Laura (1942)

I’m starting the two-volume collection of “suspense novels” by women crime writers from the 1940s and 1950s, published by Library of America. Vera Caspary’s Laura is the first. It was serialized in 1942, published as this short novel in 1943, and then served in 1944 as the basis for Otto Preminger’s first movie, of the same name, with Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Vincent Price, and Clifton Webb. It’s a pretty nifty picture but as usual the book is better. Like a lot of midcentury crime fiction, it came under some modern literary influences, with light touches of experimentation. The formal POV in Laura shifts from section to section. The most effective is Laura herself, who finally speaks up in the second half. Waldo Lydecker, Laura’s mentor and wannabe lover, shows up first. He is an obese man in the novel, but I kept seeing the svelte Webb who plays him in the movie. One very short section is a transcript of a police interview. For all this fancy dancing, the murder mystery is fairly humdrum and conventional. The most interesting aspect of Laura is once again Laura herself, a de facto feminist and successful advertising woman. Gene Tierney is perfect for the part in the movie—beautiful, smart, and wary of men. Of course, there are still midcentury values all over it, so naturally she falls for and ends up with the competent detective working the case. It doesn’t feel that satisfying for all the formal huffing. The next most interesting detail is the woman’s point of view Caspary can and does bring, though she seems to be at least as constrained as Laura by rigid gender roles. I do think the cross-gender problem in writing cuts both ways—women are generally better at writing men than vice versa (lord knows), but Caspary’s male lead, the detective, has virtually no interior life. Lydecker works better—as presented, he feels possibly more gay than straight, but more than anything he is vindictive and grasping and that comes through well. Vincent Price plays a lothario type Laura almost marries before the cop comes along. Lydecker wants her too. In the end she chooses the cop, which at least feels tidy. But if the great strength of Laura is her independence maybe she could have continued on that way. I don’t expect her to start sexualizing her power the way a lot of men do but conventional romance doesn’t seem right either. It all comes out about even—I like the experimental spirit of the novel and Laura may have seemed more independent at that time than she may now. The characters in Laura have some interesting angles even if the mystery feels slightly forced. The surprises in the middle, and there are a few, including a big one after the first part, likely speak to the novel’s origins as a serial. Interesting short mystery novel of the time.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

The Palm Beach Story (1942)

USA, 88 minutes

Director: Preston Sturges

Writers: Preston Sturges, Ernst Laemmle

Photography: Victor Milner

Music: Victor Young

Editor: Stuart Gilmore

Cast: Claudette Colbert, Joel McCrea, Rudy Vallee, Mary Astor, Sig Arno, Robert Dudley, William Demarest, Franklin Pangborn, Al Bridge

The Palm Beach Story is packed to the rafters with loony comedic character actors, and it also has some of my favorite stars of the time, including Mary Astor and Claudette Colbert. And Rudy Vallee is a revelation here, smooth, self-possessed, and knowing. But there are points in this movie—the opening scenes, for example—when I wonder how director and cowriter Preston Sturges was ever allowed to make movies. It's so clumsy in its frenetic attempt to establish a premise, with quick cuts, mugging for the camera, pointless freeze-frames, people fainting, someone escaping from a closet. Madcap! Zany! Wackadoodle! But can someone please tell me what's going on?

Eventually the antics settle into a story—a marriage that has lasted five years is now foundering because hubby Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea, a Sturges regular) sees himself as a stone failure. And he might be, considering his ambitions. His dream is to build an airport in the downtown of a city above the buildings, made out of steel mesh—I think we're actually intended to believe he's some kind of inventor-prophet without honor in his own land. But the main point of the story is the souring marriage, which of course will be saved by picture's end in a wrap-up nearly as frenetic as the picture's opening, and more pleasantly unlikely. Symmetry.

