Spike Jones & His City Slickers, “William Tell Overture” (1948)

[listen up!]

In my Dad’s bachelor days after World War II he became a record collector. Instead of the 33-1/3 10-inch and (mainly) 12-inch LP he more favored a different type of album, boxed sets of three seven-inch 45s. With six songs these albums were closer to what we would now call EPs. I wish I could remember more of the artists (George Shearing was one) but as a kid the one that caught me up was the bandleader and novelty specialist Spike Jones—who, remember, in their song “Up on Cripple Creek,” even the Band seemed to endorse. Jones’s version of Rossini’s “William Tell Overture” is pure controlled chaos, starting from the usual trademark razor-sharp performance by Jones and orchestra—no multitracking or overdubs were available in 1948 recording studios, it had to be played, flawlessly, the way you hear it. That is combined with ... a horserace?! Yes, and in the running are horses named Cabbage (“leading by a head”), Girdle (“in the stretch”), Banana (“coming up through the bunch”), Mother-in-Law (“nagging in the rear”). Apartment House (“with plenty of room”), and, of course, Beetlebaum. My appreciation of this whack job actually started with my appreciation for the “William Tell Overture.” I was never particularly into the Lone Ranger TV show, for example, but tuned in whenever I could for the theme song. Eventually my siblings fell in with me on playing and overplaying this, shrieking at the various gags, and bellowing, at top volume, “Beetlebaum” (eventual winner of the race, spoilers). No doubt it annoyed the hell out of my parents. In addition to the Rossini and the horserace, the song features barking dogs, clanging kitchen utensils, thunderclaps, mellow chirping birds, cowbell, bicycle horns, crashing objects falling down, a man gargling a sappy melody, horse whinnying, and more. “It’ll either be a photo finish or an oil painting.” In its way it is exhausting.

The Heart of the Matter (1948)

I’ve read a few Graham Greene novels along the way and thought I knew what I was in for with this highly rated one. But it was a disappointment, a cheap, sour, and bleak romance. It reminded me too much of Ernest Hemingway and his eternal stoic stone face intended to represent some kind of nobility. I thought of two other writers much better at what I expected from Greene: Georges Simenon’s so-called “hard” novels (e.g., Tropic Moon and I want to get to more) and South African J.M. Coetzee, a master at compressed language and terrible developments. Greene is not high on colonialism as a general rule, but he is by comparison with Simenon and Coetzee. In The Heart of the Matter a middle-aged policeman at an African outpost is in a loveless marriage and, improbably enough, finds himself in a lousy affair with a widow more than 30 years younger. I suppose these things happen, and speak to some of the basic problems with colonialism. The sweltering weather is often noticed—even light caresses start the sweat going. Our guy’s wife is also having an affair, with a junior officer who hates him. “Syrians” are all over the place, lying, blackmailing, smuggling. Unclear where they are in the World War II setting. Not particularly with the Allies. Another detail I found annoying was Catholic religion, taken seriously by our (philandering) guy and his (philandering) wife. For example, it’s a major crisis for him when he does not confess everything in a confessional but still takes communion afterward. This is a grave problem for him. His girlfriend doesn’t get it and neither do I, frankly. And you really should get it for the ending to land as hard as I think Greene wants it to, and apparently does for others. I appreciate how meticulously structured it is to deliver maximum bleak, but you have to buy the whole Catholic thread more than I could. Also, as these people seem to be WASPy Brits, I assume it must mean something specific that they’re Roman Catholics and not Church of England, but I don’t know what that is and am not interested enough at the moment to try chasing it down. I’m not even convinced this is one of Greene’s best, let alone one of the best novels of the 20th century as per Modern Library.

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

“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” (1948)

[2017 write-up here]

When I first encountered J.D. Salinger’s work as an adolescent, I was most impressed and often identified with the privileged voice of middle-class dread—all of the accoutrements and none of the shows of happiness. Later, Salinger’s uncanny abilities as a writer came to impress me most. He is amazingly skillful at making his narratives dense with layers of meaning. This one, for example, works fine at its most obvious level (almost too obvious!), a caustic lampoon of empty suburban ways of life. But there is much more going on here, and the details tell. Two 30something women are getting together for a catch-up. They drink the afternoon away, bemoaning their present lives and reminiscing about college days when they first met. Both were dropouts within the year. Eloise gripes about her husband and waxes nostalgic about a boyfriend named Walt. In what may be a retcon, which I don’t think is exactly Salinger’s style, Salinger later said it’s Walt Glass—another member of the Glass family, yes. To me Walt is the most important part of this story, not because he is a Glass but because he died in the war. I am starting to sense, for the first time, how significantly Salinger’s experience in the war as a combat soldier affected him and reverberates out in his work. War experience is also a main point in “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (he does favor some long and silly titles, doesn’t he?). Seymour was plainly overwhelmed by the war. Walt died of it. Eloise loved him and misses him keenly, but there’s little room in her upscale life now for grief, especially not all these years later married to another man. Her friend, Mary Jane, is not much better off—divorced, a career woman in 1948—too late for the war years, too early for women’s liberation, her life is just as narrow and constricted as Eloise’s. “Uncle Wiggily” is a nickname Walt had for Eloise after she sprained her ankle. Now she lives in Connecticut, miserable and drinking herself into stupors regularly. She’s also awful to everyone around her, including her husband, daughter, and maid. Eloise and Mary Jane are not close friends. It’s not even clear they like each other much. They close the visit as evening comes down, passed out. Mary Jane was over two hours late, claiming she got lost. In fairness, I often get lost in the suburbs myself. But that’s partly because I have a seething resentment of the suburbs that distracts me. That’s the kind of dynamics on display between these two, profound and unprocessed disappointment and regrets, all surmised from dialogue and the scene-setting.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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“A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948)

