“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955)

This long story by J.D. Salinger was packaged in 1963 with another long piece, “Seymour, an Introduction,” for the last book he published. With Franny and Zooey, from 1961, they were all Glass family stories, all as written by Buddy Glass. “Raise High” goes lighter on the spiritual / religious extracurricular activities and is essentially a very good wedding-day story. The groom, Seymour Glass, and his bride Muriel are entirely offstage. The wedding has been delayed or called off because of some crisis for Seymour. It’s 1942 and everyone is suddenly in the military. Buddy barely gets a pass to come home to New York City. When he arrives, it’s a sweltering day and wedding attendees are chaotically leaving for the reception. Buddy ends up in a full taxicab that includes the Matron of Honor. Then they are caught in traffic (a passing parade) but they are near Buddy’s and Seymour’s New York apartment, which is air-conditioned. Buddy invites them there, where they can cool off, make phone calls, and sort things out. The story is pleasantly random, full of the energy, strange ways, and grace of special days. It’s interesting to me how, across “Franny,” “Zooey,” and especially “Raise High,” Seymour is more and more manifestly unfit to survive, seemingly a simple soul in some ways. He is also, as a matter of the Glass family saga, given as a wise or even holy man. But a lot of the details here, Seymour’s gross naivete about love and relationships and practical matters, make him out at best as a holy fool. We also know what’s looming in the “Bananafish” story so there is also sadness at the bottom of this great jumble of joy and confusion and peevishness, with let’s call it an epiphany about the meaningfulness of this special day. The title comes from the sister Boo Boo, about whom we don’t know much from the extant Glass stories. It is a typically exuberant Glass / Salinger message written in soap on the bathroom mirror. Boo Boo had been staying there but recently shipped out, forced to miss the wedding. It is this absolute rapturous cheer that I may like most about Salinger in general. He is entirely up to special days—it’s the quotidian ones that tend to give him problems. Writes Boo Boo: “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everybody on this block.” So sweet I get a cavity—in the clinch, YMMV.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction
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The Long Tomorrow (1955)

This novel from the Library of America ‘50s SF box is by Leigh Brackett. I barely know the name but I see she has a big reputation and, indeed, she is a good writer who can construct a novel (as opposed to all the fix-ups, more common than I knew). The Long Tomorrow features a postapocalyptic scene, set in the US after “the Destruction”—presumably an all-out nuclear war. The idea is summed up in the “30th Amendment” to the US Constitution, which outlaws cities and sets limits on density. The Amish have risen to prominence because they know better how to survive without a lot of the modern technology that has been lost. Religion has returned to prominence along with biblical public policy like stoning as a means of execution. Two boys from a small town (well, small towns is all we’ve got here) are curious about science and knowledge. They want to get to a perhaps mythical place called Barterstown, which honors knowledge according to the legends and rumors. I can’t help seeing a lot of this through the frame of now, and these religious anti-city anti-science folks in charge inevitably made me think of trumpism. The boys eventually escape and make the long journey to Barterstown, which of course isn’t at all what they thought it would be. I should probably shut up now, because I’ve already spoiled Brackett’s work to keep it uncertain in the first half whether Barterstown even really exists. The thing I like best about The Long Tomorrow is simply how well done it is. There are probably better dystopias involving religion, but this certainly merits a look if that’s your thing (Harlan Ellison, say, or Margaret Atwood). It’s not mine so much. My sympathies, here and elsewhere, straddle the religious and antireligious. In this day and age I would have to count myself, in a general sort of way, on Team Antireligious. The religious folks here are pigheaded and can be brutal but they’re not all bad, much as the Barterstown residents are sadly flawed too. Hard to know exactly where, between these two sides, that my sympathies would lie. The careful ambiguity counts as a good thing by my lights. The Long Tomorrow was good enough I’m inclined to track down some more by Brackett,

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

“Franny” (1955)

