Mammal Watch: Siberian Weasel

I am an enthusiastic mammal-watcher, which is harder to be than a bird-watcher because mammals are more visually elusive. Last night as I was walking through Yongji Park in Changwon, I saw a mustelid mammal that I thought might have been a feral ferret. But the coloration also matched the Siberian Weasel, which is indigenous to Korea. Here is a picture of the Siberian Weasel that I lifted from the Web:

I got a really good look at this mammal, since it was not particularly fearful and the lighting in the park was good. After I got home, I posted queries at the forums at Animal Rescue Korea and MammalWatching.com (an excellent site). Respondents confirmed that the Siberian Weasel has adapted to urban environments in Korea and China, and is seen in Seoul, Busan, and Shanghai, also on Jeju Island off the South Korean coast. So I was able to confirm my sighting as this species, which excited me considerably. There is not much mammal action around here; I’ve only seen Red Squirrels a couple of times locally. And I've never seen any mustelids in the wild before, so this was a great experience.

In the Shadows

Have you ever noticed how in biographies, a fringe character who pops up periodically but about whom little is known is always described as a "shadowy figure"? Well, that guy is me. It's not so easy to be mysterious in our electronic era as in earlier times, but I am doing my best. This blog, of course, is written under a pseudonym (one of several handles that I use online). I have never been on Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, and recently deleted my LinkedIn account. I have been scrubbing a lot of my Internet presence elsewhere as well. I have moved rapidly from city to city and lately from country to country, and am about to make another such leap. Usually when I leave a place, the vast majority of people I knew there never hear from (and perhaps about) me again. I want to be hard to find, except for that small group of family and friends that I keep apprised of my movements.

Our worldwide social movement towards oversharing of information, total personal transparency, and constant surveillance both overt and covert, appalls me, and whatever little I can do to resist it, I will. I rather expect that a small but vigorous counter-movement will form around this notion of renewed privacy and semi-visibility; Mark Zuckerberg et al. have swung the pendulum so far in their "We Live in Public" direction that an opposite if not equal reaction is probably inevitable.

The surveillance society, a development of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon concept employing all the latest modern technologies, is especially troubling to me. Lately I have noticed how about half the visual content on local television news programs in Korea is made up of hidden camera videos. Blaise Pascal once said that "the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room"; but we may all have to do that if we wish to have any personal zone whatsoever.

We are not only over-watched, we are over-identifiable. It used to be that you could remake your identity fairly easily. Crossing borders without papers was common. Then, as Paul Fussell discusses in his wonderful book Abroad, passports and visas became required burdens and avatars of modern identity. You could still gallivant around in your own country without much fuss as late as the Fifties and Sixties, the time of On the Road and The Fugitive. The premise of The Fugitive, that Richard Kimball could move from state to state without ever having to produce a picture ID, open a bank account, or obtain a driver's license -- without ever having to prove who he is -- is unthinkable nowadays. We are demanded to produce such proof all the time.

It becomes harder and harder to say, as Frank Sinatra sings in "Angel Eyes," "Excuse me while I disappear...." But I think that when the ability to disappear, to not be known, is lost, something fundamental has been taken from us. And yes, I admit that when that ability does exist, people will misuse it to evade taxes, to escape from the consequences of their crimes, to bail out on responsibilities -- naturally they will. There is no benefit without that kind of corresponding deficit. But it is a trade-off I would happily return to. A world without shadows is glaring, frightening, and Orwellian.

David Foster Wallace

With David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel The Pale King coming out, there has been a surge of essays and articles about the late writer, and one of the most interesting is this account in The Guardian (those British newspapers strike again!) of a visit with his widow, artist Karen Green:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/10/karen-green-david-foster-wallace-interview

I love this bit about Wallace's friendship/rivalry with Jonathan Franzen:

Franzen was one of very few literary figures with whom Wallace kept in touch. They had both been beset by similar doubts about their work, and about the future of the American novel, which they had attempted to resolve in different ways; Franzen committing himself to "old-fashioned" storytelling in The Corrections, Wallace persisting with his sense that fiction had to be frenetically alive to the way "experience seemed to barrage me with input".

