M (1931)

Legendarily dark and disturbing Fritz Lang masterpiece about a child murderer (played by a pre-Hollywood Peter Lorre) in an impersonal and alienating modern city. It has been ranked by important critics and polls in Germany itself as the greatest film ever produced in that country, which tells something about how that nation's intelligentsia at least regards itself and the nature of existence, because there is little in it, if anything, that could be called joyous or sentimental or life-affirming. Some people prefer their movies this way, however. Certainly like many of the celebrated films of the Weimar Republic--several more of which are waiting in the wings in this set of reviews--it captures the atmosphere of foreboding and dread and despair that in retrospect is the clear precursor to the the national nervous breakdown of the Nazi era, does not look away from it or deny it to feed the public pablum and feel-good lies, etc, in this sense it is a frank and truthful art that many people in this country wish that we had, though obviously in the case of the German avant-garde of the 20s it had little practical effect on the course of history, and resulted in most of the artists themselves leaving the country, though not before they had had their substantial say in defining the character of this tumultuous and endlessly fascinating era.

As with most of these iconic movies I make notes about here, this was my first time seeing M, and afterwards I went through it again with the commentary and the other extensive special features that you get with the Criterion disk, though I cannot remember any earth-shattering revelations in these. As is often the case with me on encountering something great on a first viewing (or reading, or listening), I found it more strange than immediately compelling, but that usually indicates that the thing is good and has layers of meaning and significance that will speak to people further up on the brightness ladder than I am. So I tend to find strange things to be attractive and mildly thrilling for the connection I can imagine having to the kinds of people whose acceptance I have always fantasized about, even if when it comes down to it, I have been rather shy about really desiring it. The sets and props in this are some of the most desolate and alienating, psychologically, in a Western environment that I have ever seen.

A favorite image from M.   

So now at least I have improved my basic familiarity with the filmic canon, had my initial introduction to a titanic director, and really, in this new and somewhat more alert phase of journal-keeping in these matters, to an entire major period and movement in the development of the art, all of which helps one gradually feel ever so slightly more like a real film buff, and all of the dreams of revival houses and arguments in smoke-filled taverns, and the art girls--oh, we'll never stop dreaming of the art girls--that I associate with that state of being.

Art girls here I come

Movies 1981-2002 (Common Theme: Great Depression)

The Road to Perdition (2002)My main impressions while watching this movie:

What is the point of this story?

I'm not buying Paul Newman and Tom Hanks as ruthless gangsters, especially to the extreme they are supposed to be in this movie.

I can more easily buy Daniel Craig and Jude Law as sociopaths, I guess, though I don't get the point of their characters either.

Despite a lengthy trail of corpses and bank robberies, no police ever appear. They do not exist in this movie. The characters only have to worry about other gangsters.

It might be worth seeing just for the sets and clothes and heavily artsified 30s ambiance. If they hadn't actually gunned down a child and his mother in their own bathroom I would probably say it was definitely worth seeing.

Jennifer Jason Leigh, in the period (1931) dress and hair, looks quite a bit like my wife in this, which probably caused the scene where she is murdered with the child in cold blood to upset me more than it ordinarily would have. I know this is at least the 3rd time I have said a movie actress resembles my wife (Shirley Maclaine circa The Apartment and Sybil Seeley from the Buster Keaton movies are the other 2 I can think of off hand), but in each instance something in the resemblance was striking enough to make an impression that I thought it worthwhile to take note of.

I wondered how differently the history of cinema might have developed if the United States had not been the dominant filmmaking country during the formative years of this art. Specifically I was assuming that the genre of the super-violent gangster film would not have attained quite the place of esteem in the cinematic repertoire that it has attained, to the point that nations as disparate as Britain and Korea, who do not have much of a history of their citizens engaging in machine gun massacres and shootouts in their streets and places of public business, feel impelled to regularly make movies in which as many people are blown away by advanced weaponry in a single scene as normally die in such manner in a couple of decades in those countries.

It may be argued that my quibbles about the lack of realism in certain instances in this movie are prosaic and beside the point, that the narrative does away with these restrictions because it is really about other things. In the present case however this is where the movie, which is otherwise almost impeccably made, most falters. The departure from probability and consistency within the parameters it sets out, especially given the excessive brutality of its violence, I found to be too great. Most stories that attain a degree of cultural importance require some suspension of literal disbelief, to be sure, but the psychology of the characters has to be believable and consistent within the parameters of whatever imagined or idealized world they are inhabiting, which also necessitates the mental and emotional universe of that world being comprehensible to the audience. That did not occur to my satisfaction here.

