Hereafter & The Ghost Writer (2010)

These two sort of go together.

I don't see a whole lot of contemporary movies--it is usually more fun to catch up on the classics, and the newer ones rarely speak to me anyway. However, I found I enjoyed both of these, mostly due to their presentations. They are well-made, by famous and very old directors, Clint Eastwood (b. 1931) on Hereafter, and Roman Polanski (b.1933) on The Ghost Writer. Despite having been made by these dinosaurs, both of these felt contemporary to me--or at least what the contemporary world looks like through the lenses of minds rooted in the 1960s or 70s, or even the 50s, which is about where I seem to be stuck as well. A younger person attuned to the thought processes, aesthetics, attitudes and so on of this digital era might not find these to have much to do with the present at all.

The main appeal to me of both of these is what I will call 1% porn. I wonder if there has not been a trend in this direction in recent years since the recession and the ever increasing gulf in educational and professional achievement between the cognitive and financial elect and the masses. There is something in this that echos the many movies of the 30s that depicted the lavish lifestyles of the wealthy, though the emphasis in this modern incarnation is less on raw luxury than on quality of life aspects that suddenly seem inaccessible to large numbers of formerly semi-competitive people. In my youth in the 80s and even the 90s, wealthy people were often presented in movies and other pop culture in a rather cartoonish aspect. The emphasis was on over the top or otherwise absurd and useless frivolities that millionaires indulged in, such as having a hundred sports cars, or a thousand pairs of shoes, or a specially installed room for tanning in the mansion. Qualititavely there was otherwise little difference in the life of such a person and the viewer at home. While the rich kid's boarding school, for example, may have had more thoroughly obnoxious snobs and girls who were into horseback riding, it was not implicit that it was academically superior  to any ordinary suburban high school, if anyone even cared about such things. Indeed the servants or other help were usually at least the intellectual equals of the master, so much so that anyone who took the message of these programs too seriously could not help but believe that fortunes were distributed in the world on a completely arbitrary basis. This trend I am noticing in more recent works is not merely a corrective to this faulty view that prevailed in the past, but probably is reflective of a change in the public imagination and sensibility where the wealthiest and most privileged people are concerned.

In Hereafter, for example, which has a rather bizarre plot about communicating with the dead, most of the appeal of the movie, which I cannot otherwise explain, is in its tasteful settings and what it shows people doing in them . There are three storylines, centered in Paris, San Francisco and London, and the movie opens with a modern French supercouple, a journalist/author and a television personality, at a resort in Thailand that is neither too grandiose nor too bourgeois, which seems to be the sweet spot of modern life. There is, objectively speaking, no little unpleasantness. The Thai vacation coincides with the famous tsunami, in which thousands of people are killed, and the London family consists of a drug addicted single mother living in a council estate with her twin boys, one of whom is killed by a truck. However, after being dead, or very nearly dead, for several minutes, the Frenchwoman caught in the tsunami ends up coming back to life and discovering priorities that are more attractive to the typical fan of the cinema; and in the London episode the surviving son begins traveling all around the city to various beautiful old buildings, train stations, libraries, auditoriums, doctors' offices, etc, in his quest to communicate with his dead brother. Even when the drug addicted mother consents to go to rehab, her facility is in a remodeled castle. We are told that Matt Damon's character works in a factory making $2,000 dollars a month (do they still have jobs like this in San Francisco? as least where the workers speak English as a native language?), but he lives at a much--much--higher tone than this situation implies. He has a very nice 1920sish apartment, where he lives all alone, in what looks to be a neighborhood in the area of the wharf. I am not very familiar with San Francisco, though I am guessing the area where this apartment seems to be is expensive. He takes a Italian cooking class from a distinguished Italian chef in which the students drink good wine and listen to classical music as they slice tomatoes, and everyone in the class is beautiful and well-educated--even the old people. Socializing with or even being around people who are good-looking and smart to any degree (and not being in a position of subservience to them) seems increasingly to be a mark of privilege. I suspect that even if I signed up for a class or joined an activity that had these kinds of perfectly developed persons, I would stand out as not belonging so egregiously that I doubt the desirable people would stay in the class or the outing club once they found I was to make part of the group.

