“The Rockery” (1912)

E.G. Swain was a cleric and a colleague of M.R. James. Swain wrote his own collection of ghost stories, The Stoneground Ghost Tales, where “The Rockery” comes from originally. I got a kick out of this one. The characters are so oblivious they are in a vampire tale that it reads to me like a lampoon of the trope. Mr. Batchel, a vicar with a small estate next to the church (a “glebe”?) and its churchyard, takes great pride in and fastidious care of his garden. At one edge of it is “a cluster of tall elms … and about their base is raised a bank of earth, upon which is heaped a rockery of large stones lately overgrown with ferns.” Mr. Batchel finds it unsightly and determines to have it removed. Swain is humorously cynical about the relationship of Mr. Batchel and his gardener. Mr. Batchel thinks of the work as a “we” project, but it is the gardener who labors. Among the stones they find architectural debris of columns and capitals and such, as if perhaps a temple of some kind had collapsed or been destroyed. It’s a fantastic afternoon’s work and here is where we can start to feel Swain winking at us: “One detail, however, must not be omitted. A large and stout stake of yew, evidently of considerable age, but nonetheless quite sound, stood exposed after the clearing of the bank. There was no obvious reason for its presence.” Au contraire, Sherlock! we want to cry. It's really quite obvious, and I suspect, in 1912, that Swain knows that exactly. A lot of time and effort (all by Mr. Batchel’s gardener, of course) subsequently goes into removing the stake, which includes finding a plate of copper nailed to it, bearing a message punched in with hammer and nail: “MOVE NOT THIS STAKE, NOV. 1, 1702.” Does this stop our industrious pair? It does not. You know where this is going and you are correct, not to be too spoilery about it. This vampire, once released, is more the beast type. But even that got me thinking. Maybe, after two centuries of being buried under tons of rubble with a stake through its heart, it’s going to take a while for the beast to get its bearings and get back up on its legs and create that life of leisure and sophistication and seduction we know so well. Count Dracula, in his castle and tuxedo, etc. It takes some time to put that undead life together again. I’m interested in reading more by Swain.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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“Out of Season” (1923)

This story by Ernest Hemingway is possibly his first under influence of Ezra Pound and Pound’s “imagism,” which attempts to use omission to strengthen the impact or meaning of a poem or story. It’s an intriguing and very Poundian idea. Look at him go in perhaps his most famous poem, “In a Station of the Metro”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough” (that’s the whole thing; let it tumble in your mind). In many ways Hemingway is just the man for imagism. This story is also the first that Hemingway reconstructed after a suitcase full of manuscripts was stolen. He claimed later this story came back to him quickly. There is some sense in it of laboring to exhaustion (natural enough as he is recreating it), but for the most part I think it works pretty well. Set in Italy after the Great War, it involves a local, Peduzzi, who has signed on to take an American married couple on an illicit fishing expedition. The incidents are fragmented yet potent with suggestion: Noticing a “Fascist café” sets the historical era vividly and economically. Peduzzi, the guide, is working to make the outing as easy for himself as possible yet he also hopes to make as much off the Americans as he can, including, perhaps most importantly, drink. There is tension between the couple. It’s not clear she’s interested in fishing at all, as she lags well behind the two men, carrying the fishing rods and saying very little. The townspeople observing this group seem sullen, as if resenting how the Americans can break the rules with impunity, or perhaps they are envious of Peduzzi. Hemingway is obviously working out his technique. It’s often not subtle or effective at all that things are missing. Yet just as often these things can be felt through the gaps. This story first appeared in a 1923 privately published edition, Three Stories & Ten Poems. By the time it made it into the 1925 edition of the In Our Time collection it was accompanied by vignette paragraphs that alternate with the stories. I don’t always understand the relation of these vignettes to the stories—it’s art, it’s poetry—but “Out of Season” is preceded by one about bullfighting. The first time I read this story that vignette annoyed me and colored my reaction some. A later second reading (minus the vignette) won me over more. A tremendous amount is communicated here by the shattered minimalist approach. It seems strange to me that someone so resolutely masculinist—it’s arguably Hemingway’s greatest influence, and not a good one—is also so tender and studied about his aesthetics.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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Scarface (1983)

