A really fatal woman!

The Big Heat was enjoyable for its enveloping atmosphere of corruption and the psychological tension in Bannion, the hero.  Too Late for Tears [YouTube clip]is a treat because it features the most thoroughly characterized, and completely evil femme fatale that I’ve ever seen in noir.  She is played by Lizabeth Scott, who had a string of such roles.  She looks mean, even when she’s trying to be nice, and she has a voice even more husky than Kathleen Turner’s.

This movie wastes no time – the first scene has Scott and her husband driving to a dinner party when she starts complaining that she doesn’t want to go because the hosts will look down on her, they’re so snooty.  She finally grabs the wheel in an attempt to force her husband to turn around and go home, and he skids to a stop.  A car drives by and hurls a leather satchel into their back seat.  It’s filled with cash.  There you have it – her deep-seated psychological unease about her social position, her violence and impulsivity, and a pile of money to set them ablaze. 

After evading the crook who tries to catch up with them to retrieve what was supposed to have been given to him, the couple fights about what to do with the money.  He wants to give it to the police – she wants to keep it, spend it!  They compromise, and he deposits it in a locker at the train station, hoping she’ll calm down and give in. 

Nothin’ doing!  She starts spending money on luxuries, and hiding them in the kitchen cabinets.  Minks, dresses, accessories.  When he gets a call from his banker about the state of his checking account, he confronts her.  She reveals her deeply wounded childhood:  “We were poor.  Not hungry poor.  Middle-class poor!”  (That’s worse!)  People always looking down at them because they couldn’t keep up.  It’s what drives her, but hubby is a little too simple to see what a beast he has by the tail.  Dan Duryea, the crook who finally catches up with her to demand his blackmail loot is smarter.  He gives her the nickname, Tiger,  and he finds out he has her by the tail, and only barely.  Her lust for loot is terrifying.

Finally, near the end, she makes off for Mexico with the cash.  Hubby and the crook have been dealt with.  We see her checking in at a fancy hotel, and her delight at finally reaching the sphere where she belongs is almost girlish.  She is having the time of her life.  Crime really pays!  Funny, it’s rare in films that you ever see the bad guys enjoying their ill gotten gains.  Of course, her high time doesn’t last long.

And here you will stay…

How did I not know that Richard Sala’s Delphine No. 4, the final issue in his reworking of the Snow White story, had been published?  I just happened to wander into Forbidden Planet, and there it was, with some looking, on the shelf!

The story is sort of like Snow White from the Prince’s point of view, and it’s dark, gothic, and a downer.  Did you think there would be a happy ending?  (That’s as much as I’ll give away.)  No, Sala is into the rich soil of the real stories behind the Disney fairy tales.  They are not that hard to find – just go to Brothers Grimm.  You may be surprised at how goth they are!  (And for a wonderful essay on fairy tales in the raw, check out Robert Darnton’s book, The Great Cat Massacre.)

Sala’s style here is at its most muted, more ”realistic,” less far-out weird than his stuff has been in the past – this suits the tone and pace of the story.  His art in Delphine is like a subtle basso continuo that sets off the hysterical, shrieking, hilarious weirdness of earlier pieces like One of the Wonders of the World. It’s  one long tone-poem on obsession, frustration, longing, illusion, fear, and some other not too pleasant topics.

One reviewer commented:

He is a sorely under-appreciated storyteller and I’m not sure why that is. Perhaps because his influences are decidedly anachronistic, out of pace with current pop culture in spite of the work being deeply entrenched in popular culture’s folklore

I hope he’s getting the attention he deserves, but I don’t keep tabs on the comics business world.  The reviewer makes a fine point when he touches on the paradox that Sala is out of sync with todays pop culture (explicit sex, vulgarity, explosions, violence, knowing irony and sarcasm…am I a crank?) while his work is “deeply entrenched in popular culture’s folklore.”

Sala doesn’t make “references” or “allusions” to “pop icons.”  There’s nothing knowing or arch about him.  He has absorbed vast realms of imagery and literature, and he writes and draws what he loves – in this sense, completely “in genre.”  (What is his genre, though?)  I see him as an exemplar of the personal mythologist, and as it happens, his myths are very sympatico with mine!  A very brief and incomplete list of “influences” that I detect in reading him:

Judex, Dante’s Inferno, Dashell Hammet, Film Noir, Grimm Brothers, Surrealism, Max Ernst, literary grotesque (depictions of monstrous transformations) and Gothic, Louise Brooks, Poe, Kafka…

And speaking of Kafka, at his new site, Sala has an old story, Herman, the Human Mole, that brings to mind that author’s story, The Hunger Artist. (Also Nightmare Alley).

