Johnny “Guitar” Watson, “Space Guitar” (1954)

[listen up!]

The scene in Back to the Future where Michael J. Fox plays a high school prom in 1955 and stuns the crowd into baffled silence with a Van Halen type of fugue-state guitar solo has its origins in a way with this singular rave-up instrumental by Johnny “Guitar” Watson, later a disco man. “Space Guitar” seemed to come from nowhere in 1954 and it was promptly sent back there, never getting close to any charts. "This could break a few eardrums if it's played too loud,” said the now-famous befuddled Billboard review. “It's unusual, has a sound, and, in a way, it moves.” That’s one way to put it. Watson’s piercing, shredding guitar is on the attack from the jump here, spinning off into the outer space realms promised in the title, stalking the record with heavy reverb cutting in and out, lyrical talking-guitar passages, and a random quote from the well-known theme of the show Dragnet, because why not? Watson’s playing positively throbs and is mostly barely connected to the more conventional R&B band trying to keep up. The alto sax also gets the random reverb-on / reverb-off treatment from producer Ralph Bass but it’s not particularly in the same galaxy as Watson. “Space Guitar” may have sunk out of the market like the proverbial lead balloon, but it did not take long for such luminaries (per Wikipedia) as Bo Diddley, Ike Turner, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Frank Zappa to take notice, advancing the cause for a certain thundering liberation of the electric guitar. It should be noted that, as original as it all is, Watson hardly sprang out of nothing—Texas-born, he sought to emulate the showmanship of T-Bone Walker, perhaps the first to pick an electric guitar with his teeth. “Space Guitar” is now recognized for its wide influence, but it’s still somehow surprising to hear how positively crazy it sounds.

Under the Net (1954)

I got a kick our of Iris Murdoch’s first novel, a picaresque farce about a struggling (“hack”) writer in London scraping along on his wits. There are many sideline characters and their dalliances, which resolve neatly if not always satisfyingly. The connective tissue involves a lot of unlikely coincidences and eavesdropping. All in a day’s work for a farce, though I rolled my eyes at some of the prolongations. At the center of it are Hugo Belfounder, the narrator’s strange friendship with him, and what comes of it. They meet as subjects in a study of the common cold, systematically infected with viruses and their reactions recorded. Under the Net is full of great details like that. Hugo and Jake Donaghue, the narrator, begin a conversation that lasts for weeks and months, philosophical stuff about language and reality. Jake keeps notes and finds himself idly working them up into a book format, which he circulates and ultimately finds a publisher for. All this seemed increasingly unlikely to me, but Murdoch also had a foot in the world of academic philosophy, so maybe. And at a certain point “unlikely” came to be not very important here. I just gave in to the sequence of events, which can be equally funny and imaginative. Her writing style as Jake is roguish and raw. Both Jake and Hugo are larger than life and hugely entertaining. It is a farce but a very clever one. Murdoch continued to publish books of philosophy as well as some two dozen novels, plus a handful of plays and two collections of poetry. Prolific! I thought it was interesting that the Modern Library list of the 100 Best 20th-Century Novels included this debut—rather low, at #95—over any other title by her, some of which are at least vaguely familiar to me (e.g., The Sea, The Sea, a 1978 Booker Prize winner). Lots of good stuff here. Hugo is an interesting “genius” character, inventor of “set piece fireworks,” an amateur philosopher, and eventually a film magnate. A dog named Mars gets mixed up in the action, a one-time star of the screen like Rin Tin Tin. It’s always good when there’s room for a dog. “Under the net” is a term of impromptu philosophy whose explanation you’ll have to read for yourself to understand. True confession: I’m still not quite getting it.

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

I Am Legend (1954)

This compact novel by Richard Matheson—really, at about 100 pages, it’s more like a long story, or novella—may have been oversold to me a little. While generally quite well done in the boiled-down Matheson style, the story never quite reached me. What I found most interesting about it, and a little surprising, is that it’s mainly a vampire tale. Yes, it has the zombie element too—these monsters crowd together and lurch around like zombies and there are many of them. But they are explicitly vampires. I give the first movie version, The Last Man on Earth (1964) with Vincent Price, more credit for creating recognizable George Romero-style zombies. But then Romero also cited I Am Legend as an influence, so there you go. Something in the air, something in the water. As a postapocalyptic story it has much the doomy feel of many Twilight Zone episodes to come (some of which Matheson wrote). Our guy, as the first movie’s retitle puts it, is the last man on earth as far as he knows. He spends his days scavenging for goods and reinforcing the barricades on his house. At night the creatures come out and howl for him, pounding at his door. He reads Dracula by Bram Stoker and considers all the vampire lore the creatures confirm. They shun sunlight, recoil from garlic, mirrors, and crosses. They want blood. The basic thrust of the story is our guy’s scientific investigation into them. There are flashbacks to his sad life, a wife and daughter taken by this plague. He buried his wife and then she came back. I wanted more on her “second chapter” but all we learn is he’s sure she’s gone for good. Maybe he got her with a wooden stake—more vampire lore that is used in an interesting way here. There is another sad episode with a non-vampire dog. The story spans a few years, specifically January 1976 to January 1979, focusing on four periods in his life. There’s a climax when a woman shows up, which feels mechanical as much as anything. Three major film versions have been made: the 1964, The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007). I’ve only seen the first and then I was more distracted by the obvious influence on Romero. I’m not sure Matheson’s novel actually lends itself well to film treatments, but they keep trying and now I’m curious about the other two. There may be too much concept here requiring exposition. Matheson, ever the trafficker in brutality, also provides an unpleasant sexual charge, with female vampires trying to entice our guy with lewd gestures. This leaves him thinking about sex more than he or any of us would like. I Am Legend is on many short lists of best horror novels of all time. I can’t go all that way. Maybe this is one you have to decide for yourself. It’s good and dirty, the way Matheson does, and I’m happy enough I took a look.

