On Dangerous Ground (1951)

USA, 82 minutes

Directors: Nicholas Ray, Ida Lupino

Writers: A.I. Bezzerides, Nicholas Ray, Gerald Butler

Photography: George E. Diskant

Music: Bernard Herrmann

Editor: Roland Gross

Cast: Robert Ryan, Ida Lupino, Ward Bone, Ed Begley, Cleo Moore, Charles Kemper, Ian Wolfe, Sumner Williams, Frank Ferguson, Anthony Ross

The oddly structured and executed On Dangerous Ground is kind of a lumpy affair, arguably stagy and affected in many places. IMDb credits Ida Lupino as an uncredited director with Nicholas Ray, who also gets a credit as writer. Wikipedia has nothing to say about this so I’m not sure what the issues are. Just looking at it, it’s pretty clear most of the first 30 minutes are wasted on establishing that Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is a sadistic cop who beats confessions out of criminals on the regular. It’s not that it’s a bad plot point—indeed, it’s an important one. But they take too long with it in a movie that is already short.

There’s a strange, prolonged, and inadvertently hilarious scene, for example, where Wilson’s boss, Captain Brawley (Ed Begley), is eating solo at a restaurant. He’s going at it like a starving squirrel that just discovered garbage treasure. “More peas,” he orders, telling Wilson the restaurant serves unusually excellent vegetables. He has asked Wilson there to reprimand him, between mouthfuls, for Wilson’s brutality. But the warning doesn’t take, Wilson ruptures the bladder of a suspect during an interrogation, hospitalizing him. He is subsequently sent “upstate” to work a case and cool off. These scenes upstate are shot mostly on location in Granby, Colorado, at which point the picture notably comes alive.

The World of Apu (1959)

Apur Sansar, India, 105 minutes
Director: Satyajit Ray

Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray

Photography: Subrata Mitra

Music: Ravi Shankar

Editor: Dulal Dutta

Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee, Dhiresh, Majumdar, Sefalika Devi, Dhiren Ghosh

The first two movies in director and cowriter Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, were made consecutively in two years—Ray’s very first movies. Three years and a couple of other movies intervened before Ray finished this trilogy with The World of Apu. In that time Ray’s stature as a filmmaker grew, enabling more funding, perhaps attracting better players, and certainly simply getting better at making movies. All the Apu movies are based on autobiographical novels by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, but Ray had absorbed even more of his Western influences by 1959. The World of Apu, the best of them, thus has affinities with and even stands as equal to such monumental landmarks as Fellini’s La Strada or Truffaut’s 400 Blows, rich with life and wisdom. Where Ray may have leaned somewhat mechanically into Freudian conceits in Aparajito, in The World of Apu it is Shakespeare that he turns to, much more skillfully, for its greatest resonance.

Apu has lost all his family in the first two movies of the trilogy—older sister, father, and mother—and he is alone in the world now in The World of Apu. Poverty is all he has ever known, but whereas, in Aparajito, he pursues more practical studies in science and engineering as a way out, at the beginning of The World of Apu he is unable to finish his education because he has run out of money. His interests have shifted too, from engineering to more of the literary pursuits of his father. And he appears to be good—we see, as he is leaving school, an instructor encourage him to continue writing, and we also see that a story of his has been accepted for publication. His best friend Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee) believes in him too. But Apu is among the most luckless of all movie or literary characters and the worst is yet to come—but not until after the best.

Aparajito (1956)

India, 110 minutes

Director: Satyajit Ray

Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, Kanailal Basu

Photography: Subrata Mitra

Music: Ravi Shankar

Editor: Dulal Dutta

Cast: Pinaki Sengupta, Karuna Bannerjee, Kanu Bannerjee, Smaran Ghosal, Ramani Sengupta

It has been nearly 10 years since I last revisited Pather Panchali, the first movie in director and cowriter Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, but I see that the second, Aparajito, picks up within days if not hours of Pather Panchali. The Apu trilogy is a long continuous story—it begins on the day of Apu’s birth and continues into his adulthood in the third and final installment, The World of Apu. Aparajito sees the greatest changes in Apu, necessitating two actors as he grows from a boy into an adolescent and then young man. After the death of Apu’s sister in Pather Panchali, the family, now only three, leaves their home village for the big city of Varanasi (called Benares in the movie). Apu’s father cobbles together income as he can. His ambition is to be a literary writer, creating plays, poetry, and fiction, but he also serves as a community priest and picks up agricultural work as he can. In Varanasi, earning money has become the first order of business to get his family back on its feet. Even providing adequate food is becoming a problem. Sometimes he must travel and be away from his family for significant parts of a year.

