It Happened One Night (1934)

USA, 105 minutes

Director: Frank Capra

Writers: Robert Riskin, Samual Hopkins Adams

Photography: Joseph Walker

Music: Howard Jackson

Editor: Gene Havlick

Cast: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Alan Hale, Ward Bond, Jameson Thomas, Arthur Hoyt, Frank Capra

Going on 90 years later, there is lots of trivia to discover about the sprightly It Happened One Night. Men’s undershirt sales reportedly fell after Clark Gable tears off his shirt in one scene and reveals a bare chest. The picture stands as an early marker of screwball comedy, arguably one of the most popular of all time as, among other things, It Happened One Night made a sweep at the Oscars that has only been matched since by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs. My favorite piece of trivia is that Looney Tunes animator Friz Freleng wrote that the movie influenced the creation of Bugs Bunny. In one scene Clark Gable is eating carrots and talking fast and Roscoe Karns as a minor character on a Greyhound bus has a habit of calling people “Doc.” It may not be much but it’s an honest influence.

I think it's interesting to note that It Happened One Night is considered pre-Code, released just four months before the Hays Code went into effect policing the content of movies. Yes, the picture is somewhat candid about sexuality—candid for 1934, let’s say—but I’m always more shocked by Clark Gable’s roguish brand, before and after the Code. Only James Cagney was a worse role model. Peter Warne (Gable) is a vaguely corrupt, hard-drinking newspaperman who can tell a woman to shut up and make it stick. Warne tells his future father-in-law that his daughter Ellie (Claudette Colbert) needs “a guy that’d take a sock at her once a day, whether it’s coming to her or not.” This, of course, seals the deal with Ellie’s father. He's all for Warne now. Next stop, Peter and Ellie with a baby carriage.

"The Pale Man" (1934)

Julius Long is a fairly obscure horror story writer, a lawyer from Ohio who published his handful in Weird Tales between 1933 and 1938. He died of conditions related to asthma in 1955 when he was 47 or 48 years old. In some ways this very short story, written when he was about 27, may have been a kind of vision of his own death. The first-person narrator is a low-level academic. "If only..." he laments, "I should now be a full-fledged professor instead of a broken-down assistant." He is even losing that position, likely for reasons of health, as he has been exiled to this rundown hotel in some small town on a mandatory vacation. "There is something positively gratifying about the absence of the graduate student face," he tries to console himself. He has a room in front with a view, 201—he had to haggle to get it. Way in the back is the pale man's room, 212. He arrived the same day. The pale man is more like moon-age daydream Ziggy Stardust with snow white tan. "I can not believe that he is ill," the narrator says of him, hinting the place might not exactly be a hotel, "for his paleness is not of a sickly cast, but rather wholesome in its ivory clarity." There is a sick woman in 208 or 207, however (the confusion could be a typo or it could be Long's suggestion of the narrator's mental unbalance), and she dies as the pale man moves closer to her. The pale man is steadily changing rooms in the story, like a checker piece on a board, from 212 to 211 to 210 and closer. The narrator wonders what will happen when he reaches the sick woman's room, but what happens of course is that she dies. And still the narrator does not understand who or what the pale man is. At one point the hotel manager is seen insisting the narrator leave and go to the hospital, which he refuses. That suggests his own death is not for long and it isn't. The story is almost underwhelming at first but things about it stick. "I suppose I should have guessed his identity when he skipped the three rooms the night I fell unconscious upon the floor." It stays with you.

Read story online.

"Pigeons From Hell" (1934)

Robert E. Howard wrote this long story in 1934 but it was not published until 1938, two years after his suicide. It would be interesting to know why it wasn't published. Was it rejected? Was it in the pipeline awaiting publication? Was Howard sitting on it, and if so why? It is far and away the best story I have seen by him, a pure horror jam set in the Old South complete with overtones of Faulkner, yet strikingly modern in the brute force of its imagination. It may not necessarily have appealed to Howard's bread-and-butter fans pumping up his Conan the Barbarian and Kull the Conqueror lines of sword and sorcery epics, which made his name in the pulps. Full disclosure, I don't care for any of Howard's stuff in that vein, and this story flat took me by surprise. I had about given up on him. Later I recalled that Stephen King talked up this story in his essential Danse Macabre as one of the best of the 20th century. "Pigeons From Hell" is a moody Southern gothic that turns into a haunted house story and transmutes from there to voodoo and an offshoot zombie monster Howard has invented called a "zuvembie"—cool new word but I don't believe anyone else has picked up on it. I'm actually a little surprised there haven't been more adaptations of this story beyond a 1961 TV show and a couple of comic books. I recently took another look at the 1996 movie with Vincent D'Onofrio as Howard, The Whole Wide World. It's kind of a sudsy bucolic affair, with Renee Zellweger as a somewhat unlikely love interest, but I was struck by the way Howard was shown writing. He has already explained that he reads everything he writes aloud, but when we see him actually at the typewriter he is declaiming even as he types—shouting, ranting, bellowing, and typing.