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

The Blunderer (1954)

Patricia Highsmith’s third novel made it into the Library of America Women Crime Writers series, but a lot of reviewers find it flawed. I do too. In some ways Highsmith’s dim view of humanity makes it work anyway. No character in this novel is likable, but there’s something about that perversely that I like. The main problem is an insanely unlikely story involving the similar deaths of two characters who are otherwise unlinked. They take place several weeks apart. Our title character is Walter Stackhouse. Highsmith never used the term “henpecked” to describe his marriage, but I will. His wife Clara bosses him around a lot and is never happy with anything he does. Walter is kind of a fool, but he doesn’t really deserve the treatment. He loves her in spite of it but, as the story begins, he’s finally getting to the end of his rope. Any discussion of separation, however, leads to his wife making suicide attempts. So it’s a pretty harrowing predicament. The form that the two murders take is the wife is traveling alone by bus, the husband follows until the bus makes a rest stop, and then he leads his wife away and kills her. We see the first one, committed by a Melchior Kimmel, at the start of the novel. The death of Walter’s wife is more ambiguous. It’s probably a suicide, a fall from a cliff. That’s certainly all Highsmith gives us, but Walter followed the bus and a witness saw him at the rest stop. I’m pretty sure Highsmith intended him to be not guilty. But his strange—and unlikely—interest in the Kimmel case makes him look suspicious. Highsmith never makes any of this very convincing, which is ultimately fatal to it as a “suspense” novel, the way Library of America is selling it. I have to say it’s no page-turner. In fact, the labor to connect these plot points ends up making it practically the opposite of a page-turner and it turns toward the sloggy in the last third. What works for me here is Walter’s marriage, which is over at the halfway point. But it is a wonderfully sardonic view of marriage until then. Highsmith is not exactly adroit about showing the dynamics, but she makes it clear Walter loves her until he is finally driven away. His wife Clara is never satisfied with him even when he does exactly what she asks. In fact, a weak point here is that, for the sake of the plot, Highsmith tries to make the marriage fail in the space of the narrative. Walter seems more like the kind of guy who would stick it out no matter what. I think The Blunderer would have been a better novel if it had skipped all the noir, with murders, cops, and even blackmail, and instead made it a portrait of a bad marriage. But maybe it wouldn’t have been commercial that way? Approach with caution.

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

Johnny Guitar (1954)

USA, 110 minutes

Director: Nicholas Ray

Writers: Philip Yordan, Ray Chanslor, Ben Maddow, Nicholas Ray

Photography: Harry Stradling Sr.

Music: Victor Young, Peggy Lee

Editor: Richard L. Van Enger

Cast: Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Ernest Borgnine, Ward Bond, John Carradine, Scott Brady, Ben Cooper, Royal Dano

Johnny Guitar may look easy enough to classify as genre—duh, Western—but director and cowriter Nicholas Ray’s approach transports it to some other realm that is partly overheated Sirk romance, partly psychotherapy study, and only partly Western. It has chaps and horses, yes, but also operatic psychology. It is set out West, in mining and ranching territory, and formally involves the tensions between ranchers and the coming of the railroad. Vienna (Joan Crawford) is a fashionable single woman of a certain age who has set up a casino to take advantage of the railroad when it comes, catering to the farmers and the others it will bring en masse. Emma (Mercedes McCambridge) believes she is speaking for the town when she says, “You heard her tell how they're gonna run the railroad through here, bringin' thousands of new people from the east. Farmers! Dirt farmers! Squatters! They'll push us out. Is that what you're waitin' for?”

But this is not a typical Western story of ranchers and farmers and the railroad. The primary conflict is between these two women, Vienna and Emma, who are similarly attracted to bad boy men. Vienna has a thing for Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) who comes blowing into town like a tumbleweed with his guitar slung over his back and carrying no guns. When he plays his instrument, which is not often, it’s a bunch of flamenco-like fancy fretwork. Emma for her part has a crush on the so-called Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady as if cut from cardboard), whose gang is working a silver mine but they’re rough types. Everyone, including Emma, thinks they’re out abroad on the countryside robbing people. With layered psychological complexity, Vienna and Emma hate each other for what they see in the other of themselves, or some such. It’s kind of a doppelganger story.

