The Best American Poetry

“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

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

Style: You've either got or you haven't got style

Happy birthday, Sir Francis

Thanks to Jimmy Van Heusen & Sammy Cahn:

and thank you, Cole Porter:

 

Double Indemnity: The Highest Achievement in Film Noir [by David Lehman]

from David Lehman's latest "Talking Pictures" column for The American Scholar:

<<<
Director Billy Wilder’s 1944 film, Double Indemnity, is the ne plus ultra of American film noir. If we were to give out noir awards on the model of the Oscars, I believe it would win for best picture, best screenplay (written by Raymond Chandler in collaboration with Wilder), best femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck), and best supporting actor (Edward G. Robinson). Excellent as a villain and a dupe, Fred MacMurray would get a nomination for best actor in a lead role but would lose to Out of the Past’s Robert Mitchum.

The plot is that old reliable, homicidal adultery. Man falls for woman whose husband stands in the way. To consummate the illicit affair requires the couple to collaborate on eliminating the obstacle. As in The Postman Always Rings Twice, also based on a book by James M. Cain, murder presents itself as a feasible solution, albeit one that involves an intricate scheme. In both movies, the woman’s husband is almost incidental to the plot—though Cecil Kellaway’s Greek diner owner who likes getting drunk and sings “She’s Funny That Way” in Postman is a live wire next to Mr. Dietrichson (Tom Powers), the stiff to whom Stanwyck is married in Double Indemnity. There are various love triangles involving Stanwyck’s stepdaughter Lola (Jean Heather) and her boyfriend (Byron Barr), but in all of them, the husband figure is almost an afterthought, like the corpse in chapter one of a detective novel. It is Stanwyck who dominates the picture, and the triangle in which she and Robinson stand at opposite poles in MacMurray’s consciousness is the most vital one of all.

Our narrator is the wounded Walter Neff (MacMurray), a bachelor in his 30s with a healthy libidinal appetite, dictating his confession into a recording device: “How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?” Neff is the chump who works for an insurance company and knows that, because of the so-called “double indemnity” clause, the firm pays double for accidental deaths incurred while a policyholder is traveling. He and Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) conspire to amend Mr. Dietrichson’s policy before bumping him off. Then Walter will impersonate the victim and fall off a moving train, though one that is going very slowly. He and Phyllis will plant the corpse on the tracks. Plausible on paper, but it smells bad to an experienced insurance investigator—and then, to paraphrase Dana Andrews in Laura, the dame pulls a switch on you. It turns out that Phyllis has manipulated Walter to do her bidding all along. She’s in it not for love, but for her husband’s dough. She loves somebody else—to the extent that she loves anyone other than herself. By the time Neff gets cold feet, it’s too late. “The machinery had started to move, and nothing could stop it.”

Some favorite moments:

1. Stanwyck as traffic cop and MacMurray as speeding motorist when he first calls on her, hoping to get her husband to renew his life insurance. Mr. Dietrichson is not at home, but Mrs. Dietrichson is scantily clad at the top of a staircase. She descends. Sparks begin to fly. Walter has come on a bit strong, and the dialogue is a wonderful fencing match:

Phyllis: There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.

Walter: How fast was I going, officer?

Phyllis I’d say about 90.

Walter: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.

Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.

Walter: Suppose it doesn’t take.

Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.

Walter: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.

Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.

Walter: That tears it.

>>>>

Continue reading here

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-highest-achievement-of-american-film-noir/

Berlioz & the music in "The Shining"

From Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique," the music in "The Shining" by Stanley Kubrick:

On Gene Kelly [by David Lehman]

Here's an excerpt from "To Dance an Exclamation Point," a "talking pictures" column in The American Scholar:

<<<
The best stanza of Carl Sandburg’s “Lines Written for Gene Kelly to Dance To” proposes a parallel between the languages of dance and speech: “Can you dance a question mark? / Can you dance an exclamation point? / Can you dance a couple of commas? / And bring it to a finish with a period?” Fred Astaire, my other favorite dancer, can climb the wall and dance on the ceiling, but if anyone can dance an exclamation point, it’s Gene Kelly.

Of Kelly’s four outstanding midcentury movie musicals, Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is the best-loved. In Hollywood history, the title number is second in popularity only to “Over the Rainbow,” and for sheer joy it’s hard to top “Good Mornin’” with Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor. In Singin’ in the Rain, the late Clive James felt he encountered “the absolute concentration of an entire popular culture at its most powerful.” As for Kelly, James said, “it took the whole of America, including all its modern history, to create one of him.

In It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), the most underrated of the quartet, Kelly dances down the street in roller skates, Dan Dailey does a nifty tipsy song and dance, and the two of them and Michael Kidd—Army buddies who reunite 10 years after the end of World War II—dance on trash can lids in one number, and, later on, sing of their plight (as civilians of different classes and backgrounds, who don’t like one another) to the tune of the Blue Danube waltz. Add a Dolores Grey showstopper (“Thanks a Lot, But No Thanks”) and the dancing feet of Cyd Charisse, plus lyrics of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and well, if it’s a lesser masterpiece, it’s a masterpiece nevertheless.

