DeMille getting away with it, post-Breen.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Given recent controversies around Cleopatra, an early scene here hits hard.

At this point in the story, Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert), in Egypt, has wooed Julius Caesar (Warren William), and now we cut back to the gossip-mongers of Rome. Cleopatra’s name is mentioned, dismissed by some, but a naïve woman says she’s heard “all kinds of things” and asks with seriousness:

Is she black?

There’s a pause. And everyone else laughs uproariously.

I guess one generation’s joke is another generation’s unending point of contention. But it's interesting that it was already out there 100 years ago. Though dismissed out of hand, it was brought up. People knew.

“Is she black?”

Frightened people
Apparently they made this because “The Sign of the Cross” (1932), directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Colbert, was a huge hit, while “Four Frightened People” (1934), with both, was not. So Paramount's Adolph Zukor said, not unreasonably, “Why not another historical epic with lots of sex in it?”

I’m curious how much sex there would’ve been without Joe Breen's Production Code, which gained the power to stem Hollywood’s prurient/profitable impulses in the summer of 1934. Watching all the half-naked girls writhing around, I assumed it came out in the early months of ’34. Nope. September. But DeMille, big on bacchanalia followed by shame (lots of bacchanalia, a soupcon of shame), was always good at getting away with it—probably because his sex/shame cycles tended to be within historical/religious epics. While this one isn’t religious, we do get a villainous Herod (Joseph Scildkraut) for a few scenes, as if to say (maybe to Breen), “Guess who's coming to dinner?”

DeMille’s “Cleopatra” is better than I though it would be, and it’s mostly thanks to Colbert. This remembrance by DeMille, per IMDb, is instructive:

“She wanted to do something different with Cleopatra, not make her lofty or fussy or superstitious—nothing like that. She set out to give her humor and humanity, and she stamped her own personality on the role. She emerged from it most vividly, I thought.”

All of that shines through. Her Cleopatra is down-to-earth and calculating, breezy and fun.

She begins the film powerless, having been kidnapped by Pothinos (Leonard Mudie), the eunuch right-hand man of her brother Ptolemy, and brought bound and gagged and left to die in the desert. For some reason, they leave the philosopher Apollodorus (Irving Pichel) with her, so he promptly unties her, reminds her that Caesar is approaching, which is why she was kidnapped: Rome wanted to deal with the more pliant Ptolemy. But she smuggles her way back to Cairo in a rug, which is unfurled before Caesar, and the wooing begins. William's Caesar is more business than pleasure, so he only turns in her direction when she shows her empire-building acumen. But the dalliance causes tongues to wag in Rome and eventually leads to Caesar’s Ides of March death at the hands of colleagues and friends—including, as Caesar says here, “You too, Brutus?” 

Which leaves Cleopatra (not to mention “Cleopatra”) adrift again. That’s the problem with cozying up to power. Power shifts. Who has it now? It’s a triumvirate, with Marc Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) one of the three. The movie does some fancy footwork to keep her sympathetic. She’s 1) distraught over Caesar’s death, until 2) courtiers tell her he never really loved her, which gives her leave to 3) seduce Antony for the good of Egypt, at which point she 4) falls in love for real, as does he, and we get their grand love story.

It's also when my interest flagged. Maybe because Wilcoxon is strong-jawed, stentorian and a little dull? Again, Rome turns on the lover of Cleopatra, with Octavian (Ian Keith) now leading the charge. The Battle of Actium scenes aren’t much, mostly quick cuts and stock footage and re-used footage. Feels like it was done on the cheap. Not exactly a cast of thousands.

I’ve forgotten the official story around Antony and Cleopatra—if I ever knew—but this one includes some Shakespearean misunderstandings leading to their deaths. Antony’s army has deserted him, Egypt is besieged, and in defeat Cleopatra tries to work the levers of power once more—but in defense of Antony rather than Egypt. She’s willing to surrender if his life is spared. Antony, however, assumes she’s once again seducing a power broker of Rome—from Caesar to him to Octavian—and stabs himself in grief. “I was pleading for your life and you were taking it!” she cries. After he goes, she takes her own life with the asp.

