Scott Wenner surprised audiences at the Motionpoems Festival in Fall 2011 by unveiling this motionpoem adaptation of David Lehman’s poem, “French Movie.” In it, the narrator is depicted as an old-school movie camera, and the inevitability of the poem is like a bullet.

(From the description at Vimeo.)
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"Once Upon a Time in America" [by David Lehman]

The subject of my latest "Talking Pictures" column for The American Scholar is Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, and these are the warmup paragraphs:

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Nearly four hours long, Once Upon a Time in America was drastically cut when released in 1984. Viewers were puzzled, and reviewers panned the butchered 144-minute version that they saw. The movie makes a lot more sense at its proper length. When the 85 minutes of deleted footage were restored, some of the same folks who derided Once Upon a Time in America hailed it as Sergio Leone’s melancholy masterpiece, a gangster epic that doubles as an exploration of friendship, betrayal, male competition masked as sexual desire, greed, violence, and the American dream.

The gangsters here are first-generation Jews, the locale is New York City’s Lower East Side, and there are three distinct time periods. Though the story begins in the early 1920s, the movie opens in 1933, in the aftermath of a disastrous caper that only one of the gang members survives. That survivor is David Aaronson (Robert De Niro), known to all as “Noodles.”
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For more click here.

https://theamericanscholar.org/gangsters-in-love/
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_jIL0UJe1Q
https://youtu.be/-LCAIUamxZ0

"Odd Man Out": the Belfast Noir [by David Lehman]

<<<
British director Carol Reed turned out three masterpieces in the late 1940s. With an exemplary performance from Ralph Richardson, The Fallen Idol (1948) does justice to Graham Greene’s brilliant story “The Basement Room.” The Third Man (1949), the most celebrated of the three, has its unforgettable zither theme, its evocation of postwar Vienna, and its extraordinary script, including the speech Orson Welles improvised at the Prater amusement park. Fierce competition, but my vote for Reed’s best goes to Odd Man Out (1947), a modern passion play about a doomed man in the shadows and alleys of his last hours alive.

Odd Man Out foregrounds political and religious themes and differs thereby from most film noirs. Yet I wouldn’t hesitate to claim it for the category. The setting is Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the people take their Catholicism seriously, and the robbery that triggers the plot is committed not by your typical thieves but by an unnamed underground movement, presumably the IRA. Thanks to the inspired cinematography—the hero’s haunted profile, the desolate cityscape, the long narrow alleys—the Belfast we see is a dark and bleak war zone.

You may argue that the revolutionary cause is undermined in Odd Man Out, which establishes that the men who rob a mill for a cause are no nobler than those who rob banks for money. Nevertheless, the viewer’s sympathy is with rebel leader Johnny McQueen (James Mason), whom the children in the street emulate in their pretend games of cops and robbers. “It’s probably the best thing that Mason has ever done, and certainly the best film he’s ever been in,” Richard Burton observed.

Johnny, who escaped from prison six months ago, has spent the time hiding at the house where Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan) and her grandmother reside. Kathleen would be Johnny’s natural mate if he were not wedded to “the organization.” Far from a femme fatale, she is closer to a martyr or saint, embodying the Christian virtue of caritas. Love is the moral absolute that sustains her. There is no evidence that she and Johnny have so much as kissed. Yet she is willing to die for him or with him.

The narrative takes place all in one day. When McQueen and chums go over last-minute details of the heist, Kathleen implores him not to go: “You’re not fit for it.” Another man offers to go in his place: “Your heart’s not in this job, Johnny.” Johnny is rusty; his six months in hiding followed eight months behind bars. But though he is not as steady on his feet as he should be, Johnny is “the chief” and feels he must lead the four-man team.

Naturally something goes wrong. Alarms sound. Johnny has renounced violence, but now he finds himself in a struggle with an armed cashier, and when the guns go off, the cashier lies dead and Johnny has taken a bullet in his left shoulder. No one was supposed to get killed. And Johnny wasn’t supposed to fall out of the getaway car—and be abandoned by his none-too-bright chums fleeing for their lives.

Dazed and bleeding badly, McQueen manages to get to his feet and stumble into a deserted air raid shelter. There is a precious moment of relief when, upon waking, he imagines that he is still in prison—and that the little girl who has entered to recover her lost ball is reassuringly a prison guard to whom he can describe the strange dream from which he has woken. Only when his hand reaches inside his jacket and feels his blood-soaked shirt does the wounded man realize that what he dreamed did happen. He is no longer safely, almost contentedly, in a prison cell. Susceptible to hallucination, hunted by the authorities, he staggers out of the shelter and into the mercy of chance encounters.

Johnny’s progress is like that of a pilgrim on his way through hell to get to purgatory. As gray skies give way to heavy rain, he is seldom fully conscious but constantly on the move. Some citizens take brief pity on him—tending to his wounds, giving him liquor, sheltering him in a pub—before returning him to the streets. Sometimes luck lends a hand, as when Johnny is deposited in the back of a hansom cab, which the police do not inspect on the assumption that the passenger, out cold, is an ordinary drunkard.

The secondary characters are extraordinary. As Penn State media professor Kevin Hagopian puts it in his film notes for the New York State Writers Institute, Odd Man Out is “festooned with gargoyles.” The crazed painter Lukey (Robert Newton) sees in Johnny’s suffering face the perfect model for a masterpiece of portraiture. With the bearing of a genteel bordello mistress, treacherous Theresa O’Brien (Maureen Delany) lets two of the bandits drink her whiskey in one room, while in another she informs the police of their whereabouts. Dim-witted Shell (F. J. McCormick), who collects birds and speaks in avian metaphors, discovers Johnny in a rubbish heap and relishes the reward he will get for turning in this bird with the wounded left wing. But Father Tom (W. G. Fay) persuades Shell that there is a greater reward than money and it is called Faith. When Shell wonders what Faith is, his roommate, a medical student, says, “It’s life.”

Odd Man Out is rife with dualities. Father Tom stands for mercy. A police inspector, who represents justice, distinguishes between the sphere of guilt and innocence, which is his concern, and that of good and evil, which isn’t. The med student ministers to Johnny’s body; the painter labors to capture his soul. As for the politics, most of the people are like the cabman who tells Johnny that he’s neither for him nor against him but can’t afford to get mixed up in his troubles.

