L'Age d'Or (1930)

The Golden Age, France, 63 minutes

Director / editor: Luis Buñuel

Writers: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali, Marquis de Sade

Photography: Albert Duverger

Music: Luis Buñuel, Georges Van Parys

Cast: Gaston Modot, Lya Lis, Caridad de Laberdesque, Max Ernst, Lionel Salem, Germaine Noizet, Bonaventura Ibanez, Luis Buñuel

Surrealism means never having to say you're sorry, as director, cowriter, and editor Luis Buñuel seeks to show in his 1930 follow-up to the ragingly weird Un Chien Andalou. That short picture remains famous for an eyeball shot that will probably always work for as long as people look at movies. L'Age d'Or does not have anything nearly as memorable—very few movies do, actually—but Buñuel appears to have more confidence about what he is doing as a filmmaker. There's more juice to this one. He is once again working with Salvador Dali and in 1930 you couldn't get much more outré than that, or at least Parisian. Max Ernst is along for the ride as well in a small part.

L'Age d'Or, for one thing, has a much more detectable through-line. There's this couple, see—well, I can't tell you a lot more than that. Gaston Modot is billed as "The Man," Lya Lis as "The Woman." They're in a lot of scenes, together and separately. I didn't say it made sense, I said the movie has a more detectable through-line. Buñuel's loathing of the Catholic Church is often front and center. Pontiffs in full garb and later their skeletons are seen early. And there's something about Rome—stock aerial shots of the city, some locations on the ground. A clip from a documentary about scorpions starts it off. A cow is found in a very nice bed. A horse-drawn cart passes through a fancy indoor social gathering.

Earth (1930)

Zemlya, USSR, 87 minutes

Director/writer/editor: Aleksandr Dovzhenko

Photography: Daniil Demutsky

Cast: Semyon Svashenko, Stepan Shkurat, Nikolai Nademsky, Yelena Maksimova

My full disclosures here have to start that sometimes the whole narrative style of another country's cinema, or silent movies, or in this case both, can throw me off. Usually, even if I'm not particularly in the mood, I can throw on whatever movie I want to review and pretty soon the thing more or less sweeps me up. Even though Earth is short and should be quick, it feels alienating, ponderous, and opaque to me. For one thing, I had a hard time just following this "masterpiece" picture by director, writer, and editor Aleksandr Dovzhenko, partly because I had (and have) only the dimmest context for the story itself, rooted in the tension between Russia and Ukraine, which I barely understand today, let alone in 1930 Soviet Union. Something about agricultural resources.

And once again we confront a picture of great reputation that comes with version problems. I started with my commercial Grapevine DVD from 2003, which is 87 minutes and has one score. Later I looked at a version on YouTube posted in 2016 that was 76 minutes and had another and much better score (note: at the moment, YouTube appears to have up to four versions). For what it's worth, the picture is listed as 75 minutes on IMDb. My sense was that the additional footage on the DVD was largely devoted to livestock shots. Among other things Earth is a movie about oxen being replaced by tractors. It is also a movie about wresting control of land from the putative owners who won't work with the collective in early Communist times. I probably should have read the Wikipedia article first (or maybe the YouTube version is really that much better), because understanding more context and paying more attention to plot-wise visuals helped on the second look at least as much as the score.

"A Rose for Emily" (1930)

To be clear, my opinion is that the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) basically has it right about this William Faulkner story, which appears in The Dark Descent and is a pretty good Faulkner story. ISFDB, however, classifies it as "non-genre," noting somewhat snippily, "This gothic story has nothing supernatural in it, but has appeared in so many genre anthologies that we want to index its appearance for the purposes of this database." You can feel the skepticism. I'm in sympathy to the extent that I worry editors of horror anthologies too often reach self-consciously for literary credibility. Thank God for Edgar Allan Poe, the go-to win-win (we can talk about the high levels of trash another time). On the other hand, I don't think a horror story has to have something supernatural in it. But it does get to be tricky business out here at the fine edges of sorting and ranking. I'll say I also have my arguments with ISFDB from the other direction. The database for example largely excludes Patricia Highsmith, whose formal specialty is more the crime or mystery genre, that's true. But if your idea of horror does not include the Ripley novels then I am not buying your idea of horror. To be blunt, "A Rose for Emily" is not even remotely my idea of horror. Yet there it is in The Dark Descent along with stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and even D.H. Lawrence for crying out loud. Editor David G. Hartwell really did not need to go to most of these places because he otherwise has impeccable taste in stories that can only be called horror. The Dark Descent is one of the best collections I've come across yet.