This story is in my favorite Sala vein and style, and has now supplanted Wonder of the World as my all-time favorite.   It features a variation on this character from 13 O’Clock, another favorite.  Outcast, Peter Lorre-, sensitive-type.

Reading this story is like diving into a maelstrom of genre-moods:  noir, geek stories, tortured adolescent, loser kid, crazy misunderstood artist, mama-fixated psycho, I-was-framed-for-murder, culminating in a sick and hilarious reprise of the feral-child cum geek.  Is this what artists are?  Is this a self-portrait?

Hangmen Also Die!

The hangman of the film’s title is Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s top men, No. 2 in the SS, put in charge of the occupied city of Prague.  He was killed by a British commando team in 1942, and the Germans shot 1600 people and destroyed Lidice in retaliation.  At the time this movie was made, according to Wikipedia, the actual story wasn’t known, and the film makes it the act of the local resistance movement.

The film was the work of the Expressionist master, Fritz Lang, with Bertolt Brecht and others helping out on the writing.  It’s a long film for that time, over two hours, and it’s filled with shadows, menace, brutality, and a bit of Hollywood wartime feel-good sentimental patriotism.  Mostly, it’s scary and claustrophobic.  It tells a story of the assassin attempting to elude the Nazis, torn by his duty to the underground and the knowledge that the Germans have arrested hundreds of innocent people to shoot in batches until he is discovered.

The Hangman of Prague makes his entrance in the beginning, shown as a strutting peacock and a sadist.  At first, I thought I was watching Klink from Hogan’s Heroes.  In general, the Gestapo are shown as brutal, sadistic, and full of themselves.  We get a close-up of one looking at himself in a mirror while he squeezes a big pimple on his face during a break in his desk work.  The depiction of interrogations, though without much explicit violence, is chilling.  One old lady is made to stand by a chair that is designed to come apart if she puts her weight on it for relief.  The film is filled with sick little details like that.

The most interesting character in the film is Inspector Gruber of the Gestapo played by a well known Jewish character actor of the day.  Gruber is a sexual libertine and a heavy drinker.  In contrast to many of the Nazi villains who are uptight sadistic militarists,  he is earthy and almost casual in his mannerisms, but he is very clever.

Here we see him at work in his office.  No uniform, sitting down and giving orders, a modest (venus pudica) nude in the background.  He is on a long leather couch.  Could this office be the commandeered space of a psychoanalyst?

With business over, Herr Gruber gets down to business with his secretary who was behind the screen.

In Lang’s earlier classic, M, the image of a balloon floating upwards was used to indicate the murder of a child.  There is a similar use of images to indicate or punctuate actions in this film, as well as to build character.  In this image, Gruber is shown pulling us his socks and tieing his shoelaces – a frequent action for him.  It distinguishes him yet again from his fellow Nazis, always so spit-and-polish.  Here, he does it front of a naked statue, in a place that doubles as a workplace and a place of sexual indulgence.

On the track of the assassin, Gruber breaks in on a couple in the midst of a tryst, or so it seems.  (In fact, the woman is pretending in order to hide a fugitive.)  Gruber is not put off by her state of undress – he rather enjoys making her uncomfortable while he thoroughly ransacks the room.  He also enjoys the possibility, slim he thinks, that he has simply blundered into an adulterous rendezvous.  It’s all the same to him!

Later, Gruber carouses all night with some prostitutes,  and forces one of his suspects, the actual fiance of the young woman, to join him.  He thinks he can wear him down with drink, women, and jealousy.  (The guy isn’t in on what his girl is involved with.)  The lipstick on his cheek jogs his memory about a detail in his meeting with the girl and he’s off to get her.  He knows she’s involved in the plot!

He finds the real killer of Heydrich, a local surgeon, but the doctor kills him before Gruber can turn him in.  Like the balloon floating upwards, his hat, falling to the ground and rolling about under the table on which he is being throttled to death indicates his end.  His left foot dangles nearly to the floor, its sock and part of his calf visible.  When his body if found in a cellar coal heap, planted there to pin the blame for the assassination on a collaborator, only his calves, shoes and socks are visible.

