“Zooey” (1957)

As I say, it’s possible to take Franny and Zooey, published in 1961, as a kind of novel in the eccentric manner of say William Faulknew, e.g., If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem or Go Down, Moses. Maybe Salinger even intended it that way. “Franny,” a longish short story too short to be a novella, and “Zooey,” a shortish novel too long to be a novella, are obviously related. Franny and Zooey are brother and sister, Glasses, and both narratives are about the same thing, Franny’s nervous breakdown and/or spiritual crisis. Together they remain one of the cornerstones of the Glass family saga as we’ve known it since the 1950s. Franny and Zooey are the youngest of seven children born between 1917 and 1934, all of whom were regulars at one point or another on a radio show called It’s a Wise Child. A lot of the bulk of “Zooey” is Glass family backstory. In fact, it’s notably remote from the main players as we have them so far, Seymour and Buddy, the two oldest. Buddy is the chronicler of these tales and happy to insert and sneak in credit for himself at will, but he’s not there with Franny and Zooey, and Seymour is years dead. We get a spirited comical dialogue between Zooey and their mother Bessie (Zooey is in the bath, reading a long letter from Buddy). And then we get a much longer speechy dialogue between Zooey and Franny on the complications of life etc. We are still getting backstory in the Glass family stories. That’s a large part of “Zooey.” It still feels like preamble to something much larger. In the legend so far, Buddy and especially Seymour are spiritual seekers well-versed on many world religions and sects and their ways. Franny’s crisis, obviously connected in some way to Seymour, is based on an anonymous mystic Christian 19th-century Russian peasant’s book with ideas of how to live (a real tome, The Way of a Pilgrim). Salinger’s voice is clarion and charming as always—a natural New Yorker writer and pleasure to read. He was on his own spiritual quest, increasingly seen in the last four pieces he published in book form. I want to take this opportunity to say that, if there is more to the Glass family story, as persistent rumors say, then let’s have it, please. What we’ve got has never felt complete.

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Read story online (scroll down).

“A Visit to Santa Claus” (1957)

[spoilers?] The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) sniffs at this story by Richard Matheson as “non-genre,” which, OK, fair enough. Call it a crime thriller story then. Either way it’s reasonably good for December, though it is soulless conte cruel in a way that Matheson and only a few others can do. It works quite well as suspense, though it trucks in the familiar midcentury trope of the homicidal marriage. This husband and wife have been together maybe 10 years, with a boy of 5, who still believes in Santa Claus. It’s December. They’re out shopping at a mall. They are tired. The kid won’t stop nagging them to see “Sanna Claus.” They have finished shopping and are at their car loading in purchases, when the husband decides he wants to humor the kid after all. They had been promising him he would see Santa on Tuesday. Now the husband says he’ll take the kid in, the wife can wait there, they won’t be long. It’s not hard to see something is off here. Why leave her waiting in the car on a cold winter night? As things unfold, we learn it's part of a nefarious plan. The husband has hired a hitman to kill his wife and this is when it’s going down. There’s a lot of business with the car keys—the wife wants them so she can pull the car up to get them when they come back out again. It’s a sensible plan, but the husband pretends he doesn’t hear her. When he drops the keys for the hitman to pick up the kid notices and calls it to his attention. Handing off the keys thus becomes a substantial part of the story, and it’s more and more apparent it’s all a harebrained scheme, hatched with a guy the husband met in a bar, and further confirmed when we learn the terms: $100 up front, $900 later. It’s not the way these things are done, as we know from movies and such—harder to say perhaps whether people were as sophisticated about murders for hire in 1957 as we are now. Matheson skillfully makes his own plot holes work for him, by making the scheme so painfully elaborate and amateurish. All kinds of complications keep coming along even as Matheson is revealing more about the plot. The kid is a perfect uncontrollable element. Yes, ISFDB, it has no supernatural or fantasy elements. It’s just an incident in December. But if it’s Matheson you can count on getting hooked and then getting a ride. This story goes to a bleak place, of course, with a twist of a twist of an ending, but that’s all just the usual drill. Get it on your kindle and read it at the food circus in your mall while taking a break from shopping.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Story not available online.

