It Can’t Happen Here (1935)

Sinclair Lewis turns his hand to the literature of dystopia and makes a creditable job of it. His fascist takeover of the US (much like the one we are mired in and resisting?) is modeled closely on Nazi Germany. In fact, I was surprised by how much seemed to be common knowledge in 1934 and 1935 when Lewis was working on the novel. It turns out Lewis’s wife at the time, Dorothy Thompson, was the first US journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, in 1934, which probably accounts for it. He had a front-row seat. There are lots of familiar Lewis notes here: extravagantly ridiculous names (Doremus Jessup and Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip are basically the principals, plus a Unitarian “radical” named Lorinda Pike), dreary extramarital affairs, and an implicit and almost corny faith in the so-called American experiment in democracy. I think a lot of readers would complain about the surplus of “telling” and the relative lack of “showing.” It gets sloggy in patches. But in the 2020s It Can’t Happen Here has all kinds of markers of prescience. It goes to some extremes that are hard to believe, but much of it is actually all too believable. Lewis knows exactly, for example, that US fascist shock troops would look and talk and act like the goons we saw attacking the Capitol two years ago. The main point of this novel is by way of warning, which the title dryly emphasizes. It’s ultimately not that hard-hitting—though we see terrible things—because it softens the blows with broad streaks of US sentimentalism. It takes heart, for example, in the Underground Railroad to free slaves and the North’s win in the Civil War, and chooses, like many of us, to ignore the ways in which the South won and continues to win that conflict—which isn’t over yet, by the way. Lewis certainly knew that much in 1935. Black Americans get the worst of it as usual, though antisemitism in many ways is the face of this fascism, as in Germany. So altogether a mixed bag—it’s not always believable, but when it is it can be shocking just for its familiarities. The story is illustrative and the characters more allegorical. But there is a gnawing sense that this is what it would look like. I know this novel went into lots of lists of books we were supposed to read after Trump was elevated to power in 2016. So I’m late to the party again as usual. It Can’t Happen Here is a good Sinclair Lewis novel, or not bad, and it speaks eloquently to our current predicament.

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

Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

USA, 75 minutes

Director: James Whale

Writers: Mary Shelley, William Hurlbut, John L. Balderston, Josef Berne, Lawrence G. Blochman, Robert Florey, Philip MacDonald, Tom Reed, R.C. Sherriff, Edmund Pearson, Morton Covan

Photography: John J. Mescall

Music: Franz Waxman

Editor: Ted J. Kent

Cast: Elsa Lanchester, Boris Karloff, Colin Clive, Ernest Thesiger, Valerie Hobson, Una O'Connor, E.E. Clive, Dwight Frye, O.P. Heggie, Gavin Gordon, Douglas Walton, Walter Brennan, John Carradine

Bride of Frankenstein is old enough that we are still seeing experimental ways of making and marketing movies. Boris Karloff is credited as "Karloff," which seems mindful of the way sophisticated French film stars of the time such as Arletty literally made glamorous names for themselves. Elsa Lanchester never properly gets credit for playing the Bride, only for playing Mary Shelley in the odd frame story. Bride of Frankenstein is also a sequel, a follow-up to the original 1931 Frankenstein, which was as much a sensation as any of the theater productions that preceded it by well over a century. We used to love this story. Bride of Frankenstein is more fun than the 1931 original. Technology had visibly improved even across four years, and the idea of making a movie that is basically "I'd like some more of that please" in regard to another popular movie might have still seemed novel. Some like to call this the greatest sequel ever made, or one of them, and I'm not inclined to disagree.

The movie is remarkably short but remarkably packed full of unique scenes swirling around the Frankenstein mythos. The frame story depicts another storm-driven night, like the famous one in Geneva that produced Shelley's Frankenstein novel and John William Polidori's story "The Vampyre." Lord Bryon (Gavin Gordon) struts around and acts decadent, handing us the "previously on" recap while Percy simpers. Mary says she has more to tell them about "Henry" Frankenstein's miserable experiments. They gather close. Dissolve to the chaotic scenes of the end of the first movie, where the monster has presumably been destroyed with the burning windmill in which he was trapped and the villagers are relieved and happy again.

Claudius the God (1935)

Claudius the God is at least as good as its forerunner published the year before, I, Claudius, and they are probably most usefully considered as a single long work. This second historical novel focuses on Claudius's time as a Roman emperor and his ultimate deification. In one way it might be inferior to the first in that it feels like it has one eye cocked on Jesus and the Christians, which were unknown to most Romans in the time of Claudius but likely of greater interest to Robert Graves and his publisher's target market in the 1930s. But the story of Herod Agrippa and Claudius and their friendship is compelling. In fact, generally I enjoyed this even more than the first. Graves feels more comfortable with the material, just rearing back and letting it fly, with broad themes of Claudius's political reforms, his engineering projects, and his taking of Britain, with more backstories of Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and others. Claudius is always interesting, realized extraordinarily well by Derek Jacobi in the PBS production. He is intellectually formidable yet physically disabled and the butt of Roman society for most of his life until he became emperor (and even then). Yet the way he wields power is remarkable. He is a transformed character from the first book, with confidence and a fierce sense of justice. Some of his actions are positively alarming. He orders many, many casual executions. But he is also paradoxically a humanitarian with sincere compassion and ideals. At least, that is, until the story of his wife Messalina reaches its conclusions, when he becomes almost unrecognizable. I know Graves is grounding everything in historical fact, but the change is shocking. So is Messalina's behavior. "You can't make this stuff up." The ways of the Romans are deeply human and recognizable, but don't always fit well with our sense of what a civilization is and is not. Are there lessons for our age here? Perhaps—it does feel like extreme times now, but they may have been even more so when Graves wrote, with democracy besieged by fascism and communism. Mostly what I like is the rolling anecdotal way Graves unlocks Claudius and lets him tell his story.

