Young Frankenstein (1974)

USA, 106 minutes

Director: Mel Brooks

Writers: Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, Mary Shelley

Photography: Gerald Hirschfeld

Music: John Morris

Editor: John C. Howard

Cast: Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, Peter Boyle, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr, Kenneth Mars, Gene Hackman, Richard Haydn, Mel Brooks, Danny Goldman

Young Frankenstein is so scrupulously faithful to the 1930s Universal franchise that it fairly fits itself into the canon itself. You must start with the 1931 Frankenstein and 1935 Bride of Frankenstein, of course. But then I say it’s your choice: the star-studded 1939 Son of Frankenstein (Boris Karloff! Bela Lugosi! Basil Rathbone!) or this affectionate send-up. It boasts a luminous black & white palette, old-fashioned wipes from one scene to the next, and arguably cowriter Gene Wilder’s greatest single performance. It comes with all the trimmings too, including the little girl, the bride, the blind man, pitchforks, torches, elaborate mechanical wind-up law enforcement out of Peter Sellers, and more.

Wilder is Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (pronounced fronk-un-steen in a running gag), grandson of the mad scientist Victor (renamed Henry in the old movies for some reason). Frederick is a professor of human anatomy and biology trying to live down his grandfather’s crimes, constantly needled by his students. Wilder, as ever, and perhaps more so here, is a paradox of style, a quiet-mannered player who uses off-beat pauses, the position of his head, and the volume of his speaking voice to convey great stores of molten angst, rage, and depression, which erupt in calibrated, pitch-perfect sobbing rants. The ongoing, never-ending, exhausting battle over the pronunciation of his name is just a foretaste of what’s to come with the driven, neurotic, obsessed fool Wilder has made of Dr. Frankenstein.

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris, France, 193 minutes

Director: Jacques Rivette

Writers: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Jacques Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, Henry James

Photography: Jacques Renard

Music: Jean-Marie Senia

Editor: Nicole Lubtchansky
Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder

Given the surreal rambles of Celine and Julie Go Boating, along with a release date not far past the 1960s, you have to wonder if psychedelic or something like it was the intention here. There are references here to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s adventures with big rabbits and clocks and such. Hard candies falling in the laps of Celine and Julie in dream-like situations (falling literally into their mouths) and provoking visions bears some suggestion of LSD, whose doses at one time were famous for coming on sugar cubes. Today’s viewers may be more likely to think of cannabis edibles, which were largely unheard of in 1974 as far as I know. That works too. I haven’t seen much by director and cowriter Jacques Rivette, but he seems to have some penchant for going long. La Belle Noiseuse (1991) is four hours, a pair of Joan of Arc pictures from 1994 run nearly five hours together, and of course the 1971 Out 1 famously goes nearly 13 hours.

Not until the very end of Celine and Julie is any kind of literal boating seen. The boating in the title is more like the boating found in the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows”: “Turn off your mind relax and float down-stream / It is not dying.” There is a recurring title card in Celine and Julie that in a way tells the story of the whole movie: “But the next morning...” Black screens of a few seconds are used as transitions, sometimes the usual matter of “later that day,” but sometimes mere seconds or less, suggesting powerful epiphanies of some kind to the brain. From over here it looks like a pretty good time, as Celine (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier) bop about on somewhat mystifying adventures in an alternate reality—looks like they’re having a great time. But merely watching it is not the same thing.

“The Same Dog” (1974)

Here’s another nervy good one from Robert Aickman, operating much like a fairy tale at altitude. He introduces us to Hilary—a boy, but his name often confuses others. He’s the third son in a broader extended family that has only boys. Already coming at us with the small, absurd, unsettling details. Hilary’s brothers are both older than him by double-digit years. Their mother is dead. Hilary has no memory of her. He is sent to the boarding school everyone in his family goes to, and there, as a young boy, he meets Mary, who becomes his closest friend. She is the first female in his life. It seems likely to be a lasting union, even so early. They take longs walks in the woods, share imaginary stories, and make detailed maps of imaginary places, such as Fairyland and the bordering Giantland. On one day’s walk, deep in the woods, they find a very high wall. A dog that can’t be seen makes strange noises: “... barking—if, indeed, one could call it a bark. It was more like a steady growling roar, with a clatter mixed up in it, almost certainly of gnashing teeth.” This is frightening, but they take turns being frightened and reassuring. They follow the wall to a gate, where they see the dog, a strange yellow beast, and also the house, which appears abandoned. After they return from the adventure, Hilary takes sick the next day and is bedridden for two months. When he recovers, he is told that Mary is dead. No further word is ever learned about Hilary’s sickness or how Mary died. No one seems willing to tell Hilary how she died. It’s a shocking development, for the reader too. The story then jumps ahead 20 years, to when Hilary as a young man has occasion to visit the school again, visiting a friend who lives in the region. The area has been developed considerably, with many new homes. It’s hard to tell whether they can even find the strange house. Hilary tells his friend the story meanwhile. Then they find it. It has been fixed up and is occupied now. The title has already given away what they find, but there is more—Aickman’s usual ration of unsettling more. It’s arguable Aickman was the best short story writer of horror or fantasy in the second half of the 20th century. More evidence here.