While making Pather Panchali, Ray reportedly had no idea of extending the story beyond that movie. But it proved so popular he was able to get funding within a year to make Aparajito. Both are based on popular autobiographical novels by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. For Aparajito, however, Ray took artistic liberties with the source story that proved unpopular in India even though these two movies in many ways established Ray’s stature internationally. I don’t know the novels and basically admire both movies equally, as well as The World of Apu. According to the critical survey at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Aparajito has the lowest regard—no matter how movie trilogies may be structured, it does seem like the second is often judged the weakest, perhaps because it is a kind of bridge piece.

“The Man Who Spoke in Rhyme” (1969)

This story by Ray Russell has a bit of a tangled history, at least in terms of its title. ISFDB is adamant that it is “The Man Who Spoke in Rhyme,” the title as it was originally published in Ellery Queen magazine—a strange place to find it in the first place. However, the preference of Russell, who died in 1999, appears to be “The Vendetta.” He may have even made some revisions toward that end after the original publication. (For whatever reason, the storytellers at youtube call it just “Vendetta.”) The Penguin collection Haunted Castles, with a foreword by Guillermo del Toro (!), came out circa 2013 and has the title Russell’s way. But I have to admit I’m a fan of the original title too, because I like that aspect of the story and think it’s worth calling attention to. It turns out the man is a very bad man, and he does speak in rhyme—doggerel, really. “But pray go on, although it chill your marrow—a half-told tale’s a bow without an arrow,” etc. A rhyming man is typical of Russell’s many flourishes. He wrote in the latter half of the 20th century but imagined some gothic, infinitely sophisticated past he often attempted to recreate. This story is in the form of a letter—the epistolary form—written “probably in 1876 or 1877” and detailing an incident many years older than that. Layers of distancing shove it ever further into the past. As always, Russell’s language is witty and to the point. The letter writer is in Venice (of course), shuddering at the advent of telephones, which he puts in scare quotes (“telephones”). It proceeds like a letter in a regular correspondence, with news of the weather and reference to other letters. And, finally, to the story at hand. There is the Count, the man who speaks in rhyme, and his beautiful sister of marrying age. And there is an artist, a Spaniard, who shows up at the Count’s castle and wants to paint the sister as Eve before the Fall. The Count is weird about his sister, jealous and possessive, but for some reason he feels OK about this artist. Then it turns out the artist and the Count’s sister are using their modeling and painting time for making love behind closed doors. Eventually the Count catches them in flagrante (my term). They’re both naked. There’s no point denying anything. They marry. She becomes pregnant. At this point the story becomes complicated, although Russell has set it up well. But the twist involves a lot of explanation which is there to be discovered. Now that I think about it, I guess another argument for the original title is that in many ways “The Vendetta” gives away the twist—that this is a revenge story, in approximately the same way the movie Oldboy is a revenge story. The vengeance is admirably thought through, patiently anticipated, and instantly devastating. Then the letter closes cheerfully, as letters do. It’s classic Russell.

Ray Russell, Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories
Listen to story online.

