Dr. Metablog

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.

 

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.

Cliche of the Decade

There's this woman of a certain age, good looking, usually blonde. Generally, she's a detective but she could be reporter or a spy -- some sort of investigator. She has an instinct for her work, an unusual insight or gift. There's a murderer or villain out there and she's determined to get him; it's personal with her and often she has to violate procedures in order to bring this character to justice. She regularly confronts her superior, an older man who is a stickler for the rules and wants to shut down the investigation. As a last resort, she'll ask for 24 hours, or more rarely 48 hours, to bring the villain in. And guess what -- it turns out that her instinct was right all along and after a brief struggle, in which her life is in danger (often there's an attempted assassination, usually by speeding vehicle), the criminal/mastermind/murderer is handcuffed (British version) or shot (American version).

Amnesia on Film: Crossroads

What a strange little movie, odd even by amnesia-on-film standards!  Film amnesia is the most malleable and flexible of illnesses, as fact free (and fact-averse) as the EPA under Trump.. 

In this modest 1942  adventure, David Talbot, played by William Powell affecting a slight now-you-hear-it-now-you-don't French accent, is either an amnesia victim or an amnesia scammer. He either was or wasn't a criminal before the accident in which he apparently lost his memory.

An extortionist-grifter Henri Sarrou, played by Basil Rathbone, who looks like "two profiles glued together," is trying to squeeze him for a million francs in exchange for not turning him over to the police for a murder that he might or might not have committed in his former life, if he had one.

I don't think I'm giving away any secrets to say that all turns out for the best. But what is interesting, amnesia-wise, is that there is no recovery of memory.  Talbot's amnesia never resolves, and he comes to the end of the film with no knowledge of three-quarter of his life, and that this painful situation doesn't seem to compromise or concern him the least little bit. Off he goes, at the end, blithely, with his luminous bride Hedy Lamarr, at his side.

There are holes within holes in the plot, but what is most striking, I think, is how casually amnesia is deployed,  as if losing one's memory is no more a challenge to selfhood and identity than a case of sniffles.  

 

"Wyoming"

I am totally in love with a bit of dialogue in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), the great Sidney Lumet social drama/comedy/crime film.

Sonny's plan to finance his wife Leon 's sex change operation by robbing a bank has run aground. In exchange for freeing his hostages, Sonny wants a plane to take him to a foreign country. He asks his not-so-brilliant friend/co-conspirator Sal to what country he would want to travel. Sal cogitates for a while, then suggests, "Wyoming."  After a pause, Sonny replies, "Sal, Wyoming's not a country." The exchange (by John Cazale as Sal and Al Pacino as Sonny) is delivered magnificently -- Cazale with blank-faced understated sincerity, Pacino with tempered exasperation.

"Wyoming" was not in the script (nor in the essay from which the script was drawn) but was improvised by Cazale. A moment of pure genius.

If you haven't seen the film, run -- not walk -- to your nearest TV.  

Small Screen Godlessness

We binge-watched the seven-hour mini-series Godless in three marathon nights.

Godless is a Western, or more exactly a fantasia on Western-movie themes and incidents. To the genre-literate, almost every plot element or character will be familiar, but shootouts and jail breaks and horse-rustling and miraculously healing bullet wounds were re-combined in ways that kept our attention. I'm proud to say that I didn't fall asleep once during the three long evenings, which is quite a compliment to the series, inasmuch as I've recently emerged as an Olympic-quality narcolept, prone to drift into sleep at the drop of a hat, even during the second overtime.  

The three most interesting features of Godless, were, in my opinion, a) the landscape, which, although it surrounds us here in Boulder, seemed particularly crisp on the hi def screen, b) the horses, which are noble beasts of their own and were respectfully depicted and admired by the cinematographer, and c) the character of MaryAgnes, played by Merit Wever, who was rather wonderful in the role and who was rewarded with a lot of the good lines. MaryAgnes is a tough young rifle-toting crack shot who plays for the other team but who you want on your side.  

I thought that Jeff Daniels who played the ruthless mass-murderer Frank Griffin overacted like crazy. If overacting were a crime, he'd be looking at a good twenty years in solitary. Plus I know it's the fashion that your deranged evil charismatic lunatic villain always has to be a bible thumper yet let's face it -- that's a cliche that has served its purpose and earned its retirement. Speaking of religion -- even aside from the title of the series and the observation that it's a godless country there's a heck of a lot of religion stuff both good and bad but mostly bad in this series. For example, much of the backstory evokes the Mountain Meadow Massacre -- one of the most dreadful acts of domestic terrorism in our nation's history -- which was perpetrated by Mormons (although Mormon participation is underplayed and instead the atrocity is attributed to a nonspecific religious fanaticism). There are frequent scenes of worship and pilgrimage as well as intermittent focus on the new church that the villagers of LaBelle are constructing and specifically on the fashioning of a substantial cross that is photographed as though it were brimming with significance. Moreover, the inhabitants of LaBelle wait six and seven-eighths episodes for the new preacher to arrive but when he finally appears he has only the most banal platitudes to deliver. Frankly, I'm not positive whether the writer of Godless thought the preacher's speech was genuinely profound or whether he couldn't give him better words, or whether he was trying to assert that the pieties of faith offered no consolation whatever to the beat-up townspeople. It would have been better if the preacher had just sung an appropriate hymn and let the LaBelleians join in so we could at least end with good music.

Godless offers a number of revisionist moments where tradition is overturned, sometimes too obviously. An instance: LaBelle is inhabited almost entirely by women and it is the women who make the decisions and take the active roles; men are passive bystanders. Quite an inversion of the usual macho practice. And also: usually in the westerns when there's the threat of intermarriage between the races, it's the dark skin who gets killed. This time the commonplace was turned on its head with the gratuitous killing of he white guy -- but I think it was a bit too pointed to name him "Whitey." And the Indians: now that we have the word "orientalism" to describe the mythologizing and falsifying of people of the east, we could apply the word "Indianism" to the romanticizing of the Paiutes, who are depicted as repositories of supernatural mystery and tribal wisdom (which is I suppose is a step up from brutal savages, but still not respectful or true). "Indianism" leads to a grotesque failure in the story when the sheriff is accompanied by a lone brave on horseback who may or may not be a ghost and who should have thudded to the cutting-room floor (along with some faux-spiritual nonsense, totally out of place, about the sheriff losing and regaining his shadow). 

