Anthology of American Folk Music (1952)

I grew up with my head in top 40 radio from the age of 10 and some sort of innate resistance to most folk music. I associated it with church youth groups or something. Glenn Yarbrough’s “Baby the Rain Must Fall” was more my style, thanks to that same top 40 radio (and Shindig). I never much liked singing “This Land Is Your Land” in grade school exercises (whereas now I’ll join any random singalong I encounter). I hated We Five with a deadly passion (whereas now I have come to love their hit “You Were on My Mind”). I had little use for the Kingston Trio or Burl Ives, and “Puff the Magic Dragon” was only a guilty pleasure by the time I reached junior high. I could go on. I was still having problems in the ‘60s and ‘70s with a lot of the Laurel Canyon stuff. These are my excuses for missing one of the most influential releases of the 20th century, by reputation a treasure house for anyone associated in any way with “folk” music, including Canned Heat, Bob Dylan, the Holy Modal Rounders, Steve Martin, and Pete Seeger, to briefly sketch parameters (and noting the possible exception of Paul Simon). I’m not sure I even knew the Anthology of American Folk Music existed until the 1997 CD reissue and Greil Marcus’s fierce beating of the drum for it.

In a way anthologist Harry Smith—a record collector among many other things—invented the mixtape with the Anthology. All 84 songs are commercial releases from 1926 to 1933, professional studio not field recordings. They come from Smith’s massive collection, and you get a sense of how important the sequencing is just by scanning the track listings. The Anthology has both broad themes—“Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs” (whatever exactly they mean)—and obvious fine tuning within and across them. Several artists appear more than once, sometimes by pairs of songs together but more often scattered across the vast field of this sprawling set. Smith seems to be following the rules and aesthetics of the old mixtapers, thinking about the organization and sequencing and even cover art and liner notes at least as much as the music itself. It’s largely a lost art now, a neglected consideration. Burning to CDs and building and sharing playlists from streaming services offer some close approximation, of course—but choosing to listen on shuffle (as I typically do with playlists these days, and no one is burning me CDs anymore) undermines the main points of sequencing.

At the same time, the Anthology is just so big I have had a hard time for years getting my arms around it. I enjoy it when it happens to be on, usually at someone else’s place, but I rarely play it for myself, instantly flummoxed by my lack of a context for the whole thing or how it works together. Hailing it as the “old, weird America” is not enough help for me. There’s lots more where this came from that’s available now on streaming services, yet something unusual and distinct remains about the Anthology. What is it? I decided to rely on the convenience of the CD package and treat it as six separate albums in the way I approached listening to it. There’s a high degree of consistency across the whole thing (I understand some feel the “Social Music” sets are not up to the rest but that’s not entirely my experience). I should note upfront that I still don’t have my arms around it—I may never—but here are some thoughts on the songs and individual CDs.

“De Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” (1952)

In this story by J.D. Salinger we see him carry off—insofar as he does carry it off—a farcical, mostly empty tale, riffing at a hundred miles an hour and nothing to work with. I see on Wikipedia that it was originally published in World Review (London), after the New Yorker rejected it because “the piece was judged too short to adequately address the complex religious concepts.” Complex religious concepts was news to me. It doesn’t strike me as a very serious story. It’s written when the first-person narrator, John Smith, is an adult, looking back on episodes in his youth, particularly involving his stepfather. The family of three departs for Paris after the stock market crash of 1929. They stay in Paris 10 years, during which the mother/wife dies. Back in New York City in 1939 they are trying to make ends meet. Smith is a painter, though not convincing when he talks about it. He did take some art classes in Paris, maybe even got a degree. He sees an ad for a position in Montreal at a correspondence art school. He drops Pablo Picasso’s name all over the place and gets the job. But it’s an absurd job, just part of a fraud operation. One of the students he critiques is a nun and he’s very impressed with her work. He sends her a note of encouragement but, shortly after, the convent withdraws her from the class. This is a kind of blow to him, a crisis. Apparently this is one place where religion is read as an element of the story. But the context is all so absurd and comical I didn’t really recognize it as any kind of religious crisis of faith or whatever. Then, per Wikipedia, Smith has an official Epiphany one night as he is “looking into a display window of an orthopedic appliances store.” This also barely registered on me, I must admit. Because the narrator dedicates the story to his stepfather in the first paragraph, I assumed things were all good between them and that aspect was one of my favorite parts of the story. Wikipedia seems to think otherwise and now I’m not so sure. The classic Salinger voice is wisecracking and perhaps deceptively lighthearted. I know he would get increasingly into profundities about life and religion, not always well-suited but it’s arguable he got better at it, notably as he developed his Glass family. I think this is more of an awkward early attempt and does not work well.