USA, 170 minutes

Director: Brian De Palma

Writers: Oliver Stone, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, Armitage Trail

Photography: John A. Alonzo

Music: Giorgio Moroder

Editors: Gerald B. Greenberg, David Ray

Cast: Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia, Paul Shenar, Harris Yulin, F. Murray Abraham, Miriam Colon, Richard Belzer, Dennis Holahan, Michael Alldredge, Mark Margolis

I was surprised, perhaps 25 years ago, when I noticed that director Brian De Palma’s 1983 homage to Hollywood gangster cinema had a lot of fans. Scarface appeared to be significant for bro wannabe gangsters, no surprise—but also cineastes of various stripes. Glenn Kenny just published a book about it, for example. For a long time I wondered how they could all be so wrong. My first impression was not a good one. My takeaways (and pretty much all I focused on) were a gruesome early scene involving a chainsaw in a motel shower, and then the last hour of a picture that runs nearly three, where the operatics and scenery-chewing reach various spectacular yet ludicrous climaxes. Yes, this includes Tony Montana (Al Pacino) sitting in his monogrammed chair at his desk piled with a mound of cocaine, into which he periodically bobs his head and comes up with a frosty powdery nose-tip. The emptiness of gangster life, as always, is appalling. But making it so buffoonish is something else again. Hoo-yah!

It took me this long to get back to Scarface, such was my recoiling reaction, even given that I might be a little more indulgent of De Palma’s prolific work than some others I know. But a lot of serious people continue to have a lot of serious things to say about Scarface, so I made a point of looking again. And yeah, it’s not bad—certainly stands up to gangster pictures of the ‘70s and ‘80s as well as the originals from the ‘30s. Not that, full disclosure, I really like gangster pictures as such that much—it seems to be kind of an overachieving genre. But Scarface fits, it belongs—it’s the story of a rise and fall, with the usual self-serving moral qualms. The chainsaw scene now seems more like the kind of wanton ultraviolence we are more used to as entertainment. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, and I am saying it’s still hard to watch, but the scene does what it’s supposed to do in this movie, in terms of plot and character development. And the last hour—well, we’ll get to the last hour.

Sanctuary (2022)

Sanctuary feels a little like a stage play, with the basic setup of two primary characters largely confined to a sumptuous hotel suite. It’s practically the only element of stability in this tricksy loop-the-loop tour de force which fully showcases Margaret Qualley as Rebecca and Christopher Abbott as Hal. You think these guys can’t perform? Come and take a look. Hal is a rich guy with issues whose father just died, leaving him the family business worth $185 million. Rebecca is a dominatrix for hire. The seesawing dynamics here are all about power and control. It’s more than a BDSM hobby for both, though they both take turns declaring it’s only that. Eventually they start talking about “the game” because it’s nearly as hard for them as it is for us to figure out when they are speaking directly and when they are speaking in various characters or simply being deceptive. The action revolves around Hal trying to cut Rebecca off now that he’s stepping into the responsibilities of his inheritance. He gives her a watch worth $32,000, goes doe-eyed, tells her how much it all meant to him. Rebecca is having none of it. She claims she can blackmail him—and we are on. I better admit I found this movie hot—Qualley is notably on her game. But it’s all in the script and by way of performance, on both their parts, within the movie and without. It’s hard to tell what’s real in the ever-shifting dialogue (again like a play)—there are a lot of movies like this—but in this case Sanctuary keeps things moving fast enough to distract from the general unbelievability. I’d say it takes about 15 or 20 minutes after the movie is over for the spell to dissolve. Perhaps the point is that during the movie we have no questions and few objections as the tensions ratchet and the back and forth goes everywhere. What unfolds is often quite startling from minute to minute and for me the movie was entirely unpredictable. I believe someone with more experience with tricksy movies might have seen this finish coming from a long way away, but I never. Sanctuary—for the kicks.

