Pinocchio (1940)

USA, 88 minutes

Directors: Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen

Writers: Carlo Collodi, Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman Penner, Aurelius Battaglia, Bill Peet, Frank Tashlin

Music: Leigh Harline, Paul J. Smith, Frank Churchill, Edward H. Plumb

Animators / editors: numerous

Cast: Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Cliff Edwards, Evelyn Venable, Walter Catlett, Frankie Darro, Charles Judels, Mel Blanc, Walt Disney

In case you haven’t noticed, a lot of Pinocchios have been showing up around here lately. There’s a Disney remake starring Tom Hanks as Geppetto and a long-in-the-making version by Guillermo del Toro, both of which came out just last year. Haven’t seen them yet. This 1940 fully animated Disney version is the first of a long line of movie and TV adaptations. It has felt like the original to me most of my life, but the wooden puppet—pine, if you please, source of his name—and wannabe boy actually goes back to a series of stories by the Italian author Carlo Collodi published in the 1880s. Among other things, Collodi’s Pinocchio is something of a reprobate and in fact ends up hanged from a tree by the Fox and the Cat. The scene as reported by Wikipedia is desolate: “[A wind] beat the poor puppet from side to side, making him swing violently, like the clatter of a bell ringing for a wedding.... His breath failed him and he could say no more. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave a long shudder, and hung stiff and insensible.”

There’s nothing quite so bleak or explicit in this 1940 picture, where the Fox is known as J. Worthington Foulfellow, or Honest John, and the Cat is called Gideon and set up to be a version of Harpo Marx. The best cat in Pinocchio belongs to the craftsman Geppetto, who builds Pinocchio. Its name is Figaro and it is a feisty, charming tuxedo cat who almost steals the show for as long as we are in the Geppetto household. But I digress. Of course, no one is going to be hanged to finish a Disney cartoon (I think?) but, in 1940, when there was much less inclination to acknowledge sensitivities, you could still have Pleasure Island and the fate of the lost boys who are kidnapped there. It’s enough to give one pause for thinking about it too much, not least because it invokes the specter of missing children.

“The Other Side of the Mountain” (1963)

This long story by the French writer Michel Bernanos is pretty good, another quality yarn turned up by editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer in The Weird anthology. It is taken as a novel by many, maybe because of its ambitious scope. It starts as a wild and harrowing seagoing adventure and then turns into more classic weird in the second half. It reminded me some of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness,” both for the size of its vision and for its original take on lost world stories. There’s a lot of stuff in this story I’ve never seen or heard of before. It’s one of those where the greatest temptation is to tell people to just go read it. Things like the trees worshipping the mountain before dawn, in an unexplained eerie light, or the feel of a mouth and lips made of sand at the bottom of a river, are there to be discovered in the full pleasures of their contexts. The sea tale has almost nothing to do with the lost world we end up in, but it’s a rip-roaring way into the bigger story and I wouldn’t be without it. You get mutiny, madness, cannibalism, and more. The central relationship in this story is between an 18-year-old youth tricked into the voyage and the much older ship’s cook, a familiar setup for adventuring, protector/mentor and protege, grounding these strange events into a welcome human frame as things go along. Make no mistake, this story amounts to approximately weirdness squared. Yet it moves quickly and nimbly. It never lingers overlong on anything, perhaps because it knows well how many surprises it has around so many corners. Another touchpoint with the long Lovecraft are the strange statues found everywhere on the island (or continent, whatever it is), reminiscent of the intricate carvings in Lovecraft’s place. This is definitely world-building stuff, but the style of language is never ponderous, the way Lovecraft and much fantasy can be. This story tends to strip out a lot that’s ultimately unnecessary—we never learn anything about how the youth was tricked onto the voyage, other than that it happened that way—and keeps the narrative nicely propelled. Description necessarily gets dense on the island, but even there, generally, we’re only told what we need to know to keep the story moving in its intended direction, as per the title. I admit I struggle in some cases with the VanderMeers’ tastes, but they do have a real nose for the good ones.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.

