Crabs
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Last night, in the hallucinatory hour after bedtime but before sleep, I saw little crabs coming down onto my bed in clusters from shimmering grey spiderwebs. I was so startled I slammed into the bookshelf on the other side of the room before I was even awake. I switched on the light but nothing was there. I guess that's what they call working too hard, though I can't dismiss the notion that I've been watching too many movies, either. I took a shower and went back to sleep, still shaken.
Today, my day off, I walked from Battery Park to Houston Street. My new back seemed pretty well able to support my weight post-surgery, and it looked like summer had arrived, squiggling red on everything, linking the waters of the Hudson river to the people circling it in lycra and hotpants. I'm not summer's biggest fan, but it does have its moments. I arrived at Houston just in time to catch He Walked by Night at the Film Forum. Instead, I kept walking. Finally, exhausted, I stumbled into a late showing of the latest X-Men movie, which is a little like not seeing anything at all except the faint glimmer of one's adolescence getting raped (Ian MacKellen made the whole thing relatively painless, that is, if it's entirely kosher to say that about one of the few knighted gay men on earth). Anyway, don't imagine I'll sleep better for it tonight--I've got a reading tomorrow I'm not quite prepared for, my first in over a year. It's at the KGB and, well, here's the info: http://www.opencity.org/events.html.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:59 AM, ,
Baseball, Apple Pie and Total Solitude
Friday, May 26, 2006
Baseball, Apple Pie and Total Solitude
I Was A Communist for the FBI (1951) borders on the pornographic in its embodiment of hysterical red-baiting. Blonde, smirking college boys suck down caviar as they casually explain how the Soviet higher-ups have a new objective: educate "the Negroes" just enough get them rioting. Actually, "Negroes" is the word he's corrected to use by the hero standing next to him, all-Serbian-American double agent Matt Cvetic (Frank Lovejoy). But there's not enough time for these fine points: college boy is too busy rolling up lead pipes in Yiddish-language newspapers and passing them out to rioters at the factory strike.
If that's all the movie was, I guess it'd be sort of entertaining. But it also happens to be one of the loneliest films I've ever seen. Cvetic is forced to play a role, puffing out his chest and belting lines like, "Father Dan, I'm a Communist and proud of it" as his family wails in consternation. Frank Lovejoy seems to capture a certain type of middle-aged male loneliness in ripe decline. His jaw remains set yet his eyes moistly survey the room. He's kidding around and buddy-buddy all the way up to the time when his own brother calls him a dirty red, tells him never to come back and shoves him headfirst out the door. His son, taped up from a schoolyard fight (someone called him a Red), and finally abreast of "the truth," says, "when I grew up, I always thought I'd want to be like my pop. Now I know that can never happen." Where is Cvetic's wife? One can only assume that she's left him. The only woman he meets is a card-carrier, a Mata-Hari working under Soviet employ. He must pretend to like her but knows that she is soiled. When he's alone in his undecorated single apartment he paces the floor, like a lost baseball rolling after a freak home run.
If the man were more of an ephebe, we'd plug tab A into slot B and come to the conclusion that he's gay. Lovejoy is too thoroughly unerotic for that. No, anyone with the right family history (or, hey, anyone who's spent a significant time around right-wing organizations) can recognize this man for what he is: an alcoholic. The whole movie has that holiday vibe when the relative you haven't seen in six months turns up in a 10-year-old suit that doesn't fit around his stomach and starts slapping everyone a little too hard on the back. He doesn't have a date. Soon, he'll start crying. And just like every alcoholic, his secret is that his family will never know that he's really a hero.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:04 PM, ,
More Mayhem, part 5
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
More Mayhem, part 5
Cop Broderick Crawford nearly gets gipped on a little diamond ring. He doesn't, but a murder just down the block, and a crafty escaped murderer, means he's suspended without pay (which really means he's going undercover). Roughhousing down at the docks. Liquor is served, while down the street it's more murder. Wisecracks. ("Be careful." "Yeah, sure. I'll carry real bullets in my gun.") Kidnapping of the object of the little diamond ring. Disguises. Marriage?
Family political squabbles. Riot induction (blacks). World domination (real!). Seduction by schoolteachers. Father-son fallings-out. Loneliness. Riot induction (Jews). "I can't take it anymore!" "We need you to stick with this." Together: "He's quite a guy." The trial that sets them free. Plus:one roundhouse punch in the jaw for the scumbags.
Bank Robbery as the credits rise. Another security guard makes a desperate plunge and gets it casually, on the way out the door. Moll Kim Novak seduced by Fred MacMurray. Fred MacMurray and his cop buddies watch Novak through the blinds. Straying buddy eyes to the nurse next door. Secret rendevous: real love, real money. Bank robber snuffs it. Cop buddy snuffs it. The spiral. At the bottom: Fred MacMurray. Novak gives him a peck on the cheek and gets stuffed into a squad car.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:30 AM, ,
A Tally of Mayhem no. 4
Sunday, May 21, 2006
A Tally of Mayhem, part 4
A bank robbery in which a nerd is called out avant la lettre. Gunplay: the nerd throws himself in there and appears a hero. Joseph Cotten cracking wise about his fiance, grills the nerd, gets the truth. Gunplay outside the nerd's apartment. The nerd's wife falls to the floor. Vengeance killing: a guard, a farmer, and Mr. avant la lettre. Vengeance stalking: Joseph Cotten's wife. The nerd, full of holes, face down in a dress on the Cotton family's manicured lawn.
A very young Charles Bronson holds up a gas station, kidnaps a friend and his wife, tortures a drunken veterinarian, and gets shot. Some other people in the movie watch him with either approval or disapproval.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:27 AM, ,
A Tally of Mayhem, part 3
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
A Tally of Mayhem, part 3
A pistol-and-mine-shaft murder gives way to a cigarette advertisement on television. Later, adultery with the girl who was murdered. Extortion and verbal castration, then the pistol-and-mine-shaft girl gets murdered for real, behind her couch. Extortion from Edward G. Robinson. Murder? Edward G. Robinson points a real gun on television. Murder.
Kidnapping of the screw's daughter, the screw in compliance with death row inmate Edward G. Robinson. Peter Graves smashes apart his meticulously handcrafted bridge. Flashing of false identification. Prison Break. Dead: two guards, the warden, and three escapees. Shot: Peter Graves. Kidnapped: the priest, the doctor, the guard, the newsman. Primitive surgery. Bullying of the green newsboy. Internal bleeding while picking up the nest egg. Identification. Police barricades, ultimatums. Hail of gunfire, hothouse melodrama. Dead: innumerable cops, the guard, Edward G. Robinson's girl, Edward G. Robinson's accomplices, Edward G. Robinson, Peter Graves. Shot: the green newsboy. Threatened: a priest
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:04 PM, ,
Landlords Versus Tenants in the Land of Teenage Dreams
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Landlords Versus Tenants in the Land of Teenage Dreams
The family in Rebel Without a Cause is square because James Dean blocks them that way. His hysterical, weeping face stamps everything around it as normal and only nominally lifelike. James Dean is an eccentric, but a deeply conservative one. Before Rebel Without a Cause, one could go to the movies and find the type of eccentric who just wanted to be alone, the type who wanted to join the circus or the navy, who quoted from poetry or ratted out his friends but was kind to animals. After Rebel, it seems, there were simply rebels, squares and serial murderers. The rebel recieves women, money, noteriety, life; until finally he's down on his knees, weeping, in front of his brand new car--or in a sandstorm, if you're Nicholson in Five Easy Peices--because he can't have more. The squares gasp in horror, go grey en masse, and applaud near the end. The serial killer--start with Sal Mineo, the Micheal Myers of his day, squeaking with his last voice before the mask goes on and he begins to "represent" things--is everyone who stands outside of this dynamic, any jerkoff who wants something he can't have. The implication is that if you've worked hard enough for what you want, or have fallen kneeward for it, and still can't have it, then what you want must be murder or something like it.
I used to blame this on Nicholas Ray, the director James Dean sort of strutted all over when Rebel was made. After seeing They Live by Night, I'm not as quick to judge. Night is a perfectly balanced teenaged fantasy of us versus them, two lovers on the run from the law in a film that predated the Starkweather murders by ten years, something any teenager, even Charlie himself, could have latched onto to build his or her dreams of transgression and real beauty, and could still, if 1) the thing were available on DVD and 2) they weren't diverted by the big, flashing Rock and Roll road sign Ray erected in front of it seven years later.
Here's what 21st Century non-film-geek teens are missing. Early in They Live by Night, Granger's foot is hurt in a prison break and he has to be left behind by the older men escaping with him. Whether or not they come back for him determines what kind of movie this is going to be. That they send back their accomplice's daughter, Cathy O'Donnell (who appears in a fedora and wet, as from out of a dream), is a roundhouse whollop to what is expected, an underscoring of how loose and unprofessional--how familylike--their organization is. They are all connected, driven by quick desires and vague future needs. That is to say that the family relationships in They Live by Night feel truer than in Rebel. They're contingent. They frame the fantasy of escape with reality, and show what a family is like to leave, and what it's like to (unsucessfully) create one. Where Jim Backus, as James Dean's father, sort of hunches his shoulders and walks back in forth like a mechanical target, Farley Granger's "family"--the toughs who helped break him out of prison--push back and fill up space. They love him, depend on him, need things from him he finds it difficult not to give them. They rob banks together.
Forties-crime-film eccentricity abounds in the first film: Granger's two fathers bicker like the Honeymooners: one is a coolheaded Alice in the body of Dick Butkus, the other a hotheaded, murderous Ralph. The woman who sells Granger out is hotheaded and caring, brittle when conscious-stricken. And Cathy O'Donnell is incredible, at once a teenaged auto mechanic and a siren, dreaming tough and drifting in her own head, always acting and sometimes directing the action. By comparison, Natalie Wood in Rebel appears as a figment of James Dean's imagination, insecure and pliable. She seems as likely to be ignored by him in the future as by her distant father, in which case she might simply disappear in a whiff of smoke and a truncated crying jag.
If Farley Granger had had a little more time, in a different sort of world, he might have been able to set things up (modestly) for everyone, created a family above ground and unhounded by basic illegality. He would have wanted to. The fantasy he lived by was doomed but had love and responsibility for others at its core. My feeling about James Dean is just the opposite: that, after the credits roll, he'll have all the time in the world he needs to become a landlord, or to set himself up nicely in real estate, where he'll never have to be bothered by the "phony" world again.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 10:12 AM, ,
A Tally of Mayhem, part 2
Friday, May 12, 2006
A Tally of Mayhem, part 2
Robert Ryan tortures a suspect in a drab one-room rental, screaming, "Why do you make me do it? Why? You punks always talk..." He has to be pulled off another suspect in an alley. He goes upstate, where a girl has been murdered. Ida Lupino, blind, knocks over all the beautiful things in the house. Ward Bond goes nuts and blasts a shotgun into an empty car. A deranged teenager falls off a cliff and dies.
Farley Granger pushes down a guy for trying to be nice to him. Bank robbery. Farley Granger drives to fast and gets in a wreck. Farley Granger's buddy shoots a cop. Second bank robbery. Farley Granger goes to say goodbye to his girl and gets shot by the cops.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:39 PM, ,
Lawrence Tierney Day
Thursday, May 11, 2006
Lawrence Tierney Day
The Film Forum cranks up the B Noir confetti this week and the first chance I've had to catch up with it was on Lawrence Tierney day. Lawrence Tierney would have made a good Dan Duryea if given a chance. Instead, a brittle, aging Hollywood put him up front in the movies and hoped for another A-list tough guy, though the floodlights made his eyes go all pinpointy and dead. In Born to Kill (Wise, '47) everyone keeps talking about how "terribly attractive" he is on account of his viciousness. Really, he barely looks like he wants to be in the movie at all, or with top-billed Claire Trevor. He's just waiting around to become the jowly, respected burgher he would become years later in Resevoir Dogs. He's not much better in The Bodyguard (Fleischer, '48) as the good guy, but it's a lot of fun to watch him watch baseball with Pricilla Lane. The best movie in the bunch was Shakedown (Pevney, '50), where he merely plays Lawrence Tierney, somewhere in the background, a representation of totem-pole-headed brutishness the character up front can't hope to aspire to.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:58 PM, ,
A Tally of Mayhem, part 1
Anyway, here's the The Tally of Mayem, an extraction of all the bloody parts in the Film Forum's B-Noir series:
A Tally of Mayhem, part 1
Howard Duff takes a beating as the front credits roll. Howard Duff takes a photograph of a man drowning in his car. He tells him, "Stick your head out of the window. That's right, now raise your arms." Howard Duff takes a picture of Lawrence Tierney wiring a bomb into a car. When Tierney leaves, he sticks around and waits for the victim to show. He lights the scene perfectly in preparation. Howard Duff takes a picture of his own murderer--it's front page news.
Isabell Jewell talks about how wide Lawrence Tierney's shoulders are and how she's planning to make him jealous by stepping out with her ex. Lawrence Tierney murders them both in her kitchen that night. Claire Trevor sees the bodies lying on the floor but decides not to call the police. Elisha Cook holds a knife to an old lady's throat but gets stabbed by Lawrence Teirney instead. Claire Trevor gets shot by Lawrence Tierney as Lawrence Tierney gets shot by the police.
Someone takes a shot at the meatpacking heiress but hits the window instead. Lawrence Tierney gets a blackjack to the head and wakes up next to his boss in a car as a speeding train hurtles toward them. Someone is described as having gone through "the hogsaw." The nephew of the meatpacking heiress shoots the foreman, tries to shoot Pricilla Lane, and gets beat up instead.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:06 PM, ,
United Flight Room 23-B
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
United Flight Room 23-B
What is there to remember about a hospital room? Nothing. That's the worst thing about it. A guy named Gigi moaned some combination of the the word "yes" and "no" all night beside me, I found out my next door neighbor worked in the neurological ward at Roosevelt Hospital, I ate the pressed chicken in yellow gravy hungrily, and then they released me. My episode of "minor back surgery" was over.
I came home from surgery full of Vicodin and optimism, still pretty sore, and proceeded to take a few naps. A druggy nightmare I had last night stuck a tuning fork in all that optimism. In this dream I was the floor manager at a fashion show that went on for many weeks. It was spread out in a U shape, like a royal banquet within a massive tin-walled warehouse. Nervous, drugged-out models walked up and down the banquet table and were jeered more lasciviously as the festival progressed. There were feather boas and wadded slips, riotous color piled up everywhere like the inside of some exploded animal. With a sickening jolt I became aware of bulbheaded, vaguely human shapes crawling on their hands and knees beneath the tables, watching me and waiting to surface at the end of the show. Hence I tried keep the riot in a semblence of order so it wouldn't burn itself out. Everyone was drunk.
The culmination of the show was a movie premiere. The aisles in the theatre were tight and framed by a bead of tiny lights running along the floor on either side. The seats in the theatre were divided into long, densely packed rows of three, like the inside of an airplane. There were even emergency exits vacuumed to the side walls and the dim lights were all emergency red. Clever, I thought. The movie started; it involved bulbheaded people who communicated by telepathy and mostly talked about how middle class they were and about how no one else in the world liked them. When they had sex they did it en masse and their giant, fleshy heads melted into one another and just became a lot of eyes. The audience started to boo and throw popcorn at the screen. I thought: Michel Houellbecq's really outdone himself this time. Then a title came on the screen. It said "September 11, 2001." I rolled my eyes. More booing from the audience.
The screen showed a lot of people in a theater decked out to look like the interior of an airplane. Massive rocking shook the onscreen theater. The talent huddled against each other and wept as the whole environment around them shook. Their faces were tastefully cloaked in anonymity and they clawed at the seats and clutched their faces. Some of them prayed. On the other side of the screen, just behind me, I thought I heard Gigi moaning "noooo..." and an invisible lightning flash of hate and panic burned through the theater. A face on the screen appeared, red lit and grotesque in fearful peity, like a character in a Noh play. A medium shot showed a passenger vomiting that creamy Hollywood rope of puke which has become such a cinematic cliche. In front of me, an audience member produced the same pure line, then another one further down. "It's sick!" someone yelled, and on the screen, someone yelled "God help us!" Theater and screen spiralled and looped. The booing turned into screaming near me and the guy behind me started weeping and ripping the seat out of the floor. His face was red lit and ghoulish. The roaring from the Dolby Surround Sound became deafening and I had just enough time to think: first, they should have never pulled this prank; and second, they're going to break my back again. Then I woke up sort of shivering and squirting tears, afraid, and took another pill.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:08 PM, ,
Mayday
Monday, May 01, 2006
MAYDAY
Four hundred dead dolphins spill onto the Zanzibar coast. I get my first rejection in years from a magazine--they say they'll be featuring only French poetry in their next issue (the French dog my every step). My sister graduates from college next week and I barely have enough money to buy her a token present. My phone just called me and told me I have less than 10 dollars in my account. Bush strikes back again at a symbol of our pluralist society. A week from today I undergo back surgery. Dr. Elowitz says no ibuprofen for a week, so it's like an electric crowbar has been left on in my back. It crushes the Tylenol I throw at it. The inactivity has left me fatter than ever. Tomorrow is my birthday.
Amid this disillusionment, the second print edition of The Entertainment Industry wriggles funk-eyed into life. This means I've had the chance to make innumerable little fixes to the grammar and spelling throughout the site, so check the archive. You can read the introduction here.
And on the bright side, gala dinners still happen for the talented, and the Film Forum will speed my postsurgical recovery with nearly two months of B Noir Films.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:33 PM, ,