Movies that make intelligent use of poetry or scripture hold a charm for me, and when he is being painted, Johnny breaks from his delirium into lucid speech, quoting from I Corinthians (13-11 and 13-2): “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, I understood as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” With a visionary gleam in his eyes, Johnny stands up and raises his right arm: “Though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”

The heavy rain has turned to snow by the time Kathleen locates her man. Johnny: “Is it far?” Kathleen: “It’s a long way, Johnny, but I’m coming with you.” Shots ring out. And then the clock strikes midnight.
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From "An Exchange of Bullets in Belfast," The American Scholar (July 9, 2020)

SF and NY Duke it Out [by David Lehman]

          In Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum says he used to live in New York and Rhonda Fleming says she’s never been there and Mitchum says that if she goes there, she’ll know one reason why he’s in San Francisco.

          San Francisco, because of its natural beauty, its hills and bridges and bay, may be the most popular location for film noirs and crime dramas. Think of The Lady from Shanghai, Dark Passage, Woman on the Run, Vertigo, Bullitt, Dirty Harry. These movies feature some of the distinctive landmarks of the city – Chinatown’s Mandarin Theater, the Steinhardt Aquarium, and Playland-By-the-Beach in The Lady from Shanghai; the Golden Gate Bridge in Dark Passage; Fisherman’s Wharf and the Embarcadero in Woman on the Run; the Presidio, Coit Tower, and Muir Woods in Vertigo; the Dodgers’ Don Drysdale on the mound at Candlestick Park in Experiment in Terror; Kezar Stadium in Dirty Harry; the many steep streets on which Steve McQueen drives his green Mustang in Bullitt.

          Still, as a New York native, I must put in a plea for the city of my birth. Jules Dassin’s Naked City comes to mind because of the producer’s pioneering effort to shoot the film entirely on the streets and sidewalks of New York (photo right). In Don Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Clint Eastwood is a deputy sheriff from Arizona who flies into the big city to nab an escaped killer in Fort Tryon Park and leave for the airport from the heliport on top of the old Pan-Am Building, now named for Met Life. In The French Connection, Fernando Rey eludes Gene Hackman on the subway and dine on French cuisine at an elegant midtown restaurant while Hackman shivers in the cold holding a cardboard cup of coffee.  

         Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street gives us the subway and a shack on the waterfront where our hero resides; Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street treats us to art galleries and a desolate Central Park bench at dawn; John Farrow’s The Big Clock situates us in a magazine empire’s midtown skyscraper. In Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends, the Manhattan Bridge in the background is a constant reminder of where we are.

           Among neo-noirs and technicolor crime films, New York is home to The Manchurian Candidate, which features Sinatra’s favorite bar, Jilly’s, and the Central Park lake. In part one of The Godfather, Michael and Kay go to Radio City Music Hall on Christmas Eve. To elude a possible tail, the driver of the car taking Michael and his antagonists to the Italian restaurant with the best veal in the city begins to cross the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey, then makes an illegal u-turn to deliver the group to the Bronx.

          Die Hard with a Vengeance is a virtual tour of the town with stops in Harlem, Wall Street, the FDR Drive, Central Park, and Yankee Stadium. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are laugh lines in this 1995 movie that does its bit to combat racial prejudice by pairing the Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson. And you get to hear the odious villain say he loves “this country,” his words belying his scorn for Americans, such suckers, so trusting.  Mind you, this is a movie you’re not supposed to like; you’re allowed to call it a triumph – of “blitzkrieg action,” perhaps – but only after first denouncing it as “bombastic mush.”

"Coward, Take My Coward's Hand" [by David Lehman]

David Lehman's "Talking Pictures" column for The American Scholar is devoted this month to "Home of the Brave," Mark Robson's 1949 movie. Here is the opening paragraph:

<<<
Much of my early education in film history I owe to the old Million Dollar Movie on television (WOR-TV Channel 9 in the New York metropolitan area), which showed the same movie back-to-back every night for a week, with Max Steiner’s theme from Gone with the Wind to usher you in and out. As a boy, I watched the 1949 war film Home of the Brave on successive nights, deeply moved by this so-called “problem picture,” which Ralph Ellison praised for hitting the “deep center of American emotion.” It was, Ellison wrote, “a look at the ties between the races and also the deep-seated nests of American racism itself.”  It “set up a confrontation. One is forced to deal with racial issues.”
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For more of the piece, please click here.

https://theamericanscholar.org/coward-take-my-cowards-hand/#.XzW0125KiM-

Crediting Saul Bass [by Stefanie Green]

The credit sequences that open a movie constitute an under-appreciated art form, as you will conclude if you watch an hour of Saul Bass’s film title sequences on youtube.com [https://youtu.be/qqM3McG4-LE ]. Distinctive and recognizable, Bass’s style relies on all manner of graphic images: cut paper, printed ephemera, close-ups of objects, signs and symbols. Some of the most notable directors of the 1950s up through the ‘90s chose Saul Bass to do the credits for their films, and his creative output tells you why.

Bass, who was born in 1920, was of the same generation as Milton Glaser and Herb Lubalin: a trio of tremendously talented Jewish boys from New York City. At Brooklyn College, Bass studied with Gyorgy Kepes, the influential Hungarian emigré designer and film maker, and was influenced by the Bauhaus and its American version, the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Running through his work, as through that of Glaser and Lubalin, is the idea of combining word and image, and presenting it boldly, either with color or strong direction, or jagged type, or any other number of graphic techniques.  

Of the three designers, Bass's work has the most immediacy. It is as if he ripped the lettering right out of paper. (In fact, the title sequence for Bunny Lake is Missing shows a hand ripping paper.)  In contrast, Glaser and Lubalin seem to me to have a more literary and historical style, although both were immensely innovative in their use of color, imagery, and typography. Bass’s work, both his animation and graphic design, feels much more raw.

Bass was a master of logo design as well as animation. The sales pitch film for his ATT logo redesign in the mid 60s  [https://youtu.be/xKu2de0yCJI ] is a beautiful example of the post-war ideal of mass communication. I noticed, also, that his ATT bell logo is used in the titles of Ocean’s 11 (Sinatra version). The bell shows up as one of the slot machine figures.