Disappeared (2009-2022)

I happened to remember this old Discovery true-crime show about missing person cases which I used to watch a lot. I found it online complete except for most of the first season and that was all she wrote for a week or 10 days. I didn’t get to all of it, but I sampled all the seasons and saw a couple of them complete. The initial run lasted six seasons, starting in 2009. Then there was a break and three more seasons, then another break and season 10 ran just last year. It turns out I hadn’t seen all the old episodes by a long shot. The comforting voice of Christopher Crutchfield Walker provides the voiceover in all seasons except 7 (nonetheless a pretty good season). The show is built out of interviews with various principals—not always all of them—accompanied by reenactments, which can be confusing or distracting but also helpful. It’s fair to say the shows are often padded out to fit a one-hour TV time slot. Compare the much more highly efficient Forensic Files, which can practically pack in three intriguing cases in the time Disappeared spends on one. But in many ways I appreciate the slower pace of Disappeared, which offers time to let the complexities settle in. They are essentially different shows despite all the police procedure: Forensic Files explicitly knows whereas Disappeared explicitly does not know. In general, I think the early seasons are better. The cases seem to be chosen more for their inherent interest, while the later seasons, especially 10, are focused more on urgent public service in the mold of America’s Most Wanted and To Catch a Predator, offering a platform to help solve cases. Since Gabby Petito there have been increasing cries for the media to focus on BIPOC missing person cases rather than solely on young white women, which is fair and reasonable. We hear more about gross police incompetence in these later seasons, and in turn police don’t always cooperate with interviews, which is unheard of in the early years. It’s easy to come away with a sense of outrage and urgency in the later seasons and it’s not out of place for these cases.

I found a Wikipedia article that traces ongoing results of the cases, another reason I favor the older episodes. Those cases simply have a better chance of being resolved by now. I ran into plenty of “still missing” notices there, but sometimes there are developments and sometimes they are as surprising as any twists and turns captured in the show. To be clear, these resolutions can also be something like learning how a stage magician’s tricks work. At first, curiosity is satisfied but then it starts to feel stupid that you ever wanted to know. For what it’s worth, my interest in these cases is apparently more about the mystery of them, how strange they can seem, rather than the horrors and sadness of human brutality and trafficking. Many of these vanished are victims of various crimes, or suicides, or even people trying to start over—and many times it’s fairly obvious what has happened to them. Once in a while they are found alive. Often their bodies are never found, or haven’t been yet. Among other things I am amazed how hard it can be to find a body—sometimes the follow-up casually mentions it was finally found in an area that was supposedly searched carefully. Once or twice the body has clearly been moved there later. The ones who likely died from exposure are often lost in unimaginably vast and harsh terrains. It’s actually disconcerting how many missing person cases there seem to be. The show is also useful that way, reminding us of it. What happens to these people? I feel for the families and those left behind, of course—their grief is often the hardest part to watch. See enough of these episodes and they start to fit patterns. Near the end of many someone is often seen saying, “Well, someone knows what happened here and I just wish they would come forward with what they know.” Check the Wikipedia page—sometimes they did.

“The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change" (2007)

I liked this long story with the long title by Kij Johnson a lot. It’s perfectly unclear about some things—notably, “the Change”—but highly specific about other things, such as oral storytelling traditions of domesticated dogs. After the Change, domesticated animals can talk. It’s part of the Change. The result for many dogs (as well as other household and farm pets) is to be rejected and abandoned by their owners or caretakers. Johnson is likening their situations in some ways to slavery, which doesn’t entirely work, but she pays close attention to the way pets are often abused. Whether it’s “good training” or just lost temper episodes doesn’t matter as much now that they evidently have something to say about it. It’s somehow just not going well with many people. I like the way Johnson boils it down to primary evolutionary terms, the latest chapter in the uneasy alliance between wolves and monkeys. There’s a lot of natural pathos to this story too, as domesticated dogs are much closer to “cute” and further from their fiercer wolf origins. Johnson ducks what these dogs are saying that is so upsetting to people, which is probably the wise course. Anything specific could well have been disappointing. It’s enough to know they are being abandoned in large numbers. The really great part of this story are the stories the dogs tell. They come across like ancient myths, with certain tics and conventions always observed. The story is always about One Dog and the first sentence is always, “This is the same dog.” They’re numbered, starting with #2. A lot of odd business here and some quirks of style. The story is very big and very focused all at once, with vignettes from the history of monkeys and wolves. I found it in the Edited By anthology edited by Ellen Datlow, a kind of retrospective or self-selected greatest hits from Datlow’s long and prolific editing career. In turn, this story was published originally in a 2007 themed anthology called The Coyote Road: Trickster Tales, edited by Datlow and her long-time Year’s Best partner Terri Windling. I like how Johnson really fell all over it and how a themed anthology sparked one of the best stories from this century I’ve read yet. Caveat: I haven’t read that many stories from this century yet. But this is a good one—eerie, funny, heartbreaking, and effective. I also have to agree with Datlow’s afterword: “Here is where you find out that I’m a sucker for animal stories, especially bittersweet ones.”