John Updike believes that On the Town (1949) was the freshest and had the most energy of the group. Kelly himself felt that “we”—the unit assembled by MGM genius producer (and lyricist) Arthur Freed—may have “made better movies,” but On the Town “was the apex of our talent.” Purists may register reservations if only because some of Leonard Bernstein’s sublime songs (“Some Other Time,” “Lucky to Be Me”) were dropped from the Broadway version and replaced with lesser, albeit still good, tunes by Roger Edens. Still, the film is giddy with infectious delight from the moment Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Jules Munshin, playing three sailors on 24-hour shore leave, get off their ship, take in the sights of New York City, and pair off with Vera-Ellen, Betty Garrett, and Ann Miller, respectively. In the exhilarating opening sequence, shot on location in or near Chinatown, Rockefeller Center, Central Park, Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty and other such landmarks, the fellows sing their hymn of praise to “New York, New York, a wonderful town.”[1]

While I love all four movies, I would press the case for An American in Paris (1951) as Kelly’s best. He plays a painter named Jerry Mulligan, a GI who stayed in Paris after the war because, he says, if you can’t paint in Paris, brother, you might as well go home and marry the boss’s daughter. Jerry is pursued by Milo Roberts (Nina Foch), a wealthy American expat, who looks smashing in a dress she is “almost wearing” and in a brown suit with elegant earrings. She wants to sponsor Jerry; she rents him a studio and arranges a one-man show. But Jerry’s heart belongs to Lise (Leslie Caron), who is engaged to acclaimed music-hall singer Henri Burel (George Guettary).

Like Victor Lazlo in Casablanca, Burel may have the greater claim on the lady, because he protected her during the war after her parents, active in the Resistance, were deported by the Nazis. But being a man of honor, and not having a world war to fight, he lets true love take its course. The movie ends with a masquerade party, which segues into a full-scale ballet presentation of An American in Paris, arguably George Gershwin’s second greatest work for piano and orchestra. Vincente Minnelli directed the film, which won the Academy Award for best picture. Alan Jay Lerner wrote the Oscar-winning script.

Why do I defy the consensus in casting my ballot for An American in Paris?
>>>

for the answer & for the rest of this article, click here

https://theamericanscholar.org/to-dance-an-exclamation-point/

National ‘Caveman’ Day: A Look Back at "The Boys Next Door" [by Joe Lehman]

The philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that in a state of nature the life of man would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Unlike Rousseau, who felt that man in his natural state was noble and that society was to blame for his ills, Hobbes believed that human nature, left unchecked, would result in a lawless world, every man for himself. This was how Hobbes saw America in the seventeenth century.

Hobbes believed in the creation and preservation of a lawful society, one dedicated to establishing the safety and security of peoples. If man, left to his own natural primitive devices, is vainglorious (and vicious), a sovereign authority is necessary to police him. How else to react to sociopathic behavior?

As one who has often pondered the question of the malcontent individual’s place in an enlightened society, I maintain that 1985’s The Boys Next Door, an independent cult classic, is a movie that is worth a fresh look for the light it throws on the problem that boys in America face -- and the problems they create.

The Boys Next Door is a Hobbesian parable. It emphasizes that hostile individuals are among us, acting upon their homicidal tendencies whether because of greed, out of frustration, or on a random impulse. Society requires a capable police department, composed of officers that protect innocent people from predators.

Penelope Spheeris directed The Boys Next Door, one of her first films, starring a young Charlie Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield as Bo Richards and Roy Alston, two high school graduates-turned spree murderers in mid-1980s Los Angeles.

The opening credits display dossier photographs of notorious serial killers and mass murderers accompanied by voiceovers emphasizing the seeming “normality” of the killers, and how well they blend into society. This throws the concept of "normality" into question. Is the psychopath "a natural-born killer" or has the social system helped transmogrify him? No doubt there has been a decline in social norms and moral standards. It is nevertheless the individual who must bear full responsibility for his behavior.

The Boys Next Door has a loud heavy-metal soundtrack playing throughout, as well as quick cinematography. The camera angles are widely and intensely shot. This speaks to how rapidly events are spiraling out of control, and the escalating ugliness of the boys’ violent behavior. 

Bo and Roy’s grand ambitions are incompatible with the hard-pressed reality of the future they face. As the trailer’s narrator says, “they’re trapped, and they don’t fit in.” The boys come from dysfunctional families. They are destined to stay in their small town, working at menial jobs, and perhaps raising dysfunctional families of their own. The narrator asks the rhetorical question, “What happens when there is no way out?” What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?

The film begins with a typical high school prank. Roy traces a chalk outline of Bo on the pavement outside the school, and then the next morning the boys watch in awe as the other students mill about, speculating about what kind of “crime” could have occurred. A female student carries a book with the initials “JFK” on the cover. It is possible that the naming of the school after John F. Kennedy signifies the slow decline of Kennedy-style idealism (“Ask what you can do for your country”) that once prevailed in the national sentiment. The New Frontier has died, and in its place are two violent members of Generation X, who exist in order to wreak havoc on their country. 

The bald, bow-tie wearing teacher congratulates the graduating class by speaking of what bright futures they have ahead of them. "You have got a unique opportunity to ride the crest of the third wave,” he says. Roy and Bo just roll their eyes, and make ‘jerking off’ motions; they know their futures are bleak. After class, Roy scoffs, “What the fuck does he know about humanity? What the fuck does he know about anything?” As far as the boys are concerned, they are too cool for school if only because school has nothing to do with "humanity." They radiate disdain. It doesn’t help them that the other students despise them back.

Roy considers joining the marines. This would be a healthy outlet for his pent-up rage. But the potential recruiter notes politely that Roy “doesn’t seem interested in the corps, he’s just curious.” After Roy asks, “have you ever killed anyone?” The officer sees the eager expression in Roy's eyes and understands that Roy isn't interested in the ideals the corps stands for. The marines, who consider themselves the most disciplined and honorable of people, would be an unsuitable option for a budding psychopath.

As they begin their odyssey to Los Angeles, the guys stop outside the factory where they are designated to begin working on Monday. Roy laments: “We’ll run the drill press the rest of our lives.”  Bo answers: “It could be worse. We could have no jobs at all.” Both agree: “Either way we’re screwed.”

