Lance Mannion

Writers aren't people exactly...

Sunday night, April 18, 2021.

A writer trying hard to be one person. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, detail from a caricature by Barry Blitt, in the New Yorker. November 2009.

It was my first inkling Wylie was a writer. And while I like writers---because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer---still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly, or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors, who lean backward trying---only to see their faces in reflecting chandeliers.

--- from “The Last Tycoon” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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Lots more to read: "Slow Fade: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood" by Arthur Krystal in the New Yorker, November 16, 2009.

George Segal in "California Split": Addicted to hope

Posted Friday night, March 26, 2021.

Portrait of two gamblers. One does it for the company. The other does it to be left alone. Both are addicted to hope: Charlie and Bill at the track (Elliot Gould and George Segal, second and third from the left) in Robert Altman's "California Split". 1974.

You know George Segal’s gone, right? Died Tuesday, the 23rd. Eighty-seven. One of my favorite actors. Going by the outpouring of emotion on Twitter, he was one of everybody’s favorite actors. The people who worked with him at any point in his long career in the movies and on TV especially. I should be able to write up a retrospective without having to think, just drawing from the movies through which I first got to know and like him when I was a kid---”No Way to Treat a Lady”, “The Bridge at Remagen”, “Where’s Poppa?”, and “The Hot Rock”, which I remember as having seen all at once, “The Hot Rock” being the only one I saw in a theater. Mom and Pop Mannion must have just gotten cable at that time---but I have a hard time writing up anything these days. But I want to show my appreciation. So I hope you don’t mind if I cheat and re-post the review of “California Split” I wrote in 2010 for a series of reviews of films directed by Robert Altman. I think it’s one of Altman’s best and it was Segal’s performance that made it so. 

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I’m assuming you know that calling this series of discussions the I Hate Robert Altman Film Festival is a joke.  I don’t hate Robert Altman. 

Altman’s one of my favorite directors.

He’s one of my favorite American artists.

I don’t know how I’d have felt about the man. Probably what George Segal, the star of tonight’s feature, “California Split”, felt when he was working with Altman.

Our relationship was warm, mutually respectful, and a little distant.  I wasn’t in his rhythms…I guess I was more middle-class than he would have liked.  Different sensibilities. He was living a seventies lifestyle and I was little bit behind in that area.  He’s Kansas City and living by the seat of your pants and making this totally innovative movie, M*A*S*H, changing the rules, and I’m a rule player.  Elliott [Gould, Segal’s co-star on California Split] was also an antirules guy and a freewheeling guy…I brought an innocence, and he didn’t have time for that.  Risk was not a part of my persona and it was part of his.

That distance Segal felt, Altman used it in the movie. He made the movie about it. I think Segal’s wrong about Altman not having time for that innocence. Maybe he didn’t off the set. It’s in the movie. It’s in every close-up of Segal and I’m not going to swear to this but I think there are more close-ups of George Segal in “California Split” than there are of any other actor in any of Altman’s other great movies from the 1970s, which is to say, the movies he made in his prime.

Altman’s movies were about people in groups, as members of societies.  He worked mainly in long shots and medium shots because he wanted to fit as many people into every shot as clowns want to fit in a circus car.  The difference is that the clowns want you to see them one at a time as the climb out of the car. If Altman had been a ringmaster he’d have had the car made entirely of glass and not let the clowns out so the audience could see them all crammed in there together and trying to get along or get away.  Every contorted face and body is interesting and important because of the pressures put on the person they belong to by the owners of the other faces and bodies rubbing up against them and for the pressures they put on them.

“M*A*S*H”, “Brewster McCloud”, “McCabe and Mrs Miller”, “Buffalo Bill and the Indians”, and “A Wedding” are all about people crammed into small spaces and forced to get along. The 4077th, the Astrodome, a haphazard collection of buildings hemmed in by wilderness that hardly deserves to be called a town, the tents and performance space of a travelling Wild West show, a single house. In “Nashville”, Nashville is a small, company town and in “The Long Goodbye”, Los Angeles might as well be a single street and a short strip of beachfront for all the room the characters have to escape each other’s company and problems.

In “California Split” the cramped and closed in space is the mental and spiritual one of shared addiction. The addiction isn’t to gambling. It’s to expectation.

All the characters, except Segal’s Bill Denny, but including the call girls, Barbara and Susan (Ann Prentice and Gwen Welles), who do not literally gamble, do what they do, take the risks they take with their money, their happiness, their jobs, their lives, for the joyful feeling of being on the edge of something wonderful.

That’s why Segal gets his close-ups. Close-ups are isolating and Bill is isolated within the community of hope addicts.

Bill’s the literal gambling addict. At least, he’s the one who knows what he’s doing when he gambling. He’s past hope. His addiction has lost whatever thrill it used to give him.  At the point we meet him gambling has cut him off from everything meaningful in his life, from the small, crowded communities he is supposed to be part of, his family, his office. He is alone, a cramped, closed society of one, and he hates the company.  Even sitting shoulder to shoulder with the people he’s playing poker with, he’s all by himself. He latches onto Charlie [Gould] because Charlie is involved.  Charlie lives on risk and hope, like all the other gamblers. But for him gambling is social. He can’t do it without conversation. Bill flinches from the people close to him.  Charlie reaches out to them. He has to bump, nudge, nuzzle, rub up against all around him. He loves the company. The attention of other people make him happy, even when the attention comes in the form of a beating or a stick-up.

Not that he’s a good guy, necessarily. In many ways, he’s a supreme asshole. He’s as addicted to expectation as the others, but he doesn’t expect happiness as much as he expects excitement, and so he gambles with other people’s emotions. He rubs shoulders in order to rub people the wrong way. He wants them to get angry with him because anger makes people unpredictable. It makes them reckless. It makes them interesting.

It makes them fun.

Bill wants to be like Charlie. He wants to be having fun. He wants to have friends. He wants to feel like part of the crowd.  He wants to think that what he’s doing at the poker table, at the track, at the casino is something nicer, happier, better than gambling.

The good feelings and good times only come in bursts, and in Charlie’s company, and even with Charlie there Bill can’t always sustain the mood, or the illusion of the mood. He falls back in on himself. He shuts himself off and up, and that’s how the camera often finds him.

Charlie is able to enjoy his life because he is corrupt and dishonest.  It isn’t right to call him a rule breaker or an antirules guy because he doesn’t seem to know that there are rules (not counting the rules of the games he plays and bets on) or why there are or need to be rules.

Bill, however, is a rules player. He even has rules by which he conducts his gambling. And he’s an innocent. At any rate, he remembers what it was like to be innocent. Bill is stuck in the middle of two opposing desires, although both would allow him to join in a society and shake his loneliness. Either way, he would belong again. He could give in, give up, and become like Charlie, and at least enjoy his self-destruction. Or he could give up gambling and go home. He can’t make up his mind, so he sits and broods and hates himself for both impulses.

Altman caught that.

Once an actress asked Altman how she would know when the camera was on her in a crowd scene so that she would know when to do her acting.  Altman told her to do her acting when she felt the moment was right, the camera would find her.

One of the many risks Altman ran when he made a movie was that the camera wouldn’t find an actress or an actor at a crucial moment, that it would get there too late or at the wrong angle.  And that probably happened many times. But those times didn’t matter because of all the other times when Altman had the camera right there.

He trusted that there would be lots of those times because he made sure that there was always something for the camera to catch.  If one character in a shot wasn’t doing something worth paying a lot of attention to, not just one other but several others were. He chose his actors to make sure of this.  And he kept track.

His eyes and ears were open in a way more disciplined, more exacting, more rules playing directors aren’t.  They pay attention to their plans. Altman paid attention to what was happening and paid so close attention that he could see what was about to happen because of it.  He could get the camera there a beat ahead.

He saw and he heard George Segal. And he made his movie about what he saw and heard.

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“California Split” is available to stream at VUDU.

"The Cross of Snow"

Posted Saturday morning, March 19, 2021.

Saorise Ronan as Jo March in a scene from Greta Gerwig's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women".

Today’s Morning Song is a morning dirge.