(spoilers) J.D. Salinger’s story shares some interesting points with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Both were published in the New Yorker, both in 1948, both with shocking twist endings, and both in many ways made their careers as breakthrough stories. I also remember both being taught in my 10th-grade English class. “Bananafish” is basically the start of the Glass family saga. The twist ending is out of the O. Henry school of hit ‘em with never-saw-it-coming wry irony aka the temptations of fickle fate. Here the very ordinariness of the day described—the story feels aimless for much of its length—is what sets up the shock of the ending (content warning: suicide). Interestingly, it is better understood now that a suicidal person may appear cheerful and upbeat shortly before committing the deed, having finally made the decision. Not sure Salinger knew that, which might make it an impressive feat of intuition. There is ultimately a lot of psychological veracity here. Future trademarks of Salinger’s writing are apparent too, such as italicizing individual syllables to better mimic actual speech. One of the most seductive aspects of reading him is the sense that a real person is speaking directly to you. It may no longer be as effective, going on a hundred years later—speech patterns change. But, call it nostalgia if you must, but rereading these stories has often felt like something akin to going home. That’s not to say it’s entirely a pleasure. Rereading “Bananafish,” we know what’s coming. Seymour’s scenes with the young girl, Sybil, often struck me as cringy and forced. He is represented as ostentatiously “good with children” but I’m not convinced, partly because I know what is about to happen. And we know now—we learn elsewhere in the still fragmented cycle of stories—that Seymour’s worshipful brother Buddy is the author (or “author”) of this story. The jovial chatter and stream-of-consciousness bantering and joking—bananafish? bananafish?—feel empty and weird. Is Buddy trying to burnish the reputation of a suicide? Likewise the scene with the woman on the elevator, when Seymour accuses her of staring at his feet. It departs from the narrative of the suicide at peace, as now he is suddenly peevish. I think more of these miscues are Salinger, though some are also Buddy’s. But “Bananafish” is nonetheless an auspicious start, there’s no getting around that—to a singular and vastly influential writing career, to the Glass family tales to come, even just to the Nine Stories collection itself. This story is a good place to start in all kinds of ways.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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“Just Before the War With the Eskimos” (1948)

This story by J.D. Salinger, published first in the New Yorker in 1948 and later in his essential Nine Stories collection, seems likely to typify much that people don’t like about him. It involves a bunch of semi-miserable adolescents crabbing about things from the center of their vastly comfortable lives. Their circumstances vary—certainly in their self-consciousness they calibrate themselves on different levels in terms of wealth and class. But the high-school girls, squabbling over cab fare, attend a private school in Manhattan, and the two guys are college educated. I think? I see that some on the internet take one guy, Franklin, older brother of one of the girls, as a Jesus figure. That never occurred to me. He struck me more as an early version of Holden Caulfield (and let’s please not get into any Jesus implications thereof). He complains a lot and he’s quick to dismiss or judge people as snobs and phonies. Selena is Franklin’s sister and Ginnie is her friend, or anyway her nemesis on the cab fare issue. While Selena is in another part of the house very slowly getting Ginnie’s money, Franklin enters with a bleeding finger (just like Jesus!) and goes off on a monologue. Franklin is a few years older than Ginnie and I take the arc of this story to be Ginnie developing a crush on him. The recent war has a presence here. Franklin says he couldn’t get into the army because of a heart problem. He has been working at an airplane factory for three years. So I guess he’s not college educated? He comes across like he is, meaning, I guess, that he’s obviously intelligent and informed and a little neurotic. This story is basically very slight. Salinger makes it work with his voice and all the great dialogue. They are the two features that rarely failed him and always make him a pleasure to read. No, I don’t have much use for spoiled rich kids. But I know, with Salinger, with movie director Whit Stillman, and with a good many others, that they can be thoroughly entertaining in their pretensions to being wearied seen-it-all adults. For that matter, Salinger’s adolescents usually have profound undertones that are felt as much as read in the text.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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Pitfall (1948)

USA, 86 minutes

Director: Andre de Toth

Writers: Jay Dratler, Karl Kamb, William Bowers, Andre de Toth

Photography: Harry J. Wild

Music: Louis Forbes

Editor: Walter Thompson

Cast: Dick Powell, Lizabeth Scott, Jane Wyatt, Raymond Burr, Byron Barr, Ann Doran, Jimmy Hunt, John Litel

Pitfall does not rate even one star in my Halliwell’s film guide (“Modest suspenser, quite efficiently made,” it notes). But elsewhere film critic Andrew Sarris alphabetizes director Andre de Toth into his “Expressive Esoterica” list and specifically calls out Pitfall as one of his most interesting pictures. As a film noir, Pitfall assembles a lot of the basic familiar elements: a woman of undeserved reputation, her jailhouse boyfriend, a cynical insurance agent and the sinister private detective he uses, and an impossibly wholesome family out of midcentury movies and TV, featuring Jane Wyatt who would become more famous as the Mom in Father Knows Best.

