The Best American Poetry

Some cinematic suggestions [by David Lehman]

For The American Scholar, I've posted short essays on the movies listed here, with brief excerpts from each:

-- 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.” >>>

 

Who is the real hero of "Citizen Kane"? (and other pressing questions) [by David Lehman]

1) Who is the real hero of "Citizen Kane"?

a) Barry Kane
b) Marshall Will Kane
c) Charles Foster Kane
d) Xanadu
e) Captain Queeg

Name the three other relevant movie titles implied by the choices.

2) St. Patrick's Day special: When the hero played by Victor McLaglen shouts "Frankie, your mother forgives me," he is referring to

a) Frankie Machine
b) Frankie 5 Angels
c) Frankie McPhillips
d) Fred Derry
e) General Frank Savage

Name the novel on which the movie is based.

3) Which of these characters does not figure in "Les Enfants du paradis"?

a) Garance
b) Baptiste
c) Pepe Le Moko
d) Jericho
e) Frederic Lemaitre

Who directed the movie?

4) Who says it? "I wouldn't even have to act, just be myself."

a) Moe Green
b) Khartoum
c) Johnny Fontaine
d) Solozzo
e) Barzini

Did he also say, "You don't buy me out. I buy you out"?

5) Which of these personages survives the bloody finale of "The Wild Bunch"?

a) Pike Bishop
b) Deke Thornton
c) Mrs. Froy
d) Robert E. Lee Prewitt
e) Joel Cairo

True or false: "Pike Bishop" was Sam Peckinpah's sneaky way of predicting the disappearance of Bishop Pike in the summer of 1969.

"Street Scene": The Movies That Use Alfred Newman's Theme of the City

 

Listen to it (with Alfred Newman and orchestra, 1946):  here

https://youtu.be/DqjWf7qgoHg 

Or here

for Nic Raine & the City of Prague Philharmonic (rehearsal)

Maybe best of all, the horns and strings on the soundtrack of How to Marry a Millionaire

Directors: Henry Hathaway (2), Otto Preminger, Elia Kazan. Robert Siodmak, Jean Negulesco, Bruce Humberstone, George Marshall, and King Vidor 

Glamour Defined: Rita Hayworth as "Gilda" (1946)

Even Bad Books Have Their Charms [by David Lehman]

 

Even bad books have their charms.
Last night I read such a book
the title of which I shall not mention
nor will I name the book's author
who thinks that at the end of "Dark Passage"
Bogart wears a white dinner jacket as in "Casablanca"
and that Loretta Young's father in "The Stranger"
is the president of the college where Orson Welles teaches
when in fact the dad is a Supreme Court justice
and Mr. Welles as the Nazi without a German accent
teaches at a prep school
and as for "Detour" the author doesn't get the point
that it's a study in the unreliable narrator
while "Double Indemnity," in the writer's opinion,
is only so-so because both Stanwyck and MacMurray
lack sex appeal, ha, and, too, the author likens Dana Andrews
to a baseball player who got to the majors only because
Ted Williams and co are fighting the second World War
I could go on but why should I
when I enjoyed reading the book even despite the irritating
use of "creep" and "milquetoast" just because
I love noir and so does the author so all sins
are forgiven losses are restored and sorrows end

"A Matter of Pride": on Gentleman's Agreement [by David Lehman]

<<<<
It’s funny to think of a movie that won an Oscar for Best Picture as underrated, but highbrow (and even middlebrow) critics have long looked down on Elia Kazan’s 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement, which screenwriter Moss Hart adapted from Laura Z. Hobson’s best-selling novel of the same name. The movie has its flaws—Kazan himself, looking back on the film 30 years later, described it as “patronizing”—but Hart’s script is powerful, and the movie packs a punch.

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.”

