The Best American Poetry

First and Last Lines: A Literary & Cinematic Quiz

Name the author, the book or movie or play, and whether the quote is a first or last line:

(1) Our is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
(2) 'Nobody's perfect.'
(3) [The earth said] 'No, not yet,' and the sky said 'No, not there.'
(4) 'Yes,' I said. 'Isn't it pretty to think so.'
(5) 'Hot dog!'
(6) 'The old man was right, only the farmers won. We lost. We'll always lose.'
(7) The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
(8) 'We're free.'
(9) 'We'll have no money, no decent place to live. We'll have to work, get kicked around. . .'
(10) 'Who's there?'

"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?

Poets Love Marilyn Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marilyn Monroe not only loved poetry and poets, poets have reciprocated in writing Marilyn into poetry. While I may be the first to write an entire collection centered around Marilyn, in doing so I have entered into a long tradition of poets who have written poems devoted to or referencing the famous actress.

Marilyn appears in passing in Frank O’Hara’s “To the Film Industry in Crisis” published in 1957, while Marilyn was still living, as “Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls” and more recently in Alex Dmitrov’s “LOVE” from his new collection LOVE and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2020):

“And yes, I love that Marilyn Monroe requested Judy Garland’s “Over

the Rainbow” to be played at her funeral. And her casket was lined in

champagne satin. And Lee Strasberg ended his eulogy by saying, “I

cannot say goodbye. Marilyn never liked goodbyes, but in the peculiar way

she had of turning things around so that they faced reality, I will

say au revoir.”

 

In fact, it is Marilyn’s tragic death that poets have explored over and over. Here’s Edwin Morgan’s “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” from 1968, with her death as metaphor for America:

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

        By Edwin Morgan

What innocence? Whose guilt? What eyes? Whose breast?

Crumpled orphan, nembutal bed,

white hearse, Los Angeles,

DiMaggio! Los Angeles! Miller! Los Angeles! America!

That Death should seem the only protector –

That all arms should have faded, and the great cameras and lights

become an inquisition and a torment –

That the many acquaintances, the autograph-hunters, the

inflexible directors, the drive-in admirers should become

a blur of incomprehension and pain –

That lonely Uncertainty should limp up, grinning, with

bewildering barbiturates, and watch her undress and lie

down and in her anguish

call for him! call for him to strengthen her with what could

only dissolve her! A method

of dying, we are shaken, we see it. Strasberg!

Los Angeles! Olivier! Los Angeles! Others die

and yet by this death we are a little shaken, we feel it, America.

Let no one say communication is a cantword.

They had to lift her hand from the bedside telephone.

But what she had not been able to say

perhaps she had said. ‘All I had was my life.

I have no regrets, because if I made

any mistakes, I was responsible.

There is now – and there is the future.

What has happened is behind. So

it follows you around? So what?’ – This

to a friend, ten days before.

And so she was responsible.

And if she was not responsible, not wholly responsible, Los Angeles?

Los Angeles? Will it follow you around? Will the slow

white hearse of the child of America follow you around?

 

Then in 1984, Sharon Olds writes a poem with the same title that appears in her collection from that year The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984).

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

By Sharon Olds

The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, heavy as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close
the mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the side, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet,
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.

These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other's eyes.

Their lives took
a turn-one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him-a place where she
would be waiting,

and one found himself standing at night
in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing, just an ordinary
woman
breathing.

Marilyn’s death forever transforming the men, and the reader in Old’s poem. We cannot look away. In Frank Bidart’s 1996 poem, “Marilyn Monroe” that ran in The New Yorker, Marilyn becomes a vehicle for the idea and perhaps the impossibility of transformation.

 

Marilyn Monroe

by Frank Bidart

Because the pact beneath ordinary life (If you

give me enough money, you can continue to fuck me—)

induces in each person you have ever known

panic and envy before the abyss,

what you come from is craziness, what your

mother and her mother come from is

craziness, panic of the animal

smelling what you have in store for it.

Your father’s name, she said, is too

famous not to be hidden.

Kicking against the pricks,

she somehow injured her mind.

You are bitter all that releases

transformation in us is illusion.

