We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)

Shirley Jackson’s last novel is often called a masterpiece and that’s fair enough, except I’m more inclined to think of Jackson as a short-story writer and “The Lottery” as her masterpiece. ISFDB relegates this short novel to “non-genre” and Wikipedia classifies it as a mystery. No one seems to know what to do with it, including me, though I have no objection to the masterpiece label. It’s about a family with many dark secrets. The darkest may be the one kept by Mary Katherine “Merricat” Blackwood, age 18, the first-person narrator. The Blackwoods have long been resented by the locals for being rich and aloof. A few years before the time of this story someone poisoned the entire family with arsenic in the sugar bowl. Only three survived: Merricat and her sister Constance, who didn’t take sugar with the berries that were served, and Uncle Julian, who barely survived the poisoning and is now disabled and in a wheelchair, with mild encroaching dementia. Merricat is the one most able to go into town twice a week for groceries, but she has to be careful or the townspeople will hassle her. I’m not going to give it away but it’s not hard to figure out who did the poisoning, which is readily revealed at about the beginning of the last third of the novel. Constance was charged with the crime but acquitted, leaving the Blackwoods more isolated and reviled than ever. One day their unpleasant cousin Charles shows up and makes an attempt to take over the family. He’s mostly interested in their money. Merricat can’t stand him and wants him to leave, but he intends to stay. Eventually the conflict leads to the house catching fire, destroying the upper floors. Firefighters—who also hate the Blackwoods—arrive to put out the blaze and the rest of the town shows up to watch and catcall. “Let it burn,” is their sentiment. After the fire is under control a riot breaks out. The townspeople enter the home and destroy everything in it that they can. The fire and the riot are amazing, vivid, painful scenes. The entire novel is suffused with intense tensions. In some ways it’s hard to know why We Have Always Lived in the Castle even exists, it is so full of hate and rage and pointless fury. But it’s also powerful and unforgettable—as good as any reasons to exist.

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

The Exterminating Angel (1962)

El ángel exterminador, Mexico, 95 minutes

Director: Luis Buñuel

Writers: Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza

Photography: Gabriel Figueroa

Editor: Carlos Savage

Cast: Silvia Pinal, Enrique Rambal, Luis Beristain, Jacqueline Andere, Jose Baviera, Tito Junco, Ofelia Montesco, Claudio Brook, Nadia Haro Oliva

For the record, and FYI, director and cowriter Luis Buñuel has no fewer than six titles in the top 200 of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?, a roundup of critical opinion from around the world: Viridiana, #88; The Exterminating Angel (my favorite), #138; Los Olvidados, #139; the inestimable Un Chien Andalou, #149; L’Age d’or, #166; and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (my other favorite), #172. A seventh, Belle de jour, is trailing not far behind at #256. He’s obviously a very big deal among cineastes, partly for his dedication to surrealism and the originality of it, partly for his caustic treatment of religion and capitalism, partly for a prolific, globe-trotting career that saw him making pictures in Spain, France, Mexico, and elsewhere—and partly because he’s pretty good at making movies.

Among other things, The Exterminating Angel shows a lot of skill unrolling the premise. It starts with a dinner party—how many Buñuel pictures involve (and mock) the genteel dinner party, attended by the upper-middle class as they strain after more social class? In fact, the picture is a bit dull in the first third as they gather and work their status symbols, though it is enlivened somewhat by slapstick and sarcasm. For some reason all the servants, including the cooks, are leaving. They can’t explain themselves but only apologize. And they will not stay. But the host and hostess make do and muddle through with the only servant left, a butler. After the dinner the group retires to the parlor for brandy and more polite intercourse. They’re a bit bored but not yet inclined to leave. The hours peter away until finally, around 4 or 5 a.m., the hosts, eager to break it up, offer them rooms in the mansion. But they prefer to undress and bunk down where they are. So do the host and hostess. It’s not until the next morning, when the group wakes and starts thinking about breakfast, that they realize they are somehow trapped there.

“The Question My Son Asked” (1962)

[spoilers] Stanley Ellin (not to be confused with Stanley Elkin) was a successful and prolific writer in a mystery verging on horror (or “suspense”) subgenre favored at midcentury. He wrote several novels and some Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes but was known more as a short story writer, which won him a bunch of Edgars and eventually a Grand Master Award in 1981 from the Mystery Writers of America organization, of which he was a longtime member and past president. This is a horror story insofar as it is a look inside the mind of a homicidal maniac—or that’s the twist anyway, revealed in the last sentence. The first-person narrator is an electrician by day, an executioner on the side. He somewhat primly tells us he calls himself an “electrocutioner” because the electric chair is his medium. He is equally pedantic about defending the death penalty, saying that juries and judges are as culpable as he is. He keeps his work a secret because of the stigma, but he is seething with resentment about society’s judgment. Also, this is an “all in the family” enterprise—his father was an electrician and executioner, and he hopes his son will be too. Indeed, the son is already an electrician. But he recoils when his father tells him of his electrocution work. I’ve seen accounts around the internet saying this story is ambivalent or ambiguous about where it stands on the death penalty. It doesn’t seem so to me. In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court was not far from outlawing capital punishment altogether, which stood for 10 years or whatever, until Gary Gilmore came along and got us all mixed up again. This story has also been published under the title “The Question,” so portentous does it want us to take the plot point that goes on at the end:

    You enjoy it, don’t you? [my son asked]....
    Enjoy it?
    That was the question my son asked me. That was what he said to me, as if I didn’t have the same feelings deep down in me that we all have.
    Enjoy it?
    But, my God, how could anyone not enjoy it?

Rimshot. And therein lies the rub, or something. The story is pretty clearly opposed to the death penalty, making its principal out to be a psychopath, and thus less horror and more social commentary. The narrator and electrocutioner is not likable at all. He’s thin-skinned and petulant. When we find out he’s a sadist who enjoys killing people with the electric chair, deaths he describes in some graphic detail, it doesn’t help us like him any better. But, come on, it’s not fair to imply that anyone who favors the death penalty is a homicidal sadist—as social commentary it’s a little like holding soldiers responsible for foreign policy. It might be even less fair to claim this is a competent horror story, as much as I may agree with the moral of it. It is intended primarily to shock but only in the service of a larger social point. Horror is better off without social points and morals.

These Will Chill You, ed. Lee Wright & Richard G. Sheehan (out of print)
Listen to story online.

Vivre Sa Vie (1962)

Film en douze tableaux, France, 85 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Writers: Marcel Sacotte, Jean-Luc Godard

Photography: Raoul Coutard

Music: Michel Legrand

Editors: Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Guillemot

Cast: Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, Andre S. Labarthe, Guylaine Schlumberger

In the opening titles Vivre Sa Vie is "dedicated to B movies." It's not the first time director and cowriter Jean-Luc Godard has done it, certainly in spirit, and it's a good reminder that we are entering Jean-Luc Godard-world, where fantasy and reality are all mixed up "playfully" (and/or for reasons of budget). Reality is generally a form of fantasy (notably when machine guns and gangsters appear) but it can also be text and factual information. I learned on IMDb that the script for Vivre Sa Vie is a single page, listing the 12 episodic scenarios, and the players improvised the dialogue from there. Cultural referents include Emile Zola, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Jules and Jim playing a nearby theater (because why not?!).

Confoundingly, Godard's story of a middle-class woman who becomes a prostitute acknowledges but does not satisfy the impulse to project pathos on the story. Nana—yes, that's a big fat Zola shoutout, and she's played by JLG's beautiful wife for five years, Anna Karina—Nana is an obvious if cartoonish victim, eventually (spoiler) gunned down in the streets, in a convenient random meaningless plot development, slaughtered by two-bit movie actors in trench coats for a suitably reflexive existential-type playful bleak ending. Having executed such neat FIN we can ask what Godard may really be doing here, aside from fooling around with movie equipment.

James Brown's Live at the Apollo (2004)

I enjoyed this title by Douglas Wolk in the 33-1/3 series—it almost effortlessly shows the openings for creative avenue in the tidy one album / one author / 33,000 words format. I have to admit first I've always been slightly underwhelmed by this particular album, often pitched as the greatest live album of all time. That's partly because it took me so long to get to it and by then its reputation had preceded it and I had other James Brown priorities. But Wolk is a fan, a close listener, and a solid researcher. One of his prevailing conceits is noting that the performance was recorded across several days while the Cuban Missile Crisis was happening, an unusually charged historical moment. Wolk finds other intriguing things going on at the same time, including John Cage's 4:33 recording of silence, which Wolk really hopes was at the same exact moment of a peculiar silence in James Brown's Apollo show. I hope so too! Wolk artfully breaks down James Brown's career as the sequential details of the album are encountered in linear fashion. It mimics the album in many small ways. The chapters can be as short as a paragraph or a line, with evocative titles—Sweat, Amateur Night, Yvonne Fair—running down the album that came of a multiple-night stand. It's a good evenhanded take on JB, aware of all his flaws (usually result of unbridled ego) and all his many strengths. Wolk's little book is also a great treatment of how a product comes together, the album as artifact. I like how Wolk seems to notice everything, like the way the album has come with so many variations to its name. He settles on Live at the Apollo and I'm good with that, but the range of variation is remarkable. That's typical of Brown, who always seemed to be working with grooves and their variations. Mashed Potato was a groove. Popcorn was a groove. Cold Sweat, New Bag, Sex Machine—they just kept coming. It feels like Wolk covers it all, and it's full of sharp insight, surprising details, and always an abiding love and awe of JB, a true force of nature, we can see now. One of my favorite things I learned here was that at the height of the album's popularity people were calling in to request it on radio stations—the whole thing: both sides. And the radio stations accommodated them, packing in the ads in the empty patches of the 10-minute "Lost Someone." Hence the beginnings of its reputation. Wolk's treatment of "Lost Someone" is superb, full of information and finding a great way to approximate its imposing length in words and text. I really love it when these 33-1/3 books are good. This is one of the best.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