In what follows, links are embedded in the movies' titles.

The Man with the Golden Arm

            Bass loved using the human body in abstract form. In this case, he was lucky that the film’s title included “Golden Arm.” The arm and hand in the poster are jagged, and with the rectangles that surround the actors’ photos, that edginess expresses the drug-induced state and its withdrawal. The mock handwriting typeface also has that jagged quality.

Vertigo

            A closeup of a woman’s lips, then her eyes. The music has a clock-like beat, and suggests hypnosis. The image then dissolves into a turning eye, and then a spiral getting larger and smaller. The optics prepare the viewer for the feeling of vertigo to which James Stewart is susceptible.

Anatomy of a Murder

            The movie’s score was written and performed by Duke Ellington and his orchestra. The film itself is a courtroom drama, but the music signs that you’re in for something unexpected. The case involves not only a murder but also a rape, and the couple involved, as played by Lee Remick and Ben Gazzara, are not quite believable. The score, along with Jimmy Stewart’s jazz piano hobby, set you up for a cool noir story. In the title sequence -- and in the poster -- Bass returns to the graphic of body parts made from ripped paper. As strong as the graphic is, it misses the mark for me, because the story doesn’t analyze the murder so much as the emotions that lead to it. Still, it’s one of his most memorable images. I remember it from the time the movie first opened.

North by Northwest

            The opening credits, with Bernard Hermann’s pulsing, atonal score, is all angles and lines going in vertical and diagonal directions. Again, the typeface is a bold sans serif---not Helvetica, the European typeface, but something resembling Franklin Gothic Condensed, which US newspapers used before Helvetica became the symbol of modern design. “Bass had experimented with graphic animation techniques as far back as The Seven Year Itch in 1955, but the title cards themselves had always remained static. North by Northwest is often credited as being the first sequence to use kinetic type — or simply, type in motion.” (www.artofthetitle.com/title/north-by-northwest/) The credits beautifully convey the movie’s urbane finish and comic undertow as we move from animation to street scenes, crowds walking, people descending subway stairs, and the city bus slamming its door in Alfred Hitchcock’s face, arguably Hitch’s greatest cameo.

Psycho

            As in Vertigo, Bernard Hermann’s score and Bass’s animation work together beautifully. This time the lines are vertical and horizontal, moving in and out of the frame with the same pulsing movement in the ear and the eye. There are several different versions of the print poster but they all use the same lettering for the title: the word “psycho” --- all caps and split through the middle.

Spartacus

            The sequence opens with hands bound, dissolving into ancient artifacts, more hands from statues, busts of Roman generals and leaders, then close-up images of Roman inscriptions. All these images fill the screen and move in and out of each other. The images are simple but multiple and immediately recognizable as ancient. It’s like a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Exodus

A burning flame suggests the memory of the Holocaust and the struggle for Israel’s independence. Ernest Gold’s soundtrack is sweeping and heroic. The poster incorporates a hand raised, holding a rifle. The addition of that graphic creates movement and a powerful emotional response in the viewer.

Ocean's 11

Digital numbers, one to eleven, fill the screen like a Times Square flashing headline. Then playing cards, slot machines, dice. Wow.

West Side Story

Here the end credits are amazing: graffiti on city walls. The soft background music from Leonard Bernstein’s score contrasts sharply with the rawness of the scrawled lettering.

Cape Fear, Casino, The Age of Innocence

These three Martin Scorcese films have beautifully-crafted title sequences. Cape Fear opens with a screen full of dark, gently rippling water from which a pair of dark menacing eyes appears. The Casino titles are a shocking surprise, and the background music of the Saint Matthew Passion by Bach, plus the floating body in flames, really set you up for an epic story. Finally, The Age of Innocence sequence is a lush time-lapse of sensuous flowers opening in slow motion. It’s a perfect use of imagery. You can tell Scorcese must have worked closely on the design of the titles. It’s a perfect collaboration.

-- Stefanie Green was the art director of Cornell Alumni Magazine and Weill Cornell Medicine from 1987 to 2015.

Epitaph for a Genre: On Kubrick's "The Killing" [by David Lehman]

Adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Jim Thompson from the pulp novel by Lionel White, The Killing is classic noir. The plot is about an expertly planned racetrack heist that goes spectacularly wrong because the weak link in the chain of confederates is married to a two-timing frail. A cast of noir stalwarts under Kubrick’s direction brings this story to life. Later Kubrick movies such as 2001 and A Clockwork Orange are more ambitious undertakings, but many of us with noir in our bones have a special affection for The Killing, a taut, black-and-white depiction of futility and failure.

Just out of prison, Johnny Clay is tall, tough, taciturn, and as decent a guy as you could want in a thief—a role Sterling Hayden was born to play. He has planned the robbery with a chess player’s precision. An inside job, it requires the contributions of a pay-window cashier named George (Elisha Cook Jr.) and a track bartender. Johnny has also recruited Randy (Ted de Corsia), a crooked cop, who drives solo in his prowl car; Nikki, a sharpshooter (played with great nastiness by Timothy Carey); and Maurice, a muscle man (Kola Kwariani, a Georgian wrestler with whom Kubrick played chess).

Nikki must shoot Black Lightning, the favorite in the high-stakes race of the day, just before the colt reaches the backstretch of the track. At the same time, Maurice will pick a fight at the bar. You need 10 men to hold Maurice down, and so, amid the chaos, no one notices the cashier when he unlocks the door marked “NO ADMITTANCE,” behind which men count and stash the day’s take. The diversions give Johnny time enough to walk in, don a mask, brandish a submachine gun, and collect the dough in a duffel bag, which he then tosses out the window … for Randy to pick up and drive away in his cop car. A perfect crime.

Kubrick starts and restarts the story, shifting points of view, reverting each time to the track announcer’s call of the $100,000-added Lansdowne Stakes. The marksman’s story features a chilling scene between Nikki and a black racetrack employee played by James Edwards. The narrative throughout is advanced by voiceover, a matter-of-fact male voice of authority, accentuating the suspense.

The novel’s original title was Clean Break. Elisha Cook, Jr., so memorable as the humiliated gunsel in The Maltese Falcon and as brave, lovesick Harry Jones in The Big Sleep, is outstanding as George the cashier, a man who, in Lionel White’s novel, is said to be “crazy about his wife” but “not completely blind to her character.” He knows, too, that “he himself had failed as a husband and failed as a man.”

