The first time I saw this movie, I was a teenager obsessed with Sting and The Police. It must have been on VHS, although I can’t even imagine where I would have rented it in our small Tennessee town. I see myself watching it in the middle of the night, in the dark, legs crossed with a blanket wrapped around me, my body leaning toward the flickering screen. It may not have been that way, but that’s the way I remember it.
I completely failed to appreciate it then.
But now, decades on, I am swept up in the look, feel, and sound of this snapshot of British mod culture. And I am reminded, almost to tears, of the painful, joyous, restlessness of youth. What a great movie.
“Back Street of Tokyo,” by artist Kiyoshi Saito, 1947. Saito was among the most important artists of the 20th century, in part because he was at the vanguard of printmaking when painting was still the dominant medium. His catalog is deep and wide. I hope to see his work in person sometime. The screen is an imperfect filter.
The last time I was at the movies, I saw Gene Tierney’s “Leave Her to Heaven” at the annual Belcourt noir festival. It was January. I met my friend Polly there, and ran into another colleague. It was pretty much a perfect movie going experience.
I had seen the movie before and loved it. Gene Tierney is heart-stoppingly beautiful here as everywhere, and received her only Oscar nomination, which was well-deserved. And the sets, cinematography, and technicolor are spectacular. Watching it on a giant screen, from a red velvet seat, in a room filled with other classic film fans, well that was just perfect.
Being an introvert and a homebody, my social life hasn’t changed all that much in pandemic land. But I miss going to the movies. A lot. If I had known pandemic was coming, I would have gone to see something, anything, when I was in New York the week before the shutdown. But I missed that chance. Since the Ziegfeld and Paris theaters closed there, I don’t make the effort I used to.
But when we are doing things again safely, the first place I will be is the AMC with the recliners five minutes away. I can’t wait. #genetierney #classicmovies #oldhollywood
This is “Sun Setting Over a Lake,” by JMW Turner. I saw it in person a couple of weeks ago at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville. It was my first cultural outing since March. I know there are millions of people who are really happy to get back into football stadiums or to see games on TV, and I am happy for them. But this is my football. I went with my daughter on my birthday, and it was the best way I could have spent it.
I didn’t know Turner’s art well, and expected galleries full of oil paintings of boats on water and landscapes. There was that, but also things like the above, that are more impressionistic. And also simple, charming sketches and watercolors. The older I get, the more I appreciate simple things done well.
One thing I plan to do in The After is go to smaller galleries and look at new art, and maybe even buy something within my (very) modest budget. I have a theory that there is way more talent in the world than there are consumers for it these days. I’m worried about artists in this world. We need them.
This is Henri Matisse’s “La Fenetree Fermee,” or “The Closed Window.” I saw it last week at the Frist Art Museum, as part of the show “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas and Their Times: The Mellon Collection of French Art.”
It’s a hotel room in Nice, where Matisse lived and painted just after World War I. It stopped my heart in the gallery. I couldn’t decide if it’s hopeful, with the curtain pulled back and the exterior view, or sad, with that closed window. Or maybe it’s neutral, just an interesting view with a red carpet. At any rate, it was my favorite in a quite stunning collection. The Mellons knew how to spend their money.
The exhibit closes soon so I went at lunchtime and spent just about an hour in the galleries. I’ll go one more time if I can. I took photos of eighteen paintings and their accompanying text boxes, and I’ll look at them a bit more closely online and read about the artists with whom I’m not familiar. Most of the exhibit is Impressionist and Post-Impressionist; all of the works are accessible and not particularly challenging intellectually. I know there are art aficionados who dismiss them because of that, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about art to be concerned with such things. It is freeing to be drawn to a painting just because of what it looks like. A hotel room in Nice. A closed window.
Nearly fifty years after she left the family farm of her childhood, Virginia Bell Dabney was compelled to write a memoir. She and her two sisters were raised on a Virginia farm during the hardscrabble years of the 1920s and 1930s. Her determined, independent mother managed to make a life for her famiy, despite hardships such as the Depression and a fire that destroyed their home.
This was a happy accident. I was looking for a different title at the library and pulled this from the shelf. It’s a memoir, written about a woman’s Depression-era childhood fifty years after the fact. Author Virginia Dabney’s gifts are a clear eye, a gift for storytelling, and a remarkable memory.
Great childhood memoirs for me evoke for the reader that sense of alienation that kids used to feel, when the adult world was a separate and mysterious sphere. Every kid feels misunderstood and at least a little bit neglected, or they used to. The author felt that way, making her way into the strange world of grown-ups over the course of the book. Dabney’s world was small but deep, a farmhouse in the country, animals, a garden, a creek...life. Fun things happened and terrible things happened; her mother anchored it all.
