The Best American Poetry

Happy birthday, Robert Frost

 

Who said poetry makes nothing happen? -- SDH

 

"The Wild Bunch": Last of the Great Westerns [by David Lehman]

My latest "Talking Pictures" column for The American Scholar (February 23, 2023) is titled "Brilliant Carnage: Sam Peckinpah’s slow-motion bullet ballet"

I have seen The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 masterpiece, many times. The film marks the definitive end of the truly Western Western, a farewell to the time when desperadoes played poker in frontier saloons, gunfighters fought legendary battles, and the cavalry saved the day or died with their boots on. A righteous man could be John Wayne romancing Claire Trevor in Stagecoach or Gary Cooper taking on three killers in High Noon, and a little boy could end the movie by begging “Shane! Shane! Come back!” Once, when my son Joe, then twelve, and I watched The Wild Bunch together, he came up with the perfect two-word description of the movie: “brilliant carnage.”

Myths die not all at once but in stages, and the Western always owed something of its appeal to the knowledge that the era it depicted—and, to some extent, invented—was long since gone by the time talking pictures filled movie screens. With each year, the cowboy-as-hero, whether lawman or bandit, grew more distant. Of the horsemen making up The Magnificent Seven (1960), Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen are the only two who ride off into the sunset. Though they have defeated the bad guys who terrorized Mexican farmers, they know their days are numbered. “Only the farmers won,” Brynner says. “We lost. We always lose.”

In The Wild Bunch, Pike Bishop (William Holden) leads the eponymous outlaws with Dutch (Ernest Borgnine) as his right-hand man. Tector (Ben Johnson) and Lyle (Warren Oates) are brothers with bad tempers and a healthy lust for liquor and ladies. Angel (Jaime Sanchez) is the one Mexican among them, passionate and brave, while Sykes (Edmond O’Brien), a good-natured elder statesman, remains behind the scenes, because he can no longer meet the physical demands of a hold-up job. The bunch would have had one extra fellow, but Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), Pike’s closest friend, was arrested, flogged mercilessly, and blackmailed by a vicious railway baron (Albert Dekker) into leading a team of “peckerwood” trash to hunt down the gang. The actors up and down the line give sterling performances.

The movie begins on the outskirts of San Rafael, a small Texas town, with children gleefully burning straw atop a battle of ants and scorpions. It is a powerful image, conveying the idea that cruelty and an impulse to destroy may be innate in even the youngest and most innocent human beings. In sharp contrast, a salvation salesman leads an open-air temperance meeting in the center of town, where a pathetic crowd swears off alcohol and sings “Shall We Gather at the River?”

It is then that Pike and his men, dressed in U.S. army uniforms, ride in to rob the railway’s offices. Their plans have been anticipated, however, and an ambush organized against them. In the ensuing crossfire, only Pike and five others ride their horses to safety. One of them will die of his wounds minutes later. And their bags of stolen treasure turn out to contain no treasure—just dime-store metal washers.

from The American Scholar https://theamericanscholar.org/brilliant-carnage/
for more click here

She Got Pinched in the Assss. . . tor Bar! [by Stacey Harwood]

[In 2011] I visited my mom for a couple of days and while with her I went through some of her old photo albums.  Whenever I do, I find something that had previously escaped my attention.  This time, I came across this bit of memorabilia from a different age (below left, click to enlarge):

  



The Hotel Astor stood at 44th Street and Broadway, a stunning example of Beaux-Art architecture that was demolished in 1967 to make room for a 50-story office tower.  It was  walking distance from the Milk Barn, the coffee shop where my mother worked as a waitress.  Many of her customers were "garmentos" (as those who work the rag trade are now called) who would on occasion give her gifts of belts (she had a tiny waist) and monogrammed hankies.  I love imagining my mother stopping in at the Astor Bar for a post-work cocktail.  Did she?  She won't say.  But it was quite the place,  made even more famous by Cole Porter's "Well Did You Evah/What a Swell Party."  There are many great versions of the song (I like Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop's subversive take here. Listen for raunchy lyrics that Porter would have loved) but you really can't beat Der Bingle and Ole Blue Eyes in High Society as rivals for Grace Kelly, who is betrothed to another.

from the archive; first posted on February 14, 2011.

Kurosawa's 30 [by Lewis Saul]

In 2010 -- a Baker's Dozen ago -- the Film Forum ran 28 of Akira Kurosawa's 30 films. (Ran [1985] and Madadayo [1993] weren't shown). Your Editor invited me to make a few comments, which I did in a verbose 63,136 words. You can read them here. [This post tracks in at 1,963 words. I'm trying.]

Today, I make an attempt to merely summarize all 30 films -- the worst of which* is still worth seeing.

Wartime

1. Sanshiro Sugata (1943)

 

After a fruitful apprenticeship as an assistant director with Kajirō Yamamoto (Horse, 1941), Kurosawa got his chance to direct when he snapped up the options on a novel by Tsuneo Tomita.

Initially, Kurosawa wanted to be a painter. Just watch the opening shot and one can see the Meiji-era scene come to life. In a pan, we move down an alley and meet Sugata (Susuma Fujita).

The story of human struggle to attain perfection attracted the military censors. They weren't so happy about the love story and thus that subplot was mangled.

Hansuki Murai -- the girl's father -- is played by Takashi Shimura.

 

2. The Most Beautiful (1944)

 

A girls-only factory produces optical devices for fighter planes. Yōko Yaguchi is the heroine. She would soon become Mrs. Akira Kurosawa.

Check out the Eisensteinian montage of the volleyball game.

Shimura plays Chief Goro, the head of the factory.

*3. Sanshiro Sugata Part II (1945)

 

A sorry and soggy sequel. A Turk -- Osman Yusuf -- plays the bullying American sailor. The plot hinges on the superiority of Judo compared to the vicious American sport of boxing. Fujita returns, but Shimura wisely skipped this one. 

4. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail (1945)

 

Based on the kabuki play Kanjinchō -- itself a remake of the Noh play Ataka -- the 12th-century general Yoshitsune Minamoto and his retainers are disguised as monks and who must evade his evil brother, Yoritomo, who controls the border checkpoint. The ambiguity of the denouement demonstrates the ingenuity of the young Kurosawa.

Shimura plays one of the monks. The comedian, Ken'ichi Enomoto, enlivens this short film with astonishing humor.

Occupation-era

5. No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)

 

General MacArthur and SCAP encouraged Kurosawa to make a film which help the populace understand the earth-shattering transition from militarism to democracy. Set in the mid-30's, Kurosawa seeks to humanize rather than simply caricture the militarists.