J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
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“The Old Man and the Sea” (1952)

“The Old Man and the Sea” was a kind of media event unto itself, Ernest Hemingway’s “last major fictional work published during his lifetime” (Wikipedia), published in its entirety first in the glamorous Life magazine with a photo of the author all over the ding-dang cover. It won a Pulitzer and “was the only work explicitly mentioned when Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.” The obvious comparisons and perhaps the ambitions too are stuff like Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” Jack London’s Call of the Wild. If it ranks behind all of them that still puts it within range of Mount Rushmore status, for those inclined. The novella also rates comparison with Hemingway’s own “Big Two-Hearted River” in the way that it basically just observes. It feels more labored and exhausted but it’s still a reasonably good last gasp. The arc of the story—physically, literally—is out to the deep waters of the Gulf Stream from Cuba and back again. It is as simple (and Hemingwayesque) as it could be, all detail focused on what the old man fisherman must do next with his resources and skills as situations develop. As admirably as it may be done there’s little we haven’t seen from Hemingway before. There was a lot of sideline chatter at the time about writer’s block and weak recent novels. A lot was on the line commercially. Its sheer competence was greeted with relief by those under his influence. Later, more carping reviews began to complain of bonehead simplicity and other sins. I read this when I loved Hemingway very much, at 19 or 20, and swore by its straightforward compaction. More recently I didn’t find it as breezy and readable. It’s certainly straightforward and simple, but I was more bored this time by all the MacGyver making-do antics. Yes, yes, life and death, but the references to baseball seemed notably strained. All my problems with Hemingway’s valorization of the stoic are here. It’s what he does. I don’t think “The Old Man and the Sea” lives up to all the attention—a lot of what made it a big deal are more like sideline issues. So it’s hard to know what to make of it, but it’s probably as good a place as any to end a consideration of Hemingway’s shorter fiction. I probably missed a few from the ‘30s, ‘40s, maybe even ‘50s.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
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“Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952)

This may or may not be Philip K. Dick’s first published genre story—some say yes, others say it’s “Roog” (which also features an animal for those keeping score at home). “Beyond Lies the Wub” is very simple and in many ways playful, although the twist may fairly be called chilling. Certainly it works. The story opens on a scene like the biblical Noah’s ark story, with animals on Mars being led aboard a spaceship. A lot of the crew, such as the first mate, appear to be unhappy about something. They seem to disapprove of the work, or possibly have problems with the captain. One of the crew comes aboard with a “wub,” which is described as a 400-pound pig. The captain says he’d like to eat it, at which point the wub speaks up with perfect English—indeed, polished and intelligent. He says he would prefer not to be eaten. No one else really wants to eat it either, especially once they realize it is sentient, with a detectable personality. In typical Phildickian fashion, these things just happen and no one is particularly fazed. Not even Peterson, who has jurisdiction of the wub and has been carrying on a running conversation with it about cultural matters (specifically, at the moment in the story, Odysseus). We are instinctively on the side of the wub—it has been humanized, so to speak—but alas. The captain gives the orders and the wub is butchered and roasted. At the dinner table the story’s twist occurs and it surprised me, though you might guess it if you think about it enough. “Beyond Lies the Wub” is an early story for Dick but already has many of his hallmarks: the effortless reach for universal Western cultural markers like Odysseus, the whimsy and “soft,” almost magical science. Given: there are animals on Mars, including pigs, and they are sentient and intelligent (and have unique powers too). Take it or leave it. I notice on ISFDB that this story has an unusually high number of rankings, with a fairly high aggregated score of 8.22. Ten “Beyond Lies the Wub” fans can’t be wrong. The story is worth tracking down for all followers of the Phildick.