My own childhood in the 1970s looked nothing like this on the surface, but this memoir evoked strong nostalgia just the same. It is the way of a book that finds its way to you by accident, that flash of recognition. Someone else is like me. It’s why we read.
Directed by Vincent Sherman. With Bette Davis, Claude Rains, Walter Abel, George Coulouris. Popular and beautiful Fanny Trellis is forced into a loveless marriage with an older man, Jewish banker Job Skeffington, in order to save her beloved brother Trippy from an embezzlement charge, and predictable complications result.
This movie embodies for me why Bette Davis became such a huge star, and remains one of the most important actors in Hollywood history. She wasn’t the first choice to play Fanny Trellis. The part was turned down by both Merle Oberon and Hedy Lamarr, both more traditionally beautiful women. But it’s hard to imagine either of those cool beauties willingly made up to look old and haggard, to become not just old on screen, but ugly. Bette Davis tore it up, almost gleefully.
In the movie, Davis is young, beautiful, and broke, her family money gone. She marries older businessman Claude Rains because if she doesn’t, her brother will go to jail for embezzling money from Rains, his boss. Rains is in love with her, and marries her knowing she does not return his feelings. Over the course of their marriage, she humiliates him at every turn until eventually they live apart. He goes into service during the War, and it is what happens during and after that comprise the emotional weight of the movie, all in the final few moments.
I think you have to really love traditional Hollywood melodramas to get into this one, and I understand how, to today’s modern sensibilities, Davis’ acting style is over the top and insincere. But I watch a lot of old movies, and I love her. She is never not fully immersed, never unwilling to look bad or ugly or cruel. She was an actress and a star.
Somerset Maugham was an extremely popular commercial writer in his time whose books are now often considered classics, if minor ones. This is probably his most literary novel, although “Of Human Bondage” and “The Razor’s Edge” are likely more read now. Despite being published almost 100 years ago, the writing feels contemporary, probably because his style is a bit stripped down. Although highly descriptive and with fully realized characters, Maugham does a great deal with few extraneous words. That’s the kind of writing that impresses me most, that feels the hardest to do.
I was utterly relieved to find that the dated sexism of other classics I’ve recently read doesn’t come into play here. Kitty Foyle is shallow and vain as a person, not as a representative of a gender. Without a spoiler, I will say that the somewhat hopeful ending of the book is well-earned and quite moving.
After re-reading the novel, I watched the movie starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, and Liev Schreiber. It was filmed in China, and I recalled that there were compromises made in order to achieve that. The movie is quite good, with Shreiber in particular making a strong impression in a blustering performance. Watch it some rainy afternoon.
Directed by Peter Godfrey. With Ann Sheridan, Dennis Morgan, Jack Carson, Alexis Smith. Shiftless playboy Tom Collier lives to jump from party to party--until he meets photographer Christie Sage. Through Christie, Tom takes over the ownership of The Bantam, a liberal magazine which opposes everything his family represents. As Tom and Christie's relationship deepens, love blooms and he proposes to her. Realizing that she could never fit in with Tom's social circle, Christie says no, ...
I wonder if I will ever run out of movies from the 1940s that I’ve never heard of but turn out to be better than average. It makes me sad just to think of it.
The story is good and the screenplay is fantastic. I note that the Epstein brothers were credited for additional dialogue, and I wonder if that’s why. Star Dennis Morgan is less known today, although he was incredibly popular in the era. You might remember him from “Christmas in Connecticut.” Alexis Smith plays his scheming, greedy wife perfectly.
Not to be all superficial, but this is a great clothes movie (gowns by Milo Anderson) and there is also a house in Connecticut, which of course I loved. I’ve always wanted a house in Connecticut because of these movies. They always have these enormous windows looking onto lawns, and chintz everywhere, and a big fireplace. Heaven.
There’s also a message in the movie, and it frankly depressed me because the message is true and right and completely dates the movie as hopelessly out of touch. Maybe the world never was that way, I can’t know, but it sure isn’t that way now.
Directed by John Huston. With Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter. A divorcée falls for an over-the-hill cowboy who is struggling to maintain his romantically independent lifestyle.
Holy cow. How did I never know how great this movie is?
Okay, so Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift worked together here for the only time. She famously said that he was the only person she’d ever met who was in worse shape than her. They were both immensely talented actors, and their bond in this movie is so tender and beautiful it just breaks your heart.