"The Feasting Dead" (1954)

John Metcalfe's long story is squarely in the H.P. Lovecraft tradition of horror, no doubt a chief consideration for August Derleth in publishing it as an Arkham House novel as well as in the 1963 When Evil Wakes anthology Derleth edited. The novel has also been published more recently by Valancourt Books. I don't have any copy of the novel and it's hard to tell whether Metcalfe expanded the 50-page story for it or it's just a short novel. It has a title fit for an Italian giallo movie and Ramsey Campbell, circa 1987, named it as one of the most important works in postwar horror. It's basically a vampire variation, or incubus story maybe, or "familiar" type of ghost, set in the UK and the Auvergne region of France. A widower, an Englishman (and the first-person narrator), strikes up a friendship with a Frenchman who also turns out to be a widower, with two sons. The narrator's son Denis is their age and they become friends. M. Vaignon, in an unusually generous gesture, invites the narrator to send his son to live with them in summertime and other school holidays, apparently to broaden his education and because all the boys get along. Or for more sinister reasons. Denis soon begins behaving strangely. Then the mysterious M. Vaignon cuts off the arrangement suddenly, writing a letter to the narrator: "I am the victim, it appears, of a fantastic persecution or visitation." Next, Denis wants a friend he met in Auvergne—Raoul, an older groundskeeper—to come and live with them in England. Next, Raoul shows up. His features are somehow hard to make out and no one can ever remember what he looks like when they're asked. So it goes. Like much of Lovecraft it takes a long time to get to very little. It's a slog of a read and yet the uneasy mood stayed with me the first time and lasted. It brought me back a few years on. The second read was still hard. Once under the spell of Raoul, Denis spends all his days with him, unavailable. They can't be found. Raoul looks like a scarecrow and Denis begins wasting away. No mention of puncture wounds. In the "changing times" column it's interesting to see how slow people in this story are to even consider child abuse, when it's practically our first thought these days. Somehow this story is entirely empty of sexual implications, but the silence is deafening and may be intentional. To me the story feels repressed to a certain point of suffocation. Maybe that works too for the long-term impact. Denis is sympathetic but it's evident he is being lost to whatever Raoul is—there are further clues. Vampire does not seem unlikely although 1954 for that somehow does, slightly (Metcalfe was 63 when he wrote this story so maybe that explains it). Raoul is probably the best point, underplayed just right, an unnerving, insidious presence gnawing away at us. Always taps at the windows instead of knocking on the door. He seems to get his way in most things, and everyone seems resigned to it. Nice beast.

When Evil Wakes, ed. August Derleth (out of print)
Story not available online.

"The Father-Thing" (1954)

Horror folks and weirdniks want badly to claim Philip K. Dick, and this story is one of their primary items of evidence. Personally, I think "The Hanging Stranger" is his great horror story. But Dick always seems to me a certain epitome of science fiction, even when his stuff is making me nervous, so I'm generally not that interested in the categorizing conversation. Case in point, I found this story in an intriguing anthology published in 2000, My Favorite Horror Story, edited by Mike Baker and Martin H. Greenberg. The premise (which really should be repeated every 10 or 15 years) involves asking contemporary horror writers to pick a favorite short story. The result features a bunch of same-olds but that's OK with me—they're all pretty good or better. This story was the choice of Ed Gorman, who I don't know well. In his introduction, Gorman explicitly denies the obvious connection with Jack Finney's Body Snatchers, the novel that provided the basis for the movie(s) Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But "The Father-Thing" does have a lot of elements in common with the movies and they are likely in Finney's novel too. The novel was serialized the same year "The Father-Thing" was published but I'm taking it more as one of those "in the air" things, which happen. There are more or less aliens from outer space in both, replicating humans evidently, purpose unclear. In the Dick story they might be from another dimension, or they could even be some exotic terrestrial insect, which would put it more squarely in the realm of the weird. Anyway, the story has been so oversold by Gorman and others that perhaps inevitably it disappoints a little. It's a simulacrum story at its core, division of remote-controlled doll. Dick keys it sharply on parents and what they are to children, a mix of gods and monsters, telling it from the point of view of an 8-year-old who believes he has witnessed something that means his father is not what he appears to be. Dick shifts the pronouns for Dad to it/its, a simple way to keep readers nervous, even as we attempt to discount the 8-year-old's ideas. A creepy centipede is featured in the last third, which seems to be an attempt to push it more into the rational and assert its fantastical reality with explanation, but in effect it siphons away energy. To me the critical point is that something so profoundly familiar might actually be something profoundly strange—not a bit comforting if you are 8, and a hard idea to shake once it's in your head. Ray Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven!" version from 1948 altogether made a better job of that, approaching it from a slightly different direction. But I'm not going to argue with the enthusiasm of Gorman and others. "The Father-Thing" is definitely worth a look—another nice point is that Dick makes a Black kid one of the heroes of the story without making a big deal of it. But hey, don't miss "The Hanging Stranger" while you're at it.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin B. Greenberg (out of print)
The Philip K. Dick Reader
Read story online.