Hot girl picked up in the cooking class in Hereafter

I almost forgot that Matt Damon is a rabid Charles Dickens fan. He chills out at night by listening to David Copperfield on books on tape and has the great man's portrait hanging up in his kitchen. Later on, after he gets laid off from his $2,000 a month job, he regroups by taking a trip to London, perhaps the world's most expensive city, and goes to Charles Dickens's house on Doughty Street (I was there too! It looks like they have re-arranged some of the displays since that time). This was all very corny, but I admit, it drew me in.

In the Ghost Writer the impression made is more of the untouchable power, knowledge, raw intellect and grim professionalism of the modern well-educated and connected. The movie is very persuasive on the point that pretty much all the core faculty and best graduates of places like Harvard and Oxbridge are in the employ of the CIA or Halliburton-like corporations and deeply involved in endless political machinations of a decidedly sinister character, to which they seem to devote an even greater part of their considerable intelligent energy than to their glittering academic careers (which only underscores how impressively brilliant they must be). While the bulk of the story takes place in a pretty ugly modernist bunker (albeit on the ocean on Martha's Vineyard) we do get to examine the interior of one particularly evil Harvard professor's perfectly maintained and appointed colonial home in one of New England's most desirable zip codes. Most of the movie was actually shot in Germany and France due to Roman Polanski's well known legal situation, but a second unit was dispatched to Provincetown and Wellfleet on Cape Cod to shoot some exteriors. As I have written before, all these years I have lived in New England, but I have never made it yet to Cape Cod. It looks great in this movie, though it appears to have been filmed in November, when it is unlikely I will have the time or opportunity to go down there anytime soon. Maybe this summer--Gloucester is also on my never been/to visit list, courtesy of the Captains Courageous movie, though Gloucester is on the north shore and I could go there as a daytrip. Cape Cod is too far to go for the day, and during the high season it is difficult, both due to expense and availability, to drop in for an overnight or a weekend on the spur of the moment. The summer is so short anyway when you have to work.

Ghost Writer star Olivia Williams: The favorite middle-aged actress of a certain kind of Anglophilic, book collecting, undersexed middle-aged dilettante intellectual. Born Camden Town, London, 1968

Another facet of this movie that was of personal interest was its depiction, somewhat unusual I think, of the professional aspect of the publishing industry and writers, people who are actually in it to make money, who take on projects and assignments for hire, and are expected to be able to execute those tasks competently. In other words it bears somewhat more resemblance to real life than the image of the writer wrestling with his typewriter in his film noir inspired New York apartment or cabin on a lake in Maine hoping to wrench something resembling literature out of it that I somehow latched onto. This more adult version has probably always been out there for me to pick up on, in movies and real literature itself, but when I was younger I would either not have seen it or thought it was somehow beneath consideration. It is true, it is not an aspect of writing that most English teachers, either in high school or college, treat as of much importance, or maybe they take it for granted that everyone understands the nature and importance of professionalism. I am not going to blame them for the oversight.

Troy (2004)

I am going to review this very quickly. I don't think this got especially good reviews, but if you were able to block out all of your pre-existing knowledge and feeling about The Iliad and the legend of the Trojan War and maybe ancient Greece itself the movie is somewhat successful as an entertainment. The actors are very good looking, have incredible bodies (assuming they are real), to the point that it would almost be ridiculous if they did not have sex with each other all the time, which they do. I like the casting of Diane Kruger as Helen of Troy--she is plausible--and I like the seduction scene where she lowers her top and invites the willing Paris to come and get it, though I don't think it happened quite that way back in the day. There is a similarly smoldering Briseis who holds a knife to the throat of Achilles, played by a supernaturally buff Brad Pitt. Needless to say he does not panic, but smiles devilishly and begins to massage her sensitive areas, and pretty quickly the knife falls harmlessly to the floor. After all this sex, in marked contrast to modern life, the women are wiped out and look as if they won't be able to rise from the bed in any kind of functional state for several days, while the men are up at the break of dawn as fresh as newly laid eggs ready for a full day of ancient warfare in open arid terrain in 90 degree heat.     