The series centered on the conflict between father and adopted son -- a borrowing straight out of Red River, but this time around there's not going to be a reconciliation. The allegorically-named son Roy Goode winds up shooting his father, up close, pistol to temple. Which I liked a lot, because, first of all, I was by this time totally inured to violence, and also because the evil addled father-villain-prophet repeatedly claimed the ability to foresee his own death and "this isn't it." "You're wrong," says Goode, pulling the trigger. So much for prophecy. Immediately afterwards, the hero rides alone into the sunset -- not into a metaphorical sunset but a very real and carefully photographed sunset -- even though if he had his wits about him he would take his more-than-a-match lady friend with him. It's a unsatisfying conclusion and one that is dictated, I think, more by the zillion Saturday afternoon Westerns of my childhood than by the internal logic of the film. She loves him. But Western heroes named Goode just plain love their horses more than hearth, home and sex and they are all secretly afraid that if they marry and allow themselves to become domesticated they'll wind up like poor uxorious powerless Van Heflin in Shane.

Lady on a Train (1945)

When you start to watch a 1945 black-and-white movie called Lady on a Train you have certain expectations, especially when you're told in advance that it's about a woman who sees a murder take place from a train window. And when the movie features such noir stalwarts as Dan Duryea and Ralph Bellamy. And especially when the title of the movie evokes The Lady Vanishes and Lady in the Lake and Strangers on a Train. But Lady on a Train is not what you might think it's going to be; in fact, it's a film that never has a clue about what it is or wants to be. It's an unsatisfying hodgepodge.

There are some films that are so bad that they become fascinating for sheer awfulness. Lady on a Train is that kind of awful. It starts out noir-y and offers, intermittently, fistfights and mistaken identities and shadows, lots of shadows, and enough red herrings to feed cast and crew for the entire time the film was in production. But it also takes a shot at comedy -- not sophisticated banter but broad farce: in one scene, trying to hide herself from a hired gunsel, the heroine disguises herself as a chair and moves around from place to place just as she would in an Abbott and Costello vehicle. And then, if farce/noir weren't enough of a burden, at three separate times during the events, with the least possible justification, Deanna Durbin, playing at being a detective, breaks into song, but only because she's Deanna Durbin, not because the film requires her to do so. So it's a noir-farce-sentimental musical. It just don't work, except for connoisseurs of badness.

Plus it features two of the ugliest hats ever to come out of the Hollywood chapeau-shop:

 

 After making this film (and another clunker) Deanna Durbin left Hollywood, where she had been the highest paid woman in America, married and moved to France, never appeared on stage or on film again -- and reassumed her birthname, Edna Mae Durbin. It's a decision one can respect. 

Amnesia on Film: Love Letters (1945)

Here's another film in the sub-genre that might be called a "Did I Do It."  And still another case of "post-murder amnesia."

Singleton, who can't remember anything, even her own first name, is played by Jennifer Jones with a kind of distant unfocused look about her. She is seriously troubled; in addition to her amnesia, she's been the victim of a prank in which Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten) wrote her Cyrano-like love letters under the name of the lout Roger Morland. She fell in love with the author of the letters, but alas, deceived, married the lout. Now the lout has been murdered and Singleton, blamed for it, is just out of the mental hospital where she was incarcerated. Did she do it?  Of course not. She may not have a clue, but Alan and we the audience suspect that she's too pretty and harmless to have done anything bad, let alone committed a murder. Eventually, the truth outs and the real murderer is revealed. Singleton regains her memory and gains the replacement husband (the eloquent Alan that she wanted all along). It's a mighty unbelievable story but whenever amnesia is involved, probability goes flying out the window.

Bosley Crowther, the New York Times film critic at the time, who never liked anything, called it "sentimental twaddle." I myself, once disbelief is not only suspended but obliterated, found it to be a quite an engaging mystery. 

Amnesia on Film: Journal of a Crime (1934)

This pre-Code film deploys amnesia in a manner that is bizarre and possibly unique. Paul, a playwright, is conducting a no ambiguity, no euphemism affair with the actress Odette. His wife Francoise is jealous, so much so that she shoots and kills her rival. And gets away with it. However, she is overcome with guilt and falls into a profound depression, which the actress Ruth Chatterton portrays convincingly, perhaps because her face lacks expression even when she is jubilant. It appears for a while as though Francoise is going to succumb to guilt. However, she is seriously injured in an automobile accident. She is hospitalized but recovers, losing only her memory. But no memory, no guilt, and in the end Francoise has recovered her husband and her health and happily sips martinis on the Riviera. It's a rare case of therapeutic amnesia. Loss of memory doesn't create a problem; it solves it. And why is Paul content to re-unite with his wife the murderess? Because he is convinced that it is all God's will -- a mighty shallow expedient. So God too is complicit in the murder and its aftermath.

This was 1934; they couldn't have made it that way in 1935, when adultery and crime were required to be punished.

Here's Ruth Chatterton, famous in her day but now almost forgotten: 

 

Amnesia on Film: The Blue Gardenia (1953)

Just two days after we watched The Scarf (1951) along comes another case of not "whodunnit" but "dididoit" or better still, "doirememberdoing it."  Another case of amnesia, this one implicating Hollywood stalwarts Vera Caspary and Fritz Lang, who should have known better. This time it's Norah Larkin, a telephone operator well played by Anne Baxter, who picks up a poker and takes a crack at wolf/would-be-date-rapist/nasty-character Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr) and then blacks out. Another case of "stress amnesia," I suppose. After many twists it turns out that Norah may have struck Prebble but not hard enough to finish him off -- the real murderer was another of Prebble's victims, a seduced and abandoned ex-girlfriend.

 

I have to say, once again, that Norah's amnesia seems less like a medical condition than a very very tired plot gimmick. Memory is lost and regained o so conveniently.  But the larger implications of the relation of memory to sense of self are left unacknowledged and unexplored. 