It’s fair enough, I suppose, to call J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, published in 1961, a novel. Certainly the two narratives are related. But they were originally published two years apart. “Franny” is more like a short story, albeit a longish one at 40 pages. “Zooey” is four times that length, which makes it more like a short novel. “Franny” is an example of how good Salinger was getting, almost exponentially by the year. All his subtleties, however, worked against him a little this time. He is showing Franny Glass—yes, this is core to the Glass family tale—in the midst of a spiritual crisis of meaninglessness. She is meeting her shallow frat-boy boyfriend in some college town for a football game and party weekend. He is a Holden Caulfield version but one who can keep it together for college antics. Most readers, apparently, and there were a great many of them for the 1961 bestselling book, took the crisis to be one of pregnancy. I don’t know if I have ever read it that way, but now that you mention it I can see how people would. I never thought of pregnancy because as a teen I read the Raise High the Roof Beam book first (notably with “Seymour, an Introduction”), and knew all about the Eastern woo-woo it is marinated in. And/or that Salinger was. In many ways Franny is a stand-in for him, quivering in the face of meaninglessness and flailing for help. It’s sad, in a way, when you see Franny’s crisis as Salinger’s own. Franny has recently read a 19th-century Russian Christian devotional text (Eastern Orthodox the primary frame?) called The Way of the Pilgrim, which speaks of a technique called ceaseless prayer. At story’s end we see that Franny seems to be practicing it. It doesn’t exactly fit with the pregnancy idea, but doesn’t entirely undermine it either. Anyway, most of Salinger’s primary religious preoccupations, as I recall, are much further east—Buddhism and Taoism. The Way of the Pilgrim suggests much wider reading and implies, with the rest of the Glasses (chiefly Seymour and Buddy), a spiritual crisis of Salinger’s own, which in the most likely if pedestrian way is related to PTSD. The Glass family is decidedly middle-class with all the usual middle-class privileges. It’s unknown where Franny will go next, but she will always have a place to go. On to “Zooey.”

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
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Eye in the Sky (1955)

This early short novel by Philip K. Dick is not bad, with a few points that struck me as remarkable. The premise is that a group of eight with a guide are touring a particle accelerator when there is an accident. The accelerator malfunctions and a platform collapses, dousing them in cosmic rays or something and tossing them into alternate universes with only passing resemblances to our own. In fact (or “in fact”), these alternate universes are actually the creations of individual members of the group. They are basically lying wounded in the accelerator all this time. The first we encounter is the vision of an elderly fundamentalist Christian. This was the first remarkable point for me, as the system of belief was not very different from that of evangelicals in our day, nearly 70 years later. Dick’s details are as convincing as this world is terrifying. God (or “God”) is actively involved and belief trumps science and reality at all turns. I thought this was the world we would be staying in—I’m pretty sure it’s what the title is primarily about. But we escape that and then enter the heads of others, in total about four of the nine characters. I thought these subsequent ones were weaker though the action is often strange and fun. The fourth is merely a plot device—got to tie these things up somehow! The other remarkable point here is that the tour guide is a key character, he is Black, and his life situation is dealt with accurately and sensitively. He’s a trained engineer, for example, but the tour guide job has been the only work he has been able to get. He’s an important character and an important part of the story resolution. Taking such views in the 1950s should not surprise me, maybe, but I liked finding this treatment. I’ve read hackwork by Dick from the ‘50s but Eye in the Sky is not that. It deals some heady concepts, keeps things moving, and altogether works well. The other two alternate universes are from two of the women characters. Sadly, they are sexist. One woman is single, which seems to signify that she is psychotic. The other is a champion of culture, but something of a philistine. She likes Beethoven but not Bartok, whose work is destroyed or nonexistent in her world. Just being in favor of cultural priorities makes her a winner in my book, but Dick doesn’t seem to think so—maybe because he’s a kind of Bartok of literature.

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

Beast in View (1955)

This very short novel by Margaret Millar won an Edgar Award in 1956 for Best Novel, but I’m really not so sure and even have some impulse to argue with various internet reviewers who also think it’s great. For one thing, it’s full of the usual outdated midcentury ideas such as a woman’s life is over if she reaches the age of 30 without being married and having kids. It’s easy to take potshots at stuff like this, but it’s hard to avoid the temptation here. Another complaint was that people in this story were hearing from old friends on the phone but never recognizing their voice. It’s possible that can be explained away by the reveal at the end, but it doesn’t help the issue before that. Probably the worst thing to contemporary sensibilities is the treatment of a gay man, presented as more like mentally ill. The reveal of his sexuality is apparently meant to explain all his erratic behavior, except it doesn’t really. Nevertheless, Beast in View won one of the most prestigious awards for mystery/suspense fiction. It’s also included in the Library of America two-volume series of suspense novels by women crime writers. I can’t explain it, and for that matter have to say I didn’t find most of the eight suspense novels in the series that good, although one or two (notably Mischief) are great. This is one of the weakest. There are also some mumbo-jumbo plot devices here about multiple personality disorders, which were not understood well in 1955. But they made handy devices in more novels than just this one. Seems like Jim Thompson turned to them frequently as well. This is the second novel by Millar I’ve read—maybe I’m not getting to the best because neither one did much for me. I’m more surprised actually that these LOA choices are coming up so short because its American Noir series is often stellar and has no duds. Millar was married to hardboiled detective writer Ross Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar) and won a lot of praise in her own right, more reason for surprise she has been disappointing so far. I didn’t think the characters or situations here were much believable. It’s possible Beast in View is better than a lot of mystery/suspense stuff written by men in the ‘50s but I still didn’t think it was very good. It may not be bad as a document of bad takes from the era, but that’s about its only utility as far as I can see.