Green recalls their rivalry with a smile. "They were really great together, you know like two kids in the back seat of the car, squabbling, it was really delightful to see them together. Jon has lost that neck-and-neck competitor, his soccer-field pal."

In one corner of the room where we are talking is a beautiful guitar given to Green by Franzen, which she is learning to play: Leonard Cohen and Rufus Wainwright. "Jon was one of David's very, very few writing friends," she says. "He was sort of like a god to David and I think Jon maybe felt something the same about David. And he has been an incredible friend to me since [Wallace's suicide] happened. He feels like a brother."

At the end of the article, there is a nice little annotated bibliography of Wallace's writings.

RIP Sidney Lumet

What a great film-maker he was (and by every report I have ever read, a fine and thoroughly decent man). Roger Ebert has put up a thoughtful obituary:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20110409/FEATURED/110409988

Lumet's output is equally rich in accepted classics, and re-discoverable neglected films. He started out performing on the Broadway stage as a child, and always had a marvelous touch with actors, who revered him. He is underrated as a visual artist because he created a separate style appropriate to the needs of each movie. And as a dramatic director, keeping the audience involved in every scene, very few are in his league.

I am partial to so many of his films, but would give special shout-outs to Prince of the City, probably his most complex movie, and in my view a masterpiece; the stunningly tense Fail-Safe, under-appreciated because of its proximity to the identically plotted Dr. Strangelove; and Network, in which Lumet, brilliant screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky, and an incomparable cast, foresaw the world we live in now.

POSTSCRIPT: Jeffery Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere is with me on Prince of the City:

To me Lumet's masterpiece is Prince of the City ('81) -- a nearly three-hour-long drama about the morality of finking out your friends in order to find your morality, and entirely about New York cops and mob guys and district attorneys and junkies, most of it set in the offices of this or that prosecutor with guys dressed in suits and shirtsleeves with cold takeout food and tepid coffee on the desk.

POSTSCRIPT: I found an interesting tidbit in a tribute piece by Clint O'Connor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

http://www.cleveland.com/moviebuff/index.ssf/2011/04/sidney_lumet_an_appreciation_g.html

When I asked about some of his all-time favorites, he wouldn't bite. "I'm not going to tell you that," said Lumet. "If I tell you about the ones I feel good about, it makes orphans of the other ones."

Robert Altman made a very similar comment in an interview once: The films are all my children; whatever one you say you don't like, I'm going to stick up for that one and say it's a favorite.

No orphans.

The Human Jungle

[Cross-posted as a "TV Noir of the Week" at The Blackboard.]

In addition to everything else that Sigmund Freud wrought, he made inadvertent major contributions to the practice of narrative. Since the Freudian sub-conscious is a place where information can hide, the ascendancies of the mystery as a genre and of the surprise ending as a narrative device can be partly traced to Freud. Further, the process of accessing the sub-conscious can usefully form a major strand of a story’s plot, with the accessor, usually a psychologist or psychiatrist, playing an important and often heroic role, and the end results of the access being one or more cathartic big “reveals.” Variations on this narrative template have been ubiquitous in literature, theater, film, and television for many years, to the point where it can seem rote and tired and needs a special dose of cleverness to revive it (as in The Sixth Sense).

The title of the 1963-1964 British psychiatric television drama, The Human Jungle, perfectly captures the appeal of the Freudian scenario for storytellers. The jungle of the mind, like the actual physical jungle, is wild, it is lush, and there are things in it you cannot see, at least not at first. I wish I could say that The Human Jungle rings interesting changes on the typical psycho-narrative, which was worked pretty hard throughout the post-war era. But in the episodes I have watched, it is fairly standard stuff, offering predictable and humdrum revelations that are insufficient pay-off even for the low investment of a televised hour. Its noir markings are exceedingly faint, although the smoky credit sequence, with our hero-psychiatrist listening pensively to a taped patient session while slow background jazz plays, seems to promise more in that regard.

