Earth, Wind & Fire, “Reasons” (1975)

[listen up!]

I was doing my much belated due diligence recently, checking up on Earth, Wind & Fire, an act I too long neglected. That’s the Way of the World is something like their fifth or sixth album but it’s where the (multiple) hits started (plus don’t forget the worthy deep cuts): “Shining Star,” a #1 hit I admit I heard enough on the radio and in some telephone company ad, the glistening title song (#12) much better than I remembered, and then this beauty, never a Hot 100 hit but it did appear on the Adult R&B chart. I was surprised—I knew “Reasons” as well as the other two, and not because it has become an unlikely staple at wedding celebrations (unlikely because if you listen to the words it’s about a one-night stand). That doesn’t explain why it seems so familiar because I don’t make it to that many weddings. The leisurely five-minute “Reasons” insinuates with fluttering horns and electric piano and Philip Bailey’s haunting, darting, lovely falsetto. But what I really love is one of those moments I’m starting to think only the best pop songs can deliver, heard in snatches on the radio (or somewhere) that stop me cold—in this case the lurching, battling rhythms that hit when the singers start going “la-la-la-la-la” around 1:15. It gets even better about a minute later when strings take the “la-la” melody line and the song sails on pure intuition, a robot out on the dancefloor reeling and careening at deliberate tempo. I can’t get enough of it. Cover versions by Miki Howard, the Manhattans, Maxi Priest (smooth reggae), Musiq Soulchild, and Nelson Rangell (lite jazz) only remind how good is the EWF original. Stick with this—and no live versions need apply either.

Red Headed Stranger (1975)

The story of Willie Nelson’s first album for the Columbia label is likely well-known by now. When he played the finished production for label heads, the story goes, they lost their minds. They assumed it was a demo and, when Nelson told them it was the album he wanted to release, they fought it but had no recourse. Nelson’s contract gave him full creative control. Lucky for them, as the album eventually went double-platinum or better, elevating Nelson’s status as a country artist and outlaw singer. The stripped-down production lets us focus on Nelson’s voice which has somehow always felt unusually pure. It also lets us get the strong bones of his songwriting more directly, with roots which run back to earliest country days of the American songbook. “Outlaw” has always struck me as the wrong word for Nelson and his work, even if he is a known consumer of marijuana. His voice is gentle and warm and his songs hit the same way, almost always instantly likable, simple and memorable. Of course, we’re also dealing with a concept album here, about a bitter man who slew his wife and her lover and has been on the run since. Like many concept albums I can’t always make out the narrative, but in this case I can feel it fine, a sad and dangerous man, wrecked, adrift. The album is short, under 35 minutes, with some calculated repetitions across the 15 tracks: “Time of the Preacher” makes three appearances, one of only 25 seconds, and “Red Headed Stranger” shows up twice. “Tale of the Red Headed Stranger,” written by Edith Lindeman Calisch and Carl Stutz, was originally recorded by Arthur Smith, more famous for “Guitar Boogie,” a popular candidate for first rock ‘n’ roll record ever. It’s also a handle Nelson likes to apply to himself. Red Headed Stranger also features standards by Fred Rose (“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”), Juventino Rosas (“O’er the Waves”), and others. The sing-song simplicity of the approach, picking out tunes on an acoustic guitar and serving up instrumentals as well, works well as cover for a real sense of complex poignancy. I’m not sure it’s the place to start with Willie Nelson, but certainly it’s essential across his amazing career. It goes down easy and it’s not hard to make a daily habit of it.

The Female Man (1975)

I’m not sure what to think of this Joanna Russ novel, billed as science fiction, nominated for a Nebula, and now widely considered a classic of so-called New Wave science fiction, though not without controversy and detractors. It bears a lot of the hallmarks of New Wave SF, but to me it seemed about two parts science fiction to seven or eight parts righteous feminist critique. What I liked best is that Russ is a witty and genuinely funny writer, skewering herself as well as men at large. What I liked least was feeling lost most of the time. Wikipedia helped with some of it. Reading it with others would probably be good too. That’s a feature I associate with New Wave SF—it’s often confusing. The Female Man is freewheeling and reads like someone’s head has just exploded, presumably Russ’s. There are multiple characters from multiple settings, a time travel theory, alternative histories, and more by way of high concept. The novel feels like it’s chasing its own tail for the first two-thirds, however entertaining. Then, with Part Seven, it focuses and bears down harder on its characters and even more on its complaints about men, which comes down to the famous quote from Sarah Moore Grimke, “All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks.” There’s a lot to complain about men, of course, and even more she may not have known yet in 1975. The endless sexualizing, the never taking women seriously, the use of women as slave labor, etc., etc. One thing she may not have known (or maybe did) is how much work women have done for science without credit. There’s also the whole baby-making expectation—men claiming motherhood as sacrosanct yet not offering much of anything tangible to help with it, as a matter of political policy, and even indignant about requests for life-saving healthcare. There’s not much new here for anyone who lived through the ‘70s and beyond. But Russ is way more fun than it might sound from the summaries. She’s playful, weird, and sardonic, all with a light touch. She’s angry too, with a good outlet for it here. The science fiction aspects feel more like a costume she has donned for the occasion. The ideas are intriguing but need more development and/or clarity. The main point here is—I don’t want to say the “war,” so let’s say the human condition between the sexes.

