"The Long Sheet" (1941)

I found this William Sansom story in the Weird anthology, where editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer compare it to Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” (also in the anthology). It’s a fair comparison in many ways but the author and novel it more put me in mind of were George Orwell and 1984—maybe that’s the Brit in them as Sansom also hailed from the UK. “The Long Sheet” feels more dispassionate than the Kafka as it breaks down its Sisyphean dynamic. The task assigned here, and the geometric setting, seem more perfectly absurd than the physical cruelties of “Penal Colony.” Wringing out a sheet to complete dryness is not even as possible as this story makes it sound. Sansom surely knew this, thus forcing the reader to understand it’s even worse than it seems. There actually is a narrative arc here—a climax and resolution is reached—even though it is willfully anti-rational. The story numbers the allegorical chambers it conceives 1 to 4, but describes them in this order: 3, 2, 4, 1. There’s a narrative logic to the way they build, but I don’t know why 3, for example, could not have been labeled 1. It feels like something about the power of bureaucracy and totalitarianism to confuse and exhaust with irrationality, which again feels more connected to Orwell. Each of the four chambers has a group of at least five people working on the task (wring out the sheet, at knee-high level, to complete dryness). They are also periodically harassed by things like piped-in steam. It is a miserable situation but that is more understood than felt. The one point where the Kafka story is stronger is that the intolerable absurdity is more directly felt. “The Long Sheet” resembles Germans turning techniques of mass production to death and ultimately genocide. But part of the horror here is that death does not occur. This life goes on and on. I like the story quite a bit. It may be a little too neat and tidy, but that also contributes to the chilly antiseptic air of it. It’s like a dry, anonymous report from a bureaucracy. It qualifies as weird, that slippery term, the same way the Kafka story does, because it’s such a strange thing to imagine in the first place. What society goes to the trouble of creating an installation for this work that is pointless by design, and why? How do people in that society feel about the imprisoned? Do they know at all? What do they know? “The Long Sheet” is a case study in raising more questions than it answers, with the same gray feeling of bureaucracy as Orwell. And to think, Auschwitz was not even yet a thing when this story was written and published.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.

"Old Acquaintance" (1941)

It was nice to run across another story I like by John Collier, whose Fancies and Goodnights collection has been consistently disappointing for me since "Witch's Money." It's a good way to do a ghost story, placing it in the context of a loveless marriage that is finally ending after 20 years when the wife dies. A backstory comes swirling in about the friendship of the husband, wife, and a second man, Robert. They partied a lot, in the modern parlance. Their time was the Roaring '20s. The woman chose between them but came to regret her choice. Judging from the behavior we see of her husband it's not hard to understand why. She dies in their hotel room. He decides not to let anyone know until later. He is actually elated about the death and wants to hide it as an impropriety. He had nothing to do with her fatal illness. But he's happy it happened and she is finally gone. This all takes place in Paris—further artifact of the Jazz Age. Our guy goes to a modest café for a drink, where he is astonished to find his wife, "apparently in the best of health." She doesn't have much to say to him but she's pounding down drinks and seem equable enough. Then they run into Robert and it's like old times again. It's amazing and it barely makes sense, but they carouse the night away. The story was probably even more poignant in 1941, when Paris was occupied, but it's still pretty poignant even so. Then our guy passes out and does not wake until the next morning, when he is alone. His wife's body is gone from the hotel room. The concierge tells him his wife can't be dead because she saw her, adding (for a second time in the story), "but Madame was from Angers. You know the proverb." I wish I did! Internet searches just give me stuff about anger management. Anyway, our guy, still seemingly obtuse, seems to think Robert has something to do with this strange situation. He decides to report it to the police but on the way there he sees his wife and Robert again in a cab, "locked in each other's arms, scandalously drunk, and quite oblivious of his existence." He jumps in another cab and orders it to follow them. When his cab finally catches up to it it's just an elderly gentleman, "probably an ambassador," who gets out of the cab. Our guy soon learns that Robert died less than three months earlier. So that's that—they're ghosts now. I like the feeling of the reunion with Robert. Again, there is a lot of nostalgia and sense of lost opportunities that drive this story. I like the treatment of the husband too. He's a terrible person, revealed in a number of ways subtle and overt, but he seems to have little awareness himself of how awful he is.

John Collier, Fancies and Goodnights
Story not available online.