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

Julie Is Her Name (1955)

More because I encountered people online who were high on Julie London in the era of the D/L, and less because she had once been the wife of Jack Webb, but maybe a little of both, I came to be a fan of Julie London several years after her death in 2000. Oh, I knew the Arthur Hamilton chestnut from the 1950s, “Cry Me a River,” which opens the festivities here. But I associated it with Barbra Streisand, Joe Cocker, and such. You ought to hear Julie London’s version. Her debut LP is about as good as I’ve heard her. “Cry Me a River” was her only hit (#9 in 1955) but it sets the tone for this whole album and baker’s dozen package: a bass that softly grounds it (Ray Leatherwood), an electric guitar played low and gentle (Barney Kessel), and London’s vocal, approximately one notch above bruised murmur but exquisitely competent at these hushed levels. Credit to producer Bobby Troup for reining it all in so assiduously, and to London even more for delivering the goods. Julie Is Her Name smolders with contained power—it has it, it doesn’t have to wield it, you can feel it in every phrase. It’s the less-is-more idea in action. “Gone With the Wind,” the album closer, finishes it exactly right. Written by Allie Wrubel and Herb Magidson in 1937, the song has nothing to do with either the movie or the novel, except it was written the year after the blockbuster novel came out, so just saying. But London’s version makes it a bon voyage, sending us off with all the breezy essence of the album. It feels like she’s waving from the deck of a departing ocean liner. The album recedes into the horizon. In between “Cry Me a River” and “Gone With the Wind” there are four songs under 2:00 and covers of standards by Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Jimmy Dorsey, and more. “It Never Entered My Mind,” a Rodgers & Hart tune the internet seems to think is a Miles Davis song, gets a particularly nice treatment here. In fact, it’s been playing a lot in my head lately, when I wake up or do the dishes or anytime. Earworms are only bad when you fight them. Inspirational line (from “Easy Street”): “Just lie around all day, just sit and play the horses.”

East of Eden (1955)

USA, 115 minutes
Director: Elia Kazan
Writers: John Steinbeck, Paul Osborn
Photography: Ted D. McCord
Music: Leonard Rosenman
Editor: Owen Marks
Cast: James Dean, Raymond Massey, Jo Van Fleet, Julie Harris, Dick Davalos, Burl Ives, Albert Dekker, Barbara Baxley, Harold Gordon

It's probably not possible to overstate the self-importance of East of Eden. It's less than two hours, with no intermission, but somehow merits an overture, pounding away on Leonard Rosenman's swelling theme, which appears throughout the picture, including characters randomly humming it. The story makes heavy-handed and obvious references to the Bible, Freud, and Marx, occasionally juggling all three at once like a circus clown. And the humor is sparing, if it's there at all. It's also the debut of James Dean, pushing method acting front and center in this hothouse Oedipal tale of fraught family relations.

Yet it works—another masterpiece by director Elia Kazan and one of the most powerful movies made about all the very many issues it wants to get to, clutching at them furiously like some beast in a bathrobe bursting into Walmart at 5 a.m. for the sale: sin, redemption, father love, mother love, brother love, capital, labor relations, war and profiteering, immigration tension (against German-Americans, as this is set in World War I times), greed, honor, lust, and other mortal sins, plus the wages of corrosive bitterness. The real miracle is that it does work.

In the Wee Small Hours (1955)

(Requested by reader T.J.)