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

“Ladies in Waiting” (1975)

[spoilers] I recently reread Hugh B. Cave’s epic long story “Murgunstrumm,” which put me in the mood for some more of his luscious pulp—I understand it’s all he wrote and he wrote for decades. The premise in this one is that, a few months earlier, our young couple had visited a house in the New England countryside. They were shopping to buy, the realtor handed off the key to them, and they had been trapped there overnight in a freak snowstorm. It was plainly a traumatic experience but now it is August and they want to look at it again. Or the wife does—is quite insistent, in fact. The experience in April was harder on her and the husband can’t understand why she wants to look at it again. Maybe we can guess? I love how Cave piles on with the heavy-handed foreshadowing about this so-called Creighton house: “The Creightons had lived here for generations, having come here from Salem where one of their women in the days of witchcraft madness had been hanged for practicing demonolatry.” Clang clang clang! I love the word “demonolatry.” I mean, what do you think is going to happen? The thing is that this is Hugh B. Cave and it is the ‘70s, with sexual liberation in the air. Skyrockets in flight—afternoon delight! So that’s what happens and in its way it is beautiful:

He lay on his back, naked, with his nameless partner half beside him, half on him. He saw her scaly, misshapen breasts overflowing his chest and her monstrous, demonic face swaying in space above his own. And as he screamed,, he saw that she did have more than two hands: she had a whole writhing mass of them at the ends of long, searching tentacles.

The last thing he saw before his scream became that of a madman was a row of three others like her squatting by the wall, their tentacles restlessly reaching toward him as they impatiently awaited their turn.

Tentacles, yes! Note that this extended quote is the actual end of the story. It’s really the only appearance of tentacles, reserved by Cave to shock and pretty good at it. He is setting us up to think of witches which I believe are not usually associated with tentacles. Very Lovecraft in a way, very ‘30s and very ‘70s at once, and very Hugh B. Cave. Bravo.

Hugh B. Cave, Murgunstrumm and Others
A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
Story not available online.

Legs (1975)

The first novel in William Kennedy’s “Albany Cycle”—it became a trilogy with the Pulitzer-winning Ironweed and grew from there—is a fictional account of the gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, whose career ended in late 1931 with his mysterious execution-style death in Albany, the capital of New York state. He was 34. His murder was never solved. Kennedy tells his story with such wit and spirit it almost forces you to read more slowly and savor it. He says only suckers ever called him Legs—he was Jack to everyone who knew him. But somehow I feel more comfortable calling him Legs. So call me a sucker. Legs is a real historical character, of course, a bootlegger who was famous for surviving assassination attempts until he didn’t—that is three, but not the fourth. His legend provided some grist for F. Scott Fitzgerald, inspiring the character of Jay Gatsby. The style of charisma differed between Legs and Gatsby, but Legs had it too, and by the barrel, entertaining the news guys who followed him around and adored and reviled him by turns. He was an unpleasant and cruel man, taking revenge (including murder) on everyone he could who he felt deserved it. He took a famous trip to Europe when he was under suspicion for one such, and for which he was responsible—by reputation dismembering and dumping the remains in a river. The only problem was nobody could find the body. It was a big story. Reporters traveled with Legs aboard the ship to Europe and he entertained them with carefree banter. He was subsequently denied entry into the UK, Belgium, and Germany, and sent home. It’s all here, including his wife, mistress, and the general sex appeal. The writing is just great, with Kennedy spewing rapid-fire gangland argot of the time and wielding a structure that gets several threads going at once, like the man spinning plates on top of sticks. He keeps it going, and already Kennedy’s deep love of place is apparent in terms of Albany and environs, which includes the Catskills region. Legs, in fact, first established himself in the town of Catskill, the first place he organized for criming purposes, and the foundation of his career bootlegging booze in the Prohibition era and branching out from there. Kennedy’s cycle is up to eight novels now, two published in this century (and Kennedy is still alive!). Looking forward to getting into more of them.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.
William Kennedy, An Albany Trio

“The Lady of the House of Love” (1975)

