A High Wind in Jamaica (1929)

This novel by Richard Hughes is a great and unsettling adventure story involving seven kids from two families living in Jamaica as colonialists. From the summaries it’s easy to reach the conclusion that this is some kind of YA story. It is decidedly not that. Five of these kids are the children of an English couple there shortly after the British empire emancipation of slaves in 1834. The plantation system with its mansions and slave quarters is still evident, but in a state of ongoing decay. Big things are going on here. First there is an earthquake and then there is a hurricane. The descriptions are vivid and unique, playing to Hughes’s strengths as a writer. The parents decide Jamaica is no safe place for children. They pack off their five, along with two from another family, sending them back to England. The ship, however, is attacked by pirates, who take the children. It’s a decision they soon regret as the kids take over the ship for playing purposes. They are so young they don’t understand their danger, which is real, as a few surprising and even shocking incidents demonstrate. Part of me was surprised the pirates didn’t just throw the kids off the boat, but on another level I can buy it. Even pirates must blanch at killing children. I admit the general premise sounds like it could work as a Disney fantasy type of feel-good movie. But much of what is going on here—by suggestion as well as direct revelation—is not even PG-13 but full on very close to R. The two oldest in the family of five are the main characters. They are about 12 and 9. The tale is great, not a bit sentimental, and Hughes’s writing is impeccable. The descriptions may be his strong suit, but the pacing is just as good—the story never stops plowing relentlessly forward. And it’s full of things you just can’t expect, though they make perfect sense as they go down and wrench the story in new directions. A novel like this is the reason I’m willing to go through the Modern Library’s arguably predictable list of the best novels of the 20th century. I’d heard of this one before, and heard the fulsome praise too, but was inclined to discount it. Don’t make my mistake. Put A High Wind in Jamaica high on your list to read.

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

Red Harvest (1929)

Dashiell Hammett’s comical (as I take it) Red Harvest casts a long shadow. It’s arguably the first hard-boiled detective novel, a subgenre that dominated mystery fiction across the 20th century and into the 21st. It was also influential on the movies Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars, at least via a bank shot off Hammett’s own The Glass Key, serialized in 1930. Akira Kurosawa, director of Yojimbo, a certain influence on director Sergio Leone, said The Glass Key, not Red Harvest, inspired his movie. Be that as it may, they all involve corrupt townships which an outsider manipulates into open and devastating warfare. As always with Hammett and much hard-boiled detective fare (the exceptions are James M. Cain and Jim Thompson) I tend to get confused with the typical blizzards of characters, motives, and fedoras that can be virtually indistinguishable. Characters can tend to be embodiments or markers of motive. It’s still fun to read from time to time, and reminds me it’s been too long since I looked at Hammett (or Raymond Chandler). I call this one comical because it is often funny and what else are you supposed to do? It’s a bacchanalia of blood-simple depravity. A fictional town in Montana named Personville (which many call Poisonville) is overrun by bootleggers and gangsters. Our unnamed first-person narrator, the so-called “Continental Op” and a regular in Hammett fiction, arrives and sets the various factions in town against one another. They quickly get to killing every time. One of my favorite jokes is a paragraph where our guy adds up all the corpses in his head and comes to the number 16. Shortly down the road is a chapter called “The Seventeenth Victim.” And it doesn’t stop there. The spoiler would be telling you who survives. Red Harvest is short, under 200 pages, and Hammett remains one of the greatest writers of the form. Yes, sometimes the language may seem too chiseled and/or overly active. But come on. How many writers ever err on that side? Most of them, like me, run on at will and leave all their wordy little darlings in place. It’s possible some may find Red Harvest too dark and grim. But that’s only because of all the death. Lighten up, folks!

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

Dodsworth (1929)