 

Just as in The Scarf, Norah recovers her memory and gets the guy -- in this case Casey Mayo, the reliable Richard Conte, who plays a gossip columnist who has just enough brain to solve the mystery.   

 

The Blue Gardenia has been called "feminist," but if it is, its feminism is mild and unobtrusive. Is it that Norah's roommate Crystal Carpenter, played by wisecrack-heavy Ann Sothern, keeps her ex-husband and present-boyfriend around strictly for sexual purposes?  But that's all the film offers in the way of strong women; Norah herself, after her one moment of reflexive poker-wielding, becomes passive, emotional, incapable of taking action. Passive, she leaves it to others to clear her of guilt.

Amnesia on Film: The Scarf (1951)

The Scarf is a most curious, eccentric film. Something of its oddity is conveyed by TCM's one-sentence plot summary: "An asylum escapee meets a waitress and hides on a turkey farm; supposedly he killed someone." The film was written and directed by E. A. (Ewald Andre) Dupont, one of the many German refugees working in Hollywood during and after the war, and features a splendid cast including John Ireland, Mercedes McCambridge, Emlyn Williams and especially James Barton, in a rather brilliant performance as a good-hearted, grizzled, hermit farmer whose flock of turkeys serves as source of income and as watchdog and possibly as metaphor.

John Howard Barrington escapes from an institution for the criminally insane. It seems that he's been incarcerated for a murder that he can't remember committing. Some sort of stress amnesia, the audience is expected to believe. He falls in with Connie Carter, a forthright waitress-singer-floozy: she introduces herself succinctly: "I'm no lily, not at all.  But my morals have no zipper. Let it go at that."  Connie wears an unusual scarf; when Barrington notices it he regains a smidgen of memory. It's going to be the clue to resolving his amnesia.  After many an adventure and some good photography, it is revealed that judge, jury and Barrington himself have been deceived. Barrington is innocent and the real murderer and villain is Dr. David Dunbar, an effete confidence man/psychologist who has hidden his own psychopathic past. At the climax, all is revealed (with the help of the scarf) and turns out for the best --  Barrington gets the girl, regains his memory and his innocence, and takes up the serious business of farming turkeys.

I found The Scarf absolutely riveting although I had to suspend disbelief over the many holes in the plot and some occasional crazy continuity problems. But amnesia movies can be mighty flexible about such details.

And there's a subtext of theatrical repetition-compulsion:  Emlyn Williams, who plays the maniac-murderer David Dunbar, "became an overnight star in 1935, with his thriller Night Must Fall, which he wrote and also played the lead role of a psychopathic murderer." 

You Can Count on Me Again and Again

All my movie-loving friends told me that I must watch Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester-by-the-Sea (2016). That was before the film won all those awards. So I crashed the Netflix line and there it was in my mailbox the first day that it was released on disk. And indeed it's a fine film. No car chases, no special effects, just real people wrestling their way through his world of woe. Good dialogue. Excellent camera work, excellent editing, splendid acting. 

But half way through the film, I began to experience disappointment. An unavoidable sense of dejavuitude. Wait, haven't I seen this before? And then I remembered Lonergan's earlier film, You Can Count on Me (2000). Hmmm.

In YCCoM, 20ish small-town boy Terry Prescott is unsteady and unfocused because he has lost his parents in an automobile accident. in MbtS, 30ish small-town boy Lee Chandler is sullen and isolated because he has lost his children in a house fire. In YCCoM,  Terry Prescott has a nephew, son of his much more grounded sister, with whom he tries to connect. In MBtS, Lee Chandler has a nephew, son of his brother, with whom he tries to connect. In YCCoM, Terry Prescott gets into a fight with a guy he used to know very well. In MbtS, Lee Chandler gets into a bar fight with a guy he's never met.  In YCCoM, Terry Prescott can't stay put, has to be on the road; in MbtS, Lee Chandler is stuck at home, can't get out of his rut. 

The details are different, but it's unquestionably the same story, inverted. It can almost be thought of as a sequel, with Casey Affleck recapitulating the role created by Mark Ruffalo. 

They're both excellent films -- just a trifle redundant. As a would-be enthusiast of the later effort, I felt just a little cheated.  

All writers, even the best, repeat themselves. Nevertheless, I'm hoping that Kenneth Lonergan's next picture, to which I'm looking forward with great anticipation, breaks out of the box, tries something entirely new.

Chinatown -- Odd Man Out

At the Vivian de St. Vrain Theater, also known as the bedroom, pleasurably supine on what Italians call the letto matrimoniale, we watch films from all decades of cinema history. The new technologies deluge us with riches. Films arrive by mail, by download, and on TCM and MGM and Encore Classics. It's all so remarkably easy.

We especially enjoy unplanned, spontaneous juxtapositions. Two nights ago, for example, we re-re-re-rewatched, on Encore, a film that must be on everyone's top ten list, the great noir classic Chinatown. Dazzled we were, once again. And then, last night, courtesy of the U. S. Post Office and Netflix, along came Carol Reed's masterpiece, Odd Man Out. There was, trust me, no plan to follow the one with the other -- but what a stroke of good fortune!!  

Chinatown (1974) gives us a fully-realized Los Angeles in the 1930s. The plot is complicated but not confusing. J. J. Gittes, a bored, compromised detective, is smart enough to unravel the plan to steal the water and smart enough to identify the murderer but nevertheless too innocent to grasp the unspeakable corruption at the heart of the of Mulwray-Cross family. Odd Man Out (1947), which also manages to make its Belfast setting as real as real, offers only the slightest plot -- Johnny McQueen's desperate attempt to escape his city. Yet what a remarkable story and how ably peopled with a variety of characters. It becomes almost picaresque in organization as Johnny reels from adventure to adventure, encountering Irish samaritans good, bad, and traitorous. On the surface the films are miles apart --Los Angeles all bright colors and fancy clothes, awash with prosperity, Belfast dark dark dark and gloomy. And yet the two films seemed oddly similar.