Pale Gray for Guilt (1968)

I wanted to revisit a Travis McGee novel by John D. MacDonald partly to test myself. Admittedly, MacDonald is a good mystery writer in the hard-boiled vein and McGee is a certain classic. I read a half-dozen or so of them some years ago but finally had to give them up. They almost always included scenes that triggered me, usually women being mistreated or assaulted in ways that left me sick. I had the impression MacDonald enjoyed writing them. Someone once described his style as rabbit-punching and that clarified it for me. But the people blurbing and praising him remain big names: Lee Child (who wrote an introduction for my 2012 edition), Donald Westlake, Roger Ebert, Sue Grafton, etc., etc. As it turns out, I can say “almost always” because—happily—no such scene occurs here. It has all the stuff I remembered: a senseless title that is there to name a color, the brooding loner on a Florida houseboat Travis McGee, a revenge story, a sting, various beautiful women, and me thinking her? Is she the one who gets it? But nothing, or very little. I’m going to try another and see how it goes. I picked this from a generic google search (“best travis mcgee novels”). Later I found it at #13 on a ranked list of all 21 and nowhere near any rando top 5. What up, google? Maybe people like those terrible scenes? As usual, damsels in distress are all over Pale Gray for Guilt, as well as many shades of gray (literal, not figurative). But MacDonald is just good at pulling you into his crazy storylines. Here a friend of McGee’s is murdered, which isn’t clear at first because it was elaborately staged as a grotesque suicide. That leaves behind a widow in distress and a thirst for cold as you can stand it revenge in McGee. It all comes to revolve around a stock swindle, which gets complicated and I got lost. But you can see it works by the way the bad guys yelp and carry on and somehow MacDonald makes even that satisfying. Pale Gray for Guilt (ninth in the series btw, which don’t really need to be read in order) also has a poignant love story that runs parallel to the main mystery story, with an affecting, bittersweet ending. Still, there’s always a little more Hugh Hefner than I like in MacDonald. A lot of things about Travis McGee have not aged well—but all the bigs love him.

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

23. Echo & the Bunnymen, Porcupine (1983)

[2021 review here.]

Once again a previous review says a lot of what I want to say (it’s the same album, after all, and it’s still me). I don’t plan to make a habit of this, but still: the weirdly titled Porcupine “arguably tends more toward the cerebral side of psychedelia, full of trippy climax and those thrumming string contributions from L. Shankar [no relation to Ravi].... these woozy dim images playing from wake-up movies, tarted up with exotic Eastern elements and a dense and sludgy production that bursts at will into clarity. The trademark dread of the Bunnymen lurks constantly. They're afraid of something. What is it?” (No, I don’t know what I meant by “wake-up movies” either.) Though Porcupine is now considered an album in good standing in the Bunnymen canon, in 1983 it got a fair amount of bad press. The knock, mainly from the UK, was that the band was already, with their third album, starting to go stale and recycle themselves. I have never heard Porcupine that way. For one thing it has two of their best songs in “The Cutter” (quite possibly their single best) and “The Back of Love.” It’s my favorite by them, and it's not just the exotic Eastern flourishes, but equally that creeping, gnawing sense of anxiety. Certainly on the druggy side of psychedelic experience dread and anxiety are usually there. Consider a first trip, or any. waiting to come on. Everyone is a little nervous and conversation is hard to focus. This is probably also the place for me to mention that, while I don’t consciously participate on either side of any rivalry between Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen and Julian Cope of the Teardrop Explodes, I certainly have a preference. Cope if anything has pursued more determinedly psychedelic avenues but I couldn’t connect with any of his solo stuff lately, at least not on first listens (of Peggy Suicide and Interpreter), nor have I ever cared much for the T.E. But when I reached for the first four albums by Echo & the Bunnymen they all sounded at least as good as ever. And this still sounded best, as psychedelia or otherwise.