In a roundabout way that brings us to the topic of "gothic," ISFDB's term which I probably need to understand better. Starting with the dictionary definition, the third sense in Merriam-Webster gives us "a style of fiction characterized by the use of desolate or remote settings and macabre, mysterious, or violent incidents." Sounds like Wuthering Heights! But we are starting to split hairs fine here as that definition in many ways applies equally to horror. Specific circumstances in "A Rose for Emily" reminded me of the Dickens novel Great Expectations and its scenes with Miss Havisham (perhaps as Faulkner intended?), another reason ISFDB's "gothic" seems right. "A Rose for Emily" tells a gruesomely horrific story, if I'm getting the picture right from the usual Faulknerian fragments: Miss Emily Grierson's father would not let her marry, she was 30 by the time he died and her prospects were limited by then, a Northern laborer was beneath her but even he wouldn't have her so she murdered him and slept next to the moldering corpse for many years.

Again, there's a good deal of overlap between horror and grotesque cruelty, mental aberration, and/or crime, so the argument may be fair that "A Rose for Emily" belongs or fits as horror. But something is missing here that I always find in horror, some sense of the uncanny or mystery of an unknowable beyond. In many ways this story reads like merely straightforward degradation of Miss Emily Grierson, with misogyny supplying some of the energy but much more a kind of resentment from the author, an understandable one too, toward the perversions of the Old South, here made absolutely and quite cynically concrete. To stretch it a bit, Faulkner does indulge one of H.P. Lovecraft's ploys, with an insistence on a penetrating noisome smell, but it doesn't feel derived from Lovecraft, and incidentally makes me wonder if Faulkner was even aware of him, though they were roughly contemporaries. Lovecraft was a little older but only by a few years. My main takeaway from "A Rose for Emily" is that the literary values of horror are best left to sort themselves out. Editors of horror anthologies don't need to drag morbid literary stars into the picture to shore up mainstream credibility (beyond Poe of course). Perhaps because it is a reliable commercial cash cow, perhaps for other reasons, horror will never get mainstream credibility and probably shouldn't. Let Faulkner be Faulkner. Let horror be horror.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell

"The Book" (1930)

Margaret Irwin was primarily a historical novelist but also wrote a couple of fantasy novels and a handful of spooky stories. This is less of a ghost story, as it's usually classified, and more along the lines of demonic possession, with some surprising and effective details. The Corbetts, the featured family—father and mother, two daughters, son, and dog—are like something from a Noel Coward setup. They banter wittily with one another, even the young children, at their ease over breakfast. They are a family of readers. They have a bookcase downstairs jammed with a motley assortment, including some ancient volumes inherited from an uncle. One of them becomes an object of fascination to the head of the household, Mr. Corbett, after a bout of insomnia. The book is written in Latin—hand-printed, in fact, in a precise hand. Mr. Corbett fortifies with his young boy's Latin dictionary and dives in. Groping translation fragments meaning but the text seems to be about matters such as the "trial of a German midwife in 1620 for the murder and dissection of 783 children"—a very large number! As his studies proceed Mr. Corbett, by profession a lawyer, grows aloof and distant from his family. When he notices new text being added to the blank pages at the end of the book, we can see much better than Mr. Corbett that it has taken control of him somehow. Dark thoughts begin to cloud his mind. He finds his children inadequate and dismisses them coldly. He detests his colleagues, relishing the investment tips yielded by the book that suddenly make him rich and successful beyond them. Then the book begins to make strange requests of him, "of a meaningless, childish, yet revolting character, such as might be invented by a decadent imbecile." He soon learns that not doing them, not following these instructions, leads alarmingly quickly to sickening downturns in his fortunes. So he does them. Soon enough it wants him to kill the dog, which has not been reacting well to him lately anyway. Then it wants him to kill one of his children. Obviously, this is not going to end well.