Tarzan (1999)

In addition to the undiscriminating reviewer who overly loves TV movies, my system suffers from another critic who has caused me to suspect him or her to be in the employ of the Walt Disney Corporation, so uniformly and emphatically partial to the works of this studio he be. There are a few Disney movies that I will admit to liking, though they were all made before 1960; the artistic sensibility of the pre-1945 productions especially, middlebrow though it was, is of an entirely different order from what they seem to be able to muster lately.

This late model Tarzan, following in the train of the big 90s hits like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, wholly escaped my notice on its initial appearance. I was willing enough to like it if it had moved me to do so, but I did not see anything the least noteworthy or at all different from any other 90s Disney movie.

King of the Hill (1993)

Another movie set in the Great Depression ('33 I believe was the year in this case) which seems to have been a recurring theme with me lately, or perhaps the time is such a good one to set movies in that more of them turn up on my list than they do from other periods. While Road to Perdition was based on a comic book/graphic novel and had a more mythical atmosphere about it, this was based on a memoir by a more conventional earnest writer type (A. E. Hotchner, of whom I had not previously heard). Despite being directed by Steven Soderbergh, whom I thought was considered an A or near A-list director, having a largely recognizable if not star-studded cast, and receiving almost uniformly positive reviews, the film is still not available on DVD. (I still have a VCR, so I bought an old videotape and watched that).

The sets and props and costumes lack the calculated grandeur and overall sense of Sturm und Drang, so in keeping with the post-millenial spirit, that we got in Road to Perdition, and are more in what I would consider the 'traditional' Depression period-piece style, iron bedsteads, print dresses in muted colors, peeling wallpaper and flaking plaster, scratchy radios, dusty streets, all of which motifs I am much more comfortable with. They boil some hot dogs--never destined to be eaten, as it happens--in water in a big heavy pot at one point which for some reason I found extremely pleasing, as if the image summed up all of my most superficial feelings about the 1930s in a single blow. While there is a plot, and a not wholly insignificant one, the interest in the movie to me rests on the effectiveness of these images from the lives of our grandparents and great-grandparents and what relevance we can be persuaded to think they have for us now. It is about half-successful in this.

This movie has a couple of early 80s era actresses whose careers never really blew up big but whom I always liked a little, Lisa Eichhorn and Elizabeth McGovern. Lisa Eichhorn is 41 here, my age exactly now, and she still looks like her sweet senstive self. Now she is 59 and she looks old and not like her sweet sensitive self at all. This is nothing to the point except that I probably had not thought about her since around that time, so it came as rather a shock to realize that she was nearly 60 now. 1993 in certain things does not seem to me a long time ago. I was already with my wife in that year, for example, and she is still only in her 30s, and does not seem to me to have changed all that dramatically. Elizabeth McGovern probably is not much my type personality-wise. However she always reminds me of my main junior high love interest, who was also named Elizabeth, who also had an Irish surname beginning in McG--, who also had short cropped curly brown hair, and who due to the custom of forcing students to sit in rows in alphabetical order in class which was the rule in my middle school was seated about 2 feet in front of me around five hours a day for two years. Though she engaged in some mild teasing, on the whole she was cordial to me, and even danced with me twice at the Christmas dance in 1983, which was practically the highlight of the entire decade of the 80s as far as I was concerned; nonetheless she expertly managed me so that my passion remained always at a fairly low boil and never threatened to burst out in an unseemly spectacle, which looking back I think is quite admirable. She was flirty and playful without being conniving or narcissistic, and at least in junior high and early high school she always maintained a genuine respectability without being a killjoy, all of which are qualities I like in females. But all of this has very little to do with Elizabeth McGovern outside of my own head...

On Golden Pond (1981)

Just a few postings ago I mentioned that I had never seen this New Hampshire-set movie, a few days after which my system predictably turned it up to go on my list. This summer happens to be the film's 30th anniversary, so there are a number of events in New Hampshire commemorating the occasion as well, such as local theatrical productions of the original play and so on. I am not planning on attending any of them, but I think it is of interest to note that these goings-on are in the atmosphere as I try to make some sense of this old--in many ways really prematurely old--movie for myself.