Edited By, ed. Ellen Datlow
Read and/or listen to story online.

Letters From the Earth (1904-1909)

Here’s another of those Mark Twain pieces, like The Mysterious Stranger (which I am calling his last), cobbled together after his death from fragments of his writing and notes. The cobbler in this case is the historian and man of letters Bernard DeVoto, who published this in 1962 after one of Twain’s daughters finally relented and gave permission. It’s much like The Mysterious Stranger in many ways—jagged and inconsistent and focused with keen interest on the character of Satan, with whom Twain has obvious sympathies. Not for Satan’s love of evil but for his rejection by such a flawed God. At approximately this stage in Twain's career—call it the 20th century, or date it from the death of his wife in 1904—Twain is consumed and cannot really mask his contempt for God. These fragments boil with rage. This is a side of Twain I only dimly knew even existed, though of course his general mockery of Christianity often surfaced elsewhere. I generally took it as irreverence for effect, but I’m starting to think these issues were more important to him than I knew. He is scathing about the foolishness and contradictions of both Christianity and theism at large. He argues for the capriciousness and petty jealous character of the biblical God, mocking his omniscience and omnipotence as proof he hates us and does us all evil. The letters—barely connected fragments—are from the fallen Satan (lounging on Earth) to his former archangel companions Gabriel and Michael. Obviously Satan has some beef with God, but that doesn’t mean he’s not making good points. He focuses mainly on Adam and Eve and the Fall, and also on Noah and the flood, and a little on the contrasts and conflicts between the Old Testament and New, either one working to undermine the other, and adding up to nothing in Satan’s or Twain’s estimation. I’ve had discussions or arguments with Christians that resemble Twain’s here (like what was the big problem with Cain anyway?). They seem to tend to cite isolated passages in the Bible elsewhere. Twain gives us long passages of extreme violence he dredged from the Bible—I didn’t double-check him but I assume DeVoto did—as examples of God’s hypocrisy and low moral values. My sympathies are all with Twain here, on a cerebral level. But the intensity of his hatred is bracing and can be hard to take. He’s right and he's wrong too, just like those he criticizes. What a world, what a world!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Heart of the Congos (1977)