I liked imagining that with some of the passages in this story, as a couple of pals, on a road trip from New England and far from home, are forced to put up overnight in an ominous abandoned mansion. It's too late even for gathering firewood so they roll out their sleeping bags and go to bed directly for the night. The wild stuff starts around 4 a.m. when Griswell is awakened from what might have been a dream and sees his friend Branner rise and leave, lured away by a whistling sound. When Branner finally returns, I can hear Howard shouting: "... a shriek burst from Griswell's lips. Branner's face was bloodless, corpse-like; gouts of blood dripped darkly down it; his eyes were glassy and set, and blood oozed from the great gash which cleft the crown of his head!" He really lets loose on that last clause as his italics indicate. But this is what I mean about modern: it wasn't really until '80s horror movies churned up on high that something like a person walking around with a grievous axe wound and split skull would be seen. Maybe some of Washington Irving's ghosts (maybe) but they were always ghosts or explicitly figments of imagination. This is our friend Branner, in the violated flesh. Eventually he's dead for real, and eventually explanations come along for the reanimation too, but there's a lot to see and experience along the way: a noble sheriff, slave relations on the old plantation, the haughty survivors of the proud white family who owned it, the ruin of the Civil War, a wise old Black man, secret rooms, and certain mechanics of zuvembies. The zuvembie at hand may or may not be what is left of a proud "mulatto" housemaid whose mistress operated under the brutal "West Indies" persuasion of slave management. Lots of people here have reason to be mad in this story, though reason is generally not the strong suit of any of them. That's the beauty of this story. It's all explained, and it rocks right along, and it somehow makes sense in never making sense. When Howard took hold of a narrative he put everything into it and here he has his hands on a high-voltage current and he's not letting go until it's done. This long story is constantly surprising, with nothing really cheap about it.

Read story online.

Tropic of Cancer (1934)

I tried reading this Henry Miller novel in my 20s. It seemed to be considered his best, or at least most notorious, but I soon abandoned it as ridiculously rambling and pointless. I was mystified. I picked it up again more recently and finished it this time—still found it rambling, but now somehow it had become an advantage. Or at least a serviceable platform for the language, which is so vital and exuberant. If it's "about" anything, it's about Miller's survival in Paris in the early 1930s, including his sources of shelter, food, income, and sex and how he acquires and loses them. It's thoroughly bohemian, practically a novel-length definition of bohemianism. Karl Shapiro's early-'60s introduction (shortly after the book finally became free of censorship problems in the US and elsewhere and thus "legal") asserts upfront that Miller is not a poet. "I do not call him a poet because he has never written a poem; he even dislikes poetry, I think," Shapiro writes. Well, maybe, because Shapiro then goes on to make the key connection of Miller with Walt Whitman. Which, indeed, Miller himself makes in this so-called novel, loudly extolling the great American poet's virtues. Miller's language appears rambling, but his word choice can be remarkably precise, and he has a vocabulary. His sentences can be long but his sense of rhythm rarely fails. The whole thing rushes pell-mell ... to nowhere ... and yet it's easy to hitch along for this ride, even for someone like me who resents a little the labor of the nonnarrative literary arts (including most especially poetry). Miller's world is one of much boozing and whoring in Tropic of Cancer, deeply and bluntly sexist in many places, but the bracing honesty redeems it—really. Or something does. I want to say it's the language winning me over, which is often sublime, but more than that I think it's the sense of a soul just behind the words, a real soul. This soul is stuck here like mine is (or there, in Paris), making the best of things. Raging against the futilities and stupidities of civilization at large, yet crucially able to let go of rage for the sake of having a good time—restorative to all souls. Giving up rage, resentments, depression is one of the most profoundly positive and even subversive actions we can take in a way, when we can. Tropic of Cancer is a kind of undirected how-to manual, filled with implicit case studies. As someone who may (or may not) allow himself to let go and have a good time often enough, I appreciate the practical advice here. Miller feels like someone I might be able to keep going back to.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Appointment in Samarra (1934)

According to Wikipedia, a cranky John O'Hara late in life denied licensing rights to his stories for anthologies—especially literary collections intended to be taught in college—which may account for his relative obscurity since his death in 1970. Or, anyway, I barely knew him and only read this novel recently. I think I mixed him up with some other writer (for some reason I want to say John Hersey) and thought Appointment in Samarra was some kind of war novel. It is not. It is the kind of novel for which John Updike writes a warm introduction. O'Hara is the kind of writer Fran Lebowitz can call "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald." And Fitzgerald (and Ernest Hemingway too) liked O'Hara or at least this novel real well. I like it a lot too. Not very much happens in it and yet it is almost perfectly mesmerizing. It is set among the country club claque of a small city in Pennsylvania in 1930. The Great Depression has arrived but not yet FDR, and it's still Prohibition. Julian English is the town Cadillac dealer and a drunk. On Christmas Eve he tosses a drink in the face of a man with powerful connections in the town, including its organized crime underworld. It's all in a day's work for the reckless English, who is cynical, embittered, and self-destructive. O'Hara has caught a unique moment in American history here, the widespread economic collapse as seen through the eyes of the wealthy and relatively unaffected. Organized crime is accepted by them as a way to do business. Most people seem to be relatively comfortable acquiring alcohol from the black market, for example. Perhaps the strongest point of the novel is O'Hara's candid and realistic treatment of sexuality in marriages, the natural connubial blisses as well as the philandering. Updike writes that "the Englishes have a heterosexual relationship beside which those in The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms are romantic and insubstantial." I also get some sense of Sherwood Anderson's writing in O'Hara—not just the focus on Midwestern-style grotesques, but the whole approach to writing as a process of corralling happy unconscious accidents. I suspect both O'Hara and Anderson may not have understood how they managed to create their best work. Appointment in Samarra was the first of O'Hara's 17 novels and 13 story collections (he also wrote nonfiction, plays, and screenplays) and it's widely considered his best, published before he was 30. The only one worth reading, according to some. I understood he has some reputation for short stories, a regular in The New Yorker for years, but this novel is the first and only thing by him I know. It is indeed a great and impressive novel, and should be read before anything by Hemingway (and never mind that Updike wrote a foreword and made some good points).

In case it's not at the library.

I, Claudius (1934)

I liked Robert Graves's historical-fiction treatment of Roman times in the era of Augustus Caesar and after, but it does present another point for complaining about the Modern Library list of greatest 20th-century novels, certainly for anyone familiar with the '70s PBS TV miniseries. I, Claudius makes the list but its sequel, Claudius the God—equally source material for the excellent TV show—does not. In others case, such as John Dos Passos's USA trilogy, James Farrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy, and most obviously Anthony Powell's 12-volume Dance to the Music of Time, "extra" books are included. I haven't yet read Graves's sequel, but the notices seem to generally regard both together as a long single work, and certainly the TV show did. But never mind that. Do like me and plan to read them both—and don't miss the show either, though I see now it's rather different. In the book, the wit and intelligence of Claudius is much more readily apparent. In the TV series, the garish, entertaining, and appalling decadence of Rome's ruling class is more the point of interest, for better or worse. Both views are worth experiencing. If I have any quibble, it's the one you hear about Russian novels—tracking all these characters who at once have multiple names and similar names. There are numerous people here named Agrippa, Nero, Drusus, Germanicus, and even Claudius. I read a kindle edition of this first one, and for once found the X-Ray feature useful, even indispensable (I bought a paper version of Claudius the God, so we'll see how that goes). Graves was a poet and critic as well as novelist, and considered his Claudius books as commercial work. Yet I, Claudius is entirely convincing as the personal record of a historian. Claudius declares himself forever resisting the temptation of getting into too much detail in certain areas, and sometimes he cannot resist it, so down the rabbit hole we go on specific battles, for example, or the German wars. I don't read history as much as I wish but this has all the things I like about it, especially with its narrative sweep and authoritative voice, and little that I don't like, usually along the lines of deadening uninspired soporific language. I, Claudius can get dense with blizzards of detail, but the threads and connections never feel lost. It's discursive, chatty, and disarmingly fascinating all the way. If it's a bit coy about some transgressions, it's absolutely frank about others. It makes me want to try Suetonius or Tacitus again. I'll have more on Claudius the God when I get to it. But this is one case where I think book and film production are both worth looking into—not one over the other but both equally. And maybe I can get back to that miniseries again myself too.

In case it's not at the library.

A Handful of Dust (1934)

I read some Evelyn Waugh when I was a teen (and much later saw the TV miniseries Brideshead Revisited) but not much sticks. He's British and very dry, his humor easy to miss until you step back to look at the bigger picture. Tony and Brenda Last are in a comfortable if not passionate marriage, but trouble is on the horizon early in this story. Tony is landed aristocracy. His estate, Hetton Abbey, has been in his family for generations and is practically more important to him than his marriage. But Brenda finds it a cold old barn and has little interest in Tony's endless renovation projects. Before long she has taken an apartment in London, and then a lover, John Beaver, a shallow society player who amuses her. The marriage falls apart in slow motion and there's even more bad luck ahead for Tony. Eventually it's divorce, but Brenda and Beaver are heartless in their demands, overplaying their hand. Once Tony realizes they would force him to sell Hetton to settle with them, he finally understands what he is up against, says Fuck you (figuratively—that's me talking not Waugh), and trots off with a friend on a jaunt to South America as "explorers." This does not go well, to say the least, and Tony's final fate is inspired, creepy—and comic, when you step back. Interestingly, Waugh also wrote an alternative ending, in which Tony escapes the jungle and returns to England and reunites with Brenda, who has been rejected by Beaver when it becomes evident she's not actually wealthy. It's not a happy ending either, but it's happier. I thought it was interesting, and enjoyed the chance to read it, but prefer Waugh's first choice too. Waugh's language is careful and nuanced, very good in many small ways—his colors, for example, can be almost distractingly precise and vivid. And he's sly too. The story slips back and forth between a comically acerbic voice and tender moving tragedy, like an optical illusion with two competing images. Is it profiles of two faces or is it a vase? Still, though it is often well done and some parts are great, I think overall it might be just a little too reserved and British for me.

In case it's not at the library.

Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

My first foray into P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories was a good time in spite of inevitable high expectations from the high praise I've been hearing on and off all my life. It's funny—actually funny. It's the second novel of the Jeeves series, but he had published dozens of short stories from that world since 1917. Bertram Wooster is the first-person narrator. Jeeves is his butler, or valet, or man. He's always there, waiting on Bertie. In this particular novel the story involves keeping the principals in two impending marriages together until they can make it to the altar. Circumstances keep mitigating against the happiness and Bertie takes it upon himself to get this thing done. In many ways, it plays like classic situation comedy—Dick Van Dyke, say—where the humor is in how everyone's elaborate patrician manners keep cocking everything up. The title is a recurring phrase used in any social situation that threatens to become awkward. "Right ho, [name]." "Right ho," the response. This is a rhythmic device that frequently becomes hilarious by its constant use. Right Ho, Jeeves also recalls the sophisticated film comedies of the era, such as The Thin Man, Fred Astaire, or Busby Berkeley musicals. Bertie has an irreverent and slangy way of slipping into a knowing, confiding tone: "Old Pop Kipling never said a truer word than when he made that crack about the f. of the s. being more d. than the m." (Not knowing Kipling, I imagined it as "face of the sun being more dark than the moon," but when I looked it up it's "female of the species being more deadly than the male.") At the same time, Bertie is perhaps the least self-aware person in the whole thing. His Aunt Dahlia loathes him unrelentingly, another rhythmic device that often grows hilarious. The comical climax, a gift-giving ceremony at a boy's school, is a long scene of sustained inspiration. You wonder how long Wodehouse can keep this up and then he keeps it up longer, ratchet by ratchet. Wodehouse evidently spent a lot of time figuring out the intricacies of the plot, and it shows, even as his language sparkles. This is just a big pile of fun start to finish, with a careening plot—screwball comedy is another parallel—and lots of ingenious twists all the way.

In case it's not at the library.

Tender Is the Night (1934)

