Double Star (1956)

I’m pretty sure Robert Heinlein remains a divisive figure among science fiction readers. Certainly I agree to the extent he injects his various conservative political ideas into his work. But he’s also reliably a very good storyteller, as this very short novel shows (under 150 pages). Yes, it’s on the preposterous side and has crazy ideas, but it’s so readable it’s not hard to knock off in a day. It’s set in the far future when the solar system has largely been colonized and settled. There’s still hope for Venus in 1956 and many planets are crawling with their own life forms. Martians, for example, look like trees. Our main guy and first-person narrator is an actor. The art of the theater is one place where Heinlein has a lot of strange ideas, but never mind. For complex political reasons the actor is called on to impersonate a high-level functionary who has been kidnapped, which would be no excuse for missing some ceremonies. There’s a lot here about the art and science of performance, sprinkled with “method” ideas and chin-pulling theory. Maybe an actual actor could speak better to it, but it struck me as a bunch of bloviating. Nevertheless, the story moves quickly and doesn’t leave us much time for doubting its assertions. Double Star is the first novel in the second volume of the Library of America’s American Science Fiction set of nine SF novels from the ‘50s, a big rollicking start. I don’t think I’d heard of Double Star before, but it won Heinlein his first Hugo. You can do worse in science fiction than go with award winners. Although the solar system setup is rife with science fiction gadgets and technology, this novel is mostly about politics, with a lot of complicated parliamentary procedures driving the action. Heinlein, happily, wastes little time on lectures and asides, but is obviously into the machinations of power—I thought that side of it was dullish. He is prone to some lecturing about acting here. The ideas are interesting but a little bit trite. No matter—Double Star is short, moves fast, and simply rushes past its flaws. It’s entertaining, as Heinlein often is for me, though I generally prefer his stuff before the 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land. After that one you’re on your own.

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

Willows, “Church Bells May Ring” (1956)

[listen up!]

The Willows were a five-piece doo wop act out of Harlem who fell victim to the 1950s industry convention of covering Black artists threatening the pop charts with white groups who had the resources (label PR and dough) to nab the bigger hits. It produced strange and somewhat embarrassing results, such as Pat Boone covering Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and getting the bigger hit with it. Teens of the ‘50s, what hath thou wrought? The Willows were successfully prevented from reaching the pop charts, but the Diamonds (from Toronto) took their inferior version of what they retitled “The Church Bells May Ring” to #14 in 1956. The Diamonds version all but eliminates the bells, buried in the mix except for jazzy solos that miss the point of the song. What makes the Willows’ version so resounding is exactly the pounding bells it pushes so hard. The song, written by the Willows, was originally called “Church Bells Are Ringing” or maybe just “Church Bells”—church bells were always going to be involved. And, indeed, they are what makes the song stand out. They’re chimes, or tubular bells—as it happens, played by studio hand that day Neil Sedaka. They add a rhythmic luster around which the lusty singers dart in harmony. The song feels like the happiest wedding day, bursting with upbeat energy. “Oh ah linga linga linga linga ling ding-dong,” chants the lead vocalist with exuberance. You never knew you could dance to church bells but now you do. To be clear, I have nothing against the Diamonds. I like their big dance hit of a couple years later, “The Stroll.” But it’s a fact that the Willows plainly have the better version of this song.

The Shrinking Man (1956)

Richard Matheson’s next novel after I Am Legend went on to become one of the great 1950s science fiction movies, huffing up the title to The Incredible Shrinking Man. Matheson wrote the screenplay and, in fact, improves the story by making it much more straightforward in time. This novel is constantly hopping all over the place, from when the main guy, the shrinking man, is trapped in the cellar, missing and presumed dead by his family, to sections labeled by his height: 68”, 35”, etc. It feels similarly unfocused by perspective. Sometimes things seem larger or smaller than they should from descriptions in the same passage. I could also do without the masculine panic as he goes from 6’2” to subatomic, which reminds me of another complaint, this thing about shrinking proportionally at the rate of 1/7” per day. WTF is 1/7”? Just say an inch per week and leave the rest of the math to us. On the other hand most of this takes place in the previous week, so maybe that’s what you have to do. Another point that worried me is the sense that the structure of the novel by definition makes the timeline 74 weeks, from 74 inches to nil. It wasn’t that clear and I had the sense more time was elapsing, maybe even years, but maybe Matheson was true to the concept after all. The Shrinking Man is thus disorienting but not necessarily in good ways. Maybe I’m not the one to ask. I didn’t go much for I Am Legend either. Matheson is a good, active writer and still highly readable even when he can feel a little lost here. There are too many Hemingwayesque issues with masculinity and it is too easily read in contexts that developed after 1956 as panic about losing positions of power men had previously dominated. To be clear, I don’t think Matheson thought of it consciously that way at all, but that’s where his imagination went. He liked the possibilities of steady shrinkage (as George Costanza once yelped) and somehow it became something about satisfying women (that is, pacifying them). Matheson is famous for an ugly imagination. His vampire stories are particularly hard for me to read. This one manages to evade a lot of that, but I take the movie, with its own flaws, as Matheson’s second draft, with improvements. Hard to talk about fears of sexual inadequacy in a 1950s movie, which also helps.

