Arthur Smith, “Guitar Boogie” (1945)

[listen up!]

I was reading an interesting book by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes called What Was the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record? (review next month!), which included this instrumental as one of its 50 candidates. Then I noticed the tune is included in a Hillbilly Boogie box set on the Proper label I’ve been listening to lately (with Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “The Shotgun Boogie” and one more gem for next week). Arthur Smith and his music have traveled under many names, in part because there was a Grand Ole Opry player named Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith and in part no doubt because the Smith name is so common. So we have Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, Arthur Smith’s Hot Quintet, Arthur (Guitar Boogie) Smith & His Cracker-Jacks, etc., etc. Notably, he also wrote a song in 1955 called “Feudin’ Banjos” that was adapted by Eric Weissberg & Steve Mandell as the #2 1973 hit “Dueling Banjos” (from the movie Deliverance). Arthur Smith got around. I would not remotely consider this the first rock ‘n’ roll record—I’m not even sure it’s rock ‘n’ roll. Its chief virtue, as with “Dueling Banjos,” is the technical skill of the players and the “tasty” polish of the performance. It’s simple but resonant, and if it’s a quintet that must be at least three acoustic guitars with a bass. I’m not even sure I hear a drummer—one of the guitars is doing that duty. The tune has a nice boogie feel, of course, and some interesting interplay and solos. Overall it seems much closer to me to straight-up country—it’s telling that Wikipedia lists the people influenced by Smith as Glen Campbell, Roy Clark, and Hank Garland. In just that way “Guitar Boogie” is so smooth it’s almost soothing.

Animal Farm (1945)

Animal Farm is George Orwell’s attempt to write a fairy tale, and what surprises me most about it is that it succeeds exactly on those terms. It always feels like an Aesop’s fable even when its anti-Soviet message is most thuddingly obvious. It’s also wickedly funny in places, for example the farm animals’ rallying song, “Beasts of England,” sung to the tune of “Clementine” (or maybe “La Cucaracha”). The very short novel, under 100 pages, was a staple of Cold War literature, taught in my high school in the early ‘70s. I read 1984 and saw the 1956 movie based on it around the same time but I don’t think it was for any class. I liked Orwell—he was dark, and mordant, and acid. But by the time I was in my 40s and doing a high school literature catch-up and reread (A Separate Peace, Hesse, Bradbury, Lord of the Flies, etc.) I was inclined to skip Orwell, who had become a darling by then of movement Republicans and other libertarians who like Ayn Rand too. I’m glad I got back to him—Animal Farm is a gem. I’ll know more when I get back to 1984, but I’m taking Orwell as less specifically anticommunist and more generally antitotalitarian. Totalitarianism can come from the right as well as the left—today’s GOP can fairly be called totalitarian, and Orwellian too, with their book-banning, speech controls, and increasingly invasive calls for body monitoring, all in the name of freedom. These days we accept active, constant, and close surveillance so deeply we walk around with the device enabling it everywhere we go. We think everyone should have a smartphone—I finally broke down and got one myself last year. Setting aside all the allegory issues, I think really what makes Animal Farm work is the fairy tale air and some great characters: notably Boxer and Clover, the horses, and Squealer, the propaganda pig. The pigs take over everything. The two main ones—Napoleon and Snowball—are obvious analogues of Stalin and Trotsky, respectively. I am stuck with an edition that has an introduction written by Christopher Hitchens in 2003, which turned out not to be as cringy as I feared. He makes an interesting point about how Stalin and Trotsky are part of the story, but not Lenin. Best of all about Animal Farm is that the story is often touching. The betrayals and ultimate fates of many of these characters are often sad. Very nice tale.