The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 1
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Poor Cedric’s Almanac (1952)

I had a blast revisiting this collection of column fragments by Cedric Adams, a Minneapolis-based journalist who also had a career on radio. Arthur Godfrey wrote an introduction and Bob Hope kicked in a postscript, so you can tell Adams had some profile in 1952, if you’ve never heard of him. It was a book my parents had that I took down off the shelf and read and loved when I was 9 or 10 or 11. It has a lot of the breezy gossip columnist style, with boldface type and such, but the topics are less about celebrities and more like a parade of what we now call factoids. Reading is more like browsing a strange collection of trivia. It’s culled from Adams’s column writing in the 1930s and 1940s and breaks down into topics like the weather, health, children, etc. The section labeled “S - E - X” is not once ever about s-e-x but only marriage and dating. I’m not exactly nostalgic for stuff this coy and chaste but I will say it’s refreshing. A lot of the nostalgia that is there comes from finding some of the items of my conventional wisdom which have stuck. For example, Adams writes that scientists have determined—scientists have determined lots of things here but nothing is sourced (it’s a chatty newspaper lifestyle column, Jake)—that humans respond more quickly to green lights than to reds and thus ideally they should be reversed in traffic lights. But of course it’s too late now or even in the 1940s. Absolutely trivial things like that have stayed with me all this time. If you are inclined to read it you should be prepared for a full blast of midcentury values, for better and worse. Race is utterly invisible, and gender is pretty much hopeless. Most of the advice for women is about housework. There is a syrupy father-and-son heart-to-heart thing that recurs frequently. It has a fair amount of Minneapolis and Minnesota detail and lore that appealed to me then and still. I think a lot of my appreciation for trivia may have started here. The publication date is 1952 but the material is older than that, extending back into the 1930s. Among other things it is familiar with WPA projects, so it’s even a little bit older than it appears. I instinctively reject most of Adams’s obviously well-intended advice and also have to admit to regular wincing. But I can’t deny Poor Cedric’s Almanac is very charming and a lot of fun.

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

City (1952)

I had high hopes for this sci-fi novel by Clifford D. Simak, for nostalgic reasons as well as due to some surprise recommendations in recent years. It turns out to be a “fix-up novel,” as Wikipedia labels it, meaning it’s a collection of previously published stories revised and worked up with connections and transitions and such. Ray Bradbury did a few of them, like The Martian Chronicles. I will say Simak’s connective tissue is clever, with notes for each story by some obscure far-future academic putting them in a context of scientific debate and history. The title is somewhat misleading as the very first story argues that the city as a social structure has become obsolete through technology, and from then on it is. People live everywhere on multiple-acre estates. Humanity has fallen by the second story, replaced by intelligent, speaking canines—dogs. I love animals but I had a hard time feeling this plot point. The scope of time across this novel (“novel”) is vast, some 12,000 years, twice our entire recorded history. That gives Simak a lot of opportunity to stretch out, and indeed there are often centuries between these stories. Interesting mutant humans and immortal robots also appear. I felt Simak’s humanity—the pathos of City is richer and deeper than most SF work I know from the ‘50s. Or maybe I just love dogs, or haven’t read enough SF from the '50s. Even I thought the dogs felt like an eccentric device in the end. Still, I’m touched one of them was modeled after one of Simak’s own. My nostalgia is from being a neighbor of Simak’s in the ‘60s when I was growing up in the western suburbs of Minneapolis. He was on one of my paper routes. I know now he worked for the newspaper I was delivering, but I actually recognized his name then as an SF author. I’d seen his byline in anthologies though they none of his stories ever stood out or stuck with me. I thought of introducing myself but had no idea what to say, so I never did. I don’t remember his dogs. Anyway, when I saw the book talked up on social media in recent years—this era of distraction makes it harder to remember specifically where some information comes from—I bought a copy and finally got to it. I’m sorry I didn’t like it more. At the same time, I’m glad something like this, so earnestly compassionate, with such random strange ideas, is as popular in SF circles as it appears to be.

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

The Quiet Man (1952)

USA, 129 minutes
Director: John Ford
Writers: Frank S. Nugent, Maurice Walsh, John Ford
Photography: Winton C. Hoch
Music: Victor Young
Editor: Jack Murray
Cast: John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Barry Fitzgerald, Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, Mildred Natwick, Arthur Shields, Eileen Crowe, Sean McClory, Jack MacGowran

The Quiet Man finds director and cowriter John Ford in an unusual marrying mood. His more typical masculinist agenda is pushed well to the side—in the end, perhaps even reading as a kind of self-deprecating comic relief—which may be why it's the one of all his movies I always respond to whole-heartedly. It doesn't hurt that Ford found someone so suitable to his worldview in Maureen O'Hara, playing the "spinster" Mary Kate Danaher (O'Hara was 32 when this movie was made, costar John Wayne 45). O'Hara's persona as a proud hot woman of passionate moral virtue fits Ford's purposes well. It was her second turn with Ford (and with costar Wayne), after Rio Grande two years earlier, and one more was still ahead (The Wings of Eagles). I've seen the first two, not the third, and I think being in color rather than black and white has something to do with why The Quiet Man may be a little better than Rio Grande.