This story by Angela Carter is ostensibly, more or less, a straight-up vampire story. But little is ever really straight-up with Carter. The story obeys lots of vampire story rules: set in a deserted village in Romania (central / eastern Europe), sunlight harmful, weird (or no) reflections in mirrors, sleeping in a coffin. The female vampire lives in a decrepit mansion in the abandoned village. She is very old, spends her days drawing the same tarot cards over and over. She can appear as young as a teen. She feeds on small woodland mammals and people passing through. She has a servant, an old woman dressed in black. This story—and Carter’s work generally—is stuffed with heavy portents and symbols. The vampire’s eyeglasses break at one point and she cuts herself trying to clean up the shards. A fountain in the village square, with pure spring water bubbling from a lion’s mouth, is used to attract victims. The servant, who is mute, lures them with gestures of a promised meal. The intended victim here is a young man touring the country on a bicycle (a symbol, Carter notes, of the geometrically rational, “two spheres and a straight line”). He is a virgin. It is summer 1914. We see the dance of seduction—invited by the servant for dinner, then coffee and hazy mind-addled conversation with the vampire in her bedroom into the wee hours—but it’s not entirely clear how or why our young man escapes her. Is it because he is a virgin? Or perhaps because he is on the verge of being tossed into the greater blood-sucking maw of World War I? He wakes in the morning with dim memories of the night before. The vampire has died. Carter writes her epitaph:

I will vanish in the morning light; I was only an invention of darkness.
And I leave you as a souvenir the dark fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave.

Roses are a recurring symbol not only in Carter’s work, but she does seem to have specific affinities for them. Shortly after this interlude our young man receives his draft notice and goes into training. There’s one more apparition of the rose, and then the story ends, “Next day, his regiment embarked for France.”

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

The Passenger (1975)

Professione: reporter, Italy / France / Spain, 126 minutes

Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

Writers: Mark Peploe, Enrico Sannia, Michelangelo Antonioni, Miguel de Echarri, Peter Wollen

Photography: Luciano Tovoli

Editors: Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Arcalli

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Charles Mulvehill, Maria Schneider, Jenny Runacre, Ian Hendry, Steven Berkoff

There may be an argument that director, cowriter, and coeditor Michelangelo Antonioni (all 10 syllables of him) invented or contributed to the spy thriller movie aesthetic way back in 1960 with his elusive and allusive existential drama L’Avventura, which meanders to its points with long shots and museum-perfect mise en scene. From James Bond to The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and beyond these pictures throw random, seemingly unassorted data points in our face, thrusting us into the stories in medias res and not always giving us much help to keep up. I guess this occurred to me because looking at The Passenger recently I was struck by how well it works as a thriller, and remembered that Blow-Up, another mystery thriller (or “mystery thriller”), probably counts as my favorite Antonioni.

Jack Nicholson no doubt has something to do with it. Coming off Chinatown, he positively radiates crime thriller. But the story this time really explicitly involves spy thriller types of stuff. David Locke (Nicholson) is an international investigative reporter who is in Africa at the start of the picture covering a rebel guerrilla war. He meets and befriends a dissolute international playboy, Robertson, who seems to be a rich guy with a mysterious disease and no particular purpose. Robertson says with a grin that he’s not supposed to drink, offering Locke another drink and helping himself to one too. And by the evidence he really shouldn’t—he turns up dead the next time Locke sees him.

Brian Eno's Another Green World (2009)

I enjoyed Geeta Dayal’s meditation on Brian Eno’s great album, which is pitched well to the mood of the album and indeed to much of his work in the mid-‘70s and beyond. It appears in writing this 33-1/3 book that Dayal even used the Oblique Strategies card deck created by Eno in collaboration with multimedia artist Peter Schmidt. Eno famously used it while working on Another Green World and many others to follow. There’s a chapter where Dayal runs down the album tracks in order, like most of these books from the 33-1/3 series, but otherwise she is floating around Eno’s work and poking at it gently, trying to figure out how it works from the constituent pieces, and it’s somehow a perfect pleasure to read. She has taken great advantage of the many interviews given by Eno and others involved with the album, pulling amazingly on-point quotes from decades of them. She also received email from Robert Fripp, whose voice here is unusually pungent with love and respect. I always forget things like Phil Collins is on the album, or how odd it is that Fripp, late of King Crimson, and Collins, still in Genesis, would sign up at all for an album like this. Part of that is likely due to Eno’s strange charisma, so potent that Bryan Ferry reportedly kicked him out of Roxy Music for drawing too much attention away from him. Not even exiling him to the soundboard in performance could diminish his appeal. I jumped on the Eno bandwagon a little later, with the Bowie/Berlin collaboration, and was in thrall to his projects well into the ‘80s (with some return to strength in the early ‘90s with the Walkabouts track). Another Green World could well be the summit of his otherworldly powers—more like just one peak in a mountain range. But listen to me go on. Dayal has a similar devotion. One thing I like here is that she doesn’t land squarely on Another Green World. She also likes and discusses Discreet Music, released earlier in 1975. And she likes the two Fripp collaborations—(No Pussyfooting) from 1973 and Evening Star from 1975—as well as Eno’s first two solo albums. That’s a pretty good cluster, and she also delves into his influences, such as notably Steve Reich. For once one of these 33-1/3 books seems way, way too short. I wanted more of Dayal’s reflections and quotes from old interviews. There’s a little sentimental charge here too in the way it reminds me of listening to Another Green World and Eno in the ‘70s. The album is made to be listened to in quiet rooms, and it goes crazy places, from pop songs about tying your shoes to vivid jungle and forest scenes. It’s so odd and so perfect in its way it almost feels like a novelty, a precious intricate toy or gift. Honestly, I thought this book had some of that magic too.