Tender Is the Night seems to come up a lot as the novel to read next by F. Scott Fitzgerald if you like The Great Gatsby. People genuinely seem to go for it. The 1998 Modern Library list of greatest 20th-century novels, for example—which has Gatsby at #2 (behind the inevitable Ulysses)—puts Tender Is the Night at no less than #28. It's ahead of, among others, All the King's Men, The Call of the Wild, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Maltese Falcon, Pale Fire, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Sister Carrie, and many others that seem plainly much better to me. I will echo the sentiment that if you like Gatsby you might as well try Tender, but in my experience it's a sad pile of fragments by comparison. This may be partly a reflection of how much I like The Great Gatsby—a favorite of mine for its brilliant structuring, its perfect vantage from which to observe the '20s high life on Long Island, the way it subtly expands to encompass something as universal and persistent as the American Dream itself, and of course for the beauty of the language. The language in Tender Is the Night is about as beautiful as ever, I can confirm that. That was Fitzgerald's enduring gift, and it's there at least in flashes in practically everything he did. I can also throw in the personal caveat that the whole Zelda / Paris-in-the-'20s thing (see the Woody Allen movie Midnight in Paris for a primer on the basic cliches) has never much impressed me. I recall a time when it seemed like everyone I knew was reading Nancy Milford's Zelda biography and mooning over the romance. Maybe I missed an opportunity. Maybe reading it would help me understand Tender Is the Night better. But I do think fiction has to stand on its own, without the necessity of "understanding" factual underpinnings. And honestly, the ignorance on display in Tender Is the Night about mental illness should be enough to put anyone off nowadays. It's certainly something anyone reading it should bear in mind. Fitzgerald's fictionalized retelling of his and Zelda's trials and tribulations, while affecting in moments, feels constantly labored and overworked to me. A miasma of all too understandable depression hangs over it—understandable, but not a winning formula. It's often unpleasant too; there is something between the principals but it doesn't feel like love. It's not much surprise to learn the novel can also be taken as one more artifact from perhaps the most painful case of writer's block in literary history. Approach with caution.

In case it's not at the library.

L'Atalante (1934)

France, 89 minutes
Director: Jean Vigo
Writers: Jean Guinee, Albert Riera, Jean Vigo
Photography: Jean-Paul Alphen, Louis Berger, Boris Kaufman
Music: Maurice Jaubert
Editor: Louis Chavance
Cast: Dita Parlo, Jean Dasté, Michel Simon, Gilles Margaritis, Louis Lefebvre

I like to think of myself as a reasonably well-informed follower of cinema—a lightweight among the real cineastes, to be sure, but in possession of a basic knowledge of the road map and landmarks. Thus it was surprising to me to find a title so high on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?—in the top 20 no less—with which I was not even passingly familiar, with the movie itself or even with its director, Jean Vigo.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this. L'Atalante did get a DVD release, in 2003, but it's out of print now and also unavailable through Netflix. Prices for it are not particularly kind, presently starting at $22 for a used copy and $93 for a new, and so, cheapskate that I am, I turned to a VHS version that's still easily obtainable. The print is mediocre, the running time seven minutes less than what's indicated on IMDb, and—oh, indignity—the title is misspelled "L'Atlante" on box and tape. Shabby treatment indeed for such a perfectly charming picture.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)

Newspaperman James M. Cain's first novel is so radically boiled down to the fundamentals, practically inventing the most characteristic aspects of the noir sub-genre as it goes, that it's little more than a long story, easily finished in one sitting—which is usually how it goes, especially on first encounter, because the actions and motivations come at you like pepper spray, swift, stark, and compelling. "They threw me off the hay truck about noon," it starts. Last chance to catch a breath. Maybe you've seen the movies. I actually haven't seen any of them yet. The plot is a classic love triangle, set in down-at-the-heels California Okie territory and related by drifter Frank Chambers, who wanders into the Twin Oaks Tavern shortly after noted exit from hay truck. The tavern is run by an older Greek fellow named Nick Papadakis and his young wife, the luscious Cora. It's not too long before Frank has jumped Cora, who until then has found only disappointment in her sojourn from Iowa to the Golden State, netting her only a position as short-order cook in a roadside joint and a husband almost twice her age. And it's not too long after that that Frank and Cora are plotting Nick's murder, nor after that when they rapidly begin losing trust in one another. Even if this is the origin point for many noir conventions, there are few surprises now in the basic paces though which Cain puts his characters, or even so much in any of the characters themselves. Instead, as Albert Camus must have picked up on himself, citing this as a primary inspiration for The Stranger, there is something eternally fascinating about trying to suss out the various shades of motivations for these uniformly desperate characters as Cain moves them deliberately about his chessboard. The sexuality is potent, even explosive. Papadakis never gets short shrift as the chump fifth wheel, but rather brings the pathos by the pailful. And the scenery is breathtaking, the inky black shadows of California after dark, the greasy stink of kitchens, the musk of unmade beds. Before you know it, it's over—but worth going through slowly one more time to savor how much Cain has packed in here, so efficiently and yet in such briskly headlong fashion that the desperation is palpable and never more than an inch away from the action.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)