Though it's a departure, The Quiet Man is a Ford production in many familiar ways, notably the casting, which features a bunch of familiar loyal troupers we've seen before: Wayne, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen. Mildred Natwick and Arthur Shields had been in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon a few years earlier. But The Quiet Man is also different because of its setting, in 1920s rural Ireland, which is as green in the glowing color as Monument Valley is orange and blue in Ford's color Westerns. With the addition of certified Lucky Charms leprechaun Barry Fitzgerald as the village's whiskey-quaffing marriage broker, the blarney that is generally lurking in the background of most Ford movies is shoved up front in a kind of charm offensive. And it works. This movie is almost perfectly charming as it goes through its localized courting paces.

Invisible Man (1952)

This great American novel, the only one Ralph Ellison published while he was alive, is conceived in such scope and detail it's clear he must have argued a lot with himself about the details. Obviously, for example, he decided not to use the definite article ("The") for the title, presumably to universalize the central tenet (or perhaps thinking he could avoid confusion with H.G. Wells's 19th-century horror tale). And he did not insert a comma between the two words, which would have emphasized his motivating idea with a pivot to hipster dialect. As much as anything, the struggle Ellison lays out in the totality of his amazing episodic saga, full of fancies and bold conceits and simply one of the best American novels that exists, is the matter of looking to win the simple respect of being seen. The presidency of Barack Obama and what came after are urgent reminders that the racial problems we refuse to face today we have always refused to face. And until the majority can look at the minority (however you slice and dice, by race, gender, ethnicity, religiosity, sexual orientation) and see them—a prospect that could still be unlikely today, more than 60 years after the publication of this book, which was nearly a hundred years after the Civil War—then the problems we have always had will continue. Some aspects of Invisible Man may seem out of date now, such as the lengthy episodes with the Communist Party, but if they are dated they are nonetheless good history, and certainly illustrative of dynamics still at play. Ellison's panorama is sweeping. It starts in the South, where Negroes are omnipresent but institutionally shackled, and travels to the North, where official policy is to keep blacks out of sight. In either case, the vertiginous sense of invisibility is produced for its objects, who are people. If it feels dated in some places, it still makes its way to moments that feel ripped from today's headlines, such as many of the encounters with police. And it's never less than dazzling, with its clarion language, headlong narrative momentum, and many cunning tricks. It is always operating poetically at multiple levels, with surging power. It's never mired by literary baggage but the baggage is there to be unpacked, on practically every page. The first-person narrator and our epic hero is unnamed, of course. One of his early experiences in the North is a job in a factory that specializes in a paint so bright it seems to glow, called "Optic White." By the general reaction to him of his all white coworkers it's evident he's a token hire. His first task is the final step in the process of making "Optic White" paint: 10 drops, no more and no fewer, of a mysterious liquid black substance. Oh there's black and white all over Invisible Man—it's what it's self-consciously made of. At the same time, in the factory, Ellison is also drawing a portrait of a nearly totalitarian war industry—which indeed prevailed openly in World War II and after, was characterized in 1961 by President Eisenhower as the "military-industrial complex," and is more virulent now than ever. So it's not just race that Ellison is on about, but also American power and corruption, the Communist movement, crony capitalism, and much more. Essential.

In case it's not at the library.

Ikiru (1952)

Japan, 143 minutes
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni
Photography: Asakazu Nakai
Music: Fumio Hayasaka
Editor: Koichi Iwashita
Cast: Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Kyoko Seki, Miki Odagiri, Yunosuke Ito, Nobuo Nakamura

"Ikiru" is a Japanese verb that means "to live, to be alive, to exist," but somehow that translation has only occasionally been tried for the title of one of director and cowriter Akira Kurosawa's greatest movies. Perhaps Kurosawa's status as the most Westernized of Japan's famous midcentury film directors, with Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu, had to be compensated with the most Japanese-sounding titles in the West—Rashomon, Yojimbo, and Kagemusha are among his most famous.