Why her?
Again, not great but not bad. With a better Antony you might’ve had a story that could ring through the ages.

Why does the story of Cleopatra ring through the ages? Is it the woman in power thing? Seduction? Sex? And with Antony giving up power for love like Edward VIII? I’d love to see how her story has changed over the centuries. How much do we update it for the times? What do we need her to be now?

1934 was a big year for Colbert: She starred in four films, including the No. 1 box-office hit (“Cleopatra”), an attempt to take on racial matters (“Imitation of Life,” with Louise Beavers), and “It Happened One Night,” which became the first movie, and one of only three in Hollywood history, to win Oscars in the five major awards: picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay. May we all have such years.

Newspapers.com's timeline for the Queen of the Nile. Colbert's version had a nice little bump in 1934 but it was Liz in 1963 when things skyrocketed. Not sure what accounts for the spike in 2000.

“Madigan” was filmed on location in New York in '67, and premiered in late March '68, just before all the assassinations. At one point, Midtown, we get a passing shot of a marquee advertising a film I'd never heard of: “Tobruk” starring Rock Hudson and George Peppard. For a second I thought it was a fake movie. Tobruk? Certainly sounded like a fake movie. But it was another in a neverending stream of WWII actioners that wound soon end as the world changed and moved on.

Both movies were from Universal Pictures, although “Tobruk” was the indier of the two—produced by Rock Hudson's production co., Gibraltar, as well as Roger Corman's (his high-end outfit), and merely distributed by Universal. “Madigan” was in-house. Both movies featued '50s movie stars at the tail-end of their movie careers, with TV beckoning. All of it was just before the moment that Quentin Tarantino depicted so well in “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood”: the old dying and the new not only born but dismissive of the old.

Isn't this the loveliest photo? It's from the recent documentary on Christopher Reeve, uncommented upon within the doc, just shown, but my comment would be: Did you ever see Queen Elizabeth look so happy? My god, she's like a schoolgirl. Adorable.

It was taken at the British premiere of “Superman: The Movie,” mid-December 1978, so, beyond pre-movie publicity, Reeve wasn't a thing yet. He wasn't a name. But he was still what he was. A tall drink of water. Superman.

Initially I thought that was Persis Khambata next to him, but apparently by this time she'd already shaved her head for “Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” (I like that all these movies back then, culled from other sources, had to remind everyone in their subheds that they were in fact movies.) But of course, it's the cast of “Superman,” so that's Sarah Douglas (Ursa), and two down is Terrence Stamp (Zod), and ... is that Trevor Howard between them? Most likely I'm mixing up my Krypton elders.

Not much makes me happy these days. This photo makes me happy. Makes me feel like a schoolboy.

WARNING: SPOILERS

It’s a great premise. Three amateurs steal $300,000 from the mob in Harlem, killing five or six in the process, and it becomes a race to see who finds them first: the cops or Cosa Nostra.

The drama is in the search, but the crisis—as the man said—consists in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born. It’s 1972, baby: worlds are changing and organizational fractures revealed. Harlem bosses take no shit from Mafiosos, while older working-class white cops are being shunted aside by a younger, smarter, blacker model. Can anyone get along long enough to do the job? 

“Across 110th Street” was filmed on location in NYC during the spring/summer of 1972, so we get great shots of Robert Moses’ dream crumbling—or his Frankenstein monster turning on its creators. Plus Bobby Womack on the soundtrack? C’mon. 

Given all that, it should be better; but we’re a small step up from exploitation/blaxploitation here so there’s little complexity within the fractures. Everything is broad: cops are racist, Cosa Nostra is racist, black people ain’t putting up with that shit. “Nigger” is tossed around freely and we get a “You all look alike” comment for good measure. 

