The Best American Poetry

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The greatest title sequence by the master, Saul Bass.

 

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

NOIR CITY Magazine No. 34

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

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

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

 

Happy birthday, Dean Martin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Washington Post, May 5, 2022

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

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

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

from the archive; first posted May 19, 2008

Here's to Crime!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On The Mysterious Romance of Murder:

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

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

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

-- Paul Auster

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

-- Nicholas Christopher, author of Somewhere in the Night

 

Hans Christian Andersen’s "Tin Soldier" as Adapted by Jon Voight [by Joe Lehman]

In the early summer of 1996, just before I turned thirteen and a few years before the Internet conquered the world, I used to frequent several independently-owned video rental stores. One evening I rented a recently released VHS film titled The Tin Soldier, the only film that Jon Voight has directed as well as held the starring role.  It was apparent from its cover that the movie’s theme was geared toward someone exactly as old and in need of a lesson as I. Its official tagline read: “A modern-day fairy tale about old-fashioned courage.” 

Jon Voight found his inspiration in the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale The Steadfast Tin Soldier. In a child’s toy collection, a tin soldier with a hobbled leg falls in love with the paper ballerina placed nearby. The soldier falls from an open window and from then on must face a series of overwhelming obstacles as he attempts to return home to his ‘true love,’ the ballerina. 

The movie is not a direct adaptation. It contains the key elements of Andersen’s fable: a toy collection, featuring a one-legged tin soldier and a beautiful toy ballerina. But instead of Andersen’s nineteenth century Denmark, it is set in 1990s’ Los Angeles. As in the Andersen story there is a young boy, only here he has a name and a pensive personality. He is twelve-year-old Billy McClusky (Trenton Knight), a working class transplant from Detroit to L.A., whose recently widowed mother (Ally Sheedy) is a struggling waitress. The father’s death has caused a rift between mother and son. The two are sitting across from each other at the breakfast table. They are brooding silently.

It is Billy’s first day at the new middle school. Two youth gangs occupy turf in the school: Pack 13, which seems  predominantly made up of white ethnic kids, and the rival  Snakes, largely black, who are antagonistic toward Billy from the get-go.   Pack 13’s de facto leader, a burly thirteen-year-old, Clyde (Aeryk Egan), quickly recognizes Billy as plucky and resolute in spite of his being physically small. Clyde insists on recruiting Billy into his gang on a trial basis.

Billy wants to join the science club and to impress a pretty girl named Toni (Bethany Richards), who is equally attracted to him but disapproves of the gang. Upon school’s dismissal that first day, Snakes’ most volatile member, a boy nicknamed “Psycho” (Travis Perkins) chases Billy down the streets into a neighborhood antique toy store owned and operated by the kindly and eccentric Mr. Fallon (Dom DeLuise). Fallon immediately shoos Psycho off the premises  while Billy hides in a corner.

At the toy store, where the toy tin soldier and ballerina lie dormant on the shelves, Fallon lectures Billy on the virtue of showing respect for his elders. He encourages the boy to borrow the tin soldier, telling him that he might learn a few lessons about honesty, integrity and courage from possessing it for a while, as these are the principles the antiques represent. Billy reluctantly accepts the loaner.

At this point the movie takes an enchanted turn. Billy wakes up in the middle of the night to discover, much to his disbelief, that the toy has morphed into a real-life medieval knight named Yarik (Jon Voight), who speaks in Chaucer-style English and professes chivalry and righteousness. The fairy tale, which Hans Christian Andersen wrote in the nineteenth century, reflects a similar code of chivalric conduct and honor.

                  It is concerivable that there are super myths common to fairy tales, folk tales, and children's literature of whatever provenance. The theme of chivalric virtue is a central theme in both the fairy tale and the movie, and this made me turn to the pages of the medieval Song of Roland to seek out what are the traits of a noble knight. The medieval knight’s code of chivalry includes seventeen imperatives. Among them are to fear God and maintain His Church;  to serve the liege lord in valor and faith; to protect the weak and defenseless; to live by honor and for glory;  never to refuse a challenge from an equal; and never to turn the back upon a foe.

         The living and breathing tin soldier presents himself to Billy as a knight “of the Order of Fallon.” Billy is henceforth Yarik’s young squire. Only Billy can see Yarik. Like the tin soldier of the Hans Christian Andersen story, Yarik has come to life with an injured leg.

