“The frenzied push-pull [RE: Trump threatening to send the military to the Minnesota protests in late May] was just the latest incident in a five-year struggle by Facebook to accommodate the boundary-busting ways of Trump. The president has not changed his rhetoric since he was a candidate, but the company has continually altered its policies and its products in ways certain to outlast his presidency.

”Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents shows it began as far back as 2015, when as a candidate Trump posted a video calling for a ban of Muslims entering the United States. Facebook's executives declined to remove it, setting in motion an exception for political discourse.

“The concessions to Trump have led to a transformation of the world's information battlefield. They paved the way for a growing list of digitally savvy politicians to repeatedly push out misinformation and incendiary political language to billions of people. It has complicated the public understanding of major events such as the pandemic and the protest movement, as well as contributed to polarization.

”And as Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees.“

 — ”Zuckerberg once wanted to sanction Trump. Then Facebook wrote rules that accommodated him," in The Washington Post

Did everyone else know that Anthony Lane got Covid? In the May 25 New Yorker, he has a good piece on the history of plague movies (“Our Fever for Plague Movies”), which is the kind of thing I would‘ve done—not as well—back in my MSNBC days.

Near the end of Lane’s piece, he drops this bomb:

Cronenberg would be amused and gratified, no doubt, to learn that, while embarking on a private retrospective of his work, I succumbed to the coronavirus. Pretty soon, I couldn't decide whether I was watching the films or the films were watching me. Perhaps they smelled fresh meat. To see “Shivers” while having the shivers is quite a ride. Other side effects of the virus include splintered sleep, drumming headaches, and special corona dreams, which are like Hieronymus Bosch without the playfulness; would Cronenberg be interested, do you think, in buying the rights to my nights?

Cronenberg, Lane concludes, is high art for the genre; so is Murnau. He also goes through the schlock. It's a fun read during a pandemic. Put it this way: I'd certainly rather read Lane on the subject than, as a germaphobe, watch them myself. Hell, I never even watched “Contagion,” and that one has Marion Cotillard in it. In the early days of the crisis, mid-March, yes, Patricia and I did have our upstairs neighbor over for a viewing of “The Andreomeda Strain.” I liked all the ‘70s TV guest stars in it. It also felt vaguely intellectual and (despite the topic) un-sensationalistic. But that was the last night we’ve had our neighbor over. We talked about watching another virus movie, but I was wary and put the kibosh on it. I erred on the side of caution. Maybe someday we‘ll have people over again. But it’s been more than three months and things are getting worse. At least in Donald Trump's America. That's the real plague.

Here's a shot of Ann Sheridan in “They Drive By Night,” starring George Raft and Humphrey Bogart. 1940.

Sheridan plays the tough waitress that can deal with any loudmouth trucker who stops by the cafe. Raft is the man who woos and wins her. I think the subtitled quote is from Raft. Not sure if it would work today.

This is an ad for MGM that ran in the Motion Picture Herald during the summer of 1932:

Eighty-eight years ago we were worried about the stock market, wondering over fashions, and trying to figure out if our fellow countrymen were smart enough to go with a dynamic candidate promising change or stick with a man who'd been sitting on his hands during a huge national and international crisis that was ruining lives and sometimes taking them.

Well, they made the right decision anyway.

The one certainty, btw, which was on the next page, is that exhibitors who chose MGM films would do great. 

“Hachette read the book and loved it and despite me being a toxic pariah and menace to society, they vowed to stand firm should things hit the fan. When actual flak did arrive they thoughtfully reassessed their position, concluding that perhaps courage was not the virtue it was cracked up to be and there was a lot to be said for cowering.”

— Woody Allen in a postscript to his autobiography “Apropos of Nothing,” which I need to get around to reading one of these days 

Just another pawn in their game.

The Atlantic's Adam Serwer has a good piece on the inability of Trump and Republicans generally to play white-male identity politics against a candidate who is not African-American nor female. None of the old tricks are working against Joe.

“The president's sparsely attended rally in Oklahoma on Saturday was a showcase for Trump's blunted arsenal,” Serwer writes. “He warned that the left wants to ‘defund and dissolve our police departments.’ He fantasized about a ‘tough hombre’ breaking into your home at night, warned that Biden was a ‘puppet of China,’ ... But even Trump didn't really buy it. ‘Joe Biden is a puppet of the radical left,’ Trump said, before acknowledging that ‘He’s not radical left. I don't think he knows what he is anymore. But he was never radical left.'”

Radical left elements are still a problem, of course, exemplified by protesters who think they can run a Seattle neighborhood without cops, or protesters who, yesterday, attacked a gay Democratic state senator in Madison, Wis., for filming their protest rally. The radical left will always be with us, sadly. But it's not touching Joe. 

But this is the part of Serwer's article that stands out for me. It's the lede, and it took me back:

Eight months into Barack Obama’s first term as president, the right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, who was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Donald Trump earlier this year, warned that Obama’s election had ushered in a dangerous inversion of power.

“Obama's America—white kids getting beat up on school buses now,” Limbaugh declared in September 2009, in response to a viral video of a fight between a black teenager and a white teenager on a bus. “In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.”

Limbaugh was offering a template for the next decade of culture-war arguments on the political right. For eight years, the Republican Party’s chief villain was the first black president, whose center-left liberalism was decried as “Kenyan anti-colonialism,” whose health-care bill was “reparations,” and whose election set off a “race war” waged by power-mad black Americans. His anointed successor, Hillary Clinton—in Limbaugh’s words, a “feminazi” armed with a “testicle lockbox”—was an easy target for anxieties about a different inversion of power, that of America’s traditional gender hierarchy. Clinton’s defeat was not sufficient to remove her as a target; to this day, Fox News’s most successful hosts return to the Clinton oasis like wanderers dying of thirst.

That pissed me off all over again. Like it was 2009 or 2016 all over again. (The “Clinton oasis” line is genius.)

Anyway, since we‘re apparently doing this anti-racism thing now, since the news media has seeemingly decided (how?) that, yes, we guess racism is bad after all, how about digging into the people who funded racist attacks on Barack Obama; who turned an extremely centrist president into that KenyanMuslimAntiColonialist bullshit we had to listen to for eight years. The story is who funded all that, and who maintained or achieved power because of it. Cf., Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” The focus shouldn't be on “pawn” but “their.” Identify the “their.” That's the story. 