In Gentleman’s Agreement, Gregory Peck plays Philip Schuyler Green, a widower who has moved from California to New York with his mother (Anne Revere) and his small son, Tom (Dean Stockwell). A talented writer with a degree from Stanford, Phil works for Smith’s Weekly, a liberal magazine, whose publisher, John Minify (Albert Dekker), wants him to write a series of articles on anti-Semitism. The assignment disappoints Phil, who thinks that the subject is old news. He agrees to do it only after Tom overhears him talking about the articles with his mother and asks, “What’s anti-Semitism?” and “What are Jews, anyway?” Phil has a dickens of a time explaining things.

Phil needs an angle for his articles and can’t find one until he thinks of his Jewish boyhood friend, Dave Goldman (played by John Garfield, a Jew whose real name is Julius Garfinkel), and imagines himself in his place. He decides to impersonate a Jew whose real name is Philip Greenberg and see what it’s like from the inside. (He’s even worked out the title for the series: “I was Jewish for six months.”)

For the ploy to work, it has to be clandestine. Besides his editor, his family, and Dave, the only person who knows that Phil is really a Christian is Minify’s niece Kathy Lacy (Dorothy McGuire), a divorcee who quickly becomes Phil’s girlfriend. Kathy has sold her uncle on the idea that combating anti-Semitism in print is a good and timely idea. Nevertheless, she recoils when Phil confides his plan to tell everyone that he’s Jewish. “Jewish? But you’re not, are you?” she asks, before quickly adding, “Not that it would make any difference to me.” It’s the first hint that for all her avowed liberalism, Kathy’s tolerance extends to genteel anti-Semites and the “gentleman’s agreement” among them to keep Jews out of their neighborhoods, hotels, and clubs.

At the editorial board meeting where Minify announces the series on anti-Semitism (“We’re going to call a spade a dirty spade”), Irving Weisman (Robert Warwick), a Jewish industrialist, voices his disapproval. He says it’s a “very bad idea” and may even be “the most harmful thing you could possibly do now.” Weisman stands for all the Jewish movie moguls who dodged this subject, preferring a strategy that Minify disparages as “a conspiracy of silence.” Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century Fox, the studio that made Gentleman’s Agreement, was one of the few studio heads at the time who was not Jewish. He decided to take on this project when the Los Angeles Country Club rejected him, assuming that he was as Semitic as Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, Adolph Zukor, Carl Laemmle, and David Selznick.

At the meeting, Green lets it be known that he is Jewish, and by the time he gets back to his office, the news of his religious affiliation has spread like wildfire. Green’s secretary (June Havoc) reveals that she, Elaine Wales, has changed her name from Estelle Wilovsky. Otherwise, as a Jewish woman, she would never have landed her job.

Peck is sometimes denigrated as a wooden actor. But no actor is as good at being earnest and righteous (not to mention tall, handsome, and all-American) as Peck in fedora, suit, and pocket square, bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders. This is a terrific role for Peck—one that he took on despite his agent’s warning that doing so would endanger his career.

The love affair that develops between Kathy and Phil is marked less by romance than by their constant quarrels about Jews and Judaism. On the verge of breaking up, Kathy says that she’s sick of Phil’s “lessons in tolerance” and that she’s relieved he’s really a Christian. “It’s just a practical fact,” she says, “like being glad you’re good-looking instead of ugly, rich instead of poor, young instead of old, healthy instead of sick.” Moreover, she believes that “they”—Jews—“always make trouble for everybody, even their friends! They force people to take sides against them.”

In contrast, there’s Anne Dettrey (the radiant Celeste Holm, who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress). As the magazine’s fashion editor, she is Phil’s most sympathetic colleague. Though Green is chivalrous and doesn’t want to hear it, she tells him the truth: Kathy is a hypocrite. “She doesn’t rate you, Phil,” she tells him, capping her pitch with the best line in the movie.
>>>
For the rest of this essay, click here for The American Scholar, which commissioned it as part of the "talking pictures" series. See also Lehman's columns on Robert Mitchum and William Holden.

On "The Bigamist" by Ida Lupino on her birthday [by David Lehman]

I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
movie Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.

Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angeles
(Ida herself, who has a baby).

Watching The Bigamist, you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the 
        same time and continue to function,
an even more difficult challenge when the contradictory ideas
       are Joan Fontaine and Ida Lupino.