“Small World” (1957)

Among other things, this story by William F. Nolan is a good example of the blurring between horror and science fiction that was going on in the 1950s. It’s really a science fiction story—the premise involves an attack on Earth by aliens from outer space. It’s also very much in the realm of O. Henry or Maupassant with a calculated twist at the end custom-designed for shock, handwringing, and/or sad wisdom. Nolan is another prolific and well-decorated genre writer I don’t know that well. He wrote a lot of stories, but this one appears to be minor in the larger scheme of his work, which is perhaps capped by the 1967 novel Logan’s Run, a collaboration with George Clayton Johnson. This story may bear some similarities to that novel in that it features a character who is hiding and running around a lot, avoiding certain menace. Because its intention is to surprise, SPOILER warning now, as I’m about to give it away. The aliens killed everyone over the age of 6 and departed. This story takes place a few years after that. What our hero Lewis Stillman has spent the story avoiding is feral children. It’s not entirely original—Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life” has some of it and I suspect there are other examples. Are there 19th-century dystopias with feral children abroad on the land? Maybe. But it feels more to me like a midcentury science fiction natural. The setting is an abandoned Los Angeles, which suggests the scope nicely, even if the story gets a little too cluttered with street names. It takes a big bomb (or big alien technology in this case) to wreck a giant city like Los Angeles. Nolan is a pretty good writer, and the story works pretty well as suspense, but I have my nits. I thought the devotion of Lewis to Ernest Hemingway does not age this story well. Also: the original title was “The Small World of Lewis Stillman,” which I think by far the better title. The edited version is punchy, sure, but it always leads me to expect it’s going to be a story about coincidences. But, overall, really not bad. How did it get into an anthology so full of crap?

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
Read story online (scroll down).
Listen to story online.

Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

USA, 96 minutes

Director: Alexander Mackendrick

Writers: Clifford Odets, Ernest Lehman, Alexander Mackendrick

Photography: James Wong Howe

Music: Elmer Bernstein, Chico Hamilton Quintet

Editor: Alan Crosland Jr.

Cast: Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Martin Milner, Susan Harrison, Barbara Nichols, Emile Meyer, Clifford Odets, David White, Jeff Donnell

Technically, Sweet Smell of Success probably has to count as a noir, but it’s something of a lightweight one in terms of crime. The corruption runs deep and extends into the police force too, but there’s no particular foul crime—no murders. Instead it’s all about PR and newspaper columns, publicity and celebrity and making it. It’s new enough, and my memory is long enough, that it reminds me a little of scraping out freelance work from magazines and newspapers in the ‘80s. There was a PR angle to everything entertainment journalists did then, and Tony Curtis as press agent Sidney Falco, in perhaps the biggest performance of his career, is a certain ideal of the 24/7 hustler in that world. It's not about money or even power as such there, but rather about fame, recognition, adulation, as only the entertainment industry can deliver it.

I will say my memory is not long enough to remember Walter Winchell, the model for Burt Lancaster’s role as powerful gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, but the point is quickly understood. Hunsecker wields enough clout in his column that he can make and destroy reputations and careers. He has a faint odor too of the right-wing anticommunist polemicist / crank. In this particular case, Hunsecker has opinions about who his kid sister Susan (Susan Harrison) should and should not marry. Her beau, Steve Dallas (Martin Milner, later a cop on Adam-12), is a hotshot guitarist in a jazz group otherwise played by the Chico Hamilton Quintet. But Hunsecker thinks Dallas is beneath his sister and he applies his overbearing influence to breaking them up. There’s the story. Without any obvious motivation beyond pathology, it makes Sweet Smell of Success, as Hunsecker himself notes, basically a story about “shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun.”

"Smart Sucker" (1957)

This story by Richard Wormser is laughably ridiculous and ends on a weak and unbelievable note, but it has its moments. I’m probably willing to forgive its miscues because it’s from my earliest exposures to horror literature. Wormser was a prolific genre writer but ISFDB discounts him because, presumably, most of it was detective fiction and Westerns. So I’m not sure why they list this story because it’s just a human cruelty caper, a conte cruel, in the form of a remorseless urban gang of 20somethings who hang out in an obscure bar in the bad part of town and waylay strangers. Our hero, an office supplies salesman, wanders in unaware to get out of the rain. He knew it was a sketchy situation, but no one could expect this. Probably because I’m quite certain nothing like it has ever happened. Ever. The gang in the bar is a bunch of psychotic beatnik thrill killers, more or less. The bartender appears to be part of it and closes up the joint when they head out on their extortion and robbery escapades. Why do they use such a complicated way of doing it? That’s hard to say. Maybe kicks. Because it doesn’t make much sense any other way and who knows what you can expect from a beatnik. It also makes no sense that they just let their victim go. I was fully aware at all times of how silly each separate incident is in this story. They’re strung like pearls on a choker. Wormser is a pretty good pulpy crime writer and there’s just enough cruelty to put it, maybe, in something like the class of George Hitchcock’s “Invitation to the Hunt.” Then I saw on ISFDB that “Smart Sucker” was translated into French in 1967 and it clicked. There is something Godardian about all this, like Alphaville, Pierrot le fou, Band of Outsiders, Breathless—something a little cerebral and French. Even the title phrase—“sucker,” specifically, is a key word in this story, stylized the way it is hit so hard and so often. This psycho gang looks forward to Charles Manson and all that, but the strains were already creeping into the pop culture youth scene in the ‘50s, with The Wild One and other images of juvenile delinquency, some sliding over into more psychotic precincts. That’s just how it was for nonconformists at the time to some people—if you’re psycho you gotta be French.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories My Mother Never Told Me, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
Story not available online.

