Black Narcissus (1947)

UK, 101 minutes

Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Writers: Rumer Godden, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Photography: Jack Cardiff

Music: Brian Easdale

Editor: Reginald Mills

Cast: Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Kathleen Byron, May Hallatt, Sabu, Jean Simmons, Judith Furse, Flora Robson, Jenny Laird, Nancy Roberts, Eddie Whaley Jr.

Black Narcissus was filmed entirely in Ireland and the UK, which is somewhat unexpected for a movie so determined to be about its location in the remote Himalayas. Watching closely, it’s not hard to make out the various matte paintings decorating the cinematic mise en scene unto the mountainous horizon—that is, if you’re not already distracted by the spectacular glowing technicolor of cinematographer Jack Cardiff. All I took from this movie the first time I saw it many years ago was that it is amazingly vibrant with color, and has something to do with nuns.

Both IMDb and Wikipedia classify this Archers team picture—codirectors and cowriters Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, based on a 1939 novel by Rumer Godde—as “psychological drama.” In a sense that’s true—Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron skillfully gobbling everything in sight) is having a heck of a spiritual crisis, which being sent to this unlikely site in the Himalayas only exacerbates. The picture is about setting up a convent from scratch with a small team of nuns, in a building that once housed the harem of an Indian royal, poised on the precipice of the edge of a deep valley. I mean like literally on a cliff, with minimal protective fencing. It’s a wonder there is not a parade of Vertigo-like falls.

The Lady From Shanghai (1947)

USA, 87 minutes

Director: Orson Welles

Writers: Sherwood King, Orson Welles, William Castle, Charles Lederer, Fletcher Markle

Photography: Charles Lawton Jr., Rudolph Mate, Joseph Walker

Music: Heinz Roemheld

Editor: Viola Lawrence

Cast: Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Everett Sloane, Glenn Anders, Ted de Corsia, Erskine Sanford, Gus Schilling

By the time The Lady From Shanghai was shot and released in 1946 and 1947, Orson Welles, the director, cowriter, and star, had already so thoroughly alienated himself from Hollywood powers and money that he was denied credit for directing—his involvement is given in the opening titles as “Screen Play and Production.” In a way these tales of Welles and his titanic studio battles are just cases of petty on petty. Welles wanted to make great pictures—he wasn’t even 30 yet when he proved he could. But he could also be petty and passive-aggressive himself with the money people he resented. For The Lady in Shanghai, for example, he had his then wife Rita Hayworth cut her long red hair and dye it blonde. He probably knew what was going to happen—the studio got mad at him.

So it’s a two-way street between Welles and the studio heads, although the studio heads were always the ultimate power. Even as they attempted to rework his stuff, thrashing through edits and retakes, the mauling could go well above and beyond mere fixes. They often came back at him in ways that felt personal. Perhaps the most notable and painful example is the ballroom scene in The Magnificent Ambersons, reportedly in the vicinity of an hour or more in Welles’s original rough cut. The studio not only took it out but also destroyed the negative, making it impossible for anyone to ever see it. And so it went for most of the rest of Welles’s life. It was as if he and the studio powers could not help themselves. Welles saw himself in the business of making great pictures, which, especially in the Hollywood system of the ‘40s, tended to take great amounts of money. And Welles always seemed more interested (understandably enough) in the strategy that asks forgiveness later instead of permission first.

The Blank Wall (1947)