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

Rockabilly Boogie (1956-1957)

I was looking for a 1956 album called Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, listed in The MOJO Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time. Instead, I ended up with this terrific 1989 Bear Family CD: 28 tracks, encompassing all 12 tracks from the original album and all 20 tracks from a 1993 CD release listed in Wikipedia, plus copious notes and scrupulous research you’ll need a magnifying glass to read. The sequencing is weirdly varied across all three. One of my favorites, for example (out of about 28 stellar favorites), is “Rock Therapy” (“I don’t need a doctor, I don’t need a pill”)—track 3 on this album, not appearing on the original LP, track 13 on the 1993 CD. In short, you’re probably best advised to get this Bear Family CD and play it loud and often. I don’t see it on my streaming service, though I might be able to cobble together a reasonable facsimile from tracks available. But why bother when I can just play this CD? I consulted the internet on Johnny Burnette, by searching on “best rockabilly artists.” Burnette, who died in 1964 at age 30 in a boating accident, seems to fall in the lower echelons of the top 10, preceded by names you would predict: Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Wanda Jackson, etc. More modern names also appear, such as the Stray Cats and Reverend Horton Heat. Johnny Burnette could thus well be a familiar name but still relatively unheard except by the most dedicated followers of rockabilly. I recommend you don’t skip Burnette. This stuff throbs with life, good screams, heavenly backup singers, barbed-wire guitar breaks, and deep thick grooves. On “Touch Me” Burnette even trills like a songbird inside the clatter. Most of the necessities are here: “Tear It Up,” “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” “Rockbilly Boogie,” “Lonesome Train (On a Lonesome Track).” “Butterfingers” is a goof, possibly playing on the candy bar’s popularity. “Eager Beaver Baby” might go too far—yes, I think it might. “Midnight Train” is a country jailhouse lament—Burnette obviously had a thing for trains. The last track, “Shattered Dreams,” is all show horns and no guitars as Burnette is called on to belt it out like Bobby Darin. It’s a novelty. Most of the rest is some of the purest rockabilly you may ever hear.

The Stars My Destination (1956)

Tiger! Tiger!
This science fiction novel by Alfred Bester was not anything like what I expected. I’ve been aware of it for decades, with a library roomful of other classic science fiction authors and titles I’ve been meaning to get to all this time. But honestly, the title this one is known by in the US, The Stars My Destination, always gave me pause. It sounded like something aspirational or inspirational intended to dignify SF. But no. In fact, Wikipedia says some consider it foundational to cyberpunk. That’s closer to the truth, along with Bester’s original title, published that way in the UK, a reference to the William Blake poem “The Tyger.” Indeed, this novel helped me get a better sense of that poem. It’s potent stuff. It’s not without flaws, notably its treatment of women, which ranges from unfortunate to very bad. And the revenge story on which it hinges is fairly weak soup as well. But this main character—Gully Foyle—is a ferocious survivor, his face covered with glowing Maori tattoos. He’s finely tuned, a human machine of reflex, transcending hero figures and mythical whatnot by the expedience of his single-minded focus on staying alive, out in cold space in barely imaginable, always hostile conditions. Among other things it’s fair to call this short novel pulpy space opera too, involving a 25th-century war among the humans who have settled 11 planets and satellites in the solar system. A teleportation ability called “jaunting” is a new but natural human skill that must be developed and trained for, still not entirely understood. It’s one of the ideas that keeps the action well-paced—exciting, even, which was revelatory for me about a 1950s sci-fi novel. It’s dated to the degree it’s a future based in Cold War dynamics—thermonuclear weapons are the standard for military-grade options—which is not really a future we imagine anymore. But Gully Foyle is something more abiding, a figure that works still today, a model of the antisocial antihero whose ethos and everything is about simply not dying. Bester’s novel works so well it practically overcomes all defects. Don’t be put off like I was by the New Age-sounding The Stars My Destination. Lay into it for the Tiger! Tiger! It might blow you away like it did me.