Trying to get my bearings on Frank Sinatra to write about this album, which is a genuine milestone achievement in more ways than one, I took another look at The Man With the Golden Arm, a Sinatra vehicle directed by Otto Preminger that came out the same year and won him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. It was also the year that Sinatra turned 40. That's an age when most of a person's innocence has worn away, yet when heartbreaks hurt more than ever. The movie, edgy by definition, is about a heroin addict living in an anonymous American slum trying to make it on the straight and narrow. It revels in down-and-out bitterness and squalor, something of a Barfly (or The Panic in Needle Park) for its time, gritty social realism based on a celebrated work by Chicago novelist Nelson Algren. In the Wee Small Hours by contrast is about losing a girlfriend—Ava Gardner, to be specific. It's about heartbreak. Which brings us to the first thing that's a milestone about it. It's a very early, perhaps even first "concept" album. Every song is selected and arranged toward an end of presenting on LP vinyl a portrait of a man (this is not exactly a woman's album), alone and sad after midnight, the hour past which no good happens. A little drunk, perhaps, but in any event can't sleep. Sitting up, vulnerable, in pajamas, feeling out as more embers of the lost innocence of his life fade to ash. It's intended to be played and enjoyed in exactly such circumstances, and it's brilliantly pulled off, built out of hand-picked standards by numerous usual suspects (Rodgers and Hart, Hoagy Carmichael, Duke Ellington), arranged with tender saccharine by Nelson Riddle, and worked out from there to the tiniest detail. I'm impressed more than ever by Sinatra's craft. A quote from John Rockwell (which I pulled out of the liner notes by Pete Welding) really gets at how fine the work here is: "The slight insecurity in the area just above middle C became more pronounced," Rockwell writes about Sinatra's vocal development, saying he was "masterful in exploiting that frailty for expressive purposes." I think that's what I hear going on in "Can't We Be Friends?" in the part of the melody that first goes "I thought I'd found the girl of my dreams / Now it seems, this is how the story ends"—on the word "seems" (and, later, "bust") and the way he finishes the line, as if running away from it. That level of technique has to count as a milestone achievement too. There are times I'm not sure anyone, ever, sang as crisply or on point as Sinatra. The way he hits the notes and lets them go, his phrasing, so often sensitive to the lyric, the way he has of handling and feeling through the melodies. The exercise of attempting to sing along, as always, illustrates how difficult what he's doing actually is. Get this one for the next time you have insomnia and study it closely.

Pather Panchali (1955)

India, 119 minutes
Director: Satyajit Ray
Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray
Photography: Subrata Mitra
Music: Ravi Shankar
Editor: Dulal Dutta
Cast: Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Uma Das Gupta, Subir Banerjee, Chunibala Devi, Runki Banerjee

Pather Panchali (translated as "song of the little road") is the first film in director and screenwriter Satyajit Ray's so-called "Apu trilogy." It is explicitly about poverty but that's not the reason it's low-budget—not intentionally. The unadorned footage often feels documentary in style if not purpose. Francois Truffaut reacted badly to it—though it also appears a distinct influence on The 400 Blows—reportedly saying he wasn't interested in seeing movies about "peasants eating with their hands." It is also Ray's first movie, widely honored around the world now (and making a long-term home in the top 100 films on the list of the greatest of all time at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?). But it was made on the fly, while Ray worked a day job in an advertising agency, interrupted as funds ran out.

In 1955, India was largely isolated from Western mainstreams of filmmaking (which still hasn't improved that much), and by the evidence Ray was nearly as isolated from more localized Indian Bollywood mainstreams too. In many ways, the strains bend so far away from one another they meet on the other side. Under the influence of Jean Renoir, whom Ray met, and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Satyajit Ray and Pather Panchali actually preview a lot of the nascent preoccupations and energy of the French New Wave and the heroic era of art film. One key difference: while it may be lighthearted (surprisingly so surprisingly often), Pather Panchali is rarely just whimsical. The stakes are high for these people with mere cling holds on survival. It is shot on basic black and white film stock, the music by Ravi Shankar is used sparingly, and the attention remains raptly focused on the impoverished family at its center.