This short novel by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding is the best one yet in the Women Crime Writers series, fast-paced and compulsively readable, though not without elements that strain belief. Our main character is Lucia Harper, housewife. Her husband is away at war. She has a 17-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son. Her father also lives with them. A Black woman, Sibyl, is their hypercompetent maid. The daughter, Bee, is a headstrong adolescent who has taken up with a creep in his 30s who is obviously out to use her. Ted Darby’s occupation is given as “art-dealer,” which seemed innocuous until I learned it means he deals in pornography. Lucia is trying to keep them apart but he shows up this night—apparently Bee’s idea—and winds up dead in an accident. Lucia discovers the body in the morning before anyone else and recklessly disposes of it. A pretty good movie by director Max Ophuls came of this novel, called The Reckless Moment. The movie is faithful to the novel in most ways, and the title is better, except there are actually lots of reckless moments, so hard to know which was intended. The next development is blackmailers who have letters Bee wrote to Darby, and that’s the predicament Lucia spends most of her time working on. The blackmailers are two partners, one of whom comes to fall for Lucia—she’s everything that’s clean and good to this guy and so on. He has an even stranger thing for Sibyl, not as a love interest but because he thinks she’s possessed of greater wisdom, or something like that. Lots of strange tones like that here. They make it less believable but also somehow more interesting. The point, I think, is supposed to be the ferociousness of the mama bear protecting her brood. But Lucia also, plainly, falls in love with the blackmailer who loves her. The weirdest thing is the guy’s right arm going dead in a major confrontation. In the movie they sensibly ascribe it to an injury in the fight. But in the novel it just ... goes dead. It’s psychological. For the purpose of the story it’s another chance to showcase Lucia’s unnatural strength (and poise) in these situations. She always rises to the occasion, and everything is for her family. But the thing with the arm is just crazy, even working as another odd tonal feature. I understand Raymond Chandler was a fan of Holding and it’s not hard to see why from this one. It grabs fast and provides a pretty good ride—same with the movie, which flattens away some of the memorable and intriguing weirdness. Both novel and movie are worth chasing down.

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

In a Lonely Place (1947)

Before I ever got to the Library of America series (Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s ... and then four more from the 1950s), I did not know much about Dorothy B. Hughes’s reputation. I picked In a Lonely Place out of a list of recommended short mystery novels on the CrimeReads website. I thought I’d check it out, along with some others such as Georges Simenon’s Tropic Moon, as long as they were being recommended (and short!). In a Lonely Place is far more daring than the Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name based on it and, when you break down the feminist themes (as Megan Abbott does in an afterword), it’s pretty remarkable, anticipating Patricia Highsmith’s whole Ripley series among other things. Jim Thompson might have liked making a main character a narcissistic psychopath. Hughes keeps all her violence offstage, which is one way to do it, maybe better than Thompson’s full-frontal assaults. Dix Steele (Dix Steele!!), our (anti)hero, is closer to Ripley, a smooth-taking con man, however brutal under the surface. But Steele is also a brutal psychopath, and—chillingly—it seems to be all misogyny. There’s a lot of really sharp inversion here, such as a woman who appears at first to be standard-issue femme fatale, playing it cool, until the moment you suddenly realize she’s onto this guy and scared out of her wits. The novel is also really good on Los Angeles, reminding us again it’s the only city for noir. New York and London don’t have the sunshine to make the distinctions so plain between light and shadow, or something. Hughes makes the urban sprawl itself and the geography as sinister as they need to be. In a Lonely Place helped me see how good Dennis Etchison is on that city too. I struggled some with the language—for all its clarity it felt labored in patches. But I have the same problem with Dashiell Hammett so no doubt it is me. Certainly it qualifies as well-written. I have some interest in seeing what else Hughes has done—Ride the Pale Horse seems to be a favorite, though I didn’t get much from that movie version. If anything, In a Lonely Place is prompting me to look into Highsmith’s Ripley novels further. I don’t like the misogyny in Lonely Place, but I think that’s the intent. The novel is often simply about the fear of men that women can have to live with constantly. Hughes is quite thorough about justifying that here.

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

"Uncle Einar" (1947)

I'm infatuated with this story by Ray Bradbury, which puts him more squarely in the realm of horror than science fiction where I usually slot him. It was published first in a Bradbury collection called Dark Carnival and later in a more famous one called The October Country and it's part of Bradbury's "Elliott Family" series. The Elliotts are a kind of Addams family—kooky, altogether ooky oddballs with strange powers. It's gentle, of course, the way Bradbury does. Besides the Addams family, the Elliotts also feel like some precursor to the X-Men with their mutant gifts and outsider status. Most of the Elliott family has more subtle powers, with mental abilities like telepathy and telekinesis. Uncle Einar's is harder to hide from the world: he has a giant pair of green wings growing on his back and he can fly. I imagine his wings as more like dinosaur wings than bird or moth, leathery and tendoned. He can't really go among humans at all and he must do most of his flying at night when he won't be seen. He also has a kind of radar that enables him to sense objects in his way as he flies around in the dark. But a terrible accident occurs one night. Something goes wrong and he collides with a high-tension tower and takes a massive jolt of electricity that knocks him out. Fortunately he lands on a farm operated by Brunilla Wexley, a single woman who will become his wife. Bradbury plainly has a lot of feeling for Uncle Einar and imbues him with much humanity—his love of flying, his sadness at being grounded, his love for his wife and eventually their children, and finally the solution they work out so he can fly safely again. At the same time, as benign as we know Uncle Einar is, it's not hard to imagine how scary it would be to see him flying at night. That's a neat trick on Bradbury's part. It's all quite vivid. I have a clear sense of Uncle Einar and Brunilla too, and like them both. I should say it's also the only Elliott Family story I've read that I like much—in general the concept is typically too cute and wholesome by half, though some of the powers are certainly interesting. This Elliott Family story comes a bit later than the first batch and in many ways feels like Uncle Einar might have been a character who nagged at Bradbury and importuned him to tell his story. It feels like a Sherwood Anderson story too with its candid treatment of socially determined grotesques and their experience of being marginalized. In fact, a lot of Bradbury stories feel like they have sources in Anderson. This is one of the best.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman's)
Read story online.