Woke up early the other morning thinking about Greta Gewig’s adaptation of “Little Women''---deliberately. I was trying to cheer myself up and muster the mental energy to face the day. This isn’t a response to the political situation. I’ve never let that get to me to the point where I can’t think about anything else but my outrage and anger. By never I mean since I was a kid. Life in these United States has always been one damn thing after another. The difference this time out is a lot of white middle class, middle-aged intellectual types have been caught up in trials and tribulations that to them are as terrible as those suffered by the poor, the not-white, and other marginalized and less privileged Americans and have chosen to obsess over it on social media and make themselves feel worse in the process. With me, on mornings like this, of which there have been way too many lately, finding ways to cheer myself up is just something I’ve increasingly needed to do, as over the last several months my health has been flagging and with it my morale. Gerwig’s “Little Women'' has joined my list of favorite movies of the last ten years and Saorise Ronan’s Jo is one of my favorite movie heroines of all time, so thinking about it, whether deliberately or whether something reminds me of it or if it just pops into my head, lifts my spirits and gladdens my heart. It would cause my soul to sing out with joy and laughter, if I had one. It’s past time for me to rewatch it. I haven’t seen it since last February. But I don’t really need to. I can replay whole scenes in my head, maybe not shot for shot and line for line, the way I can with “Casablanca”, “His Girl Friday”, and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, but that’s because I haven’t seen it enough times. Like I just said, it’s past time. This morning the scene I replayed was the one in Jo’s New York City boarding house where she’s standing in front of the fireplace---too close to the fireplace---furiously scribbling down an idea for a story in her notebook and Frederich, her seemingly too stern and earnest would-be suitor, with whom she’s been arguing, suddenly calls out, “You’re on fire!”

“I know,” she replies, somewhat dismissively. She means it figuratively: Her mind is on fire, kindled by her talent and ambition. He means it literally. The hem of her skirt is glowing. But they get it put out before it flares up, and Jo is unfazed. Happens all the time, she says.

It’s a hilarious scene, perfectly staged, perfectly shot, perfectly designed, and so perfectly Jo. It sums up everything we love and admire about her---her focus, her devotion to her work and her art, her practicality, and her courage---and it predicts the future of her and Frederich’s romance and marriage: she’s going to blaze ahead, and he’s going to chase close behind, ready to put her out when she’s gotten too hot for her own good. It made me laugh to think about when I woke up and it’s making me laugh again now as I type. But it’s an example of Gerwig’s anachronistic approach to adapting the book. I don’t mean it’s anachronistic of the Shakespeare’s having the clocks chime in Julius Caesar’s sundialized Rome variety. I mean that Gerwig has pushed the story ahead of its time thematically and given it a spirit and a heroine more “modern” than Alcott’s own, as if Alcott was predicting the turn of the 20th Century instead of looking back nostalgically at the middle decades of the 19th.

“Little Women” was behind its times, in style and spirit. It was published in 1868 and 69, and by then George Eliot, whose writing Alcott admired and paid tribute to---something Gerwig acknowledges in the scene at the beach when Jo reads “The Mill on the Floss” to Beth---had already written, among other books, “Adam Bede”, “The Mill on the Floss”, and “Silas Marner.” But while the influence of “The Mill on the Floss” caused Alcott no anxiety, and Eliot’s heroine Maggie Tulliver is clearly a model for Jo, “Little Women” is a...nicer book: more accepting of people’s faults; less critical of the society the March sisters are a bumptious and rebellious part of; nearly apolitical, which is perplexing considering it’s set during the Civil War---both of Alcott’s parents were ardent and active abolitionists, Alcott herself served as a nurse in a hospital in Washington D.C.---religious, but not questioning---again perplexing, considering that Alcott’s father Bronson Alcott was notorious for his free-thinking views---not particularly philosophical---perplexing again, considering Ralph Waldo Emerson was a close family friend and benefactor and Henry David Thoreau was the young Louisa’s tutor---and not deeply psychological: Alcott’s characters are types, Dickensian in their lack of complexity; they are who they are and that’s pretty much all there is to them. “Little Women” is a domestic comedy with a traditionally comedic ending. The three surviving March sisters get married, start families, and live happily ever after.

Alcott’s novel is about the joys---and sorrows---of childhood and its inevitable end. Gerwig’s movie is about the joys---and sorrows---of achieving adulthood. Alcott’s story ends with Jo coming home. Gerwig’s story is all about Jo breaking away. I prefer Gerwig’s story, that’s all.

But something occurred to me this morning that made me stop laughing.

People did catch on fire in their homes regularly in the 1800s and died horribly from their burns. One of those who died that way was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wife Fanny. In 1861, her dress caught on fire from a candle she was using to seal wax packets of keepsakes. Longfellow suffered severe burns trying to put the flames out. This would have been heart-rending news in the Alcott household. Longfellow and the Alcott's were members of the same literary and intellectual circle. But it’s not even subtext in the scene in the movie. Not that it should have been, it’s simply that what could have been a wholly fun post is about to have a sad ending. One of my favorites of Longfellow’s poems is one he wrote as a eulogy for Fanny. He wrote it in 1879, when he was 72. Eighteen years after she died, nearing the end of his life---he died in 1882---he was still grieving.

In the long, sleepless watches of the night,

   A gentle face — the face of one long dead —

   Looks at me from the wall, where round its head

   The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.

Here in this room she died; and soul more white

   Never through martyrdom of fire was led

   To its repose; nor can in books be read

   The legend of a life more benedight.

There is a mountain in the distant West

   That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines

   Displays a cross of snow upon its side.

Such is the cross I wear upon my breast

   These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes

   And seasons, changeless since the day she died.

 

----"The Cross of Snow" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

"Loud and Wrong": The poet remembers his college friend, the future Supreme Court justice, back in the day

Posted Wednesday, October 21, 2020.

Portrait of Langston Hughes by Carl Van Vechten. © Van Vechten Trust. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Via Poetry Foundation.

Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy,
Sometimes a bone
Is flung.

To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only heaven.

---"Luck" by Langston Hughes, via the Poetry Society of America.

There’s a scene in “Marshall” that at first almost jarred me right out of the movie. It takes place in a Harlem nightclub and a character, played by Jussie Smollett, makes, for me, an unexpected and implausible entrance.

“What’s Langston Hughes doing in this movie?” I said out loud when I realized who Smollett was playing.

Jussie Smollett (right) as Langston Hughes with Mark St Cyr as his date for the evening in a scene from “Marshall”.

At first I thought this was one of those invented moments makers of historical films seem to feel obligated to stick into their movies to prove to audiences they’ve done their homework and if what’s happening on screen didn’t really happen, it’s authentic to the times. I was even more convinced when Rozanda Thomas as Zora Neale Hurston sits herself down at the table and begins bantering with Hughes and Chadwick Boseman’s Thurgood Marshall. But, no. I don’t know what the real life relationship between Hurston and Marshall was, but Marshall and Hughes were friends and classmates at Lincoln University and they crossed paths from time to time in the years after they graduated.

Marshall was a big man on campus (literally and figuratively; he was six-four), but Hughes may have eclipsed him:

One of the more arresting figures [Wil Haygood writes in “Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America”] who would often be seen walking alongside Thrugood was Langston Hughes, already admired as a published poet. Hughes had transferred to Lincoln from Columbia University. He wore his hair pomaded...and dressed stylishly enough to draw stares…born in 1902, [he] was at least six years older than most Lincoln freshmen. He had published a remarkable book of verse, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, before his arrival at the college. Langston Hughes was also a hepcat who knew the gin joints and speakeasies of Paris before setting foot in rural Chester County. “I like the school out here immensely,” Hughes would write to his friend Carl Van Vechten…”We’re a community in ourselves. Rolling hills and trees and plenty of room. Life is crude, the dorms like barns but comfortable, food plain and solid, first bell at six-thirty, and nobody dresses up---except on Sunday...I room with the campus bootlegger.”...His celebrity could hardly have gone unnoticed. “February our freshman year a poet came into our midst...He is a product of Central High School of Cleveland,” a fellow student would come to write for a campus publication at the time. “One who travels extensively acquires a certain amount education just from contacts and so Lank came to us with many stories of the South Sea islands, northern borders of Africa.”

Hughes appears to have liked Marshall and thought highly of him, but if he was overly impressed at the time, he didn’t let on:

Hughes had quite a gift for sizing people up; it was not unexpected given his worldly wanderings. The poet thought young Thurgood Marshall keen of mind but a bit randy, remembering the Baltimorean as “rough and ready, loud and wrong, good natured and uncouth.”

One more by Hughes, via Poetry Nook, “Young Sailor”:

He carries
His own strength
And his own laughter,
His own today
And his own hereafter—
This strong young sailor
Of the wide seas.

What is money for?
To spend, he says.
And wine?
To drink.
And women?
To love.
And today?
For joy.
And the green sea
For strength,
And the brown land
For laughter.

And nothing hereafter.

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“Marshall" is available for streaming on YouTube. Hat tip to Twitter pal Faith for recommending “Showdown”. “Young Sailor” and “Luck” are collected in “Selected Poems of Langston Hughes”. The young sailor might have been based on Hughes himself. He spent six months as a member of the crew of a freighter plying the coasts of northern Africa and southern Europe.