Robert Aickman, Cold Hand in Mine
Listen to story online.

“There Are More Things” (1974)

[spoilers] This story by Jorge Luis Borges is from his collection The Book of Sand. It is formally dedicated “to the memory of H.P. Lovecraft.” There seems to be some confusion at Wikipedia about the dedication because Borges is elsewhere dismissive of Lovecraft. Is it a case like Scott Bradfield (and kinda sorta me), a reversal after a lifetime of bewilderment and disdain? It took me a second reading for Borges’s story to really click, but ultimately it is good at hitting the high notes of dread, piling on with humdrum detail. It’s short but requires a good deal of setup. Reports of glazing over are common among readers. I thought, as with Lovecraft, that it got better with familiarity, as the concepts settle in. You have to read this stuff slowly, more slowly than I can always manage. Borges indulges the Lovecraftian with a mysterious mansion changing hands, windows permanently covered, work that goes on all night, and strange furniture. I like the ending, but I see why some complain. Borges foreshadows monsters more and more intensely, and just at the moment we are about to see them—the story stops. “... I heard something coming up the ramp—something heavy and slow and plural. Curiosity got the better of fear, and I did not close my eyes.” That’s how it ends. No attempt at further description is made (which I must say is not very Lovecraftian). By the literary rules under which I’m pretty sure Borges is operating, this first-person narrator survives the encounter to tell the tale. We know that (or we think we know that)—and, further, he tells it calmly, soberly, thoroughly. What did he see? One element of Lovecraft not used here is the tendency for characters to be high-strung and/or go mad. It’s an interesting omission on Borges’s part. Exactly what he is up to with this story I don’t know—a general hallmark of his work. It’s a reasonably good facsimile of Lovecraft overall and strikes that mood well. Why doesn’t the narrator tell us what he saw and how he escaped? Perhaps, I like to think, because he thought it might drive us mad, turning us as the readers into that element of Lovecraft, tittering mindlessly at the throne of chaos where the thin flutes pipe (with apologies to Destroy All Monsters). The title is from Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory
Read story online (scroll down).
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“Reflections” (1974)

Angela Carter is a dense prose stylist. This story, formally a kind of M.C. Escher exercise, gets to strange places. The first-person narrator is taking a walk in the woods—his voice feels to me more like a woman, but he is a young man. He hears the singing of a bird, then the singing of a woman. His reverie is interrupted when he trips on something, which turns out to be a seashell. “A shell so far from the sea!” It’s very big and also the pattern of whorls on it goes the wrong way, our first clue that we are inside some mirror world. The singing young woman has a gun and shoots at him. She sics her “enormous black dog” on him. She forces him at gunpoint to an ”ancient brick house” surrounded by a magnificent walled garden. Wikipedia, via ISFDB, summarizes: “A boy goes on a Through the Looking-Glass-like adventure into a bizarre, reversed world. He encounters an elderly woman who is actually a hermaphrodite, and is raped by a girl in a forest before ultimately escaping.” That’s about it all right. The girl’s name is Anna, a palindrome. Everything in this world is reversed or reversible. Perhaps the androgyne represents a kind of balance between the two worlds. Here’s a typical Carter sentence, during the rape of the narrator: “I shouted and swore but the shell grotto in which she ravished me did not reverberate and I only emitted gobs of light.” What would the reverse look like, one wonders. By this time our guy is aware he is in a mirror world. He takes Anna’s gun and shoots her. He knows where the mirror portal is and intends to escape. The androgyne, I should mention because I’m sure it means something, if not everything, seems to spend all their time knitting prodigiously. Attempting to put it all together, the story has much the feel of dreams in the retelling (and rereading by fragments). Carter is one to read almost like poetry, slowly and carefully, savoring and pondering its raw ways. It’s at least as weird as, and maybe even better than, the Lewis Carroll tale. I know that’s saying something but also I have always found the classic Carroll tales slightly oversold.

