Tennessee Ernie Ford, “The Shotgun Boogie” (1950)

[listen up!]

Tennessee Ernie Ford had a big hit with this entertaining story-song in 1950, which sat for 14 weeks atop the Rockabilly & Western Swing chart. It hits with a rollicking piano, hip-wrigglin’ boogie bass figure, and upbeat nimble tempo. Our narrator is a good old boy living off the fat of his land with his shotgun standing in the corner. In the first part, he is out hunting. “The big fat rabbits are jumpin' in the grass / Wait 'til they hear my old shotgun blast.” Said blast is replicated throughout the song by hard hits on the snare drum, probably my favorite part of the song and its most ingenious. It sounds right purely by context. “Look out bushy tails, tonight you'll be in the pot.” In the second part, he meets a Daisy Mae type of beautiful backwoods gal. Among other things, of course, she is a deadly shot with her own shotgun. He is instantly smitten. “I looked her up and down, said, ‘Boy, this is love.’” But the usual complications soon prevail. “I sat down on a log, took her on my lap / She said wait a minute, bud, you gotta see my pap / ... He don't like a man that's gonna trifle.” And so our guy follows the script. “Well, I called on her pap like a gentleman oughter / He said, ‘No brush hunter's gonna get my daughter.’" And raising his shotgun, fires. No worries, our guy gets the drift and outruns the shot. “I wanted weddin' bells / I'll be back little gal, when your pappy runs out of shells.” Ford’s voice is homely and flat, especially on the long notes, but it’s all part of the charm.

“For Esme – With Love and Squalor” (1950)

[spoilers?] I’m not sure I have ever realized before what a nearly perfect short story this is by J.D. Salinger. Strike that “nearly.” Salinger takes his faith in children as the best of humanity and combines it with war experience for a powerful evocation of trauma and how it works. As a World War II soldier Salinger participated in the D-Day Normandy invasion, storming the beach. If the Utah Beach sector looked like what we saw in the opening of the movie Saving Private Ryan, it’s useful to keep in mind. This story is told as the before and after of that event, Salinger coming to terms with his own experience, or trying. In the first part of the story the first-person narrator, the soldier, is in England on a rainy day, finishing up training for the invasion. He has some time for himself and gets out of the rain in a tearoom. There he sees a girl he had seen moments earlier in a church, at a choir practice. She stood out to him. She’s 13, with her 5-year-old brother in tow. They are orphans. This is Esme, a serious girl absorbing the hard lessons of life. They strike up a conversation. He tells her he is a short-story writer. The bravery of it, even to a 13-year-old, is bracing. She asks him to write a story for her sometime. This part of the story is often funny. “I prefer stories about squalor,” she tells him. She is wearing a chronographic watch her father gave her. He died in the war. The scene in the tearoom is warm and charming. In the second half of the story, after Normandy, the narrator switches to third-person. “This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story,” he writes, “and the scene changes. The people change, too.... I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.” Of course, that’s not true at all. We see him coping to hold himself together emotionally and failing. He has a stack of unopened letters he’s not looking at, but a package from Esme catches his eye. She has sent him her father’s chronographic watch and a letter. The watch has been smashed in transit, which I believe may be the saddest things I’ve ever read. But her letter is very cheering—the kind of cheering that makes you cry. It’s all a sudden rush of a roller coaster right at the end and it left me wrung out in all the best ways.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Mischief (1950)

I don’t really know Charlotte Armstrong at all, but I see she was fairly prolific, and this short novel is a dandy, coming on like a Jim Thompson story before even Jim Thompson was writing them. First there is a glamorous, loving couple that reminded me of Nick and Nora Charles from the Thin Man movie—debonair, witty, and good-hearted. Instead of an adorable terrier dog they have an adorable 9-year-old daughter named Bunny. They’re staying in a midtown hotel because the husband, Peter, is being given some honor at a formal banquet that evening where he will be giving a speech. It’s a momentous occasion in his life and career. At the last minute his sister calls to say she can’t babysit that night as planned. It puts them in a jam, but Peter asks around the hotel and finds an elevator operator, Eddie, who says his niece can do the job. Eddie has been at the hotel for 14 years. They take his word as good. But Nell the niece is not what she appears. She is the crazy Thompson element and Armstrong is positively gleeful about laying on the mayhem. Mischief walks a fine line between almost-horror and brazen comedy with very few missteps. Nell’s nature is revealed by degrees. At first she seems like a painfully shy young woman but once alone with Bunny (who she mostly ignores) her actions are progressively more shocking. The way she trashes that room is amazing, a thing to behold in itself. Armstrong sort of knocks us around with this and then delivers Nell’s backstory, which raises the stakes to the sky. This is the first of these “suspense” novels from the Library of America series that I thought actually had some suspense, wondering how far it was going to go. Among other things, it’s an expertly done hotel story, using its setting well. Nearly all of it takes place there. I also like the high contrast of the successful and sophisticated couple with Nell. Nell is not only psychotic but also specifically lower-class. There’s a 1952 movie made of this novel with Marilyn Monroe as the miscreant, Don’t Bother to Knock, but it’s nowhere near as good. Track this one down if you have to. It’s worth it.