After Dark, My Sweet (1955)

I probably shouldn't complain about the novel that 35 years later became the movie that became a keystone in the revitalization of Jim Thompson's reputation. It's vintage Thompson: a drifter and ex-boxer at the center of it, falling in with and in love with a mercurial lush, whose moods switch around like the cat who thinks it wants to be outside, and she's mean when she's in a foul mood, which is often. There's also a grinning avuncular con man out of Sinclair Lewis, another familiar figure in Thompson novels, who's half Foghorn Leghorn comic relief and half deadly plot point. And what in the world are these three nogoodniks up to? Restaging the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping basically. So there are lots of interesting elements to the mix. I like seeing Thompson feel his way around the pathology of a kidnapper. Another area that looked promising, the relationship of the criminals to the boy they kidnap, only goes to predictable places after all. It feels like at some point he decided nothing about these things was much interesting. On the matter of plot construction it's reasonably sturdy, setting up and knocking down the various pins of a crime caper noir and pretty much keeping it all together for that. It's something he'd been trying for since at least A Swell-Looking Babe, and here he manages it pretty neatly. But with the parts working together like a machine the result is somehow robotic. The types are too set-in, especially Faye, the love interest / lush. Her mood swings, often conveniently serving some narrative purpose, feel mechanical, although, as always, few do mean quite as well as Thompson so perhaps it balances out. But it's not particularly believable as random behavior. Or this: our hero Collie has a history in mental institutions, to no discernible purpose other than to provide a vulnerability others can exploit. Frankly, I'm a little tired of mental institutions and the abuses thereof in Jim Thompson novels. There I said it. After Dark, My Sweet is regarded highly by many fans of Thompson—on short lists of the best, even. I'm not so convinced of that, but I don't think it's one you can skip either.

In case it's not at the library.

Julie London, "Gone With the Wind" (1955)

(listen)

Some years back I tumbled onto a trove of Julie London's mid-'50s recordings that completely turned me around. Before that I had associated her only with "Cry Me a River" (a song I was indifferent to because of the Barbra Streisand version) and with Jack Webb, her husband for a time. Shortly after that marriage ended, in 1954, her career took off, with a long string of albums starting in 1955. My favorite is Calendar Girl, a concept album before anyone thought of concept albums—13 tracks: "June in January," "February Brings the Rain," "Melancholy March," etc., finishing on "Warm in December" and "Thirteenth Month." But "Gone With the Wind" comes from what is probably the better starting place, her 1955 album Julie Is Her Name, which includes "Cry Me a River," "I'm in the Mood for Love," "It Never Entered My Mind," and many other standards. "Gone With the Wind" finishes the album in typical style. I like how it practically defines that style as it does so. Here's what you just heard, bub: scraps and pieces blowing around, deceptively casual yet tightly executed, thrilling in their moment and then gone. Most of her songs, here and elsewhere, rarely run even to three minutes. They are quiet and subtle, almost fussy, and here there is only a bass player and guitar player padding around behind her, and the reverb that is thrown on the vocal toward the end. Excess is not within the ken of this music. It's practically nothing but her voice, and her voice is practically nothing but a whisper and a thought, and she made many albums like it, each as good as the next, filled with this simple formula and a grab bag of sweet tunes.

Ordet (1955)

Denmark, 126 minutes
Director: Carl Th. Dreyer
Writers: Kaj Munk, Carl Th. Dreyer
Photography: Henning Bendtsen
Music: Poul Schierbeck
Editor: Edith Schlussel
Cast: Henrik Malberg, Emil Haas Christensen, Preben Lerdorff Rye, Cay Kristiansen, Birgitte Federspiel, Henry Skjaer, Ejner Federspiel

There's every good chance this could well be the silliest, most frivolous and beside-the-point SPOILER WARNING ever issued, but I suppose it has to be done. The "twist ending" delivered here, in one of the handful of cinema wayposts given us by master director Carl Th. Dreyer (going well back into the silent era and including The Passion of Joan of Arc, previously discussed), is about as far from the usual kinds of narrative stunts we're supposed to warn about as it's possible to imagine. Not to mention it's almost better to know what's coming, the better to appreciate the pace and careful foreshadowing and development of themes that goes into this. Not to mention that the people who require these kinds of warnings probably have Ordet way down on their to-see lists in the first place.

Among the top 50 films on the list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, only L'Atalante rivals Ordet (with maybe a couple of others, still to come) among the most obscure for me; at least I had the advantage of knowing Dreyer from that long-ago college film class I've mentioned before. Dreyer's career is fascinating, nearly as sparse as his aesthetic, spanning the silent era and penetrating all the way into the '60s, based in Denmark but traveling well afield, with long gaps between projects, and a continuing obsession with religious themes approached from a variety of angles: Joan of Arc, one of the great vampire pictures (Vampyr), 16th-century witch hunting hysteria (Day of Wrath, produced and released during World War II). Ordet, with its radical and homely meditation on faith as lived and experienced, fits perfectly with these.