"I work for Mr E.H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific Railroad..."

Posted Sunday morning, October 18, 2020.

Sundance stalks down the tracks from the engine of the train he’s just stopped at gunpoint. The fireman jumps from the cab to follow him. He’s excited that his train is being robbed by the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang. Sundance gives him a look. “Just want to watch,” the fireman says. “Bring the kids, why don’t you?” the Kid says. They continue down to the mail car where Butch and the rest of the gang are gathered. Butch is arguing with someone on the other side of the locked and barred car door.

Sundance: “What’s going on?”

Butch: We got ourselves a patriot.

Fireman: That’s young Woodcock. He’s awful dedicated.”

Butch: Woodcock?

Woodcock (talking through the car door): Yes, sir?

Butch: You know who we are?

Woodcock: You’re the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, Mr Cassiday, I understand that. But you got to understand that Mr E.H. Harriman himself, of the Union Paciic Railroad, gave me this job, and I’ve got to do my best, don’t you see?

Butch: Your best don’t include getting yourself killed.

News Carver: Dynamite’s ready, Butch.

Woodcock: Mr E.H. Harriman had the confidence in me…

Butch: Open the door or that’s it! You think E.H. Harriman would get himself for you, Woodcock?

Woodcock (as he ducks behind a crate): I work for Mr E.H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific Railroad, and he entrusted me…

Dynamite: Ka-BOOM!

Butch and Sundance and News scrambled up through the blasted doorway. News and Sundance head right for the safe. Butch stops to check on Woodcock who is lying by the door, bloodied and dazed. He props Woodcock up and decides he’ll be ok.

Butch: Whatever Harriman’s paying you ain’t enough.

---from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”.

I’m in the middle of reading “Showdown”, Wil Haygood’s absorbing account of the Congressional fight over Thurgood Marshall’s nomination to the Supreme Court. You probably figured that out. (See here, and here.) I’m reading it along with twenty other books I have going. I always have twenty books going. A concerned reader once suggested it was a symptom of undiagnosed ADD. He may have been onto something. At any rate: Along with those twenty other books is “Empires of Iron: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America” by Michael Hiltzik. I was predisposed to like it before I started, because of the subject matter, because I’ve read Hiltzik’s previous book, “Big Science”, a biography of physicist Ernest Rutherford, and liked that a lot, because I’m a fan of Hiltzik’s columns in the L.A. Times, and because Michael and I follow each other on Twitter. (That was the requisite full disclosure, for those of you keeping score.) But I was taken with it from the opening paragraph which introduces as a character not a robber baron or even an employee of a railroad, but a young and not-yet-famous Scottish writer:

For two weeks in [the] deep summer [of 1879], westbound passengers on a Union Pacific train, encountered a tubercular Scot whose conversation, dripping with literary grandiloquence, had earned him the nickname “Shakespeare.” Pale, thin, and wracked by coughing fits, he seemed not long for this world. Generally, he could be found seated at one end of a car, propping open the door with his feet as though hoping the rush of air might soothe his unremitting fever.

That would be Robert Louis Stevenson, who was making the trip across the Great American Desert to San Francisco, taking notes that he’d turn into a travel book called “Across the Plains”.

Robber Barons follow Stevenson soon after. One of them is Ned Harriman. Edward Harriman. Edward H. Harriman. E. H. Harriman. Mister E.H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad. And whenever I come across Harriman’s name anywhere, I immediately begin to replay in my head that scene from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and hear the voice of the great and much missed character actor George Furth, who played poor but dedicated Woodcock, saying, “I work for Mr E.H. Harriman, of the Union Pacific Railroad....” Harriman is a major character in “Iron Empires”, its chief hero and villain, in fact, so I’m going to be hearing Furth/Woodcock a lot.

The movie is mentioned in the book. I checked the index and skipped ahead. Hiltzik doesn’t quote Woodcock, and he doesn’t spend many words on Butch and Sundance. In the passage that mentions them, his main focus is on what’s known to fans of the film as the “super-posse”:

One of Harriman’s pioneering initiatives would be turned into legend by Hollywood. This was his effort to end train robberies on the Union Pacific. The railroad’s route through Wyoming “had long been a Mecca for outlaws”...That stretch of track was especially vulnerable to [robberies] because the roadbed was hemmed in by mountains on both sides, affording robbers “opportunities for the ‘get-away’ which is essential to the highwayman’s profession.” Typically, the raiders would strike in early evening and safely on their way to the canyon-etched foothills known as the Hole-in-the-Wall country before a posse could be assembled.

The members of the protean community of outlaws, Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, AKA Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, have been credited with the longest string of successful...robberies of the period. They would be immortalized in a 1969 film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, as was Harriman’s solution to the repeated robberies [on his line]: the creation of a team of special agents to be shuttled along the Union Pacific tracks on their own train and supplied with horses that could a hundred miles in a day. The presence of a rapid-response brigade, superbly equipped and trained, discouraged raids on the Union Pacific and prompted robbers to concentrate their attentions on competing lines.

I couldn’t help read that passage without hearing Butch/Newman’s refrain as he and Sundance repeatedly failed to throw the superposse off their trail: “Who are those guys?”

The outfitting and the employment of the superposse didn’t cost Harriman much compared to what it saved him but in the movie---and maybe in real life---Butch can’t believe that. When he hears that Harriman has put the best lawman and tracker on his payroll, Butch is aghast, “That crazy Harriman,” he exclaims, “if he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him!”

Ok, time for me to get back to “Iron Empires”. Or “Showdown”. Or one of the nineteen other books on my stack. Meantime, I thought you’d enjoy having Woodcock’s voice stuck in your heads too...

"Even the singing cowboys"

Posted Saturday morning, October 17, 2020.

“Never a dull or lazy moment”: Chadwick Boseman as the 32 year old Thurgood Marshall in 1940, long before he became a justice on the Supreme Court, when he was a lawyer for the NAACP, looking as if he’s almost enjoying the harassment of a crowd of white racists outside the courthouse where he’s defending a black man on trial for raping a white woman in a scene from the 2017 movie “Marshall”.

I love it that Thurgood Marshall’s secretary Alice Stovall called the Westerns her boss enjoyed “they-went-that-a-way movies”. I wish she’d been a character in the movie “Marshall”. I wish the movie had shown Marshal going to a movie with a singing cowboy star. I wish I’d been able to find a photo of the real 32 year-old Thurgood Marshall to go with this quote from Will Haygood’s book “Showdown”:’’

Marshall began doing legal work for the NAACP. Charlie Houston [the first president of Howard Law School and Marshall’s mentor] kept a close eye on his onetime star pupil. “There’s never a dull or lazy moment, except when I have to travel with him,” Alice Stovall, another one of Marshall’s earliest secretaries, would come to recall. “Then I’m always left on the train while he spends his time in the dining car, gossipping with the crew...If we have a layover, changing trains, I sit by myself in the station, by preference, while he goes off to see one of those they-went-that-a-way pictures; anyone will do, even singing cowboys.”

---from “Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America” by Wil Haygood.

Lee Iacocca, young at heart

Posted Saturday night, September 19. 2020.

A salesman through and through. “Listening to Lee talk about a car, I didn’t know whether to drive it home or make love to it.”: Lee Iococca in 1968 standing at the open driver's door of the 2 millionth Ford Mustang to roll off the assembly line. Photo courtesy of Ford, via Automotive News.

Along with a couple hundred dozen other books, I’ve been reading A.J. Baime's “Go Like Hell”, the book the movie “Ford v Ferrari" was based on, once removed. (Development hell. Long story. You can read about it here.) Baime’s introduction of Lee Iacocca into the story definitely places Iacocca in the American grain...

It was this world of money and cutthroat competition that Lee Iacocca stepped into in the winter of 1960. Iacocca’s promotion to the top man at the Ford division occurred the same week that John F. Kennedy was voted into the Oval Office. Inside Iacocca’s nerves slithered, but his outer shell was impenetrable. His colleagues saw a salesman through and through. After listening to Lee talk about a car, one once said, “I didn’t know whether to drive it home or make love to it.”...

Iacocca embodied the other end of the American dream. He was the son of Ellis Island immigrants, raised in Allentown, Pennsylvania, he was the first top man in the Ford division who had real dealership experience, selling on the floor, and he hadn’t shed the bootstrap urgency...He had rougher edges than his associates. He could work the phrase “son of a bitch” into every other sentence. He had dreamed of working at Ford since he was in high school. The day a recruiter from Dearborn showed up at Lehigh in a big Lincoln, and Iacocca smelled the leather interior , his resolve had only strengthened.

