Some Came Running

Literary interlude

You know what? I don't care that he's dead. That's what I wrote in a letter to his sister-in-law after finishing the above, and then I went out and mailed it to her, but walking down Sixth Avenue something in the sunlight struck me, a glint in the leaves made me dizzy, the sounds and the feel of breath and being lifted me above myself right into the middle of the street, and I don't know if Peter was looking down on me then but the sky was crying warm blood, and it may have been only that pounding in my veins at the ecstasy of being alive. See, because when all is said and done I don't care that he is dead, though I feel a certain complicity, because other than that there would only be anger left, anger at life and anger at our blood that spills out of our weakness into troughs of uncaring. If I let myself get started I will only begin to rant and threaten those who glamorize death, but there is a death in the balance and you better look long and hard at it you stupid fuckheads, you who treat life as a camp joke, you who have lost your sense of wonder about the state of being alive itself, I AM OUT FOR YOU, I know who you are and I'll shoot you down with the weapons at my command and I don't mean guns.

And ultimately this lance of blame must turn back upon myself, whom I have nothing to say in defense of, any more than I can honestly say I will never take drugs again because of Peter Laughner, which would only be a terrible insult to his memory. Realizing life is precious the natural tendency is to trample on it, like laughing at a funeral. But there are voluntary reactions. I volunteer not to feel anything about him from this day out, but I will not forget that this kid killed himself for something torn T-shirts represented in the battle fires of his ripped emotions, and that does not make your T-shirts profound, on the contrary, it makes you a bunch of asshole if you espouse what he latched onto in supports of his long death agony, and if I have run out of feeling for the dead I can also truly say that from here on out I am only interested in true feeling, and the pursuit of some ultimate escape from that was what killed Peter, which is all I truly know of his life, except that the hardest thing in this living world is to confront your own pain and go through it, but somehow life is not a paltry thing after all next to this child's inheritance of eternal black. So don't anybody try to wave good-bye.

—Lester Bangs, "Peter Laughner," New York Rocker, September-October 1977, reprinted in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, edited by Greil Marcus

By popular demand

What was the name of that PIL song? "This Is What You Want, This Is What You Get...?" Ha! Those among my gentle readership who've requested more of my writing about, well, movies, for heaven's sake, can indeed find some species of same over at MSN Movies, where...wait for it...my notice on Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore has just gone up. I do not joke when I say I expected, no, hoped for better. Baby puppy. On the one hand, there is a rather good latter-day Looney Tunes short attached to the thing. On the other, as a whole the feature presentation, I note, fails even to maintain a level of "sub Katzenbergian vulgar exuberance," a phrase I like. Anyway, what else of cinematic note is happening this weekend, besides Dinner For Schmucks, Charlie St. Efron, and a raftload of "small" pictures of dubious impact, significance, and/or aesthetic value? When the hell is Centurion opening? There's a new film worth grappling with...

Naked

Some observations on the happy end problem in Film Noir

And since I'll be beginning with Gilda, I ought to state right off the bat that I'm using a very liberal definition of "Film Noir" here...

 

The "stinkers/let's go home, Johnny" finale of Gilda deserves, of course, to be enshrined as the ultimate in illogical, nonsensical, and worst of all, emotionally unconvincing wrap-ups not just in the history of the Hollywood studio film but the history of film anywhere at anytime, including 1970s Turkey, just to concoct a random for-instance. It's monumental. But is it typical? It's an ending some cinephiles like to cite as a prime example of Hollywood narrative double-dealing of the time and the Production Code. And yet...

 

...Out of the Past, made a mere year later, in the same town, and under the restraints of the same Production Code, lives up to the inexorable tragedy it, like Gilda, was always headed for. And also does so without succumbing to nihilism, or make its final and genuinely tortured note of...well, let's not call it "uplift," but rather "comfort"—resonate beautifully, a little quaveringly. 