The Night of the Hunter (1955)

USA, 93 minutes
Directors: Charles Laughton, Robert Mitchum, Terry Sanders
Writers: Davis Grubb, James Agee, Charles Laughton
Photography: Stanley Cortez
Music: Walter Schumann
Editor: Robert Golden
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, Don Beddoe, Evelyn Varden, Peter Graves, James Gleason, Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce

Anyone who watches true-crime TV is likely well acquainted with the feebleness and gesture of last resort that has become the word "evil" in such contexts. It's what people say when they don't know what else to say about the horrors that confront us, horrors that seemingly have been with us for all time. But in The Night of the Hunter the whole notion of evil is taken on and aired out quite deliberately and self-consciously. Harry Powell (played by Robert Mitchum) famously goes about the picture with "L-O-V-E" tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand and "H-A-T-E" on the knuckles of his left, and he's got a funny little story to tell about that too. It's something of a conceit that wears thin the more often one sees the picture, but it's also a useful avenue in to the fanciful, occasionally alienating extravagances of this project and what makes it work so well as a whole, in spite of some of its rather painful limitations.

The Night of the Hunter must stand as yet another example, with Casablanca and The Third Man, of a uniquely collaborative happy accident. It's Charles Laughton's only film-directing credit; Laughton was better known as a classical Shakespearian-style actor on stage and in the movies (he did direct a few theater productions as well). It's on a short list of James Agee's screenplays, with The African Queen; Agee was better known as a journalist and novelist who slummed as a film critic. And, perhaps most significantly, it's only one of dozens of photography credits for Stanley Cortez, whose work ranges among The Black Cat, The Magnificent Ambersons, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, Sam Fuller pictures Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss, a couple of episodes of TV's "Family Affair," and Chinatown.

24. Johnny Cash, "Folsom Prison Blues" (1955)

(listen)

This is a country standard now, covered far and wide by artists including Charley Pride, Slim Harpo, and the Reverend Horton Heat, which is some indication right there of the range of its appeal. It's also become one of a handful of Johnny Cash's signature songs, easily my favorite among them, but gosh, he made a whole lot of really great songs. It's closer to American folk idioms, self-consciously drawing on familiar and well-worked traditions of both train and prison songs. But it's so dark, largely the work of the one famously memorable line—"I shot a man in Reno / Just to watch him die"—that it remains as fresh as ever, decades on. The Sun version is the one I like best, though Cash is one of those artists whose work is worth chasing down in all its forms, live performances, outtakes, alternate versions, even covers and tributes by others, the whole shebang. There's a popular version from the late '60s, recorded live at Folsom Prison itself (and sweetened some in the mix to make it sound more raw and desperate), that's nearly as popular as his first run at it in the mid-'50s. But the original Sun version is such a model of the form, stripped down to essentials, occupying a kind of eerie hush that entirely gets out of the way of the song proper, just Marshall Grant playing bass, Luther Perkins playing a spidery, barbed-wire electric guitar, and Johnny Cash sounding as lonesome and lost as he ever did, which is saying something. The melody is plain and lovely and sticks—if anything, Cash may have been underrated as a songwriter. If the whole thing doesn't last even three minutes, it always sounds good, and the more closely you listen the more it gets under your skin.

The Great Twenty-Eight (1955-1965)