Although these teenage slackers have probably never heard of Thomas Hobbes, they hold fantasies of living in a Hobbes-defined state of nature. “I mean wouldn’t it be great, if the government declared an official ‘caveman’ day,” Bo says, “I mean you could just knock girls over the head, drag them back to your house, and just completely drill their socks off. You could do anything. You could throw rocks at people. Run around naked. Take a shit, in the middle of the street. Just be totally prehistoric.” Imagine a seventeenth-century America, in which there is no law and order and Bo and Roy can find themselves at home, unrestrained in their appetite for mayhem.

While their small California hometown is almost entirely racially homogeneous, Los Angeles captivates the boys with its multiethnic diversity. In one sense, they are like fish out of water, but somehow they feel right at home in the weirdness of Hollywood. Here, with relative anonymity, they can act without any impulse control or self-restraint. Their roster of victims represents a cross section of different racial and social subsets. One man they viciously beat is an Iranian gas station attendant. They throw a beer bottle at the head of an old woman who is complaining about the Rastafarians smoking dope on the beach in front of all the young people – an act that represents the assassination of a conservative-minded older generation. They murder a homosexual young urban professional, a WASPish-looking teenage couple, and a flighty female astrology buff. 

That Bo and Roy do aspire beyond the drudgery they seem to be destined for is reflected in a scene where Bo stands over the beach, reciting lines from Edgar Allen Poe's poem “Annabel Lee.” The moment is spoiled when the cruder Roy abruptly cuts Bo off from this recitation, telling him to shut the fuck up. He has no patience for great poetry.

The boys are not entirely unaware of their inner demons. Roy confidentially tells Bo that he has a fury inside him that makes him want to kill people, but he hasn’t had the opportunity to act on his impulses until now. Roy justifies his desire to kill by saying after the gunshot murder of a teenaged couple in their convertible, “I gave her two seconds of pain. Girls like that would have given us eighteen years of pain.” Roy is the dominant partner, while Bo is submissive to his rage. Where Roy commits the physical attacks of maiming and killing, Bo makes half-hearted attempts to dissuade Roy from continuing his endless crusade of wanton destruction. He appears genuinely conflicted about the murders of women and girls, to whom he is attracted, and his dependence on keeping Roy’s friendship. In the eyes of the law, of course, both are equally guilty.

After the thugs’ attack on the Middle Eastern gas station attendant, a phony witness comes forward to claim that the crime was perpetrated by two blacks and a Mexican. The falsity of this statement underscores the discrepancy between people’s assumptions of who are responsible for committing crimes and the reality. It would be convenient to suppose that only minorities are violent people, not Caucasian American kids.

In the aftermath of this attack the two detectives from the LAPD’s robbery-homicide bureau enter the picture. The elder is grizzled veteran Detective Ed Hanley (Hank Garrett), who expresses profound disgust at the wanton cruelty inflicted upon the Iranian, and for what? A dispute over a lousy two dollars (“un-fucking believable”). “I can’t calm down. I feel so fucking useless”, says Mark Woods (Christopher McDonald), the younger detective. So affected is he by the escalating body count that, after the shooting deaths of the teenaged couple in the convertible, he equates the criminal situation with an epidemic. Unlike cops as depicted in some currently popular narratives, these detectives exhibit the futility of their own rage as well as compassion for the victims. Following the murder of a homosexual accountant whom Bo and Roy follow home from a bar, Hanley pushes a bigoted colleague up against the wall, snarling that he “has a mouth like a toilet!”

The killing of Chris, the doomed gay yuppie, signals that Roy might be repressing homosexual impulses himself. Bo and Roy had naively entered a gin mill, not realizing that it was a gay bar. When Chris invites Bo and Roy up to his apartment, Roy, panic-stricken, beats Chris and throws him through a glass table. The deadly duo then steal Chris’s 38 caliber pistol and they use it to fire a fatal shot into Chris. Now that they are armed as well as dangerous, Roy’s bloodlust and Bo’s acquiescence to that bloodlust are fully awakened.

The rage that drives Roy’s madness reaches its apex in the final homicide, when he reaches out and grabs a young astrology aficionado named Angie in the middle of her lovemaking session with Bo. Over Bo’s protests, Roy beats Angie and breaks her neck, yelling at Bo, “you fucked that?!!!” It is as though Angie’s and Bo’s intimacy had unwittingly exposed Roy’s latent homosexual attraction to his best friend, and he cannot tolerate letting any woman coming between them.

In the last killing, Bo finally takes a shot with the stolen 38. Ironically or fittingly, Roy is the victim. In the aftermath of a grueling police car chase and then a chaotic foot pursuit through a closed shopping mall, Bo turns the gun on his accomplice, saying “you’re my best friend, Roy.” The frozen look on Roy’s face is one of sheer disbelief, and then instant death: “two seconds of pain, Roy,” is what Bo mutters before Detectives Hanley and Woods, and a phalanx of uniformed officers and mall security guards surround Bo.

“Why did you kill your friend?” Woods barks at Bo as he is taken into custody.

Bo answers hesitantly “because I had to.” But we think of what Roy had said earlier about "two seconds of pain" as a release from "eighteen years" of suffering.

Perhaps, then, Bo’s releasing Roy’s demonic spirit from his body is a merciful gesture. Everything comes full circle when the police trace a chalk outline around Roy’s now-deceased body, an echo of the the prank he and Bo commit in the opening scene. What a hell of a way to spend the weekend.

"Picnic" on Labor Day [by David Lehman]

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

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

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

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

from "For Every Season, A Classic Holiday Movie" by David Lehman | August 28, 2021. Click here for the rest of this  "Talking Pictures" post written for The American Scholar.

