The Garret

It annoys me very much that Alexander Knox's The Closing Door (1949) performed so dismally on Broadway that it never had a chance at a film option, since it would have made a neat little semi-noir addition to the catalogue of mid-century cinema that isn't totally pants about mental illness. Psychiatrically it suffers from the inevitably explanatory trauma and narratively from the climactic restatement of the moral that any audience with half an attention will have gathered for themselves, but not more so than some similarly oriented narratives from its era and certainly less than many. Otherwise and the critics who were bored by it can bite me, its representation of mental illness is remarkable for its ordinariness. Until the last-act decompensation which is explicitly stress-tipped over, Vail Trahern has no blackouts, freakouts, or delusions worth the name; he's a tired, nervous, lucid man who's frightened all the time without being able to say of what and whose ability to hold a job, never fabulous, has deteriorated to the point where he's lied for a month about losing the last one so as not to feel any more of a failure in front of his family than he has for years. He has some odd, jerky triggers, decisions easily overwhelm him, he can tell it's bad when stumbling into his son's photo-finish camera-flash leaves him in the childish pain of a nightmare. "I used to have some kind of a card index in my mind, now the cards are blowing about like snow." He's so terrified of being institutionalized that it makes even setting up an outpatient evaluation a minefield, which per the author's note is much of the social message even without the half of the family that views treatment as a more brazen stigma of lunacy than genteelly hushing the whole thing up. It has a more uncertainly open ending, but the frustrated insistence that mental illnesses should be regarded no more sensationally than physical ones reminded me directly and surprisingly of The October Man (1947), still my gold standard for the subject in its decade. At least on the page, it should not have been a two-week flop. It is never so much of a sociological treatise that it doesn't function as a character study; it doesn't need to be tricky to be tense because the stakes of sanity and autonomy are high enough. Knox wrote the central couple of Vail and Norma Trahern for himself and his wife Doris Nolan and while I am unfairly ill-equipped to imagine her performance, having seen her only as the chic deep freeze of Holiday (1938), he should have been very good as the disconnected, not inhuman Vail. I have not been able to find more of a visual record than the production stills accompanying the published text, which after years of just about every playscript or screenplay of interest to me turning out to be inaccessibly stashed in universities or special collections, I was genuinely shocked to find reproduced in full in the May 1950 Theatre Arts. The sparsely furnished loft which post-war signals the Traherns' poverty—accessible by service elevator, its wall of a studio window overlooking the surrounding roofs with their night-flashing signs—would have gentrified into the millions these days.

It isn't just the jack-of-all-trades quality: his career as an actor looks weirder with every fact I learn about it. I had known that he did a season with the Old Vic in the late '30's, but I had not understood it was 1937–38 which made him part of the legendary A Midsummer Night's Dream directed by Tyrone Guthrie with Ralph Richardson as Bottom and Vivien Leigh as Titania and Robert Helpmann as Oberon, of which I have seen photos and caricatures and considered burning a time machine ticket on. He played the wittiest partition of Snout the tinker, for which he got irresistible notices—bettered when he co-starred with Olivier in the same season's The King of Nowhere, which the future Sir Larry conceded he had walked off with. He did first-run late Shaw in the West End and at the Malvern Festival, where his own first effort as a playwright premiered. He did television so early for the BBC, his appearances couldn't be burninated because it was not yet technologically possible to record them. For a while as both director and performer, he was involved with a company that did sort of experimental masques. Like any character actor worth their chameleonism, he played older than his own age from the start, at least once diegetically, already like a meta-joke. Except that he happened to be on Broadway in 1940 where it was easy for him to come to the attention of Hollywood, it starts to feel confusing that he got into American films at all, although even less surprising that he fit so badly into the Lego-set style of the studio system. He did post-war, post-blacklist theater in the UK, too, such that I have to hope for the survival of his televised 1970 When We Dead Awaken with Wendy Hiller. It feels existentially incorrect that the two of them were never in the same Shaw at the same time. I refer often to the hell of a good video store next door, but for some people you want the extra-dimensional expansion to the time machine.