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

“Something to Do With Figures” (1945)

Some interesting problems with this story by Miriam Allen deFord—not so much with the story itself, which is competent as mystery stories go, but more with its provenance and related issues. I think the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) has, for the first time, failed me. ISFDB has a page for deFord, who was born in 1888 and wrote science fiction as well as mysteries (even appearing in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions!), but has nothing on this story or any of the anthologies under the Ellery Queen brand in which she published. Technically, this story would have to be classified as “non-genre” (meaning at ISFDB no speculative elements), but it’s not in the non-genre part of the deFord page either. I’ll give credit for this one as a find to Mary Danby, editor of 65 Great Murder Mysteries. Danby edited Fontana anthologies alongside Robert Aickman, Christine Bernard, and R. Chetwynd-Hayes from the ‘60s into the ‘80s and then went on to put together big fat anthologies of 65 stories each, which haunted Half-Price Books outlets for years. Like any reasonably good anthologist of horror and related, Danby turned often to tried-and-true classics—inevitable in the business of selling these things. But she was also notably good at ferreting out lesser-known pieces that are often surprisingly good. She had good taste, in short, and read widely. There’s nothing fancy or perhaps even that special about “Something to Do With Figures” but it’s a classic detective/mystery story in a certain line descended from Poe. It has a big reveal at the end that verges on gimmickry but plays by all the rules. It hinges on a point of forensics that slightly strained credulity or at least it was new to me and I’ve seen a lot of Forensic Files episodes. The idea is that a body bleeding out dies in different positions depending on whether an artery or a vein was severed. I mean, maybe, I’ve just never heard of it. The premise is that an unpleasant woman has been murdered and her brother is accused of doing it. He was found standing over the body with a knife in his hand that had blood on it, but let’s not jump to conclusions. The setting is a hotel floor with three connected rooms. The detective is certain it’s the strange neighbor in the third room. As mystery stories go, this one is neat and tidy—perfect for Ellery Queen—with some very good misdirection. Nice little find.

65 Great Murder Mysteries, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Story not available online.

The Iron Gates (1945)

[spoilers] This is the first I’ve read of Margaret Millar and by all signs it’s not one of her best. But it’s not bad, just eccentric or maybe a bit of a failed experiment. I found it tucked into the back of one of those Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthologies of the ‘60s, Stories for Late at Night. It’s labeled (fairly) as a novel even if it is a short one, under 200 pages. It’s also listed on ISFDB, in fact the only novel there by Millar, who wrote more than two dozen in her career. ISFDB is notably finicky (if also inconsistent) about “non-genre” literature so, along with the Hitchcock placement, I half-expected something supernatural. As it turns out, not so much. The main character, Lucille, has some vivid dreams, is institutionalized, and eventually commits suicide. It turns out she is a very bad person, though I have to say she’s more likable than many others here. Millar had written a handful of novels by this point and has a good sense for putting the story together. The characters all defy expectations. Lucille is basically a psychopath—we find out that she murdered her friend with an ax so she could marry her husband, the widower. The stepchildren never liked Lucille. And they were right to feel that way. Yet they are a couple of miscreants themselves. There might be elements of psychological realism but I’m not always sure when Millar knows it. There is also a detective in a starring role, Inspector Sands, from an earlier novel, Wall of Eyes. I would call The Iron Gates workmanlike and professionally done but not very inspired. Millar has her own reputation so I’m sure there’s much better out there. I wonder how editor Robert Arthur came to include it in the Hitchcock anthology—sounds like some Southern California story. I like the themes this one takes on and the way it goes for psychological depth, but it never really builds up much steam. Lucille and the Morrow family all certainly have their problems. It uses a diary to tell a key part of the story. It worked but also felt gimmicky. But being gimmicky, as a mystery story, also makes it comforting, though it never quite jelled for me. Mixed bag.

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

"The Aleph" (1945)