I never got our main shunted-aside guy—Anthony Quinn’s Capt. Mattelli. Per IMDb, the role was offered to the usual ’50s heavyweights—John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas—but nobody went for it (I really don’t see Wayne going for it), so Quinn, as producer, stepped in. But his Mattelli seems too desperate: grasping one moment, shrugging the next. He’s not interesting. I don’t know if I’ve seen Quinn less interesting.

A crucial scene
Here’s a crucial scene between Harlem boss Doc Johnson (gravel-voiced actor Richard Ward), Mattelli and Yaphet Kotto’s Lt. Pope: 

Doc Johnson: You're new here, ain't you, college boy?
Lt. Pope: Two years.
Doc Johnson: Right on, baby. Yeah. I could get you [Matelli’s] job. They're looking for bright black boys on the force. How much are we paying this dude, Shevvy?
Shevvy: He's the guy that sent back the Christmas present.
Doc Johnson: Yeah? Mr. Mattelli don't do that. We’ve been giving him $2500 a month for the past two years. And he come in here, giving me orders. Shit, he works for me!

Johnson is purposely embarrassing Mattelli … and it works. Mattelli defends himself, but weakly, looking down, unsure. You know what you need? A gleam, like a Richard Widmark gleam, as in “…and your point?” Matelli’s a corrupt cop in a city of corrupt cops in a world of white privilege. And sure, that ground is shifting, but it’s still fucking solid. He still has the upper hand—even in Harlem. But the movie pretends otherwise. Because it’s blaxploitation.

Kotto’s great, by the way, he does a lot with not much, but all the white actors seem off. Mattelli doesn’t seem cop enough, while Anthony Franciosa’s Nick D’Salvio doesn’t seem mob enough. I guess intentionally? He’s the in-law trying to prove himself. Carlo from “The Godfather” without the wife-beating.

Confession: For much of the movie, I thought Joe Logart was played by Ivan Dixon from “Hogan’s Heroes” when it was Ed Bernard from “Police Woman” and “The White Shadow.” He’s one of the three amateurs, the everyman of the three. He’s between Paul Benjamin’s sweating, angry Jim Harris, who initiates the barrage of death with a submachine gun, and Anthony Fargas’s Henry J. Jackson, the getaway driver who lets himself get boxed in.

How are they found? Their car is dredged from the river, its owner and his wife are questioned, and they say they sold the car to ... Henry J. Jackson. In other words, these guys steal from the Mafia and flee … in a car they bought. Not a stolen car, but one that can be traced back to them. It’s so stupid it made me do a doubletake.

Henry had the least to do with the crime—he killed no one, just drove poorly—but he’s first found (by D’Salvio) and most brutally mutilated. Off-screen he’s castrated and killed. Our everyman is picked up, too—he works at a dry cleaners—and questioned on a rooftop, hung upside down over the city. Don’t know why he thinks giving up Jim Harris’ name will get him cut loose—other than the way they do it: cutting the rope and letting him fall however many stories to the pavement below.

The mob is always several steps ahead of the cops, but they tackle the final guy, the most dangerous guy, poorly: They announce themselves. D’Salvio doesn’t make it out of the stairwell alive, while Harris flees to the rooftops. (Nothing better than NYC rooftops; there’s worlds up there.) When he’s wounded, and all is lost, he tosses his share of the loot over the side to kids in a playground below. Not sure why the bag doesn't open and the bills flutter down. Wouldn't that feel more cinematic? Instead, the bag goes down, whumpf!, and the kids descend on it.

Oh, 11th hour—actually five seconds to midnight—one of Doc Johnson’s men, the aforementioned Shevvy (Gilbert Lewis), kills Matelli on the same rooftop with a rifle/silencer. Whitey gotta go, I guess. But the freeze-frame is on Matelli’s hand grasping for Pope’s., white in black, like Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier trying to hop a train again. In 1972? Nah. Wrong end, whitey.