"White Rabbits" (1941)

Leonora Carrington is better known as a Surrealist painter but she also wrote stories and novels. She was born in Britain in 1917, tossed around by European political currents and her own rebellious behavior, and finally landed in Mexico in the early '40s. This very short gem from The Weird speaks to the itinerant traveling lifestyle, told first-person by someone who has just arrived in New York City, living at "40 Pest Street" across the way from an odd house. "This is not the way I had imagined New York," she writes in dry understatement. The narrator is never specified by gender but feels like the voice and life of a woman. Her view of New York is a little unusual but has some of the atmosphere of Charles Addams or Edgar Allan Poe, taking careful note of the light, which is dim and hazy. She can see into the house across the way through the living room window but no one ever seems to be at home. "I finally took to undressing quite freely before my open window and doing my breathing exercises optimistically in the thick Pest Street air." After some time she sees a woman at the other house on the balcony, who calls to her, "Do you happen to have any bad meat over there that you don't need?" The story creates mounting unease by the paragraph, with swift strokes. Out of curiosity, the narrator buys "a large lump of meat" and sets it out to rot a few days. There may be some exaggeration about the smell but the story moves quickly, as next the narrator is seen bearing the reeking prize across the way. Now the story hits its stride. Everything is turned upside down and insane and weird and ghostly inside the house, whose entrance, to start, is difficult to find. "It turned out to be hidden under a cascade of something, giving the impression that nobody had been either in or out of this house in years." I particularly love that "hidden under a cascade of something." Carrington writes vividly but she also knows where to apply the eraser and rub out details. The white rabbits, to get to that detail (stars of Lewis Carroll and Jefferson Airplane before and after), are shiny white and hopping about like bunnies, but they are also carnivores, which immediately sets us off balance. The bad meat is for them; they are not just carnivores but carrion-eaters, like vultures. Any immediate danger in this story is easily escaped, but that offers little solace in this terrifying universe. We see the rabbits, we learn more about the strange occupants of the house—more than we want to know. The story takes comforting things like bunny rabbits and sparkling textures and casually makes them hideously wrong.

The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Story not available online.

Sullivan's Travels (1941)

USA, 90 minutes

Director / writer: Preston Sturges

Photography: John F. Seitz

Music: Charles Bradshaw, Leo Shuken

Editor: Stuart Gilmore

Cast: Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, Robert Warwick, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Porter Hall, Byron Foulger, Eric Blore, Robert Greig, Torben Meyer, Jimmy Conlin, Margaret Hayes, Ray Milland, Preston Sturges

At the point we meet John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), at the start of Sullivan's Travels, he is a successful can't-go-wrong Hollywood wunderkind director of comedies (for example, Hey, Hey, in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Plants of 1939). Maybe a kind of Roy Del Ruth or Lloyd Bacon? Now he wants to make an earnestly serious picture about social suffering and so forth. Mogully producers love Sullivan for his commercial touch of comedy gold, but they don't want to muck that up with some dour exercise that won't sell tickets. This is actually a familiar pattern even in later eras, where comic players of varying ability often appear to believe drama is more exalted than comedy, something they consider more like their day job. Because I am a Boomer, Woody Allen (Interiors, etc.) and Bill Murray (The Razor's Edge, etc.) spring quickly to mind.

I usually forget that the earnestly serious movie John L. Sullivan is determined to make is called O Brother, Where Are Thou? so it usually comes as a pleasant surprise. The Coen brothers redeemed it as a good joke nearly 60 years later. One of the bottomless supply of character actors attending director and writer Preston Sturges (speaking of the commercial comedy touch of gold, which for him was approximately across the midcentury war years) points out to Sullivan that he's not qualified to make a movie about social troubles, having never experienced any himself. That makes Sullivan determined to go to Wardrobe, get himself a hobo costume, and bum the rails around the country, searching for just that experience. And so here we are. 