And then there’s Clark Gable, who is fantastic in a part that requires depth and vulnerability. And Eli Wallach. And Thelma Ritter. Every actor in this movie down to the bartender at the rodeo is perfectly and thoughtfully cast.
The cinematography was so incredible that I went and looked up the person responsible, who turned out to be one Russell Metty, who deserves a full post about his body of work. He transitioned from film to television in an interesting way, and had a long and successful career.
This movie is written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston. The shoot was famously catastrophic. Huston had a gambling budget built into his contract and often stayed out all night taking advantage of it. The heat was unbearable. Miller and Monroe were in the midst of divorcing. His mistress was on set during the filming, and he sent Monroe pages of rewrites nightly. A doctor was on set because of Monroe and Clift’s health problems and addiction.
And yet they collectively made an incredible movie.
Is it still possible to leave one life and enter another? Is it still possible to drift into something? To move far away and find work and do it for a while and then move on to somewhere else? I think so, and hope so. There are seasonal workers who follow harvests. There are people who live in their RVs, moving around the country for seasonal work. This is a side curiosity of mine, I guess. I’d like to travel with some of those folks, especially out West.
If you like Annie Dillard or May Sarton, or Cormac McCarthy’s Western novels, then you maybe should read this book. It’s lovely.
This is Vivian Leigh from “Waterloo Bridge,” 1940. Her iconic work in “Gone With the Wind” and “A Streetcar Named Desire” has overshadowed her other roles, which is a shame, because her acting is phenomenal in every film she did, including this one. It’s a true tearjerker, directed by Mervyn LeRoy and co-starring Robert Taylor.
Those who like to quibble with wardrobe and accent anachronisms will have a great time with this one. But it’s generally considered an overlooked gem, and that’s how I received it. The cinematography is gorgeous, and that one scene in the club (You’ll know it when you see it.) deserves all the love lavished on it in IMDB user comments.
Directed by Byron Haskin. With Lizabeth Scott, Don DeFore, Dan Duryea, Arthur Kennedy. Through a fluke circumstance a ruthless woman stumbles across a suitcase filled with $60,000, and she is determined to hold onto it even if it means murder.
Lizabeth Scott was never a huge star, and she had a relatively short career, but it’s worth seeking out any of her films. She was a strikingly beautiful blonde, with an inner reserve that made her especially great at femme fatale roles. Scott also had one of those husky voices, like Lauren Bacall, that is just made for moody black and white films. She would have a made a great Hitchcock heroine; it’s a shame they never worked together.
This movie, “Too Late for Tears,” was lost for some time and fairly recently restored. It’s a great noir film, with Scott playing a woman whose avarice takes over when $60,000 of stolen money literally falls into her lap. There are lots of twists, with the last one being the best, and a nice buildup of tension as we watch her machinations to keep the money. How far will she go?
I guess I should mention the poster above, of the man slapping the woman full across the face. It’s pretty shocking these days. I wonder if it was shocking then, or if anyone even noticed.
Brittain’s study of her experience of the first world war as a nurse and then victim of loss remains a powerful anti-war and feminist statement
There were times when reading this book that I would look up and around at my clean, well-ordered life and shudder with relief. So vivid is the imagery of Vera Brittain’s prose that one becomes deeply immersed in field hospitals and trenches of World War 1, living with her for word from the front even as she nurses soldiers back to life or eases them into death.
For me, this book is successful and important on many levels. Because she waited 17 years to write and publish it, the writing has a perspective and maturity to it that really helps the reader to feel what she lost. And she lost pretty much everything.
Because Brittain was an early feminist, one reads about her efforts to live as fully and independently as men with something like awe. She was already a trailblazer as a female scholar at Oxford. But she could not live in that safe world while her brother, fiance and friends were fighting. So she became a nurse, and saw the very worst of what war does to people. Because the book is based largely on letters (What has history lost by the death of letter writing?), we feel the war in a fuller sense, as she lived it in hospitals and with her family back home, and as the soldiers lived it in their letters to her.
It’s always puzzled me that World War II overshadows World War I by a wide margin in scholarship and popular culture. It was World War I that ushered in what has steadily become more and more an age of irony, detachment, and scorn for any romanticism. The poetry that Vera Brittain writes, and that her fiance sends her from the front, is often flowery in a way that is completely dismissed today as sentimental drivel. But pay close attention to the imagery, which is devastating in its realism. The reality of war pushes out naive ideals of heroism, patriotism, and innate human goodness. Face evil head on and then encapsulate it in a poem to your fiance, along with some dried violets plucked from around the body of a dead soldier. We are all disillusioned now, as a matter of course. It’s tiresome.