Chicago manual of style
The movie is based on a novel by Wally Ferris, adapted by Luther Davis, and directed by Barry Shear—all white dudes born before 1925. Actually I don’t know when Ferris was born. Not much out there on him. He wrote this and “The Hunt.” He might’ve been a TV cameraman? That was mentioned in one book review—though whether they meant it literally or figuratively I don’t know. The 1970 Chicago Tribune review of his novel, “Across 110th” (no “Street”), isn't exactly kind:

To this story of Harlem, the Mafia, the cops, and a black man on the run, Wally Ferris has brought both a tin ear and a glass eye and has ended up by producing a novel of such astonishing dullness that the only reason for reading it is to discover what piece of dialogue he will stumble over next or what description he will botch. How long has it been since a black woman has been seriously described in a novel as a “Negress”?

Give the man credit, though, that’s a great title. 110th Street is the northern border of Central Park, with a lot of wealth on either side; then it's Harlem and another world. Bill Burr did a great bit about white people crossing that border, the tension and awkwardness and all of it, which I've felt myself. A few years back, visiting friends on the Upper East Side, my wife wanted to see the Apollo Theater, so we walked there. I thought I’d be better at it but I wasn’t. You feel your gait stiffen, and the more you try to loosen up the worse it gets. And this is in the middle of the day! Maybe that accounts for all the bad white acting here. They were all awkward in that other world. 

Watching, I was pretty sure I’d just seen Paul Benjamin in “The Anderson Tapes,” and I had, but IMDb helped me connect more dots. Right, he was the gang leader helping Clint Eastwood in “Escape to Alcatraz,” and yes, and most importantly, he was one of the three guys sweating beneath the umbrellas and commenting on events like a comic Greek chorus in Spike Lee's “Do the Right Thing.” They were one of my favorite parts of a great movie. I could’ve stayed on them a lot longer.

“I said to somebody once: The reason theater is so successful as an effigy of human life is that human life already feels like an effigy. And therefore we can make the leap.

”You know, plays to me are very much like life. You're generally stuck with who you are. You can't change it that much. Aside from suicide, you have to stay till the end of the play. So you have to stay and be who you are. And then you have to find your wiggle room inside that as a way to feel like you have your dignity.“

-- Craig Wright in the podcast ”Behind the Buzz!: Let's Talk About Recent Tragic Events. Season 2 - Episode 4: My Own Garfunkel—a conversation with playwright Craig Wright, Jan 31, 2022"

I've long wondered (long = since January) what would happen if a court of law ordered someone to do a thing, and that someone, say, Pres. Donald J. Trump, just ignored it. Is there an enforcement mechanism? Or: What is the court's enforcement mechanism? Answer? It's the U.S. Marshals Service, which is an arm of the Justice Dept., which is run by AG Pam Bondi, a Trumpling ready to do his bidding. Bummer. 

Today I got a deeper, more informed answer from Prof. David Noll of Rutgers University writing on the Democracy Docket website. He says that “while the marshals have traditionally enforced civil contempt orders, the courts have the power to deputize others to step in if they refuse to do so”:

This authority is recognized in an obscure provision of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which govern proceedings in federal trial courts. Rule 4.1 specifies how certain types of “process” — the legal term for orders that command someone to appear in court — are to be served on the party to which they are directed. The rule begins in section (a) by instructing that, as a general matter, process “must be served by a United States marshal or deputy marshal or by a person specially appointed for that purpose.” ...

To be sure, a court that appointed someone other than the marshals to enforce a civil contempt order would be breaking new ground. Because of the marshals' long and honorable history of respecting their legal obligation to enforce federal courts orders, the courts have rarely, if ever, had to turn to other parties to have their orders enforced. If forced to do so, however, individuals from court security officers and probation officers to local police and sheriffs have the training and experience to bring contemnors into court. And unlike the marshals, these individuals would be responsible to the court alone.

At least there's a pivot.