My experience with reggae is fairly conventional boomer business, more or less. I know a fair amount of Bob Marley’s catalog and I’ve spent a lot of time with Trojan boxes and similar compilations from the ‘60s and ‘70s. In approximately 2009, just past the downloading era online and at a time when blogging was losing most of whatever juice it ever had, I recall a blogathon, one of those blogging exercises going on, a cooperative venture where everyone on their blog chipped in reviews of something and linked to others—in this case, the Heart of the Congos album. I had never heard of it. It was released in 1977, produced by Lee Perry, and then revived in the mid-‘90s apparently with renewed interest in dub. Ever since, I have noticed it placing high on most lists I see of best reggae albums. Mojo’s “The 50 Best Reggae Albums Ever!” published earlier this month is typical: “Perfect dread harmonies amid a Lee Perry mix of staggering complexity and endless soft-edged density,” it notes of the album, ranked at #5. I played it those years ago, warmed to it some but couldn’t think of much to say, and thus it ended up on my long get-to list. Which brings us to today. The reviews that came of that blogathon were effusive but not very enlightening. In fact, I still don’t have much to say and I’m even still a little mystified, so I’ll be on my way soon. I can say that, if the music didn’t hit me right away, it has tended to sound better every time I play it. Songs like “La La Bam Bam” are almost purely musical, like Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September.” Who needs actual words when you have this gift for melody? I note that a number of these 10 songs, all credited on Wikipedia to Cedric Myton and Roydel Johnson with some input from Lee Perry, often sound familiar and I was taking some as covers. “Can’t Come In” may be the best example, a version of “Keep A-Knockin’,” which has its own murky origins. It’s most often credited to Little Richard, but Louis Jordan recorded a version well before that and apparently parts of the song go back even further into 19th-century minstrelsy. It’s a little odd to me that I don’t see more reference to these sources of the Congos, but I also have to say I’m not bothered much by them. A lot of my favorites on those Trojan boxes are Jamaican covers of US and UK pop music, the way they so completely absorb these influences into the island frame. I’m less sure how Heart of the Congos connects to dub—if anything it reminds me more of the juju grooves from Nigeria and King Sunny Ade and others. It’s quiet and restrained but somehow fiercely intense behind that, and always lovely—worth making a habit of because it seems to unfold and deepen more all the time.

The Passenger (1975)

Professione: reporter, Italy / France / Spain, 126 minutes

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Writers: Mark Peploe, Enrico Sannia, Michelangelo Antonioni, Miguel de Echarri, Peter Wollen

Photography: Luciano Tovoli

Editors: Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Arcalli

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Charles Mulvehill, Maria Schneider, Jenny Runacre, Ian Hendry, Steven Berkoff

There may be an argument that director, cowriter, and coeditor Michelangelo Antonioni (all 10 syllables of him) invented or contributed to the spy thriller movie aesthetic way back in 1960 with his elusive and allusive existential drama L’Avventura, which meanders to its points with long shots and museum-perfect mise en scene. From James Bond to The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and beyond these pictures throw random, seemingly unassorted data points in our face, thrusting us into the stories in medias res and not always giving us much help to keep up. I guess this occurred to me because looking at The Passenger recently I was struck by how well it works as a thriller, and remembered that Blow-Up, another mystery thriller (or “mystery thriller”), probably counts as my favorite Antonioni.

Jack Nicholson no doubt has something to do with it. Coming off Chinatown, he positively radiates crime thriller. But the story this time really explicitly involves spy thriller types of stuff. David Locke (Nicholson) is an international investigative reporter who is in Africa at the start of the picture covering a rebel guerrilla war. He meets and befriends a dissolute international playboy, Robertson, who seems to be a rich guy with a mysterious disease and no particular purpose. Robertson says with a grin that he’s not supposed to drink, offering Locke another drink and helping himself to one too. And by the evidence he really shouldn’t—he turns up dead the next time Locke sees him.

“Don’t You Dare” (1968)

This story by John Burke is not that good but it does bear interest as a barometer of the homicidal spouse story circa the late ‘60s. I did not know the publication date as I was reading it, but was struck by the rancidly bad marriage, which are generally milder in ‘40s and even ‘50s fare. Murderous marriages seem to be largely a postwar phenomenon that waned in about the ‘80s. The first wife here is a dominating, belittling terror who openly carries on with other men. Maybe there’s some Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in here too. That would make sense. The second wife starts out like a regular old helpmeet, bad enough of course, but then is apparently possessed by the spirit of the first. The first was drowned in an accident, swimming across the river to see a lover. Swimming across the river, as one does. There is a possibility that our meek and mild husband killed her in a rage and threw her in the river. But she was also known to enjoy the challenge of swimming near a dangerous junction, called a weir, where the current ran high. I learned that a weir is a kind of dam. Maybe it’s some British deal, but a lot of things are generally murky in this story—it often feels a little rushed. The marriage to the second wife is an example. Suddenly she is there and they are married. I should say, if I have to, that marriage is not a good thing in this story. That’s a given. The first wife is a terrible person, the second wife soon becomes one, and the husband turns into a homicidal maniac. The ghost story / supernatural side is just a plot convenience or there for the atmosphere. It’s also murky. The one thing that’s plain is the murder at the end, which is surprisingly brutal. It’s useful to remember the story is from 1968. Besides Burke’s busy novelization work in the ‘60s (Look Back in Anger, A Hard Day’s Night, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, etc.), he edited a series of anthologies and was also a regular in many others with his own stories. Maybe he’s better elsewhere. As for the homicidal spouse plot line, well, next stop is probably something like Texas Chain Saw Massacre, if that had a bad marriage in it. Now that I think of it, maybe it did.