"The Fly" (1957)

This story by the French-born British writer George Langelaan feels like a classic to me now for a few reasons. Published originally in Playboy, a solid source of horror in the '50s and '60s under Ray Russell's editorial hand, "The Fly" made it into an Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthology a few years later, where I read it as a kid. It was actually anthologized a lot in the '60s, as science fiction as well as horror. It has a fly theme, obviously, with which I had mild preoccupations then (see also Jane Rice's "Idol of the Flies"). It was quickly adapted for a 1958 movie, and I remember even staying up late to see it on TV. In the '80s, director and cowriter David Cronenberg adapted it for one of his best movies. I recently made a Fly day of it—read the long story and looked at the two adaptations. The 1958 movie is quite faithful to Langelaan's story, which is decidedly clunky and slow, but carried by its great idea: a scientist has basically invented teleportation and then a terrible mistake happens. Andre Delambre is a reckless cowboy of a scientist. For example, he's so excited about a successful teleportation of an inanimate object that he throws the family cat in to see how it goes with life and blows it to nothingness. He's sincere, he means well, but he is impatient and remarkably heedless. Having finally worked the bugs out of teleporting living beings, he climbs in to teleport himself. But alas there is a fly in the chamber with him.

In the story and the first movie, the switcheroos happen on a macro level and are relatively more antiseptic. There's one intriguing detail nothing is made of, but it always sticks with me: the printing on the first inanimate object he successfully teleports comes through backwards, suggesting levels of mirrors and reflection. But the rest is horrifying and/or gross enough. Andre's head and right arm end up on the fly, tiny size ("Help me!" this strange "white-headed" fly calls in munchkin voice), while the head and one tentacle-leg of the fly end up human-size on Andre. He drapes a towel over his head and communicates with his fashionable '50s wife Helene by typing out messages. I was surprised to see it's a color movie (my TV the first time was black and white) and then a little jarred by the motley cast, which includes Vincent Price, doing his usual thing, and David Hedison as Andre. I only know Hedison as a star of the TV show Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (rendered as "Voyage to See What's on the Bottom" by Mad magazine ... not sure why that has stuck with me). Hedison was later a ubiquitous hey-that-guy on TV shows like Cannon and Love, American Style. Patricia Owens as Helene plays it more or less like a screaming sexpot, and their kid Philippe (Henri in the story) is an unbearably normal Leave It to Beaver specimen. How Vincent Price got mixed up with all this is anyone's guess.

David Cronenberg rechristened all the characters and moved them to the big city, but his real innovation was taking the teleporter mix-up down to the genetic molecular level. The computer was confused during the reintegration process, we learn. This version of The Fly is focused more deliberately on the slow-motion transformation. The result is something far better than Langelaan's story, though plainly indebted to it. It doesn't hurt that the cast includes Jeff Goldblum as the reckless scientist Seth Brundle and Geena Davis as his casual love interest Ronnie. Goldblum is nearly pure sparkling charisma, eccentric as always but putting it over especially well here, and Davis keeps up with him. We see tendencies of flies start to overtake him, such as an inordinate taste for sugar. Eventually it proceeds to more fly-like modes of digestion, at which point we're reminded how much body horror is a staple of Cronenberg's work. Of all three versions, this Fly is best at working the horrific tragedy Langelaan intended. To unlock the secret of teleportation, and then to become vermin. Has anyone ever conceived a greater fall?

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
Read story online.

Nights of Cabiria (1957)

Le notti di Cabiria, Italy / France, 117 minutes
Director: Federico Fellini
Writers: Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini
Photography: Aldo Tonti
Music: Nino Rota
Editor: Leo Catozzo
Cast: Giulietta Masina, Francois Perier, Amedeo Nazzari, Franca Marzi, Dorian Gray, Dominique Delouche

It's possible that Giulietta Masina's greatest turn was as the lifelong partner of director and cowriter Federico Fellini. Her face is wonderfully expressive and she has a natural rapport with the camera, a trait common to all the greatest stars. But as an actress her range is limited. In her best roles—here and in Fellini's La Strada—she plays characters so simple and unaffected it sent me to check status of the term "mentally retarded" (the preference now appears to be "intellectually disabled"). She's not that, but the prostitute Cabiria (Masina), in spite of believing herself in the know, is almost pathologically trusting, innocent, easily fooled, always wearing her heart on her sleeve. The role in other hands (and/or written differently, like maybe think Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver) could call for a lot of skill to balance someone as apparently guileless with someone who nonetheless manages to survive—without a pimp, in fact, because the whole idea of one outrages Cabiria's sense of her own independence. It's admirable, but more naïve than anything. You might find yourself wondering how she gets away with it, but watch.

