La Notte (1961)

Italy / France, 122 minutes

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Ennio Flaiano, Tonino Guerra

Photography: Gianni Di Venanzo

Music: Giorgio Gaslini

Editor: Eraldo Da Roma

Cast: Marcello Mastrolanni, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Bernhard Wicki, Maria Pia Luzi, Gitt Magrini, Vincenzo Corbella, Rosy Mazzacurati, Umberto Eco

“Sometimes beauty can really be depressing” is a random line of dialogue earkt in La Notte, where, in fact, all the lines of dialogue can be taken as random. It could well represent the theme not only for this picture but for the larger “Trilogy of Incommunicability” of which it is the second part. Director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni’s project started with the much-decorated L’Avventura (1960), continued with La Notte, and finished on L’Eclisse (1962). As usually happens with three-packs like this, the second one tends to get shorted in terms of credit. For example, La Notte is presently ranked at #196 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? whereas L’Eclisse sits at #130 and L’Avventura is in the top 40 at #38.

I would call La Notte my favorite of the bunch, but I suspect it’s only because my long-term quarrels with the other two have been resolved by time and learning how to look at Antonioni movies. Just look. Don’t try to connect. Connections come unbidden. You see how thoroughly composed within the frames his shots are, the placement of objects, heads, and bodies, using techniques as needed such as deep focus for contrast and startling images. The narrative is in a dated style, out of self-conscious midcentury existential texts. It takes place in Milan, a bustling city with ongoing construction and traffic jams. The main couple here—the novelist Giovanni Pontano (Marcello Mastroianni) and his elaborately “alienated,” sometimes almost zombie-like wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau)—wander this urban landscape aimlessly. Eventually we learn that, while Giovanni is a respected novelist with a new one just out, it is Lidia who has all the money and whatever control it might give her. They seem perfectly happy to spend their time going from place to place, seeing people, mingling, posing. Well, maybe not perfectly happy.

Gene Thomas, “Sometime” (1961)

[listen up!]

I wound my way back to Gene Thomasson’s 1961 near-hit (which peaked at #53) mainly because it’s one of the cover songs on the classic Flamin’ Groovies 1976 album Shake Some Action, and I am always happy to seek and find the originals. Shake Some Action is a 14-track affair that came after founders Roy Loney and Tim Lynch had left the band. It’s composed of half original songs by Cyril Jordan and Chris Wilson and half cover songs by artists as well-known as the Beatles and as obscure as Gene Thomas—adding up to a nearly perfect, seamless whole. Thomas managed a #17 hit in 1968, “Playboy,” in the Nashville-based Gene & Debbe act with Debbe Neville and her spectacular beehive hairdo. It’s a nice country-tinged tune, apt in many ways for 1968, but I agree with the Groovies that “Sometime” (or, as it is sometimes and more accurately credited, “Sometimes”), is the better song. And I’m not sure who does it better. The Groovies version rocks it up nice with a full band and emphasis on harmonies, drumkit, and electric guitar. The Gene Thomas version is much more stripped down, with an easier tempo and Thomas’s plaintive solo voice stalked by a mellow saxophone. The singer’s problem is the same in both places, of course: “Sometimes I cry when I’m lonely / Sometimes I cry when I’m blue / Right now, I’m cryin’ ‘cos I love you / I’m cryin’ ‘cos you don’t love me too.” He’s worried that “all the tears I shed were shed in vain.” Given the way things generally go in this world, it’s a valid concern and he’s probably right. It doesn’t take much more than that for a great pop song.

Solaris (1961)

Polish author Stanislaw Lem’s most famous science fiction novel is a reminder that books behind movies are often better than the movies based on those books. I still haven’t seen Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 version of Solaris, but Andrei Tarkovsky’s version has thwarted me a few times. For one thing, I suspect Soviet director Tarkovsky may have expected viewers to already be familiar with Lem’s novel. His shots of this strange ocean planet, Solaris, are quite beautiful, but the novel has more detail about the planet’s formations and activity, if Tarkovsky even were attempting “mimoids,” “symmetriads,” “asymmetriads,” and such. It’s easy to be distracted by the bizarre scene on the research space station where the humans dwell, as Tarkovsky’s movie may be. It feels like there’s more plot there. But Lem intended the novel chiefly as a “first contact” story and specifically contact with an entity or intelligence utterly alien to humans. The entire planet is a life form itself. The attempts to communicate with it are still accounted as failures after many decades of study. What it seems able to do is manifest strange beings. Somehow it reaches into the minds of these scientists for the most traumatic events in their lives, and then somehow it replicates their most significant others. Most are implied on this small team. They feel shame and hide these strange creations from the rest of the team. The only one we learn about is a former lover of one scientist who killed herself. She—or it—is not a hallucination and it is not human. It is frighteningly needy and thus manipulative and it has unusual, unexpected strength and abilities. What, if anything, is Solaris attempting to communicate? I have always read it (in the movie and in the early going here) as a style of defense or warning of its powers. But I think Lem intended it as beyond understanding. On the other hand, if you were Solaris, it’s not hard to believe you would feel attacked by much of these research efforts. In the end there’s no understanding. The human research goes on—they have found a way to neutralize the strange manifestations. And the ocean planet beneath them roils on as ever, ceaselessly. A great novel.