In the first place I suspect that the most noteworthy aspect of the picture is the performances of Katherine Hepburn and Henry Fonda, which appear to be so strikingly good that one almost wonders if it is not somehow an illusion, and that either the rest of the cast, or the writing of their characters, are abnormally terrible, or that there is something in the old legends' superior, almost effortlessly self-assured bearings that hoodwink the viewer into thinking their acting work grander than it really was, because we have become unaccustomed to seeing these particular qualities in our contemporaries. The dominance of the aged stars also contributes to the film's seeming to belong to a more remote past than it really does, Hepburn and Fonda's careers of course dating back to the earliest days of talking pictures, nearly half the entire history of which is (remarkably) contained within my own lifetime, but which are such a ubiquitous part of our cultural lives that its early era psychologically feels nearly as distant to us as artistic movements hundreds of years old.

The story is also dated in other of its concerns. Its primary theme is the generational conflict between the hard core of the Depression/WWII generation (Hepburn and Fonda) and their children, the Silent Generation that came of age in the 50s and early 60s. Unlike the baby boomers, who though usually obnoxious even they aren't being dangerously wrong-headed are at least adversarially strong, the Silents were never much of a match for their elders, and even in this movie which was clearly written by one of their number (it has been noted that the cohort of Americans born in the 1930s has been highly prolific and accomplished in most of the arts comparative to most of those which followed it), which I gather was intended to present their situation in a sympathetic light and try to reconcile especially the Henry Fonda character's overbearing and stifling qualities with his strong ones, they come across as almost hopelessly weak and stunted in their development when juxtaposed against their parents. One of the major plot threads is that Henry Fonda and his daughter (played by his actual famous daughter Jane, whose limited acting ability contrasted against her father's brilliance while essentially on his deathbed only further emphasizes the previous point) are estranged because he was hard and emotionally distant. In 2011, with middle class society on the brink of collapse and when our concerns are almost exclusively socio-economic, these 1970s era complaints about domineering and emotionally unavailable fathers strike one as almost quaint. From our vantage point, Henry Fonda hardly seems like such a terrible father. Besides being married and having a better relationship with his children's mother than most contemporary men are able to manage, he not only had a career, but quite a prestigious one (professor at an Ivy League university! think of the advantages! the connections!). The children doubtless were all sent to private schools. He was a competent outdoorsman and was a good role model as far as not being a total pussy or woman-dominated man goes. No evidence is offered that he beat his children unduly. Who cares that he was not the most cuddly guy in the world? Where is all this sensitive new age fathering getting us anyway?

This was filmed at Squam Lake in New Hampshire, about a 45 minute drive from my house. While I have driven past it numerous times, I have never actually gone in or on it, though I believe there are points that are publicly accessible. There are a multitude of other lakes around that I have been to, so it is more a matter of chance that I have not been there rather than socioeconomic deprivation, though I am under the impression that it is one of the more expensive lakes in the area as far as property values. Although I don't think of myself as having any friends, I have still managed over the years to get myself invited to a few private cabins on other lakes, several of which were older and a lot like the one in the movie, though the ones I visited were probably a little smaller. It has been a trend since affluent people began to really rake in the bucks in the mid-90s to knock down these older cabins and build something more in keeping with one's contemporary level of grandeur, but there are still a good number of old New Englanders of more modest means clinging to the old cabins their family bought in the 40s. These are the people I mainly know. Of course the temptation to sell out when mom finally passes on is increasingly great, and if Mitt Romney (to name one noted summerer on the New Hampshire lakes) or one of his buddies is the buyer, you can be sure they won't be keeping the old house standing, unless it is to store boats and take showers in.

Movie Music Video of the Week

This week's classic film was the 1938 Hitchcock (British period) effort "The Lady Vanishes". I hadn't seen it before. Surprisingly I had never seen any Hitchcock movies until I undertook this educational program within the last couple of years. Their reputation, such as it was, for being good, but not in the ways bourgeois audiences thought they were good, I suspect psyched me out when I was younger. I had no interest in seeing them.

