Finally…Allegory of Fortune by Salviati

Allegory of Fortune – Francesco Salviati

I’ve been searching online for an image of this drawing that I saw at the Morgan Museum several years ago, and I finally found it.  I have attempted to (inexpertly) remove the watermarks on this large-size version of the digital image.

I’m not quite sure how Signora Fortuna is manageing to ride her wheel as if it were a unicycle.

Wheel of Fortuna!

White Hot

White Heat (1949), a gangster film starring James Cagney, gave us the ‘iconic’ finale of Jarrett shouting to his dead mother, “Made it Ma! Top of the world!” from inside a refinery about to explode.  Va va va voom! and he’s gone in a glowing plume of flame. Jarrett is a homicidal maniac prone to crippling headaches, and he has a too-strong attachment to his murderous demon of a mom. A volatile combination.

The plot of the film is pretty dull, involving Fallon (Edmund O’Brien) as an undercover cop who gets close to Jarrett in prison to try to learn the identity of the currency fence who launders Jarrett’s loot. Fallon is too cool, too efficient, and dull, but Cagney and his co-star Virginia Mayo as his wife, Verne, keep the movie crackling. According to Wikipedia, it was said that she “looked like a pin-up painting come to life,” and she plays it for all it’s worth in this flick.

The film has many scenes that are classic sequences, including the mess hall bit when Cody passes word along the tables that he wants to hear how his mother is doing on the outside.  When word is returned that she is dead, he goes wild, flailing away at the guards who try to restrain him until he is carried out horizontally, bawling like a little boy.

Earlier, while hiding out from the cops in a drive-in movie theater, Verne, Ma, and Cody share the front seat of their sedan, with Ma in the middle in more ways than one.  The kisses that Cody gives his wife and the ones he gives his mother aren’t all that different. He seems to have more feeling for Ma, and not much heat when it comes to his luscious wife.

Cody hatches a plan to ‘confess’ to a lesser crime in another state, and do a short stretch in stir to get the heat off him for a massive and bloody heist he has just committed.  This gives Verne some ideas about making the separation permanent.

As these thoughts move through Verne’s head, the WWII movie reels on, and we get a  prefiguration of Cody’s destiny.  Could that torpedo have other significance as well?

While Jarrett’s away, Verne and Big Ed get to spend more time together.  Big Ed has a lot of moxie, but his plans to get Cody bumped off in jail don’t pan out.  Instead, Cody breaks out and is headed back to the gang, with some scores to settle.  Verne is all for fleeing, but Big Ed wants to stand and face down Cody.  To keep Verne around, and who wouldn’t want to keep her?, he threatens to tell Cody how his ma died, shot, in the back, by Verne.  Yep, they’ll face Cody together…

Well, things don’t go so well for Big Ed, and Verne and Cody are back together.  Maybe there is some chemistry between them after all?

click to animate

Fallon rigs Cody’s car with a tracking device, a primitive GPS setup, to foil his last heist.  I always enjoy the use of maps in these old movies, shown here as the cops demonstrate their newfangled toys for following Jarrett’s car remotely.

Fallon is still undercover with the gang, right up to the end when he’s found out after the heist goes bad.  Cody wants to use him as a hostage to get out, but Fallon tells him the obvious, it won’t work.  With the gang armed, dangerous, but surrounded, Verne shows up to try to make a deal with the cops, claiming that she can coax Jarrett to give up.  No deal – her charms fall flat on the copper.

The last gang member tries to give up, but Cody shoots him down in cold blood.  No deals for anyone!

Those tanks are ready to blow!

Updike and Out!

I have just read what is considered one of John Updike’s best novels, Rabbit Redux, the second of four telling the story of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom’s life.  I found it to border on revolting, almost claustrophobic in its ‘conservative’ resignation to…well, almost everything, misogynistic of course, smug and obtuse about race in America – I could go on.  Updike is obviously an extremely intelligent man, and he writes beautifully, but what is style without content?  What is intelligence without critical appreciation?  Writing a novel isn’t a practical matter, just laying it all out, like engineering!  If you really want a good take-down of the man’s work, you cannot do better than the Gore Vidal in this review of Updike’s memoir and (then) latest novel.