In case it's not at the library.

Green Hills of Africa (1935)

I recently read Green Hills of Africa by Ernest Hemingway for the first time, but I think I recall my parents might have owned a hardcover copy of it. The illustrations in my paperback—called "decorations"—struck familiar chords anyway. I had the impression it was a novel, but it's actually nonfiction, a travel adventure dressed up in some of the clothes of fiction such as the usual Hemingway alternation between description and dialogue. A brief Foreword condescendingly and somewhat pretentiously implies he is working the territory we now call "creative nonfiction," the "nonfiction novel," and/or "new journalism." To be fair, Hemingway was there long before Truman Capote or Norman Mailer. It's possible to make the case for Green Hills as a species of novel, but chiefly it bears comparison to a Hemingway novel, which does reduce its innovation quotient somewhat. My favorite parts were when he talked about, or showed people talking about, reading and literature. Some of the hunting scenes were good too. But as usual Hemingway's awfully huge ego squats in the middle of everything like an overweight gorilla, and stinks up the joint a little. We are made privy to his petty jealousies over the hunting successes of another, perfectly likable man. Hemingway's squeeze on this safari, unbearably referred to as "P.O.M." (we find out what it stands for at the end, but I've forgotten and looking for it is somehow altogether too depressing), is a case study in what has been called—just as unbearably, I admit—"codependency." It's a creepshow. Now I know I've been complaining a lot about Hemingway's stoic, long-suffering shtick, and I suppose I should be happy he is exposing himself warts and all here. But I'm not. And why? Because he seems determined to depict these character flaws as unchangeable facts of life that must be borne under, delving into overly detailed rationalizations. It's the abuser cycle of eruption and contrition, with no sense that it can be dealt with and changed, or even that it's particularly a problem to be addressed, except confessionally. So we are back to the stoic and long-suffering. Even so, if one can look away from that (and you see it's hard for me), there are many lovely passages here, and I certainly enjoyed it more than my recent revisits to the two more celebrated novels.

In case it's not at the library.

They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935)

Horace McCoy is another newspaperman of the Great Depression who turned to crime fiction after arriving in California, followed shortly by a career and steady work as a screenplay writer. His first novel eventually became a movie, but that wasn’t until nearly 15 years after his death. As with a surprising number of the novels that series editor Robert Polito collected for the Library of America two-volume set of crime novels, it's as inventive and sure-footed as it is dour and gritty. In this case, some typographical stunts help ground the basic setting of the novel in a courtroom at the moment sentence is pronounced, with the context gradually filled in by a series of extended flashbacks. Robert Syverten, the narrator, and the defendant, is a bit of a Jimmy Stewart character, by temperament anyway, who has shown up in Hollywood to make his fortune. He meets Gloria Beatty, a few years older and far more chewed by the Hollywood grind of the time, which feels alive with detail. Both need to make money and Gloria suggests the marathon dance, an event that fortuitously is just about to start when they meet. It's a foolish idea, of course, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and as the details of their participation slowly unfold it becomes apparent just how desperate those times and measures were. Marathon dances went on for days and weeks and months. Contestants here are allowed a 10-minute break every two hours and otherwise go around the clock; that break time must be used for eating and cleaning as well as sleeping. Contestants are required to keep moving to stay qualified, which necessitates partners taking turns sleeping on their feet while the other drags them around the floor. Periodic events such as footraces are also staged to liven it up for the sake of drawing crowds and cruelly to eliminate couples more quickly. For something that may seem from our vantage as quaint and goofy as stuffing telephone booths or swallowing goldfish, it quickly becomes evident what these things really were, and it's no wonder they were eventually outlawed. Gloria, for her part, remains resolutely a complete and relentless downer, bitter to the core—that has something to do with her eventual demise, an act perhaps more effectively framed as one of mercy than malice. The book is no marathon itself but rather another quick, pointed, and sprint-like exercise that nonetheless seems to get well under the skin of its times.

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

The 39 Steps (1935)

UK, 86 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writers: Charles Bennett, Ian Hay
Photography: Bernard Knowles
Cast: Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Mannheim, Godfrey Tearle, Peggy Ashcroft, John Laurie, Helen Haye, Frank Cellier, Wylie Watson

Positively straining at the limitations imposed by the stodgy '30s talkie technology, it's probably fair enough to characterize this as a cracking good yarn. Marked by paranoia, murder, intrigue, the usual gang of Hitchcock's mysterious spies, and a setting that sprawls across the UK, from London to Scotland and back again, there's not much you could do to improve the bold strokes of this script—unlikely coincidences, outlandish resolution, and all. It gets off to a brisk start as a strange London music hall performance is interrupted by gunshots. Leaving the venue, Richard Hannay, played by Robert Donat, appears to find himself getting picked up by a Garbo-like woman. played by Lucie Mannheim, who asks if she can go home with him. There she drops hints of an incredible spy plot in which, she says, she has now involved him. He politely feeds and listens to her. It's all quite chaste—we know from earlier Hitchcock fare such as Blackmail that he wasn't afraid to veer toward the sordid if it suited his purpose—and Hannay never believes a word. Later that night she reappears with a knife in her back, clutching a map, and collapses across him (as a gentleman, of course, he had put her up in his bed while he took the living room couch). This would seem to bolster her story, and in any case he's now likely to be accused of the murder, so he does what any sensible character in a Hitchcock film would do: flees, and tries to makes sense of the cryptic clues that she left behind. Along the way he finds any number of close shaves along with true love, neither of which comes without their various difficulties. Will he evade the police? Will he ever get to the bottom of this mystery? What do you think?