65 Great Tales of the Supernatural, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.

Girl in the Picture (2022)

This may be the saddest and most wrenching true-crime story I have ever seen, vying with talhotblond and Dear Zachary in a competition where I don’t want to know the winner. One thing about true-crime stories is they are about things that more or less actually happened, squarely in the “you can’t make this up” category of things. Or you could make them up, but no one would believe you. This Netflix documentary delivers shocking twists and turns on the regular, launching the saga with the death of a 20-year-old woman on a lonesome highway in Arizona in 1990. The woman’s husband and kid hightail out of the region and so it all begins to unfold across years and decades. I will say I was annoyed with the style of the storytelling in the first third or so of this feature-length picture. It struck me as the “peekaboo” style of narrative, intimating it has things to tell us but not telling us, because too often it has little really to tell us. But no, this is actually an insanely complicated case and there were times I got a little lost in it, so in the end I appreciated getting the information one morsel at a time, carefully designed to clarify more than the obfuscations and delays of the peekaboo style. Girl in the Picture adds up to a story of great enormity and tremendous sadness. I don’t want to give much more than that away about it. Things are never quite what you think they are. It’s about the girl in the picture in the poster and her amazing indomitable spirit which is nonetheless trampled. It’s an elusive mystery and a terrible story of human depravity. It’s an indictment of the system and a cautionary tale about human predators—they are capable of more than you can even suspect, at least if you’re as naïve as I may be. It breaks your heart just to learn what they do. It’s not giving away too much to say it is heartening in the end but any feel-good was accompanied for me by a surprising amount of hard crying. I mean, maybe I was in the mood or something. Or maybe documentaries like this just do things to me and you.

Jeff Buckley’s Grace (2005)

Daphne Brooks’s entry in the 33-1/3 series is more along the lines of an academic monograph, with dozens of footnotes for each chapter. I’m not fond of this approach—too much compulsive checking only to find “Ibid.” or its moral equivalent—but it’s a sign I appreciate of how much writers are really allowed by the series editors to do these treatises any old way they want. Brooks is an actual academic too, currently with a position at Yale. Her encounters with Jeff Buckley and his only album took place when she was a graduate student at UCLA. Her various experiences bring a nice personal touch to an intense meditation on Buckley and his sources. Buckley and Grace have mostly eluded me beyond the cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which exists on a plane unto itself and is basically as much of the album as I’ve known. Brooks identifies Buckley’s sources as including Ray Charles, Judy Garland, Mahalia Jackson, Nusret Fateh Ali Khan, Led Zeppelin, Edith Piaf, Nina Simone, and others. She frequently attempts to make a case for Jeff Buckley’s “punk-rock soul,” which I’m not buying. She describes a formative period for him in New York in the early ‘90s when he regularly played solo coffeehouse gigs. That sounds more like a beat to me. The book has opened up the album for me more, though I remain dubious—not about his great talent, which is much apparent, but about whether it’s for me. I must say it sounds better to me now, studying it with her, but nothing is close to “Hallelujah,” which in spite of my other doubts I have always heard as one of the most beautiful tracks ever recorded by anyone, a kind of miracle. Brooks does not get to it until the very end of her monograph and then does not have much to say about it compared to the rest. She wisely seems to assume it speaks for itself. But I would say the rest of the album benefits from her explications and heartfelt support. I also learned a lot of things I didn’t know, clearing up some misconceptions I had. His father Tim Buckley died when Jeff was 8 or 9 and Jeff remembered meeting him only twice. It's really amazing given how much the two have in common in terms of their music. Certainly Jeff had opportunity to study Tim closely, though it could not have been without pain. But Brooks makes a more convincing argument that Jeff charted his own way, and remains altogether an interesting figure himself.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