“Sardonicus” (1961)

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

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

“Heavy Set” (1964)

This Ray Bradbury story, first printed in Playboy magazine under Ray Russell’s editorial regime, comes with a few surprises. It is recognizably Bradbury’s Midwestern sing-song voice, but the details are quite dark, not science fiction or wistful or elegiac at all, which I normally associate with him. “Heavy Set” works on subterranean levels, like Robert Aickman or Dennis Etchison. The main character Leonard is nearly 31 and living with his mother. He’s a bodybuilder, working out constantly with weights and such. He hangs around with high school kids who admire him and call him “Heavy Set.” The girls want to go out with him, but he always seems to have excuses to get out of it. It’s Halloween and he’s having a party, dressed up like an English schoolboy, “the mean little boy,” carrying a giant lollipop. It reminded me of Herbie Popnecker from ACG Comics in the ‘60s. The story is set in California and Leonard is also a surfer, by the way. He’s having the party at “the beach,” not at his mother’s place. It seems strange for Leonard to be having a party. Some interpretations of this story have him as intellectually disabled. It doesn’t read that way to me, although something about him is definitely not right. He’s sullen, withdrawn—not the type to throw a party. And it turns out to be a disaster. Not even half the people invited show up and Leonard is the only one in costume. The center of this story is the relationship between Leonard and his mother, which is not healthy. They seem to be all each other has. Whether it’s incestuous is not clear but my guess is sadly yes. It definitely radiates an aura of needy and creepy impulses. While Leonard is away at his party his mother worries he will never come back, without a word, that she will just never see or hear from him again. This story feels deeply unpleasant on multiple levels. It plays with us, teases us, then shanks us with the worst suggestions when Leonard comes home from the party upset. He talks to his mother about it, but he's still upset. He spends hours on the punching bag, until after 3 in the morning. Then he comes into the house and gets into bed with her. It seems to be something new but possibly it’s happened before. She pretends to be asleep. He’s still working out with hand grip strengtheners which squeak in the dark. The last line notes it’s still “a long time before dawn.” But this scene that tremors with terrible potentiality is just the capper. All the details here are increasingly weird and disturbing. Nothing seems real but it’s not a dream. The phone rings at strange times. It’s that kind of story and it’s amazing.

The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Ray Russell (out of print)
Read story online.

Johnny Guitar (1954)

USA, 110 minutes

Director: Nicholas Ray

Writers: Philip Yordan, Ray Chanslor, Ben Maddow, Nicholas Ray

Photography: Harry Stradling Sr.

Music: Victor Young, Peggy Lee

Editor: Richard L. Van Enger

Cast: Joan Crawford, Sterling Hayden, Mercedes McCambridge, Ernest Borgnine, Ward Bond, John Carradine, Scott Brady, Ben Cooper, Royal Dano

Johnny Guitar may look easy enough to classify as genre—duh, Western—but director and cowriter Nicholas Ray’s approach transports it to some other realm that is partly overheated Sirk romance, partly psychotherapy study, and only partly Western. It has chaps and horses, yes, but also operatic psychology. It is set out West, in mining and ranching territory, and formally involves the tensions between ranchers and the coming of the railroad. Vienna (Joan Crawford) is a fashionable single woman of a certain age who has set up a casino to take advantage of the railroad when it comes, catering to the farmers and the others it will bring en masse. Emma (Mercedes McCambridge) believes she is speaking for the town when she says, “You heard her tell how they're gonna run the railroad through here, bringin' thousands of new people from the east. Farmers! Dirt farmers! Squatters! They'll push us out. Is that what you're waitin' for?”

But this is not a typical Western story of ranchers and farmers and the railroad. The primary conflict is between these two women, Vienna and Emma, who are similarly attracted to bad boy men. Vienna has a thing for Johnny Guitar (Sterling Hayden) who comes blowing into town like a tumbleweed with his guitar slung over his back and carrying no guns. When he plays his instrument, which is not often, it’s a bunch of flamenco-like fancy fretwork. Emma for her part has a crush on the so-called Dancin’ Kid (Scott Brady as if cut from cardboard), whose gang is working a silver mine but they’re rough types. Everyone, including Emma, thinks they’re out abroad on the countryside robbing people. With layered psychological complexity, Vienna and Emma hate each other for what they see in the other of themselves, or some such. It’s kind of a doppelganger story.