Poor, you thought being rich

is utterly corrosive; and watched with envy.

Posing in the garden,

squinting into the sun.

 

Even nearly sixty years after her death, Marilyn continues to serve as poetic muse, metaphor and mirror. And there’s no end in sight. Brava Marilyn!

Marilyn Monroe as Chanteuse [by David Lehman]

We don't think of her as a singer, but Marilyn Monroe (whose birthday it is) sang -- and sang well. Unlike Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in Pal Joey, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, she needed no dubbing. (They shouldn't have dubbed Ava Gardner in Show Boat but that's another story.) See Marilyn making the most of a secondary role in Niagara, or fighting with her beau in Bus Stop, or teaming with Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or joining Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Mitzi Gaynor, and Donald O'Connor on the Irving Berlin bandwagon in There's No Business Like Show Business, or cavorting with cross-dressers Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot. She sings in each of these movies and the songs are noteworthy, each and all.  

Some songs with male chorus and big brass solos, such as Berlin's "Heat Wave" ("she started a heat wave / by making her seat wave") are extravaganzas of sexual desire and energy. You can't keep your eyes off her, which is as it should be, but one consequence is that you don't hear enough of the voice. And wait till you hear her sing the same songwriter's "Lazy" and “After You Get What You Want You Don’t Want It.” Sublime.

Listen to her rendition of "I'm Through with Love," or "I Wanna Be Loved By You," "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" or "Bye Bye, Baby" -- but listen to the songs without looking at the visuals. You'll hear a melodious voice of limited range, thin but accurate, with a husky low register, a breathy manner, and a rare gift of vibratro. When her voice trembles over a note -- over "you" or "baby" -- the effect is seductive and yet is almost a caricature of the seductress's vamp. The paradox of her singing is that she reveals her sexual power and flaunts her vulnerability -- to flip the usual order of those verbs. She can be intimate and ironic at the same time.

Compare her version of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" with Carol Channing's definitive Broadway treatment, and you get the essential difference between theater and cinema, New York and Hollywood. Channing's is the superior theatrical experience: funny, charming, a show-stopper of the first order. But Channing serves the song where Monroe makes her songs sound like illustrations of her life. Monroe's treatment of "Diamonds" may not be as effective as Channing's in its service to Leo Robin's marvelous lyric for Jules Styne's delightful tune. But Monroe's version is younger, friskier, sexier. When she sings it, the song is about her. Music is the food of love, and sexual ecstasy is on the menu, for dessert.

Nowhere is she better than "I'm Through with Love," which she sings in Some Like It Hot. Gus Kahn's lyric, which rhymes "I'm through" with "adieu," is as apt for Marilyn as "Falling in Love Again" was for Marlene Dietrich. In "I'm Through with Love," the singer feigns nonchalance, affects an uncaring attitude. But melodically during the bridge, and lyrically in the line "for I must have you or no one," the song lets us know just how much she does care. Monroe implies this pathos in "I'm Through with Love" at the same time as she struts her stuff. She vows that she'll "never fall again" and forbids Love -- as if the abstraction stood for a Greek god or for the entire male sex -- to "ever call again." But we don't quite believe her, because we know temptation is just around the corner. In a sense, her voice thrusts out its hips when she sings. It's a feast for all the senses.

June 1, 2017

Ed. note: All BAP blog posts by David Lehman are copyright c David Lehman. All rights reserved.

Marilyn Monroe’s Love of Poetry: Happy Birthday Marilyn! [by Heidi Seaborn]

         

“I love poetry and poets”

                      ~Marilyn Monroe, 1962

So declared Marilyn Monroe on a list of notes she had made in preparing her response to a series of interview questions. The notes were among her journals and letters discovered decades after she died and later compiled into the book, Fragments. The editors of Fragments, Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, considered these notes to be her last, and that they may have been written within days before her death on August 4, 1962.

We’ll never know the question that inspired Marilyn’s answer. But we do know that she loved both poetry and poets. I wrote yesterday about her own poetry. Today, on what would have been her 95^th birthday, I’ll shed light on the poetry that Marilyn surrounded herself with.