The overlaps and echoes were such that we decided to investigate. Here's what we discovered, via the wikipedia entry on Chinatown. "Filmmaker Roman Polanski (the director of Chinatown) has repeatedly cited Odd Man Out as his favorite film. 'I still consider it to be one of the best movies I've ever seen and a film which made me want to pursue this career more than anything else....  I always dreamed of doing things of this sort or that style.  To a certain extent I must say that I somehow perpetuate the ideas of that movie in what I do.'"  So our speculation about the similarities was validated. Unquestionably, Polanski had Carol Reed in mind while making Chinatown.

Let us cut to the chase and (spoilers coming, so watch out!) concentrate on the two films' last scenes. Johnny McQueen, badly wounded, is trying to make it down to the docks to get himself out of Belfast. He's helped by his girlfriend Kathleen Ryan. For a hopeful second, it appears that he's going to escape, but the police surround him. He can no longer see, but he asks Kathleen, "Is it far?"  Kathleen replies (and you have to be made of stone not to drop a tear), "It's a long way, Johnny, but I'm coming with you." She shoots at the police and they respond with "deadly force." It's suicide by cop -- a sad emotional love-death Romeo and Juliet ending. The ending of Chinatown is much more hopeless. Evelyn Mulwray tries to escape her father, corrupt and powerful Noah Cross. She drives away with her daughter but a fusillade of police bullets kills her. Evil, malevolent Cross wins everything -- the money, the land, the water, the child. (Polanski even altered the original ending to make it darker, more like Odd Man Out.) "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown" --  i.e. inexplicable, impenetrable.

More on Polanski here.

A "Hitch" Conundrum

According to his biographer (Peter Ackroyd), Alfred Hitchcock "feared and hated the body." When he was a student at St. Ignatius in London, whenever he used the lavatory, he scrubbed it "so that it seemed as though no one had been there." At maturity, Hitchcock stood 5' 5" and weighed approximately 300 pounds. His marriage to Alma Reville (4'11") was mostly "white." He claimed that it was "sexless" and that he was a "celibated" director, and that his daughter, Patricia, was some sort of error. "If he was not the center of conversation or attention at a dinner table, he would often doze off." He made a bet that a property man would not be able to spend the night chained to a camera in a dark studio, then sabotaged him with a bottle of brandy laced with a strong laxative. He referred to his audience as the "moron millions." He was fond of the great painters but had no interest in any "symbolic significance or inner meaning." The actress Ann Todd reported that he had a schoolboy's obsession with sex and "an endless supply of very nasty and vulgar stories and jokes. He was a very sad person." He "had a fetish about women wearing glasses." One of his secretaries reported that he bought her five or six pairs but if she appeared without wearing one, "it irritated the devil out of him." During the making of Psycho, Hitchcock would place one or more grotesque models of Norman Bates' mummified mother in Janet Leigh's dressing room, just to hear her scream. "He would also regale her with his fund of dirty stories just before she went on camera." When asked, "what is the deep logic of your films," he replied, "to make the spectator suffer." When an actor was dissatisfied with a performance, Hitchcock refused another take, saying, "They'll never know in Peoria." While "The Birds" was being filmed, he harassed Tippi Hedren mercilessly, sending her flowers, specifying what clothes she could wear, keeping her from her daughter, trying to convince co-workers that they were having an affair. He gave Hedren's young daughter (Melanie Griffith) an image of her mother lying in a coffin. Hitchcock's recurrent dream was that his penis was made of crystal. 

Is it possible that so stunted a human being might become a great artist?  Or is it rather that his obsessions, distortions and failures of human empathy constitute a permanent barrier to greatness and that time will reveal that even his best films are shallow and brittle -- all surface glitter?

It Happened in Brooklyn, so they Say

If it happened in Brooklyn, it must have happened in metaphorical or mythological rather than real Brooklyn, because it's not the Brooklyn of my memory. It Happened in Brooklyn is a 1947 musical, I guess you'd have to call it, featuring still skinny Frank Sinatra and womanly Kathryn Grayson, and also Jimmie Durante, who steals the show. And also the ever-luminous Gloria Grahame in a very small role as an Army nurse in England. Brooklyn is evoked as a fairy tale land where everyone is nice to everyone and jobs and money fall from the trees -- kind of an urban big rock candy mountain. Not the case -- though nowadays Brooklyn, which used to be mocked, is every Twenty-Something's land of putative milk and theoretical honey. In truth there's nothing much that is recognizably Brooklynian -- even in geography -- to my jaded old eyes except a rather beautiful sequence of Frank Sinatra singing and "dancing" on Brooklyn Bridge. Most of the action supposedly takes place in the basement of New Utrecht High School, but in actual fact it's a Hollywood sound stage.

Sinatra, a returned soldier, thinks he's in love with Kathryn Grayson but she prefers Peter Lawford, playing the shy grandson of an English Dook. The film is worth seeing if only because Sinatra and Grayson sing, believe it or not, "La ci darem la mano" from Don Giovanni -- as far as I know Sinatra's only foray into grand opera.

If I had been the screenwriter, I would have had Gloria Grahame jump on a luxury liner and return to Brooklyn for the climactic concluding scene, rather than remaining, as she does, merely a sweet overseas memory of Frankie's. 

It Happened in Brooklyn

 

Poor Robert Mitchum (Out of the Past, Angel Face)

On successive nights, we watched Out of the Past (1947) and Angel Face (1953). Both are, as they say, "gripping" films. In my present situation, "gripping" means that even though the nominal curtain rose on these movies after 9:00 pm, and I was in bed, comfortable, with a full stomach, I was sufficiently gripped that I didn't waver or snooze or nap, even for a second. Such criteria of excellence may not seem significant to younger folk, but trust me, loyal readers, in these latter years, staying awake and engaged is a crucial critical yardstick.    