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

The Mothman Prophecies (1975)

Life at home: As my never-ending project of downsizing continues, my eye often lingers long and cold on cruddy old mass market paperbacks. I've got a handful or so that fell into the bin of "read before probably tossing" and here is the first. I read and enjoyed ufologist John A. Keel in the '70s, notably Operation Trojan Horse, but wasn't sure at all how I would feel about him now. But I enjoyed The Mothman Prophecies much more than I thought I would. The whole Mothman thing, I admit, has never meant much to me but I have known people who are into it. I didn't think the 2002 movie that gave this book a second life had much going for it. And I see a fair amount of grumbling around the internet that the book is disjointed, aimless, and obscure. It is all that, although at least it sticks to a timeline. But it's really all over the place—for one thing, is Keel a skeptic or a believer? He's trying to have it both ways. It's all anecdotes, as opposed to scientific or even methodical. But what anecdotes! It took me a while to figure out (as Amazon reviewers and many others have noted before me) that Keel is actually a pretty good paranoid horror story writer, working sneaky special effects, including the now famous "men in black," along with phones on the fritz and strained synchronicity, e.g., was I making too much of a coincidence? Yes, probably, we can only answer, but please continue. Basically, the book details scenes and incidents around Point Pleasant, West Virginia, from November 1966 to December 1967. So many UFOs you think they should have sold concessions. Then this man-shaped man-sized flying thing, like something out of a Ray Bradbury story, and the sightings thereof. The climax is a spectacular failure of infrastructure—a fairly famous disaster, as these things go—in the collapse of the Silver Bridge at rush hour during Christmas season. Wikipedia has the death toll at 46. Mothman and UFO sightings dried up after that, followed by Robert Stack, ominous organ chords, and a commercial break. This book is like a grand expiation of some kind, sold in drugstores. Keel comes across a little like one of H.P. Lovecraft's preoccupied investigators, or maybe just a nutty Bircher, especially when he is harassed by unseen but powerful forces. Not the phone ringing again! Men in black have been a joke since the movie franchise, but they work for me here. Keel is at pains to make clear they are not likely government men. They are the aliens, whatever the aliens are. The Mothman Prophecies is a lot of fun, complete with thrills and chills. Just don't ask me whether it is nonfiction.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Dhalgren (1975)

It was good to finally get to this monster after much of a lifetime circling it. It's both maddening and seductive—deliberately obtuse yet surprisingly lucid. Full of strange surprises and effects. Rampantly sexual. I usually had a good sense of what was going on—spoiler, it's all weird. I have a natural suspicion of large novels (or even short stories) that begin midsentence, and I did bog down midway and it became harder to keep going, but mostly it's a pretty good ride. The setting is a city in the Midwest, Bellona, that has been destroyed by something never explained. Not only are there inconveniences of no radio, TV, or telephones, but also basic physics of time and visual perception don't seem to be particularly reliable. The main character cannot remember his name. Clues indicate it's likely William Dhalgren. He's known among the postapocalyptic survivors as the Kid, or Kidd, or just Kid. He wanders into the city—the only way in or out is a walk across a bridge over a river—and then has strange adventures. Among other things, he fancies himself a poet after he finds a partially filled notebook. Many passages of the novel, including much of the last section, are transcriptions from the notebook. Another theme is in the title of the second-last section, "Palimpsest" (dictionary definition: "a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain"). In the '90s the novel was used as the basis for an online real-time texting destination (or "MOO," as it was called), which fit Dhalgren's whole aesthetic well. The novel is intensely textual, with bizarre interpolations of multiple sources all the way. I'm not sure you could even do a kindle version of the last section. You might be able to do a movie, with some of the memorable images and ideas it has—a second moon, a sun that threatens to swallow the sky for one day (and one day only), a gangster rig that turns into giant holographic images of dragons and other creatures. The gang is casually called "scorpions." More than anything they remind me of '80s DIY hardcore punk-rockers even though the novel came first. Maybe Jamaican rockers. Dhalgren has an amazing amount of gay and polyamorous sex for 1975 SF but it's just woven in. It might still be ahead of its time, or have finally just arrived at it.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"So Much Water So Close to Home" (1975)