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

“The Haunted Woodshed” (1961)

Harold R. Daniels was more of a crime fiction writer, thus perhaps it’s not surprising this is more like a mystery story, complete with nifty solution and happy ending. In some ways that makes it a relief in this These Will Chill You anthology, whose stories more have the capacity to become unpleasant with torture, putrefaction, etc. “The Haunted Woodshed” involves a murder and the search for a corpse and is often lurking on the edge of gruesome. It also telegraphs its main points so it’s not that good as a mystery either, a genre with which horror was often conflated in the postwar decades. The haunted woodshed of the title does not have a ghost, exactly, but only a bad vibe, although that might be close to the same thing. The main character is a retired schoolteacher, a woman approaching 60, who buys a property in a small town. Everything about it is perfect except the woodshed. When she looks into the history, she finds out the wife of the previous owner mysteriously disappeared not long before and the case is still open. The woodshed has a dirt floor but police dug it up and never found a body. Meanwhile there’s discussion of a community meat locker, a freezer space where locals can rent space and keep the meat they buy at quantity for better prices. No one stopping by for that night’s chops and cutlets seems to be factoring in thaw time, but anyway, you see what I mean about telegraphing. The mind goes to the obvious places. There’s still one more twist from there, then the corpse is recovered and the mystery solved. Huzzah! I like how Daniels goes to lengths for a specifically happy ending, for a feeling that may best be expressed, with sighs of satisfaction, as Awww. All’s well that ends well. It clarifies some differences between horror and mystery. The supernatural and/or “hunches” may or may not occur in either, and downbeat endings happen in both. But so rarely does horror have upbeat endings it almost writes them out of the category. At the moment, the only other one I can think of was written by Agatha Christie, straying from her usual territory but with her usual instincts.

These Will Chill You, ed. Lee Wright & Richard G. Sheehan (out of print)
Story not available online.

“The Colomber” (1961)

This story by the Italian writer Dino Buzatti is short and quite mild. In the introduction to it in The Weird, editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer compare it to a fable, which seems about right. It also has certain echoes of the short novel by Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. A “colomber” is a made-up term for a sea monster, a giant shark that trails its prey from a distance, waiting to strike. The legend is that only the person hunted by the colomber can see it, and it will hunt you all your life. Oh, well, apparently, relatives of the hunted can also see it. The father of the main character, Stefano, is a sea captain. When Stefano turns 12 his father takes him on a voyage and they see a colomber. The father knows it means Stefano is doomed. He urges his son to stay on land. Then the father dies and, when Stefano turns 22, he decides he wants the sea life after all. He is soon pursued by the colomber but evades it and has a long career at sea—40 years. The colomber never gets him. Then he takes out a small boat to confront the colomber, who not only can communicate with him but also has a story and gift for him. The gift is a giant pearl. The story is briefly of his attempts to reach him all these years. Much sadness, much poignance. Stefano feels he has been wrong all his life. Then one more twist: “Two months later, pushed by the undertow, a small boat approached a steep cliff. It was sighted by a few fishermen, who, curious, went to see. Onboard, still seated, was a white skeleton, and between the tiny bones of its fingers it clutched a little round pebble.” The colomber gets his man, if psychologically. But did Stafano believe he was holding a pearl until the end? Or what? It seems a little silly when you start to probe at it too literally, but I thought the story was effective and worked pretty well. It does feel like a fable, but it is also baffling that way. I did not detect any meanness to the colomber in its encounter with Stefano. If anything, it seemed to pity Stefano, who was so obviously full of regret by then. For that matter, what did Stefano lose? He had a long and full career in the occupation of his choice. He may have felt shadowed by the colomber all that time but how was he supposed to know it only wanted to give him a gift? The legend sounded bad enough and he got it from his sea captain father. Maybe the colomber is death itself, which shadows us all our lives and always is coming for us. In the end perhaps it is a lustrous gift, or perhaps it is an illusion. Who can say? But you can see the thing about it being like a fable.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

Splendor in the Grass (1961)