Fujita returns as the unfortunate pacifist martyr who is lucky enough to marry the incomparable Setsuko Hara (her first of only two films with Kurosawa). The great Denjirō Ōkōchi is her father.

 

6. One Wonderful Sunday (1947)

 

Struggling young lovers (Isao Numasaki and Chieko Nakakita) meet on Sundays, only to find nothing to do -- they can barely afford a cup of coffee. Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" features prominently in the plot.

7. Drunken Angel (1948)

 

Having discovered Toshiro Mifune and teaming him up with Shimura, Kurosawa finally had made a legitimate masterpiece. Gangster and alcoholic doctor become frenemies, while the viewer is treated to a documentary-like look at postwar Japan.

 

8. The Quiet Duel (1949)

 

A minor picture, liable to induce some cringing at the overwrought characters and their reactions to the then nearly incurable disease of syphillis. Mifune and Shimura are father and son.

 

9. Stray Dog (1949)

 

A fine noir, featuring a young cop (Mifune) learning the ropes from an old pro (Shimura). Mifune has lost his gun to a pickpocket on a sweaty, crowded bus, and we perspire along with him, as we count the number of bullets left.

 

10. Scandal (1950)

 

Considered a minor picture by most critics, but this reviewer begs to disagree. Mifune is a serious painter, whose career is threatened by a scandal sheet which prints a false rumor about an illicit affair with a famous singer (the gorgeous Shirley Yamaguchi). Shimura is his bedraggled lawyer, who must win the libel case in court, despite being bribed by the deep-pocketed opposition.

There is one unusual spiral wipe.

11. Rashomon (1950)

 

Marge: "You said you liked Japanese films?"
Homer: "That's not the way I remember it!"

12. The Idiot (1951)

 

Kurosawa -- a lifelong fan of Dostoevsky -- was furious when the producers couldn't stomach the running time. "Cut the damn thing right down the middle of the strip," he cried, more or less disowning the truncated release print.

Setsuko Hara returns as Nastasya/Taeko Nasu, the woman who stands between Masayuki Mori (Myshkin/Kameda) and Mifune (Rogózhin/Akama).

Post-occupation

13. Ikiru (1952)

 

Mifune took a leave of absence, leaving Shimura to star in this unforgettable tale of "it's-never-too-late," inspired by a short story by Tolstoy.

14. Seven Samurai (1954)

 

My old 8,984-word post will have to do. I was really into studying filmic punctuation back then -- There are 1,467 total cuts in the film; 1,399 straight cuts; 15 fade-to-blacks; 32 horizontal wipes left; 13 horizontal wipes right; and eight dissolves.

15. I Live in Fear (1955)

 

The 35-year-old Mifune plays an elderly factory owner who wants to move his entire family (mistresses included) to Brazil, where he believes they would be safe from a nuclear bomb. Godzilla -- from the previous year -- was meant to reflect similar fears then ever present in the Japanese public.

Shimura is a dentist who volunteers in a family court assigned to help the family sort things out.

 

16. Throne of Blood (1957)

 

Minoru Chiaki (Woodchopping samurai of the Seven) co-stars with Mifune as warlord generals in this adaption of Macbeth.

 

17. The Lower Depths (1957)

 

Based on the play by Gorky. A masterpiece of ensemble theater, Kurosawa as at the top of his game here. Mifune plays the thief (Vaska/Sutekichi), but Kamatari Fujiwara steals the show as The Actor. Bokuzen Hidari (Luka/Kahei) is golden as The Pilgrim.

Look for an incredible musical performance in the final scene. It may sound like a jazz improvisation to Western ears, but is called bakabayashi -- literally, "fools' orchestra" -- and has the poverty-stricken characters singing about the "avarice and hypocrisy of the Buddhist monks," as they sing sarcastic praises of all the  things salvation money can buy.

18. The Hidden Fortress (1958)

As the widescreen format reached Japan, Kurosawa immediately took advantage. This wonderful adventure romp stars Mifune as a general on an important mission and Fujiwara and Chiaki as two peasants along for the ride. (The latter was the inspiration for the droids in Star Wars.)

19. The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

 

Time to get serious again. Loosely based on Hamlet, Mifune plays Kōichi Nishi, buttoned-down secretary to Iwabuchi, the important Vice President of the "Public Corporation" (Mori, aged beautifully). Nishi is not what he seems, however, his late father standing in for Hamlet's ghost ...

 

20. Yojimbo (1961)

 

Forever copied, but never equaled, this megahit features Mifune as a ronin, with smarts. If you ever wonder why John Belushi's SNL samurai imitation is always scratching himself -- as Mifune does here -- it is because he never had clean clothes, and was being bitten by fleas.

 

21. Sanjuro (1962)

 

The studio, of course, demanded a sequel, and Kurosawa was not about repeat his youthful mistake with Sugata II.

 

Although Mifune's ronin yojimbo is the same character (thirty [sanjuro] going on ...), this is a very different film than Yojimbo, set in a different time-period and involving very different circumstances.

Now the wise ronin is made to advise ten young, rather stupid, samurai retainers of a lord thought to be corrupt. Once again, the widescreen format allows for amazing compositions. Tatsuya Nakadai is the delicious villain who makes film history in the final scene.

 

22. High and Low (1963)

 

Loosely based on King's Ransom by Ed McBain, this powerful police procedural has Mifune playing a shoe company executive who is unwillingly drawn into a kidnapping. The film is bifurcated into two equally suspenseful halves. The young Tsutomu Yamazaki (Tampopo) is the kidnapper.

23. Red Beard (1965)

 

In Kurosawa's final black-and-white film, and Mifune's swan song with the director, he is again beautifully aged to play "Red Beard" -- a Japanese expression for any physician who was trained in the medical arts at Nagasaki by the red bearded Dutch.

In fact, it is the young Yasumoto (Yūzō Kayama) who passes on his Nagasaki training to the elder Mifune.

185 minutes flies by in this -- one of Kurosawa's great masterpieces.

 

Post-Mifune

24. Dodes'ka-Den (1970)

 

He surely must have missed Mifune as often as he cursed television for drying up the money he required to make films. Joining with three other prominent Japanese directors, "The Four Knights" club was formed with the intention of producing each others films.

Kurosawa went first with this tale of a retarded boy who pretends to be a trolley car (thus the title: dodes'ka-den is the sound he makes imitating the engine), along with all the inhabitants of a Tokyo slum. A fascinating watch, the film tanked and Kurosawa tried to kill himself. Thank God, he did not succeed.

 

25. Dersu Uzala (1975)

 

But with no funding available to him, he set off to the Soviet Union to visit Tarkovsky, who was in post with Solaris. Inspired, he signed onto Mosfilm, and went as far away from civilization as possible -- to the frozen tundra of Siberia.