           At first, neither Billy nor Yarik has an idea of what Yarik’s purpose is. The shining knight looms invisibly over Billy at school suggesting correct answers to a teacher’s questions. But this seems hardly reason enough for Yarik’s presence.

           It is when Billy reveals to Yarik his crush on the lovely and sweet girl Toni that Yarik senses a common mission between them. Both lad and knight yearn for the love of a female. Yarik covets the ballerina Fallon has named Katrina and can sense the growing affection between Billy and Toni. Yarik’s quest is to connect the two adolescents.

           In Andersen’s original story, the tin soldier declares, “that is the wife for me. But she is too grand, and lives in a castle, while I have only a box to live in; [there are] five-and-twenty of us [soldiers] altogether, that is no place for her. Still I must try and make her acquaintance.” Andersen is incorporating the old ideals of chivalry and courtly love in this declaration, for these concepts require a seemingly unattainable romantic devotion.

           In The Steadfast Tin Soldier, the toy survives numerous existential threats. The children place it in a paper boat, where it is swept away at sea, swallowed by a large fish, and eventually is recovered by his owners when the fish is caught and cut open. As Andersen describes the scene: “The flames lighted up the tin soldier, as he stood, the heat was very terrible, but whether it proceeded from the real fire or from the fire of love he could not tell.” A cinder from the stove blows onto the paper ballerina and burns her up too. And so ends Andersen’s tale.


       In the movie, however, the sooner Yarik can complete his quest to unite the two kids, the sooner he will return to his toy-sized metal form and be reunited with his own love Katrina. Just as the steadfast tin soldier of Hans Christian Andersen’s imagination surmounts whatever obstacles fate throws his way, the movie’s knight Yarik must guide his squire through the pangs of adolescence, heavily complicated by his dilemma of avoiding the lure of the youth gangs. “The important thing is to choose your friends, and don’t let them choose you,” is Yarik’s counsel.

         Each supporting character has a crucial role to play. There is Toni, Billy’s love interest, who represents nobility and honor. Clyde is the bully, who represents unchecked power. Street smart and brash, he has ambitions of his own, even if those ambitions are self-defeating. “You know, the only place you can get respect is on the streets, and if you don’t have that, you don’t have anything.” And adults who act alarmist over the presence of gangs, to Clyde, are hypocrites who turn to “their precious booze and pills.”

         If Toni represents the virginal, seemingly unattainable object of courtly love for Billy the squire, then it is just as believable that Billy’s wounded mother, who is left unnamed, once played the same role for his late father, a failure to her and their son. When Billy asks her “do you think Dad was anything like me when he was my age,” she replies, “No, you’re nothing like your father. You’re going to make something out of your life.” She is quite young, a sure indication that she was in her teens or early twenties when she had her son. She clings to a tremendous concern for the safety and the passage of her son into young adulthood. They just cannot communicate.

          If Yarik is successfully to advise Billy using 14^th Century values of chivalry, then he must school the squire in self-defense tactics. He shows him how to fight bareknuckle.

          Billy, while wearing Pack 13 ‘colors,’ saves the life of a young African-American boy, a member of the Snakes, pulling him up from the edge of a scaffold. Billy’s sudden heroism confuses the other Snakes, and in order to restore their feeling of stolen honor, they challenge Billy to a one-on-one fight against the rival Psycho. The match is to be held the next night at an abandoned warehouse. Though Yarik disapproves of Billy’s gang activity to begin with, the codfe of chivalry instructs him never to refuse a challenge from an equal and never to turn the back upon a foe.

           Once the task of guiding the boy is completed, Billy realizes that the only paternal figure he has left in his life—Yarik—will soon be returning to his miniature form, Billy sees Pack 13 as the only fraternal organization that cares for him. and Yarik will disappear soon. “Why do you have to go too? You taught me to do things. To be brave. To be a man,” Billy asks Yarik tearfully.