"Sweets to the Sweet" (1947)

How do you solve a problem like Robert Bloch (sung to the tune of "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" from The Sound of Music)? I mean, he has all the bona fides: corresponded with H.P. Lovecraft as a teen when he first started publishing, wrote the literary property behind Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, grew up in Milwaukee, published hundreds of stories in all the right places (from Weird Tales to Playboy), wrote scripts for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and many others, and won enough awards to melt down and build a tank, if he were so inclined. The My Favorite Horror Story anthology, published in 2000, asked leading horror lights of the day to name and write an intro about [the title]. Bloch and Lovecraft were the only writers with two stories, and this story by Bloch was the choice of Stephen King. How can I argue with that? I can't. "Sweets to the Sweet" is not a bad story and even very good of a type. The main feature is its twist ending, which is hard to see coming because Bloch uses misdirection well (the misdirection is child abuse but apparently we are letting that pass because 1947 or something). But "Sweets to the Sweet" is also entirely typical of the problems of Bloch's stories, which is that if he can't scare you at least maybe he can make you laugh or if not that force a groan with some terrible pun. I’m addicted to brake fluid, but it’s OK because I can stop at any time. Let's not forget the jokey undercurrents about mothers in Psycho (Norman Bates: "Well, a boy's best friend is his mother")—that's Bloch as well as Hitchcock. "Sweets to the sweet"—well, you'll have to read this one to get that because I'm not going to give too much away. You may as well enjoy Bloch at about the best I've seen him while I complain about everything else. Instead, I'll give away "Catnip," a minor effort from the following year published in Weird Tales. Like a lot of his stuff, it feels like a hurry-up first draft never looked at again. All you really need to know about it is its dependence on hatred and fear of black cats and the old figure of speech, "Cat got your tongue?" to understand the arc and get the joke of this story about an unlikely bully and a witch. In Playboy in the early '60s, for another example, Bloch published a story called "The Traveling Salesman," which features the alleged actual traveling salesman from all the jokes I'm pretty sure nobody tells anymore, now more or less relics from the Johnny Carson era. This guy's life is hell because he has to go and act out every new traveling salesman joke that comes along. Hyuk-hyuk. It's not horror, it's a gag. In a lot of his stories Bloch comes across like a stand-up comic teetering on the verge of a bad flop sweat episode. He evokes the elements of horror—gore, mayhem, grotesqueries—but they're more like shtick on the way to the punchline. And if that don't work: What did one eye say to the other? Just between you and me, something smells. I understand the impulse to laugh at the whole horror game because, yes, it's all pretty silly when it comes down to it. These are just make-believe stories, of course! But uh the wise-guy routine sort of spoils the mood, and even if Bloch did hit a few twist endings pretty well—no small feat, I admit—I can't help feeling just a little bit taken by most of his stuff.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin B. Greenberg (out of print)
When Evil Wakes, ed. August Derleth (out of print)
Listen to story online.

The Plague (1947)

