Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Zora Neale Hurston’s classic of the Harlem Renaissance has followed a tortuous path in its relatively brief time. Poorly reviewed when published, Hurston was subsequently attacked on dignity grounds. Folks like Richard Wright were embarrassed by her celebrations of the culture of poor Blacks. The book went out of print. All of her books, novels, nonfiction anthropology collections from oral tradition, and a memoir, went out of print. She was working as a maid and substitute teacher at the end of her life. Their Eyes reads to me as somewhat disjointed and it is very thick with dialect. But there is great beauty in many of the descriptive passages, and Janie is a lively and always interesting character with lots of interesting characters and situations around her as she travels Florida pursuing her destiny. There is a hurricane scene that is amazing. Hurston died in 1960. There was an attempt to revive interest in her in the late ‘60s, in the context of the civil rights movement. That effort fizzled and her books again went out of print. In 1975 there was another attempt, in the context of second-wave feminism, and this one stuck. It started with an essay by Alice Walker published in Ms. magazine. Hurst’s books have been read, taught, and stayed in print ever since. I suspect Wright, whose Native Son is one of the great novels of the 20th century, may have been uncomfortable with the frank sexuality of Janie, who has no problem leaving her first marriage to marry her second husband without divorcing, and was otherwise perfectly faithful to her partners even when they mistreated her. The larger point may be that Janie’s first marriage was not really her choice, at age 17. Her grandmother picked him for her. The other two—both of whom die, with Janie still in her 40s in the present time of this novel—may have been odd unions and perhaps not her best options, but at least they are her own choices. It’s not hard to see how Their Eyes works better as feminism than civil rights. At any rate, it’s a rollicking tale that travels far in Florida. I like the setting very much, and parts of this shaggy tale are just knockout good.

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

“Blind Man’s Hood” (1937)

This story by John Dickson Carr (aka Carter Dickson) is mainly a ghost story, though for some reason it also has elements of a locked-room mystery—possibly Carr’s market instinct for detective fiction kicking in. He was more generally a mystery writer. But the most effective moments in this story, which are usually matters of precise detail, make it a reasonably unsettling spook story. It’s set at Christmastime, with a young couple arriving late on Christmas Eve for a visit with the family of friends at an isolated mansion in the countryside. All the lights in the house are on and the door is ajar (in December!), but no one appears to be home. They bang on the door, then gather up their things and enter. A young woman appears who claims she didn’t hear them knocking. They don’t know her. It was immediately evident to me this was a ghost, and further small details confirm it. The corner of her eye is gray rather than pink, for example. She has a convoluted story to tell them—about why the house is empty, about the things that happened there, about betrayal and revenge of a sort. It really doesn’t make much sense but often feels ominous. This story tends to telegraph its basic plot twists and is basically a straightforward ghost story, the kind of tale told around campfires and designed chiefly to produce feelings of unease. Making sense is not a requirement of these things. The young woman ghost is toting around a kind of opaque pillowcase she says is more effective than a handkerchief for a blindfold in games of blind man’s buff (here called blind man’s bluff). She says the way to do it is by draping it over the player’s head and cinching it closed at the neck. She says it’s too easy to cheat and peek out from under a handkerchief. The game is key to the story’s climax, which is why this is all explained so early and in such detail. Actually, the whole locked-room mystery side of this story was a little bit of a hindrance to me. Things don't necessarily have to add up in a ghost story. In the best of them, blatantly impossible things with no explanation at all often make the story better. On the other hand, the best of them often work toward some kind of smash-bang surprise at the end. This one just sort of peters out. But it has the holiday spirit about it and some effective moments.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.

Learn From Experience (1937)

Kafuku zempen (pt. I) / Kafuku kohen (pt. II), Japan, 157 minutes

Director: Mikio Naruse

Writers: Fumitaka Iwasaki, Kan Kikuchi

Photography: Mitsuo Miura

Music: Takio Niki

Editor: Toshio Goto

Cast: Takako Irie, Chieko Takehisa, Minoru Takada, Yumeko Aizome

Japanese director Mikio Naruse was a prolific filmmaker who worked on silent films in the early 1930s and continued with sound well into the 1960s. He is generally considered second-tier behind the usual suspects of Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu. Naruse may have been overshadowed most by Ozu, whose themes of domestic life Naruse also tended to pursue. But this domestic sphere is one I happen to like very much and to my mind Naruse is nearly the equal of Ozu (though I have many films still to see by both). The lengthy Learn From Experience is classed as a "woman's film," which probably explains why it was cut into two separate releases, in the manner of Children of Paradise or Kill Bill, even as the story, cast, production crew, and other elements simply continue from one to the next. A movie this long in 1937 needed to be epic in order to be commercially viable, and Learn From Experience is many things but it is not epic. At the same time the complexities of the story are such that not a minute of it is wasted.

A reviewer over at IMDb praises the film but complains about the title—but really, Learn From Experience could practically be the working title for any "woman's film." It's a commercial Hollywood designation as much as anything and the idea is that women would pay to see stories full of romantic heartache and incidentally a feminist critique when it can be slipped in. Learn From Experience mixes in class elements as well to fortify the doom of its doomed relationship. Toyomi (Takako Irie) and Shintaro (Minoru Takada) are young and in love, but Shintaro's father is in debt and needs him to marry a woman who can deliver a dowry, and furthermore he has a particular woman in mind. Shintaro, a gentle but weak man, intends to go home and stand up to his father and so stirring is his declaration that the night before he leaves Toyomi spends the night with him.