Here's another classic Raymond Carver story with lots of familiar themes and notes. It's instantly recognizable as one of the stories adapted for the movie Short Cuts. As it happens, it's also one of the more extreme examples of Gordon Lish's editing. Carver's original manuscript version is 20 pages in the Library of America edition whereas the version in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is only seven. In the restored-plus version in Where I'm Calling From it's 25 pages. So that makes three versions of the four suburban husbands on a weekend fishing trip who discover the nude corpse of a young woman who has been murdered and dumped. You recall they tie the corpse to a tree and go on fishing and drinking for another day or two, and therein lie all the problems. It's an ingenious premise, a perfect fictional device. The morally occluded fishermen stay a little longer in the long version, but in both cases leave earlier than they had planned. The wife of one of them is the first-person narrator of this story. I think Carver does OK at the cross-gender voice though it's not perfect—cross-gender voices rarely are. This wife is not taking this situation well and her husband does not understand or anyway is defensive. It's serious enough that it seems to threaten their marriage though the ending is ambiguous. I've done a side-by-side a couple times now and for what it's worth came out both ways. The first time I liked Carver's easygoing storytelling style more, but this last time I thought Lish's editing made the points of the story hit harder. It's unfortunate you can't approach each version in a similarly open way. Who knows? Maybe my different preferences are a matter of which one I read first each time. I don't recall. What a problem! The long version spends more time on the wife and her crisis, externalized when she travels 120 miles to attend the young woman's funeral, and really her crisis is the point of the story along with her husband's oblivion. She has an unsettling experience on the way to the funeral, which is handled better in the long version. I can see Lish has turned it into a sort of half-comic anecdote about witless men and their exasperated wives. But the power of this one in concept still basically transcends the confusion of the myriad versions. My suggestion is stick with Where I'm Calling From. But keeping a copy around of What We Talk About is not a bad idea either. Even lamed Carver is still pretty good fiction.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)

"Distance" (1975)

All the stories in the Raymond Carver collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love are now available (in the Library of America collection) in the versions that Carver originally submitted to editor Gordon Lish for publication. Carver's title for the collection was Beginners and the differences in the various story versions clarify the extent to which Lish made changes. Even that long lovely mysteriously chatty title, which I always took as pure Carver, evidently came from Lish. As a general rule I am taking the versions Carver used in his last, best-of collection, Where I'm Calling From, as his final word on Lish's edits. In the case of "Distance," for example, Carver reworked it some, but essentially reverted to the version he submitted originally. It's nearly twice as long as the one in What We Talk About. I am basically with Carver on this one although I have also discovered that's not the case with every story. Lish always added improvements in his edits even if he didn't always improve a story on balance. The original "Distance" had details that should have stayed. In many ways, starting with these titles, it appears to be Lish who brought some of the brash, confident tone I have always associated with Carver. Indeed, Lish has boasted that he made Carver—certainly he had a lot to do with the Carver who staged such a grand entrance into American literature as the new avatar of short story fiction with What We Talk About. Carver the "minimalist" was largely Carver as edited by Lish. Maybe writers and editors collaborate a bit like comic book pencil and pen illustrators—an inker can often change the work of the main star, the penciller, radically. In "Distance," a father tells his grown daughter a story of when she was a baby. The raw, unedited Carver is both more plodding and earnest than Lish's final but in many ways plodding and earnest is the more suitable tone. as the first-person narrator father struggles to understand the 20-odd years that have passed and all the things since the events of the story. Note that I'm not attempting any close line readings in these side-by-sides. I'm only reading them consecutively for general impressions. Lish's cuts and changes make this story more intuitive and lively, as his edits often did. Instead of the admittedly inert "Distance," Lish gave his version a title that feels 100% more Carver, "Everything Stuck to Him." But in the end it is actually a story of deep melancholy, which works much better than the funny early marriage anecdote Lish turned it into.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

USA, 133 minutes
Director: Milos Forman
Writers: Lawrence Hauben, Bo Goldman, Ken Kesey, Dale Wasserman
Photography: Haskell Wexler
Music: Jack Nitzsche
Editors: Sheldon Kahn, Lynzee Klingman
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Will Sampson, Brad Dourif, William Redfield, Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito, Scatman Carothers, Sydney Lassick, Michael Berryman