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
Story not available online.

“A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” (1974)

This story by Philip K. Dick is the last story in The Dark Descent. So I finished it, huzzah! Editor David G. Hartwell often reached beyond horror in the oversize anthology—sometimes to a fault, e.g., Faulkner, Turgenev—so ending on Dick is not a big surprise. He argues for science fiction horror writing: “Bodies of work from such writers as Dick and [Gene] Wolfe and [Thomas] Disch ... demand the broadening of the older definitions of horror literature, and require discarding criteria based on content in favor of the effect itself.” I think a Dick story from the ‘50s, “The Hanging Stranger,” makes an even stronger case for him as a horror writer, but there’s no reason this can’t be a “both/and” situation, at least in principle. “Tempunauts” is a time travel story that takes the Apollo moon mission as a model. A crew of three “tempunauts” has been hurled 100 years into the future in a launch attended by media frenzy. But, in fact, something went wrong and they traveled into the future only a few days. They soon learn they perished on their return from the future. These various paradoxes somehow mean they have thrown themselves and possibly the world or even universe into a closed time loop that is eternal. A successful reentry would break the loop. I’m not sure I understand how they know these things, even that they are in a loop at all. The reentry has failed and we come to learn it’s the result of sabotage by one of the tempunauts in order to (per Wikipedia) “find resolution in death and close the time-loop, freezing all of humanity, and possibly the whole universe, in endless repetition of a single week.” At one time, when I was a kid, time travel was my favorite SF idiom, but these days honestly the paradoxes can just put me on overload. I like Dick’s storytelling skills but the ambiguities here are a bit arch for science fiction, let alone horror. It seems to be an irrational act on the part of the tempunaut. He learns they die because of the reentry and that it’s because of sabotage and he even speculates a closed time loop may exist. But he has a choice not to sabotage the return and does so anyway. The problem I had was that it wasn’t entirely clear while I was reading. I thought that’s what was going on, but it seemed perverse and unmotivated. It’s a chilling enough idea, like horror should be, but it’s also at way too many removes for me. So the anthology ends on a curiosity, but there’s still another edited by Hartwell and nearly as big, Foundations of Fear. Look forward to getting into that.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

USA, 91 minutes

Director: Brian De Palma

Writers: Brian De Palma, Louisa Rose

Photography: Larry Pizer

Music: Paul Williams

Editor: Paul Hirsch

Cast: Paul Williams, William Finley, Jessica Harper, George Memmoli, Gerrit Graham, Rod Serling

Phantom of the Paradise is one of director and cowriter Brian De Palma’s wacky experiments from the ‘70s. It wallows in that era’s sense of decadence, with a voiceover intro by Rod Serling and a sloppy munge of classic horror or horror-adjacent narratives like Goethe’s Faust (about the German historical and literary figure, not the German band), Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado,” and, most obviously, the Gaston Leroux novel and subsequent Universal movie The Phantom of the Opera. Fair enough—obvious enough. All you have to do is look at Phantom of the Paradise to see those things. But the last time I watched it I ended up spending a lot of time trying to think of the term for this type of picture, because I think it’s one of the better examples. Is it really “rock musical” (as per Wikipedia)? I was even willing to go with “rock opera.” Candidates for comparison I thought of included Flesh for Frankenstein aka Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Performance, The Rocky Horror Show, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Grace of My Heart, and Velvet Goldmine, and Wikipedia had a few more good ideas as well (Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease, The Wiz, Pink Floyd – The Wall, Ken Russell’s Tommy, so on so forth).

Whatever you call it, De Palma’s picture flopped on release in 1974 but became a cult classic over time as midnight movies and VHS tech became more common, which is approximately where I came in. A friend passed it along to me in the early ‘80s and I flipped for it. The plot goes all over the place but holds together, and holds up too, and I get a kick out of all the rock signifiers. Swan (Paul Williams) is a certain type of brutally ambitious producer, impresario (owner of the Paradise theater), record label honcho (“Death Records”), and general rock ‘n’ roll savant. He is reminiscent at once of Phil Spector, Rodney Bingenheimer, and Arte Johnson. The Juicy Fruits and their various incarnations are Swan’s breakthrough project. The quasi-tragic Winslow Leach (William Finley) comes across like an era-specific Elton John / Billy Joel / Todd Rundgren kind of piano-banging songwriter. Although Leach is literally “the phantom of the Paradise” the star of the picture is more like Swan, which raises the very interesting problem of Paul Williams.