Serenade (1937)

James M. Cain's Serenade was written right after The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity and it definitely has a lot of their brisk, hard-boiled forward momentum. And despite its many strange elements it is still, more than anything, a crime novel in a decided noir style, recognizably Cain. Yet it is ultimately served well by the strange elements: an Aztec-Mexican prostitute, a shrewd and talented American opera singer, and various lurid mid-century details of drunkenness and debauchery, notably a crazed power-mad homosexual stereotype who arrives late. At which point it heads off directly into the macabre and the caricatured with just about enough unholy zeal to get it across the finish line. Until then, and after a brief prologue in a purple Mexico, it tends to be most interesting when it is about the career of the opera singer, John Sharp, who is on the comeback trail. Sharp talks and behaves more like an automaton, as he wheels and deals with figures of great power in the entertainment / culture industries of the '30s in Hollywood and New York, which is frankly weird. But if the tone is slightly jarring, the details are always interesting, based on Cain's own keen appreciation for the world of opera. The whole thing is way overheated from start to finish, larded up with arguably too many caricatures. But I thought it was remarkably sensitive to Juana, the Aztec-Mexican prostitute, who plays hard against expectations and has a lot of complexity behind her accent, frequently observing that things seem "fonny." Serenade goes over the top at its climax, in a scene that very much surprised me, and clarified the love relationship between the principals. I guess it might suffer overall in some of its extremes when you reflect on it, but the inflamed language and incident pretty much had me all the way. I also liked and was surprised by some of the ways Cain treats homosexuality here, though of course it had to be explicitly licensed by the theatrical opera settings. In the '30s, evidently, everyone understands that's where you find "them," and "they" are all here: transvestites, lesbians, and gays, oh my. But behind that a remarkable clarity sometimes peers out, which I like about Serenade quite a bit. "There's nothing to tell," Sharp says when he is finally confessing his gay affair of years earlier to Juana. "Every man has got five per cent of that in him, if he meets the one person that'll bring it out, and I did, that's all."

In case it's not at the library.

Thieves Like Us (1937)

Edward Anderson's second of only two novels is a quiet and glum affair born of the Great Depression, yet proceeds in such stately and plainspoken fashion that it almost belies the variously lurid goings-on documented. Three hard-bitten jailhouse buddies—Elmo "Chicamaw" Mobley, T.W. "T-Dub" Masefield, and Bowie Bowers—bust out of an Oklahoma prison and return to the life they know, crime, setting off on a spree of bank robberies across Texas. They live high, blow the dough, and go at it again. It appears to be the way they roll. Most of the action is related from the point of view of Bowers, who during the course of the story takes up with a teen-age girl named Keechie. The couple, during periods when the gang is laying low, set up house and lead a decent, simple, and appealing way of life. At the time, Anderson was hailed as a contemporary of literary figures such as Hemingway and Faulkner, and bank robbery, of course, was all the vogue—figures such as John Dillinger and Bonnie & Clyde were huge folk heroes. The title derives from remarks made by the characters about bankers and other capitalists, a none too popular bunch in '30s America. If this novel lacks the complexities explored more fully by, say, Theodore Dreiser, the world that Anderson constructs (or reflects) will nonetheless be familiar to anyone who knows Dreiser or other American naturalists: the game is stacked against the little guy, routinely obliterated like an insect by circumstances, some of his own making, some not. There's no point in caring and what if there were, etc. To Anderson's credit, and perhaps the reason he won and still wins very high accolades, he never overplays his hand. The bank robbers are hardly admirable—not even Bowers, though he comes closest—but the system in which they live would never help them anyway. Anderson lets the talkiness of his characters tell this part of the story with no histrionics and always by careful, deliberate measure. There's a feeling of inexorable fate and doom closing down on practically every page even as events move along briskly, and even as pleasure, joy, and self-satisfaction are briefly found by the thieves. Although the novel has been in and out of print many times during its history, it has been made into two movies, one directed by Nicholas Ray in 1949 (called They Live by Night) and the other by Robert Altman in 1974, neither of which I have seen.

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

Grand Illusion (1937)

La grande illusion, France, 114 minutes
Director: Jean Renoir
Writers: Charles Spaak, Jean Renoir
Photography: Christian Matras
Cast: Jean Gabin, Dita Parlo, Pierre Fresnay, Erich von Stroheim, Julien Carette, Georges Peclet, Werner Florian, Jean Daste, Sylvain Itkine, Gaston Modot, Marcel Dalio

Amazing stuff, this, which by and large escaped me on my first viewing of it in a college film class. Not sure why—maybe I was tired that day? It's first a fine war movie, told from the point of view of a practical pacifism, nothing much political about it—anti-war but only by virtue of its whole-hearted embrace of life (and despite the fact that World War I is the one that can make anybody anti-war). The narrative is spirited and free-wheeling, multilingual in fascinating rhythms, telling the story of the capture and eventual escape of two French officers in World War I. The humanity that the two sides show one another, alongside the implied cruelties, are often surprising, even startling. Erich von Stroheim's performance as a punctiliously civilized German officer is notable in that regard. The settings and camera are both as restless as the story itself, which spans a continent and multiple class systems, all thrown into a discombobulating explosion of continual motion. My favorite scene emerges out of a love affair that occurs between Jean Gabin's Lt. Marechal and Elisa the farm woman (played by Dita Parlo) when the escaped soldiers are forced to hide in her home for several days during the December holiday season. On Christmas morning, she uses awkward German to shyly offer Capt. de Boeldieu (played by Pierre Fresnay) a cup of coffee with cream. It somehow signifies everything that has happened between her and Marechal, and the sad fleetingness of it, and it's an enormously touching moment. Then the soldiers must be off again, making for the Austrian border. An absolutely gorgeous final shot follows shortly to end this stirring and beautiful movie.