-- David Lehman

"William Holden, Model Prisoner" [by David Lehman]

from The American Scholar 

<<<
William Holden, arguably the model for American men of his era, plays a prisoner of war in two major motion pictures. The Germans hold him and other American airmen captive in the close confines of Stalag 17 (1953), and in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), he sweats it out in a Japanese POW camp. In both movies, Holden’s character makes a daring, even miraculous, escape. His getaway happens at the very end of Stalag 17, but in The Bridge on the River Kwai, it marks the beginning of our hero’s adventures.

Both films were celebrated. Playing Sefton in Stalag 17, the cynical POW with the smarts to profit by bartering with the camp guards and running gambling schemes to fleece his fellow prisoners, Holden won the Academy Award for best leading actor. The Bridge on the River Kwai won eight Oscars, including those for best picture and best director.

To some extent, the repetition illustrates the success principle: if at first you succeed, try, try again. Nevertheless, if you identify Holden with the masculine ideal of the postwar years, the coincidence is too keen to overlook.

Aside from Holden and the POW camps, the contrast between the two movies is striking. Stalag 17 is a black-and-white studio production directed by Billy Wilder, whose other masterpieces include Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, and Some Like It Hot. It’s set in late December 1944, and man, is it cold. References to Bastogne make it clear that the Battle of the Bulge is raging, and the Nazis are the enemy. The POW camp commandant (Otto Preminger) tells the prisoners they can forget about having a “White Christmas,” a song written, he says, “by one of your composers who stole his name from our capital” (Berlin). Later we hear “Jingle Bells” and “Adeste Fidelis” in the background.

To balance the surfeit of sentiment, we get the comic antics of two of the prisoners, Harry Shapiro (Harvey Lembeck) and his friend the “Animal” (Robert Strauss). There is essentially one set: the barracks housing the American POWs. It’s easy to tell that a Broadway play preceded the movie.

At one point in Stalag 17, the men improvise a Christmas party by marching around the barracks singing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.” When a couple of guys in a makeshift band play the old Harlan Thompson and Harry Archer tune, “I Love You,” some of the boys pretend to be girls. As they dance, Harry Shapiro is the stand-in for the Animal’s adored Betty Grable. Once, when I dropped in on my Miami-based mother, then in her 80s, she was watching Stalag 17 on television and we watched that particular scene together. A sweet number, I thought, and wondered if Sinatra had recorded it. When I returned from Miami to New York, I listened to “I Love You” sung by Sinatra on a Capitol Records compilation. That was an amazing moment. I recommend you do the same if you want an object lesson in the difference between a pleasing rendition of a song and a masterly performance.

Clocking in at 161 minutes, 41 minutes longer than Stalag 17, The Bridge on the River Kwai was shot in vivid color on location in Sri Lanka. Directed by David Lean, whose other movies, similarly epic in scope and length, include Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, the film follows U.S. Navy Commander Shears (Holden), one of the very few men who have not succumbed to disease or the sadism of the camp commandant, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa). It’s beastly hot, which gives the producers multiple chances to show William Holden without his shirt on: sweating as he digs a grave in the POW camp or sipping martinis as a free man on the beach. Here, the Japanese are the enemy and Allied victory does not yet seem inevitable.

In both movies, Holden displays great survival instincts, resourcefulness, guile, and the weary self-interest that Bogart expressed in Casablanca: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” He is very lucky, too, until his luck runs out. As Shears in The Bridge on the River Kwai, he manages to escape from the isolated prison camp that needed no gates or surveillance because there was no place to escape to—the camp is bordered by a steep promontory from which few would survive a jump or a fall.
>>>

Click here for the rest of this essay.

 

"Film Noir" [by Sean Speers]

Why me?