Ennio Morricone's Soundtrack for "Once Upon a Time in America"

 

 

As soundtracks go, it's hard to beat Ennio Morricone's for Once Upon a Time in America:which incorporates the immportal song "Amapola":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaZFLkR6fVU

On Hitchcock's birthday, His Jokes, Heroes, Villains, and More: Multiple Choice [by David Lehman]

 

 

When August 13 falls on a Friday, as it does this year, let us honor Alfred Hitchcock, born on this August day. In the spirit of macabre and bemused jollity, I recommend that you listen to Shoistakovich's amazing Symphony no. 5 and ponder these multiple choice questions if you like the form, as I do. -- DL

Which of the following is not an authentic Hitchcock moment?

-- Grace Kelly cozies up with Harper's Bazaar while her beau, nursing a broken leg, takes a nap
-- Raymond Burr signs a contract to play first base for the New York Yankees after the death of Gary Cooper
-- Grace Kelly offers her beau "a leg or a breast" as they stand on the terrace on a tropical evening
-- Grace Kelly finds the scissors on the desk and with a desperate lunge wards off the intruder and kills him
-- Jospeh Cotten deprecates the ordinary people of Santa Rosa, where the Hitchcock family lived (his house is pictured right), as if he were Orson Welles atop the Ferris Wheel in The Third Man

The better the villain, the better the film." Acknowledging that "better" is an elastic term, which of the following is the best villain? Discuss at least three.

(a) James Mason in "North by Northwest"
(b) The birds in "The Birds"
(c) Robert Walker in "Strangers on a Train"
(d) Claude Rains and his mother in "Notorious"
(e) Anthony Perkins and his mother in "Psycho"
(f) Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder"
(g) Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt"

What conclusions can we come to?
(a) some bad guys tend to be guys with mother complexes or enraged beasts
(b) "the more deranged, the better"
(c) the "suave index" (Ray Milland, James Mason) makes the movies less threatening
(d) murder like sex can be considered either as an art, a sport, a battle, a competition, or an act of passion

 Which of the following does not qualify as a typical Hitchcock joke?

-- to cuff his hero and heroine, leave the room and lock the door
-- to pose as the fat man in a weight-reducing ad that is espied if not read on a lifeboat full of the survivors of a shipwreck 
-- to employ Otto Preminger to play the commandant of a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp
-- to suggest the act of fornication by showing a speeding train enter a tunnel
-- to kill Kim Novak twice, in both cases at the top of the church tower at Mission San Juan Batista in California

In the auction scene in North ny Northwest, Cary Grant makes contradictory and ludicrous bids in order to

-- attract attention because he is a certified narcissist who thinks he is Cary Grant
-- attract attention and get ejected because the cops are preferable to the killers awaiting his exit
-- fulfill his part of the bargain with Ingrid Bergman, who has done her part by going to Brazil and enduring a near-lethal dose of poison administered slowly so it looks like sickness and not murder
-- warn about an imminent terrorist threat in a way that wouldn't panic the public because only one man present would understand the message, and what better way to do that than to to be caught holding the knife that killed the US Ambassador to the UN when that instiution was not yet immoral, irrelevant or fattening (to slightly misquote Irene Dunne on life's pleasures)
-- arouse the admiration of co-star Eva Maria Saint, who has aired her doubts about his skill as a comic actor

Good luck! -- DL

"Fedora, Trench-Coat, Cigarette, and Gun" [by David Lehman]

From The American Scholar July 17, 2021. Click here for the rest of this "Talking Pictures" post. Here's an excerpt:

<<<
Humphrey Bogart was far from your conventional heartthrob. Not blessed with the looks of a Cary Grant or Gregory Peck, he was reliably good as a hoodlum or bootlegger, a Cagney sidekick in flicks of the ’30s, or an unlucky truck driver playing second fiddle to George Raft in Raoul Walsh’s They Drive by Night (1940).

Not until he was 41 did Bogart become a leading man. In Walsh’s High Sierra, (1941), Bogart plays Roy Earle, nicknamed “Mad Dog,” an ex-con on the lam after a heist goes wrong. Roy dies on a mountaintop, but not before winning the love of Marie (Ida Lupino). Even Bosley Crowther, the film critic for The New York Times, with his astonishingly low batting average, had  good words for Lupino and Bogart: she was “impressive as the adoring moll,” and he displays “a perfection of hard-boiled vitality.” Then to confirm that, these concessions aside, Crowther was his usual self, he added, “As gangster pictures go—if they do—it’s a perfect epilogue.” The right word would have been prologue, as what followed was a whole new genre of crime and noir movies.

The role of Sam Spade, the hard-boiled private eye in The Maltese Falcon (1941)—Dashiell Hammett’s novel adapted by John Huston in his directorial debut—made Bogart’s reputation and accounts for the image many of us have of him today. The tough guy who won’t let Mary Astor play him for a sap and outwits the wonderful Warner Brothers trio of Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook, Jr., is, as he points out, not “as crooked as I’m supposed to be,” even as he joins in the hunt for the legendary priceless black bird, which turns out to be a fake.

A wide-brimmed fedora and belted trench coat are as vital to Bogart as top hat, white tie, and tails are to Fred Astaire. A lighted cigarette dangles from Bogey’s lips. He is quick with a quip, and when this is pointed out to him as if it were a fault, he replies, “What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?” His voice conveys an aggressive world-weariness. It is difficult to impress him. He incorporates skepticism in the sound of his words. As he says in The Maltese Falcon, “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”
>>>

To read further, with commentary on Casablanca and The Big Sleep, link here. Photos are stils from The Big Sleep.  