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

USA, 100 minutes
Director: John Huston
Writers: John Huston, Dashiell Hammett
Photography: Arthur Edeson
Music: Adolph Deutsch
Editor: Thomas Richards
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, Elisha Cook Jr., Barton MacLane, Lee Patrick, Ward Bond, Jerome Cowan

If I could find some way to rank my favorite movies based on the number of times I've seen them (which seems like a reasonable metric), The Maltese Falcon would likely make the top 10. I discovered it when I was still a teen, watched it many times on TV and in retro theaters, rediscovered it in my 20s and then in my 30s. It seems to be good for practically any occasion. The parts intended to be most powerful—for example, those speeches at the end about love and betrayal between Humphrey Bogart as detective Sam Spade and Mary Astor as a scandalous woman of many aliases—have actually worked on me once or twice (I do love the image near the end of Mary Astor in an elevator, behind bars, going down). More often now I appreciate seeing a bunch of professionals busy on some of their best work, starting with Dashiell Hammett who wrote the original novel, one of his best.

In fact, the credits seem a little confused about who matters among these professionals. Gladys George as the widow of Spade's partner is featured with Bogart, Astor, and Peter Lorre in the opening titles, though she barely makes an impression (not George's fault—it's the way the role was written for the picture). Sydney Greenstreet makes the second plateful of names, but there's no mention of Elisha Cook Jr. until the closing credits. It's a commercial film, but The Maltese Falcon is no Hollywood glamour romp of movie stars—instead, it's more like a parade of character actors, starting with Bogart, and working all the way down to the ubiquitous Ward Bond (the Kevin Bacon of his era), James Burke, John Hamilton, and Walter Huston—hey-that-guys one and all. Out of curiosity I decided to keep track of how long it took to get to the main ones.

The Lady Eve (1941)

USA, 94 minutes
Director: Preston Sturges
Writers: Monckton Hoffe, Preston Sturges
Photography: Victor Milner
Music: Phil Boutelje, Charles Bradshaw, Gil Grau, Sigmund Krumgold, John Leipold, Leo Shuken
Editor: Stuart Gilmore
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn, William Demarest, Eugene Pallette, Eric Blore, Melville Cooper, Martha O'Driscoll, Janet Beecher, Robert Greig, Luis Alberni, Jimmy Conlin

In many ways The Lady Eve comes on as a romantic comedy, with two big and beautiful stars in Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. But the instincts of director and cowriter Preston Sturges steer the movie more toward screwball and beyond. We may think of 1941 as a war year, but the Pearl Harbor attack did not occur until the end of the year. And the movies, in the isolationist meantime, were prolific and often seemed more intent on tearing up and rewriting templates. The Lady Eve is a romantic comedy in the same way Hellzapoppin'  is a musical and Citizen Kane is an experimental art film and/or biopic. More than anything, I suppose, The Lady Eve is a Sturges picture, offering up a full orchestra of vaudeville gags, character players, and pratfalls, themselves little symphonies of smashing plates, falling cutlery, and stammered apologies. Sturges never had much sense of cinema formally. But just like he was willing to try anything for a laugh he was also willing to try anything with the technology, as seen in a mirror-driven monologue here. Rampant experimentation appeared to be a regular feature of the movies in 1941. Even a relatively straightforward comedy like the W.C. Fields vehicle Never Give a Sucker an Even Break is full of surrealistic turns.

In the spirit of classic screwballs like My Man Godfrey and Bringing Up Baby, the leads here are as zany as everything else. Stanwyck, who in the first place could do anything, is about at the peak of her powers. Consider her 1941: Ball of Fire, The Lady Eve, Meet John Doe, and You Belong to Me. She's Jean, a conniving con artist and card sharp traveling aboard a passenger ship as the daughter of her mentor, the self-titled Colonel Harrington (Charles Coburn, excellent as always). She is self-assurance itself, speaking a mile a minute and flinging off sparks in all directions. "Every Jane in the room is giving him the thermometer," she says in the mirror monologue, sizing up her prey and the competition. Her target is the dweebish and independently wealthy Charles Poncefort Pike (Fonda), a scientist with an interest in snakes who is returning from an exploring expedition in the Amazon. She calls him Hopsie after he tells her it's a family nickname he hates. Working against his already stolid type, Abraham Lincoln Tom Joad Henry Fonda is especially good playing an absent-minded professor harried by a perpetual erection—a notable skill, not often seen in midcentury American movies or done well ever.