Many are primarily fascinated in this movie by Lizabeth Scott, who plays Mona Stevens, the woman of reputation. Scott is a bit of a Hollywood cult figure at this point and it’s not hard to see why. She made sporadic appearances on TV shows like Burke’s Law, but her most famous roles are film noir or adjacent—Dead Reckoning with Humphrey Bogart, Too Late for Tears with Dan Duryea, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers with Barbara Stanwyck, etc. And I like her here too—a calculated woman of mystery, Scott brings a nice girl-next-door way about her while also somehow being sultry and inviting. But what tends to keep me coming back to Pitfall is the strange, unsettling, and simmering relationship between insurance agent John Forbes (Dick Powell) and the detective he throws work to, J.B. MacDonald, or “Mac” (Raymond Burr).

Portrait of Jennie (1948)

USA, 86 minutes

Director: William Dieterle

Writers: Robert Nathan, Paul Osborn, Peter Berneis, Leonardo Bercovici, David O. Selznick, Ben Hecht

Photography: Joseph H. August, Lee Garmes

Music: Claude Debussy, Dimitri Tiomkin

Editors: William Morgan, Gerard Wilson

Cast: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, David Wayne, Cecil Kellaway, Florence Bates, Felix Bressart

My Halliwell's film guide lights up like a pinball machine for this peculiar fantasy romance exercise about ghosts of New York, with an effusive three-star judgment: "A splendid example of the higher Hollywood lunacy: a silly story with pretensions about life and death and time and art, presented with superb persuasiveness by a first-class team of actors and technicians." And I have to admit I enjoy it too, for many of the same reasons. Joseph Cotten is one of the best players of his generation. Released in 1948, the supporting cast of Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Felix Bressart, and others effectively hark to gauzy past prewar days of cinema. And Jennifer Jones is suitably ethereal (though oddly reminiscent to me of Debra Winger or Karen Allen). In the big finish, Portrait of Jennie even takes a page from the silent era, subtly tinting the frames with increasing color, pushing toward a big final shot in technicolor that feels bigger than it can possibly be.

In fact, producer David O. Selznick stamps B - I - G all over this even before we get to the stylized main titles, which I suspect explains a lot of the lunacy—Selznick the misty romanticist tycoon. Cotten plays the starving artist Eben Adams, who is down to his last dollar. As he wanders the city trying to hawk his work he enters Central Park near the end of the day, where he meets a young girl named Jennie Appleton. It's Jennifer Jones and in these early scenes we're intended to believe she's quite young, no older than 12, which is mostly accomplished by positioning the camera above her. She sings him a strange and beautiful song, tells strange stories, says things that don't make sense. She does some goo-goo da-da bits in her delivery, asking Eben to wait for her to grow up. Eben sees she doesn't seem to understand the math of aging.

The Ghost of Blackwood Hall (1948)

It was fun going back to one of the old Nancy Drew mysteries, which I adored when I was 8 and 9. I can't say for sure I read this one then but it's likely given the publication date. They were largely written by Mildred Benson, arguably the "real" Carolyn Keene, responsible for ghostwriting the first 23 books in the series under the Keene pen name and basically setting the whole tone. The regularity of the chapters and the cliffhangers do not work on me the same way anymore (how could they?) and thus it wasn't as enthralling. But lots of small things were nice to see again: a general wholesomeness, a quicksand episode, the copious "Tom Swifties"—people don't just "say" things, they urge and cajole and chuckle them. I was more intrigued now by Bess and George, who are cousins and Nancy's friends. All the principals are that perfect age of 18. More cynical now, I see bolts of signifiers in the cousins. Bess is frilly and feminine and George is boyish and impetuous. Bess has blonde hair, George is dark. For her part, Nancy has a boyfriend named Ned, but it's an anodyne relationship. He's mainly there for the muscle. I also liked the ghost story side of this short novel, though it's apparent from the start that Nancy and her crew keep their feet on the ground about seances and such things. The bad guys, of course, are bunco artists who are exposed in the end. They always are in Nancy Drew mysteries. Still, Benson / Keene blatantly works on having it both ways, with scenes where a ghost appears to be playing an organ and other shamelessly spooky things happen. One interesting data point is that when I was introduced to Nancy Drew mysteries they were in a public library in Vermillion, South Dakota, where my family stayed for the summer in 1963 while my Dad was taking classes at the college. When we were back home and I was visiting the Minneapolis Public Library again, I saw they did not carry them. The librarian acted funny when I asked about them. It might be my first experience with genre bias. On the other hand, the Minneapolis library was loaded up on science fiction and horror anthologies, which were at least as good.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Spring in a Small Town (1948)