During his first six months on the new job, Iacocca took a hard look at the American car buyer, not just in the present day but what the customer was about to become. He had the benefit of a new tool feeding him information. Computers had arrived in offices...Sitting in Henry II’s office one day, Iacocca began to map out his vision of 1960s America. He clutched his Ignacio Haya cigar like a stage propped, and he armed himself with numbers. He was very good at math.

“Next year there will be a million more 16-year-olds than there are today." The key to the future, Iacocca reasoned, was the youth market. The war-baby generation was coming of age. Soon the kids would be filing into government offices to get their driver’s licenses...Trends come and go, but one thing never changes: the primary goal of every sixteen-year-old is to own a car...If Ford could get the kids when they were young, he argued, Ford could get them for life.

…

Iacocca gathered a team of admen, engineers, and designers, and began to outline a new theme for Ford. “What we need is a campaign, a philosophy that is young at heart,” he told them,. The team went to work in a large windowless room at the Ford office called “the tomb,” where Iacocca enforced security so rigid the garbage was burned under his supervision. Weekly late-night meetings were held in a nearby motel called the Fairlane Inn. Iacocca’s underlings began to understand the depth of his ambition. He was proof that you couldn’t have enough balls in this town.

Iacocca’s vision included a new model, and a marketing theme to sell it, a way to make a statement: Ford cars were about performance, style, adventure. He knew America was ripe for something different. The numbers were there in the market research, and he could feel it in his gut. Together with his chief engineer Donald Frey, he approached the styling department. Within days, a secret prototype was in the works. The original name as Tornino, after the Italian city of Turin. But it would one day soon become a car called Mustang.

---from “Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans" by A. J. Baime.

Taking Chadwick Boseman to heart

Posted Sunday morning, August 30, 2020.

I’m sure you’ve all heard. Chadwick Boseman is gone.

I didn’t know he’d been so ill. The last movie I saw him in was the last movie there was to see him in, Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”. I was a bit startled by the sight of him. He didn’t look well to me. He looked thin and haggard. I wondered if that was for effect. He was playing a soldier in the Vietnam War and I was thinking he was meant to look war-weary. But I also wondered if his age was beginning to tell. He was forty-three. That’s hard to accept, going by how young he looked in “Black Panther”, which he made when he was forty. He was ten years older than Jackie Robinson was his first season with the Dodgers when he played him in “42”. But now it’s clear it was that he was losing his four-year-battle with cancer.

“42” was the first movie I saw him in, and I took him to heart at first glance. I didn’t have a fantasized friendship with him. I didn’t see him as a surrogate me. Somehow I can’t explain, he struck a chord in me. It might have to do with the Dodgers connection. More likely, and more simply, I just liked watching him work.

He struck chords in a lot of people. A lot of people took him to heart. By all accounts, he was a genuinely good person.

I’ve only seen two of the movies in which he had the starring role, “Black Panther” and “42”. I have to fix that. Tonight the plan is to watch “Marshall” or “Get On Up”, but I hear “Message From The King” is good, so we may go with that. At any rate, I’ve only written about him once on the blog. For no good reason, I didn’t write a formal review of “Black Panther”. And it’s on the list of my top favorite movies of the 2010s. Go figure. I did write a review of “42”. It’s a long one, so I’m not going to repost the whole thing here. But here’s an excerpt from the heart of the review...

As Robinson, Chadwick Boseman is heart-breaking in conveying that sense of aloneness and the what must have often felt unbearable loneliness that would have gone with it.  I have some vague memories from my kidhood of the white-haired Civil Rights leader Jackie Robinson became, but I only know him as a player from film clips so I can't say with any certainty how close Boseman comes to capturing the real man. Rachel Robinson seems impressed enough. But Boseman isn't built like Robinson---Robinson looked and ran like what he was, a former star running back at UCLA---so he can't quite match that sense of dangerous abandon on the basepaths.  Imagine what it was like to be a shortstop of the time, who tended to be puny and anemic, and looking up to take the throw from the second baseman on what is now not going to be a routine 4-6-3 double play seeing Robinson coming at you as though you are all that stands between him and a touchdown.  Boseman doesn't fly, he sprints like an athletic actor who might have run track in high school.

Robinson's voice was high and piercing and he spoke fast with the volume turned up. Boseman speaks low and slow. No one would describe his Robinson as the real Robinson's teammate Don Newcombe once described him in an argument, as not just wrong but " loud wrong." And the thoughtful look in his eyes is that of someone who sees obstacles ahead as problems he's quietly worrying his way toward solving, while the brilliant glint in Robinson's eyes was that of a man who sees obstacles as challenges to be met head on, at top speed, and at full force.  And if, as the great sportswriter Roger Kahn said of him, Robinson burned with a dark fire, Boseman smolders.

But impersonation isn't required. Boseman plays Robinson as what he was in essence, a proud and talented man called upon to be two things he would rather not have had to be, a hero and a saint, and one thing he was but only more so, a great ballplayer. Boseman captures the pressure and the frustration and the strength, but he also conveys the natural human fragility. He's strong enough that we believe he'll stand up to it all, but we can see how he might break.

In case you’re interested in reading the whole review, follow the link to “A Man Alone” at the blog.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

ABC is showing “Black Panther” tonight, without commercials. It starts at 8 EDT. “42” is available to stream on YouTube. So is “Marshall”. You can watch the “Da 5 Bloods” and “Message From The King” at Netflix.

"Onward" and Pixar's fixation on loss, longing, and death

Adapted from the Twitter Feed, Friday night, June 26, 2020.

Friday night. Ten-fifteen. Watched "Onward" tonight for family movie night. Enjoyed it. Lots of fun and laughs. So why am I now sitting out on the porch in the dark, brooding?

Probably that "Impermanence of Life" theme Pixar has made a cornerstone of its brand.

Think about it. Aren't most Pixar movies loss, longing, and death?

“Finding Nemo”. "Finding Dory". “WALL-E”. “Inside Out”. All the Toy Story movies, especially “Toy Story 3”. “Coco”. ¡Dios mio! “Coco”.

Of course not all of them are as straight-forward and insistent about it as "Up".

Pixar’s next movie is “Soul”. The main character is dead, at least temporarily. And an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book” was in the works, and may still be.

"Onward" is in the same vein, even more so.

And all the "Lord of the Rings" references don't help.

And, jeez, it's right there in the opening line:

"Long ago, the world was full of wonder."

Long ago...

Sigh

At least there are fire works here.

On a quest you have to use what you have.

"The people had never seen such concentrated, artistic electrical luminosity"

Posted Saturday night, May 30, 2020.

“Columbian Exposition–The Grand Basin Court at Night–Electrical Illumination of MacMonnnies’ Fountain and the Administration Building.” Drawing by Charles Graham, Harper’s Weekly June 1893. Via Chicology.

The White City illuminated at night was a radiant electrical vision long remembered by all who witnessed it, acclaimed as the most fabulous spectacle in a fair brimming with fabulous spectacles. On Monday evening, May 8, as twilight gathered...the sky darkened to a deep indigo over the lake, and the air grew perceptibly chillier. Suddenly, the gold-domed Administration Building came brilliantly to pulsating electrical life, provoking a prolonged sigh of pleasure from the crowd. Next, the long classic sweep of the peristyle on the far end of the great basin burst forth from the twilight’s shadow, wondrously luminous with the tens of thousands of Westinghouse’s “stopper” lamps glowing softly up in the cornices and along the pediment, highlighting the hundreds of statues. The crowd clapped wildly at this bravura burst of electricity. Next, all the white palaces glowed to electrical life, radiant visions of an imagined past, followed swiftly by thousands of lights encircling the dark waters of the 1,500-foot Great Basin, its rippling surface now a-shimmer. Hundreds of arc lights lining the waters came on, spreading their clear, blue white coronas....Ghostly gondolas and long electric craft looked like a fairy fleet. Then, from the highest roofs swung to luminous life, four massive searchlights, each raking the night sky, even as it shone, white, then bloodred, then green, then blue. The people, who had never seen such concentrated, artistic electrical luminosity, let out a steady, breathless chorus of “Oh!” and “Ah!”

Then all went dramatically, suddenly dark, and the White City loomed only as a spectral vision. The murmur of the crowd mingled with the sound of the chilly spring winds off the lake. Out of the total blackness, with a rush and a roar “the great electric fountains lifted their gushing and gleaming waters. There were two of these fountains, one on either side of the MacMonnies Fountain, and through all their many changes each was the counterpart of the other, alike in color and form.” The gushing colored waters formed beautiful shapes and hues. Finally, at 9:30, the lights were quelled and the electrically dazed and sated crowds drifted slowly home, awed by the transformation of the dark into something so magically new.