In short, he is the archetypal noir loser, married to Sherry (Marie Windsor), who is discontented, fickle, frustrated, and doomed. When George confides that in the next few days he will have a lot of money, she says, with practiced cruelty, “Did you put the right address on the envelope when you sent it to the North Pole?” Sherry gets George to reveal the gang’s plan.

Everything goes right until the guys gather to split the proceeds. Sherry has spilled the beans to her handsome boyfriend Val (Vince Edwards). Val and a henchman barge in to steal the dough, and in the ensuing shootout all are killed except George, who is badly wounded but has enough vitality left to stumble home and shoot Sherry before he expires. “It isn’t fair,” she says, making the cinematic most of the moment. “I never had anyone but you, not a real husband, not even a man.”

Having transferred the loot to the biggest suitcase he could buy, Johnny Clay arrives at the scene 15 minutes too late. Seeing George stumble down the front stairs, Johnny puts two and two together and drives away with the sound of sirens in his ears. He and girlfriend Fay (Coleen Gray) hightail it to the airport.

The Killing ends with the greatest money shot in the movies, its nearest competition being the shower of love bestowed on James Stewart on Christmas Eve at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. Johnny and Fay are at the airport about to board a flight to Boston and freedom. He doesn’t want to let go of the suitcase, but it is too big for the overhead compartment, so he reluctantly yields it. He and Fay watch the suitcase totter atop the checked luggage in the cart taking it from terminal to plane. When a spectator’s dog runs into the cart’s path, the driver swerves, and the suitcase falls off. It pops opens, and the money flies around like snow in a swirling wind.

The set-up has been executed perfectly and yet, because of a stray event, a tiny happenstance, all is for naught—all the blood spilled, all the careful calculation.

Johnny Clay does not survive in the novel. On the last page, two bullets from George’s gun make a “peculiar, plopping sound” as they enter Johnny’s stomach. Under his elbow is a folded newspaper, headlined “Race Track Bandit / Makes Clean Break / With Two Million.” The novel’s original title was Clean Break.

The movie’s ending is even better. Two million bucks in small bills go up in a whirlwind, and the bandit has not only lost the cash but has also unmasked himself as the culprit. Dazed, helpless, Johnny and Fay retreat and try to hail a taxi. They are standing by the airport’s front doors as two armed plainclothes cops walk menacingly toward them. The look on Sterling Hayden’s face is unforgettable.

Fay: “Johnny, you’ve got to run.”

Johnny: “Ah … what’s the difference?”

This exchange, which ends the movie, could stand as an epitaph for all of noir.

Written for and posted by The American Scholar. Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

Odd Man Out: "the best thing James Mason has ever done, and the best film he’s ever been in”

British director Carol Reed turned out three masterpieces in the late 1940s. With an exemplary performance from Ralph Richardson, The Fallen Idol (1948) does justice to Graham Greene’s brilliant story “The Basement Room.” The Third Man (1949), the most celebrated of the three, has its unforgettable zither theme, its evocation of postwar Vienna, and its extraordinary script, including the speech Orson Welles improvised at the Prater amusement park. Fierce competition, but my vote for Reed’s best goes to Odd Man Out (1947), a modern passion play about a doomed man in the shadows and alleys of his last hours alive.

Odd Man Out foregrounds political and religious themes and differs thereby from most film noirs. Yet I wouldn’t hesitate to claim it for the category. The setting is Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the people take their Catholicism seriously, and the robbery that triggers the plot is committed not by your typical thieves but by an unnamed underground movement, presumably the IRA. Thanks to the inspired cinematography—the hero’s haunted profile, the desolate cityscape, the long narrow alleys—the Belfast we see is a dark and bleak war zone.

You may argue that the revolutionary cause is undermined in Odd Man Out, which establishes that the men who rob a mill for a cause are no nobler than those who rob banks for money. Nevertheless, the viewer’s sympathy is with rebel leader Johnny McQueen (James Mason), whom the children in the street emulate in their pretend games of cops and robbers. “It’s probably the best thing that Mason has ever done, and certainly the best film he’s ever been in,” actor Richard Burton observed.

from The American Scholar (July 9, 2020). For the rest of the article, click here.

Richard Deming on "A Touch of Evil" as BFI Film Classics Return

BFI Film Classics – books commissioned by the British Film Institute, published by Bloomsbury in the United States -- make a welcome return with Richard Deming’s excellent study of A Touch of Evil. Orson Welles’s 1958 noir is justly celebrated by film aficionados, though its meandering plot has puzzled many viewers. Deming's book is a fine guide for the perplexed.

Set in a town near the US-Mexican border, the movie fuses sex and violence in a boiling cauldron. It begins with an explosion that interrupts an embrace and ends with two shooting deaths in an oilfield.

As Deming points out, one remarkable thing about the film is the extent to which the plot is subordinate to the technique. Welles uses cinematic means to explore questions of justice, motivation and “a complex, perpetually equivocating moral world,” in the author's phrase. If the causality and chronology of events are enshrouded in a swamp-like fog, it’s because Welles achieves his effects by cinematic rather than literary means. Deming’s analysis of the famous tracking shot that opens the movie is right on the money. 

Deming strikes a personal note in his preface by way of ushering us into the darkness of Welles’s vision. In chapter one he presents a valuable summary of noir, its meaning, its history. He argues that A Touch of Evil “is more than the apotheosis or apex of a genre or a style” – to his mind, it is the ultimate noir, and then some. The movie’s central thesis, he argues, is spoken by Charlton Heston, playing the Mexican policeman Vargas, to Welles, playing the corrupt police chief Hank Quinlan, an obese bully, a bigot, and a slob: “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”

Janet Leigh, the blond Yankee spouse of the Mexican Vargas, is as beautiful and vulnerable as in Psycho and The Manchurian Candidate, and Marlene Dietrich as a fortune teller may have the best line in the movie. When Welles asks her to read his future, she has, “You haven't got any.” “Huh?'” “Your future's all used up.”

