Lilith Eternal

First there was the novel, Nightmare Alley, now available in a new printing from the NYRB.  Then the film, with Helen Walker playing Lilith Ritter, the female psychiatrist with ice water in her veins.  She sucks the life out of Stanton Carlisle, played by Tyrone Power, and throws away his deflated husk of a body.  He descends back into the muck from which he came and finishes as a geek, biting the heads off chickens for a living. It’s a faithful adaptation of the book.
  
Then there was Lilith, the uptight dominatrix of the TV sitcom Cheers, played by Bebe Neuwirth.  She has to be channelling Helen Walker!

After that, came the comic book adaptation of Nightmare Alley by Spain Rodriguez, published by Fantagraphics.

Lilith has Bebe’s dark hair…

… and is up-front about her needs…  The toe nail painting is a nice noir reference to Scarlett Street, by Fritz Lang.

And finally, we have the nifty neo-noir, Side Effects, in which Catherine Zeta-Jones , as Victoria Seibert, is definitely channelling all of the above.

Brooks be humble…

I hear David Brooks, the NYTimes conservative columnist, is teaching a course on humility at Yale.  There’s so much irony, I just won’t touch it.

I don’t read him these days unless something particular points me there, and I saw a reference to a column he wrote on his favorite topic these days, humility, mentioning Pauline Kael and how she didn’t “suffer fools gladly.”  Hah! I thought, who is she to suffer or not suffer fools?  (I don’t like her film reviews much.)  He dissects the meaning and use of the phrase, and I agree with him there. People who speak foolishly out of naivete, simple ignorance, and the like, should be treated with graciousness and respect.  We’ve all been in that situation, and will be again, but…

As with so much of Brook’s ‘deep’ commentary, I can’t help think that there’s something autobiographical here, some secret wound he’s nursing.  Heavens, did somebody not so nice maybe treat him shabbily, like a damn fool?  Maybe it was someone really smart, who knows a lot about something that Brooks was remarking on (and perhaps knew very little about.)  Maybe, could it be, somebody like Paul Krugman, or some other intellectual?

Let’s face it, people who treat badly the kind of fool I described here are not looked upon well by thoughtful people.  But there is also the other kind of fool, the kind who is ignorant, and prefers to remain so.  The kind who is quite arrogant in, even about his ignorance.  The kind who loves to hear him or herself talk, even when he or she knows nothing about the topic.  Yes, there’s that class, of which Brooks is a premier member, of the pundits, the pedants, and the talking-heads.  They often speak as fools, and you can hardly blame them; it’s their job to keep talking to fill up the air time.  Or to fill up those column inches.  And they do seem to get it into their heads after a while that they actually have powers of intellect which they consistently fail to display.

I’d put Brooks in this latter class of fool.  He’s also paid a huge amount for his chatter.  So if someone takes him down in print or on the air, I will not feel he’s been treated badly, despite his pleas for humility.  It just goes with the territory.

American Freedom

Not the model the Sandy Hook shooter used, but hey, are we going to outlaw such a cute innovation?

“Love It or Leave It” – Full Circle!

There has been a lot of discussion about the surprise, even shock, felt by ‘conservatives’ at the failure of Romney to win the presidency.  Some of it, such as this article in the NYTimes today, has focused on the discomfort of right-wingers with the ‘new’ America.

Well, during the Vietnam War protest era, there was a popular bumper sticker directed at those dissidents:  America-Love It or Leave It!  Now, what goes around has come around, and I say to those guys in Montana and Wyoming who just can’t see where they fit into the new multi-cultural, irreligious, liberal-welfare-state Democratic America:  Love it or leave it, and I’d prefer that you just get up and leave, period!

Argo

Last night, I caught the recent Iran caper, or Canadian Caper film, Argo, created by Ben Affleck.  It tells the story of a CIA clandestine operation to get six Americans out of Tehran after the U.S. Embassy was stormed, initiating the interminable hostage crisis for the Carter Administration.  The six took secret refuge in the Canadian embassy.  The successful plan involved creating a cover story of a Canadian film crew scouting exotic locations for a tacky sci-fi adventure story with a middle eastern look to it.  A Star Wars rip-off.

