Totality

Moment of totality, North Hudson, NY. If you zoom in on the photo, you can see the black disk of the moon over the sun (obscured by overexposure) and a planet, probably Venus, to the right of the sun/moon.

The Public Enemy – Misreading

I watched “The Public Enemy” (1931) for the first time; blown away, totally. Once again, I am floored by James Cagney’s power as a screen actor. I’ve seen many excellent analyses and histories of the film online, including this one, that rightly emphasizes the sexual aspect of Cagney’s character, i.e., his rather mama-infantalized nature, and this one that focuses more on its place in cinema history. As the latter study notes, despite being associated with the classic gangster-flick story arc of rags to ill-gotten riches, and then downfall, Tom Powers never gets to be more than a successful hood working for others. And his character never grows out of the adolescent stage of frustrated inarticulate rage at the world and fixation on his Ma, not unlike his character in “White Heat.”

The scene shown in the image above is one of the most famous in Cagney’s career, so much so, that he came to regret having done it. People were always sending grapefruits to his table as he ate in restaurants. There are a lot of stories about the scene and how it came to be: Cagney claims that he and Mae Clarke improvised it as a joke to shock the stage crew and that the director decided to work it into the final cut. I first saw a clip of this scene when I was very young, and I always heard it referred to as a moment of supreme pre-code comedy, but that is a misreading of the scene, as pre-code.com points out.

Tom’s mistress is trying to have a conversation with him over breakfast about their relationship, its present and future, if it has one. Tom is already bored with her, and he’s playing the field, getting ready to make it with the Jean Harlow character. His response to her attempts at dialog is to growl and push a grapefruit into her face. Seen out of context, you could take it as comic, but in the context of the film action, it is simply a brutal revelation of the stunted mental life of Tom Powers. Another spoiled, violent, mama’s boy who is a war with society, and women, and reacts with violence when he’s drawn up short by his own inadequacy and inability to articulate his feelings.

I’d say that this scene ranks with the famous diner scene in “Five Easy Pieces” (1970), as one of the most mis-read scenes in cinema.

Two Italian Smogs

“Smog,” is a film directed by Franco Rossi, released in 1962. It is also the title of a favorite Italo Calvino story, published in 1958. They have some things in common, besides air pollution. The story is easily found in English, while the film, just recently restored, is mostly to be seen in awful quality prints with sometimes jarringly loud audio.

The film narrates the adventures of a rather non-descript Italian lawyer who gets to adventure into Los Angeles during a layover on his way to Mexico City where he is to assist in a celebrity divorce case. As the story goes on, we find him to be a rather superficial character, accepting of conventional wisdom about the Italian “Economic Miracle,” appalled and amazed at the formlessness of L.A. (“All the Italians try to walk, to find a cafe,” he is told by a fellow expat), content to follow his domestic path to success and status through the marriage to his upper-class fiance. He meets various Italians, at first by chance, all hustling like mad to pluck some low-hanging fruit from the golden orchard of America, and the film progresses through a series of parties and get-togethers, reminiscent of “La Dolce Vita.” Through the city’s smog – pretty awful in those days – he is introduced to some major mid-century modern architectural landmarks, e.g. the pavilion and transit tunnel at the airport, the glass Stahl house overlooking the city from the Hollywood Hills, and the Triponent dome house. I felt nostalgic for my childhood while watching these images.

It seemed to some to be an anti-American movie, but it certainly is just as much an indictment of Italians, and their embrace of superficial materialism, and pointless running around as a way of life. As an historical set-piece of L.A., it is remarkable. The city has changed enormously since then – it is now one of the most densely settled in the USA, and no longer the futuristic dream/drosscape depicted here. For the lawyer, there is no redemptive grace in the end, only loneliness among the inhumane architecture.

Calvino’s story has some of the same tone as Rossi’s film. A disaffected young journalist takes a nothing job with an industrialist in an unnamed north Italian city blanketed by smog. He too is a child of the Economic Miracle, and not enjoying it all that much. He accepts, but is wrankled by the hypocrisy of his position, toadying to his tycoon boss who eggs him on to create literary gems for the house organ, “Purification.” 