Fellini finds another way to tell the story of such extremities of the life. He torques up the movie magic glitter, even inside the neorealism frame he hadn't abandoned yet, with full support by Nino Rota's perfect score, and focuses on making a clown movie, which can also be seen as a variation on Chaplin's City Lights (with lots of elements from Modern Times as well, such as an evocative reverse shot at a key moment down the long roadway the Tramp and his girl walked, saying, "Buck up, never say die," etc.). Here's Wikipedia's groupthought: "The comedy that clowns perform is usually in the role of a fool whose everyday actions and tasks become extraordinary—and for whom the ridiculous, for a short while, becomes ordinary." Masina's face and manner are custom-built for it, with a dopy infectious grin and tilt of head and a love of physical motion for its own sake that is completely endearing. Like City Lights, like freaking Jerry Lewis once in a while, Nights of Cabiria is episodic, surprisingly gritty, playful and slapstick silly yet capturing indelible emotional moments, and in the end delivers up one of the great movie finishes. It's like a slice of three-layer chocolate cake it's so sweet and well done.

"The Misfits" (1957)

Story by Arthur Miller not available online.

In my rambling internet research on Arthur Miller's story, which in 1961 became a movie with Marilyn Monroe, I found it characterized as a novella (what I read was less than 20 printed pages), found unsubstantiated word of a 2002 novel version, and more often had to pick through information about the movie, for which Miller wrote the screenplay. I know the movie pretty well, and Miller's stage productions to some degree, but I was surprised by what I found in this short story. I'm sure this betrays my own stereotyping (is it the Clark Kent glasses Arthur Miller wore?) but it's way more outdoorsy and, um, masculinist than I expected. It focuses on a degraded mustanging operation of the three principals, all men (the most studly of them is named Gay, for what that's worth). Roslyn is a simmering presence who remains off stage. But she's on Gay's mind—Gay is her 46-year-old boyfriend who worries she might be sleeping with others, including his friends. In the movie Gay is played by Clark Gable and Roslyn by Marilyn Monroe—she is definitely on stage. (As a point of interest, The Misfits was to be the last film for both of them.) The short story details the round-up procedure used by the men, scaring wild horses with a plane diving at them and herding them to a rocky plateau where they can be picked off one by one with a pickup truck and a shrewd if cruel strategy. They get even fewer horses here than they did in the movie. It's pitiful. The horses are pathetically outmatched—and all they will bring from the rendering plant comes to about $100, divided between the three. They feel vaguely ashamed about what they're doing, but Gay keeps trying to cheer them with his motto, "Better than wages!" Yes, they all agree, it's better than wages, but they are still vaguely ashamed, even (or especially) Gay. What surprised me is how much, once into it, "The Misfits" has the structure and rhythms of a nature story. More specifically, it's on the order of a hunting story, but the hunt has been debased by the superiority of their technology and the weakness of the animals (there is a colt here that particularly breaks everyone's heart). This is much less like James Fenimore Cooper and Natty Bumppo and much more like Sarah Palin emptying automatic weapons into wolves from a helicopter. The only possible justification would be financial, and that is shown up for what it is in this story. Even in 1957, a hundred dollars split three ways was barely adequate for three days' work. In its sense of tragedy, "The Misfits" feels like something an East Coast playwright might come up with. But even that is a remarkably subtle element here. This is good stuff.

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

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Det sjunde inseglet, Sweden, 96 minutes
Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman
Photography: Gunnar Fischer
Music: Erik Nordgren
Editor: Lennart Wallen
Cast: Max von Sydow, Bengt Ekerot, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Nils Poppe, Bibi Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom

In spite of The Seventh Seal being so ripe for parody—and only more so as the years pass—I have never tired of sitting down for another look at it. From the powerful opening sound and images to the final resolution, director and writer Ingmar Bergman's robust and portentous contemplation of death is actually much more lively, varied, and interesting than the heavy-handed metaphors for which it is famous, e.g., especially, the game of chess between a knight returned to Sweden from Crusades-related activity versus Death personified, a kind of Uncle Fester figure in pasty make-up and form-concealing black drapery. Even the game of chess itself is more interesting than you would expect.