"The Golden Man" (1954)

This long 1954 story by Philip K. Dick makes an interesting comparison with the movie made in 2007 based on it, Next. The story has all of Dick's paranoia, with a government agency out systematically hunting radiation mutants, but a lot of time is spent on setups and revelations, as we watch one of the operations at work. In the story, the mutant Cris Johnson is barely even socialized—he's never even spoken. Mutants are categorized into 87 types but he's not one of them. A lot of time is spent defining his power, which is being able to see into the future. In the movie, mutants are a non-issue. Cris (played by Nicolas Cage) is a stage magician in Las Vegas, and he can see two minutes into the future—with some exceptions. It's quite a bit different from the story, which more works through how a consciousness or brain would function with that kind of information coming in. In fact, the movie could have stood a bit more of that. It was directed by Lee Tamahori, who also directed Once Were Warriors, a movie I liked a lot. Next has star power and some indie cred, with Cage, Julianne Moore, and Jessica Biel. Cage is good in the part, more in his restrained smoldering mode. I read the story and saw the movie on the same day, both for the first time, and for once I enjoyed the movie more. It seemed more lucid about the power. In the story Cris is treated literally as if he were a god, which seemed silly. With the ordnance going off and Cage striding around unfazed, occasionally twisting aside to let a bullet pass him, the movie can be thrilling and hilarious all at once. Cris has a line in voiceover where he denies he is a god (as if speaking to the Dick story) but in his best moments in the movie that's exactly what he looks like. There's no paranoia in the movie about mutants, which was a good idea to dispense with as the X-Men and the age of Marvel loomed ever larger in 2007. There's a government agency but it's counterterrorist. The specific case at hand involves a loose nuke in the Los Angeles area, a scheme apparently run by Russians. It goes to some ridiculous and unlikely places but it always keeps its cool and the fascination with the power is infectious. Dick's story feels a bit pounded out and padded for the sake of word count, though it does retain his unique sense of paradox. The movie doesn't feel very Phildickian to me but has other ways of getting trippy that are often interesting. It feels like everybody involved was having more fun than Dick writing the story.

The Philip K. Dick Reader

On the Waterfront (1954)

USA, 108 minutes
Director: Elia Kazan
Writers: Budd Schulberg, Malcolm Johnson, Robert Siodmak
Photography: Boris Kaufman
Music: Leonard Bernstein
Editor: Gene Milford
Cast: Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint, Lee J. Cobb, Rod Steiger, Karl Malden, Pat Henning, John F. Hamilton, Martin Balsam, Fred Gwynne

On the Waterfront attacks with a jazzy midcentury Leonard Bernstein score, folks working on raising pigeons on tenement roofs, and black and white Method acting draped all over it like sheets over furniture. In many ways it's a perfect picture of American postwar '50s, ripened out of innocence into the knowledge of corruption, with great power. The dockside labor unions of New York are so rife with organized crime it's merely a given. Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) is a boxer who once showed promise, but now he's pushing 30 and on the way to becoming a bum, living the easy life as a mascot for the dockside Mob run by Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb) and Malloy's older brother Charley "the Gent" (Rod Steiger). Edie ("introducing Eva Marie Saint") is the sister of Joey, a friend of Malloy's (fellow pigeon keeper) who Malloy inadvertently set up to be murdered. Father Barry (Karl Malden) counsels love and righteous wrath, smokes cigarettes, drinks beer, and tries to talk sense to these people. He's a sincere man of God but it goes about the way you'd expect.

Something feels so churningly ancient in this story, or biblical—it's so bare-faced and focused on raising the dramatic stakes to the sky. In summary, it's something like the redemption of the love for a good woman in the context of divided loyalties between brothers, seasoned to taste with good and evil. On the Waterfront sees director Elia Kazan at the peak of his powers—the very next year he would amplify these themes of Cain and Abel, mixing them in with tones of Babylon and Oedipus and Freud, in East of Eden. But as good as that is, On the Waterfront is the better picture. It's less about the self-pity of its main player, and more about a universal plight in a world that is not merely uncaring but actively hostile. Terry Malloy thinks he can stand to the side of a social world breaking down around him but he finds out that he can't.