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

Aparajito (1956)

India, 110 minutes

Director: Satyajit Ray

Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, Kanailal Basu

Photography: Subrata Mitra

Music: Ravi Shankar

Editor: Dulal Dutta

Cast: Pinaki Sengupta, Karuna Bannerjee, Kanu Bannerjee, Smaran Ghosal, Ramani Sengupta

It has been nearly 10 years since I last revisited Pather Panchali, the first movie in director and cowriter Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, but I see that the second, Aparajito, picks up within days if not hours of Pather Panchali. The Apu trilogy is a long continuous story—it begins on the day of Apu’s birth and continues into his adulthood in the third and final installment, The World of Apu. Aparajito sees the greatest changes in Apu, necessitating two actors as he grows from a boy into an adolescent and then young man. After the death of Apu’s sister in Pather Panchali, the family, now only three, leaves their home village for the big city of Varanasi (called Benares in the movie). Apu’s father cobbles together income as he can. His ambition is to be a literary writer, creating plays, poetry, and fiction, but he also serves as a community priest and picks up agricultural work as he can. In Varanasi, earning money has become the first order of business to get his family back on its feet. Even providing adequate food is becoming a problem. Sometimes he must travel and be away from his family for significant parts of a year.

While making Pather Panchali, Ray reportedly had no idea of extending the story beyond that movie. But it proved so popular he was able to get funding within a year to make Aparajito. Both are based on popular autobiographical novels by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. For Aparajito, however, Ray took artistic liberties with the source story that proved unpopular in India even though these two movies in many ways established Ray’s stature internationally. I don’t know the novels and basically admire both movies equally, as well as The World of Apu. According to the critical survey at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Aparajito has the lowest regard—no matter how movie trilogies may be structured, it does seem like the second is often judged the weakest, perhaps because it is a kind of bridge piece.

Calendar Girl (1956)

Even the cover art on this one—even the title, really—make it clear someone decided to market Julie London on her third album as a sex kitten, sultry and wanton. Sure, that’s already there in her singing style to some extent, which has range. But lay off the sledgehammer for pity’s sake. Unfortunately, the marketing conceit follows all the way into the musical arrangements, which feature horns, strings, and backup singers. Gone is the plain varnish of London’s voice backed only by soft electric guitar and bass. Whose idea was this? Calendar Girl is formally a concept LP, with one song each devoted to every month of the year (“June in January,” “February Brings the Rain,” “Melancholy March,” etc.), plus an extra, “Thirteenth Month,” to make a baker’s dozen. I don’t really know many of these songs, whose writers include Hoagy Carmichael, Arthur Hamilton, and many others. From my notes: ”’Sleigh Ride in July’ is a very bad Christmas song. ‘Time for August’ may be the most embarrassing sex kitten play of all.” The album is tainted by an unmistakable ‘50s style of upscale lounge music applied like frosting and it’s almost unlistenable to me for that. Yes, London’s singing and phrasing can be made out through the frippery, but these settings are so intrusive and repellent that it takes more work than worthwhile to get to them. I grabbed this up in the usual throes of a downloading frenzy, which is how it ended up on my list of albums to get to. Later research revealed for listeners like me that London’s second album, Lonely Girl (1956), and a follow-up to her first, Julie Is Her Name, Volume II (1958), are more like the obvious next steps after her first, done up very nicely much the same way. They all have the same producer too, Bobby Troup—even Calendar Girl. I don’t know what goes on there. And after that you’re on your own, because those three are plenty for me. I’m not one to listen to this kind of thing that much, for whatever reasons living in horrors of most popular music from the 1950s. Approach with caution. Trying to help you here.

Baby Doll (1956)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Elia Kazan
Writer: Tennessee Williams
Photography: Boris Kaufman
Music: Kenyon Hopkins
Editor: Gene Milford
Cast: Karl Malden, Carroll Baker, Eli Wallach, Mildred Dunnock, Lonny Chapman

Director Elia Kazan made Baby Doll right after two of his most famous movies, On the Waterfront and East of Eden, and right before another interesting curiosity, A Face in the Crowd, which uses a monster Andy Griffith as a certain type of charismatic Southern authoritarian politician (think Donald Trump in good old boy drag). In some ways the success of those earlier movies appears to have opened a vein of experimentation for Kazan. Baby Doll is also the first of only a few original screenplays by Tennessee Williams, who mostly stuck to the theater, though by 1956 he had adapted a few of his own plays for the screen, including The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Rose Tattoo. For the most part the air of alcoholism and hysterical tones of Williams's work—all that unsympathetic Southern gallantry and desperation—usually loses me quickly. I know they're still working out the trauma of losing a war to defend slavery down there, hence the Confederate flags, statuary, etc., but already it's almost a hundred years here (and now it's more like 150 and they're still not over it).