A Touch of Evil takes the romance out of noir, and leaves only the criminality, the hostility, the spite, and the evil that men do that lives after them. It is a deliberately ugly movie, refusing to treat sin and crime, the stuff of noir, with the romantic sheen and sensual promise that usually comes with the turf. (Think of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past.) Welles, possessor of a “distinctive smoothly textured baritone with its ability to slide across tonalities with both insolence and nobility,” is willing to sacrifice even this most valuable of assets; he slurs his words, mumbles, steps on other characters’ lines.

“Who’s the boss – the cop or the law?” Vargas asks. That’s the thematic crux of A Touch of Evil. the movie. But the experience of the movie is far more unsettling than any such formulation, and Richard Deming's discussion of the film makes it an object lesson in understanding the meaning of a narrative in cinematic images rather than in literary terms.

The BFI has seized the opportunity to reissue of other books on the backlist. I enjoyed Greil Marcus’s take on The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer), for example. Marcus, who writes with swagger and is never less than interesting, regards the picture as the “most exciting movie” from Citizen Kane to The Godfather, an overstatement but an arresting one.

The Manchurian Candidate is Frankheimer's best movie To make his point about the originality and brilliance of the brainwashing sequence that opens the movie, Marcus argues that by comparison the Hitchcock / Dali dream collaboration in Spellbound is “visually florid and intellectually dead.” I maintain that Spellbound, Hitch’s most Freudian effort, is underrated, but perhaps the larger point is that Gregory Peck's dream in Spellbound has a very different function from the collective hypnosis of the American POWs in The Manchurian Candidate. To exalt the latter it is not necessary to deprecate the former. Criticism is not a zero sum game.

Again, to substantiate his feeling that Sinatra’s performance in The Manchurian Candidate is the best in his Hollywood career, with which I would concur, Marcus says that Sinatra in From Here to Eternity gave "a one-note performance" and that Ernest Borgnine's in the same film was "better." Come on. 

Agree or disagree, Marcus is a compelling writer, and he hits the nail on the head when he talks of “the Iron Maiden of repression,” which sums up Laurence Harvey's acting in The Manchurian Candidate -- and explains why Al Pacino’s work in The Godfather movies was the best of his career.

Other books in the BFI series include Camille Paglia’s characteristically provocative and engrossing study of The Birds. Paglia contends that Tippi Hedren is “the ultimate Hitchcock heroine” (not a consensus view) and analyzes her, what she says, what she wears, with the meticulousness of an exceptionally astute apostle of Freud. It is always stimulating to spend a few hours listening to Camille Paglia, though I do wish she would overcome her aversion to Doris Day, among the best of all the big band singers, and Deborah Reynolds, whose contributions to Singing in the Rain and The Tender Trap are not to be underrated.

-- DL

Judy Gemini Could Go On Singing [by David Lehman]

Judy Garland: The Road Gets Rougher

          Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate.  She habitually came late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

    On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.

          Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

         The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.

         An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.

          As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merryl Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

         In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

            In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

           Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

            If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

-- from the archives; first appeared, in somewhat different form, in 2014. 

          Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate.  She habitually came late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

    On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.

          Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

         The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.

         An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.

          As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merryl Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

         In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

            In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

           Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

            If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

-- from the archives; first appeared, in somewhat different form, in 2014. 

          Born to sing America’s all-time favorite movie song, Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow,” Judy Garland was as natural a Gemini as you will find – totally binary, loyal to a fault yet fickle, cheerful and proud yet sometimes suicidally desperate.  She habitually came late to the set fortified by drinking bottles of “Blue Nun,” “Liebfraumilch,” and similar white stuff, which tasted terrible but did the job.

    On June 10, 1922, Judy Garland was born in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, at 6 AM. With her moon in Sagittarius, and her Mercury and Venus in Cancer (her rising sign), the great singer had the heart of a poet, the sensitivity of an eternal diva, and a really good voice. If only there had been more Virgo in her chart, the girl who embodied Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” might have had greater career endurance. The absence of earth signs doomed her to a nervous disposition and the likelihood of an early death. The 2019 movie Judy did Judy no favors.

          Born Frances Ethel Gumm, Judy craved the approval of father figures, was easily bruised by criticism, sometimes affected nonchalance but really cared very deeply about other people and wanted to be included in group activities. Her Saturn in Libra helps to explain her outstanding musical talent, and her will to succeed in motion pictures may be inferred from her midheaven in Pisces conjunct Uranus.

         The death of Judy's father at age thirteen stunned the young actress, who eventually broke off relations with her mother. The amphetamines helped in the short run. She had five husbands and a torrid affair with lyricist Johnny Mercer when she was eighteen and he, thirty. He wrote the words of “That Old Black Magic” and “I Remember You” with her in mind.

         An old astrological adage: The stars favor the stars.  From the moment the teenage Garland sang to Clark Gable's photograph ("You Made Me Love You"), her astonishing rise to the heights of Hollywood glory was in the cards (Queen of Hearts high) as was, alas, the inevitability of internal conflicts and demons postponed but not resolved by the habitual use of narcotics. She was still in her teens when she and Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr sang as they danced along the yellow brick road leading to the wonderful wizard of Oz. That was in Technicolor. Already in the black-and-white of Kansas cornfields, she sang the anthem of eternal aspiration, “Over the Rainbow,” which was named the greatest song of the twentieth century in a survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Recording Industry Association of America in 2001.

          As kids Judy and Mickey Rooney teamed up in movies, and their duet versions of “Our Love Affair” and “How About You?” are the best out there. She did “The Trolley Song” in one picture and “The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe” in another. The two best versions of "Have Yourself a Merryl Little Christmas," the best American Christmas song not writen by Jews, are hers and Sinatra's. She would have made a great Annie Oakley in Irving Berlin’s “Annie, Get Your Gun,” and we still have tape of the one song she did (“Doin’ a What Come Naturally”), but she was too fucked up to do the movie and the part went to Betty Hutton.