I still haven't seen that many to this point. Psycho seems to me to be overrated. Strangers on a Train was a very cool and good-looking movie to watch but I didn't think the plot was particularly brilliant in that either. I liked this one. The plot is pretty silly of course but the wit and humor throughout more than redeem this. I thought the climactic scene with all the jokes as the British vacationers have a shootout with the demented Germanic contigent was brilliant. I hadn't seen Margaret Lockwood, the de rigeuer Hitchcock "girl" of this movie, before, and I like her a lot. She looks really intelligent; the 1930s British form that intelligence took of course detracts nothing from the effect upon the imagination.. I don't know if it is that I like this generation of women better than the 50s and 60s generation, or Hitchcock had better taste as a younger man, but the type of girls he casts in these earlier films are much more interesting to me than those who came later. Five years after this movie we got the much-celebrated (on this blog anyway) Teresa Wright, who was also intelligent after the manner I like, in Shadow of a Doubt, which has a similar overriding theme, that is to buck up the prettiest girls and the boys who love them for a big fight in which Western Civilization itself hangs in the forest. I suppose you can't really go wrong with Grace Kelly, but Janet Leigh and people of that ilk didn't bring much to the entertainments that couldn't have been much more than a simple line of dialogue, a single movement, to begin with.

I'm falling asleep. Enjoy the song.

Augie March Part 2


The first note I made was on the frequency of retarded characters in American literature, as Augie's little brother Georgie (also my youngest son's name by the way) is an "idiot". Benjy in The Sound and the Fury immediately comes to mind, and there is also an important retarded character in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I had thought of another major one but I can't remember it now. This is not even counting movies like Forrest Gump (the mentally handicapped character appears to be especially prominent in works originating in the South) or Bill (remember that one? It starred Mickey Rooney as a retarded old man). This is a unique characteristic of our literature, and perhaps of our humanity. The French, for example, I think do not do retarded people in their art. They have no use for them, requiring all their agents to be articulate and conscious and sensual. The Greeks would seem to have little interest in such characters also, for similar reasons, plus the necessity of the figures of their dramas to take actions.


Early on I remarked that the book seemed overwritten at times, thought this impression did subside considerably once the story got rolling. As I noted in the last post I also find a lot of his learned references come across as awkward, especially in this book where Augie, who is the narrator, never really comes across as having become the sort of person who would instinctively compare a scene encountered while hustling on the streets of Chicago with an incident from the Roman senate. He is always portrayed as too much of that street culture to do that.


The name "Augie", which was generally I believe a diminutive of August, seems as if it should be due for a comeback. I rather like it. There were a number of ballplayers in the 30s and 40s with the name, most notably Augie Galan, who was a slap-hitting outfielder with the Cubs and Dodgers, leading the league in runs scored in 1935 (133!), walks in 1943 and 44, (103 & 101), and stolen bases in 1935 & 37 (22 & 23; it was not a running era).


p.57--"Mama showed at last the trembling anger of weak people that it takes much to bring on."


I was greatly endeared to Einhorn by his love of Coca-Cola, which I indulge in almost to excess as well. Other literary Coke lovers were Ganesh and his wife in The Mystic Masseur, or at least they broke out the Coke whenever guests came to the house. However I interpreted that these two were supposed to be understood as foolish characters, while Einhorn is insisted upon numerous times as having been "a great man".


p.65--"I understand that British aristocrats are still legally entitled to piss, if they should care to, on the hind wheels of carriages."


p.67--Einhorn "had dynastic ideas...the organizer coming after the conqueror, the poet and philosopher succeeding the organizer, and the whole development typically American, the work of intelligence and strength in an open field, a world of possibilities."


p.76 "...the true vision of things is a gift, particularly in times of special disfigurement and world-wide Babylonishness"


p.86--"I was reading where Tex Rickard wrote the other day in the Post, that before the Willard fight, when it was a hundred in the shade out there in Ohio, Dempsey was trained so fine that when he took a nap before the event, in his underwear, they were crisp and there wasn't a drop of sweat on him."


There was a J.P. Morgan reference at one point. One of these years I should do an article on J.P. Morgan as someone who held a dominating position in the American psyche through several of its most important decades. It is virtually impossible to read a novel, set in the industrial states at least, written between 1900 and 1950 that does not at some point invoke the spectre of this awesome captain of industry, and really, as much a father of our modern nation, in numerous ways, as anyone.