We are in the midst of the one of the top 5 crises in America history, and the president of the united states has been watching TV and whining about what he sees for more than an hour. pic.twitter.com/QHWRVW9PKD

— Kurt Eichenwald (@kurteichenwald) June 22, 2020

WARNING: SPOILERS

According to AFI's film site, Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration, demanded the following changes to Lillian Hellman’s script of “Dead End,” which was already a neutered version of the hit 1935 play by Sidney Kingsley:

• Delete the line “All cats look alike in the dark”
• Delete the implied curses of  “son of a—“ and “go to –”
• Delete the word “bum” from British versions, since it’s Brit slang for posterior
• No Bronx cheers
• No cockroaches
• Garbage might cause offense
• “Spit” shouldn’t spit

Apparently Mr. Breen was fine with the scene in which a Lower East Side gang, the Dead End kids, lure the local richie rich, Philip (Charles Peck), into a nearby basement and beat the shit out of him. Off camera we hear him cry out in pain and horror, and afterwards we see him run back to his high-rise in tattered rags while the Dead Enders parade around in whatever of his (jacket, necktie, pocket watch) they hadn’t destroyed.

I saw “Dead End” when I was a kid—it turned up on our local Friday night movie show, “Comedy and Classics,” hosted by John Gallos—and that scene freaked me out so much I turned off the TV. I was hardly a richie rich, but I was the furthest thing from a tough kid; so of the two, I identified with the former. What happened to him horrified me: that kids could be so cruel; that the world could be so lawless; that adults would care so little.

It’s more than that, though. It’s that the movie cares so little. It doesn’t give a shit about the rich kid with the French lessons and swim lessons. It only cares about his tormentors. 

Dead/Angels
“Dead End,” the play, is what brought the Dead End kids (Billy Halop, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, et al.) to Hollywood, and “Dead End,” the movie, is what sent them from the Goldwyn Studios over to Warner Bros. Apparently they raised such hell at Goldwyn that Sam didn’t want to deal with them anymore. Their “sez you” vibe was more in tune with Warners anyway. The surprise is they didn’t start there.

You can see in “Dead End” the outlines of a better movie Warners would make a year later: “Angels with Dirty Faces.” Gangster (Bogart/Cagney) returns to his old neighborhood, meets up with old pal (Joel McRea/Pat O’Brien), reconnects with old girl (Claire Trevor/Ann Sheridan), interacts with neighborhood punks (Dead End kids), dies. The ending of this movie even anticipates that one, since the kids exit stage right singing a song about angels, while William Wyler/Gregg Toland’s camera rises above the squalor with their voices:

If I had the wings of an angel
Over these prison walls I would fly
I would fly to the arms of my mother
And there I'd be willing to die

So why is “Angels,” the copy, so much better than “Dead End,” the original?

For one, “Dead End” feels like the play that it was. Apparently Wyler wanted to film on location in New York, which would’ve been amazing, but Goldwyn nixed it. Instead, Richard Day created an elobrate set that was much praised, and Oscar nominated, but to me still seems like a set. It also seems vaguely European? Particularly at the beginning? That slight hill and curve? Anyway, we barely move from this set. I suppose such stasis adds to the sense of how trapped everyone is, but it still makes it seem like a filmed play. That’s one.

Two, Rocky Sullivan has a reason to return to the neighborhood. He’s just out of prison and wants his dough, see? There’s something the guy wants. That’s rule No. 1 of drama. Father Connolly wants something, too: to make sure his old friend Rocky Sullivan doesn’t corrupt the Dead End kids. And the kids? They want to be Rocky Sullivan. It’s what you might call a Mexican standoff of raison d’etres. In comparison, “Baby Face” Martin is just kinda hanging out. He’s a Public Enemy No. 1 with a surgery-altered face, but he’d like to see his mom and maybe his old girl again. Neither reunion goes well. His mom curses him out and the girl, Francey, turns out to be a prostitute—vaguely, per the Production Code—and this hard-bitten gangster is shocked, shocked by it. (That said, Bogart, a late addition to the cast, is the best thing in the movie. He looks gut-punched in both scenes.)

Three, it’s the relationsips, stupid. All of Rocky’s relationships interact with and inform each other. They’re deeply felt. Rocky and Connolly were boyhood pals who went separate ways but still care about one another. Connolly is basically if Matt Doyle from “Public Enemy” found religion. In “Dead End,” “Baby Face” and Dave (McCrea) …. kinda sorta knew each other? Back in the day? There’s no there there. There’s very little there with McCrea, to be honest. In the play, the character was a crippled artist named Gimpty and Hollywood turned him into a handsome, broadshouldered architect who can’t find work and who mopes around after a rich dame, Kay (Wendy Barrie), even with Drina (Sylvia Sidney), right under his nose. His trajectory is to stand up to “Baby Face” and realize Drina is worth his time. Which is what happens. He winds up killing “Baby Face” on the rooftops and using the reward money to maybe start a life with Drina—whose kid brother, Tommy (Billy Halop), the leader of the Dead Enders, has just been sent to reform school.

By the way: Are we supposed to feel sad Tommy that was sent to reform school? It feels like the movie wants us to feel sad. But the kid’s a jerk. And it's not just Charles Peck. Milty (Bernard Punsly) wants to join the gang but only has three cents of the quarter it supposedly costs. Tommy takes it, won’t let him join, won’t give it back, and then they all beat him up. Drina has to arrive to admonish her brother for, whatever, the thousandth time. Later, the cops show up. “But please, officer, he’s a good kid!” Right. 

Maybe most important? There’s a self-important vibe to “Dead End.” It’s from a hit play, with prestige filmmakers, a prestige actress, and it garnered four Oscar nominations: picture, supporting actress (Trevor), cinematography (Toland), art direction (Day). I guess “Angels” garnered three (actor, director, story), but the self-important vibe isn't there. Film historian David Thomson: "Warner Bros. had its share of trash, but few of its films were boring or pretentious.”

Dramatic corners
I’m curious if we owe Robert Moses for the conceit of “Dead End.” Here’s the opening title card:

Every street in New York ends in a river. For many years the dirty banks of the East River were lined with the tenements of the poor. Then the rich, discovering that the river traffic was picturesque, moved their houses eastward. And now the terraces of these great apartment houses look down into the windows of the tenement poor.

That’s why out-of-work architect + rich broad. That’s why Dead Enders + Richie Rich. This spot is where the classes clash. But is the conceit just a conceit or created from real-life East Side development pushed through by Moses? The original New York Times review of the play doesn't mention specifics; it simply passes it off as “one of those dramatic corners on which Manhattan advertises the distance that divides poverty from riches…”

This is the first of six “Dead End Kids” movies that often paired them with Bogart, Cagney or—would you believe—Ronald Reagan. They kept going into the 1940s as, alternatively, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids and Bowery Boys—the last two without Hallop. Then it was bit parts, B movies, and TV walk-ons. (Halop, for example, played cabbie Bert Munson in 10 episodes of “All in the Family.”) Most of the kids aged fast and died young: Bobby Jordan at 42, Gorcey at 51, Halop at 56. Gabriel Dell held on until 68, Huntz Hall to 78. Bernard Punsley, the tubby Dead Ender with the three cents, got out first and lasted longest. He stopped making movies in 1942 to become an MD, and he's the only kid who saw the 21st century. He died in 2004 at the age of 80.