La Jetee (1962)

France, 28 minutes
Director / writer: Chris Marker
Photography: Jean Chiabaut, Chris Marker
Music: Trevor Duncan
Editor: Jean Ravel
Cast: Helene Chatelain, Davos Hanich, Jacques Ledoux, James Kirk

I prefer the version of La Jetee with the voiceover by James Kirk in English because, between the images and words and the high concept of the narrative, it feels easier to absorb by watching and listening rather than by reading and trying to watch. La Jetee is not much longer than an episode of The Twilight Zone, with which it has many affinities, including the black and white photography, the science fiction themes, and something like a twist ending (in this case the twist serves more to give the whole thing a densely constructed poetic integrity rather than to shock, but it's still a surprise). In other ways it's even more primitive than earliest cinema, let alone '60s commercial TV, composed visually entirely of still photos and a few title cards. Very occasionally, the camera pans across a photo, or tracks or zooms in or out of one, and many transitions are dissolves rather than pure cuts. But it's basically a slide show, perhaps the best edited one you will ever see. The approach may not be surprising, given that director and writer Chris Marker like Stanley Kubrick started his career as a professional photographer, but it's still bold, even now. I saw La Jetee first in the mid-'90s, after Terry Gilliam's "inspired by" remake Twelve Monkeys came out, which is four times as long and not even a quarter as effective. I liked La Jetee for its eccentric aesthetic but it took a while for the full implications of the story to register. It's almost too short—perhaps behind Gilliam's impulse to blow it up big and make it operatic. And the conflation of early-'60s art cinema with science fiction is disorienting and distracting as ever. See also Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, which more strays across the line into ridiculous. Time travel in La Jetee appears to be accomplished by some kind of hospital procedure involving injections, which is different from most SF explanations to say the least. It took DVD extras to finally hep me to how deeply inspired the picture is by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. La Jetee has narrative points and visual shots, such as the one at the top of this review, specifically mimicking Hitchcock's strangest and perhaps best movie. The time traveler (Davos Hanich) and the woman he falls for because something feels so familiar about her (Helene Chatelain) have a similar kind of troubling, circling, stalking relationship as Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine Elster (and/or Judy Barton) in Vertigo, though note that no extreme makeovers occur in La Jetee. Once you see that connection a lot of the scenes start to fall in place. At its most fundamental, La Jetee has all the beats of a romance, which is one of its secrets for getting away with the science fiction (not just time travel but also World War III and virtual human extinction). As odd as it is, there is something almost perfect about this small picture. And it's probably not overstating the case to say it's beloved—I've seen it at the top of all-time lists of films more than once, with its fierce partisans ready to fight. I don't think I'm quite there but there's a lot to admire in La Jetee. Rod Serling never came close.

L'Eclisse (1962)

The Eclipse, Italy / France, 126 minutes
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Ello Bartolini, Ottiero Ottieri
Photography: Gianni Di Venanzo
Music: Giovanni Fusco, Mina
Editor: Eraldo Da Roma
Cast: Monica Vitti, Alain Delon, Francisco Rabal, Lilla Brignone, Rosanna Rory, Louis Seigner

L'Eclisse is the third movie in an informal trilogy by director and cowriter Michelangelo Antonioni, following L'Avventura and La Notte. They are aimless, vaguely existential, and decidedly modern art films from the early '60s, the heroic era of the art film. The first, L'Avventura from 1960, is more often singled out as the most impactful. Someone once said you can see its influence on David Lean, for example, in the difference between The Bridge Over the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. L'Eclisse is generally ranked not far behind. Perhaps because I've seen so many movies influenced by Antonioni, none of the actual Antonionis has ever lived up for me to their reputations. The people are too beautiful and rich for me, as a general rule, and the psychic dead spaces between them no more illuminating than the psychic dead spaces between a million others encountered on a daily basis.