For much of the book the main problem I had with it was that the Augie character was never very vivid for me. It became a little clearer towards the end, mainly as a result of his own explanations, but still, major aspects of his character, such as his attractiveness to several extremely desirable-sounding women, and his autodidactic learning of the classics, are not really convincing. In fact, where the women are concerned, this is a fairly constant difficulty in all of Bellow's books, figuring out why the particular ones he writes about would be at all interested in the characters he gives them to.


p.135--"You know nothing about girls; girls want to marry. And it's not in the modest old times when they sat on it till somebody would have mercy."


p. 142--"With you? I should say not. I certainly won't." This is what the impossibly gorgeous Esther Frenchel says when Augie asks her to go dancing at the house of David. He recovers of course. The author is trying to show us that to be a real hero you have to bring your game to the hottest girls and learn to be unaffected by their disdain. And he's right.


On the other hand our author's penchant for introducing vocabulary and learned allusions into situations and the thoughts of a narrator where they could not be expected to arise spontaneously mainly serve to reveal his middle-class origins. The worst writer for this sort of thing (besides me) is John Fowles, who was actually very talented and certainly had a high I.Q., but who unfortunately has the habit of forever straining to demonstrate that this is the case. Bellow was less constrained in this way, as the cultural intelligentsia in the U.S. is not a terribly forbidding lot, and one can always do an end run around them by garnering European approval, but he still writes at times as if he considers himself to be accountable to some exalted body of people outside of his familiar connections.


p.155--This is a specimen of Bellovian writing that I don't care for: "His spirit was piercing, but there has to be mentioned his poor color, age-impoverished and gray; plus the new flat's ugliness; dullness of certain hours, dryness of days, dreariness and shabbiness--mentioned that the street was bare, dim and low in life, bad; and that there were business thoughts and malformed growths of purpose, terrible, menacing, salt-patched with noises and news, and pimpled and dotted around with lies, both practical and gratuitous.`` Halfway through this sentence I felt like I was the one lost in a bad neighborhood.

p.162--``As for the immigrants, my thought about them was, Hell, why shouldn`t they be here with the rest of us if they want to be? There`s enough to go around of everything including hard luck.``

p.166--Erie, Pennsylvania gets dissed: ``To get off in Erie gave me no feeling that I had arrived somewhere, in a place that was a place in and for itself, but rather that it was one which waited on other places to give it life by occurring between them; the breath of it was thin, just materialized, waiting.``

p.166--``...people in great numbers were on the highways.`` The wanderers on the roads and the hoboes riding the trains in the 30s are noted by just about every writer of the period. Clearly this was a significant and deeply impressionable phenomenon. The figure of the hobo remained a staple of songs, comedy routines, films and TV shows and books well into the 1960s, and while always treated as an outsider, was a familiar one. I make this observation because there seems to be a fashion current in conservative ideological circles and among economists to argue that the sufferings of Americans during the Depression have been greatly exaggerated, that the New Deal actually exacerbated such disaster as there was, that Roosevelt was overrated and ineffective as a leader, etc. Such people always fail to take into account the day-to-day psychological impact on a society of huge numbers of grown men reduced to beggary, homelessness, tramping and the suspicion at least of criminality, especially when most people`s financial situations are precarious enough that they are not too far from being in the same position, and affect to be confused when they demand dramatic short-term actions to solve problems rather than adopt rational long-term strategies to improve their lots. Roosevelt became popular despite the questionable direct economic successes of his programs because a lot of people perceived him as acknowledging their existences, and even seemed to entertain the possibility that they might be important to the national life, which is why he was able to win election four times and galvanize the incredible national unity of the 1940s that people so much lament the collapse of today.

Along a similar theme, this book gives a good flavor of the old industrial midwest that we have lost now. Even in the depression with all the hoboes around the impression made is still of a comparatively bustling, crowded place compared with what is left of it now. Diners are full at 11pm, train stations (and trains) are crowded, factories churn, the farm fields are full of activity. Perhaps this life was no more communal or vigorous or interesting than the mall and drive-through culture that we have today but it certainly seems like it was.

p.183--Description of what a man should not be: ``...a man-chick, plucked and pinched, with scraggle behind and anxious face full of sorrow-wrinkles, human fowl chased by brooms.``