Here he found his Dersu (Maxim Munzuk) -- a Tuvan actor -- and made an extraordinary film about humanity surviving in the indifferent conditions of Mother Nature. Vastly underappreciated.

26. Kagemusha (1980)

 

Finally, three very successful American directors (Lucas, Spielberg and Coppola) recognized a genius in trouble and provided much-needed financing.

In the five-year period between films, Kurosawa had hand-painted complete storyboards and the only major hiccup in the production occurred in casting. Kurosawa imagined that the great Shintaro Katsu (Zatoichi) would make a great Kagemusha (shadow-warrior) in a 16th-century story involving a great warlord who employed his look-alike brother as a double. Realizing the need for a third "double," they recruited a thief was about to be crucified as a stand-by. Katsu was to play both the warlord and the thief.

But his swelled ego blew his chance on the first day of shooting (he brought along his own film crew and argued with AK, until he was thrown off the lot.) "Call up Nakadai -- see if he's available," and the whole thing was fixed. Nakadai played the dual roles, with Yamazaki (High and Low) playing the brother.

 

27. Ran (1985)

 

King Lear, with sons instead of daughters. Color-coordinated so as to never lose track of who's who, Kurosawa raised the epic to new levels. Nakadai stars.

28. Dreams (1990)

 

Eight vignettes, each preceded by a caption "and I dreamed that ..."

Uneven, but the episodes that work really work! The first two for example: "Sunshine Through the Rain," and "The Peach Orchard" are miniature masterpieces. Disappointments follow until we reach "The Crow" starring Martin Scorsese as Vincent Van Gogh. The final dream "Village of the Watermills" stars the great 86-year-old Chishū Ryū playing a man who is 105.

29. Rhapsody in August (1991)

 

Ooh, how the American critics savaged this for just one scene where the kids ask why there is no American memorial in the Nagasaki Peace Park. "Because they were the ones that dropped the bomb."

A survivor is grandma to a bunch of thoroughly Americanized kids, who gradually come to realize the horror that was visited upon her in her youth. Richard Gere steps in to smooth things over, and a Schubert song on an out-of-tune organ plays a big part in the story.

Watch for the ants crawling up the rose in the Sutra scene.

30. Madadayo (1993)

 

The 83-year-old filmmaker was "not yet" done. This heartwarming tale of a German professor traverses time and space and features a lot of beer drinking. The title refers to a kid's expression when playing hide-and-seek: "Are you ready?" ... "Not yet!" (Madadayo).

"Scarface Nation" [by Ken Tucker]

Highly recommended.

Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie by Ken Tucker (St. Martin’s Press)
Not merely the behind-the-scenes making of the 1983 De Palma/Pacino film (and the 1932 Howard Hawks/Paul Muni version), but also a critical analysis of how Scarface has influenced pop music, TV shows, YouTube videos, and political culture (see the chapter “President Scarface,” starring Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney, among others). "Insightul, intelligent, memorable, true." -- Lawrence Starling

The Critic [film by Mel Brooks]

Some Cinematic Suggestions [by David Lehman]

For The American Scholar, I've posted short essays on the movies I've listed here. Here are links to, and brief excerpts from, the articles. To this post, which first  appeared on March 27, 2020, I have since added my piece on The Manchurian Candidate from January 22, 2022. Click here to see other Talking Pictures features.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Gentleman's Agreement with Gregory Peck

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

The Manchurian Candidate
January 22, 2022
Political scientists used to define politics as the art of the possible. If it has morphed into the craft of manipulative paranoia, the change dates back to the assassination of President Kennedy. The Warren Commission’s report satisfied few skeptics, journalists, or serious historians, and the credibility of politicians (who used to be called “statesmen”) keeps ebbing.

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

Talk about serendipity: On October 22, 1962, only two days before the picture’s release, President Kennedy announced to the nation that he had ordered a naval blockade to repulse Russian ships, equipped with missiles, heading to the Caribbean. The Cuban Missile Crisis has been seen ever since as the tensest moment in the 45-year Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and here was a movie advancing the thesis that a Communist assassination plan was in the works.

The Manchurian Candidate is wickedly satirical. Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a demagogue in the manner of Joe McCarthy, is revealed to be an imbecile under the thumb of his ambitious, intellectually superior wife, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury at her best). What happened to her first husband? The movie, mum on the point, offers an Oedipal triangle in which Mrs. Iselin controls her war hero son, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), and gets him to eliminate her rival, his bride (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of Senator Iselin’s fiercest, most principled opponent (John McGiver). Lansbury was less than three years older than Harvey. In the novel, she seduces him; in the film, just a kiss on the lips, but it’s enough.

What most distinguishes The Manchurian Candidate is its opening. If you miss the first five minutes of Hamlet, you can catch up (at the cost of some excellent verse), because the ghost does not appear to Hamlet until act I, scene 4 and doesn’t speak to him until scene 5. But, as the movie’s theatrical release poster accurately proclaimed, “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about.” The film begins in Korea, 1952. Betrayed by a guide, an American army unit is ambushed. After Saul Bass’s marvelous title credits, featuring the queen of diamonds on an oversize political campaign button, we go to an American airport, where Sergeant Shaw, survivor of the ambush, is honored with hoopla for the valor he is said to have displayed under fire.

In the following scene, the camera slowly approaches Shaw’s commanding officer, Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra), asleep beside an insomniac’s paradise of books, among them The Trial, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Ulysses. Marco, who nominated Shaw for his medal, slides into a recurring nightmare of what really happened in Korea.

The brainwashing sequence begins with the captive GIs in their army fatigues on a stage. The audience appears to the men, in their trance, to consist of dowagers in sunhats who have gathered to talk about hydrangeas at a suburban garden party in New Jersey. In fact, the ladies in the audience are Russian and Chinese bigwigs, and Frankenheimer switches us back and forth between alternating versions, the harmless old women and the malevolent Communists in suits or uniforms. Then we watch in horror as, under orders, Shaw kills two of his fellow POWs while the other soldiers look on, affectless.

Like Major Marco, Corporal Al Melvin (James Edwards) has recurrent nightmares culminating in a public murder committed by Shaw. And, like Major Marco, he is programmed to say, when asked, that “‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Everyone says so, and it’s odd, because Raymond is a singularly cold, humorless fellow whom the men dislike..