But what is L'Eclisse? Let's go to the IMDb synopsis, which basically covers everything we need to know: "In the suburbs of Rome, the translator Vittoria [Monica Vitti] breaks her engagement with her boyfriend, the writer Riccardo, after a troubled night. Vittoria goes downtown to meet her mother, who is addicted to the stock market, and she meets the broker Piero [Alain Delon] on a day of crash. The materialist Piero and the absent Vittoria begin a monosyllabic relationship" (synopsis by Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). Keywords: italy, insomnia, sports car, reference to zeus, obsession, marriage, isolation, male female relationship, father daughter relationship, depression, boyfriend girlfriend relationship, boredom, mother daughter relationship, construction site, stock broker, alienation, loneliness

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

USA, 123 minutes
Director: John Ford
Writers: James Warner Bellah, Willis Goldbeck, Dorothy M. Johnson
Photography: William H. Clothier
Music: Cyril J. Mockridge
Editor: Otho Lovering
Cast: James Stewart, John Wayne, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, Edmond O'Brien, Andy Devine, Jeanette Nolan, John Qualen, Ken Murray, Woody Strode, Lee Van Cleef, Strother Martin, John Carradine

"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," Gene Pitney's #4 hit song in 1962 written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, has only a little more to do with this movie than Buddy Holly's "That'll Be the Day," a #1 in 1957, had to do with another famous John Ford movie, The Searchers. It's possible the Pitney song was originally commissioned for the movie, given how close the release dates are, and certainly it is based on the same 1953 story by Dorothy M. Johnson. But the song never appears in the movie. Nevertheless, the chorus rampages through my head every time I even think of the title.

It's easy to see why director John Ford would have rejected the little pop confection, but in many ways his movie is a kind of pop confection itself (albeit somewhat dulled by the soundstages and the black and white treatment, which were due to budget constraints). It's packed with stars new and old—John Wayne and James Stewart go back to the days of silent films, while Strother Martin, Lee Marvin, Vera Miles, and Lee Van Cleef look forward to visions of the future by way of Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, and TV. And The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a kind of clinic in the art of engrossing narrative. I've seen it several times and if I'm rarely enthusiastic about seeing it again—the Pitney song pounds through my head at the thought, a certain deadly earworm—all resistance falls away once the story begins to unfold.

Like Love (1962)

Here's another very short novel in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain), and another one that mostly resembles a conventional mystery story. A couple is found dead of apparent suicide in a tenement apartment. The gas for the oven was opened up and eventually the apartment exploded, smashing much of it to smithereens. It's typical exaggerated McBain violence. The dead couple is found in their underwear, lying in bed together, with a suicide note nearby. At this point, ineffable cop instinct sets in—it's Steve Carella as the main detective, as usual, with Cotton Hawes partnering with him on the case. Bert Kling and Meyer Meyer are also around to help out. As these things go it's a reasonably good puzzler. McBain was usually competent about devising these stories, inserting the red herrings, and finally explaining it all. That talent, in fact, is a critical element in the keeping the series going with the variety that it has. The mysteries can often carry the momentum, while he sorts out what he wants to do with the characters for the long term. There's also a separate suicide case, which occurs at the beginning and later impinges on the investigation of the dead couple. The title phrase is spoken two or three times along the way to inject notes of jaded cynicism, corrupted innocence, or a little of both. There's not much here on the personal side. Bert Kling is grieving the death of a girlfriend in an earlier book and that's about it. I wasn't much interested in the case—the whole thing seemed improbable to me, no matter what the "solution" turned out to be. So mostly I rode along on McBain's bantering voice. I wouldn't count this as one of the better books in the series, but as something for travel or a sleepless night it's perfectly adequate. It delivers an enigma and then, if you follow along far enough, a plausible resolution. Maybe you can get some sleep now. Maybe your plane is ready to land now.

In case it's not at the library.

The Empty Hours (1962)

The Empty Hours is a collection of three long stories (or novellas)—one of the things I like best about Ed McBain, author of the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals, is a kind of restless, experimenting, creative energy that drives his work. These stories feel churned out in some kind of frenzy, chasing down the spasms of ideas. The first, "The Empty Hours," is a smoke-and-mirrors mystery story involving insurance claims and mistaken identities, featuring Steve Carella and the usual gang of detectives. It probably could have been woven into more typical 87th Precinct novels, as either a main case in its own right or one of the smaller ongoing side cases, a strategy that became more common as the novels became fatter in the '70s and especially the '80s. There's not a lot to it but it's done efficiently. (It also seemed familiar, which means either I read it before, or it was incorporated somewhere else in the series, maybe even ported over to the Matthew Hope series, the other main McBain series, which I'm probably not going to deal with.) The second story, "'J,'" could also have been integrated into a typical 87th Precinct novel, though it might not have been so easy to work with. It seems better designed to be a stand-alone. Also, the mystery-story aspect in this one turns out to be a bit of a cheat. But it has particular resonance for the character Meyer Meyer about his Jewish identity. Meyer Meyer is known in the series for being bald, Jewish, and with a father with a strange sense of humor. The third story, "Storm," focuses on Cotton Hawes on a skiing vacation, and is probably the most obvious stand-alone of the three. In many ways it strikes me as emerging from character sketches on Hawes, who remember was intended as a late addition, insisted on by the publisher—a swinging bachelor type to replace Carella after Carella got married. Hawes was always one of the weakest characters in the series, largely because McBain's heart may never have been in it, and he's even weaker going solo without the others (babe in arms or no, and of course there is a babe in arms—he's a swinging bachelor on a ski vacation). The mystery story is not bad, however, and I like the ski resort setting pretty well too. The Empty Hours is a bit of a change of pace for the series, but also deeply characteristic and interesting in many little ways.