Editor's Note: This is, I submit, the epitome of film noir in a two-word sentence. James Stewart says it in Vertigo, Edmund O'Brien says it in DOA, and Janet Leigh never gets the chance in Psycho. --DL

"Gentleman's Agreement" (1947): The Trailer

Highbrows have long condescended to this Academy Award-winning movie. They are wrong. Gregory Peck is great; do you remember the foul-mouthed comedian  in "Mad Men" who tells Don Draper "I loved you in Gentleman's Agreement"? Best line in the movie, delivered by Celeste Holm to Peck regarding Dorothy McGuire: "She doesn't rate you, Phil." And Peck to his mother: "You're quite a gal, Mom." 

In this photo you see Holm, Peck, and John Garfield.

"Cape Fear" (1962) [by David Lehman]

Here is the first of my monthly movie columns for The American Scholar. For my opening salvo I chose Cape Fear (1962), in which Robert Mitchum captures the very essence of threat, lust, rage, and menace.

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-shadow-of-evil/#.Xeb13jNKiM8

A Brief Digression on Critics and Cops [by David Lehman]

Why do award committees pin the tail on the horse’s ass? Because award committees combine a universal truth (“everyone’s a critic”) with an old punch line (“the committee in charge of designing a horse came up with a camel”). What is a critic? According to the critic Kenneth Tynan, “the critic is one who knows the way but cannot drive the car.” According to Kierkegaard, the critic resembles a poet as one pea another except that he lacks the anguish in his heart and the music on his lips – that is, everything.

When Annie Get Your Gun opened on May 16, 1946, with Ethel Merman as Annie and one of the most glorious scores ever written for the stage, the critic Ward Morehouse of the New York Herald-Tribune wrote that la Merman was “in her best form since Anything Goes” but that “Irving Berlin’s score is not a notable one.” Brooks Atkinson of the Times seemed to concur, characterizing the songs – There’s No Business Like Show Business, They Say It’s Wonderful, Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better, and the rest – as “routine composing.”  Recall, too, the reviewer who left the theater after a performance of Roberta complaining that Jerome Kern’s score lacked tunes you can whistle. Maybe his mind was elsewhere when the orchestra played Yesterdays, Let’s Begin, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. But for dumbness after the fact, it is hard to top the assessment of Guys and Dolls that appeared in the London Sunday Times in May 1953 (three years after the show’s debut on Broadway). Quoth the critic: the show, “despite its striking, incidental merits,” is “an interminable, an overwhelming, and in the end intolerable bore.”

On the screen, the critic is depicted often enough as a venomous, haughty lout (Clifton Webb in Laura), a conniver (George Sanders in All About Eve) or sometimes a guy who needs a drink because he has to choose between telling the truth and keeping his job (Joseph Cotton in Citizen Kane). But in song-and-dance movies with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly in them, the critic is transmuted into the figure of the cop who looks on the festive proceedings and glares skeptically (as at the end of Kelly’s performance of the title number in Singing in the Rain) or with amused toleration (as when Fred Astaire, sporting a boater, does his shoeshine number in The Band Wagon). The cop is the reviewer saying, You’re not supposed to be having such a good time. Don’t you know there’s a war going on? Don’t you realize that life is serious and art must be the same? Art has a moral imperative. Literature is a criticism of life. To which line of objection, the best answer is the movement of a dancer, the smile on Gene Kelly’s face as he wraps himself around a streetlamp and lets the rain pour on his face, and the recollection of the late John Simon's typically brutal and wrong-headed attack on that landmark movie, The Godfather

The Greatest Songs to Lose the Academy Award [by David Lehman]

In 1937 the award for best song went to "Waikiki Wedding." Nominated was "They Can't Take That Away From Me" by the Gershwin brothers, neither of whom ever won the award.

In 1941 the award went to a worthy song, "The Last Time I Saw Paris," music by Jerome Kern, lyrics Oscar Hammerstein. But "Blues in the Night" (music Harold Arlen, lyrics Johnny Mercer). "It was the only timer an Oscar [award] was stolen by an Oscar [Hammerstein]." Pictured at left is Harold Arlen, who could take solace in know that, with lyricist Yip Harburg (with an assist from Ira Gershwin) he wrote the music of the most popular of all Oscar-winning song, "Over the Rainbow."