         In Chinese astrology, Judy was born in the year of the dog. Her element is water. This is consistent with her destiny. Her relation to Minnesota mirrors that of Dorothy to Kansas except that there was no home to go back to. The three farm hands in the dream were almost recognizably there, surrounding her bed, when she awoke in Hollywood. Why did gay men have a thing about her? Because (a) they had good taste, (b) they could identify with her suffering, (c) they could admire her indomitable will, (d) they could smell the tragedy on her breath, (e) even macho boys could identify themselves with Dorothy Gale, (f) where gossip and conjecture overlap, anything goes, or (g) all, some, or none of the above. And remember: she was the mother of Liza Minelli, and all you need to do is see the 2014 revival of Cabaret (2014), good as it is, and compare Michelle Williams’s performance as Sally Bowles with that of Liza in the 1972 movie, and you will see the difference between an actress who is trying as hard as she can and a natural-born diva, with the vocal cords of a heroine and the soul of Judy Garland’s daughter.

            In the 1960s Judy was hell on wheels to work with, if Mel Tormé's account in The Other Side of the Rainbow is to be trusted. Mel Tormé was the music director on her short-lived television program, “The Judy Garland Show” on CBS, and Tormé says she tormented him. Judy would call you in the middle of the night, make you come over and hold her hand, make capricious decisions, stand up guest stars like Lena Horne, skip rehearsals, tell fart jokes on the set. On the other hand she was who she was, and you loved her when she lifted her glass and said “l’chayem.” She was so earnest you couldn’t help pulling for her. “This television jazz is all new to me,” she said. “The Blue Lady helps to get my heart started.” She couldn’t stand what she called the Smothers’ Brothers “goyishe humor,” and the show had other guests of that ilk. But when Barbra Streisand was the guest star, it was incredible. The two divas did a duet of “Get Happy” and “Happy Days Are Here Again” that you can listen to over and over again – it is the ideal rendering of two of the Depression’s enduring hits.

           Judy sang and danced with Gene Kelly (“For Me and My Gal”) and with Fred Astaire (“Easter Parade”), and the saints of St. Louis marched in and sang "The Trolley Song" in unison on June 22, 1969, the day of her death. She had a natural talent for the Al Jolson songbook ("After You've Gone"). At Carnegie Hall in 1961, with composer Harold Arlen in the audience, she sang "Get Happy," "Stormy Weather," "The Man That Got Away," and "Come Rain or Come Shine." Five Grammy awards! She was dead at 46.

            If Judy and Frank Sinatra had been lovers, they would have scored very high in passion, high in intimacy, average in synergy, and below average in commitment.

-- from the archives; first appeared, in somewhat different form, in 2014. 

"After You Get What You Want, You Don't Want It" [with Marilyn Monroe]

On Marilyn Monroe’s Birthday

On Marilyn Monroe’s birthday I have
to catch my breath running
as a receiver catches a football,
shakes off tacklers, glides down
the sidelines to the end zone as
the game clock runs out or
like a fisherman angling for
trout, turning over phrases
until I feel a tug, catch a bite, that’s
what this jolt of morning joe, like “joltin’
Joe” DiMaggio, has done to me but if
I could calm down long enough to stop
hurrying and concentrate on the lawn
in front of me the wind at my back the laughter
from Alexander Pope’s dagger-like couplets
still echoing from last night’s reading
of The Dunciad – or maybe just to clear
the mind of words, all of them, including
the words that keep coming even now
-- if I could look at the trees darkening
as a cloud covers the sun, look at the grass,
the myrtle, the pine needles, the maple leaves
and the one rhododendron the deer have not devoured,
what then? After ten minutes of bliss,
I shall return to my mind, and she will be singing,
“After You Get What You Want, You Don’t Want It.”

Music and lyrics by Irving Berlin
Video from the movie "There's No Business Like Show Business"

Richard Deming Takes On "A Touch of Evil"

Ray Kelly, at "Wellesnet: The Orson Welles Web Resource," reports on the new book by the poet and Yale professor Richard Deming:

<<
Richard Deming’s Touch of Evil — the latest offering in Bloomsbury Publishing's relaunch of the BFI Film Classics series — looks at Orson Welles' role as screenwriter, as well as director and star of the 1958 film.

Deming, a senior lecturer in English and director of creative writing at Yale University, sees the film as an outstanding example of the noir genre and explores its complex relationship to its source novel, Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson.

"Badge of Evil is a solid potboiler, but it has no grand ambitions. Welles uses the basic idea of the novel and remakes it as a meditation on cruelty, irony, and the intrinsic complexity of trying to respond justly to an unjust world. There are so many differences between the novel and the novel, it is hard to catalogue them all," Deming told Wellesnet. "Some broad differences, just to name a few, are that Welles transferred the setting of the action from San Diego to the U. S. Mexico border; the novel’s protagonist, Mitch Holt, becomes Miguel “Mike” Vargas in the movie; and Welles wholly invented the opening scene, one of the most famous in cinema, and offered it as a master class in developing suspense that arguably out does Hitchcock in its use of dramatic irony."

He added. "As ever, however, it is Welles’s deep sense of how to use the visual elements of cinema to evoke rather than explain, to gesture and suggest rather than to declaim and illustrate, that so transfigures the novel’s raw material."

Deming called Welles "one of the greatest figures in cinema."

"Whereas many directors get more and more restrained as they mature — especially if their work doesn’t always fare so well at the box office — Welles become more and more daring," Deming said. "Visually, Touch of Evil is as radical and innovative a film as any ever produced by a major studio. It is morally complicated, dark, provocative, and the more one watches it, the more one sees in every frame. I have also been so amazed with what Welles did with his own acting. It seems incredible that he wanted to make his own character so visually repulsive and would slur his lines and mumble. His voice was a precision instrument, so his willingness to take his greatest strength as an actor and do that kind of damage to it so as to make such an unforgettable character seems truly remarkable. Also, the history of the film and its multiple versions is fascinating and raises the issue of what the 'authentic' text of a film really is."

Filmed more than 60 years ago, Touch of Evil remains both relevant and radical, Deming said.
>>>

For more click here.

"Strangers and Mirrors": On Two Noirs from Orson Welles [by David Lehman]

Today The American Scholar posted my essay on The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai, two late 1940s noirs from Orson Welles. Here are the opening paragraphs, with a link to the piece at  The American Scholar.

<<<
Orson Welles directed and starred in two late-’40s noirs. He is the hapless hero in one; in the other, the dastardly villain. In The Lady from Shanghai (1947), Welles cast himself as itinerant Irish sailor Michael O’Hara, who narrates the film and is the fall guy in an intricate homicidal plot. In The Stranger (1946), Welles plays an unrepentant Nazi. In both, the acting up and down the cast is superb, and the direction a marvel.