But the only notes I made when I looked at it again recently are as follows: "Fear of death." An old friend of mine died last month. Not anyone so close now, but a good friend in the past. More recently he and I seemed part of a broader phenomenon of reconnections made via social media. Many describe a similar arc. Several years ago, after tracing the webs of mutual friends and friending (that exciting gerund) this new way on Facebook, we had a few conversations on the phone and felt good about being in touch again. Not long after that, we started getting on one another's nerves again. So it goes. We weren't on the best terms when word got to me that he was gone.

"Sonny's Blues" (1957)

Read story by James Baldwin online.

James Baldwin's classic meditation is made up of equal parts brooding memoir, artful fictional devices, and, perhaps most surprising, a turn toward music criticism. Sonny is the younger brother of the first-person narrator by seven years, a jazz musician and on-and-off heroin addict. Their parents died before either was 25. They were raised in Harlem. The carefully unnamed narrator is a judgmental moralist, a high school algebra teacher embarrassed by indigenous African-American culture such as jazz. Interestingly, Sonny, who is a Charlie Parker follower, is embarrassed by the mention of Louis Armstrong, in one conversation where the narrator tries to connect with and understand him. "No. I'm not talking about none of that old-time, down home crap," Sonny retorts about Armstrong. The relationship between the two brothers is complicated as all family relationships are, with the additional burden of the African-American context. Here is where Baldwin is at his best in this story. He has concocted a voice for his narrator that balances delicately between stuffy erudition, reflexive contempt, and rage, dictating his words with an icy clinical precision. He's ashamed of Sonny's heroin addiction and legal troubles, but he made a promise to their mother the last time he saw her alive (a promise he hasn't kept very well) that he would look out and be there for Sonny when Sonny needed him. To the narrator, it's one more aggravating responsibility in a life of drudgery and frustration. Though he has a happy and good marriage, the narrator and his wife recently lost their 4-year-old daughter to polio. In the end, however, grudgingly and mostly against his will, he agrees to step into the nightclubs he detests to see Sonny perform. That performance is a revelation for the narrator and reader alike, as the music connects with the narrator in extraordinary ways. It's a wonderful voice in that moment, full of its own intelligence but with barely a vocabulary for the way the music moves and plays and develops. As he describes what the musicians are doing and the various elements of the song and arrangement, it evolves into as effective a description of real-time jazz as I've encountered anywhere. It's shorn particularly of Mezz Mezzrow hipsterism, because that is exactly the kind of thing the narrator loathes. In turn, that leads him to understand Sonny and fully see him for the first time. Really good stuff.

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

12 Angry Men (1957)

USA, 96 minutes
Director: Sidney Lumet
Writer: Reginald Rose
Photography: Boris Kaufman
Music: Kenyon Hopkins
Editor: Carl Lerner
Cast: Henry Fonda, Lee J. Cobb, E.G. Marshall, Jack Warden, Ed Begley, Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Jack Klugman, George Voskovec, Robert Webber, Edward Binns, Joseph Sweeney

12 Angry Men may be director Sidney Lumet's first feature film, but it draws on many years of experience in the early days of broadcast television, taking on the self-serious grain of message pictures and the confined space of a soundstage to the point where it's almost dreary. Reginald Rose's screenplay is based on his own stage play about a jury deliberation that proceeds much in the format of an Agatha Christie "10 little Indians" tale. We only learn about the murder case they are deliberating by way of their own sparring analysis and debate. On their first ballot, early in the movie, when they finally sit down to start hashing out a verdict, the tally is 11 to one for conviction. It's the hottest day of the year, a thunderstorm is brewing up just outside the windows, and they have to make a decision.

Rose's story is fairly pat—you come to understand quickly that the drift here is changing "guilty" votes to "not guilty" votes, one by one. There are many convenient plot points along the way but nothing egregious. It feels, still, vividly evocative of its time (which is not to say dated by any means), addressing most directly issues of prejudice and bigotry there at the early years of the modern civil rights movement. We get one look at the defendant in the establishing shots early. He is a young man of color, but after that it is perfectly ambiguous. He could be Arabic, Mexican, Italian, Greek, or many other ethnic strains or combinations. But more than that, more than anything, 12 Angry Men comes across as a nearly full-throated affirmation of the American system of justice, albeit leaving room for concerns about it from many different directions.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Smultronstället, Sweden, 91 minutes
Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman
Photography: Gunnar Fischer
Music: Erik Nordgren, Gute Loven
Editor: Oscar Rosander
Cast: Victor Sjostrom, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Bibi Andersson, Naima Wifstrand, Jullan Kindahl, Gertrud Fridh, Gunnel Brostrom, Gunnar Sjoberg

Wild Strawberries was one of the first art films I saw and thus remains one I still like, as it has many impressive tricks and stunts for the novice. Truthfully, since then, I have been around the block a couple of times about it. The bold, high-contrast black and white simplicity of the look, the general dour cast of mind, and the overbearing symbolism in the dream sequences were exciting as signifiers of high A - R - T. Later they seemed pretentious and trite for the same reasons. Now it all has a nostalgic glow—quaint, out of touch, overdone, perhaps, but very charming in places and often searing in its insights. And if it seems hackneyed, well, that might just be an indication of its influence.