The story is basically true, and the film was entertaining and suspenseful.  It was particularly good, I thought, at showing the tension of the six fugitives as they struggled to accept the least bad of a lot of bad choices for getting out of Iran.  It also conveyed the release of the pent-up rage and near hysterical revolutionary fervor (that’s what happens when you keep the lid on people too long) of the Iranians rather well.

Personally, however, although I was entertained, I wasn’t buying it.  The last minute glitches, and their skin-of-the-teeth resolution, the airport getaway finale, the Alan Arkin old-Jewish-guy producer character…it all seemed invented for Hollywood to me.  (Of course, Affleck has to add a deeply personal note at the end, as the main character reconciles with his wife – why, we don’t know…)

As it turns out, a perusal of the Wikipedia article indicates that all those things were invented; dramatic license. There was some undiplomatic bashing of the Brits and other diplomats as well that was resented and refuted by those governments.  And there were some trivial historical manipulations – showing the giant Hollywood sign in ruins (I remember it well) when it was actually repaired in 1978 – I wonder why ‘artists’ do that sort of thing in a film like this, but I’m just a viewer…

I was in Iran for about a week, leaving just a few days before the crisis erupted.  I only spent 45 minutes in Tehran:  as dumb as I was, I knew that was not a city to hang around in then.  We met some soldiers on a train from the north, and they led us by the hand through the streets, filled with enormous packed crowds of men with black beards, all staring at us, until they saw us safely deposited on an express bus to the gorgeous city of Isfahan in the south.  No crowds there.  Just anti-American posters, and a lot of people who told us how much they loved Americans, and hated our government.

Big Combo Encore

I just watched The Big Combo (1955) again – one of my favorite film noirs.  (I talked about it earlier in this post).  Fantastic cinematography, and a great cast of characters.  It has a rich trove of noir themes, woven together with subtlety and skill.

One reason I like these old B-movies is that they work within a genre, with familiar situations and themes, and we usually aren’t very surprised by the plot developments. (Do we need surprise to enjoy something?)  We’ve seen it all before; we know how it will all end.  It’s familiar.  The repetition of stories and conclusions accumulates to give the latest one the force of myth.  No self-conscious striving after effect or novelty.  Not that the great ones didn’t innovate, but it was within the limits of the genre.

Cornell Wilde plays Lt. Larry Diamond, a man with a mission.  He wants to rid his town of The Big Combo, but the outfit is really just one single man, Mr. Brown.  He’s obsessed with Brown, a cold, murderous accountant turned mob leader (Richard Conte) because Brown has quite a girl – Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace), a society chick who’s fallen pretty low down.  Diamond is in love with her, from afar; wants to save her, but she tells him there’s no saving her.  She’s lost in a maze, and all paths lead back to Mr. Brown.

She’s a bit of a masochist, this lady, but Mr. Brown also knows how to keep her satisfied.  Pretty explicit for 1955.

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This Diamond fellow, isn’t so pure either, despite his wish to be the knight to rescue Susan.  In fact, he has a problem with women in general.

While he longs for the cool blonde girl who loves classical music, he keeps his needs in check with Rita, a stripper at a club where he hangs out.  She loves him and will do anything for him, but she just ends up getting filled with lead by two thugs who think they’re knocking off Diamond when they break into his darkened apartment.  She was all dressed up and waiting for a big night with him after work… So, he wants the masochist who won’t have him because she represents something beautiful and pure to him even though she’s as deep in the mud as you can get.  And the girl who loves him with a heart of gold, he treats like a worn out bathrobe to throw away when he’s done with it.

But Susan is otherwise engaged.  Fante and Mingo, Brown’s thugs, always keep an eye on her comings and goings.  At least those two have a loving relationship:  they’d die for one another, but they end up double-crossed by Brown and dying together.  They aren’t effeminate like the flirty thug in Odds Against Tomorrow: their homoerotic bond is thoroughly masculine.  I think the filmmaker uses it to convince us that we really are in the underworld, where such deviant relationships are taken for granted.  Is this retrograde or progressive?  They are totally against the stereotype of homosexuals as weak and unmanly men.

The film makes use of the abuse of hearing aids as an instrument of torture.  Mr. Brown borrows the device from his No. 2 man and shouts and  plays loud music into it to show Diamond who’s boss. (He removes the aid from Mr. No.2′s ears when he kills him.  “I’ll do you a favor; you won’t hear the bullets.”  We see the shooting from the victim’s point of view, without sound.)