In 1953 Harry Warren's "That's Amore" as delivered by Dean Martin should have gotten the nod over Sammy Fain's "Secret Love."

In 1954 "Three Coins in the Fountain" by Jules Styne and Sammy Cahn won the prize, and it's a good song, especially as sung by Mr S, but an even better song was "The Man That Got Away" by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin sung by Judy Garland in "A Star is Born."

In 1960 do you really believe "Never on Sunday" is better than "The Second Time Around"?

In 1964 "Chim Chim Cher-ee" collected the most votes. Among the also-rans was the vastly superior "My Kind of Town" by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, perhaps because the two of them had already won four times each.

After 1965, when "The Shadow of Your Smile" was named the winner, it no longer mattered, but for the record here's the full list starting in 1934 when "The Continental" was winner number one.. -- DL

Lauren Bacall sings at Eddie Mars's Casino [in "The Big Sleep"]

"Yes, her tears flowed like wine. She's a real sad tomato, she's a busted Valentine."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmK-gF8nEh4

Long Live Noir -- and No R [by David Lehman]

A few years ago I wrote a piece for The American Scholar employing the Raymond Roussel method of composition that obliges the author to commence with one word or phrase and end with a meaning derived from a homonym of the initial word or phrase. Noir became No R. Here's how:

<<<
Kaminsky got on the noir bandwagon early on.

At Wesleyan he majored in French, spent his junior year in Paris, went to the Cinémathèque Française at the Palais de Chaillot, and watched American movies with French subtitles as a way to learn the language. Many of the films were classic noir efforts of the 1940s and early ’50s. He saw Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, and Double Indemnity with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, and Dark Passage with Bogart and Bacall, and The Killing with Sterling Hayden organizing a racetrack heist, and The Lady from Shanghai with Anita Ellis’s voice coming out of Rita Hayworth’s mouth singing “Please Don’t Kiss Me” and meaning the exact opposite, and Pickup on South Street with Richard Widmark as an experienced pickpocket who lifts a woman’s wallet in the subway and the wallet happens to have strips of microfilm that the Communists crave, and Widmark lives on a houseboat under the Brooklyn Bridge and Thelma Ritter gets offed and Jean Peters gets beaten up like you wouldn’t believe, and Cry Danger and The Woman in the Window and Laura and The Asphalt Jungle and the dozens of other notable movies that feature fatal females, mixed-up males with mixed motives, robberies and insurance scams that go wrong, greed that turns lusty, lust that turns deadly.

The dialogue is snappy, witty in the hard-boiled manner. Even cabdrivers crack wise. The fare is a private eye, and the cabbie says sympathetically, “Tough racket.” “Maybe so,” the dick replies, “but cabdrivers don’t live forever.” “Maybe not,” the cabbie concedes. “All the same it’ll come as a surprise to me if I don’t.” In another part of town, Ann Sheridan of the magnificent mane kills a burglar in self-defense, or so she claims. The dame-in-distress sobs to the police: “I’ve told you all I know.” Husband Zachary Scott of the mustachioed sneer knits his brows, but can’t help looking bitchy: “There’s nothing for you to be ashamed of.” Both are lying. But the true noir note is sounded by Eve Arden as Paula, a secondary character, officiating at a party for the suspects, witnesses, and extras. When she has everyone’s attention, she admits to having committed a crime against society some years ago. I “married a man,” she announces. Later the busty broad deadpans that “practically everything” she has is real. “It’s a shame to waste two perfectly good mouths on you,” she remarks when a pair of gossiping girlfriends get on her nerves. Later, still: “Don’t show me out, I know the way. I always look for an exit in case of a raid.”