            When, near the denouement of the film, Billy and Psycho go hand-to-hand in a brutal fight, Billy ultimately recognizes the futility of the chaotic rumble that Pack 13 and Snakes have ensnared him in. Toni, having kissed Billy on the cheek for luck, knows she cannot talk him out of fighting when his “honor is at stake.” With Toni and her friends as hidden spectators and the invisible Yarik standing overhead, the two combatants have given each other a hell of a beating. Billy has Psycho pinned down and the rest of Pack 13 is egging him on to finish him off with a hockey stick. Billy suddenly withdraws, shouting “What’s the matter with you people? Am I the only one who can see how stupid this is? This isn’t a fight about honor. This isn’t a fight about respect or space.” He reveals to everyone that his father died in a street fight just like this one. “And it didn’t bring him honor. It didn’t bring him anything. I didn’t fight for my honor today. I saved it by stopping.”

          As Billy leaves the warehouse Clyde sneers, “He wasn’t part of Pack 13 anyway.” And because the fight didn’t end the way the gangs had planned, the rest of the kids stay behind and duke it out, but not before Yarik’s voice materializes in Clyde’s ear, inspiring him to exclaim:  “Anyone who wants to leave can do so right now.” Clyde is surprised to hear himself utter these words. He then qualifies himself by saying, “but anyone who wants to stay and finish this, can stay and fight right now!” The warehouse descends into chaos, but not before a few of the kids decide to heed Billy’s warning and put away their colors and walk away. “Sometimes it takes far more courage to sheathe a sword than to wield it,” Yarik tells Billy as he congratulates him.

           In the end, Billy proves himself to Toni and then he reconciles with his worried mother, and Yarik elevates Billy to the rank of knighthood. Just as the Hans Christian Andersen story ends with the tin knight and the toy ballerina enduring a final goodbye as they burn into the melting pot, in the movie Yarik disappears after Katrina the ballerina appears to take his hand in one final magical dance in the moonlight. He has reverted back into doll form. Billy next returns the tin soldier to Mr. Fallon, who offers the boy a job at his antique toy store, which Billy enthusiastically accepts. Mr. Fallon marvels at how Billy immediately knows where the knight wants to be placed. Right next to the ballerina. “He has his lady, and I have mine.” The film fades to black as Billy and Toni, hands clasped together, walk away from the store down the street, and Mr. Fallon waves farewell for now.

The Ides of March [by David Lehman]

The Ides of March

The origin of every fortune is a crime.
The ides of March are a dangerous time.

The ideas of March originate in wind.
Madness may spring from a mind that hasn’t sinned.

The guides of March have scary stories to tell.
The family money came from a corpse and an oil well.

The editors of March fly to the moon and bring back April.
The original sinner has learned to shave and say “I will.”

You can trace each legacy back to the day
when the id of March exposed the ego’s feet of clay.

The dice of March roll on the green felt tabletop.
The suicides of March drive past the octagonal sign: Stop!

On the dais of March sit the deceased father and mother.
Every happy family is different from every other.

from The Atlantic (March 2011)

The Ultimate Language Poem [in "The Shining" (1980)]

Wendy Torrence (Shelley Duval) discovers the "Language" poem that her husband Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson) has been struggling to complete. -- sdh

 

Cornell UP Announces "The Mysterious Romance of Murder"

Coming from Cornell University Press in May 2022:

<<< From Sherlock Holmes to Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles to Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, Harry Lime to Gilda, Madeleine Elster, and other femmes fatales,—crime and crime-solving in fiction and film captivate us. Why do we keep going back to Agatha Christie's ingenious puzzles and Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled murder mysteries? What do spy thrillers teach us and what accounts for the renewed popularity of morally ambiguous noirs? In The Mysterious Romance of Murder, the poet and critic David Lehman explores a wide variety of outstanding books and movies—some famous (The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity), some known mainly to aficionados—with style, wit, and passion.

Lehman revisits the smoke-filled jazz clubs from the classic noir films of the 1940s, the iconic set pieces that defined Hitchcock's America, the interwar intrigue of Eric Ambler's best fictions, and the intensity of attraction between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. He also considers the evocative elements of noir—cigarettes, cocktails, wisecracks, and jazz standards—and includes five original noir poems (including a pantoum inspired by the 1944 film, Laura) and ironic astrological profiles of Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, and Graham Greene. Written by a connoisseur with an uncanny feel for the language and mood of mystery, espionage, and noir, The Mysterious Romance of Murder will delight fans of the genre and newcomers alike.
>>>

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

-- Paul Auster

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

-- Nicholas Christopher, author of Somewhere in the Night

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501763625/the-mysterious-romance-of-murder/

"Perky Cuties I Had a Crush On": Movies and Beauty [by Mark Strand]

8 / 26 / 09

Dear David

Pursuant to our conversation of the other night, the one in which we discussed what various movie stars meant to us, I have decided to write not simply one email to you, but several. 