I haven't read that much by Jorge Luis Borges so I don't know how typical "The Aleph" may be, but it's pretty good. Much of the story is spent on the first-person narrator (named "Borges") and his awkward relationship with a mediocre poet who is also the cousin of a woman he (the narrator) loved deeply and ridiculously. She is dead at the time of the story. The narrator gives examples of the poet's work along with the poet's own analyses. He's mocking how the poet dotes on his own work. It does seem mediocre, although of course he is celebrated and beloved by the story's end. The word "Aleph" does not even appear until well into the story. An Aleph is a very strange thing. The poet claims there is one in his basement. By this point the narrator has decided the poet is merely a nut, but he forces the issue on the Aleph and says he's coming over to see it. It's a lot of setup and foreshadowing and while it pays off for me I'm not sure it would for everyone. An Aleph, as Borges describes it, "is one of the points in space that contains all other points." Borges describes its physical presence as little more than an inch in diameter, so about the size of a ping-pong ball. His willingness and ability to attempt describing the sensation of seeing everything in the universe at once is what makes this story, along with all the effortless transitions from the mundane to the exalted and back again. The narrator's precious moments with the Aleph have imposing religious implications—experiences like this are what change lives and start churches. It's comical in a way how little it seems to affect the narrator. He won't even give the poet the satisfaction of admitting he saw it. But he saw it—he can't help but give us, anyway, the satisfaction of a narrative account. He saw it and his life has been changed by it. Borges is not generally considered a genre writer but he has obvious parallels with M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft, and other bibliophile types. They are all notably fascinated by obscure texts, old books in libraries, and the study of literature, all the way down to the minutia of scholarship and citations. Borges feels a little sardonic here about the poet's fine points of erudition whereas Lovecraft is generally more focused on pumping up the cosmic wonder. What's really great about this story are the contrasts, from the petty lives of the narrator and his cousin to the trippy ecstasies of the little portal to everything. Borges doesn't tease the Aleph hard at all, beyond the title, but holds it back to the last third, and it's about perfect that way.

The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

"D-Day" (1945)

Robert Trout was a radio newsman most famous for his work as a broadcast anchor during World War II, including coverage of the D-Day Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944. This very short story appears to be Trout's only fiction, as far as the internet is concerned. I don't even see it listed among his papers. But the typically scrupulous ISFDB shows no sign of doubting the authorship. At any rate, "D-Day" is presented as a transcript from a radio broadcast in the early hours of some kind of attack on the US (in "196–"). Little is known about what is happening so the broadcaster is just going with what he sees coming in over the wires. The enemy in this story is entirely unknown. This story was published in 1945, in the Saturday Review of Literature, years before the Soviets had nuclear capability. It could even be aliens from outer space. But a nuclear attack seems most likely. The context sketched in as we go is that by the 1960s the end of warfare has been accepted as a practical imperative. It's still early hours but the attacks on Pittsburgh, New York City, Detroit, and D.C. sound devastating. The basic premise coupled with the terse dramatized you-are-there feel of midcentury media make the story effective, even scary. It has a natural home in a horror anthology. The brevity helps too. Yes, "D-Day" is kind of gimmicky and easy with Robert Trout imagining Robert Trout doing his greatest-hits job like shtick at the end of the world. But not many could put this across as convincingly as the experienced radio broadcaster. I grant it may have been ghostwritten but Trout must have had some hand in it. What's weird to me is that something this well done and this primary and even foundational—credibly channeling the zeitgeist of October 1945 direct—has been buried inside an Alfred Hitchcock-branded collection of short stories from 1961. With the story's publication date less than 90 days after the nuclear blasts that ended WWII, you almost have to take it as an early example of nuclear anxiety, possibly the first of its kind, with a whole generation's worth to follow. In Trout's imagined near-future of the 1960s there is already the familiar theme of all-out war is no longer possible accompanied by the equally familiar theme of there has always been all-out war in human history. In a nutshell (and in a nut's hell!) that is nuclear anxiety. Cynical human nature intrudes as usual to ruin the party with the final familiar note, which is that the idea of ending war is naïve. Case in point: "D-Day," as ultimate destruction appears to be raining down at story's end and the audio finally cuts out. Broadcast over. Trout may not have been best at this game—you can take your pick, from UFO mania to TV's The Day After to Cormac McCarthy's utterly convincing apocalypse in The Road—but Trout was probably first to get right to the point. That counts for a lot in journalism but it also made for a pretty good horror story too as it happens. (Note: H.R. Arnold's 1926 story "The Night Wire" is an earlier example of a tick-tock teletype-based story, as is Orson Welles's 1938 prank version of The War of the Worlds for that matter, but the nuclear payload is missing from both.)