I went back to reread Albert Camus's The Plague about a year before the covid-19 pandemic started and it has turned out to be even more eerily accurate than I suspected, down to small details of bizarre behavior. It's so convincing I had to keep checking Wikipedia to make sure there really had not been a bubonic plague in Oran, Algeria, in the 1940s. Camus based The Plague in part on an outbreak of cholera in Oran in 1849 but—no doubt because we seem to be so forgetful as a species about the way epidemics and pandemics work—people have preferred to read into it things like an allegory of the French resistance to Nazi occupation. I guess that makes sense, certainly given our collective amnesia about epidemiology. It also reminded me of the quiet way the stories in the Martin Beck series of police procedurals go down—nothing to see here, just professionals working on solving a public health problem. In a more general way, its tone of glum plodding realism also seemed like a Jean-Pierre Melville movie. The Plague is restrained and polished, letting the details tell the story, for example that the epidemic virtually starts with a sudden and massive die-off of the city's rat population. The main character is Dr. Bernard Rieux, a physician in his 30s. It feels like a police procedural because another main character is the state, which sets curfews, seals borders, maintains quarantine rules, cares for the sick, disposes of the dead. And an epidemic is much like crime—obeying its own rules and patterns, random, cruel, and lethal. Rieux has a small circle of friends he sees during the epidemic. He is separated from his wife because she is sick herself (not with plague) and has lived in a sanatorium since before the epidemic. Rieux is confined to living in the city, which no one is allowed to leave. The Plague is a great novel, straightforward and moving, compressed and to the point—in the category of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. I can see now how accurate it is about the ways these ordinary people resist and deny the reality, on the one hand, and can also rise to the occasion on the other. At the time I reread it, these extraordinary circumstances still seemed exotic. It reminded me more than anything of Camus's novel The Stranger and also the work of Paul Bowles. Now I see better there is nothing flashy or overly cerebral about The Plague. It has a terrible story to tell—the one, in fact, we have struggled through most of this year—and it simply tells it. It has statistical proportion. In a metropolitan area of 200,000, where hundreds are dying every week, any single individual's actual exposure to the experience of the worst still feels limited. As now, people feel isolated and distant from the disease until they are plunged right into it. When we finally see a death (after only very quick snapshots of the grotesque, such as the rats) it's powerful and moving. There's something about The Plague that almost feels sacred. At the very least, it's essential 2020 reading.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Under the Volcano (1947)

I'm aware how appreciated and respected Malcolm Lowry's novel is. It's not only high on the Modern Library list of best 20th-century novels (#11), and Larry McAffery's too (#14), but I've also personally heard good word of mouth on it from friends. But, lord, it's not an easy one for me. I gave up on it early 10 or 15 years ago and then got through it on a second attempt recently. I love the swooning, surging language, and the use of Mexico and the volcanoes is effective too. I'm more ambivalent about the swirling way the plot unfolds. On the whole it requires study aids. For example, it's not only set on a single day but also, according to Wikipedia, a specific date in history—November 2, 1938 (82 years ago tomorrow, for those keeping track)—which I don't believe is ever actually mentioned in the novel, nor particularly means anything of itself, other than being the last day of the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico (and the birthdate of Pat Buchanan). Whoever figured it out had to spend time parsing the clues, for which I'm grateful as it does clear up much of the talk about the Spanish Civil War, Nazis, and so on. I only wish I had checked in with Wikipedia sooner than the 90% point I reached when I did. Under the Volcano is a lot of work, in other words, and I'm not convinced it's worth it, though another reading could well open it up. But, lord, another reading. Geoffrey Firmin is our main man, which is not evident until midway through the second chapter (and these chapters are long). His quasi-estranged wife Yvonne is important too, and his younger brother Hugh. Yvonne has been unfaithful in the past (we glean slowly) but with whom is never entirely clear. Hugh seems likely. Some vivid scenes come swimming up out of this, such as a bullfight and strange incidents on a bus. There is a wonderful miasma of doom over it all. It ranges into Spanish language often and I was grateful for kindle translations. There's also French and German as well (again grateful). In that way it reminded me a little of the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. On one level it's an annoying kind of cosmopolitanism, yet it's also an accurate recounting of experience in a place like Mexico on a day like November 2, 1938. I was often put off by the excessive drinking too, I must admit. In the early chapters Firmin, known as "the Consul" for his minor political position, thinks he is drinking strychnine (shades of the movie The Master!), and all through drinks mescal. In fact, Yvonne, Hugh, and a lot of others are worried about his drinking. Am I giving something away if I mention things never get better for Firmin or anyone? Actually, that's part of the study guide too.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"A Distant Episode" (1947)