Herbert Lom plays psychiatrist Dr. Roger Corder with an intense manner (that is however capable of relaxing into friendliness) and a slightly beady stare; one imagines he might be good at hypnosis if required. Like most psychological professionals in this sort of set-up, he is a locksmith who can provide you with the missing key. He is assisted by an ambitious young colleague (check), a trusty secretary (check), and a seemingly madcap but actually quite sensible teenage daughter whom he is raising alone as a widower. The widowerhood provides an aura of personal loss that suggests that Dr. Corder will not have to fake his empathy with patients: he too has suffered.

The episode “Fourteen Ghosts” is quite emblematic of the series and its approach. The wife of a prominent judge has been arrested for shoplifting. Naturally she has no economic reason to steal, so the kleptomania is expressive of deeper issues (as it is in Hitchcock’s Marnie). When a woman shoplifts, then you can be sure that somewhere, sometime, the men in her life done her wrong, and in this case it doesn’t take Dr. Corder long to figure the particulars out; you or I could have done it. Lady Shaw had a difficult relationship with her rigid father, and now has an even more difficult one with her super-rigid husband. Hubby the judge has his own deep unresolved traumas, and Dr. Corder diagnoses that he too should submit to therapy, but of course the judge is having none of that. He wears down quickly, however, this being television, and his shameful war history of responsibility for the deaths of others (implied in the title) comes spilling out.

The Shaw family situation also includes a supportive and sensible daughter, a type apparently thick on the ground in Britain at that time, and a son-in-law who has been unfairly rejected by the judgmental judge for not being “good enough” for his daughter. (A penniless artist! It just won’t do!) Even from my brief description, you can sense the metaphoric group hug this is all going to end with. Another triumph for Dr. Corder!

I am scarcely immune to the pleasures of this type of story; I bawl my eyes out every time I watch Ordinary People. But that is an unusually effective example of the classic-style psychological family drama, partly because it is more realistic: the super-rigid mother played by Mary Tyler Moore adamantly refuses the group hug and packs off instead. It is a standard that The Human Jungle doesn’t measure up to. Despite my fondness for Sixties London in black-and-white, this series is too blah and formulaic in its execution to win me over.

Mystery of the Day

Why would people still go to journalism school, when serious professional journalism is essentially over in this country -- over as a business, over as a profession? Many, perhaps all, of the folks in public radio are about to be out of a job. It's not just that you can't find a journalistic job because of the intense competition; there is virtually no place to be hired. In the words of a student at my Korean school, The Future Is Dark. (We native teachers at the school feel this would be an excellent name for a depressive pop band; one wag suggested that it could put on a "Kill the Lights" tour.)

Along these lines, the fine freelance cultural commentator Colin Marshall was just grousing at his eponymous blog:

...watching people work hard and well while clearly getting paid for it — and probably having their proficiency positively effect their quality of life — in any setting tortures me. Over time, I’ve whittled my wish list down to one compound item: to be able to work hard at what I’m good at, to only do that, and to have my accomplishments therein translate into something. Anything....Writers? Forget it; can’t get paid for that anymore. Filmmakers? Forget it; can’t get paid for that anymore. Broadcasters? Forget it; can’t get paid for that anymore....Feel free to do all that stuff on the side while, for a paycheck, you either suffocate in alienated Kafka-hood or ask people if they want that macchiato extra wet.

http://colinmarshall.typepad.com/blog/2011/03/rj-cutler-the-september-issue.html

I commented:

I can't be sure of the level of irony here, so for the sake of argument, let me just take the post straight. I think the notion "Do what you love and the money will follow" was always a remote dream for most, but yes, it is probably getting even worse today, as the production of "content" of all forms is increasingly hobbified and unpaid. So I think the only realistic model is "Do what you love, and do something else (that you don't dislike) for money." That leads a lot of us to teaching, for obvious reasons.

But whatever activity it leads to in the second category, it is important to preserve free time for the first category, and that, in turn, often means forgoing a "normal" or conventional family or romantic life. In other words, it is not usually possible to work eight hours a day at the secondary money-making activity, come home to the spouse and kids and house, and also keep up the beloved primary activity.