"Uncle Einar" (1947)

I'm infatuated with this story by Ray Bradbury, which puts him more squarely in the realm of horror than science fiction where I usually slot him. It was published first in a Bradbury collection called Dark Carnival and later in a more famous one called The October Country and it's part of Bradbury's "Elliott Family" series. The Elliotts are a kind of Addams family—kooky, altogether ooky oddballs with strange powers. It's gentle, of course, the way Bradbury does. Besides the Addams family, the Elliotts also feel like some precursor to the X-Men with their mutant gifts and outsider status. Most of the Elliott family has more subtle powers, with mental abilities like telepathy and telekinesis. Uncle Einar's is harder to hide from the world: he has a giant pair of green wings growing on his back and he can fly. I imagine his wings as more like dinosaur wings than bird or moth, leathery and tendoned. He can't really go among humans at all and he must do most of his flying at night when he won't be seen. He also has a kind of radar that enables him to sense objects in his way as he flies around in the dark. But a terrible accident occurs one night. Something goes wrong and he collides with a high-tension tower and takes a massive jolt of electricity that knocks him out. Fortunately he lands on a farm operated by Brunilla Wexley, a single woman who will become his wife. Bradbury plainly has a lot of feeling for Uncle Einar and imbues him with much humanity—his love of flying, his sadness at being grounded, his love for his wife and eventually their children, and finally the solution they work out so he can fly safely again. At the same time, as benign as we know Uncle Einar is, it's not hard to imagine how scary it would be to see him flying at night. That's a neat trick on Bradbury's part. It's all quite vivid. I have a clear sense of Uncle Einar and Brunilla too, and like them both. I should say it's also the only Elliott Family story I've read that I like much—in general the concept is typically too cute and wholesome by half, though some of the powers are certainly interesting. This Elliott Family story comes a bit later than the first batch and in many ways feels like Uncle Einar might have been a character who nagged at Bradbury and importuned him to tell his story. It feels like a Sherwood Anderson story too with its candid treatment of socially determined grotesques and their experience of being marginalized. In fact, a lot of Bradbury stories feel like they have sources in Anderson. This is one of the best.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman's)
Read story online.

"The Crowd" (1943)

This Ray Bradbury story has turned up in both the Dark Descent and Weird anthologies, and lots of others too, including Weird Tales magazine where it was originally published. It plays a typical Ray Bradbury trick of taking something reasonably normal—in this case the phenomenon of looky-loo crowds that inevitably gather around accidents, suicides, and other unusual public occurrences—and turning it into something mistily malevolent. For the most part it works really well, with Bradbury using his effects cunningly. Some of it even retain a certain prescience now too, looking forward for example to the ludicrous excesses of J.G. Ballard's Crash (and David Cronenberg's film adaptation of the same name) in the way it puts the common daily occurrence of auto accidents so top of mind. Even the mild-mannered Bradbury seems to be indulging some excess by necessarily including three of these accidents, and the same guy, our main character, is in two (the second deliberate). Simple details propel the best effects in this story: first, how rapidly the crowd forms after an accident. The emphasis is a bit overdone, with Bradbury detailing some of it down to the second as if with a stopwatch. The best effect is when our guy notices that exactly the same people are seen in the crowd at different accidents in different parts of town at the same time. Much like the investigator in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, he has gone to the public library archive to look up newspaper photos. These anonymous people are marked out by simple identifying details: a boy with freckles, a red-haired woman, certain facial features. They are anonymous but they are recognizable and they are the same people. At this point, about two-thirds into a pretty short story, we reach an almost perfect crescendo of menace and mystery, wondering what in the heck is going on around here. Our guy becomes almost like one of them, appearing at an accident, seeing members of the crowd he recognizes, trying to follow them. But they elude him. In my opinion somewhere around here was the place to end the story. We know for a fact that these same people are showing up at the scene of accidents in impossible ways but we don't know why or even how. That's perfect. What strange mad universe are we, etc. Bradbury, however, the Charles Schulz of horror, wants to inject an explanation for our edification and satisfaction, which unfortunately is even more preposterous than the premise. Bradbury often aims to be elegiac but some of his stories have such sharp edges they can only be classified as horror—which, in turn, Bradbury seems to fight in himself sometimes, dulling them with bucolic platitudes, as if his own imagination frightened him. In fairness, I think I might be scared too if I were dreaming up stuff like the first two-thirds of this story in a room by myself.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman's)
The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Listen to story online.