The Conversation (1974)

USA, 113 minutes

Director/writer: Francis Ford Coppola

Photography: Bill Butler, Haskell Wexler

Music: David Shire

Editor: Richard Chew

Cast: Gene Hackman, Frederic Forrest, Cindy Williams, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, Robert Duvall, Elizabeth MacRae

“Masterpiece” is always a loaded, fuzzy term to use. But in the case of director and writer Francis Ford Coppola it’s probably fair to say it about the four movies he released in the ‘70s, even if by reputation alone: The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. It’s also fair to say he never came close again after that, though some of his pictures have their partisans: The Cotton Club, Dracula, Tetro, others. I’ve always liked One From the Heart, Peggy Sue Got Married, and the S.E. Hinton adaptations, but they’re not really within shouting distance of the big four.

The Conversation is the quietest and most compact of them and was also the least successful commercially on its release. The cast today looks absolutely star-studded, featuring the versatile Gene Hackman who is excellent as always. It’s a certain representation of prime ‘70s American cinema, shot by Bill Butler and Haskell Wexler and with a soundtrack (a good one) by David Shire. John Cazale and Allen Garfield are stellar, and the small but indelible appearances by Teri Garr, Harrison Ford, and Robert Duvall are fun and impressive too. Ford is impossibly young. Cazale, as you may have heard, died young and thus gave us only a handful of performances, but they are uniformly knockouts (both of the Godfather movies, Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter, and The Conversation). He was the Anton Yelchin of his time. Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams as anonymous surveillance targets are also impossibly young. In one way they are barely in the movie at all. In another, they are at the center of it.

"Sticks" (1974)

If H.P. Lovecraft married The Blair Witch Project and they had a baby, it would be this story by Karl Edward Wagner. Wagner was a trained doctor and psychiatrist who abandoned the profession as soon as he could. He looked like a biker outlaw or member of Jethro Tull. A tireless champion of cosmic horror, he published as the principal of Carcosa Press, edited an annual Year's Best Horror anthology through the '80s and into the '90s, and wrote a lot of stories. He died young, in 1994, at 48. "Sticks" is a great example of Wagner's knack for the cosmic. It's now considered part of Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. I particularly like the casual inside view Wagner brings here of horror publishing, making the main character an illustrator for pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, mentioned by name. But it's the so-called lattice structures that particularly make the story. They are combinations of sticks and boards nailed or bound together in geometric shapes and they litter the forest floor by the hundreds. Our guy is out looking for a trout stream the day before he is due to report to the draft board to serve in World War II. He finds these strange stick figures and follows them to what might be their source, an abandoned house deep in the woods dating back to pre-Revolutionary times. The stick figures multiply the closer he gets to it and, well—we're here to solve the mystery of all this, which takes years and decades. The closer our various psychic detectives get to it (writing letters to one another—a lot of this story is classic epistolary business), the more likely they are to die under strange circumstances. It's altogether epic for a story that only goes about 20 pages. Things happen in it you can't expect, even if you've read Lovecraft and watched Blair Witch. It's great with landscapes, especially the New England wilderness, which is really the heart of the whole thing. I must be getting used to the Lovecraft style (minus the bigotry), because I found "Sticks" easy and enjoyable to settle into, let it work its magic, and ride along for the fun. I liked the peek behind the curtain of horror fiction publishing, and the sense of how important illustrators are to the enterprise. The story never feels strained, maintains a nice pace, and all developments are organic and natural enough on their terms. Something just feels unusually lucid in this story of the Cthulhu realms. It might even be a good place to start on cosmic horror if you're not sure of Lovecraft and his well-deserved reputation for being objectionable.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Masters of Horror and the Supernatural: The Great Tales, ed. Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg, & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)
Listen to story online.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974)

Angst essen Seele auf, West Germany, 92 minutes

Director/writer: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Photography: Jurgen Jurges

Music: unspecified Arabic

Editor: Thea Eymesz

Cast: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin, Katharina Herberg, Irm Hermann, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Walter Sedlmayr, Wolfgang Hess

I'm not the most dedicated fan of German director and writer Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died in 1982 before he was even 40, but I have seen a lot of the movies he made in a prodigious if short-lived career. I associate him more with Berlin Alexanderplatz and The Marriage of Maria Braun, so I was surprised to find this one at the top of his films on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?—#144 in the latest iteration, with Berlin Alexanderplatz next down at #327. I didn't even get a look at Ali: Fear Eats the Soul until 10 or 15 years ago and at that time its story of hostility toward Arab immigrants in West Germany struck me as way off-brand for Fassbinder, an extreme student of director Douglas Sirk, and the movie just too dreary.