The difference? How about the differences? We auteurists, you might think, would be reflexively inclined to blame/credit the director, and it is true that we tend to hold Out of the Past's Jacques Tourneur in higher esteem than we do Gilda's Charles Vidor (although deep scholars will be quick to tell you that Vidor was no one to sneeze at). But I think here the split can really be put down to studio sensibility. The RKO Picture's head—in both the real and the metaphorical sense—was still something wholly other than the Columbia Pictures head. Harry Cohn, to whose ass the world might have been wired, would never in a million years, erm, sat still for a GIlda in which Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth didn't wind up alive, and together, and happy...and also having learned their lessons to stop being such stinkers, and to go back to being the crazy lovable American kids they always were, damn it!

RKO, of course, would experience its own change in sensibility in 1948, when Howard Hughes took it over. 

Columbia's Cohn, who kept working until a heart attack killed him in 1958, expressed an affection for the "lousy little B pictures" that were Columbia's stock-in-trade when he wasn't in the grip of whatever ambition prompted him to give the nod to a Lost Horizon or an All The King's Men, might have insisted on letting Brian Keith and Ginger Rogers stay alive, and together, and happy, at the end of Phil Karlson's 1955 Tight Spot. But he let well enough alone, and the picture's real ending—a shatteringly sad portrait of betrayal on Edward G. Robinson's face after the line stating that the bathroom window had been unlocked from the inside—occurs sufficiently close to the actual final credit that it pretty much thunders over whatever triumphalism comes after it. 

 

And sometimes we, as hard-boiled as we'd like to believe we are, really want that happy ending, sometimes the more improbable the better. Karlson's 1957 The Brothers Rico is based on a tale by things-ending-badly-maestro Georges SImenon, so one might expect its maze of double-crosses to lead to a bad end for straightened-out-gangster Richard Conte. One might argue that everything in the moral equation of the narrative calls for him to not get what he wants. One hesitates to provide spoilers, so I won't go into detail—the film is a splendid part of the splendid recent Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics II box—but here is a shot from the picture's finale. (The female player is Dianne Foster.)

 

Cop-out, or moment of respite in a harsh world? You tell me. I felt it was wholly...well, deserved. And as we all know...

Department of apologies

I entirely agree that this blog has been practically choking in self-indulgence so I'll keep this brief. My prior characterizations of the truly great Ray Pride were based on misinformation and some entirely avoidable confusion on my part. So I wanted to offer the man a public apology. Which I hereby offer. Along with a screen cap from Melville's Bob le flambeur. That is all. In other news, appalling people continue to appall (no link provided), and I just need to get over it. And in other news, Jim Emerson continues to get it, and to raise the bar. "This time I know our side will win," etc. (Kidding.)

Image of the day, 7/28/10

Emil Janning Jannings in The Last Command, Josef von Sternberg, 1928. Seems somehow appropriate.

From the spanking-new Criterion box of Sternberg silents, which I dearly hope to be able to actually watch some day soon. After which I will likely enthuse.

Life on Mars...

Looks something like this, according to a 1918 Danish film entitled Himmelskibet, or A Trip To Mars. You should see what the explorers from Earth that the happy Martians are greeting look like. You can, on a double-feature disc from the Danish Film Institute entitled Danish Silent Classics. The subject of my Foreign Region DVD Report at The Daily Notebook today, and a launching pad for some considerations of cinema's ever-evolving but still fundamentally largely unchanged notions about space travel and potential aliens, and what qualities make a "classic" film. Enjoy!

Bad fellas

It's taken me a while to get to it, but right now I'm enjoying the hell out of Jimmy Breslin's brisk, droll The Good Rat, which is, among other things, a kind of summation of a lifetime of crime reporting. I was particularly tickled by this passage on the sloth of the typical gangster:

These people are not attracted to work even in illegitimate places. Sal Reale had his airline workers' union office just outside Kennedy, and it was all right, except he had to hire people highly recommended by the Gambino family. Sal had a list of employees' credentials. Typical was:

"Harry D's son-in-law—$200G"

"Harry D's wife—$150 G"

Each morning the list ruled the office, particularly when work orders started to fill the in baskets.

"The morning starts with sixty-two people in the office," Sal recalls. "By ten o'clock there were twelve people working. We had a lot of paperwork. You had to fill out insurance forms, various federal formseverything you think of that they could put down on paper. We were left with twelve people to do the work. Where did the others go? Here's a woman who gets up, picks up her purse, an walks past me without even nodding. I call after her, 'Couldn't you give us a hand?' She says, 'I was told I didn't have to do any of this work. I have to get my hair done. I'm Paul Vario's cousin.'"

