Dr. Metablog

Canyon Passage (1946)

In our tour of classic western movies, we watched Canyon Passage (1946), directed by Jacques Tourneur, who is famous for the noir masterpiece Out of the Past (1947). Canyon Passage is a good substantial film and it's got everything a frontier drama should have: a cabin raising, a saloon in which a poker game is perpetually in progress, gold mines, muddy streets, Indians (unsympathetically depicted as mere murderous savages), gun fights, bar brawls, lovely landscapes, and Andy Devine. 

At its emotional heart is a mighty curious three-way relationship between Dana Andrews as Logan Stuart, an upstanding entrepreneur; Brian Donlevy as George Camrose, a banker/gambler, and Susan Hayward as Susan Hayward. Hayward is engaged to George but attracted to Logan. She doesn't seem to know what is made obvious to us, that George is a compulsive gambler, a wastrel, an embezzler, a serious flirt, and eventually a murderer. Why Hayward, or Lucy as she's sometimes called, doesn't see him for what he is puzzles us. It's an even greater mystery that Logan Stuart, who knows George's faults, remains loyal -- even, at one point, risking his life and imperiling his reputation to break his friend out of prison. 

The oddest scene is one in which George gives his fiancee Lucy a tepid kiss. He turns to Logan and says, "Can you do better?" Logan takes the challenge and kisses his friend's fiancee; he wins -- she clearly responds less to her intended than to his friend. What are we to make of this?  It seems borderline pervy. Is there a suggestion that the men are closer, more "friendly"  than the conventions of the western film ordinarily allow?  Or are Logan and George more than just good ol'  loyal buddies?

After George is killed, Logan and Lucy wind up together, but more for convenience than passion, or so it seems to suspicious ol' me.  

Notting Hill (1990), Two on a Tower (1882)

We watched Notting Hill, a cute 1999 "rom-com" or "date movie" with cute couple Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. (It's hard to believe that the film is almost twenty years old. It's so slight and fluffy that I can't remember whether or not I saw it last millennium, but frankly, it wouldn't make much difference one way or the other.)  In Notting HIll, Julia Roberts plays a pricey celebrity actress ($15,000,000 a film) who happens to wander into Hugh Grant's tiny bookstore and -- a few cute scenes later -- into his tiny Notting Hill bedroom. It's a slight, unconvincing fairy-tale of a film and I'm giving away no secrets when I say that the cute apparently- mismatched couple not only overcome all psychological obstacles and class anxieties in order to marry but that also, in the cute coda scene, when she's lying in his lap on a bench in the park, she's well along in her pregnancy. Ah love! Ah romance! Ah idealized domesticity! Ah cuteness!

Cynic that I am, I'm curious whether she's crammed herself into his narrow digs (and displaced his second-banana roommate) or whether she's purchased the biggest finest mansion in the upscale Notting Hill neighborhood and moved the new husband into it. And closed down the bookstore. The film is wise to sidestep concerns of such dreary ordinariness. 

Notting Hill is a rip-off and inversion of Pretty Woman (1990), in which Julia Roberts was poor and Hugh Grant was Richard Gere, a mega-billionaire. Notting Hill might just as easily have been called Pretty Man -- it's that close a parallel. Only without the shopping.  

And Notting Hill, though upscale, is no Rodeo Drive. It's a neighborhood that has gone through a number of transformations. Once famous for its piggeries, by the middle of the 19th century, it was on the way up. In 1862, when Thomas Hardy left Dorchester and his Wessex homeland to apprentice himself as an architect, he took up residence in Notting HIll's recently constructed Westbourne Park Villas. And there in Notting Hill he wrote his first novel, never published and now lost, called with the remarkably appropriate Hugh-and-Julia title of The Poor Man and the Lady. 

Lower class boy and upper class girl was a perennial theme in Hardy's novels. An obsession, in fact. By coincidence, I'd just finished reading -- on the same day as I watched Notting Hill -- one of Hardy's most thorough explorations of the poor-rich theme -- his novel Two on a Tower (1882).

No idyllic pregnancy in the park in the Hardy universe.