In case it's not at the library.

Advise & Consent (1962)

(requested by reader Phil)

USA, 139 minutes
Director: Otto Preminger
Writers: Allen Drury, Wendell Mayes
Photography: Sam Leavitt
Music: Jerry Fielding
Editor: Louis R. Loeffler
Cast: Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon, Don Murray, Henry Fonda, Lew Ayres, Edward Andrews, Burgess Meredith, Gene Tierney, Franchot Tone, George Grizzard, Paul Ford, Peter Lawford, Inga Swenson, Will Geer, Larry Tucker, Betty White

Advise & Consent belongs to a grand American tradition of political movies, usually set in Washington, D.C., endeavoring to explicitly show how sausage gets ground into legislation and/or policy, presented in a brisk spirit of upbeat no-nonsense and glowering knowingness. Maybe it started with Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, or maybe Gregory La Cava's Gabriel Over the White House, or probably way before that even. The most recent example may be Steven Spielberg's Lincoln. Along the way there's Meet John Doe, A Face in the Crowd, The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, All the President's Men, Wag the Dog, Charlie Wilson's War, and many others—also, on TV, The West Wing.

What likely unites them most is their smug sense of realpolitik, as they otherwise wander afield among distractions such as high drama, buffoonery, and plain old shtick. Advise & Consent revels in the amiable corruptions of its early-'60s glamour cast, found wandering the sanctified halls of D.C. power. It's solid storytelling about American political intrigues, marked by shrewd and unguessable moves from all sides. The plot twist that it turns on toward the end feels remarkably fresh and contemporary, which could be happenstance—but at least it's not the only thing that makes this picture so surprising and crackling alive.

Cleo From 5 to 7 (1962)

Cléo de 5 à 7, France / Italy, 90 minutes
Director / writer: Agnes Varda
Photography: Paul Bonis, Alain Levent, Jean Rabier
Music: Michel Legrand
Editors: Pascale Laverriere, Janine Verneau
Cast: Corinne Marchand, Antoine Bourseiller, Dorothee Blanck, Michel Legrand, Dominique Davray, Lucienne Marchand, Serge Korber

The premise of Cleo From 5 to 7 is simple yet evocative, detailing the interval (in the late afternoon of the longest day of the year) during which a young French pop star waits to get the results of a biopsy. Though a good deal of somewhat unlikely incident is packed into its 90 minutes the presentation is close to real time. Made during the heights of the French New Wave, it even includes cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina, as if to bear the stamp of an imprimatur. It is certainly as playful as anything made by Godard, moving about a privileged Paris in freewheeling fashion. It may be as programmatic and multileveled as well, with its arch chaptering and indulgences of fashion and music and visuals.

Yet we see these things from a decidedly alternate point of view, through the eyes of someone who wonders if it won't be the last time. Director and writer Agnes Varda brings an unusual perspective for this vein of cinema—a woman's—focusing on the familiar figure of a fictional pop star, Cleo Victoire (Corinne Marchand in her biggest role), who by manner and appearance is straight out of Godard or Antonioni, easily perceived and pigeonholed as beautiful, shallow, vacant, over-privileged, fragile. It was one ideal of the feminine at this point in film, not just in the French and Italian concoctions, but in America too with Audrey Hepburn, Shirley MacLaine, Natalie Wood. Indeed, the world had been seized at this time by "Pop" (capitalized), which people are still at work unpacking 50 years on. On one level, Agnes Varda's version is just another installment, but one of the best.

Martian Time-Slip (1962)