“Some things that happen for the first time / seem to be happening again”: Lorenz Hart’s definition of déjà vu (from his lyric for “Where or When”) applies with a vengeance to noir. Accidents seem predetermined; events occur as if repetitions of themselves. The gang leader has a heart-to-heart with his dead Ma in the back yard after dark, and the brains of the operation feeds nickels into the jukebox so he can watch a nubile girl jitterbug with a boy her own age. Exhibitionists in gaudy undergarments perform for laid-up photographers across the courtyard. The surgeon with a cigarette dangling from his lips gives the escaped con a new face, and if there’s a knock on the door, the chances are that a man with a gun will enter the room and shoot first, ask questions later. What do you want me to do, count to three like they do in the movies?

A thug throws a pot of hot coffee at a moll’s face or, giggling, rolls an old lady’s wheelchair down a flight of stairs and the wrong man is arrested. The prizefighter refuses to throw the bout and gets beaten in the alley. There's a scheme to do away with one angle of the triangular three, sit pretty, and collect the insurance. bit it doesn't quite work out as planned. The pampered invalid has a panic attack, picks up the phone, and dials the emergency number she has been given. A voice answers, “City Morgue.”

The dead return to life. A beautiful murder victim walks into her own living room wondering what the hell the gumshoe asleep in an armchair is doing there. A small-town notary goes to San Francisco, has a drink, feels funny, and spends the next week—that is, the rest of his life—trying to solve the mystery of his own murder before he expires of a slow-working poison. In one scene at a club, a girl singer does a swinging version of “Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are.” We go to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Reno, Mexico, the state penitentiary, a lost highway or two, but for some reason we keep returning to San Francisco. There is also a valise stuffed with $20 bills, a crooked cop, a cuckolded husband, a pair of lethal scissors on the desk, a sensitive black man played by James Edwards, a stick-up in the parking lot, a confusing plot, a lot of rain, and a lot of cigarettes.

It was an easy genre to like. The French were crazy about it.
>>>

But that's just the noir portion. How do we get from here to "no R"?
Click here to find out.
From "No R" by David Lehman in The American Scholar. Click here for the rest of the piece. [Originally posted 2015.]

For other noir features we have run every Sunday since July 2019, click here.

"The Big Clock" -- Kenneth Fearing's novel, John Farrow's film [by David Lehman]

On TCM on a recent Sunday at midnight and again at 10 AM, Eddie Muller of Noir Alley showed The Big Clock (1948), a great movie adapted from the fearless Fearing novel centered on a magazine empire that puts out such periodicals as Newsways, Crimeways, Sportsways, Airways, Styleways, and Artways. Charles Laughton is the Luce-like villain; Ray Milland the magazine editor who happens to be in the wrong place at the right time and is the object of a manhunt that he is supposed to be in charge of. Watching it, and enjoying Elsa Lanchester's splendid performance as a kooky painter modeled on Alice Neel, I recalled writing this paragraph years ago for American Heritage. Here's what I wrote when asked to name an "underrated" detective novelist:

<<< The 1940s was a great period for the indigenous American crime novel, and Kenneth Fearing was a notably sophisticated master of suspense. A distinguished feature of his Dagger of the Mind (1941) is that it is set at a venerable artists’ colony like Yaddo or MacDowell, where intrigue and amorous affairs are usual but homicide is not. The Big Clock (1946), one of the greatest murder mysteries, has inspired two movies (the one from 1948 with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton has it all over the 1987 remake with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman, No Way Out). Fearing offers a clever variant on the law of the purloined letter, which stipulates that the elusive object of a search may be most effectively concealed if it is left out in the open. The Big Clock —the title is an allusion to Time Inc.—also features a manhunt organized and led by the hunted man, an editor at a magazine empire whose publications include Newsways, Crimeways, Homeways, Personalities, and The Sexes. How can I, a poet who has written for a newsmagazine and has a passion for detective novels, fail to embrace Kenneth Fearing, a hugely undervalued poet with a splendid last name who wrote for a newsmagazine and produced several masterpieces of detective fiction?
>>>

For our other recent film noir features, timed to coincide with the conclusion of Eddie Muller's Sunday morning repeat of Saturday midnight's noir, click here.