Even if you've never seen it, it probably feels familiar within minutes. It has been parodied nearly as much as director and screenwriter Ingmar Bergman's other film of that year, The Seventh Seal. Victor Sjostrom plays Isak Borg, an accomplished doctor and researcher who has reached the age of 78. The film mostly takes place on a single day, a June 1—a day of long light in Sweden, as spring slips into summer—when Isak is scheduled to receive an honorary degree from a prestigious university for his life's work. The night before, he can't sleep. He has a dream that looks to us now like an epitome of art film dream clichés—clocks with no hands, his own body spilling out of a coffin, etc. But it sets a mood, almost first thing in the movie, and begins to soften us for the strange, deliberate, Brechtian way that fantasies, dreams, and memories mix and comingle in this picture, existing side by side across time and space. See also Woody Allen's Another Woman, which lifts the stream of consciousness device whole and recontextualizes it nicely.

Killer's Choice (1957)

Another early entry in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain, Killer's Choice is short, tight, and focused, covering two separate cases. McBain is still sorting out and trying things here. With the title, for example, he abandons the specific criminal type of the previous three (The Mugger, The Con Man, The Pusher) and embarks on a set of four which will include the word "killer" (Killer's Choice, Killer's Payoff, Lady Killer, Killer's Wedge). More significantly it's also the debut of Cotton Hawes, which, as McBain explains in an introduction written in 1991, was a requirement of the publisher. According to McBain, the publisher believed heroes had to be single (and male, of course) in order to appeal to women readers, who did not like married men. Interesting conventional wisdom. John Lennon's first marriage was kept secret during the heights of Beatlemania for similar reason, setting aside all the obvious differences between rock stars and fictional homicide detectives. It has to be a '50s artifact—that thinking is retired now, right? At any rate, it explains a lot about why Hawes—he of the red hair with the white streak from the knife wound—remained generally the most uninteresting and undeveloped character for the length of the series. On autopilot, he is a competent investigator and an empty womanizer. It also explains how Steve Carella, married or no, publisher edicts or no, remained the de facto hero of the long-term series. That is, assuming a certain pugnacious stubbornness to McBain's own character, which I think is a safe assumption. In Killer's Choice, McBain is still exercising his right to kill off characters summarily. Roger "We Hardly Knew Ye Either" Havilland gets it here. The main case takes on the usual shape of a mystery story. A woman turns up dead in a liquor store and the investigation reveals she had secrets. As in life, there are mysteries everywhere. My fascination with police procedurals, in the first place, is because that's the way most mysteries are solved. McBain gives himself more latitude here to dispense with red herrings and cute twists and such. The twists and turns are often more convincing when they're not cute. Publisher demands notwithstanding, McBain is starting to pick favorites among his characters, which I count as a good thing. He likes—no, he loves—Carella and Carella's wife Teddy, obviously, but Bert Kling is already getting a fair amount of play too. McBain hasn't figured out much of what he's going to do with Kling yet, but he's a person of interest. I'd call this one of the good ones from the '50s.

In case it's not at the library.

The Con Man (1957)

The Con Man is another early entry in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain, and it's a pretty good one. A lot of the best of McBain's writing is already present—the basic thrust of the procedural, multiple storylines only tangentially related, inspired riffing around an idea captured in the title, and the characters we have come to know and like. In fact, the afterword McBain wrote for it many years later explains how this was actually a critical juncture for the detective Steve Carella's prominent position across the series. This may be the place where he became the de facto hero of it, along with his wife Teddy, who is beautiful, deaf, and communicates by signing—interesting and remarkable for a major character, especially then. I think what I like best, however, is the loose, swimming rush of words as McBain finds a way to make his rolling language fit within the strictures of genre writing. He knows how to do this, obviously—the setup for the climax, for example, is carefully constructed to let a scene of tremendous suspense develop and unfold naturally. On the surface, even so, he maintains the jokey, goofing tone that helps propel it and make it even more of a pleasure to read. The idea of the "con" is played with every way he can, continually and allusively, describing classic cons, including new twists as plot points, and working the metaphorical territory to good effect as well. I haven't thought that much of the '50s entries so far in this series, but this is a good one. Maybe even a good place to start for anyone who has never read him. You could certainly do worse.