After she died, her personal book collection of 430 books was auctioned off with other personal possessions by Christies NY on October 28-29, 1999. The collection includes many of the classics and shows she read broadly across genres and interests. Within that, her poetry collection included the following (with some identifiers missing):

A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Houseman
The Poetry & Prose Of Heinrich Heine by Frederich Ewen
The Poetical works Of John Milton, by H.C. Beeching
The Poetical Works Of Robert Browning (H.C. Beeching?)
Wordsworth by Richard Wilbur
The Poetical Works Of Shelley (Richard Wilbur?)
The Portable Blake, by William Blake
William Shakespeare: Sonnets, ed. Mary Jane Gorton
Poems Of Robert Burns, ed. Henry Meikle & William Beattie
The Penguin Book Of English Verse, ed. John Hayward
Aragon: Poet Of The French Resistance, by Hannah Josephson & Malcolm Cowley
Star Crossed by Margaret Tilden
Collected Sonnets by Edna St Vincent Millay (2 editions)
Robert Frost's Poems by Louis Untermeyer (Poe: Complete Poems by Richard Wilbur (a 2nd copy?)
The Life And Times Of Archy And Mehitabel by Don Marquis
The Pocketbook Of Modern Verse by Oscar Williams
Poems by John Tagliabue
Selected Poems by Rafael Alberti
Selected Poetry by Robinson Jeffers
The American Puritans: Their Prose & Poetry, by Perry Miller
Selected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
Poet In New York by Federico Garcia Lorca
The Vapor Trail by Ivan Lawrence Becker Love Poems & Love Letters For All The Year
100 Modern Poems, ed. Selden Rodman
The Sweeniad, by Myra Buttle
Poetry: A Magazine Of Verse, Vol.70, no. 6
Poems Of W.B. Yeats

The Poems, Prose & Plays Of Alexander Pushkin

Selected Poems by Emily Dickinson

The Poems And Fairy-Tales by Oscar Wilde

Selected Poems by DH Lawrence

 

As an actress, Marilyn had met many writers before she famously married the great playwright, Arthur Miller. But their association broadened her circle of writers, playwrights and poets. Through Miller, she befriend Louis Untermeyer. And she became especially closeto the poet, Norman Rosten. Rosten introduced her a wide range of poets and poetry and encouraged Marilyn’s own writing. At dinner parties, Marilyn would often read poetry aloud, including a memorable reading of Yeats at a gathering at Rosten's home.

After her marriage to Miller ended, Marilyn continued to foster her love of poetry and to develop friendships with poets. Most notably with Carl Sandburg, who was at the time in his early ‘80s. In the list of interview answer notes is one that must have been in response to the question, “Who do you admire, and why?” Marilyn writes “Eleanor Roosevelt—her devotion to mankind”, President Kennedy and his brother Robert and Greta Garbo, each with a reason, then lists Carl Sandburg—his poems are songs of the people by the people and for the people.”

Marilyn always considered herself of the people. It is not surprising that she gravitated toward the work of Sandburg and Walt Whitman. As someone who befriended many writers who were blacklisted by McCarthy for the communist associations and who supported Miller during his own investigation by HUAC, and who was likewise investigated by the FBI for her communist sympathies, Marilyn was outspoken in support of labor, and always aware of her own humble childhood and hard work to get recognition.

Marilyn’s love of poetry and poets was not just a publicity ploy to knock her image of being a dumb blonde. From everything I have come to understand about her, the publicity ploy was pretending to be a dumb blonde, when in reality she was forever a student of learning and literature. Happy Birthday Marilyn!

Marilyn Monroe, Poet [by Heidi Seaborn]

Tomorrow on June 1, Marilyn Monroe would have celebrated her 95^th birthday. Even now, nearly sixty years after her death, she remains one of the world’s most iconic figures. We know that she continues to serve as muse and subject to poets, but she was also someone who had a deep relationship to poetry. The poet Heidi Seaborn’s new collection An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe arrives on Marilyn’s birthday having won the PANK Books Poetry Prize. Best American Poetry has invited Seaborn to guest edit a week devoted to Marilyn Monroe in Poetry.