Well, I didn't say this was going to be easy. But I have found throughout my life -- I am 52 now -- that I can make some (not much, but enough) money, and maintain all my interests and creative outlets, by opting for an unconventional and frankly semi-monastic kind of life. Surprisingly perhaps, it is also a reasonably satisfying one.

Everyone's solution will be different, of course. But trying to "have it all" is usually not practical. Something, somewhere, has got to give. Only you can decide what that something needs to be....it is one thing to accept temporary privations as a condition en route to making it and "getting to work hard at what [you're] good at," and quite another to accept privations as an ongoing precondition of getting to do what you're good at in your spare time, for little or no monetary compensation. Do you love what you love that much? That's the question. Many don't, and that's OK too. Most people can't accept the trade-offs involved in the pursuit of a true avocation -- first and foremost among them that it is an avocation.

Absolutely the worst stumbling block in your one wish is the phrase "to only do that." That is where the fantasy and its likely unrealizability is concentrated, in those four little words.

POSTSCRIPT: Another phrase in Colin Marshall's wish, "to have my accomplishments....translate into something. Anything" is vague but bears thinking about as well. What would that something be? Money? Recognition? Despite Colin Marshall's sophistication and extensive knowledge of cutting-edge world art, there is a naive and sweetly American character to this assumption that you have a gift, you get to exercise that gift, and you get rewarded and recognized for using it. What world is that in? 95 times out of 100, the difference your creative gift makes in your life is to make it harder and more complicated, not easier. I'm sorry, but this is true. And although it may be depressing to contemplate, it is immature not to.

The Arbor (2010)

Robert Kennedy's latest review at his excellent Cranes Are Flying blog, of Clio Barnard's quasi-documentary portrayal of the late Scottish playwright Andrea Dunbar, The Arbor, rang a bell for me. Where else had I read about this recently?

http://cranesareflying1.blogspot.com/2011/03/arbor.html

[I]n format alone, this is a dizzying conception that defies convention and has the audience on their heels from the outset....Most of the time characters are speaking directly into the camera, as if in an interview format, though each, as it turns out, is a recreation. Other times the cast is gathered on the front lawn and enact scenes....as neighbors watch from the street. I’m not sure when it clicks in, but at some point you stop fighting what you initially can’t comprehend and start appreciating what’s happening onscreen, as the film only grows more intimately compelling until the audience is completely riveted and even overwhelmed by the material....The presentation is so radically different than what viewers are used to that they may have a hard time realizing what they’re witnessing, but they’ll certainly pick up what’s essential....[I]t uses the power of the theatrical performances, some of which are sensationally powerful and worthy of an award nomination....This is unconventional filmmaking combining the dramatic power of language with a fierce new sense of theatricality, a major work brilliantly directed, using a dazzlingly inventive conceptual design to accentuate some of the most intimately personal and humane material to ever grace the screen.

I wracked my brain and finally remembered that I had seen a post about this film at another excellent blog, the self-titled Dr. Tony Shaw, "Mainly the Obscure, and/or mainly 'Outsider' Literature," which is an RSS feed in my Google Reader, and which I recommend highly. Dr. Shaw has always got good stuff, and it is obscure and outsider for sure.

http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com/2010/12/clio-bernards-arbor-and-andrea-dunbar.html

The Arbor (2010) is a documentary about the life of the playwright Andrea Dunbar, with the state of Thatcherite northern England in the 1980s as a backcloth. Or is it more about the aftermath, the heritage of Dunbar, both artistic and personal? Certainly it's one of the best films of the year, although don't expect it to win any Oscars: this is definitely arthouse only....Clio Barnard's film is experimental, taking the words of survivors - above all Dunbar's two daughters Lorraine and Lisa - with actors lip-synching them....[T]he film...is a mélange of the lip-synched episodes, documentary television footage, and scenes from The Arbor performed on the grassy area of Brafferton Arbor....[T]his is a wonderful movie that I don't recommend to anyone expecting thrills galore. The lip-synching, and the various stories told in hindsight, tell us how impossible the truth is to find, or rather, perhaps, that truth is plural. Brilliant is a word that comes to mind for this engrossing film.