Most news reports about Trump's rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma last night focus on the fact that only 6,200 people showed up after the campaign bragged it had sold 800,000 tickets. There was supposed to be a second speech, outside, in the overflow area, but that area was empty. Where were all the people? There are rumors that K-Pop fans and Tik-Tok teens bought a mess of the tickets to mess with the campaign. Who knows? 

The bigger story to me is that the president of the United States, in the midst of a huge economic downturn caused by a global pandemic that's hit the United States harder than any other country, and where Covid-19 numbers are again on the rise, repeated what we all know: He doesn't want to know the numbers.

“When you do testing to that extent, you are gonna find more people, you‘re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people, ’Slow the testing down, please.' They test, and they test. We have tests that people don't know what's going on.”

His campaign says he was joking but we know he's not joking; he's said it before. That cruise ship off the west coast in March that couldn't find a port? “I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.” That speech in Pennsylvania in May? “When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn't do any testing, we would have very few cases.” It's how he thinks. It's who he is. He's ratings-obsessed and these are bad ratings. Better to not know. The more you know your enemy, the better your chance of defeating them, but he doesn't want to know this enemy.

And by the way: This is exactly the reason why the Covid response in the U.S. has been so abyssmal. It's the exact reason why so many people are getting infected and so many are dying. This. Him. His idiocy.

The Biden campaign's response was fast and good:

The Biden campaign released a statement after the rally, saying that in “an outrageous moment that will be remembered long after tonight's debacle of a rally, President Trump just admitted that he's putting politics ahead of the safety and economic well-being of the American people.”

The U.S. has 2.2 million confirmed cases of Covid and 120,000 Covid-related deaths. Yesterday, 32,500 new cases were confirmed. That's our highest daily figure since May 1. 

As member of SABR, I get daily trivia questions, called “horsehide trivia,” which, weekly, add up to a particular theme. Last week, for example, some of the answers included: Nolan Ryan (Monday's answer), Bob Gibson (Tuesday‘s), Dick Bosman (Saturday) and Bob Moose (Sunday). What do they have in common? They all pitched no-hitters, sure, but it’s more than that. They all pitched no-hitters against that year's eventual World Series champion. Yes, you‘ve got to get pretty deep in the weeds.

Daily is a better fit for me. I think I got Ryan here on first glance:

Q. Who is the all-time career leader in fewest hits allowed per nine innings pitched?
Hint: He received a highest Hall of Fame voting percentage in the twentieth century except for that of an old teammate.
Hint: He was the first player to suit up for all four of the original expansion franchises.
Hint: In fact, those were the only ones he suited up for.

From the first hint you go “Seaver,” so Mets, Reds or White Sox. Second hint means Mets. Also means he played for Angels, Astros and Senators/Rangers. So ... Ryan. And yes, he didn’t give up many hits. Walks, yes. Hits, no. 

The dailies are tougher when the answer isn't such a well-known player, of course, but I was tickled by this final hint on the Bosman question: “On another occasion he became the fourth of the five pitchers to have their no-hitters broken up by a lone Cesar Tovar hit.” I was tickled more by the way they answered it the next day:

“In an utterly unimaginable defying of the odds, Venezuela's uniquely versatile and ultra-durable Cesar Tovar had the lone hit five different times, ruining no-hitters for Barry Moore on 30-Apr-1967, Dave McNally on 15-May-1969, Mike Cuellar on 10-Aug-1969, Bosman on 14-Aug-1970 and finally Catfish Hunter on 31-May-1975. Somebody above my pay grade would have to calculate the odds of that happening.”

The picture below, with Billy Martin, is from 1969, the year he stopped the two Oriole no-nos:

Bosman's true no-no, by the way, came in ‘74 against the past and future world champion Oakland A’s.

Here's a key question for the Rev. Derrick DeWitt, director of the Maryland Baptist Aged Home in West Baltimore, a 100-year-old nursing facility that has had no coronavirus infections: What was the moment you realized the threat was real and that you had to take action to protect your residents and staff?

“Right after President Trump said we had 15 cases and it would soon be down to zero.”

I dare not put words in a Baptist minister's mouth, but it sounds like he listened to what the President of the United States had to say, then decided just the opposite would be true.

“It does sound like that,” Reverend DeWitt agreed.

— from “How a West Baltimore nursing home has zero COVID-19 infections,” Dan Rodricks, The Baltimore Sun. You know that “Seinfeld” episode where George decides to do the opposite and winds up succeeding beyond his wildest dreams? We should all do that but with Trump. Seriously.

On July 13, 2003, the last sars patient walked out of Tan Tock Seng and it was over. Some people loosely say that SARS “burned out,” having killed only seven hundred and seventy-four people worldwide. It didn't burn out. As Ali Khan told me, it was stopped.

“What are you most concerned about now?” I asked Brenda Ang, at Tan Tock Seng, six years later [in 2009].

She laughed in frustration. “Complacency,” she said. “And apathy.” Mundane but crucial infection-control measures—the assiduous hand washing and wiping of doorknobs with alcohol—can lapse after a crisis. “People become complacent. They think there is no new bugs around.” And larger lessons, beyond the outbreak locale, beyond Singapore? “There's no point just protecting your own turf,” she said. “Infectious diseases are so globalized.”

Ali Khan later told me the same thing: “A disease anywhere is a disease everywhere.”

— from “The Warnings: Why we should have known to prepare for COVID-19,” by David Quammen, in the May 11 New Yorker, about the successful battles to contain SARS and MERS. It's where I also learned a new word: zoonotic. We should all know this word. 

Alito says that “sex” must be defined exactly the way that lawmakers understood that term in 1964. I'm skeptical he‘ll apply that same rule to defining what counts as “arms” when reading the Second Amendment.

— Adam Winkler (@adamwinkler) June 15, 2020

Background: On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that members of the LGBT community were protected under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In other words, they can’t be fired for being gay, bi or trans. Justice Gorsuch, of all people, wrote the decision and was slammed by textualists, who claim that the writers of the Act didn't have anyone from the LGBT community in mind when they wrote it. Gorsuch went with a straightforward interpretaton of the meaning of “sex”: “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”

WARNING: SPOILERS

“So what do you think happens?” I asked my wife as both of us were watching “The Letter” for the first time. “Does she get away with it?” I assumed I knew the answer: 1940, Production Code, murder. Nope. 

Confession: Bette Davis movies are one of the big gaps in my film studies. If she’s with Cagney or Bogart, sure, and I own “All About Eve,” but the women-centered pictures she made in the late ’30s and early ’40s, and which Carol Burnett parodied so often and seemingly so well on her variety show, I’ve never gotten around to. Trying to rectify that.