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After her death, Arthur Miller said of his former wife, Marilyn Monroe, “…she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.” As a poet who has written a collection largely in the persona of Marilyn Monroe, I find Miller’s description sad, but also intriguing. Did he really see her as a poet, or was he referring to her as having a poetic soul? Having thoroughly researched Monroe for my collection, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (PANK Books, June 2021), it’s not clear that Arthur Miller ever read Marilyn’s poetry. But I have.

When Marilyn died in 1962, her personal possessions were bequeathed to her acting coach and friend, Lee Strasberg. Decades later, and long after Strasberg was also dead, his widow Anna Strasberg discovered two boxes of Marilyn’s letters, journals and poems. Eventually the contents of those boxes became a book, Fragments (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment). Fragments contains mostly handwritten documents reproduced and transposed into text and some letters Marilyn typed herself. What’s revealed is everything from Marilyn’s grocery list for a party to letters to psychiatrists, to her notes for an upcoming interview with Life Magazine to her inner most anxieties. And intertwined in all these remnants from her heart and mind, are poems or fragments of poems. Here from a red spiralbound ‘Livewire’ notebook that Buchthal and Comment attribute to being from the summer of 1958 when Marilyn was in LA filming Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot.

 

“I left my home of green rough wood—

a blue velvet couch I dream till now

a shiny bush just left of the door.

[illegible] down the walk clickity clack as my doll

in her carriage went over the cracks—“We’ll go far away”

The meadows are huge the earth (will be) hard

on my back. The grass surged touched

the blue and still white clouds changing from an

old man shapes to a smiling dog with ears flying

Look—

The meadows are reaching—they’re touching the sky

We’ll leave We left our outlines against/on the crushed grass.

It will die sooner because we were there—will something

else have grown?

Don’t cry my doll don’t cry

I hold you and rock you to sleep.

hush hush I’m I was only pretending now that I’m (was)

not your mother who died.

I shall feed you from the shiny dark bush

just left of the door.” [1]

Marilyn never finished this or any of the rough drafts of poems that we find in journals and sheets of hotel stationary. Inspired, I wove lines from Marilyn’s forgotten poems into my own, to create a collage of her voice and the one I created for her in my persona poems. In one, I pulled lines from a poem Marilyn had written on the stationary at the Parkside House in Surrey, England where she and her brand-new husband, Arthur Miller, stayed while she filmed The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956. In my research, I had discovered an interview given by a maid who took care of the Millers at the Parkside House. In the interview, the maid described observing Marilyn writing and quietly crying. In my poem, I combine the observer and observed:

 

What the Maid Witnessed

~with lines from a maid’s interview and a poem Marilyn Monroe wrote in 1956

 

Mrs. Miller alone at the kitchen table, writing, a cup of tea

                                She remembers—her pale chiffon dress

pink robe

                            that she wore on a windy afternoon when she walked

feathers fluttering at her wrists like cherry petals

                            where no one had ever been

fingers curl a pencil

                            her clear-eyed baby who lived to die

hair the color of her milky tea

                            The woman stares

confetti of tears

                            & stares in space[2]

 

To have gathered Marilyn’s words into my own poetry feels like an act of completion. And recognition, that I am recognizing Marilyn not just as a poetic soul, but as a poet. I came very late in life to poetry and to being known as a poet, I imagine that if Marilyn had continued living, she might have turned more deeply to poetry. And be renown not her celebrity and beauty but also for her words.

 

 

[1] Fragments by Marilyn Monroe, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment

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

 

Ida Lupino, the First Lady of Noir [by David Lehman]

Ida Lupino in 1953's The Bigamist, which she directed as well as starred in (Everett Collection)

At a time when female directors were few, Ida Lupino directed several important, unorthodox films. The Bigamist (1953), which she directed and acted in, for example, is among the most unconventional of all movies that connoisseurs tag as noirs.