Illustration from YouTube video.

"The Million-Year Picnic" (1946)

Even though this story by Ray Bradbury appears last in The Martian Chronicles it is the first he published of that whole cycle of stories (in all their various permutations), beating the next by two years. "The Million-Year Picnic" has to count as another very early story of nuclear anxiety, published within about a year of the blasts in Japan. It must be noted with Bradbury that his science fiction can be quite soft. As soft as the dew falling in an Indiana cornfield in June, as he might say (or is it Illinois?). He's too glib about the technology and with little sense of the conditions on Mars and all the impossible time and precision required to get there. In fairness, a lot of scientists in the 1940s were in approximately the same boat about Mars. People had mostly given up on the canals idea but not entirely. For all that, Bradbury has a mood down cold here, mulling the profound sadness of our self-destructive species doing all the wrong things as usual. He tells it by showing the father and husband in a family of five (and a half) quietly shepherding them from where they landed on Mars to a safer place. The year is maybe 2026 and people in this story are able to nab rockets on Earth and head out. The man is taking pains to leave no traces behind them, even destroying the rocket they came in on, as nuclear war has virtually wiped out life on Earth but more people may be coming to Mars on these handy if dangerous rockets. This guy has some insight into human psychology but he has also allied with another family in hopes of starting a new civilization, slightly Noah style. The hubris is almost as astonishing as the finality. One of the best tricks in this story—which I've also seen elsewhere but never done quite this poignantly—is taking the idea of "Martians" and applying it to humans now living on the red planet. It's apt, but still has the power to surprise and affect. This story is before the Martian aborigines Bradbury developed for the cycle later and it benefits from that. "Elegiac" is not a term I toss around often as compliment, certainly in genre literature, but Bradbury was capable of it and could be very good at it. This is not a bad example and bears interest as an early canary in the nuclear era.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman's)
Read story online.

Illustration, Alexander Leydenfrost, from Planet Stories, Summer 1946

"Mars Is Heaven!" (1948)

Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles is characterized by Wikipedia as a "fixup" novel, a term new to me for a novel made out of revising and stitching together previously published (and formally unrelated) short stories. Hey, William Faulkner and Go Down, Moses! Why not? Well, one reason might be so that there is a single standard version. The one I read in the Everyman's collection has a different last paragraph from the one I found online. The latter may be from The Martian Chronicles although there the story is called "The Third Expedition." The change to the finish is small but significant, throwing a different slant on the ambiguities of the story. But never mind, the basic nut of it, a surreal insidiously unsettling concept, remains just as effective. It's excellent by sections and can be claimed equally for science fiction or horror (and works in comics form too). It's fine as a stand-alone—even better, I think, with the Everyman's ending. The idea of traveling to Mars and finding the 20th-century Midwest is bodacious, especially for Bradbury, who practically owned that time and place as his very own hobbyhorse. What saved him always is that he was so good at setting the extremes of his contrasts. He reminds me in many ways of Charles Schulz's Peanuts comic strip, which also bore overweening sweetness with some very sharp edges, particularly in the early years. Bradbury's usual big bath in nostalgia is somehow even more cunning in this story. He can verge on treacle when he waxes poetic about boyhood, summers, playing ball, and swimming, but the deeper he goes into it here the stranger it becomes. This crew of 16 puts down on Mars in the year 2000 and encounters—an idyllic small town, with lovely green lawns and shade trees and houses with porches and sunshine pouring over everything. This town is a little antiquated, with origins in the mid-19th century. And then, from within these houses, the astronauts begin to discover cherished relatives. Grandparents, brothers and sisters, Moms and Dads, aunts and uncles. Have they gone mad?