It certainly comes across that both Kennedy and Shaw were ultimately thrilled by the richness of the material and the aesthetic challenges the film presented.

More on Andrea Dunbar at her Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Dunbar

A feature in The Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/andrea-dunbar-a-genius-from-the-slums-2105874.html

Another in The Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/8066286/The-Arbor-examining-Andrea-Dunbars-legacy.html

And a third in The Guardian. These British newspapers are serious. I love them!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/apr/12/theatre

Alan Ladd

[Responding to a "Noir of the Week" on the Alan Ladd movie Saigon at The Blackboard.]

There is something ambiguous and mysterious about Alan Ladd -- maybe it is his slight blankness, the fact that you could project onto him -- that made him natural casting for Jay Gatsby, even if the movie didn't turn out so great.

It also helps explain why he is far and away the most iconic male noir star among gay men. I believe this was always the case; recall the photo of Ladd taped inside Sal Mineo's locker in Rebel without a Cause. (Mineo would later say that he played Plato as film's first "gay teenager" at Nicholas Ray's express instruction.)

Ladd aged rapidly after 35, which was fairly common in those days, but his aging did not give him the physical authority it bestows on some actors; he went from being boyish to looking like an oldish boy.

(Aging can be especially hard on shorter actors in Hollywood, I think; Audie Murphy's career also started to fizzle after 35, and even the great James Cagney had to make major adjustments and develop as a character actor.)

Ultimately Ladd's story, with his attempted gun suicide at 49 and his eventual fatal overdose at 50, is one of Hollywood's saddest. His alcoholic mother had committed suicide years before; probably he was always at risk, and not well-equipped emotionally to deal with the downslope of a movie career. An interviewer asked him in 1961 "What would you change about yourself if you could?", and he replied, "Everything."

The Woefulness of Golf Writing

Jonathan Wall at Devil Ball Golf wrote a pretty bad post about Justin Rose's failure to win the Transitions tournament. I responded:

Why are we clinging to this notion that there is a "will to victory"? Statisticians in all other sports have long since discredited the notion of clutch performance and "winner psychology." Tiger Woods didn't blow everyone away for a decade because he had some steely-eyed will to victory; rather, he was simply more talented than anyone else playing at that point (and disciplined about his talent, which it helps to be). If you are talented enough, you will win or have a late lead in a certain number of tournaments, especially on courses or in formats (match play) that favor your particular gifts. But you cannot affect the performance of the other golfers, only your own; and while you can get in your own way by letting your nerves get the better of you, I don't believe that you can "seal the deal" by thinking the right sort of thoughts. Too much golf writing focuses on the presumed psychological state of the week's winner, and not on their statistical profile, the type of course, the mix of competitors, injury issues, and other factors far more germane to determining a tournament's outcome.

Golf writing, with its repeated mantras like "He knows how to win," is pretty darned primitive in some ways. Notice all the emotionally loaded language in Mr. Wall's piece:

"After struggling to break through on the PGA Tour..."
"...it seemed like Rose had finally turned the corner."
"He was playing with a confidence that had been missing from his game for some time..."
"...should [we] be genuinely concerned about Rose closing out tournaments again [?]"
"...we know he's got what it takes to seal the deal."
"...he'll learn from his final round struggles and come out a better player..."
"He's too good a player not to take something positive out of this experience..."

This is lazy, vapid writing. The phrasings are vague sportswriter-speak -- "turned the corner," "got what it takes," "something positive." I learn nil about Rose as a player from reading this pap. I'm not saying that emotions have nothing to do with to playing the game, but I somehow doubt that Mr. Wall is a trained psychologist or is that intimate with the workings of Justin Rose's mind, so this is pure armchair pop psych based on no discernible psychological information. Sportswriting should hold itself to a higher standard than that.