The period in mainstream movies when men still wore fedoras and nudity was allowed was but a sliver, but “Madigan” fit into it.

WARNING: SPOILERS

Put it on a double-bill with “Coogan’s Bluff.” Both were directed by Don Siegel and filmed on location in Manhattan. Both include Don Stroud on the wrong side of the law and Susan Clark as the smart-girl love interest, while each story revolves around a fish-out-of-water cop who screws up, lets a prisoner get away, and is tasked with getting him back within a prescribed timeframe: 24 hours for Clint, 72 here.

You could say Don Siegel had a niche in ’68.

Clint Eastwood’s Coogan was the classic fish-out-of-water, an Arizonan navigating the Big Apple, while Richard Widmark’s Dan Madigan is simply a New York cop patrolling Spanish Harlem like normal. But he feels out of time. Actually, all the cops do. It’s 1968 but they all wear fedoras. I thought fedoras went away with JFK or at least the Beatles, but every cop is wearing one here. Is this the last movie where that happened? I’d love to see the stats on when the bottom fell out of the fedora industry. Therein lies a tale.

Broads
The title is off. The movie is based on a novel by Richard Dougherty called “The Commissioner,” who is played here by Henry Fonda, a much bigger star than Widmark ever dreamed of being, and he’s half the movie. When you pull back, the movie is really about the problems Police Commissioner Anthony X. Russell has to navigate over a long weekend:

1. A Harlem minister in unhappy his son was questioned on a rape charge and wants justice.
2. Russell’s longtime friend, Chief Inspector Charles Kane (James Whitmore), is caught on tape accepting a bribe.
3. Two cops in Spanish Harlem lose their guns to a man wanted for questioning in Brooklyn, who—it’s later revealed—is wanted for murder.

That third problem, featuring Madigan and his partner, Det. Rocco Bonaro (Harry Guardino), is the brunt of it, but it’s still odd to name a movie for a guy who doesn’t have anything to do with a third of the film. Apparently Siegel wanted to call it “Friday, Saturday, Sunday,” the intertitles we see throughout the long weekend, which is at least accurate. 

We get some great shorthand dialogue. After the opening credits (oddly dreamy music over gritty shots of NYC), we alight on two plainclothes cops stopping on a case. Madigan pulls a cigarette to his mouth before offering the pack to his partner, who shakes his head.

Rocco: 11 days already.
Madigan (sarcastic): Hooray.

You could argue that everything goes wrong for these cops because the Production Code went away. They find their suspect, Barney Benesch (Steve Ihnat), in bed with a young woman, Rosita (Toian Matchinga), naked beneath the sheets. During the jabber, as Barney dresses, he tosses the sheets aside and tells Rosita to get his jacket. It’s a scene you wouldn’t have gotten in the Joe Breen days—we get flashes of flesh—and it distracts Madigan enough that Barney steals his gun, then uses it to steal Rocco’s, then makes his getaway. That’s the quote from the poster, but it actually comes from Rocco (“You bum, you were lookin’ at the broad!”), rather than, as implied, Fonda’s Russell. “Broad”doesn’t seem part of Russell’s vernacular. Or Fonda’s.

Much of the movie is the difference between Russell and Madigan. Russell is the super-straight arrow, while Madigan “lives a little on the arm,” as Charlie Kane puts it with a shrug and a smile, meaning he accepts freebies from local diners and nightclubs. We also see him threaten to upend an elderly secretary’s desk to get info. He does the job and takes the rewards, basically. Meanwhile, back in the day, when a local butcher gave free Xmas turkeys to the men in blue, just as thanks, everyone accepted except Russell. He sent his back. When Kane defends Madigan, calling him ”one of our best men,” Russell says the following in that great Henry Fonda drawl:

I’m not at all convinced that Madigan is one of our best men. I haven’t seen him in years and yet I somehow always have the feeling he’s out on the streets doing something I’d rather not know about.