Even so, something about this nifty collaboration with Kazan has kept me coming back for more. Probably, yeah, the raw charge of sexuality is part of it, a shot across the bow of the coming sexual liberation, written by a gay man. It's a strange and compelling movie, with one of Eli Wallach's greatest performances, which is saying a lot, especially given that this is his feature debut in a long and illustrious career.

A Man Escaped (1956)

Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut, France, 101 minutes
Director: Robert Bresson
Writers: Andre Devigny, Robert Bresson
Photography: Leonce-Henri Burel
Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Editor: Raymond Lamy
Models: Francois Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock, Roland Monod, Jacques Ertaud, Jean-Paul Delhumeau, Roger Treherne

Like Au Hasard Balthazar and Pickpocket, which precede A Man Escaped in the top 100 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, director and screenwriter Robert Bresson's picture largely succeeds because it latches onto certain concrete circumstances. In the first two it's the life of a beast and the criminal art of pickpocketing, respectively, and in A Man Escaped it is the amazingly painstaking escape of a Frenchman from a German prison during World War II, based on true events. In fact, though I don't like it as much as the other two, in many ways A Man Escaped is the one that's most getting right down to the business of Bresson's major theme: the gyrations of the soul imprisoned in the flesh. That prison is perfectly externalized by the Montluc prison in Lyon, France, where the movie was shot and from which the original true-life escape was made.

As usual, some allowances must be made for changing times. The privations of the prison may look to us now more like a very bad dorm. Everyone's clothes are elaborately dirty but otherwise these prisoners don't look too much the worse for wear. Yes, we often hear shocking bursts of gunfire, suggesting executions (as most of the prisoners believe), or perhaps escape attempts cut down. But we actually see very little violence. The prisoners and guards seem mostly docile and without the air of aggression projected in modern prison scenes. Guards here are peevish and rude more than hostile, and inmates mostly just sullen. This is more of an existential imprisonment. It doesn't look like any kind of place I'd want to spend time, but it's preferable to the prisons we see in popular culture these days, where the preoccupation is rape, followed by random death by shiv. No one gives any thought to rape here, and the closest thing to a shiv is used only to help engineer the escape.

The Girl Can't Help It (1956)

USA, 99 minutes
Director: Frank Tashlin
Writers: Frank Tashlin, Herbert Baker, Garson Kanin
Photography: Leon Shamroy
Music: Little Richard, Julie London, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, Platters, Treniers, Ray Anthony, Abbey Lincoln
Editor: James B. Clark
Cast: Jayne Mansfield, Tom Ewell, Edmond O'Brien, Henry Jones, John Emery, Barry Gordon

The Girl Can't Help It looks like it might have started as an attempt to repeat the success of Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch from just the year before. Tom Ewell reprises his role as a mild-mannered (not to say dweebish) comfortable husband type, and Jayne Mansfield gets the sexpot honors that Marilyn Monroe had in the first picture. And the story goes similar places. But there are a couple of key ingredients The Girl Can't Help It has that The Seven Year Itch does not. The first is director and cowriter Frank Tashlin, whose style and instincts were honed as a key figure at the Warner Brothers animation factory in the '30s. After this movie he would go on to work with Jerry Lewis. The second is rock 'n' roll—real rock 'n' roll, from 1956.

In fact, the whole thing is so packed with music there's room for names you're sure to recognize—Little Richard, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Fats Domino, and the Platters—as well as some that maybe you won't: Ray Anthony, the Chuckles, Eddie Fontaine, the Treniers. And there are even a few names, such as Abbey Lincoln and Julie London, that make you wonder how they happened to wander into this at all. My guess—again, because this is still so relatively early, in 1956—is they just cast the net wide: if it was a hit because of jukeboxes (and/or radio), it was a candidate for inclusion. And it's that sense of all-embracing inclusion as much as anything that makes this movie such a great big kick.