Another confession: I can’t even look at the title of this movie without think of Carol saying “Give me the lettah!” I couldn’t find that skit online but the search did make me realize the bit didn’t originate with Carol. “Petah, give me the lettah” was such a common Davis impersonation that Davis herself sent it up with Jack Paar in 1962. Like many of the classic imitations—“You dirty rat,” “Play it again, Sam,” “Judy Judy Judy”—it's a line the actor never said.

Third confession? I was a bit disappointed in “The Letter.” It’s directed by a great, William Wyler, from a play by a great, W. Somerset Maugham, and garnered seven Oscar nominations—including picture, director, actress, supporting actor, editing, cinematography. It’s got a good opening scene, too. The rest is a slog. It’s pure melodrama. Not to mention tinged with the racism of the day.

Vaguely threatening
Apparently it’s based on a true story, the 1911 Ethel Proudlock case, which caused a scandal in British-run Malaysia, and which Maugham turned into a short story and then a play in the 1920s. The highlighted portion of this Wikipedia description of the crime is almost the beginning of “The Letter” exactly:

On the evening of 23 April 1911, she was alone in the VI headmaster's bungalow while her husband dined with a fellow teacher. In the course of that evening, she shot dead William Steward, a mine manager. Steward had visited her by rickshaw and had told the rickshaw boy to wait outside. Shortly afterwards, the boy heard two shots and saw Steward stumble out of the house across the veranda followed by Proudlock carrying a revolver, who then emptied the remaining four bullets into him.

In the movie, it’s Leslie Crosbie (Davis), who empties the gun into Geoff Hammond (David Newell), in the middle of a hot, steamy night, while Chinese and Malay servants silently gather. Leslie stares with a kind of dread at the moon, and a servant stares with a kind of dread at her lacemaking; and then her husband, Robert (Herbert Marshall), a police inspector (Bruce Lester) and a lawyer, Howard Joyce (James Stephenson), all arrive to hear her story.

We know she did it so there’s no tension there. After she tells her side of it—admirably without flashbacks—we seemingly know why she did it: Hammond got drunk and tried to take advantage. Joyce, her lawyer, thinks she’ll be acquitted soon enough.

Ah, but then the lettah.

It’s brought to the attention of Joyce by his assistant, Ong (Victor Sen Yung, Hop Sing on “Bonanza”), who, throughout, is both ingratiating and vaguely threatening. The letter Joyce sees is a copy—meaning hand-copied—and it’s from Leslie to Geoff on the night of the murder asking him to come by the estate. When Joyce asks Leslie about it, she says, yes, in the horror she forgot about that, but she only wanted to ask him about birthday-present ideas for her husband. Joyce says the letter implies more. It does. It implies they were lovers. Ong tells Joyce the original is in the hands of Hammond’s Chinese widow (Gale Sondergaard, playing ethnic again), a Dragon Lady type who lives in the Chinese district, and can be had for a price: $10,000. Joyce balks. It’s unethical! It could get him disbarred! But Ong keeps insinuating himself, the letter, and the money, into the conversation.

I never really bought Joyce’s turnaround on the ethics of it all: from “No way!” to jumping through all those hoops to make it happen. Once they agree to the $10k, Mrs. Hammond makes an extra demand: Leslie has to deliver the money herself. She does, with Joyce, riding a big car through narrow Chinatown streets. The two wind up in the Opium Den of the perpetually smiling and vaguely threatening Chung Hi (Willie Fung), where Leslie examines an ornate knife before Mrs. Hammond makes her arrival through beaded curtains. I assumed Leslie would try to use the knife. Otherwise why show it? Right, because of the Chekhovian adage; it shows up in the third act.

I think I would’ve liked this face-to-face more if Warners had cast a Chinese woman in the role. Here, it’s pretty one-note: the widow stares down imperiously from a top step, bristling with anger, while Ong translates slowly and Chung Hi laughs inappropriately. The widow keeps upping her demands. Mrs. Crosbie has to remove her veil. Mrs. Crosbie has to walk over. Mrs. Crosbie has to pick up the letter off the floor when the widow drops it on the ground. It’s a long elaborate ritual that delivers not much.

The widow and the servant
So the letter is bought, the trial occurs, Joyce is conflicted but performs his duties, and the jury exonerates Leslie after less than an hour. But she can’t exonerate herself. (Plus Production Code.) On another moonlit night, she confesses to her husband that she loved Hammond and still loves him; that she killed him because he was leaving her. Afterwards, led by sounds, and by the appearance/disappearance of the ornate knife, she wanders outside the gates, where Mrs. Hammond is standing, bristling with anger. Wait, it’s not just Mrs. Hammond but Leslie’s own servant? Who muffles her screams while the widow takes the dagger and stabs her? Why did he get involved? Was it the lacemaking. Is it part of the movie’s overt/covert racism? You can’t trust any of them.

I don’t know about the play, but in the 1929 movie version, made before the Production Code had teeth, Leslie doesn't die; her husband simply keeps her on the plantation “as punishment”—I guess because he’s broke so there are no servants. By 1940 this wasn’t enough. The widow and servant can’t get away with it, either, so after they do the deed they turn and, whoops, there’s a cop. A little too neatly tied up, Warners. I like the camerawork anyway: panning from Leslie’s body outside the gate to the party still happening in the house. But then we have to have the moon again. “The Letter” is too much that: moon and melodrama.

I’m curious if Mrs. Hammond got a trial? Or if Joyce was ever disbarred? So many loose ends. I’m mostly interested in the marginal figures. Did Ong buy a bigger car? (His teeny car is a sight gag in the movie.) Did he fight the Japanese, who occupied Malaysia for three years during the war? Did he fight the British afterwards? Independence was finally declared on August 31, 1957. I know so little of it all.

Last time I did one of these we weren't even in the midst of a global pandemic. Imagine. Onward.

