Lee Tracy

I wrote this ages ago for another forum:

Lee Tracy, too little known today, is one of the all-time great comic actors and a personal favorite of mine. He was the original Hildy Johnson in The Front Page on Broadway and although his major films are not numerous, each is a delight. Blessed Event with co-star Dick Powell and Bombshell with co-star Jean Harlow are gems long beloved by Thirties film buffs, but even they may not have seen The Half-Naked Truth, which is a pure jolt of the Lee Tracy magic. His physical and vocal presence are uniquely and unmistakably his: the lankily elastic body, the whirling-dervish energy, the sarcastic tone, the long fingers that always seem to be jabbing in someone's direction. There's not another screen actor I can think of who has quite the manic joie de vivre of the young Tracy. In The Half-Naked Truth, he plays a carnival barker and theatrical promoter who will go to any insane lengths to hog headlines (a very contemporary figure for us!). He's paired with Lupe "Mexican Spitfire" Velez, who proves to be an extremely apt partner for him; you believe in these two together, and that makes their final scene surprisingly emotional. (Tracy's magnetism definitely has its romantic aspect; watching Bombshell, an audience can be driven to heights of frustration waiting for Tracy and Harlow to realize that they are, in fact, perfect for one another.) The wonderful ending of The Half-Naked Truth also crystallizes the Tracy credo in a single line: "What good is life if you don't get some fun out of it?" You can have some of that fun by watching this film.

POSTSCRIPT: When I say that Tracy and Harlow are "perfect for each other" in Bombshell, I mean within the context of the film, that ends when the film is over: you can't actually imagine a future for them, but they demand to be paired by the 90 minute mark. Oddly, you can just about imagine a future for Tracy and Velez in The Half-Naked Truth (which is one reason its final scene is so good).

Tracy, a talent who takes a back seat to no one, pissed away his career, literally, in 1934. He had been cast in the film Viva Villa! (imagine Wallace Beery as Pancho Villa!), which was filmed partly on location in Mexico City. Bad boy Tracy pulled a prank by standing on the balcony of his hotel room and urinating on a passing military parade. This created quite a scandal. He was fired from the film and, although he did not stop working thereafter, he found himself increasingly relegated to second-tier productions.

Tracy did continue to appear in theater and, later, television, and had a bit of a comeback playing the President in Gore Vidal's The Best Man both on Broadway (he was nominated for a lead Tony) and film (he was nominated for a supporting Oscar). But his moment was really that 1925-1935 decade, both on stage in New York and on film in Hollywood.

The Isle of the Dead

First, there was a painting by the Swiss symbolist Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901). Or actually, there were five versions of the same subject, painted between 1880 and 1886 (four still survive; another was destroyed during World War II). The paintings had no names; Bocklin did not believe in titles. But one of his early dealers, the shrewd Fritz Gurlitt, dubbed this subject The Isle of the Dead, which stuck and (inevitably) became part of the meaning of these paintings. This is the second version, now in Basel:



The irresistible combination of image and title provoked fascination, even obsession. What can you you say about an image that was beloved by Hitler, Freud, and Lenin? -- well, that it is suggestive, without question. Other artists took the bait over the years. Sergei Rachmaninoff, Max Reger, and the monumentally obscure Heinrich Schulz-Beuthen all wrote music based on Bocklin's work. August Strindberg incorporated The Isle of the Dead into his great play The Ghost Sonata. Novelists, film-makers, other painters have all responded in turn. (There might be a book-length study in this.)

Val Lewton was, as we have seen, a man of pronounced visual sensibility who looked to art not just for the "look" of his films, but also for suggestions as to subject matter (Hogarth prints as the basis for Bedlam, for example). He first featured Bocklin's Isle of the Dead image in I Walked with a Zombie, then spun a whole film off it (with a notable re-creation of the image a few minutes in).

The plotting is most inventive: Lewton's Isle is set off the Greek coast during the First Balkan War (1912-1913), on a tiny island that is beset by plague and quarantined. Into this fraught situation also erupt catalepsy, vampirism, premature burial, and plenty of general hysteria. The movie may have the creepiest atmosphere of any of the Lewton pictures; and of the ones I've seen, it certainly has the highest body-count ("isle of the dead," not kidding).

"Everybody Plays the Fool"

Every so often, a pop song expresses an emotional truth so perfectly that it becomes a definitive example of that truth, scarcely to be bettered. One such for me is The Main Ingredient's 1972 R&B hit "Everybody Plays the Fool," which sums up in a more light-hearted fashion (and fewer words) what I was trying to get across in my post on "Love" the other day. It is a consoling song, too; I like that.



Okay, so your heart is broken
You sit around mopin'
Cryin' and cryin'
You say you`re even thinkin' about dyin'
Well, before you do anything rash, dig this

Everybody plays the fool sometime
There's no exception to the rule
Listen, baby, it may be factual, may be cruel
I ain't lyin', everybody plays the fool
Falling in love is such an easy thing to do
And there's no guarantee that the one you love
Is gonna love you

Oh-oh-oh, loving eyes they cannot see
A certain person could never be
Love runs deeper than any ocean
It clouds your mind with emotion

Everybody plays the fool, sometime
There's no exception to the rule
Listen, baby, it may be factual, may be cruel
I want to tell ya
Everybody plays the fool

How can you help it when the music starts to play
And your ability to reason is swept away
Oh-oh-oh, heaven on earth is all you see
You're out of touch with reality
And now you cry but when you do
Next time around someone cries for you

Everybody plays the fool, sometime
They use your heart just like a tool
Listen, baby, they never tell you so in school
I want to say it again
Everybody plays the fool
Listen to me, baby
Everybody plays the fool, sometime
No exception, no exception to the rule
It may be factual, may be cruel, sometime
But everybody plays the fool
Listen, listen, baby
Everybody plays the fool

Another Billy Budd

Seeing Peter Ustinov's excellent film adaptation of Billy Budd back-to-back with Benjamin Britten's opera is tremendously illustrative. Ustinov was a triple threat on this production, as director, co-writer (with, as it happens, DeWitt Bodeen, twenty years after he penned Cat People for Val Lewton), and star (as Captain Vere). Ustinov directed eight feature films, of which this was the fifth; but the others are not readily accessible, which means I have no way of putting his considerable achievement here into context. I will say that as actor-director, he seems not merely dutiful and professional as Robert De Niro does with The Good Shepherd, but brilliant as George Clooney does with Good Night, and Good Luck.

Operas are so stripped-down. Sung words are fewer than spoken words; musical tableaux take their time. This poses real challenges for the sort of psychological opera that Britten specialized in: how to convey the subtle-but-portentous mental shifts of Herman Melville or Henry James or Thomas Mann in such a tight format? Choose their shorter works for adaptation, that's for starters; but even so, the challenges remain. There have to be five times, maybe seven or eight times as many words in Ustinov's two-hour Budd as in Britten's two-and-a-half-hour Budd; which means that that much more meaning, in words, can be conveyed. Music certainly conveys other meanings, in Britten, but so does the visual and aural surface, in Ustinov; in general, Ustinov has more of an expanse to work with.

And he uses it. Just as novels are almost always more subtle and detailed than their film adaptations, this film adaptation of Melville is more subtle and detailed than Britten's operatic adaptation. How could it not be? These differences are built into the media; even at comparably high levels of excellence, Britten and Ustinov are working in different territories of potentiality.

Not all differences are dictated by the medium, of course. Ustinov's Budd is Claggart-dominated while Britten's opera is Vere-dominated; that is artistic choice. Remember how I asked for a Claggart that was as self-tormented as other-tormenting? It didn't take me long to find him. Robert Ryan's Claggart is one of the greatest (and fullest) "villains" in film history (odd to think that he didn't receive a single award for this performance). Ryan did much great acting over the years, but this is truly exceptional. He dominates the long central section of the film, in a series of brilliant dialogues with Ustinov's Vere, Terence Stamp's Budd, and Lee Montague's Squeak; and this material (more detailed even than in Melville) spells Claggart out without simplifying him. There is no equivalent explication in Britten's opera, not for Claggart or for Vere either; opera relies on broader strokes.

Terence Stamp was only 22 when he made his film debut as Billy Budd, and it can be said without exaggeration that he was born to play this role (and it got his career off to a charmed start to debut in it). Stamp didn't seem to have to reach very far to summon the innocence of Budd; either it coincided with something in him at the time, or he is an even cannier actor than one would suppose. In any case, he got recognized but fast, garnering an Academy Award nomination for his first film part.