[possible spoilers] This short story by Paul Bowles is shocking enough that it probably warrants some sort of trigger warning. I'm also wary of the way he uses the generic greater Arabia as the seat of all human mystery and cruelty, particularly the latter. Much the same is also seen in Bowles's novel The Sheltering Sky. They are nonetheless thrilling experiences to read. In this story the main character, known only as "the Professor," travels to a small village as part of his study of linguistics. From the references, per Wikipedia, the region is likely Morocco or Algeria in the Western Sahara. The Professor is European and his facility with local languages alone shows he is not a typical tourist. Yet in many ways he has the typical problems, a mixture of arrogance, condescension, and sheer naivete that is famous for getting travelers into trouble. The Professor wants to look up a casual old native acquaintance in the village but finds the man has died. Mostly in an attempt to make a new acquaintance, he presses the man who knew the fate of his old friend for certain goods, "camel-udder boxes." The man says they aren't for sale in town but he can help the Professor get them. I didn't have the impression these camel-udder boxes were black market goods so much as something made by a clan that was not on good terms with the clan in the village. Very quickly, they are taking off on foot into the evening on a journey that does not look that promising for the Professor. Yet he pushes on, following the man and taking it as a kind of adventure. Like many travelers to risky areas, he thinks the worst he might find can be handled by a cooperative manner and a willingness to give up cash. At a certain point beyond the village, the Professor's guide leaves him. "The path begins here," he says. "The rock is white and the moon is strong. So you can see well." To our inevitable question, What could possibly go wrong? Bowles has a fiendish answer. And not only that but a calmly vivid and elaborate way of playing it out. The events are there to be discovered in this immaculate tale of human cruelty. Trigger warnings. Trigger warnings. It's deadly swift too, hurling you before you know it into a kind of numbed shock. I'm doing you a favor by raising your expectations so high because maybe then it won't hurt so much. Also, as a word from the PC police, again, I'm not entirely comfortable with the way Bowles uses the alien Arab world as an excuse for the stuff he dreams up. Other horror writers do similar things with Haiti. I didn't look that hard, but I couldn't find any basis in historical accounts connected to Arabs for the things that happen here. As a shocking story, however, with perhaps deeper things to say about alienation, colonialism, and human psychology, it's practically magnificent.

In case it's not at the library.

Out of the Past (1947)

USA, 97 minutes
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Writers: Daniel Mainwaring, James M. Cain, Frank Fenton
Photography: Nicholas Musuraca
Music: Roy Webb
Editor: Samuel E. Beetley
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Richard Webb, Steve Brodie, Virginia Houston, Dickie Moore

Out of the Past is a great little movie made out of many great small things, such as cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca's shimmering black and white. It's set mostly in the Lake Tahoe region of northern California and the scenery often reminds me of Ansel Adams photos: streaming showers of sunlight etching well-defined shadows, with silvery leaves rustling in the foreground and stoic gray mountain skylines beyond. Director Jacques Tourneur, whose previous work included the best of producer Val Lewton's low-key B-movie approach to horror in Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, is just about as deceptively casual creating one of the greatest examples of film noir.

That's a pretty big statement but in fact I've been a little surprised by how much it's agreed on (here for one example is what they were saying on the Goodfella's Movie Blog eight years ago). The term for me evokes more the splashier exercises such as Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, or Touch of Evil, so on so forth, or the extremely low-budget pictures, viz., Gun Crazy, Kiss Me Deadly, or Detour. Don't get me wrong, I think they're great, and so is Out of the Past, but it's the one that sneaks up on me. I think of it as small, maybe even a little slick and dull, though it has all the ingredients of dangerous men and even more dangerous women, low motives and high living, jealousy, vengeance, gnawing dissatisfaction, cigarette smoke, drawn guns, and the deep shadow that goes like frosting on a cake. Out of the Past definitely has one thing that the best of film noir has and maybe a majority doesn't, which is a coherent well-oiled plot with lots of the narrative pieces working together like a machine, and no stinting on the clarity. It gets to be perfectly absorbing as it unfolds, and it's also one of those movies that gets better the more it is seen.

"The Valiant Woman" (1947)

Story by J.F. Powers not available online.