---from “Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World” by Jill Jonnes.

Buster Keaton understanding how the magic worked

Posted Tuesday morning, May 12, 2020.

Buster Keaton on hold: assiduous googling isn't turning up what movie this shot is from, but whatever it was and wheneverr it was made, it  looks like Keaton had come to understood pretty well by then how the magic worked.

New York City, 1917: Twenty-one-year old Buster Keaton setting an example for us all who need to understand how the “magic” is made…

At a studio on East 48th Street, a young vaudeville star named Buster Keaton was making his first film, Butcher Boy, directed by the comedian Fatty Arbuckle. At the end of his first day on the set, Keaton brought the camera home, where he took it apart so he could fully understand how the magic was made…

---from “March 1917: On the Brink of War and Revolution” by Will Englund.

Brian Dennehy

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Thursday night, April 16, 2020. Posted Sunday morning, April 19.

“Isn’t that a remarkable thing?”: The late Brian Dennehy as Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman” in London in 2005, a performance I hope to snare tickets for when I get to heaven. Ray Tang/Shutterstock via the Guardian.

You probably heard. Brian Dennehy is gone.

I've been trying to think what are my favorites of Dennehy's movies and characters. And I can't come up with one. And I don't mean I can't choose one among many…

It was surprising to realize when I looked at his imdb page that he didn't star in many great movies or play many characters who were fascinating in their own right…

What he did was make movies he was in better for his being in them. He made many movies only worth watching for his scenes…

And he usually played some version of Brian Dennehy. Which was fine because any version of Dennehy was compelling…

I do have a favorite Dennehy performance. It was on television. In the 1989 mini-series “Day One”, which was based on Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb”, he played the boisterous, bullying General Leslie Grove, who oversaw Los Alamos for the military, Robert Oppenheimer’s ostensible boss. There’s a moment at the first successful testing of the bomb, Grove stands up in the dugout where he and Oppenheimer and others are observing the blast and cheers with his arms outstretched almost as if he’s embracing the mushroom cloud, that’s all at once exhilarating, comic, and terrifying moment thanks to the great grin on Dennehy’s face and the roar of triumph he lets out that’s almost as loud as the bomb’s blast. I wish I could find a picture of that moment, but I can’t find any stills from “Day One” online. Best I could come up with for now is this photo of the real Groves and the real Oppenheimer.

I’ll keep looking.

In “Day One”, Oppenheimer was played by David Stathairn. Strathairn is the best Oppenheimer ever put on screen. He was a better Oppenheimer than Sam Waterson, and Waterson was a better Oppenheimer than Oppenheimer.

“The Making of the Atomic Bomb” is one of the books I recommend to anyone who wants to understand America’s history and its character.

Back to Dennehy.

Dennehy was so good that I couldn’t bring myself to see the move “Fat Man and Little Boy” which came out later that year. I figured it would be a let down, even though Grove was played by Paul Newman. I couldn’t bear to feel I’d been let down by Paul Newman.

That’s Dwight Schultz as Oppenheimer to the right of Newman as Grove. I can’t tell you how good an Oppenheimer Schultz was. I can’t imagine, though, he was as good as Strathairn.

The Fatman and Little Boy of the title don’t refer to Grove and Oppenheimer. They’re the codenames for the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. A former student of Oppenheimer came up with the names. He based them on the bombs’ designs. Fat Man's design reminded him of Sydney Greenstreet in the Maltese Falcon. His character was referred to as the the Fat Man. The young scientist originally wanted to call Little Boy Thin Man after the character William Powell played in the Thin Man movie series.

Dennehy did play some great characters in some great productions of some great plays. Willy Loman, Sir John Falstaff, Hickey in Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh”. He made O’Neill a specialty. His theatrical home was the Goodman Theater in Chicago. He began to make his mark there in the 1980s. In the 80s, Mrs M and I were living in Fort Wayne, Indiana, three hours west through the corn fields and up into the Rust Belt at the corner of Indiana and Illinois. Every other month or so during the five years we were honorary Hoosiers we made weekend trips to Chicago. A few times we took in plays while we were in town. At least one of them was at the Goodman. Dennehy wasn’t in it.

His triumph at the Goodman during those years was playing Hickey in “The Iceman Cometh” in the fall of 1990. In the fall of 1990 we were still living in Fort Wayne but our attention was focused on Syracuse not Chicago. We were organizing our move back east and the long drives we took were to look for an apartment.

Dennehy’s next big success at the Goodman was as Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman” in 1998. That production eventually traveled to New York City in 1999 and on to London in 2005.

In my dream of heaven, you get to see all the things you missed when you were alive: that includes great World Series, concerts, movies that never got made but would have been wonderful if they had, and plays. So in my dream of heaven I have front row seats to “Death of a Salesman”

Dennehy came back to the Goodman in 2012 to perform in “The Iceman Cometh” again. This time he didn’t play Hickey. He played Larry Slade the bitter former labor organizer. Nathan Lane played Hickey. That production moved to New York in 2015. Lane adored Dennehy and he adored working with him. He credits Dennehy with teaching him how to be more than a musical comedy star.

“Brian Dennehy was a great actor and a great friend to me for over 30 years," the actor Nathan Lane said. “Never more so than when we acted together in ‘The Iceman Cometh.’ He was my biggest supporter and a loving mentor through that whole experience and I will always love him and never forget him for that, as well as his fierce brilliance, wit, and that wild Irish twinkle in his eye.”

I could have gone to see him in “Inherit the Wind” in New York City in 2007. He played Matthew Harrison Brady. That’s the character based on William Jennings Bryan. In 2007 we were living here and making frequent trips into New York City. But for some reason---lack of the money, I’m betting---I don’t remember even thinking about going to see it. The New York Times didn’t think highly of that production, but did rave about Christopher Plummer as the Clarence Darrow stand-in Henry Drummond.

But while the subject of teaching evolution and religion in public schools is even more topical than it was when Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s worthy war horse first galloped onto Broadway more than half a century ago, Mr. Plummer at play is something sacred. If the Bible-quoting fundamentalists in “Inherit the Wind” want to make a case for the spark of divinity that separates man from beast, they need only point to the show’s august star, having the time of his life, as Exhibit A.

About that twinkle in his eye Lane was smitten with. He always had it. I think it should have made him a leading man in the movies. I think he should have graduated quickly from supporting character to leading man. He was that good looking and charismatic when he was younger…

And he had a great voice. Calm and calming. Persuasive. Appealing. It's why he could play such convincing and formidable villains. Same goes for his smile. The smile and the voice should have belonged to good guys. The picture above is of him as the sheriff hunting down Rambo in “First Blood’. Not exactly a good guy.

Funny thing about the voice though. I became a fan when I saw him in "Semi-Tough". That's when most people my age did. And in "Semi-Tough" he didn't have very many lines. Mostly he just growled and grinned manically…

But then he was playing a psychopath. A cheerful and friendly and likable psychopath, but a psychopath…

Another thing that has me scratching my head. Who are the character actors in their 30s and early 40s now who are what Dennehy was, actors who make movies better for their presence and who were immediately recognized for it from the start…

That isn't a "They don't make 'em like that any more" old man's gripe. I'm sure they're out there. I'm just not calling them to mind at the moment. Help me out?

At any rate, here's to him! In his memory I should watch "Semi-Touch" again tonight. Maybe I will...

So sad to think how almost all its stars are now gone. Reynolds, Clayburgh, Robert Preston, now Dennehy. Anyone checking on Kristofferson?

"Mistah Christian! MIS-TAH Christian!"

Adapted from the Twitter feed, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Posted Wednesday night, April 15.

Let me get this straight. Andrew Cuomo is Clark Gable and he’s Charles Laughton?

Tell the Democrat Governors that “Mutiny On The Bounty” was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!

---Donald “Captain Bligh” Trump on Twitter, Tuesday, April 14, 2020. Do you really want the link?

What’s too easy is noting that Captain Bligh is the bad guy in the movie---movies. The question he leaves open is which of the two most famous ones was his favorite.

He might mean the 1935 version with Clark Gable as the lead mutineer Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as the tyrannical Captain Bligh. He might mean the 1962 version starring Marlon Brando as Christian and Trevor Howard as Bligh.

It strikes me as unlikely he means the 1984 version, which was called simply “The Bounty”, in which Mel Gibson played Christian and Anthony Hopkins played Bligh. In 1984, Trump was probably too busy building his reputation as a celebrity real estate developer, enviable rich guy, and playboy to get to the movies as often as he might have liked. By that time, too, he was happier mingling with movie stars, and acquiring notoriety and fame by association, than watching them do their jobs on screen while all around him in the movie theater was ignoring his existence. But like I would know.