Ustinov's Vere is highly accomplished without being moving in the way that Philip Lsangridge is in the English National Opera production of Britten's opera (and that Britten's music calls on him to be). In the movie, Vere's damning involvement in Budd's trial and conviction follows Melville almost word-for-word, while Britten, significantly, skips most of that. And Ustinov is commanding in that scene, and in his confrontations with Budd and Claggart. But in the end, one isn't pained for him, the way one is in Britten and in Melville. It might have been beyond Ustinov's not inconsiderable range to involve the audience in that way.

The movie benefits enormously from being largely shot on an actual ship at sea; never underestimate the power of location. Billy Budd readily passes another Patrick Murtha test of quality cinema, easily demonstrated on a DVD player: pause at any frame, plucked randomly from the image flow, and the resultant image not only looks great but highly significant -- interpretable.

Ultimately, the interpretable party here is Herman Melville, who draws forth such greatness in his adaptors. I should re-read the novel Billy Budd, to go back to the source.

Menswear Moments: The Leopard Man

Leading man Dennis O'Keefe is a tall, handsome guy who favors double-breasted suits in the movie, wearing two, a grey chalkstripe and a dark (navy?) solid. The grey suit is ventless (as many suits in Forties films are). With the grey suit, O'Keefe wears dark brown or cordovan wingtips, argyle socks (very visible in one scene where he buffs his shoes), and -- interestingly -- a button-down shirt (which is supposed to be a no-no with a double-breasted suit, but I now feel I have an authority to justify the practice). With the solid suit, O'Keefe wears a point collar in some scenes, button-down in others, and black shoes; that suit appears in fewer scenes. There is also a trenchcoat in some scenes, and at one point O'Keefe carries a hat, although you never actually see the chapeau atop his noggin.

I looked in vain for a good photo of O'Keefe wearing one of these suits. The best I could come up with is this:



But I lucked out in another way. In one scene O'Keefe wears his grey suit trousers with an open-collar white shirt and a striking sportcoat that would pose a challenge to describe adequately. Fortunately, I found a great shot of it on a Spanish-language poster. The shot (from a lobby card?) is in color even though the movie is in black-and-white:

Val Lewton

One of my most pleasurable viewing projects of recent months has been watching the celebrated series of nine "horror" films that Val Lewton produced for RKO in the Forties. I had seen several but not all of these before; I am now six films into the current project, and they are all rewarding experiences. The "horror" tag is a misleading one for many of these films, whether you are comparing them to earlier horror cycles (the Universal monster horrors of the Thirties) or later ones (the slasher films of the Seventies and Eighties). The Lewton films vary quite a bit among themselves, and overt horror elements are sometimes completely absent. They are all shuddery, subtle, and stylish, though: those are their commonalities.

Probably the most famous of these films is the first, Cat People (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur from a script by DeWitt Bodeen (but Lewton had a writing hand, credited or uncredited, in many of these films). The movie almost maintains its ambiguity about whether the heroine Irena does become, as she fears, a killer cat -- until a shot that, if you take it at face value, settles the matter in the supernatural column. Lewton fought that shot and the studio insisted on it; but it is an effectively scary insert that doesn't jar the poetic mood that Tourneur and his team had been at such pains to establish. Cat People is renowned for how much it unsettles given how little you see, and even this view of a black panther is the merest blink. (William Wellman borrowed liberally from Lewton's method twelve years later in his unusual adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's Track of the Cat, in which you never actually see the "black painter" -- you just see its tracks and hear its vocalizations.)

The follow-up, Curse of the Cat People (1944), which I have written about before in this blog, came two years later after four intervening films in the cycle. It's a wonderful piece about the fears and fantasies of childhood that has always been criticized for the misrepresentation of its title, which leads people to expect an entirely different sort of film than the delicate tale on view. But the plot linkage with the earlier film is indeed strong: Curse is truly a sequel, but one that has its own independent life and rationale for being.

Lewton did well with cats. The same panther that appeared in the insert shot in Cat People was brought back for a more extended role in The Leopard Man (1943). (I have written about leading man Dennis O'Keefe's nice wardobe in the post above.) This film has a flavorful Southwestern setting and no hint of supernatural agency; it is renowned as an early example of a "serial killer" story (based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich). There is a great murder scene in this movie that depends, again, entirely on the unseen (although not the unheard). You can look forward from The Leopard Man to the infamous ear-slicing in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, which people always remember as having seen in excruciating gory detail despite the fact that Tarantino's camera is pointed away during the atrocity, which you actually only hear.

In the same year as The Leopard Man came I Walked with a Zombie (coming up in my viewing schedule), The Seventh Victim, and The Ghost Ship (the Lewton unit was a busy group). The Seventh Victim is one of the most densely packed of all these rather short films (71 minutes in this case). The sheer ballsiness of the movie is striking, and one can't help but wonder how many elements of it got past the Hays Office censors. Devil worshippers? Blatant lesbians? A dark suicidal ending that has to be seen to be believed?

The Ghost Ship is the least celebrated of the Lewtons because of its odd history; a legal dispute over the source material kept it out of view for a half-century. But it is one of my very favorites because of its sea setting. This title is also misleading: there are no ghosts, really no supernatural elements unless you count a deaf-mute sailor who seems a bit clairvoyant. This is a "nautical noir" with an excellent nuanced performance by Richard Dix as a captain whose surface reasonableness and charm masks a madness that becomes gradually apparent to some, not at all to others, and plays out tragically. As in other Lewtons, there is a memorable and unexpected death scene.

The last three Lewtons in 1945 and 1946 all starred Boris Karloff: The Body Snatcher (which I've yet to see), Isle of the Dead (next up in my queue), and Bedlam. The last illustrates a good rule of thumb, that any film that starts with William Hogarth prints under the opening credits is going to be wickedly cool. Lewton, who wrote the screenplay himself (under a pseudonym) with director Mark Robson, appropriately gives Hogarth, an early "graphic novelist," a story credit. This tale of the infamous Bedlam insane asylum is cleverly thought out and beautifully executed, with wonderful and believably-in-period art direction, photography, acting, and direction. As with so many other films in the Lewton series, there is no supernatural element; Bedlam is a historical film about real horrors, and an uncommonly effective one.

Love

For the first time [Wilson] realized the pain inevitable in any human relationship -- pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish one was to be afraid of loneliness.

...

[Scobie] forgot for the while what experience had taught him -- that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness.

...

If [Scobie] had been returning to an empty house he knew that he would have been contented.

...

[Wilson] had read somewhere that love had been invented in the eleventh century by the troubadors. Why had they not left us with lust?

Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter

In these quotations from different chapters of The Heart of the Matter, Greene captures what experience has taught me, too. We expect too much from "love." I am not saying that people constituted to find pleasure in constant companionship can't make a go of it sometimes, with luck and with patience. But my beef with "love" is that it represents a form of unhelpful magical thinking -- in the thrall of the emotion, we impute to others qualities that they are highly unlikely to possess (one of those being an overriding concern for our happiness). People are fascinating, endlessly so, but they are not magic beings. We are all of us distinctly limited, and the notion that we can find "the one" whose limitations will dovetail and actually work productively with ours -- I can't see making this the priority that most of us do. It is such a terribly unlikely outcome.

Leaving minor episodes out of the reckoning, I have been "in love" six times in my life. On every single occasion, I completely misread and wrongly estimated the other person. There have been no exceptions to this. In only one of these instances did the other person fall in love with me, very briefly and also on the basis of a mis-estimation of my actual characteristics. That relationship folded quickly when the other person discovered their error -- much the best outcome, in retrospect.

In one other case, there was a disastrous live-in relationship that lasted better than four years, with "love" on my side and none on the other, and no understanding whatsoever on either side. It was a folly of ridiculous proportions.

Now, my record is particularly bad -- I'd never deny that. But how well do most of us really do in identifying a life partner? Is life partnership in the way we have to come to imagine it even a realistic goal? Ironically, I'm known among my friends for having pretty shrewd insights into character -- but not where my own love life is concerned. And that is a weak area of understanding for most of us.

If I analyze the roles of sex and money in the equation of attraction, I tend to draw even more cynical conclusions. But focusing on sentiment alone leads me to believe that it a very poor guide to decision and action -- there is scarcely one worse. I think I have come to understand a little better the logic of cultures where arranged marriages prevail -- I find no appeal in that, either, but I kind of get it.

[T]he mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Work

"I've concluded," wrote Wisconsin-based business editor Steve Prestegard, "that you should not love your job, because your job does not love you." And that comes pithily close to being all that needs to be said on the subject, although I also like what Loyola University Professor of Philosophy A.R. Gini (The Importance of Being Lazy) once asserted:

[Most Americans] agree to accept boring, meaningless work in return for a paycheck big enough to buy goods and activities that will compensate them during their leisure hours...When most Americans go to work, they strike a bargain with the devil.