Ikiru is also something of a departure in that, as with most of Ozu's work, Kurosawa has set the action of this picture in modern-day rather than historical samurai times. Long-time Kurosawa trouper Takashi Shimura takes the dominating lead role of Kanji Watanabe, a middle-aged widower and Japanese government bureaucrat for most of his adult life, who has learned—well, figured out really, as the Japanese medical system as shown was remarkably evasive about it—that he has inoperable stomach cancer and at most a year to live. It might be Shimura's greatest role, bearing the largest burdens of a man in extremis, facing down his own death. The picture follows the arc of his coming to terms with his condition, with the last hour reserved for an unusual show of consequences.

Cropper's Cabin (1952)

Cropper's Cabin came out the same year as The Killer Inside Me, and feels like a rush job—but then, so does Killer, and much of Thompson's catalog. It slots pretty easily into a certain hillbilly mode of pulp fiction, set in the familiar environs of Oklahoma, but with many trappings of the Old South, white trash division. Moonshine and intimations of incest, for example, tend to be givens, the sharecroppers are growing cotton, and they are sharecroppers. There's a flavor of Oklahoma in a general lust for oil, but that's mostly in the background as a motivational device. As usual, Thompson plays with genre clichés and expectations at will. So the sharecropper's boy Tommy Carver (who narrates) is involved with the landlord's hot daughter. His family background is complicated and creepy—widowed stepfather with a bought-and-purchased 14-year-old helpmeet (who is of age in the present time of the tale, but of course having sex with both stepfather and stepson). This is definitely second-tier Thompson, at best, but nonetheless with many of the Dostoevskian touches we know him by: the fulminations at fate, the aw-shucks language masking deeper issues, the wanton ways of worthless reprobates, and a story that dissolves into nothing before ... The End. He's done it better elsewhere but he usually does it pretty well, and on that level Cropper's Cabin is worthy enough. There's also a murder mystery in the middle of it, though typically enough that becomes incidental. Some interesting lore about Oklahoma and Native Americans rounds it out, things we don't really need to know but evidently Thompson thought we might find them interesting, mostly concerned with the Trail of Tears and then the later Oklahoma Land Rush. So it's not exactly a mystery, and it's not exactly the hillbilly pulp sub-genre, but something of both, and vintage Jim Thompson more than anything. You don't want to start here, but you might want to end up here.

In case it's not at the library.

The Killer Inside Me (1952)

Jim Thompson's breakthrough novel—not literally his first, but it might as well have been—is typically hailed as his masterpiece. Even Stanley Kubrick got in on the act, famously calling it "probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered." I'm not sure I agree. I can think of at least two other novels by Thompson that are better, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280, and many more with details much more vivid and disquieting than anything here. But this is where Thompson figured himself out as a writer, already in his mid-40s. It has the thrill of discovery and certain clarity. The brutality and the raw (if folksy) misogyny, offered so casually and lightheartedly, the insight that psychopaths are people a lot like you and me (and very different too), Thompson's easy manner of feeling his way into the story with such a calculated jaunty air, and above all the bold innovation of telling it first-person from the point of view of the diseased mind—that's all born practically fully formed here. It's lurid and violent but always just a little bit comical, except it's never funny. It has the effect of someone amped on speed and too many days without sleep trying to tell a joke. It's impossible to get away and you dread the punch line because you know you will be expected to laugh. The Killer Inside Me is very much experimental work and half the fun is watching the crazy ideas come from nowhere, discarded when done with. Thompson appears to have had some notion, for example, that Lou Ford, our (anti)hero, a deputy sheriff in a rural Texas county, would among other things bore people to distraction with unending streams of platitudes. That's pretty funny until you see it in action. Then it's just weird. By the second third of this very short book it's about dispensed with. I understand most of Thompson's novels, and all the good ones, tended to be written in concentrated bursts, after a few weeks in a cheap hotel room. They read that way and I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Thompson, at his best, is almost always in perfect command of his work. I say start with A Hell of a Woman if you're only going to read one or two. But this one should not be much behind that if you're pushing on. It's the one everybody talks about and then you understand.

In case it's not at the library.