USA, 124 minutes

Director: Elia Kazan

Writer: William Inge

Photography: Boris Kaufman

Music: David Amram

Editor: Gene Milford

Cast: Natalie Wood, Warren Beatty, Pat Hingle, Audrey Christie, Barbara Loden, Zohra Lampert, Sandy Dennis, Phyllis Diller, Martine Bartlett, Gary Lockwood, Ivor Francis

Splendor in the Grass is set in the Roaring ‘20s of Kansas USA, in part perhaps so it can use the Wall Street Crash of 1929 as a convenient plot point. Shades of Singin’ in the Rain and Sunset Blvd., looking back from the economic safety of postwar boom times. Really, Splendor almost couldn’t be more of a ‘60s movie, at least that part of the decade that took place before 1967. Less than 10 years after the coming of Playboy magazine, maybe two years after the coming of the birth control pill, the picture is obsessed with sex among coming-of-age youth—desiring it, denying it, getting it, trying to understand it, wondering what it’s all about and what it’s going to be like being grown up. The movie wants to shrug off the mantle of sexual repression, but the burden still weighs it down in 1961. Splendor in the Grass has one foot planted in the arrival of liberated sexuality, exploring the wonders of men discovering women actually enjoy sex, and the other foot planted in the puritan shame of sexuality. Director Elia Kazan is on the psychoanalyzin’ boards again.

It's only an interesting coincidence that the picture pairs a former child star and one-time America’s sweetheart, Natalie Wood (Miracle on 34th Street, Rebel Without a Cause, The Searchers), with “introducing” Warren Beatty, who happens to be so ridiculously young here that he kept reminding me of Tony Dow, the Beaver’s older brother Wally. Living in the future as we do now, we know this aw-shucks captain of the football team routine of Beatty’s is not what we would come to expect from the future lothario by reputation. Shampoo, maybe, is more like it. There is thus an interesting and eerie tension to this strange exercise in managed hysteria, which is worth a look if you don’t mind cringing at things a fair amount.

“Sardonicus” (1961)

Ray Russell was an editor for Playboy in the ‘50s and ‘60s who specialized in acquiring horror and mystery stories, by which he kept a lot of bright lights going, including Charles Beaumont, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Henry Slesar, and others. That Playboy anthology below is remarkably good. Russell’s 1962 novel The Case Against Satan is considered an important forerunner to William Peter Blatty’s 1971 The Exorcist, but otherwise “Sardonicus” is probably his best-known story, the first part of an informal “gothic unholy trinity,” with two more long stories, “Sagittarius” and “Sanguinarius.” No continuing characters or plot threads, but they are all similarly filled with aristocrats, castles, and unspeakable cruelties. “Sardonicus” is the best of a very good bunch. In this long story, “Sardonicus” is the name taken by a strange and tormented reclusive rich guy suffering from the condition risus sardonicus, also called “rictus grin.” Inevitably it reminded me of Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, but not sure whether Russell was a comic book reader in the 1940s, when the original versions leaned toward the psychotic before going antiseptic prankster in the ‘50s. At any rate, risus sardonicus is real but normally associated with tetanus or strychnine poisoning. Here it is all abnormal psychology. The grotesque face and the backstory for how it got that way are inspired. Russell has selected his gothic details well—the very name, the “S” monogram used by Sardonicus, the castle where he lives in Bohemia, the grave that he disturbs, his cold manipulations involving his wife and a doctor he thinks can help him. This story was originally published in Playboy in January 1961 and Russell went on to write the screenplay for a William Castle movie based on it that same year, Mr. Sardonicus. The most familiar player in it now is probably the Igor-type sidekick Krull, played by hey-that-guy character actor Oskar Homolka (Ball of Fire, I Remember Mama, The Seven Year Itch). The picture suffers for its inability to create a realistic rictus grin, but makes up for it ingeniously with a pale mask Sardonicus wears in company that covers his whole face and makes his presence infinitely disturbing. I’ve seen a few Castles, The Tingler, House on Haunted Hill, Rosemary’s Baby—not to mention the Joe Dante valentine from the ‘90s, Matinee—and typically enough Mr. Sardonicus appears to have an in-theater promotional gimmick attached to it, long gone of course since the original release, with only a strange artifact ending to remind us of what it might have been. The picture evidently learned some useful lessons from Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits in turn may have learned some useful lessons from them all. The era of horror stories transmuting into television episodes was well upon us by 1961. “Sardonicus” the story is a throwback way back all the way to 19th-century gothics, but with a kind of 1960s Madison Avenue sheen that makes it unique. Only other stories by Ray Russell are very much like Ray Russell stories, and here’s a great place to start.

The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories
Story not available online.