The notion that you can find satisfaction and fulfillment in what you do for pay -- "do what you love and the money will follow," etc. -- is a lovely fiction but in this society (maybe most) is largely a non-starter. It is not an impossible goal, but one can waste a lot of time and energy on it and never come close to achieving it. That would describe me -- for a long time, I thought I could solve my problems by finding the right line of work. From a more mature perspective, that "paycheck big enough..." that Gini refers to is, I see, what really counts. I'd have no problem whatsoever not working for pay at all, but I'm not independently wealthy, and if society requires me to put in my 40 hours a week to keep the questionable engine of the whole running, I can do that, albeit somewhat grudgingly.

There are, of course, small satisfactions to be found in those 40 hours; one tries to make sure that there are, otherwise the passage of that time would truly be unbearable. But the key question is this: how much of your work would you replicate in your personal life if you weren't being paid? The answer for most of us is pretty clear: precious little. Even the work relationships that help us get through the week are mainly situational relationships that evaporate once the context is lacking. I don't know why this should be true, since relationships formed at schools and in other unpaid situations often last a lifetime. But I am sure that it is true: work friendships are disposable, and people ought to be wary of placing too much faith in them -- they can't bear the weight. Truly, your job does not love you.

The Good Shepherd

On the evidence of The Good Shepherd, Matt Damon can empty himself out to play a seemingly emotionless character, but cannot add enough flicker of emotion around the edges to make the character interesting enough to watch for three hours. The movie, Robert De Niro's directorial take on the history of the CIA, is a noble failure that should be watched for its intentions but cannot be praised for its execution.

The miscasting of Damon (whom I generally like) is emblematic. It's a tricky role to be sure. Based largely on CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, and secondarily on Richard M. Bissell, Jr. (not to be confused with the novelist Richard P. Bissell), Damon's Edward Wilson is a cypher from the get-go. Angleton, a paranoid eccentric and poetry aficionado (an angle the movie explores with some zest), is a figure of perennial fascination to anyone writing about the CIA, from either a fictive or non-fictive perspective. But for eccentricity, the screenwriter Eric Roth has largely substituted a Protestant stiffness which Damon dutifully but uninterestingly embodies. The actual Angleton was only half-WASP; his mother was a Mexican high society beauty. (This gets me noodling that Raul Esparza, who can layer bland and edgy, might have brought something telling to this role.)

There is a lot of star casting in The Good Shepherd -- who wouldn't want to work with De Niro? -- which can either work for a movie, as it largely does in Oliver Stone's J.F.K., or backfire badly; this is somewhere in-between. Generally the non-stars -- Tammy Blanchard, Lee Pace, Oleg Stefan -- do more impressive work, although John Turturro registers as Damon's spiritually ugly assistant. Angelina Jolie is, well, Angelina Jolie -- what is it about her that reminds me of Joan Crawford in full star throttle? Even allowing for the zero chemistry of their forced husband and wife relationship in the movie, Damon and Jolie have zero performance chemistry -- nothing to make us care what happens or doesn't happen between these two.

There is nothing wrong with De Niro's work as director, exactly -- it's completely professional -- but it doesn't compel. The Good Shepherd fails a basic Patrick Murtha test of film-making, which is that there should be at least one great scene every 30 minutes, on average. (Really, if The Sopranos can offer a great scene every five minutes, is this so much to ask?) At 167 minutes running time, then, this movie ought to offer a minimum of five or six great scenes. Instead there are, sadly, none. There is one sort-of-great line -- "The rest of you are just visiting" -- for the undoubted sake of which De Niro kept in a scene with Joe Pesci that otherwise would almost surely have wound up on the cutting room floor, since it comes out of nowhere and leads nowhere.

The CIA, with its secret history growing out of other secret histories (Yale's Skull and Bones, featured prominently here), grips certain minds with obsessive force -- Norman Mailer's novel Harlot's Ghost, which apparently overlaps The Good Shepherd considerably in subject matter, weighs in at 1300 pages and ends with the words "To be continued," for goodness sake. De Niro himself hopes to follow The Good Shepherd with two sequels -- and despite all my reservations, I would anticipate those with interest. In the meantime, I need to read Mailer, and Robert Littell's The Company, and watch the six-hour mini-series of the latter with Michael Keaton as Angleton -- maybe I'm in the grip too.

POSTSCRIPT: Re the poetry angle: I figure this is the only Hollywood feature I'll ever see in which Trumbull Stickney is mentioned several times, so I've got to like it at least a little bit on that basis. More on Stickney in another post sometime.

UPDATE (5/17/2009): I eventually watched The Company (and bought a copy of Littell's novel, which I've yet to crack). The mini-series makes for a fascinating comparison with The Good Shepherd, in part because the basic material is so similar, in part because Damon's character in The Good Shepherd is split in The Company into its component parts -- the "all-American boy" agent, and the shadowy behind-the-scenes James Jesus Angleton. This makes more sense than De Niro and Eric Roth trying to fuse two disparate concepts in one character and expecting poor Matt Damon to pull it off.

Here, the Angleton side of the equation couldn't be better, because Michael Keaton is spectacular. (Alfred Molina is also a delight in a key spymaster role, and Rory Cochrane is terrific as one of the younger spies.) But the all-American side founders because Chris O'Donnell, well cast physically, doesn't consistently make us feel the way events weigh on him. His performance actually improves when he gets beyond his actual age; he's at his best in the fifth and sixth hours as a near sixty-year-old.

The whole series was written by Ken Nolan and directed by Mikael Salomon, and benefits from that consistency of personnel, although it does split cleanly into six hour-long units, of which maybe the best is the third, the 1956 Hungarian uprising (filmed on location in Budapest). The fourth hour, the Bay of Pigs, benefits from location filming as well (with Puerto Rico standing in for Cuba). Plenty of money was spent on this series, and it was put to good use.

Billy Budd

Benjamin Britten's operas are one of the great bodies of work of the 20th century in any medium, and Billy Budd on any reckoning ranks among the best of these. The all-male setting of Herman Melville's story drew a particularly passionate response from the all-but-publicly gay Britten (who, if not quite "out," was unusually close to it for his era; anyone marginally informed would have known that he and tenor Peter Pears were partners). He wrote the linchpin role of Captain Vere for Pears; one of the role's finest modern proponents has been Philip Langridge (who is generally distinguished in Britten, having also sung Peter Grimes and Quint in The Turn of the Screw). We are lucky that the late Eighties English National Opera production with Langridge, and Thomas Allen as Billy, was captured for BBC television and is now available on DVD. (This should happen more often with plays, musicals, and operas: we can save great stage interpretations and should not hesitate to do so. The Metropolitan Opera's live HD broadcasts in movie theaters are encouraging in that respect.)

Tim Albery's production of Britten's revised two-act version of the opera (the original four-act version is still played occasionally as well) is simple, forceful, and effective, and the difficult score is beautifully conducted by David Atherton. Langridge, 48 at the time of filming (he seems younger), shows complete command of his part musically and dramatically: it's a great performance. Allen, as widely noted, is perfect for Billy vocally but somewhat too mature-looking for a character whose youth is so crucial. (The young American tenor Nathan Gunn later became famous for playing this role shirtless!) In the third great part, the evil master-at-arms Claggart, Richard Van Allan is as dark and foreboding a figure as one might wish for, although one of these days it would be interesting to see a Claggart who seems as self-tormented as other-tormenting. (This is not to say that some might not see Van Allan in just that light; we all see different things in performances.)

Billy Budd ends famously with an aged and remembering Vere alone on stage, ultimately singing his final words without even the orchestra as comfort; and on the DVD the effect is most beautiful because of the cut straight from his final phrase in near-darkness -- "when I, Edward Fairfax Vere, commanded the Indomitable" -- to the rolling of silent credits. In the theater a great Vere such as Langridge and a great production such as this would rightly receive cascades of enthusiastic applause; but with the DVD you are alone with your own thoughts when the opera ends.

Basketball Coach Fashion

Basketball coaching, along with the related field of sports announcing, is an arena in which guys actually try to dress well, and are unabashed about French cuffs, pocket squares, and so on. I like that. I'm a big Jay Wright fan; I also like Billy Donovan's style (although he almost always takes his jacket off at courtside; Wright not only keeps his on, he remains buttoned up).