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
Story not available online.

Rome, Open City (1945)

Roma città aperta, Italy, 103 minutes

Director: Roberto Rossellini

Writers: Sergio Amidei, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Alberto Consiglio

Photography: Ubaldo Arata

Music: Renzo Rossellini

Editors: Eraldo Da Roma, Jolanda Benvenuti

Cast: Aldo Fabrizi, Anna Magnani, Marcello Pagliero, Maria Michi, Giovanna Galletti, Carla Rovere, Francesco Grandjacquet, Harry Feist, Joop van Hulzen

There's a reasonable argument for a chain of cause and effect that starts with director and cowriter Roberto Rossellini making propaganda films for Italy's Fascist regime in the early '40s. One thing leads to another, giving us Naked City and eventually Jack Webb's hectoring pro-police agitprop media empire in the '60s and '70s and onward to documentaries as we know them today. No one can match the Lumiere brothers for impact on documentary moviemaking, they literally invented it, but Rossellini might be the No. 2 suspect here with his brand of neorealism, an aesthetic that relies on the structurally primitive for credibility and has informed a thousand million pieces of gritty realism as we understand it today: camera in motion, shooting on location rather than soundstage, favoring nonprofessional players over entertainers, and thematically placing the focus on scenes of poverty and social privation. The house is burning down, neorealism says implicitly. Who cares if the film stock matches?

That's pushing it a little, of course. Neorealism didn't just come out of nowhere. It emerged from Italy in the '40s under the care and guidance of Antifa critics and filmmakers such as Luchino Visconti, whose Ossessione—his take on James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice—is considered the first neorealist film. All Rossellini did was manage to put himself in the right place at the right time, wining a big prize at Cannes in a postwar bust-out that launched neorealism, or something like it (looking at you, Dragnet), permanently into popular consciousness. But Rossellini was more than a reformed propagandist who got lucky. He was a sensitive filmmaker and a complex figure relying on instinct, at bottom something of a romantic. He was aware of history but his impulse, for better and worse, was to make sweeping emotional statements out of it. 

Dead of Night (1945)

UK, 102 minutes
Directors: Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer
Writers: John Baines, Angus MacPhail, T.E.B. Clarke, H.G. Wells, E.F. Benson
Photography: Stanley Pavey, Douglas Slocombe
Music: Georges Auric
Editor: Charles Hasse
Cast: Mervyn Johns, Roland Culver, Frederick Valk, Mary Merrall, Miles Malleson, Sally Ann Howes, Googie Withers, Ralph Michael, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, Michael Redgrave

It may be hard to make out these days, following the advent and then the primacy of TV, but people have never stopped trying to make anthology films work. Just last year the Coen brothers were at it with The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and who can forget such efforts as Four Rooms from 1995 or New York Stories from 1989 (which mysteriously elected to include Francis Ford Coppola and exclude Spike Lee). I have the anthology film associated in my mind with epic art cinema—e.g., Boccaccio '70 (1962), Spirits of the Dead (1968), and others—but even more with horror. That brings us to Dead of Night, which may or may not have been the first horror anthology picture but certainly contributed to popularizing the idea, giving evidence it can be made to work. Someone always seems to be giving it another shot: Kwaidan (1964), Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), V/H/S (2012), etc.

And Dead of Night does work, very well in some ways. Before I get to the good stuff here, however, I should sound a word of caution as I have run hot and cold on it even in the few times I've seen it. Episode-based TV, which we have been living with coming out of radio for something like 75 years, with its potential for stand-alone shorts—from Twilight Zone to Outer Limits to Black Mirror—brutally exposes the weakest part of anthology films, which is the strained quality of the narrative connective tissue attempting to tie together different work, often by different directors and almost always by different authors. The episode model lets you dispense with that and focus on the merits of each story rather than something phony that is supposed to unify otherwise un-unified stories. That said, the best part of Dead of Night is exactly that connective tissue, for which it is rightly well regarded.