The Pusher (1956)

SPOILERS STOP READING NOW. This third book in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain is also the third book in McBain's original three-book contract. By the time he was actually writing it he already had a contract for the next three. But the road had been bumpy for a young writer, breaking in, as documented in a series of prefaces (in this case, an afterword, to avoid the spoiler) which he wrote for them in the early '90s, as they were republished with some fanfare. The forces that be at his publisher did not want him to marry off the hero, Steve Carella, for example. They thought he had to be an eligible bachelor. Before long Cotton Hawes was introduced exactly to fill that role. For this one, McBain decided rather dramatically to kill Carella now that he had married and couldn't any longer be the hero. You catch a little whiff of tantrum in this decision. And that is what this book exists to deliver, decked out in the strange garb of murders occurring around small-scale heroin dealers. The 87's own Lieutenant Byrnes bizarrely turns up with a high school kid who's also a mainlining heroin addict. None of it makes a lot of sense, though maybe that's something to do with '50s youth and heroin addiction. It's only the scene where Steve Carella comes face-to-face with his shooter that the intensity level indicators peg the meters. It turns out it was all a misunderstanding and everybody wanted Steve Carella alive after all, not least McBain himself, who got orders from the publisher to turn the frown upside-down on the face of the would-be widow, and literally to turn those tears of sorrow into tears of joy instead. Done and done—one and a half paragraphs added, as I count it, and the lifelong hero of the whole thing escapes by the skin of his teeth. In terms of whether you need to read it, well, no, not so much, unless you're intending a real deep dive into the whole series. Basically, the first six are about organizing it for long-term stability. It's fun to read the work of a writer who clearly thrives on putting himself out there in terms of making it up as he went along. Here the dramatic punch everything is calculated for is based on something that didn't happen after all—oops, do-over style. Give McBain credit though—he got much better at wounding and killing beloved characters. This is basically a trial balloon that fizzled. Even so, count me with McBain and everyone who appreciates that Steve Carella lived on.

In case it's not at the library.

Cop Hater (1956)

Cop Hater is the first novel in what became the giant 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter, which wasn't his real name either). It's about what you'd expect from a hungry young writer in his late 20s with a lot of raw talent: uneven and a little crude. It's worth the visit for completists but not many others. (I would say start approximately anywhere else but here—selected by random and out of sequence. But that's just the way I've done it. Every time I have tried to read them in order I have foundered in the first handful.) The debt to Dragnet is perhaps nowhere else so clear, and the story perhaps nowhere else so shapeless. The main idea, putting the focus on an ensemble of detectives and policemen rather than a single hero, is also perhaps nowhere so abused. No fewer than three detectives appear and die: Hank Bush, David Foster, and Mike Reardon. Gone. R.I.P. We hardly knew ye. But fair enough, sanctioned by the title. We see Steve Carella for the one and only time as a single man—the story ends on his wedding with Teddy. We see Bert Kling as a patrolman and already unlucky, though not yet specifically with women. The story is structured like a mystery, which means a reveal. It feels slightly rote and mechanical, but it's also fair by the rules of these things. We might have guessed the identity of the culprit, and it could have been others as well. McBain got better at this, especially when he found other ways to approach the problem of a mystery—or, better, all but abandoned it, using it only as one more element, sometimes a minor one, along with police procedure, character development, and his seductive bantering language. Obviously McBain learned to be more sparing and deliberate with his kill-offs of continuing characters, and he was quick to feel his way into developing them across the series. He got better at everything in every way. That's the reason I point away from this. He worked at it, and got better, but the enterprise came to him in patches, fits, and false starts over many decades. He was best—most consistent, complex, conversational, rollicking—in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, though there are many great stories at every point. I'm just happy some acquisitions editor saw fit to keep throwing contracts at him—or maybe that was the book-buying public beating down doors. Cop Hater is a good start, but it's rough.

In case it's not at the library.

Night and Fog (1956)

Nuit et brouillard, France, 32 minutes, documentary
Director/editor: Alain Resnais
Writers: Jean Cayrol, Chris Marker
Photography: Ghislain Cloquet, Sacha Vierny
Music: Hanns Eisler