The Soft Machine (1961)

I had some work trying to sort what's intended by William S. Burroughs and his publishers with this novel and a group of others associated with it. I'm reading a 1988 mass market Grove Press collection of three short novels—The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Wild Boys. The first two are cited with a fourth, The Ticket That Exploded, as a trilogy. Burroughs later said this trilogy was in no particular order and could be read all six ways possible and it was all the same to him. Most discussions of it go chronologically by publication, starting here, so I will do that too, pausing for a look at The Wild Boys before finishing up. The real unifying element, I suspect, is that all (including Naked Lunch before them and possibly The Wild Boys too) are drawn from a 1,000-page manuscript called The Word Hoard that Burroughs assembled as a source for his cut-up style. I approached this so-called Nova Trilogy carefully, having struggled with Naked Lunch in the past. In a way it's like meditation. You have to keep resisting the impulse to impose narrative coherence. It feels like it should be there, because you're holding a book and reading, but it isn't there. It can get frustrating. But passages absurdly sing and when he's lucid Burroughs shows a lot of ability to be vividly crisp and to the point. It's quite welcome, in fact, when it lasts for the majority of a single page. But wrestling through, sentence by sentence, clause by clause, actually can be enjoyable for the language itself, abstracted. The fragments are a barrage, preposterous, an affront: hustling sex, scoring dope, getting off in a murky world of danger and paranoia. Burroughs comes on like a literary aesthete, which he is, and in the best sense of the idea, but he serves up these coarse turds of the underground life, e.g., the redundancy of the recurring phrase "rectal mucus." I expected no narrative coherence and I got none, which somehow made it more enjoyable. As I would see, however, it grows more tiresome across four novels even if they are very short. What is perhaps most amazing to me is that Burroughs worked and reworked all of them—I think my 1988 book has about the second or third version of The Soft Machine, and there is now a "restored text" version published in 2014. A lot of monkeying around for something that doesn't really add up except as pure abstracted reading experience. But it's possible the revisions really were constant improvements.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Moviegoer (1961)

I was pretty sure a well-liked award-winning novel with this title would be one I'd go for, even though it somehow evaded me most of my life and a misbegotten attempt at another Walker Percy novel (Lancelot, I think) had not gone well. But I did not like The Moviegoer very much. It has some resemblance to The Great Gatsby and Appointment in Samarra, with a quixotic single white man of 30, a born daydreamer now more urgently required to grow up. The moviegoing aspect was more metaphorical and symbolic than merely moviegoing. It still got some things right on that score but they seem old now, coming from a time when Paul Newman was just on the horizon. My main complaint was the aimlessness of the narrative, which mimics the aimlessness of its main character, one Binx Bolling, an insufferable Southern gentleman twit. He lives in a suburb of New Orleans and works as a stockbroker in a local office. He gets along all right, kaff-kaff. He's a womanizer, targeting a series of secretaries. His family is fractured and complicated. He appears to be close to an aunt, and a cousin is a romantic interest. He has his problems. He's not likable. But he is a very good writer—Percy, I mean, by way of Binx, who is the official first-person narrator. Every sentence here glitters. I read a print version and missed the online dictionary access of kindle products because my vocabulary was challenged and I was too lazy to go look things up. I wish he would have talked more about movies. His obsession felt convincing and familiar but often alien too. He had a thing about theater architecture, for example. I might have shared it even as recently as the '70s, but the years and decades of multiplexes and video rental outlets have drummed it out of me. He also sorts his movies more by performers than directors—well, I suppose most people do. But movies are really beside the point in this novel, where "moviegoer" is more like someone passively gazing at life—actively pursuing passively gazing, or something like that. It's just an image. Much like his sex life, which is a little reminiscent of the smug Nails song "88 Lines About 44 Women." It all appears to relate back on deeper levels (I'm on the Wikipedia article now to shore up my case for why this exists) to existential considerations, Soren Kierkegaard, Dante, and naturally the status and future of Southern writing. The Moviegoer is resolutely inert, with formal likenesses to The Stranger by Albert Camus. I came away from it with some vague hostility, the result as much as anything of disappointed expectations set by the title, and also frustrated by all the beautiful sentences in the service of allusive complications too tedious to follow. At the same time I suspect, somewhat uneasily, that The Moviegoer could become one I like more with another reading. At the moment I can't bear to think of that. But so many people do like it so much.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