Xiao cheng zhi chun, China, 98 minutes

Director: Mu Fei

Writer: Tianji Li

Photography: Shengwei Li

Music: Yijun Huang

Editors: Chunbao Wei, Ming Xu

Cast: Wei Wei, Yu Shi, Wei Li, Hongmei Zhang

It surprised me when I realized that, according to the critical roundup at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, Spring in a Small Town (presently ranked #161 overall) effectively amounts to the greatest Chinese movie ever made. It's followed on the big list by Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (a very long documentary from 2002, #323), Platform (2000, #376), Yellow Earth (1984, #384), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (?!, 2000, #391). This is all complicated by the ambiguous status of Hong Kong and Taiwan, which have pictures at #42 (In the Mood for Love, 2000), #118 (Yi Yi, 2000), #124 (A Brighter Summer Day, 1991), #192 (A City of Sadness, 1989), #194 (Chungking Express, 1994), and five more in the 300s before getting to Platform and Crouching Tiger. The latter two are credited to China, Hong Kong, and other countries here in our 21st-century global era.

The Western bias appears to be showing—Spring in a Small Town has a title and date that make it sound more like film noir although it is actually an Ozu-like domestic drama. It was released the year before the Chinese Communist Revolution, a regime that suppressed it as decadent and Western until the 1980s. In this ongoing culture war that favors Hong Kong over China in the West and domestic angst over the sweeping currents of time, it seems curious that the 161st-greatest movie of all time exists in one of the shabbiest prints I've ever had to pay for ($2.99) at Amazon Prime. Someone needs to make up their mind about whether or not this is an important and historical film.

"Mars Is Heaven!" (1948)

Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles is characterized by Wikipedia as a "fixup" novel, a term new to me for a novel made out of revising and stitching together previously published (and formally unrelated) short stories. Hey, William Faulkner and Go Down, Moses! Why not? Well, one reason might be so that there is a single standard version. The one I read in the Everyman's collection has a different last paragraph from the one I found online. The latter may be from The Martian Chronicles although there the story is called "The Third Expedition." The change to the finish is small but significant, throwing a different slant on the ambiguities of the story. But never mind, the basic nut of it, a surreal insidiously unsettling concept, remains just as effective. It's excellent by sections and can be claimed equally for science fiction or horror (and works in comics form too). It's fine as a stand-alone—even better, I think, with the Everyman's ending. The idea of traveling to Mars and finding the 20th-century Midwest is bodacious, especially for Bradbury, who practically owned that time and place as his very own hobbyhorse. What saved him always is that he was so good at setting the extremes of his contrasts. He reminds me in many ways of Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip, which also bore overweening sweetness with some very sharp edges, particularly in the early years. Bradbury's usual big bath in nostalgia is somehow even more cunning in this story. He can verge on treacle when he waxes poetic about boyhood, summers, playing ball, and swimming, but the deeper he goes into it here the stranger it becomes. This crew of 16 puts down on Mars in the year 2000 and encounters—an idyllic small town, with lovely green lawns and shade trees and houses with porches and sunshine pouring over everything. This town is a little antiquated, with origins in the mid-19th century. And then, from within these houses, the astronauts begin to discover cherished relatives. Grandparents, brothers and sisters, Moms and Dads, aunts and uncles. Have they gone mad?

When these long dead and still sorely missed relatives speak, the story becomes even stranger. They know they died on Earth. They know they are on another planet. They are strangely defensive and call it a second chance. The captain of the ship maintains his poise perhaps the longest, desperately sorting through the possibilities. Perhaps, the captain speculates, the crew never left Earth and somehow didn't know it. Perhaps much earlier, secret missions to Mars have populated the planet this way. Perhaps they entered a time rift in space. None of his ideas really make sense. The captain maintains his poise until he sees his brother, who died years ago, an untimely death. He was 26 and still looks the same. He takes the captain to their old home (all the astronauts are finding houses they know) and there his parents are. And here is exactly where our perceptions begin to diverge from his, the last rational man. We still know this is all too good to be true—something is deeply wrong about it. Bradbury subtly stokes our doubts. It is positively alarming when we see the captain enter his own insensible ecstasies of nostalgia. Later, in bed in his old bedroom, he returns to doubt and considers a theoretical scenario that is as close as this story comes to explaining itself, involving native Martians with telepathic powers and no good intentions (or, from their view, defending themselves, fighting back to nip colonialism in the bud). This part of the story is a bit clunky and mechanical but also has one of the best scare effects involving his brother. But from there the story retreats to further ambiguities and veers dangerously close to incoherence, which is not helped by the alternate endings. But I love the way Bradbury so boldly transports his beloved Midwest and plonks it down on the red planet, Mars. It plays to all his greatest strengths and arguably is one of his best.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman's)
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Comic book panel, Wally Wood, from Weird Science (EC) #18, 1950