When I was very young, say, around seven or eight, I went in for cowboy flicks.  I usually went with a pack of boys my own age, we paid our dime and watched a double feature. The National Anthem was played and sometimes there’d be a yo-yo contest.  There were usually one or two cartoons, a serial of Superman or Captain Marvel and always Movietone Newsreels.  I had no use for Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers.  I liked Randolph Scott, I guess because I admired his perfectly chiseled features and the fact that he didn’t sing.  But I’ll talk about the male stars of my past at another time.

Now I want to discuss the females that I had begun to want to watch, the many on whom I developed a crush.  I was nine or ten when I thought Esther Williams was hot. It was her swimming, naturally, that did it for me. In those days I liked women who evinced some athleticism. I never really thought of them as women, but as grown up girls,   Esther Williams could swim. That was it for me. I thought her face a little broad, especially when she wore a swimming cap. The crush was short lived. I moved on. Athleticism ceased to be a necessity, since almost none of the female stars was athletic, at least not on screen. That is, with exception of Ginger Rogers, whose dancing I considered a kind of athletic event. (As I grew older I ceased to think of it as merely that.) I should also mention Betty Grable, who does a terrific solo in “The Gay Divorcee.” But this and other Rogers/Astaire movies I saw sometimes as many as ten years after they first appeared.  It wasn’t simply Rogers’ athleticism that got to me, it was her energy, he perkiness. That’s it: she was perky, despite those eyes that could be a shade soulful, a little hurt.

Other Perky cuties I had a crush on were Janet Blair, Joan Leslie. I have not seen Janet Blair [left][ since I was ten years old, so I can’t say what effect she would have on me now, but I recently watched “Flying Down to Rio” and took a good hard look at the young Ginger Rogers but was not overwhelmed. More overwhelming was the seemingly endless Carioca dance numbers with Fred and an ensemble of hundreds (it seemed). And most overwhelming was Dolores Del Rio to whom I had paid no attention when I was a boy. Ah Dolores! I ran into her once in an elevator in Mexico City back in 1953. I was with my father and he noticed her right away and practically fainted on the spot. She was then 48 and I was 19.  She was still beautiful, but not the way she was in “Flying Down to Rio.” She was darkly glamorous, which is about all that I could be certain of in the few seconds we were on the elevator. In “Flying Down to Rio” you noticed the playful intensity of her eyes and her perfect features. But more about the true beauties next time. -- Mark

Dear David

Pursuant to our conversation of the other night, the one in which we discussed what various movie stars meant to us, I have decided to write not simply one email to you, but several. 

When I was very young, say, around seven or eight, I went in for cowboy flicks.  I usually went with a pack of boys my own age, we paid our dime and watched a double feature. The National Anthem was played and sometimes there’d be a yo-yo contest.  There were usually one or two cartoons, a serial of Superman or Captain Marvel and always Movietone Newsreels.  I had no use for Tom Mix or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers.  I liked Randolph Scott, I guess because I admired his perfectly chiseled features and the fact that he didn’t sing.  But I’ll talk about the male stars of my past at another time.

Now I want to discuss the females that I had begun to want to watch, the many on whom I developed a crush.  I was nine or ten when I thought Esther Williams was hot. It was her swimming, naturally, that did it for me. In those days I liked women who evinced some athleticism. I never really thought of them as women, but as grown up girls,   Esther Williams could swim. That was it for me. I thought her face a little broad, especially when she wore a swimming cap. The crush was short lived. I moved on. Athleticism ceased to be a necessity, since almost none of the female stars was athletic, at least not on screen. That is, with exception of Ginger Rogers, whose dancing I considered a kind of athletic event. (As I grew older I ceased to think of it as merely that.) I should also mention Betty Grable, who does a terrific solo in “The Gay Divorcee.” But this and other Rogers/Astaire movies I saw sometimes as many as ten years after they first appeared.  It wasn’t simply Rogers’ athleticism that got to me, it was her energy, he perkiness. That’s it: she was perky, despite those eyes that could be a shade soulful, a little hurt.