I really don't know Muriel Spark at all and most of my associations here are with Oscars excitement in the '60s for a movie I never saw. If anything, I had this filed in my mind with the execrable My Fair Lady, a film based on a Bernard Shaw play. But actually this short, bristly novel is pretty good, dense and swift-moving. Miss Jean Brodie is an unconventional teacher at a girls' school. She claims she is in her prime, sophisticated, charming, and civilized as she ages from her 30s into her 40s, a single woman. The narrative is soon unmoored in time, with flashbacks, flash-forwards, and all manner of flash-arounds, plus there are some things to figure out. Miss Brodie cultivates a group of six girls passing into high school age. They are the "Brodie set"—her favorites. Each has a name and one or two distinguishing characteristics, which is not to understate how vivid each one will become. They are an odd group. The strangest may be Mary Macgregor, who is not very bright and ultimately dies in a hotel fire when she is 23. The most detailed (she might secretly be the author) is Sandy Stranger, who has small eyes, rejects Calvinism, and becomes a nun later. It all takes place, or mostly, in Edinburgh in the 1930s. One of Miss Brodie's most unsettling traits is her confident embrace of fascism. In fact, in a way that's what leads to her downfall, as in the arc of this story she is betrayed and loses her career. The people out to bring her down are more worried about her sexual adventuring, which of course is quite mild. She has a crush on one teacher, and a dalliance with another, which ends when he marries someone else. Much is made of these incidents—by the girls, by school authorities, and by Miss Brodie herself, whose real flaw is merely a dose of narcissism and an inclination to talk too much about her world view and personal life. Of course, they're part of the reason the six girls adore her too. I can see myself a little in them, remembering a notably young and glamorous woman who was my sixth-grade teacher. She had no fascist sympathies or love affairs with other teachers I ever heard about, however, though she did drive a VW bug. Honestly, one of the things I like most about this novel is how much Miss Brodie can make my skin crawl. I've met this self-obsessed type elsewhere and I don't like them, even though I recognize the charismatic charms, and even wish there were a way I could meet her for coffee sometime. She's a corker and so is this novel.

In case it's not at the library.

"Harrison Bergeron" (1961)

Read story by Kurt Vonnegut online.

The premise of Kurt Vonnegut's story is a type of Devastating Wry Dystopic Satire that feels typical to me of its New Frontier times. It riffs on a straw man, an argument I don't think anyone is making or has ever made. Setting that aside, it's a great example of what a sharp and chiseled writer Vonnegut could be. In the future of this story people have gone mad for equality. Society has evolved a counterbalancing system wherein the most gifted are formally handicapped. Strong people are burdened with extra weight. Smart people are fixed with buzzers that sound off in their ears every 20 seconds to interrupt concentration. And so forth. As a view of coming attractions I do think it's unlikely. As a joke, however, Vonnegut has a few good ways to work it. It's a very short story with lots of dialogue, which enables it to establish rhythms that start to work almost musically and can be funny. It's also comical to see such mediocrity as the accepted norm. In this world excellence is an affront of arrogance. George and Hazel Bergeronn are parents of the anti-equality revolutionary Harrison, a Nietzschean superman if ever there was one. George and Hazel are watching a ballet performance on TV. But the dancers are not very good. George and two of the ballerinas have ear buzzers, which are synchronized. George and Hazel have an absent-minded conversation. One of George's best recurring lines is "Um." So the comedy is pretty rich and it's fun to read. But put it down a second and think about it and it starts to be annoying. Perhaps it's the mood I'm in at the moment, but it's hitting me as another privileged indictment of "identity politics." The year this was published the Civil Rights movement was on the rise, and a renewal of feminism just over the horizon. "Harrison Bergeron" can too easily be read as mocking such movements by willfully misunderstanding them. No one who wants to protect civil rights is trying to take anything but unfair opportunity away from anybody. The issue is equality of opportunity and fair treatment, not literal equality. This was originally published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Make of that what you will. It's still fun to read. Set a timer on a buzzer so you don't have to think about it too long.

Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

L'année dernière à Marienbad, France / Italy, 94 minutes
Director: Alain Resnais
Writer: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Photography: Sacha Vierney
Music: Francis Seyrig
Editors: Jasmine Chasney, Henri Colpi
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff

It's tempting to fix the blame for the admittedly art-damaged Last Year at Marienbad on Michelangelo Antonioni and L'Avventura, which was released to wide acclaim (and derision too) the year before and which the following year, 1962, would be declared in a Sight & Sound poll of critics to be the second-greatest film of all time ever made. (Cooler heads have since prevailed somewhat and the 2012 version of the poll has L'Avventura at #21.) Both pictures are similarly aimless and pointless, er, I mean, ambiguous and ethereal, but the fact is, for all its artifice, I get a kick out of Last Year at Marienbad, and have so far remained mostly resistant to L'Avventura.