But it hits a little differently in this era where immigrants are so widely reviled and blamed for all problems once again. Obviously this is a continuing theme through history and arguably the US is a nation of immigrants. The problem may or may not be worse here, but it is certainly more comically hypocritical. In my second look at Ali, in the midst of our present-day intense hysteria about immigrants (the whole "border crisis" which is just Benghazi 2.0 a political stunt), I still found the story hard to believe in many ways, but its didactic points about intolerance are put over convincingly, along with tremendous performances from the main players, Brigitte Mira as Emmi and El Hedi ben Salem as Ali.

Celestial Navigation (1974)

I liked Anne Tyler's fifth novel, full of all the usual stuff—Baltimore, a repressed man hero, a nurturing extrovert woman for his partner. It's a little experimental in form but solidly constructed. The experimental part is that each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, sometimes first-person, sometimes third-person. Our repressed man hero, Jeremy Pauling, lives in a rooming house his mother operated, taking it over after she dies at the start of the novel. He really is an extreme case, nearly autistic in his affect, much more damaged than the charming eccentrics Tyler would produce later (damaged as they may be). Jeremy's girlfriend Mary moves into his place on the rebound from a rebound relationship following a divorce. She's big and loud and competent and gives birth to six kids in the space of this novel. Jeremy is the father of the last five, but he's such an abstracted figure to them they all call him by his name rather than Dad or even Daddy. Conveniently enough, he's able to make a living as a fine artist—a gallery owner takes him under his wing and Jeremy's work catches on. Most of the pleasure in this is Tyler's language and her usual sharp eye and ear. Small details unexpectedly swim off the page and hit hard. I had my usual trouble always believing the easy way Tyler characters survive and fall together. Her faith in love and relationships can be romantic verging on sentimental. Yet something about the story of Jeremy and Mary tugs hard. Notably, I did not expect it to end the way it did. In fact, the zigging and zagging of the plot is often unexpected, yet never outlandish. Part of this is achieved by her narrative strategy. By shifting the points of view steadily, large events in the story often happen offstage. The story may lurch a little with each new chapter, but the novel is effective and moves with confidence. There's a quick tempo and a steady, grabby momentum. I've been reading my way through the novels from the first half of Tyler's career backward, and it's interesting to see some of the work losing focus in a way. Jeremy is not as sharp as Macon Leary and Mary is not as sharp as Muriel Pritchett, but they are certain foundations for those characters. And Celestial Navigation bears interest on its own merits as definitely one of the good ones.

In case it's not at the library.

Cop Killer (1974)

Near the end now of Maj Sjöwall's and Per Wahlöö's Story of Crime series, and main characters are making various life decisions. The police detective Martin Beck has risen high in the ranks, and even become a bit of a celebrated public figure. At first I took the title as another nod to Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series (which started with Cop Hater and had a small run with "Killer" in the title). But it's actually more of an involuted double entendre. Some cop killing does go on here—technically not really, but the details are there to be discovered—which produces a ludicrous but easily imagined overreaction on the part of the national Swedish police force. Indeed, the brooding ruminations on police power across the series reach a certain crescendo in this one. The title is also a way to describe a policeman who has killed, along the way distinguishing it as well from policemen prone to such actions, which would be more like "Killer Cop." The cop killer in this case is Beck's friend Lennart Kollberg. In spite of recent police rules mandating it, Kollberg has long refused to carry a firearm except in the most extreme circumstances. He was involved in an accidental killing early in his career which he deeply regrets. The main case at hand in Cop Killer, however, is the disappearance of a woman living next door to a known sex criminal. In fact, he's known to us too—from Roseanne, the first novel in the series. It's part of tying the whole series together, but feels a little strained as a plot element. On the other hand, the situation with the sex criminal actually has some interesting wrinkles. We see the crime in the carefully written first chapter, and see enough to know it could be but isn't necessarily him. Beck and Kollberg come to believe he is innocent and the case is interesting and fair. However, the B story, which is the confrontation that produces a dead cop, becomes the more interesting story (even though it comes in so late) because that's where police force militarism is examined most closely and lampooned without mercy. Part of the interest here, and much of my own in police procedurals, is the inherent tension of police power—its ability to routinize and stabilize daily life and its enormous potential for abuse. Those are the themes Sjöwall and Wahlöö are best on in this one.