Diane Kruger as Helen. I like her look. Born Algermissen Germany, 1976 (around age 27 at the time of the filming this movie, which, though now ten years old, I still think of as being brand new. I have no sense of cultural time after about 1999).

All this aside, I think there is a certain point, depending on the amount of immersion in Homer and the study of Ancient Greece that you have had in your life, where it is hard to get past the many liberties taken with the traditional story (Agamemnon and Menelaus don't die during the war, obviously, and it's kind of hard to get past that here) and the general atmosphere of lightness with regard to the material. I don't want it to be over-reverent, but I would like to have seen more of a sense of the true epic quality of the story, which I did not get. The gods, just to name one example, play no part in the film at all, and they are kind of central to any understanding of the Trojan war story, I would think.

Rose Byrne (Briseis). Born Sydney, Australia, 1979
 
I like Peter O'Toole, but I don't like his teary-eyed, moist-lipped turn as Priam here.

Dorian Gray--Part 3

In Chapter 14 there is a little rapture about Venice, with a nod to Oxford thrown in at the end of it, that I take to be an homage to Ruskin. Really, Wilde, for such a supposed iconoclast and fastidious upholder of artistic standards, seems to have held an unusually large number of his contemporaries, and their work, in high esteem. Gray, the morning after murdering Hallward, is turning over the pages of a volume of Gautier's poems--Wilde gushes about the beauty, exquisiteness, etc, of these too--when he comes to one about Venice. "Devant une facade rose/Sur le marbre d'un escalier." "The whole of Venice (he thought) was in those two lines." Of course it isn't--not for an aesthetic ingenu anyway--though perhaps the goal of education and experience is to be able to comprehend a great deal of meaning in such clear and concise terms. But the point of the book I think is either that it is not, or that Gray/Wilde has not absorbed the totality of the intellectual environment is which he moves to make such distinctions in a meaningful way. "...Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything." Literature would not exist without sentences like this--I do believe that, too--but again the foreground must be somehow commensurate with the background, for the background to have any meaning. The novel Dorian Gray itself, for all its abundant charms and the cleverness of its conceit, is lacking the high purpose and understanding that a work of art must possess to be a world masterpiece; it is not good that way, and its author I believe is aware of this at a pretty conscious level; it is one of those books of which it will always be said 'it is one of the finest things of its kind'. Oh yes, regarding the trip to Venice: "Basil had been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret." If the world gains nothing else from this blog, I hope that somebody might be reminded that if he should ever go to Venice, he needs to see the Tintorettos. This has become in the space of a year a pleasure I was not aware of having missed to the 11th or 12th greatest regret of my life; and that rank may rise yet if I keep being reminded of it. Chapter 15: "It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough, who was a very clever woman, with what Lord Henry used to describe as the remains of really remarkable ugliness." Same party: "...Lady Alice Chapman, his hostess's daughter, a dowdy dull girl, with one of those characteristic British faces, that, once seen, are never remembered..." Something tells me I probably would have thought this girl was hot in some indefinable way and been agitated all through dinner. Something of the sort happened to me once. I was seated across the table at some dinner from a girl with a singularly homely face--it was as if during the formation of her features they had not set at the proper time, though whether too early or too late I could not make out--and who was quite boring to boot, eating salad and vegetables only, along with water, and talking of nothing the whole time but how she got up at five every morning and went on a four-mile run (to her credit, she did appear to be of well-above average fitness); alas, I found myself distracted for much of the meal, wondering if she did not have any interest in me as a lover, etc. (Chapter 17) This one is kind of famous, but it is good: "The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for." Chapter 18: "Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That is all." This is essentially the theme of this whole blog, so in theory it should shut itself down now, having long established what side of the muscular equation it lies on, but as we all know the weak only cease to talk under direct compulsion or intimidation; then you won't hear a peep from them, they do