"There's No Place Like Home" [by James Thurber]

Idling through a London bookstore in the summer of 1937, I came upon a little book called `Collins' Pocket Interpreters: France.' Written especially to instruct the English how to speak French in the train, the hotel, the quandary, the dilemma, etc., it is, of course, equally useful - I might also say equally depressing - to Americans. I have come across a number of these helps-for-travellers, but none that has the heavy impact, the dark, cumulative power of Collins'. A writer in a London magazine mentions a phrase book got out in the era of Imperial Russia which contained this one magnificent line: `Oh, dear, our postillion has been struck by lightning!' but that fantastic piece of disaster, while charming and provocative - though, I daresay, quite rare even in the days of the Czars - is to Mr Collins' modern, workaday disasters as Fragonard is to George Bellows, or Sarah Orne Jewett to William Faulkner. Let us turn the pages of this appalling little volume. 

Each page has a list of English expressions one under the other, which gives them the form of verse. The French translations are run alongside. Thus, on the first page, under `The Port of Arrival,' we begin (quietly enough) with `Porter, here is my baggage!' - `Porteur, voici mes bagages!' From then on disaster follows fast and follows faster until in the end, as you shall see, all hell breaks loose. The volume contains three times as many expressions to use when one is in trouble as when everything is going all right. This, my own experience has shown, is about the right ratio, but God spare me from some of the difficulties for which the traveller is prepared in Mr Collins' melancholy narrative poem. I am going to leave out the French translations because, for one thing, people who get involved in the messes and tangles we are coming to invariably forget their French and scream in English anyway. Furthermore, the French would interrupt the fine, free flow of the English and spoil what amounts to a dramatic tragedy of an overwhelming and original kind. The phrases, as I have said, run one under the other, but herein I shall have to run them one after the other (you can copy them down the other way, if you want to). 

Trouble really starts in the canto called `In the Customs Shed.' Here we have: `I cannot open my case.' `I have lost my keys.' `Help me to close this case." I did not know that I had to pay." I don't want to pay so much." I cannot find my porter.' `Have you seen porter 153 ?' That last query is a little master stroke of writing, I think, for in those few words we have a graphic picture of a tourist lost in a jumble of thousands of bags and scores of customs men, looking frantically for one of at least a hundred and fifty-three porters. We feel that the tourist will not find porter 153, and the note of frustration has been struck.

Our tourist (accompanied by his wife, I like to think) finally gets on the train for Paris - having lost his keys and not having found his porter - and it comes time presently to go to the dining car, although he probably has no appetite, for the customs men, of course, have had to break open that one suitcase. Now, I think, it is the wife who begins to crumble: `Someone has taken my seat.' `Excuse me, sir, that seat is mine.' `I cannot find my ticket!' `I have left my ticket in the compartment.' `I will go and look for it.' `I have left my gloves (my purse) in the dining car.' Here the note of frenzied disintegration, so familiar to all travellers abroad, is sounded. 

Next comes `The Sleeper,' which begins, ominously, with `What is the matter ?' and ends with `May I open the window?' `Can you open this window, please?' We realize, of course, that nobody is going to be able to open the window and that the tourist and his wife will suffocate. In this condition they arrive in Paris, and the scene there, on the crowded station platform, is done with superb economy of line: `I have left something in the train.' `A parcel, an overcoat.' `A macintosh, a stick.' `An umbrella, a camera." A fur, a suitcase.' The travellers have now begun to go completely to pieces, in the grand manner. 

Next comes an effective little interlude about an airplane trip, which is one of my favourite passages in this swift and sorrowful tragedy: `I want to reserve a place in the plane leaving tomorrow morning.' `When do we start?' `Can we get anything to eat on board?' `When do we arrive," `I feel sick.' `Have you any paper bags for air-sickness?' `The noise is terrible.' `Have you any cotton wool?' `When are we going to land ?' This brief masterpiece caused me to cancel an air trip from London to Paris and go the easy way, across the Channel.

We now come to a section called `At the Hotel,' in which things go from worse to awful : `Did you not get my letter ?' `I wrote to you three weeks ago.' `I asked for a first-floor room." If you can't give me something better, I shall go away.' `The chambermaid never comes when I ring.' `I cannot sleep at night, there is so much noise." I have just had a wire. I must leave at once.' Panic has begun to set in, and it is not appeased any by the advent of `The Chambermaid': `Are you the chambermaid ?"There are no towels here." The sheets on this bed are damp." This room is not clean." I have seen a mouse in the room.' `You will have to set a mouse trap here.' The bells of hell at this point begin to ring in earnest: `These shoes are not mine.' `I put my shoes here, where are they now?" The light is not good.' `The bulb is broken.' `The radiator is too warm.' `The radiator doesn't work." It is cold in this room." This is not clean, bring me another." I don't like this." I can't eat this. Take it away!'

I somehow now see the tourist's wife stalking angrily out of the hotel, to get away from it all (without any shoes on), and, properly enough, the booklet seems to follow her course - first under `Guides and Interpreters' : `You are asking too much." I will not give you any more." I shall call a policeman." He can settle this affair.' Then under `Inquiring the Way' : `I am lost." I was looking for-"Someone robbed me." That man robbed me." That man is following me everywhere.' She rushes to `The Hairdresser,' where, for a change, everything goes quite smoothly until: `The water is too hot, you are scalding me!' Then she goes shopping, but there is no surcease: `You have not given me the right change.' `I bought this two days ago.' `It doesn't work.' `It is broken.' `It is torn.' `It doesn't fit me.' Then to a restaurant for a snack and a reviving cup of tea: `This is not fresh.' `This piece is too fat.' `This doesn't smell very nice.' `There is a mistake in the bill." While I was dining someone has taken my purse." I have left my glasses (my watch) (a ring) in the lavatory.'