Both Out of the Past and Angel Face are superior noirs. In both films the central character is played by Robert Mitchum. I couldn't detect a the least tad of difference between the two parts he plays. You could lift his Jeff Bailey from Out of the Past and plunk him down in Angel Face as Frank Jessup and no one would notice, except that civilian Frank would lack private-eye Jeff's semi-official trench coat and fedora. In both films, Mitchum's character is expressionless and sleepy-eyed and smart but, once his testosterone kicks in, falls prey to a clever, ruthless bad bad bad girl. Both characters know that they're being framed for murder and yet can't just pack up and move to Nebraska or Mexico or somewhere sensible -- as any human being outside of the world of noir would do. You, the spectator, want to raise yourself from your soft pillow and shout at the TV and at the guys Mitchum plays, "Hey you big lug, what the heck are you doing. Use your noodle." But lunkhead Mitchum makes mistake after mistake. I hope everyone who's reading this post has seen the movies, because I don't want to spoil their pleasure in the endings, but let me just say this -- Jeff, or Frank, or Bob, please next time don't get into an automobile with a homicidal femme fatale in the last few frames of a murder mystery and expect to escape alive. And if you must  do so, at least check your so-called girlfriend's purse for a silver-handled Beretta. And under no circumstances surrender to her the keys to the vehicle. Do the driving yourself.

These films have everything one would want in a classic film noir: a relentless wicked ambitious beautiful dame who entraps an honest but naif and helpless ingenu, and also snappy dialogue, a gloomy claustrophobic atmosphere, multiple plot twists and turns, and the valueless atomistic society that Hobbes feared would follow from curtailed authority. And much yearning for cash, which is never in adequate supply. Lots of shadows and odd-angled photography. Some good, complicated characters but a few who are merely melodramatically evil. 

Mitchum's acting is much praised of late but I don't buy it: he's effective in a way but monochromatic to a fault. A better actor is Kirk Douglas, who  projects gleeful menace as a corrupt, criminal businessman. But to me both movies are carried by their female leads. Dazzling Jane Greer as Kathie Moffat is equally adept at innocence and villainy, often in the same scene, sometimes from moment to moment. At the end of the film, when she's killing people left and right, she wears a nun-like snood that only an accomplished actress could transform into a brilliant metaphor. Equally splendid is Jean Simmons as the angel-faced Diane Tremayne, who conveys innocence, ambition, obsession, and intermittent but genuine madness with the raise of an eyebrow (and the help of excellent lighting). And good girl Mona Freeman shines in a restaurant scene in which she sees right through Tremayne's beauty to the dangerous craziness beneath.  

Here's Mitchum and Greer together.

 

 

 

Pussygate

A textbook example of the unthinkable actually happening:

"It's good to be the king," says Mel Brooks (as Louis XVI) in The History of the World, Part I, lifting the skirt of one of his lovely courtieresses in order to dry-hump her. It's make-believe Hollywood pseudo-licentiousness. It's outrageous, beyond the pale, and hilarious as long as it stays in the movie.

"It's good to be star," says Trump, bragging about his license to kiss women and grab them by their "pussies."

What in comedy is amusing is in real life simply grotesque -- as is the perpetrator of the atrocity, the maniacal Republican candidate for the most powerful office on earth.  

Junebug (2005)

When I saw Junebug for the first time shortly after it appeared in 2005, I enjoyed its gentle, affecting comedy. It's yet another "stranger comes to town" enactment, although this time, for once, the stranger is a woman. Madeleine Johnsen is a fortyish, worldly, sophisticated Chicago-based art-dealer. She arrives in a small North Carolina Christian-saturated community accompanied by her brand-new twenty-something husband, who is a native of the place. If they're not deeply in love, they're certainly enjoying a time of sexual satisfaction, perhaps even frenzy. As the film proceeds, a series of exquisite culture-clash misunderstandings illuminate both city and country.  

On last night's viewing, however, the film was far less amusing and more painful than I remembered. Did I see it the first time with rose-colored glasses?

In the film's loveliest scene, the young husband George Johnsen, played gracefully by Alessandro Nivola, is prevailed on at a church-basement social to "give us a hymn," which he does rather beautifully, offering Will Lamartine Thompson's ""Softly and Tenderly, Jesus Is Calling" which is an extremely melodic but theologically naive piece of sentimentality. As he sings, obviously very comfortable with the milieu and with the surroundings, the director's camera focuses on his wife Madeleine's (i.e. Embeth Davidtz's) expressive face. 

When I saw the film in 2005 or thereabouts, I thought Madeleine shone with wonderment and appreciation. O, I thought, she sees and appreciates a new dimension in her husband. This will lead to understanding between them and help her to navigate the gulf between her and her new family. How could I have been so undiscerning? This time, it was entirely clear that her reaction was exactly the opposite of what I had previously attributed to her. Madeleine doesn't get it at all. It's not appreciation, it's incomprehension, perhaps even condescension. Madeleine, I'm sorry to say, doesn't understand her husband, his culture, his religion, or his family. And indeed, subsequent events in the plot confirmed my new pessimism, for every time Madeleine has to make a choice, she does so with no accommodation to her husband's upbringing or values

She's glad to leave the place, she says at the end, but it's clear to me that she's learned nothing and that there's trouble brewing.

Most of the attention that the film has garnered is owing to Amy Adams' performance as George's pregnant child-like sister, which is indeed a remarkable piece of acting. But for my money, it's the visiting husband and wife who steal the show -- along with the intelligence and art of the director (Phil Morrison) and the writer (Angus MacLachlan).

"Oil the Women"

A friend recalls seeing a film, many years ago (1950s or 60s), in which a character speaks the wonderful line, "0il the women." My friend cannot remember the name of the movie or much about it, except that it was a desert "sword and sandal" job in which a sheik or pasha or emir or something else very "Orientalist," preparing for a lubricious but acceptable-to-the-League-of-Decency orgy, utters the fabulous phrase.

I can't identify the film and the words don't google. Does anyone out there in blaguelandia know where such an inspired bit of dialogue occurred. Who said it?  And more importantly, what genius wrote it?  

In the absence of real information, I'm free to create my own scenario. It's got to be a 1950s film in now-faded Technicolor, and really cheesy. It's not a real desert but a sound stage with minimal sand and and a few plastic rocks. The inferior lighting allows you to see shadows on the stained backcloth that passes for a vista. The costumes are off the rack and every once in a while there's a visible zipper. A microphone appears briefly and intermittently at the top of the screen. The part of the sheik is played not by Steve Cochran but by one of his less-accomplished imitators. The dialogue is in pseudo-archaic phony-middle-Eastern-accented English.