My first exposure to Updike was Roger’s Version, which seemed little more than trash to me, but I was assured by fans that it was the very worst of this prolific writer’s output.  I had read some of his literary reviews and found them sensitive and interesting:  I’d even liked a short story and poem or two that I’d run across.  Time to give him another chance I thought.  While Rabbit Redux is a world away from Roger’s Version, the themes and content are very similar, and I’m done with Mr. Updike.

I had to grit my teeth to finish Redux, it was so deeply boring.  Harry/Rabbit understands little, questions nothing, and acts on instinct, all the while claiming to feel guilt.  I think this is how Updike seeks to portray the beautiful ordinariness of peoples’ lives.  Harry also hits his wife and the eighteen-year old rich drug addict runaway whom he takes in after his wife leaves him.  He and a loony black radical, another house guest  the one pushing dope on the girl, use her as their sex slave while they read Frederick Douglas’ autobiography to one another.  Harry also has a kid who witnesses much of this, whom Harry give beer to drink, and before whom he swears profusely and smokes pot.  He also complains the world is going to hell and that hippies have no respect for their country – go figure.

It sounds melodramatic, and maybe even interesting, but it’s all so flat, so filled with descriptions of the material minutiae of the 1960s, and the people all seem on autopilot, that it is simply excruciating.  Updike is considered a giant of the realist tradition, but to me, none of it seems real: more like the fantasy of reality imagined by an overly literary and intellectual man who is for some reason preoccupied with religion and authority.  Consider:  Harry works as a linotype operator, and comes from a working class family.  His sister goes to Hollywood to become an actress but ends up as an expensive whore.  Everyone in the family seems fine with this:  not a peep about choices, lifestyle, disappointment, anger, whatever, when she breezes home for a few days.  She and Harry chat about fucking a lot.  Just like brothers and sisters everywhere, right?  Maybe I’m naïve…

I could go on a lot about everything in this book that I didn’t like, didn’t believe, or couldn’t fathom, it was so elaborately pointless – the extended descriptions of Harry’s masturbating for example.  The lame discussions of the politics of the Vietnam War.  The constant looming of sex as a instinctual drive that seems to give no one pleasure.  The fact that neither Harry nor anybody else seems to want to try to figure out a way to do something with their lives that satisfies them.  Harry’s love for his son that seems limited to his view of him as a biological extension of himself and that certainly does not involve any care for his welfare beyond asking the drug addicts he harbors not to shoot up in front of him.  And… oh, never mind.

He sure does write sentences well, though.

Nellie has a sense of humour.

Nellie McKay is a fantastic performer.  I saw her last night in Montclair, NJ, where she did more or less the same sets as when I saw her at a free concert in NYC over the summer.  This time, however, she was alone onstage (without her marvelous jazz band) and I was in the second row in a small venue.  In this setting, her fabulous piano skill was highlighted with high-energy playing and inventiveness.  As always, her singing is great.

She prefaced “Why am I so Black and Blue?” by recalling that as a child she wondered if she’d be a better pianist if she were blind:  She played it with her eyes closed for a while just to try it, and turned it from a bluesy lament into jazz romp.  In her version of South Pacific’s “Wonderful Guy,” she kept the sunny, optimistic tone in her vocals, but transformed the tune into a slightly jangling dissonance with the singing, providing an ironic undermining of the words.  That sort of multiple point of view in a single song comes up a lot in her shows.

When Nellie picks up her ukulele, she can be marvelously dreamy with Jobim’s Meditation, or rockin’ (yes, with a uke!) with the Beatles’ “I’m So Tired.”  But when she does one of her signature songs, “Feminists Don’t Have Sense of Humour” she deploys the full range of her sharp, and a little bit weird, intelligence.  She smiles and adopts the pose of a grown-up Shirley Temple, signing sweetly the anti-feminist clichés of…who?  Men?  She’s the one signing it like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.  The voices of men appear in the lyrics as raspy, vulgar interjections – Yeah, honey.  Take it off! – and she flirts with them, lifting her skirt and cooing.  Just who is speaking here?  Fodder for meta-textual feminist theorizing abounds, but just go see her instead. [She concluded the song with the announcement, "I'm Anne Romney, and we work for a living."]