In a typical crime drama, adulterous lovers kill the spouse who stands in their way, as in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique, titles I juxtapose to illustrate how much variation there can be in the basic formula. In The Bigamist, however, no one gets beaten up or shot. No one robs a bank or a payroll, and the culprit’s downfall is signaled by nothing more violent than a baby’s sudden cry from out of the dark. Yet it qualifies as a noir, this smoky, black-and-white study in human failure, thwarted desire, and quiet desperation. When you add that The Bigamist is implicitly critical of the conventional moral standards governing romantic triangles, you get a sense of what distinguishes Ida Lupino’s films, as well as why I have dubbed her “the First Lady of noir.”

Born in London in 1918, Lupino contracted polio at age 16 but overcame it. A theme in her work is that self-pity sabotages the will and must be warded off—as by the blind woman she portrays in On Dangerous Ground (1951), who is vulnerable but brave, able to touch and redeem Robert Ryan, a cop so consumed with rage, he is like “a gangster with a badge.” Lupino took over the direction (uncredited) of On Dangerous Ground when the movie’s original director, Nicholas Ray, suffered a nervous breakdown.

In effect, Lupino acted in movies to subsidize her real career aspiration: to direct them. Two films she directed address the subject of female independence. The protagonist in Not Wanted is an unwed mother; in Never Fear, it is a dancer named Carol (Sally Forrest) who is afflicted with polio. A “message movie” of the kind that was popular in the late 1940s (The Snake Pit, Home of the Brave), Never Fear argues that a conscious act of will is needed to surmount the affliction; psyche must assist soma. All the therapy in the world will do little good unless the polio patient overcomes the defeatism to which patients are prone. 

Never Fear features a terrific square dance with wheelchairs.  I also love it that Carol’s upbeat doctor offers her a cigarette in her hospital bed. She says no. He lights up. He assures her that she will walk again but first must go through physical therapy and “muscle reeducation.” Before he exits, he gives her the pack of cigarettes. “You may want one later,” he says. Later, Carol evolves from being “a cripple” (“That’s what’s wrong with me,”) to feeling “ashamed of [her]self for being so full of self-pity.”

In The Bigamist, the man with two wives is far from odious. Lupino and her screenwriter wrote to understand, not to denounce. Harry (Edmond O’Brien) is simply weak though well-meaning, and the sympathetic portrayal of his plight is in its way as radical as the protagonist’s in Preston Sturges’ hilarious The Miracle of Morgan Creek (1943), a comedy made for a wartime Christmas. There are no laughs in The Bigamist, though. There is only grim disappointment.

Neither of the wives—Eve (Joan Fontaine), the ambitious blonde businesswoman in San Francisco, and Phyllis (Lupino), the melancholy brunette waiting tables in a Chinese Restaurant in Los Angeles—is the movie’s protagonist. The spotlight is squarely on Harry, the traveling salesman caught between them. Technically he is a cad, but he is too nervous, too much at cross-purposes with himself, to resemble the stereotypical two-timer. If we can trust Harry’s narration, and the film expects us to do so, he loves both his wives—although the love that connects him to Eve, his first wife, is a complicated mix of pity, sympathy, co-dependence, and emotional blackmail. Beer ads may advise us to “drink responsibly,” but it is impossible for the bigamist to love responsibly.

Eve, the less likeable wife, has a professional career that she enjoys and is good at. Despite dropped hints, she is blissfully unaware of what her husband may be doing on his regular jaunts to Los Angeles. Is it a coincidence that she, the career woman, is unable to conceive and yet desperately wants a child?

Phyllis, of frail constitution and limited means, has a sense of humor and a quality of warmth that the ever-cheerful Eve lacks. Phyllis makes no bones about Harry’s other life. She and he meet as strangers taking a bus tour of Hollywood. After he lights her cigarette—so often the initiating gesture for a romance—she lets him pick her up, because what she sees in him is loneliness and need, not lust.

Harry accepts his fatherhood of Phyllis’s baby. At the same time, when Eve suggests that they adopt a child, he agrees. Does he realize the jeopardy that the adoption process will put him in? Does he want to be caught?

Caught he is by the adoption agency’s Mr. Jordan (Edmund Gwenn, the Santa Claus of Miracle on 34^th Street [1947], whose Hollywood home is pointed out by the tour bus driver in The Bigamist). The jig is up when the benign but increasingly suspicious Mr. Jordan, completing his background check, visits Harry’s Los Angeles address and hears the baby crying.  The movie ends in a courtroom scene—Harry is guilty, the crowd disperses, and when Phyllis and Eve, left alone, look at each other, the viewer is desperate to know what each is thinking of the other.