• Jonathan Chait over at New York Magazine compares Gen. Michael Flynn's ramblings in a recent Op-Ed to the paranoid “fluids” talk of Col. Jack D.  Ripper from “Dr. Strangelove.” Apt. And sad. I hope someday Flynn gets the prison sentence he deserves rather than the one Trump needed.
• Also at New York mag: What it's like to find yourself a social media pariah for a crime you didn't commit? Dude went for a bikeride and found himself accused of being the bike-riding dude who accosted the teenage girls putting up #BLM signs. Which he wasn‘t. But the world is full of amateur sleuths now and police—even as the police are daily being demonized.
• The New York Times talks to Bob Dylan upon the release of his latest album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways.” Fun fact: That 17-minute JFK song he released last year? It was the first No. 1 single he’s ever had. Disclaimer: I don't know what having a No. 1 single means anymore. When I was 10, 20, 30 or more, it meant something. Now? Is there a new Top 40 countdown show? Dylan's still in good form, btw. He's always straightfoward and honest. And that's tough for a Minnesotan.
• Related: Martin Scorsese's great documentary “No Direction Home,” is streaming on Netflix. It's a must for any Dylan fan, music fan, Scorsese fan. It's the only document that's ever made me believe in a collective unconscious. Patricia and I watched it last week—me for the ... third time? I could watch it again right now. (Fun fact: Joan Baez does about the best Bob Dylan imitation I‘ve heard.)
• John Bolton has a new book out that would’ve helped during the impeachment hearings. Yeah, fuck that guy. (Profit before country, John.)
• Good god, do i miss Jon Stewart. (Glad NYT is embracing the Q&A format more.)
• I‘ve never really thought much of Melania Trump. Not disparagingly, I just don’t blame one spouse for the other spouse. But if a new book about her is accurate, and she's the reason Donald decided to run for president, she's on my forever shit list. Not-so-fun fact: Melania is the first immigrant First Lady since 1829—Louisa Adams, John Q's wife. A bit ironic given DT's stance on immigration. Seriously, how the fuck did we let all of this happen?
• Related: P and I are watching “Babylon Berlin” and the shocking thing is how relevant 1929 Weimar Republic is to current-day United States. Shocking and sad. And worrisome. 
• Baseball's on hold but Yankees suck.

Friday afternoon, I walked over to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ, to see what's going down.

That last bit, “to see what's going down,” is from The Book of Daniel. Doctorow, not God. Daniel is the son of the Isaacsons (really: Rosenbergs), the Jewish couple executed for treason in the McCarthyite 1950s, and now it's 1967 and he's in his 20s, at grad school, and leftist kids are storming the barricades. He's writing his book/thesis in the library when a young hippie arrives to tell him they‘re bring the “motherfucking university to its knees! ... Close the book, man, what’s the matter with you? Don't you know you‘ve been liberated?” To which Daniel smiles and decides to go outside and see what’s going down. That's one of the book's last lines. I love Daniel for that. I love Doctorow for the book. 

Yesterday morning, in that haze between dream and wake, I was trying to remember the acronym protesters took for the several blocks they cordoned off on Capitol Hill. Had to be CHEZ, right? “Home” in French. Then I remembered: No, they went with CHAZ. As in “the spaz.” Kids.

I was only down there briefly on Friday afternoon so I don't have much to report. Basically 12th is no longer a thruway. They blocked off the street between Pike and Olive, and then for several blocks to the west. The abandoned East Precinct is right in the middle of it, on Pine, and now covered with grafitti. That's also where Northwest Film Forum is located, and Northwest Liquor, and that Chinese place Vinny and I went to a few times in better times. You can still walk around inside just fine. You kind of get looked at as you enter—at least I did—but no one's hassling anybody.

A block to the west, at Cal Anderson Park, where I used to play softball, tents have been set up and garbage was overlowing the bins. Again, I didn't stay long. It was way too crowded for a 57-year-old asthmatic-germaphobe in the midst of a global pandemic, but even without Covid it still wouldn't have been my scene. Both too dirty on the ground and too clean in the minds. The “We don't need cops” crowd feels hopelessly idealistic to me. They‘re kids. They’re the Bernie folks, working on fucking up another presidential election for the rest of us. And Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, who helped set up the zone, and told others not to allow cops in, is about the last person I'd follow anywhere. She declares orders within the zone while leading chants on impeaching the democratically elected mayor.

Here's a report from The Stranger on Friday:

Tonight, the six-or-so-block radius within Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood was filled with more teach-in tables, murals, free food, tents, and people than it had been since this conflict between demonstrators and police began over a week ago.

Protesters have called this an uprising and have a long list of demands that include rent control, free college for the state of Washington, and abolishing the Seattle Police Department and “the attached Criminal Justice Apparatus.”

Yesterday, Fox-News spread lies about the zone, because that's what Fox-News does, when all they had to do was just report what was going down. It's teach-in tables, murals and free food. What's being taught, who's doing the painting, and who's paying for the free food are part of the unanswered. (FWIW, my wife is impressed by the artwork.) The bigger unanswered is how it all ends. When the free food runs out? With the first act of internecine violence or power struggle? I assume it‘ll be more whimper than bang. Give it a few weeks and it’ll become a drag. That's my hope anyway. We definitely don't need any more bangs.

The Johns Hopkins site for Covid cases is invaluable but I‘ve had trouble drilling down on a state-by-state basis for trends. Georgia reopened early. Has it hurt them? Mixed. Plus each state tests differently. It’s more difficult to get tests in some states than others. Sometimes test kits aren't available, sometimes it's politics. Anecdotal, but I know a nurse in Florida who was caring for Covid patients early in the pandemic without proper PPE, and who then came down with all the symptoms. But she was never tested. Her fever didn't break the threshold for an automatic test and so it was never administered. After two weeks, she was ordered back to work. She feels she had it but she's not among Florida's numbers. This resistance to test, which began at the top with Donald Trump, is the great shame of the U.S.'s response to this pandemic. We‘re paying for it. We’ll be paying for it for a while.

This morning, even though I have better things to do, I drilled down into the JH numbers to get a better sense of trouble spots. Here's the state-by-state numbers sorted by the confirmed cases yesterday, June 12. 

Shouldn't it be bigger news that Alabama, with one-fourth the population, had more confirmed cases yesterday than New York, the one-time epicenter? Arizona's spike (below) is particularly worrisome. 

In the world, there are 7,702,513 confirmed cases. More than two milliion are in the U.S. Nearly half a million people around the globe have died; nearly 114,000 in the U.S.

By the time it got to Arizona...

WARNING: SPOILERS

This is an historic movie. Most people don’t know that.

No, it wasn’t acclaimed at the time, garnering no film awards or even nominations. I doubt it did any kind of boffo box office. And the storyline is muddled. The first half is about two brothers, Joe and Paul Fabrini (George Raft and Humphrey Bogart), wildcat truckers struggling to survive in a tough, bottom-line world. The second half is about the screwy dame (Ida Lupino) who has such a thing for Joe that she kills her husband (Alan Hale) to give him an opening. Which Joe doesn’t take. So she pins the murder on him.

So why should we consider it historic? Because Bogart's next movie was “High Sierra,” and one after that he did “The Maltese Falcon,” and three after that he was cast in “Casablanca.” He’s fourth-billed here but afterwards he’ll always be the lead. He'll become the biggest Hollywood star of the 1940s and at the end of the century the American Film Institute will vote him the greatest male movie star of all time. 

And he owes it all to his co-star on this one.

Sleepy Paul
That’s well-known, right? That George Raft kept turning down the roles that made Bogie Bogie? Raft was offered “High Sierra” but didn’t want to die in the end. He turned down “Maltese Falcon” because he didn’t think it was an important picture. He even turned down “Casablanca.” By the end of that one, Raft was no longer the star; he was the asterisk.