Other Perky cuties I had a crush on were Janet Blair, Joan Leslie. I have not seen Janet Blair [left][ since I was ten years old, so I can’t say what effect she would have on me now, but I recently watched “Flying Down to Rio” and took a good hard look at the young Ginger Rogers but was not overwhelmed. More overwhelming was the seemingly endless Carioca dance numbers with Fred and an ensemble of hundreds (it seemed). And most overwhelming was Dolores Del Rio to whom I had paid no attention when I was a boy. Ah Dolores! I ran into her once in an elevator in Mexico City back in 1953. I was with my father and he noticed her right away and practically fainted on the spot. She was then 48 and I was 19.  She was still beautiful, but not the way she was in “Flying Down to Rio.” She was darkly glamorous, which is about all that I could be certain of in the few seconds we were on the elevator. In “Flying Down to Rio” you noticed the playful intensity of her eyes and her perfect features. But more about the true beauties next time. -- Mark

toujours meilleur en francais

 

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.

from the archive; first posted March 2, 2020
Top left: Dana Andrews; top right Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity; center left Edward G. Robinson in The Stranger; center right Tom Neal and Ann Savage in Detour; bottom left Gloria Grahame; bottom right Elisha Cook, Jr., and Marie Windsor in The Killing.

“Grand Illusion”: Why and How it Matters [by Bruce Kawin]

Ed note: The last time I taught a graduate literature seminar, only two of fifteen students had seen Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, one of the most celebrated of all American movies. To help remedy this unfortunate situation, I am hoping to run columns on the blog about some of the greatest old movies that college students owe it to themselves to see. I asked Bruce Kawin, longtime professor of English and film studies at the University of Colorado in Boulder, to write about Grand Illusion, the great movie set in a World War I prisoner-of-war camp. The stars include Jean Gabin, Marcel Dalio, Pierre Fresnay, and Erich von Stroheim. Grand Illusion establishes the conventions – such as the attempted escapes, the complicated relation of captor to captive, the home-spun varsity show put on by the prisoners -- that animate many subsequent POW movies, from Stalag 17 to The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Great Escape. -- DL

See It for the Way It Matters

In the title of Jean Renoir’s 1937 movie Grand Illusion (La Grande illusion), “grande” can mean “great” or “big.”  The illusion is huge and has aspects of nobility, the old ways, the high walls that kept commoners out, the train that ran on the rails of history and tradition, the Rolls that rolled over you. People kill each other over the illusion, set up systems as large as governments by it, cover the ground with it.  The illusion is great or grand in that it involves social and economic classes, national boundaries and identities, control and surveillance -- the whole gamut of experience.  

But whether it’s big like a fence or great like a tower, and whether or not it’s noble, what is it?  What illusion is so comprehensive that individuals and countries can (or must) live by it?  In Renoir’s movie, we encounter multiple mirages: the illusion of class, the illusion that war is grand, the illusion that the earth is divided into political units. That war is of value. That an international nobility has not vanished along with its values and value.  Class, war, and the artificial divisions that estrange us to the point of murder:  these are the falsehoods we elevate into principles and masks. 

Once it has established all this, Grand Illusion is about removing those masks.  Circumstances force or allow the characters to unmask, to act the way they finally are. The characters are divided by World War I, for they fight on opposing sides, but it is also the war that brings them together. Most of the action takes place in German prison camps.  The soldiers, the guards, and the commanding officers are divided by language, and they speak in many languages.  They are divided by class, so that the "high" plot concerns two officers from the upper classes, one French (Pierre Fresnay) and one German (Erich von Stroheim as the prison commander), while the "low" plot concerns a working-class Catholic (Jean Gabin) and a rich Jew (Marcel Dalio), who also are officers but of lower rank. 

The two higher-ranking officers see each other as equals and come from much the same social place. The major characters cross these dividers, reach across them to each other, proving as deep as real people and far more complicated than the single-motivation figures often found in run-of-the-mill movies.  As a viewer, you can’t take anything for granted in this picture.  The aristocratic opponents become friends—until the ancient code that unites them butts against the prisoner’s code of working together to escape. When the highborn French officer follows the code of the soldier, the prison commander, following the code of the officer, is forced to shoot him—a defining example of tragedy. 