This story by J.F. Powers is something more than an anecdote, but mostly it feels cute, focused on the relationship between a Catholic priest and his housekeeper. It proceeds from a church-approved view of priests as somewhat bumbling and inept in everyday things, implying they are distracted by their higher callings. It's a precious view of priests, especially the way it plays out in the story. The housekeeper, Mrs. Stoner, is a shrewish type in her late 30s or early 40s, who is subtly taking control of Father Firman's social life. The dynamic, of course, is the work husband and wife, two people who work together and, though they are often married to others and not having an affair, behave at work like a married couple. The dynamic between them in this story is well-known among Father Firman's community of priests and church workers. Father Nulty, who visits him on his birthday, teases him by humming "Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine." Father Firman and Mrs. Stoner have an unhealthy and unpleasant relationship, but it's played off as comical, which is why I keep coming back to the word "cute." Powers has the dynamic right, I think. They play cards at night after any visitors have left, and it's a painful ritual of passive-aggressive confrontation. On the night of the story, Mrs. Stoner wins—it seems as if she might win more often than not. Father Firman appears powerless to do anything to mitigate her ever-encroaching control. She is young enough that she could well outlive him. This could go on for the rest of his life. He is obviously miserable with it. But the tone of this story is more or less that it's funny—unfortunate, yes, perhaps even deplorable, but ultimately the stuff of laughter. I'm not convinced Powers is able to get past a certain Catholic fatalism because ultimately it seems to champion a kind of unyielding stoicism about circumstance, which I'm not sure often goes to good places, as a general rule. This is Catholicism before Vatican II so it's very old school. For the most part it feels unquestioning of precepts we are very skeptical about now. It's an interesting curiosity, but not much to it beyond that.

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

"Torch Song" (1947)

Story by John Cheever not available online.

John Cheever is famous for his artful midcentury short stories of suburban angst, and somehow became a comical figure ripe for puncturing. The root cause is probably a toss-up between his closeted bisexuality and the insistence with which he was taught to a generation of high school and college students, but one episode of Seinfeld also managed to do a lot of damage. I've always found Cheever a mixed bag and haven't read him that much, but when he's good he's good. This is one of his most anthologized stories. Published in 1947, it starts 10 years earlier, when Jack Lorey and Joan Harris, who are both from the same town in Ohio, happen to move to New York at the same time. In their first year they see a lot of one another, meeting for dinner or drinks or at parties. It's never a romantic involvement, but more the kind of alliance young people make when they are alone and new to a big city. After the first year they see less of one another, but over the years of the story they always seem to stay in touch one way or another. Among other things, World War II intrudes on their lives and then ends. Both have comically inept love lives. At the end of the story Jack is twice divorced, with at least one child, and "paying alimony to two wives." Joan's history is an even more ludicrous succession of a Swedish count, a drunken raging German, a hustler or con artist named Pete, and others. It's refreshing in some ways to realize these types of confused adult lives were not invented in the '60s, '70s, and after. A version of them has always been around, and certainly Jack and Joan are familiar people. From the first sentence, Jack—who is the main focus of the third-person narrative—thinks of Joan as "The Widow." As much as anything it's because she's a bit of a bohemian hipster, always wearing black. But the conceit is also taken to comically overblown proportions by the end of the story, when they have something like a falling-out, which again is offered and accepted as one of the ways these irresolute and tentative urban friendships can go, especially the non-roommate kind between a man and woman. It is just another alliance in the long trajectory of adult life to death. In that way, "Torch Song" is not dated at all. It's a vivid portrait of lives with no particular compass, and it looks a lot like exactly what we know.

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

Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

 

USA, 96 minutes 

Director/writer: George Seaton 

Photography: Lloyd Ahern, Charles G. Clarke 

Cast: Maureen O'Hara, John Payne, Edmund Gwenn, Gene Lockhart, Natalie Wood, Porter Hall, William Frawley, Jerome Cowan, Philip Tonge 

I saw this last fall shortly after a visit to New York—hence, I suppose, in the mythical New York state of mind, thankyouverymuch Billy Joel—and what impressed and surprised me first was how genuine to the city it felt, with its Thanksgiving Day Parade and casual references to the geography, even the title, and indeed the whole Macy/Gimbels rivalry plot point, all of which makes sense given that it was shot on location. I also recall this one, growing up in the '60s, as among the older, generally second-tier Christmas fare that aired every December (each one a must-see classic according to one person or another, though the ardor, not to mention the opportunities, always passed as quickly as the season). I always meant to see it, as so many of them prove perfectly worthwhile (though not all of them—this Christmas entertainment is a tricky business), but I never did through all these years. It was actually better than I expected, nicely low-key and almost somber as it goes about the usual business of attempting to reclaim the "real" "spirit" of Christmas. Natalie Wood is suitably adorable as a precocious 6-year-old, Edmund Gwenn is a better Santa than Burl Ives himself, and John Payne reminded me weirdly of John Cusack. Always nice to see William Frawley in anything. Merry Christmas all!