When these long dead and still sorely missed relatives speak, the story becomes even stranger. They know they died on Earth. They know they are on another planet. They are strangely defensive and call it a second chance. The captain of the ship maintains his poise perhaps the longest, desperately sorting through the possibilities. Perhaps, the captain speculates, the crew never left Earth and somehow didn't know it. Perhaps much earlier, secret missions to Mars have populated the planet this way. Perhaps they entered a time rift in space. None of his ideas really make sense. The captain maintains his poise until he sees his brother, who died years ago, an untimely death. He was 26 and still looks the same. He takes the captain to their old home (all the astronauts are finding houses they know) and there his parents are. And here is exactly where our perceptions begin to diverge from his, the last rational man. We still know this is all too good to be true—something is deeply wrong about it. Bradbury subtly stokes our doubts. It is positively alarming when we see the captain enter his own insensible ecstasies of nostalgia. Later, in bed in his old bedroom, he returns to doubt and considers a theoretical scenario that is as close as this story comes to explaining itself, involving native Martians with telepathic powers and no good intentions (or, from their view, defending themselves, fighting back to nip colonialism in the bud). This part of the story is a bit clunky and mechanical but also has one of the best scare effects involving his brother. But from there the story retreats to further ambiguities and veers dangerously close to incoherence, which is not helped by the alternate endings. But I love the way Bradbury so boldly transports his beloved Midwest and plonks it down on the red planet, Mars. It plays to all his greatest strengths and arguably is one of his best.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman's)
Read slightly different version online.

Comic book panel, Wally Wood, from Weird Science (EC) #18, 1950

In a Lonely Place (1950)

USA, 94 minutes
Director: Nicholas Ray
Writers: Andrew Solt, Edmund H. North, Dorothy B. Hughes
Photography: Burnett Guffey
Music: George Antheil
Editor: Viola Lawrence
Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Gloria Grahame, Carl Benton Reid, Frank Lovejoy, Jeff Donnell, Art Smith, Martha Stewart, James Arness, Billy Gray, Robert Warwick

As much as anything, In a Lonely Place stands as an interesting example—and there aren't that many of them—of a movie adaptation that is as good as the literary property it's based on. What's more, both book and movie stand as innovations in their unique ways, but they are different ways. Director Nicholas Ray and screenwriter Andrew Solt "changed the book" so self-consciously they even made the issue part of the story, which is set in Hollywood and involves a screenwriter, Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart). Compare the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, in which Steele is a mystery novelist. Part of the movie's story is that Steele has been given an adaptation to do and he's told specifically not to change the book.

But changing the book, obviously, is exactly what Ray and Solt did, and not just making Steele a screenwriter instead of a novelist, which is merely cute. In Hughes's short novel, published in 1947, Steele is not only the killer (that's no spoiler, btw, it's front and center as a story element) but in fact he is a serial killer—and Hughes's book looks forward to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, published in 1952, which takes the conceit even further by making the killer and serial killer also the first-person narrator. But Hughes dreamed hers up first, and as a woman she also brings a compelling view of male rage. In the movie Steele has serious anger management issues that are eating him alive and destroying his life, but he's no killer, let alone psychopath. There is something wrong with Steele in both book and movie, but Ray and Solt took him in a direction that is more realistic, if depressing.

"The Shadowy Street" (1932)