And when the fugitive soldiers, the working-class Catholic and the Jew with a rich family, begin to fight on the road, they become more nearly complete as individuals and as members of social groups, as inseparable and yet as different as the two noble officers.  When the escapees meet a German mother and her daughter, who house them for a time, Protestants join the Catholic and the Jew.  And a mature woman (Dita Parlo) joins the tale.  A genuinely moving international love story ensues.

This is a movie that treats important issues with intelligence, honesty, range, and care.  It was one of the films that convinced many people that movies could be serious, significant, and artistic—with as much to say, to reveal, as some books or paintings. And it did all this by being a movie:  the camera that moves down the tables and groups, the soundtrack that crashes together “foreign” languages, the design of the dark stone prison and the single geranium, and most definitively the final scene’s image of a snow-covered mountain on which no political borderline can be seen, but which the two escaping soldiers cross into freedom—crossing a line that is an illusion.  The line is there in the political sense, a reality, but it is also an abstraction, a line that to all appearances isn’t there.  The camera sees the snow.

-- Bruce Kawin

Talking Pictures: On "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) [by David Lehman]

On The Manchurian Candidate (1962): " John Frankenheimer’s masterpiece remains supreme in the field of conspiracy-theory celluloid."

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

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

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

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

for the rest of this "Talking Pictures" column written for The American Scholar and posted January 22, 2022 please click here.

Eddie Muller Interviewed by Mark Yost for "Stay Thirsty"

In the summer 2015 issue of Stay Thirsty there's a great interview with Eddie Muller (shown here with Kathleen Maria Milne). Eddie is host of TCM's Noir Alley and head of the foundation that has rescued from oblivion such film noir classics as Cry Danger (1951), Try and Get Me! (1951), Repeat Performance (1948), Too Late for Tears (1949), and Woman on the Run (1950). Watch his showings -- midnight Saturdays and 120 AM Sundays -- and you'll marvel not only at his erudition and charm but also at his period-authentic ties and stylish decor. Click here to read the interview. It was a particular thrill for me when Eddie genrously provided a blurb for my new book, coming in May 2022, The Mysterious Romance of Murder: Crime, Detection, and the Spirit of Noir. -- DL

https://www.staythirstymedia.com/201507-089/html/201507-yost-muller.html
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501763625/the-mysterious-romance-of-murder/#bookTabs=1

"Talking Pictures: Holiday Edition [by David Lehman]

In many households, a showing of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) is an annual event. A suicidal George Bailey (James Stewart) gets to see what life in his small town would have been like had he not existed. A benevolent angel helps him to choose life with his lifelong love (Donna Reed). Far be it from me to discourage you from enjoying this movie that ends with a basket of dollars expressing the townspeople’s love of George while the chorus sings “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and “Auld Lang Syne.”Far be it from me to discourage you from enjoying this movie that ends with a basket of dollars expressing the townspeople’s love of George while the chorus sings “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing” and “Auld Lang Syne.”

Nor would I speak against Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), if only for Judy’s Garland’s magnificent rendition of that most melancholy of all Noel songs, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” with its resolve to “muddle through somehow.” Nor White Christmas (1954), another annual-viewing tradition for many families, which boasts the talents of Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Danny Kaye, and Vera-Ellen. Irving Berlin’s score includes the title number, winner of the Oscar for Best Original Song 12 years earlier for its use in Holiday Inn. It was, and may still be, the best-selling song of all time.

But there are cinematic gems you may have never seen or considered in the context of the holiday season—whether they illustrate the spirit of Christmas or provide an ironic counterpoint to it

For the five recommended "gems," click here.
https://theamericanscholar.org/christmas-movies-beyond-the-expected/

Lina Wertmüller, August 14, 1928 – December 9, 2021

Tracy Danison, who writes for us from Paris, e-mailed me last week with the news that Lina Wertmüller, the award winning director, had died in Rome, at 93. Together we had seen a series of Wertmüller's films (including Seven Beauties and Swept Away), at an old movie house in Schenectady, NY.  You can find the New York Times obituary here. 

Her films are streaming now on the Criterion Channel and I look forward to watching them. Do they hold up? 

Meanwhile, here's the opening montage from "Seven Beauties."

 Have you seen it, or other Wertmüller films? What do you think of Swept Away? -- sdl