My favorite song of hers is “I Want to Get Married,” a beautiful, soulful tune with lyrics expressing a woman’s complete nullity without a man to serve and please – I want to get married, that’s why I was born.   If you believe she feels that way, you’re on a different planet, but the very funny thing about it is that the song could have been sung in the 1950s, perhaps in a film with her beloved Doris Day, without a single change.  And she sings it with real sadness, longing and tenderness.  Her mastery of tone is tremendous…I can only think of Flaubert.

How real is real?

Bart: … It’s just that everything’s going so fast. It’s all in such high gear, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like me. Does that make sense?
Laurie:  When do you think all this?
Nights. I wake up sometimes. It’s as if none of it really happened, as if nothing were real anymore.
Next time you wake up, Bart, look over at me lying there beside you. I’m yours, and I’m real.
Yes, but you’re the only thing that is, Laurie. The rest is a nightmare.

Those crazy kids from Gun Crazy (1949).

She only shoots people when she gets really scared, but I think she likes it more than she says.

Eve, Satan, and Sewers…

In discussing his fine illustrated version of The Old Testament, R. Crumb said he always thought that Adam and Eve had more fun in Eden than The Bible lets on.  In Paradise Lost, Milton takes the same view, emphasizing just how much our first parents enjoy one another’s company, all without sinful lust, of course.

This all changes of course.  I was very taken by the passage in which Milton describes Satan, in the guise of the serpent, spying on Eve in the garden.  So beautiful is she, that he is briefly transported out of his evil self, almost becoming good, until he comes back down to earth!  Milton uses the simile of a city-dweller, oppressed by the smell of sewer fumes, feeling transported on leaving the town for the country, and viewing the green prospect, smelling that pure air.

Yeah, well, just pointing it out, the sewer bit, that is… (emphasis added to make my tedious point, etc.)

 As one who long in populous City pent,
       Where Houses thick and Sewers annoy the Aire,
       Forth issuing on a Summers Morn, to breathe
       Among the pleasant Villages and Farmes
       Adjoynd, from each thing met conceaves delight,
       The smell of Grain, or tedded Grass, or Kine,
       Or Dairie, each rural sight, each rural sound;
       If chance with Nymphlike step fair Virgin pass,
       What pleasing seemd, for her now pleases more,
       She most, and in her look summs all Delight.
       Such Pleasure took the Serpent to behold
       This Flourie Plat, the sweet recess of EVE
       Thus earlie, thus alone; her Heav’nly forme
       Angelic, but more soft, and Feminine,
       Her graceful Innocence, her every Aire
       Of gesture or lest action overawd
       His Malice, and with rapine sweet bereav’d
       His fierceness of the fierce intent it brought 

       That space the Evil one abstracted stood
       From his own evil, and for the time remaind
       Stupidly good, of enmitie disarm’d,
       Of guile, of hate, of envie, of revenge;
       But the hot Hell that alwayes in him burnes,
       Though in mid Heav’n, soon ended his delight,
       And tortures him now more, the more he sees
       Of pleasure not for him ordain’d   then soon
       Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts
       Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites.

       Thoughts, whither have he led me, with what sweet
       Compulsion thus transported to forget
       What hither brought us, hate, not love, nor hope
       Of Paradise for Hell, hope here to taste
       Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,
       Save what is in destroying, other joy
       To me is lost. Then let me not let pass
       Occasion which now smiles, behold alone
       The Woman, opportune to all attempts,
       Her Husband, for I view far round, not nigh,
       Whose higher intellectual more I shun,
       And strength, of courage hautie, and of limb
       Heroic built, though of terrestrial mould,
       Foe not informidable, exempt from wound,
       I not; so much hath Hell debas’d, and paine
       Infeebl’d me, to what I was in Heav’n.
       Shee fair, divinely fair, fit Love for Gods,
       Not terrible, though terrour be in Love
       And beautie, not approacht by stronger hate,
       Hate stronger, under shew of Love well feign’d,
       The way which to her ruin now I tend.

Family Gig

Hawaii Five-O continues to surprise.  Every character actor who ever was appears on the show, and here we see James Hong, frequently cast, and Melody Patterson, wife of Danno!, engaging in some interesting low-life, trans-racial, sex play – not at all the norm for 1969 TV.  Besides the nice legs, she was interesting in this role as a girl who is pleased as can be to be in the thick of racketeering and money laundering.

(The Devil and Mr. Frog – Season 2).

Slightly Scarlet?