Point Blank

Walking, walking, walking…his name is Walker.  His wife won’t know what hit her.   I fondly recall this pedestrian passageway from the Los Angeles airport. Another weird view in a mirror.

    

  

Driving around sun-drenched LA.  Beauty waits for the Beast.  Another view in a glass.

The scenes from the movie trailer I remember seeing in 1967.  Bam, bam, bam…who knew he was shooting at an empty bed.  His target flew the coop long ago.  He really messed up her bed, and not with rough sex.  Is Walker shooting with blanks, as they say?

The obligatory after-passionate-sex scene when the couple usually takes langrous drags on cigarettes.  No smoke here, no fire.  Walker dangles his empty gun limply between his legs.

  

They sucumb to reverie…how they met.  “You were drunk,” she says.  She wore white.  And who are those thugs shadowing them all the while.  They sure “met cute.”

   

Yeah, but things didn’t turn out so great.  Life’s no picnic in southern California suburbia…

 

Wife’s dead, a suicide with pills.  Now he gets with her sister.  Nice scenery in Santa Monica.  Will she help him, he asks as he uses the scope to sight the penthouse where his prey is living?  Is it an accident that they are the same color?  A woman and a telescope, just a means to an end…getting that $93,000 he’s owed. 

 

They set up Walker to be shot by a sniper, but he’s too smart for them.  The bad guys get killed.  The wonderful L.A. River is the setting.  Thanks to the US Army Corps of Engineers for this splendid WPA Deco style set doubling as a public works flood control project.

  

Waiting in the hillside villa for the big guy, Chris wonders, “Does this guy feel anything?”

  

While he waits, a little TV.  Part of the weird and sardonic social satire this movie contains.

  

Chris collapses after pummeling him, and leaves.  But not before she sets the kitchen buzzing with multiple appliances running riot just to annoy him.  The effect is of a poltergeist loose among consumer heaven.

Give my love to the sunrise…

Elsa’s farewell to Michael – she looks glamorous even when she seems to be really dying.  How many times do you see that in an old ‘B’ movie?  This is after the famous shoot out scene in the house of mirrors, a location that reflects (no pun) the nature of Michael’s befuddled nature throughout the film.  He knows he’s been taken for a chump.  A wonderful femme fatale noir flick, and the local scenes in Frisco’s Chinatown are another entertaining piece of it.  Not to mention watching Hayworth running through the market streets in high heels and furs and speaking Chinese!  She is the Lady from Shanghai, after all.

In noir, everything is foreshadowed, pre-ordained, determined.  Michael rescues Elsa from some clumsy thugs who jump her while she’s riding in the horse drawn carriage  in which he first saw and spoke to her in Central Park.  Later, saying goodbye after declining to work on her yacht because he suddenly discovers that she’s a married woman…

…he hands her the gun he found …”Would it be this you’re lookin’ for?  You were smart to carry a gun, traveling alone in the park.  But if you knew you had the gun in your bag, why through away the bag?”

“I meant for you to find it…I don’t know how to shoot.”

“It’s easy.  You just pull the trigger.”

It’s all summed up in Michael’s monologue on sharks, inspired my Melville?  Inspiration for Spielberg’s Quint’s tale of the Indianapolis?

And of course, pull the trigger they do in the fabulous and famous shootout in the crazy mirror room of the funhouse.

Kubrick – Falling Woman

On my noir journey, I just watched Stanley Kubrick’s first film (oh, second – he removed his first feature from circulation himself), Killer’s Kiss. The title doesn’t make all that much sense to me, despite the labored voice over on the theatrical trailer that leads up to announcing it, (“Her Soft Mouth Was the Road to Sin-Smeared Violence”) but the film is pretty good.  Not great, not even really good, in fact, it’s seriously flawed, but Kubrick is so imaginative, and it has such great location shots, and so much weird and fascinating imagery, that I like it.  Of course, I am a huge fan of Stanley K.

The film is short – 67 minutes – and is narrated by Davy while he waits for a train in Penn Station, NY.  The use of that glorious setting, now long gone, gives the film an unintentional kick for the architecturally aware.  Davy is a nice guy and a boxer, but a has-been boxer.  He’s just had his last chance in the ring, and he failed.  He needs to start fresh in life.  Kubrick shows boxing as unglamorous and brutal.  Just the shots of Davy being prepped by his trainer are disturbing.