"The Idol of the Flies" (1942)

I have little conscious memory of it now but I was exposed twice to Jane Rice's unpleasant story when I was a kid reading these things, including the These Will Chill You anthology my folks gave me for my birthday one year along with the Rubber Soul album. I see better now that that whole collection is full of unpleasant stories, as it also has Poe's "Valdemar" and one by George Fielding Eliot called "The Copper Bowl," which I will be getting to down the line. But this Rice story also made it into an Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology I probably read too. In 7th grade, as it happens, there was a fad in my junior high school that lasted a few weeks for kids to capture flies, remove their wings, and keep them as so-called pets in tins (Sucrets, as I recall). This inspired me to write a jokey how-to piece about having flies for pets in an English class assignment which somehow ended up as officially my first publication anywhere later that year, in the junior high literary annual. Many years after that I showed it, thinking it was funny and maybe even precocious, to a woman I wanted for a girlfriend but she was so horrified by it that it was kind of a bad episode for me. In fact, I don't even have the heart to dig it out of my papers at the moment. The annual had an unusual name, which I wish I could remember.

At any rate, Rice's story is quite thoroughly creepy, about a boy named Pruitt who is cruel to servants and animals. It has a "happy ending" which does nothing to mitigate what we witness. Pruitt goes out of his way to humiliate the servants and he kills small animals in grotesque ways, such as running a toad through with a stick. It dies slowly. We would now consider Pruitt prime material to be a serial killer sooner or later, and we might even wonder a little about Rice (perhaps the way that woman did about me). It's a fiendish imagination Rice applies here. I was tempted to lay it off on the publication date, thinking she was British because the story feels so British, and it must be her rage about Nazis fueling this. But no, Rice was born and spent much of her life in the US South, so I'm not sure what to make of that. It's probably not fair to mention that Nazi laws were often based on their close study of the Jim Crow South. But two more points need to be made about Rice and her story here considering the 1942 publication date.

Go Down, Moses (1942)

William Faulkner considered this cycle of seven stories to be a novel and that's good enough for me. Some of them were published separately, but even what is likely the most famous story here—"The Bear"—has a long section that has nothing to do with any bear and everything to do with themes and elements developed in the other stories. The stories are discontinuous but sequential in time, with a shifting cast of main characters. As with much of Faulkner, the themes and elements can be reduced to interbreeding among Old South settlers and natives, including of course slaves. It's the story of the McCaslin family across the generations, but it's not easy to sort out all the relations in this sizable clan, especially the brooding way Faulkner tells it, elliptically, from obtuse angles, occasionally wading deep into minutia of genealogy. I saw a chart once that made reasonably clear what is meant by first, second, and third cousins, and the "removed" business too, but I still have a hard time wrapping my head around it, especially in Faulkner's brusque linear narrative form. To make things worse, the African line of descent is of course kept secret among McCaslins (open secret, not to be discussed aloud) and marked by shame and humiliation. But character traits and physical features can emerge in any part of the clan, and they are all united in some ways. There are lots of lively anecdotes here, and Faulkner often surprises with humor, though much of it is ultimately tragic. The main character—or the unifying character—is Isaac McCaslin, a white man, gifted hunter, and lifelong bachelor who repudiates an inheritance of land and utterly bewilders everyone else here. As readers we can see that he's actually explaining himself fairly clearly, in that strangely stilted language of Faulkner that grows hypnotic. Isaac McCaslin is explaining himself—they just don't want to understand. We can understand better. So it goes. The first story tells of how Isaac's father was tricked into marriage late in life. His name is Theophilus but he's known as Buck. In the later stories Isaac is Uncle Ike and an old man. The centerpiece and best story is "The Bear," a great hunting adventure with nice exaggerations, spending a significant portion of its significant length on Isaac's explanation of himself in a somewhat arch experimental format, which is nonetheless effective. This novel, as slapped together as it feels in a way, is one of my favorites by Faulkner.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

There Was a Father (1942)

Chichi ariki, Japan, 87 minutes
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Writers: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujiro Ozu, Takao Yanai
Photography: Yuharu Atsuta
Music: Kyoichi Saiki
Editor: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Cast: Chishu Ryu, Shuji Sano, Haruhiko Tsuda, Mitsuko Mito, Shin Saburi