The Stranger has the more straightforward plot and is the more righteous of the two. It includes newsreel footage informing an incredulous public of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. It is also the only movie Welles made that showed a profit when it was first released. Variety called it “socko melodrama.”

Franz Kindler (Welles), a bigwig in the Third Reich, who is said to have “conceived the theory of genocide,” has reinvented himself as Charles Rankin, an instructor at the exclusive Harper School for Boys (“established 1827”) in an idyllic Connecticut village. An imprisoned Nazi fanatic, Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne), is released in the hope that he will lead the authorities—in the person of pipe-smoking Mr. Wilson, agent of the war crimes commission (Edward G. Robinson)—to Kindler.
>>>

For more of this piece, please link here. And click here for previous essays on classic movies.

Great Movie Music: Fifteen examples that avoid the usual suspects [by David Lehman]

from The American Scholar

By David Lehman | April 28, 2020

Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, and Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot (1959). (TCM Mediaroom/Wikimedia Commons)

In an effort to be mildly unconventional, this list of songs, soundtracks, and musical moments from cinematic history omits all “best song” Oscar winners (“Over the Rainbow,” “Thanks for the Memory,” “Moon River”), old favorites (“Yankee Doodle Dandy,” “As Time Goes By”), justly celebrated soundtracks (Gone with the Wind, The Godfather, Vertigo, 2001), and numbers performed by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland.

1. “Isn’t it Romantic” (music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart) in Love Me Tonight(1932). This great standard is sung in a musical relay race begun by Paris tailor Maurice Chevalier in his shop and continued by a customer in a top hat, a taxi driver, a composer, a troop of soldiers, and a gypsy band, before reaching princess Jeanette MacDonald in the casement of her palace boudoir. The glamorous melody is whistled, performed as a violin solo, and sung as a show tune, a march, and an aria. You hear the tune in a lot of movies but usually without the words that you get here.
   
   For the other fourteen, click here.

The Rule of Three: Film Studies C-3003 Final Exam

Why are there always three sailors or soldiers, never two or four, on shore leave or furlough?

(a) Because Gene Kelly favored the “rule of three”
(b) Because one can sing, one can dance, and one can provide comic relief
(c) Because human kind cannot bear very much reality
(d) Because, according to Freud, “three” is a magic number and a phallic symbol
(e) Because the sergeant tells the captain to lay off his daughter until the sailor marries Wilma.

Which movie illustrates the condition described by T. S. Eliot in the garden?
(a) All of them 
(b) All musicals except It's Always Fair Weather

(c) .Hitchcock's Hollywood films except Rear Window and Vertigo
(d) The Third Man but only if seen in Vienna on a Friday evening
(e) Casablanca

Who is "the third man" in The Third Man?

(a) Fred MacMurray 
(b) Claire Bloom's lover when they reach the Berlin Wall and begin to climb
(c) Harry Lime
(d) Hamlet
(e) Franz Kindler 

 When Carol Reed made The Fallen Idol,

(a) he understood that he could not be faithful to Graham Greene's story
(b) he asked Orson Welles for advice on casting the butler
(c) he cast his own butler as the butler 
(d) he was dating Carol Burnett
(e) he and she sang carols with Carroll O'Connor

The star of the movie was

(1) Arletty
(2) Ilse Lund
(3) Laurence Olivier as Hamlet
(4)The man who didn't shoot Liberty Valance

(5) Madeleine Elster's gray dress at Ernie's

Who is the “odd man out” in Carol Reed’s film with James Mason?

(a) Shell
(b) Lukey
©  Kathleen
(d) Johnny McQueen
(e) Father Tom

How did the British top brass get William Holden to volunteer for the dangerous mission to blow up the bridge in a Burmese jungle?

(a) Because they appealed to his sense of fair play.
(b) Because he was a queer bird, even for an American.
(c) Because he has done what Don Draper will do in Korea: he steals the identity of an officer killed in an action that he survives. But unlike Draper he is found out and hasn’t any choice.
(d) Because they reminded him that he had already been in a POW camp in Germany
(e) Because he is depicted shirtless at the POW camp reminding the viewer of Picnic with Kim Novak.

 

What made Barbara Stanwyck scream?

(a) She phoned the number her lover gave her and the voice on the other end said, "City Morgue."
(b) She said we're both rotten and he said only you're a little bit more rotten
(c) She beat Henry Fonda at poker
(d) She saw Addison De Witt commit a murder and try to pin it on her
(e) When she went to bed with Robert Taylor, he called her Ruby Catherine Stevens

What are the last words spoken in Double Indemnity?

(a) "Round up the usual suspects."
(b) "Straight down the line."
(c) "I love you, too."
(d) "How fast was I going, officer?"
(e) "Sorry, baby, I'm not buying."

In The Best Years of Our Lives, Hoagy Carmichaael

(a) orders a beer for the navy but lets army and air force get drunk as a skunk
(b) doesn't play "How Little We Know" on the piano for Lauren Bacall to sing 
(c) teaches Homer to play "Chopsticks" with his hooks while Al watches and Fred in the phone booth breaks things off with Peggy
(d) owns the bar where Dana Andrews meets Teresa Wright 
(e) invented the hoagy by shoving in a roll everything he could find in the icebox.

Geoffrey O'Brien's "Phantom Empire" [by David Lehman]

Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire (1993) is one of the all-time great odes to Hollywood. In gorgeous prose O'Brien adopts the associative logic of a Hollywood dream to address the subject of movies in general and specific movies that illustrate a point or document a lifelong love of the screen. The insights are imaginative and spring off the page. Examples:

"The decades were not successive but simultaneous. . . . Certain individuals developed specialized tastes for particular years: there were self-created 1929 people, 1957 people. 'I've been in the forties for months.' History was the rack from which they picked hats and gloves, witticisms and courtships."

"You could end up adopting a whole life. Young people chose to become dead actors, walking around in borrowed accents and clothes. James Dean went everywhere. . . . It could get out of hand; there was such a thing as caring too much. Some found it necessary to follow Jimmy into his death car, to share Marilyn's pills."