Davy lives in a tiny one-room apartment across an airshaft from a pretty girl who works nights in a sleazy dance hall.  They are aware of each other, and intrigued – they watch each other through the window, each unaware of the other’s gaze.  Voyeurism, objectification of women, mediation of sex – the usual Kubrick drill.  Here Davy watches her undress, and later she, in a perfectly composed shot, watches him.  Kubrick’s background as a Magnum photographer shows here.

At the dance hall, we are treated to the sight of the advertisements showing busty women, “Couples Invited,” “Dance with Us!”  More women as objects for sale.  And the girl’s name is Gloria Price.  She’s the not-so-willing lover of the owner of the hall, Rapallo, and they watch Davy’s last fight on TV together.  At least one of them is getting very turned-on by the spectacle of a man being beaten…and Rapallo suspects that Gloria may be keen on him anyway…

When he returns to his apartment to rest after his defeat, Davy gets a sympathetic call from his uncle.  As he talks to him, he looks at Gloria undressing across the way.  In this wonderful sequence, Davy looks out at us who stand in the space occupied by Gloria.  We see him looking at her in the mirror behind him.  You can barely make her out in the bright window in this still, but he’s watching!  Space, mirrors, the two lovebirds watching each other through windows and on TV…will they ever get together?

Davy falls asleep, but awakes from a nightmare of driving through Brooklyn to the jeers of the audience at his last fight.  The dream is in negative, another Kubrick favorite.  Remember that trip to Jupiter in 2001? 

When he awakes, he hears Gloria screaming as she is threatened by Rapallo.  He rescues her, and that’s the start of their romance.  Rapallo is the jealous type, so he orders his thugs to rough up Davy, but they grab his manager by mistake, and then kill him.  This all happens in Time Square, the source of some great NYC location shots c. 1955.  At times, the camera is hand-held and jumpy.

From there, it gets nasty, as Davy uses his wits and brawn to get even.  Rapallo has kidnapped Gloria, so the fight is over the woman too.

Talk you scum!  Where is she!?  They drive to a deserted loft neighborhood.

There’s a chase over the roofs of NY that is remarkable again for the location shots, and then the final duel to the death between Davy and Rapallo in a mannequin warehouse.  As they fight, female figures are hacked to pieces, skewered, used as weapons, and tumbled upon.

As a surreal commentary on this brutal chivalry, these body parts tremble in the dark, silent and mysterious like a de Chirico painting.

In the end, he gets the girl…

L’amour noir et fou

I have been dipping into the inky reservoirs of film noir these days, and enjoying myself immensely.  This genre has been so well critiqued and appreciated by cineastes, scholars, and pseudo-intellectuals, that I won’t pretend to have anything new to say.  Besides that, I am a relative newcomer to this pasture of pop culture.   Instead, I will just talk here about a few films that are among my favorites right now, and that share the theme of l’amour fou and the femme fatale.

I’ll start with Gilda, which stars Rita Hayworth, shown above in one of the sexiest vamp scenes in film history.  Hayworth was a fabulous dancer (Fred Astaire said she was his favorite partner – did Ginger know that?) and she had great comic talent.  The dancing is in evidence in this film, but the comediene is suppressed, although it gives some zing to the repartee between Glen Ford and her.  Personally, I can’t really see her as a femme fatale in this movie, although she is certainly a fatal woman for a few characters.  She has a heart of gold, she’s not really gone bad – just searching for a way out.  She still loves Glen Ford’s character…and there is a happy ending for them.  Is that noir?  Picky, picky, it’s a wonderful film.

Gilda does her famous one-glove strip tease to excite the jealousy and anger of her one-time boyfriend, Ford, who just can’t get her out of his system.  He watches the routine form the casino office, but when she calls for help getting out of her dress after the number – “I’m not very good with zippers…but maybe if I had some help!” Several gentlemen rush to oblige – Ford looses his cool and yanks her offstage.  Watch the entire clip here.

And speaking of Fred and Ginger, here they are in a sexy dance clutch in an otherwise absurd film, Flying Down to Rio. Ginger is definitely naughty in this one, unlike her image in the contemporary imagination.

Then there’s Criss Cross, a real noir!  You thought Yvonne DeCarlo looked like Lily Munster?  Guess again!