Jay Wright


Billy Donovan

I don't give a fig for basketball, but I would almost watch just for the coaches. Apparently, some people do (and certainly the fact that coaches like Wright, Donovan, and Kerry Keating are wicked handsome doesn't hurt); the "Runway to the Fashionable Four" has become quite the yearly event -- some of the coaches even trash-talk each other about their suits!

http://www.collegeinsider.com/sanantonio/


Kerry Keating

The Three Caballeros

I have mentioned before that I have an abiding fondness for Latin American culture, and I think this partly stems from the presence in my childhood household of a 1945 children's book called Donald Duck Sees South America (along with a 1944 companion volume, Mickey Sees the U.S.A.). What fun to follow Donald on his journeys through all the then independent nations of South America! (As I recall, he skips the Guianas.) I was hooked from that time onward.

This book is contemporaneous with other Disney excursions into Latin America, which have an interesting political history. The U.S. State Department, as part of the manifestation of our "Good Neighbor Policy" during those troubled years of the early Forties, urged a Disney good-will tour of South America, intended to have a filmic result. In the event, it had several: the short compilation feature Saludos Amigos (1942), which combines travel footage with four cartoons; the more elaborated The Three Caballeros (1945), which unites Donald Duck, the Brazilian parrot Jo(s)e Carioca, and the Mexican rooster Panchito; and the related featurette South of the Border with Disney (1942), which also documents the good-will tour. They are all available on one DVD, along with two Latin-themed Donald Duck shorts, Don Donald and Contrary Condor.

Graphically, parts of The Three Caballeros in particular are as inventive as anything Disney was doing at that time. The travel footage in Saludos Amigos and South of the Border plays up the idea that the Disney artists were extremely stimulated by their journey, and I believe that is genuinely the case, because we can see the results. A number of the detachable cartoon segments in the two features ("Pedro," "The Cold-Blooded Penguin," "The Flying Gauchito") are charming in their own right, but the material becomes considerably wilder when it is not so tied down to storyline.

One oddity of The Three Caballeros is that, perhaps because of stereotypical notions of Latin American "hot-bloodedness," this is an amazingly sexual cartoon for Disney; the three gay caballeros sometimes really are pretty gay with each other (in passing, you've got to look quick) and Donald is one lascivious duck throughout (watch him on the beach at Acapulco!). One is not so surprised to encounter parallel material in Warner Brothers cartoons, but Disney is another matter.

Miscellaneous Round-Up

I realize, reading through some of my posts, that I might at times seem an awful grump; but there are things that make my soul merry, too, and I hope those are reflected here as well. "Clicking" with a book is definitely one of those, and I am happy to say that I feel it happening with George Eliot's Middlemarch, now that I am about a hundred pages in. Eliot is not a comically oriented novelist in the way that Dickens or Trollope can be, and I had wondered whether Middlemarch might yield any laugh-out-loud moments; but in Chapter 9, Mr. Brooke and Rev. Casaubon are discussing the prospects of Casaubon's nephew Will Ladislaw:

"He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce or a Mungo Park," said Mr Brooke. "I had a notion of that myself at one time."

"No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement of our geognosis: that would be a special purpose which I could recognize with some approbation, though without felicitating him on a career which so often ends in premature and violent death..."

That got me; and there have been more such moments since. ("Geognosis" is such a Casaubonian word!)...I discovered a dandy online resource for keeping all those versions and editions of the Bruckner symphonies straight:

http://www.abruckner.com/

This is very fun to browse to see which conductors recorded which versions...Through the ever-useful portal Arts & Letters Daily, I came across an interesting article by Roger Sandall on John Ruskin and Welby Pugin, both so prominently featured in Kenneth Clark's The Gothic Revival:

http://www.rogersandall.com/Spiked_Medieval-Spells.php

(Note that Sandall gets the order of Pugin's names wrong: It's "Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin," not "Augustus Northmore Welby Pugin" -- not that this is hard to scramble!)...The most recent Time Tunnel episode I watched, "Crack of Doom," is the Krakatoa episode, but despite the presence of a young Ellen Burstyn (then known as Ellen McRae), the hour falls into the rut of a number of these episodes: the writer plants our heroes on the crack of doom, but then has a hard time coming up with anything compelling for them to do. Should they try to change the course of history? Should they not try to change the course of history? Should they just save their own behinds? Should they try to save other people's? It's a limited series of dramatic options over which they usually spend a number of scenes dithering; but the viewer can't help but feel this as filler. Krakatoa is inherently interesting (I was reminded that I must read Simon Winchester's book about it), but the series frequently over-relies on that sort of automatic trigger. Pearl Harbor! Little Big Horn! Halley's Comet!

Even bubble gum must be well-made enough to be chewable.

UPDATE (5/4/2009): I've never been too sure about this sort of omnibus post: Should it be broken up into smaller units? Should I wait until I have more to say on any of the individual subjects? Should I add what are clearly "follow-up bits" to the earlier posts they relate to, as Updates? It's a puzzler, although the Updates solution is seeming meritorious to me at the moment.

Life at the Top

I finished John Braine's Life at the Top, and although it winds up being sour about married life, sour about business life, and sour about adulthood, all notions I can approve, I cannot rate it very highly as a novel compared to Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, which combines similar elements with much more architectural skill. The plotting in Braine's novel is weak, with an especially unbelievable final act, and there's not a character in sight that you can invest any emotion in. Braine's attempt to squeeze some real feeling out of the bond between Joe Lampton and his four-year-old daughter turns out oddly creepy; far from charming, the daughter is a demanding little horror.

Because of the success of the great film version of Room at the Top, this sequel was also filmed with Laurence Harvey repeating the lead -- and despite my reservations about the novel, I would of course like to see the film. A few years later, the Joe Lampton character was reprised in a television series called Man at the Top that ran for two years in Britain, with Kenneth Haigh in the lead role. Braine would appear to have been involved (but I'd like more detail on that). The opening sequence of the pilot episode is, wouldn't you know, available on the frequently surprising YouTube:



Haigh's Seventies hair is a mite distracting!

My Wardrobe: Tan Poplin Suit

The tan poplin suit is the perfect basic summer suit, as far as I'm concerned. It's incredibly versatile; you have a hard time finding pieces that don't go well with it. I've owned several of these suits over the years; my curtain model is a Joseph A. Bank two-button that I purchased on sale for $99.00 -- and they seem to run that particular sale price frequently. I intend to pick up an olive poplin and a navy poplin there before long.

I also find the tan poplin an emotionally reassuring suit, a friendly suit. When you're sporting a nice tan, you're going to look sharp in it, but it's also non-threatening, so suitable for any occasion. It dresses down much more easily than a pinstripe (which doesn't really dress down effectively at all). A very bright or whimsical tie works; no tie at all works. A dressy shirt works; a button-down works; a polo works. How could you not like a garment that's so agreeable?

Not Your Bloggish Blog

That last post was the 100th, as it happens, and although I was going to write this taking-stock post anyway, it now seems even more timely. I am sure there are other blogs like Patrick Murtha's Diary (since there are so many blogs out there), but this is not much like other blogs that I look at. It is heavy on text, light on visuals, heavy on cross-references within the blog, light on hyperlinks outside it. No matter when you come on board, the blog makes the most sense if you read it from the beginning; I didn't intend for it to become like a book, but that is what the result has been. It is not part of the literary blogosphere or the film blogosphere or the menswear blogosphere, despite touching on all those matters. It is not an act of professional self-promotion, as a fair number of single-subject blogs are. I feel free to insert more self-revelation and personal musing than most critical blogs, as well as far more cultural criticism than most personal blogs. So the product is perhaps a strange mix -- but I rather like it.

Likability

I'm not honestly sure that John Braine's Life at the Top, which I'm two-thirds through, is as engaging a novel as its predecessor Room at the Top. The prose doesn't seem as sharp; I've scarcely noticed a telling phrase in the sequel, while the first novel abounds in them. And a 35-year-old cushily settled Joe Lampton inherently lacks a bit of the interest of a 25-year-old upwardly striving uncertain-of-outcome Joe Lampton. The older Joe seems smug, and since he continues as narrator, you're confined within his smug perceptions. Or almost confined -- I love the moment when his wife breaks out and accuses him of being so "damned triumphant." If you recall my earlier post about Joe's sexual confidence, you won't be surprised that at one point Joe muses about a possible extra-marital conquest (my bolding):

[W]omen..wanted me...I was well aware that I had both bored and infuriated Norah. But in bed it would be a different story.

One thinks, Well, nice for you, dude. And his wife for her part has grown a bit weary of his obsession with sex: ""You think that's the answer to everything."

No, I'm just not liking Joe Lampton that well on the occasion of spending a second whole book with him. Alpha males wear me out. And there are certainly plenty of them in the British "angry young man" movement. It gets me thinking, how much does the likability of the protagonist affect my apprehension of a text?