as they are ordered, but given enough leeway to pretend to substance, they will indulge in it every chance they get. This of course is the great curse of the internet. Some of the Background for Romance, Oxford. "It would not look well to go on." Lord Henry regretfully calling off the day's hunt after one member of the party has accidentally shot and killed a beater. Lord Henry is one of those amoral and contemptuous characters who is at the same time clever and highly amusing, his social skills a template for anyone who aspires to be cool, knowing, and in demand, and never is. He is at the same time undeniably wicked, but this does not seem to bother anyone of importance and influence, perhaps the occasional eccentric genius or virtuous millionaire can look coldly upon him with some sting, but for the normal person it is hard to know how to take him. As your disapproval of his behavior is meaningless, and as his social qualities are so desirable to you, you of course must train yourself not to covet them, which is supposed to be one of the aims of a proper humanistic education, anyway; which is why the widespread denunciation of the liberal arts as outdated and useless that is afoot in the republic is a disturbing trend for its moral and psychological health. Chapter 19: "It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world." I don't know where this came from, but I find the coincidence (I wanted to say karma, but the dictionary indicates that that implies a transmigration of souls, which I don't think applies here) interesting, since I was just mentioning San Francisco, a place to which I have never been and rarely think about, in another recent post (about the Caine Mutiny). Here is how it would have looked in Oscar Wilde's day. One is tempted to say he'd be more at home there now, but the Victorians may have had more of a appetite for the rough and tumble of life than we give them credit for. Compared to similarly privileged and sexually-inclined characters in later books like Brideshead Revisited, the fops in Dorian Gray are like Greek warriors in the manly energy of their artistic and social pursuits. (Note that we have a hint of 'heavy industry' in the picture). "...I always contradict the aged. I do it on principle. If you ask them their opinion on something that happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current in 1820, when people wore high stocks, believed in everything, and knew absolutely nothing." Absurd, but it still amuses in many instances. I confessed at the end that I didn't know how to take this book morally. Our age, with the exception of a few extreme, mainly sexual, vices, has strayed so far from presenting any very comprehensive moral code by which the individual might be expected to govern himself that Gray by comparison, though his code is more of an anti-code against moral (but fastidious in its observation of social) propriety, comes across as a man of principle. People's political affiliations, and the dogmas attached to these, I suppose provide the equivalent of moral codes, but a political movement cannot properly appeal to any idea of universal absolute right without making a mockery of itself. It is pretty clear that Dorian Gray is seen as having transgressed against essentially immutable and universal laws, and that that is why he, morally, and his picture, become grotesque. Yet am I not long gone down the same path myself, by any reasonable estimate, if not with the same excess and abandon? Or was Gray's immersion in vice far worse because he was given such an exquisite intelligence and beauty, genuine talents? You see I have no idea how to move about in such a room. Chapter 20: "There was purification in punishment. Not 'Forgive us our sins', but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just God." I think many highly intelligent people must instinctively feel this. It requires real religious genius to be both intellectually able and honestly come to embrace the prospect that you, or your soul, will be entering into some variety of no-strings-attached eternal bliss in which you will know constant ecstasy being anything imaginable on earth. From the Pre-Blog Archives: I was curious to go back and see what I had written when I read The Importance of Being Earnest a few years back. It was not one of my better analyses. From July 11, 2004: "(Wilde) is perhaps the most optimistic and reassuring of all authors really, one never suspects there is anything to be troubled about in the world, that good humor and amusement suffice. It begs the question (sorry--pretentiousness alarm going wild) of his 'importance' which seems to be that of the shining light or comet. I had not realized how much his method relies on irony. That, and an especial delight for the (painlessly) outrageous declaration and his unique personality. Almost more a great literary character than author."

Is Blogging Over?