Orphans of the Sky (1941)

Robert Heinlein uses two long stories, "Universe" and "Common Sense," to think about one of the most difficult ethical problems of long-term space travel. If it's going to take multiple generations of time to get to another solar system, which is the best we can hope for from technology then and now still, that means the people setting out originally are the only ones with the choice of being there or not. Literature is full of stories of intergenerational conflict. Start with Oedipus—or Cain. That's probably not going to change just because you think you're on the adventure of a lifetime across the galaxy. That conflict is basically at the center of the two stories that make up Orphans of the Sky, with some ingenious twists. One is that, even though the original mission was intended to take only two or three generations at most, a mutiny, followed by religiously based ignorance, has left the sojourners believing the ship itself is the entirety of the universe. There is no anywhere else. It's a big ship but I'm sure you see the problem. Also, radiation has produced mutant strains who are ostracized and whose existence fuels a lot of the religious jingoism. Heinlein may be cynical but he's even more shrewd about human psychology. He gets away with the cynicism, in many ways like Mark Twain, because of the sunny disposition of his storytelling. Heinlein lives on a wonderful midcentury American attitude of can-do. His best characters are all about getting things done. This leads to various unbelievable points, such as the finish, but the well-scrubbed straight-shooter air nonetheless buoys it. I don't always agree with the main viewpoints in lots of Heinlein's work—he's way too militarist and capital-friendly for my tastes generally and the racial and sexual ideas can stray into the rancid. But it's easy to blame some of it on "the times" and rock along with his voice. Among other things he's about the work of imagining utopias, and his particular vision is one I can't help finding attractive, built on the urgency of our longing to know more and to explore. Heinlein obviously thought long and hard about the problems of multiple-generation space exploration. He's clearly not sure it's even feasible. But the resolve to do it is felt.

In case it's not at the library.

"Why I Live at the P.O." (1941)

Read story by Eudora Welty online.

I struggled some with Eudora Welty's colorful Southern story full of colorful Southern people doing colorful Southern things. Welty was a native of Mississippi so the tone, approach, and subject matter are little surprise. I haven't read much of her—and, I'm sorry to say, I mix her up with Edith Wharton (the initials, no doubt, probably combined with the gender and general "back there" timeframe). This is also one of those stories full of precision Southern dialect. But dialect is often a tough go for me, no matter how precise. Welty was also a photographer and the story in large part is spun out of one of her photos, a picture of a woman ironing in the back of a post office. It's told first-person by a young woman, known as Sister, and the primary plot point, as suggested by the title, is an explanation of why she moved to the post office. The home situation is clannish: there's Stella-Rondo, who is Sister's sister, and Papa-Daddy, their grandfather, and Mama, their mother, and so on. Stella-Rondo has recently moved home again after a short period of being married, and appeared with a 2-year-old no one has ever heard about. Stella-Rondo claims the girl is adopted, but Sister does not believe that. It's a pretty riotous crew all around, with lots of ongoing friction, catcalling, and shenanigans between family members. The weirdest turn for me was when Uncle Rondo, Mama's brother, showed up wearing one of Stella-Rondo's dresses. Everyone thinks it's in poor taste but rolls with it. The story takes place on a 4th of July, underlining the narrator's independence, or something. I understand this is all comical business, but it never seemed very funny. The general dynamic between most family members I would characterize as abusive, but maybe that's just me. I understand it's exaggerated for grotesque effect, but even when you let the air out of it it's still pretty awful. Let's apply good old Occam's razor to Stella-Rondo's situation, given what we know from the story. She probably got pregnant, moved away, and came back two or three years later with a child. The marriage was real enough but short-lived. Now she wants to claim the man she married is not the father. It's ambiguous, but the implications are so rotten it's hard to find much comical about it. I probably need to relax and go with the flow a little bit more on this one.

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

"You Could Look It Up" (1941)

Read story by James Thurber online.