I was reading Sinclair Lewis anyway, and I liked the 1936 movie directed by William Wyler based on Dodsworth, so I decided to give the novel a try. The Wikipedia article sees it as a novel of Europe and the US, Old World and New, in the Henry James tradition. Yes, it’s that, but I think more centrally it is about middle-class—really, upper-class—marriage in the US. Samuel Dodsworth is an auto manufacturer tycoon who has made his nut and retired at age 50. He built his auto company up from the ground and has now sold out—not to General Motors by name, but it’s GM. The elder of his two kids, a daughter, is getting married, and his son is a junior at Yale or something. His wife now wants to go to Europe and roam for a long time, like months and years. She feels they deserve it. Particularly she deserves it. So a fair amount of traipsing around goes on here, along with the people they meet—in London, Paris, Berlin, Italy. Written in 1927 and 1928, published in 1929—the year before Lewis won his Nobel (which specifically cited Babbitt)—Dodsworth is curiously silent about the rise of fascism, which might have still had a relatively low profile in the late ‘20s. But there’s also no mention in the Berlin scenes of any calamitous economic conditions. Fascism comes up as a background item in Italy, but it’s all quite anodyne. I chalk it up to the difficulty of reading the sweep of history in any present moment, at which few are actually very good. The comparisons of European and US customs and manners seems more accurate to me than those of Henry James, who could be more soft-headed and romantic about the Old World. Lewis had already demonstrated his keen eye for Midwestern white man business ways and how the good ol’ boy stuff works here—still works here. So there are lots of interesting scenes with Dodsworth trying to find himself somewhere in between. He’s a creative spirit, even as a tycoon, which is not 100% believable, but the suspension of disbelief was worth the price here for me. Lots of things creak along the way, but the dissolving marriage is handled particularly well, as affairs of the heart (chaste as they may be in terms of actual sex) begin to happen on their travels and the future of the marriage seesaws precariously. Dodsworth is made a little too much the hero for my taste, and his wife a little too hateful, but I think the novel makes its points candidly and well about the difficulties of marriage. I would compare it favorably to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, which travels similar paths. Lewis is your basic 20th-century workaday social realist. He may not have the best eye for US class distinctions—in fact, he doesn’t as a general rule—but he gets lots of details right about humdrum rituals we still know.

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

Pandora’s Box (1929)

Die Büchse der Pandora, Germany, 133 minutes

Director: G.W. Pabst

Writers: Frank Wedekind, Ladislaus Vajda, Joseph Fleisler, G.W. Pabst

Photography: Gunther Krampf

Music: An orchestra

Editor: Joseph Fleisler

Cast: Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer, Gustav Diessl, Carl Goetz, Krafft-Raschig, Daisy D’Ora, Alice Roberts

Pandora’s Box is one more movie classic that comes in many bewildering versions: just at a gross level based on running times, for example, Halliwell’s has it at 97 minutes, IMDb puts it at 109 minutes, and the one on the Criterion Channel goes 133 minutes. Then the soundtrack—for a picture of the silent era in the silent style, with intertitles—offers its own set of problems. Well, soundtracks for silent pictures always do, don’t they? Descriptions of the Criterion DVD, now out of print and going for circa $210 each, claim four separate soundtracks. But there is only one online, an orchestral version. I thought I recognized some of the themes as well-known, but that might have been only because they recurred regularly and became familiar across a long movie.

Though it failed in its time, the chief attractions of Pandora’s Box now are the star, Louise Brooks, a certain “it” girl of that era, and the director, G.W. Pabst, whose name I remember from film classes in college. Otherwise I don’t know his work well. The story is about a young woman, Lulu (Brooks), a flapper type of the 1920s with a bobbed haircut and super-sexualized air. She may have loose morals—she may even be a prostitute—but she exudes sex so much that women as well as men are attracted to her, struck dumb in her presence. Lulu has affairs with men in high positions and lives a carefree life but gets caught up in murder plots and intrigue. One thing follows another in tacked-on fashion, based on a pair of stage plays, as the picture builds a big head of steam for the second half.

Un Chien Andalou (1929)

France, 16 minutes
Director/editor: Luis Buñuel
Writers: Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel
Photography: Albert Duverger, Jimmy Berliet
Cast: Simone Mareuil, Pierre Batcheff, Jaume Miravitlles, Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel

This landmark of Surrealist art, a collaboration between Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali on the precipice of worldwide economic collapse, is short but it stays with you. Director Buñuel and cowriter Dali famously worked to extrude anything of particular meaning that could be taken from it. "No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted," Buñuel wrote. "Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything." Quite right, and nothing adds up except, intuitively and in flashes, on certain Freudian levels. But some things can be rationally laid at its doorstep. It packs a punch because it saves its best for first—a brief scene in which, through the magic of montage (or editing, or cutting), a woman's eyeball appears to be sliced through by a razor. Among other things it prefigured a common strategy of action and horror pictures, which is to insert a spectacular set piece right up front (Saving Private Ryan, say). In psychological terms, you are thus softened. Shock and numbness soon have hold. In Un Chien Andalou, why a man (it's Buñuel, by the way) would be slicing a woman's eyeball at all is not even a question that occurs to anyone after witnessing it. For many first-time viewers, the remaining minutes of the picture pass in a kind of desperate muddled delirium. What did I just see what? In fact, the eyeball scene, just a matter of seconds, still has the power to make me want to look away and to flinch if I don't. It's the very idea, of course, so naturalistically rendered, that does the work. But the image, however brief, is also viscerally detailed. Even in the few seconds it's onscreen it's readily apparent that it's the eyeball of a dead animal, not the woman, but you do have to be looking at the screen to see it. There are more shocking images that follow, though they tend to pale by comparison: ants crawling in and out of a hole in the palm of a hand, two dead donkeys on a couple of grand pianos, a groping scene that now can seem the most disturbing element in it if you're past the initial shock (this also applies to most of the stuff with animals, for that matter, who were evidently harmed in the making of this picture). These strange images wheel in front of our numbed sensibility and unsliced eyeballs, filling our heads with what? Men dressed in nun's habits (oh that again, Luis), a severed hand making the rounds in a striped box, a butterfly with a marking that might look like a human skull, a mouth wiped right off the face of a man and turned into a woman's armpit hair. "Dream logic"—I suppose that's one way to conceive it. Within the year the world was more worried about things like fascism and a cratered economy, but Un Chien Andalou lives on fresh as ever—fresh, and exceedingly weird.