I remember reading something to this effect recently, that whatever dynamism was being infused into cultural life by bloggers has moved on to newer, more timely formats and modes of expression, that blogging had been mainstreamed, adopted and taken over (on the Google Search Rankings anyway) by the organized, professional media. It makes sense. I certainly have to come to grips with the realization that the historical moment has passed this blog by. When I started I had taken for one of my models the old Spectator papers of 1711-12 which took both contemporary England and the course of English literary history by storm. This page has now been going considerably longer than the original Spectator did (it lasted about 16 months, I think), and, so far as I can tell, its impact on society and history to this point has not been comparably pronounced. So do I do the wise, the pro-active, the vital thing, and shut the blog down and anticipate, even have a hand in creating, the next wave of literary-inflected communication, be for once at the forefront of a movement instead of straggling in amidst a motley mass long after all the choicest vantages have been claimed? No, because I am incapable of imagining that anything new will be the thing needed, let alone any good or not, before I am clubbed over the head with evidence of it, but changes will be coming, the tone and atmosphere of the page will be made less overbearing, and hopefully a stage will be reached where I can rationally determine if there is a purpose for the blog to continue, and if so to let it attain that purpose in a manner indicative of some degree of amiable humanity, and if not to recognize the fact and let it be snuffed out.

Cold Climates and Poverty. Having recently been reading some (in my current opinion greatly exaggerated) estimations of the hardships and deprivations about to sweep the American populace due to the collapse of the economy concurrently with a recent traveler's account--Paul Theroux's new book actually where he retraces the trip across Asia he took in 1973--of the incredible level of poverty that still exists in India, all of which was juxtaposed with a solid thirty day stretch where the temperature never got above 20 degrees, I became convinced that such sqalid conditions--the incredible numbers of people sleeping on the streets, in train stations, in tin and cardboard shacks, defecating and washing clothes in the rivers, battling with rats over scraps of food, etc, that are frequently remarked about life in third world countries--would be impossible to duplicate in any northern latitude on any but the tiniest scale due to the climate. People would freeze or starve to death, or have to leave, very quickly if conditions reached that desperate state. For some reason the idea of 100,000 people in Vermont freezing to death (only about 400,000 live there, and the majority wouldn't ordinarily die even under extreme dire circumstances) is less disturbing to me than its being crammed with 20 million living at an Indian level of poverty; I hope this is because I don't think it (the mass death by freezing) is ever really going to happen. That the climate of India allows for the survival of tens of millions of people effectively without housing or any participation in the greater economy through apparently endless generations I thought was its peculiar curse, though this is certainly not the proper way to look at the matter from any spiritual point of view; India being of course famously one of the most spiritually developed places on the planet, while the snow belt of North America historically has been conspicuously neglected by the palpable presence of any vital gods whatsoever. Indeed, the presence of gods, or at least interesting ones, appears to correlate highly with a confluence of sunshine, heat and a large, materially deprived population, all of which is short supply in most of the world's cooler regions.

There are however a few anomalies which threaten to confuse my theory, the main ones at the moment being Russia, and Detroit, though it is probably not a coincidence that these are currently two of the most rapidly depopulating areas on the planet. The survival, not to mention the continuous growth and relative increase in strength of Russia over the last 800 years seems to me one of the more improbable episodes of history given the incredibly harsh conditions of life as a poor person--always the vast majority of the population--and seemingly inconsistent patterns of industry and social organization that have often held sway there. Now that they can however more people than previously do appear to be deciding that it is not worth while carrying on there anymore. Detroit meanwhile seems simply to have ceased to function at a level necessary to sustain, or even to offer any reasonable hope of ever attaining again, most of the basic requirements for human beings to thrive in a rather dismal climate. I would say that it has really no choice but to die or become even more grotesque, but it is curious that Windsor, Ontario, which is right next door, as well as other nearby cities in Ontario seem to be prosperous and at least somewhat alive. They function anyway, and have attained some mastery over poverty, which the consensus seems to be are triumphs beyond the grasp of any collective will Detroit as presently constituted can hope to muster.