The answer is, considerably. And although I understand that my "dislikable" is not exactly the same as anyone else's, still I can't imagine that some of these guys rank high on most people's Pleasant Meter. One reason I haven't written yet about Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life, as excellent a film as it is, is that the rugby player protagonist Frank Machin doesn't appeal to me either conceptually or as embodied in Richard Harris's fine, bruised performance. Imagine Tony Soprano without any prism of humor, and you're about there. (Anderson himself, a gay man, was hypnotized by the Machin/Harris thuggishness, and fell painfully in love with his relentlessly hetero leading man.)

John Osborne's Jimmy Porter and Bill Maitland are neither of them very likable (although Kenneth Branagh's Jimmy is more tolerable than Richard Burton's Jimmy). Likability doesn't register in John Osborne's scale of values, as anyone will immediately perceive if they spend an hour researching Osborne's life.

Albert Finney's Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning calibrates for me a little differently, with some Frank Machin-like characteristics but also a spirit of fun and roguery that exerts an appeal. Or am I saying this because I like Finney, and am reverse-engineering my reactions to this performance from his magnificently likable Tom Jones (the very next film he made)? Who knows: these strands cannot be completely separated. Our psycho-sexual reactions to performers inevitably influence our assessments of their performances (would that more critics were honest about this), and our knowledge of their careers can't be neutralized either. But Arthur Seaton does seem to be liked by the characters who surround him in the film; while Frank Machin isn't even liked by his lover.

POSTSCRIPT: Speaking of Frank Machin's lover, Rachel Roberts (who also stars with Finney in Saturday Night), was acclaimed and Oscar-nominated for her performance opposite Richard Harris, although she seems to hate him so very much that it is hard to see why she ever agrees to sleep with him: there is not even a flicker of positive attraction on view. Roberts, like Mary Ure and Gene Tierney whom I discussed in earlier posts, was an actress with a large gift and a completely messed-up personal life. Roberts was an alcoholic who committed suicide at 53 (after her divorce from Rex Harrison, whose busy life included six wives and the suicide of a lover, Carole Landis, in 1948). Tierney was mentally unstable and romantically promiscuous. The fragile Ure, also an alcoholic, gave birth to Robert Shaw's son while married to John Osborne, and later died a possible suicide at 42 after a disastrous West End opening night.

I don't think I want to come back as an actress.

Miscellaneous Round-Up

Bravo to Green Bay Packers GM Ted Thompson for calling Brett Favre's bluff by indicating, No, we won't release you, and No, you haven't got a starting job if you choose to re-activate. Thompson is a planner who sticks to his plans, and who, having played Brett's game since coming on board with the Packers in 2005, is not going to take kindly to having his chain yanked now. The franchise is bigger than the player now no matter how big he is, and Thompson ably represents the franchise. Favre has miscalculated. And the way the winds are blowing here in Green Bay, the fan who commented online that "Brett should [be] treated like a God" is now actually in the minority -- people are fed up. Bully for Ted, I say...I have listened my way though almost the entire Barenboim set of Bruckner symphonies, only the 1st to go. The strength of my reaction to the individual symphonies is in this order: 7th, 9th, 4th, 3rd...and then I think I need to get to know the 8th, 6th, 5th, and 2nd better, in multiple performances, to determine where they land for me. The 4th has great tunes, the 3rd is expansive and confident, and the unfinished 9th is sui generis even for Bruckner -- one of the bleakest and most terrifying musical structures I've ever encountered. Not to be glib, but it sounds like a symphony the composer would die before completing: terminal...I've been making my way slowly and pleasurably though Barbara Tuchman's great The Guns of August, about the onset of World War I. A hundred pages in, as Tuchman arrives at the crucial eight day period of declarations of war, July 28 to August 4, 1914, the tension, and Tuchman's command of her narrative across multiple countries (England, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Serbia, and Belgium), is simply tremendous; every hour brings new drama...I re-invigorated my ongoing John Huston project by re-watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, one of the Hollywood films of its era (there were a few) that seems uncompromised; it can hold its own in any cinematic company. One measure of Huston's directorial brilliance is that he doesn't rush the denouement, as a hack director would; the last half-hour of the film unspools at just the right deliberate tempo, not even scurrying through a lengthy scene in Spanish with no subtitles...I also re-watched Sidney Lumet's marvelous courtroom drama The Verdict, in part because of the David Mamet connection (Mamet wrote the screenplay from a novel by Barry Reed), in part to compare it with Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, in part because I love Paul Newman's performance and hadn't seen it in a while. Interesting that Preminger forgoes closing arguments, while Lumet and Mamet give Newman perhaps the best closing argument scene in movie history:

You know, so much of the time we're just lost. We say, "Please, God, tell us what is right; tell us what is true." And there is no justice: the rich win, the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time, we become dead... a little dead. We think of ourselves as victims... and we become victims. We become... we become weak. We doubt ourselves, we doubt our beliefs. We doubt our institutions. And we doubt the law. But today you are the law. You are the law. Not some book... not the lawyers... not the, a marble statue... or the trappings of the court. See, those are just symbols of our desire to be just. They are... they are, in fact, a prayer: a fervent and a frightened prayer. In my religion, they say, "Act as if ye had faith... and faith will be given to you." If... if we are to have faith in justice, we need only to believe in ourselves. And act with justice. See, I believe there is justice in our hearts.

The Catholic Church is, as in Ulu Grosbard's contemporaneous True Confessions, the ultimate villain in The Verdict: cold, corporate, political. Although Newman's Frank Galvin is clearly a believing Catholic, the movie makes a large and proper distinction between the faith and the institution (in which you can't have faith). It has always seemed perplexing to me that for centuries people made up conspiracy theories about Jews when Judaism notably lacks a central authority and a gargantuan structure for conspiracy to emanate from and hide in. The labyrinthine and secretive Catholic Church is much more apt soil for conspiracy theories, honestly, and in these latter days, popular writers such as Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code have spotted the possibilities in that. The fact that the Church under John Paul II re-asserted its centralized and authoritative style after the refreshing period of de-centralization and questioning under John XXIII and Paul VI has had a lot to do with this pop suspicion of the Vatican. Despite some groaning to the contrary, in my eyes this "anti-Catholicism" is not in the least like anti-semitism; it's more like criticizing Exxon or GM...By the way, I'm actually wearing flip-flops today, on the theory that if you can't beat them, etc. I was in an odd duck mood yesterday, and drifted over to the DSW Shoe Wearhouse, where I tried on quite a number of pairs of their vast inventory of flip-flops, and chose the most expensive, a dark brown pair of Clarks that actually aren't too bad. Maybe I was feeling sort of goofy or "undignified" (my earlier word for flip-flop wearers over 40), I don't know. In any case, this shows how authoritarian I am: I can't even obey my own rules.

The Time Tunnel

I was an obnoxiously precocious little kid, and one of my early interests was history. Most children can't relate to history at all (as any honest social studies teacher could tell you), but I must have been born with the history gene, because it was all completely fascinating to me.

So in the fall of 1966, as I was entering 3rd grade, I was ripe for the premiere of the television series The Time Tunnel, a concoction of Irwin Allen's in which two strapping young scientists are "lost in the swirling maze of past and future ages, during the first experiments on America's greatest and most secret project, the Time Tunnel. [They]...tumble helplessly toward...fantastic adventure, somewhere along the infinite corridors of time."

Tony Newman (James Darren) and Doug Phillips (Robert Colbert) always seemed to find themselves at a key historical juncture, just before a major event occurs, never after. The ground rules of the series won't bear close inspection: the scientists back at the Tunnel complex can watch Doug and Tony and can fitfully and imprecisely move them around, but the gobbledegook they spout has no internal logic (so don't even try to go there). Everyone that Doug and Tony encounter in the past speaks modern English, which is certainly convenient but is never explained. Really, the series is pretty juvenile overall.

And yet, it fired the imagination of this eight-year-old, so "juvenile" is not an entirely pejorative description. The series made decent use of movie stock footage to create large-scale ambiance. The predictable stops for Doug and Tony were fun (the Titanic before it sinks, Pearl Harbor before it is attacked, Krakatoa before it blows); but they were more piquant and offbeat destinations too -- the War of 1812, Devil's Island. There were also a number of science-fictional "future" episodes, consistent with the ability of the Tunnel to send travelers backward or forward in time. I wasn't as much into those, but the logic of the series demanded them.

The Time Tunnel, an expensive series to produce, only lasted a year. But it has continued to have a vigorous fandom, and is now available on DVD. Especially if you have children who might take the bait, it's worth a look.