“First is first, and second is nobody.”  That’s his slogan, and he has nothing but contempt for Diamond whom he describes as steady, intelligent, and with a hankering for a girl he just can’t have.  A nobody.

Yes, that girl.  She’s at a club when she meets her old piano teacher.  The man is delighted to see her again, and eagerly asks how she is progressing with her music.  She has to break the news to him that she has given it up…such a wasted talent!  She asks him to dance with him while Fante and Mingo look on, making sure there’s no funny business.  Suddenly, she starts to swoon.  “I’ve taken some pills…I think I’m going to die!”  There it is, Sex & Death, Eros & Thanatos.  In her attempted suicide she looks just as she did when Mr. Brown was bringing her to an orgasm.

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Odds Against Tomorrow

Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) out of Harry Belafonte’s own production outfit, and directed by Robert Wise, is a late noir with a black man as a lead.  He’s not just a figure in the background: he’s the hinge of the plot.  Not surprising since it’s Harry’s outfit.

The film is a cool heist story, with a smooth jazzy score, and lots of local NYC atmosphere.  Ed Begley plays Burke, a cop gone bad, looking to score a big one so he can live on Easy Street after getting out of the pen.  He’s staked out an upstate bank in New York that looks like an easy target.  Belafonte is Ingram, a nightclub musician with a bad gambling habit and a big, big debt to a polite but violent loan shark.  One of the man’s thugs is an openly gay guy who flirts with Ingram.  As one of the only club women who’s not trying to make time with him says, “That little boy is in big trouble!”

Rounding out the gang of robbers is Robert Ryan as Slater, a WWII veteran who fears getting old and irrelevant.  Shelly Winters stuck by him while he was in stir for killing a man in a rage, but he can’t stomach living on her wages; it makes him feel like a little boy.  Meanwhile, Gloria Grahame plays the weirdo downstairs who just wants to feel her skin crawl as Slater tells her “how he felt when he did it.”  Slater obliges, and makes her feel a whole lot more…

Slater is an out-and-out racist, and Burke has to hold him in line to keep the heist on track.  His bigoted comments are pretty raw for a 1959 film, and his sarcastic filth keeps the tension high.  When they are setting up the job in the small Hudson Valley town of Melton, NY, Ingram has the bad luck to be standing at the corner when there is a car accident.  A cop stops him and asks if he saw anything.  Later, the three men, all nervous, discuss their plan, and Ingram is afraid the cop might have gotten too good of a look at him.  Slater says, “Don’t flatter yourself, Ingram.  You’re just another black spot in Melton, even if you do wear $20 shoes.”

In the heat of the job, Slater loses control and refuses to give the getaway car keys to Ingram.  Because of this, a cop catches them, and a gunfight ensures.  Burke shoots himself after being downed: he won’t endure another stay in the joint.

Slater and Ingram start fighting with each other:  of course Ingram blames Slater for the debacle.  They race off in the night with the police in pursuit.  Ingram chases Slater into an industrial farm with big fuel tanks that is shown in an eerie light that makes it look like a Charles Sheeler realist Precisionist from the 1930s.  There are lots of odd zoom shots as the men run around, and scale ladders trying to get a shot at one another.  Finally, they face off, and va va va voom!  The whole place blows up.

A sardonic conclusion makes the racial equality point again when the clean up workers examine the charred corpses and remark that you can’t tell one from another.

EC Comics to the Rescue!

Entertainment Comics, usually called EC (comics), was a line of, you guessed it, comics, published in the 1950s by William Gaines, later publisher of Mad Magazine.  I just finished a book, Came the Dawn, that features stories from EC drawn by Wallace Wood. They fall into two categories:  horror tales, e.g. those from Tales from the Crypt; and noir-ish social tales, including straight up crime stuff, but also a lot of stories about mob violence, prejudice, and institutional corruption.  They can be surprisingly blunt and hard-hitting, and the fine upstanding citizens of the small towns and cities of American don’t come off all that well in them.