In Two on a Tower, Lady Constantine falls in love with Swithin St. Cleeve, an impoverished amateur astronomer, but Hardy strews their path with one obstacle after another. For the Lady, a wastrel husband who is missing in deep dark Africa, and who may or not be dead; an inadvertent pregnancy; a duped second husband, this time a clergyman; for St. Cleeve, a badly-needed inheritance that can only be claimed if he remains single, and an extended exile. For both of them, misunderstandings, accidental damaging eavesdroppings, important letters gone astray, etc. And finally, when it appears possible that the poor boy and lady might find solace together, a sudden inexplicable spontaneous death.

Good thing that Thomas Hardy didn't write Notting Hill. Trust me, there would have been no happy ending. Perhaps Hugh would been disfigured in the fire that destroyed his bookstore and his livelihood, and Julia, repulsed, would have returned to her abusive alcoholic boyfriend. But very likely something even more arbitrary and cruel.

  

Cousins

Hey there, internet pilgrims, searchers, wanderers who might be googling their own name or a relative's.  All of the following people are cousins of each other, cousins of mine. If  you find yourself here, identify yourself on the comments page, and I'll tell you how I think you are related. Hint: you're all descended from Lebe Hessel (d.1910) and Tsina Voloshen (b.1854).

Talia Soglin, Oliver Soglin, Ella Pearlman-Chang, Lola Pearlman-Chang, Luke Pearlman, Caleb Pearlman, Asher Pearlman, Hannah Kaplan, Josiah Kaplan, Leslie Pearlman, Matthew Pearlman, Nancy Groce, Nora Groce, Susan Groce, Paul Pearlman, Ruth Pearlman, Owen Pearlman, Clara Pearlman, Karen Hessel, Dana Hessel, Alexander McCarthy-Hessel, Jane McCarthy Hessel, Deborah Hessel, Haley Roher, Jenny Roher,  Michael Hessel, Victoria Hessel, Mark Hessel, Andrea Hessel, Laurie Pearlstein, Jason Schoolsky, Rebecca Schoolsky, Allyson Schoolsky, Barry Pearlstein, Mitchell Pearlstein, Hunter Pearlstein, Remi Pearlstein, Holly Cooper, Alec Cooper, Elizabeth Cohen, Mateo Davis, Connor Davis, Christopher Cohen, Jonathan Cohen, David Cohen, David Markson, Aubrey Peluso, Samuel Markson, Zachary Markson, Nicholas Markson, Madeleine Markson, Wendy Markson, Charlotte Riley, Joelle Riley, Zoe Riley, Samuel Riley, Steven Gross, Ellen Gross, Edward Cohen, Terry Cohen, Joseph Cohen, Charles Cohen, Mahala Cohen, Judith Cimochowski, Alexander Cimochowski, Erica Cimochowski, Alexander Cimochowski, Lawrence Baizer, Judith Baizer, Sarah Baizer, Tessa Baizer, Barbara Pearlman, Rachel Wells, Andrew Wells, Steven Pearlman, Samuel Pearlman, Maya Terry, Nathaniel Pearlman, Benjamin Hessel Pearlman, Eve Pearlman, Nicholas Cohen, Mollie Liliana Sand, Adaline Sand, Jay Sand, Marc Sand, Daniel Cohen, Jonathan Cohen, Solomon Cohen, Emmanuelle Cohen, Abigail Cohen, Ella Cohen, Phoebe Cohen, Hannah Cohen, Ayanna Gould, Aiden Gould, Cole Pearlman, Reese Pearlman.

There will be many errors and many omissions here.  Tell me. 

Amnesia on Film: High Wall (1947)

In High Wall (1947), an extremely noir-y noir, Stephen Kenet, played by an unusually glamorless Robert Taylor, suffers from a fully credible traumatic amnesia. Did he, or did he not kill his wife. He can't remember.

So far so good. Happens all the time in such films.

But he's cured of his affliction in a most unlikely, most unscientific  manner. He's injected with "truth serum" --  sodium pentathol -- and what was once lost is found. Such easy recovery of memory could ruin dozens of amnesia movies.  Good thing the treatment never caught on. 

The gimmick spoils an otherwise grainy, hard-edged film. 

Here's Kenet (Taylor), and Ann Lorrison, played by Audrey Totter. They're good as patient and doctor, but unpersuasive when they emerge as lovers in the last scene.

 

 

The scenes in the asylum are painful especially when they're supposed to be amusing. To me, it's more like a concentration camp than a therapeutic institution. It's scary that it might reflect reality.

 

East 9 Street Between Ditmas and 18th, 1939 -1955

Beginning at the northwest corner and preceding south -- in the first brick house, a family of notably obese immigrant Syrian women who spoke no English; there were no children that I know of and no interactions with other neighbors. The house itself was not unusual but it was fronted by a wrought iron fence and a row of ancient stubbed catalpas which we called "umbrella trees." Next was the house belonging to Dr. Jerry Yurkovsky, our M.D. In retrospect, he was a kind man but a badly-trained, out-of-touch physician. He was also an immigrant -- from Poland, I believe. My father, who rarely spoke badly of anyone, thought that he was a decent sort but that Mrs. Yurkovsky was "a real pill." I remember only her iridescent dyed red hair. Then came the Lampsons, Hubert and Dorothy. He was never seen in daylight but was rumored to own a "yacht"; she was the neighborhood grouch, known to slice in half any errant pink "spaldeens" that that might be punched (kids played "punchball" in the street) over her tall privet hedge and into her front yard. While I never questioned this neighborhood orthodoxy, I never saw a sliced spaldeen either. Then came the large Victorian house belonging until about 1950 to the Heidtmanns and then to another family whose name I can't remember but who had an impaired daughter who screamed and screamed at maximum volume at all hours day and night. Next came our immediate neighbors on the south, Mr. and Mrs. Pynn, who lived in a small old wood-shingled structure.The Pynns (did they have given names?) were extremely old, in their 90s I would guess. He was a retired Cornish seaman, believe it or not; she cultivated colorful gladioli in her small backyard garden. Their upstairs tenants were the Rhodins, Thor and Pearl. He was a tall gaunt ancient austere Norwegian whose only known activity was writing letters to local newspapers; she was almost as tall but Jewish and "went to business." They had three children but they were out of the house and too old for me to know them: Thor, jr, Yammie (Hjalmar), and Margeret. Thor was a physicist at Cornell rumored to have worked on the "bomb." I have written about the Rhodins elsewhere. Then came our house, a three-story 1912 Victorian of which our family of five occupied the top two floors. The first floor tenants were the Burnets (formerly Bernsteins), Albert and Bessie. He was musician who had retreated to accountancy. There were two sons, the older, Leonard, was troubled, and I now realize, probably gay; he played the sax; the younger son, Henry, had a cleft palate, later corrected by surgery, I believe, and banged on his drums incessantly. To our north were the Carps, who owned a brickyard or building supply business somewhere not in the neighborhood. They were a gloomy Dickensian family. Both of the daughters were nuns who came visiting once a year in their long black robes; the son, hang-dog Eddie, had the demeanor of a jaded funeral attendant. The Carps first act on moving into the house was to erect a tall forbidding chain link fence around the perimeter of their property which annoyed my father no end. Proceeding south, the next house was occupied by the Spollens, an immigrant Irish family who seemed to produce a new child every year. My memory is hazy about the south end of the street, under grand old elms until they fell victim to the Dutch blight, except that in one of the houses dwelt two tired bony sisters, perhaps twins, who every Sunday, trudged down 9th Street and past 18th Avenue to one of our neighborhood's numerous under-attended Protestant churches. They had a splendid garden of hollyhocks. Also at that end of the street lived, Mr. Mennino, who shared his personal variety of cucumbers with my father. At the very end of the block lived the dog-faced man..  

On the other side of the street was an Italian family named Cocito, pronounced American'ly, ko-see-to. When Junior Cocito (perhaps he had a name, but everyone called him Junior) grew up and married, he bought the house next door to his father's. Then next, coming closer to us, were the Cunninghams. Mr. Cunningham was a large imposing firefighter; there was at least one daughter and two sons, Jimmy and Billy. Billy was our only celebrity; he became rich and famous as the "Kangaroo Kid"; he also played first base on my younger brother's baseball team. After the Cunninghams was another house of semi-mystery, occupied by an unfriendly family whose last name was Harris. I believe my mother told me that Mr. Harris was a school principal. There was a shapely daughter a year or so older than I whom I admired from a distance. She (Betty) married at 16 or 17 ("shotgun," I was told), and disappeared -- as did the family. Then came the Burkes, directly across the street from us. There were two sons, Charley, a genuine dolt and high school dropout who became an armed guard for Wells Fargo, and lanky John, who was studying for the priesthood. There was also an uncle or cousin who lived with them and who spent every weekend waxing and noisily buffing his big new DeSoto. Then came the house occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Petranto along with their ancient father who spent all day every day watching the traffic from the oversize glider on the porch. There was an older daughter, Madeleine, whom I didn't know, and a son, Frankie, a bachelor, a contemporary of my older brother Eugene, who later found work in the U.S. post office and who, when I investigated a few years ago, still -- eighty years later -- lived in his childhood home. Upstairs from the Petrantos dwelt the Meinekes, Charlie and Tessie. He was a butcher; she was "at home." There was a rather sad ungainly but harmless daughter just my age, Charlotte, who dropped out of school early. I hope she a good life but I wonder. Next northward was another mystery house, probably a rental; for a year it was occupied by the Tebbets family. There was an attractive mid-twenties daughter whom my older brother and his peers admired no end, and a son, Lee, whom twenty years later I encountered in Vermont where he gave me an envelope of blue corn seeds (which I never planted). And then came the Constantino household. The father was a shoemaker, I believe. There were three children, Frankie, a terrific athlete; Regina, a beauty, and Carly, who dyed his hair henna and moved to Greenwich Village. There were two or three more houses at that end of the street, but I'm vague about them. Sorry, don't remember; too far away. The name Ortner comes to mind. Mystery houses.

Even though I lived on the street for my entire childhood and until I left for college, I never entered a single house, nor did any of the neighbors ever enter ours. It wasn't that kind of neighborhood. Or perhaps we weren't that sort of people.

Garum vs. Ketchup

The universal condiment in the ancient world, a staple of Roman, Greek and Byzantine cuisines, was garum. Garum was manufactured in enormous quantities and shipped in special amphorae all over the civilized, colonized universe. What is garum? It's a fishy sauce that any sensible modern apple-pie-loving American would avoid at all costs. Trust me, you would not want to slaver your bacon cheeseburger with garum.  

To make garum, the innards -- the guts -- of fish (whitebait, anchovies, mackerel, tuna, etc.) were stacked between layers of salt and herbs and left in the sun for several months. Honest to Pete!! The result, which must have been malodorous and horrid, was then strained and bottled, or rather, poured into amphorae for transport.

Don't believe me? Here's a direct quotation from a 10th century Byzantine manual: "the intestines of fish are thrown into a vessel and are salted; and small fish especially atherinae, or maenae or lycostomi are seasoned in the sun, and frequently turned; and when they have been seasoned in the heat, the garum is thus taken from them. A small basket of close texture is laid in the vessel filled with the small fish already mentioned, and the garum will flow into the basket." Sounds dreadful, you must admit. And I don't even know, and I don't know that anyone knows, exactly what sort of monsters of the deep are designated by the words atherinae and lycostomi.

Here's a picture of a ruined garum factory in Baelo Claudia in Spain. The remains of such factories can be found all over the Mediterranean world. I myself have toured one near Pompeii. Garum factories were set as far as possible from centers of population because they, er, stunk. 

 

Garum was the ancients' ketchup. What could they have been thinking?

 

Strange to say, there's a etymological link between ancient fish sauce and modern ketchup. In the 1600s, there existed a Chinese concoction that was called, depending on the dialect, akôe-chiap or kê-chiap, guī zhī, or gwai zap; all these apparently translated as "the brine of pickled fish." By the early 18th century, the sauce had arrived in the present day region of Malaysia and Singapore, where it came to the attention of hungry, hardened  English colonists.The Malay word for the sauce was kicap (pronounced "kay-chap"). English settlers took kay-chap with them to the American colonies.

 

But kay-chap was a long way from our familiar ketchup. The commonest kay-chap of the 18th century was not tomato but mushroom based. Tomato ketchup was a mid-19th century invention -- the first recipe for "Tomata Catsup" appearing in 1812. Ketchup was popular long before fresh tomatoes because tomatoes were thought to be dangerous and possibly poisonous. A man named Jonas Yerkes is thought to be the first American to sell tomato ketchup in a bottle. But his initiative was overtaken and displaced by the 1876 ketchup launched by Henry Heinz. Heinz still controls 60% of the ketchup market. 

 

Most of the world's Heinz tomato ketchup is made in the main U.S. plant at Fremont, Ohio (home town of President Rutherford B. Hayes). 

 

I imagine that the air in Fremont, Ohio is ketchupy, which is a heck of a lot better than if it were garumy.

 

Ketchup was not used in my family of origin. It was a revelation when, a Brooklyn youth, I first discovered ketchup, along with french fries, in a local delicatessen. It's been a staple of my diet ever since. Garum, not so much. Nor salsa, an emerging contemporary competitor.

 

I'm happy that I live in a post-garum world.

Nomenclature

If a widow and a widower form a relationship when they're both in their seventies, what is the proper and appropriate name for their relationship?

Legally, they're married, because here in the state of Colorado, if you live together and represent yourself as married, you're married, even if you haven't sought governmental sanction. Yet "husband" and "wife" don't come easily to the lips. They seem too doggone official. And they also seem like words out of an earlier era, especially "wife," which carries irrelevant overtones of a dominant-submissive relationship. "Just a housewife."

But "companion" is only slightly better. To my ear, it smacks of "faithful companion Tonto." "Partner" is even worse; are we associates in a law firm? 

"Girlfriend" and "boyfriend" are clearly ludicrous and inappropriate to persons of mature years. Such words lack seriousness and heft; they trivialize a weighty relationship. So, similarly, does the naked "friend," which in this context is colorless, neutral. "Ladyfriend" is a bit more serious. "Gentleman caller" was last said without irony in Peoria sometime in the middle of the nineteenth century. "Mistress" suggests that the friendship is merely sexual; its counterpart, "gigolo," is even more specific, and seedy to boot. "Lover" is also one-dimensional. 

"Old lady" and "old man" are outmoded hippieisms. So is "significant other." Other archaisms: "main squeeze," "stud," "pal," "steady lay," "fancy man."  "Love-slave." 

"Spouse"? No, too dry, too legalistic. "Consort"?  Disrespectful. "Odalisque"? "Handmaiden." Sexist. "Concubine?" 

It's fascinating that we've had more trouble with nomenclature than with living, eating, working, and sleeping together.

A Truly Awful Western

The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) -- another film so awful that it's utterly, undeniably fascinating. It's packaged as a western, but underneath the arid mountainous scenery and the garish Technicolor, it's a film noir.  What's it about?  Well, a gang of crooks have been muscling in on the Elder ranch. Not an unusual circumstance, but in this case the heart of the matter, it seems, is that the four sons of frequently praised Katie Elder, proprietor of the ranch, have neglected their mother. They should have visited more often, or written, or at least called. The brothers are, in birth order, swaggering John Wayne, a gunman; sniggering Dean Martin, a gambler; colorless bland Earl Holliman, a failed businessman, and sophomoric Michael Anderson, whom the older brothers want to send to college, but whom they should rather send to high school to fulfill the prerequisites for Acting 101. It's all a mighty predictable -- a string of cliches -- and, just as expected, after the climactic gunfight the Elders get their land back from cheating Morgan Hastings and his gang of no-goodniks. The dialogue throughout is embarrassingly wooden; no, not wooden, harder than that, ceramic; no, not ceramic, titanium. 

I blame it all on Henry Hathaway, the director, who had some good westerns and also a series of films noirs (The House on 92nd Street, The Dark Corner, Kiss of Death, Call Northside 777) to his credit. How could he have perpetrated this film? And someone, I don't know who, has to take responsibility for the ugliest, unfunniest, uncomic bit of grotesque "comic relief" ever perpetrated, in which Dean Martin auctions off his make-believe glass eye to a passel of local yokels. But I also think that some of the blame attaches to the producer, Hal Wallis. This is a film utterly without a female presence except for Martha Hyer,  who wanders into a couple of scenes without point or purpose. I couldn't figure out what the heck she was doing in the film until I read that she was married at the time to Wallis and that her career was on the fritz. I'm positive that Wallis told the screen writer, "Put in something  for Martha."  Well, he did, but it just made the whole mess a little messier, and if possible, a little less coherent.   

The Sons of Katie Elder stoked my indignation. What a waste of resources! 

But hey, there's a good three minute scene of a hundred or more horses being herded by the brothers, and there's George Kennedy as a gunslinger and Dennis Hopper as a neurotic youngster who gets killed  by his own father. It's something, but, sorry, not enough to dilute the indignation.

 

Addendum November 16.  I've just watched another western, Big Jake (1971), in which John Wayne parodies an earlier John Wayne. Just as awful as Katie Elder. Maybe less intelligible. You can infer a lot from the poster.