In the recent countdown exercise of hit songs I occasionally found myself chastised for various exclusions, inclusions, and perceived mistakes in emphasis, none of which particularly surprised me. I mean, 100 seems like a pretty big number, but it's finite, and I know already I'm a bit of a crank anyway. But in retrospect shutting out Chuck Berry seemed weird even to me, so I made a point of revisiting this essential collection of the best of his best. No question, this is the cream: the virtual invention of perhaps better than half of the most familiar rock 'n' roll guitar licks, Berry's guitar playing itself, clean and punchy, often underrated or forgotten, and of course his endless sly and biting wit, the winking, knowing references to staples of teen life (which sadly metastasized in his late visit to the charts, 1972's "My Ding-a-Ling," his biggest hit but thankfully not included here). On this latter score I think he is most underrated—"Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" alone, the deeply coded mid-'50s assessment of the state of racial relations, demonstrates that he pretty much always knows what he is saying and saying exactly what he means, e.g., "Arrested on charges of unemployment" (although the song distractingly doesn't appear to understand some of the most basic terminology used in the game of baseball, or maybe I'm missing something?). Some of the tracks leaping out at me on this tour have included "Too Much Monkey Business" and "Come On," almost perfect expressions of exasperation about the hassles of life. "Havana Moon" has a spooky stripped-down sound. "Beautiful Delilah" features a hilariously brisk, practically harried piano tinkling in a distant background. "Oh Baby Doll" is upbeat and on the attack. And what do you know, some of the hits sound as fresh and bracing as ever too, notably, at this moment, "School Days." To make it the complete package, there's even a mystifying omission—1964's "You Never Can Tell." But I would be less than honest if I didn't also mention the gulches of familiarity into which my car of pleasure drove as well, the places where maybe I need to accept that I have used up my lifetime supply now: "Maybellene," "Roll Over Beethoven," "Rock  & Roll Music," "Johnny B. Goode," so on and so forth. Is it possible to do anything about this? Does it even matter? Sometimes context may take a role—even what I like here usually sounds tired on the radio. Maybe judicious use in movie scenes might wake some of them up for me again? At any rate, I have to think those new to Chuck Berry can still hear them with the same delights I once found, even if that pool of listeners is likely shrinking all the time, inevitably hearing first the ever-increasing ancient oldness before anything else. And if I don't exactly feel the thrills still myself, at least I still have clear memories of them, "cruisin' and playin' the radio." Maybe hauling out the old shibboleths and saying nothing else is the best idea after all. Rock 'n' roll it will never die!

"(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" (1955)

39. Bill Haley & His Comets, "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" (May 14, 1955, #1, 8 wks.)

You have heard this, if only as the opening theme for TV's "Happy Days," so you know what we're talking about. What's harder now is to reimagine it in its context, when it could simply be used as the opening theme for a gritty movie of inner-city strife (Blackboard Jungle) and literally cause riots to happen across England. Bill Haley was just barely on the right side of 30 when he scored this definitive hit. Paunchy, sweaty, already obviously losing his hair, he was never going to make a suitable object of desire for the masses in the new world that his classic song (and already fifth top 20 hit) was ushering in. That would be a job for Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry and perhaps Little Richard, who each had oceans more of sex appeal. Nonetheless, it was Bill Haley who got his shoulders up above the Pat Boones and Patti Pages of the deadening mid-'50s radio fare, opened his arms wide, and welcomed one and all with a kind of infectious and undeniable and mad joy. Even now it's not hard to hear its appeal—the country twang of Haley's singing, the rhythm and blues elements marking out the arrangement, the chanting and insistent nursery rhyme mentality that never lets it fade into the background. The drums hit hard, the band swings, the guitar rocks, and the tune quickly tattoos itself to the inside of your head. Nothing was ever going to be the same again, and even if this were atrocious crap it would still belong on a list like this simply for the impact and lasting influence. Fortunately, it's an altogether nifty concoction, even if you (and I) may be rather tired of it at this juncture.

Lolita (1955)

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is no doubt far more notorious than read, a book that it's dangerous to be seen with in public even today. It's understandable enough because the argument against it is so flatly dismissive and easy to make that it's hard to counter, particularly in this day and age: "I don't need to read anything about a pedophile to know it's a bunch of garbage," etc. And that argument comes from all corners, not just fundamentalists and other professional prudes. That's just a shame, of course, not least because the thing is done so well; it's humorous, light, deft, and clever as hell without ever pulling its punches about the events it describes. It is never close to salacious, describing instead grimly pathetic and desperate lives. It is most convincing in those moments when the tragedy of the girl—Dolores Haze, by name, and note even there how well Nabokov understands how hard she is to see, as are most children—is most plain to see, as when she realizes she is well and truly trapped at the side of this man, Humbert Humbert, sobbing at night in their motel beds after she thinks he has fallen asleep, or, later, when the direction of her life as an adult is revealed. That's when the profound grasp of the material that Nabokov has brought to this is most apparent. Yes, it's a story about rape and murder and abuse. It's also a story about America and hypocrisy and the good life—in its second half, it even turns into a genuine road story, Jack Kerouac's raw material given substance and urgency and meaning two years before Kerouac's novel was ever published. The main trick with this book, I think, is simply to sit down and read it. Forget the outrage and especially forget all the highfalutin literary gimcrackery that gets claimed for it and about it. There's plenty of time for that and plenty of critics to read if you're interested, because Nabokov is performing entire series of literary feats within these pages. But first read it. Because perhaps the most significant stunt Nabokov manages here is that he has made it so engaging, so perfectly and rapturously entertaining without ever skipping past any of the unpleasant implications inherent in the very nature of the story. It's really impressive.