Loving (1945)

I have my objections to the Modern Library list of the best 20th-century English-language novels, but occasionally it points me to something I might not have got to otherwise. That's the case with this odd British novel by Henry Green. It's an Upstairs, Downstairs type of story set in an Irish country house during the London Blitz attacks of World War II. All the servants and the family too are British. Relations with Ireland and the Irish were tenuous at the time. There's lots of talk against Catholics (called "Romans") and the IRA. But it's a comedy, acerbic and knowing, about how the classes live and abide with one another (or don't). It starts and ends like a fairy tale. The first thing that happens is the head butler dies—one of the funniest death scenes I've ever read, running in the background. The footman who succeeds him, Charley Raunce, is our basic hero, a philandering slippery nogoodnik who appears poised to change for the better, maybe. He's chasing Edith, who is some 20 years his junior, and she appears capable of making him an honest man. Maybe. Meanwhile, the lives of the others grind on, with humdrum petty spats and rancor that is somehow hugely entertaining. You have to work a little at Green's style and approach. It's a 19th-century manners kind of story but told with 20th-century zip: all elliptical concrete details and ear-pure dialogue. Sometimes it's like he's going out of his way to confuse—two boys among the servants are named Albert, for example, and it's easy to mix them up. Others in the household do too. There are episodes of adultery, alcoholism, and other troubles—decoration. The scenes with the unfaithful wife (from upstairs) are funny partly because we know things in these scenes the characters don't. Green is remarkably skillful at setting up and executing scenes like little miniatures. The greatest strength of Loving is that it is so nonjudgmental about all the things it sees. It just shows them to us, with perhaps a hint of a smirk. Can you even believe the things people do? it seems to be saying. Oh look at this now. I liked it quite a bit. I can't explain the title. It's true there's a love story here, but it's mostly unbelievable, in an affable and slightly cheeky sort of way. We have to take it as given. It seems more likely the title was meant to fit with other similar gerund formation titles of Green novels: Living, Party Going, Doting, etc. Not that they're all like that (e.g., Blindness, Caught, Nothing). But they do all have a Pet Shop Boys kind of single-word tang. Loving is good enough I might look into some of them.

In case it's not at the library.

Scarlet Street (1945)

USA, 102 minutes
Director: Fritz Lang
Writers: Georges de La Fouchardiere, Andre Mouezy-Eon, Dudley Nichols
Photography: Milton R. Krasner
Music: Hans J. Salter
Editor: Arthur Hilton
Cast: Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett, Dan Duryea, Margaret Lindsay, Rosalind Ivan, Arthur Loft, Samuel S. Hinds, Jess Barker

Scarlet Street is just as much a dream state film noir as The Woman in the Window, but everything is a little more frayed at the edges, beat down, wretched, and pointless. Edward G. Robinson is once again the middle-aged patsy for Joan Bennett, but instead of Richard Wanley, a professor who belongs to a private walnut-paneled club in Manhattan, he plays Christopher Cross, a humble henpecked minor clerk who thinks he's a painter. The Joan Bennett character is the same, but a few rungs down the ladder. In The Woman in the Window she was Alice Reed, a woman with no visible income. In Scarlet Street there's no question that Kitty (Bennett) is a prostitute. And she's in love ("love") with her pimp—Johnny (Dan Duryea). Duryea slaps Bennett around like last time, even more actually, but this time she's crazy mad for the guy. The most haunting line in the whole movie might be, "Jeepers, I love you, Johnny."

There's a lot of crossover between the two movies but perhaps the most intriguing is the theme of painting. In The Woman in the Window it's a painting that draws Wanley to Reed, but here painting and the world of art are much more enmeshed with everything. Cross, it turns out, is not a wannabe but actually an undiscovered genius, whose talent is unveiled within hours when Johnny lifts a few samples of his work and takes them down to Washington Square to see what he can get for them. Johnny had the impression he could get more, a lot more, but we can see what really counts is that the Most Important Art Critic in New York simply must know who this artist is (he happened to walk by Washington Square, apparently). So Johnny tells him it's Kitty. What could possibly go wrong? Spoilers, of course.