The Shape of Water (2017)

USA / Mexico, 123 minutes

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Writers: Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor

Photography: Dan Laustsen

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Editor: Sidney Wolinsky

Cast: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Doug Jones, Richard Jenkins, Michael Stuhlbarg, Lauren Lee Smith, Nick Searcy, David Hewlett

I took a second look at The Shape of Water the other day and found my original review basically covered all the main points I have to make (it’s linked down there at #5 in the list below). It’s still a monster movie that makes me cry. The period detail—early-‘60s US Cold War—is still on the nose (in the Urban Dictionary sense of “unsubtle or overly and clumsily direct” as opposed to the older sense, which is its opposite, “precisely correct” ... how do these things in language happen? Compare the verb “table”). And Sally Hawkins particularly but the whole cast is still tremendously good. After Pacific Rim it’s probably my favorite movie I’ve seen by director and cowriter Guillermo del Toro. So see the movie. Read my original review.

This second time through I had occasion to think about my problems with del Toro, whose work has been so disappointing so often I have tended to avoid it, and thus have many many gaps with him. I just realized now, for example, he did Nightmare Alley (which came out totally in the middle of Covid ... I still haven’t been back to a movie theater, but soon). Anyway, I know this is chatty and all over the place, I have plans to write about Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio soon and I should probably look at del Toro’s Pinocchio for that. Oh heck, I probably should have looked at it for this. A second look at The Shape of Water helped clarify some of the problem. It’s not so much anything to do with del Toro. It’s on me, or mostly.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)

I had never read the original collection of Raymond Carver stories, as edited by Gordon Lish and published in 1981. It propelled Carver to elite literary status as a short story writer and so-called minimalist. It’s not hard to see why this collection was taken as a cultural milestone and literary sensation. These stories hit hard and keep moving. It’s the world of the impoverished uneducated underclass, but the voice is sharp with wit and lively with close observation. I know there’s controversy around Lish’s editing, as Carver later published revisions of some of these stories in Cathedral and Where I’m Calling From, in many ways restorations of what he originally wrote. But this book and these stories all jammed together are so crackling good I’m willing to take it as a successful collaboration and leave it at that. We can see now that Lish was at pains to expunge all sentiment, and that sometimes Carver wanted to write sentimental stories. This very short book captures an exquisitely perfect moment that would not be possible to continue, this minimalism, without high risk of going obvious, arch, and/or empty. In retrospect, Cathedral was the only way forward. But for the moment these 17 stories are gripping, poignant, weird, and compulsively readable. For one thing, they set up a context where “Popular Mechanics” finally actually works. It’s the shortest piece here, a two-pager that is rather obvious taken on its own or in its longer earlier and later versions. Lish has argued he is the author of the voice of Raymond Carver. That’s not entirely true but it’s not entirely wrong either. He may be the author of perhaps the most pungent and perhaps the most heartless shading of Carver’s voice. Carver was reporting in from the front lines of the economic shifts and dislocations that resulted in Reaganomics and a hollowed-out middle class, on the ground watching it happen. Lish is there to throttle back the impulse to compassion. That leaves us with 17 shards of lived experience which ring true, every sentence. Divorce, alcoholism, lost children—they’re all here, showing us what it looks like and feels like in its bewildering reality. I still think Where I’m Calling From is the best place to start with Carver, and Cathedral is a necessary stop. But so is this one, with the long Carver-esque title which Lish picked out of one of the stories, renaming the story (one of the longest and best) and the collection. Carver had wanted to call it Beginners. Make no mistake, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a collaboration between editor and writer—I think that’s the credit Lish wants too. Ultimately a very successful one. Essential.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

Les parapluies de Cherbourg, France / West Germany, 91 minutes

Director/writer: Jacques Demy

Photography: Jean Rabier

Music: Michel Legrand

Editors: Anne-Marie Cotret, Monique Teisseire

Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Anne Vernon, Nino Castelnuovo, Marc Michel, Ellen Farner, Mireille Perrey