Criterion editions are often little masterpieces themselves of restoration, but even their print of this picture by director Yasujiro Ozu is badly damaged, suggesting the neglect it may have suffered since its Imperial Japan release date, when it was a modest success. Yet now it's almost as if that were the plan: the abrupt cuts, the missing time (seven missing minutes under the oversight of Douglas MacArthur), and the hissing audio, which sometimes drowns dialogue. They actually work to underline the poignant and affecting themes, which focus on loss, where the heart barely has speech. On one level it's a story of duty and well-meaning (and arguably necessary) neglect, but what is produced is a heartsick kid and man, a vivid and painful unrequited love that an only son feels for his father, who was widowed when the boy was still quite young.

It's like Fred MacMurray and My One Son and profoundly tragic. At the time of the movie the father, Shuhei Horikawa (the always impressive Chishu Ryu, one of Ozu's regular players), has apparently come to terms with his wife's death, but we see him take on even more baggage. As a strict but beloved schoolteacher, dubbed "the Badger" by students, he escorts his students on an annual field trip involving overnights. One year a student, disobeying his admonitions, takes a boat out rowing. It capsizes and the student drowns. Horikawa blames himself and retires from teaching. At first it gives him more time to spend with his son, but he soon realizes they must live apart. His career is now more itinerant and he believes, probably rightly, that stability is what's important for his son. He places the boy in a boarding school when he is not yet even 12. They will never live together again.

Why We Fight (1942-1945)

Prelude to War (1942); The Nazis Strike (1943); Divide and Conquer (1943); The Battle of Britain (1943); The Battle of Russia (1943); The Battle of China (1944); War Comes to America (1945), USA, 422 minutes, documentary
Directors: Frank Capra, Anatole Litvak, Anthony Veiller
Writers: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Anthony Veiller, Robert Heller, Williband Hentschel, Adolf Hitler, Eric Knight, S.K. Lauren, Anatole Litvak, John Sanford, Confucius, Emma Lazarus
Photography: Robert J. Flaherty
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin, Hugo Friedhofer, Leigh Harline, Arthur Lange, Cyril J. Mockridge, Alfred Newman, David Raksin, Anthony Collins, Louis Gruenberg, John Leipold, Roy Webb, William Lava, Howard Jackson, Max Steiner
Editors: William Hornbeck, William A. Lyon
With: Walter Huston, Anthony Veiller, John Litel, Frieda Inescourt, Lloyd Nolan, Elliot Lewis, Harry von Zell

At the moment, it's not hard to understand the monumental task of the United States and the democratic nations in 1942 converting the Greatest Generation into the original Antifa. It took some prodding. As we are currently living through a period of nearly perfect amnesia about fascism it's instructive to see, as documented in this series of instructional films, that Madison Square Garden could be filled in the late 1930s with Nuremberg-style rallies for American Nazis, swastikas blazing and thuggish beat-downs for anyone raising objections to the usual toxic swill. Sad (and obvious) to say, the only difference in today's "Lock her up" "Send her back" rallies is that they are shot in color, and they're not yet so brazen with the swastikas (though they think it's funny to say "Hail Trump").

But a monumental task was met with a monumental propaganda film project, appropriately preserved now in stained, scratched, and iffy prints, cheaply available in libraries, on YouTube, cable-TV channels, Amazon Prime, DVD, even VHS (though no longer cheap in that format). Why We Fight set out to be our Triumph of the Will. Even today it remains as stirring, entertaining, and inspiring as a seven-hour seven-part movie can be. Sometimes, as in the studious prologue of the first episode, Prelude to War, it can be dull with didactic explanation. We're still a little bored with Manchuria going down in 1931 and Shanghai and Nanking in 1937, even with the Japanese altogether (other than Pearl Harbor and the A-bombs). These anonymous filmmakers expertly manage our expectations. They know it's German Nazis we want and it is German Nazis we will get. They just make us sit through some instruction first. As they put it, at the end of every episode, with words it is good to remember now (their italics, but my emphasis too): "The victory of the democracies can only be complete with the utter defeat of the war machines of Germany and Japan."