The series hit another nerve for me, too. There was something vaguely homoerotic about these two young guys traveling everywhere (literally) together, and I think that registered with me in a subliminal way. I definitely developed a huge crush on Robert Colbert -- I wanted to be just like him. James Darren (fresh from Gidget) was supposed to be the heart-throb, but Colbert did it for me.



As if Colbert wasn't enough to make my heart go ping (kids are sexual, too, you know), there was a guest spot by Linden Chiles as Tony Newman's Navy father in the Pearl Harbor episode. I still think Chiles in uniform is about as handsome as handsome gets.



So The Time Tunnel was a formative experience not just for a history-minded boy, but a gay boy, too.

Goodbye to Sports

I have a free ticket for tomorrow night's Wisconsin Timber Rattlers game, but I don't think I'll go. I have written earlier in this blog of my affection for baseball and my enjoyment of the minor league stadium atmosphere. But in considering whether to go to this game, I realized something. It's only the atmosphere. I couldn't care less about watching the games anymore.

The signs have been there for a while. I go to these games and barely spend an inning or two in my seat. I leave early and though I usually listen to the rest of the game on the radio, that's because I like the style of Rattlers announcer Chris Mehring, not because I care about the outcome of the games. I don't. Most of the time at the stadium I spend in the Leinie Lodge, hanging out. That wouldn't be so bad except that I have never encountered decent human conversation in any Wisconsin bar, including this one, so why bother? Between a ticket, parking, two burgers, three beers, and a bag of peanuts, I spend about $25.00, and while that's not much compared to what I'd spend at a major league game, I could buy a tie or a couple of books with that money. Those pleasures are much longer lasting. The food and beer I can have for a fraction of the cost at home.

I go, I think, because I believe in the concept of the "third place" -- the stadium, the bar, the coffee shop. I don't want to spend all my free time in my apartment. But only coffee shops are really doing the third place trick for me these days.

There is another factor to account for, too: the allure of sports has continued to diminish for me. One of the best essays I have read in recent years is Joseph Epstein's farewell to sports, "Trivial Pursuits" (in his collection Narcissus Leaves the Pool). Epstein writes:

...for more than half a century I have watched boys and men and a lesser number of women throw, chase, and hit various balls in various parks in various cities and countries...doing so has not made me one whit smarter about the world or my own life...if I had it to do all over again I would spend the time learning to play the harpsichord...I feel foolish for having spent so much time on what now seems an empty enterprise.

Now, it could be accurately argued that knowledge of and enthusiasm for sports is still a key avenue of socialization among American men -- hence, like the third places, sports have a positive role to play although perhaps empty in themselves. Well, I live in Green Bay Packers Country, and let me tell you, I have had my fill of that kind of socialization. Also, as a gay man, I can exempt myself from such considerations, and I think I'll take advantage of that.

The worst event in the history of modern American sports was the advent of ESPN, because it converted sports from a fairly harmless pastime to a 24/7 obsession. That obsession has had an utterly trivializing effect on American manhood. Vince Lombardi didn't care as much about the Packers as Packers fans today care about the Packers. Things have gotten way out of hand.

Sports used to be a refreshment, like a nice beer; but now it's as if everyone interested in sports is a sports alcoholic. I think of what Trollope wrote of the beleaguered George Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her?:

From what fountain should he attempt to draw such small draughts of the water of comfort as might support him at the present moment? Unless a man have some such fountain to which he can turn, the burden of life cannot be borne.

I understand that sports can be such a fountain, but I find that they have ceased to be so for me. Books, and movies, and music, and art, and history, and nice clothing, and yes, good beer, and my cat: those are where I find the water of comfort. Sports, I now see, are pretty much out of the picture.

UPDATE (5/6/2009): The psychologist David Barash published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education a couple of months ago, "The Roar of the Crowd," that was strikingly similar in import to Epstein's essay:

It is not the doughty doing of sports that is so ill-conceived, but the woeful watching, the ridiculous rooting, the silly spectating.

(Nice use of the under-used adjective "doughty," by the way.)

I attended the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers' pre-season "Lead-Off Experience" banquet, as well as the opening night game (I lasted about half-way through; it was a pretty nice night for early April in Wisconsin). It was a highly significant off-season for the T-Rats, as they switched their affiliation from the distant Seattle Mariners to the home-state Milwaukee Brewers, and that has created considerable excitement. Opening night was sold out with more than 5,000 spectators -- the team's biggest crowd ever, by a very wide margin. Apparently lots of people had my problem in caring about the outcome of the games, albeit for different reasons, and now they have a rationale for caring. I'm happy for the team and its front office staff, who are uniformly great people.

Despite my basic agreement with Epstein and Barash, I'll never shed my warm feeling for baseball (as Epstein admitted he would not, either). Along with golf (which I've never played), it's one of the sports that still has predominantly pleasant associations for me, although I invest much less time in it now than in my younger days. I enjoy reading baseball history books, and recently completed a quite good one, Mike Sowell's The Pitch that Killed, about the famous death of Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman from a Carl Mays beanball during the 1920 season.

Images

Written shortly after the Perfect Couple comment:

I am continuing to fill in my Altman gaps. Images is another striking, important, neglected film, although about as different as you could imagine from my other recent Altman rediscovery, A Perfect Couple. One of the ways in which it is different is subtle. A Perfect Couple is a "sport," both within film history and within Altman's oeuvre. Its closest filmic relations, and they are not even that close, are with other Altman films; but essentially, it is out there on its own, a glorious oddity, of uncertain parentage and with no progeny.

Images, despite its obscurity and persistent non-availability, is situated quite differently: it is connected in a dozen ways to other films and film-makers; it has obvious parents and children; it is deeply embedded in both film history and its particular cinematic moment.

Images focuses intensely on the mental breakdown of an upper middle class woman played by Susannah York, and takes place largely at a remote country house in a magnificent Irish landscape. Psychological thrillers and psychological art films were something of a rage in the Sixties and Seventies. Altman has admitted explicitly that Bergman's Persona was his starting-point and is in "the DNA" of Images. Patrick McGilligan in his Altman biography Jumping Off the Cliff states that:

Altman has said that, with Images, he wanted to make a Joseph Losey- type film. Losey was one of those few film directors, like Huston and Welles, whom Altman would admit to admiring.

Losey, a great and singularly under-rated director, is worthy of Altman's admiration, and Images indeed bears the Losey stamp. It also has a good deal of Polanski in it (Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby; there are also strong affinities with The Tenant, which postdates Images).

A line can be drawn from Images, backward or forward, to almost any film that depicts mental instability largely from a mentally unstable protagonist's point of view (Barton Fink and A Beautiful Mind, to cite two wildly different examples).

McGilligan also positions the film in a quartet of Altman projects having to do with unstable women: That Cold Day in the Park; Images; Three Women; Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

Another affinity is with other highly polished, stylized, sharply and precisely visualized and auralized films: Losey fits there, so does Nicolas Roeg, and I was strongly reminded of Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette. Images, like Chinese Roulette, uses plenty of glittering glass, mirror, and crystal imagery. The cinematography of the justly celebrated Vilmos Zsigmond is eye-popping, both in the tricky-to-film interiors and the hypnotic landscape exteriors.

Images also shares its DNA (love that phrase of Altman's!) with, and perhaps even exerted a direct influence upon, Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, made just a few years later. Images might very well have played theatrically in Australia; a number of Altman films seem to have had better distribution abroad than in the United States.

Altman never made a visually and dramatically tighter film than this; his famed looseness is nowhere in evidence. With a cast of only six and the isolated setting, Images does play like one of Bergman's famously tight chamber films; it's reminiscent not just of Persona in that respect, but also of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and others.

The actual title on the film's title-frame is Robert Altman's Images, which is a gambit reminiscent of Fellini and is as acutely self-reflexive a title as any film-maker has ever dared. Robert Altman's Images, indeed! That's a signature card for his entire work.

In an interview on the Images DVD, Altman reiterates his frequently-made point that all his films are installments in an ongoing vision and that assessments of the installments as being higher or lower in quality don't matter much to him: if you're interested in the vision, you're interested in the vision, right? I think we should take Altman seriously on this: it is a challenge to us to re-frame our way of experiencing films. This is not to say that there are no differences of quality between films or that those assessments don't matter; it is to say that, once a director has shown their artistic distinction and their ability to control their projects without major compromise, everything they do is interesting and of value because it expresses their vision.

Look at most of the directors mentioned in this post: Losey, Polanski, Bergman, Fassbinder, Coen, Fellini, Roeg, Huston, Welles, Weir -- all of them have tremendous artistic distinction, all control their projects to a very large extent (certain exceptions involving studio interference easily noted), and I would therefore advance the thesis that none of them ever made a "bad" film. We need everything they have done.