News comes of a victory in battle and the bejeweled and beturbaned emir, whose heavy eyebrows dance above his too-heavily-kohled eyes, turns to his muscular bodyguards and shouts, "bring out the food, bring out the drink, oil the women."

Anyway, that's the way I imagine it. But it's also possible that the line comes from a parody of such a film. Could it be tucked away somewhere in a Marx brothers movie? Or somewhere in one of Mel Brooks' historical skits. It's Monte Pythonish but alas before their time. 

Please help, friends of Vivian de St. Vrain. Who oiled what women?

Amnesia on Film: Black Angel (1946)

Black Angel is a good, fast-paced Cornell Woolrich mystery and certainly one of the noiriest of all noirs. It features lots of grimy black-and-white photography of seedy hotels and bars, and a nebbishy weakling who is falsely accused of murder and who is rescued from execution by a last-second phone call to the Governor. It also offers a blackmailing chantoosie and a hogshead of red herrings. The plot turns on an unusual episode of amnesia. Martin Blair, played by Cornellian Dan Duryea, has strangled his cheating ex-wife while in an alcoholic haze but doesn't remember that he did so. He gets himself involved with the attractive wife of a man who has been accused of the murder, abandons alcohol for Coca-Cola and sets out the find the killer. Eventually he falls off the wagon, and in a blackout suddenly "remembers" that he himself is the perpetrator. "It's Korsakoff's syndrome," mumbles an authoritative doctor, trying to add a glimmer of credibility to a doubtful turn of events.

I had never heard of Korsakoff's and I thought it was just mumbo-jumbo, but it turns out there is such a condition: "Korsakoff's syndrome is a chronic memory disorder caused by a severe deficiency of thiamine. It is most commonly caused by alcohol misuse." 

But Korsakoff's is not a come-and-go disease; it's a progressive deterioration. Moreover, there's not the vaguest hint in the "literature" to suggest either that a Korsakovian is likely to commit a murder and then forget it or that a second bout of drinking can restore his memory.  That sort of stuff is strictly Hollywood

Once again Hollywood amnesia proves to be the most flexible and variable of all diseases. 

 

Black Angel

Amnesia on Film: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)

Desperately Seeking Susan offers a cartoon version of amnesia. Pow, Roberta is knocked into a lamppost and doesn't know who she is. And then, a day later, pow again, she is knocked to the ground, bumps her head, and her memory returns intact. The film isn't interested in amnesia except as a plot device to facilitate the doppelganger relationship between Roberta and Susan. Roberta is a downtrodden cautious Fort Lee housewife; Susan is an anarchic adventuress. In the course of the film, each woman tries on the other's identity. Without a memory, but wearing Susan's clothes, Roberta "becomes" Susan, and Susan in turn invades Roberta's home and tries on her clothes, her pool, and her husband. At the end, Roberta has absorbed enough of Susan's pizzazz to leave her stifling husband and Susan has changed enough so that she can enjoy a moment with the boyfriend who has been desperately seeking her. It's an easy-to-watch film. Rosanna Arquette is lovely as a perpetual naif and Laurie Metcalf is superb as Roberta's short-tempered know-it-all sister-in-law. And it has more than one brilliant line of dialogue. "I thought you were dead."  "Naw, I was in New Jersey."  And my favorite: "How do you use the bird?"  -- which you have to have been there to understand and appreciate. An enjoyable film; unless you approach it with the idea that it has anything to do with real-life loss of memory.  

Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal

I remember that my first and until yesterday sole viewing of Bergman's The Seventh Seal took place in August of 1958 at one of those big old downtown Brooklyn movie palaces. I was in the company of Leigh Anderson and Alice Bruno, who might not remember the day -- or remember me, for that matter.

It was a memorable occasion because Bergman mattered, or so it seemed at the time. Like everyone in my age-cohort, I had grown up on westerns and crime and horror and musicals. I knew what to expect in a movie theatre. A beginning, a middle and an end, for one thing. A resolution. But then along came Fellini and Kurosawa and Bergman and the rules changed. It was exciting and puzzling and like other observant college kids, I was trying to figure it all out. Movies had been Saturday entertainment;  I did not know that thee could be "intellectual."

The Seventh Seal took me by surprise in all kinds of ways. It was episodic and the episodes didn't tie together into a linear narrative. Its emotional range -- from sexy to sordid to brutal to picturesque to ruminative -- was more than I could fathom or follow. It didn't have a Hollywood plot -- no one ended up with the money or the girl.  And then there were these long brooding silent shots in which the point lay in the cinematography (I word I didn't wouldn't learn for twenty years). I had no vocabulary to help me understand what I saw -- I didn't even know the word "allegory", or if I did, I didn't connect it with movies.

Last night, The Seventh Seal came around again, this time not in a palace but right there on the big hdtv.  I was hoping it would still be as magical as it was in the 1950s, but alas, not so. It seemed, I'm sorry to say, stagey and contrived and pretentious. The allegory -- the despairing knight's search for meaning in a godless universe -- came across, last night, as shallow. The discovery that there ain't a god out there does not shock this born and raised atheist, although I do feel for Bergman and all those others whom it cost so dearly to surrender the illusion.   

Amnesia on Film: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

As far as I can remember, and I've read the stories many times, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes never had to deal with amnesia, which in those days of reading and writing had not yet become the most routine of plot devices. The Holmes of Billy Wilder's movie runs into amnesia straight off the bat, when Gabrielle Valladon, a handsome though mighty bedraggled woman, appears at 221-B Baker Street apparently suffering a loss of memory precipitated by both a bump on the head and a near drowning in the Thames. But there's a gimmick within the gimmick: Mme. Valladon's amnesia is totally fraudulent. The lady is in "fact" a German spy pretending loss of memory in order to insinuate herself into Holmes' sympathies.

The audience falls for it, which is not a surprise, because we watchers have been indoctrinated to willingly and enthusiastically suspend our disbelief at the slightest hint of film's most common malady. But that Holmes should succumb -- well, that's a bit of a disappointment. Fictional Holmes would have been a lot more discerning, amnesia-wise, than filmic Holmes.