But they have one thing in common: broads. The Commish, a widower, is sleeping with a married woman, Tricia Bentley (Clark), who is, unmentioned in the film, also much younger. How much younger? The actors have a near 40-year difference in ages: Fonda was born in 1905, Clark in 1943. The movies have always been a patriarchal game but that’s about as bad as I’ve seen.

Widmark’s Madigan, meanwhile, somehow wound up married to Julia, played by Inger Stevens, 20 years Widmark’s junior, and runner-up to Audrey Hepburn for Holly Golightly. We’re talking looker. And sure, Julia’s a pain—complaining about how bored she is and how he’s never home—but their relationship is a disconnect, like the Mona Lisa displayed in a greasy spoon. Wait, how did this end up here?

And he's got a mistress! Kinda sorta. He goes to a nightclub to drink on-the-house booze and hear Jonesy (Sheree North) sing. She’s the other girl. Even as he admits to her that he loves his wife. That makes him a stand-up guy, I guess.

To be honest, these relationships are the weakest part of the movie. They stop everything. Inger Stevens, lovely to look at, is in a particularly thankless role. 

The police procedural part isn’t bad. It’s mostly a matter of tracking down and shaking down Midget Castiglione (Michael Dunn, quite good), who directs them to Hughie (Don Stroud), who finally points them to Barney. There’s some reconciliation just before the fireworks when Russell tells Madigan to be careful: “Good detectives are hard to find.” So of course Madigan is killed, and of course Julia blames Russell, and of course the Police Commissioner takes it all with that Hank Fonda equanimity. We’ve already seen him forgive Charlie Kane, who only took the bribe to protect his son. So that's two of his three problems. As for the Harlem minister?

“I don’t know, Charlie. That’s Monday.”

And that’s our end. Not great, not bad.

Stevens, lovely to look at, in a thankless role. 

Wild, wild trek
The movie showed up on TV in 1969, got great ratings, and—despite the title character’s death—CBS convinced Widmark to reprise the role in a series of 90-minute movies-of-the-week during the fall-winter of 1972-73. He went unwillingly. He did six and convinced the network to film half of them in Europe: London, Lisbon, Naples. No one else came along for the ride. Design or happenstance? Sadly, three of the movie’s young principles were already dead: Inger Stevens in 1970, age 35 (suicide), Steve Ihnat in 1972, age 37 (heart attack), and Michael Dunn in 1973, age 38 (complications from dwarfism).

Other TV connections: Both Dunn and Matchinga had regular roles on “Wild, Wild West,” while Dunn, Ihnat and Stevens all had prominent one-off turns on “Star Trek” (“Plato’s Stepchildren,” “Whom Gods Destroy” and “By Any Other Name”). The film itself, particularly the background scenes at the 23rd Precinct, gives off whiffs of “Barney Miller.” Some guy is hauled in, saying, “What do I need a lawyer for? I did it,” and another complains to the desk sergeant, “I don’t know her name. She hit me with a shoe and left.” You get a sense of the crazy life of the city. 

For more on fedoras, please consult your George W.S. Trow.

Whiffs of “Barney Miller” at the 23rd Precinct.

Much of last year was spent sorting through the belongings of dead loved ones.

After our mother's stroke in 2016, my brother Chris moved into her 55-and-over condominium in Richfield, Minn. She died in 2019, he in 2023, and both had a bit of the pack-rat gene, so there was stuff to sort through. The toughest part, as anyone who has done it knows, is deciding what to keep (for family/friends), what to donate (mostly to GoodWill), what to throw away. Occasionally it wasn't awful. Occasionally it was, “Oh my god, I remember this!” But then you'd want to share that joy with the loved one who was no longer there. Whose thing it was.

The only time I felt a sense of triumph was with Chris's old copies of Metro Student News.