I use the word "artifice"—I'll even extend that to L'Avventura (though it is actually much more naturalistic)—and not the word "pretension," which is the one many may prefer. To be sure, I see the problem. Last Year at Marienbad is full of artfully posed mannequins wearing tuxedos and gowns, floating wanly about a mysterious French chateau with surrealistic geometric gardens, a wheezing cheesy organ providing soundtrack, and with no obvious point or even discernible plot beyond the cover story of a resort vacation: "The servants were mute," we learn from the randomly murmuring and often redundant voiceover narration, which is not always that informative (unreliable narrator, thy name is Last Year at Marienbad). "The games were silent, of course. It was a place for relaxation. No business was carried out, no plots were hatched. No one even discussed any topic that might cause excitement. There were signs everywhere: 'Silence' ... 'Silence.'"

Frankly, that sounds like a nice vacation to me, but for others, particularly of a fashionable European early-1960s Heroic Era of the Art Film bent, I'm sure it signifies a certain existential hell.

Catch-22 (1961)

Catch-22 remains significant, important, and brilliant, though it's all reducible to variations on the paradoxical idea signified by the title. Interesting to find out that it was written first as "Catch-18," but then was scheduled for publication in the same year as Mila 18 by Leon Uris, which necessitated the change. For a while Heller was determined on 14 but editor Robert Gottlieb said it had to be 22 (one wonders how these conversations went)—22 seems so right now it's hard to believe it was ever anything else. The concept is all spelled out early. You have to be crazy to fly bombing missions in a war because people try to kill you. But asking out of the duty is the proof you're sane. That's the catch—Catch-22. Therefore you have to fly them. You can actually look up the term now in the dictionary. It's part of the language: "a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem." Catch-22 is sometimes described as an antiwar novel, but it's actually closer to anti-bureaucracy, sawing away on the kind of witty paradoxes that also populate Oscar Wilde narratives: "Fortunately, just when things were blackest, the war broke out.... The case against Clevinger was open and shut. The only thing missing was something to charge him with.... [Colonel Cathcart] was someone in the know who was always striving pathetically to find out what was going on." And so forth. I remember it as delightful the first time but the totality produces something more of a slog on later visits. It's very funny in places. It's very horrifying in others. Sometimes, as when the ambitious mess officer Milo Minderbinder contracts with the Germans to bomb the American base where they are all stationed, I'm really not sure which is which and it's unsettling. There are dozens of characters coming and going, but they are all working through the same dense fog of comic paradox, playing out the roles assigned to them. There are some great sendups of the vainglories of military rankings. Though it's set in "the good war" it seems much more suited to the '60s, heralding them even in some ways, published in 1961. I think it could have been shorter, mostly for my own convenience, because I also think it could have been longer, and I really wouldn't know where to cut or add. In its capering way it's somehow a certain model for postmodern war novels, transcending earlier and more conventional work from James Jones, Norman Mailer, and the rest with a fractured nesting narrative strategy that makes it vivid and absurd to the point of alienated. But the resulting lack of narrative momentum also works against it a little, at least in terms of taking it on as a whole. You only need to read it once. Then you can go back for pages or chapters at a time. By the fragments, it's one of the best we ever got.

In case it's not at the library.

Viridiana (1961)

Spain / Mexico, 90 minutes
Director: Luis Buñuel
Writers: Julio Alejandro, Luis Buñuel, Benito Perez Galdos
Photography: Jose F. Aguayo
Music: Bach, Mozart, Handel, Gustavo Pittaluga
Editor: Pedro del Rey
Cast: Silvia Panal, Francisco Rabal, Fernando Rey, Jose Calvo, Margarita Lozano, Jose Manuel Martin, Victoria Zinny

I was a little surprised when I realized this is the first movie by director and cowriter Luis Buñuel I've encountered yet on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? I've had mixed feelings about the work of the Spanish Surrealist provocateur ever since a 16-mm version of the 16-minute film Un Chien Andalou more or less blew my mind when I saw it in high school at 16. Later viewings of some of his others, including Viridiana, have often occasioned a bewildered confusion that feels like disappointment. Do I have to read a book to get this? Now I wonder if something similar might be going on with critics at large, just by the patterns in the TSPDT list. Buñuel actually has no fewer than seven titles in the top 200, more than any other director at the moment (Alfred Hitchcock is closest with six) but also with the slowest start: Viridiana is presently the highest at only #81, followed by L'Age d'Or at #118, Los Olvidados at #124, Un Chien Andalou at #135, The Exterminating Angel at #143, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at #152, and Belle de Jour at #197.