Maybe I’m late to it, but I like to think I like musicals as much as the next guy, especially those classics from the 1940s and 1950s, often from the MGM studio. But I’m not sure I’ve seen many that are as willfully dedicated to the conceits of the genre as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, with the possible exception of the 2012 Les Miserables. There is no spoken dialogue here, only singing—every last doggone line. It’s possible there was some straight dialogue in Les Mis, I can’t recall for sure. I was too busy resisting any charms it might have had. But I know for sure there is no dialogue in Umbrellas. In both, necessary exposition can be dialed all the way down to some dialogue that is merely sing-songy chant, but generally no one is talking and everyone is always singing. That takes some getting used to.

The unusual and memorable color palette of Umbrellas is another feature that tends to stick in memory, along with the general weirdness. Let’s be clear. This is a really weird movie. The colors are bright and unnatural but also strangely muted, verging on sickening blasts of pastel, ideal for single frames and screenshots. What makes this movie work as well as it does—something about it I didn’t entirely catch the first time through several years ago—is how expertly it works its self-conscious tropes. Set in a romantic harbor town far from Paris, the story is divided into three parts. “The Departure” details the puppy-like intrigue of two adolescent lovers, Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) and Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), whose union is disapproved by Genevieve’s mother, Madame Emery (Anne Vernon). “The Absence” focuses on the changes for them after Guy is drafted and goes to the war in Algeria for two years, leaving behind a forlorn would-be bride. And “The Return” is the resolution, set a few years later. In other words, boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, and a happy ending. Well, maybe we’ll have to call this one bittersweet—it’s nonetheless fully on the romance spectrum.

“The Man Who Spoke in Rhyme” (1969)

This story by Ray Russell has a bit of a tangled history, at least in terms of its title. ISFDB is adamant that it is “The Man Who Spoke in Rhyme,” the title as it was originally published in Ellery Queen magazine—a strange place to find it in the first place. However, the preference of Russell, who died in 1999, appears to be “The Vendetta.” He may have even made some revisions toward that end after the original publication. (For whatever reason, the storytellers at youtube call it just “Vendetta.”) The Penguin collection Haunted Castles, with a foreword by Guillermo del Toro (!), came out circa 2013 and has the title Russell’s way. But I have to admit I’m a fan of the original title too, because I like that aspect of the story and think it’s worth calling attention to. It turns out the man is a very bad man, and he does speak in rhyme—doggerel, really. “But pray go on, although it chill your marrow—a half-told tale’s a bow without an arrow,” etc. A rhyming man is typical of Russell’s many flourishes. He wrote in the latter half of the 20th century but imagined some gothic, infinitely sophisticated past he often attempted to recreate. This story is in the form of a letter—the epistolary form—written “probably in 1876 or 1877” and detailing an incident many years older than that. Layers of distancing shove it ever further into the past. As always, Russell’s language is witty and to the point. The letter writer is in Venice (of course), shuddering at the advent of telephones, which he puts in scare quotes (“telephones”). It proceeds like a letter in a regular correspondence, with news of the weather and reference to other letters. And, finally, to the story at hand. There is the Count, the man who speaks in rhyme, and his beautiful sister of marrying age. And there is an artist, a Spaniard, who shows up at the Count’s castle and wants to paint the sister as Eve before the Fall. The Count is weird about his sister, jealous and possessive, but for some reason he feels OK about this artist. Then it turns out the artist and the Count’s sister are using their modeling and painting time for making love behind closed doors. Eventually the Count catches them in flagrante (my term). They’re both naked. There’s no point denying anything. They marry. She becomes pregnant. At this point the story becomes complicated, although Russell has set it up well. But the twist involves a lot of explanation which is there to be discovered. Now that I think about it, I guess another argument for the original title is that in many ways “The Vendetta” gives away the twist—that this is a revenge story, in approximately the same way the movie Oldboy is a revenge story. The vengeance is admirably thought through, patiently anticipated, and instantly devastating. Then the letter closes cheerfully, as letters do. It’s classic Russell.

Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories
Listen to story online.