In case it's not at the library.

Wild Town (1957)

If anyone is looking for a generic Jim Thompson novel, you could do worse than Wild Town. It's less than inspired but packed with familiar Thompson notes, including a return appearance by the Texas deputy Lou Ford, star of The Killer Inside Me. Unfortunately, Ford has become less psychopathic ham and more Lex Luthor crossbred with Professor Moriarty, a sort of utility super villain who knows all, sees all, etc., which makes him a good deal less interesting. Once again the scene is a big hotel, and an isolated Texas boom town, and once again the plot is distractingly intricate. Babes abound, most of them swell-looking, and our hero, Bugs McKenna, is a typical Thompson outsider antihero, gruff, even corrupted, but with a heart of gold, kind of. For no reason I can discern, Lou Ford's girlfriend Amy Standish—also from The Killer Inside Me—gets a big role too. I get the sense from these mid-'50s novels that someone was seriously counseling Thompson to focus on plot because that is ultimately all they are, to the detriment of Thompson's rampaging, demented energy, which feels in Wild Town as if it is absolutely suffocating. At least Wild Town helps me see better how great The Killer Inside Me is by comparison. In fact, the two side by side really throws the situation in perspective. Checking Thompson's biography, I find Wild Town marks the end of a sustained burst of productivity, which maybe helps explain why the last few have felt a little exhausted. Jim Thompson was not done here—arguably his best work was still ahead of him, which we will be getting to presently. As for Wild Town, it's only for the hardest of hardcore fans, I would say. I'm not touching on all Thompson's work in this little series, but had meant to get to his best. Maybe I cast my net just a little wide. Wild Town is approximately 98% recycled devices, with diminishing vitality. No one needs to see Lou Ford like this. Feel free to skip.

In case it's not at the library.

The Kill-Off (1957)

The Kill-Off is Jim Thompson's second bite (at least) at the As I Lay Dying apple, along with The Criminal. I associate the narrative strategy—multiple first-person stories by different characters from chapter to chapter—with the 1930 Faulkner novel, which now that I think of it has its own sources in the epistolary tradition of literature, alternating personal communications of different characters, which of course goes way back: Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a very fine example, and that's from the 18th century. But taking it out of the realm of letter-writing, perhaps prompted by influences of cinema with its cut-and-paste editing, Faulkner (or someone else?) came up with something that proved popular with noir writers of the '30s and '40s, and here is Thompson doing it again. Indeed, it feels like a carefully refined approach to the strategy. No character gets more than one chapter, for example. Thompson attempts (almost comically sometimes) to strike and maintain a specific voice for each one. But his two basic modes predominate: a foul surly turn of character mood whose foundations are beyond our ken alternating with a kind of prissy (and hilarious) formality. It is the usual candy store of taboos: alcoholism, adultery, miscegenation, incest, murder, rape, de facto slavery. Too bad there's not a fetish involving kitchen sinks. A lot of The Kill-Off was not convincing to me, notably the racial situation. It's set in a New England resort town for no particular reason. Characters have names like Pete Pavlov and Marmaduke "Goofy" Gannder. Still, I have an intense curiosity about one thing: What did people spending the original 35 cents make of these novels? If I had a time machine I'd like to travel back to 1957 or 1958 and strike up a conversation with someone I saw reading it. I should say the plot for The Kill-Off is reasonably well worked out. But the cast is so uniformly grotesque it's hard to care about or even follow all that's going on. A rich old woman sucking the energy off of a much younger man, a corrupt doctor and his mysterious maid Hattie, random nightclub shenanigans, prostitutes, surly jazz players, surly carnival moguls. Where do you put your hat down? Don't forget the weird structure! As for the title, it has something to do with Pillsbury Bake-Off competitions, which were popular in the '50s.

In case it's not at the library.

3:10 to Yuma (1957)

USA, 92 minutes
Director: Delmer Daves
Writers: Halsted Welles, Elmore Leonard
Photography: Charles Lawton Jr.
Music: George Duning
Editor: Al Clark
Cast: Glenn Ford, Van Heflin, Felicia Farr, Leora Dana, Henry Jones, Richard Jaeckel, Robert Emhardt

It's interesting to watch virtually back to back the two movie versions of the 1953 Elmore Leonard story, "Three-Ten to Yuma," made 50 years apart out of the same story—indeed, the same screenplay, as Halsted Welles (who died in 1990) gets first writing credits in both. Many of the same plot points and even scenes and lines of dialogue recur in both. Yet they are two rather different films. The 2007 remake is a remake, first, hallmark of a metastasizing trend of the 2000s (and counting), patching in state-of-the-art action stylings by expanding a good deal, and not unsuccessfully, on the story's middle section. The original eschews a lot of the fancy set pieces of the remake, no doubt in line with budget considerations, instead focusing on the story much more as suspense chamber piece with Rod Serling-level ironies of human foible.