Brief Encounter (1945)

UK, 86 minutes
Director: David Lean
Writers: Noel Coward, Anthony Havelock-Allan, David Lean, Ronald Neame
Photography: Robert Krasker
Music: Sergei Rachmaninoff
Editor: Jack Harris
Cast: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Cyril Raymond, Joyce Carey, Stanley Holloway, Everley Gregg

Producer, cowriter, and head mastermind Noel Coward made a deliberate choice to set Brief Encounter in prewar times, even with blackouts, screaming V-2 rockets, and World War II raging along during production. He wanted the story to be more one about the universal human condition and less one obscured by fog-of-war urgencies (and/or excuses). Yet inevitably, even with its narrow focus on a love affair between two people married but not to each other, Brief Encounter bears the plucky stamp of the "keep calm and carry on" ethos, a kind of way of life that is equal parts internal fortitude and cheery manner and all British. Ultimately that makes this movie something of a strange beast, a chaste meditation on illicit sexual attraction never consummated. Somehow it came together to create one of the greatest movie romances ever made.

In many ways, Brief Encounter is another one of those movies like The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca that amounts to a uniquely successful collaboration. Coward basically wrote every damn witty graceful word, cabling in some of the revisions from a war front where he was entertaining troops, and he is the one who had the good sense to insist for the score on pounding relentlessly Sergei Rachmaninoff's swooning Piano Concerto No. 2. But director David Lean quietly structured this picture in any number of clever and even brilliant ways, packing it full of careful symmetries, to make it what it is, and Celia Johnson as Laura Jesson is genuinely the star—her face or her voice in narration populate practically every frame. For whatever reason, Wikipedia does not classify Brief Encounter as a "woman's picture," though it is that rarest picture for its times—a woman's story, not only told from her point of view, but literally by her. In fact, Johnson is so singular that she takes some getting used to—working on me like a kind of Sandra Bernhard figure strained through the reserved Laura Bush. I did not understand what the big deal was about this movie until I happened to look at it a second time. Ever since, it only gets better.

Cass Timberlane (1945)

Sinclair Lewis's "novel of husbands and wives" is evidently considered minor in Lewis's canon. Wikipedia never discusses it in the article about him, only listing it with his works. I love it more than anything else I know by Lewis, though I can see it has more flaws than some of his celebrated work (Main Street and maybe Babbitt, though not the dreadful Elmer Gantry). The values and much of the detail in Cass Timberlane are dated, as is the case with most books older than 70 years. But the dynamics between lovers in relationships are drawn with clarity and an astute skepticism that comes of experience. Lewis probably started on it in earnest around the time of his second divorce in 1942. It is often bittersweet and melancholy. The main narrative involves Cass Timberlane, a judge in the fictional medium-sized town of Grand Republic, Minnesota, a prairie town that most resembles Duluth (though it is more inland and explicitly distinguished from Duluth). Timberlane is young for a judge, in his early 40s, and a red-blooded Midwestern white man of a certain type—loves to hunt and fish, etc. He falls for a young woman more than 15 years his junior, Ginny. They go around the mulberry bush, marry after about a year, and then the problems start. As a device obviously inspired by John Dos Passos, Cass Timberlane also includes recurring portraits of Grand Republic citizens under the title An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives. They are often great stand-alone pieces, acutely observed scenes of marriage and its give and take within many different couples. The novel is remarkably candid, especially the troubles between Cass and Ginny. They have a stillborn baby. Ginny is flirtatious, and attracted to other men. She is also diabetic, of all things. The sexual politics are mostly the conservative post-/pre-feminism that prevailed in the '40s. In most ways women are understood to have the disadvantage of men, but they have some ways to compensate. Something about this novel also reminds me of James M. Cain's Mildred Pierce, which is similarly focused on one person, but in relationship with a specific other in a domestic context. Interestingly, the marketing copy on my 1974 mass market paperback of Cass Timberlane is at pains to sell it as weirdly brawny and he-manly: "The towering classic of a man's passions," it says. "He was a man's man with a reputation as big and solid as his name." But let's not kid ourselves. This is a classic woman's story, and that's exactly what I like about it so much. Essential, really.