Made in the mid-'50s, Alain Resnais's documentary often feels strangely inhibited, as if 10 years were still not time enough to think about, or talk about, or show, the evils of Germany's concentration camp system. Even the abbreviated length, just over half an hour, suggests the delicacy, the unwillingness to engage—the sense it is somehow sacrilege even to acknowledge the terrible reality. The visible signs of evil are limited, if blunt, which is part of its point. The footage from the '50s, shot on color film, has the bland look of road trip home movies. The camp sites that it visits have been abandoned to nature. The buildings of the camps still stand but they are crumbling and unused. Grassy nature is reclaiming them, softening the sharp lines. But the memories are still searing. They always will be. Documentary film and photos in black and white alternate with these inoffensive scenes, offering up images of the horrors and humiliations we know, or think we know: corpses in railroad boxcars, lines of naked prisoners standing in roll call formation, mountains of sorted personal effects, decapitated heads in baskets, corpses bulldozed into the ground. Written and narrated by Jean Cayrol, a survivor, the film is at pains to imply more than it says. It's a matter of decorum—what it implies, after all, is unspeakable. It struggles every second to walk the line between dignity and the impulse to pule at atrocity. It is dense with information and allusion, the images playing off the narration and the facts disclosed or shown, reminiscent in that way of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (Marker a cowriter on Night and Fog), Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (where the ideas are abstracted), and of course Marcel Ophuls's Sorrow and the Pity. By 1969, when The Sorrow and the Pity came out, the dams were bursting. There was more willingness to consider at length the monstrous events—that documentary is over four hours long. In another 15 years, Shoah would more than double that. Less than 10 years more, Steven Spielberg was up for Oscars for a four-hour narrative treatment, Schindler's List. The enormity of that part of Nazi history, the so-called Final Solution (die Endlösung), has sunk in slowly. Some even deny it altogether. Night and Fog is only incidentally informational—it's intended for people who already know the basic outlines, whose lives were directly affected, whose trauma is evidenced most by the mute countenance. It lives on as an evocative symbol of the difficulty of responding to great wrong: with barbarous yawps of rage, yet restrained down to seething fury by the survivor's impulse not to talk about it at all, not to become the ranting thing they already hate. Civilized man is rational man—we cling to that. The images, particularly toward the end, grow more horrifying, as the world discovers the camps after World War II. Everything in this documentary passes, is soon over, except the unease it produces, which lasts a long time—hopefully, long enough. But frankly I'm as dubious about that as the filmmakers themselves, who are clear in the end. Brutalizing anxiety, and unending skepticism for human capacity to do the right thing, are the legacy of the Nazi regime, and thus necessarily of this short documentary.

"The Minority Report" (1956)

Philip K. Dick's 1956 short story is easily recognized in Steven Spielberg's 2002 film adaptation of it, which is only more remarkable for the fact that nearly half a century separates them. The technology is very different—they're still using punch cards and audio tape in the Dick story whereas Spielberg convened a consortium of technical experts and/or visionary whatsits to inform the view of  future technology he used in his picture, which includes hacking directly into human brains, as well as all manner of strangely probable urban design. In the story, our hero John Anderton is middle-aged and over the hill; in the movie he's Tom Cruise, capable of extraordinary chin-ups in battle situations. But the basics are there: computer analysis predicts crimes that are then thwarted before they happen. "Precrime" has practically wiped out murder and other violent crime, yet everyone in prison is by definition innocent of actually doing something. There's the rub, and it chafes as much in 2002 as in 1956. Anderton finds himself suddenly charged with a precrime and, convinced it's a put-up job by a career rival, he runs and attempts to get to the bottom of it all. The precogs who see the future in dream states are a trio of genetically mutated humans who are taken as developmentally disabled by most, and treated like animals raised for consumption. In fact, their appalling role in this is largely unexamined in either story or movie. To me their treatment is clearly a greater institutional crime than jailing people for what they weren't able to do, given at least that it seemed to be working for the purpose. But the issue bothering most people around here is the one about imprisoning technical innocents, with its ringing echoes of Enlightenment priorities. It's not that Dick and Spielberg are unaware of the inhumane treatment of the precogs—both depictions are remarkably brutish, though in different ways—it's more that they don't know what to do with it, and genuinely seem more interested in the issues of precrime criminal justice. And they are worthy issues, no doubt, complex and gristly. We need to stop people murdering one another if we can, of course. It's just, for me, if you're enslaving and brutalizing people to get that information in the first place, that's the first issue you'd want to deal with. Thus, both story and movie feel slightly beside the point, for all the interesting highlights they otherwise have to offer.

In case it's not at the library (and in other anthologies).