When I looked up ranking histories I saw a similar pattern, a kind of generalized slow-motion fall from favor. L'Age d'Or, for example (the one that made me wonder if I should have read a book first), has previously spent time in the top 100, as high as #72, but with overall steady drops. Un Chien Andalou is an exception, with a somewhat erratic journey higher starting at #198—a few years ago it jumped from #165 to #117, though it has fallen off of that recently. Viridiana, in fact, is the only permanent resident to this point in the top 100, reaching as high as #68. That would appear to make it, then, the aggregated consensus choice as Buñuel's best. But we have some idea of how aggregated consensus works, highlighting odd choices (Hitchcock's Vertigo is a similar case), especially when votes are split. In historical terms, Viridiana is actually something more like a comeback picture, making a big splash at Cannes and reminding people how good Buñuel could be as a filmmaker. In turn, that opened doors to contracts and at least two much better pictures by my lights, Exterminating Angel and Discreet Charm.

Lady, Lady I Did It (1961)

Here's another example, in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain, that highlights McBain's ability to work within conventional mystery story structures, serving up the clues fair and square and still managing to surprise with the resolution. It takes a few shortcuts along the way, such as a police hunch paying off. A bookstore is shot up and four people die. The police hunch—Steve Carella, as ever, with Bert Kling and Meyer Meyer mainly—is that only one of the four victims was the actual target. The rest are there to confuse the investigation. Well, OK. Interesting hunch. The case is further complicated by the fact that Bert Kling's girlfriend is one of the victims. Which is also convenient, because when it comes to Bert Kling and women, well, he just can't catch a break. This is a shorty, under 200 pages in mass market, so I'm willing to forgive some of this for the sake of getting on with it. There's blessed little dwelling on Kling's grief, though it's there. The victims and the case produce a number of interesting characters and situations. For the most part it's people just making their way in the big city, where it's well known that shit will happen. So some shit happens, and soon enough someone has an inspiration and the case is solved. But I love how scrupulously fair it is. The second-to-last chapter even lingers over the telltale clue, trying to help us see the course of things. But we don't, or I didn't, and so it's a pleasant flash of insight when it comes. The asides about the detectives' personal lives are running in place, especially if you're prone like me to read Kling's bad luck with women as ultimately an element of black humor on the part of McBain. Here it's early enough—though I believe Claire Townsend is already the second girlfriend Kling loses to violence—that it's less comic and more ham-fisted tragic. With Lady, Lady I Did It as #14 in the overall series, McBain has been at it long enough that he knows what he's doing and is comfortable with it: writing mystery-story police procedurals with a continuing cast of characters, some of whom are occasionally killed off. I think many of these short ones from the '50s and '60s can be effective and I'd call this one of them. There's a detective I don't remember seeing before—Di Maeo. Also Arthur Brown, Hal Willis, and Bob O'Brien, briefly. I haven't entirely made up my mind about the fairness of the title, in terms of the mystery story, but mostly I think it works and even gets away with the self-conscious tricksiness.

In case it's not at the library.

Yojimbo (1961)

Yôjinbô, Japan, 110 minutes
Director/editor: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Akira Kurosawa, Ryuzo Kikushima
Photography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Masaru Sato
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyu Sazanka, Daisuke Kato, Seizaburo Kawazu, Takashi Shimura, Eijiro Tono, Kamatari Fujiwara, Isuzu Yamada, Hiroshi Tachikawa

Akira Kurosawa—director, co-writer, film editor, even costume designer on this one—enjoyed his biggest international hit to that point with Yojimbo, a samurai action picture that remains uniquely modern, positioned at a unique crossroads of film history and going its own way. It serves up a cynical, comical human corruption that eventually made its way into the American Western and still strikes chords decades later. Sergio Leone adapted the basic narrative for the first of his iconic Man With No Name spaghetti westerns, Fistful of Dollars.

It's not just the Leone style of storytelling, with the unmistakable echoes in the work of Quentin Tarantino, Beat Takeshi, and so many others, that makes Yojimbo look and feel so oddly fresh today, compact and muscular and efficient. It also packs a mixed nuts assortment of strange elements that keep one off balance, even as it rollicks along. The soundtrack is jazzy and jarring, with an air of West Side Story, a '50s Broadway musical about New York City juvenile delinquents. The widescreen treatment lifts the petty level of squabble on which Yojimbo operates into an epic realm of blowing dust, scheming, and sudden grotesque death. Long shots with telephoto lens provide a fluid and gritty documentary feel and contribute to the heavy air. And with the expedient of a firearm—that's singular, as one thug only, Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai from The Human Condition), is somehow in possession of a six-shooter—it even slips into moods and gestures of the Hong Kong action films that followed later. Yojimbo is so insistent on its own weirdness, with its curated selection of elements that don't quite gel, that it's the experience of seeing it and being surprised by it that most sticks.