Why, oh why is this film called Slightly Scarlett?  With two bombshell redheads, Rhonda Fleming and Arlene Dahl, Technicolor that seems almost lurid at times, and enough sin for a few films, Positively Scarlett would have been a better name!  Based on a James M. Cain novel, and released in 1956, it stars John Payne as the man in a full-blown noir maelström.

First a cranky note about preferences:  I know that The Postman Always Rings Twice, perhaps the most famous Cain-film noir adaptation, is revered as one of the greats, but I found it pretty tame and weak.  Then there are a lot of films that are billed as ‘noir’, at least on Netflix, that seem to me hardly to make the grade.  Union Station, with William Holden, is one of these:  Black and white, police work, suspense, but basically a procedural melodrama.  The only noir aspect, remarked by many, is the singularly rough treatment given the crooks, including a staged near-murder of one of them to scare him into talking.  In the end, the good guys win, everyone is happy, the crooks are dead.  Not in Slightly Scarlett!

Maybe it’s the Technicolor that causes the filmmakers to go slightly round the bend.  Think of Leave Her to Heaven, another color-noir that is mind-boggling.  John Payne also starred in Hell’s Island, a crazy and enjoyable color romp through the catalogue of film noir themes.  As for Scarlett, my Encyclopedia of Film Noir refers to it as ‘one of the most bizarre noir films‘ made while the Hollywood production code was in force, and it identifies many of its strange elements as the result of attempting to accommodate the censors.  That, and the director Allan Dwan’s taste for perversion.

Dorothy just got out of jail and there’s sister June to greet her.  Ben Grace is spying on them with a whopper of a lens. He works for the local mob boss, Solly Caspar, and he’s trying dig up dirt on a mayoral candidate running on a clean government platform.  June is the pol’s secretary and, platonic, love interest.   All Ben gets is some female cuddling.   What was Dorothy doing time for, I wonder?

How does June afford that house on a salary?  Solly was probably onto something thinking there was some hanky panky with Mr. Squeaky Clean.  When Dorothy gets there, she goes right for the booze, and something seems fishy between the girls.  We learn that June is a completely co-dependent family member, enabling Dorothy’s dispsomania, kleptomania, and nymphomania.  Maybe Dorothy doesn’t need a shrink…maybe she’s just bad!

Solly gets steamed watching that mealy-mouthed reformer call him names on the nightly news!  He’s angry that Ben didn’t get any material to use against him.

Ben has limits to what he will do, leading to a dressing down from Solly, who refers to him as ‘Genius,’ presumably because he went to college and speaks standard English.  Ben is a real noir type – Solly has his number:  “You’re not crooked, and you’re not straight.  You’ll take what crumbs you can get, but you don’t want any trouble.”

After humiliating Genius - Hey guys, remind me never to send my son to college…if I ever have a son!  Har har! – Solly shows how things are done by throttling the newspaper owner who supports the reform group.  Oops, he used a little too much force.  He’s dead!  Ben informs on him, and Solly has to skip town, leaving Genius to take over the rackets.

Will Solly gone, the Goo-goo get elected mayor, and Ben moves in on his secretary.  Tight clothes and lots of skin a part of the suburban scene, 50s style.  Check the view through the window.

Dorothy isn’t about to let sister have all the fun.

Just butting in…

Wow, that’s between a rock and a hard place!

Genius takes over the rackets, and does quite well with them.  He runs a tight ship, with a minimum of violence.  It’s just gambling anyway – somebody has to give people a place to have fun.

Ben gets wind that Solly has returned from being on the lam, and it’s time to scram.  There’s a lot of money in the safe at Solly’s beach house, enough for him to skip the country. The scenes of the ocean remind me of my childhood in southern California.  Dorothy tags along with Ben while he searches the place:  maybe he does a little exploring of her secret places too, but it’s only hinted at.   Dorothy is pretty looped, as usual, and with that interior, those colors! – who could blame her?  Anyway, she’s always running riot in somebody else’s house – her sister’s, Solly’s beach house, Solly’s mansion, now lived in by Ben – that’s what she likes to do.

She goes a little too far, playing the pretty mermaid with a harpoon gun.