The Mugger (1956)

This slender novel comes very early in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain—only the second book, and it shows in some ways. He is still figuring out the pieces and where they belong. A couple of detectives here were not familiar to me (Havilland and Temple) and others are missing. Steve Carella is reported as being on a honeymoon, but no Cotton Hawes, no Andy Parker, no Arthur Brown. In many ways the narrative is what's called in comic books an "origin" story, as we see patrolman Bert Kling take on the investigation of a murder and end up promoted to detective by story's end. An undated preface by McBain (which Wikipedia has as 2002) is something of an apology by way of explanation for these deficiencies, or oddities, and others. As a novelist, he's just evidently not quite comfortable yet, hasn't entirely worked his way in to the grooves ahead. Some of the best features of the 87th Precinct novels, I think, are the natural narrative asides he develops, and also a knack he can have, admittedly to differing degrees, of tying things together with themes, puns, coincidences, and more strategies. He got to be very artful in these books, but The Mugger is not really one of them. It has some interest for its mid-'50s setting, and there is a twist to one of the stories, but not a very good one. Bert Kling is not that interesting, let alone a new love interest for him in Claire Townsend. Interestingly, it is exactly the new love interests for Bert Kling that would come to be one of the most compelling threads in McBain's larger tapestry. There's not much to see here beyond rudiments. I recall some of the '50s books as very good so I'm not writing anything off yet except this one specifically, and even then all I'm saying is you can wait awhile on this one if you're stacking up McBains to read. Put it close to the bottom of the stack. He's still in the middle of figuring things out. From the vantage of reading many of the later ones first, you get a better sense of what will be discarded, and then some sense into the thinking that put it all together, as it evolved.

In case it's not at the library.

36. Screamin' Jay Hawkins, "I Put a Spell on You" (1956)

(listen)

This early rock 'n' roll novelty—recorded in a drunken session Hawkins claims he didn't remember even the next day, banned from radio in some places for its "cannibalistic" noises, and generally so weird that it never cracked the charts—has managed to transcend its strange pedigree to become a classic in its own right. I know I was aware of it before Jim Jarmusch's 1984 film Stranger Than Paradise but that's certainly where it really caught my attention, bawling out of a cassette tape player that the female lead carried with her wherever she went (Hawkins himself later made a memorable appearance in another Jarmusch film worth seeing, Mystery Train). Knowing the backstory to the song, the elements of the drunkenness and even the "cannibalistic" noises, may (or may not) clarify what you're hearing, but I think the truth is that they work only to the extent they complement and sharpen the tension with the careful and plodding attack by the sax and rhythm section—and what's that, a banjo?—setting up something that is equal parts clownish and supernaturally powerful, and altogether startlingly original, which Jarmusch played to perfectly. I'm not entirely convinced Hawkins ever had a firm handle on what he had wrought, but he was anyway able to take it and parlay it into an over-the-top shtick involving props such as coffins, capes, skulls, and the like, all of that rather remarkable of course for the '50s. Now it bears the label generally of "shock rock," and it laid the ground for the likes of Screaming Lord Sutch, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, arguably even Alice Cooper and everything that followed in his wake. But this is ground zero for all of that, and it's pretty special in its own right.

The Searchers (1956)

USA, 119 minutes
Director: John Ford
Writers: Frank S. Nugent, Alan Le May
Photography: Winton C. Hoch
Music: Max Steiner
Editor: Jack Murray
Cast: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, Natalie Wood, John Qualen, Olive Carey, Henry Brandon, Ken Curtis, Hank Worden, Walter Coy, Dorothy Jordan

I have to admit this has always been fairly an acquired taste for me, as John Ford has tended to be generally, and westerns too for that matter. And while I'm at it I better note also that I have little appreciation for John Wayne either—entirely overrated, I think, by a generation who saw some ideal of manliness in his grouchy, laconic contempt for everyone and everything that falls within the orbit of his characters. I'll grant that he's an icon, for what that's worth—because how could I not?—but for me he is an annoying, one-note figure whose various achievements, such as they are, are mostly a matter of someone else knowing how to erect a setting for him.

Certainly that's what we have here, a crafty piece of work that is always beautiful to look at, often astonishingly so, with a strange, darkly stirring, and disturbing story. Yet it's almost fatally out of balance with itself, frequently harsh or lumbering in its details and with broad swaths of cringe-inducing humor—routinely belittling ethnic minorities, abusing "squaws," offering up grotesquely cornpone accents, and when all else fails going to the yuk of last resort, butt hurts—which unfortunately swamp the many admirable subtleties of Ford's obvious gifts for economical and visual storytelling.