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

"The Summer People" (1950)

This Shirley Jackson story is devastating in a very sneaky way, which is typical of her clinical style, half New Yorker breeze and half ancient eerie portents warning you not to do things, like go into that house. Or, in this case specifically, not to stay at your summer place after Labor Day. The Allisons—Mr. is 60, Mrs. 58—have always talked about staying but have always returned to New York on time, white shoes put away. Then they usually spend much of September and October regretting it. We never do find out things like the source of their income. They are obviously wealthy on one level, but not so much that they feel they are. They put up with things at their summer place like no electricity or plumbing in order to enjoy the soft, rustic summer views of a lake. The inconveniences make the Allisons seem more hardy and adventurous. This year, they finally decide at the last minute to stay. Jackson then wields an artful sledgehammer to knock the foreshadowing into place. Not a single local they mention it to likes the decision one bit. They could simply be resistant to change, as the Allisons take it. But the news travels like fire among them and their resistance feels sinister. And indeed, by the time of the story's insanely undetailed end, sinister is practically all that's left. Certainly it has exact parallels with Jackson's more famous story, "The Lottery," the two stories written within months of one another. The style is pure midcentury New Yorker, with a chirpy third-person voice relating compressed description and dialogue. It bears a vertiginous sense of pitching forward momentum that is unnerving, hard to put a finger on. We don't know where we're going, ever, but we feel the motion almost right away. The reveals, such as they are, come swiftly and they are powerful, almost physically affecting. In the space of a day or two the Allisons go from looking forward to an extra few weeks at the lake, to encountering trouble getting their usual services, to—apparently—sitting quietly as the sun sets waiting for their deaths. Their kerosene has been cut off. Their car has been tampered with and won't start. Their phone is dead. A letter from their son doesn't sound right—a very effective detail that throws the scope of this into much broader perspective. I haven't really been able to let go of this story since I first read it several years ago.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

"Born of Man and Woman" (1950)

This very short story with its swaggering biblical title basically launched the career of Richard Matheson in auspicious style. It was his first publication at the age of 22, appearing in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (F&SF). It is a monster story of some kind, widely held as open to interpretation. As far as I can tell, the most conventional take is that the child in this story, who is keeping a diary, is deformed, born with congenital disabilities, and an innocent, and it is the parents who are hateful, abusive monsters. See Wikipedia, for example. Others (like me) read it as that thing in the basement is the monster. It oozes a green sticky substance and crawls across the walls and ceiling with multiple arms or legs. It sounds like a big freaking spider, though the clues are admittedly scant. I will grant there is something wrong with these parents. It would be bad enough if they had a monster kid and tried to hide it from the world, which I believe has happened at least in fiction, chaining and beating them and so forth. That's toxic but proceeds logically enough from shame. But these parents are giving cocktail parties and their idea of responsibility seems to be telling the thing in the basement to stay out of sight and don't make a sound. It's really messed up. Matheson is working a fine and ambiguous point of balance through misdirection and these vague but evocative (but vague) clues. This story packs quite a punch, done artfully enough to stand up to repeated reading. It's a kind of bridge piece from Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis looking forward to Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life." The diary structure and child's voice also look forward to Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.