"Liberty Hall" (1929)

Read story by Ring Lardner online.

Ring Lardner is a writer I should probably read more. So is S.J. Perelman. But I digress. I happened to be rereading The Catcher in the Rye recently, where Holden Caulfield has high praise for Lardner, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 48. "Liberty Hall" is set in 1920s Manhattan (so it's not hard to see where Holden Caulfield might be coming from). The story is charming, witty, just really well done, and not shallow either, though it easily could have been. It's told in the first person by the wife of the main character, Ben Drake, who is a celebrated Manhattan composer—George Gershwin is name-checked as a "rival." Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael seem likely as more rivals, perhaps even models for Drake. Drake is plunged happily into his work and has little patience for glad-handing and swimming the social currents. Getting him out of exhausting social calls is the chief preoccupation here. People want to befriend him for the cachet of doing so, and they also want to feel superior to him. I understand this is a common problem of celebrity. The impossibility of it all climaxes when they meet the Thayers, a couple who seem much less than ordinarily grasping. Eventually the Drakes trust them enough to accept an invitation to stay with them as house guests for a week or two, for purposes of isolating and recharging, between jobs in Drake's busy life. But the Thayers quickly show they are the most grasping and controlling of them all, in scenes that are at once funny and painful. It reminded me very much, and in all good ways, of an episode of I Love Lucy. One such incident raises questions about when the story was written. Drake sees a copy of The Great Gatsby and eagerly picks it up, saying he had meant to get to it and is now grateful to find the opportunity. "'Heavens!' said Mrs. Thayer as she took it away from him. 'That's old! You'll find the newest ones on the table.'" The alert reader will have noticed she takes the book away from him, even as she piles on with the debt of her hospitality and her superiority (she has all the latest books, you see, whereas Drake has not even read the old Fitzgerald). That's how the story proceeds. It's exasperating chamber encounters and often very funny. As for the niggling issue of the date, I keep seeing either 1924 or 1929, or both, on the copyrights, which suggests to me it was published and then rewritten later for republication. The Great Gatsby, of course, was published in April 1925. At any rate, "Liberty Hall" is a good story—above all, funny, which is about the hardest thing to do in writing, but making heavy points about the (comical) human condition as well.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

The Maltese Falcon (1929)

I'm glad I took an opportunity to go through Dashiell Hammett's groundbreaking masterpiece of hard-boiled detective fiction again. Hammett was always a thoughtful, deliberate, and careful writer who set a certain level of clarity as a baseline. This narrative is so clear, in fact, that whole sections of it have been channeled intact into the classic 1941 movie with Humphrey Bogart. The Fat Man's character is particularly faithful and the others are right there. But I also felt, a little sadly, like I've used up all my opportunities to be astonished by it, in either form—once apiece for book and movie.(There's also a 1931 film version I've never seen. Maybe that will get me one more time.) That was a little disappointing because so many of my favorite novels, stories, and movies somehow yield up new things all the time. Sam Spade by Hammett is different from Humphrey Bogart—that always surprises me, and I think I like Hammett's Spade a little more. The object of the title, a statuette, is a classic "MacGuffin," an object motivating everyone in sight but with little intrinsic interest otherwise. (True story: when I went to check the definition of the term just now, I found The Maltese Falcon used as a primary example.) The problem might be that so many of its elements have been copied now they feel a little like clichés. The hostile tension between police and private investigators, for example, or the scene where the detective is drugged and/or coldcocked. You didn't see much of that with Sherlock Holmes, but they're all over Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. And don't forget the femme fatale—not invented here, but done memorably well (perhaps even more so in the 1941 movie). I classify Chandler and Macdonald with Hammett, as masters of this particular form. For me, all of them can be too often too preoccupied with byzantine plot points that don't add up or are just confusing. In terms of its influence, for better and worse, do I have to remind you of Star Trek's Jean-Luc Picard and his appreciation of Hammett inside the holodeck as an example of the unfortunate abuses? One forgives the familiarities of The Maltese Falcon because in many ways it's the original, after all, and it doesn't have much of the problems of excessive detail found elsewhere. Hammett has got it just about right here and it's still a great read, wonderfully intricate in its setting, all pell-mell action and pieces moved swiftly about the board, with Spade figuring the angles in advance of everyone else. At least one great movie came of it too. The dialogue sings, the twists and turns come fast, and the characters are priceless. I envy anyone who's about to experience it for the first time.