A Common Room (1954-1987)

More exciting tales of my misspent youth misspent the wrong ways. In the '70s, not quite a college student though old enough, I spent most of one winter and spring haunting the basement of Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota. I was taking a night class in American literature and the rest of the time prowled the library stacks, reading randomly. That's when I encountered Reynolds Price's work. Price was a lifelong professor at Duke University in North Carolina, where he also got his undergraduate degree. He wrote fiction, essays, plays, and poetry. He started teaching in the late '50s and published his first novel in 1962. Wikipedia says he was openly gay, but there's little hint of that in this collection of essays, aside from his unremarked status as a perennial bachelor and, in one piece from the '80s, a surprising candor about transsexuals. Probably, as usual, my gaydar is just off. I read his stories back in the day but his gently insistent and patient voice are very much present in these pieces too. He occupies an unusual place in literature, a son of the New Critics bravely facing the changes of the '60s, '70s, and beyond. At times I found myself irked or less than interested in some of his more conventional positions—openly Christian, a fan of John Milton (especially), Henry James, and Eudora Welty. A Southerner, his views sometimes shade over into the rationalizations of the Confederacy, yet he has an appreciation for Jimmy Carter that is refreshing to see after all the years of Carter's abuse by the organized right. Price was a very careful writer and sometimes these pieces feel one of two revisions overlabored. But he's good too—more than anything I came to respect in this collection his patience in developing and expressing his themes. These pieces are often personal but they always maintain a distance and formality appropriate for an academic. The circumstances of his life also included onset paraplegia when he was in his 50s. I was often disappointed with his opinions—typically for his generation he thinks too much of Hemingway and too little of Faulkner to suit me, for example. Yet his humility and focus make him rewarding to read—still.

In case it's not at the library.

"Adjustment Team" (1954)

This story by Philip K. Dick works from a premise that is essentially chaos theory, though it didn't have the name yet in 1954. The famous example is the butterfly in Brazil that causes a hurricane in Texas through a chain of random cause-and-effect events. In Dick's story there are figures behind the scenes, pulling the strings to keep things on track according to some master plan—basically, making sure the butterfly is where it's supposed to be and that it's flapping its wings. Obviously these folks have extraordinary powers, as supernatural or divine or at least superior beings. In the way that things happen in stories by Philip Dick, a random person named Ed Fletcher is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somebody on the "adjustment team" botched their assignment. And Fletcher sees things he shouldn't have seen. What he sees is the great strength of this story, an inspired vision of gray dust. The rest of it is little more than pro forma plotting for the sake of a beginning and end. More than 50 years later, in 2011, it was made into a thriller style movie starring Matt Damon, The Adjustment Bureau. Damon plays David Norris, the renamed Ed Fletcher character, and more new glitzy details have been heaped on—Norris is a high-flying New York politician, he falls in love with a woman played by Emily Blunt he is "not supposed to be with," and the "adjustment bureau" hunting him includes John Slattery and Terence Stamp, looking like auditions for The Matrix. The movie does a pretty good job of maintaining a Dickian air, but it also should be mentioned that in some ways "Adjustment Team" is an early sign of Dick's religious bent, as what else are these technocrats of reality but some kind of angel or perhaps demon working for higher powers? Also, note again Dick's ability to suss things out of the air when they're about to break big, in this case chaos theory. But the best part of either story or movie is Dick's stark vision of the gray "real" reality behind the one we live in. The movie does attempt one scene like it, briefly, in a conference room, but can't match or even come close to Dick's vision and was wise to stop there. In more general terms the story feels a little too long and padded out, as if Dick needed to hit a certain word count. It's not one of his best, but serves notice that even not his best can have really strong things to recommend.

In case it's not at the library.

Sansho the Bailiff (1954)

Sanshô dayû, Japan, 124 minutes
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Writers: Ogai Mori, Fuji Yahiro, Yoshikata Yoda
Photography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Fumio Hayasaka, Kinshichi Kodera, Tamekichi Mochizuki
Editor: Mitsuzo Miyata
Cast: Eitaro Shindo, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Masao Shimizu, Akitaka Kono, Keiko Enami, Masahiko Kato

Based on a children's book published in 1915, which was in turn based on a folk tale dating back a millennium, Sansho the Bailiff is a calculating and cruel tour de force of casual human depravity. As if offering balm for its horrors, the film is silvery beautiful, with languorous elaborately framed shots like formal works of art, using a full spectrum of glowing grayscale tones. The beauty blunts only somewhat the harsh black and white realities of this story, which is less about Sansho and more about two children, Zushio and his younger sister Anju, and their parents. Even the folk tale puts Sansho in the title, however. He may be a sideline character but he represents a way of life—the strong man way, with vast wealth, slaves, concubines, and a brutal style.

That's part of Japanese history, from the country's feudal Heian period that provides the movie's setting. What's less part of Japanese history (or at least until halfway through the 20th century) also has a good deal to do with what makes Sansho the Bailiff so cunningly effective. Zushio's and Anju's father, Masauji Taira, is a kind of post-Jesus pre-Enlightenment savant. "Men are created equal," he gently impresses on Zushio. "Everyone is entitled to their happiness." Or at least the pursuit of it, I'm sure. Only two years before the release of this movie, Japan was still occupied by a culturally heavy-handed US which favored such sentiments. It's our good fortune (or maybe my American bias) that it works so well for this movie and story.