Specifically, I would say that what you gain from playing a particular course are insights that might help you the next time you play that course, not "something positive" that will assist you "going into the Masters." All that language really implies is the need for a fiercer determination on Rose's part. Mr. Wall may think that fierce determination wins tournaments, but I do not. I think that talent wins them.

RIP Augustus Owsley Stanley III

The Grateful Dead's (and many others') LSD chemist/producer/supplier was a colorful figure, to say the least:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/us/15stanley.html

I first read extensively about Owsley in Jay Stevens's incredible history Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, a book I cannot recommend highly enough. But he shows up in every chronicle of the era. This slightly cheeky New York Times obituary shows that he stayed eccentric right up till the end.

As it happens, I am just now reading Jack Kerouac's brilliant On the Road, which of course has its share of thinly disguised "characters" of the postwar fringe. Neal Cassady would have crossed paths with Owsley Stanley through Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters (whom he also supplied copiously with hallucinogens, many of which he concocted or commercialized himself, such as the notorious STP).

Here is a 2007 profile of Owsley Stanley that appeared in Rolling Stone:

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/owsley-stanley-the-king-of-lsd-20110314?page=1

The Duel at Silver Creek (1952)

[Posted at The Blackboard.]

I have never seen Don Siegel's 1952 color Western The Duel at Silver Creek, with Audie Murphy, Stephen McNally, and Faith Domergue, mentioned as an off-genre noir. But I watched it tonight through Netflix streaming, and I think it qualifies: it's got a noir-like narration by McNally, a lynch mob, a preponderance of night scenes in the mid-section, and, most pertinently, a femme fatale who is an actual cold-blooded, on-screen murderess. I can't think of another such in any Western I've seen from that era. Check this film out, it's interesting. It's a bit of a Johnny Guitar precursor, too: most of the characters have campy nicknames such as Lightning, Rat Face, Dusty, and Brown Eyes, and the outfits worn by Audie Murphy's Silver Kid and Eugene Iglesias's Johnny Sombrero are positively pimpin'.

Commonplace Book: Desire

So Dantes, who three months earlier had wanted nothing except freedom, felt already not free enough, but wanted wealth. It was not the fault of Dantes, but of God who, while limiting the power of man, has created in him infinite desires!

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo (tr. Robin Buss)

David Lynch Is Keeping Busy

With his new web-store:

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/david-lynch-launches-web-store/

With his upcoming gallery show:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/03/david-lynch-to-exhibit-new-paintings-sculptures-in-gallery-show.html

But apparently not with any new feature films. It figures. Why is it that artists who are clearly amazing and professional in their primary medium want to be loved for their dilettantish and amateur work in secondary media? I will sometimes follow these side ventures, grumbling as I do, but really, isn't it all kind of arrogant?

Emmett Gowen

Rex Parker at Pop Sensation posted this strange paperback original cover from 1937:

I dug around and came up with this information about the author, which I posted as a comment:

A Tennessee Erskine Caldwell, apparently. This was his third and final novel, after Mountain Born (1932) and Dark Moon of March (1933), which has a great cover in this 1952 reprint:

Gowen (1902-1973) had a sordid beginning: "Court-martialed from the Marine Corps, Gowen served three years in the Naval Prison at Parris Island, South Carolina before being dishonorably discharged in 1923. He taught himself the craft of writing as a reporter on several Memphis newspapers while churning out stories for pulp magazines." But he persevered after these early struggles with military justice and fiction-writing to become a freelancer for outdoor magazines and a field guide for hunters and fishers in Mexico and Central America. His final gift to readers was the formidably titled On Man and the Good Life: Leaves From the Notebook of Emmett Gowen, Being a Rather Loose Collection of Writings, Notes and Folk Beliefs on the Delights of Farming, and Other Subjects Related to our Earth, and Tennessee in Particular, Including Some Interesting Things That Grow on It, and Live on It, and the Health-Giving Properties Thereof (1974). You can find a bibliography of Gowen's work here. I think I am Emmett Gowen's new biggest fan.