Madness has now come upon her and she rushes wildly out into the street. Her husband, I think, has at the same time plunged blindly out of the hotel to find her. We come then, quite naturally, to `Accident', which is calculated to keep the faint of heart - nay, the heart of oak - safely at home by his own fireside: `There has been an accident!' `Go and fetch a policeman quickly.' `Is there a doctor near here?' Send for the ambulance." He is seriously injured." She has been run over." He has been knocked down." Someone has fallen in the water.' `The ankle, the arm.' `The back, a bone." The face, the finger.' `The foot, the head." The knee, the leg." The neck, the nose." The wrist, the shoulder." He has broken his arm."He has broken his leg.' `He has a sprained ankle.' `He has a sprained wrist.' `He is losing blood.' `He has fainted.' `He has lost consciousness."He has burnt his face."It is swollen."It is bleeding." Bring some cold water.' `Help me to carry him.' (Apparently, you just let her lie there, while you attend to him - but, of course, she was merely run over, whereas he has taken a terrific tossing around.)

We next see the husband and wife back in their room at the dreary hotel, both in bed, and both obviously hysterical. This scene is entitled 'Illness': `I am feeling very ill, send for the doctor.' `I have pains in-' `I have pains all over.' `The back, the chest.' `The ear, the head.' `The eyes, the heart.' `The joints, the kidneys.' `The lungs, the stomach.' `The throat, the tongue.' `Put out your tongue." The heart is affected." I feel a pain here." He is not sleeping well.' `He cannot eat.' `My stomach is out of order.' `She is feverish.' `I have caught a cold." I have caught a chill." He has a temperature." I have a cough.' `Will you give me a prescription ?"What must I do?' `Must I stay in bed ?' `I feel better.' `When will you come and see me again?' `Biliousness, rheumatism.' `Insomnia, sunstroke.' `Fainting, a fit.' `Hoarseness, sore throat.' `The medicine, the remedy.' `A poultice, a draught.' `A tablespoonful, a teaspoon-ful.' `A sticking plaster, senna.' `Iodine.' That last suicidal bleat for iodine is, to me, a masterful touch.

Our couple finally get on their feet again, for travellers are tough - they've got to be - but we see under the next heading, `Common Words and Phrases,' that they are left forever punch-drunk and shattered: `Can I help you? 'Excuse me.' `Carry on!! 'Look here!' `Look down there!' `Look up there!' `Why, how?' `When, where?' `Because.' `That's it!' `It is too much, it is too dear." It is very cheap." Who, what, which ?"Look out !!' Those are Valkyries, one feels, riding around, and above, and under our unhappy husband and wife.

The book sweeps on to a mad operatic ending of the tragedy, with all the / rings and brasses and wood winds going full blast: `Where are we going?' `Where are you going?' `Come quickly and see!!! 'I shall call a policeman.) 'Bring a policeman!' `I shall stay here.' `Will you help me?' `Help! Fire!' `Who are you?' I don't know you." I don't want to speak to you." Leave me alone. "That will do." You are mistaken." It was not I. "I didn't do it. "I will give you nothing.' `Go away now!' `It has nothing to do with me.' `Where should one apply?' `What must I do?' `What have I done?' `I have done nothing.' `I have already paid you.' `I have paid you enough.' `Let me pass!' `Where is the British consulate?' The oboes take that last, despairing wail, and the curtain comes down.

Kryptonite: A Parable for Bastille Day

"You can't cancel me. I'm Superman."

<<<
Superman 
is just a  flash in the pan. . .

I've been  around the world in a plane,
Settled a revoltuion in Spain,
The North Pole I have charted,
But I can't get started with you. 

On the golf course I'm under par, 
Metro Goldwyn wants me to star,
With queens I have a-la-carted,
But I can't get started with you . . .
>>>

(from "Can't Get Started," music Vernon Duke, lyrics Ira Gershwin; you'll hear it in the background of Chinatown, which has a world-class soundtrack from Jerry Goldsmith.)

The case for "Blow Out": 40 years later -- on 7/4/21 [by Joe Lehman]

Brian De Palma directed Blow Out (1981) at the height of his ‘Hitchcock’ period,  during which he helmed such films as Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to Kill, and Body Double. All these movies contained homages to Alfred Hitchcock. The film critic Roger Ebert, in his review of the movie, suggested  that Blow Out is a mirror image of mid-to-late twentieth century American history. In his view, Blow Out achieved originality in spite (or perhaps because) of the “cross-references” it makes to other films and to historic events.

Blow Out pays homage to the 1966 Michelangelo Antonioni classic Blow-Up, the story of a fashion photographer who believes he has inadvertently captured the image of a murder in one of his shots. Jack (John Travolta), the hero of Blow Out, is in the same position.

The prologue of the film is the screening of a low-budget slasher movie set at a college sorority house, filmed from the demented killer’s point of view -- much like the beginning of 1978’s Halloween. The scene concludes with the killer brandishing a butcher knife at a helpless young woman in the shower (as in Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960]). De Palma had included memorable shower scenes in previous hits such as Carrie (1976) and Dressed to Kill (1980). He subsequently parodied the whole gambit in Body Double (1984). In the shower scene in Blow Out, there is one complication: the actress playing the slashing victim is unable to provide a sufficiently terrified scream. It is at this moment that viewers realize they’re watching the filming of a movie within the movie.