The buried truth—that the recipient of a Congressional Medal of Honor, feted with fanfare, is a secret, trigger-ready weapon concocted by the enemy—created a mental shock to anyone who saw The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. (I was 14 years old, and amazed.) The plot: to engineer the nomination of the clownish Senator Iselin for the position of vice president, then to kill the man at the head of the ticket, paving the way for Iselin’s rise to that position. The paranoid paradox: the extreme right-wing John Iselin is really a clueless Communist placeholder. The brains of the operation: Eleanor Iselin, as icily ruthless as Lady MacBeth.

Marco, the veteran suffering from PTSD who tries to save Shaw from his predestined fate, looks like a man having a nervous breakdown, but he must have something going for him, because the glamorous and beautiful Rosie Cheyney (Janet Leigh) is willing to break her engagement to her fiancé on the basis of a shared cigarette with Marco on the train between Washington, D. C. and New York City. Although Leigh is extraneous to the plot, I have published a poem contending that the only justification needed for Janet Leigh’s presence in the movie is that she is Janet Leigh. More creatively, Roger Ebert argues that in the paranoid universe of The Manchurian Candidate, Leigh may secretly be Sinatra’s controller.

I will not give away other surprises and speculations except to say that the guises assumed by the queen of diamonds will endow that particular card with a rare significance if you are a part-time poker player. An amusing scene takes place in Jilly’s, Sinatra’s favorite New York hangout. When the bartender, telling a story, says, “Go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake,” Raymond—a solitaire addict who has just encountered the trigger card—does as told. Marco has to fish him out.

The Manchurian Candidate has altered political discourse, and the very word brainwashing has acquired a stink. The evil mesmerist-in-chief, Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), crows that Raymond Shaw’s “brain has not only been washed, as they say; it’s been dry-cleaned.” In 1967, George Romney shot his presidential candidacy in the foot when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because US generals had “brainwashed” him. Recently, Donald Trump has been depicted as a “Manchurian candidate,” allegedly willing to favor the Russians in exchange for lucrative real-estate deals.

But The Manchurian Candidate offers more than a linguistic afterlife, thrilling paranoia, and the cunning of Eleanor Iselin. It succeeds as well as it does because of the strong sense of the uncanny that informs it, as if we were watching our own history rendered as a spooky hallucination, delivered with the plausibility of a newsreel.

https://theamericanscholar.org/the-prophecy-of-an-assassination/

Sterling Hayden as Johnny Clay in Kubrick's "The Killing" [by John Harbourne]

For more  of John Harbourne's pioctures, visit this site:
johnharbourneartist.com
copyright (c) 2022 by John Harbourne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fay: “Johnny, you’ve got to run.”

Johnny: “Ah … what’s the difference?”

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

Written for and posted by The American Scholar, April 1, 2020.

Pearl Harbor according to "The Godfather"

"Say, what do you think of the nerve of them Japs?" Sonny asks. "Dropping bombs on our own backyard on Pop's birthday here." To which Fredo, who didn't go to college to get stupid, replies, "They didn't know it was Pop's birthday." The flashback finale of The Godfather, part 2.

"What Hath Gable Got?" Rhett Butler in "It Happened One Night" [by David Lehman]

I could have called it "Hail to the King" or "Odysseus Hitches a Ride," but I went with "What Hath Gable Got?" for my American Scholar piece on the actor who played Rhett Butler & won Claudete Colbert's heart in "It Happened One Night":

As a college student, I watched Gone with the Wind at a Times Square theater where the 1939 film was enjoying a revival. At the first appearance of Clark Gable-as-Rhett Butler standing at the base of a spiral staircase and looking up, the woman sitting next to me, who was old enough to be my mother, blurted out, “God bless him.” At one of the film’s climactic moments, Rhett Butler mounts that spiral staircase with the indomitable Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh at her most ravishing) in his arms.

No male actor exuded as much confidence and devilish sex appeal as this six-foot-one fellow with the best pencil mustache in the business. In his other movies, Gable frequently plays a variation of Rhett Butler. He is the take-charge guy, the born winner, whom it is impossible to dislike—unless you’re Bosley Crowther of The New York Times, who characterized Gable as a “well-tailored roughneck.”

Gable is the American male as he would like to be: crafty, capable, sure of himself, equal to any situation. Born and raised in Ohio, he loved literature and used to recite Shakespeare’s sonnets to friends. Devastated by the loss of his wife, the actress Carole Lombard, who died in a plane crash, he joined the U. S. Air Force in World II and flew operational missions over Europe in B-17s. Undershirts went out of style when Gable took off his shirt to reveal a bare chest in Frank Capra’s sublime 1934 comedy, It Happened One Night, in which Gable plays a brash newspaperman who wins runaway heiress Claudette Colbert’s heart—much to his surprise, and hers.

It was in It Happened One Night that Gable established what we today would call his brand. When we first encounter him, he is on a public phone, getting fired, and his boss hangs up on him. Several of his journalist pals are listening, and Gable doesn’t let on that he has lost the phone connection, let alone his job. With a show of bravado, he declares that he wouldn’t come back even if his boss begged him to, “and let that be a lesson to you.” He hangs up, and his chums hail him as “the almighty king.” The character’s real name is ordinary, Peter Warne, but he is more kingly than the patrician “King” Westley (Jameson Thomas), a stuffed shirt to whom the mixed-up Ellen Andrews (Colbert) is engaged. Ellen expresses her ambivalence about the nuptials by running away from her upper-crust home to the buses and trailer parks of the common folk.

Gable is a hero on the model of Odysseus. Luck favors him. On the bus from Florida to New York in It Happened One Night, he takes the one available seat, which happens to be the seat next to Ellen. She wants nothing to do with Peter, but after much disputation, they join forces. To scare the dickens out of a pest who has recognized Ellen from a newspaper photo, Peter assumes the identity of a gangster. As if to proclaim his destiny, he presents himself at a motor lodge as the husband of this chic woman with the wide eyes, the semi-circle eyebrows, and effortless charm.

For the rest of this piece, click here to reach the current "Talking Pictures" column on the web site of The American Scholar.

Homage to "Laura" [by John Harbourne]

Diptych by John Harbourne. Copyright (c) 2022 by John Harbourne. All rights reserved.
John Harbourne has made similar drawings of many other noir figures. www.johnharbourneartist.com

Laura

Then the doorbell rang.
Time for one more cigarette.
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
He is not in love with a corpse

Time for one more cigarette.
The venomous drama critic insinuates
He is in love with a corpse.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.

The venomous drama critic knows
He is sane.
It’s a typical male-female mix-up.
He thinks she is dead and she thinks he is rude.

Is he sane?
Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
He thinks she is a ghost and she thinks he is rude
When the picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman.

Each wonders what the other is doing in her living room.
It hasn’t stopped raining.
The picture on the wall becomes a flesh-and-blood woman:
Gene Tierney in Laura.