My favorite details here are subtle points, such as the way Mr. Corbett's thinking and attitude shift in small but steady ways, from boisterous and cracking jokes to something darker and more foul. Making a book the haunted object, or possessed by a demon, has many antecedents elsewhere. Lovecraft was working much the same territory at this time with his various holy and unholy texts. It's seen vividly in the Evil Dead movies where the Necronomicon (an invention itself of Lovecraft's) has a rubbery disquieting life all its own. Throw it on the fire! Certain other hallmarks of demonic possession appear in this story too. I've seen them elsewhere but mainly in stories. It's a certain kind of forcing against the will, particularly with text involving religious matters. In this story, for example, when Mr. Corbett attempts to pray, he finds the words coming out in reverse order and he's unable to say them right. In W.F. Harvey's 1928 story "The Beast With Five Fingers," we see a man whose writing hand is capable of recording notes and instructions from the demon for others. In perhaps the most formal version I've seen, Ramsey Campbell's 1976 story "The Words That Count," the first-person narrator makes the first word in every paragraph the Lord's Prayer in reverse word order, starting the story on "Amen to that." It's gimmickry, a pure stunt, and not surprisingly much of it is strained. But seeing the words so arranged, seeing the owner of the hand unmindful of its busy activities, and seeing Mr. Corbett struggle to say his prayers right—somehow it's quite effective.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

U.S.A. (1930-1936)

John Dos Passos's masterpiece is billed as a trilogy—consisting of the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), published separately—but it was intended and is best taken as a single work, though any one of the novels gives the basic idea. The same eccentric structure is used in them all. Sections called Newsreel string together headlines, snippets of song lyrics, and other flotsam of popular culture. Sections called The Camera Eye take interior, stream-of-consciousness views and are often difficult to parse. Still other sections offer poetically compressed biographies of key historical figures: Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Edison, Eugene Debs, Thorstein Veblen, many others. But the great majority of U.S.A. consists of the stories of a sprawling cast of characters, who appear in one novel and reappear in another, or maybe disappear altogether, and often intersect with one another. It's a clinic in social realism. Altogether it is the story of the US in the first 30 years of the 20th century: the tail end of the Gilded Age meeting the headwinds of Progressivism, followed by war and other financial insanities. It's big, it's ambitious, and it works. It should be included in all discussions of great American novels, as it could well be the very best. There isn't enough about the women's movement of the time, specifically suffrage, nor about the 1918 flu pandemic, which did away with an estimated 3% to 5% of the world's population, but now I'm quibbling. U.S.A. is mostly focused on the struggle between capital and labor, as big as anything in that time. It tracks the rise of the modern public relations business and its use as propaganda. None of its characters is entirely innocent and no one is entirely guilty. Most of them drink too much, show loose morals, can't keep it together. "It's a good life if you don't weaken" they say to one another. But of course we all weaken and we all know we do too. Writing in the depths of the Depression in the 1930s, Dos Passos seemed sanguine about the fate of the struggle. The '30s were not good times for bankers either, many of them set back on their heels good and hard. And Russia could still be taken as a bright light, though it was beginning to dim with Stalin. You can never be optimistic about capital and labor, not least because the conflict has run for centuries, but Dos Passos might have felt generous toward the at least temporarily vanquished forces of conservatism. That overconfidence did not serve his values well in the long run, as the rise of Reagan happened 10 years after Dos Passos's death, but the equanimity does provide a nice balancing element that benefits this work a good deal. The capitalists in U.S.A. have human sides, and labor is not without its flaws. Mostly, this is one of the most American things I know. Essential.

In case it's not at the library.

"Flowering Judas" (1930)

Read story by Katherine Anne Porter online.

Katherine Anne Porter's story is set in Mexico during revolutionary times. It's a murky but cosmopolitan scene. Our main character, Laura, is Anglo. A vaguely menacing character, Braggioni, is Italian. And there are Indians, Poles, Romanians, others. Already I get a hit of the surreal sense of Latin American literature, or culture, a kind of acceptance of the absurd that requires no discussion. Laura is frequently described in nun-like terms, and she dresses and behaves modestly. Braggioni is interested in her—courting her, even, but not in any way that she appears able to decline. She's in a situation, somehow, where her best choice may be to go along with it for the time being. Her occupation is described as teaching Indian children. Braggioni serenades her, singing and playing a guitar. "She knows what Braggioni would offer her, and she must resist tenaciously without appearing to resist, and if she could avoid it she would not admit even to herself the slow drift of his intention." Braggioni was some kind of commanding soldier in the revolution, grounded in carnal realities and equations of power. Despite Laura's modest manner and reserve, or perhaps because of them, Braggioni lusts for her: "he wishes to impress this simple girl who covers her great round breasts with thick dark cloth, and who hides long, invaluably beautiful legs under a heavy skirt." Laura is more than a teacher—she obviously has a stake and specific personal reasons to be there, attending union meetings and visiting political prisoners. Even if she were interested in a relationship she probably wouldn't have time—but, again, she appears to have limited choice, beyond those for any Anglo woman in that time and place. As we come to learn, she is also somehow involved in subversive activity. There's a strong but fleeting suggestion that she may have provided the means for a political prisoner to commit suicide. There are many layers to reality in this story, and tearing one layer away also can have the effect of resetting reality to a new ground. Laura is afraid of Braggioni's vindictiveness, which could leave her even more vulnerable in a situation she seems more committed to than ever. The story ends with a bad dream Laura has after going to bed. There's a sense there are many days and nights like this still ahead of her—and many already behind her. The language and images are precision-fitted, and altogether it's a pretty good story.