The overwhelming point of this amusing baseball anecdote by James Thurber is the dialect, which is almost as charming as it is thick. Some of my favorite locutions here include "the iron eye," "finely," and "all Bethlehem broke loose." I got used to it ("finely") but it was slow going at first. This story was published in 1941 and 10 years later was acted out in reality by St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck, who signed small person Eddie Gaedel (3 feet 7 inches) for a one-time appearance as a pinch hitter. You could look it up. Not surprisingly, Gaedel—and the wonderfully named Pearl du Monville in this story—are walked on four consecutive pitches. Well, that's not exactly the way it goes down in this story, but I'll let you get to the details on your own. Veeck claims he was unaware of the story, or at least he said, in conversation with New York Giants manager John McGraw, that he'd had the idea before 1941. This suggests to me that the premise was already part of the oral lore of baseball. Thurber turned it into this story. Veeck made it a one-time stunt in a ballgame. In both instances it was hilariously cited as making a mockery of the game, which is rich. Me, I like baseball anecdotes quite a bit. This is a little more formal, even with the dialect, but still has an appealing air of yarn spinning. It might even be fun to hear it read aloud by someone who can do it justice, although as always the risks for flopping would be great. Oral storytelling necessarily requires some theatrical skill, especially when dialect is involved, which can lead to wincing. If anything, this story might be too long for just an anecdote. The best ones are quick. Joaquin Andujar on how he would pitch to himself: "Fastball down the middle. What do you think, I'd try to get myself out?" Or Don Drysdale's view that an intentional walk was a waste of three pitches. The anecdote of the small pinch hitter here is easily told just by stating the premise, so the story feels a little bloated, and might be annoying if you are not a baseball fan or don't enjoy reading dialect. I have my problems in the latter area, but Thurber's pretty good at it and also at telling a story. Plus it's a classic, you know.

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

"The Eighty-Yard Run" (1941)

Read story by Irwin Shaw online.

Irwin Shaw's story is a case of fairly conventional midcentury white man's anxiety about failure. It's skillfully done, switching point of view between settings 15 years apart, but the basic idea seems to be how tragic it is that a white man has failed. The fact that his wife becomes successful after he has failed only makes his failure worse. You might want to argue that using football is verging on cliché but I will agree with you only on the general point about sports, because how often does football show up in literary efforts so artfully described? Not often. And the title event is not without its twist of irony. The central memory and high point in the life of Christian Darling (another one for the what-a-name file) actually occurs in a practice session, not even a real game, let alone at a crucial game point. It's even likely he has always exaggerated how good the run was, and still does. But it cemented his place on the starting team, he believes. He was soon overshadowed by others and by his own lackluster performance. The 15 years in question, by the way, span 1925, when he dazzled himself in a scrimmage, and 1940, when he is a much diminished 35-year-old. He lived high off his potential at first, marrying the daughter of a rich man who set them up. That took some of the sting off the football mediocrity. But then the Depression came and all was ruination. This story was written before Pearl Harbor—the basic arc here is about the '20s and '30s. After the stock market crash, after his father-in-law kills himself, Darling becomes a mumbling incompetent. His wife steps up and begins a successful career in publishing as a literary editor. The story is just full of clichés, but what's interesting about them is how they capture a sense of US life that would change radically with World War II. It captures that moment before Pearl Harbor in almost perfect amber. Among other things, football would go on to become the favorite sport in the US and a generator of grotesque levels of revenue. But that's far in the future for 1940, when it's still kind of a gentleman ruffian's unusual hobby, more like, say, rugby is considered today. I don't feel much sympathy for Christian Darling. I wish there were more here about his wife, Louise. I wish the whole thing were about her and told from her point of view. But you can't have everything. And it's a really nicely turned story, no matter how silly or strange some of its ideas may be, which is nothing to take for granted.

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

"A Bottle of Milk for Mother" (1941)

Read story by Nelson Algren online.

Nelson Algren's 1941 O. Henry Award nominee is something of a one-trick pony—all flinty Chicago mobster slang, featuring a police interview of one Bruno "Lefty" Bicek concerning a robbery and shooting death. "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" (the title refers to Lefty's attempt at an alibi) can get so heavy on the Chicago wiseguy dialect that it's easy to bog down parsing what is being said in the dialogue passages. That's annoying—dialect is notoriously difficult to do well, as there's a necessary tension between the accuracy of the rendering and the clarity of its meaning. Algren's attempt is not bad. I've seen worse, and it does bring the Chicago flavor. But in general the story is so dated as to read as quaint, or "colorful." It hinges most on the shock of the naturalistic Chicago cops and criminals of the Depression era, the sight of them in their environs, interacting. The cops are cynical and corrupt. Lefty is brutal and dim. Hard street life scenes are dropped in all over: Lefty's life is about accepting the conditions or escaping them. He attempted first to escape them, as a reasonably talented boxer and baseball player, but now he's leaning more toward accepting them. That involves a life of crime one way or another. In the back and forth of the police interview, the cops finally corner Lefty and he realizes he's going to take the fall for the crime, which he probably did, we see by the evidence presented. The last line of the story poignantly underlines both the motivation to escape and the acceptance of the conditions: "'I knew I'd never get to twenty-one anyhow,' Lefty told himself softly at last." Yes, it's tragic, but equally bad and worse things happen now, and I'm left mostly unmoved. There's just not enough going on beyond the Chicago trappings, which are the featured attraction in this story but no longer read as vividly as I'm sure they once did. To my jaded contemporary ears it comes off more like Damon Runyon than perpetual human tragedy. In this case, for better or worse, the "colorful" swamps the "human." I have a lot of regard for Nelson Algren. He's one of those writers whose reputation intrigues me and I've always meant to read more, beyond a handful or so of his stories over the years. What always appeals to me are the moods and tones, the gritty city scenes and the plain way they are described. But he has also seemed hit and miss in my limited experience. "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" is more of a miss for me.