It hasn’t stopped raining.
“Dames are always pulling a switch on you,”
"Dana Andrews says in Laura.
There was something he was forgetting.

“Dames are always pulling a switch on you.”
It wasn’t Laura’s body on the kitchen floor.
There was something he was forgetting.
Then the doorbell rang.

-- David Lehman

"Laura" is taken from David Lehman's book The Mysterious Romance of Murder, pubished by Cornell University Press in 2022. Copyright (c) 2022 by David Lehman.

Andrzej Wajda: Ashes and Diamonds (1958) [by Lewis Saul]

Creeping authoritarianism. Teetering democracy. Dangerous political leadership.

No, I'm not talking about the U.S. of A. but the centuries of sadness which is synonymous with the historically chopped-up country of POLAND.

Specifically, the 24-hour period (May 8-9, 1945) during which this film takes place and the year it was made -- 1958.

**

Josef Stalin's death in 1953 ushered in a period which is sometimes referred to as the "Stalinist thaw." The ground was still pretty frozen, but a few sprigs were sprouting up in both the Soviet Union and its satellites. Shostakovich enraged the dictator with his Ninth Symphony (1945) which -- instead of a paean to the glorious victory of The Patriotic War -- was a lighthearted, short jokey affair. He saved the good stuff for his Tenth (1953), which at the same time as dealing with the tragedy of the war, also included a biting satirical portrait of the madman.

The Polish October (1956) ushered in a period of astonishing artistic freedom for Polish artists -- a mere three years after the death of Josef Stalin -- we get the outrageously cutting-edge music of Penderecki and Lutoslawski, and a trilogy of war films from the young Andrzej Wajda. [The first two were A Generation (1955) and Kanal (1957), about the Warsaw resistance.]

**

Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski) have made a big mistake. In one of the many striking scenes in this film (influenced by Citizen Kane), Andrzej is on the phone with his superior -- Major Florian (Ignacy Machowski). The mistake must be corrected, but not before Wajda shows us the three important characters in deep focus -- Andrzej in the foreground on the phone; Maciek desperately trying to get Andrzej's attention and the survivor of the mistake in the far background, Szczuka (Waclaw Zastrzezynski).


Maciek -- looking so cool in his sunglasses (a result of spending so much time in the Warsaw sewers, he casually informs us) -- is the central character. He represents the anti-Communist freedom fighter, but Communism and the Communists (along with the aristocracy) all saddle up to the bar together. [Wajda had the censors so confused that they passed the film (to much subsequent consternation) after a few rounds of vodka.]

Drewnowski (Bogumil Kobiela) -- the aide to the mayor, Swiecki (Aleksander Sewruk) -- seems to be swinging on the hinges of the door between the two sides. He had big prospects for advancement with the Communists, but blows it all by purposefully getting stinking drunk at the big banquet he was supposed to be organizing. His transformation of a fire extinguisher to a gun is one of the more hilarious moments in the film.

Last, but certainly not least, is the gorgeous Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska). She is all women, confounding the men's political work by intense, focused love. In the end, Maciek is obviously much more interested in her than any political theatre.

But alas ...

Cybulski

Hail Kelly Full of Grace [by David Lehman]

Born today, Grace Kelly was twenty-six when she married Prince Ranier and became the princess of Monaco. Thus ended a brief but magnificent cinematic career. Astrologically, her charm, beauty, and royalty are all prefigured in her chart: Scorpio is not only her birth sign but also her rising sign! Born on Philadelphia on November 11, 1929 -- on Veterans' Day, just two weeks after the stock market crashed -- Grace had the perfect first name, face, height (5'7), and acting chops. Her status as an Earth Snake (in Chinese astrology) with a magic number of 8 prefigured her fate. If only her moon had not been in OPisces, she might have lived a longer life; she died in a car crash in 1982, months shy of her fifty-third birthday. "I can't see myself as an old woman," she confided. "I will always be the model on the cover of Harper's Bazaar." Gracve Kelly shares her birthday with Demi Moore, Leonardo Di Caprio, and Dostoyevsky.

Whether playing a quaker lady dressed in virginal white in the Wild West (High Noon), or lounging amid the leading luminaries of Newport society while Louis Armstrong plays his trumpet (High Society), Grace Kelly was one of the most glamorous of all the screen queens of the 1950s, a Harper's Bazaar cover girl who enjoys dinners at 21, vacations in St. Tropez, and knows how to plan a picnic or stand up to a killer. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra sang to her. Did Cary Grant prefer her (in To Catch a Thief) to Ingrid Bergman (in Notorious)? Did Hitchcock? In Mogambo (1953), she competes with Ava Gardner for Clark Gable's affections. Little-known fact: Bennington College rejected her application because her mathematics scores were not up to snuff. Given the choice of playing against James Stewart in Rear Window or Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, she chose the former. That may be all ye know of her, and all ye need to know.   --DL

Krzysztof Kiešlowski: Three Colors Trilogy

Krzysztof Kiešlowski was born in Warsaw, Poland on June 27, 1941. After two attempts and two rejections, he was finally admitted to the Łódź Film School on his third try. His first major success came in 1989, when he made the stunningly brilliant  Dekalog, a series of ten films made for Polish television – each film a cinematic comment on the Ten Commandments. 

The next year, he formed a partnership with the Romanian producer Marin Karmitz, with whom he made his last four magnificent films. 

The Double Life of Véronique (1990) was a success, and Kiešlowski immediately began planning his final three films -- the trilogy, Three Colors. All three films are scored by Zbigniew Preisner, but Kiešlowski used a different cinematographer for each film. 
 
It is important to watch these three films in the correct order (as in the French flag) -- otherwise one will miss important segues and sequences (and spoilers!) which will lessen the impact of these three films – perhaps the most brilliant trilogy of 20th-century filmmaking.

Blue (1993) 

The first shot in Blue is a rush of high-speed traffic, filmed from the bottom of a car, at wheel level. One immediately notices how the color blue is reflecting off every surface, and indeed the color will permeate the film, obsessively built into its fabric, as a matter of design. (On my Criterion Blog review, I detail all the spots throughout the film where blue is prominent.) 
 
We are in Paris. Juliette Binoche is Julie Vignon, her husband is Patrice de Courcy (Hugues Quester), a well-respected composer tasked with writing a grand cantata to celebrate the unification of Europe, aka the newly-founded European Union. 

Other important characters are Olivier (Benoit Régent), Sandrine (Florence Pernel), and Lucille – a prostitute – played by Charlotte Véry. 