Art Pepper, "Brown Gold" (1952)

(listen)

Another gift, and one I can be more gracious talking about than the last one. The album was Black California, a double-LP anthology of somewhat disparate '40s and '50s session work featuring Sonny Criss, early Eric Dolphy, Slim Gaillard—including his redoubtable "Dunkin' Bagel" ("splash! in the coffee")—Art Pepper, Hampton Hawes, Helen Humes, and others. My favorite side was the one that had four by alto-sax player Pepper with piano-player Hawes as a sideman, followed by four more from a Hawes trio. All smooth as silk, with lovely dynamics and potent forward momentum. An easy habit to play every day. I was so smitten with "Brown Gold," which opened the side, I once declared that when I owned a home I would wire up the doorbell to play it so I would always be in a good mood when someone dropped in, even unexpectedly. And I meant it. That never happened, of course—things like that rarely do—and in fact time has worn away my keenest appreciation of it a little. Not that it doesn't still sound pretty good. It does. It's spry and nimble as ever. And it introduced me to Pepper and incidentally to Hawes. I still like Pepper a lot and you can hear most of the reasons why here: a neat, clean reading of a jaunty melody, a plain and effective arrangement, and nicely crafted solos on the breaks—lyrical, jumpy, rolling, and confident, and all done in two and a half minutes nothing overstays its welcome. In fact, if anything, this applies an old show-biz adage well, "Always leave them wanting more." It worked. I find myself still gathering up Pepper and Hawes material as I find it, and when I'm in the mood nothing else will do.

Monkey Business (1952)

USA, 97 minutes
Director: Howard Hawks
Writers: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, I.A.L. Diamond, Harry Segall, Howard Hawks
Photography: Milton R. Krasner
Music: Leigh Harline
Editor: William B. Murphy
Cast: Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, Charles Coburn, Marilyn Monroe, Hugh Marlowe, George Winslow

This exercise in foolishness, directed by Howard Hawks, is constructed well enough to make itself likeable, even charming. The star-studded cast doesn't hurt anything either—Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Charles Coburn all get their chances to jump around and use juvenile voices, doing their variously silly impressions of youthful teens, while Marilyn Monroe, on the very cusp of becoming an icon, gets by fine with her fallback little dumb-blonde lost shtick, cooing and swishing around and showing off body parts (I'm always a little taken aback by her voluptuousness, forever expecting that her reputation for beauty will mean the usual quasi-anorexia of today).

It's the kind of movie I used to love finding on after-school matinees on TV, a confection built out of broad concept, even broader humor, and star turns artfully deployed, which I'm pretty sure adds up simply to testament of Hawks's ability to make a picture. Cary Grant plays Dr. Barnaby Fulton, a genius—the term is bandied about so casually it's drained of the typical pretensions and becomes a kind of equivalent of "dentist"—and an affable chemist who works for a big corporation on "formulas," which in turn produce products like nylons that won't run and popcorn bags that won't crackle. In this case he is working on a fountain-of-youth drug. Well, that's kind of like a popcorn bag that won't crackle.

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

USA, 103 minutes
Directors: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly
Writers: Adolph Green, Betty Comden
Photography: Harold Rosson
Music: Nacio Herb Brown, Arthur Freed
Choreography: Gene Kelly
Editor: Adrienne Fazan
Cast: Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, Douglas Fowley, Millard Mitchell, Cyd Charisse, Rita Moreno

It's interesting how some of the best Hollywood movies of the early '50s—thinking specifically of this and 1950's Sunset Blvd. but several others fit the bill as well—seized the moment to look back acidly on the transition of the industry from silents to talkies. That's the story here, set in the late '20s, as Donald Lockwood (played by Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (played nicely as Judy Holliday send-up by Jean Hagen), a beloved Hollywood couple of the grand era, are forced to confront the coming realities of sound.

But wait a minute, does the plot here even matter at all? Singin' in the Rain backfills its narrative with any number of clever ways to show how film technology continually failed everyone in those times—most notably, of course, jarringly wrong voices emanating from beloved faces, but taking on as well the necessity for static microphones on set, troubles such as the incidental sounds inevitably captured, precarious synchronization, and words that worked on title cards failing miserably as dialogue. But the answer to that question remains decidedly no. The plot doesn't matter here in the least.

The Birth of Soul (1952-1959)

Along with Sam Cooke and (I insist) James Brown, Ray Charles stands as one of the great inventors of soul music, that unearthly combination of sacred gospel and secular (or "profane," though the critical term is overshadowed here by racist anxiety, so I prefer the more neutral "secular") rhythm 'n' blues. Ray Charles was first, barely, and if he had neither the gospel training or vocal chops of Cooke or the work ethic and sheer creative brilliance of Brown, he managed a level of exuberant joy not often touched by either. He also had the most purely natural sense for how to put together and work the material, and by the sound of things he had the most fun, driving a rollicking, often surprisingly rich, dense keyboard, his head audibly bobbing in motion into and away from a stationary microphone. Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like what Ray Charles put across in the '50s. All the Atlantic work of the time is documented here. Enjoy.