In this one, he’s the star. The Fabrini brothers begin this thing on the road, exhausted, in hock, and one step ahead of the creditors. After a mishap, Joe winds up at a roadside café where one guy, Irish (Roscoe Karns), is stuck at a pinball machine because he keeps winning, and where the rest of the guys are making eyes at the waitress, Cassie (Ann Sheridan, the “oomph” girl), who takes no crap.

Paul, perpetually sleepy, wouldn’t mind getting off the road for good. It’s not just the long hours; he’s got a wife who wants kids, who wants a family, and who wants him home. But Joe’s got a dream of turning this haul into that profit, and that haul into another, until they own a whole fleet of trucks, see? So he keeps pushing. And suddenly they’re doing kinda OK. They buy a load of lemons and sell them for several times their value. They pay off the truck and are on their way. But at gas station, the same gas station they always seem to wind up at, the attendant wonders why Joe is always driving while Paul is always asleep. That doesn’t seem right to him. Joe suddenly cares what somebody else thinks—this gas station attendant, of all people—so he and Paul switch places. Ah, but Paul, sad Paul, forever sleepy Paul, falls asleep at the wheel and goes into a ravine. Joe is thrown clear. The brothers lose the rig and Paul loses his right arm.

That sets up our second half. Without Paul, Joe finally agrees to get off the road and take a job with his friend Ed Carlsen (Hale), a former trucker who now owns the proverbial fleet. He also has a slim, perpetually scowling wife, Lana (Lupino), whose every cutting remark Ed laughs off. He doesn’t see that she has eyes for Joe, nor how uncomfortable it makes Joe—who is with Cassie now. Ed doesn’t see the danger.

We do. At a party, Ed gets drunk, a disgusted Lana drives him home, and in the garage, staring at him asleep in the passenger seat, she gets an idea: a wonderful, horrible, awful idea. With the motor still running, she slowly eases herself out of the car and onto the driveway and past the censor that automatically closes the garage door—new tech which Ed proudly showed off earlier in the movie. And as the music wells, those doors close onto Ed like a tomb. Next scene, she’s tearfully explaining to the police how Ed must’ve driven himself home and… Sob!

I assumed the censor would be the clue that nails her—since how could the garage doors close unless someone walked past it—and it is, but not that way. It’s the blood stain for her Lady Macbeth. Anytime she sees a censor, she panics, and relives her crime. At Joe’s murder trial, she breaks down on the stand. There’s not even any suspense to it. She’s a state’s witness but she cracks without effort.

Stuff dreams are made of
After all that, Joe wants to leave Ed’s company but none of the rest of the guys are having it. So he stays on as president, with Paul by his side. They finally have their fleet of trucks, and good women at their sides. Yay.

None of it really works. Sometimes that happens no matter the talent involve. So you regroup and try again. Director Raoul Walsh regrouped and made “High Sierra” with Bogart. Then he regrouped again and made “Manpower” with George Raft and Edward G. Robinson as friends on an LA power-company road crew who compete for Marlene Dietrich. You get why Raft went that route. Him and Robinson and Dietrich? Seems like a winner. Makes way more sense than working with that rookie director who’s trying yet another version—the third version in 10 years!—of Dashiell Hammett’s silly novel about a black bird.

From The New Yorker, 1956 or ‘57. 

Not sure when The New Yorker began doing film reviews but I doubt it was during Cagney’s heyday since there isn't much mention of him during those decades. Just a few Talk of the Towns and this.  

MAK: All three of those arrested by federal law enforcement were members of a Boogaloo Facebook group, according to a criminal complaint. NPR examined the Facebook profile of one of the suspects and found that he was a member of multiple Facebook groups relating to the Boogaloo movement. Joel Finkelstein is the director of the Network Contagion Research Institute, which tracks hateful ideology online. He says that Facebook has become a key place for members of the Boogaloo movement to organize, recruit and discuss communication strategies through the use of private groups.

JOEL FINKELSTEIN: In terms of a structure that allows these things to remain hidden, I think it goes without saying, almost, that Facebook is far and away one of the best kinds of platforms that you could have for that purpose.

MAK: Finkelstein said that as he and his team researched these extremist groups, Facebook began to advertise to him.

FINKELSTEIN: We were given targeted advertisements by the platform supporting the Boogaloo in the form of shirts containing Boogaloo memes, hats, military badges containing this kind of material.

— from Tim Mak's report, “Facebook Becomes Key Place For Extremist Boogaloo Movement Organizers,” on NPR's “Weekend Edition” last Saturday.

When I was clearing out my Facebook account last fall, and I deleted all of my photos, this was what was left on the page:

You see it? That ghostly image under “Create Album” in the upper left? I saw it right away. Maybe because I see it in my nightmares. Maybe because it's been our national nightmare three years running. Apparently it's also the ghost in the Facebook machine. It's so weird and unnecessary. It's not like any of the albums had anything to do with him. So why was it there?

And if it's not Trump, who or what is it? 

I searched online but haven't seen anyone else commenting on this phenomenon. Maybe because no one else deleted all their shit before deleting their account? FB recently changed its design so it's probably not there anymore. But why was it there to begin with? A final “fuck you” from Facebook before I headed out the door? Part of its idiot algorithms? “Hey, you keep writing ”Yankees“ [suck], so why not buy some Yankees memorabilia?” “Hey, you keep posting about Trump, so we‘ll leave you with this ghostly image under your photos. Oh, don’t bother thanking us. We enjoy doing it.”  

I really do wonder about Zuckerberg sometimes. Winklevoss twins, we hardly knew ye.

“We were following the news from China very closely. So we started our preparations long before the first case tested positive here in Iceland. And it was very clear from the beginning that this was something that should be led by experts—by scientific and medical experts.”

— Iceland's Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir in Elizabeth Kolbert's must-read article, “How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus,” on the New Yorker site. The article is an indictment of the Trump administration without once mentioning Trump or his administration. And yes, Iceland is a distant island nation, which helps with this crisis, with a population of only 300,000, which also helps with this crisis. But they were aggressive in contact tracing and their citizens didn't fight common-sense measures. In early April, they were getting 100 confirmed cases a day. By May, that was down to nine ... for the entire month. In the U.S., we‘re still seeing 20,000 cases a day. I fear that number will rise with summer, boredom, protests, and businesses reopenings. 

Iceland’s confirmed daily cases, per Johns Hopkins: 99 on April 2, nine for the entire month of May.

Nope, not this guy.

This week's SABR “Horsehide” trivia questions have focused on Gold Glove winners, and for some reason, the other day, I decided to check out who has won the most this century. I guess it was because I knew the all-time dudes but not the recent ones.