Death and Noir: Lummis Asks Lehman

Suzanne Lummis:

David, in your book forthcoming from Cornell University Press, A Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir, you confront mortality, not just death in the abstract but --with your cancer diagnosis -- death as a more immediate threat.  This got me thinking of how many times in my life I thought I might die -- not eventually, but, like, Right Now. First time I was 18. I was over-reacting, sure. But it was an awful lot of blood. Out in the open air where it was not supposed to be. I don't think this is unrelated to my attraction to noir. How about you?  Did your immersion in film noir come into play when you got your diagnosis and had to think about the ultimate Noir? 

David Lehman: I am superstitious person and have had recurring nightmares in which I die because I misjudged my ability to cross the street and am struck by a car. Sometimes I fall down a steep flight of stairs because I forgot to hold the bannister. My superego is too strong for me to get into any real trouble, so I like going to noir valley for my dose of vicarious vice. When I was sick and didn’t have enough energy to get off the couch, I watched old movies – including a bunch of noirs with Dana Andrews. Laura, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, While the City Sleeps, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Fallen Angel.

In 1956 and ’57, when I was eight, my idea of the grown-up American male was Dana Andrews, whom I saw in such pictures as Zero Hour! and Comanche. Years later I saw his most successful pictures, Laura and The Best Years of Our Lives. I identified with his plight in the latter:  a returning war veteran who can’t get a job and is trapped in a bad marriage.

In the Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger noirs, he always communicates a certain nervousness – like a man who has suffered a nervous breakdown, a man who needs to play with a pocket pinball game to help control himself. There is a suppressed anger and energy, and at the same time he is capable, confident, handsome, and at ease in his body whether cast as a detective, a cop, or a newspaperman. Dana Andrews had the best poker face in noir. I read his obituary in 1992. He was an alcoholic.  Drunk or sober he never missed a word. And I thought: it figures.

This is the sixteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here.

Noir and You: David Lehman Asks Suzanne Lummis About The Studio System

David Lehman:

Do you believe that true noir as a genre -- leaving out neo-noirs, parodies, and ingenious movies on the order of The Getaway, The Usual Suspects, and Memento -- owes its existence to the studio system, where you had the value of a generic formula, the availability of contract players to round out a cast, and excellent writers of dialogue?

Suzanne Lummis:

Film noir probably owes its origins to the studio system but not necessarily its flourishing. I’ve come upon alternative views that say the abrupt weakening of the studio system in the aftermath of some legal battles allowed more independent producers to enter the field, producers who then hired independent directors with their own visions and signature styles. I think it would’ve been hard to get a movie as weird and anarchistic as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly made under the strictures of the earlier studio system.  

Maybe the question has no definitive answer, because there always was a type of formula B-movie cranked out within the profit-making machine. Get yourself a Man, a Woman, and a Gun, maybe a second woman, maybe a couple more guns, and, somewhere, Money—that can be gotten by cheating, thievery, or murder.  Oh, and you’ll need law enforcement, which could be a squad car filled with anonymous cops or one guy who’s made it his life’s work to crack this case or dog these fugitives. They could roll those elements around each other and come up with a working script to film fast and cheap.

On the other hand, we have examples of brilliant moviemaking. Double Indemnity, for instance -- no one pitched that as a B-movie. It was top-tier all the way: Billy Wilder directing and writing, Raymond Chandler co-writing, the source material a book by a seminal writer of hard-boiled crime, James M. Cain.  Starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson. All of them, great talents at the top of their game. 

I just read a quote by Robert Aldrich about the paradox of the studio system, the good and the bad of it. This makes me laugh — file it under You Can’t Win for Losing. “We'd had twenty years of petty dictators running the industry, during which time everybody worked and everybody got paid, maybe not enough, but they weren't on relief. Seventeen years later you wonder if the industry is really more healthy in terms of creativity. Are we making more or better pictures without that central control? But when everybody worked under those guys, they hated them.”      

This is the fifteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here.

Acting Noir [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

Who’s Your Favorite Noir Actor?

Suzanne Lummis:

I can’t choose between Richard Widmark [left] and Dan Duryea, both consummate artists, absolute originals who enlivened every scene of every movie they appeared in with their idiosyncratic expressions of evil, villainy or rascally mischief—lowlifes but so alive.  