The problem of industrial smog. ”Will we solve it? We are solving it.“ Of course, it’s all hooey.

The journalist has an ongoing affair with a very rich jet setter who is attracted to him for some reason that neither we nor he understands: perhaps his mediocrity is more real to her than her everyday charmed life. For him, she exists in an ideal beautiful world, inaccessible to him in his grubby working grind, in a city in which everything is covered with grime and soot as soon as it comes to rest. She, however, somehow never seems to become soiled by it when she visits him. 

The story recalls a vignette by Calvino from “Invisible Cities,” about the town of Leonia, where everybody uses everything only once, discarding it in massive piles of trash each morning to be picked up by heroic garbage men who are applauded the way we praised hospital workers from our balconies during the COVID pandemic. The people of Leonia seek redemption by ceaselessly discarding the material “skin” of their daily existence, reborn daily as the snake is reborn when it gets a new hide. In “Smog”, the hero achieves some grace in the end when he takes a bus to the countryside where, in a small town, he sees a vista of drying laundry, fresh, clean, unsoiled, bright in the sunlight.

Smog in both Rossi’s film and Calvino’s story is an enveloping environment, the World, circumstances and history, from which no one can escape. It is the stuff of life, our inferno, also described in “Invisible Cities.”

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Grounds for Kitsch?

I visited “Grounds for Sculpture,” in central NJ last week. It’s on the site of the old NJ Fairgrounds, transformed into a sculpture park by Seward Johnson, disowned heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune.

When Mr. Johnson died in May 1983, at the age of 87, he left Barbara [his housekeeper] the bulk of his estate, valued between $400 million and $1 billion. Only one of the six Johnson children, J. Seward Johnson Jr. of Princeton, was named in his father’s final will. Given the size of the estate, that bequest – for $1 million plus a house on Cape Cod -was, as the son once put it, ”a cold fish in the face.” Omitted altogether were the five other Johnson children, and the Harbor Branch Foundation, the Florida oceanographic research institute he founded and nurtured.

NYTimes

Well, that’s neither here nor there, but I do like the “cold fish” bit. Seward Johnson fils eventually became a sculptor, set up atelier to help aspiring artists navigate from the academic to the art-world, and achieved some success for his work. There are many interesting pieces there, mostly abstract, in stone and bronze, and it has a lot of his work there, including earlier stuff that is kind of interesting. The Johnson pieces that get the most attention are his painted bronze recreations of Impressionist era works.

The pieces are sometimes figure-excerpts from paintings, and sometimes conjure up the entire image, and they are sort of fun, but definitely within the kitsch realm, it seems to me. What surprised me, even after coming upon a 3-D staging of Dejeuner sur l’herbe, complete with naked model, was to find Manet’s Olympia, staring out from her perch on a hilltop near the exit from the park. Do those families gleefully taking selfies know that she is a prostitute (or sex worker, should I say?) He includes the cat, emphasized for comic effect, but the Black maid is omitted.

I’m waiting for someone from the culture police (Right or Left?) to raise a ruckus.

The Xmas Season Again

The Shadowy Way

The Crooked Way (1949), with John Payne was surprisingly good, and it’s available on Youtube. Camerawork by John Alton gives it that heavy noir atmosphere that carries it through the weak places in the plot. Another army vet with a piece of metal in his brain who has no past, at least until it catches up with him in L.A. It struck me as a precursor to Momento, as I watched Eddie Rice/Ricardi grope through the present in search of his identity, constantly trying to figure how he should respond to the people who know Eddie, but are strangers to him. The film is quite brutal for its day, something that upset a lot of critics:

The Crooked Way races along as a melodrama should and it has more than enough plot to keep its hard-working actors going from one dangerous situation to another. But there is so much pointless brutality in it that one may seriously question whether the movie people are wise to go on with the making of such pictures. The human family may not be perfect, but why subject it to so-called entertainment that is only fit for savage beasts.”

Coming from Bosley Crowther of the NYTimes, this is a sort of back-handed compliment. Of course, he got the boot when he panned “Bonnie and Clyde;” too out of touch with the new sensibility, but the question does linger. Why, indeed?