Full disclosure, as a Ken Kesey fanboy I have mostly followed his lead on this movie adaptation of his first novel, though I did see it all the way through when it was new. Kesey was involved in the early stages of making it but reportedly never even looked at it after he left over creative differences. As a result I pushed it to the side and missed how supremely popular it has remained. Its present ranking at #114 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?—the highest it's ever been there, in fact, and the reason I'm writing about it—only begins to suggest the levels of affection that exist for it. A better gauge might be IMDb's always intriguing popularity contest of a best movies list, where The Shawshank Redemption has long ruled all. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sits at #16 there—pretty high! But the single reason, I'm convinced, for its enduring popularity, was the Oscars sweep, taking the so-called grand slam that year (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best [adapted in this case] Screenplay), the first movie to do so since 1934's It Happened One Night, and one of only three with 1991's The Silence of the Lambs.

Winning a bunch of Oscars is not the reason to like a movie but you know how people are. I will note in passing that I do like It Happened One Night. And getting over myself enough to look again at Cuckoo's Nest reveals a number of outstanding features. It has numerous good and/or interesting performances, not just Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher (though Nicholson and Fletcher are the best), including Brad Dourif and Christopher Lloyd in their first roles, William Redfield, and Danny DeVito apparently with hair. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler's credits include In the Heat of the Night, The Conversation, and Coming Home, and he shot this in rich '70s color and luminous style. But the many grave errors of the picture's narrative are still there, romanticizing mental illness as poetical (note the dancing nut) or, even worse, as a metaphor for politics. It sees individualism as such a virtue that it makes a hero of a preening, self-serving ass who is most believable when he's out for himself alone, and least believable when his lip trembles and he appears to care.

The Terrorists (1975)

So happy endings all around? In a general sort of way, yes. The democratic social welfare system remains as riddled with defect as ever, and as Dennis Lehane points out in his introduction for the 2010 reprint, the last word in the book and thus the whole Story of Crime series is "Marx." Authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö would likely consider themselves optimists in that regard, and so do I. But getting there is still not a pretty picture. Even so, police detective Martin Beck and his crew at least manage to get to some hard-won happy places in their lives. And bully for them. In the larger series I'm more interested anyway in the context of liberal paradise Stockholm, even more than the specific crime cases, which are artfully constructed but also tend toward the pro forma. Published in 1975, inevitably the point of view of The Terrorists is historically bound. People with the sense that terrorism started in 2001 might be interested to learn about some of the prequels alluded to here. A mastermind terrorist cell network—the Red Army Faction of the time is the likely model, but even more deadly and effective—is determined to strike at a conservative U.S. senator on a scheduled visit to Stockholm. It's up to Beck to stop the mayhem, or, well, actually his various superiors, who variously take the credit for themselves. And stop it they do. Though Per Wahlöö died of cancer the year this was published, at the age of 48 (coauthor Maj Sjöwall is still alive today), The Terrorists was always intended as the final volume in a series conceived much earlier. The novels are more episodic than working within a larger narrative arc, but they veer about carefully from touchstone to touchstone, from serial killers to police violence to a locked-room mystery to international spy intrigue and more. The larger theme is the nagging question of barbarism and civilization and the social welfare state. What's it going to be? If we give up barbarism we opt for the suffocations of cooperating with one another on a scale of numbers we can't even comprehend—presently approaching 8 billion people. You could say it's pretty well a bleak vision too. Just look around you. And Martin Beck would have to agree. Take it as a mercy for him that he ended up in a happy relationship.

In case it's not at the library.

Searching for Caleb (1975)

Anne Tyler's sixth novel tells the story of a very familiar family, though her eye and ear have not yet entirely reached the fine tuning to come. The Pecks are from Baltimore, of course, and at the center of the novel (if not the family) is a married couple of first cousins: Justine, a fortune teller, and Duncan, a ne'er-do-well, though obviously gifted, who has gone out of his way to reject the family. He has moved away from Baltimore, and continued moving his family every two or three years, though never far from Baltimore. Justine and Duncan have a 17-year-old daughter and also a grandfather who lives with them. The grandfather is the one searching for Caleb, who is his brother and the true black sheep of the family. Caleb disappeared in 1912 and has never been heard from since. The story takes place in the summer of 1973. Again, nothing is quite as sharp and distinct as Tyler's characters would become, but many of her best aspects are already apparent. The Pecks are a certain familiar type of alienated clan nonetheless clinging to one another. The chief tension is the paradox of rejecting family without rejecting oneself. Duncan and Caleb are working through how it doesn't really work, or what the trade-offs are. The paradox is that self-knowledge of family weaknesses does not get rid of them in you. One person's self-knowledge is another's benighted existence—there's not much difference. Justine is the one character who seems most capable of balancing the competing forces, but it's not clear even she is doing well at it. Which also depends some on the reader's point of view. I had a hard time taking Justine seriously as a fortune teller—much like most of the Peck family, in fact—yet the narrator's view is ambiguous. We might be intended to believe in her psychic powers, though the tone is generally more along the lines of entertainment than insights. She is a kooky sideshow at church bazaars, for example, and though her gift is on the order of seeing the future there aren't many convincing examples of it, if any. Tyler would do much better elsewhere with all the themes found here. If you're on a jag, go ahead and throw this one on the pile too. Otherwise, never mind.