Amnesia on Film: And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen (2002)

There can't be a disease in fiction that demands more vigorous suspension of disbelief than movie amnesia. And Now, Ladies and Gentleman, a latter production of the great Claud Lelouch, pushes the  disbelievery to the breaking point. It asks us to accept not one but two identical and fanciful cases of the affliction. Both Valentin Valentin, played by Jeremy Irons, and Jane Lester, played by Patricia Kaas suffer from symmetrical "blackout" periods in which memory evaporates.

What, prithee, are the odds?

Duelling amnesias are mighty unlikely, but such is the premise of the film. Although I doubt that there's much in the scientific literature about the romantic potential of mutual amnesia, in this film the disease becomes a mild erotic stimulant. Why the heck not, I say.

 Inasmuch as no one but confirmed amnesiaphiles are ever going to see this film, let me spoil it at once by saying that both Valentin, a jewel thief, and Jane, a chantoosie, find themselves in Fez in Morocco. There they are healed, and after much ado, set out to circumnavigate the earth in a racing boat called Ladies and Gentlemen (hence the film's odd title). Valentin, a traditionalist, takes the orthodox medical route and goes to a local surgeon, who shows him and us an MRI generated picture of his brain disfigured by a great white splotch ("It's a wonder he can remember anything," says the Doc.) Valentin undergoes radical surgery but Jane, taking an easier route, is cured by making a pilgrimage to a local Moroccan saint. How  unjudgmental and egalitarian to equate medicine and mystery;  and also, by the way, how very nonsensical. 

The film is well made --  replete with all kinds of fancy effects and flashbacks and dream sequences. I love the idea of draining color from the characters' faces to signify that they have begun another of their symmetrical "blackouts." But aside from the amnesias, there's not much to wonder at, at least not if you've seen your share of caper/jewel thief films. 

I loved the exotic North African locales. I'm chagrined to report that I didn't recognize the wondrous Claudia Cardinale, who was 63 when the film was made. Claudia had been a great friend to my youthful imagination.

The amnesia that afflicts Valentin and Jane is, as far as I know, unique in that it comes and goes, appears and disappears. Less like an amnesia than an allergy -- here one moment, then gone. But as a plot device, constant.

Amnesia on Film: I Love You Again (1940)

The ol' amnesia gimmick plus "screwball" comedy plus W. S. Van Dyke plus Willam Powell and Myrna Loy equals "I Love You Again" (1940).

Workaholic, unfun Larry Wilson gets conked on the head and wakes up as an amusing grifter named George Cary. (Hollywood amnesia will do that to you, apparently -- completely revise your personality.) But in his new and at the same time prior state, Larry/Geoge has to come to terms with Larry's wife Kay, who wants a divorce from the melancholy cheapskate half of the compound hero. And yet It comes to pass that Kay  prefers the grifter.

Much forced hilarity ensues. 

Once again, amnesia proves to be the most malleable of maladies. Bop on the head, he's Larry; another boy, he's George. Amnesia is a gas, even to the pont that Myrna Loy, unhappy with what she's got, picks up a vase to re-transform William Powell into the way she wants him. Mechanical (not medical) amnesia anticipates Danny Kaye in The Court Jester: a snap of the finger he's a duellist; another snap and he's a clown.

It's obvious a) that amnesia easily combines with the Jekyll-Hyde doppelganger scenario, and b) that even by 1940, movie-amnesia could be a target of ridicule. 

Amnesia on Film: Unknown (2011)

Here's a case of double amnesia, in which a second case of the disease is overlain over the first (as usual, once the amnesia genie is activated, screenwriters cry havoc and let slip the dogs of anything goes).

Our hero, played by a tired Liam Neeson, awakes from a coma not remembering much but thinking he's Dr. Martin Harris, a geneticist. He has no identification, and no one knows him, even his young wife. Turns out, he's not Dr. Harris at all, but a professional assassin who has somehow forgotten that his alias is an alias. It takes an innocent new girlfriend and several car chases and some highly-choreographed fist fights before he comes to his senses. Once he realizes that he's a professional killer, however, he turns over a new leaf and becomes a Good Guy. He thwarts the intended assassination and with solemn steps and slow, begins a new moral life.

Here's the question that occurred to me:  a guy is a long-time, career assassin. He has an accident and forgets that he was a murderer. Then little by little he remembers. Is it probable that his personality would change and he would be reborn to innocence and good citizenship, I only ask because that's the red herring that Unknown's audience is asked to masticate? I myself don't buy it.

Neeson asks, over and over, "Who am I?"  In serious works of literature (cf. Lear's "Who is it that can tell me who I am'), such a question is tragic.  In amnesia movies, "Who am I" is not tragic but merely mcguffinic.

Amnesia on Film: Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

I imagine that the writers of Cowboys and Aliens had a grand old time inserting into their screenplay as many as possible of both Westerns and sci-fi/horror cliches. They did very well: there's a loner cowboy with cigarillo and fists of steel, a domineering cattleman and his feckless son, a timid barkeep, a posse on horseback tracking abducted relatives a la The Searchers, a band of Chiricuara Apaches fighting for their own survival, innocent distressed maidens, etc., etc., and at the end, a hero riding off into the sunset. On the other side of the ledger, computer graphic aliens resembling the velociraptors in Jurassic Park (except for the slimy green blood) attacking us poor mortals, multiple abductions, and o my gosh even a little boy hiding from a creepy creature in a crevice in the rock, and then our intrepid James Bond-y macho hero sneaking into the spaceship to free the captives and dynamite the mother ship, my o my what a bounty.

And to these cliches, the unsatisfied writers added a bonus -- a dollop of movie amnesia. Why not? Jake Lonergan awakes in the desert not knowing who he is, why he is wounded, and without a clue as to why he has a futuristic bracelet soldered to his wrist. Like most movie amnesiacs, he remains fully functional and unimpaired. He's not the least bit agitated by his loss of memory. But then comes a truly embarrassing, semi-racist moment. The Indians, who as everyone knows are noble and in touch with the human soul in a way that we products of western civilization can never be, treat his amnesia with a frothy brew (perhaps mescaline, but who can tell?). Memory spontaneously returns; Jake remembers that he escaped from the mother ship, knows where it has been parked, and also knows about the secret entrance. And so to work.