Belgian writer Jean Ray's story has some really nice points, with an inclination he might have for making people vanish physically and permanently. It's only the second story I've read by him and it happens in both. Which isn't to say it doesn't work. I like how it's structured as a portmanteau, and even more I like the alleged source—manuscripts found in the junk from a shipping bale that burst open as it was being hauled off a dock. There's a "German manuscript" and a "French manuscript"—these old horror writers are forever turning up mysterious manuscripts, aren't they? Both detail events in the same town in Germany, in fact even the same section of town. The narrator believes one manuscript may shed light on the other, and so they do, though principally I suspect by being shoved together this way. In the German manuscript a group of women battle an invisible monster of some kind in their home. It's not exactly a ghost, and actually quite a bit like the so-called Horla from the 19th-century story by Guy de Maupassant. The women begin to pop out of existence one by one as the manuscript cuts off. In the French manuscript, a man has found a street no one else can see. Everyone else only sees a continuation of a wall. Down that street, into which the French narrator ventures finally, are houses, and in those houses are items of fantastic value, along with a stairway blocked midway up by a wall. He can take those items, pawn them with an eager fence he finds, and the next time he returns to the street they have been replaced and may be stolen and sold again. Another feature of the street is that it bends and twists sharply, and around each bend is only the same scene again. Nothing in life is ever free or easy, and making money stealing silver that replaces itself was never going to be enough for this guy, who is soon hurtling to a brutal apocalypse. "The Shadowy Street" is world-building fantasy pretty much straight up, but elliptical, churning with suggestion. I like it because I like the bent of Ray's visions. Invisible monsters appeared regularly (so to speak) in horror stories after the Maupassant, maybe not as much as vampires but more in the range of Pan. No version yet has convinced me it's a very scary monster, more like a slight panic irritant, like some ghosts, and so it is here. But I like so many other things about this story: the found manuscripts, the paired narratives, the street that no one else can see, down which is only mindless repetition and redundancy. The story feels like it's working by instinct and it works almost perfectly. It's tempting to lump Ray with a couple of his countrymen (and proximate contemporaries), the prolific mystery novelist Georges Simenon, who could write with the sharp edges of this in his "hard novels," and the Surrealist painter Rene Magritte. The shadowy street in this story, in fact, is reminiscent in its details—quotidian as well as bizarre—of many of Magritte's street scenes, like the one above (The Dominion of Light). Nice one!

The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

Pather Panchali (1955)

India, 119 minutes
Director: Satyajit Ray
Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray
Photography: Subrata Mitra
Music: Ravi Shankar
Editor: Dulal Dutta
Cast: Kanu Bannerjee, Karuna Bannerjee, Uma Das Gupta, Subir Banerjee, Chunibala Devi, Runki Banerjee

Pather Panchali (translated as "song of the little road") is the first film in director and screenwriter Satyajit Ray's so-called "Apu trilogy." It is explicitly about poverty but that's not the reason it's low-budget—not intentionally. The unadorned footage often feels documentary in style if not purpose. Francois Truffaut reacted badly to it—though it also appears a distinct influence on The 400 Blows—reportedly saying he wasn't interested in seeing movies about "peasants eating with their hands." It is also Ray's first movie, widely honored around the world now (and making a long-term home in the top 100 films on the list of the greatest of all time at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?). But it was made on the fly, while Ray worked a day job in an advertising agency, interrupted as funds ran out.

In 1955, India was largely isolated from Western mainstreams of filmmaking (which still hasn't improved that much), and by the evidence Ray was nearly as isolated from more localized Indian Bollywood mainstreams too. In many ways, the strains bend so far away from one another they meet on the other side. Under the influence of Jean Renoir, whom Ray met, and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves, Satyajit Ray and Pather Panchali actually preview a lot of the nascent preoccupations and energy of the French New Wave and the heroic era of art film. One key difference: while it may be lighthearted (surprisingly so surprisingly often), Pather Panchali is rarely just whimsical. The stakes are high for these people with mere cling holds on survival. It is shot on basic black and white film stock, the music by Ravi Shankar is used sparingly, and the attention remains raptly focused on the impoverished family at its center.

Ray (2004)

USA, 152 minutes
Director: Taylor Hackford
Writers: Taylor Hackford, James L. White
Photography: Pawel Edelman
Music: Craig Armstrong, Ray Charles
Editor: Paul Hirsch
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Clifton Powell, Aunjanue Ellis, Harry Lennix, Terrence Dashon Howard, Larenz Tate, Bokeem Woodbine, Sharon Warren, Chris Thomas King, Curtis Armstrong, Kurt Fuller

All right then, one more beloved dead icon of various complex attractions up for our end-of-year delectation. Granted, Ray now happens to be many years old. But it's a product of a reasonably unchanging formula, which has been in place since at least The Glenn Miller Story, and in a way, seeing an older version now sets off the basics in stark relief. Ray is a biopic, most plainly and fundamentally. But also Oscarbait, major career enhancement vehicle, hoaried slice of 20th-century popular culture, heroin cautionary tale, inspiration narrative for the disabled, civil rights story, and a few other things as well. It's trying to hit a lot of notes, pun not intended, with a little bit of sugar for everyone. But here's the kicker: it doesn't matter that much because the little bit of sugar for me (division of invention of rock 'n' roll) in many ways trumps all. Critical acumen, such as it is, goes right out the window. All sins instantly forgiven whenever the music starts to play.