In 1984, I was in grad school way out yonder in Iowa. New York City only mattered to us as the home of the magazine and book publishers that were going to have the honor of discovering us and making us famous. Donald Trump didn’t catch my attention until 1988, when I was a newly wedded husband so besotted by my cute and frisky young wife to notice much else in the immediate world around me let alone what was happening way back east in New York City. News that there was a Donald Trump in the world only reached me through Doonesbury and our pal Nance’s subscription to Spy.

Still, in “The Bounty”, Bligh is the good guy and real hero, or, any rate, he’s heroic, while Christian is a feckless neurotic who mutinies in a moment of moral panic, and more sympathetic emphasis is put on the two men’s friendship. Their friendship is based on their mutual admiration for each other’s skill as seamen. So, maybe…

But in all three versions the mutineers need the same thing from the captain: water! Bligh cuts the crew’s ration in order to save his precious cargo of breadfruit he’s intending to import to from Tahiti to Jamaica as cheap fodder to feed slaves---”The Bounty” glosses over this point.

It’s fun to think he’s mixed up “Mutiny on the Bounty” with “The Caine Mutiny” and the captain he’s identifying with is the paranoid and incompetent Captain Queeg. I mean, we’re all thinking along those lines already, aren’t we?

Mulling it over, however, he probably means the 1962 version of “Mutiny on the Bounty”. Unless it played at some second-run house in Queens when he was a kid, the likeliest way he’d have seen the Gable-Laughton version at the time was on TV where it would have been pan and scanned and riddled with commercials. It’s possible but not likely it would have made a deep impression on him. The 1962 Brando-Howard version came out when he was sixteen, and I can imagine the teenage version of himself seeing it on the big screen and being enthralled. It’s not a very good movie but it looks gorgeous and it’s romantic and sensual and sexy, and I can see him imagining himself as Brando as Christian.

Brando played Christian as an 18th Century playboy, a rake, a charmer, a dandy, a sensualist, and a not very repressed hedonist who needs only the mildest psychological shove to give in and go native. He also looks more than just in passing like a young Donald Trump---like the young man sixteen year old Donald would have flattered himself he’d grow up to be.

Of course, there’s something else about that version that would have captured the sixteen year old Donald’s imagination and stuck with him for the next sixty years…

I can’t really blame him. After all, Tarita, who played Brando’s love interest Miamiti, captured the young Brando’s imagination and she’s the reason he, like Christian, went native on Tahiti.

Ok, that was fun, but it’s time to call it a night. A last note and a confession before I go, however. My introduction to the existence of “Mutiny on the Bounty” as a movie and a story was thanks to Bugs Bunny. And when I was a little kid I had a “Mutiny on the Bounty” coloring book that was a tie-in to the Brando-Howard version. I don’t recall what my feelings were when I wore out my crayons coloring in the outlines of Tarita and her carefully arranged leis and just long enough sarongs. Whatever they were they were probably subliminal, but still, I’m sure coloring her in for the first time was a sexually constellating moment. And aren’t you glad I shared that?

Last image, because Gable and Laughton are still the best and you know you want to take the image of Gable with his shirt off to bed with you...

Why make movies about writers?

Posted Monday night, March 30. 2020.

Nicholas Hoult as J.R.R. Tolkien in the 2019 biopic based on the creator of Middle Earth's early days as a developing writer, doing his best to make writing look dramatic!

Why do people keep making films about writers? And why do people watch them? It’s not as if writers do anything of interest. Unless you’re Byron or Stendhal, a successful day is one in which you don’t fall asleep with your head on the space bar.

---Anthony Lane in his review of “Tolkien” in the May 10, 2019 issue of the New Yorker,

Borges on Cowboys

Posted Friday night, March 20, 2020.

John Wayne makes his appearance in John Ford’s classic western “Stagecoach” and in one shot establishes himself as a major movie star, a legend, and an icon.

Reading essays by Jorge Luis Borges, just for the fun of it, and it is fun. And funny. Borges had a wicked sense of humor and a sharp pen. One of the essays was about the place of the cowboy in American literature, of all things. But then Borges wrote of all things. In the essay I came across this line and it gave me a real kick: “to this day [cowboys] have not inspired a good film.”

Borges wrote that in 1938.

“Stagecoach” came out in 1939.

I’ll bet he saw it. I wonder what he thought of it.

Even more I wonder what he thought of “The Searchers”.

Technically, Ringo and Ethan Edwards aren’t cowboys, although Ethan did work on his brother’s ranch before he went off to fight on the wrong side in the Civil War. So I suppose those don’t count as cowboy movies. But then there’s “Red River”. I’d like to know what Borges thought of that one. I’d like to know what he thought of Howard Hawks as a director. And John Ford. And John Ford versus Howard Hawks as directors and as men. I wonder what he thought about Wayne, as a man, as an actor, and as an icon. I wonder what he thought about all the things.

I’ll go back to my reading now, and find out what he thought of Virginia Woolf...and Ellery Queen.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

"Selected Non-Fictions" by Jorge Luis Borges is available in paperback at Amazon.

Jo's story, Alcott's book, Gerwig's movie: Notes on seeing "Little Women" for the second time

Mined from the notebooks and adapted from the Twitter feed, Monday night, February 3, 2020. Posted Friday morning, February 7.

From the ridiculous to the sublime. Forget Trump's needing a geography lesson for now. We saw "Little Women" again yesterday afternoon. [Sunday, February 2, 2020.] I loved it even more than I did the first time. A few thoughts as I work my way toward writing a formal review.

It's Jo's anger that's at issue, not Marmee's.

The tension at the root of the story is how to be a good person while being true to yourself. The bittersweet irony in the end is that each of the three surviving March girls has to give up a part of herself in order to be her best self.

Class is an important conflict too but not in the conventional way. The Marches are of the "right" class. They just don't live by the rules of their class. That rebellion started with both their parents.

The movie casts a critical eye on marriage but it is not anti-marriage. Far from it. After all it does end with Jo, Meg, and Amy happily married and to good men.

For those who haven't read the book or seen the previous movies, spoiler ahead…

Here's the spoiler: Amy and Laurie's marriage saves everybody, starting with Amy and Laurie themselves. But they---and their money---and not Jo's writing success save the family and save Meg and John's marriage, which is shown to be worth saving, and makes Jo and Friedrich's marriage possible

Keep in mind: Jo is not Louisa May Alcott. “Little Women” is autobiographical but it is not an autobiography. Start with the fact that Jo is about 15 years younger than Alcott was at that point in time. It wasn’t just Bronson Alcott who went off to the War. Alcott herself went. Teenage Jo, fifteen or so when the novel opens, can only wish she could go…as a soldier.

Jo is Alcott to the degree David Copperfield is Dickens, Tom Sawyer is Twain, Jake Barnes is Hemingway, and Augie March is Bellow.

Jo is rightly ambivalent about marriage for herself. But the character who is most strongly anti-marriage is Aunt March, and she's not presented as the wisest and kindest of people.

"I'm not always right, but I'm never wrong."

I love that line and I love the way Meryl Streep delivers it. But Aunt March is wrong about never being wrong. The thing is that like all of us she's often right and wrong at the same time. That's the case with her view of marriage

Something else Greta Gerwig introduces into the story that Alcott had to leave out or write her way around.

Sex.

Amy asks Laurie to "untie" her. She's not just asking for help with her painter's smock.

Americans during the Victorian era were more prudish than their counterparts over in Great Britain, the actual Victorians.

Alcott’s favorite novel when she was young was “Jane Eyre”. She made the Brontes Jo’s literary heroes. She knew how sex figures in literature. She also knew she couldn’t write it into her stories if she wanted to sell them in the United States.

But Gerwig doesn't have to worry, so she doesn't. In fact the first time we meet Amy and Laurie we see in their eyes and expressions that they are passionately sexually attracted to each other and that attraction informs all their scenes together as adults.

That sort of look is never exchanged between Laurie and Jo. It is between Jo and Friedrich when they first meet. Gerwig makes sure we know that Amy and Laurie are going to have a sexy marriage. But she also lets us know that Jo and Friedrich will too. And Meg and John as well! In fact, the sexiest scene in the movie is between Meg and John!

The difference for Jo and Friedrich is that theirs is a marriage of true minds as well as true hearts.

Which brings me to my last note.

Good moviemakers are good storytellers. Gerwig’s “Little Women” isn’t an adaptation. It’s a re-telling. The story of the movie is Jo’s story. The book it’s based on is Alcott’s story. But the movie is Gerwig’s story. Gerwig has stolen "Little Women" away from Louisa May Alcott and done that thing countless other artists have done---taken another artist’s work and made it her own.