To Be or Not to Be (1942)

USA, 99 minutes
Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Writers: Melchior Lengyel, Edwin Justus Mayer, Ernst Lubitsch
Photography: Rudolph Mate
Music: Werner R. Heymann
Editor: Dorothy Spencer
Cast: Jack Benny, Carole Lombard, Robert Stack, Stanley Ridges, Felix Bressart, Lionel Atwill, Sig Ruman, Tom Dugan, Charles Halton

I still haven't seen all of director and cowriter Ernst Lubitsch's best pictures, and I think at this point I might prefer The Shop Around the Corner for pure artistry (also known as "the Lubitsch touch"). But To Be or Not to Be, presently considered his greatest, is a strange beast that really should not be missed. A Hollywood comedy about Nazi-occupied Warsaw in 1939 and the early '40s, what is perhaps most amazing about it is that it was made shortly after the invasion and while the death camps were starting to happen. The actual invasion of Warsaw in September 1939 is shown, complete with devastation. A calendar page in the last third of the movie shows a date of December 16, 1941—nine days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and nine days after Germany's decision to move forward with the "Final Solution." It has to be doubtful that the filmmakers knew about either while they were working on the movie.

That's right, I said comedy—that's what Jack Benny and Carole Lombard in particular are doing here. It's the darkest days of World War II in Poland but To Be or Not to Be is also lighthearted, urbane, musical, and funny. What's less surprising, of course, is that no one knew what to make of this movie in 1942. It was variously considered in poor taste, a downer when morale needed to be kept up, and even maybe unpatriotic. Perhaps most shocking for audiences at the time was the treatment of German Nazis as mostly harmless if obviously dangerous buffoons. It's much more like Hogan's Heroes than Come and See (or even Stalag 17)—in fact, it's quite likely that the set piece of a frustrated Colonel Klink bellowing "Schultz!" finds its direct origins here.

Love's Lovely Counterfeit (1942)

I don't think you can count this as one of the best by James M. Cain, which makes me wonder how precipitously the quality falls off after his three best-known novels (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and Mildred Pierce). Even this one got made into a movie too (Slightly Scarlet, 1956) so conceivably it is still better than many others. It frequently put me in mind of Dashiell Hammett's first novel, Red Harvest. Both are focused on changes of corrupting power in mid-sized or small cities, engineered by one or two clever enterprising fellows (and dames), the chief enterpriser also doing the first-person narrative honors. So we see and hear from such principals as the mayor, district attorney, chief of police, and boss crime lord. Excuse me for yawning. I don't see many productive directions for fiction about political corruption to go, All the King's Men notwithstanding. If it turns out the bad guys win it's cynical and also not a surprise; if the good guys take it it's not believable. Better all around to go the factual route, because the old cliché holds true: you can't make up the best stuff. Given that it is Cain in 1942, there's a certain amount of quality here in spite of everything (including that I would be surprised if he looked at this manuscript more than twice, and not at all surprised if it were only once). Dialogue and exposition are clipped and propulsive, also lots of people are strangely familiar with opera. There's a love story at the center but Cain is unable for once to make it sick enough to be interesting, so it tends to just lay there and quiver any time it's rotated up front. There's lots of action, lots of narrative sequence, but not much in the way of stakes, just low-level hoodlum types getting over on their higher-level superiors, extending all the way up to the mayor's office—two mayor's offices, actually, because of course there's also an obvious element of irony here about the everlasting fungibility of political corruption. There are biographies and history books packed full of stories much better than this. For better or worse, however, few will tell them as well as Cain does, so you can take that into account too.

In case it's not at the library.

Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas (1942)

Don't let anyone tell you Nebraska does not have a place in the literary history of America, producing at least two fine writers in Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz. Sandoz is the author of this excellent biography of the Lakota legend, along with a shelf on the American West, including novels and straightforward histories alike. Crazy Horse is admirably detailed and even more admirably sensitive to the legend, legacy, and enduring influence of the colossal figure, one of the most important of the 19th century and in all American history. Sandoz is a great writer, straightforward, unadorned, and evocative, and has even further bona fides in that obviously the Great Plains of North America run deeply in her blood—she bears a wistful affection for the harsh geography and the cultures it has nurtured, a flinty realistic approach to ordering the facts, and a profound respect for the Lakota (also known as Sioux). This all serves her quite well in her genuine appreciation for a figure who remains powerful and mysterious well more than a century past his death. Much like the white man's George Washington, Crazy Horse is a historical figure who is known generally by a great many far and wide—but push deeper and he only becomes strange and inscrutable. We know basic things about Crazy Horse. He is considered a great leader by all, a brave, shrewd, and cunning warrior. He never allowed his photograph to be taken. He was instrumental in defeating Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. And he was ultimately betrayed into an ignominious death in an isolated outpost. Sandoz details all this painstakingly but with lucid and penetrating style. Her work feels authoritative at every step and she has great sympathy for the tragedy of the story, which nonetheless never gets in the way of her telling it. Obviously Crazy Horse was no more successful at stemming tides of history than any other Native American to date, a continuing tragedy. But something about Crazy Horse remains uniquely vital, moving, and significant. It can't be any surprise, for example, that he has inspired one of the greatest monuments ever created, still in progress, set in the Black Hills, intended partly to eclipse Mount Rushmore itself. I haven't read other biographies of Crazy Horse, partly because Sandoz's book seems so definitive in both its meticulous research (extraordinarily thorough), and partly because the story is so sad and infuriating. It's a story you don't want to miss—really—and this is a very fine place to get it.

In case it's not at the library.

Casablanca (1942)

#9: Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942)

We've been at this for awhile and I'm tired, plus this one falls in the category of Everybody Already Said It. Therefore I'm going to take the easy way out and point to a review I wrote for my blog last spring. Maybe you can find something new in that. The short version: I've been watching Casablanca nearly all of my adult life, starting back when it was cut to pieces for commercial breaks on late-night broadcast TV, and I've been all over the map: in thrall to its screenplay, both at the level of the endlessly witty and quotable dialogue (the clip at the link is reasonably representative) and also at the level of its densely plotted structure ... and contemptuous of (or maybe I should dial that back to saddened by) its "of the times" racism and sexism. Mostly I have loved it. The last time I looked I liked it fine. I even thought I saw a way of looking at it that cleared up the sexism, maybe. People will be looking at Casablanca for as long as they remember Humphrey Bogart and World War II and the movies—that is, approximately until Cormac McCarthy's The Road becomes reality. Or, as the headline for a story about a Bogart retrospective we once ran in the college paper I worked at put it: "Here's kids looking at you, Bogey." Forever.

"I like to think that you killed a man—it's the romantic in me."

Casablanca review

Phil #9: On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) (scroll down)
Steven #9: A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951)

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

USA, 88 minutes
Directors: Orson Welles, Fred Fleck, Robert Wise
Writers: Booth Tarkington, Orson Welles, Jack Moss, Joseph Cotten
Photography: Stanley Cortez, Jack MacKenzie, Orson Welles
Music: Bernard Herrmann, Roy Webb
Editors: Robert Wise, Jack Moss, Mark Robson
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Dolores Costello, Agnes Moorhead, Tim Holt, Anne Baxter, Ray Collins, Richard Bennett, Erskine Sanford, Donald Dillaway, Orson Welles

I found myself surprisingly put in mind of F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby the last time I looked at The Magnificent Ambersons. It's not just the similar title constructions—in the case of Ambersons the adjective appears mostly offered with at least irony, if not sarcasm, unlike the intermeshed and more complex layers of meaning intended for Gatsby. The Magnificent Ambersons is based on Booth Tarkington, of course, so as with not just Gatsby but also Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and many others it also consorts in a certain ideal of the turn-of-the-20th-century Midwestern American idyll, rendered more caustically by H.L. Mencken as the "booboisie." I also thought the lovely overboiled language of Welles's voiceover narration occasionally strayed into Fitzgeraldian realms. And of course there's a number of incidental touch-points in their parallel stories of lifelong love for a woman cruelly denied.