Joey Dee & the Starliters, "Peppermint Twist - Part I" (1961)

Dec. 4, 1961, #1 (3 wks.)
(listen)

When I say that "Peppermint Twist" by Joey Dee & the Starliters (both parts, or either) is my favorite Twist song, it doesn't mean I necessarily endorse music muscled up the charts by organized crime, nor music that today may be heard streaming at 9 a.m. on a weekday at an Albertson's, where I happened to hear this while trying to figure out how to write it up. Serendipity, man. Yet if being in the oldies mix at a grocery store by definition ought to tell me it has been vastly overexposed by now, it doesn't mean I like it any less. Oh no. I love the way it enters at full steam, taped live, mid-workup, already in full possession of its soft, irresistible groove. It's music that can play for hours—maybe did play for hours, if anyone possibly remembers the scene at the Peppermint Lounge in those halcyon times. "Bop shoo-op, a bop bop shoo-op," go the backup singers. "Well meet me baby down at 45th Street," says the singer (that's the Peppermint Lounge!). "Bop shoo-op, a bop bop shoo-op," go the backup singers. So much to love here: a nice mellow sax, an impossibly spry and nimble guitar break, with clapping along, and the way the frontmen jump in unison on the video I'm pointing to. (I'm less comfortable with the proportionality of Joey Dee's head size in that video, however.) How long does it go? Looks like 2:03 for the hit, another 1:50 for the b-side flip "Part II." Impressively economical. But you'll want to let it go 20 minutes at least, so figure on playing, oh say, at least eight times.

The Man in the High Castle (1961)

Philip K. Dick's breakthrough novel, his only Hugo Award winner, feels in many ways barely like science fiction at all. In fact, it is widely considered a landmark in another genre entirely, the alternate history. The concept is butt simple: Japan and Germany won World War II, and carved up the United States much like Germany was carved up in our present time stream (it is likely symptomatic of Dick's sway that I make reference to a specific "time stream"). Japan and Germany are quite a bit like the US and USSR, with relations having turned chilly between the wartime allies and a cold war setting in. Well, that's about it. The Japanese are very wise, the Germans are very evil, and a shattered America is a place of lost dreams and ennui. One suspects massive opiate addictions. The action, such as it is, is set in San Francisco, under Japanese occupation and control. The characters are largely listless and accepting of the world as it is, though numerous narrative strands show some of them attempting to face down tides of history (or maybe that needs scare quotes: "history"). The principals organize their lives and decisions by consulting the I Ching. A bestselling book everyone seems to be reading or at least aware of, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, is a speculative fiction in which Japan and Germany lost World War II. That plot point is a little too cute for my taste, but again, Dick has a way of pushing past the obvious, here traveling into a kind of proto-string-theory vision of a multiverse with infinite parallel universes. There is a method for traveling between realities that some of the characters have stumbled on, including quite possibly the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy aka the man in the high castle, which is located in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Cheyenne is also an important place, a capital city, in at least one other Dick novel, Now Wait for Last Year. Hard to fathom the fascination—maybe because it's inland, with further protections, necessary in times of great conflict, afforded it by the surrounding mountains. I'm also hard put to say exactly why The Man in the High Castle works so well. It's thoroughly conceived and imagined and for the most part resists the impulse to clonk one over the head with its obvious points. Nonetheless, somehow, I always find myself righteously clonked by this little beauty.

In case it's not at the library.

"Stand by Me" (1961 / 1986)

66. Ben E. King, "Stand by Me" (May 22, 1961, #4 / Nov. 1, 1986, #9)

One of those freaks of pop music history, a song that managed to chart on two separate occasions, in this case separated by more than 25 years, which might make it the record-holder ("The Twist" was by just two years and "Monster Mash" by 11). The second showing was largely the result of a movie of the same name, based on a Stephen King novel, directed by Rob Reiner, and featuring Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, and Kiefer Sutherland—you can probably imagine how that would make a good platform for launching a hit. And it's not a bad show, worth seeing for any number of reasons, but probably the best thing you can say about it now is that it reminded everybody what a great song this is, spare and supple and swooningly beautiful, seething with understated power. It's one of the finest products to come out of the Brill Building era, in that "Up on the Roof"/"Under the Boardwalk" Drifters mode when the three-minute wizards were particularly fascinated with orchestral accompaniments. Written by the singer himself, Ben E. King, with Leiber and Stoller (oh yeah, them again), it actually was originally intended for those Drifters, but King got the honors when they turned it down. It's been widely covered (see) but surely we can all agree that King's original remains the best, as the 1986 resurgence incidentally argues convincingly as well for. In fact, it's hard to imagine any other voice leading the lovely charge here, just as it's hard to imagine any other arrangement. The simplicity of it is absolutely pristine. I think what I'm trying to say is that this is just about perfect the way it is, and I can't imagine how anyone ever could improve on it in even one single way.