"The Lottery" (1948)

At this point, Shirley Jackson's story is your basic stone classic—of horror, of short stories, of midcentury literature. For spoiler-phobes who haven't read it, I'm talking about everything here. According to legend (and Wikipedia), no story or article published by The New Yorker has ever received as much mail from readers—some concerned the story was factual reporting, some thinking it was reporting and wanting to know where they could go watch. But most, quite reasonably, inquiring into just what in the hell was going on around here. By the methodology used at Make Lists, Not War, "The Lottery" is the highest-ranked short story of all time, tied with D.H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner" (which, in case anyone was wondering, is the Lawrence story misplaced in The Dark Descent). It's not hard to see the reason for the brouhaha. The story is crisp, straightforward, and quick to the point, yet bottomlessly mysterious, with no explanations. In fact, a good many of those letters to The New Yorker and/or Jackson were exactly requests for explanations. To me, its popularity (or notoriety) is equally surprising and mysterious, emerging sideways out of the horror genre (The New Yorker known for many things but horror not one of them), banked as it is with such superhot stores of blind cruel rage they are practically explanatory in themselves. I get a similar charge from the more current Purge franchise of movies, which also rely on a similar outrageous yet believable enough ritual. Further enlightenment on what this story unleashes may also be found in the end of director Peter Jackson's movie from the '90s, Heavenly Creatures.

The explanation, which ironically satisfies no one, is catharsis. Let's think about that one because it's one of those things that always seems fuzzy, even at dictionary level. Merriam-Webster, for example, puts "catharsis" squarely in the realm of art, with its 1-a definition—"purification or purgation of the emotions (such as pity and fear) primarily through art"—but I think the Oxford spin actually applies more directly here: "the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions." That seems to be an explanation, at least for the lottery within Jackson's story. But I'm not sure it explains the story "The Lottery" itself, why it exists in the world or its effect on us. As with The Purge—and resembling Scott McCloud's space between the panels in comic book narrative—a lot of the power of "The Lottery" is derived from trying to imagine how we got from here to there. Why June 27, for example? What does that commemorate? We can guess Jackson's intent as the writer, using the solstice associations of that time of year with ancient rituals, sacrifices, and festivals. The "purge" in the movies is set similarly on the spring equinox, the night of March 21. Both imply surging life and bloody rites of spring. But how, within the story of "The Lottery," did this shockingly barbaric ritual—stoning!—come to pass? No explanation. Why do they do it at all? No explanation. The Purge movies offer some extreme right-wing Christian patriot mumbo-jumbo justifications, which may not weaken them as a whole but plainly is where they depart from "The Lottery."

"The Lottery" makes you answer those questions for yourself, or give up and write them down and mail them to The New Yorker or Jackson (who died in 1965 at the age of 48). The story is full of great effects, mostly working like some sunny day afternoon John Cheever story. This so-called village could as well have been named Any Town Suburb USA, it is intended to be so white-majority generic, with its families named Watson and Martin and Delacroix and Hutchinson. The people are brave and everyone is kind. The ritual has been deeply impressed into the fabric of their lives. It simply exists without question. As with public exhibitions of lynchings and executions in the US past, a number of sadists may be seen nibbling at the edges, there for the sick kicks. Mostly it seems to be ordinary people on a busy weekend but the details can be telling. Much is revealed in small actions by these people, e.g., Mrs. Delacroix, who lifts "a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands." After the victim has been selected, in a murky process, the official in charge lets the townspeople loose with a word: "All right, folks. Let's finish quickly." It is a nearly perfect balance between a suburban daydream and a sickeningly barbaric violation. Stoning is perfect. Hanging would not be enough. Crucifixion would be too much. Jackson's precision is amazing at every point of this story. We are shocked, benumbed, that its events are even happening at all, so swiftly do they come.

Shirley Jackson, Novels and Stories (Library of America)
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Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948)

USA, 87 minutes
Director: Max Ophüls
Writers: Howard Koch, Stefan Zweig, Max Ophüls
Photography: Franz Planer
Music: Daniele Amfitheatrof
Editor: Ted J. Kent
Cast: Joan Fontaine, Louis Jourdan, Mady Christians, Art Smith, Marcel Journet, Howard Freeman

This is one of those movies I seem to have a hard time making up my mind about. Sometimes I wonder how I end up seeing these movies I'm ambivalent about so often. Director and cowriter Max Ophüls was a primary interest of movie critic Andrew Sarris, which is where I first heard and became curious about Ophüls's work. Another highly regarded picture by him, at least as measured by the critical lists collated for the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, is Madame de... (this includes Sarris, who considered it the greatest movie ever made). At the moment, to give you some idea, Madame de... is at #120 on that list and Letter From an Unknown Woman at #122 (Ophüls's next-highest is Lola Montes at #323, another movie I'm ambivalent about but never mind). I've always had regard for Madame de..., along with some others by Ophüls I like quite a bit such as The Reckless Moment and Caught (also known as Wild Calendar). But Letter From an Unknown Woman has often posed challenges for me even in staying awake.

It's not Joan Fontaine and never was, but I'll get to that in a minute. In an attempt to make all this even less interesting if that's possible, I want to speculate that my ambivalence might be related to media format. That is, the copy of Letter From an Unknown Woman I've had for many years now is a VHS cassette, which is serviceable enough in 2018 but increasingly impractical, most notably because there is no longer a way to operate the machine with a remote. And I'm spoiled now—without a remote it's almost too hard to watch a picture carefully. So I fretted about it and finally decided to pay the $2 to watch it on Amazon Prime, and what do you know, the whole darn thing came to life again in a big new way. I can't explain this very well, but I know I liked Letter From an Unknown Woman the first time I saw it, in a theater setting.

The Red Shoes (1948)

UK, 134 minutes
Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Writers: Hans Christian Andersen, Emeric Pressburger, Keith Winter, Michael Powell
Photography: Jack Cardiff
Music: Brian Easdale
Editor: Reginald Mills
Cast: Anton Walbrook, Moira Shearer, Marius Goring, Robert Helpmann, Albert Bassermann, Leonide Massine, Ludmilla Tcherina, Esmond Knight

I love the swooning romantic pulse of The Red Shoes by the Archers (codirectors and cowriters Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger). It's magical, of course—a technicolor movie full of special effects based on a ballet based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale—but it bears a dark and keen edge as well. While the narrative frets over questions of art, love, and sacrifice, perhaps its most germane features are that it was designed by a painter, cast with professional ballet dancers, and dreamily hops about Europe, from London to Paris to Monte Carlo, like there had never just been two great wars and a major economic depression. Mostly it stays indoors within the world of theater and make-believe.

The gist of the fairy tale is that the red shoes are tools of Satan, the color being the giveaway by which he may be known. They tempt a young girl with their handsome fashionable charm and then, once she puts them on, cause her to dance without surcease until she falls down dead (no obvious relation to They Shoot Horses, Don't They?). The Japanese horror version from 2005 is more true to the Andersen story, which does not include even one artist but rather mostly just goodly humble church people. In turn, there are none of those here. Or, if there are, their house of worship is more like the backstage rehearsal space and the holy sacrament of art, Art, ART. In fact, the real star of The Red Shoes is not the young girl, but a character Andersen never conceived at all: the svengali impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who is the veritable Jesus, Buddha, and Rasputin of art.

Sorry, Wrong Number (1948)

USA, 89 minutes
Director: Anatole Litvak
Writer: Lucille Fletcher
Photography: Sol Polito
Music: Franz Waxman
Editor: Warren Low
Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster, Ann Richards, Wendell Corey, Ed Begley, Harold Vermilyea, Leif Erickson, William Conrad, Jimmy Hunt

[Spoilers] This nifty Barbara Stanwyck thriller originated as a radio play first broadcast in 1943. As a result it is at least as set-bound as most movies adapted from stage plays. Yet, at its best, it finds ways to take advantage of the great strength of radio theater, which is an uncanny ability to recruit the listener's imagination. It doesn't hurt that the whole premise here is based on mystifying another object of audio, the technology of the telephone—all those mysterious clicks and shifts in sound quality, like you were hanging your ear into outer space. You could dial zero and talk to a human being in 1948. In 1949, Jack Webb recorded himself placing a long-distance phone call for Dragnet, still a radio show at the time. It takes two minutes and gives some sense of the world at your reach from the inside of your telephone when you picked up the receiver then (listen here, h/t Steven Rubio). That's what the best parts of Sorry, Wrong Number sound like.

The prologue sets the tone: "In the tangled networks of a great city, the telephone is the unseen link between a million lives ... It is the servant of our common needs—the confidante of our inmost secrets ... life and happiness wait upon its ring ... and horror ... and loneliness ... and ... death!!!" (yes, three exclamation points). Stanwyck is Leona Stevenson, an invalid woman in her 30s confined to her bed. She is in New York with her husband, who is there on a business trip, He is supposed to be with her that evening to care for her—her usual nurse has the night off. The movie essentially takes place in real-time though much of what we see is flashbacks. As the picture opens, Leona has been frantically calling her husband's office all evening and only getting a busy signal. Shortly before 10 she calls an operator and asks her to place the call. Somehow she is patched into a phone call she can only hear. The men speaking do not hear her when she speaks. Then she notices their conversation sounds like it is about a murder for hire, scheduled to happen at 11:15 that night. Can you guess? Can you guess?

"A Red-Letter Day" (1948)

Story by Elizabeth Taylor not available online.

Elizabeth Taylor's story is sharply observed but dated to the extent that some of its plot points likely no longer register the same way. Tory is a young single mother on visiting day at the boarding school her son attends. She sees a maternal woman who is there to visit her multiple sons and resents her—resents, we surmise, the older woman's greater comfort with being a mother, having a successful marriage, or just in general. Tory got pregnant the first time she had sex, married the man, and is now divorced from him. Her feelings about her son Edward are not conventionally maternal. It's not even clear that she cares about him, though it's also not clear that she doesn't. Certainly she has poignant feelings for him, in an abstracted way. They are uncomfortable together and it is a long day for both of them. Most of the time Tory seems to be focused on the maternal woman, Mrs. Hay-Hardy, and dwelling on her "womb": "she looked as if she had what is often called a teeming womb," for example. The contrast is stark if obvious and Mrs. Hay-Hardy recurs throughout the story. Mostly it says inside Tory's head but occasionally we see things from Edward's view. He is 11 and, while not any more comfortable than Tory about the visit, he doesn't seem that needy either. If anything, he seems reasonably happy and adjusted to boarding school life. It's possible he will eventually need therapy or have problems as an adult, but he seems fine now, which in some ways implicitly argues she's doing OK as a mother. But I don't think that's supposed to be the point of this story. This is more along the lines of proto-feminism, underlining the limitations women are subjected to. It's plain Tory never wanted the responsibilities of a child, at least not on these terms. She hates her ex-husband and doesn't react well when Edward tries to bring him up. So she's a person with anger and resentments, and I think the way these feelings confuse her about her own motherhood is intended to be a little shocking. That's mostly what feels dated. We know better now that the life of a single mother is not an easy one, and often leads to bitterness for perfectly understandable reasons. I'm not sure we're intended to like Tory much, but I think it's easier than ever to identify with her now. I think it's even possible this story is about one very bad day—we all have them—and everything worked out fine for her. Or, anyway, as fine as possible for a woman in her time.

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

"Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" (1948)

Story by J.D. Salinger not available online.

Technically, this story by J.D. Salinger belongs with his Glass family stories, though it's a bit of a stretch. The Glass family member making an appearance is Walt, who is dead during the action of this story, and the Glass family name never appears. Instead, it's a type of story we're more used to seeing from John Cheever or John Updike, exploring midcentury Eastern seaboard suburban malaise. For that matter, the word "Connecticut" never appears either, except in the title. So the insights seem a little paltry—you know, like, suburban life and values are so lame, man. Well, at least the insights have the virtue of being mostly true. As for the rest, it's great. It sparkles with Salinger's usual insanely engaging language. I understand that might be a generational, class, or otherwise narrow view, but it does work for me. The story is about one college friend visiting another. They are grown now and in their 30s and this seems to be a recurring if infrequent event. Mary Jane gets lost trying to fine Eloise's place and then they spend the afternoon getting drunk, while the maid minds Eloise's girl, who makes an appearance to charm Mary Jane and we the readers. Salinger might be at his best with children—real children, not adolescents and adults who won't grow up, though he's pretty good with them too. He just seems to understand what makes kids tick, and how we spend the rest of our lives failing to live up to that. It also means, for better or worse, that he goes to some cloying places as well. Their charms may be too precious, and certainly the idealization of them as perfect innocents is overdone. Yet it's also exactly this sense of innocence that he's especially good at—the naturally occurring and amazing kind in real children. It's also a somewhat trite war story. These days the lethal factor would probably be more like an auto accident for the same effect, but in 1948 it was still easiest just to resort to the war. The picture of ennui at the center of plenty may or may not have been radical then, but certainly the view is now mainstream, so there's some tedium to the story in that regard. But it's also Salinger in his prime, so I'm not about to steer anyone away from it.

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

"Innocence" (1948)

Story by Sean O'Faolain not available online.

Sean O'Faolain is another writer in these anthologies that I'm basically getting my introduction to now. I barely even know the name, but Wikipedia informs he was Irish (duh), primarily a short story writer, and fairly prolific. A man of letters—he also wrote criticism, biography, novels, and more. The language in this story is beautiful and seductive, but the story—which is very short, barely five printed pages—is kind of a labored joke about a boy's misunderstanding of the word "adultery." It's also saturated in Catholic culture. The misunderstanding occurs in a confessional. The scene is actually pretty funny. The priest is old and doddering. At first he mistakes his confessor for a girl, which suggests the first-person narrator's youth at the time of the incident—or his underdevelopment, because his voice might have still been high. The narrator is recounting the story as an adult many years later, a full-grown man with a son of his own, looking back through the haze of memory, quite evidently casting a glow on it. It's also a little too cute about withholding the term in question ("adultery"), which instantly clarifies all the mystifying confusion. But it wouldn't have been as funny that way. Oops, I gave it away. Well, it's an odd duck at any rate, much closer to memoir. I have to wonder if the "innocence" of the title is perhaps not a little the narrator's own still. The revelation appears to be that the Catholic church is fallible despite its claims. What he's most worried about now is what it will do to his son's psyche when he comes to the realization in his turn. It's something like the way we think about breaking it to kids that Santa Claus is all a hoax. So maybe it's me, after all, and not the narrator, who is the real innocent around here. Still, the whole little thing strikes me as a bit of a stunt. It's also way too Catholic for my taste. But my vague sense of O'Faolain's reputation (set permanently as Irish, likely in the long shadow of James Joyce), and especially the wonderful ease and expressiveness of the language here, make me think he might be worth looking into further one of these days.

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

"Charles" (1948)

Read story by Shirley Jackson online.

SPOILER ALERT. "Charles" is a very short story with a twist ending in the O. Henry vein. I had it figured out on the first page, but I had read it before. I can't remember if it fooled me the first time. It might have. Wikipedia comments: "This story is a prime example of dramatic irony where many times the reader can figure out——" Ah ah ah, Wikipedia. You just might have given it away without even a spoiler alert. Between my figuring it out quickly, and Wikipedia giving it away just like that, there's probably no harm in discussing it candidly, but I'll be scrupulous just in case. It's right there online for you and it's very short. By the evidence of this, "The Lottery," and other stories by her, Shirley Jackson was often in the surprise ending business, which was very popular in short stories for much of the 20th century. Jackson's work has value beyond this entertainment aspect, and reasons can be glimpsed here, though this story is mostly focused on its surprise business. Jackson is really good at midcentury American suburbia with malevolent overtones. "Charles" turns on a young couple sending their first-born off to kindergarten and dealing with what comes of it. There are profound moments in terms of child development and the bemusement and wonder of the parents. At a length of only five printed pages, this story verges on being a "short short." I understand it gets hard making these distinctions—short short and short stories, novellas, novelettes, etc.—and maybe it's not even worth it. But they seem to have some shadings by size. A short short (three printed pages max and as short as two sentences) almost always has a twist or multiple twists. Otherwise we're in the realm of prose poetry and frankly I don't want to go there. "Charles" is long enough to establish a narrative sequence, even though it deliberately dances around a key plot point that is saved for a "reveal" (that new noun). It's not purely a stunt, as Jackson's crisp jokey rhythms and suburban detail are worth the quick ride—her characters can be real in surprising ways. Still, it's mainly a stunt, or at best occupying the form of a stunt. "The Lottery" is a better story, but mostly because it's longer and thus there is more of Jackson's writing. It's also a stunt. But both are also more than that.

Library of America Story of the Week (Library of America)

The Naked and the Dead (1948)

 

Something about the mysterious little wonders of reading and books went into my experience of finally getting to the towering Norman Mailer's first towering novel. It's possible that it is the last mass market Signet paperback I will ever read—purchased new in 1975 (the date dutifully inscribed into the inside first page), for approximately $1.25, I carted it around with me everywhere I moved until I finally picked it up and read it over 25 years later. And wondered why I had taken so long to get to it. Well, that's not actually a hard question to answer (because the harder question, perhaps, is what is one to do about the towering Norman Mailer). The author in thrall to Ernest Hemingway, taking World War II more or less as novelist career opportunity, and all the way down to the "fugging" language, this seemed impenetrable every time I tried, until finally it wasn't. There's some fine storytelling here after all, convincing and vivid "War is hell" passages, a schematic cross-section of America in the soldiers of the platoon a la Blackhawk comics, forward momentum like crazy, and evidently the author more in thrall to John Dos Passos than Hemingway, a pleasant surprise. I loved it in all its pulpy juicy lunatic experimenting glory. I like the Pacific theater setting. I like the sure way it grinds along. Certainly it bears all the elements of the brand Mailer would create and build on, the self-aggrandizing wise man buffoon with such an acute eye for detail and lacerating wit, though at the time he seemed more a natural match with James Jones and James Michener, who were also making slab-o-book careers out of World War II. It's worth noting Mailer had plenty of time to burn, publishing this as something of a prodigy at the age of 25, which is truly remarkable given how self-assured and well done it is. So he had a decade to flail around some and try this and that to find his way to a man of letters career—it's those subsequent agonies as much as anything that make him so much fun still to read. In the meanwhile, he always had this very fine war novel to fall back on for literary reputation. On the "fugging" issue: Look, I know, different times, different times. But fair or not, in a weird way it makes Mailer look a bit of a moral coward. He's brave enough to want to reproduce the language of soldiers, but acquiescent to his publisher who insists on at least softening "fuck" to "fug," giving birth to one of the more annoying tics in all literature. At least it gave us the Fugs in the '60s. And Mailer did go to war to get the experience to write an important literary work, so there's that too. This is a good one.

In case it's not at the library.

Fort Apache (1948)

USA, 125 minutes
Director: John Ford
Writers: Frank S. Nugent, James Warner Bellah
Photography: Archie Stout, William H. Clothier
Editor: Jack Murray
Cast: John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple, John Agar, Ward Bond, Pedro Armendáriz, George O'Brien, Victor McLaglen, Miguel Inclán, Hank Worden

My self-rehabilitation project re: John Ford took a decided turn for the better when I came across Fort Apache. It's nicely effective, perfectly enjoyable, and Ford to the core, a western with John Wayne set in Monument Valley.

Monument Valley, even shot in a harsh dusty black and white, remains imposing as ever, its wide open spaces and the alien shapes of its mountains and rock formations establishing a backdrop that keeps one off balance, identifying with the isolation of the characters. In a way it's a distraction—yet in another way as much a character as anyone walking around on two legs. It's oppressive, bearing down on the story more and more as the story develops, the characters for the most part eventually just lost in it, as at least one of them simply becomes just lost.