"The Magic Barrel" (1954)

Read story by Bernard Malamud online.

Bernard Malamud was taught in my high school. I thought pretty well of him then, but I wasn't sure what to expect after so long. I was happy to find this story engaging and charming. The protagonist (perhaps) is Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student who is about to graduate and be ordained. Told he could get a bigger congregation if he were married, he turns to a matchmaker whose ad he found in the classifieds, Pinye Salzmann, who is the other possible protagonist. Salzmann speaks with a strong and endearing Yiddish accent. They quickly develop a fraught relationship. No candidate that Salzmann turns up is good enough for Finkle. He rejects a widow, a woman in her 30s, for her age (Finkle is 27), and another woman whose father is likely coercing her. Salzmann shares his common-sense wisdom about love and relationships, but Finkle is wary and rejecting. Finally, in exasperation, Salzmann shows up one more time with an envelope of photographs. But the tension between them is so great that Finkle doesn't even look at them for weeks. This is probably a good place to register the spoiler warning. I really don't take Malamud's story as built for the sake of a surprise twist. It's not that kind of story. Nevertheless, there is a twist here. Salzmann has accidentally included a picture of his daughter, whom, he will later tell Finkle, "is a wild one—wild, without shame.... She is not for you." But, of course, that is the woman Finkle wants. He already seems half in love with her from the photo, more interested by magnitudes than anyone that has been offered to him yet. It sets up a wonderful last scene where Finkle meets the young woman. In his first look at her he sees that her eyes are "filled with desperate innocence." Meanwhile, "Around the corner, Salzmann, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead." The tables are turned in interesting ways. On balance, I take it as a comedy. Finkle has hired a matchmaker and ignored everything he told him. So he goes to his doom. Thus has it ever been, thus shall it ever be. We last see Finkle approaching her "with flowers outthrust." Good one.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

"The Fisherman From Chihuahua" (1954)

Story by Evan S. Connell not available online.

This moody and atmospheric story by Evan S. Connell, set in the boardwalk of Santa Cruz, California, during the off-season, struck me as comical, though looking into what others say it doesn't seem to be generally taken that way. The diner that provides the specific setting is owned by Pendleton. One of his regular is "a short fat Mexican who worked as a mechanic." Pendleton thinks of him as "Toltec" because of his resemblance to Toltec idols. He calls him "Pablo," which offends the Mexican. The Mexican is a regular, showing up most nights for dinner, pinball, and music from a jukebox. One night he shows up with a companion, who is taller, better dressed, more handsome, and silent. Silent, that is, until the Mexican plays music, at which point he begins to raise a mighty sound. It's actually hard to make out what is going on at first: "His lips had peeled away from his teeth like those of a jaguar tearing meat, and the veins of his neck looked ready to pop. In the shrill screams bursting from his throat was a memory of the Moors, the ching of Arab cymbals, of rags and of running feet through all the marketplaces of the East." It's singing. At first Pendleton tries to get him to stop—but the strange tall man doesn't respond to being addressed, only carries on that way whenever the Mexican plays music. After about a week of it, Pendleton notices that he's getting more customers for dinner. The strange tall man has started to become an attraction, even though it's the off-season. Here's where I started to take it as comedy. The eruption of noise appears to be unpleasant but it's the spectacle itself, the mere fact that it happens—the grotesquerie—that seems to be drawing people. Tracking down other interpretations, they speak of it more as a clash of cultures, where the California tourists are ignorant rubes and the strange tall man represents the dignity of an alien culture. But I don't get that. From the descriptions, the narrator seems as convinced of its alienating nonmusical qualities as Pendleton or any of the tourists, who seem to be there to gawk. He provides colorful detail ("the ching of Arab cymbals") but the experience does not sound very appealing. Then, just as Pendleton figures out he has something of a cash cow for his diner, the strange tall man disappears. The Mexican says he's out on a drunk. A few nights later, that he's recovering from the drunk. When the strange tall man finally comes back, he's apparently ill, fading away, and by story's end he's gone, leaving only the memory of the image of him wailing and shrieking, surrounded by fascinated Californians and visitors.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

Journey to Italy (1954)

Viaggio in Italia, Italy / France, 80 minutes
Director: Roberto Rossellini
Writers: Vitaliano Brancati, Roberto Rossellini, Colette, Antonio Pietrangeli
Photography: Enzo Serafin
Music: Renzo Rossellini, Giacomo Rondinella
Editor: Jolanda Benvenuti
Cast: Ingrid Bergman, George Sanders, Maria Mauban, Anna Proclemer, Paul Muller, Anthony La Penna, Natalia Ray, Jackie Frost

Director and cowriter Roberto Rossellini's third and last picture with his wife, Ingrid Bergman, shortly before their marriage ended, almost seems like an imaginary movie now, something that someone wrote about in a novel. That's probably more because of its relative obscurity. A beast with no natural home, a neorealist piece with Hollywood stars, an art film and a woman's picture all at once, it was released to terrible reviews and short runs, variously butchered in attempts to make it more commercial, and quickly sank like a stone. Besides all the confusing markers—an Italian movie shot in English, with stars but whose careers were on the slide—it's also about the end of a marriage, which makes it a complete and total bummer. Audiences at the time were baffled, which tells you something about different times.