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

The Neon Wilderness by Nelson Algren

Bugs Bunny vs. Cecil J. Turtle: The Tortoise and the Hare Trilogy (1941-1947)

Tortoise Beats Hare (1941), Tortoise Wins by a Hare (1943), Rabbit Transit (1947), USA, 22 minutes
Directors: Tex Avery, Robert Clampett, Friz Freleng
Writers: Aesop, Dave Monahan, Warren Foster, Michael Maltese, Tedd Pierce
Animation: Charles McKimson, Robert McKimson, Ken Champin, Gerry Chiniquy
Music: Carl W. Stalling, Milt Franklyn
Editor: Treg Brown
Cast: Mel Blanc

The World War II years marked the crucible for the Warner Brothers cartoon character Bugs Bunny. That's when he solidified into the sassy, confident rabbit we know today, picking up his Brooklyn accent, his catch phrase, his carrot, and all his winning ways. Others foolishly think they can take advantage of him—he's just a rabbit, right?—but in fact he's the unassuming wise guy who never loses—never, ever loses. He became a kind of model for America in the world during the war years and after—unassuming but skeptical and jeering, and always a winner. More than anything he was about minding his own business, and that business was about being left alone, another long-term yearning of the American soul. But when dumbass hunters, ducks, and other miscreants come along, the rabbit's only choice is to rid himself of them. And he is always successful—no one loses to Bugs Bunny. He is faster, smarter, and more funny than anyone who challenges him. That's his way.

In the Aesop fable, by comparison, it's the rabbit who is doomed to fail, and only the rabbit. So the decision to create not one but three cartoons based on the story is an interesting one. Yes, a steady wellspring of cartoon makers in the '40s were fables and fairy tales, they are scattered all through the Warner Brothers catalog, made to be seen before feature films in theaters. In fairness, Bugs does have his struggles in some cases, but he is really thrust into an impossible situation this time. The tortoise wins that race—you can look it up. But the hare, the rabbit, is—Bugs Bunny. It's the famous case of the irresistible force and the unmovable object. But three times? What punishment must Bugs endure, and how can it possibly be resolved?

The Lady Eve (1941)

#15: The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges, 1941)

In his earlier pick of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, Steven wrote, "There was a time when it was the duty of Americans to insert the wisecrack that could deflate delusions of grandeur." Preston Sturges practically spun an entire career out of that—short, perhaps even limited, but so fully realized that nearly every one of the dozen or so pictures he made are worth seeing. They crackle with energy and spitfire dialogue, which sometimes goes by so fast even the players seem to be having a hard time keeping up (and I have to think a lightbulb or two lit up over Robert Altman's head when he saw the way Sturges made use, perhaps inadvertently, of overlapping dialogue). The troupe of character actors Sturges regularly went to—William Demarest, Eddie Bracken, Jimmy Conlin, Al Bridge, Arthur Hoyt, Victor Potel, and many others—are so familiar it's a case of never-ending déjà vu, and they are absolute comedy pros.

My favorites include The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (Betty Hutton's great moment), Sullivan's Travels (in which a successful comedy director wants to make a very serious Grapes-of-Wrath-style picture called O Brother Where Art Thou?), Christmas in July, and Unfaithfully Yours, which came a bit later than the sweet spot of Sturges's early '40s surge. (The Great Moment is really the only one to skip.)