POSTSCRIPT: Another commenter found comparisons of Gowen to Erskine Caldwell and James Thurber here, as well as this tidbit: "The author taught at Commonwealth College, closed in 1941 as subversive by the Arkansas attorney general." Emmett Gowen rocks!

Hidden Fear (1957)

[Cross-posted as a "Noir of the Week" at The Blackboard.]

Andre De Toth’s Hidden Fear (1957) is poised between two styles, and enacts the transition between them over the course of the movie’s running time. The first style is the Euro-moody postwar thriller in the vein of The Third Man and Mr. Arkadin, which dominates the first two-thirds of the film; the second style is the Sixties action thriller, which is prefigured in the last third, especially with an extended multi-vehicle chase sequence (car / motorcycle / helicopter / boat).

Hidden Fear was a location shoot in Copenhagen, using Danish technicians and many Danish actors. John Payne plays detective Mike Brent, whose sister Susan has been hanging out with a seedy crowd in Europe and gotten herself pinned with a murder rap. Mike is here to help, but also harbors quite a bit of anger against his ne’er-do-well sibling, and in one memorable scene, actually roughs her up (“You tramp!”). There surely was a lot of violence against women in Fifties crime films, wasn’t there? The mood of these later noirs is decidedly undecorous, and their protagonists are angry, embittered men.

Mike Brent is no exception. “Brennt” is “burns” in German, a language well-known to Danes, and Payne, his career on the wane – this was his last feature film until 1968 – expresses plenty of fiery rage, when he is not merely grim. Payne was 44 when Hidden Fear was made, about to put his time in on one of the ubiquitous TV Westerns of the era, The Restless Gun. He is quite physically imposing; at 6’2”, he towers over his European co-stars, and De Toth often puts him dead center in the frame, striding purposefully in his sharp-cut, shoulder-padded suits. Sneering and potentially lethal, he is a precursor to Dirty Harry.

The local atmosphere in the night scenes is rather fun, with the typically shadowy streets and alleys, and flavorful musical accompaniment (is that an accordion I hear?). But the noirish flourishes are mostly decorative. We do get a tour of the Danish bar scene, including one nightspot with a revolving indoor carousel. We learn, no surprise, that Danish girls like American men, and American men like Danish girls. Had it been made a decade later, the film would have pushed that angle considerably harder!

The plot, such as it is, involves a double-crossing counterfeiting ring led by Alexander Knox and Conrad Nagel. Their scheming is not of much consequence except to set up the cat-and-mouse antics of the film’s final section. It must be admitted that the chase is nicely done, with cool POV and helicopter shots, and a nifty explosion. James Bond beckons.

POSTSCRIPT: Fellow Blackboarder Dan in the MW pointed out that John Payne was actually one of the first actors to take an interest in playing James Bond; he held an option on the novel Moonraker in the mid-Fifties, although nothing came of it. The Payne on display in Hidden Fear would have made a quite credible Americanized Bond, with the anger turned down and the charm turned up.

The very first on-screen Bond was another American, Barry Nelson, in an hour-long adaptation of Casino Royale that aired on the television anthology series Climax! on October 21, 1954.

Golf and Aging

[Comment posted in response to an article about the decline of Canadian golfer and former Masters champion Mike Weir at Devil Ball Golf.]

For some reason, people don't seem to realize that age is a factor in golf just as it is in all other sports. Weir peaked between 30 and 35. This is something that many golfers do. He has been on a slide since them. Also not unusual. He is about to turn 41. The odds are very long that he could recuperate his game sufficiently to be a Top 50 golfer again. There will of course always be a few golfers whose decline is slower, or who defy gravity and play their best golf in their forties (Kenny Perry, Steve Stricker). But this is an exceptional group; most golfers will wither in relation to the competition by the time they hit that age, especially with today's young bucks crowding the field.

Time does not stand still for golfers. It is perfectly possible also that Tiger Woods has hit his peak and is in a natural phase of decline that has nothing to do with his personal troubles, his attitude, or any of the other pop psychological explanations beloved of sportswriters. He and Mike Weir might have that in common.