“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936)

This story by Ernest Hemingway takes place on an African safari, which is not promising. Then it gets into Hemingway’s moralizing about courage and integrity, which is even less so. It doesn’t help, reading the story nowadays, that big game hunting has become something much more painfully perverse, especially if the game is animals in dwindling populations. But this story somehow still works with its shocking scenes and revelations. It’s a hunting party of three: a rich fool, his wife, and their guide. The guide is the obvious Hemingway hero and/or stand-in, stoic and judgmental and above it all by right of his own excellence. The rich fool, who is paying for all this, has already committed the act that brands him a coward before the story begins, earlier that day. He turned and ran from an approaching lion. The guide had to bring it down and it turned into a messy kill. Some of us might be more inclined to call turning around and running away prudent, and a lot of us think they shouldn’t even have been there in the first place, even in 1936. Take the coward thing as given, it leads to severe humiliations for the rich guy. He and his wife are not getting along. She takes the opportunity of his shame to sneak into the guide’s tent for a few hours that night. The infidelity is so blatant I’m not sure you can even call it deception. These two events may (or may not) seem unlikely if you think about them but they work in the story, casting an awful pall. The story finishes on a third terrible event, just as extreme and unlikely, as the rich guy is charged by an African buffalo the next day. There has been an incident that morning in which his cowardice was redeemed. But, apparently, it’s just some illusion, as ultimately true nature cannot forgive him, or something. Or his wife, who gets him in the head trying for the buffalo (or was she?). I don’t know. It worked for me at the same time I was moaning and groaning about all these hypermasculine rites and rules and all the immutability of it. It does get tiresome. But this story is done pretty well and worked for me in spite of all that. It’s moving in a number of ways. And I don’t mind the arrogant contempt the guide has for the rich couple, who remind me of Tom and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby. No doubt unconscious on Hemingway’s part.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Read story online (scroll to p. 15)
Listen to story online.

Things to Come (1936)

UK, 100 minutes

Director: William Cameron Menzies

Writer: H.G. Wells

Photography: Georges Perinal

Music: Arthur Bliss

Editors: Charles Crichton, Francis D. Lyon

Cast: Raymond Massey, Edward Chapman, Ralph Richardson, Margaretta Scott, Cedric Hardwicke, Sophie Stewart, Derrick de Marney, John Clements, George Sanders

From the distance of nearly a century, the 1930s looks like a period of constant historical reckoning. Two of the most interesting movies in 1936 and one in 1937—Modern Times, Things to Come, and Make Way for Tomorrow—thought very hard about where things were going after most of a decade in a persistent economic depression and with fascism strutting around and acting ever more aggressive. None of them really "got it right" about the future (Make Way for Tomorrow comes closest by keeping its ambition in check), but getting it right happens so rarely in futuristic tales that we can't stop talking about it when they do. Consider Network. And remember there were still phonebooths in 2001: A Space Odyssey (just as there were in 2001, though they were gone by 2010, nor have we seen anything remotely like commercial space travel, the Musk & Bezos clown shows notwithstanding).

Thus, in Things to Come, a worthy science fiction heir of Metropolis, the coming war with fascism was seen quite clearly, and it starts in 1940, which is pretty dang accurate for a UK film although maybe not that hard to predict in 1936. Director William Cameron Menzies and writer H.G. Wells work it up as a 30-year grinding death-fest that makes the Great War look like a picnic with Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo. Pay attention, class! The war in Things to Come ends in the late '60s and is followed by an epidemic of "the wandering sickness," which weirdly looks like zombies without all the scabs or gore. It's certainly some kind of prescience. From that point it all becomes a figment of H.G. Wells's imagination, which was prodigious but also a little unfocused and wrong. The movie ends circa 2036 (so as yet still in the future for us) with the coming of space exploration that looks nothing like space exploration as we know it.

"The Trapdoor" (1936)