I will say, yes, upon reflection, a certain smug cleverness is apparent in the specific points where Matheson draws back from revealing more. But in a way that indulgence is earned too, as the story hits like someone suddenly lighting up the organ in a dark church at night with chords you can feel rumble through your body. It has a 19th-century quality in its certainty that all it has to do is tell you such things exist, "born of man and woman." And it might also be influential in another way, opening up the routes to trauma-sourced horror that comes of of parental, school, bully, police, and other societal abuses, a theme wending through Algernon and bubbling under in horror circles until emerging again with more force in midcentury. As with many stories, "Born of Man and Woman" gets away with excesses and plot holes by a combination of brevity and chutzpah. It's just crazy enough to shock and by the time you're asking questions (hey, why don't the authorities seem to know anything about this cocktail party crack house?) it's all over. I remember Matheson well from my forays into horror when I was a kid in the '60s. His very name made me nervous to see in the books I picked up. I didn't necessarily like his stories. There was always something brutal and viscerally disturbing about his stuff. That is seen here already, in his first published story, in the large amount of time spent on the beatings this creature is taking from the parents. Matheson is using it as a way to set readers on edge and gain sympathy for the monster/narrator. We're still not entirely sure what the thing telling the story is, but it appears to have real consciousness and character and we instinctively recoil at the chains and beatings—even more so when we learn it is for the sake of a cocktail party. But the monster also kills a cat, out of a fear we can understand, but still there is the death of a cat in this story, as Matheson once again balances his elements toward ambiguity. We have enough sympathy for the monster, who after all is communicating with us, that we loathe their parents for them. Still, we have seen this thing kill, and at the end of the story it's starting to lose its temper.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Read story online.

In a Lonely Place (1950)

USA, 94 minutes
Director: Nicholas Ray
Writers: Andrew Solt, Edmund H. North, Dorothy B. Hughes
Photography: Burnett Guffey
Music: George Antheil
Editor: Viola Lawrence
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Carl Benton Reid, Frank Lovejoy, Jeff Donnell, Art Smith, Martha Stewart, James Arness, Billy Gray, Robert Warwick

As much as anything, In a Lonely Place stands as an interesting example—and there aren't that many of them—of a movie adaptation that is as good as the literary property it's based on. What's more, both book and movie stand as innovations in their unique ways, but they are different ways. Director Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Andrew Solt "changed the book" so self-consciously they even made the issue part of the story, which is set in Hollywood and involves a screenwriter, Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart). Compare the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, in which Steele is a mystery novelist. Part of the movie's story is that Steele has been given an adaptation to do and he's told specifically not to change the book.

But changing the book, obviously, is exactly what Ray and Solt did, and not just making Steele a screenwriter instead of a novelist, which is merely cute. In Hughes's short novel, published in 1947, Steele is not only the killer (that's no spoiler, btw, it's front and center as a story element) but in fact he is a serial killer—and Hughes's book looks forward to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, published in 1952, which takes the conceit even further by making the killer and serial killer also the first-person narrator. But Hughes dreamed hers up first, and as a woman she also brings a compelling view of male rage. In the movie Steele has serious anger management issues that are eating him alive and destroying his life, but he's no killer, let alone psychopath. There is something wrong with Steele in both book and movie, but Ray and Solt took him in a direction that is more realistic, if depressing.

The Young and the Damned (1950)

Los olvidados, Mexico, 80 minutes
Director: Luis Buñuel
Writers: Luis Alcoriza, Luis Buñuel
Photography: Gabriel Figueroa
Music: Rodolfo, Halffter, Gustavo Pittaluga
Editor: Carlos Savage
Cast: Roberto Cobo, Alfonso Mejia, Miguel Inclan, Estela Inda, Alma Delia Fuentes, Mario Ramirez

Spanish Surrealist director and cowriter Luis Buñuel was naturalized as a Mexican citizen in 1949, which may account in part for the foray into social realism he takes with The Young and the Damned. Various business considerations no doubt came into play as well. It was probably never easy making a living as a midcentury Spanish Surrealist filmmaker. The movie is better known in cineaste circles by its original name, Los olvidados, which translates literally as "the forgotten ones." I think it bears comparison, as Latino social realism, much more with movies such as City of God or maybe Amores Perros or even Roma than with other pictures in Buñuel's catalog before or after. That would include most famously, perhaps, 1929's Un Chien Andalou and 1972's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but don't forget Viridiana and The Exterminating Angel from the early '60s. I would class The Young and the Damned more as an outlier, in short, even if it is presently considered Buñuel's second-greatest picture in the critical roundup over at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

You'd be forgiven for wondering what happened to the Surrealism, but it is actually here, caught briefly in a dream sequence and more generally in the very harsh tenor of this picture (Surrealism, after all, has always been about brainstem perceptions as much as anything). The harshness also suits the social realism, of course. I have no problems with that in theory. I've been fascinated all my life, since at least S.E. Hinton's remarkable novel The Outsiders, with stories of juvenile delinquency, violence, and disaffection. But Buñuel's treatment is so primitive it's almost too much, even in the relatively compressed running time. It's a low-budget affair, obviously, but practically seems to wallow in its conditions, a kind of pornography of despair on some levels. Set in Mexico City, these down-and-outers have zero glamour, no doubt as intended. A surprising amount of time in this picture is devoted to people heaving rocks at one another, and inflicting terrible damage too, including death. They have other ways to fight, and the movie has other themes too, but the rock-throwing may best epitomize the plight Buñuel is depicting here. When you have nothing, and the ground you walk on is stony already, well, what do you think you're supposed to do?

All About Eve (1950)

USA, 138 minutes
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Writers: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Mary Orr
Photography: Milton R. Krasner
Music: Alfred Newman
Editor: Barbara McLean
Cast: Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Thelma Ritter, Gary Merrill, Hugh Marlowe, Gregory Matoff, Marilyn Monroe, Barbara Bates, Walter Hampden

All About Eve is a strange romp, an overlong movie that pretends to despise Hollywood but won 14 Oscar nominations for its pains, still the only movie ever to give four women four major nominations (Bette Davis and Anne Baxter for Best Actress and Celeste Holm and Thelma Ritter for Best Supporting Actress). Very few movies, especially this celebrated, so radically disregard the advantages of cinema, opting instead for dialogue (witty and urbane or not, according to your inclination) and a convoluted script shot in endless drab interior scenes. Going outdoors in this one, even a walk down a city street, tends to involve unconvincing rear-screen projections. Befitting its schizophrenic approach, All About Eve has not one but two voiceover narrators (George Sanders as a theater critic and Celeste Holm as possibly the only human being in the picture), weaving intricate backstories of the mother of all backstage dramas, and then not one but two psychotics.

It's kind of a train wreck, with a hodge-podge cast that ranges from the brilliant (Bette Davis, George Sanders) to the competent (Thelma Ritter, always) to the mundane (I like Hugh Marlowe but he's much more familiar to me as a hey-that-guy science fiction movie and TV player and Gary Merrill and Anne Baxter never even managed that much profile). It plods along in gossipy enjoyable scenes and then in its last act turns into a kind of horror picture of improbable nested blackmail schemes poised in midair, defying gravity. It's done quite neatly but they forgot to make them people. Still, there's no point denying the bitchy fun of this one (not to mention the chance to use the word "bitchy"). I might prefer its de facto companion piece from the same year, Sunset Blvd., or you might prefer Kirk Douglas and company chewing the scenery in The Bad and the Beautiful from a couple years later. It all amounts to the same thing. Those beautiful people in Hollywood making big successes where we can't, they're all miserable depraved slobs anyway. Pony up for the show, folks. Get your ticket.

"A Country Love Story" (1950)

Story by Jean Stafford not available online.

Jean Stafford's story bears the familiar theme in postwar US of the tragedy of divorce. I use the word "tragedy" a little mockingly because it's so much more common and expected now. But it wasn't then, and if the implied alarms about societal breakdowns now seem overdone, the sadness and bewilderment of divorce is often effectively captured here. But there's also a sense that Stafford is leaning conveniently into the perception of tragedy, at least a little. At least in the biting title. The countryside is where this marriage goes to die, hand in hand with husband Daniel's illness, which first puts him in a sanitarium for a year and then, on doctor's orders (for the good air), to the place in the country he buys with his wife May, an old farmhouse in New England. It sounds like Daniel has tuberculosis, which I admit puts me in mind of The Magic Mountain, though that's probably me. Anyway, setting aside the amazing privilege so taken for granted in their lives, it seems like a good relationship, or has been for five years. It's now being tested by the intrusion of this disease and/or aging into another phase. At first things go well, "like a second honeymoon, for they had moved to a part of the North where they had never been and explored it together." As the first summer ends, however, Daniel turns to a writing project, and soon May feels isolated and abandoned. The relationship breaks down—we know enough to guess a few credible theories for why, but the story is not about explaining it, only charting it. They bicker. They can't make decisions. They talk less and less. The point of view is May's, and she is in pain but apparently helpless to do anything to make it better. This is very familiar to us, nearly 70 years on (a lifetime), though as I say it may have been more of a novelty then. The original source, which is common to so many of the stories in this collection, is the New Yorker. I know Stafford's name but haven't read much of her. This story is nicely put together—the characters are interesting, the language a pleasure. But it seems more of a type (early midcentury divorce American style), at least at this distance. There could well be many more good stories by her.

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

"My Oedipus Complex" (1950)

Story by Frank O'Connor not available online.

On Wikipedia they are selling this story as "perhaps [Frank O'Connor's] most popular." Published originally in the New Yorker, it bears the unmistakable tang of that magazine's midcentury time—witty, urbane, and often actually funny. It's a reminiscence by a man named Larry of his father's homecoming after serving in World War I. Here's some of that New Yorker tang now: "The war was the most peaceful period of my life." I'm not sure what my snarking is about exactly—one of the best traditions of the New Yorker is some of the greatest writing and writers of its times. And I was entertained by this story. It was just I kept feeling it could have been written by Ring Lardner, J.D. Salinger, or James Thurber. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but a certain sameness to them was revealed here, with the dry distance and overweening wit. I don't otherwise know O'Connor at all, so perhaps I'm not being fair to him either. The story in practical terms is like an illustrative sketch of the Freudian term under consideration. The most peaceful time in Larry's life included rising early and finishing in bed with his mother, having drowsy conversations before breakfast. The reason his mother gives him for sleeping in separate beds and rooms at night is that it's healthier. Larry is thus understandably baffled by his father sleeping with his mother on his return, after a long absence during the war. Larry thinks it's selfish, and even worse, reckless, to sleep with her. He is endangering her. At one point in the story Larry announces to them both that he plans on marrying his mother when he grows up. He is even more confused when they react as if he's told a joke. This story doesn't just remind me generally of Ring Lardner, but even more specifically of a story by Lardner in this same collection edited by Robert Penn Warren. "Liberty Hall" is also carefully, perhaps even intricately, structured, even if the structure turns out to be largely in the form of a joke. The punchline part of "My Oedipus Complex" involves the arrival of a new brother for Larry, Sonny, and the effect it has on the marital bed Larry has long since quitted. An Oedipus complex cuts all different ways, as this story elegantly illustrates, with Larry and his father closing ranks as allies. It's almost touching really, and funny too.

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

Night and the City (1950)

UK / USA, 96 minutes
Director: Jules Dassin
Writers: Jo Eisinger, Gerald Kersh, Austin Dempster, William E. Watts
Photography: Mutz Greenbaum
Music: Franz Waxman (USA), Benjamin Frankel (UK)
Editors: Nick DeMaggio, Sidney Stone
Cast: Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Googie Withers, Francis L. Sullivan, Hugh Marlowe, Herbert Lom, Stanislaus Zbyszko

Midcentury was approximately the full ripening of American film noir, that mystifying quasi-genre label that was first applied (obviously) by the French, to Hollywood movies in which black dominates white in the primitive color schema and badness dominates goodness in the narrative. Many noirs are low-budget B-movies, typical for the time, relying on basics of darkened soundstages and often talky two-shot dialogue to keep costs down. The problem now is that this general term "film noir" can be made to fit movies from Citizen Kane to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Maybe the charm is the maddening vaporous attempt to pin it down. Like pornography you know it when you see it. Night and the City, one of the great noirs or certainly one of my favorites, has many of the familiar markers: jazzy soundtrack, crazy-angled shots, black shapes dominating the frames, a preoccupation with lowlifes and crime, and perhaps the key ingredient, desperation as the air the characters breathe. It's classic noir in that the story is packed full of betrayals, treacheries nested inside treacheries. Yes, it's a woman, but Helen Nosseross (Googie Withers) is hardly the usual femme fatale. She ends up impaled on her own betrayals—but she's not the only or even the chief betrayer in all the great gobs of bad faith on trade here.

In other ways, Night and the City is unusual. It's set in London, which despite its famous gloom is a little too tallyho for noir, compared with the Southern California scenes of transplanted Midwesterners we're more used to. Director Jules Dassin, a Connecticut native who ended up in New York City, was a pioneer and prime mover of noir, with The Naked City and others already to his credit. But in 1950 he was blacklisted for belonging to the Communist Party in the 1930s. Night and the City was his last Hollywood film, and even at that he was pulled off after the shooting was finished. He had nothing to do with editing or postproduction. Because of requirements of the US and worldwide markets at the time, the result, weirdly, was more or less two separate movies, with separate soundtracks and numerous differences in editing. Full disclosure: I only know the US version.

"The Sojourner" (1950)

Read story by Carson McCullers online.

This story by Carson McCullers is a nice meditation on time and loss. John Ferris, whose most recent residence is Paris, has returned to the US for the funeral of his father in Georgia. Now it is the last day before he returns and he is in New York, and by chance happens to see his ex-wife. He has not seen her for many years. At first he follows her, struck by the strange coincidence of seeing her again. But finally he catches up to her and greets her. She has since remarried and had children—she and John never did. John knew she had a family but still he is unsettled to meet them, as she invites him for an early supper. She and her husband are going to the theater that night and it's all the time they can spare on such short notice. This is a wonderfully done story, somehow involving and poignant from the start. John has a complex mix of feelings seeing his ex-wife's life. Her son Billy, a boy of about 8, is friendly until he learns John used to be married to his mother. Then he becomes edgy and confused and finally has to be sent to bed. John exaggerates the qualities of his life, claiming he will soon marry the woman he's been seeing, even as he realizes his life has been a long series of short relationships. (There's a terrific last scene in Paris after his return, when John is seen attempting to connect with the 6-year-old son of his present mistress. It doesn't really seem to take, though it makes the boy hopeful even as it makes John sad.) I like the way there is so little incident to the story but so much of life swirls around in it: death, loss, divorce, regret. We're just seeing the aftermath but also realizing how, in many ways, all of our everyday lives is aftermath to something. John is self-deluded, but he is more lost in the world than malevolent. He tells lies and exaggerates about himself, but not to hurt anyone. Only because it hurts him to view the realities of what he has become. They both still have feelings for one another, knowing they will never be acted on. When his ex-wife sits down to play the piano for him, while her husband is seeing to their boy, she plays a song that is meaningful to them. It's also significant that she knew John's father, and the news of his death pains her. This story is done so simply and with such clarity. This is how people behave, and this is how they behave with one another. There's not a single frill to the whole thing, and it's only 10 pages, yet so much is packed into it. It's remarkable.

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

"Impulse" (1950)

Read story by Conrad Aiken online.

Conrad Aiken's story is more by way of object lesson or cautionary tale—i.e., "Don't shoplift"—but the details are distanced and foggy. It feels more like an idle daydream than a recounting of actual events. It bears a certain Dostoevskian tone by way of Nietzsche, in the heightened language as the situation develops, and more generally in the way the story is set up. The main character, Michael Lowes, is saddled with responsibilities—a job, a wife, kids. But he tries to live as if they don't exist, because they are actively hampering the privileged life of leisure he imagines he deserves. At his weekly bridge game with three casual friends—not sure what a weekly bridge game signified in 1950, the year this story was published, but that's the plot point. It smacks a little of privilege now, and certainly Lowes's wife, Dora, considers it an indulgence, when they are plagued with debt and other problems. At this game, one week, there is a passing discussion of the impulses that strike us all to flout conventions or even break the law. Lowes is delighted to find that others are prey to this experience too, but somehow, internally, he turns the open philosophical bull session into personal license to give in to one. Accordingly, on his way home that night, he enters a drugstore and attempts to steal a shaving kit in a leather case. Information in the first paragraph of the story has already indicated it's something he doesn't need. He's just doing it, in the existential sense, because he can and because he thinks he's so superior he can get away with it—deserves to get away with it. Well, you can imagine how this goes, so spoiler alert, go read the story now. He doesn't get away with it at all. He's caught before he's even left the store. From that point on it becomes a cascading nightmare, as all worst possible outcomes begin to develop. He attempts to get out of it by claiming it's a light-hearted affair, a joke, based on a bet he made with friends. It's a lie and his friends deny it. No one has pity for him or gives him any credence. He goes to jail, goes to trial, and draws a 90-day sentence. He loses his job. He loses the last shred of respect his wife had for him. They go deeper into financial troubles and she divorces him. It almost couldn't be worse. Lowes responds with numbness and confusion, the brittle Nietzchean superman shattered, withdrawing further into himself. As an object lesson, the story is painfully obvious. But I like to think of it more as an internal fear-based fantasy of an empty narcissist—a daydream. Abstracted that way, it is at once comical and searing.

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

Sunset Blvd. (1950)

#13: Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950)

Billy Wilder's background in Weimar Berlin served him well even if he had to suffer the inconvenience of fleeing. He's cynical, bitter, and funny, pretty much in all the right proportions, and his talent as a screenwriter is at least as abundant as his ability to work with actors and frame visuals. In a list of 50 I was never going to name any more than two titles by any one director, even for my favorites, and Wilder is certainly on the short list of my favorites. I was happy to see Phil pick The Apartment earlier, because that was one it pained me to omit, and I was sorry Phil felt constrained to drop Double Indemnity just because I got to it first. Like other pictures that have been mentioned here twice, I think it's one that's always worth talking about some more.

But Sunset Blvd. is my favorite Wilder. It's frequently characterized as a noir, and indeed one of the great ones. Its various deep shadows and the incidental crime in the frame make that appropriate enough, I suppose, but its black absurdity makes it seem to me more of an American gothic—or even more specifically a Hollywood gothic. A lot of unexpected faces come floating out of it: Erich von Stroheim as the dour butler; Cecil B. DeMille in a cameo; even Buster Keaton's stone visage turns up, aged a couple of decades and sitting at a table playing cards. The most cheerful, healthiest version of Jack Webb I've ever seen is there in a small role too.

Sunset Blvd. (1950)

USA, 110 minutes
Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, D.M. Marshman Jr.
Photography: John F. Seitz
Music: Franz Waxman
Editors: Doane Harrison, Arthur P. Schmidt
Cast: Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Erich von Stroheim, Nancy Olson, Fred Clark, Jack Webb, Lloyd Gough, Cecil B. DeMille, H.B. Warner, Anna Q. Nilsson, Buster Keaton, Hedda Hopper

Billy Wilder is one of my favorite film directors, and Sunset Blvd. happens to be my favorite picture by him, so naturally I'm happy to see it placing so high on the list of all-time greats at the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? website. Wilder is cynical, bitter, and funny, pretty much in all the right proportions, and his talent as a screenwriter is at least as abundant as his ability to work with actors and frame visuals. Nowhere does he bring all that together in a more dazzling confection than here.

Sunset Blvd. is frequently characterized as a film noir—indeed, one of the great ones. It's good to see it lauded for any old reason, and all the various deep and angled shadows, along with the incidental crime in its story frame, make the designation appropriate enough, I suppose. But its black absurdity makes it seem to me more of an American gothic—or even more specifically a Hollywood gothic. Is there any other noir that makes such flawless use of not only a dead chimpanzee, but a pipe organ that catches the wind in a way that makes it sound as if it is on its deathbed of lung cancer? Or any other one even like it?

Rashomon (1950)

Japan, 88 minutes
Director/editor: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto
Photography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Fumio Hayasaka
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Machiko Kyō, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura, Minoru Chiaki, Kichijirō Ueda, Noriko Honma, Daisuke Katō

Akira Kurosawa's breakthrough art-house hit introduced him to Western audiences as something of an ambitious and self-serious (not to say pretentious) filmmaker. Rashomon has its analogues in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (both of which came a few years later) as compact black-and-white non-English-speaking pictures that lend themselves afterward to lively, overly intellectualized discussion and explication over coffee and cigarettes, and which incidentally tended to over-define their creators. They are a bit obvious about their intentions and also tended to obfuscate some of the better efforts that followed.

Nevertheless, I remain fond of Rashomon, even as I most often get the sense in latter-day reviews how unexcited many are about it now, as they argue that at this point the picture is more famous for being famous. David Thomson, in the 2002 edition of his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, says that its "debate on truth is trite." But I like it for the artful way it is shot, for its music, for its players—and yes, even for its debate on truth.

Welcome to the Monkey House (1950-1968)

Kurt Vonnegut's first and likely best collection of short pieces—most are stories, but a few other things are scattered in as well—is where I started with him, back in the misty climes of the past. It's not a bad place to start, though I think a few of his novels are probably better (notably The Sirens of Titan, Cat's Cradle, or Slaughterhouse-Five). What surprises me about this collection is how many of the stories amount to little more than badly dated women's fare, in tone as well as subject matter; three were published originally in "Cosmopolitan" and three others in "Ladies' Home Journal." They are the kind of sentimental tripe that only a cynic of the highest order could produce, with titles such as "Long Walk to Forever" and "Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son." Read them as closely as you can and you find only the barest hints, if that, of the dark comic sensibility behind them—which is interesting in itself. The science fiction exercises, perhaps a third of the selections, mask that sensibility nearly equally as well behind another set of commercial priorities, albeit one that allows more latitude for the wry or offbeat. In "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," for example (published originally in 1950 in "Collier's"), his antiwar priorities are already plainly in place as a scientist develops and taps into psychic powers, taking them underground to begin systematically destroying the most dangerous weapons systems of belligerent states. This makes him a menace, of course. "The Euphio Question" (also from "Collier's," this time from 1951) imagines a specific band of radio waves emanating from somewhere out there as dangerous narcotic, with comic results. Some of these stories, such as "Harrison Bergeron" (from "Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine" in 1961), which conceives a world in which human equality of every imaginable kind is bizarrely and elaborately mandated via reduction to lowest common denominator, have stuck with me all my life as frames or explanations of the vicissitudes of my own experience. Since that is arguably the point of literature and art in the first place, one would have to call this at least in part a resounding success. It is otherwise almost always interesting, often amusing, and, as usual with Vonnegut, compulsively readable once begun.

In case it's not at the library.

Night of the Jabberwock (1950)

Fredric Brown grew a checkered 20th-century career as a newspaper proofreader in Milwaukee turned into science fiction and mystery novelist after establishing himself as a story writer in the '40s and '50s pulps. He was prolific, author of dozens of stories and many novels, whose quality varies. He's always good, carefully written, but may feel rushed, working the hell out of one or two surprise tricks or snap twists, and supplementing that with broadside parody when nothing else would do—a Midwestern O. Henry by way of H.L. Mencken wishing he could be Sinclair Lewis and damn proud to speak it so proudly, yet always with a gentle, affable humor. The aliens turn out to be advertising men on the other planet, or the gladiatorial combat actually was about a corporate merger, things like that—'50s man in the gray flannel suit stuff basically straight up, with proto-Rod Serling twists when he could manage them and occasional splendid results (fans included Philip K. Dick, Ayn Rand, and Mickey Spillane, it says here). Nowhere else that I've seen did Brown get it together quite so economically and so brilliantly as in this little gem, whose surprises come regularly as the story becomes stranger. It doesn't really cheat with anything, which is just the start of what makes it so good. By its setting, it's already one of Brown's most personal novels—a quiet Midwestern town where our narrator, a newspaper publisher in his 50s who longs to break just one big story once for his weekly paper, has just put the paper to bed for the week and headed off into the night with a bottle. Right on cue, weird stuff starts happening. First there is someone pretending to be a character out of a Lewis Carroll novel waiting for him at his home with a strange request. Before our narrator can hear him out he gets a call. Something about a serious auto accident involving prominent citizens on the outskirts of town. On the way into the office, he discovers the town bank being robbed. Then gangsters, guns, eventually more Lewis Carroll, a haunted house, and murder. Things happen fast and the action is rat-a-tat precise in this short novel. Everything happens practically real-time across the space of a single night, and the whole extravagant Alice conceit is delivered on nicely, the reading experience of it like the funhouse scene in a cartoon, with trapdoors, sledgehammers, teacup cars, cigar-smoking bad guys, bizarre images in the mirror, all of it coming at you like a freight train right down the tracks on you. Really. A big ride. Suspenseful too. And the drinking is amazing. Just delightful from beginning to end.

In case it's not at the library (you better hope it is, looks like).

Poet of the Blues (1950-1954)

Poet, huh? "Existentialist" might be the better word. Look up Percy Mayfield in any Internet source and the first thing you're likely to learn is that the singer and songwriter wrote the 1961 Ray Charles hit, "Hit the Road Jack." That's fine and good, I suppose, if you like that. Me, I think it's one of Ray Charles's lesser accomplishments (for the best, see here) and, certainly in the context of the riches on display here, not really among Mayfield's greatest either. Underneath the smooth proto-cool R&B of these songs Mayfield's baritone warble solemnly intones all kinds of dark nights of the soul. At first that seems likely because, as the second thing you'll learn from those Internet sources, in 1952 he suffered a horrific auto accident that left him seriously injured and with his face "disfigured," which sounds like something straight out of some Douglas Sirk movie. But chalking the sensibility up to that, of course, is way too easy and doesn't nearly cover it, as the accident happened approximately halfway through the recordings you'll find here—and don't miss that his earliest success as a recording artist came in 1947 with a song called "Two Years of Torture." Maybe he always was oriented this way? But the accomplishment is that he manages to avoid any taint of self-pity, first by his careful, studied phrasing, the way he gently seeks and touches and caresses the notes (the kind of thing that Merle Haggard, in an entirely different style, also excels at), and then by the delicately wrought lyrics, which I suppose is where the "poet" notion comes from. I will leave you to ponder these words from the above-named "The River's Invitation"; Emily Dickinson might have given us "I heard a fly buzz when I died" but this is not so far behind: "I spoke to the river / And the river spoke back to me / It said man you look so lonely / You look full of misery / And if you can't find your baby / Come and make your home with me."