That Great Gatsby…

Generations of high school students and literary scholars have opined on the significance of Dr. Eckleberg’s eyes in The Great Gatsby: I don’t want to talk about them. What intrigued me in this absolute gem of a novel is the neat symmetries of the plot. 

One driver of the story is Gatsby’s “appalling sentimentality,” (as Nick calls it) that saturates his story of love and longing for Daisy. He idolizes her, idealizes her, longs for her, but doesn’t know her at all. She is the pinnacle of his project, to recapture and rework his past so it is all of a piece with his current role as a man of leisure and wealth. This plot line crosses with the other main one, the sordid sexual love affair carried on by Tom, Daisy’s husband, with the working-class wife of the pathetic man who runs a gas station on the edge of the Valley of Ashes (overlooked by those all-seeing eyes.) Tom takes Daisy, and everything else in his luxurious world, for granted, and has his “spree” on the side. One man climbing up, the other relaxing in the mud. 

The terrible fated accident at the crossroads that brings the Gatsby house of cards tumbling down kills the low-class woman of easy virtue: In fact, she is killed by Daisy, who never suffers the consequences of her crime. That’s how rich people are: they destroy, and everyone else cleans up the mess. Tom keeps Daisy, the dead woman’s husband kills himself after conveniently killing Gatsby, and thereby tying up any loose ends on the accident that the police might care to investigate. 

Pretty much of a downer, this book is. Yet its reputation is of a glittering tale of the “Jazz Age,” a term I think Fitzgerald himself coined. Of course, people can think what they want if they’ve never read the book. Pretty much of a downer, Mr. Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. He knew the scene he wrote about, the Beautiful People of the Roaring 20s, but he doesn’t seem to have liked them much. Or maybe not himself either, seeing as he was a serious alcoholic who died of a heart attack in his forties.

I have tried to read other material by F. Scott, but This Side of Paradise curdled my blood, and I found The Beautiful and the Damned indigestible, while his short stories seem wildly uneven, with “Babylon Revisited” standing out as another gem, once again telling a story of high living in the 20s that’s like a brick to the head.

After the deluge…Adam and Eve

Nothing like a good apocalyptic disaster to wipe the slate clean, and to start anew. That’s the premise of the novel Deluge: A Romance, published privately in 1927 by the author, and then taken up commercially to great success in 1928. The story unfolds in England, which is destroyed, along with the rest of the civilized world, by a mysterious geologic cataclysm that shifts the Earth’s crust. Many consider the book to be the grandad of all apocalyptic novels and stories, although it certainly is not the first. (Consider The Last Man by Mary Shelly, for example.) But while Shelly’s story erases humanity with a plague, Deluge simply destroys his works (and a lot of the population with them), but leaves the survivors to rebuild from scratch. It provides S. Fowler Wright with a stage on which he can have people act out his ideas and criticisms of economics, class structures, and sexual mores, building a new society that is more noble and natural than the old.

The hero of the tale is a lawyer, who loses his wife and child in the great flood. He forms a relationship with a woman survivor, a rarity, who is a champion swimmer, and whom he rescues from some men who have reverted to savagery. Oddly, a week or two after the civilized world has been obliterated, all the men seem to think about is accumulating women. Later he finds out that his wife and child have survived the flood, and his new companion and his wife decide that in this brave new world there is no reason why they should not both have him as a husband. This conclusion was too much even for pre-code Hollywood, so in the 1933 American movie adaptation, the swimmer defers to the traditional wife, and sets a course towards a new shore, leaving her rescuer behind.

The novel was quickly republished in America, where the Art Deco abstract cover design was replaced with something lurid, calculated to appeal to the savages still among us, even if only in our repressed consciousness.

The movie was also very successful, and contains some exciting special effects showing New York City being swept away, as the story was transposed to the USA.

There is an amusing sequence near the end of the film (available on Youtube) where a group of survivors is discussing how to order their new lives. The hero, being an educated man and a lawyer, understands that the economy must be set going again, so he creates fiat money. He gives each person a certain amount and then sets up an auction (a free market!) to parcel out some of the more valuable detritus they have collected. From there, it’s a short step to full-fledged capitalism, surely.