For all that, the influence of Journey to Italy has grown over the years. Now safely installed in the top 100 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, it could almost be reverse-engineered from close viewings of Abbas Kiarostami's amazing Certified Copy, from 2010, or Richard Linklater's series of "Before" movies with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. It's about a relationship going bad, and incidentally about how travel can complicate that. One reason it flopped, and still languishes in all but critical obscurity, is likely exactly this downbeat trajectory. If it still seems a little alien now on that score, that's more for its general air of reticence. Among other things, Journey to Italy is also a story of the clash between repressed Northern Europeans and lusty life-affirming Southern Europeans. In the scope of film history, it can also serve as a milestone finish to Italian neorealism, Rossellini's career bread and butter, which was arguably no longer operative by 1954. It's also a swooning look at the layers of history with which we live. There is some sense here that the events could have happened hundreds and thousands of years ago, or that they could still happen now and in the future, and very little about the story would have to be changed. The threat of Mount Vesuvius is the only constant.

The Nothing Man (1954)

Jim Thompson's The Nothing Man features an angry, sarcastic, drunken newspaperman named Brownie, who was castrated in the war, hence "the nothing." His boss at the newspaper was also his commanding officer in the war and Brownie is constantly mocking, needling, and trying to provoke him. As usual, something well to the side of the main events brings the most energy, in this case Brownie's constant caustic spew. Brownie dishes it out constantly, another one of Thompson's hellishly observed cases of foul disposition. The boss takes it from him because he feels sorry for him. At which point, some structural POV problems crop up, which Thompson attempts to deal with using alcoholic blackouts. Well, Thompson's plots tend to be purely incidental anyway, a loose skeleton onto which to drape things. What matters more is how well he manages to burrow into the psychotic mind, or some semblance of it peculiar to him and few others. On that score, The Nothing Man is not among his best. With Thompson, the hope always is for those chilling, clarifying breaks with reality, which connect in significant ways I think with writers like Poe, O'Connor, and Faulkner. In many ways all Thompson springs from the third section of The Sound and the Fury: tethers cut loose, raging with great abandon and almost no reason, and so desperate and vivid it is like staring through the pages. "Writing ecstatically," as Updike said of Nabokov. Well, there's less of that in The Nothing Man—it's good enough but second-tier. The whole impotence thing bores me now, after Faulkner's Sanctuary. With Thompson, I can let that go, along with the disappointing and mechanically happy ending. He's earned the right to fail now and then, even spectacularly, and The Nothing Man is not a failure, it's only entertaining.

In case it's not at the library.

A Hell of a Woman (1954)

I tried to write about this one before, but it was awhile ago so here's another go. If not Jim Thompson's best, A Hell of a Woman is at least on the short list of his best. By nicknaming his main character here "Dolly"—otherwise a bill collector named Frank Dillon—I think Thompson makes clear that no one, least of all himself, is immune to the impulses of perversion, at the right time and place. Our hero Dolly breathes and swims in an effluvia of rot and corruption that is distinctly American—money and sex are what you get by swindling and manipulating, and a good day's work by a smart operator should net plenty of both. The reward, at the long day's end of work, is drinking and oblivion. Dolly doesn't want to be here anyway, he's just too cowardly to kill himself. The last chapter is his way of saying goodbye. The "self-destructive tendency" finally brings Dolly to its inevitable deserts. Along the way he thinks he has found the ideal woman—a hell of a woman, deeply victimized and passive. A case study in learned helplessness. But decidedly innocent, and even pure, if defiled. But of course Dolly can't even hang on to that—among other reasons, for his own stupidity, and the sin of vanity, believing himself to be the smartest person in town and on the planet too. As his dreams slip away and his doom is realized he cracks apart into strands of narrative resolution and implodes in front of our eyes. It's crudely Joycean at that point but works. Even more so as a dime novel paperback original. What in the world did people think? Printer error, I suspect. A couple of chapters are framed up as chapters from a memoir ... or something ... but it is otherwise straightforward lurid steamy pulp. A bill collector is cheating everybody in sight and getting away with nothing. A mysterious girl and her elderly aunt are conducting a prostitution operation out of their house. Couples bicker and fight and get drunk, and then the fights get worse. Why would anyone want to read such things in the first place? The horror of finding a calculating, intelligent mind and persuasive worldview behind it is almost impossible to overstate. A Hell of a Woman is one of the most chilling things I've ever encountered.

In case it's not at the library.