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

#20: The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941)

In many ways The Maltese Falcon arrives now full-blown, with a lot of its sure-fire elements in tow: a great cast, a great screenplay based on a great literary property, a great strategy for production design and photography (yes, Phil's kids, black and white), and a great director in John Huston, who remained as vital (and as hit and miss) right into the '80s. But none of this was so certain in its time. Huston was no sure thing in his first effort as a director (the shot earned on the basis of his work as a screenplay writer), nor was Humphrey Bogart quite yet the star he would become.

As is typical of most hard-boiled detective fiction in the classic mode—and, based on one of Dashiell Hammett's best and best-known novels, this is about as classic as it gets—the plot developments come fast and furious, quickly snarling into a mess verging on chaos, albeit calmly piloted by the private eye at the center of it, in this case Bogart's Sam Spade. For the most part The Maltese Falcon sticks close to the book, particularly its dialogue, but Huston's screenplay makes it look a lot easier than it probably is to adapt one of these stories, and it remains the standard by which to compare others.

Mildred Pierce (1941)

You could fit both of James Cain's first two novels inside of this one, and still have room left over for a good chunk of his third. It's a funny thing when a writer's work starts feeling expansive when a novel comes in at 300 pages, but that's the thing about Cain. With the preternatural compression and determined hard-nosed flint of those first two, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, Cain went to supernatural lengths to remove the inessential. He's still pretty hardcore hard-boiled here in his fourth, but as the title alone would seem to indicate, this is more a self-conscious attempt at a "woman's story"—sardonic parody, straight-up melodrama, or otherwise—and so even though there's enough mayhem and cruelty to satisfy any aficionado of crime fiction, there are shades and nuance of emotion and a parade of sticky relationships as well. Those things require time and space to develop, hence the comparative War and Peace scope. I was familiar first with the classic Joan Crawford vehicle directed by Michael Curtiz. But I see now that typically enough a lot of blunting and elision was required to get the story whittled down to a two-hour feature (unlike the productions based on Cain's first two, which are practically straight lifts). (I am looking forward, let me add quickly, to the Mildred Pierce mini-series scheduled to arrive late next month on HBO, directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet, which I think from its scope has a better chance of successfully hewing closer to the novel.) I was surprised at Cain's ability here to strike a relaxed tone and let events unspool more deliberately, as the complications ripen naturally. The Crawford movie is starkly black and white in more ways than one; I recall the central relationship between Mildred Pierce and her daughter as fairly clearly defined. One is bad and one is not. While much of that dynamic comes from the novel, the situation in toto is infinitely more complex, even starting with its surprising grasp of the difficulties confronting women who need to earn a living and want to be successful about it, particularly in those times. Cain's voice here reminds me more of hale and hearty American bonhomie, more Sinclair Lewis than Dashiell Hammett—though, to be sure, Cain as always remains an original. The shift in tone suits the material better, setting up the gut punches more effectively rather than telegraphing and continually attempting to top them. In his first two novels Cain delivers a gnawing sense of doom from the first sentences forward. Here, he dresses up that sense of doom inside pretty wrapping paper of ordinary American lives, simple hopes, and the bravado of cheer. Open the package, it's still pretty dark in there.

In case it's not at the library.

Citizen Kane (1941)

USA, 119 minutes
Director: Orson Welles
Writers: Herman Mankiewicz, Orson Welles, Roger Q. Denny, John Houseman, Mollie Kent
Photography: Gregg Toland
Music: Bernard Herrmann
Editor: Robert Wise
Cast: Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingore, Agnes Moorehead, Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins, Erskine Sanford, Everett Sloane, George Coulouris

When something is as universally adulated as this—not just ranked high but routinely rated #1 in critical poll after critical poll—it can paint a target on its back for contrarians such as myself. It seems hard to believe that anything could possibly foster such agreement and it smells like the kind of thing that annually delivers up Oscar travesties, the hoariest industry trend of all by now.

But a few little items in recent years have helped me better get over myself in this regard, and I pass them along for what they're worth for anyone who might be struggling with a similar predicament. First, I read about an encounter reported by Jonathan Rosenbaum that occurred in a film class he took in the early '60s, when he was given to understand, after asking about the exclusion of Citizen Kane for any consideration in the class, "that Orson Welles's film was basically uncinematic and therefore only impressive to amateurs who understood little about the medium." That's the kind of thing guaranteed to raise the hackles of any self-respecting contrarian.