Martian Time-Slip is the first novel by Philip K. Dick that well and truly blew my mind. On subsequent revisits I isolated the effect essentially to one chapter, featuring an example of the title concept, which is only explained tangentially, indirectly, by recourse to various important words that are not exactly as we understand them, today or then, the most important of which is "schizophrenia." One important character here, Jack Bohlen, is described as "ex-schizophrenic." The paranormal abilities of another important character, the autistic boy Manfred Steiner—"autism" also gets a Dickian treatment—are equally grounded in terms of "faux" mental illness. Then there are the native Martians—yes, the book is set on Mars, in the 1990s—called "Bleekmen," who are similarly able to unplug from the perceived time stream. As a plot element, the Bleekmen remind me a good deal of aborigines in movies by Nicholas Roeg and Peter Weir. Finally, there is a can-do American spirit of the '50s, crystallized most in the person of Arnie Kott, a corrupt union official and small-time despot. In the background are the harsh conditions of Mars and the bored empty lives of the humans living there. Arnie—he insists everyone call him "Arnie," coldly correcting anyone who calls him "Mr. Kott"—wants a schizophrenic who can predict the future—more accurately, project into the future—in order to get a leg up on his business competition. He drafts first Jack and then Manfred to his cause. The results for Arnie play much like a situation comedy. He just can't catch a break, can't win for losing, what does he gotta do, etc. Through the welter of random and often unmotivated betrayals, snafus, and setbacks, Arnie finally settles on a single point in time to go back to in order to attempt to change the course of events. The book is chronological, so that means we can see the moment of time and Arnie's attempted interference with it before we really understand what is going on. Dick pitches his action and tone at unbelievably bland levels—his language is rarely heightened but almost dead, which provides a rich loam for his bizarre and troubling ideas. Thus the particular chapter I'm talking about (10) plays like a malfunctioning machine, continually resetting itself. It is subtle, and quite terrifying, and no level of rational explanation later (which is neat enough but ultimately not enough, in terms of credibility) even comes close to a weird new sense of reality, which never goes away. Or maybe probably that should be with the scare quotes: "reality." This is a great one.

In case it's not at the library.

Bobby (Boris) Pickett & the Crypt-Kickers, "Monster Mash" (1962 / 1973)

Sept. 15, 1962, #1 (2 wks.) / June 30, 1973, #10
(listen)

"Monster Mash" is one of those rare hits that managed to hit twice (see also "The Twist," "Stand by Me," and perhaps others too ... anyone?). "Monster Mash" is a novelty song, basically a girl group vamp, which appropriately hit first within the Halloween time frame in 1962. The summer 1973 hit is a bit more mysterious (there was also a Hot 100 appearance in August 1970), but we'll get to that. On the original release in 1962, the BBC banned the song as "too morbid." In 1973 it was rereleased in the UK, where it peaked at #3 in October. But how it became a hit in the US just before that, well out of the Halloween time frame, is the mystery. I remember it on the radio that summer, and I remember enjoying it with others, in the car and such, because it really is a wonderful little thing, but I was puzzled also that it was a hit. Maybe somebody out there knows that story too. Anyway, it is a delicious toss-off relic of its first era, the NYC / Brill Building pop factory good times, specifically division of Twist. It is indeed a "monster mash" of time-bound parodies: the Mashed Potato dance craze (a variety of the Twist) paired with Bela Lugosi's Dracula and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, themselves a craze because of the arrival on late-night TV of the Universal monster movies of the '30s. Total 100% formula, perhaps the very definition of a novelty song, and yet for me it entirely transcends the label. I like to think it has something to do with the presence of Leon Russell, but some sources say he was late for the session and only appeared on the b-side song. It's goofy funny with the Lugosi impersonation and sound effects and all, but what brings me back is the conviction of the backup singers and the pleasing way it rolls along. It gets to some good places.

We Can Build You (1962)

For the most part Philip K. Dick novels do not fall into the realm of "hard" (i.e., technically plausible) science fiction, which is one of the first things I noticed about We Can Build You. It's full of the usual preoccupations with schizophrenia and epidemics of mental illness, including a US governmental agency called the Federal Bureau of Mental Health (FBMH) that manages a national system of treatment and facilities. It's a bit totalitarian, to say the least, but also weirdly good-hearted. But the main feature of We Can Build You, I think everyone agrees, is the appearance of a deeply sophisticated Abraham Lincoln robot, whipped up in their spare time by a schizophrenic teen girl and an engineer at a manufacturer that produces electronic organs and other musical instruments. Never mind how preposterous it is. Dig, rather, the eerie gravitas this classic figure of Lincoln brings to a Dick novel. Partly it is the result of the reactions of the other characters, who instinctively address him as "Mr. President" (or simply faint, in one notably overplayed scene). Partly it is because Dick seems to have Lincoln basically right—or anyway in line with Henry Fonda's version in the 1939 John Ford movie, Young Mr. Lincoln. Dick seems preternaturally comfortable with our secular martyred national saint, fluidly touching all the familiar notes: his physical stature, his gloominess, his silly but endearing wit, his aching loneliness (this incarnation was seen most recently, of course, by Daniel Day-Lewis in the 2012 Spielberg movie). I went back and had another look at Young Mr. Lincoln just to make sure, and I have to think Dick was well aware of the movie as he wrote (in 1962, though the novel did not actually see light of day until 1969, serialized in a magazine, and was not published as a book until 1972). It is a typical bunch of Dick's anomic disaffected rubbing shoulders and having strange conversations about their strange ambitions and the strange ways they go about realizing them. It's set in Boise and Seattle, mostly. Dick loved the American West, that's plain. But with the Lincoln figure it is the first sense I get of him as an American writer, and citizen, so to speak. The US felt more like a canvas he was painting on in The Man in the High Castle. In We Can Build You—and this is perhaps the biggest surprise I've encountered yet reading Dick, which is saying something—we find a writer with a strong sense of American identity, no simple patriot or rejecting anti-patriot or (what I probably expected) oblivious apathist, but rather someone who lived in this country and understood very well our most profound and intractable complexities. We know this because he understands so obviously well how Abraham Lincoln represented them, or at least some mass shared historical perception of them, and how he continues to embody them somehow even if only in his caricatured $5 bill affect, as Dick is implicitly arguing, carried into a vision of the future that is reasonably plausible in terms of its psychodynamics. The last thing I ever expected. Not to be missed.