Picture: I am pretty sure this is Detroit. If it isn't, it should be. Jobs They Never Told Us About in School, Part 1

The children in the picture below are not merely playing with paints, as the naive reader might suppose, they are engaging in Art Therapy. Art Therapy is a profession requiring considerable training (and certification) in both Art and Therapy in which patients are enabled to heal psychologically through engagement with the fine arts, which sounds akin to the long tradition of depressives seeking consolation through philosophy, religion, poetry, music, etc, that have been coming down to us since antiquity, only now with the assistance of a professional Art Therapist, the likes of which would have been only to Boethius or Mill. It is not an especially lucrative profession--the median income is $45,000, with a master's degree, though administrators or Phds in private practice can sometimes make up to $100,000. Still, their self-esteem and belief that their work is important seems to be fairly high, which is no small consideration. There are 4 of them employed where I work (all women), and they are not in the least abashed to proclaim what they do before the greatest neurosurgeons and millionaire benefactors of the organization.

The Caine Mutiny (the movie)

I saw this a couple of weeks ago now, and thought at the time there were a few matters of interest in it to write about. Hopefully I can remember what they were. This is one of those old Hollywood movies where you often find yourself for long stretches being impressed by how smoothly good it is, only to wince five minutes later. I guess it is mainly this I guess that I had wanted to write about.

The plot construction, pacing, dialogue and suchlike storytelling mechanisms of this, as well as many other classic movies, has an ease and naturalness in its execution that almost everything put out in the last 40 years does not begin to approach. Old movies are comparatively almost all dialogue, unless there is a fight scene of some kind--no 5 minute interludes showing characters getting themselves in shape or working or walking all around the city's landmarks or writhing in bed as music plays--and the dialogue is always in the service of moving the plot in a definite direction, a writing skill which became undervalued in the experimental fervor of the 1960s and 70s and which consequently few modern screenwriters, even talented ones, employ with the same control as their predecessors. There are no two scenes in The Caine Mutiny (apart from those involving the love story, which I will get to farther on) which do not bear a clear relation to each other, do not recognizably follow directly from what has come before, and lead to what is coming next. This sounds perhaps like an unimaginative, by-the-book way of presenting a story, but it is does with an admirable degree of skill. Organizing a plot thus neatly, so that the film, which is slightly over two hours long, moves and never really drags, even in the ridiculous romantic parts, and so that the climactic scenes, especially the trial at the end, seem almost rushed and underemphasized compared to the modern method of plot construction, which would involve a half-hour of soul-searching and philosophizing and time-killing before presenting the trial as a spectacle, is not easy to do, and is a refreshing approach if it is not one you have seen for a while.

We are alerted that we are in San Francisco by a three second shot of the ship steaming under the Golden Gate bridge against a backdrop of very busy docks and a mid-century skyline. Then it's right back to dialogue and moving the story. The real purpose of this observation however is that it has been a long time since I've seen anything filmed in San Francisco in which the impression conveyed, either intentionally or unintentionally, was "industrial might" (The film was made in 1954).

At the same time that I praise the construction and pacing, the imagination and intellectual heft of the writing at the end of the movie (and presumably the book) I thought had some weaknesses. Popularized 50s ideas about psychology are woefully dated and look absurd when you see them being treated as serious now. Also the emphasis on the captain's obsession with the missing can of strawberries in playing such a leading part in his downfall struck me as a very trivial device on which to hinge a story about a mutiny in a U.S. Navy ship during wartime. Both the book and the film however were very popular in their time, when this era was fresh in the collective memory, and the annoying trivial minutiae of military life was a popular subject in books that came out about the war so I have to assume the incident was symbolic of an attitude widely-held at the time.