In case it's not at the library.

Love and Death (1975)

USA, 85 minutes
Director/writer: Woody Allen
Photography: Ghislain Cloquet
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
Editor: Marilyn McLaren
Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, James Tolkan, Harold Gould, Georges Adet, Despo Diamantidou, Frank Adu, Olga Georges-Picot, Jessica Harper, Lloyd Battista

Woody Allen's lampoon of Russian literature remains one of his funniest movies, arguably the best of the early comedies, and the last of them. But it was also an early sign that we might have a pretension problem on our hands. In Love and Death, people often erupt in philosophy jargon babble—"but judgment of any system or a priori relation of phenomena exists in any rational or metaphysical or at least epistemological contradiction to an abstract and empirical concept such as being or to be or to occur in the thing itself or of the thing itself"—which, even as it makes fun of such affectation, also serves to let us know Woody Allen has read philosophy. He's no nebbish. He's a real intellectual. (He also gets to have it both ways, as this particular speech is punctured by Allen's laugh line response: "Yeah, I've said that many times.")

The Russian setting of Love and Death is plainly Tolstoyan, taking place during the Napoleonic era. The scheme by Boris Grushenko (Allen) and his cousin Sonja (Diane Keaton) to assassinate Napoleon (James Tolkan) wallows in obvious Dostoevskian angst. And Sonja's life is Chekhovian. (I'm sure there are nods to Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, and others as well.) But the structure of the movie is more like a 19th-century American novel, Moby-Dick. That's the way of classic Woody Allen comedies, indeed of a certain style of movie comedy still used all the time today, from the Zucker brothers' Airplane! to Judd Apatow and beyond, and dating back to the Marx Brothers: set a quick pace and use everything you can think of that might work, visually, verbally, and every which way, and never stop doing that. But Love and Death has even one more secret weapon.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975)

Belgium / France, 201 minutes
Director/writer: Chantal Akerman
Photography: Babbette Mangoit
Editor: Patricia Canino
Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte

It's appropriate, predictable, and a little depressing that the one appearance of a woman director in the top 100 movies of the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? (presently barely making it in at all at #98) would be a landmark of feminist culture. The only other two movies directed by women in all of the top 300 (for a total representative ratio of 1.0%) are Beau Travail by Claire Denis at #155 and The Piano by Jane Campion at #211. Thus, with The Piano similarly defined by its feminist preoccupations, we might estimate that the only way 67% of movies made by women can be taken seriously is by bearing these themes, which are also certain commercial death. So it's another one of those traps—the kind that perpetually keep the people in power in power. Like credit in finance. Like patience in racial politics.

So it's not surprising that Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig in a bravura one-woman show), whose name and street address provide the title of this very long and slow movie, ultimately has to be taken as an angry woman. It's mostly hard to see, however, as she spends most of her time alone at home ostentatiously wearing a placid exterior with a housecoat, skirt, cardigan sweater, and low heels. She's a single mother raising a son of about 15. She was widowed six years earlier and now appears to be supporting herself as a prostitute in the afternoons. This is established in the first 30 minutes. In the scenes with men she is shown from the neck to the knees in profile, her head cut off by the frame. These scenes are as routinized as practically everything else in the picture. But they turn out to be only a small part, at least in terms of onscreen minutes.

Jaws (1975)

USA, 124 minutes
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb
Photography: Bill Butler
Music: John Williams
Editor: Verna Fields
Cast: Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gray, Murray Hamilton, Carl Gottlieb

A few weeks ago, catching up on horror backlog during the Halloween season, I got a chance to see Frozen (from 2010, not to be confused with the Disney animation from 2013), which is pretty nifty and actually much better than I expected. Two particular things I noticed: the name of one of the production companies involved is A Bigger Boat, and in an interview director and writer Adam Green declared—tongue no doubt in cheek, but still—that he wanted to make a movie that would do for chairlifts at ski resorts what Jaws did for sharks at summer beaches. This in turn impressed two more things on me: the enduring impact of Jaws, and my basic immunity to its premise.