She is a classic femme fatale in this one, Anna, Steve’s former wife whom he cannot…of course…get out of his system.  She’s with a hood now, Slim Dundee, but when Steve gets back in town, there’s no keeping them apart, after they hash out old grudges, especially after she shows him how her new boyfriend treats her.

Things go from bad to worse, as they are wont to do in the noir universe, and everything is predetermined, or “in the cards,” as Steve says in the voice-over narration.  (Interesting that he can narrate his own story since he is dead…)  In the end, cornered, Anna makes clear to Steve that her first priority is her survival, and she tries to wise up Steve, the incurable romantic, to reality as she packs her bags.  Too late, they both come to a bad end.  The final tableau, shown here in what I think is a studio still, slightly different from the image in the film, is obviously influenced by renaissance depictions of the deposition and pieta.  A reverse pieta, befitting noir:  the male cradles the female, the good sinner supporting the sinner at heart.

Gun Crazy is the story of Bart and Laurie, two crazy kids, real crazy, who meet cute and go on a spree.  Watching these films, with their intense sexual energy, you wonder what they would have been like if they had been made ten or fifteen years later.  Well, with Gun Crazy, you need only watch Bonnie & Clyde to know.  It owes “Crazy” a big debt for its linking of ecstatic sexuality with deadly gunplay, although not its explicitness.

Here’s the sequence where Bart and Laurie meet.  At the carnival shooting demonstration, she walks onstage after the build up, with guns blazing.

Bart is mesmerized, and positively bewitched when she points her gun at him and pulls the trigger…just a blank!

Bart accepts the barker’s challenge to a shooting contest with Laurie, and of course, he wins.  That doesn’t usually happen, so Laurie and her manager don’t have the promised $300 prize on hand to give Bart.  He accepts her diamond ring as payment, their future union assured.

One of the most fascinating passages in Gun Crazy is during one of their many bank heists.  They hijack a large Cadillac from a passing motorist, and use it for the pickup and getaway car.  The entire scene – it goes on for minutes – is filmed from the back seat of the car, no cuts!  Here are some stills:

Driving to the crime scene…

They pull up to the bank, but a cop appears and lingers.  Laurie has to take care of him.  She engages him in conversation and lets him handle her gun.  She tries to get him to hand her his gun, but no dice.  Note – it is all framed by the car window.

The bank alarm goes off, and she knocks him out.  Bart can be seen on the left rushing out the door to get to the car.

Home free!  Look at that smile on her face.

I am indebted to my friend and noir mentor for pointing me to this snippet of an interview with the director regarding his instructions to the young actors:

I told John, “Your cock’s never been so hard,” and I told Peggy, “You’re a female dog in heat, and you want him. But don’t let him have it in a hurry. Keep him waiting.” That’s exactly how I talked to them and I turned them loose. I didn’t have to give them more directions

Below is a still from the ecstatic death scene in Bonnie & Clyde:  click on it to see a video clip.  I don’t think noir ever demonstrates this sort of pure sensuality in crime and death.  The scene’s suspense and power is heightened by the creative and assured editing.

In The Big Combo, we have another classic noir, a hard boiled detective story with some torture, homosexual thugs, and sexual obsession thrown in.  Diamond is a police detective obsessed with Susan, a good girl gone bad, and now the moll of the head of the big crime syndicate, Mr. Brown.  Brown dresses nattily, and never talks directly to the scum he has to deal with, the police that is.  “Tell the man that if he tries to arrest me…Tell this man that if…” Yes, Susan is the femme fatale for Diamond, but for her, the fatal attraction is to Mr. Brown.  She is in thrall to him because of his ability to bring her to unspeakable (and unshowable) sexual excitement.  This is abundantly evident in the sequence shown below, as Mr. Brown sinks out of the frame, covering her with kisses all the way down.

Finally, Nightmare Alley, the old story of a con man’s swift rise and precipitous fall, fleecing the credulous with his bogus spiritual revelations.  I was familiar with the story by way of Spain’s comic book (graphic novel, for you sophisticates) version of the story, and I think that carried me through the too slow build up in the film.  But it was worth it to see Helen Walker as Lilith Ritter, the praying mantis style of femme fatale, send the con on a dizzy downward trajectory with a nasty double cross.