Most commenters on this movie cannot resist pointing out how ridiculous the love story is (it even tries to work in a Freudian angle involving the male character's mother issues), though I did like the sojourn the lovers took to Yosemite--the lodge looked like a fun place to stay, and the expected level of physical exertion and respect for the environment for a proper visit contained within limits I can handle. The Fifties was not a good decade for romance, though few have been, especially since the end of World War II. The Forties I always thought was very good, one of the best, because there was some real intensity and yearning in that era, directed at reasonable objects of desire (i.e., the boy or girl next door, or at the soda fountain) who bore some resemblance to actual human beings as well as representing symbols. By 1954 evidently people had already had, like Blanche Dubois, enough of realism and were looking for something else. Our WWII hero is smitten with a pneumatic and by our standards very fleshy, red-bustier-wearing nightclub singer. Meow! (The actress, May Wynn, whose career never really took off, is the kind of woman that you want to avoid seeing if you haven't gotten any action for a while--or ever--and you are already six or seven drinks into your evening; the only chance you have that is likely to improve is that of getting arrested.) Back to the 50s though, people really became disillusioned with domesticity; I think either it became too much separated from other currents of interesting adult life (which it still is) or, what is probably more likely, that the definition of interesting adult life got upgraded to something that in actuality very few people actively experience. I am going on at greater length than I wanted to, but the trend in the 50s was decidedly away, in the more interesting movies and literature anyway, from any vision of attaining longterm romantic satisfaction--or growing out of the need for constant new, but not necessarily psyhcically enriching, sexual excitement. Hence the Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, even Audrey Hepburn generation of movie stars.

Again unlike a lot of modern movies, I was struck by the abundance of generally likable male stars in the cast. If they happened to be really bad guys in actual life, I apologize. I have not turned up anything that indicates that to be the case. Humphrey Bogart has always struck me as those of a decent, reasonable sort of person. Fred MacMurray is back playing another morally icky character, as he did in The Apartment; to be honest, I always found him a bit creepy on My Three Sons as well, but he does a good job playing a pretentious character unpretentiously here, which I imagine is hard, and he also displays a better sense of wit here that I thought he had in him. I would have been taken in by his character whole-heartedly. Van Johnson, who I see just died in December at the age of 93, is easy to dismiss as a totally bland, whitebread 50s kind of guy, but I've seen him in several movies now and I rather like him. He plays a similar type of role in all his movies. He's not an alpha male, not a leader or dominating personality, but he is not a loser either, which often seems to be presented as the only two options available nowadays. He is competent--in The Caine Mutiny actually the most competent person on the ship, and as the sidekick in Brigadoon he demonstrated an ability to tapdance, which contrary to popular belief, is usually an indicator of further substantial capabilities--and his abilities and moral decisions often turn out to be as crucial to the success or failure of great enterprises as those of his leaders. This doubtless mirrors a general attitude that was prevalent in the whole society at the time. The Last Time I Saw Paris, another film he was in, is not a great movie, though he does decently portraying an alcoholic failed writer in it (I would know) who marries Elizabeth Taylor and proceeds to get eaten alive (I didn't marry Elizabeth Taylor at least--that would have been really ugly--but I can still relate). Unfortunately however I'm afraid the lesson one takes from the movie is that Paris, literature and bombshell women are no countries for earnest whitebread American boys to mess around in separated from a guided tour, lest they end up broken, quivering shells of human beings.

By the way Herman Wouk, the author of the novel The Caine Mutiny and a plethora of other doorstop bestsellers from the 50s to the 70s, is still alive (he's also 93). He is definitely not regarded as a contender for the Nobel Prize, and I don't think is even considered to belong to the realm of literature anymore, though he did win the Pulitzer way back in 1951.

I have to stop this post now, which means I will have to elaborate on my theory that the 1941 Judy Garland vehicle Babes on Broadway was Hollywood's answer to Triumph of the Will, which I had intended to do in here, at some later time. It is probably for the best given the delicacy of the subject manner, though the parallels of the two films are eerily and unignorably striking to me every time I consider the matter.

Hey, I have a follower! It is probably an error of some kind, but for the moment it is a pretty exciting development.