At the center of Blow Out is a car crash off a bridge into a river. The scene made the movie’s initial viewers recall the Chappaquiddick scandal. Around midnight Friday, July 18, 1969, when the rest of the world was waiting for the rocket carrying the first men on the moon to reach their destination, Senator Ted Kennedy (allegedly intoxicated) drove off the bridge of that name at Martha’s Vineyard, leaving his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne to drown. Kennedy did not report the accident for several hours; he consulted his advisers instead. Had he notified the police, a diver may have been able to rescue Kopechne. A mere decade later, Kennedy challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination, but the effort backfired when Roger Mudd quizzed Kennedy on recounting the events of Chappaquiddick in a televised interview. Kennedy also flubbed the softball question Mudd tossed: “Why do you want to be president?

In a way, Blow Out’s crash is a reversal of the events of Chappaquiddick. Instead of the politician escaping the accident, it is the passenger who climbs free – Sally (Nancy Allen), who is what we have been taught to call a sex worker. Jack, the witness to the crash, dives into the river, but is able only to recover Sally. Jack, who happens to be a professional sound effects man for movies, has serendipitously made an audio recording of the accident. Listening to it over and over, he becomes convinced that he heard a gunshot precede the blow out of the limousine’s tire, and that the shot caused the crash. Hence, it was no accident. It was coldblooded murder. Meanwhile, the governor’s own chief of staff, Henry (John McMartin), is hell-bent on covering up the incident, so as not to embarrass the governor’s wife and children. Both sides of the presidential primary race are slimy. But such is the nature of politics. The conspiracy is the truth, and the truth is disadvantageous to all parties.

Blow Out tells the story of a political assassination that almost wasn’t. That is to say, the intent of the conspirators is in dispute. Did they want the governor to be killed, or merely just humiliated—caught messing around with a mistress—and knocked out of the presidential race? This discrepancy of motives is revealed in a telephone conversation between Burke the gunman (John Lithgow) and his immediate superior Manners (Maurice Copeland). Except for Jack, the film’s characters are unwilling to pursue the crimes to a satisfactory conclusion. But Jack perseveres.

Much like the act of peeling layers off an onion, Jack is able to peel the layers of the conspiracy off to reveal more shocking crimes and events that are spinning out of everyone’s control.  And as each layer is peeled off, the onion’s sting grows stronger and is cause for more tears and pain. Burke has snuck into the evidence warehouse and removed the bullet from the busted tire, so as to eliminate any suspicion that a gun was fired. He then proceeds to murder a pair of sex workers, both of whom resemble Sally, to create the appearance of a serial killer on the prowl . Dispatching her in this manner would remove all evidence of the initial crime. The series of three is a staple of murder mysteries, so Blow Out can be seen not only as a political thriller but as a salute to Hitchcock’s handling of the mystery genre.

Just as Hitchcock used such landmark settings as the UN Building and Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest (1959), de Palma uses Philadelphia’s patriotic imagery.  The City of Brotherly Love had been a host of the nation’s 1976 bicentennial celebration. Displayed in many scenes of Blow Out are paintings of Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross-style American flags waving on street corners, and most prominently, shots of the Liberty Bell, which the audience learns is about to be ceremonially rung for the first time in a hundred years. All this suggests that there are sinister currents beneath the surface of innocent Americana.

The making of the horror movie, which frames the movie, parodies the “slasher” craze of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, which itself reflected the scary uncertainty of of American society at the time, when the country was plagued by inflation, rising crime, and an energy crisis. Spoiler alert: In the film’s final scene, Jack obtains the “scream” he needs for his unfinished slasher movie. It happens to be Sally’s death scream recorded as Burke strangles her. Throughout the film, Jack’s face seems jittery, worn, stressed and ultimately distressed.  In fact, John Travolta was reportedly suffering from insomnia while playing the role. This was certainly an advantage to his method acting talent.

If you want to see a movie that demonstrates how narrative can often overtake truth, and how life and artifice can change places, I recommend Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. All the mayhem—the many murders and mistruths— occurs during the great patriotic Liberty Bell celebration. I write these words on July 4^th. God bless America.

Amapola as swing, as aria, and as orchestral piece (and Besame Mucho, Cielito Lindo,& Granada)

Do you know who composed the theme of Perry Mason?

It was Fred Steiner, who died at age 88, at his home in the town of Ajijic in the Mexican state of Jalisco.

but let's not overlook, Jerry Goldsmith, who wrote the music for Patton and did some of the incidental music for many episodes of Perry Mason,

and while we're at it, let's saluter another Jerry, Jerry Fielding, who wrote the music of The Wild Bunch.

Selfie with Marilyn Monroe: Writing in the Persona of Marilyn Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

She was a just postcard at the MOMA, a stamp of pink and lemon yellow. Her mouth, a red smear, slightly open. Is that a word forming, wanting to slip from tongue to lip to air. Trapped in an Andy Warhol silk screen.

I bought the postcard, propped it on my desk. We gazed at each other.

What did I know about Marilyn Monroe—nothing really—blonde bombshell, actress, married to Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, something about the Kennedys, died young, suicide?  She was just a very famous face. But arguably the first female celebrity known by a single name. And still the most enduring. Even 60 years after her death, she’s still here, on YouTube, all over the Internet, and at the moment, in the form of a controversial statue in Palm Springs.

Why is that?

Turns out Marilyn pioneered multiplication—And I don’t mean math, but the concept of blanketing the world with her image, before the Internet made it easy— she was the first instant celebrity, it gave her power. She created the Marilyn Monroe image then projected and performed it over and over.

Think about yourself. How do you appear on Instagram, Hinge or Twitter? Isn’t social a form of  multiplication? Aren’t we all projecting and performing? Every selfie is posed and a pose. Even in real life, we perform some version of our self. I am now. So are you.

T.S. Eliot wrote about putting on a “face to meet the faces that you meet.” The daily act of assuming a persona. As a poet, to really explore our performance culture, I assumed someone else’s persona—Marilyn’s.