This business of charting an artist's work strictly in terms of peaks and valleys is pop journalism, not serious criticism. Pauline Kael set the tone for discussion of Altman in her early reviews, which went up and down like a ping-pong ball; loved MASH, hated Brewster McCloud, loved McCabe and Mrs. Miller, hated Images (and at that point she said that since she had discerned a definite alternating hit/miss pattern, she couldn't wait for his next film). She continued on in that opinioneering way throughout his career. Kael wrote much that was interesting on Altman, but I would submit that as his biggest champion, she nonetheless misunderstood the nature of his work (and everyone else's, frankly) in some very crucial ways. This was because Pauline Kael didn't care about Robert Altman's vision, shocking as that may sound; she only cared whether she liked the particular movie, not how it fit into the pattern of the whole. That's a serious, indeed a damning flaw in a critic.

A Perfect Couple

Written about a year ago and transferred here from another board:

I finally got around to seeing this for-many-years-as-good-as-lost Robert Altman film, and I must say, I was extremely impressed. It is a highly unusual piece. Altman biographer Patrick McGilligan says "There is not another movie like it in the Altman canon," and he's not kidding; there is scarcely another movie like it in anyone's canon. The closest I can think of is George Romero's equally criminally underrated There's Always Vanilla, which also deals with the arc of a romance between "ordinary" people with no touch of Hollywood iconography about them.

The film is conceived in terms of a number of binaries: two families, a rigidly patriarchal Greek family and a rock music collective with its own sort of patriarch; classical music and pop music, which join hands in the climax; a "perfect couple" of two decidedly imperfect, non-glamorous people, and a near-silent "imperfect couple" of two glamor-pusses, whose path repeatedly crosses that of the perfect couple, but in ways that only the audience perceives. (The perfect couple meets through a video dating service that is a direct precursor to the Internet dating services of our own day; that lends the film an oddly contemporary touch.)

The rock music collective, Keeping 'Em Off the Streets, co-formed by Altman collaborator Allan Nicholls, actually existed and concertized a couple of times, but failed to win a recording contract. (The movie soundtrack was apparently preserved on Altman's own Lion's Gate label; I am conducting a search for the record.) As others have noted, the music is quite delightful, and rather difficult to pigeonhole, with rock, pop, jazz, and theater music elements. There are a lot of musicians, a lot of singers, even a dog just hanging around, in somewhat elaborate and rather magical spaces (courtesy of master designer Leon Ericksen), and the musical numbers seem to emerge from the ambiance. The film is very driven by the songs.

Adding to the flavor of A Perfect Couple is a remarkably casual- positive attitude toward several gay and lesbian characters, so much so that Vito Russo singled the film out in his book The Celluloid Closet as being "special" for its era in its recognition of a "happy, well-adjusted" lesbian couple as a "family."

In the lead roles, Paul Dooley is remarkably winning, and Marta Heflin has a mysterious, somewhat withdrawn quality that suddenly announces itself forcefully in her one solo number, "Won't Somebody Care", which is also one of the great musical sequences in all of movies, if you ask me -- right up there with Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy" in Nashville.

The next forgotten Altman film that needs to be rehabilitated is H.E.A.L.T.H., which Helene Keyssar praises most interestingly in her book Robert Altman's America. I saw it only once many years ago and am eager to see it again.

POSTSCRIPT: You can listen to the music here, but I recommend seeing the film first. The songs are more fun to listen to once the visual context is in your memory bank:

http://www.selvan.com/pcmain.shtml

I still haven't found the soundtrack album, although, interestingly, an Italian issue of the album did show up on Ebay a while back.

UPDATE (5/3/2009): I did eventually score a copy of the album, at a reasonable price on Ebay (since no one else cares), unplayed in mint condition. I think it must be very rare; it probably had microscopic distribution to non-existent demand. My cat Claire seems entranced by the music.

Frank Norris

The turn-of-the-century California novelist Frank Norris is, like Charles Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and Zora Neale Hurston, one of those authors that I feel a particular kinship with; they are very personal favorites. Norris hooked me with McTeague, which as a young man I read at a record pace because I found it so completely absorbing. Everything I read about Norris only made me feel that much more linked to him; his early passing at 32 a real sadness to me. His relatively uncelebrated novel Vandover and the Brute, published posthumously, struck me as the equal of McTeague and a "lost" classic. (Martin Seymour-Smith thinks it Norris's best work.)

I have been a long time getting to The Octopus, the first in Norris's uncompleted "Trilogy of the Wheat," but I immediately re-discovered what I love about him. The Octopus is written in very long chapters that seem to be designed like symphonic movements, and the first is a dilly: a sweeping dramatic panorama that introduces most of the major characters; that seems to climax in a visual panorama, seen from a hilltop, of the entire "world of the novel"; and that then double climaxes in a moment of genuine power and shock.

The protagonist of the first chapter, Presley, is a Frank Norris-like figure, a would-be poet who wishes to capture the "epic" of the American West, but, one immediately senses, hasn't the gifts to do so. Norris himself was much closer to the West's true literary champion, and he certainly sets himself Presley's exact task -- even though no one could live up to Norris's Homeric conception of what that champion would need to be. He is shrewd enough to realize that the very elements which get in the way of Presley's naive conception of the Western epic are actually close to the heart of the matter:

He had set himself the task of giving true, absolutely true, poetical expression to the life of the ranch, and yet, again and again, he brought up against the railroad, that stubborn iron barrier against which his romance shattered itself to froth and disintegrated, flying spume. His heart went out to the people, and his groping hand met that of a slovenly little Dutchman, whom it was impossible to consider seriously. He searched for the True Romance, and, in the end, found grain rates and unjust freight tariffs.

Norris knew that those "grain rates and unjust freight tariffs" were an element of the American True Romance of business from which the story of the West cannot be separated -- except in naive poetry.

Norris, a writer of power, is not without his flaws by our standards, especially in his handling of racial and ethnic matters. Critic Richard Chase sees in him a "a tension between Norris the liberal humanist and Norris the protofascist, complete with a racist view of Anglo-Saxon supremacy, a myth of the Superman, and a portentous nihilism"; Kevin Starr expands on this theme in his introduction to the Penguin edition of The Octopus and notes the anti-Latino and anti-Semitic elements in the novel's characterizations. I would not exonerate Norris of these charges, since I remember being startled by the "protofascist" Nietzschean elements in his nautical potboiler Moran of the Lady Letty. Norris was a complex, self-contradictory thinker, a man of his time and at odds with it, and a novelist of quite remarkable gifts -- and I realize that in so describing him I am putting forward a formula that, tweaked by a word or two, could encapsulate almost any writer in world history that I like.

POSTSCRIPT: This is almost (but not quite) entirely gratuitous for me to remark, but Norris was also one of the most foxily handsome of all American writers. I wonder if I am reading too much into all the photographs of Norris that I have seen that he seems quite aware of his own sexual magnetism:



Martin Seymour-Smith says, I'm not sure on what authority, that Norris "had been very worried by the consequences of his (apparently ordinary) sexual excesses"; but whatever the truth of that, there is a palpable element of that sort of sexual panic in both McTeague and Vandover -- one more element in the fascination that Norris holds.

"Can't Do a Thing Well, Leave It Alone"

So says the Paul Douglas character in A Letter to Three Wives, and the little observation has been sounding in my head ever since, representing as it does a belief I have long been progressing toward. This belief is not an excuse for always shying away from things one is afraid of; sometimes you surprise yourself, and actually turn out to be good at them and able to take pleasure in them. But it is a warning not to waste much time on activities unsuited to your gifts and inclinations (even or especially when others try to coerce you to do so).

I realize that something I have very much left alone is the notion of having dependents, other than my pets. I recently noticed an observation in one of Joseph Epstein's essays from In a Cardboard Belt! to the effect that from a very early age there was never a time when he didn't have others dependent on him; I think I detected a trace of bitterness in his saying this. It has been quite the opposite with me. There has never been a time when someone else has truly been dependent on me, and I realize in hindsight that I have avoided that. Really, it is hard enough taking care of oneself, ne c'est pas? Perhaps in the days when a man who worked hard could be fairly guaranteed of a living family wage and lifetime employment, taking on the burdens of others made sense, but I can't see it now. Periods of unemployment and underemployment can undermine anyone's sense of being equal to the needs of providing for a household.

In the one sustained "relationship" I've had, there was no actual question of dependency because the parties kept their finances separate, although there was a considerable and unpleasant psychological question of dependency because my partner's true desire (always plainly stated, I'll admit) was to live a live of leisure and free spending premised on the wealth of another. I wasn't in a position to offer that, and I'm glad I wasn't; I might have been stupid enough to throw a lot of money away. Eventually we both woke up and moved on (although there's a lot more to the story which I'll no doubt tell on another occasion).