The same sequence contains an example of the casual racism that is common in films of the day, as a Black man ogles a reproduction of a Greek carving of a nude woman resembling the Venus de Milo. “But her arms is broken!,” he protests as the lawyer demands a higher bid for her. Everyone laughs. As if they get the joke. In the end, the another guy wins the statue, and all the other men eye him enviously and he cradles her in his arms for the trip home saying as a farewell, “I know what I’m doing this winter. And no imagination!”.

The character of the woman swimmer was played by Peggy Shannon, who had her own personal apocalypse. Seven years after this film, she died of a heart attack brought on by her extreme alcoholism. Her husband shot himself a few weeks later while sitting in the chair where she had been found slumped over a table, an empty glass in her hand. No starting over for them.

Antonio and Zuleika

Zuleika Dobson (1911) is an outrageous satire by Max Beerbohm, caricaturist and author. Some see it as a simple poofy love song to Oxford, while the recent exhibit at the NYPL describes it as a biting lampoon of the cult of celebrity. I think it’s sort of both, but the satire certainly bites deeply. Bell’ Antonio (1960) is a cinema adaptation by Bolognini of another outrageous satire with the same name, written by Brancati of Sicily, and published in 1949. The film is good, but tamps down the spirit of the novel a great deal. The two stories have a weird symmetry between them.

Zuleika, an ordinary girl who has made a fabulous career as a third-rate magician comes to Oxford to visit her grandfather who is on the staff there. The secret of her success is that all men are passionately attracted to her on sight, despite the fact, we are told, that she is a young girl only conventionally pretty, and with no great gifts of conversation, charm, or intellect. She, on the other hand, finds the universal adulation of the males convenient and profitable, but boring. She is incapable of loving any of her slavish admirers, and so she falls for one undergrad, The Duke, who, at least at first, seems aloof and immune to her spell. That brief idyll of love ends quickly when he too declares himself her devoted lapdog and announces that since he cannot have her love, he will kill himself. The Duke is the hero of all the Oxford men – he is handsome, fabulously rich, well-dressed, speaks five languages, is academically brilliant and always perfectly correct – so they all proclaim that they will follow his lead. Eventually, the entire undergraduate population does commit suicide, to which the Oxford faculty and Zuleika have no great reaction: She decamps and goes on with her life.

Antonio is a young bachelor of about thirty considered by all, men and women alike, to be an absolute Adonis. Women swoon over him on sight, whether at mass or on the street. Those of lesser respectability offer themselves to him immediately; the more upper class hesitate a bit first. His romantic exploits, real and simply rumored, are legendary, but he seems unaccountably cool about it all, never reveling in the sexual opportunities thrown at him by women, young, old, ugly, beautiful, rich, and poor, and not joining in very much in the man-to-man vulgarity that surrounds all discussions of sex and romance. On the urging of his parents, he agrees to marry a local (rich) girl after glimpsing her in the street and being overwhelmed by her beauty. The only problem is that he is impotent.

He has been impotent for some time, but with all the women around him, no one ever guessed. He truly loves his bride, and she is young, and so cloistered, that it takes her a few years of unconsummated marriage to realize things are not right between them. (A few coarse words from a servant help her see the light.) Her family has the marriage annulled and she marries a man even richer than she. Antonio is humiliated by the scandal, and his father, a randy fellow in his day, cannot fathom that he has produced such a son. Antonio is buried under an avalanche of letters from women who are convinced that, now that he is free again, they have what it takes to get his equipment running in good order again. He is appalled and disgusted by their advances, and notes with bitter irony that they are using all the tricks common to any Don Juan trying to seduce virgins. The gender tables have turned.

The film is more subdued than the novel, leaving out all the political satire of the fascist regime, which closely associated itself with Italian machismo, and adopting a rather melancholy tone in place of the free-wheeling comedy that takes up much of the very funny book. Marcello Mastroianni is wonderful as Antonio, another of his portrayals of a man adrift in his society and sexuality.

Can we say that Zulieka and Antonio are both impotent cynosures for the other sex? She, incapable of love, he incapable of sexual consumation?