In case it's not at the library.

A Clockwork Orange (1962)

The story of how this novel came to be written is very nearly as interesting as the book itself. Following a collapse in a classroom where he taught in Southeast Asia's Brunei in 1959, Anthony Burgess was (mistakenly) diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor and told he had less than a year to live. He was 42 and worried how his wife would survive after he was gone. As a result, he churned out some five novels within the year and 11 by 1964, including A Clockwork Orange, The Doctor Is Sick, Honey for the Bears, Inside Mr. Enderby, Nothing Like the Sun, One Hand Clapping, and The Wanting Seed. It's thus little surprise that A Clockwork Orange feels like a rush job, often reminiscent of some of Philip K. Dick's novels produced under similar pressures. As much as anything it's saved by two factors: Burgess's training as a linguist enabled him to concoct a flamboyant argot that thoroughly permeates the action (a glossary of this so-called Nadsat was published in earlier editions and is now found easily online; it's essential to understanding the book, though contextual clues are plentiful). Much of Nadsat is based on adaptations of Russian, which makes this more or less de facto a post-apocalyptic Cold War novel as much as anything. Perhaps most significantly, the fate of the work was sealed when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick took it on as a project. Burgess complained loudly and often that the picture distorted the novel unconscionably, particularly in following the American publishers' lead of lopping off the last chapter entirely, but the film seems to me actually remarkably faithful to the novel. Or maybe that's some artifact for me of the indelible aspects of the picture, notably Malcolm McDowell's performance, which rings loudly all through this in dialogue lifted straight off. Even little throwaway lines such as "What didst thou in thy mind have?" recall the picture for me vividly. I loved the movie when I was in high school—perhaps for the wrong reasons, the cartoony verve with which it relished its brutality, "the old ultra-violence"—and was suitably impressed when I read the novel then. Now I think it's still an interesting book, and think of it still for adolescents, though I suspect it's way more marginalized in this day and age. I think the dense slang is what makes it useful, more for the way it forces appreciation for language and its sources than for the moral/ethical conundrum that the narrative pretends to address of the "clockwork orange"—a thing manufactured but with the appearance of the organic—which gets a bit simplistic and overly dependent on I-R-O-N-Y to makes its heavy-handed points about freedom and social conditioning.

In case it's not at the library.

Jules and Jim (1962)

Jules et Jim, France, 105 minutes
Director: Francois Truffaut
Writers: Henri-Pierre Roche, Francois Truffaut, Jean Gruault
Photography: Raoul Coutard
Music: Georges Delerue
Editor: Claudine Bouche
Cast: Oskar Werner, Jeanne Moreau, Henri Serre, Vanna Urbino, Boris Bassiak, Anny Nelsen

I had some plans here to complain some about Jules and Jim. I have been overexposed to it over the years, plain and simple—it seemed to be always a picture someone or other wanted to force on me, or that was around when I was with people in the mood for an art film. It has always been there. Its dour subject matter and grim resolution would appear to fly in the face of most of the conventions of French New Wave, which it bears in abundance, indeed in many ways stands in for as symbol. As with, say, Wild Strawberries—which I liked a good deal more at one point—it has suffered some from its position as Important Landmark of Film.

But a funny thing happened. One more viewing unexpectedly mellowed me some. Generally speaking, the problem I tend to have with Truffaut is inherent in what I also tend to like best about him and consider his strong suit—his humanity and his light-hearted and almost mischievous playfulness. But the playfulness can also veer toward the precious and at those times he is like the angel cherub currying favor with teacher, wrinkling his nose and dimpling his chin in order to acquire another tablespoon of kindergarten paste, which as likely as not he has been eating.