Here are the winners, by position, for this century. Turns out most of them aren't recent:

• P: Greg Maddux* (8)
• C: Yadier Molina (9)
• 1B: Mark Teixeira (5)
• 2B: Dustin Pedroia and Orlando Hudson (4)
• 3B: Scott Rolen and Nolan Arenado (7)
• SS: Derek Jeter** (5)
• OF: Torii Hunter (9)
• OF: Jim Edmonds (6)
• OF: Ichiro Suzuki (10)

* Also the all-time leader, in any position, with 18
** The shame of the nation

Of the 11 guys, eight are retired, and two more are near it: Pedroia, who's had all of 31 at-bats over the last two seasons, and Molina, who turns 38 in a month. Only Arenado is the up-and-comer, and boy is he. Seven seasons in the bigs, seven gold gloves. Not many other up-and-comers in their 20s. Mookie Betts, I guess, who's 27 and has won it the last four years. Zack Greinke's won it the last six seasons but those are his only six, and he didn't start winning it until he was in his 30s.

Anyway, there's our answer to the title question: Ichiro, with 10, has won the most Gold Gloves this century. The shocking ommission, to me, is Adrian Beltre. He did win it five times, which is nothing to sneeze at, but sporadically: 2007, 2008, 2011, 2012, 2016. Meanwhile, his career defensive bWAR is 27.2, which is the 13th best all-time, and second-best for a third baseman after the legendary Brooks Robinson. But he has the same number of Gold Gloves as Derek Jeter, whose defensive bWAR is ... wait for it ... -9.4. Yes, that's a negative in front of the nine. So is anyone on his tail? Yes: Andrelton Simmons has four: two in the NL (2013, 2014), two in the AL (2017, 2018). He seems to deserve them, too: 26.7 defensive bWAR. C'mon, kid. 

WARNING: SPOILERS

The title drew me in; it’s just so bizarre. Apparently Bogart never much liked the movie nor his role in it—which was like his role in so many late ’30s Warner Bros. movies: the secondary gangster who out of pettiness or ambition screws up the deal and BLAM BLAM. Apparently he always referred to it by its potential porn-title name. Yeah, you don’t have to be James Joyce to see it. It’s so obvious it’s as if they started there and worked their way back.

More fun with words? Or names? The movie is based on a British play by Alfred Edgar, who took the pen name Barré Lyndon, presumably from the Thackeray novel, and stars Emanuel Goldenberg, who was told at drama school that his name was too Jewish, so he went with Edward G. Robinson. The leading lady is Claire Wemlinger, better known as Claire Trevor. Only Bogart is Bogart. 

And yes, sports fans, Bogie, Trevor and Robinson make up three the four principles in John Huston’s great 1948 noir “Key Largo.” (No Bacall; she was just 13 at the time.) Huston has a hand here, too. He worked on the screenplay with John Wexley (“Angels with Dirty Faces”), who was later blacklisted. The director is Anatole Litvak (“The Snake Pit”), who does good work.

Bogart may have been dismissive but “The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse” is a lot of fun, with a great turn by Robinson. Its premise is basically “Breaking Bad”: What happens when a man of science gets mixed up with the mob?

Mensch/gonif
The movie opens at a swanky estate, where an opera singer regales the swells; then the camera pans outside and rises to the second floor where a cat burglary is in progress. Actually, two cat burglaries. One burglar climbing through the window stumbles upon the other. A flashlight in his face, he’s coolly questioned, ordered to stand with his hands in the air, then becomes the fall guy for the crime he arrived too late to commit. The original cat burglar? He’s one of the guests, Dr. Clitterhouse (Robinson), who returns downstairs just in time to applaud the singer at the end of her aria. No one notices he was gone.

When the burglar is found, the doctor coolly calls the cops. When the burglar is hurt in a shoot-out, the doctor coolly calls for an ambulance, then bandages the fellow under the watchful eye of Inspector Lane (Donald Crisp). Lane, to be sure, is watchful of the thief. Of Clitterhouse, he is deferential. All the other guests, in fact, are searched for the jewels, but the good doctor, an important man with other patients to attend to, is allowed to waltz out under a police escort.

That’s the great joy early in the movie: Watching Clitterhouse use his position and his calm voice of authority to get away with everything. He’s so good he seems to tempt fate. He asks a nurse to fetch his glasses from his medical bag and she’s shocked to find it full of jewels. But he wins her over. He explains he’s involved in a scientific experiment—he is—and then takes her and his bag of jewels to the police station. Not to give himself up. No, on the theory, he tells her, that “the best defense is a bold attack.” He pretends he’s worried about Inspector Lane’s health—and Lane admits he’s under a lot of stress—so he gives him a quick medical exam while extracting information. Lane says the jewel thief has committed three other crimes and hasn’t tried to fence anything. Clitterhouse makes casual conversation while going through his paces. How does the police know that? What is a fence? How would one get in touch with such a person? The laugh-out-loud moment is when Clitterhouse leaves his medical bag behind and Lane fetches it for him. He’s grumbling, “If we could only get our hands on those jewels,” just as he’s getting his hands on those jewels.

(There’s another great scene at the police station just before Clitterhouse arrives. Behind a smoky glass door, the unseen police commissioner reams out Inspector Lane for letting these cat burglaries get out of hand. “I’m not interested in long-winded explanations!” he shouts. When Lane is finally allowed to leave, he spots his captain, and reams him out in the exact same language, whereupon the captain spots a passing lieutenant and … you get it. Ad nauseum, one assumes. Consider it the true trickle-down effect.)

The name of the fence Lane mentions is Jo Keller, whom Clitterhouse assumes is a man. Nope. It’s Claire Trevor, who runs her mob out of a hotel she owns. Her boys are the usual fun Warners crew: Allen Jenkins, Ward Bond, and—in particular—Maxie Rosenbloom as the dopey, sweet, giant Butch. At one point, the cops burst in on their card game, looking for “Rocks” Valentine (Bogart) and making various threats; instead, Clitterhouse, the voice of authority, questions them and sends them on their way. The boys love it. That’s his in. He’s stays, helping plan jobs, because he’s interested in … whatever. The effects of illegal activity on the central nervous system or something. It’s the movie’s maguffin. There’s also shades of a love triangle: “Rocks” likes Jo, who develops a thing for Clitterhouse, who’s too intent on his work to really notice, which pisses off “Rocks” all the more. He’s the one guy in the gang who won’t go along with Clitterhouse’s tests. He’s both tough guy and sourpuss. No one did that combo better than Bogie.

He’s also the one who figures out Clitterhouse’s true identity and tries to blackmail him at gunpoint—one of the few times in the movie Clitterhouse doesn’t have the upper hand. At which point he realizes his research isn’t complete. He missed doing tests on the greatest crime of all! “What’s that?” Rocks asks. “Why, homicide naturally,” Clitterhouse responses. A minute later, Rocks is dead. Upper hand returned.