One last shoplifting run and the cops are on to Dorothy.  She’s all set up to head back to the joint because this store detective isn’t taking any excuses – “She’s ill.  She needs a doctor! – from June.  Poor June – she’d ruin her own life to save Dorothy.  Maybe the morality squad just couldn’t stomach a really evil woman:  just say she needs a shrink and it’s okay for public consumption…

The latest run in with the law sends Dorothy over the edge.  She ends up at Solly’s beach house and finds him there, waiting to take revenge on Ben.  Meanwhile, he has a little fun with the fetching nympho, watching TV, running barefoot through piles of money… that sort of thing.

June shows up, and Solly is all set to plug her and dump her over the terrace into the sea.  After all, she must have been part of sending him on the lam so her boyfriend could be the Mr. Clean mayor.

Dorothy is just loving it!  She’d love to see Solly plug her sister – it would be fun!

Doesn’t work out that way…June shoots Solly with the harpoon, Ben rushes in to save the day, but he’s got to hold off the hoods until the cops arrive.  Solly tells his thugs to take care of Ben, but he taunts Solly for being not ‘big enough‘ to do it himself.  Do what?  Not big enough where?

Genius takes a few bullets in his body to protect the ladies.  Pretty masochistic.

As Genius bleeds on the rug, the cops and the mayor arrive.  Cops wear fedoras, pols wear homburgs:  I have both.  Mr. Clean and the cop confer.  June weeps over Ben’s not quite dead body.  Mr. Clean and June share an awkward moment:  can they get together again?

The ambulance takes Ben away and Mr. Mayor goes to retrieve hysterical Dorothy.  It’s all going to be okay.  June will be with the mayor, Dorothy will go to a mental hospital, Solly is headed to Alcatraz, and Ben… nowhere to be seen.

Faerie Queene: Whore of Babylon

One of my favorite images from The Book of Revelation, WOB for short, makes an appearance in Spencer’s Faerie Queene.  The valiant knight, Redcrosse, physically weakened after drinking from a magic fountain that induces sluggishness, is morally compromised through fornication, physical or allegorical, not sure which, with the evil Duessa, a lady of all things false, who is disguised.  He is then assaulted and nearly killed by a giant, Orgoglio, borne of Earth’s womb, who is stayed by Duessa’s entreaties, she desiring to keep the knight for her own pleasure.  The hideous giant is much taken with Duessa, and decks her out with a seven-headed serpent that recalls the WOB, which allegorizes the Church of Rome, at least for the Protestants.

So daunted when the Geaunt saw the knight,
His heauie hand he heaued vp on hye,
And him to dust thought to haue battred quight,
Vntill Duessa loud to him gan crye;
O great Orgoglio, greatest vnder skye,
O hold thy mortall hand for Ladies sake,
Hold for my sake, and do him not to dye,
But vanquisht thine eternall bondslaue make,
And me thy worthy meed vnto thy Leman take.

He hearkned, and did stay from further harmes,
To gayne so goodly guerdon, as she spake:
So willingly she came into his armes,
Who her as willingly to grace did take,
And was possessed of his new found make.
Then vp he tooke the slombred sencelesse corse,
And ere he could out of his swowne awake,
Him to his castle brought with hastie forse,
And in a Dongeon deepe him threw without remorse.

From that day forth Duessa was his deare,
And highly honourd in his haughtie eye,
He gaue her gold and purple pall to weare,
And triple crowne set on her head full hye,
And her endowd with royall maiestye:
Then for to make her dreaded more of men,
And peoples harts with awfull terrour tye,
A monstrous beast ybred in filthy fen
He chose, which he had kept long time in darksome den.

Such one it was, as that renowmed Snake
Which great Alcides in Stremona slew,
Long fostred in the filth of Lerna lake,
Whose many heads out budding euer new,
Did breed him endlesse labour to subdew:
But this same Monster much more vgly was;
For seuen great heads out of his body grew,
An yron brest, and backe of scaly bras,
And all embrewd in bloud, his eyes did shine as glas.

His tayle was stretched out in wondrous length,
That to the house of heauenly gods it raught,
And with extorted powre, and borrow’d strength,
The euer-burning lamps from thence it braught,
And prowdly threw to ground, as things of naught;
And vnderneath his filthy feet did tread
The sacred things, and holy heasts foretaught.
Vpon this dreadfull Beast with seuenfold head
He set the false Duessa, for more aw and dread.