There's not a lot I can tell you about C.D. Heriot, the author of this somewhat obscure story. Wikipedia is silent on him (at least I believe it's a him) and the invaluable Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) is sketchy: he was British and published three stories, including this one, which I found in Mary Danby's Realms of Darkness collection. Two are from the '30s and one from the '50s. It probably makes more sense to align him with ghost story writers like E.F. Benson, F. Marion Crawford, or M.R. James (I understand the penchant for initials is artifact of the disreputability of horror or, in some cases, like E. Nesbit, because they wanted to conceal they were women). But in a way "The Trapdoor" can also be likened to Italian giallo horror movies like Lucia Fulci's The Beyond. An H.P. Lovecraft story, "The Dreams in the Witch-House," has specific similarities too and could well have had some influence, even on the movie. Things happen in The Beyond, as in "The Trapdoor," that make no sense. They just happen. You can't figure it out. They are not there to be understood. In turn, in brief flashes, they can point to dread of widening-gyre chaos loosed upon the world. In either case, the plot breakdowns may equally be matters of ineptitude. But still they have their ways to get to you. In this story, for me, it's a few paragraphs in the middle, fleetingly. The premise and setup are otherwise lame and the payoff lamer. John Staines is under doctor's orders to rest on weekends and finds a place to stay he likes in a village in the country, an "isolated beer house." Almost immediately he finds himself in tense relations with the sour landlady, Mrs. Palethorpe. To be fair, Staines has developed a fixation on a trapdoor in the hall outside his room, which leads to a loft. Anyone in Mrs. Palethorpe's position would likely be annoyed. Think about the greater likelihood that Staines is wrong and there is nothing sinister. Mrs. Palethorpe tells him the loft is empty and unused. But Staines notices the trapdoor has been sabotaged to be difficult to open. Or, alternatively, it has rusted shut because no one uses it. Staines has many questions. One night he is awakened by a knocking from above. It can only be coming from the loft. For a few minutes in the utter silence of the middle of the night in a strange place in the country he's not sure whether he's imagining it, and neither are we. For this brief and very nice passage we are right there with him in every strange room we've stayed in ourselves as he tries to decide what's real and what's not, and can't. Then the story moves into its more florid Fulci-like paces and things happen or don't happen that can't happen in the world we understand. Like Fulci, it gets progressively more silly. In the end Staines realizes he's getting the opposite of the rest that was prescribed and he quits the premises forthwith. An explanatory letter of sorts from Mrs. Palethorpe follows some weeks later, sounding nothing like the character we met earlier. Now she is "Alice." But it's too late and altogether the wrong impulse for explanations. Still, it was good while it lasted.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)

Story not available online, but this piece by Tom Mullen, circa 2003, talks about it with a story by M.R. James and is worth a look. 

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936)

This long story by H.P. Lovecraft has a lot of his usual gaffes as well as strengths. It's a pretty decent rave-up overall that way but, curiously, he seems to miss the most interesting point of his own story. I'm tempted to put that squarely on his ongoing xenophobic panic, not to remind everyone about it but because I think this time it hurt a story even more than usual. But not to worry. As part of the "Cthulhu Mythos," these Deep Ones and/or Old Ones have likely seen treatment by someone who doesn't miss the point (I wouldn't know because I haven't read much beyond Lovecraft in this particular universe, or even all of Lovecraft). "Innsmouth" pairs a shabby and mysterious New England seaside town with a teeming underwater civilization just over the harbor reef. The sea creatures can interbreed with humans and begin life on land. As they age they return to the waters, where they live forever (which reminded me of the robot kid in A.I.). In return for being allowed to live among the townspeople in Innsmouth, the amphibians use magical mystical powers to draw fish to the harbor, creating an exclusive market for the community. The crusty New England fishermen have all the work they can stand. The amphibians also appear to have some process for extracting gold from the ocean, or perhaps mining it somewhere. They keep a refinery going in the town, which supports everything.

It's beautiful, really, but no, H.P. has to make it a nightmare of foreign alien invasion, shading everything in that direction. The whole place smells "fishy"—an observation that only comes up 16 or 17 times. The strange and creepy "Innsmouth look" features eyes that never blink, narrow heads, scaly necks. The only clonking detail he might have missed is that they keep goldfish food sitting around in snack bowls. They are meant to frighten us, but first they are comical and then they just start to look like a lost opportunity to tell an interesting story about evolution. But, right, they frighten the clutched-up narrator, who desperately tries to figure out whether they are "Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine, or negroid." The amphibians have a history of being horrible so, like aliens from outer space with their anal probes, they have to be taken as horrible to a certain degree on the story's terms. So horrible they are. They and their rubbery pursed lips have put the clampdown on Innsmouth, chasing away all the Christian churches (or even better, adapting them) and also starting their own, the Esoteric Order of Dagon. They don't like strangers in town, especially when the stranger talks to (and can understand the ludicrous dialect of) a 96-year-old alcoholic we see pound the best part of a quart of liquor (yeah, right). And they really don't like it when the stranger stays overnight, which our narrator never intended to do but, well, things happen.