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

As I Lay Dying (1930)

I was impressed all over again by how difficult Faulkner can make things with his abrupt changes in point of view, even inside of one character, and here we are privy to the inside first-person views of some 15 characters. This often reads to me like Benjy Compson's first section of The Sound and the Fury, with simple declarative sentences and straightforward dialogue that yields very little directly. Even so, in As I Lay Dying the scope reaches biblical proportions of event, with both flood and fire and arguably locusts too, as it tells the story of a backwoods impoverished white Southern family attempting to transport the body of their matriarch, Addie Bundren, to her desired resting ground in Jefferson, Mississippi. Much grotesquerie goes on with the various family members and especially the corpse, to the point where it becomes comical. The corruption is passed out unequally but most of the characters share some taint—adultery, greed, pride, and sloth are the usual suspects among the God-fearing population of Faulkner novels. I respect it like hell for its adventurous experimentalism and for its usual x-ray of the bizarre (and still familiar) ways of the post-Reconstruction South. But it feels mannered and disconnected too, again reminiscent of Benjy Compson's narrative style. What I prefer of Faulkner, which is otherwise more commonly found, is the brooding ruminating free-flowing narrative voice, with long artful spiky sentences. It is an even more difficult style to read in some ways—the extreme is Absalom, Absalom!, which I admit is a bit much even for me—but also, once in, the most luxuriant and energizing to read. Light in August may be the best expression of it, or the rest of The Sound and the Fury, after the first section. Faulkner set out to write a tour de force with As I Lay Dying, and accomplished it on multiple levels—stylistically, by plot points, by influence (particularly on pulp noir writers), and by the way the story proceeds, like a relay match, handing off the baton of narrative chore to the next seeming random character, even as Addie Bundren reaches the point of her death, is put inside a box, and after some ordeals finally comes to be buried. It does what it sets out to do and it feels like an accomplishment to read it too, so all good all around, I suppose. But it feels mechanical too, it always has to me—something less than organic.

In case it's not at the library.

The French Powder Mystery (1930)

My experience with Ellery Queen mysteries has not ranged so broad, but I'm sure I've read one or two I liked pretty well. This is not one of them. It's only the second collaboration between the two Brooklyn cousins who traveled under the Ellery Queen pseudonym, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee (also pseudonyms, but they really were cousins from Brooklyn), and it shows where their first priorities lay: constructing an intricate mystery, specifically, the "locked-room." It is essentially a novelization of a logic problem, a puzzle type for which I've never had much interest (or capability). It is filled with useless and pointless knowledge and uninteresting characters, who are uniformly if randomly "grinning," like lights on a Christmas tree, blinking on and off to indicate ... something? There is surprisingly little recognizable human behavior here—let alone police procedure, which matters when one of your main characters (the father of the amateur sleuth and our hero Ellery Queen) is a high-ranking police investigator. Dannay and Lee are plainly proud of what they have wrought here—their first effort, The Roman Hat Mystery, had been a big hit the year before. They issue a challenge to readers directly, just before the last chapter and infinitely tiresome Big Reveal, to make their guesses and/or forever hold their peace. At which point I might have been seen yawning. I did try my usual Perry Mason "n - 1" formula (the character I judge second-unlikeliest to have "dunit," admittedly not that accurate, because I am always completely lost in these things less than halfway along). But I was wrong. The culprit was a character who never meant anything to me in the least. In fact, that was true of most of the 30-odd characters (as found in a useless list at the front). Most of the rest I actively did not like, including especially Ellery Queen himself, who is a diaper-soiling version of Sherlock Holmes—a character I like, with human qualities. I've got another one of these so-called "nationality" mysteries by Queen to try (The Dutch Shoe Mystery) but I am proceeding with caution. As I say, I remember encountering both good and bad Ellery Queen books many years ago. If only I could remember the titles of the good ones, alas....

In case it's not at the library.