In case it's not at the library.

Pick-Up (1955)

Charles Willeford isn't a typical crime/noir novelist, starting out rather as a poet and eventually making his way into academia. Pick-Up was as likely intended to pay the bills as much as anything, but it packs a real punch, and across his career Willeford never did end up straying far from the genre. It's fair enough to call this second novel of his depressing, a relentlessly detailed account of the enervating realities and the gray life that the down and out are forced, by circumstances and by their own choices, to live inside of in America. Yet something about its compact, straightforward style bears its own momentum right to the very end, where a twist ending reconfigures one's perception of everything that has gone before. Harry Jordan is a talented artist and World War II veteran scraping along as an alcoholic short-order cook in whatever San Francisco diners he can catch a job in. He meets Helen Meredith, also an alcoholic and now estranged from her upper-middle-class origins because of it, drinking in a bar. They take up with one another, first setting up digs in Harry's room at a boardinghouse. Typical conversation: Harry: "I'm pretty much of a failure in life, Helen. Does it matter to you?" Helen: "No. Nothing matters to me." The connection is forged, though it's not easy to see at first how or why, let alone that it could possibly be anything lasting or good for either one, and sure enough, after a brief period of glowing hope during which Harry paints Helen's portrait and takes a job, attempting to go out on the straight and narrow, things soon spiral into mayhem and tragedy, marked by death, madness, and the mundane rituals of the court system. But the getting there is often oddly toned. Things happen that don't make sense: fights erupt too quickly in bars, Harry's situation seems impossibly precarious, psychologists ask the strangest questions, and Helen's family takes an instant and visceral dislike to him, in spite of the obvious improvements in Helen's life. But much of this is in retrospect. It's a short book, some 160 pages, that moves briskly and generally keeps one involved, in spite of the potentially off-putting squalor and the extremity of the circumstances. It's never repulsive for its own sake—it's no Barfly, put it that way. Willeford brings a familiar '50s sense of the melodramatic and even the existential with the couple's love contrasted against the overwhelming context of their constant (and refreshingly if disconcertingly conscious) desires to die, moving the action through bars, jail, mental institutions, and the like. Then the senses-altering payoff, which comes literally in the second-to-last sentence and which I (for one) never saw coming. It is also a revelation entirely of its time, the '50s, yet one so artfully done that I think it still resonates powerfully even now.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

Patricia Highsmith knocked around New York and Mexico and paid the rent in the '40s as a comic book scriptwriter, churning out the skeletal bones for four-color biographical tales of historical figures such as Albert Einstein, Edward Rickenbacker, and others. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, got picked up by Hitchcock and turned into one of his best films, though the book itself is somewhat clumsy and turgid. By the first Ripley book, however, written when she was 34, Highsmith was clearly settling into the strengths that would mark her out as a uniquely memorable writer of crime fiction: cogent portraits of an unsettling psychological depravity accompanied by enviable levels of sophistication in the art of living. Tom Ripley, as Frank Rich pointed out in his epic valentine to the 1999 movie based on this novel, is "an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby"—emerging out of impoverished middle American origins but with a self-defined destiny as broad and fine as the entire world itself, old and new. Highsmith claimed Ripley as her favorite creation and certainly in this first outing with him (of five total, between 1955 and 1991) there's a bracing zest to the proceedings as she puts him through his paces, using, cheating, defrauding, and ultimately murdering, if he must; whatever he is required to do to acquire the life he imagines for himself, that's what he will do. He is the consummate flimflam man, artful and deft, with a knack for finding the weak spot of anyone he meets and ruthlessly exploiting it. He has discriminating taste but, as the novel unfolds, more and more obviously no soul whatsoever. The only suspense on display here, in fact, is how far Ripley will take things. Otherwise it's flat and straightforward, moving steadily forward across time and staying close to the details and rationales, always perfectly understandable, for Ripley's ongoing adventures. By the time he's unloading a corpse over the side of a boat you're likely to start feeling in need of a shower—though, perhaps, with a fine Chianti on hand to enjoy with a light dinner of cold roast chicken and cucumber slices in your robe and slippers after.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)