In Cleo: A Journal of Film and Feminism, Elise Moore asserts that The Bigamist “directs its criticism at patriarchal, institutional monogamy’s failure to accommodate complicated emotional, work, and financial needs and responsibilities.” Is this, translated into the jargon du jour, what I’m saying? I don’t know, but I concur that The Bigamist is not reductively “a plea for understanding for one hapless, misguided man.”

It can only add to our appreciation of the picture that Collier Young, its screenwriter and producer, was, at the time of the filming, Joan Fontaine’s husband and Ida Lupino's ex.

Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

David Lehman, a contributing editor of the Scholar, is a poet, critic, and the general editor of The Best American Poetry annual anthology. His book One Hundred Autobiographies has just been published. He currently writes our Talking Pictures column.

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-first-lady-of-noir/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-first-lady-of-noir

 

Great Songs of Cinema [by Elizabeth Samet]

What do you think of first? “Over the Rainbow,” “As Time Goes By,” “Singin’ in the Rain”? Win, place, and show on the AFI’s “Top Movie Songs of All Time” list. My pick, Judy Garland’s devastating “The Man That Got Away,” from A Star is Born, comes in at #11. It was another Garland song, “Get Happy,” the triumphant final number in Summer Stock, that launched what became a feature in my film class this semester: “Movie Song of the Day.” This innovation was inspired by some extremely music-savvy students in the class—astonishingly well versed in everything from Alternative Country to Tin Pan Alley, nearly impossible to stump, able to hum obscure covers of obscurer originals. Lately, owing to their tutelage, I find myself with a rather eclectic mix on the iPod.... It is one wild ride to work in the morning. After Garland, I brought in everything from Fred Astaire’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (Blue Skies) to The Rolling Stones’ “Monkey Man,” one of the many songs featured in that magnificent montage toward the end of Goodfellas. One morning I played The Doors’ “Peace Frog,” featured in, of all movies, The Waterboy—a fact one member of the class announced even before Morrison had time to warm up. My students also began to bring in their favorites: Bobby Bare’s cover of Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s alkin’” (Midnight Cowboy), Keith Carradine’s “I’m Easy” (Nashville), Citizen Cope’s “Bullet and a Target” (Alpha Dog).

from the archive; first posted Novdmber 22, 2014

Talking Pictures: On "The Asphalt Jungle'"

Ed note: Since December 2019 I have written a regular column on classic movies for The American Scholar. Here are the opening paragraphs of my latest, which was posted yesterday (April 17) under the heading "Blind Accidents: How John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle brilliantly epitomizes the caper film." -- DL

<<< “If you want fresh air, don’t look for it in this town,” Louis the “box man” Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) tells Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe),the mastermind of a million-dollar jewel heist, in John Huston’s 1950 noir, The Asphalt Jungle. Surprise: the robbery doesn’t go off as brilliantly planned. Doc, also known as “the professor” and “Herr Doktor,” will end up in prison along with Gus (James Whitmore), the hunchbacked counterman who is a top-notch getaway driver; Cobby (Marc Lawrence), a bookie; and Lieutenant Ditrich (Barry Kelley), a crooked cop . Louis will leave a widow and a small, sickly child after a watchman is punched and falls to the ground,  misfiring his gun, and a slug finds its home in Louis’s belly. Oh, yes—“box man” means safecracker.

Based on the novel by W. R. Burnett, The Asphalt Jungle is the ur-example for the whole caper subgenre. The booty could be the gems in a shop on Paris’s ritzy rue de Rivoli (Rififi), the proceeds at the track on the day of a big race (The Killing) or, in a comic register, the take of five Las Vegas casinos at midnight on New Year’s Eve (Ocean’s Eleven). Whatever the setting, the result is failure, not because of the ratiocinative powers of the police but because of the inevitability of betrayal, miscalculation, and violent death. Nearly all of noir is founded on this assumption made somehow romantic and even glamorous.
>>>

For the rest of this piece, please link to The American Scholar website here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/blind-accidents/
For other "Talking Pictures" posts, click here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/dept/sections/departments/talking-pictures/

Photo: Sterling Hayden, Jean Hagen, and Sam Jaffe in The Asphalt Jungle, 1950

Free City FilmTrip – 1 “Corrupt Purposes” [film by Bill Hayward]

Bill Hayward is a creative paradox: a master image-maker who lives surrounded by poets and writers. You should see what he does to his books, which lie in great stalagmites all over his floor – he marks and annotates them like a Talmudic scholar. And then he alchemically transforms what he’s read into something filmic that can’t be categorized in any conventional way. To my knowledge, no one has synergized visual, aural and textual material in quite this radical a form. I am not exaggerating when I say that his recent, multi-award winning "Free City FilmTrips", incorporating excerpts taken directly from the novel, may represent the foothills of a movie genre. - Eric Darton

Marlene Dietrich, The Original Blonde Venus [by David Lehman]

Blonde Venus

In his latest Talking Pictures column for The American Scholar, David Lehman considers the enduring allure of Marlene Dietrich, whose seductive voice and androgynous style commanded screen and stage for more than half a century. “Marlene’s eyes say she’s seen it all and a lot of it was lousy,” he writes. “She holds an unlighted cigarette between forefinger and thumb, waiting for you to light it with your Lucifer. And you will.” Read More ➢

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

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

PART ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Erlanger describes the atmosphere of the Reformation and the Renaissance:

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

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

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

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

Ed note: this is part one of a two-part article. For part two, click here.

Talking Pictures: "The Counterfeit Traitor" with William Holden [by David Lehman]

 Ed. note: For The American Scholar, I write a monthly column under the general title of "talking pictures" about movies worth seeing and talking about. Here are the opening paragraphs of my latest effort. -- DL

<<< The Counterfeit Traitor is an underrated espionage classic in the same league as an early Eric Ambler novel or a Warner Brothers ’40s flick, albeit one set on location and in color. My best guess for why it is underrated is that the hero (William Holden) and heroine (Lilli Palmer) do not conform to accepted norms. They are played not by an all-American boy and golden girl but by two attractive and capable, if decidedly middle-aged, adults. Holden, who plays protagonist Eric “Red” Erickson, was 44 in 1962. Palmer, cast with her mitteleuropa beauty and charm as Frau Marianne von Mollendorf, Erickson’s clandestine confederate in Berlin, was 48.

Like the patron of Rick’s Cafe Américain in Casablanca, the hero of The Counterfeit Traitor does not begin the Second World War as the champion of a cause. He must be converted, and Frau von Mollendorf is his catalyst, converting the American-born, Cornell-educated Swedish industrialist from reluctant spy to committed freedom fighter.

Erickson, an oil exporter who has continued to trade with Germany after hostilities began in September 1939, has aimed for a stance of political neutrality. But he has been denounced as a Nazi collaborator, and now Allied Intelligence, led by the sardonic British agent Collins (Hugh Griffith), wants him to play the role with a vengeance. Repeating ugly shibboleths and breaking off relations with his best friend, a Jew, Erickson gains credibility among Nazi higher-ups, enabling him to gather vital information on German oil production facilities.

Not for the first time in his Hollywood career does Holden portray a resourceful skeptic that the Allies need to recruit despite his reluctance to join the fray. As in The Bridge on the River Kwai, his character needs to have his arm twisted hard. (See my Talking Pictures piece “William Holden, Model Prisoner” on William Holden in two lauded movies of the 1950s.) You might call Erickson disillusioned, but he doesn’t appear to have illusions in the first place. Virtually coerced into the role of counterfeit traitor, Erickson sums up his situation thus: “So you want me to risk my life to get off a blacklist I didn’t deserve to be on in the first place?”

. . . . . 

I first grasped the importance of a pocket square with three wings in a man’s breast pocket when I saw William Holden wear one at a cocktail party in The Counterfeit Traitor. And it was watching the movie as a 14-year-old that I realized for the first time that the hopelessness of a love affair accentuates its romantic and sexual intensity. >>>

For the rest of the piece, click here.