Gaines, shown below in the 50s and in the 70s, was called before the Congressional committee on juvenile delinquency to testify about his productions.  Estes Kefauver, a full-blown FDR liberal didn’t see the use of this sort of freedom of speech.  Legislative pressure and bad publicity forced him to cease publication of his lurid comics, which had been popular, but we got MAD Magazine out of the deal!  Subversive, maybe, but nobody could say it wasn’t in good taste!

The color cover below was the subject of a particularly amusing repartee between Gaines and the congressional inquisitors:  he didn’t give an inch, but the Congress was not having any of it.  He might not be a communist, but he was clearly a danger to society. I have read online that the audio recordings of the hearings are available at various websites.

Chief Counsel Herbert Beaser: Let me get the limits as far as what you put into your magazine. Is the sole test of what you would put into your magazine whether it sells? Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?
Bill Gaines: No, I wouldn’t say that there is any limit for the reason you outlined. My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.
Beaser: Then you think a child cannot in any way, in any way, shape, or manner, be hurt by anything that a child reads or sees?
Gaines: I don’t believe so.
Beaser: There would be no limit actually to what you put in the magazines?
Gaines: Only within the bounds of good taste.
Beaser: Your own good taste and saleability?
Gaines: Yes.
Senator Estes Kefauver: Here is your May 22 issue. [Kefauver is mistakenly referring to Crime Suspenstories #22, cover date May] This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?
Gaines: Yes sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it, and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody.
Kefauver: You have blood coming out of her mouth.
Gaines: A little.
Kefauver: Here is blood on the axe. I think most adults are shocked by that.

The congressional scrutiny of comics was sparked by a popular book, Seduction of the Innocent, by a psychoanalyst, Frederic Wertham.  He was concerned about violence and role models for the young in our society, but just how much of a nincompoop scold, and how much of a thoughtful, but over-zealous crusader against pop entertainment he was, I’m not sure.  The little I have read of him makes him seem more complex than the anti-comics bogey man image, but that’s just Wikipedia talkin’.

The artwork and the stories have a clear relationship with the contemporary film noirs, but the highlighting of social injustice, as injustice, and not just bad luck, and often openly preaching against it, do not.  In the story on the left, a black man is framed and then killed by the chief in a faked escape attempt.  The man on the right is another corrupt chief:  he lets his men beat an innocent man to a pulp to make him confess to a hit-and-run killing he had nothing to do with.  Many of the stories have O’Henry endings:  the black man is killed just after a white man confesses to the crime; the victim of the hit-and-run was the chief’s wife, whom he murdered.

Of course, women, drawn with standard 1950s Playboy fantasy voluptuousness, play a big role in the stories.  I imagine that they kept a lot of readers reading when the social justice themes started to lose their interest, but sometimes they are just plain old noir femme fatales.  In the story below, a seventeen year old piece of  jailbait gives her lover the lowdown so he won’t blow her story about being molested by a harmless old man, killed by a mob led by her hysterical dad.

In the title story, Came the Dawn, we are led to believe that the love bunny is actually a homicidal maniac escaped from a local asylum, but we learn the truth in another one of those surprise endings.  The story does a clever reversal of sex roles, with the man seeming to be the victim and the woman the sexual predator, but she turns out to be really in love after all.

In the panels below, a handsome fellow has just firebombed the house of some Jews who dared to move onto the block, and his wife is horrified.  Worse is coming:  his mother reveals that he was adopted, and that his birth parents were Jews.  Still, that wife is quite a dish!  (The dead Jews weren’t bad looking either…)

Day of the Dead

November 2 is The Day of the Dead in Mexico and other Latin American cultures.  This image is by Posada, a popular graphic artist from the early 20th century, obviously an inspiration for some 1960s hippie types.

I am hanging out in Baltimore, MD where there is power and normalcy, planning on returning to NJ on Sunday, with a few tanks of extra gasoline just in case things don’t get sorted out up there soon.

As for Sandy and climate change, which has been in the news, I can only say that what happened to NYC has been expected for at least 25 years, probably much longer, by engineers and geographers who study the place.  As one scientist said of the storm, what was remarkable about it was that it happened in NYC. If climate change predictions hold true, such flooding will be worse in the future, but wasn’t it bad enough as it was to pay attention? If fears of climate apocalypse get people to take constructive action, I won’t complain too much about their misguided notions.