In case it's not at the library.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

USA, 155 minutes
Director/writer: John Cassavetes
Photography: Mitch Breit, Al Ruban
Music: Bo Harwood
Editors: David Armstrong, Sheila Viseltear
Cast: Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Katherine Cassavetes, Lady Rowlands, Fred Draper, Matthew Cassel, Matthew Labyorteaux, Christina Grisanti, George Dunn, Mario Gallo, Eddie Shaw

There is a lot of interesting background to the making of this movie—director and writer John Cassavetes mortgaged his house and borrowed heavily to get it done and then an unusual distribution strategy had to be pursued when even independents declined to work with it. I recall a lot of discussion at the time it was released of strategies of improvisation in the performances. Much about the picture did seem shaggy and rough. But somehow that is no longer the case. It feels to me now like a consummately professional production, and points such as the handheld shooting only give it more immediacy. It is excellent filmmaking. It looks great, its story is tender and surprising by turns, and except for the rich color stock of the film, which looks like 100% American '70s cinema, it could have been released even in the last five years. The movie it reminds me of now is Boyhood, with its penetration into the ways a family orbits itself.

It's Cassavetes's film by all the normal markers, but still it owes everything to the performance of his wife Gena Rowlands as Mabel Longhetti. Mabel is married to Nick (Peter Falk) and they have three kids under 10. At first, in a reflexive sort of way, the movie might appear to be courting trouble by taking on the theme of insanity, which is so often the band-aid of fiction. But mental illness in A Woman Under the Influence is not a flimsy way to explain something. It's just the given, and as such the subject itself of the movie, focusing especially on the chaos it produces on the loved ones of the sufferer. In this case, Cassavetes seeks an interesting extra layer by casting his mother and Rowlands's mother as the mothers of Nick and Mabel, respectively. Medicine and attitudes have advanced since the '70s, but the portrait of the Longhetti family in crisis is still perfectly recognizable, with Nick attempting to come to terms with the reality of his wife's condition, fighting through denial and shame, even as Mabel continually loses her grip and blows every chance she gets in polite company.

"Minor Heroism" (1974)

Story by Allan Gurganus not available online.

Allan Gurganus's story is dense with weighty significance. It has a subtitle ("Something About My Father"), a dedication (to William Maxwell), and three subsections that are numbered and titled: "1. At War, at Home," "2. My Elder Son," and "3. Addendum." The three sections alternate narrators: two are by the oldest son, Brian, at different time periods, and the middle section is narrated by the father. All this is in service of a story of the midcentury generation gap. The father is a war hero (World War II) who was photographed with Betty Grable and involved in the fire-bombing of Dresden. By contrast, the father's oldest son is gay. It's a lot of fancy footwork for a point that now seems almost trite: the militarist father with a gay son and the father can't stand the shame. In turn, the son hates the father in a deeply conflicted way. I did like the way the second section moved. There was a lot of tiresome set-up work in the first, but maybe it pays off with the second. Part of my problem really is that I never have much sympathy for these fathers, and here I don't think we're even supposed to. The story title itself belittles the father's glories, and Dresden is the giveaway. At the time the story was written and published (five years after Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five), Dresden had become a symbol for the mistakes in the war made by the Allies—or the barbarities, as there are probably people who continue to defend Dresden. When we arrive inside the father's head in the second section, his self-pity and aggrieved tone don't make him any more sympathetic, but it feels authentic. You get a sense of his bewildered confusion about what the world turned into after the war. And Brian is done perhaps as well as anyone of the time could. There is a palpable discomfort with his sexuality, however, with so many clichés of the caustic homosexual queen attached to him. It makes the story itself feel strangely imbued with shame. At this point, the interest for me is more social-historical than anything. I don't know Gurganus at all beyond this, but there's an interesting anecdote about the story. In 1974, Gurganus was studying with John Cheever at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Cheever submitted the story to the New Yorker without Gurganus's knowledge. It was his first published story. It's not exactly Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but nice way to start a career.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

Something Happened (1974)