For two years, I became Marilyn in poetry. It began in Paris in July 2018. A place where I had first come as a student, even then assuming a role—dipping my tongue into the language to spend long nights in cafés and bars, drinking Pernod, smoking Gauloises and imagining myself Hemingway. But now, decades later, I had greater ambitions. I was going to become Marilyn Monroe.  Or maybe it had started earlier, in 1994 when I moved to Los Angeles and fell under the spell of faces plastered on billboards and ran into stars in the supermarket. The glitter of LA shaking onto my skin and sticking as I went about my life, working, raising my family. But all the time, perhaps it was there lurking—the desire to be someone else, to be the world’s most famous woman, to be Marilyn Monroe.

As I wrote, I came to know her many faces, the layers of her performance. I stripped away the façade, pushed against stereotype to try to find her truth. I found it. Sort’ve. It was fairly easy for me to capture her voice, to tell her story in poetry. She has a lot to say and poetry works for Marilyn. But as I’ve came closer to Marilyn’s truths, I’ve came face to face with my self—Maybe I used her as a foil. By becoming Marilyn, had I been avoiding my own lies?

In the end, the collection I wrote, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, is a poetic insomnia-inspired conversation between Marilyn and the speaker that confronts the truths that many women experience: abuse, addiction, careers, love, marriage and divorce, children and childlessness, mental health and death. In becoming Marilyn, I became closer to understanding myself.

At the Ritz: Plath, Sexton & Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

1958: Eisenhower’s in the White House, Explorer 1 satellite launched, The US. Supreme Court rules for school integration, Elvis joins the Army, the Yankees win the World Series, the microchip is invented, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is published, Marilyn Monroe films Some Like it Hot, Sylvia Plath moves to Boston and joins Anne Sexton in Robert Lowell’s writing seminars.


It’s also the year I was born. But that is not why I’m here conjuring 1958. Or maybe it is, inserting myself into this story about an imagined cultural intersection of poetry and pop. In my mind, Plath and Sexton are having martinis at the Ritz Carlton in Boston. They’ve come from a Lowell seminar, their minds buzzing. At the next table is Monroe. She’d driven up from Connecticut where she lives with husband Arthur Miller. She’s newly pregnant, her body hormonally adjusting. She’s nervous that she’ll lose this one too, especially as she must fly to LA next month to start filming. As she sips her cup of tea, she thinks about Arthur, his struggles with writer’s block, her need to get away for a few days. Marilyn pulls her journal out of her handbag to write. Truman Capote’s book tumbles out. As she reaches down under the table to retrieve it, she notices the two women at the next table. All other eyes in the dining room are on her, but not theirs. They are deep in conversation. There is something about them that intrigues Marilyn. Does she know them from somewhere? Plath and Sexton are playing it cool. Of course, they know that Marilyn Monroe is sitting next to them. It is only as she looks directly at them, that they turn to meet her gaze.

From everything that I have learned in the research I undertook to write poems in the persona of Marilyn for my newest collection, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, neither Anne Sexton nor Sylvia Plath never met Marilyn. Plath wanted to, or her subconscious wanted to meet Marilyn according to a 1959 diary entry: “Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother. I spoke almost in tears of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us (her husband and herself) although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me a manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life.” Discovering this diary entry prompted me to write a poetic response from Marilyn to Plath:

Dear Sylvia,

Give me your bitten hand.

I will paint each moon sliver—

Amaryllis red.

If you are a girl

swirled in the thick of a dream,

I am a play

of red-tongued wolves and barn owl howls.

Let me curl into your hair, crawl beneath

your winter. Scrawl me in lines.

Let me mean everything to you.

I promise lavender and honey cakes

and the taste of Christmas roses.[1]

In fact, as I drafted poems for An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, I had Sexton and Plath on my brain. That all three women suffered mental health issues and would die early by their hand was an obvious connection. But they also were living and making art and pushing against the constraints of being a creative, working woman at a time when women were expected to be homemakers. Sexton, Plath and Monroe began connecting into a single powerful force in my writing. I drafted a cento constructed of lines from poems all three women wrote in 1958. While that poem did not make it into my final collection, remnants of Sexton and Plath’s imagery linger in several of the poems, and specifically the bee imagery from Sexton’s “Said the Poet to the Analyst” and “Ringing the Bells” and Plath’s bee poems particularly “Wintering,” echo in my persona poem, “Hello it’s Me, Marilyn” where Marilyn is dying. Even now, beneath the lilt of Marilyn’s voice, I hear the lower pitched ones of Sexton and Plath in my ear—like a brilliant, feminist chorus and suddenly, there they are in the Ritz hotel, across from the Boston Public Garden, together and it’s 1958.

 

[1] An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe by Heidi Seaborn (PANK Books, 2021)

I like New York in June (how about you?) [music Burton Lane, lyrics Ralph Freed]

When a girl meets boy,
Life can be a joy,
But the note they end on,
Will depend on little pleasures they will share,
So let us compare.

 

I like New York in June, how about you?
I like a Gershwin tune, how about you?

I love a fireside when a storm is due.
I like potato chips, moonlight and motor trips,
How about you?

 

I'm mad about good books, can't get my fill,
And Franklin Roosevelt's looks give me a thrill.
Holding hands at the movie show,
When all the lights are low
May not be new, but I like it,
How about you?

 

I like Jack Benny's jokes,
(To a degree.)
I love the common folks,
(That includes me.)
I like to window shop on 5th Avenue,
(I like banana splits, late supper at the Ritz,
How about you?)

 

I love to dream of fame, maybe I'll shine,
(I'd love to see your name right beside mine.)
I can see we're in harmony,
(Looks like we both agree)
On what to do,
And I like it, how about you?