Lolita (1962)

UK/USA, 152 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Vladimir Nabokov, Stanley Kubrick
Photography: Oswald Morris
Music: Nelson Riddle
Editor: Anthony Harvey
Cast: James Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon, Peter Sellers

Vladimir Nabokov, author of the novel on which this is based, gets full credit in the titles for the screenplay of Lolita, but later tales of the production make it clear it's actually much more the work of director Stanley Kubrick. Certainly it's hard for me to believe that Nabokov would have been responsible for the awkward frame here, where James Mason as Humbert Humbert confronts a scenery-chewing Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in a disorientingly trashed mansion setting. That kind of storytelling device seems more a convention of the early '60s, or perhaps more generally just of movies. But the preamble especially seems to me wasted time in an arguably already too-long picture, and the closing few minutes don't add much either.

Well, they serve as showcase for Peter Sellers, which I suspect was the intent as much as anything. Sellers was a gifted screen comic, a kind of Robin Williams of his time, but I'm not sure Kubrick knew what to do with him as much as he might have thought, here or in Dr. Strangelove either. In what turns out to be more of a concise chamber drama enacted by a small cast set in the middle of a sprawling and almost kinda sorta lurid road movie (it was of course impossible to be as explicit as the material required), Sellers often seems to me the weak link.

Pale Fire (1962)

Vladimir Nabokov here takes high concept to new flights of ecstatic vision, with literary text, criticism, and pulpy narrative so inextricably enmeshed as to be virtually inseparable. It's as entertaining to read straight through as a novel as it is dense and rewarding to parse closely, breaking various sections and their interrelations down to constituent parts—a work that clearly could have been no small feat to produce, but for the most part evidently all in a day's work for Nabokov. Ostensibly it's a critical treatment written by an academic, Charles Kinbote, about a long, previously unpublished poem by poet John Shade. It opens with a foreword by Kinbote, and then reproduces the 999-line poem, "Pale Fire" (of course), which is divided into four cantos. That is followed by Kinbote's line-by-line exegeses, which increasingly ramble off-point as he details his friendship with Shade, Shade's murder, Kinbote's acquisition of Shade's poem in manuscript, and then begins to wander further afield into stories of Kinbote's homeland, Zembia, whose king was recently overthrown in a Soviet-sponsored coup. From there, as it becomes evident that Kinbote is (or believes himself to be) that king, and may or may not be insane, or suicidal, or even a murderer, it grows ever more consumed with paranoia as Kinbote believes there is an assassin on his trail, even as Kinbote is attempting to finish this critical treatise and assemble a publishable manuscript. Though Nabokov plays it as straight as anyone could, the events described are so weird and so funny it's hard not to miss the joke. And that joke is a very good one. The poem itself sprawls across most of the first quarter of the book; it's not particularly easy going for someone like me not accustomed to reading poetry closely, particularly long-form poetry. And no way, I suspect, does that poem ever stand on its own. It's just good enough to be believable and that's all the opening Nabokov needs for this story. Once into Kinbote's commentary, things move briskly, and the plot developments and their implications come from all directions at once. Sometimes you just need to stop for a few moments to contemplate the crazy integrity of it all. I found myself using two bookmarks, one for my place in the commentary and the other for the section of the poem under discussion. You probably don't even need to go through the poem all at once in the first place, as I did, struggling, but can proceed directly from Foreword to Commentary (page numbers obligingly marked out in a table of contents) and absorb the poem well enough that way. Pale Fire is really not one to miss just because the concept might seem so rarefied or intellectualized, though it does, once through, represent a fascinating, seemingly bottomless puzzle capable of sustaining multiple interpretations. At the same time, it's one of the funniest books I've ever read.

In case it's not at the library.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

UK, 228 minutes
Director: David Lean
Writers: T.E. Lawrence, Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson
Photography: Freddie Young
Music: Maurice Jarre
Editor: Anne V. Coates
Cast: Peter O'Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Omar Sharif, Jose Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy, Donald Wolfit, I.S. Johar, Gamil Ratib, Michael Ray, John Dimech, Zia Mohyeddin, Peter Burton, Basil Dignam, Harry Fowler, Clive Morton, Robert Rietty, John Robinson, Barry Warren

In terms of its movie industry antics, Hollywood has always been a pretty strange place. But it may have been even more so than normal around the early '60s, when gobs of money were so routinely poured into a seemingly endless series of bloated epics, many with historical/religious settings and each more expensive than the last. The whole thing finally teetered over under the groaning weight of 1963's 192-minute Cleopatra, a film so costly that, even just to break even, projections showed it had to be one of the three highest-grossing pictures ever made to that point. (Fun fact: It managed to turn a $4 million profit.)

And so, conventional wisdom informs us, Hollywood's studio system collapsed. With such prejudices of mine so firmly in place—that is, that all expensive productions of the time were ipso facto ludicrous—I was thus surprised to find Lawrence of Arabia so highly ranked by critical consensus. But there it is, top 20, in all its 228-minute, 70-mm glory, complete with overture, intermission, and finale orchestral music.