"Tutti-Frutti" (1956)

40. Little Richard, "Tutti-Frutti" (Jan. 28, 1956, #17)

Talk about iconic, talk about the origins of rock 'n' roll, talk about the detonation points of history. Little Richard—though he did not come from nowhere, hardly—about had it all, not least the wit to invent "A-wop-bop-a-loo-mop a-lop-bam-boom" and then use it to open this, his first hit, cramming it down the microphone hard. He's the one pumping the piano—later a saxophone shows itself in—and the whole thing is delivered with a fervent fever across its two and a half minutes that is equal parts church throw-down and titanic pleasure release. It may sound rather tame to our ears now, but I think that's more the production and the recording technology. What doesn't sound tame is Little Richard's vocal, a fact easily enough detected when one attempts to sing along and match him note for note, intonation for intonation. Then you'll feel it. He's all over the register: falsetto hoots, various growls, grunting flourishes, hard breathing, and that attempt always to enunciate those nonsense syllables as if they mean something. Because they do, and it's a meaning that transcends language, which makes his strategy really the only way to do it (just don't call it speaking in tongues). Little Richard made his bones with this, repeating the same kind of stunt over the next year and a half or so. If it's tempting to argue for any one of them over the others, that's a matter of personal taste—they are all essentially of a piece. He then retired into a career that continues today, more than 50 years on, vacillating between obedience to the Lord and a return to these devilish sounds and the kind of media empire that produces them. Little Richard himself, of course, would never use the term "media empire," even in regard to his appearances on "Hollywood Squares."

"Why Do Fools Fall in Love" (1956)

59. Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" (Feb. 18, 1956, #6)

The story of Frankie Lymon represents one of the great tragedies  and monumental travesties of rock 'n' roll and incidentally a fine cautionary tale about the music industry, its sordid origins and questionable business practices (which persist to this day, though it has also seen a good deal of comeuppance in the past decade, and few industries deserve it more richly, at least speaking in general terms). But complaining about the music industry is like complaining about professional sports, or the weather. Nobody ever does anything about it, and the point quickly becomes ever-diminishing, particularly when it's someone like me with my sour, broken-record attitude, which only has the effect of making me a notably difficult source to take seriously on the issue. So, here, go read up on the basics about Lymon if you're interested. For various reasons (Lymon himself not least among them), this distilled essence of pure doo wop joy would turn out to be just about the sum total of everything we ever got from him and his crew, certainly far and away the best of it. The bass singer groans it into motion, a snare drum powers it into action, and a simple arrangement provides all the setting needed for the primary charm, which is Frankie Lymon's pristine 13-year-old soprano vocal soaring and swooping and asking the eternal questions: "Why do birds sing so gay / And lovers await the break of day? ... Why does the rain fall from up above? ... Why does my heart skip this crazy beat? ... Why do fools fall in love?" A chattering sax comes along at one break to underline the point that what we have here is rock 'n' roll, and to make it a fun dance record. It's as simple and as profound as you want to make it, and by all rights it ought to last approximately forever.

The Very Best of Little Richard (1956-1964)

"Tutti-Frutti" The original wild man of rock 'n' roll, and accept no substitutes. In his prime—hell, even now—there is no one like Little Richard [Penniman], of Macon, Georgia, though plenty have tried. James Brown, Paul McCartney, and Otis Redding all started their careers dazzled by and frequently outright imitating him (Redding also hailed from Macon), adopting his various stylings vocally if not sartorially (few before the '70s were willing to so publicly attempt such transparent light-in-the-loafers outlandishness) in order to find their rock 'n' roll ways. Bob Dylan wrote in his high school yearbook, circa 1959, that he aspired to play with Little Richard. Jimi Hendrix once said he wanted to do with his guitar what Little Richard did with his voice, by implication his performance. Prince reaches all the way through James Brown to get to the essence of Little Richard. This is no matter of simply paying lip service to a hoary rock 'n' roll cliché or legend. A listen to what Little Richard accomplished in his prime, and maybe a gander at what he contributes to the movie The Girl Can't Help It, should serve to answer any further questions. On a driving job I had once, long ago, I can never forget how I lit up like a pinball machine whenever the oldies station played one of those early hits: "Tutti-Frutti," "Long Tall Sally," "Rip it Up," "Keep a Knockin'," and others. The excitement is palpable, irresistible, and enduring to this day. Penniman, like so many of the early rock 'n' rollers, may be driven as much by mad flight into and out of the arms of Satan—which, at least in his case, could as well simply be the mundane matter of refusing to accept his own sexuality, though arguably that amounts to the same thing. His career itself has been marked by a similar dynamic. Rock 'n' roller, minister of the church, media celebrity, hallowed communicant, on and on it goes, back and forth. Fortunately for us (if perhaps less so for him), all of that tension is compressed into this music, which, as the saying goes, will never die. That's the art of it, and his never-ending accomplishment.