In the meantime, it seems I can't read any of the detective novels he published pseudonymously in the early '30's when he was living by writing rather than acting, not because he was after all successful in taking their titles with him, but because even though Mystery*File made the connection back in 2015, short of incredible luck in a used book store the never-reprinted pulp of Ian Alexander's The Disappearance of Archibald Forsyth (1933) looks impossible for me to get near without Canadian interlibrary loan. The possibility that Alex Knox was the creator of the first fictional Indigenous detective is fascinatingly random except that it fits with the interests of his much later, mostly historical adventure novels published under his own name. I am used to the phenomenon where actors not all that infrequently double as directors or screenwriters, but obscure crime authors is a new experience.

Otherwise mostly what goes on around here is capitalism, errands, and interacting with doctors: the usual. Wishing I could vaporize people with the power of my brain.

I had missed this article on the photographs of Louis and Antoinette Thuillier, who memorialized on glass negatives, with a view camera in the improvised studio of their farmyard, thousands on thousands of soldiers and laborers from around the literal world passing through Vignacourt on their way to the British lines of the First World War. It started as a business; it became memory-work, ghost-work. They cannibalized their own windows rather than erase an exposure, the last and perhaps only record of the men who had marched on to the Somme. I was not surprised to read that they took no more photographs after the war, that the husband shot himself, that the wife did not destroy the collection but left it in the farmhouse's attic for history to deal with, too close to the epicenter herself. If I had ever seen any of their images, I had not known the story. The article makes much of the immediacy and casualness of their pictures, of which this one makes a shock of a calling card because only their uniforms and the tin hat one of them isn't wearing tell the time: their expressions aren't a century old. Time is plastic stuff. Don't even ask how long a decade ago feels.

I was in the car tonight at the right time to hear a live-in-studio set from local rockers JVK, reprising three-fifths of their debut EP Hello, Again (2022) for WERS. I get to feel slightly ahead of the curve discovering Tristwch y Fenywod at the start of this year, but I had not encountered Cerys Hafana's "Child Owlet" (2024), which without altering the ballad becomes in their telling a witch song.

The mango lassi pie from Petsi does not actually much resemble the experience of a mango lassi, but since it is constructed along the principle of a key lime pie except with mango, I love it.

I seem to have been the member of my family to introduce my niece to the Atlantic off Cape Elizabeth where I learned to swim. Since spatch and I had the honor and the fun of driving her back to her father, we took the opportunity to stop off in Kittery for fried summer foods, York Beach for body-slamming waves and salt water taffy and soft-serve, and then Two Lights for climbing all over the ledges she kept making sure were not petrified wood before handing the tall child back at Kettle Cove where she had waded out to gather wet-shining lumps of quartz. I forgot to pack swim trunks and the cuffs of my jeans are full of sand.

( As we haul away to harbor. )

At Kettle Cove, I walked barefoot over the springing beds of knotted wrack and the emery bite of barnacles. I told my niece about the invasive tiny green crabs her father and I used to catch, which even under capitalism it is now ethical to consume. I dislike so very much of the wrench of the world, but I love that my niece has turned out to love the sea.

The silver lining of having to think about the 17th Academy Awards has been the discovery of I Won't Play (1944), the year's winner in the since deprecated category of Best Short Subject, Two-Reeler. It had minor competition. Its vignette of down time in the Pacific theater is a cut above ephemera. It has nothing important to say about the war effort or American values except in the back-handed, Runyonesque fashion of popular music and tall tales. Frankly, good for it.