In case it's not at the library.

"Virga Vay & Allan Cedar" (1945)

Read story by Sinclair Lewis online.

I accept this as a short story, because I found it in a book called Short Story Masterpieces. But the fact is, it's an excerpt from a novel, a very good one, Cass Timberlane. "Virga Vay & Allan Cedar" is part of a series in the novel profiling town characters under the recurring title "An Assemblage of Husbands and Wives." These arguably stand-alone pieces alternate with chapters on the main story (compare The Grapes of Wrath, or John Dos Passos). It's a novelistic device that I think loses some of its punch without the novel's context. Even taken objectively it's closer to an anecdote or perhaps a moral tale with lesson. I suppose they're short story forms too. It's very short, less than 10 pages. It's good the way that Sinclair Lewis can be, laying bare the hollow despair beneath the Midwestern hail fellow well met bonhomie. Virga Vay (what a name) and Allan Cedar are both married but not to each other. They are conducting a tawdry and sad affair in a small Minnesota town full of busybodies and narrow people. They hatch a plan to address the impossible situation. It's not divorce and it's not murder. I will issue a spoiler alert here because the story is at some pains to keep the plan a secret from the reader for a later surprise. It is, of course (last chance), a suicide pact. Carbon monoxide via automobile, to be specific. The town is so constricting the couple feels it's their only choice. Allan Cedar is convinced they would be found wherever they tried to go. Cedar has a particularly heinous wife, as we eventually see for ourselves. Cass Timberlane makes a brief cameo. There is very good detail about the affair: they genuinely seem to love one another, but to be together they must sneak away to the outskirts of town and have their trysts in the car or on "mossy pastures." They are weak and pathetic, and reading about them makes you think you might be too. That's one reason the ending seems so unpleasant. This is where you can really feel Lewis's loathing for these small town societies. But I have to say, knowing the source novel, that I think you're better off going there and picking up these scenes along the way. This is good, but the whole novel is better. Also, I can't find much information about its publication history beyond the novel and the story anthology. I think it's possible Robert Penn Warren himself carved it out.

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

Cass Timberlane by Sinclair Lewis

Children of Paradise (1945)

Les enfants du paradis, France, 163 minutes
Director: Marcel Carne
Writer: Jacque Prevert
Photography: Roger Hubert
Music: Maurice Thiriet
Editors: Henri Rust, Madeleine Bonin
Cast: Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Pierre Brasseur, Marcel Herrand, Maria Casares, Louis Salon, Pierre Renoir, Gaston Modot, Jane Marken

Children of Paradise is regarded as being nearly as famous for the circumstances of its production as for anything else about it so I will start there. Filmed under Vichy France, during the German occupation of World War II, there's an undeniable scrappiness to all the extras and the vigor of many of the exterior shots, a sense of making do and a kind of spiritedness to it that I think may be genuinely unique. Vichy authorities, for example, had imposed a maximum film length of 90 minutes, and so the 163-minute Children of Paradise is presented as a kind of double feature, two back-to-back films each with their own elaborate (and parallel) opening titles. In so doing, they found even more ways to make their production a self-consciously "theatrical" work, with its seams showing and some of the stuffing hanging out.

They weren't, of course, so daring as to try to compress some anti-authoritarian allegory into it—they probably never would have got away with it, for one thing, if they had even been inclined that way—so this tale of Parisian culture of the 1840s wild and free on the streets does not have much to do with Parisian culture under German rule a century later, except for generalities such as the immutable human spirit. The title refers to the players and backstage crew, the participants actively involved in the exciting life of theater and drama, as well as the working-class people who attended the shows and could afford only the cheapest seats. What we would now call "nosebleed" seats were then referred to as "paradise" or "the Gods" and the best players were said to be playing explicitly to "the Gods," whose patrons gave the most immediate and unfiltered reactions to performances. "Up in the Gods," says one character, "their lives are small, but their dreams are vast." It's a heartening view of culture and theater and democracy.