Later on, the released abductees are all amnesiac, but they're cured instantly (the movie is long enough) without Apache influence.

So now we can add alien abduction to the long list of precipitants of movie amnesia.

This film could have been a gas except that its makers forgot about the comedy that's inherent in the title and in the conception. Too bad. As it stands, it's a solemn, noisy, elaborate, expensive, flimsy chimera. 

At one point in the quest, the posse comes across an enormous structure that looks like a paddle-wheeler right there in the middle of the desert. "There's no river within five hundred miles that can handle that thing." But they continue along, the boat is never mentioned again and plays no part in the story -- thereby proving that even screenwriters can suffer disabling bouts of amnesia.

Amnesia on Film: Clean Slate (1994)

I imagine that the "pitch" went something like this:

"Ok, we have the star, Dana Carvey, who's hot right now. He's a funny man. He's going to play a detective who watches The Maltese Falcon on the tv and thinks he's Humphrey Bogart. And there's a coin that's worth seven million dollars and a bunch of guys are after it. But here's the gimmick. Carvey has amnesia and he doesn't know that he has the coin. And then the real kicker -- not only does he have amnesia, but he has a kind of amnesia that starts over every time he goes to sleep, so he doesn't even know what he did yesterday.. Ain't that terrific?"

Well, it must have been terrific, because someone decided to put some money into the film, and someone managed to persuade James Earl Jones and Michael Gambon to take supporting roles in this bird-brained turkey.

Did anyone say, "Does amnesia work that way? Is there a kind of amnesia that begins again every morning."

If they did, I know what the answer would have been. "Who cares? This is not real amnesia, it's movie amnesia"  --which is, once again, the most malleable of maladies.

So here's a new genre, the amnesiac-gumshoe farce. A small, unpromising genre.

It's an unfunny movie that hovers between D (for dumb) minus and F (phony). I doubt anyone's ever heard of it, except for hardcore amnesia fans. And even they were disappointed. 

Amnesia on Film: Somewhere in the Night (1946)

Somewhere in the Night is an early Joseph Mankiewicz film noir with amnesia at its center. George Taylor, an injured ex-Marine played monochromatically by John Hodiak, returns from the South Pacific not knowing who he is are what he was --  except that he has a clue that he was on the shady side of the law. There's an involuted, convoluted and confusing plot that pushes all the noirish buttons: a chanteuse with a heart of gold and also a dame who's nothing but trouble, a missing briefcase stuffed with 2 million bucks, a funny farm where a witness to murder is imprisoned, a cynical police lieutenant, and even a polysyllabic European gangster who derives from both Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre. Everything is recycled, and so is the amnesia. George Taylor might  just as well have been a returning veteran with a perfect memory, or been a gumshoe, or a shamus and the film would have been just as good (or just as bad). It's surprising that when the money is recovered and the villains are punished, George gets the girl but, contrary to precedent, doesn't recover his memory. The film simply forgets his affliction and leaves him hanging. Perhaps it's romantic -- after all, if you win the love of the lady, what does memory matter?  Or perhaps the amnesia is so trivial, so perfunctory, so much a gimmick, that it can be shunted aside. 

Although not a good flim, it's partially redeemed by Richard Conte's turn as a smarmy nightclub owner, Sheldon Leonard's two minutes as a dumb cuckold, and Harry Morgan's thirty seconds as a bath attendant. Those guys are genuine pros.

More on movie amnesia: Spellbound, Random Harvest, Shattered, Blind Horizon The Bourne Identity The Crooked Way

Seventeen Hours of Downton Abbey

I've now sometimes zoomed but sometimes plodded through seventeen hours of Downton Abbey. The series is lovely to look at but also at various times lugubrious, false, and shamelessly gimmicky -- but apparently I'm easily seduced. Let me confess: I fell for it, mostly, but always against my better judgment. Let's face it, the primitive parts of my brain simply overwhelmed my higher critical faculties. I laughed and cried, even when I knew that I was being cheated and manipulated. 

My favorite parts: Mr. Pamuk and his Nelson Rockefeller departure ("he came, and went)," which took me totally by surprise, as did Anna's and Lady Grantham's resourceful disposal of the corpse. Lady Sybil as a nurse, in part because she was doing useful work for the first time in her pampered life, and in part because she looked so fetching in the uniform. My favorite performers -- Maggie Smith, reprising her role in Gosford Park (a much superior great house fiction), and Mr Carson's eyebrows, perpetually raised in shock at modern shenanigans. 

The series is pure, undiluted soap. It is also, as they used to say in Variety, a "costumer." Query -- would I have spent seventeen hours watching a television program set in a mansion in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2012 in which a soldier returns paralyzed from the wars and miraculously regains his mobility, where terrible culinary disasters occur because the cook almost goes blind, where granny shows her goodwill by losing a flower show, in which the family is traumatized when a daughter runs off with the chauffeur, or where a presumably innocent servant is sentenced to death for the murder of his wayward wife. I don't think so. I would have said, "cornball soap opera" and clicked back to the NBA. Or to the advertisements for zirconite jewelry. And yet I went on. And on. And continued on even after Downton Abbey not only jumped the shark but vaulted the great white whale, Moby Dick himself, when it introduced into the plot a bout of supposed amnesia. Amnesia! Is there anything soapier?

Or perhaps my reluctant fascination proves that the traditional formulas retain their power. Here's a formula of comedy: "artificial difficulties overcome." In Downton Abbey, Lady Mary and Matthew are destined for one another, and every viewer knows it, even as steaming piles of artificial difficulties are strewn and heaped in their path. Shakespeare could slice through the impediments in two hours traffic on the stage, but here it's seventeen anguished hours until heir and heiress finally figure it out. And here's another formula of comedy: always bring it to conclusion with a feast and a dance. They did, and, sucker that I am, I was elated. Even though I saw the scam coming a mile down the o-so-picturesque road