In case it's not at the library.

A Farewell to Arms (1929)

If a revisit to The Sun Also Rises was disappointing, A Farewell to Arms was worse. The only redeeming part of it, to at least start with the good, was the war scene of retreat and confusion in the last third, when our faithful narrator must finally jump into the river to escape. The love story I thought was hideous—juvenile, empty, unbelievable. If there are or were women like Catherine Barkley in the world, they are harder now for me to take seriously—that whole stoic, long-suffering, plucky figure seems to me mostly a relic of abandoned values and passé. Seems to be, let me say, as we know that all things pass and all things return again and that's how we do it. But in this post-feminist early 21st century a character like that seems to me irrelevant. The first time I read this, circa 1975, I found the ending moving and touching, and I should say that this time I was again affected by it. All sentiment, of course, because this time I also raged against it on another level—I mean, what obvious manipulative claptrap. He leaves the war, tragedy, tragedy, tragedy. Events defy belief. It's too much. In this novel over and over it is the silently suffering stoic, sucking it all up and never making a peep about the pain. People nowadays may talk too much about pain and emotions—but people of that age certainly did not talk enough. Thus A Farewell to Arms seems to me more than anything else just dated. War is hard, but this story is hard in remarkably uninteresting ways. There are numerous conversations here that include apologies for saying too much, requests to stop saying so much, etc. I like to think that this is all a thing of the past, but we'll know better a hundred years from now. Meanwhile, of course, there are the usual Hemingway strengths, such as they are, some I had not noticed before, or forgotten, such as the extreme brevity of the first chapter, which gives it the feel of a curtain-raising invocation, and brings a kind of initial high that I only wish had been merited by what follows.

In case it's not at the library.

Man With a Movie Camera (1929)

Chelovek s kinoapparatom, USSR, 68 minutes, documentary
Director/writer/editor: Dziga Vertov
Photography: Mikhail Kaufman, Gleb Troyanski
Music: Michael Nyman (2002)
Cast: Mikhail Kaufman

I'm no expert, but with the exception of the heroic graphic arts of the 1920s Leninist Soviet Union, I can think of few other artifacts that so vividly convey—propaganda or no—the brilliant optimism and energy of that unique time and place than Man With a Movie Camera. This delightful "Experiment in the Cinematic Communication of Visible Events" (and I can also think of few better or more pithy manifestoes on film than that deceptively simple "Communication of Visible Events") is an exuberant, timeless, and deeply felt and imagined classic film for one and all. Fortunately, the Russian film impresario Dziga Vertov's impossibly fresh meditation on life, freedom, beauty, work, and cinema has been enjoying another (always well deserved) resurgence of interest in recent years, appearing in the top 10 of the most recent Sight & Sound poll results and moving from #97 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? all the way up to #25.

It's not hard to see why. For one thing, the formal designations as "avant-garde," "experimental," and sometimes "documentary" are a bit misleading and do not begin to convey how perfectly charming and visually adroit the picture is. It is a feast of the optical, with as many stunningly beautiful naturalistic scenes as forays into fantasy, and a willingness to try anything, including freeze frames, stop-motion animation, and other special effects. Man With a Movie Camera seems different every time I see it, and I have been looking at it periodically for decades. I constantly notice new things and often react to much of it as if I'd never seen it before. This is possibly due to its determined lack of narrative, which offers few of the usual hooks on which to focus one's impressions, or possibly to the different soundtracks. Or perhaps, somehow, it really is a different movie every time.

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Perhaps one of the more interesting and telling points about the critical reception of William Faulkner is the wide variation and lack of consensus found in assessing any single "masterpiece"—this one gets the nod frequently, perhaps even most, but close behind it are Absalom, Absalom!; As I Lay Dying; and Light in August, not to mention the rest of the oeuvre, including a fat tome of stories, all well worth looking into. But this remains my favorite, in spite of all the effort and patience required to make it through the first of the four sections, the one that develops the "tale told by an idiot" part of the Shakespeare quote that engendered the title. As opaque as it generally is, it contains information essential to what follows, as the inevitable second reading of the whole really proves. In the sections that follow I find inspired sources and foreshadowings of J.D. Salinger, Jim Thompson, and Cormac McCarthy, respectively. Sure, it's all a bit melodramatic (strike that "bit"), but Faulkner plunges joyfully in language, meaning, and mood like a dog in a lake on a hot summer day; the pleasures and associations unfold and unfold and unfold.

In case it's not at the library.