More than enough for now. In case it isn't obvious, "Little Women" is going to make my list of Best Movies of the 2010s.

Marmee and Mr Rogers, angry all their lives

Posted Monday morning, January 6, 2020.

“I am angry nearly every day of my life.”: Laura Dern as Marmee in “Little Women”.

Shivering, dripping, and crying, they got Amy home; and, after 99an exciting time of it, she fell asleep, rolled in blankets, before a hot fire. During the bustle Jo had scarcely spoken; but flown about, looking pale and wild, with her things half off, her dress torn, and her hands cut and bruised by ice and rails, and refractory buckles. When Amy was comfortably asleep, the house quiet, and Mrs. March sitting by the bed, she called Jo to her, and began to bind up the hurt hands.

"Are you sure she is safe?" whispered Jo, looking remorsefully at the golden head, which might have been swept away from her sight forever under the treacherous ice.

"Quite safe, dear; she is not hurt, and won't even take cold, I think, you were so sensible in covering and getting her home quickly," replied her mother cheerfully.

"Laurie did it all; I only let her go. Mother, if she should die, it would be my fault"; and Jo dropped down beside the bed, in a passion of penitent tears, telling all that had happened, bitterly condemning 100her hardness of heart, and sobbing out her gratitude for being spared the heavy punishment which might have come upon her.

"It's my dreadful temper! I try to cure it; I think I have, and then it breaks out worse than ever. O mother, what shall I do? what shall I do?" cried poor Jo, in despair.

"Watch and pray, dear; never get tired of trying; and never think it is impossible to conquer your fault," said Mrs. March, drawing the blowzy head to her shoulder, and kissing the wet cheek so tenderly that Jo cried harder than ever.

"You don't know, you can't guess how bad it is! It seems as if I could do anything when I'm in a passion; I get so savage, I could hurt any one, and enjoy it. I'm afraid I shall do something dreadful some day, and spoil my life, and make everybody hate me. O mother, help me, do help me!"

"I will, my child, I will. Don't cry so bitterly, but remember this day, and resolve, with all your soul, that you will never know another like it. Jo, dear, we all have our temptations, some far greater than yours, and it often takes us all our lives to conquer them. You think your temper is the worst in the world; but mine used to be just like it."

"Yours, mother? Why, you are never angry!" and, for the moment, Jo forgot remorse in surprise.

"I've been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo; but I have learned not to show it; and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so."

---from “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott.

Saw Greta Gerwig's “Little Women” yesterday and my question for you is, “Why haven’t you?” I’m hoping to get my review written today, but the way things have been going around here, I’m beginning to think full-fledged movie reviews have become beyond my ability. Still, I intend to try. I already know the upshot though. I just told it to you. Go see it! Soon as you can. But there’s a point I want to make that won’t fit into the review. It’s this:  “Little Women” and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” share a theme, and Marmee and Fred Rogers (the character in the movie) have something significant in common. They are both apparently cheerful, self-sacrificing, self-sacrifcing, kind, generous, charitable to a fault, neighborly---they are good neighbors who look on their neighborhoods extending far beyond what would ordinarily be seen as their natural boundaries---and determined to smile their way through life and leave the world a better, kinder, and happier place than they found it, and yet both claim to be seething with anger and to have been angry all their lives. And both, in the course of confessing their anger to someone who doesn’t believe it, say they have to work every day not to let their anger get the better of them and take over their lives.

In “Little Women”, it’s the idealistic Jo who has to learn Marmee’s lesson. In “A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood”, it’s the cynical journalist Lloyd Vogel. Jo needs to learn it in order to grow up into a good adult and to keep her on track in her chosen career of writer. Letting her anger take control of her would keep her from concentrating on her work---there’s the implication that anger fuels her ambition, but Marmee isn’t advising her to give up being angry; she’s advising Jo to maintain her discipline and focus. Lloyd, though, needs more than to just get a grip. His anger is threatening to consume him and destroy his career, his marriage, his family, and himself. Marmee is just trying to set a good example for Jo. Mr Rogers is out to save Lloyd’s life.

So in “Little Women” controlling one’s anger is part of the larger theme of becoming the person you want to be and still being a good human being. In “A Beautiful Day” it’s the theme and the story and the driver of the plot. It’s not surprising, then, that Marmee doesn’t make much of her admission. But Mr Rogers does. It’s important to him that Lloyd understands this about him. And it’s important to the audience that we do. We aren’t told why Marmee is angry. The scene from the book up top and the scene in the movie based on it and which recreates it closely take place after Amy has fallen through the ice on a pond chasing after Jo and Laurie who have gone skating without her. Amy’s still a little girl. Jo is only sixteen. Jo blames herself for almost getting Amy drowned. Marmee is trying to console her. You’re free to read anything into Marmee’s anger. Alcott doesn’t go in for psychobiography. Marmee, as written and as played by Laura Dern, seems to think it’s simply a flaw in her character she wishes wasn’t there.  Mr Rogers, on the other hand, lets on that he has reasons for his anger, and at its base  it’s not a flaw in his character but a permanent fracture. The problem for Lloyd is how is he to get the better of his anger if Mr Rogers has to fight his own every minute of the day? And the movie reminds us it's our problem too.

What hope do we have of keeping our anger from taking over our lives if saints like Marmee and Mr Rogers have to fight every day to keep it from taking over theirs.

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I haven’t written up my review of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” yet either. Maybe I’ll be able to finish both it and the review of “Little Women” by the middle of the week and then post them together for the weekend.. Maybe. Meantime, like I said. Go see “Little Women” in a hurry. “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” you can wait until it streams.

There's a reason Henry James called "Little Women" a satire

Posted Thursday morning, January 2, 2020.

Then 12 year old Kirstin Dunst stealing the show as Amy in Gillian Armstrong's 1994 film version of “Little Women”, which I now want to see almost as much as I want to see Greta Gerwig's new one.

The March girls getting ready to surprise Marmee with presents on Christmas morning, with Amy as the plucky comic relief to the scene’s sentimentality:

"There's mother. Hide the basket, quick!" cried Jo, as a door slammed, and steps sounded in the hall.

Amy came in hastily, and looked rather abashed when she saw her sisters all waiting for her.

"Where have you been, and what are you hiding behind you?" asked Meg, surprised to see, by her hood and cloak, that lazy Amy had been out so early.

"Don't laugh at me, Jo! I didn't mean any one should know till the time came. I only meant to change the little bottle for a big one, and I gave all my money to get it, and I'm truly trying not to be selfish any more."

As she spoke, Amy showed the handsome flask which replaced the cheap one; and looked so earnest and humble in her little effort to forget herself that Meg hugged her on the spot, and Jo pronounced her "a trump," while Beth ran to the window, and picked her finest rose to ornament the stately bottle.

"You see I felt ashamed of my present, after reading and talking about being good this morning, so I ran round the corner and changed it the minute I was up: and I'm so glad, for mine is the handsomest now."

---from “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott.

Seems somebody important has been relegated to the cavalcade of others

Posted Wednesday night, January 1, 2020.

Marmee (Susan Sarandon) reads Father’s letter home from the battlefront to her girls, Jo (Winona Ryder), Amy (Kirstin Dunst), Meg (Trini Alvarado), and Beth (Claire Danes) in Gillian Armstong’s 1994 film adaptation of “Little Women”: “They all drew to the fire, mother in the big chair with Beth at her feet, Meg and Amy perched on either arm of the chair, and Jo leaning on the back, where no one would see any sign of emotion if the letter should happen to be touching.”

Doing my homework preparing to see “Little Women” this weekend, I’ve been reading Alcott’s novel. The endnotes of the edition I’m reading, which was published in 2004, include a short essay on film adaptations. The editor, Camille Cauti, concentrates on what she judges are the two best movie versions: George Cukor’s 1933 version, which starred Katharine Hepburn as Jo, and 1994’s version directed by Gillian Armstong and starring Winona Ryder as Jo and Susan Sarandon as Marmee. Cauti seems to prefer Cukor’s film which she praises not just as a good adaptation but an excellent piece of moviemaking. She has good things to say about Armstong’s “Little Women”, particularly its “formidable talent of [its] large ensemble cast: [Ryder] as Jo; [Sarandon] as Marmee...Kirstin Dunst [then just 12 years old], who practically steals the show as the young Amy; Claire Danes as Beth; Eric Stoltz as John Brooke; Gabriel Byrne as Professor Bhaer; and a cavalcade of others.” Fans of the book and fans of that movie will notice that an important character is relegated to the “cavalcade of others.”  And in leaving out Laurie---who is only the male romantic lead---Cauti leaves out the actor who played him. Who was that again?