For anyone interested in treatments of Elmore Leonard stories they are a particularly interesting pair, both coming from outside of the '80s and '90s bubble, when Leonard may have been coasting a little on the superstar status he enjoyed. (I need to see Get Shorty and Out of Sight again but I remember them now as bloated and self-satisfied and was definitely underwhelmed.) Both versions of 3:10 to Yuma, however, are worth seeing I think (and then, with me, it's on to catch up with the FX TV show Justified, which I suddenly realize I have been hearing good things about for years now). But if you only have time for one—and I know how that goes, life is short after all—then this 1957 version is your pick. The usual spoiler disclaimer verbiage goes here.

Harptones, "What Did I Do Wrong?" (1957)

(listen)

The Harptones, a mid-'50s vocal group out of New York, practically established a whole wing of the music that came to be known as "doo wop." Along with the Orioles (probably the true originals), and various forays by others, they perfected that innovation of bending a droopy-dog tempo and gospel harmonies to the burden of a soaring, deliberate vocal lead. They had a coulda-woulda-shoulda star in Willie Winfield, plus an arranger, Raoul Cita, who was built in to the act, and in their fleeting moment really nailed a sound to the floor. But the Harptones never did have a hit, not even on R&B charts. "What Did I Do Wrong?" is not considered top-tier by most among such better-known efforts as "Sunday Kind of Love," "The Shrine of St. Cecilia," and a version of "Life Is But a Dream." But I think it's a real honey, my favorite by them. It steps in with a good bit of deceptive pomp and dignity, then a pause, and then ladies and gentlemen Miss Carol Blades and the song is underway proper. As it moves in deeper, it proves to be almost a little spindly, led by Blades's big voice wielded like an instrument piercing the swirl of vocal harmonies, which alternate between thick washes lush as velvet curtains and more free-floating probing lines standing up and sitting down like big dogs yawning, and way off in the background a small band, tapped and brushed drums, a bass, a piano. It hits a real nerve on that big start particularly with the great line of the title, delivered so tenderly and with such a naked heart. For a moment it's as if the wounds themselves can be felt. "What did I do wrong?" That's the question.

Nights of Cabiria (1957)

#37: Nights of Cabiria (Federico Fellini, 1957)

I first came to appreciate Fellini as a result of an incident when I was working as an advertising copywriter for a cruise line and had reason to be present at the launch of a ship departing Seattle for the Inside Passage. The sun was blazing, the day soft and warm. An eight-piece brass band was playing. The air was thick with confetti strewn far and wide. Jovial passengers laughed in groups and embarked the ship. People bustled everywhere. But even after the confetti had fallen to the ground, and the passengers had boarded the ship, the band kept playing. And playing. Finally an ambulance arrived and medics boarded the ship to remove someone on a stretcher who had suffered a heart attack, and through all of that, for a departure delayed by more than an hour, the brass band kept playing.

Thus was the connection made: fragmented elliptical human drama + eccentric soundtrack = Felliniesque.

53. Drifters, "Fools Fall in Love" (1957)

(listen)

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller wrote this originally for the Drifters—the circa 1957 model of the Drifters, that is, which featured Johnny Moore on lead vocals—and to me it's one of the purest pieces of rock 'n' roll to be heard. Elvis Presley recorded it a decade later and came as close as anyone to getting a hit out of it, but of course missing the charts only cements the case on some level for its purity. Brash and supple, uptempo with a vengeance, entered into on a brushed drumkit and gently choogling sax, Moore's clarion yelp is all over it in a matter of seconds, powered by doop-a-doo-wop background moaners and chatterers, interrupted briefly only for a solo in which a guitar plucked on the lower strings carries on a conversation of some erudition with the aforementioned sax before Moore retrieves it again and drives it to a glorious sunset. Over and done, 2:30. It's not a typical Drifters song, although, to be fair, it's not exactly easy to defend the idea of a "typical Drifters" song in the first place. There's the Clyde McPhatter style typified by "Money Honey," or the Ben E. King style typified by "Save the Last Dance for Me." Rudy Lewis was the singer for "Up on the Roof" and "On Broadway." Johnny Moore was back for "Under the Boardwalk," but that's not very much like "Fools Fall in Love." I'd say you're better off going with the Leiber & Stoller label, because they've got the credentials and they're the ones who knew their way around this kind of easy-rollicking rock 'n' roll with such supreme confidence. Whoever gets the credit, it's one for the ages.