Dan Duryea’s the only actor I can think of who could inhabit characters who were not only bad, not only murderous, but downright smarmy, and still seem weirdly attractive.  Often his characters slap women around, in Scarlet Street, Woman in the Window, Too Late for Tears… One of the women noir scholars contributing to the commentary on a DVD said, “I find Dan Duryea sexy, which is really disturbing.” That made me laugh. - Problem is, confidence and energy combined with focus is sexy, and nothing can be done about that.  In life, though, I’d loath that type of abusive person, but in the movies…  In the movies, what you’re looking at is talent.

Widmark played strong, good guys, too, especially in Westerns, but in Noir, oh anything from the hapless grifter in Night and the City, a loser forever a step away from the Big Break, to the maniac in Kiss of Death. It’s said he’s the only actor ever to become famous for his first scene in his first movie. And it haunted him; he got so freaking sick of people asking him to giggle like Tommy Udo. It went on for years. I adored Richard Widmark, who was commanding in all his roles, and I sympathize with his disappointment that the public tended to reduce him to one role, one scene. Stupid public.

I especially love that Duryea [right] and Widmark lived lives that dramatically contrasted their screen images. It’s not simply that they were nice—nothing surprising about that. These guys were absolute sweethearts, known as a couple of the kindest, most honorable men in Hollywood, both with happy lifelong marriages to high school or college girlfriends, not a trace of scandal. When asked why he didn’t flirt around Widmark said, “I happen to like my wife—a lot.” When she got Alzheimer’s, he gave up acting to nurse her for seven years till her death. 

They were smart as hell, both of them. Before Widmark came to Hollywood he taught acting at the college level. At Cornell, Duryea was elected to the most prestigious honor society.  They read, these guys.  The sleazeball hustler in Scarlet Street majored in English.  The Psycho in Kiss of Death lived in a home packed with books. I love that both were able to capture that raw, streetwise (or street-dumb) darkness and wildness but knew not to live it.   It’s called acting.   

David Lehman:

Edward G. Robinson gets my vote because of his amazing versatility. He can be the indomitable investigator (Double Indemnity),the relentless G-man and Nazi hunter (The Stranger), the nasty villain (Key Largo), the poor sucker who loses everything and ends up on a park bench (Scarlet Street), or the genial clubman who kills a man in his sleep (The Woman in the Window). In each case he knocks it out of the park.

May I also cast a ballot in favor of Ida Lupino the director. I love her movies, “The Hitchhiker” and “The Bigamist.” Very daring. She is a wonderful actress, too -- for example in 'The Bigamist," about which I wrote this poem:

The Bigamist

I saw The Bigamist, maybe the best
movie Ida Lupino directed, though
The Hitchhiker gives it a run for the money.

Edmund O’Brien has
one wife in San Francisco
(Joan Fontaine, who wants a baby),
and another wife in Los Angeles
(Ida herself, who has a baby).

Watching The Bigamist, you realize
how hard it is to be a bigamist.
Bigamy is a full-time job,
especially in 1953,
requiring
two wardrobes with one or two overlapping suits
enough money to pay the bills for both households
an excellent memory to keep everything straight
a poker face
a creative mind
a happy childhood but troubled adolescence
no siblings
deceased parents
an active libido
plus the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in the mind at the same time
          and continue to function,
an even more difficult challenge when the contradictory ideas are Joan
          Fontaine and Ida Lupino.

This is the fourteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here. 

Fred and Peggy in "The Best Years of Our Lives"

Dana Andrews, left, and Teresa Wright, steering the wheel, in The Best Years of Our Lives.

And he's thinking: if only I could get a good job. 

And she's thinking: when I think that he's married, I sob. 

And he's thinking: I married a stranger.

And she's thinking: a divorce would be a game-changer.

And he's thinking: wait till my friend gets married and I'm the best man, Okay?

And she's thinking: Okay.

Well, it's been a long war. . .