Watching Rene Clair's A Nous liberté (1931) forty or more years after it was made, knowing what happened in the interim, "was like watching, in slow motion, the prelude to a car crash." 

"John Ford constructed a scale model containing all he wished to preserve of civilization -- a portable world in which John Wayne and Ward Bond could swap drinks and war stories until the end of time. . . ."

"You wore [the director's] eyes like a pair of trick glasses  turning everything you looked at into a military parade (John Ford), a masked ball (Max Ophuls), a series of medieval tableaux (Sergei Eisenstein), a blank-verse melodrama enacted by shadows (Orson Welles), or a fever dream in which you giggled as you watched your worst fears materialize (Luis Bunuel)."

"What you knew of history came off the screens. Periodically you had your memory jogged by a rapid montage of history's greatest hits: clips of the most memorable earthquakes, plane crashes, invasions, assassinations. Each event had its clip, and finally became its clip."

"President Reagan was just another Clint Eastwood fan. Eventually the ceremony would roll around and the awards would be handed out for best century, best war, best achievement in political manipulation."

To anyone who loves (or is just curious about) Dead of Night and The Fallen Idol, The Woman in the Window and The Dark Mirror, The Blue Angel and Stray Dog, La Chienne and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, I joyously recommend The Phantom Empire -- DL

Some cinematic suggestions [by David Lehman]

For The American Scholar, I've posted short essays on the movies I've listed here. Here are links to, and brief excerpts from, the articles:

-- Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear 
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-shadow-of-evil/#.Xn5LrNJKiM8 ("The Shadow of Evil")

<<< Horror is what we feel witnessing the aftermath of a fatal car wreck. Terror is what we feel in anticipation of something terrible that has not yet happened.

What Cape Fear (1962) offers is a pure example of a third kind of sensation, one that attracts even as it repels: menace. Menace is Robert Mitchum as Max Cady, newly released from an eight-year prison sentence, a cigar in his mouth and a Panama hat on his head, into the heat of summer in a small, southern town. Cady embodies evil and Mitchum embodies Cady, a character who is as cunning as he is vicious.

Although he plays an unreformed sex offender who beats up women and has no business gaining control of the viewer’s attention, Cape Fear is Mitchum’s picture from the moment he appears on the scene, confronting the attorney who put him behind bars. “Hello, Counselor. Remember me?” Cady is back with a vengeance. >>

-- William Holden, in two POW films, Stalag 17 and The Bridge on the River Kwai 
https://theamericanscholar.org/william-holden-model-prisoner/#.Xn5LANJKiM8 ("Model Prisoner")

<<< In each movie, Holden says something that communicates his capacity for irony and irreverence, as well as his distaste for the boyish conception of war as a “game.” In The Bridge on the River Kwai, Shears says to Warden: “You and Colonel Nicholson, you’re two of a kind, crazy with courage. For what? How to die like a gentleman, how to die by the rules—when the only important thing is how to live like a human being.” In Stalag 17, he offers this wonderful parting shot: “If I ever run into any of you bums on a street corner, just let’s pretend we’ve never met before.”

The slam-bang conclusion of The Bridge on the River Kwai is magnificent, and I shall say nothing more about it here except to reveal that the movie’s last word is “madness!” At the end of Stalag 17, Sefton takes wire-cutters to cut through the barbed wire, rescue a lieutenant the Germans want to kill, and guide the two of them to freedom. Duke: “The crud did it.” Harry Shapiro: “I’d like to know what made him do it.” Animal: “Maybe he just wanted to steal our wire cutters. Ever think of that?” >>>

-- The Best Years of Our Lives with Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Dana Andrews

 https://theamericanscholar.org/souvenirs-of-war/#.Xn5LL9JKiM8 ("Souvenirs of War")

<<< A great scene: lovesick Peggy confronts her parents, saying they can’t understand her because they “never had any trouble.” To which Milly responds, turning to Al: “We never had any trouble. How many times have I told you I hated you, and believed it in my heart? How many times have you said you were sick and tired of me, that we were all washed up? How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?”

I am always moved by a scene in which Fred climbs aboard a discarded bomber, his “office” during the war, which is now rusting in an aircraft boneyard. The scene has no words, just music, as Fred sits and stares into his turbulent past and blank future. This may be my favorite moment in the film, but there are others very nearly as affecting, including the one in which, at a formal dinner of bank officers and trustees, Al gulps down too many highballs but manages not to hiccup when he makes a speech that begins unsteadily but ends with eloquence. >>>

-- Gentleman's Agreement with Gregory Peck

https://theamericanscholar.org/a-matter-of-pride/#.Xn5LT9JKiM8  ("A Matter of Pride") 

 

<<< Gentleman’s Agreement is one of two late 1940’s pictures that wrestle with the ugliness of anti-Semitism. The other is Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire, also from 1947, a noir featuring three Roberts: Robert Young as an investigator, Robert Mitchum as a friend of a suspect, and Robert Ryan as a demobilized soldier who brutally murders the hospitable Jewish man whom he and his army buddies meet in a bar. But while Crossfire centers on a homicide for which the only motive is drunken anti-Semitism, Gentleman’s Agreement deals with the sort of suburban, exclusionary anti-Semitism practiced by those who claim that “some of my best friends are Jews.” >>>

 

 

 

 

The Killing (directed by Stanley Kubrick; with Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr., Vince Edwards, etc)

https://theamericanscholar.org/epitaph-for-a-genre/#.XptjCVxKiM8 ("Epitaph for a Genre")

<<<
The Killing ends with the greatest money shot in the movies, its nearest competition being the shower of love bestowed on James Stewart on Christmas Eve at the end of It’s A Wonderful Life. Johnny (Sterling Hayden) and Fay (Coleen Gray) are at the airport about to board a flight to Boston and freedom. He doesn’t want to let go of the suitcase, but it is too big for the overhead compartment, so he reluctantly yields it. He and Fay watch the suitcase totter atop the checked luggage in the cart taking it from terminal to plane. When a spectator’s dog runs into the cart’s path, the driver swerves, and the suitcase falls off. It pops opens, and the money flies around like snow in a swirling wind.

The set-up has been executed perfectly and yet, because of a stray event, a tiny happenstance, all is for naught—all the blood spilled, all the careful calculation.
>>>