Something Happened was a tremendously important novel for me when it was new, and I was 19. It seemed to prefigure all of life ahead of me, not just the bland and obvious events to come (career, marriage, family, etc.) but how it would feel to live them out. As much as anything it might be a reason I ended up not really living them out at all (though in many ways I was already headed in that direction). It's easier to see now why it got the lukewarm reviews it did. The climaxing event, which made me cry then, now seems unlikely and overdone. Still, the fundamentals are in place—the voice (marked by ever-lengthening and equivocating parentheticals), the family life described, the office life, the whole existential tone, remain deadly accurate and deeply disturbing. The title is best taken as an open-ended unknown and not the event of the conclusion. It's the sense we all have to one degree or another that we thought things were supposed to go a certain way, they didn't, and now we wonder why. Bob Slocum, the main character and narrator, is a midlevel executive manager at an unspecified faceless corporation (I remember many reviewers presumed it was Time, Inc.). He has an unusual background, his father dead or gone early in his life, and also an older brother. There's a good deal of specificity to his background. But it's all within the parameters of American "normal," as intended. Slocum makes many nervous little jokes, punctuated by "ha, ha." He's not that likable, but not that off-putting either, and quite a few things here are now painfully dated as well, mostly a matter of the supremacy of white men at the time it was written and published. But the end of that supremacy was also in sight then, which accounts at least in part for the gnawing and convincing sense of dread. Bob Slocum and his voice are midcentury classic American, recognizable still, as are notably the scenes of dialogue with his family and, perhaps a little less so, with his professional colleagues. The prodigious philandering is hard to believe and may be the most dated element. But who's to say? It's a mixed bag. As the follow-up to Catch-22, some 13 years later, it was inevitably going to be a disappointment, but I think it's still well worth looking into, and holds up. There are Heller partisans who claim it as his best novel, and I'm not inclined to argue against that.

In case it's not at the library.

Joni Mitchell, "Free Man in Paris" (1974)

Aug. 24, 1974, #22
(listen)

Of all the many musical masks worn by Joni Mitchell, it is her turn as pop tunesmith I most favor. Court and Spark is the best one-stop for it and "Free Man in Paris" could well be my favorite of all on that album, although I hate to be pinned down on these things. As a lustrous expression of joy, high-flown stepping into a big bottom, a jouncing exuberant blast of giddy sunshine, with those lush howling self-harmonies that make it snap (her knack for which is the best feature on the album, woven even into the sad songs), it has few parallels. Even Stevie Wonder might have to take a back seat on the joy front for a minute. It sounds like Paris, in spring, fresh air and flowers and the streets warm and easy and charming to stroll in the afternoon. It sounds like Paris, it sounds like spring, it sounds like liberty. It is captivating that way from the first time it's heard—an unbelievably sweet pop confection. Yet for all of the things it might have been about—think of that expression, free man in Paris—I must say it is a little disappointing that it is about David Geffen. But so go the ways of rock mythologizing. Don't pay attention to that. Try to put it out of your mind. Stop thinking about David Geffen. "There was nobody calling me up for favors / And no one's future to decide / You know I'd go back there tomorrow / But for the work I've taken on / Stoking the star maker machinery / Behind the popular song." I said STOP THAT.

Roberta Flack, "Feel Like Makin' Love" (1974)

July 6, 1974, #1
(listen)

Not to be confused with the Bad Company song of the same title one year later, although with the ongoing corporatization of rock 'n' roll in those years they perhaps stand equally as heralds of a new way to sell, sell, sell w/ sex to undazing hippies and other children—"adult contemporary" and "classic rock," by name. I was less aware of that at the time with all the other breakdowns going on. Indeed, I have wonderful memories of this song on the air in the late summer of 1974. I mean literally the air, not just radio. I heard it swelling from apartment windows and cars most unexpectedly, most welcome, as walking with friends on the Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis one night, on one of those gorgeous, still, warm but not hot August nights, coming from a taxicab. I'm prude enough that the frankness of the song made me blush a little—have always thought "making love" an awkward way to talk about sex (with or without our friend the gerund-friendlyin' apostrophe). But that's just me. On the other hand, Roberta Flack sounds like a woman in love, not in heat (again, compare Bad Company for the dopey male version of the usage), and that is what makes this song particularly beautiful and affecting in spite of my efforts to resist it. It is indeed a harbinger of the adult contemporary to come (more often than not a problem, I admit, though I like perhaps surprising amounts of it in the '70s), with its sultry, swirling, softly treading electric accompaniment. The lyrics unfold a wonderfully romantic and domestic scene that sounds as healthy as a walk on the beach, with a happy ending. Winner.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

USA, 83 minutes
Director: Tobe Hooper
Writers: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper
Photography: Daniel Pearl
Music: Wayne Bell, Tobe Hooper
Editors: J. Larry Carroll, Sallye Richardson
Cast: Marilyn Burns, Allen Danziger, Paul A. Partain, William Vail, Teri McMinn, Edwin Neal, Gunnar Hansen, John Dugan, Jim Siedow, John Larroquette

(Spoilers ahead if you can call them spoilers.) I had seen The Texas Chain Saw Massacre only once until recently. That was enough to convince me it was one of the scariest movies ever made. The decision to look at it again was thus soon hampered by gnawing unease and procrastination at the prospect. I realized the last movie that had given me this kind of problem was Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and the link is clear. Neither particularly involves the supernatural, unworldly monsters, and/or abstract forces of evil. It's just human depravity, and that's enough.

To be sure, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is fiendishly conceived and full of exaggerations for effect large and small. Based loosely on the legends of Wisconsin serial killer and cannibal Ed Gein, it seems to take a special glee in the quotidian intricacies of the butchering industry as well as solemnly nodding over tales of how Native Americans put to use every part of the whales and buffaloes they slew. So along the way we find a lot of human bones, hair, skin and such (and feathers, in a room where a live rooster squats in a cage hung from the ceiling) draped all over everything, including the faces of the killers. But the movie is also remarkably free of blood and gore, though in turn that may be offset by larger-than-usual doses of screaming, which at one point toward the end seems to go on for 25 minutes or more.

Bread (1974)

I have to be resigned when I go off on binges of the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain to reencountering books I have already read because I couldn't remember the title when I was swooping them up in shopping frenzies. It's too overwhelming to consider reading them in order—over 50 titles, published between 1956 and 2005, not to mention I happen to know some of the early entries are rough (because I have tried to read them in order before). So I just plunge on in when the McBain mood strikes again. Bread is where I started on my recent rounds, and ultimately this round-up project, and as it happens it's not one I had read before. It's got an intricate plot involving fraud and/or larceny of some kind and eventually multiple murders and assaults. It introduces an interesting character from another precinct who would go on to become a series semi-regular, Fat Ollie Weeks, a bone-deep racist with disconcertingly good police instincts, who among other things slips into an annoying W.C. Fields routine when he's in a good mood. I was just reading on Wikipedia how much McBain felt he owed Jack Webb and Dragnet—I don't think I had known that before, though it makes sense, and indeed (full disclosure) Jack Webb is one of my own favorite filmmakers, within and beyond the procedural subgenre. Because of the time frame when I first became acquainted with McBain I have more often associated the 87th Precinct series with Hill Street Blues, which owes it many obvious debts. But yes, now that you mention it, even that opening disclaimer McBain used at the front of all these books—"The city in these pages is imaginary. The people, the places are all fictitious. Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique"—clearly derives from Dragnet's "This is the city, Los Angeles," etc. Sometime I will have to get into the matter of police procedurals a little more, because I'm not always on board with the most popular ones in this post- / hyper-forensics period we now live in (e.g., the whole CSI franchise is lost on me). Homely true-crime TV trumps them consistently I think. But there's a lineage last seen in the Law & Order standard-bearer (less so the offshoots) that wends back through Hill Street Blues and Dragnet and finds a nice place to dwell in the majority of these great McBain novels and stories. Read 'em by the handful.

In case it's not at the library.

Lenny (1974)

USA, 111 minutes
Director: Bob Fosse
Writer: Julian Barry
Photography: Bruce Surtees
Music: Ralph Burns
Editor: Alan Heim
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Valerie Perrine, Jan Miner, Stanley Beck, Gary Morton

In the chronicles of the careers of stand-up comic Lenny Bruce, director Bob Fosse, and the movie star Dustin Hoffman, Lenny may well be considered a low point. Downbeat, dreary, black and white—something of a willful distortion of a figure now basically obscure beyond "free speech" nuances of legal interpretation and general '60s martyr-mongering, where his reputation largely rests. Released in a particularly emblematic year of '70s cinema, overshadowed by Chinatown, The Godfather: Part II, The Conversation, and many others (not to mention box office juggernauts The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and Airport 1975), Lenny sometimes seems all but lost to history now.

For me, at 19, having dutifully plowed through Albert Goldman's Ladies and Gentlemen—Lenny Bruce!! and in the process of attempting to construct an authentic bohemian existence for myself in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it was a revelation and running away my favorite movie of that year. I saw it numerous times. The Goldman biography was written before his books on Elvis Presley and John Lennon revealed Goldman to be a mean-spirited distortion artist, and some of those problems plague his Bruce project as well, albeit in milder form. For the most part they are cleaned up in the movie, which then as now is much less about Bruce anyway and much more about Fosse and Hoffman and their egos and pushing the boundaries of moviemaking.