Being gay did free me from the "normal" social pattern of marriage and children (which has been losing ground anyway, although still vigorous here in Northeast Wisconsin). Just as well: I would have been bad at it. "Can't do a thing well, leave it alone" -- and raising children is something one had darn well better be good at, if one is to bother having them at all. I have never gotten the appeal, and it is one of those human urges I can't seem to empathize myself into sympathy with. I have considerable common ground with the "childfree" movement, it seems.

It's not that I hate kids; I've been a teacher at all grade levels, after all. I've just never wanted the hugeness of responsibility that comes with bringing children into the world (or adopting them). I might have somewhat enjoyed being an uncle, but neither my brother nor sister has had or ever will have children. For that matter, very many of my friends both gay and straight are also childless in their forties; I wonder if I have gravitated to them partly on the basis of that affinity.

So no children, no partner or desire for one anymore, and no aging parents to take care of, either; both died fairly young. I have largely left dependencies alone, and life has not conspired to saddle me with any unsought ones. Many might see this state of affairs as rather sad and blank; that would be the received social wisdom. But the situation is quite in line with my natural gifts and inclinations as well as the areas in which I lack, and it is up to me to, as they say, make the most of it.

The Unstable Gene Tierney

I had to smile at the opening scenes of Otto Preminger's 1949 film noir Whirlpool, which reveal socialite Gene Tierney as a kleptomaniac. Because, let's see, in recent months I've watched Tierney as a "dead woman" (Laura), a neurotic widow in love with a ghost (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir), a gambling addict and alcoholic (The Shanghai Gesture), and the coldest homicidal lunatic bitch of, perhaps, all time (Leave Her to Heaven). Kleptomania, and, later in Whirlpool, suggestability at the hands of an unsavory hypnotist, are pretty mild in the overall Gene Tierney scheme of things.

Will it surprise anyone to learn that Tierney actually had her own tragic instabilities? She was out of movies for a long while after the age of 35. She is said, probably with accuracy, to have been depressive and bipolar. She underwent more than two dozen shock treatments. She had to be talked off a ledge. At one point during her therapy she was instructed to work as a salesgirl in a department store (whose nutty idea was that?) and was of course spotted, creating a media furor.

Some of her downward trajectory may stem from circumstances surrounding the birth of her first daughter by then-husband and fashion designer Oleg Cassini. Tierney contracted German measles from an over-zealous fan who snuck out of military quarantine to attend one of the star's personal appearances; this resulted in her daughter being born premature, severely underweight, deaf, partially blind, and retarded. (This is such an ultimate "wages of stardom" story that Agatha Christie could not resist using it in her novel The Mirror Crack'd.)

Tierney also had a wild love life, encompassing Cassini, John F. Kennedy, Tyrone Power, Prince Ali Khan of Pakistan (Rita Hayworth's ex), Howard Hughes, and second husband W. Howard Lee (a Texas oil baron who was Hedy Lamarr's ex). Her legendary beauty might have had something to do with that.

As with so many entertainers, her life was ultimately a mess (albeit a lucrative one). But she was a gifted performer, too, and her unstable quality is very effective in all the movies that I mentioned.

Whirlpool is a lesser entry in my ongoing Otto Preminger project. Even his great directorial skill can only do so much with a storyline that is, as the Time Out Film Guide rightly says, "daft." The film is also slightly hobbled by a weak central performance by Richard Conte as Tierney's psychologist husband. Conte could do villains ("Mr. Brown" in The Big Combo), but not noble intellectuals.

But, on the plus side of the ledger, there is Jose Ferrer as the hypnotist David Korvo. Ferrer was newly arrived from the Broadway stage -- this was only his second film -- and although it is oftimes said that the only good acting technique is the kind that disguises itself, Ferrer is a blast to watch here precisely because of his palpable and undisguised technique. It is well matched to the charlatanry of his character, true, but there is also a sheer joy in showoffiness like that of a nakedly virtuosic violinist. Ferrer is especially good with his voice; every syllable he utters has a precise function and lands just where he wishes it. I grinned throughout this performance, which of its kind could scarcely be bettered.

Reading Diary

I notice that no matter how many books I have going at once, I always seem to finish a bunch of them within a week or ten days' flurry of activity. So this week I finished Doctor Dolittle's Post Office and the great Can You Forgive Her?, and I'm about to complete Herbert Lottman's biography Jules Verne.

As I've mentioned before, Verne was the first author I took an interest in as a particular object of study. Around the time of my starting third grade (I was precocious), my mother special ordered Jules Verne and His Work by I.O. Evans for me -- I had read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that summer, dense scientific language and all. So the outlines of Verne's life story are very familiar to me. Lottman's biography is well-done and energetic, although it is peculiar in two respects. One is the distance between biographer and subject -- always a matter of import. Some biographers are definite champions of their subjects, others come to hate them during the process of research (and in the finished results, that usually shows). Lottman doesn't fall into either of those camps, but is more puckish in tone; Verne seems to amuse him slightly, although I'd be hard pressed to say why. It does make for a jolly read.

The second unusual aspect of the book is related to the first. Verne was a prolific novelist, and Lottman might be expected to uncover hidden gems tucked away in the oeuvre; but he can't seem to be bothered about that. His critical commentary is scanty, and pretty much falls in line with received wisdom. This is where a reader wants the biographer to be a champion, and looks for the special insight that comes from reading an author whole; but such insight is lacking here.

Some other quick reading observations: It's fun when reading so many different books at once yields small synchronicities, such as the gambling scenes I recently encountered in Can You Forgive Her? and Richard Powell's Say It with Bullets...I'm making good headway in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter, set in Sierra Leone during the World War II era of British colonial rule. The cockroach killing contest between bureaucrats Wilson and Harris is a great scene...Today I started two long novels I've been looking forward to, George Eliot's Middlemarch and Frank Norris's The Octopus, of which much more to follow.

Anton Bruckner

I have been spending a lot of time in Bruckner's sound universe, having now listened to Symphonies Nos 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 in the Daniel Barenboim / Warner Classics box set. I came across an interesting observation in the notes to Symphony No. 5, by Hans-Christian Schmid (not the film director?), who refers to Bruckner's "strange discontinuities of mood and development." Those discontinuities are quite apparent even to a musically untutored listener and help explain why it takes a number of hearings to acclimatize oneself to most of the Bruckner symphonies. The most immediately coherent, everyone seems to agree, and hence the most popular, is No. 7, which also benefits from uniformly superb thematic material. No. 5, the occasion of Schmid's comment, is a far more challenging mountain to approach; it seems to offer one sort of music ("lofty, hymn-like figures" with "dense, organ-like writing"), and then another ("idyllic passages...filled with bucolic naivety"), without immediate clarity as to why. But these leaps unquestionably make the symphonies both utterly distinctive (no one else would write this way!) and curiously proto-modern even when the sonorities are firmly Wagnerian. And the rewards of persevering with the music are considerable, not least in the thrill of the massive climaxes that no Bruckner symphony is without.

Brett Favre

I would say that I can't believe that the Brett Favre news cycle is starting up again, except of course that I can believe it. What is it with this guy? I'm not a football fan and in that sense I don't have a dog in the fight, but I am a resident of Northeast Wisconsin and I work in Green Bay, so I will be hearing about this ad infinitum, and that will be mighty annoying. At this point I think that Favre really needs to seek help with his pathological need for attention. Every year recently he's put Packers fans through months of "Is he returning or isn't he?", and he apparently can't stop doing that even now that he's retired. This is turning into something akin to Cher's ten-year "farewell" tour, although that was kind of crafty and this is just nonsensical.

I'm reminded that I have never felt any attraction to athletes who, like Favre or Mickey Mantle or Mike Tyson, seem to lack significant mental horsepower and articulative ability. I go for the sharp and well-spoken ones; even if I don't become a particular fan, I strongly respect those skills. Tiger Woods is a great example -- hell of a smart man. Athletes like Cal Ripken Jr., Billie Jean King, Payne Stewart, Reggie Jackson, Curt Schilling, Peyton Manning, Nancy Lopez -- those are the ones I mean. Fun to watch, fun to listen to. Whereas listening to Brett Favre try to get through a press conference is pretty painful.

(There has been controversy among sports commentators as to whether the use of phrases like "articulate" and "well spoken" in reference to athletes has a racist connotation. I can see where that could be the case sometimes --if the implication is, like wow, he's black and he can string two sentences together -- but these are two of my favorite terms of praise, and I'm not droppping them!)