Recent Reviews
The Cagneys
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)
Something to Sing About (1937)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
A Lion Is In the Streets (1953)
Man of a Thousand Faces (1957)
Never Steal Anything Small (1959)
Shake Hands With the Devil (1959)
Tuesday August 31, 2021
Days 7-8: My Cheap Blue Beachtowel
Sun comes up, it's Tuesday morning.
I first noticed it when I was applying sunscreen after that first dip in the ocean Sunday afternoon: little aqua blue flakes on my skin. Coming from the sunscreen? Like an extra ingredient? Like: “Now with aqua blue flakes!!!”? But they were the same color as the Rehoboth Beach beach towel I'd bought that morning, so I assumed that was the culprit. I guessed I should've washed it before I used it. I was hoping it was a temporary thing.
But it was the same after Monday morning and late afternoon swims, and that night I washed it with the rest of my clothes. The lint tray wound up packed with aqua blue fluff. And there were little bits of it all over the rest of my clothes.
So is it good to go now? Or did I get a defective and/or cheaply made beach towel for $19.95 at Rehoboth Lifestyle at 77 Rehoboth Avenue? Or maybe the whole line of these “First and Anchor”/“Made in China” beach towels is defective—preying on tourists in need? I know, in the scheme of things, but still a bummer. “Hey, how did your vacation go?” “Great. I picked aqua blue flakes out of everything.”
I bought it shortly after I figured out my Rehoboth exit strategy Sunday morning. Patricia and I are flying out of D.C. next weekend, and without a car there's no clear path to get there. There's no train. Rental cars are either all rented or at a premium. There is a bus to D.C. but it only leaves once a day, at 6:30 PM, from the parking lot behind the Volunteer Fire Station on Rehoboth Avenue, and doesn't arrive in D.C. until 9:30ish. That would screw up dinner plans. There's a train from Wilmington but that requires a busride to Wilmington via the DART bus service, whose website is kind of unhelpful. It's tough to see at a glance how often the buses go, where they go (how many stops), and if you can buy tickets beforehand (feels like: not). Both my sister's family and my brother-in-law's family have a car, but they're packed. In the end, the best exit strategy seemed the evening bus to D.C. I'm hoping that its company is as responsible as Amtrak is in terms of pandemic mask policies.
Because of all this—exit strategy, beach towel—I didn't get into the surf until Sunday afternoon, about 24 hours after I'd arrived. Monday morning, the last Monday of the summer season, the beach was quiet—mostly grandparents and grandkids, and a few single parents with children. Monday afternoon, I biked through the Gordon Pond Wildlife area over to Lewes, then went back to the beach like Frankie and Annette. Tuesday morning, during a 7 AM stroll along the boardwalk, amid all the geriatric joggers, I saw a school of dolphin swimming close to shore.
Overall, it's the usual beach routine in unusual times. Gus & Gus isn't allowing indoor dining (good for them), so Saturday we ate our gyros and cheese steaks on the boardwalk (they were out of chicken), then went to Funland, mostly staying outside, where my sister cleaned up at Whac-a-Mole and that squirtgun horserace game. Sunday, for dinner, we went to Obie's on the north part of the boardwalk, but we were the only ones who walked into the place masked. Monday we ate in. My brother-in-law's family lives in Canada, which requires a COVID-free test within 72 hours of reentry, and the family member who's heading back first had his on Monday: negative. Rite-Aid and Walgreen's do drive-through tests but he went to a nearby clinic, paid the extra $60 or so for the quick test, said it was much more efficient than the Canadian system. Then he went swimming.
Monday August 30, 2021
Day 6: Dolles Sign, We Hardly Knew Ye
Rehoboth's iconic Dolles Salt Water Taffy sign has greeted visitors since 1927, but now it's disappearing.
I know. I never did Days 3-5 but hope to backtrack and pick it up at some point.
Saturday I made the trek from New York City to Rehoboth Beach, Del., thinking about COVID. Every sniffle, every inadvertent cough, you probe yourself and wonder. You're careful all of the time but you still wonder. The Amtrak ride from Penn Station, New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Hall, to the Joseph R. Biden Jr. station in Wilmington, Del., was about as good as it could get under the circumstances. (Note to Republicans: Support infrastructure and maybe you'll have something named after you, too.) The train was clean, the conductor/ticket taker told people to mask up, no one complained. New York generally has been good. Half the people walked the streets masked, and indoors that was pretty much everyone, but of course they knew the tragedy of it. Delaware was a revelation.
My sister and her family picked me up in Wilmington and we made our way south but stopped near Dover for lunch: Grotto Pizza. Don't know how well-known that chain is outside of Delaware, but they're pretty big in Rehoboth and getting bigger. Too big? The most iconic sign in Rehoboth is the Dolles Salt Water Taffy sign that towers over the center of the boardwalk at Rehoboth Avenue, but apparently the owner of the property recently tripled the rent, Dolles is getting out, Grotto's is coming in, and it's removing the sign. When I read about it earlier this summer I said to myself, “That's it, no more Grotto's for me,” which, let's face it, wasn't a huge sacrifice, living in Seattle, and not being a huge fan during my infrequent stops in Rehoboth. And yet here I was, in my very first stop in Delaware, breaking that promise. My sister's family ordered a pizza and I ate a slice. I missed my slice of good New York pizza and ate a slice of lukewarm Grottos. The gods look down and laugh.
But the greater disturbance for me was inside Grotto's, where none of the customers were masked. Worse, none of the servers were masked. I haven't seen that in a while. You'd never guess we were in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.
Most of Rehoboth was the same. Buying groceries along route 1, or walking along the crowded boardwalk Saturday night, you'd see a few other masks but not many. At Penn Station, it was 95% masked and maybe 5% unmasked. I remember one lone, crazy Black dude walking back and forth along the length of the station, a weird smile on his face, plus a few Nosenheimers (people who haven't figured out how to wear a mask after 18 pandemic months), but everyone else was responsible. Rehoboth feels 95% unmasked, 5% masked. The unmasked look stupid and feel belligerent. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it. But that was a thought: “I never realized how stupid everyone here looks.”
At least the place we're staying at is beautiful and close to the beach.
For the moment, the iconic shop is occupied by a Henna store, which wasn't exactly doing gangbuster business on Saturday night.
Friday August 27, 2021
Day 2: Across 110th Street
A heroic statue of Adam Clayton Powell Jr. on 125th Street.
Lesson of the day: If you want to avoid crowds on the subway in the middle of rush hour, and in the middle of a pandemic, sit in a non-air-conditioned car. On the 6 local, uptown, it was just me, Patricia, and about five black women. At various stops we'd see people step in, feel the heat, or the lack of cool, and step out again, running down the line to find one with AC. Another plus: When you make it back to the surface, the mid-day temps actually feel cool. It's like Blanche DuBois and her hot baths in summer.
We spent the morning walking around Harlem, which neither of us had ever done before. We're staying at basically 102nd and 5th Avenue, so we started out in Central Park—the Conservatory Garden and the Untermyer Fountain, where it was us, joggers, and women pushing strollers—and then around that lake in the northeast corner of the park and onto 110th Street. Thus the movie and the song.
Walking up Malcolm X Blvd., we noticed a couple of great taglines in businesses along the way: a funeral parlor, for example, “where beauty softens your grief.” Turns out the New York Times wrote about this guy back in 2003. Then there was the ATLAH Church, whose sign out front softened nothing:
D.A. ALVIN BRAGG SAID HE WAS STUCK UP 6 TIMES IN HARLEM, ADD 1 MORE THE WHITE LESBIAN & GAYS ROBBED HARLEM FROM ALL HAMITES
This church and its signs are apparently infamous—a Black, east coast version of the right-wing nutjob signs of Chehalis, Wash. At least it's had financial troubles.
Our destination was the Apollo Theater on 125th, which was open, but where not much was going on. Two women were working there. The older one was kind and chatty, the younger one behind the souvenir counter was bored and not. Patricia admired the chandaliers. We bought postcards of bills promoting old Apollo shows.
Walking back to the apartment, I asked Patricia how comfortable she felt in Harlem. “Pretty comfortable. Not too uncomfortable.” Pause. “You kind of stick out.”
I've stuck out before, of course, living in Taiwan for several years in the 1980s. But there you stuck out in a mostly positive fashion. You were a symbol of your race, which felt positive: America, ESL, Hollywood. In Harlem, you felt like you were a symbol of your race that felt negative. But it's all “felt”; you don't know anything. And at the end of the day, you assume most people don't give a shit. Everyone's busy. But yes, I felt we stuck out, too. It's not a bad thing to feel. To feel some aspect of what it's like.
After a lunch of the previous day's Zabar's purchases, we took the subway down to the Strand, spent about an hour and no money there (they didn't have any of the movie books I was looking for), then walked the neighborhood in search of coffee and maybe air-conditioning. Tough enough being a tourist in New York City in August; the pandemic adds another layer of difficulty. It's better to sit outside in a pandemic, but it's not better to sit outside in New York City in August when it's sunny and 95. Either way, the few tables we saw were either occupied or in the sun, so we walked for a bit, then sat on a bench in the shade in Washington Square Park. A few shops in the neighborhood were closed. Most seem to have survived the pandemic.
Thursday August 26, 2021
Day 1: No Baby, No Cry
North toward Harlem.
Eventually you realize there are no babies crying. You're on a packed plane, a red-eye bound for New York, and it's pretty quiet. Where are the babies? Then you realize in the waiting area beforehand there were no babies. A few kids running around, but on your flight? It's adults. Because why bring an unvaccinated baby on a flight in the middle of another wave of the COVID-19 pandemic? You can be vaccinated, and you have to be masked, but babies can't be vaccinated or masked. Sure, I may be stupid enough to risk the journey but why would I put my baby at risk? So no babies, no cry.
There turns out to be a lot less conversation between seatmates, too. The person sitting next to you isn't someone who might make the hours go by more quickly, it's someone who might make your life go by more quickly. No one's doing it. The masks get in the way anyway. In the end, everyone is just steeling themselves for the flight. It's a planeful of people, flying on a red-rye in a crash-prone Boeing 737, in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, heading toward a hurricane.
We're not the smartest people in the world.
We'd made the plans months ago when there were maybe 70k cases of Covid per week in the U.S. and it was in steep decline. Since then, the Delta variant has been wreaking havoc among the unvaccinated, and worry among the vaccinated, and it's back up to two million cases a week, according to Johns Hopkins. But we went through with it: my wife full of confidence, me full of dread.
The pilot tells us we'll have a smooth flight with a bumpy landing. It's the opposite. In the middle of the country we experience a lot of turbulence but flying into Newark is pretty smooth. The red-eye is a good way to go if you can sleep on flights, and in the past I could a bit, if I nibbled some Xanax and had one of those neck pillows. I didn't and hadn't, so my wife and I both arrive bleary-eyed, complaining of lower back pain (hers) and hamstring tightness (mine). Then we don't make much of the rest of the day. Too tired. We're staying with friends on the upper east side. We do walk west across Central Park and down Broadway to Zabar's and pick up stuff for lunch, which we're thinking of eating outside somewhere. But we keep getting flash downpours. We try to hail a cab on Broadway. No luck. We walk east to Amsterdam Ave, and no luck there, either, which is when Patricia sees SaraBeth's, a restaurant she knows and likes. And that's where we have lunch, under a constructed transulescent roof, our Zabar's bag at her feet, sitting next to former SNL alum Tim Meadows, our first celebrity siting, whose order was misplaced and he has to order again. A late afternoon attempt at a nap goes nowhere. I think of Kramer: “I missed my chance.”
Another memory: Arriving in New York, getting a coffee at the airpot, then heading outside and being able to take off our N95 masks after, what, nine hours total, and breathe the fresh air. Yes, even Newark is fresh after nine hours masked. Then the cab ride into Manhattan, our cabbie dodging every which way through narrow spaces. I'm reminded again of what New York is: cramped and quick. The former makes the latter necessary. You've gotta make space for you. I would never survive here.
Monday August 23, 2021
Quote of the Day
“You're basically trying to create a new country in a country that's been around for centuries. ... If we're not planning to stay forever, why do we think Afghans will side with us or the government they know we're paying for? Whenever we leave, it's going to fall apart.”
-- Spc. Joshua Duren, to reporter Martin Kuz, in Logar province, Afghanistan, 2011, as remembered in Kuz's article “Looking back at Afghanistan as the past returns,” in The Christian Science Monitor. The feel is that throughout our attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan, everyone on the ground knew what the brass wouldn't say: It wasn't working. Kuz also reminds us that the Taliban offered to surrender in December 2001, but Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld rejected the offer. Add that to his list.
Sunday August 22, 2021
Miggy Hits No. 500
Miguel Cabrera went yard today for his 13th homer of the season and the 500th of his career, and to me you just have to celebrate. He's such a joyous figure. Even the Toronto home crowd gave him a standing ovation today. Plus it's been a slog getting there.
At the end of the 2016 season—when Obama was president, mind you—Miggy had hit 446 for his career, 54 short, and that seemed like a season and a half back then. But then injuries and age hit hard, and the Covid pandemic didn't help, and he had to pick up the rest piecemeal. Over five seasons he went: 16, 3, 10, 12, 13. In his rookie season, he slugged .468, and after that, through 2016, it was never below .500. After 2016, it was never above .500, and more often than not it wasn't above .400. So today's a good day.
He did it old-school, without any 50-HR seasons, the way Hank Aaron, Frank Robinson, Harmon Killebrew and Mike Schmidt did it before him. His career high was 44, which he hit twice. He's the 28th guy to join the club, and the first since David Ortiz in 2015. We only had two in the 2010s after a record nine in the 2000s. It's a rare event again, which is nice. Not even sure who's next in line. Nellie Cruz, another joyous figure, has 443 but he's 40—although he still has pop: 27 so far this season. Giancarlo at 332 has a shot if he stays healthy. Mike Trout at 310, same.
Miggy is also 45 hits shy of 3,000. That's gotta be reachable, and if so, he'll join the even more exclusive 3,000/500 club: Just Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Eddie Murray, Rafael Palmeiro, Alex Rodriguez and Albert Pujols.
My favorite Miggy homer isn't even on this list, of course, since it happened in the World Series. Worth a watch again. As is No. 500. They're kind of similar, aren't they? Opposite-field jobs, one as a 20-year-old rookie who had just been brushed back by Roger Clemens, the other as the grand old man of baseball everyone was cheering for. That's how quickly it goes. Touch 'em all, Miggy.
Sunday August 22, 2021
What is Lee Van Cleef 'Known For'?
Apparently, on IMDb, this:
First reaction: Lee Van Cleef was in “Escape from New York”? (I hadn't seen it since its release in 1981.) Second reaction: How the hell do you screw this one up, IMDb algorithms? The Leone movies are always part of the conversation, “Escape” not so much. By your own rating system, it goes “Good, Bad” at 8.8, “Few Dollars” 8.2, “Escape” 7.2. By your own number of ratings it's the same: 714k, 242k, 132k. Sure, Van Cleef gets third billing in “Good, Bad” while he's second-billed in “Dollars” and “Escape,” but that doesn't explain it. Someday I'd love to see what goes into these kooky algorithms.
I watched both “Fistful of Dollars” and “For a Few Dollars More” this week since they were free on Amazon Prime and I hadn't seen either in .... 20 years? Twenty-five? “Fistful” suffers in comparison to “Yojimbo”; “A Few Dollars” is better. They kept adding bounty hunters, didn't they? The first has one, the second two, the third three. Eastwood is handsome, small roles often include a lot of over-acting and bad dubbing, and there's art in the shots if not in the stories.
Saturday August 21, 2021
Bill Freehan (1941-2021)
Bill Freehan makes me think of my youth for this reason: He was ubiquitous when I was young and I haven't thought about him for a long time. Other players from the era stayed in my line of sight (Joe Morgan, say, as a color announcer) or in the conversation (Aaron, Mays, Bench), but Freehan receded from view. As a result, when I think of him, I can't help thinking of, say, getting 1971 Topps cards at Salk Drugs on 53rd and Lyndale, or watching an early '70s All-Star game in the basement of 5339, or going to Met Stadium to see the Twins take on the Tigers. I become 10 again.
He was the established guy when I first began to care about baseball—the starting American League catcher in the All-Star game from 1966 through 1972, seven straight years. Again, not just there: starting. But I wouldn't be surprised if I was a bit dismissive of him. When I began to watch in the early '70s, the NL starting catcher was always Johnny Bench, a superstar, and maybe the greatest catcher of all time. And who was our guy? Freehan? C'mon. So it's interesting now checking out how good he was.
He was actually the best catcher in baseball before Bench arrived. By bWAR, he was the 10th-best position player in 1967, rocking a 6.1, and everyone above him is either a Hall of Famer or Paul Blair, and none are catchers. In 1968, he was fifth-best, and again, the guys above him are the guys: Yaz, Brooks, Clemente, McCovey. First-ballot HOFers. 1968 was the Year of the Pitcher—both MVPs went to pitchers: Bob Gibson in the NL and Freehan's battery mate Denny McClain in the AL—but oddly Freehan's batting numbers dipped a bit in '69 after they lowered the mound to make it easier for hitters. He was almost always a .200/.300/.400 guy. He's that for his career (.262/.340/.412), and he was that every year between 1967 and 1972, but the numbers dipped a bit in '69. He hit 25 homers in the Year of the Pitcher, and 16 the year they lowered the mound. He could always draw a walk and he never struck out much. Career, it's 753 strikeouts vs. 626 walks, and during his heyday he almost always walked more than he struck out. He won five Gold Gloves. When he retired, he was the all-time leader for chances (10,714), putouts (9,941) and fielding average for a catcher (.993). He hit exactly 200 homeruns. He was always a Detroit Tiger.
So I'm surprised he didn't get at least a little traction for the Hall of Fame. Instead, he was a one-and-done guy. He came up for a vote in 1982, got exactly two votes, 0.5% and that was it. A lot of first-timers were on that ballot, including Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson, who probably skewed things for the rest. Then Billy Williams, who would be voted in in 1987, and Tony Oliva, who was never voted in. All the others were one-and-doners like Freehan. It's not a bad squad: my man Cesar Tovar, Tommy Davis, Tommy Harper and Rico Petrocelli. But of those Freehan had the best career WAR: 44.8. If WAR was around then, I doubt he would've been one and done.
Bill Freehan died earlier this week after suffering from dementia for several years. He was 79. The Detroit Free-Press obit lets us know how much of a Michiganlander he was: born, grew up, went to college, played, coached, died there. Above all, he was a good man. This Willie Horton quote isn't fluff: “Bill Freehan was one of the greatest men I've ever played alongside or had the pleasure of knowing. ... His entire major league career was committed to the Tigers and the city of Detroit, and he was one of the most respected and talented members of the organization through some difficult yet important times throughout the 1960s and '70s. You'd be hard-pressed to find another athlete that had a bigger impact on his community over the course of his life than Bill, who will be sorely missed in Detroit and beyond.”
Friday August 20, 2021
Louis Menand on Elvis, the Beatles, and Where the Hell Teenagers Came From
Elvis on the Dorsey Show. Radio didn't care about race, TV did.
I’ve been slogging through Louis Menand’s “The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War” for the past few months now, setting it down for another book, picking it up again when that book was finished, hoping it would get better or more interesting or more interesting to me. I liked the chapter on Orwell well enough, and the chapter on the sham of the beats, but once he got into the philosophers and the art world, well, I guess I put it down because I had trouble picking it up. Too much of it went over my head. But the other day I skipped a chapter to the one on music and “youth culture,” and … holy fuck. I wish I could buy people just this chapter.
I know a lot about Elvis and the Beatles, but not completely, and some of the angles Menand comes from are new. He doesn’t underline it, but each act presented its opposite face when performing. Privately, Elvis was polite and deferential, onstage he roared with rebellion. The Beatles flipped this script. Onstage, they were polite—bowing after each number—while in private and in press conferences, they were cheeky, rebellious, dismissive of authority. Press agent Derek Taylor talks about their fangs. Producer George Martin, the fifth Beatle, said they didn’t give a damn about anyone—that’s partly why he liked them. “They sang of love,” Menand writes; “they were loved by millions; ‘loveableness’ was the essence of their appeal. But they loved only one another.”
How the Beatles disarmed the press is well-known, and Menand calls one of the exchanges on Feb. 7, 1964, the day they arrived at JFK Airport and all hell broke loose, “sublime.” This one:
Q: What do you think of Beethoven?
Ringo: Great. Especially his poems.
Menand writes:
Some of the Beatles’ wit can be credited to the social style of working-class Liverpool life. Ringo, for instance, who was by far the least educated Beatle (childhood illnesses had kept him out of school for long periods), did not acquire his drollness with the mohair suit Brian Epstein accoutered him in. It was his natural manner of deflecting insults. The question about Beethoven was a genteel insult, and it is telling that he, the Beatle least likely to know much about Beethoven, should have had the quickest retort, and a retort to which no follow-up is possible.
He adds: “If Elvis Presley had had a month to think about it, he couldn’t have come up with that line.”
But it’s in the pullback into how teenagers became a thing where this chapter completely jazzes me. Where did teenagers come from? Hadn’t they always been? Not really. So why did they become a thing? Because high school happened. In 1900, he informs us, only 10.2% of 14- to 17-year-old Americans were in school. By 1940, it was 73%, and it kept growing. And that emphasis on education was specific to America. I’ve never heard this 1966 quote of John Lennon’s but it’s telling: “America used to be the big youth place in everybody’s imagination. America had teen-agers and everywhere else just had people.”
Teenagers happened in part because the family farm stopped happening: “In 1900, 38 percent of employed Americans were farm workers; in 1950, 12 percent were. By 1960, it was a little over 6 percent.” Then college was added. There was all this time, and money, and what do you do with it?
Menand goes into the copyright and financial battles between the behemoths ASCAP (founded in 1914) and BMI (founded in 1939), and how after World War II the FCC set out to license new, independent radio stations to create media competition. They were everywhere, and radios were increasingly added to automobiles. Menand gives us the birth of things. In 1948, Columbia issued the first 33 1/3 LP. Eight months later, RCA introduced the 45 RPM single. Phonographs, particularly for singles, became more affordable. Portable transistor radios began selling in 1953. Jukeboxes went from holding 24 records, to 100, to 500.
Why Elvis? R&B was breaking through, for both white and Black performers, and they were all played on the radio. Radio was integrated. TV segregated them again. “Many sponsors avoided mixed-race television shows,” Menand writes, “since they were advertising on national networks and did not want to alienate white viewers in certain regions of the country.” Plus TV is a superficial medium and Elvis was young, sexy, sneering. America and the world went nuts. Read George W.S. Trow on Elvis ’56.
Why the Beatles? I remember Philip Norman talking up how they were a cheery media distraction after tawdry or tragic events—the Profumo scandal in Britain, the JFK assassination in the U.S.—but Menand goes to other places. The baby boomers were coming into teenagehood, the business machinery was in place, and all the great rockers had died (Buddy, Richie), been busted (Chuck, Jerry Lee), or gone Hollywood (Elvis). “When the Beatles arrived in New York, the pop charts had been dominated by singers like Bobby Vinton, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian—the ‘teen idols’—and groups like the Four Seasons. Presley had not had a No. 1 single since April 1962; he would not have another No. 1 in the United States until 1969.”
Why the British invasion? I found this info fascinating:
Britain had more art colleges per capita than any nation in the world. The establishment of a National Diploma in Design, in 1944, lowered the bar for entry—probably all [John] Lennon had to do was to submit to an interview and show a portfolio of his drawings—and this led to an academically permissive environment. … Every British act that had a lasting impact on popular music in the 1960s had at least one member who attended art college: the Rolling Stones (Keith Richards and Charlie Watts), the Who (Pete Townsend), Cream (Eric Clapton and the lyricist Pete Brown), Led Zeppelin (Jimmy Page), the Kinks (Ray Davies), the Jeff Beck Group (Jeff Beck and Ron Wood, later with the Stones), the Animals (Eric Burdon), and Donovan.
My interest waned when Menand tries to say something meaningful about Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone magazine. But the rest of the chapter fucking rocks.
The Beatles arrive, Feb. 7, 1964, filling a huge gap.
Thursday August 19, 2021
The Pictographs of the Pac NW, Cont.
My wife found this one in Salem, Oregon:
To go with these. Vomit is still my favorite.
Wednesday August 18, 2021
Movie Review: White Heat (1949)
WARNING: SPOILERS
In 2008, “White Heat” was voted the fourth-greatest gangster flick in Hollywood history by the American Film Institute, trailing only the first two “Godfather” movies and “Goodfellas,” and ahead of such classics as “Bonnie and Clyde,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Public Enemy,” and both versions of “Scarface.” It’s the highest-ranked Cagney flick on IMDb, with an 8.1 rating, nudging out “Angels with Dirty Faces,” “One, Two, Three,” and “The Roaring Twenties,” all at 7.9. “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” has been quoted, or misquoted, everywhere and forever. Ed “Kookie” Burns imitated Cagney saying it in a 1960 episode of “77 Sunset Strip,” Bart Simpson says it several times throughout the “Simpsons” run, while the MST3K group repeated it so often they began to parody it: “Top of the pantry, Ma!”; “Top of the Wrigley Building, Ma!” When AFI ranked its top 100 movie quotes, “Top of the world” landed at No. 18.
So guess who didn’t like “White Heat” much? James Cagney.
In his 1974 memoir he calls it “another cheapjack job,” with a formulaic script “without a touch of imagination or originality,” and not much shooting time. He wanted his Irish Mafia pal Frank McHugh to play the role of Tommy Ryley, Warners said sure, then they said they couldn’t get him. “I found out later Frank had never been asked,” Cagney says.
The film also represented a defeat for him: his return to Warner Bros. and the despised Jack Warner—whom Cagney derided as the Shvontz, Yiddish for “prick”—after seven years of independent productions. During that time, Cagney and his brother Bill made four films. Two were gentle movies with literary pedigrees (“Johnny Come Lately” from the novel by Louis Brumfield, and “The Time of Your Life” from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by William Saroyan); and two were johnny-come-lately actioners (“Blood on the Sun,” a WWII movie released as the war was ending, and “13 Rue Madeleine,” an O.S.S. homage released a year after “O.S.S.”). “Time of Your Life” turned out to be the real problem. It went overbudget and bombed at the box office, and, as Cagney biographer John McCabe writes, “the Cagneys badly needed, badly wanted a success. They both recognized White Heat as it.” Thus Warners. And thus the gangster role Cagney had forever been trying to put behind him.
If you read between the lines, Cagney mostly dismisses “White Heat” for the experience of making “White Heat” rather than for the movie itself. But that doesn’t mean the movie doesn’t have problems.
The original Waingro
Previous Cagney gangster flicks had been social-message movies about why men turn to crime: Tom Powers is corrupted by Putty Nose, Rocky Sullivan can’t run as fast as Jerry Connolly, Eddie Bartlett is a WWI “forgotten man.” None of that here. Here, it gets Freudian. The movie is based on a story by Virginia Kellogg, who based it on Ma Barker and her boys, with the four sons reduced to one. Apparently it was Cagney who suggested making Cody Jarrett psychotic; and it was Cagney who came up with the idea of sitting in Ma’s lap after she helps him through one of his debilitating headaches. The true shock of that scene is that it almost feels natural it’s acted so well.
They certainly don’t waste time getting to the Freudian: The opening shot is a train coming through a tunnel. They also don’t waste time giving us a classic Cagney line. During the train robbery, in front of the conductor, one of Cody’s men comments that the train’s burners are fancier than the ones he used on the C&O. That’s information—too much of it. Cody looks at the guy and says, “Shaddap!”
Four minutes in. I smiled.
A lot of the open is like the Waingro thing from Michael Mann’s “Heat.” Some guys just aren’t professional. The sloppy one here, Zuckie (Ford Rainey), not only says the above but calls Cody by name in front of the others. “Why don’t you give ’em my address, too?” Cody barks. Later, when the conductor says “You won’t get away with this, Cody,” Cody, after a glance at Zuckie, says, “You’ve got a good memory for names. Too good,” and shoots both him and his assistant in cold blood. Has a Cagney gangster ever shot a civilian before? An unarmed civilian? It’s the movie letting us know early on that this isn’t your father’s Cagney gangster.
Zuckie winds up paying heavily for his loose lips—but from karma rather than Cody. When the assistant is killed, he falls on a lever that releases boiling steam right into Zuckie’s face. The man then has to hole up with the rest of the gang in a mountain cabin, in pain, face and hands bandaged, mummified. When they make a break for it, they have to leave him behind—he’s too conspicuous—but then Ma Jarrett (Margaret Wycherly) warns Cody about how talkative he is, so Cody sends back his pal Cotton (Wally Cassell) to put him out of his misery. Cotton can’t do it; he shoots in the air. He thinks he’s doing a good deed, but instead of dying quickly, Zuckie, already mummified, dies slowly and painfully of exposure. That’s a helluva lot of karma for one “Cody.”
It’s at the mountain cabin that we see the movie’s early conflicts. Cody’s main rival for gang leadership is Big Ed (Steve Cochran), who is making eyes with Cody’s wife, Verna (Virginia Mayo), a lazy, complaining thing. If Cody knows there’s something between them he doesn’t care much. Maybe because he doesn’t care much for Verna? And maybe Verna senses this? She’s an opportunist, and while she’s with the No. 1 guy, she knows she’ll never be No. 1 in his heart. That spot is for Ma. So she takes his rival, too.
Big Ed has a slight Robert Mitchum thing going, but in a nice monologue Cody cuts him down to size:
You know something, Verna? If I turn my back long enough for Big Ed to put a hole in it, there’d be a hole in it. Big Ed. Great Big Ed. You know why they call him that? Because his ideas are big. Someday he's gonna get a really big one—about me. And it’ll be his last.
No one ever made “Big” sound so small.
It’s right after this speech that he gets a debilitating headache. That’s when Ma takes control. She pushes him into the bedroom, shuts the door, massages his head, talks him through it, then makes him wait before reappearing before the gang. He sits in her lap and they talk; then she gives him a shot of bourbon and tells him “Top of the world, son.” The later explanation for these headaches, which we get through Treasury Dept. officials, is that as a child he faked headaches to get Ma’s attention and now he gets them for real. To me, why he gets them is less important than what they mean for the story. They’re our pathway into knowing more about Cody and his mom; and they’re the pathway for undercover T-Man Hank Fallon (Edmond O’Brien) to get into his good graces.
Let’s talk about that second headache. By this time Cody is in prison in Springfield, Illinois, having pled guilty to a lesser crime that happened concurrently with the train robbery. Fallon is undercover as “Vic Pardo,” with an eye on Cody. He tries to break the ice in the courtroom, then in the prison yard, then in the prison machine shop where he saves Cody’s life. Nothing works. Cody doesn’t trust nobody he doesn’t know. It’s only after Ma visits Cody and warns him about Big Ed that he puts two and two together about the machine-shop “accident”; and it’s only after Cody gets the second headache, and Pardo talks him through it like Ma did, and massages his head like Ma did, that Cody decides to trust him. He even gives him the old Cagney cheek pat.
We don’t know it yet but a kind of transference has taken place. The visiting-room scene is the last time Cody (and we) will see of Ma—she’s shot in the back by Verna, off-screen—and who’s there to take her place? This smart kid, Pardo. For the rest of the movie, he’s the guy Cody trusts. At one point, Cody salutes him with Ma’s catchphrase, “Here’s to us: Top of the world,” and splits his share with him, 50-50, which he’d only done with Ma before. He’s the son he never had. Part of me wonders if the movie would’ve been more interesting if Ma hadn’t died, for then she would’ve had a true rival in Pardo, rather than the shallow rival Verna always represented.
That said, Ma’s death is when the movie roars to life.
The original Joker
Before then, Cody was always back on his heels. After the train robbery, he: 1) holes up in the cabin; 2) holes up in a motel; 3) holes up in prison. He’s forever biding his time. It gets a little dull. Then he hears about Ma. Now he’s relentless, gunning for Big Ed and Verna and forever on the move, eating a chicken drumstick with one hand while killing a guy in his car trunk with the other. Whoever came up with the drumstick, the nonchalance of it, is a genius. It’s one of the best scenes in a movie filled with great scenes. It’s “Goodfellas” 40 years before “Goodfellas.”
And then just as suddenly the air goes out of the movie again. Once he’s killed Big Ed (after Verna lies about who killed Ma), all the old conflicts are resolved: Ma’s dead, Big Ed’s dead, and Verna is muted. With a half hour left, it’s like the movie needs to regroup. The transition is almost comic. We go from Cody pushing Big Ed’s body down the stairs—“Catch,” he says to his men with that Cagney sneer, as the soundtrack music wells up—to a close-up of a ceramic tchotchke, a woman carrying a bowl, into which Cody is quietly tossing coffee beans. Tink. Tink. Tink. His men are gathered around a dining table with a new caper but they can’t get him interested. He’s like a kid, a motherless child, but it leaves the movie slightly adrift. What now?
Well, three things. We get the new caper—a payroll heist of a chemical plant. The movie also introduces us to an operator above Cody, Winston, AKA “the Trader” (Fred Clark), whom Cody calls “my manager.” It’s an 11th-hour inclusion that feels a little lame, to be honest. Finally, and most important, we begin to get a sense of Cody not as some malicious unstoppable force, or a crazy mama’s boy, but as a regular guy. He takes Pardo into his confidence. He admits he walks around at night talking to his mother. “That sound funny to you?” he asks. “Some might think so.” He opens up about his dad in the nuthouse and how his mom always propped him up. The two men drink together with Verna, who gets excited about traveling to Paris. They feel like regular people here. You almost begin to feel sorry for Cody. The two closest people in his life are an undercover Fed and the woman who killed his beloved mother.
All of which raises the question: Just how nuts is Cody? Sure, he loses it in the prison mess hell, climbing over everything and blindly fighting everybody to get away from the mere knowledge of his mother’s death. Cagney, as a kid, once visited a friend’s uncle at a hospital for the insane on Ward’s Island. “My God, what an education that was!” he says in his memoir. “The shrieks, the screams of those people under restraint.” Those are the noises he’s making as he’s fighting the guards. And yet, in the next scene, Cody is totally lucid, plotting with Tommy Ryley (Robert Osterloh), and for the rest of the movie his mental state seems to improve. No headaches, for example. He loosens up. Pardo is good for him. He’s someone to take over, as Cody took over from Ma.
No, what really sends Cody over the edge is the great betrayal, when he finds out that Pardo is a copper, a lousy copper, and that he’s truly alone in the world. Cagney’s reaction shot to this is underrated—smiling through the pain and tears in his eyes. That’s when the giggle enters his voice. That’s when, giggling and fighting amid the industrial landscape, he seems like the first-onscreen version of the Joker. He even begins talking about himself in the third person, as if he’s narrating his own story:
They think they got Cody Jarrett. They haven’t got Cody Jarrett, you hear? They haven’t got him. And I’m going to show you how they haven’t got him.
Is this a first for a Cagney movie? This third-person talking? Either way, Ryley, the last man standing in his gang, sees where Cody is going (taking the stairs up and up to disaster, the mirror image of John Garfield taking the stairs down and down in “Force of Evil”), and he tries to surrender to the cops; but Cody, giggling, shoots him in the back. This is where Cagney’s wished-for casting really would’ve had an impact. That was supposed to be Frank McHugh. Imagine Cagney shooting his old Irish Mafia pal in the back. Wow.
And then another wow: the famous ending. Rather than surrender, Cody goes out in a blaze of glory, shouting the words Ma drummed into him. Did he get the irony of it? I think he did. Were the explosions supposed to remind 1949 audiences of the A-bomb? I think they were. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t end there. The original story was just as much police procedural as gangster tale until writers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts scaled the police part back—just not enough. The cops keep showing up: flat, institutional men talking oscillators and transmitter wavelengths and cross-plotting at a bearing of 210 degrees. It’s Dick Tracy decoder-ring stuff without the gee whiz. And the movie gives them the last word. It doesn’t go out on top, with No. 18 on the AFI list, but pans back to the T-Men watching it all in the flickering light of the fires Cody created:
Evans [dismissive]: Cody Jarrett.
Fallon: He finally got to the top of the world. And it blew right up in his face.
They’re the guys explaining the joke that everyone gets.
The original
Anyway, those are some of my problems with the film: our lead is back on his heels too much, the movie needs to regroup 30 minutes before the end, and the police procedural stuff is flat. Director Raoul Walsh films it flat, too, documentary style. Warners’ chinciness didn’t help.
It’s still a great movie. Howard Hawks once said that a good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes, and while the police procedural is dull there are more than enough great scenes to make up for it. When Cagney’s on the screen, the movie is on. He’s also got a nice supporting cast. Virginia Mayo just pops; there’s not a false note there. I love her spitting out her gum before kissing Cody, or the way she attempts to ingratiate herself with the T-Men—an opportunist to the end. She also gets the Mae Clarke treatment: knocked off a chair rather than the grapefruit to the face. Cagney liked her so much he requested her for his next Warners movie, the musical “The West Point Story,” even though she had to learn to dance. Then there’s Margaret Wycherly, a British stage actress, who played Ma with a matter-of-fact maliciousness. She’s all business and task No. 1 is her boy. You get why Cody loves her.
“White Heat” is a good end to Cagney’s Warner Bros. gangster cycle, recalling the first, “Public Enemy,” more than the middle two, “Angels” and “Roaring Twenties,” where Cagney is essentially an orphan and nice guy. Here, as in “Enemy,” he’s got Ma and that sneer. “Ruthless is back!” the ads proclaimed, and it was, even if, at times, on quiet nights when it couldn’t sleep, it still wandered around talking to its mother.
The happy couple.
Monday August 16, 2021
Quote of the Day
“The expression 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' actually isn't usually true for human beings. It is for bacteria, however.”
-- Michael Lewis, “The Premonition,” his new book about how America was best-prepared to handle a worldwide pandemic and how we botched it worse than anyone. It's mostly about the amazing people who saw what was coming and were willing to make the hard decisions to save lives; who was listened to, who wasn't, and why. The book was published before the delta variant became too much of a thing, but this line anticipates it. In mid-June we were averaging 79k cases a week in the U.S., down from our high of 1.7 million cases a week in mid-January. We're now back up to nearly a million cases a week.
Sunday August 15, 2021
Last Days in Afghanistan
Q: Your book [“Freedom”] briefly touches on Afghanistan, a country where you've spent considerable time as a reporter and documentary filmmaker. With the Biden administration's decision to withdraw all U.S. troops by Sept. 11, the Taliban are poised to regain power. How do you view their claim to freedom?
I loathe the Taliban like I loathe Franco and Pinochet and anyone who tramples human rights for their own benefit or their own ideology. But this is what's so tricky about the word “freedom.” Who will enjoy freedom under the Taliban? The Taliban. They represent quite a swath of Afghan society – they represent probably the majority of the Pashtuns in Afghanistan – and for them, their definition of freedom is, “We don't want somebody else telling us what to do and how to live and who to worship.” And I can't dispute that with them; I just loathe their human values.
I'm not going to tell Americans what policies they should ascribe to, but as a journalist, I can talk about the benefits and costs of different policies. The benefits of not being in Afghanistan is that there are 2,000 special ops forces that can't possibly be killed because they won't be there. That's the upside, and we also won't provide an easy excuse for the Taliban to justify their violence. The downside, of course, is that we pull out and Afghan society implodes and there's tens of thousands of civilian deaths, and in all likelihood, the Taliban reclaim the country and impose their sharia law and rewind the beginnings of human rights and women's rights. It makes me nauseous to think about it.
-- Sebastian Junger, co-director of “Restrepo,” in conversation with one-time Stars & Stripes reporter Martin Kuz, in The Christian Science Monitor on June 1 of this year. Today, Kabul fell to the Taliban, who once again rule the country after 20 years of U.S. occupation.
Wednesday August 11, 2021
Oklahoma Red
Cagney's 1925 stage partner Charles Bickford riding tall and aging well with Charlton Heston in 1958's “The Big Country.”
Another story from the Michael Curitz bio:
Curtiz convinced Zanuck that the dual role of Keith and Conniston [in the 1930 movie River's End] needed a rugged new face. Zanuck agreed and arranged to borrow Charles Bickford from MGM. The craggy, red-haired actor had been signed by MGM after a sensational 1925 turn on Broadway in Jim Tully's Outside Looking In. He quickly earned a reputation as “difficult” by constantly quarreling over scripts and film assignments. He was let go by Metro after telling Louis B. Mayer “fuck you” when the mogul insisted that the actor finish his role in The Sea Bat (1930). In addition to being stubborn, Bickford was an intimidating presence. As a kid he shot a trolley conductor in the forehead for running over his dog and was later rumored to have killed a man he caught in flagrante with his wife. Bickford was sold on River's End, however, and gave an excellent performance. Although pleased with the picture, Bickford loathed Curtiz, who he believed was “burdened by a terrible inferiority which he manifested by screaming gratuitous insults at little people who were in no position to fight back.”
Unmentioned by author Alan K. Rode is Bickford's co-star in the 1925 Tully play. Bickford played a character named Oklahoma Red, who hoboed around with a character named Little Red, who was played by an up-and-comer named James Cagney. It was Cagney's first big break. I like that someone at MGM saw the play, signed Bickford, but let Cagney go. Not exactly Decca Records and the Beatles, but amusing nonetheless.
I've written about “Outside Looking In” before but didn't know much about Bickford. The above helps. He had a long career: 114 credits, including playing the studio chief in the Judy Garland “A Star is Born” and a feuding patriarch in the 1958 Gregory Peck epic “The Big Country.” Bickford acted until his death in 1967. He also wrote a memoir in 1965, “Bulls, Balls, Bicycles & Actors” that might be interesting. If anyone has read it, let me know if he said anything about hanging with Cagney in '25. At the least, his relationship with L. B. Mayer feels like Cagney's with Jack Warner. Just shorter.
Tuesday August 10, 2021
The Stupid Giant
My research on screenwriters Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner for “The Mind Reader” made me want to see more of their work, so I was checking out the 1933 Edward G. Robinson movie “The Little Giant” on Amazon Prime. (Review here.) First I noticed the description had a bit of wit for a change, though it's a little sloppy: “...don't let the door smack your backside on way out.” Then I noticed the three credited actors and thought, “Huh, there was an actor named Ewan McGregor back then?”
No. It's the same Ewan McGregor. Amazon Prime just has him listed in a 1933 Edward G. Robinson movie. Because Amazon.
I noticed this last week, told them about it via Twitter, it still hasn't been fixed. And yes, they, or IMDb (the same parent company), still haven't fixed the “Monster” and “Millionaire” glitches from earlier this year and last year.
I know there are way worse problems in the world. But to paraphrase Hal Holbrook in “All the President's Men,” I hate inexactitude.
Monday August 09, 2021
Movie Review: The Little Giant (1933)
WARNING: SPOILERS
It’s basically a one-joke movie, isn’t it? An Al Capone-type Chicago gangster, J. Francis “Bugs” Ahearn (Edward G. Robinson), sees the writing on the wall when FDR is elected and Prohibition is about to end, and decides to go legit. So with his ill-gotten gains ($1.25 million), and his right-hand man, Al (Russell Hopton), he moves to Santa Barbara and tries to enter high society. “I’m gonna mingle with the upper classes,” he says. “I’m gonna be a gentleman!”
The joke is he thinks the upper classes have class but they don’t. In fact, the very rich are bigger crooks than he is, and take him for a yap, a chump, a sucker. This goes on for 60 minutes of a 75-minute movie. It’s only at the end that he wises up, gets the gang back together, and makes the rich and corrupt pay. That’s the fun part.
Man, if only he were around today. Send him over to Mar-a-Lago.
Anyway, the one joke isn’t good enough. Much of the movie is a slog. It’s just an hour-plus, but it took me several sittings to get through. “Bugs” makes typical working-class errors: says “Pluto” for “Plato,” assumes a “Siamese beauty” has a twin. Robinson’s good—he’s always good—but most of the lines (from the otherwise reliable Robert Lord-Wilson Mizer team) don’t stick. The dame he falls for, Polly Cass (Helen Vinson), is a leech, and so is her entire family. They’re only interested in him when they find out he’s got money; then they’re scared when they find out he’s that Ahearn—Ahearn is the wrong name for a gangster anyway—but still, for a time, they get the better of him. And sorry to be crass, but for Bugs to fall so hard for so long, the actress playing Polly should’ve been a stunner. Vinson’s fine but not a stunner.
Mary Astor plays Ruth, the stolid working woman who rents him his mansion. Turns out, it used to be her family’s until the Casses bilked her father for his fortune—sending him to an early death. That shift in focus is disappointing as well. Initially, all of high society seem suspect; by the end, it’s just the Casses. Ruth sees them as aberrations rather than as representative. The rich get off the hook again.
I do like an early “Public Enemy” reference, as Al and Bugs reminisce about the old days:
Al: Remember all the good times we had together? Remember the time we busted into that loft after them furs?
Bugs: Yeah, and you went into a panic over that big stuffed polar bear in the corner.
Al: I give it to him, didn’t I?
Bugs: Yeah, you sure opened up on him. The cops on the west side was swarming around that joint like they was bees around a hive!
It’s almost like the Warners Studio reminiscing about the glorious pre-code era as it was coming to an end.
Sunday August 08, 2021
First National
The opening to a 1933 Edward G. Robinson movie. It's Warners but not Warners.
I've long wondered about the First National logos I've seen in pre-code Warner Bros. movies, but I didn't know the backstory until I read these passages from Alan K. Rode's bio on Michael Curtiz:
Warner Bros. assumed a majority interest in First National—one of the major Hollywood movie studios—complete with a sixty-two-acre site in Burbank that became the Warner production and corporate hub, along with a surplus of First National contracted talent and infrastructure. The acting talent absorbed by Warner Bros. included Richard Barthelmess, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., and Loretta Young. Inherited personnel working behind the camera were the director Mervyn LeRoy and cinematographers Lee Garmes, Ernest Haller, and Sol Polito.
In November 1929 Harry Warner bought out the remaining one-third of First National stock from a cash-strapped William Fox. The bold acquisition stunned the other Hollywood studio heads, particularly Adolph Zukor at Paramount, who had alternately wooed and fought with First National. One competitor admitted, “It would have made more sense if First National had bought Warner Brothers.”
If Warners was the new kid on the block, First National had been around the block. It was founded in 1917 and distributed Charlie Chaplin's “The Kid” among many others. Per this list, early on, it was more distributor than producer, but began regularly doing both in the latter half of the 1920s. After the buyout, Warners kept the First National name around for tax purposes and seemed to divvy up talent by studio name. Most early Cagneys are Warner Bros., for example, while most early Edward G. Robinsons are First National. As near as I can tell, the first Cagney First National flick was “G-Men” in 1935, his 21st picture.
The same link to First National pictures lists the last one in 1936 (“Earthworm Tractors,” starring Joe E. Brown), though its main Wiki page says Warners films and posters “bore the combined trademark and copyright credits in the opening and closing sequences” until 1958. Initially, I was like “Really?” This is opening logo to “Yankee Doodle Dandy”:
It's now the classic shield and Jack L. Warner rules. And no First National anywhere. But then a few title cards later, sure, we get this:
Not very prominent. Less important newspaper stories are often called “Below the fold” stories. This is below the Foy.
Saturday August 07, 2021
J.R. Richard (1950-2021)
J.R. Richard was an All-Star, a superstar pitcher, and maybe halfway to the Hall of Fame, when it all suddenly ended. Maybe because of racism, maybe because of our demands on athletes. Maybe both.
In 1980 he was having another Cy Young-type season, his fifth in a row, going 10-4 with a 1.90 ERA and 119 strikeouts by the beginning of July, but he also had arm fatigue, lethargy, nausea. In his first appearance after the All-Star game, which he started for the NL, he had trouble seeing the catcher's signals and left after 3 1/3 innings. Maybe if he were white his complaints would've been taken more seriously? But he wasn't and they weren't. If you have newspapers.com, check out this July 17 UPI story about Richard going on the disabled list. There's a lot of puzzlement but not much sympathy. Astros pitching coach Mel Wright undercuts Richard's complaints by saying he's never seen anyone throw that well with a dead arm, while Richard's teammate Joe Niekro undercuts Richard himself: “He's quiet. Nobody knows him on this club. He says his arm hurts so it's best to put him on the disabled list. ... Now that we know that he's not going to be pitching we can go play baseball.”
Thanks, friendo.
Then they found a blood clot in his pitching arm but chose not to operate, “fearing that it might hurt his ability to pitch,” according to The New York Times. Less than two weeks later, July 30, he was working out at the Astrodome when he collapsed. From his 2015 memoir:
“All of a sudden, I felt a high-pitched tone ringing in my left ear. And then I threw couple of more pitches and became nauseated. A few minutes later, I threw a couple more pitches, then the feeling got so bad, I was losing my equilibrium. I went down on the AstroTurf. I had a headache, some confusion in my mind, and I felt weakness in my body.”
It was a stroke. He never pitched another game in the Majors, finishing with a 107-71 record, 3.15 ERA, 1,493 strikeouts.
Fifteen years later, he was homeless, living under a bridge in Houston. I remember hearing about that on the radio, the sadness of it. He bounced back, but it's shame upon shame. Baseball, Bart Giamatti famously said, is designed to break your heart. And not just baseball.
Friday August 06, 2021
Richard Trumka (1949-2021)
The video below is the first time I became aware of Richard Trumka, the then-AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, who, a year later became its president. It was the summer of 2008, in the midst of what felt like the most meaningful presidential election of my life. I was so much younger then.
God, I love this speech. What a breath of fresh air. And how prescient. I like him mopping his brow, old style. I like how he didn't tell that lady, who didn't want to vote for Obama because: 1) he's Musliim, 2) he won't wear the flag pin, 3) she just doesn't trust him, and 4) OK it's because he's black, I like how he didn't try to shame her or cure her of her racism. He brought it back to their town, a dying town, and how Barack Obama was going to help their town and why are you letting his skin color get in the way of that. And yes, along the way, he did mention: 1) he's not Muslim, but even if he were, so what, and 2) sure, he wears a flag pin, but even wearing one doesn't mean you're patriotic. Then he goes right at it: “We can't tap dance around the fact that there's a lot of folks out there just like that woman. And a lot of them are good union people.”
Democrats should've listened to him more. He was the way forward. He died yesterday of a heart attack, age 72.
“It takes more than a flag pin to be patriotic.” Remember. Repeat.
Thursday August 05, 2021
Movie Review: The Mind Reader (1933)
WARNING: SPOILERS
The titular mind reader, Chandler, AKA Chandra the Great (Warren William), gives a speech near the end of the film that reminded me of a speech Jimmy Cagney gives as a PR rep in “Hard to Handle,” which was released by the same studio, Warner Bros., in the same year, 1933.
Cagney’s speech, near the beginning of his film, is peppier and more modern:
Sure, yaps, suckers, chumps, anything you want to call them—the public. And how do you get ’em? Publicity. Listen, Mac, here’s the idea: You take the bankroll, open a publicity agency. Exploitation, advertising, ballyhoo, bull, hot air—the greatest force in modern-day civilization. ... I’m telling you, Mac, the public is like a cow bellowing, bellowing to be milked.

that isn't really in the movie.
“Tell the chumps what they wanna hear.”
Chandra’s speech is spoken directly to those yaps, suckers and chumps. He’s on stage, drunk, and tired of the scam:
You ask me to tell you things. You think I know! I’ll tell you what I know. I’m the guy who knows how stupid you are. You pay me money to wreck you, torture you, boil you up, play to you, and laugh at you. Sitting there like a school of fish with your mouths open!
It’s the movies letting us know how the world works—and what the people who pull the levers really think of us. There's even a kind of smuggled-in admission that the lever-pullers include Hollywood. Look at that “wreck you, torture you” line. Chandra doesn’t really do that in his act. That’s what the movies do in theirs. We pay them money to sit in the dark and be wrecked, roiled, played with.
So guess when Warners released “The Mind Reader”? April 1st. A bit on the nose.
The most interesting man in the world
What else do these two movies have in common? Screenwriters Robert Lord and Wilson Mizner. For the moment, let’s focus on Mizner.
Apparently he was one of the all-time great raconteurs and con men. The son of a diplomat, he was a 6’ 5” cardsharp, hotel man, dealer in fake art, prizefight manager, and roulette-wheel fixer. In the 1890s, he and his brother Addison joined the Klondike Gold Rush in Canada but to bilk the miners rather than pan for gold. (Bilking is where the real gold is anyway; it never runs out.) Afterwards, he became a playwright, opium addict, founder and co-owner of the world-famous Brown Derby restaurant in Los Angeles, and a wit who coined some of our great cynical phrases:
- “Be nice to people on the way up because you'll meet the same people on the way down.”
- “When you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; when you steal from many, it's research.”
- “Never give a sucker an even break.”
Apparently he was both friends with Wyatt Earp and the model for Clark Gable’s restauranteur/gangster in the 1936 smash hit “San Francisco.” Remember Hyman Roth’s speech in “The Godfather Part II” about the kid who had a dream of building a city in the desert as a stopover for GIs? “That kid’s name was Moe Greene, and the city he invented was Las Vegas.” You could say the same about Wilson’s brother Addison and Boca Raton, Florida, which Wilson helped him create, and from which both men fled after their corrupt wheeling and dealing became known. Stephen Sondheim was so entranced by their story he wrote a musical based on them: Road Show. It was a helluva life.
Some of that life seems to be in “The Mind Reader.” The movie opens with Chandler, and his two right-hand men, Frank (Allen Jenkins) and Sam (Clarence Muse), making their itinerant way through the U.S. as they try to perfect their scam. Chandler plays a “Painless dentist” in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and a “Wonder Hair Tonic” salesman to Black folks in Nashville, Tennessee. In Emporia, Kansas, he talks up Frank as a champion flagpole sitter (50+ days, etc.) but the only ones stopping by are two kids who whisper their question. Chandler listens and repeats, “How does he what?” Which, yes, is our question, too.
It’s in Emporia where they see a grift that works:
SWAMI RAJA
The Marvel of the Age
HE TELLS PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE
Frank does some research, discovers that people spend about $125 million a year on fortune-telling, and the other shoe drops for Chandler. “It’s a sure cleanup!” he says. “All you gotta do is look wise, tie a bath towel around your head, and tell the chumps what they wanna hear. The whole world is full of hopeful suckers. Just keep promising them things.”
Their grift isn’t bad. Sam collects questions from the audience, seems to burn them on stage, but secretly funnels them to Frank below, who reads them via electronic hookup to Chandra. Then they set up private sessions for $1 a pop.
To be honest, the movie doesn’t do nearly enough with the grift. It momentarily wrecks it for a one-note gag—when Chandra tells a dude he won’t have any children but his wife will have three, which isn't exactly what the chump wants to hear—then permanently wrecks it by having Chandra fall for Sylvia (Constance Cummings) in Kokomo, Indiana. She’s an innocent kid, but he woos her anyway and brings her along. So now we have three scam artists and an innocent. What happens when she finds out?
Initially, not much. In fact, she joins the scam, reading the notes to Chandra while Frank is busy breaking into a jewelry story—a crime Chandra will “predict” to those present. In the act, Frank can’t help himself and also lifts a diamond, which Chandra then uses for Sylvia’s wedding ring.
If he had corrupted her, the movie might’ve stayed interesting. Sadly, the opposite. A woman (Mayo Methot, Bogart’s wife before Bacall) shows up at their hotel, says Chandra gave her advice that led her to give up the man she loved, who subsequently committed suicide, and what's what she does immediately after leaving the room: down an elevator shaft. That’s enough for Sylvia. She's about to leave town when Chandler shows up at the train station on bended knee promising to reform.
Cut to: Chandler in New York City, trying to sell brushes door to door in the snow.
Not a bad gag. A tame Chandler, though, is a dull Chandler. Thankfully, he runs into Frank again, who’s now a chauffer:
Frank: A guy with your con, your larceny, selling brushes? What’s the idea?
Chandler: I’m on the straight and narrow. You know. The wife.
Frank: The wife. Love. Marriage. Honesty. Now there’s a combination guaranteed to get anybody in the poorhouse.
Which leads to the second successful grift. Same deal, but now he’s Dr. Munro, and he gets the inside dope from chauffers like Frank, who know about the peccadillos of the powerful men they drive around. It’s actually a more honest grift. Instead of making up lies about the future, Chandler is telling the truth about the present—and the wives are buying it.
But same deal again. One husband who’s been fingered shows up, tries to get tough, there’s a gun, it goes off, he dies. Chandler scrams to Juarez, New Mexico, where he’s now “The Great Divoni,” while Sylvia, who was also at the scene of the crime, is railroaded by the cops into taking the murder charge. That leads to Chandler’s drunken rant. And that leads to his 11th-hour return to New York and confession at the DA’s office. Then under police guard he visits her hospital room—she collapsed at her murder trial—tells her he wants her to divorce him, but no, she’s sticking by him. Out in the hall, he runs into Frank and Sam. As the cops pull him away, Frank gets in the last line: “Sure is tough to be going away just when beer is coming back.”
More on Muse
A few words on Clarence Muse, who played Sam, and who was one of the few Black actors during this time that didn’t contort himself into the stereotypes of the day. Here, again, he’s his own man. A running gag is Sam and Frank arguing about horse racing, with Sam usually getting the best of him. More startling is when Sylvia shows up backstage at the carny and Sam checks her out—tilting his head to the side as she enters Chandra’s trailer. “That’s a nice-looking girl,” he says afterwards. Pre-code or no, I’m shocked this got through censors. At the least, I assume it was relegated to the cutting-room floor by a lot of local censors in the South and Midwest. Shame we don’t see more of Muse in the movie. Not to mention the movies.
Vivian Crosby gets a story credit, while Lord and Mizner share screenplay credit, as they do on “Hard to Handle,” “Frisco Jenny” and “20,000 Years in Sing Sing.” According to Philippe Garnier’s book Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, Lord did all the typing and most of the writing, though Mizner “could be counted upon to inject some authenticity or wit in whatever prison or gangster yarn the studio was churning out.” Mizner lived only two days past the film’s premiere, dying of a heart attack at the Ambassador Hotel on April 3, 1933, age 56. His final last words, most likely apocryphal: “I’m dying above my means.”
This one was directed by frequent Cagney collaborator Roy Del Ruth, with cinematography from Sol Polito, and we get some nice shots in the early going. I also like the map interludes. Probably played well in those places, too. It gave the people what they wanted—themselves.
Overall, “The Mind Reader” is worth watching and comes close to being quite good. But I gotta go with Frank: love, marriage, honesty? Now that’s a combo guaranteed to ruin a nice larcenous picture.
Tuesday August 03, 2021
Quote of the Day
“Florida is in the grip of a Covid surge worse than it experienced before the vaccines. More than 10,000 Floridians are hospitalized, around 10 times the number in New York, which has about as many residents; an average of 58 Florida residents are dying each day, compared with six in New York. And the Florida hospital system is under extreme stress.
”There's no mystery about why this has happened. At every stage of the pandemic DeSantis has effectively acted as an ally of the coronavirus, for example by issuing orders blocking businesses from requiring that their patrons show proof of vaccination and schools from requiring masks. More generally, he has helped create a state of mind in which vaccine skepticism flourishes and refusal to take precautions is normalized.“
-- Paul Krugman, ”'Freedom,' Florida and the Delta Variant Disaster," in The New York Times
Tuesday August 03, 2021
My First COVID Test
Last week I met a friend for drinks and the following morning I woke up with a scratchy throat and some shortness of breath. I felt a bit of an “uh oh” but mostly thought, “Probably from talking so much.” We'd been careful. When in the bar, ordering, we were masked, when we sat outside we were maskless, and outside we had to talk at a higher volume, which is why, I figured, my throat was a bit raw that morning.
Then my friend sent me a text saying his throat was scratchy, there was some shortness of breath, so he was going to get tested for COVID.
Fuck.
The Delta variant has been raging around the country like wildfires—which are also raging around the country—and though it's mostly striking the unvaccinated, abouot 150,000 vaccinated people have gotten it, too. Supposedly it's less deleterious for them/us. I think the vaccine basically reduces COVID to a case of the flu: You may feel bad but you won't go to the hospital. For the unvaccinated, it's worse than the original strain.
The first decision I had to make was this: Do I cancel the Mariners game that afternoon? I was going with a family friend, mid-70s, vaccinated, great, great shape, but still mid-70s. Being a worst-case scenario dude, I imagined, you know, “Dad, how did grandpa die?” “Well, son, there was this asshole named Erik who thought a baseball game was more important than Grandpa's life.” I monitored myself through the morning, didn't seem to be getting better, and sent him a text around 10 AM, canceling (I hate canceling), and offering both seats if he wanted to take his wife. Turns out she didn't like baseball, he mostly went to the game to be with me, so no sale. Or no give. These are Mariners tickets: The kind you can't give away.
I tried another friend, newly into baseball, but she, it turns out, was sick in bed with a cold. She, too, had worried it was COVID but her test came back negative.
That's when I decided to get tested. And that's when the comedy began.
My friend had been tested down at Rainier Beach, a half hour away by car, and I lived on Seattle's First Hill, commonly called Pill Hill for all the hospitals and medical facilities in the area. Surely there was something nearby. Didn't the local chain pharmacy, Bartell's, test for COVID, for example? No, they merely administered the vaccine. My wife thought they were testing down at the Convention Center, a 10-minute walk, but that was earlier in the pandemic. No more. Life was back to normal, apparently. Google searches were hugely unhelpful.
So I called my GP's office, which was right across the street. They directed me to the first floor. The place on the first floor was booked that day, and anyway it would take them 3-5 business days to get the results. I needed to know sooner, since my wife and I were meeting her family on the peninsula in a few days. “Is there a place nearby that takes walkups?” I asked. “The PolyClinic on Broadway takes walkups,” I was told. So I walked over there, found the place, asked for a test, was asked why I wanted one. When I told them, they said, “Sorry, we don't test people who exhibit symptoms.” I guess it was an immune-compromised area.
Long story slightly less long, I drove to Rainier Beach for the test. It was near a park, and the “facility” was kind of like a food truck. You gave your info to a guy at a foldout table then walked to the food truck where you were given a sterile swab, which you self-administered 10 times in each nostril and handed back. Less than 24 hours later, I had my results: “None detected.”
It is a shame that after 18 months we don't have a better system. More of a shame, of course, are all the vaccine holdouts, and the bad actors on Fox News and within the Republican party disseminating the bad information to keep them holding out. What do you do besides shake your head? They don't want to wear masks, they don't want to take the vaccine, they want everything open. What children. We should be talking about the wildfires blanketing the country in smoke. We should be talking global warming, and the slowing of the jet stream, meaning weather systems stay in the same place longer, creating, say, floods in Belgium, Germany and China, and the baking of the Pacific Northwest. But the unvaccinated take up all the oxygen.
Anyway, that was my first COVID test. I doubt it'll be my last.
Monday August 02, 2021
Richard Donner (1930-2021)
Donner directing Kidder and Reeve on the set of “Superman: The Movie.”
At the end of my review of “Superman: The Movie” (1978), I picked up on the line Jor-El tells his son about the general goodness of humanity—“They only lack the light to show the way”—and applied it to Hollywood and superhero movies:
What was the greatest superhero adaptation before “Superman: The Movie”? The “Captain Marvel” serial from 1941? Max Fleischer's Superman cartoons from the same year? The Adam West “Batman” of the 1960s? “Superman” wiped them all away. It was years ahead of its time. It was Kryptonian in its advancement. It took another 11 years before we got Tim Burton's “Batman” and another 11 years after that to get to Bryan Singer's “X-Men.” Twenty-two years: an entire generation. Back in the mid-1970s, Hollywood, enamored of disaster and devil movies, didn't think much of superhero movies. But it only lacked the light to show it the way.
That light began and ended with Richard Donner, who died last month, aged 91. His watchword on the set was verisimilitude. He wanted the movie true but light, fun but not campy. He saw that the story of Superman could be epic and made it so. Maybe he saw America was ready for heroes again. We were ready to be kids again, and in awe. Sadly, we were all too ready and we haven't grown out of it. We were a maturer country then.
Donner cast great actors in supporting roles and then ignored the movie's producers, the Salkind father-son duo, who wanted Superman to have a huge package (yes), and who wanted a big name for the title role: Robert Redford or Al Pacino(!) or Clint Eastwood. Instead Donner searched and searched and searched, and no one was quite right until, wow, who's this kid? I still think of Christopher Reeve as the greatest superhero casting ever. “He was Superman from day one,“ Donner said. In the commentary track to the Richard Donner cut of ”Superman II,“ Donner is talking about how the Salkinds cheapened the product and what a sin that was, and then Christopher Reeve's name flashes on the screen during the credits and he says, alluding to Reeve's subsequent paraplegia and early death, “This is the biggest sin. This is the best kid that ever lived. Without him, there would‘ve been no Superman.”
There's a Donner cut to ”Superman II“ because Donner's reward for making a superhero movie that was true but light, fun but not campy, a movie that was the second biggest box-office hit of 1978 and that showed Hollywood the light when it came to superhero movies—a light Hollywood didn't really follow until nearly a quarter of a century later—Donner's reward for all this was to get canned from the sequel even though much of the sequel was already in the can. And in came another Richard, Lester, to muck it all up. He made it campy. He dumbed it down. The great care Donner had put into it was gone. You watched Lester's versions and couldn't believe you once believed a man could fly.
”Superman“ was Donner's second big hit in a row, after ”The Omen“ starring Gregory Peck, but before that he'd spent 15 years in television. His first directing credit on IMDb is a 1960 episode of ”Zane Grey Theater“ called ”So Young the Savage Land,“ which starred Claudette Colbert in one of her final roles. Then it was five episodes of ”The Loretta Young Show,“ six episodes of ”Wanted: Dead or Alive,“ seven episodes of ”The Rifleman.“ He did six ”Twilight Zone“s, including ”Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,“ and three ”Gilligan's Island“s. All of it seemed to be leading nowhwere. By the end of the decade he was directing the bizzaro Saturday morning TV show ”The Banana Splits.“ Was that set in London? Was he? His first movie seems to be ”Salt and Pepper,“ from 1968, starring Rat packers Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford as a pair of detectives in London, and then ”Twinky“/”A London Affair,“ about a 38-year-old American author, Charles Bronson, who, imagine this, ”discovers the difficulties of being married to a 16-year-old British schoolgirl.“ (Last century's cool movie plot is this century's career-ending move.) Then more TV (”Ironsides,“ ”Cannon,“ ”Lucas Tanner“) and TV movies (”Sarah T. — Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic“) before he was tapped for ”The Omen.“ I wonder why/how he got tapped?
I've never seen his more personal film, ”Inside Moves,“ starring John Savage, released in 1980 as personal films were on the way out, but unfortunately did see ”The Toy,“ an attempt to cash in on Richard Pryor's popularity by casting him as a man who is bought (!) as the toy for a rich man's bratty son. Damn, Hollywood, get a clue. I remember ”Ladyhawke“ being a good movie, while ”The Goonies“ is still beloved—we watched it with our nephews a few years ago—and then there was the whole ”Lethal Weapon“ series. It was a casting director who suggested Danny Glover to Donner, and though he objected at first, saying, no, it's supposed to be a white character, he listened when she said asked a simple question: ”Why?"
That's Donner to me. He was a man's man who was tough enough, sensitive enough, smart enough. He seems like he would've been fun to hang with. And he gave us Superman when we needed him.
Sunday August 01, 2021
The Pictographs of Hood Canal
This weekend, my wife and I took the Bremerton ferry over to Hood Canal—which is not a canal—to spend time with her family in Union, Wash. Saturday, the bunch of us went over to Potlatch State Park, where, after walking north along the beach until I hit a rivulet separating the public from the private, I came across a sign extolling the various types of salmon in the area: chinook, pink, steelhead, chum (they got rooked in the name game), sockeye, coho and cutthroat. And on the reverse of that sign? A warning against eating raw shellfish, with a pretty funny pictograph:
Later, we went up to Hoodsport to visit our two must-visit places in the area: Hoodsport Coffee Co., and their Olympic Mountain ice cream; and The Hardware Distillery, which makes great whiskey, vodka, gin, aqua vite, and assorted spirits. It was our first time back to either place since before the pandemic. We visited the coffee/ice cream place first (they were serving people outside rather than indoors, which I was glad to see as the pandemic ratchets up again), but we had to wait around for the distillery to open at noon. While waiting, we visited, among other places, the local library across Higway 101, where I came across yet another odd pictograph—this one a warning against slippery steps. I've seen slipping pictographs before, but never where the guy looked like he might be Gene Kelly or Ben Vereen clicking his heels.
No feet but look at those fingers.
Oh, right. In my Potlatch beachwalk, over the barnacled rocks along the shore, I also came across this googly-eyed guy, which looks like something God made in arts and crafts class:
I think I'm just two or three Hood Canal pictographs shy of my own movie rating system: from Ben Vereen (4 stars!) to Vibrio Bacteria (looking at you, Zack Snyder).