Because Brittain was a pacifist and in the public eye, we see how, after the war, politics were messy and the desire to never repeat WWI led to an astounding range of vocal political parties and peace movements. This book is the first thing that has helped me to understand the appeasement policies of the 1930′s that are today, probably justifiably, reviled. But an entire generation of young men were wiped out in World War I. The few survivors looked around and wondered which cost was greater, peace or more death and destruction. Hitler made that choice for them.
Brittain traveled through Eastern Europe and saw for herself the early warnings of Fascism and the persecution of Jews. Because she’d been widely known for her pacifism, she fell out of favor during WWII and after, even though she supported the war throughout. It wasn’t until the 1970s that this book was rediscovered and began its journey to the well-deserved status of classic.
It’s not enough for me for a book to be “important.” It has to be readable. This book is sometimes funny. It’s always observant. Brittain had a gift for recognizing the absurdity in life, and the ability to see her own self honestly. She writes beautifully of her privileged and sheltered life before the war, and even more achingly beautifully of the war itself and the people in it.
I didn’t learn until after reading the book that a movie based on it came out just last year. I watched it, and enjoyed it, particularly Alicia Vikander as Brittain and Kit Harington as her fiance Roland Leighton. It’s well-done, but it can’t touch the heart wrenching pain of the book. Read it.
How Twilight and its backlash are still shaping pop culture.
I think these books are terrible, and I read all of them when my teenage niece was into them. They’re poorly written, and the relationship between Edward and Bella is truly creepy. Don’t get me wrong. I understand why some teenage girls love it. I might have loved it as a teenage girl. That’s a very scary time. Strange men look you up and down in public. People feel free to comment on your developing body. The world suddenly feels bigger and more dangerous. I once snapped to a man in Wal-Mart who was ogling my niece, “She’s 11, you perv!”
Anyway, at that age, the idea of the person you love and desire also being someone who can take care of you in every single way and give you undivided attention, well, it’s intoxicating. I won’t comment on the grown women who became so invested in Team Edward. I don’t get that at all.
One could argue that Edward’s controlling nature came from his heightened senses making him hyper aware of the dangers that humans can blunder into. One could point out that, once Bella is changed, their relationship changes dramatically. They become equal partners. He is no longer consumed with her physical protection. They face the Volturi together. And that’s true, but the problem is, the swoony nature of their romance in the public imagination all takes place well before that, when she’s a teenage human and he’s immortal and ageless. Again, creepy.
But, I don’t think the movies are bad. And the primary reason for that is that whoever cast them was either incredibly smart or incredibly lucky. Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are both fantastic actors, as their post-Twilight careers and choices show. You watch them as a teenage girl and a vampire and you believe something that should be unbelievable. That’s talent. Similarly, the supporting cast and the physical settings help to give the movies a feeling of realism. The movies are at their worst by far when they are away from Forks. When I’m thinking about whether a movie is successful, I try to think about the choices made by the director and how many they got right. These movies had four directors (Catherine Hardwicke, Chris Weitz, David Slade, Bill Condon) but as a body they hold together well stylistically. With the source material available to work with, it’s frankly sort of amazing to me that the movies are as good as they are.
In short, skip the books and watch the movies if you’re interested at all in the series. And you will not hear that from me very often.
The book is “Swanson on Swanson,” and it’s known as one of the better Hollywood memoirs. And it really, really delivers. I knew two things about Gloria Swanson, probably the same two things everyone else knows. 1. She was Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard.” 2. She had a famous affair with Joe Kennedy.
The book is an absolute pleasure to read, well-written and filled with fascinating anecdotes about early Hollywood.
Swanson married several times, with only the final one being a happy partnership. Her last husband was a reporter who helped her write this book, a big bestseller when it came out.
More than just about anything else I have ever read, this book drove home for me just how inconvenient it was for a woman in Hollywood to be extremely smart at that time. The men who ran the industry wanted beauty and submissiveness. Time and again, Swanson was punished for standing up for herself, for asking questions, for demonstrating business acumen. It cost her roles and it cost her relationships.
After reading the book, I re-watched “Sunset Boulevard.” I’d always thought of her performance as borderline campy, with her bejeweled fingers clutching William Holden’s arm. But after reading about her experience on the set, and what she was going for with the role, and what it meant to her, I could see much more depth to it, more pathos and more to be pitied, even before the final scene.
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