As the Mafia "dissolves," Breslin continues, "you inspect if for what it actually was, grammar-school dropouts who kill each other and purport to live by codes from the hills of Sicily that are either unintelligible or ignored."

It lasted longest in film and print, through the false drama of victims' being shot gloriously with machine guns but without the usual exit wounds the size of a soup plate. The great interest in the Mafia was the result of its members being so outrageously disdainful of all rules that just the sight of a mobster caused gleeful whispers. Somebody writing for a living could find it extremely difficult to ignore them

The Mafia became part of public belief because of movie stars who were Jewish. This dark fame began with Paul Muni playing Al Capone. After that came Edward G. Robinson, Tony Curtis, Lee Strasberg, Alan King, and on and on, part of an entire industry of writers, editors, cameramen, directors, gofers, lighting men, sound men, location men, casting agents—all on the job and the payroll because of the Mafia. Finally two great actors, Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, put a vowel in there.

One could cinephile-nitpick, but the core conceit is sound. What's interesting to my mind is that The Godfather doesn't turn into anything less than a great film even with the knowledge that its core assumptions as they pertain to the reality that inspired it are, as it happens, utter horseshit. And I think Breslin understands that too. And even the mob movie that comes closest to showing "grammar school dropouts who kill each other," Scorsese's Goodfellas, can't quite scrub its characters clean of the movie-star veneer of a certain glamour that they carry. Part of the glamour, of course, is embedded in the wickedness of their actions: the outrageous disdain for the rules that so appeals, in a sense, to some part of all our ids. It's refreshing that Breslin has the good sense to call the popular culture depiction of mobsters out, but not get into much of a lather over it.

The Steven St. Croix/Harold Hecuba syndrome

I might as well just come right out with it, people: I've been in a bit of a funk lately. Dunno if it's the heat, or the fact that I'm getting behind in my work because my plasma display's still broken, or because I cannot count among my readership any authorized Hitachi parts and services providers who are fans to the extent that they would offer to repair my plasma display for free, or some combination of all of the above. (And by the way, many thanks to the readers who have taken such sympathy to my plight that they've hit the tip jar—it definitely helps.)

Who am I kidding? It's all of that, but it's not only all of that. 

The other day, some online exploration—which I'm beginning to think is just never, ever a good idea—directed me to something that I would have otherwise avoided, that is, Armond White's review, in the every-issue-thinner-than-the-last New York Press, of Todd Solondz's Life During Wartime, a film I admire substantially. Now I understand that, around the time of Transformers 2 if not well before, Armond traded a more-or-less conventionally "contrarian" stance for an extremely aggressive Bizarro World ("Us do opposite of all earthly things!") approach to film criticism; it was no longer enough to condemn that which was largely embraced by the critical community, such as it was; White now took up as his duty the slathering of thoroughly irrational praise on certifiable dogshit. None of this would matter if people just stopped paying attention to White entirely, but one peculiar bit of blowback from the situation is that White's praise for a particular film can now be used as a cudgel against that picture by those who aren't as enthused about it. Hence, someone such as myself can be put into a position of defending Solondz's film not only from attacks against it, but from White's praise of it. An odd, interesting situation, to be sure. 

Literary interlude

Brother B. carried Fancy to the rear of Greek Steve's Bar, and returned to sprinkle sawdust along the floor. Then he bought a drink for everyone in the place, but did not drink with a man of them; and when they had drunk he sent all of them out onto the street for keeps.

He locked the door, poured himself a shot, turned on the juke, and sat alone beside it, among the empty chairs, thinking of his own life and all the days to come.

When morning came he was still sober, but the juke had long stopped playing. Although he had drunk steadily all night, he had never felt soberer in his life. Moving like an old man, although he was barely forty, he put the chairs on the table and his cap on his head. Then he went to the register, punched out NO SALE, and closed his doors forever.

—"The Face on the Barroom Floor," Nelson Algren, collected in The Neon Wilderness, 1947