El Pantera – La Monja

 

I was flipping through cable TV the other night, and I hit on a Spanish language crime show. It features some lean, handsome young guy with spiky hair who rides a Harley chopper and hangs out with an old, hatted, portly detective. The show, The Panther, I have since learned is based on a comic strip, and it always takes place in Mexico City. I was intrigued because it had unusual editing, used split images, and the atmospherics were highly unusual for a TV crime series - very noir.

The video sequence above is a series of stills from the first crime in the show. Apologies for the quality – I couldn’t find a clean way to get this posted.

The woman enters a large, ancient church to steal antiquities. She is surprised by a priest, and she shoots him! She delivers the loot to her boss outside, and then makes her way…where? Is that a dance show? That 60s style decor?! Who are those women watching her as she strips her nun’s habit and does her sexy dance? Why is she there? 

The feel of this sequence struck me as if Bunuel had been employed doing TV serials. And the theme of the sexy, murderous nun – such imagery is lacking to us denizens of protestant countries.  And she is murderous – later on in the episode she hacks a woman to death, and uses a paper cutter to decapitate a scholarly gentleman.

The episode is called “The Nun”, but it  makes me think of another bloodthirsty, gothic celibate, Matthew Gregory Lewis’s creation, The Monk!)

If there are any Spanish speaking viewers out there who are familiar with this episode (no.5) please explain!

Richard Sala Comics

How nice to talk about an artist who hasn’t been dead for two centuries. Well, I see no reason to apologize for my taste, and if you read my recent post “On Paper,” you know that Richard Sala is my favorite comics artist now. This black and white piece from “The Grave Robber’s Daughter” illustrates other aspects of his work that I love: comic gore galore; black humor; great sound “effects” (does he practice stabbing people to get it right?); sexy, tough, profane female characters; and femme fatales, dead and alive.

The heroine above is Judy Drood, a dark alter-ego of Nancy Drew. She slugs and swears like a sailor. The image below is his fetching heroine, Peculia, to be found in his series Evil Eye, and elsewhere. You don’t want to mess with her either. How does he make them so sexy with such simple elements? Too bad Peculia isn’t real…she wouldn’t like me anyway…I’m reading these things too much!

I was not always a comics fan. As a boy, I read a bit of Superman and Batman. After college, I enjoyed reading Zap and Anarchy comics briefly. I always liked Edgar Allen Poe, however, and clearly, so does Sala! It was James Gillray, of course, that reawakened my joy in the pure entertainment of graphic images. The sheer delight I get from Gillray’s wild and vicious satires is matched by the giddy pleasure of Sala’s hilarious, dark, absurd, noir-world. It’s pure entertainment of a very special kind. See for yourself —-> Richard Sala’s Page.

Nightmare on Main Street

There I go again, alluding to cultural cliches in my post title, but I could not help myself. I get positively giddy when I see nightmares and surrealism going mainstream in the news. Of course, surrealism has been mainstream since the 30’s, and you could argue that it forms the aesthetic bedrock of much of the advertising industry. Well, anyway, the NYTimes Science section is featuring dreams and bad dreams – most dreams are bad, it seems – in today’s paper.

And speaking of bad dreams, a mare is a horse, and a nightmare, well, Henry Fuseli showed us what it all means with his famous pictures, one of the best known shown here.

And this strange, bloody eye, right from the page of the NYTimes! So common in horror shows these days – I just saw it last night while I peeked at my son’s favorite TV sci-fi melodrama, Heroes. To the right, we see its ancestor in that opening sequence from “Un Chien Andalou,” (An Andalusian Dog) the landmark of cinema and surrealism by Dali and Bunuel – a woman gets her eye sliced open as a thin cloud passes before a full moon…and the dreams begin. Rotting donkeys on pianos, hands stuck in doors with ants, lots of ants, sex, death, music…the usual stuff.

Not as well known to the public, because it doesn’t make for shocking juxtapositions in pop culture, is the surrealist preoccupation with l’amour fou, deranged love. This image from “L’Age D’Or” (The Golden Age) shows one of the more fetishistic aspects of this trend.

And while we are on the subject of images in the media, here’s one from todays online NYTimes. A house going up in smoke, combining with oxygen, as Mr. Rosewater (God bless him) would have it, in southern California. To me, it has an apocalyptic cast, reminding me of the final scene from that noir pulp classic, “Kiss Me Deadly,” when the scoundrels open up The Box and are illuminated with deadly radiation. End of the World, anyone?