The music composed by de Courcy (Preisner) is tonal, with a chorus singing the text of 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 (“Love is patient”) in Greek. (Greek chorus?) Kiešlowski uses many close-ups of the actual manuscript paper, panning the written notes as the score plays. 

Look for an extreme-close-up (ECU) of a sugar cube turning brown as it’s dipped into some coffee! 

White (1994) 

A new cinematographer is on board to capture the frozen white tundra of post-Soviet Poland – Edward Klosinski -- in this anti-comedy or anti-love story ... 

A suitcase clunks along an airport conveyor belt, under the opening credits: Cut to Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski)’s feet. He slows down and stops next to two pairs of feet. The camera pans up and we see his face, confused. He starts to walk again – the attentive viewer will notice that the other feet belong to a couple, kissing. We are still in Paris. 

We meet Karol’s French wife, Dominique (Julie Delpy), and later, when Karol is in the Metro playing an old Polish song on comb-and-paper, he meets a fellow Pole, Mikołaj (Janusz Gajos). 
 
The film then moves to Warsaw, as Karol finds himself in a bleak, desolate landscape – a garbage dump. His first words speak volumes: 

“Jesus, home at last” 

The filmmaker drags us along on a strange, but exciting adventure which can only end one way. He leaves the viewer hanging a bit, as it is necessary to see Red to find out how things ultimately resolve … 

Red (1994) 

A third cinematographer – Piotr Sobocinski … 

The opening scene completes Kiešlowski’s subterranean triplet (in Blue, under a car, in White, underground conveyor belt, and here, underground telephone lines). In a tour-de-force montage, the filmmaker takes us on a breathtaking voyage from telephone to telephone. (Pre-cell phone) … 

We are in Geneva now, and Irène Jacob is Valentine, a model. She accidentally hits a dog with her car, and tracks down the owner – a retired judge, Joseph Kern (a magnificent Jean-Louis Trintignant). 
 
Valentine: “Excuse me … the door was open. I’m sorry, I think I ran over your dog. Rita. A German Shepherd.
Judge Kern: [displaying little interest]: “It’s possible. She disappeared yesterday.” 
Valentine: “She’s in my car. Alive. I don’t know what to do.” [no response from the Judge] … “Would you like me to take her to a vet?” 
Judge [still displaying no interest]: “As you wish.” 
Valentine: “If I ran over your daughter, would you react the same way?” 
Judge [displaying no emotion]: “I don’t have a daughter, miss.” 

A deeply thought-out cinematic reverie on life, love, relationships, emotions, consequences, Kiešlowski pulls out all the stops, using his polished technique to film scenes taking place in physically distinct spaces by using crane shots, and thrilling pans and push-ins. The technique never shows, however, as the director always keeps the story – particularly the interior aspects of the characters’ lives and actions – at the forefront.

See "Picnic" on Labor Day [by DL]

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.

For recommendations on movies for Halloween (Aresenic and Old Lace) and Thanksgiving (Hannah and Her Sisters), click here here for my "Talking Pictures" feature that appeared in The American Scholar of August 28, 2021.

The Allure of the Enigmatic: Antonioni's "Blow-Up" [by David Lehman]

From The American Scholar (August 25, 2022). Here are the opening paragraphs of my latest "Talking Features" piece:

<<<<

When it was released in 1966, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up blew the minds of student cineastes and literary intellectuals at Columbia University—including me. Having just entered the college as a freshman, I sat at the feet of the elders at The Columbia Review and King’s Crown Essays and took a crash course in cinema as an art form.

In avant-garde circles in general, there was a cult around such European directors as Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Agnès Varda. Antonioni’s Italian-language movies—L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’Eclisse (1962)— offered an attractive blend of enigma, ennui, eros, existential fatigue, and Monica Vitti.

L’Avventura has a beginning and middle, but no true end. The character played by Lea Massari disappears; her disaffected lover (Gabriele Ferzetti) and best friend (Vitti) try to find her, and the film arrives at no resolution. It would be as if, having done away with his heroine 45 minutes into Psycho, Hitchcock failed to provide an explanation and a compensatory story to make up for her absence. The ambiguity in L’Avventura goes up a notch in Blow Up.

Antonioni based Blow-Up, his first English-language feature, on a story by the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar. He set the film in London, “mod” headquarters in the heyday of the Beatles, Carnaby Street, and psychedelic nightclubs. David Hemmings plays Thomas, a nervy fashion photographer with artistic instincts. Besides taking pictures of professional models who resemble heavily made-up mannequins, he spends his time fending off wannabe models, visiting an antiques dealer, and going to pubs and clubs.

There’s a very hot scene featuring Jane Birkin and Gillian Hills trying on clothes and playing sex games with the photographer. In an American movie, such scenes would have a bearing on the plot. Here they are all red herrings, though they do contribute to the movie’s powerful atmospheric effects.

When Thomas ducks out on a photo session, he takes his camera with him to a park. There, in an otherwise unpeopled patch of meadow, he clicks away at a man and a woman in a clandestine embrace. When Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), the woman in the scene, becomes aware of what he is doing, she hurries over to confront him. She demands the roll of film. She even follows him back to his studio, evidently prepared to go to any length to recover the photos. After shaking Jane off by giving her a false roll, Thomas develops the film, makes enlargements, and lo, there is a gun in the bushes.

Is there also a corpse? Has Thomas inadvertently photographed a murder? What should he do about it? Hemmings hems and haws, which the soundtrack anticipates: The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?” plays in the background earlier in the film.

There are elements of the classic murder mystery in Blow-Up. A dead body is there, and then it isn’t. The incriminating photos are there, and then, because the photographer’s studio with the incriminating enlargements has been ransacked, they’re gone. The effect is less a matter of suspense than of paranoia and perplexity. If the film has an allegorical dimension, it is that great shibboleth of the ’60s: “Nothing is real”—or, more exactly, nothing can stand the test of empirical existence unless it is recorded. To an extent, then, the movie is about movies, what we see versus what we think we see.

Besides the cunning ambiguity of the plot, I would single out two other elements that distinguish this major movie: Blow-Up offers a beguiling snapshot of the Zeitgeist, and it ends marvelously, with an unforgettable final sequence.

The spirit of London’s Swinging Sixties pervades the movie. It is as if everyone is high. In a club, the Yardbirds—a popular band, with Jeff Beck on guitar—perform their song “Stroll On.” When Beck smashes his guitar on stage and throws the neck of the instrument into the crowd, a frenzied fight for the souvenir ensues. Thomas gets into the thick of it and emerges triumphant. Leaving the club with his trophy, he soon throws it away. And when a passerby picks it up, looks it over, and discards it, the parable on what constitutes value is complete.