Bupkis
Again, fun movie. You get a lot of dialogue like this:

Clitterhouse: Now, just relax, counselor. Nothing to be jittery about.
Grant (Thurston Hall): My dear boy, I‘ve had over a hundred clients face the electric chair. I’ve never been jittery.
Clitterhouse: But your clients were.

The tour-de-force is the script, the direction, and Robinson’s performance. Here’s an oddity I just realized. Over the course of his career, Bogie received three Oscar nominations and one win (“The African Queen”), Trevor received three Oscar nominations and one win (“Key Largo”), Litvak would garner two noms, while John Huston, as director, writer and producer pulled in 15 noms and two wins (writing and directing “Treasure of Sierra Madre”). But Edward G. Robinson? Nada. Bupkis. I’m sure there are greater actors who never got nominated, but he’s got to be in the conversation.

“[Near the end of her life, Joan Blondell] had a small role in the ABC-TV movie Death at Love House, directed by Here Come the Brides' director and friend E. W. Swackhamer. Wearing one of her own Day-Glo caftans, Joan played the president of a movie-star fan club, but the actress was in pain. Her rheumatoid arthritis was not mollified by fistfuls of Percodan. When it became unendurable, she admitted herself to St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica. ... Marlon Brando was there on a crash diet just before leaving for Manila to shoot Apocalypse Now. When he found out Joan was in the hospital, he sent her a floral tower with a note: ‘To a woman I’ve always loved.'”

— from “Joan Blondell: A Life between Takes,” by Matthew Kennedy

WARNING: SPOILERS

In the early ’30s Edward G. Robinson played gangsters who were Italian, (“Little Caesar”), Greek (“Smart Money”) and Chinese (“Hatchet Man”), and if he’d been believable as a woman they probably would’ve given him this role, too. Thankfully it went to Joan Blondell.

It’s a traditional ’30s Warner Bros. story but interesting for its gender reversal. Our title character rises on the wrong side of the law only because the right side ain’t right. In the midst of the Great Depression, Blondie is trying to get welfare for herself and her sick mom but the welfare man sticks to the rules. She’d quit her last job at a laundry because the boss wouldn’t let her alone but the welfare man only hears quit. “That's all for now, Miss Johnson,” he declares coldly. Then Blondie returns home to find her mother dead. So she declares the following to the world:

“This city’s going to pay me a living—a good living—and it’s going to get back from me just as little as I have to give!”

It’s a bit like Scarlett’s “As God is my witness” declaration six years before Scarlett, isn’t it? Just not in Technicolor. And at the beginning of a Warners quickie rather than halfway through a Selznick epic.

Hattie’s brother
Her first con is a damsel-in-distress thing that works well but also ensnares a low-level gangster, Danny Jones (Chester Morris). Unabashed, she uses her smarts to rise with him. She figures out the power struggle within the gang, sides with Danny and Louie (Allen Jenkins) over Max (Arthur Vinton), and outsmarts them all. Now it’s Danny’s gang. But he’s interested in Blondie romantically—or sexually—and she wants to focus on business. So he opts to get hitched with Gladyss (Claire Dodd), whom Blondie had dismissed as “the dame with the platinum chassis.” But Blondie outsmarts him again, and takes over the gang, along with her female friends Mae (Mae Busch) and Lulu (Toshia Mori). The 1930s had tons of “smart chick” flicks—more than today, really—but the three of them hanging and plotting in the big office still feels revolutionary.

Unfortunately, the movie makes her have a thing for Danny, and unfortunately there has to be comeuppance for her lawless ways. So she’s sentenced to six years hard labor. Outside the courtroom, she and Danny meet—he’s about to get sentenced himself—and they promise to wait for each other. Yay.

Blondell is by far the best thing in the movie. Morris isn’t much and the usually reliable Allen Jenkins exudes little. Dodd is good as the smirking minx who will try to steal your man—she could do it in her sleep—while Sterling Holloway has a nice turn as Red Charley, a cabbie who haplessly helps her with her first scam and her last ride. Her girls aren’t given much to do. There’s also a short scene with a moon-faced Pullman porter who looked familiar to me. Turns out he’s Sam McDaniel, who played a waiter in “The Public Enemy” with James Cagney. That’s why he was familiar. On IMDb he also has 221 credits to his name, including 60+ where he’s a Pullman porter. He was born in 1888, kept working until 1960, died in 1962. He was also Hattie McDaniel’s brother. There’s a story there, but his IMDb bio is skimpy. Wiki is better but not by much. He had no obit in The New York Times.

Blondes, blondes, blondes
Ray Enright directed “Blondie Johnson,” with story and screenplay by Earl Baldwin (“Devil Dogs of the Air”). He pens some not-bad put-downs, and Blondell makes the most of them: 

Danny: If you was my dame I’d break your neck.
Blondie: If I was your dame I’d deserve it.

And:

Danny: What are you trying to do? Put ideas in my head?
Blondie: There's certainly plenty of room for ’em.

“Blonde” movie titles were of course big back then: “Blonde Crazy” (1931), “Platinum Blonde” (1931), “Anybody’s Blonde” (1931), “Blonde Venus” (1932), “A Blonde Dream” (1932), “Cheating Blondes” (1933). There was even a “Blondie”-titled movie a year earlier: Marion Davies in “Blondie of the Follies.” After that, it became the province of movie adaptions of the Chic Young comic strip.

Overall, “Blondie Johnson” is a two-time stereotype-buster: female gangster, smart blonde.   

“In life's unforgiving arithmetic, we are the sum of our choices. Congressional Republicans have made theirs for more than 1,200 days. We cannot know all the measures necessary to restore the nation's domestic health and international standing, but we know the first step: Senate Republicans must be routed, as condign punishment for their Vichyite collaboration, leaving the Republican remnant to wonder: Was it sensible to sacrifice dignity, such as it ever was, and to shed principles, if convictions so easily jettisoned could be dignified as principles, for . . . what? ... May I never crave anything as much as these people crave membership in the world's most risible deliberative body.”

— One-time GOP stalwart George Will going off on House and Senate Republicans, in his Washington Post Op-Ed, “Trump must be removed. So must his congressional enablers.” It's a fun read. And startling.

From last week's Wall Street's Journal article, “Facebook Knows It Encourages Division. Top Executives Nixed Solutions: The social-media giant internally studied how it polarizes users, then largely shelved the research”:

The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook's realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are dude to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform's “Groupss You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

No shit. Sadly, the man in charge didn't give a shit:

The debate got kicked up to Mr. Zuckerberg, who heard out both sides in a short meeting, said people briefed on it. His response: Do it, but cut the weighting by 80%. Mr. Zuckerberg also signaled he was losing interesting in the effort to recalibrate the platform in the name of social good, they said, asking that they not bring him something like that again.

Message to Mark: