Dr. Metablog

Polanski and The Ghost Writer

The Ghost Writer, which I saw last night, is a very good "thriller." It's co-written and directed by Roman Polanski and therefore inevitably dwells upon the menace that lurks beneath quotidian events. Once again, Polanski offers us a naif  who gradually comes to realize that the world is under the control of dark, implacable, omnipresent forces of evil. In The Ghost Writer, it's the CIA -- a most convenient bugbear.  Just as soon as the unnamed ghost writer cracks the mystery, he's run down and killed in the street by a mysteriously summoned agency vehicle. Ewan McGregor is convincing as the naive ghost, Jim Broadbent is wonderfully malevolent as the string-puller behind the scenes, and Olivia Williams steals the show as the intelligent angry betrayed wife the English PM. But it's pure Polanski from start to finish.

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the reign of the usurping tyrant is preceded and succeeded by the benign and holy kings Duncan and Malcolm. In Polanski's 1977 Macbeth (in my opinion one of the few great Shakespeare movies), there's an appended anti-Shakespearean coda: Donalbain (Malcolm's younger brother) goes off to engage the witches. Polanski suggests that evil is not anomalous to the reign of Macbeth but eternal and, so to speak, normal. The witches who control men's fates are the medieval Scotland analogues of the CIA.  

In Polanski's best film, Chinatown, J. J. Gittes is the naif who gradually comes to discover that villainous Noah Cross controls all of Los Angeles. Semi-demonic Noah takes bullet but like the witches and the CIA, he can't be killed. In the original Robert Towne screenplay, Evelyn Mulwray had escaped with her daughter/sister, but Polanski altered the ending to emphasize Noah Cross's unassailable power. 

And then there's Rosemary's Baby (witches) and The Pianist (Nazis).

Polanski's point of view cannot be a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the story of his life. 

Amnesia on Film: Blind Horizon

For the record, Blind Horizon (2003) may be the most confusing, confused, and derivative film ever perpetrated. It's a failed memory-assassinate the president movie, a genre of which The Manchurian Candidate stands as head and font.

Blind Horizon offers one picturesque moment -- when a giant tanker truck decorated with a Confederate flag and carrying a load of gasoline spills across the highway and blows up. The truck could have driven through the monstrous holes in the plot with room to spare. In fact, it would have been more appropriate if the truck had been carrying a load of red herrings.

Once again, amnesia is whatever Hollywood says it is. In this case, the amnesiac remembers that there's going to be an attempt on the president's life, but he doesn't remember his own name, his occupation, or his fiancee -- an unlikely scenario. He has flashes of memory that are copied, almost exactly, from the Bourne series, which we must now anoint as the movie amnesia template of the future.     

Val Kilmer is wasted as the - wait, is he the would-be asssassin or is he the Federal agent trying to prevent the assassination? I never did quite figure it out. Neve Campbell is dark and mysterious and Amy Smart is blonde and perky -- that's the way women are packaged in this expensive turkey. If the writers (F. Paul Benz, Steve Tomlin) were allowed to choose between remembering this film, or amnesia, they should definitely go for the latter. 

Hypothesis: the amnesia mcguffin liberates the screenwriter from any allegiance to probability.

Fermat's Room; Goldbach's Conjecture.

I reached my peak with numbers when I was a child at P. S. 217 (under the tutelage of Mrs. McNulty).  Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division -- that's my area of expertise. Geometry, algebra, trig -- way too abstract for my pedestrian brain. Calculus and up -- not the least chance.

Arithmetic yes, mathematics no.

Sometimes I try to read popularizations of mathematical theory, but I rarely make it beyond the first few sentences. Once symbols start to appear, I'm done. Especially Greek letters (in parentheses). 

The consolation prize is that I'm better than most people at mental arithmetic. I can do sums and approximations and other stuff in my head.

Last night, we watched Fermat's Room. It's the kind of movie that is often called an "ingenious thriller."  It's also a member of a very small group of films that concern mathematics or mathematicians:  Good Will Hunting, Stand and Deliver, Antonia's Line, Straw Dogs. 

Fermat's Room focuses on a possible proof of Christian Goldbach's Conjecture. I suppose that I should have known about Herr Goldbach and his guess, but I confess to ignorance. Goldbach's conjecture dates to 1742 and is apparently one of the oldest unsolved problems in number theory. In brief, Goldbach theorized that every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers. For example, 10 is equal to 3 plus 7, 20 to 17 plus 3 (or 13 plus 7), and 100 resolves into 47 plus 53. Although no one has found a number that doesn't work, the conjecture can't be proved -- or, at least, hasn't been proved because there are some very large numbers out there. In Fermat's Room, two of the characters claim to have proved the conjecture. And they are consequently at odds.

I had always thought of prime numbers as a kind of novelty or curiosity. But if primes are a component of all even numbers -- well, that's something.  Goldbach's idea raises the stature of primes in my perennially naive eyes -- in exactly the same way that the Fibonacci series became more important to me when I learned that the chambered nautilis is structured Fibonacci-wise.  

While watching the movie (which is a good one), I ran through the even numbers from 10 to 70.  Everything was in order. But why?

Later in the evening, I read that every even number can also be resolved into the sum of a semi-prime (which is the product of two primes) and a prime. So 100 equals 77 (7 time 11) and 23. I spent a restless  night summing, in my bed, semi-primes and primes from 10 to 100. All in order, once again.

Why should it be so?

Whether it should be, or not, it is.  I remember that I used to answer my children and my students with the response, "That's not a why question?" Goldbach's Conjecture is a fact, not a why.

It's like gravity. I understand that the apple falls to the ground and that the moon doesn't head out into space and that it's harder to walk uphill than downhill. But I still don't understand why. It works, and that's enough. For me.

Amnesia on Film: Mister Buddwing

This 1966 black-and-white oddity boasts a distinguished director (Delbert Mann, celebrated for Marty) and a group of excellent actresses (Jean Simmons, Katherine Ross, Angela Lansbury and Suzanne Pleshette). It's ambitious and sometimes imaginative. But frankly, even more than your run-of-the-mill amnesia movie, it's a mess.     

The amnesiac in this case is a young and puzzled James Garner, who comes to consciousness in Central Park (there are good historical shots of 1960s NYC throughout) and takes the nom d'oubli Sam Buddwing. We're not told how he found his way to a park bench but movie amnesia is so commonplace and so flexible that the audience has no difficulty going along for the ride. The rest of the film tracks Buddwing through various encounters until he recovers his memory with no more fuss than he lost it. 

Amnesia is merely a plot device and not the film's true focus. The theme seems to be "identity," which, if I remember, was a subject much in vogue in the 1960s. Buddwing says, more than once, "I don't know who I am." But so did all of us say the same thing, in those ancient days, even without the provocation of amnesia. Buddwing's specific problem, as it gradually reveals itself, is that he has made a series of "inauthentic" (as we used to say) choices. He should have composed the octet rather than have gone for the commercial money. He shouldn't have encouraged his wife to abort the baby. And he certainly should have prevented both himself and Grace (note signficant moniker!!) from drifting into infidelity and alcohol.

More "don'ts." The writer and director shouldn't have tried to imitate Ingmar Bergman (the excrescent scene with the beggar who thinks he's God is embarrassingly derivative). And they shouldn't have indulged all the Bergman-derived religiosity. When a prayer "O God, let her live" is followed immediately by a resurrection, it's not a film -- it's propaganda. Come to think of it, the creative team should also have put some distance between themselves and the Kafkaeque surreal. Moreover, they should not have allowed the film to slide into an easy, superficial allegorizing. Buddwing may say "I'm not everyman" -- but the film desperately hopes that he will be taken as such.  

Amnesia, it would appear, has the power to soften the brain of both writer and director. 

Act of Violence (1948)

Act of Violence (1948) says as much about the immediate post-war years (and my own first decade of life) as any film I know. In it, an ex-army-officer who survived a German POW camp has acquired a pretty wife and a sunny suburban California home, but he is guilt-ridden because while in the camp he betrayed his fellow prisoners. He's pursued by a revenge-obsessed former comrade. The film is not, for once, a melodrama.  Good and evil, innocence and experience intermingle in the main characters, and, most rewardingly, in the smaller parts. Mary Astor (otherwise Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon) turns in a brilliant performance as a tired, opportunistic but ultimately decent prostitute. In fact, women in this film (in addition to Mary Astor, Janet Leigh and Phyllis Thaxter) are for once as complex and cliche-free as the male leads (Van Heflin and the always pitch-perfect Robert Ryan).

The story-telling is flawless and economical, the mood is sombre and intense. The unsettling themes are the burden of the past, the menace of the future, trepidation at the unknown, and the expiation of guilt.  

Robert L. Richards, who wrote the spare screenplay, was fingered as a leftist and blacklisted. He lost his promising career, became a carpenter, and died, embittered, in exile. is it necessary to note that Act of Violence is a not the least bit subversive?  It's a genuinely patriotic film. Fred Zinnemann, the director, escaped from the Nazis but left both his parents behind. They were murdered in the camps. Zinnemann was therefore superbly positioned to bring to the screen an exploration of the "guilt of the survivor." 

The Next Three Days (2011)

We watched The Next Three Days because we admired Paul Haggis's two previous films -- Crash and In the Valley of Elah. This one is not quite as innovative, but it's worth watching and is definitely the second-best English teacher movie ever made in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Wonder Boys, based on the Michael Chabon novel, is more engaging and original).  The story, in brief, is that a woman is erroneously convicted of murder, her appeals fail, she's in for life, but her husband breaks her out of jail.

The plot is hard to swallow, and is told with so much intercutting of pursuers and pursued, red-herring clues, and car chases that it sometime seems like a Bourne adventure. But it's also an endearing family values film -- husband and wife and kid all cocooned up in the last scene.  Elizabeth Banks is beautiful and expressionless and Russell Crowe is merely expressionless, but they're sweetly devoted to one another. I fell for it, perhaps because I just don't see all that many togetherness thrillers.

In Hollywoodland, 90% of English teachers are rigid, authoritarian jerks who don't appreciate the brilliance of their eccentric students (who will grow up to become successful script-writers), and exactly 9% are charismatic and inspiring but a bit dangerous (Jean Brodie for example). Rare indeed is the English teacher who outwits the cops, kills a couple of the bad guys who get in his way, and makes it safely to Venezuela. Cop # 1 (with admiration): "This guy's a teacher?"  Cop # 2:  "Yeah, at a community college."

In the mandatory theme-enhancing classroom scene, our hero lectures on Don Quixote.  As in quixotic. Get it? 

Amnesia in Film: Shattered (1991)

The "neo-noir" film Shattered (1991) was directed by Wolfgang Petersen, who elicited a mumble-mouth performance by Tom Berenger and an incoherent one from Greta Scacchi. It's another in the endless parade of amnesia movies. In this variant, the central character, Dan Merrick, goes over the cliff in his Mercedes and emerges not only disfigured but, it seems, without the least knowledge of his own person or past. The film clearly demonstrates that movie amnesia can be just as flexible as a tricky plot demands. Amnesia in Shattered has nothing to do with the real human brain and its gesture to the facts of existence  is mighty perfunctory.     

DOCTOR (authoritative, bearded): "We call it psychogenic amnesia. Patient doesn't know his name, his family, his personal history. Everything else he remembers. The year, who's president. He can drive a car, he can function professionally, but anything personal is out of reach."

And now the gimmick (major spoiler coming up, so if you plan to see the movie [which I cannot recommend], please avert your innocent eyes). Not only does Dan Merrick not remember anything of his pre-accident past, he's not even Dan Merrick!  He's Judth Merrick's lover, Jack Stanton, transformed by plastic surgery into a simulacrum of Dan. And he doesn't have the least clue that he's someone else. 

There's a exceedingly complicated plot which involves voluntary and involuntary impersonations, a private investigator out of Cliche Central, two murders and three car crashes. The incredible upshot is that the villain (the temptress-wife) is killed and that Jack permanently assumes the role of Dan.    

Jack's amnesia is cured in the last scene, but not before it has been mysteriously promulgated among  his friends, acquaintances, and business associates, all of whom are utterly deceived by the plastic surgery and seem not to notice that there have also been changes to his voice, his walk, his manner, and his personality. These poor folks suffer from a devastating manifestation of Hollywoodish forgetfulness. It could be called "contact amnesia." An absurd idea, but not more absurd than the plot of Shattered. 

Erasmus Hall in All about Eve

 
"Phoebe," she calls herself, but in the script she's just "girl." It's the last scene of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's (Stuyvesant '24) All about Eve. "Phoebe" has sneaked into Eve Harrington's hotel room and has pretended to fall asleep. Eve accosts her and is about to call the police when the intruderess proclaims herself a fan of the actress. Here's the conversation as it appears in the screenplay:   

"GIRL You know the Eve Harrington clubs - that they've got in most of the girls' high schools?

EVE I've heard of them.

GIRL Ours was one of the first. Erasmus Hall. I'm the president.

EVE Erasmus Hall. That's in Brooklyn, isn't it?

GIRL Lots of actresses come from Brooklyn. Barbara Stanwyck, Susan Hayward - of course, they're just
movie stars."

Phoebe might also ave mentioned that both Barbara Stanwyck (Ruby Stevens) and Susan Hayward (Edythe Marrener) were not only from Brooklyn, but also from Erasmus Hall High School. Why doesn't she say so? Or is being from anywhere in Brooklyn disability enough? 

Phoebe might have added to her list and mentioned that Mae West was also an alumna of the same high school.  Cheers to Erasmus Hall, mother of actresses -- even though Erasmus's Barbra Streisand '59 was still in braces and still in P. S. something or other. 

Supposed Erasmian "Phoebe" was played by Barbara Bates, who was highly credible as an upwardly mobile Brooklynite. Her small part includes an iconic moment when, in the film's last scene, she appears in full narcissistic glory, preening in front of a triptych of mirrors as she tries on Eve's clothes and is reflected in multiple, infinitely regressing fragments. Bates, a native of Denver, Colorado, did not alas live up to her early promise, but soon after the completion of this film fell into bouts of insanity that came to an end only when she took her own life in 1959. 

Why Erasmus?  Because its graduates had achieved a reputation for fierce ambition?  Perhaps, but also because Erasmus (as Mankiewicz would well have known) was even more provincial -- as only the outer boroughs of New York can be provincial -- than Eve Harrington's childhood Wisconsin. "Phoebe" is a doppelganger on deck, a secret sharer in ovo, a Mr Hyde in the making; she's also defensive, megamoniacal, naive, ignorant, unsophisticated, slightly loony, and ruthless.  And so it was a excellent decision to root her in EHHS, where 50% of the students would have had the exact same addled traits of character.   

 

 

How Long Has This Been Going On?

I have a favorite moment in Diner (1982), the first of Barry Levinson's quartet of Baltimore movies, and it's not the scene in which I made my silver-screen debut. It's when two of the working-class guys who hang out at the Fells Point hamburger joint find themselves taking a drive in the Maryland countryside. They happen upon a rich, well-tended young blonde woman riding an elegant horse (in her own spacious meadow). They stop the car try to chat her up but she's clearly out of their league. When she gallops off, one of the guys says to the other: "Do you ever get the feeling that there's something going on that we don't know about?"

I was thinking about that scene when I read that Moammar Ghaddafi's son Seif threw himself a birthday party at some spectacular resort in the West Indies and paid the pop singer Mariah Carey $1,000,000 smackerootis to sing four songs. You read it right -- one millions bucks. The article didin't say whether she had to pay for her own motel and continental breakfast and transportation but I'm going to guess that expenses were extra. 

I tried to calculate whether I had earned $1M in my working life. I can't remember and I don't have the records, but I know that I started at $3600 and  by 1966 I was already pulling down $7800. I think that in my first decade of employment I earned well under $100,000. Yeah, I know, them was different dollars -- but still.

A working guy who makes $40,000 would take 25 years to earn what Mariah Carey took home for twenty minutes of effort. 

But it's not what she earned so much as what he paid. The Ghaddafi clan of brutes, lunatics, oil-bloated twits, and kleptocrats has been looting the Libyans for forty years. No wonder that the family is willing to commit mass murder to hold on to their hoard. (In his defence, Seif claimed that it wasn't him; it was his brother Muatassim.) Here's a question: how many years does it take your run-of-the-mill Libyan to earn $1M? 

I think that the average Libyan would understand the point of view of the diner guys. There's something going on out there, and it ain't all good.

Amnesia in Films: Random Harvest (1942)

In Mervyn LeRoy's Random Harvest (1942), amnesia is not merely a plot gimmick. The amnesia of Charles Rainier, a shell-shocked World War I veteran, is the principal subject of the film. Rainier (Ronald Colman) begins in Condition A (amnesiac but solid citizen and loving husband) but is hit by a cab in Liverpool and transitions to Condition B (aristocratic, efficient, but passionless, and with no knowledge of the three years between the war and the cab). Will he remember the lost years and reintegrate the two parts of his hstory?  Well, yes, he does, but only with the decades-long assistance of his patient-Griselda wife Paula/Margaret (excellently played by the ageless Greer Garson). 

It's kind of a soap-opera-y film and I'm embarrassed to confess that it moved me. The last scene, in which Rainier finally remembers that he had long ago loved and married Margaret under her real name Paula, is a curious kind of anagnorisis. Although they've known each other for decades, true recognition comes suddenly and joyfully. And I bought it, much against my will. Dropped a reluctant tear. 

Because of the amnesia, Charles has two different lives, but he doesn't, as in other films, have two different personalities. He's kindly, steadfast, and rather boring in both states. The film offers little in the way of a theory of amnesia. "As one door opens, another closes" says a friendly but passive psychiatrist, whose expertise is validated only by his middle-European accent. 

In most films, diseases resemble their manifestations in real life. Amnesia, on the other hand, can be anything the screenwriter says it it is. It's a mighty elastic phenomenon, unmoored to medical experience or knowledge. However imagined, the total amnesia of characters in films is a great plot device. The audience is always in the know and therefore feels superior to the poor character/actor who stumbles toward an understanding of his own self. It's hard to believe that Shakespeare was able to write forty plays without ever resorting to amnesia. 

At a social event a few days ago I met a psychologist who works at the AFB in Colorado Springs with veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq. I asked her if she had ever encountered a case of amnesia. She said that many injured personnel can't remember the moments just before they were wounded, but that she'd never enountered a case of movie-style amnesia. Or heard of one. And, she added, trust me, I've dealt with many kinds of mental disturbances.

More Noir: Otto Preminger's Laura (1944)

Laura is a stylish noir mystery that maintains its fascination even after the passage of sixty years.  It is cleverly written and handsomely cinematographed but it also comes with some murky psychological baggage.  At the heart of the enigma lies Waldo Lydecker (played by Clifton Webb).  He's so head-over-heels in love and so ferociously jealous of Laura (the ingenue Gene Tierney) that he'll resort to anything, even murder, to keep her from other men.  The premise is good whodunit fare, but it would make more obvious sense if Lydecker weren't both old and gay.

Clifton Webb was fifty-five when the picture was made, but he looks and acts ten or fifteen years older.  He may be a bachelor, but he's not an eligible one. There's a story that Webb had a clause in his contract with Twentieth-Century Fox that barred the company from alluding to his homosexuality, but the prohibition, if it existed, didn't stop him from playing Lydecker with a pronounced gay affect. He's fussy, he's bitchy, he's a queen -- in short a stage homosexual in every aspect except that he's not obviously interested in men.  (Well, not overtly;  but it is a surprise when he exposes himself to the detective Mark McPherson [Dana Andrews] when he steps out of a bathtub and asks McPherson to throw him a robe.)

A clue to Lydecker's character occurs in the film's first scene.  He spies on Detective McPherson, who's wandering around Lydecker's apartment, browsing an extensive collection of fragile objets d'art.  McPherson goes to pick up a piece of glass and Lydecker calls out "Careful, that's very valuable" (I'm quoting from memory).  From this incident we learn two things:  that Lydecker is a collector of beautiful works of art, and that he's willing to let people look but not touch. This same two traits control Lydecker's relations to Laura: he cherishes her beauty and molds her in a Pygmalion-like way, but he's hyper-protective.  For him, she becomes an untouchable work of art (the portrait of Laura, on which the camera focuses so obsessively, is the metaphorical signifier of her place in his mental world).  His cool sexuality (he's perfectly content with twice-a-week dinners) and his age (he's more interested in fathering Laura than in making love to her) are less powerful than his pygmalionism. 

By transforming Laura into a work of art, Lydecker attempts to preserve her virginity.  He therefore shoos away her potential lovers.  He destroys the career of Jacoby, the painter, by writing a vitriolic attack on him;  he collects revealing information about the southern gigolo Carpenter (Vincent Price).  He competes with McPherson.  It's a neat turn that to do so he becomes a detective himself -- loitering in the snow outside Laura's apartment, eavesdropping behind a post in a night club, etc.  Eventually he comes to understand that he can't preserve Laura's "purity;" it's then that the film turns to violence.  After all is lost, he gives away the game when he says to McPherson, with visceral horror, "I suppose you'll have a disgustingly earthy relationship" [i.e. with Laura]. 

It's fascinating that McPherson, though he has all the outward marks of the macho gumshoe, is himself tepid about sexuality.  He lacks charisma, emotion, lust.  The film allows him and Laura only one slight awkward peck of a kiss. The detective is not a creature of passion, but he may be, like Lydecker, a lover of art;  it's revealed, climactically, that Laura's portrait will be auctioned and that McPherson has put in a bid on it.   

Amnesia in Films: The Bourne Identity

Jason Bourne has contracted the worst case of amnesia in movie history and it's going to last for at least four long films (three of them already released). Bourne's type of amnesia is very convenient for plotting because he doesn't know who he is but yet retains an astonishing range of martial and intellectual skills. He's a born-again innocent (a murderer with a newly minted heart of gold) who is shocked to discover that before he lost the marbles of memory, he was a professional murderer. He's rather charming in an idiot-savant-assassin way, but I suspect that his particular varieity of amnesia is not very well known to non-Hollywood neurologists.  

It's a curious idea -- that an individual can be cleansed of his previous sins by losing his memory.  And yet The Bourne Identity doesn't make much of this interesting moral question. "Who am I" is not investigated in the vocabulary of tragedy, as in Lear's "Who is it who can tell me who I am" but as in "what's my name, what's my address, what's my phone number." Pertinent questions, surely, but not profound ones. 

On the other hand, King Lear never climbed down the outside of a building, handholds in the cracks between blocks of marble, nor, as far as I can remember, did he plummet his Fiat down a series of flights of stone stairs while being chased by a posse of sirening motorcyclists .    

Amnesia in Film: The Crooked Way (1949)

Eddie Rice has served in World War II, won a silver star, but lost his memory to a piece of shrapnel buried in this brain (the x-ray is flashed onto the screen). It's an "organic" rather than "psychological" amnesia and therefore incurable. Released from a hospital, Eddie returns home to L. A. to find that he was once Eddie Riccardi and that he was a no-good, double-crossing hood, hated by both police and former gang members and also distrusted by his ex-wife. Eddie Rice is a Dr. Jekyll, but his pre-amnesia self was a Mr. Hyde. It's a curious and unexplained transformation -- from evil to good. There is almost no psychological continuity between his ante- and post-trauma personality.  Eddie the amnesiac is utterly untroubled to discover that he was once a monster. He extricates himself from the mob, jettisons his past, and starts a new life. His amnesia is a thing apart. 

The direction (by Robert Florey) and the noir cinematography are splendid. John Payne, a fine, underappreciated actor, (as Rice/Riccardi) cannot possibly convey the psychological complexity that should have been, but wasn't, written into the script.

"Rio Grande" (1950) Then and Now

Last night, on the big HDTV, with the collaboration of Netflix, and peering through our toes, we watched the John Ford cavalry movie "Rio Grande." I first saw this film in the year of its release (I was eleven years old) at the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue. 

In days of yore, it was the custom for the neighborhood urchins to take in a double bill on a rainy Saturday afternoon.  It was a good way for our harried mothers to dispose of us for four hours -- and on the cheap, inasmuch as the price of admission was only fourteen cents. 

"Rio Grande" was a perfect kind of urchin movie.  Good guys (cavalry) versus bad guys (Indians), lots of action, no overt sex.  It offered much too much singing, but the slow periods would have been enlivened by hoots, whistles, popcorn-throwing, banging the head of the kid in the seat in front of you with the heel of your hand, primitive pre-flirting, and chasing in the aisles.

In 1950, Maureen O'Hara (John Wayne's estranged wife), was puzzling if not inexplicable  -- merely an impediment to the action.  Sixty years later, she is beautiful, dignified, even majestic.  The poor Apaches, who for me and for my heedless comrades were nothing other than targets for cavalry bullets, are now unutterably tragic.  John Wayne was then an immensely heroic figure, but with the passing of years. he has become a rigid incompetent dope. 

The West, in those days, was part Monument Valley, part myth;  now I live in a West that has nothing to do with Coney Island Avenue, even less with John Ford.  

What We Watched in the Fifties: Rebel Without a Cause (1955)

I watched Rebel Without A Cause last night in a state of constant twitching puzzlement.  Why has this film become a cult classic?  How can we account for the iconic appeal of James Dean, who moves me not the least bit?  How did thirty-five-year-olds manage to pass for high school kids in 50s movies?  Why, in those ancient days, did every male seem to wear a tie and jacket round the clock?  

The movie seemed like a period piece, dug up from some archive  --  which is odd, because I was 16 and a high school student in 1955 when Rebel Without a Cause was released.  It should have spoken to me then, or now.  But didn't and doesn't, not a bit. 

The Eisenhower decade was the great age of suburban "juvenile delinquency," so-called.  What do these kids want?  They all have their expensive cars and the war is over.  The teen-agers, all of them, are utterly inarticulate.  They're also shockingly unfeeling.  When Buzz Gunderson dies in the "chickie run," he is not mourned, even for a femtosecond, and within a few hours, his girlfriend Judy has fallen in love with Buzz's rival, Jim Stark. 

Nor, in this film, is the adult generation is any more admirable -- the wives and mothers are shrews, the men grotesquely henpecked.  The film has a strong gay subtext throughout -- most apparent in the Jim Stark-Plato relationship.  I'm sure that I wouldn't have noticed it in 1955, but it kind of jumps at you nowadays. 

1950s juvenile delinquents came in two categories:  urban deprived and rich suburban alienated.  I was of neither one class nor the other.  True that we had to be constantly on our toes to keep clear of the one group, but the other (those depicted in this film) might just as well have been living on another planet.

A dangerous planet, as it turned out, for the makers of Rebel Without a Cause.  James Dean was already dead when the film was released, having been killed in an automobile accident.  Sal Mineo was murdered in 1976.  Natalie Wood, drunk, drowned in 1981.  Nick Adams died of a drug overdose in 1968.  The film's talented director, Nicholas Ray, discovered his wife, Gloria Grahame, in bed with his thirteen-year-old son, whom she later married.  Ray died prematurely of drugs and alcohol. 

Horse Feathers (1932) /Everyone Says I Love You (1996)

Goodness gracious! I should have known that the two films were distant cousins -- after all, Woody Allen's film (one of his very best, and certainly his most genial) ends with an extended tribute to Groucho in which everyone wears phony mustaches and pretends to puff on stogies. But not having taken a look at Horse Feathers in twenty or thirty years, I failed to realize how much Woody had borrowed. How could I have forgotten that Everyone Says I Love You extracts and transforms two songs from Horse Feathers: "I'm Through With Love" as well as its own title song. And of course it shares its liberated and episodic series-of-skits structure not only with Groucho but with all vaudevillians. Not to mention a willingness to throw logic to the winds or under the bus for the sake of a gag. Everyone Says I Love You is a lovely, gentle film (much more mild than its raucous unsubtle predecessor).

Its exhilarating choreography is very distinctly not indebted to anything in the earlier film.

Some ambitious scholar could write an illuminating essay on Woody's Marxism.  

Replacing Children In In America

I finally got around to watching In America, a film which won all sorts of awards in 2002 and which I ordered from Netflix after it appeared on someone's best films of the decade list.  It's a fine movie, especially if you enjoy piping your eye from dawn to dusk.  Always susceptible, I cried a full quart.  Samantha Morton, familiar from her role as Hattie in Sweet and Lowdown, is endowed with the most expressive face in the history of cinema, and the director of In America, Jim Sheridan, is smart enough to take advantage of her features.  

The story is not unfamiliar -- immigrants in America, culture-clash and assimilation, poverty and a bit of triumph at the end.  The film skirts dangerously close to cliche and occasionally falls over the precipice -- I'm sorry but I've seen too many movies in which an emotionally-stunted hero waits until the final frame before he breaks into tears.  

In America is at heart a drama about replacing the dead child.  Johnny and Sarah Sheridan lost a boy to a brain tumor and they've been off balance ever since.  They're not going to be whole until they make another baby.  Sarah's pregnancy is precarious and the parturition difficult, and in a contrived piece of hoakum, the baby doesn't begin to thrive until the suffering soul of a dying friend is mystically infused into her.

No thought is given (nor should it be) to the poor baby, whose whole life will be colored by her entrance into the world as savior and redeemer and who will be freighted with expectations that she will never be able to fulfill.  

Pretty Poison (1960); Tuesday Weld (1943- )

Pretty Poison was released in 1960 to excellent notices.  I remember addiing it to the must-see list.  But I didn't get around to it at the time, probably because the film wasn't widely distributed. But Pretty Poison stuck in my mind -- or rather it was the combination of Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld that excited my interest. During the VHS years I made another attempt to see the movie, but it was apparently stuck in some sort of royalty-and-ownership dispute and never made it onto tape. And then another twenty years elapsed and I tried again, this time typing the name into my Netflix queue, and, mirabile dictu, there it was.  So at last, after fifty years, a cd of Pretty Poison appeared in the mailbox. 

It's a fine film, well worth the wait. I don't know what I would have thought about it in 1960, but in 2010 it seems like a late variant of 1950s film noir and an important but unacknowledged waystation on the road from Double Indemnity to Body Heat. It offers a dangerous jeune fille fatale in the highschool cheerleader Mary Ann Stepanek, some great plot twists, and a creepy young man who's not as clever as he thinks (very similar to his lineal descendant, the fatuous lawyer Ned Racine). The photography, all sunlit and cheerful, disguises the noirish themes and keeps the audience off balance. The screenwriter, Lorenzo Semple Jr., was, if I remember correctly, just emerging from the McCarthy blacklist, which may be why the film stresses cold-war themes -- spies and sabotage and the like. Can it be accidental that, in the last year of the Eisenhower administration, a well-meaning but ineffective government employee as given the name Azenauer?  

When Tuesday Weld, scion of an ancient Massachusetts family performed in this film, I was taking courses in Cambridge, in Weld Hall. She does a great job -- and how could anyone not be struck by her great name. Tuesday Weld is linked, in my mind, not only to the Saltonstalls, Peabodys, and Lodges but also to Billy Sunday, Rick Monday, Joe Friday, January Jones, Fredric March, May West, June Jones, August Busch, Susan Sontag, Domenico Scarlatti and Jeudi Garland. 

English Teachers Are Such Jerks

English teachers are such colossal jerks, at least whenever they appear in movies.  A case in point is Smart People (2008), which is the second-best academic movie ever made in Pittsburgh (Wonder Boys is superior). Smart People offers us a Carnegie-Mellon Professor of English, played by a shambling Dennis Quaid, who is a depressed, angry, uncommunicative, and miserable being, and who insults and patronizes both his students and his family.  He's the perfect embodiment of traditional and persistent American anti-intellectual stereotypes.  Book-learning has turned him into a mere grammarian, a pedant, who must learn about "real life" from his rolling-stone, improvident, frequently-stoned but streetsmart brother.  Smart People is constructed around stereotypes that were exhausted when Shakespeare created Holofernes and Sir Hugh Evans more than four hundred years ago. 

I've known a lot of English teachers -- some good, some bad -- but I've yet to encounter the shallow stereotype.

English teachers make their way into a disproportionately large number of movies.  There are two reasons for this phenomenon.  The first is that the writer of the film wants to illustrate some thematic point, so he brings his characters into a classroom where a pompous old fart or fartess can provide some cheap laughs while explicating a poem or novel that is tangentially related to a point the film is trying to make.  The second reason is purely revengeful.  In films in which English teachers figure, there's often --almost always, in fact -- a young man whose writing is unappreciated by the narrow-minded professor.  In Smart People, he's the son of our own nasty hero, and his sparkling poem is published in the New Yorker while his indifferent father is still waiting to hear whether his critical-theory manuscript has been rejected yet once again.  This character -- the brilliant but unappreciated young poet or playwright or novelist -- stands in for the writer or director of the film, who is saying, in filmspeak, "look at me now, you colossal jerk. I'm making movies and you're still back in high school or at State U., grading freshman term papers. So there!!! That'll teach you to give me a C+."

By the way -- Smart People is an intelligent, well-written film.  I heartily recommend it. 

In Bruges/ Don't Look Now

We enjoyed In Bruges for its black humor, its witty profanity, and the unpredictability of its plot (that is, until the mandatory chase scene).  And especially for the lovely views of medieval Bruges, an old Hanseatic town.

In Bruges contains a film-within-a-film which is described by Chloe, the handsome drug dealer and thief, as an imitation or a homage or a 'nod of the head' toward Don't Look Now, Nicholas Roeg's scary-as-hell Julie Christie-Donald Sutherland masterpiece.  I've been racking my poor brains, trying to decide whether there's a meaningful connection between the two films -- or whether the writer-director Martin McDonagh is just planting red herrings.

Bruges and Venice (where the earlier film is set) are old, architecturally rich, becanalled towns and both directors make much of their warm civic atmosphere.  The plots of both films are initiated by the deaths of young children.  In each film, an important character is a dwarf who is, one case, the perpetrator of violence and in the other its victim.  That's all that I can come up with at the moment, so I'm leaning to the red-herring theory. But I'd be interested in other people's views.

Williamsburg Bridge/ Naked City

On two occasions this year the Williamsburg Bridge (from Manhattan to Brooklyn) has made a guest appearance in the plot of my life.

In January, as faithful readers know, we set up shop in Manhattan.  One day we strolled over the bridge from the Lower East Side to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.  The bridge is a splendid monument of nineteenth-century technology and the view from above is spacious and commanding.  It's a restless, busy path from one side to another;  all around you, automobiles, subway trains, bicyclists, runners, baby carriages -- the works.  NYC in a Victorian nutshell. 

Then, a few days ago, came the news of the death of Jules Dassin.  Dassin is famous for Never on Sunday and Topkapi, but as movie-lovers know, he was a polished director of films noirs during the 1940s -- before Nixon, McCarthy, and blacklisting drove him into exile.  We decided to embark on a Jules Dassin festival and tribute right here on our very own giant TV.  Our first choice was Naked City (1949), a highly unsubversive policier, markedly patriotic but disturbing because all the bad guys are vaguely "ethnic."  The climactic scenes of Naked City were shot in the Lower East Side (just where the Williamsburg Bridge hits Delancey). The murderer/wrestler/harmonicat Willie Garzah attempts to flee. A voice shouts, "he's on Norfolk near Rivington." Right where we had just a few months ago wandered! It's right off the bridge!  And then Garzah panics and tries to escape by running across the Williamsburg into Brooklyn. Police in pursuit, squad cars, pistols, shouting, shots.  Garzah climbs the girders--the very same girders, which, just a few months before, I had decided to honor my acrophobia by not climbing. And then he's wounded, and, as always in the movies, falls theatrically to his death.

It's peculiar, isn't it, when a store or a street-corner that you know in real life appears in the movies. Does it mean that film tells the truth, is real, or does the celluloid appearance provide us with some evidence that our own life is genuine? Why should the movies sometimes seem more substantial than the reports of our own five senses? How can art validate life? And at the same time, don't we feel a little cheated--in the sense that our privacy--our uniqueness--has been violated and the things and stuff that are personal to us have been delivered over to an unappreciative anonymous world?  It's odd and disorienting when a familiar non-fiction bridge plays a supporting role in a fictional film.   

Naked City is a good, solid, intriguing piece of work, well-paced and well-written. I'm not entirely happy with the way it treats women or the working-classes, but then, many such films are far more culpable. I liked best the authentic, unstaged street shots of Manhattan as it was sixty years ago.  Delancey Street was nostalgic and poetic (although the shop signs, then lettered in Hebrew, are now mostly Chinese). The Williamsburg Bridge, solid and substantial, has weathered the years extremely well. It's well positioned to star in many another film.         

The Kent Theater/ Sex

I can't recommend Marion Meade's The Unruly Life of Woody Allen (New York, 2000), which I too hastily snatched off the library shelf. Written at the tabloid height of the Woody-Mia-Soon-yi fracas, it masquerades as a biography but in truth it's nothing more than scandalmongery.   

Before it gets down in the dirt, however, Unruly Life offers a quick summary of Allen’s life, a matter of which I was largely ignorant. Of course I knew that Allen was a Brooklyn boy who grew up in the old neighborhood.  Allen Koenigsberg attended P. S. 99 on East 10 Street near Avenue K (where my cousin Louie was also a student).  In addition, I knew, from Louie, that P. S. 99's principal was Eudora Fletcher and that, in the very inventive chameleon movie, Woody gave Ms. Fletcher's name to the psychiatrist who takes Zelig under her wing. 

But cousin Louie did not know, or did not bother to tell me, that Allen was a frequent patron of the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue and that it's rumored that it was at the Kent that the interior scenes in The Purple Rose of Cairo were filmed.  I've seen Purple Rose recently and if it wasn't the Kent, it sure looks like the Kent of my memory.  The Kent, along with its sister theater, the Leader, was one of my own childhood haunts.  In fact, it was my father’s aunt Manya, substitute cashier, who sometimes sat in the box office and took my quarter.   

It was not at the Kent but at the Jewel Theater on Kings Highway that Allen encountered Ingmar Bergman for the first time.  Well, not exactly Bergman himself.  It was Harriet Andersson disrobing in Summer with Monika that seems to have caught Allen's attention.  Unruly Life reports that Allen sat “with eyes bulging” to watch this and other early Bergman films. 

Allen’s protruding orbs brought to mind the impact that those shocking 1950s Scandinavian films had on the days of my early adolescence. It was at the Kent (aunt Manya must not have been on duty that day) that I once watched a Danish film in which there was a very brief flash of a woman in naked silhouette.  All I can remember is that I sat through to watch the picture again -- it might even have been a double feature -- and that by the time the silhouette appeared a second time, my poor bladder was so swollen (I was afraid to leave my seat for fear of missing the moment) that it was about to rupture.  How embarrassing it would have been to die of an aneurysm of the urinary tract simply to catch a glimpse of Harriet Andersson or one of her friends. 

In the 1950s, naked bodies were simply not on view.  Never at all, at least not in my slice of the universe.  I doubt that anyone from the post-Vietnam, post-sexual-revolution generation can imagine how nude-deprived were those severely repressed years.  Bodies, women's bodies, were so rare and mysterious that a brief and evanescent flash of shadowed skin, circa 1953, could remain in the memory for more than fifty years.

Which is why I retain the warmest feelings for Coney Island Avenue's Kent Theater.

Away From Her/Fiona Andersson/Julie Christie

Away From Her explores the infinitely sorrowful subject of early-onset Alzheimer's. Fiona Andersson, in her vigorous mid-sixties, has begun to lose her way and to forget names; she stores the frying pan in the refrigerator. She thinks that she’s “beginning to disappear.” Fiona’s plight is worrisome to every human being but it is especially disturbing to people of her own and of Julie Christie's generation.

Here in our home we still manage to find appropriate places for the cooking utensil, mostly.  Nevertheless, things happen. We set out to purchase six items at the market and come home with just three. We have three errands to perform and we arrive back home with two of the tasks undone. We put the camera in a special secure place and then spend a couple of hours searching for it. Keys and lists and books and tickets regularly evaporate or disintegrate or dematerialize.  Are these forgettings normal or are we en route to something that is too horrible to contemplate?

We exercise, we eat carefully, we gulp those horrid fish oil boluses. Perhaps these defensive procedures have value. Perhaps we'll be the ones to dodge the Alzheimer bullet.  Perhaps we won't.

It doesn’t help that we spend many hours a week at the facility where the Aged Parent is incarcerated. We encounter people just like Fiona -- or the remnants of them -- every day.  They're hollow shells, slumped in the wheelchair or poking at the boiled-to-mush food. The angry ones, the ones with dead eyes, the ones who moan all day long, “help me.” Better the Seconal and applesauce, the ice floe, or the bullet in the brain than to live in such horrible oblivion.   

In Away From Her, Julie Christie is entirely persuasive as the alzheimered Fiona. But let me ask you, friends of a certain age-cohort, is it really possible that that gray old lady was Julie Christie? Here’s a woman I’ve known for forty-five years, ever since she was Liz for thirty incandescent seconds in Billy Liar -- and feckless Billy was too much of a jerkass coward to run away with her. Julie and I have had a long (albeit entirely one-sided) relationship.  I was dazzled by her when she was the voracious Diana Scott in Darling and I feared for her when she was Laura Baxter in Nicholas Roeg’s scary-as-all-hell Don't Look Now.  She was my favorite Gertrude. But Fiona Andersson is outside any recognizable trajectory;  she's too raw, too dislocating to my tender sense of the way things ought to be.  No, Julie will always be Liz to me.  I've held on to that first image for most of my adult life.

I have no intention of progressing to the "second floor," or to sunset village or to memory lane or to however they euphemize the place that they put the folks with clogged synapses, but, if I should find myself in such a state, let's hope that it won't be Fiona but Liz to whom the brain clings.

Sweet and Lowdown

Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown is a sentimental love story with an unhappy ending.  Like most of Allen's works, it has become a far better work of art with a few years on its back than it seemed on first viewing (1999) -- probably because audiences habitually come to the Woodman's films with the mouth set for wisecracks and one-liners.  Woody's films grow on you;  some day, when the fuss has died down, their emotional range and artistry will be better recognized.   

The lovers in Sweet and Lowdown are Emmett Ray, who talks constantly but says very little, and Emmett's girlfriend Hattie, who is mute but miraculously expressive.  Emmett is a shallow, vain, brittle, damaged bit of goods who exempts himself from emotion and human connection with the assertion that he's an "artist."  Hattie is said to be dull-witted but whether she is or not we don't know.  We do know that she's a woman of great appetites: for sex, for food, for music.  Emmett cannot acknowledge that she's his best audience and he runs like the wind when it's revealed that she loves him.  The climax of the film is inarticulate: all Emmett can manage is "I've made a mistake."  Viewers, however, can easily fill in the gaps.

It's a fine and lovely movie, well worth the re-seeing if only for the music and the affectionate re-creation of the 30s jazz scene.  And also for the acting.  Sean Penn twists his face into an expression of perpetual dissatisfaction.  His Emmett Ray, except for a redeeming moment or two, is horrid and knows it.  On the other side of the coin, Samantha Morton is transcendent as the vulnerable but resilient Hattie.

See Sweet and Lowdown for what it is.  It's not a farce;  it's not raucus.  Don't look to it for more than it offers or for something other than it offers.  It's sufficient unto itself. 

Two Three Tens to Yuma or Two Three Ten to Yumas

I had trace memory only of Delmer Daves' 1957 3:10 to Yuma, a film that I had not seen since the days of my youth.  In my mind it was bracketed with a much better morality-play western, High Noon (1952).  I am, frankly, a little vain that I was able to recall that Van Heflin played the Gary Cooper part of the good man deserted by fearful townspeople while the clock ticks toward the climactic arrival of the Iron Horse and while Frankie Laine strums and sings off-screen.  Of course, so much detail had evaporated from the ol'  tired brain that the return to the 1950s was, once again, well, not mind-blowing, but certainly eye-opening.

3:10 to Yuma is a remarkably spare noirish western -- not a classic, but respectable and well-made.  At its heart is the near-friendship that develops between the bad guy Ben Wade as acted by smooth and charming Glenn Ford, and his captor, the god-fearing impoverished settler Dan Evans, played by the ever-gruff Van Heflin (reprising his role in Shane).  As the two (Wade and Evans) test each other, an odd mutual respect springs up between them. Wade has money and authority and the perennial appeal of lawlessness while Evans is grounded in his ranch and his family.  Each envies the other.  The relationship is imperfectly delineated and as a result the ending of the film is huddled and unsatisfying.

Slipping the DVD of the brand new 3:10 to Yuma into the machine, I thought, ah, here's a chance to remedy the original.  This time, get that off-kilter relationship between Wade and Evans right;  clarify the ending.  I wanted a suspenseful film rich in psychological insights. I couldn't have been more disappointed. James Mangold's reworking of 3:10 to Yuma is bigger, noisier, and a ton more expensive than the original.  It adds a lot of ruckus:  a fight with Indians, a barn-burning, feuding townsfolk, a pair of sadistic monomaniacal killers, a gruesome bullet extraction that belongs on the surgery channel, a cursed pistol, thirty seconds of gratuitous torture, and most of all, hundreds of fatalities.  In terms of melodrama and gunfire, there's certainly much more bang for the buck, but the characters themselves are flatter and less interesting and the climax, problematical in the first 3:10 to Yuma, is totally botched and incoherent. An opportunity squandered!

And yesterday I saw the acclaimed Michael Clayton, an eastern western.  This time the bad guy is a woman, chief counsel to a nasty polluting international conglomerate.  Will the good man, Michael Clayton, under financial and emotional siege, resist temptation and stand up for the right, like Gary Cooper and Van Heflin and Humphrey Bogart before him?  What do you think?  Will it spoil anyone's appreciation of Michael Clayton if I hint that George Clooney finds his place in the long line of inarticulate American heroes?

Here's the paradoxical upshot:  there's less of the old 3:10 to Yuma in the new 3:10 to Yuma than there is old 3:10 to Yuma in the new Michael Clayton.

The All-Time Most Tired Movie Cliche

We watched, don't ask me why, the most recent Jason Bourne extravaganza  -- The Bourne Hyperventilation I believe it was called.  So-called "action" pictures are not my cup of tea.  In my view, it's a genre that is far too deeply infatuated with its own cliches.  The Bourne Mystification was not only prefamiliar but also unusually tricky to follow.  It consisted of swatches of flashbackstory interspersed with vigorous but interminable fight and chase sequences.  The "action" was delivered in a multitude of stitched-together one- and two- second slices, which, even on the small screen, were vertiginous and almost barfitudinous.

The Bourne Hyperbole is a multiple car-chase movie.  How many time do we need to revisit this cliche?  Cars spinning out of control, cars shouldering each other for a place on the highway, cars ramming into each other, cars becoming airborne, cars landing on their sides, cars weaving into the oncoming lane, cars on sidewalks, sirens blaring, hoods flying open, windows shot out, guys shooting pistols at each other while driving one-handed at 100 mph -- interspersed with one-second glances at the speedometer, one-second glances of a foot on a brake -- all followed by the inevitable noisy, multiple-vehicle crash where the nasty hired killer winds up dead while our invincible hero emerges with only a minimal, symbolic scathe.  Is there anything in movies today that is more hectic, more predictable, or more boring? 

Let me ask my readership this art-versus-life question -- what is the ratio of your own participation and/or observation of real-life car chases compared to the number of car chases that you've seen in movies?  Am I the only twentieth-century American who has never been shot at or pursued?  Never seen a fleeing Oldsmobile pass just inches in front of the oncoming semi?  Yet I've experienced the film version of that very scene scores -- perhaps hundreds -- of times. 

I think that in the next century, when movies will be studied by historians eager to understand the great age of petroleum-based transportation (as well as the golden age of film), our descendants will take it for granted that it was absolutely ordinary for pedestrians out for a Sunday stroll to be driven from the sidewalk by an out-of-control vehicle (usually a commandeered taxi trailed by a gaggle of motorcycle cops). They will think that in our century, there was never a time that a fruiterer put that last orange on top of his pyramid of oranges that some sort of vehicle didn't barrel into the display. They will know that any time, day or night, every plate glass showroom window in North America was liable to have a station wagon hurtle through it.  Often in slow motion.

So here's my proposal for a new rating system for movies.  In addition to the stars, let's announce in advance how many car chases we are going to experience  -- or better still, exactly how many cars were destroyed during the making of the film.  It would certainly help me choose my entertainment if I were to learn that The Bourne Yesterday was a three-star, two-car chase, 197 exploded vehicle film. 

While we're changing the rating system, I have another idea.  Let's also have a Cute Puppy warning.  I'm thinking of that scene where the hero and heroine finally make it to bed and there's a reaction shot of Cute Puppy putting his paw over his eyes.  I never, ever, want to see that one again.  Agreed:  no more car chases, no more Cute Puppies.  Life will be richer.

One further exercise:  let us divide the number of cases of amnesia encountered in film by the number of cases of amnesia encountered in real life.   And the answer is:  it's impossible to divide by zero.       

Roth/Allen's Breasts

Michael Hollingsworth writes: 

"Dear Dr. M.:  you're directly on target when you claim that Woody Allen and Philip Roth are the same person, but you've unaccountably omitted to mention the most pressing evidence.The year: 1972. Philip Roth published The Breast, a fantasy about a writer transformed into one. Woody Allen released Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex, in which a giant female breast wreaks havoc upon the countryside.  Obviously, both "Roth" and "Allen" had recently read Gogol's The Nose and Kafka's Metamorphosis. Just as obviously, "both" of "them" were struggling with some seriously unresolved maternal issues. How fascinating that both of their boundless cups of creativity "runneth over" so to speak, in such similar ways. A coincidence? Hardly. 

By the way, both "Roth's" and "Allen's" contributions are embarrassingly false and flat."

Dr. M. responds:  "You know, Professor Hollingsworth, I think I support your breast remarks. I'd been aware of both of these upwellings of mammariness but I never put two and two together. If Roth/Allen aren't doppelgangers, they're certainly developing along twin tracks.

And let me add my own reservations:  the short stories by Gogol and Kafka are untouchable contributions to world literature.  Both writers create astonishing fantasies; they also manage to skewer the particularities of, in the one case, czarist Russia and in the other, early twentieth-century Prague. Frankly, neither Roth's nor Allen's breasts are anywhere nearly as full or pointed."    

Flirting with Incest, Part II

Yesterday I considered the near-incest situations of Philip Roth and Woody Allen.  In Roth's My Life as a Man, Roth's shadow Nathan Zuckerman marries Lydia Kettering and when she commits suicide he takes up with Monica, who is Lydia's sixteen-year-old daughter by a previous marriage.  When Lydia turns twenty-one, Zucerkman proposes marriage but she, wiser than her step-father, declines.  I do not know whether Zuckerman's borderline incest had a precedent in Roth's real life.  I do know that Roth's doppelganger Woody Allen eventually married Soon-yi Farrow Previn and that he has adopted two children with her.  (The woodman now has five offspring in his complex family, including two adopted and one created in the downright way with Mia Farrow.  Child-averse Roth seems to have avoided paternity.)

While reading My Life as a Man I've also been watching movies by Nicholas Ray.  Last night I saw In a Lonely Place (1950) with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame.  I recommend it to all who love film.  It's tough and intelligent, filled with great dialog, brilliant lighting, excellent music and stylish direction.  Trust me, It will hold your interest and give you something to admire.  Gloria Grahame steals the show;  she's just as good and much more subtle than Humph.

I didn't know anything about Grahame's career and life, so I looked her up on the standard databases.  Her life was so unusual that I might even try to track down a biography.

With the Roth/Allen/incest theme on my mind, I discovered these facts about Gloria Grahame.  In 1948, Grahame married director Nicholas Ray and gave birth to a son who was named Timothy.  She and Ray were divorced;  in 1960, Gloria married Anthony Ray, Nicholas Ray's son, and subsequently gave birth to two more boys, Anthony Jr. and James.   She had biological children by both father and son and has therefore left incest-flirters Roth and Allen in her dust.  What an achievement!

Query:  Tim, Anthony Jr, and James are half-brothers -- but are they also uncle and nephew?   Half-cousins?  Cousins?    I never fully grasped the theory of relativity.

A Scene from my Youth

 
This is a photograph of Coney Island Avenue, the grim commercial thoroughfare along which I crept to school unwillingly like snail between the years 1944 and 1952.  The unknown photographer who left us this record stood at the corner of Newkirk Avenue, just in front of the P. S. 217 schoolyard, and pointed his camera north toward Ditmas Avenue.  It's the east side of the street;  on the west side stood a used-car lot and a gas station, where, if the view were more panoramic, signs reading "Veedol" and "Mechanic on Duty" would have been visible.

It takes only a few seconds of detective work to date the photograph.  In the center is the marquee of the Leader Theater, which advertises the 1947 release It Happened in Brooklyn, a soldier-returns-home musical with Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, Peter Lawford, and especially Jimmy Durante, who was clearly the neighborhood favorite.  The second feature, Undercover Maisie, a policier with Ann Sothern and Barry Nelson, was released in the same year.  (The double bill was standard -- at 14 cents for kids and a quarter for adults, a good value).  It's early autumn not only because the ivy and, in the distance, a Norway maple are still in full leaf, but because the Casa del Rey advertises High Holy Day services (the orthodox congregation's synagogue on 18th Avenue had not yet been constructed).  I would guess that the large traffic sign that dominates the frame has something to do with the fact that the old trolley tracks had recently been removed.  The shops near the Leader are too small to identify, but I remember Singer's drug store, Safier's candy store, a shoe repair place, a small liquor store owned by P. V. Melia, and Joe Montuori's barber shop.  At the moment the camera snapped, I was eight years old, in Mrs. Sherwood's third grade class at P. S. 217. 

The architecture is hodge-podge -- the featureless apartment house and shops, the vaguely deco Leader, and then, closer to the camera, the what-the-heck-is-it-doing-there Moorish Casa del Rey (for weddings and other gatherings;  I passed it thousands of times but never once entered).

The man at the right of the frame, jingling his car keys in the pocket of his voluminous slacks, stares at the camera unenthusiastically.

It's a dreary picture, I'm afraid.  Gray.  A nondescript street in a nondescript neighborhood.   

I'm trying, but I just can't seem to work up the requisite nostalgia for the old country. 

What We Read in the Fifties: Scaramouche

For the life of me, I cannot remember whether I read Scaramouche because I was entranced by the movie, or whether it was the other way around, and I surrendered my 16 cents to the Leader Theater because I had already fallen in love with Rafael Sabatini's historical romances.  I know that I gorged myself on huge helpings of Sabatini -- not only Scaramouche and Captain Blood, but everything else in the rich collection of the McDonald Avenue library.  Scaramouche, first published in 1921, enjoyed a second burst of popularity when the Mel Ferrer-Stewart Granger Technicolor swashbuckler hit the screens in 1952.  I've now re-read the novel, and while it lacks the magic that it had for my 13-year-old self, and, moreover, is awkwardly plotted, and stilted, and thin, and obvious, it's nevertheless an engaging adventure story.  The central figure is the dashing and resilient Andre-Louis Moreau, who survives crisis after crisis with a witty, devil-may-care sprezzatura.  The novel itself overlays elements of picaresque (on-the-lam Moreau becomes an itinerant actor, then a fencing master, and finally a politician) onto a traditional romance plot (in the novel's final pages, our bastard hero discovers that he's an aristocrat by birth).  At heart it's yet another version of the secret-sharer, doppelganger, Jekyll-Hyde plot so common a hundred or so years ago.  Moreau is haunted by his wicked double, the Marquis Gervais de la Tour D'Azyr, with whom he competes for not one but two different women  -- one fallen and one pure, as was the custom in those days.  D'Azyr claims that Moreau has been "the evil genius of his life," but he's got it backwards:  he's Moreau's evil twin. In the thrilling climax, so-called, Moreau wins Aline de Kercadiou -- the upper-class paragon whom both he and his double desire.  The novel is set during the French Revolution, but the historical context is dimly realized  -- a much paler embodiment than The Tale of Two Cities, which, like Scaramouche, is also a novel of doubles (remember Charles Darnay and his dissipated friend Sidney Carton!).  A dyspeptic reader might assert that the novel is nothing but dilute Dumas;  it would be hard to challenge such an opinion.

The film, which I remembered fondly, was a bitter disappointment.  It's appallingly, embarrassingly bad.  There's some good theatrical dueling, but the plot is a mess, the dialog is ghastly, the humor infantile, and the acting vaudevillian. Eleanor Parker is hopeless as a cliche "spitfire" who alternately kisses and smacks around her admirers;  however, a young and rondelet Janet Leigh, swathed in whole hectares of taffeta, manages to redeem the part of Aline.  All the characters, even Aline, wear their hair in the oddest configuration: highly artificial, upswept white wigs.  They look like well-groomed sheep.  I suppose it's too late to shoot the hairdresser.

The Sesquipedalian Sibilance Society would like to extend its appreciation to Mr. Sabatini for coining the word "spadassinicide," which is much-used in the novel.  It's from Fr. spadassin, "assassin," and from the Latin verb meaning, "to kill."  Etymologically speaking, spadassinicide ought to denote a person who murders murderers, but the author uses it to mean a person who kills by taking advantage of the etiquette of the duel.  It's a handsome old neologism, although not easy to work into everyday conversation.