And so to the night of terror, when the narrator's bus out that evening breaks down and he has to stay in the town hotel and battle fishy smells. It's not a bad action / adventure type of tale at this point, though I admit sometimes I got confused about the street names and directions and landmarks as the action went down. (The narrator gets all his information about the town from a grocery store clerk in the town First National, who helpfully draws him up a complicated map and tells him all the parts of town to avoid.) The point is, at the barest level, there are malevolent monster things after the narrator and he must get away in a not-so-merry chase, but all's well that ends well and he finds a way to beat it out of town unharmed. Well, there's still one more horrible revelation when the narrator begins to notice, years later, that he is less and less interested in blinking, but I'll leave you to find it for yourself. Again, turning this into a nightmare when it could be something so much more encompassing and immersive, squishy bio/body horror, and issues about species development, consciousness development, intelligence, adaptation. I mean, all that is here—there has to be fan fiction that takes it in its obvious LGBTQ+ implications to all kinds of much better and more interesting places. Lovecraft dreamed it up. But it's almost like he didn't really notice. I mean, they're interbreeding with us. They like us on some level. Maybe we should try liking them too. If I weren't so hinky about world-building fiction as a general thing, I might be tempted to look into it further. I might anyway.

H.P. Lovecraft, Tales (Library of America)
Read story online.

"The Eye and the Finger" (1936)

Donald Wandrei's completely ridiculous and excellent story works much like F. Marion Crawford's "Screaming Skull"—by insisting on its premise with a relatively straight face. Indeed, with a quivering distended face of terror. A weary man comes home from his exhausting job in a downtown department store, where the people are rude, the noise constant, the lights too bright, and he stands all day. He trudges up to his 5th-floor apartment to find himself confronting an eyeball sitting on his bureau and a disembodied hand floating in the air, pointing first at him and then at the window. It's almost comical when you reduce it to description and in many ways functions as a forerunner to the Warner Bros. cartoon style of slapstick brutality. Wandrei, a native of St. Paul, Minnesota, and a fantasist who ran with H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth et al., keeps the focus on the tactile and sensory in this very short story. The man's first impulse is to go over to the bureau and pick up the eyeball (something of the object's mysterious power is already suggested by the way he even notices it across the room). It's soft and sticky, covered with a moist film, and warm. It's disgusting. Later, when he finds an available psychiatrist to make an evening house call (perhaps my favorite of all the ridiculous details here), his first move is also picking up the eyeball and being disgusted. In fact, he won't have anything more to do with any of it and leaves immediately. Meanwhile, the hand. I love this business of pointing at the man and then at the window. Talk about telegraphing it! Yet Wandrei maintains tone: "Where it should have been attached to an arm, he clearly saw blood, veins, flesh, muscular tissue, and bone. But it did not bleed." The man tries to grab it. In my mind it's a right hand, and shakable. "The hand felt neither living nor dead, neither hot nor cold. The fingers instantly curled around his own, not fiercely, but tugging him along, pulling him towards the window." This thing obviously has priorities. Another great detail Wandrei interjects throughout is the man's hearing, which somehow alternates between acute silence and a mysterious deafening roar. I'm probably not giving away much by reporting the man ends up taking the hint and goes out the window. Heck, what would you do? We know from cartoons and horror fiction you can never get rid of things like that. Capture it, put it in a cage, take a bus to a train to a seaport and put it on a freighter going to Hong Kong. It's still going to be waiting for you when you get back to your place. And it might not be in such a good mood anymore. Again, see also "The Screaming Skull." The thing about this kind of horror—based in Ineffable Evil, let's say—is that it's almost binary, alternating between ridiculous and effective, like that image of a vase and/or two profiles. But whichever this story might be ultimately, it's totally entertaining—the hand gesture, the available psychiatrist, everybody reaching for the eyeball first. I love it.

When Evil Wakes, ed. August Derleth (out of print)
Story not available online.

Modern Times (1936)

USA, 87 minutes
Director/writer/music: Charles Chaplin
Photography: Ira H. Morgan, Roland Totheroh
Editors: Charles Chaplin, Willard Nico
Cast: Charles Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford, Chester Conklin

I will lay it out straight here, because I may as well and no sense wasting time. Modern Times is such a longstanding favorite for me, with so many personal attachment points, that honestly I have little judgment or perspective on it. I just love it, every bit of it. For me, no Chaplin picture looks better. It is quintessentially "modern" in a way analogous to how we are all now "post-modern"; its heroic conceptions of architecture, design, and labor management (about which it is rightly dubious) feel like an entirely different time now. Yet Chaplin's iron backbone sunny-side views, unafraid to touch the treacle, balance the stark and formal geometries with warmth and humanity. Among other things it is a feel-good movie after all.