I mean that I'm not afraid of sharks, never have been, and never give them a thought. (Ditto chairlifts.) It's not like they're zombies or evil spirits or something. But I've watched people seized by the delicious agonies of the fear of them nearly all my life. That's just one more long-term effect of Jaws—adding sharks to the pantheon of classic movie monsters and/or gnawing human phobias (piranha too for that matter). The creature from Black Lagoon has nothing on these beasts, except similarly beautiful underwater footage. Over 40 years later we have a ridiculous Sharknado franchise going and some pretty good movies like The Shallows too. And they're all about sharks, which actually pose less danger to us individually than radical Islamic terrorists, tipping furniture, slips in the bathtub, or air flight crashes—probably combined.

"The Heavenly Animal" (1975)

Story by Jayne Anne Phillips not available online.

This story by Jayne Anne Phillips has a lot of good ideas but never quite executes on them. The premise is so familiar to its times as to nearly verge on cliché, but I don't think that's the problem exactly. It's a baby boomer generation gap story about a young woman in her mid-20s, Jancy, whose parents have divorced acrimoniously and now she is stuck with the shattered pieces and ongoing fallout, still living at home with her mother. Her father refuses to visit or "even step on the grass" of the home he once shared with his ex-wife and Jancy. He lives only 10 blocks away and honks when he drives by and sees Jancy's car there. He expresses his love for her by making sure her car is maintained. Meanwhile, Jancy is footloose and often troubled by tormented relationships. This is good stuff, but it doesn't feel like Phillips gets very far into her material. She has a good sense for the way these people live their lives, but falls short a little in the expression. It somehow feels like she is telling more than showing, even as the story is full of short paragraphs and intriguing stylistic eccentricities such as no quotation marks for dialogue. Maybe this is ultimately more on the order of pioneering work, opening up a rich vein that others would mine with more success. Mary Gaitskill comes to mind. I like this kind of material actually a lot—family estrangements. I just expect them to be a little more heartrending than I found this story. It is built out of powerful emotional material, which is strangely distanced and inert. It labors for a big ending with an auto accident involving a deer, but feels too thought through and abstracted. I didn't like anyone here that much. The father is bumbling and means well but he's also an old-fashioned bigot. Jancy is too skittish and confused to trust, but it takes a bit to figure that out, with the result I felt a little tricked. I've already forgotten any impression of the mother. The father is extreme about rejecting his ex-wife even as he is slipping into unattractive cheap and easy ways to live, which make him look like he doesn't really care much about living at all. The whole car thing is where the story felt most stale to me, and it is fundamental to multiple strains in it. I guess that means I have to call it flawed. But I like the direction it's going.

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

The Fight (1975)

This is my first time reading Norman Mailer's account of the "Rumble in the Jungle" championship boxing bout between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in 1974. At the time it came out my interest in boxing was less than zero. That goes for bullfighting too, which comes up now and then here. I've always appreciated Muhammad Ali as a public figure, perhaps more for his stance on the Vietnam War but his athletic accomplishments speak for themselves. Many years after the 1974 fight and this book, the wonderful documentary When We Were Kings alerted me finally to the event and all it entailed. Now, as many years after that, I finally get to the Mailer account and find him remarkably dead-on. One of the first scenes here shows Ali training for the fight by working on taking blows while positioned on the ropes. Mailer compares the strategy to chess, and maybe so, but Ali was working on many levels, not least the brute physical. His plan to wear Foreman out was a good one, if dangerous, and it worked. Ali demonstrated that winning could also be a matter of enduring, as much as dominating. Mailer was an ardent and knowledgeable fan of boxing and he's really good on the fight itself. It was also an interesting geopolitical event, taking place in Kinshasa, the largest and capital city of what's now the Republic of the Congo. The movie is much better on some elements of the big show's ambience, especially on the music performed in connection—James Brown, Manu Dibango, B.B. King, Miriam Makeba, Tabu Ley Rochereau, the Spinners, Bill Withers, and many more performed. But Mailer's account is much more knowledgeable about the main event. And the movie is pretty knowledgeable. Of course, Mailer being Mailer, he has to tell us personal anecdotes like how he took a walk on the unrailed parapet outside the window of his 7th-floor hotel room (reminiscent of scenes from his 1965 novel An American Dream). Norman! Get back in here! At any rate, it's a good account and argument for Ali's place in history. Ali conducted his fights on many levels, starting long before he stepped into the ring. He was smart and very brave. And he was a great fighter. Mailer's appreciation for the aesthetics of punching is almost infectious, although, me being me, I can't help thinking about concussions, brain damage, and such. But I appreciate what's at stake here too, on a primal level: two great warriors at battle. Only one can win, and all that. The great sports moment. Mailer does a fine job here of telling the story.

In case it's not at the library.