Now I happen to be fond of Ray Charles—as who isn't?—so there was always cause here for both interest and wariness. If we have to wallow in something it might as well be Ray Charles. And for the most part Ray seems to get the basics right. But too often it becomes overly wince-worthy, playing for too-easy emotional effects by springboarding transparently off troubled childhood, dead younger brother, impoverished single mother, Jim Crow South, and the loss of his sight as a youth. Fine and good, because true enough, but in Ray it's just the context for various outrageous, unfortunate exaggerations, which only caricature the man that the film is attempting so self-seriously to canonize, even as it seriously bags what it existed to bag: Best Actor, Best Sound Mixing, and nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editor, and Best Costume Design. Yippee!

93. Ray Charles, "Mess Around" (1953)

(listen)

On a list like this I can't very well include every track from The Birth of Soul, which is as massively enjoyable as it is massively important, so I will choose a representative favorite. I like this one best today, getting the edge if only for the iconic moment when Ray Charles deliberately drives a wedge of silence between the words "pit" and "barbecue" in the first line, which somehow launches the thing to unimaginable levels of feverish excitement. Check it out: a song based on a backyard good-times rave-up, playing and wailing just for the pleasure of it, and for the escape—the same kind of thing that Louis Jordan and others have memorialized elsewhere in songs about rent parties. The tempo is fast, and Charles furiously pumps his rollicking piano with his left hand and skitters across the keys with his right. The horns are boss—just boss. The vocal is loose but always in command. Ray Charles the piano player seems entirely self-aware of every bit of the song's stride/boogie-woogie antecedents as it moves through its paces. It's sloppy and tight all at once, and there's a saxophone solo with potential to tear your head off. This well-known version at some two and a half minutes is freewheeling and explosive, and I can only imagine how it must have sounded on gutbucket nights when whatever band Charles had assembled stretched and let it hang out, with all its trapdoors and veering passages. Best enjoyed standing on a chair. And I wish Mary Fleener would make a comic strip out of this one too.

Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962)

The nitpicker in me wishes it was "Today's" sounds rather than "Modern," which has too much baggage and evident knowingness. But end of complaints right there. Everything else about this album is as amazing as it is unexpected as it is spectacularly, cheekily right. Working off the bat with the black + white component that so intensely fueled rock 'n' roll from its origins, call it Ray Charles's shot at Rock 'n' Roll 2.0, Rock 'n' Roll 62, switching in gospel for blues (and how far apart are they anyway?), a full-grown Negro for a humble young white boy, and the best of C&W from the vaults. Ready set go. Nothing this self-conscious should work, but this one breaks all the rules. It's as fresh today as it was the day they put it down. The arrangements, with horns and Raelettes liberally deployed, are pinpoint perfect, song to song. Is it country? Yeah, it's country. In a way that stubbornly remains a whole new bag, its own thing, like no country you ever heard before or since. But it's definitely country.

The Birth of Soul (1952-1959)

Along with Sam Cooke and (I insist) James Brown, Ray Charles stands as one of the great inventors of soul music, that unearthly combination of sacred gospel and secular (or "profane," though the critical term is overshadowed here by racist anxiety, so I prefer the more neutral "secular") rhythm 'n' blues. Ray Charles was first, barely, and if he had neither the gospel training or vocal chops of Cooke or the work ethic and sheer creative brilliance of Brown, he managed a level of exuberant joy not often touched by either. He also had the most purely natural sense for how to put together and work the material, and by the sound of things he had the most fun, driving a rollicking, often surprisingly rich, dense keyboard, his head audibly bobbing in motion into and away from a stationary microphone. Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like what Ray Charles put across in the '50s. All the Atlantic work of the time is documented here. Enjoy.