It is "modern" in many different ways. The music, by Chaplin again, is often shrill, staccato, and angular. The picture opens on an extreme close-up of a clock face with a sweeping second hand. It is an old-fashioned clock face, with Roman numerals, but the close-up is so tight it effectively transforms time itself into an abstraction. Modern Times is also acutely aware of the strikes, unemployment, class conflicts, and labor unrest ripping into the fabric of the culture and economy at the time of its release, deep into the Depression. Explicit cocaine use is not only acknowledged but played as a joke, and a good one. Chaplin's mincing about, and his use of characters such as a prison inmate working on a needlepoint project, imply layers of hidden farcical sexuality. And when the vagabond couple is left alone in a department store overnight the first thing they do is go to the toys section and start playing. Or is that "post-modern" to treat the human condition and/or enterprise as one conducted essentially by immature children?

Modern Times (1936)

#29: Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936)

I first saw this in 1972 on a rerelease that was most likely predicated on Chaplin winning one of those put-up-job Oscars, in this case for his score for Limelight, a 1952 picture for which he was somehow eligible that year. I was an angry teen on a bored Sunday moping around the house. My dad piled me into the car and dropped me at the theater. I thought it might have been the most ridiculous thing he had ever done for me—done to me, actually, I probably thought.

It turned out to be one of the best. Phil has been talking recently about the paucity of comedies on his list. I may (or may not) have a few more than him, but I know this. Most comedy classics of the period between the world wars are mostly lost on me: Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, W.C. Fields, even the Marx Brothers. In company with others, especially on the rare occasions when I can find a packed theater, I laugh right along with everybody else—I love to be with people who are laughing; it's infectious. Alone, however, I barely crack a smile, and I'm more often just bored and restless. I understand this is entirely my own loss.

Double Indemnity (1936)

The second novel by James M. Cain is almost as slender as the first, but if anything it's even more propulsive about hitting its plot points and moving along. That's something I chalk up to the fact that it was published originally in serialized form. It's absolutely terrific stuff, one of the most essential mystery novels of all, not just of the noir subgenre where it might be the single one best. It's likely familiar to many as Billy Wilder's 1944 film adaptation with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, the screenplay for which Wilder collaborated on with Raymond Chandler. Cain's background as a screenplay writer in his own right made his fiction uniquely adaptable to movies, and perhaps nowhere is it so evident as here—I rank this movie pretty high too, making it one of those unique and happy occurrences that should be enjoyed when they happen: great novel, great movie. The story is pretty simple. Insurance man Walter Huff throws in with femme fatale Phyllis Nirdlinger (perhaps the most unlikely name ever for a femme fatale) on an elaborate plot to off her husband for insurance money; for him it's about the dame as much as the money. For her, it's not as clear. It's set again in southern California, and if the movie can boast the talents of the amazing Stanwyck (and, yes, MacMurray is pretty good too), the book has the advantage of color, by which I mean the language itself as much as anything. You can open this to practically any page and get prose as dense and compact as heavy metals, or sparkling dialogue, or both. It's purely a treat and even more worth savoring than Cain's first. Here's an obligatory sample, offered partly as a taste for you of what the book has in store, and yet perhaps even more as an opportunity for me to type this language and enjoy the fleeting sensation of having actually written it: "The furniture was Spanish, the kind that looks pretty and sits stiff. The rug was one of those 12 x 15's that would have been Mexican except it was made in Oakland, California. The blood-red drapes were there, but they didn't mean anything. All these Spanish houses have red velvet drapes that run on iron spears, and generally some red velvet wall tapestries to go with them. This was right out of the same can, with a coat-of-arms tapestry over the fireplace and a castle tapestry over the fireplace." Thanks, that felt good.

In case it's not at the library.

Sabotage (1936)

UK, 76 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Writers: Charles Bennett, Ian Hay, Helen Simpson, E.V.H. Emmett; based on The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Photography: Bernard Knowles
Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Oskar Homolka, Desmond Tester, John Loder

Hitchcock's work in the '30s, most of it based in the UK, often strikes me as a bit stodgy, if not outright soporific. But I put most of that off on the film technology of the time, particularly the studio-centered requirements of the early sound era for static cameras. Setting that aside, this one seems remarkably modern, its focus on mysterious agents with German accents who infiltrate the UK for purposes of "sabotage" standing in surprisingly well for today's ultra-conservative Islamist agents who infiltrate the U.S. for purposes of "terrorism." (The dictionary definition that opens the movie could apply as well to either term.) More surprising perhaps are its refreshing elements of heartlessness—you will see a bomb handed off for delivery to a young boy who encounters all kinds of nice people along the way, including a friendly street salesman, a kindly woman with a devilish cute puppeh, not to mention a whole freaking parade, even as the clock ticks toward the fatal hour. That's pure Hitchcock. The whole production is beautiful, murky black and white set in high-relief contrast, shot frequently from unexpected angles. If the proceedings here grow occasionally clunky, they are as often enlivened by Hitchcock's burgeoning sensibility, which we would come to know so well in subsequent decades after he had relocated to the U.S.