Oh, yeah. That guy!

Whatever became of him?

More forceful thoughts forced upon me by thinking about "The Last Jedi": A Romance but not an epic one

Lifted from the archives, January 5, 2018. Re-posted Monday night, December 23, 2019.

Rey (Daisy Ridley) on her quest as the Romantic but not epic hero of the less than great but still fun second installment of the Star Wars sequels, The Last Jedi.

[My Star Wars Sequels reblogging marathon continues with my second post on “The Last Jedi”.]

That The Last Jedi was not a great movie or even all that good a Star Wars movie was not the first thought I had when the final credits started to roll. My first thought was, Wow! That was fun! My second thought was, But not as much fun as I expected…

I had a great time at The Last Jedi but, like I said, it’s not a great movie. There are plot holes you can fly the Millennium Falcon through and as many of them as Yavin has moons. It’s long. Over-long. Reportedly writer-director Rian Johnson wanted to make it longer and has lot of leftover footage for when his director’s cut comes to Blu-ray, but based on what he left in, it’s hard to imagine what of interest he might have left out. There are long stretches of nothing happening, filmed and acted as if this nothing that’s happening is as critical as Luke turning off his computer or as chilling and tension-filled as Han’s being frozen in carbonite and the gang escaping from Cloud City or as packed with swashbuckling action and adventure as the fight aboard Jabba’s sail barge. There are other scenes in which nothing happens that are filmed and acted as if nothing’s happening. When things are happening, to get them happening or keep them happening, smart characters have multiple attacks of the stupids. And, most disappointing, The Last Jedi does nothing to move the story of the sequels along, because, adding to the disappointment, it reveals that the sequels don’t actually have a story.

Not one worth it taking three movies to tell.

Check that.

It’s worth a trilogy but after two movies the sequels haven’t gotten down to the business of even beginning to tell it. The Last Jedi alludes to it, as if it’s being told in another set of movies that’s being released in alteration with the sequels, and we’ve already seen Episode VIIB and Episode VIIIC, with the two series intersecting and wrapping up together in Episode VIX. Would that it were so. That other series is telling the same story as The Lord of the Rings.

The age of magic and miracles is passing.

The prequels told the story of Anakin Skywalker’s fall from grace and with it the corruption of the entire galaxy. They didn’t tell it well. But that didn’t change the fact that the story itself is profound, epic, and tragic.

The original trilogy told the story of the return to grace in the person of Luke. It’s profound, epic, and comedic in the classical sense---order is restored, harmony reigns, and the good people live happily ever after.

In both trilogies, the fate of the world is tied up in the fate of the hero.

The sequels are not looking tragic or comedic. So far they’ve been routinely Romantic. And not epic. And not profound.

The fate of the world is not tied up in the fate of a hero.

Rey, whom I adore the way I adore d’Artagnan, Robin Hood, Jim Hawkins, Bilbo Baggins, and all the Knights of the Round Table, is, as I’ve written before, Percival, the natural innocent who becomes Arthur’s second greatest knight, but she’s to the Star Wars saga what Percival is to the Arthurian legends---not Lancelot. That is, she may be the one of the greatest knights but she’s not the greatest hero. A true epic hero needs an opponent or a challenge worthy of her.

Snoke is no Palpatine, Kylo Ren is definitely, emphatically no Anakin, and without a Palpatine or a Vader, Rey can be no Luke nor is she really in danger of becoming another Anakin. The Force Awakens is Rey’s origin story. She’s tested but not challenged in the way we would expect her to be challenged as the next step in her hero’s journey. This parallels what Luke goes through in A New Hope. He’s tested but his challenge isn’t given to him until The Empire Strikes Back and the moment when during his training he confronts “Darth Vader” and in lifting the mask confronts himself. In A New Hope, Vader is formidable but as far as we know he’s just the Black Knight. Now it’s revealed he’s somebody far more dangerous. He’s not simply a powerful villain who could kill Luke in a lightsaber duel or a dogfight. He’s a threat to Luke’s very soul. Luke doesn’t know it yet---neither are we supposed to---but he’s being told that Vader is his father and his challenge is to redeem the world by redeeming Anakin while resisting temptation and not falling from grace himself. The temptation, though, will come from Palpatine, working through Vader, and so Palpatine---Darth Sidious---is Luke’s real opponent, far more powerful, sinister, evil, and persuasive than Vader.

At the end of The Force Awakens, Rey, having passed her test, is given not a challenge but a quest.

It’s relatively straight-forward. She’s to find Luke, heal his psychic wound, and convince him to come home with her to save the galaxy. Along the way, she’s to receive the training from him she needs to master her skills so she can defeat Kylo Ren the next time they meet. If the parallels to Luke’s quest to find Yoda were to continue, she would be given the challenge that would make or break her as an epic hero. Things don’t quite work out as she hopes or we might expect.

Luke, unlike Yoda, hasn’t been waiting for the New Hope to come find him. He left the map, in case the day came when he was needed, but he’s been growing increasingly afraid that that day would come. And he’s convinced himself that if that day comes he’s the last person anyone should come to for help. He’s adamant that he won’t go home with Rey---which is to say, he refuses to let her heal him---and the little training he begrudges her is actually training in why she shouldn’t want to be a Jedi.

The challenge she’s given she gives to herself. Sensing that the Resistance isn’t up to the job of resisting let alone defeating the First Order and that she’s going to need help if she’s going to do the job herself, she decides to redeem Kylo Ren and convince him to help save the galaxy. Kylo Ren isn’t in the same league as Vader as a villain, but it may be that’s because he’s meant to be a hero. After all, look at his mother, father, and uncle. Look at what his grandfather was before his fall from grace. This doesn’t quite work out as she hoped either.

Ironically, in trying to make him a hero, she seems to be turning him into a stronger villain. Also a more compelling character.

This is interesting and potentially exciting---it depends on how it plays out in Episode IX---but it takes up about 40 minutes of The Last Jedi. The other two hours of The Last Jedi is mainly an extended chase scene---with a side trip to a truly fascinating and fun corner of the galaxy where it appears James Bondian adventures in space take place but which we don’t see taking place in The Last Jedi. It turns out that this is another stretch of nothing happening to move the story along except for introducing a fascinating and fun character who, it turns out, is instrumental in creating another stretch of nothing happening---the chase ending at the Battle of Helm’s Deep, with AT-AT Walkers instead of orcs and no Rohirrim on the horizon.

The lightsaber duel between Gandalf and the Necromancer’s Apprentice is pretty intense, though.

But here’s the thing.

Rey plays almost no role in the last half hour of the movie. She’s just the cavalry.

Now, consider this.

Although she provides much needed help, at the end of The Force Awakens she isn’t responsible for blowing up that movie’s version of the Death Star. She’s busy with her own personal problems. And in The Last Jedi, it’s her personal problems that have kept her away from the main action for almost the entire movie. Frankly, I’m more interested in her personal problems because I’m more interested in her and her story. I don’t care about a reiteration of the war story that provides the background to Luke’s story in the original trilogy. And if Episode IX doesn’t do what no third episode of a movie trilogy has ever done, be the best movie in the trilogy while at the same time tying up all the loose ends and closing the major plot holes and bringing the main characters’ stories to satisfying conclusions, that’s all the sequels will turn out to have been, which, as I’ve said, isn’t much of a story.

It should be all Rey’s story. That’s what The Force Awakens seemed to promise they’d be. But Rey’s story is like Percival’s, a Romance not an epic. And it’s a side story. Percival’s story is a Grail quest that takes him away from Camelot so he’s not there for the breaking of the Round Table. (Although the best King Arthur movie, John Boorman’s Excalibur, changes that, Percival is still only the sixth lead if not a supporting character.) And it would have been fine with me if the makers of the sequels---J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson at the fore---had contented themselves with telling that story. But then it wouldn’t have been what most fans expected.

What I really would have liked to see, was Rey’s story being part of that other, imaginary trilogy, in which she and Kylo Ren would both have been irrelevant to the saving of the galaxy at the end. The two of them would have been the last Jedi because the galaxy would have no need or place epic heroes and villains with magic powers anymore. The age of miracles would have passed, and the fate of the galaxy was in the hands of mere mortals who did good or evil on their own, without the influence of devils and the intercession of angels.

Like I said, that’s what The Lord of the Rings is about.

This is a theme that’s raised in The Last Jedi but it’s not the story or, to put it another way, The Last Jedi isn’t integral to that story.

Ok, that’s what didn’t like. The forthcoming posts are going to be about what I did like, which adds up to a lot.