Directed by old-school all-rounder Crane Wilbur, the screenplay by James Bloodworth sticks close to its source short story by Laurence Schwab in setting up and knocking down the riddle of Fingers (Dane Clark), the dog-tagged Baron Munchausen-in-residence of an unidentified island in the South Pacific so currently overrun with very bored Marines that it's a wonder no one's busted out with the Rodgers and Hammerstein, whom the ever-modest Fingers would no doubt take the credit for introducing. If you believe what the gum-cracking, Variety-paging little bluffer gives out, he had a hand in every success of stage and screen from Gershwin to Sinatra, not to mention some sideman action on his own account with the likes of Goodman and Dorsey. He gave a hot tip to Bogart. Even the luscious pin-up of Kim Karol, lately classing up the sandbag-and-stenciled-crate decor of their dugout, he claims to have discovered at the nightspot on 52nd Street where he taught her the schmaltz that took her to Hollywood. He'd be insufferable except for his nonchalantly chutzpadik air of not seeming to care whether he's doubted, always with a wisecrack in the face of a direct challenge—put on the spot about his anonymity compared to the stardom of his alleged protégé, Fingers who couldn't look more Brooklyn Jewish if he were my grandfather tosses carelessly back, "'Cause I ain't got her big blue eyes." The scornfully spellbound audience of Chicago (William Haade), Rusty (Warren Douglas), and Florida (William Benedict) can't figure it any other way: "Fingers is either the biggest liar in the world or the most important guy in show business." The favorite is not Option B. On the other hand, on this tropical swamp of an island with nothing to do but sit around and read months-late mail and listen to Tokyo Rose, even an A-1 line of bull is better than a total cultural blackout, the closest any of his buddies is getting for the duration to the movie-palace, big-band comforts of home. It is a truth reluctantly acknowledged that for all his backstage bantam swagger and the nickname none of them has even seen him play a piano to justify, Fingers can be "kind of nice . . . to listen to, I mean."

Obviously, a spiel of this caliber cannot run indefinitely without either putting or shutting up and the wave function seems to collapse catastrophically when the cargo off the latest LST includes a beat-up traveling piano and in front of a rec hall's worth of eager witnesses, Fingers approaches the ivories with amazement and then ingloriously balks. He can't come through for an audience who'd thrill if he played "Chopsticks." He gets threatened with a personalized anvil chorus and digs in his heels on the title drop. Even for the chaplain (Robert Shayne) who's just as sternly worded as the next disappointed Marine, he can't muster more than the weak sauce of "Look, I don't mean to be a crab, Padre, but, well, I—I kind of made a vow, see?" which goes over even less well than his theatrical bluster about military pay not covering the rates he used to pull down nightly in New York. By the time the chaplain's finished with him for cheating the camp of the treat he as good as promised every time he sounded off about his hot combo nights on Swing Street, even his most traditionally skeptical critics are actually a little stunned. "I knew he was lying about all those people he was talking about, but imagine not even being able to play!" Lucky Fingers, if, after that exhibition, he can even get launched on one of his former anecdotes without being drowned out by the worse than silent treatment of Jolson in sarcastically three-part harmony. His glum demotion to persona insta-non grata, however, is nothing compared to the pasting his erstwhile buddies are prepared for him to receive when an unplanned refueling at the airfield gives the entertainment-starved Marines the windfall of a USO show by none other than Kim Karol (Janis Paige) her curvaceous, vivacious, flame-haired self, all set to knock what Fingers would have called the cash customers dead, especially if an accompanist can be found for the little box of a piano which is missing a couple of keys and still a better prospect than a torch song accordion. In agreement, the trio head off to collar their musical phony for a never-better chance to show him off to his own invention: "I wouldn't miss this for Tojo's funeral!"

If I have to spell out the denouement of this mishegos, I Won't Play has made such a bad job of its telegraphy that it might as well have used the Pony Express, but the sweetest twist is not what happens when Fingers gets shoved down in front of the piano or even at the airfield where he sees off Kim, but the fact that the camp braggart turns out to be surprisingly sensitive to the kind of dreams that soldiers half a globe from home sustain themselves on, whether it's a picture of a redheaded starlet or a lot of glitzy tall talk. "Everybody kisses everybody in show business." Showing off the brash and vulnerable persona that would serve him so well in his post-war noirs, Clark drops into conversations like an all-time kibitzer and sees himself out of a roomful of cut dead air with an elaborately unconvincing effort of not giving a damn. Paige was already a Hollywood singer as well as an authentic pin-up and could have wowed her audience accompanied by nothing at all, but she does such a knockout rendition of "Body and Soul" that I get mad all over again about The Pajama Game (1957). Audiences who liked their brief chemistry would get to see him strike out with her a month later in Hollywood Canteen (1944). Except that it provides the necessary distance between its antihero's claims and any means of proving them, the war remains mostly a matter of palm trees and G.I. shirts and the occasional patriotic detail like a game of darts played on a photo of Hirohito, but it's still a little jarring to hear the scene-setting narrator sound so blasé about suggesting a location of "maybe Tarawa," considering the winner of that year's Best Documentary Short Subject. Is this short fiction comparable cinema? Like hell, it's Saturday Evening Post-cute and it answers its outstanding question with a wink through the fourth wall; it looks terrible on taped-off-TCM YouTube, but I am delighted to have proof that the channel's chronically prestige 31 Days of Oscar does periodically dip into the discontinued categories instead of just the warhorses. After all, "Even a good liar is not to be lightly dismissed." This vow brought to you by my big backers at Patreon.

It feels like such a cheaply sentimental connection that I must not have allowed myself to see it for years, but the first film of any lasting meaning that I saw after the dislocating and disposessing move from New Haven which marked the end of my academic career and with it the whole pattern of my life to date was A Canterbury Tale (1944), that touchstone of continuity and exile. I got up in the morning to watch it off TCM. It gave me déjà vu as if I remembered some of its strongest, strangest images, even though it seemed after the fact impossible that I should have had any previous chance to see it. It was my introduction to Powell and Pressburger and I immediately set about tracking down as many of their films as were available in my country as I had never done with any filmmakers before—I could explain it as finding something to study after suddenly having for the first time in twenty-odd years nothing assigned, but then I could have dedicated myself to just about anything encountered in those three-ish weeks including for God's sake M*A*S*H. I had just written the most Christian poem of my Jewish life and so was perhaps more than ordinarily primed to accept Emeric's cathedral. I had forgotten that the only time in my life I was in Canterbury, I had written about its layers of time, Roman roads, the scars of the Blitz, I had linked it with the archaeological eternity of DWJ's Time City. I could have imprinted on any of the characters with their griefs and doubts of lovers and livelihoods and I went straight for Colpeper, the sticky-fingered magus in his panic of losing the past, his head so far up his home ground that he has not yet learned the lesson of diaspora, how to carry the tradition wherever you go, including into the future. I had heard it myself since childhood and never had to put it so much to the test. I loved the film at once and desperately and it still took me years to see how like time itself nothing can really be lost in it, the lifeline I called it without recognizing what it held out. I keep coming back to it, still excavating that bend in the road. It had what I needed to find in it unexpectedly, the coins from the field returned in a stranger's hand.

I seem to be continuing to sleep more than has been my steady norm for months into years, albeit at peculiar and inconvenient hours that leave me feeling like some sort of crepuscular mammal. I have never been able to nap in my life without it making me feel worse than when I conked out and now it just seems to be an irregularly scheduled part of my day. I am operating on the theory that I will eventually evolve a circadian rhythm. I had one in college, I think.

It would never have occurred to me that the house style of 20th Century Fox was historical megaflops, but Wilson (1944) is the third to cross my radar after Cleopatra (1963) and The Big Trail (1930): it lost its $5.2 million shirt at the box office and Darryl F. Zanuck died mad that it didn't win Best Picture. In the first edition of John Gassner and Dudley Nichols' Best Film Plays of 1943–44 (1945) which spatch picked up from the carrel outside the Brattle Book Shop the week before Christmas in 2017, Zanuck is the only producer to have a preface devoted to his published screenplay and it's all on the defensive, primarily against charges of unnecessary expense and boosterism for FDR. It is not majorly concerned with the historical accuracy of the script by Lamar Trotti, which is fine because regardless of whether it has its names and dates in order, it reads like a political fairy tale. How appealing it is to imagine the twenty-eighth President of the United States as a shy dry stick of a boffin animated by an almost supernal honesty and a self-deprecating sense of humor as underestimated as his perseverance, untarnished by failures of civil rights and never so impaired by his stroke that he can't share the joke with his wife of her letting him out of his presidential responsibilities. A kind of sacrificial king of American idealism, broken across a vision that the world is too fallen and fragmented to match him in, classed by the opening titles with the national saints of Washington and Lincoln. Probably it could only have been trounced by the Catholic super-treacle of Going My Way. Hollywood gonif!

Pursuing some details about Wilson with the fervor of a person who really does not want to have to watch the damn movie, I found a profile of Alexander Knox by James Hilton in the February 1945 Photoplay and blew a gasket that I hope registered with Harry Cohn's ass:

Knox belongs to the new generation of Hollywood stars who shape so oddly into the category that they are already on their way to changing both Hollywood and the star system [. . .] Indeed, the only possible thing to say is that he's an actor, and that the fame he has secured in "Wilson" neither enforces nor precludes any particular kind of thing he will do next.

In support of this argument one has only to glance at his previous motion picture roles to gather some notion of the man's range. His first Hollywood film was "The Sea Wolf" with Edward G. Robinson, in which he played the shipwrecked author, a man of physical fear but mental courage. After that there were the memorable moments in "This Above All" as the gentle clergyman and in "None Shall Escape" as the fanatical Nazi leader which in Knox's hands had the sharpness of a steel engraving.

So Knox is a star, but like many of the newer stars, he doesn't fit into the star system; and when enough people don't fit a system it is the system that has to be changed.

I don't disagree with Hilton—about either the actor or the system—but if the latter had changed to accommodate the former in the mid-'40's, I wouldn't have spent these last ten years of my semi-professional life banging my head against the exact intractability of classical Hollywood to know what to do with its actors of whatever gender who couldn't be easily typed or ticky-tackied into marketable components of the dream machine, which are naturally the kind it seems reasonable to me to like best and inclined to be frustrating to follow. In the same way that it fascinates me to encounter criticism of the Production Code at the time of its enforcement, it's useful for me to know that my feelings about the limitations of the traditional star system were shared by its contemporaries, but then it's even more maddening that its operations would not shift meaningfully until the '60's. Justice for Jean Hagen, basically. In other news, I am charmed that Knox was into motorcycles. So was William Wyler around that time; I am glad they never collided.

I forgot to mention when the three robin nestlings fledged and launched, but the current monarch count stands at one chrysalis and four caterpillars. The moon is still wildfire-stained.

Apparently if permitted to sleep, my body thinks it should be allowed to do it again. I napped this afternoon and am contemplating further adventures in napping this evening. It's inconvenient in terms of a day, but on the other hand my sleep debt was old enough to vote in the last election. Have some links.

1. Courtesy of moon_custafer: Keith Moon fills in for John Peel in 1973. The musical choices are clever and more surf-inflected than I would have guessed and the interstitial sketches are deranged. Eleven out of ten, no notes. "Here it is once again, for those of you listening, in color."

2. Courtesy of selkie: clips from this weekend's semi-concert performance of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl starring Cynthia Erivo as Jesus. The effect is not unlike Nina Simone's "Pirate Jenny" (1964). Also queer af.

3. With incredible timing, the Harvard Film Archive has just announced this winter's series of Columbia 101: The Rarities, meaning that anyone in the Boston area who actually wants to hit themselves with None Shall Escape (1944) will have two chances on 35 mm including the first night of Hanukkah. I plan to be there. Several other titles of interest I have never seen, or never seen in a theater. Especially since this spring took my plans for Noir City Boston out at the knees, wish me luck.

4. Of the minimal amount of television I watched as a child, nearly all of it was brought to me by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and viewers like you. My mother has begun to refer to the incumbent of the White House with epithets as out of Homeric epic, of which "starver of children" is currently the strongest: bodies, minds, future. The earthquake swarm around Akrotiri subsided earlier this year, but everyone I know feels like Thera and counting.

5. A whole lot of people sent me the newly published Sumerian myth and it does make me very happy.