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

USA, 76 minutes

Directors: Kevin Altieri, Boyd Kirkland, Frank Paur, Dan Riba, Eric Radomski, Bruce Timm

Writers: Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, Martin Pasko, Michael Reeves, Bob Kane

Art direction: Glen Murakami

Photography: Song Il-Choi

Music: Shirley Walker

Editor: Al Breitenbach

Cast: Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Dana Delany, Stacy Keach, Abe Vigoda, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Marilu Henner

This animated feature—officially the first by Warner Bros. Animation, rising out of the ashes of Warner Bros. Cartoons—was intended to capitalize on the Batman franchise, then blowing up, lately fortified with “dark knight” intimations out of Frank Miller and, kinda sorta, Tim Burton. Mask of the Phantasm is based on a TV series, Batman: The Animated Series, which ran from 1992 until 1999, and followed the second Burton picture, Batman Returns, a second big hit after the 1989 Batman. Phantasm was intended originally as a direct-to-video release but, because the Burton pictures were making big money, it was rushed into a theatrical release and flopped. But time has been kind to this one, which features Mark Hamill as one of the better Jokers and Kevin Conroy sounding a lot like Adam West, a subtly comforting element.

Unlike the Burton pictures, which worked the dark-knight thing but always kept one foot (or maybe three toes) planted in the campy exercises of the ‘60s TV show, Mask of the Phantasm is all in on the gritty nighttime crime-fighter who strikes terror etc. The giveaway on the serious Batman pictures remains how much hay they make out of the origin story, often including Bruce Wayne’s parents Thomas and Martha as characters but at least making a point of visits to the cemetery. Phantasm also retcons a new girlfriend for Batman/Bruce Wayne, one “Andrea Beaumont,” who has since gone on to further appearances in Batman stories. But let’s pause a moment on “retcon” because it’s an idea unique to continuing series in both the comics and TV and an important key to deciding whether or not such stories work.

“The Last Lords of Gardonal” (1867)

All my internet sources are hurrying to tell me that the author of this long story, William Gilbert, is the father of the W.S. Gilbert in Gilbert & Sullivan—noted. I like this vampire tale and sly critique of the feudal system because it moves along well, it’s always interesting, and it’s fully committed to the blood-sucking too. There’s the bad baron who does what he wants and takes what he wants. And there’s a magician (or something) called the Innominato—this story is actually part of a longer series involving him, or it. This bad baron taxes and mistreats the peasants and also marauds over a wider region, raiding towns, robbing travelers, etc. On one of his expeditions he sees a peasant woman he wants to marry, so great is her beauty. Neither she nor her family will have him, however, so he resorts to extortion and violence. Most of the family dies in the fire when the baron burns down their house, but it appears the beautiful Teresa escaped. The Innominato comes in when the peasants turn to him for help against the baron. There is quite a bit of incident as the baron foolishly takes him on. He is fixed on having Teresa. As it turns out—as we may have suspected—spoilers—Teresa did die in that fire. And in the machinations between the baron and the Innominato she is delivered to him as her bride, but she is actually of course now a vampire beast. In fact, though this story takes its time getting there, she is one of the better vampires I’ve seen. A beautiful woman by day or for public viewing (as always, the vampire rules are fungible, sunlight apparently no problem here), in private she turns into a loathsome corpse that gnaws at the baron’s wound on his neck. And it couldn’t happen to a better guy, so all’s well that ends well. Gilbert was prolific, writing a fair amount of fantastical literature like this and a good deal more besides. Trying to place this and/or Gilbert historically, the story is plainly Enlightenment-informed and opposed to the feudal system for all its inevitable corruption. The bad baron is very bad, and so is his brother, though they had a kindly father. They are repulsive bullying miscreants, a certain object lesson in human psychology. The bad baron gets everything he deserves, which makes the story as satisfying as it is well told (if, you know, somewhat antiquated). I’m still OK with vampire stories.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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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

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.