A Swell-Looking Babe (1954)

I'm not sure what it says that one of the most typical and evocative titles concocted by Jim Thompson serves a story that reminds me more of minor keys in Theodore Dreiser and especially An American Tragedy. Oh yes, there's a glancing thread of incest, and sure, it's no doubt the ritzy hotel setting and the ambitious bellboy that puts me in mind of Dreiser. This is more of a caper story, which I find little more appealing here than I do when I find them in the movies. The swell-looking babe referenced in the title, and a good many other characters, harbor secrets. Our job is to read the novel until we find them out. The two places where Thompson seems most engaged are the details of the caper, with its complicated mess of betrayals, which is central to the story at hand, and the Freudian / Oedipal tensions between our hero the bellboy and his father, which is not. It's something like the stage act where multiple plates are set spinning atop of thin dowels. Busy busy. I kind of get the sense someone might have suggested Thompson try a proper beginning, middle, and end because so much attention is given to the plot. He really seems to have something he wants to say about the love between a mother and son but it's beside the caper point. The result feels muddled and belabored and often not that interesting. But it's still capable of the classic Thompson style—brusque, crazy, headlong. The image of the swell-looking babe is powerful and strange, even if her role is ultimately mundane and she's wasted. As for Dusty Rhodes, the bellboy, he's fine, another standard-issue Thompson figure—wise, underemployed, and desperate. The story is told third-person but it is so far inside Rhodes's head I kept being surprised it wasn't first-person. So, overall, a lesser Jim Thompson, a little mechanical and unsatisfying. But good enough, and interesting enough in the way it opened the door into the next one, as he evidently decided to start putting the monster female figures that haunt and devil his work right into the titles of the novels.

In case it's not at the library.

Half Magic (1954)

In my mind I have a slight confusion between Edward Eager, the author of this and several other children's books about magic, and Edward Everett Horton, a character actor of the '30s who went on to narrate the Fractured Fairy Tales series in Jay Ward's Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. "Edward," I suppose, and all those Es. But there's also something in both of the kindly twinkly-eyed older man somehow privy to or at least aware of children's fantasy lives, and never disapproving. I know I am surely dating myself with reference to all these objects of affection from mid-20th century, but there you go. I won't say Edward Eager was the J.K. Rowling of approximately my generation—he never approached her ability to produce great slabs of tome, my single favorite aspect of the Harry Potter franchise—but he was dealing with kids and with magic all the same. Half Magic, the first of his so-called Magic series (I don't remember it having a name back in the day, but maybe that's me) is not surprisingly tentative, the product I understand of Eager's own frustration that there were no children's books he wanted to read to his his son Fritz, besides those of E. Nesbit. (As an aside, books by Nesbit were not available in the children's libraries where I obtained the Eager books, and thus I assumed they were just further fabrication.) With Half Magic, Eager started to write them himself. The basic premise here is simple and ingenious—a  mysterious found coin grants our heroes, a group of children who also appear in Eager's next book, Magic by the Lake, exactly one-half of each wish, though they can't predict how it will be divided in half, let alone which half they will get. But they try anyway to outthink it by doubling their wishes, with the kinds of results you can (or cannot) imagine. Eager was a native of Ohio born in 1911, a Harvard graduate, and a playwright and lyricist of some distinction as well the author of children's books. Not surprisingly the language in Half Magic is a perfect pleasure to read, simple and straightforward, out of the pellucid school of mid-century New Yorker. And everybody likes these books—certainly I do, still, very much—though I worry they may also seem antiquated. This would be the point where I heave a big self-satisfied sigh. "Oh, for the good old days again. Kids, get off my lawn with your fool smartphones," etc. But that doesn't mean it's not a good book.

In case it's not at the library.

La Strada (1954)

La strada, Italy, 108 minutes
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Tulio Pinelli, Ennio Flaiano
Photography: Otello Martelli, Carlo Carlini
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Leo Cattozzo
Cast: Anthony Quinn, Giulietta Masina, Richard Basehart, Aldo Silvani, Marcella Rovere, Livia Venturini

"La strada" is Italian for "the road" and that is probably as good a way in as any to this great Fellini picture. Three years before Jack Kerouac and a decade past Bob Hope and Bing Crosby—and well in front of The Road Warrior—this steps in with yet another variation on the look, feel, and traditions, now well worn, of the road story. Some of its most powerful moments are set in motion by the simple expedient of transition shots showing the principals on the move again across the postwar landscape of Italy in their ramshackle transport of motorcycle, sidecar, and covered wagon.

La Strada is frequently classified as neorealism—as much as anything for its exteriors and the desolate postwar mise en scene, not to mention that it's Italian when neorealism ruled Italian cinema—but it proceeds much more like a dream. It plunges straightway into its disorienting narrative, introducing two-bit circus strongman Zampano (played by Anthony Quinn), who is in the process of buying the child-like and otherworldly Gelsomina (played by Giulietta Masina) from her mother. He has also just informed them that another daughter he had purchased previously, Gelsomina's sister Rosa, is now dead; evidently he can't even say where she is buried. Within minutes Zampano and Gelsomina are on the road. Possible spoilers on the other side of the jump.