At a party for which jazz pianist Herbie Hancock provides the score, Thomas encounters the beautiful German model Verushka. “I thought you were supposed to be in Paris,” he says. “I am in Paris,” she replies, puffing on a joint. Before the evening is over, Thomas will take LSD with his agent, Ron.  At dawn he returns to the park, expecting to find the corpse he saw earlier, only it is no longer there.

Going home, Thomas comes across mimes at a tennis court, playing with invisible balls and rackets. They gesture to show that their ball is lost and ask Thomas to retrieve it. He does as instructed, miming the action, and then the camera pulls back, Thomas vanishes, and the inevitable murmur from the audience tells us that we have seen something extraordinary, the allure of the enigmatic.
>>>>

For more, click here. https://theamericanscholar.org/the-allure-of-the-enigmatic/

Alfred Hitchcock's Fate Was In His Stars [by David Lehman]

At 3:15 in the morning, in London, England, one hundred and twenty-something years ago today, the great film director Alfred Hitchcock was born, a solid Leo with a macabre imagination (moon in Scorpio). When August 13 falls on a Friday, as in 1993, 1999, and 2021,you may expect bats to fly in through the slightest opening in the bathroom window, and the phone will ring at 11 PM and it will be someone you have never met, who asks you for a job and sounds drunk. Hitchcock was short (5'5) and stout and perhaps unaware that he shared his birthday with both Annie Oakley and Fidel Castro.

There is a tremendous amount of fire in his natal chart (see below): more than 50%. This accounts for his energy, drive, ambition. The water in his chart, topping 18%, indicates a man of subtlety and sensitivity. He has three times as much yang as yin in his personality, and no one should be surprised to learn that a man whose dominant planets are the sun, Venus, and Mars may luxuriate in bathtubs in the English manner and have an almost phobic distrust of showers, which comes through in such movies as "Vertigo" (in which Kim Novak does not drown in the Pacific Ocean) and "Pyscho" (in which Janet Leigh meets her shocking fate behind a torn curtain). Leo, Sagittarius, and Scorpio are the predominant signs of a man whose self-confidence can lead him to commit the sin of pride. I hear that Janet Leigh greatly prefers baths to showers and has ever since working with Hitch.

A picture of the master of suspense emerges from a study of Hitchcock's chart. He is a Roman Catholic; a lover of blondes (especially American blondes); and a prankster of the imagination who knows that a straight face is best for effects either comic or scary and that the best way to get an actor and an actress to understand their parts as quarreling lovers is to handcuff them together and lock them in a room overnight, as in the filming of "The 39 Steps."

When he was a boy, Hitchcock's dad sent him to the local police constabulary with a note instructing the officer on duty to lock the boy in jail for a few hours. This experience had the desired effect on the lad, who worked out his guilt complex by dispatching heroes, heroines, and villains to their deaths from the top of a church tower or the Statue of Liberty; from a moving train, or in a wood stove, or by an attack of killer birds, or in an out-of-control merry-go-round at an amusement park, or by a nasty piece of goods who uses his necktie as a strangling device, or sometimes with a gun, a knife, or a pair of handy scissors. The leonine Hitchock had his sun and his Venus in Leo. This makes him a most logical man, a constant man, generous in his affections but domineering, and almost tyrannically loyal to his lovers and friends.

Given this man's stellar combination of assertive confidence and deep-seated guilt, it comes as no surprise to students of the great man's chart that (1) the great Hitchcock actors (male) tend to be old-fashioned types (James Stewart, Cary Grant) rather than the method-trained new breed; (2) in some (not all) of the best Hitchcock movies, the villain is either more interesting than the hero (Robert Walker versus Farley Granger in "Strangers on a Train"), suave and attractive(James Mason in "North by Northwest," Ray Milland in "Dial M for Murder") or exceptionally complicated in an attractive way (e.g., Joseph Cotten in "Shadow of a Doubt,"  the birds in "The Birds," the real imposter in "Spellbound")); and (3) the perfect Hitchcock heroines are Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Teresa Wright, and Tippi Hedren. Hitch shows us the craziness inside every man and his (almost invariably) blonde fantasy lady.

A tip of the fedora to Bernard Herrmann, a June Cancer, who wrote the music of Hitchcock's mind as well as soundtracks for such movies as "Citizen Kane" and Brian de Palma's  underrated "Obsession." -- DL

Note: Readers of "astrological profiles" know that the use of astrological terms is laid on pretty thick but with tongue in cheek, firmly so, on the nervy assumption that the horoscope -- like the "haruspicate or scry," "sortilege, or tea leaves," playing cards, pentagrams, handwriting analysis, palm-reading, and the "preconscious terrors" of the dreaming mind in T. S. Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" -- may be a bust at prediction bur may turn out to be not only "usual pastimes and drugs" but the means of poetic exploration.

from the archive; first published August 13, 2015

"The Prophecy of an Assassination": On "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) [by David Lehman]

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

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

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

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

Talk about serendipity: On October 22, 1962, only two days before the picture’s release, President Kennedy announced to the nation that he had ordered a naval blockade to repulse Russian ships, equipped with missiles, heading to the Caribbean. The Cuban Missile Crisis has been seen ever since as the tensest moment in the 45-year Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and here was a movie advancing the thesis that a Communist assassination plan was in the works.

The Manchurian Candidate is wickedly satirical. Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), a demagogue in the manner of Joe McCarthy, is revealed to be an imbecile under the thumb of his ambitious, intellectually superior wife, Eleanor Shaw Iselin (Angela Lansbury at her best). What happened to her first husband? The movie, mum on the point, offers an Oedipal triangle in which Mrs. Iselin controls her war hero son, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), and gets him to eliminate her rival, his bride (Leslie Parrish), the daughter of Senator Iselin’s fiercest, most principled opponent (John McGiver). Lansbury was less than three years older than Harvey. In the novel, she seduces him; in the film, just a kiss on the lips, but it’s enough.

What most distinguishes The Manchurian Candidate is its opening. If you miss the first five minutes of Hamlet, you can catch up (at the cost of some excellent verse), because the ghost does not appear to Hamlet until act I, scene 4 and doesn’t speak to him until scene 5. But, as the movie’s theatrical release poster accurately proclaimed, “If you come in five minutes after this picture begins, you won’t know what it’s all about.” The film begins in Korea, 1952. Betrayed by a guide, an American army unit is ambushed. After Saul Bass’s marvelous title credits, featuring the queen of diamonds on an oversize political campaign button, we go to an American airport, where Sergeant Shaw, survivor of the ambush, is honored with hoopla for the valor he is said to have displayed under fire.

In the following scene, the camera slowly approaches Shaw’s commanding officer, Major Bennett Marco (Sinatra), asleep beside an insomniac’s paradise of books, among them The Trial, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Ulysses. Marco, who nominated Shaw for his medal, slides into a recurring nightmare of what really happened in Korea.

The brainwashing sequence begins with the captive GIs in their army fatigues on a stage. The audience appears to the men, in their trance, to consist of dowagers in sunhats who have gathered to talk about hydrangeas at a suburban garden party in New Jersey. In fact, the ladies in the audience are Russian and Chinese bigwigs, and Frankenheimer switches us back and forth between alternating versions, the harmless old women and the malevolent Communists in suits or uniforms. Then we watch in horror as, under orders, Shaw kills two of his fellow POWs while the other soldiers look on, affectless.

Like Major Marco, Corporal Al Melvin (James Edwards) has recurrent nightmares culminating in a public murder committed by Shaw. And, like Major Marco, he is programmed to say, when asked, that “‘Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” Everyone says so, and it’s odd, because Raymond is a singularly cold, humorless fellow whom the men dislike..

The buried truth—that the recipient of a Congressional Medal of Honor, feted with fanfare, is a secret, trigger-ready weapon concocted by the enemy—created a mental shock to anyone who saw The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. (I was 14 years old, and amazed.) The plot: to engineer the nomination of the clownish Senator Iselin for the position of vice president, then to kill the man at the head of the ticket, paving the way for Iselin’s rise to that position. The paranoid paradox: the extreme right-wing John Iselin is really a clueless Communist placeholder. The brains of the operation: Eleanor Iselin, as icily ruthless as Lady MacBeth.

Marco, the veteran suffering from PTSD who tries to save Shaw from his predestined fate, looks like a man having a nervous breakdown, but he must have something going for him, because the glamorous and beautiful Rosie Cheyney (Janet Leigh) is willing to break her engagement to her fiancé on the basis of a shared cigarette with Marco on the train between Washington, D. C. and New York City. Although Leigh is extraneous to the plot, I have published a poem contending that the only justification needed for Janet Leigh’s presence in the movie is that she is Janet Leigh. More creatively, Roger Ebert argues that in the paranoid universe of The Manchurian Candidate, Leigh may secretly be Sinatra’s controller.

I will not give away other surprises and speculations except to say that the guises assumed by the queen of diamonds will endow that particular card with a rare significance if you are a part-time poker player. An amusing scene takes place in Jilly’s, Sinatra’s favorite New York hangout. When the bartender, telling a story, says, “Go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake,” Raymond—a solitaire addict who has just encountered the trigger card—does as told. Marco has to fish him out.

The Manchurian Candidate has altered political discourse, and the very word brainwashing has acquired a stink. The evil mesmerist-in-chief, Dr. Yen Lo (Khigh Dhiegh), crows that Raymond Shaw’s “brain has not only been washed, as they say; it’s been dry-cleaned.” In 1967, George Romney shot his presidential candidacy in the foot when he said he had supported the Vietnam War because US generals had “brainwashed” him. Recently, Donald Trump has been depicted as a “Manchurian candidate,” allegedly willing to favor the Russians in exchange for lucrative real-estate deals.

But The Manchurian Candidate offers more than a linguistic afterlife, thrilling paranoia, and the cunning of Eleanor Iselin. It succeeds as well as it does because of the strong sense of the uncanny that informs it, as if we were watching our own history rendered as a spooky hallucination, delivered with the plausibility of a newsreel.

Click here for the "Talking Pictures" column on The American Scholar, January 22, 2022.

"Our Love Affair": Which one? [by David Lehman]

Unsung heroes Arthur Freed (left; who produced The Wizard of Oz and rescued "Over the Rainbow" from extinction) and Roger Edens (who composed the "Dear Mr Gable" intro to "You Made Me Love You" for Judy Garland) teamed up to write the "Love Affair" that I prefer of the two great contenders in movie history. The rival, composed by Harry Warren, orchestrates the 1957 Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr tear-jeker,An Affair to Remember. That one has its appeal, god knows; I believe Nora Ephron regards the film and everything about it as the epitome of romance, and it's great for the string section.

But the one I vote for is the musical emblem of Strike Up the Band (1940) -- a movie directed by Busby Berkeley, in which, in one show-within-a-show scene, "demi-tasse" is the unlikely euphemism for hanky-panky. "Our Love Affair" carries the overture beyond the Gershwin title track, is sung thirteen minutes into the movie by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, and recurs throughout as background music for the young romantics. I love Freed's lyrics in general -- he also wrote the songs in "Singin' in the Rain." I will write more about him some other time -- about Roger Edens, too, who, according to reliable sources, shared a birthday (November 9) with Kay Thompson. From 1942 through 1957 they gave joint birthday parties during which each presented a surprise production number using special material featuring their friends— Garland, Lena Horne, Gene Kelly, Dorothy Dandridge, Maureen O'Hara, Ray Bolger, Ann Sothern, Danny Kaye, Charles Walters, Cole Porter, Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane — with secret rehearsals, and neither telling the other what to expect.  Anyway -- See Strike Up the Band once and you'll know "Our Love Affair" forever.

The tenderness here coexists with brass. The song can be done in swing time or full of the most wistful longing. If you get a chance listen to the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra with the Sentimental Gentleman himself on the 'bone and boy singer Sinatra (24 or 25).  crooning the words.

https://youtu.be/sy_A62FKpbE?t=1

  -- DL

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.
from the archive; first posted February 12, 2021.

"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.
from the archive; first posted February 12, 2021.

"Famous Last Lines" [by David Lehman]

from The American Scholar, today's "Talking Pictures" post features a quiz -- with clues and answers -- having to do with memorable conclusions of movies. For extra credit, who in the picture on the left, is the blonde situated between Anne Baxter and Bette Davis?:

<<<
Nearly all classic movies end on a note of exceptional pathos, irony, or humor.  Take “there’s no place like home,” “tomorrow is another day,” and “nobody’s perfect,” which perfectly match the movies they conclude: The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, and Some Like It Hot. The first of these concluding lines states the moral of Dorothy’s story, the second sums up the indomitable character of Scarlett O’Hara, and the third is the perfect punchline for a joke that’s gone as far as it could go.

Below is a list of 10 other terrific last lines. Test your knowledge using only the hints provided below—then read on for the answers and explanations.

1. “Hello, America, hang on to your lights; they’re the only lights in the world.”

Hint: Windmills.

2. Miss Harrington knows all about it.”

Hint: The drama critic can help make it happen.

3. Always the same. People come. People go. Nothing ever happens.”

Hint: Revolving door. >>>

For the other seven, please click here.