But the paradox is that whereas The Great Gatsby may arguably be a very nearly perfect work of art, The Magnificent Ambersons is famously only the smoking hulk of whatever it might have been. It's known at least as much for being the movie "they took away" from Welles and wrecked as anything else. Here's what Wikipedia has on what happened and specifically what was lost. Look at the movie, read it, and weep. That's how things work around here apparently. RKO execs slashed away some 40 minutes of footage from Welles's early cut and reshot the ending. They monkeyed with everything—the story, the music, the photography. They say a copy of that early cut was shipped to Welles in Brazil, where he was already at work on his next project, but it has since never turned up. The cut footage moldered for a time in a vault but eventually was destroyed to make room for more important things to store there, perhaps Oscars®.

The Stranger (1942)

When I read somewhere recently that Albert Camus was influenced in writing The Stranger by James Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, I decided to circle back and see how much I might have missed in the classic existentialist text when reading it as a 20-year-old. Among Camus's novels, I had much preferred The Fall and especially The Plague, but mostly his work left me cold, particularly when I took a run at The Myth of Sisyphus, more of a philosophical treatise, for a college class. I can't say much has changed for me. The 1988 Matthew Ward translation in the Everyman's edition of The Stranger seems at least as opaque and unyielding as I remembered. There is a deceptively concrete lucidity to the language of this very short novel, to the way events are described and in how they unfold, with numerous short declarative sentences and straightforward exposition. But the events remain largely puzzling and inscrutable. Meursault, the narrator and main character, seems more like a reluctant psychotherapy patient, masking his sullenness at being forced to communicate with a certain mannered stoicism and willful refusal to respond. "Maman died today," the novel opens. "Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: 'Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.' That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday." He never goes deeply into his experience of his mother's loss, and indeed the kinds of suspicions that this engenders for the reader (why is he writing this text if he has no interest in communication?) turn out to play no small part in the suspicion with which he is regarded by others within the novel. He could simply be a man going his own way—in fact, he almost certainly is—but when he overkills an Albanian native with whom a friend has been in conflict he is just as uncommunicative about that, beyond vague statements about the heat and the glare of the sun bothering him. The densely argued introduction to this edition alone points to some of the intellectualized levels at play here, with its sociopolitical background of European colonialism and the more immediate one of Vichy France and World War II, and literary/philosophical currents such as absurdism, naturalism, stoicism, and of course the big kahuna it came to represent, existentialism. But I am left disappointed by The Stranger, alienated by its refusal to engage on an emotional level (when that is the one it is expressly operating on) rather than what seems to me a purely intellectualized exercise altogether too cute by half. On the other hand, it does deepen my appreciation notably of what Cain managed with The Postman.

In case it's not at the library.

(Illustration from Masterpiece Comics.)

Casablanca (1942)

USA, 102 minutes
Director: Michael Curtiz
Writers: Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, Murray Burnett, Joan Alison, Casey Robinson
Photography: Arthur Edeson
Music: Max Steiner ("As Time Goes By": Herman Hupfeld)
Editor: Owen Marks
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid, Dooley Wilson, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, S.Z. Sakall, Madeleine Lebeau

In one way or another Casablanca has been with me all my adult life, earning something of the status of a favorite uncle—with its kindliness and predictable pleasures, and not a few flaws (though my perception and indeed judgment of them seem to change all the time), and most of all a soothing familiarity, it's a known quantity that weathers many storms of cinema fashion and just goes on enduring. Something I have been able to return to again and again.

When people talk about glories of Hollywood, this is not necessarily the very first place I go, but it's always among them. It's so big and ripe and luscious, such a piece of work to fall in with, so sweeping and engaging, from its very first shot, a slow zoom on a revolving globe and the map animation that follows as a voiceover spells out the context, all the way through to its fogbound ending.