An alt-weekly published in the 1970s, Metro Student News was, as its title suggests, written and edited completely by high school and junior high students from the Twin Cities—Chris among them. Unlike most everyone else in the world, Chris kept his copies. He carried them through the decades and had a stack of them in a file cabinet in his bedroom closet, along with leftover stationary with the MSN letterhead. I was assuming these would wind up in the “throw away” pile, but one day in June I sat down and looked through them. There were cover stories on the growing apathy of the baby boom generation, interviews with Al Franken and Tom Davis—local comedians who had made the leap to writers and actors on “Saturday Night Live”—and interviews with Iranians forced to flee when Ayatollah Khomeni came to power. All of these stories felt historically and culturally relevant. They were snapshots of a long-gone era that took in the zeitgeist and wrote about it smartly. Surely they were of use to someone. 

A library would be the proper place for them, right? But which library? We had one near our childhood home, Washburn Library on 53rd and Lyndale, which Chris and I used to go to as kids. Maybe them? Then I remembered a friend recently worked for The Minnesota Historical Society, and she gave me a way to query them. I think it was through their website, and the first response was the generic one: Thank you for contacting... Our curators undertake a rigorous... We are not able to respond directly... So I wasn't holding my breath. Everyone thought their old thing was historically relevant, or unique, when it wasn't.

But not 12 hours later, I got an email from an actual person. They wanted them:

Thank you for reaching out with this thoughtful donation of your brother's collection of “Metro Student News,” and my condolences for your loss. Our Curator of Rare Books, Maps and Print Culture is very interested in taking a look at these to add them to our collection. 

More emails were exchanged, and eventually a day/time agreed upon to drop them off at the Society's St. Paul location. I arrived early on a Friday morning, and stood in the sun next to my car. The area was green and well-landscaped, with benches, and a few people coming and going. It was a quiet moment amid an unquiet month amid an unquiet year. Eventually my contact emerged from the building, I gave her the bag, she thanked me. I reminded her that the donation should be in the name of my brother, not me. She understood. Two weeks later, I found more copies of Metro Student News, twice as many, in fact, so I did it again, this time with a different rep. In August they sent me a copy of the “deed of gift,” along with a thank-you letter, mentioning that Chris's donation would be added to the Gale Family Library Collection. I was told it would take a while—a few years, maybe—but they would get added. The newspapers wound up where they needed to wind up. They had a home.

Iran in turmoil, 1979, donated during a year America was in turmoil.

And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea

-- Paul Simon, “American Tune,” 1973

That's not this, but it might as well be. The screenshot is from a 1921 short “Charlie on the Ocean,” detailing Charlie Chaplin's first trip back to Europe since his sudden, unprecedented stardom. People today don't quite understand this—I didn't when I was young—but fame wasn't quite a thing when the 20th century began. Royals were famous, presidents, poets, writers, etc., but on a small scale, and not on sight. Movies changed all that. And no one was bigger in the movies than Chaplin.

The sadness of this photo, the irony, is that 30 years later, the country that said “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” kicked out the little tramp who represented all of that. That's always been our problem—that reactionary impulse. It's worse than ever now. It may end us.

They keep selling this movie based on anatomy Anna May Wong doesn't bare in the film: breasts back then, legs today.

WARNING: SPOILERS 

If you love love triangles, this is your movie. We get three of them, a triangle of love triangles:

1. The opening act: The dance team of Mabel Greenfield and Victor Smiles (Gilda Gray and Cyril Ritchard) is the talk of the town, but he likes her while she leans toward nightclub owner Valentine Wilmot (Jameson Thomas). Eventually Vic acts an ass and gets the boot, so it’s just Mabel and Valentine.
2. The main event: Except Mabel w/o Vic isn’t drawing them, so Valentine hires scullery worker Shosho (Anna May Wong) to mesmerize the crowds with her dancing the way she’s mesmerized the dishwashers. She’s a hit, and increasingly Valentine leans away from Mabel toward her.
3. The crescendo: Except all this time, Shosho’s been with Jim (King Ho Chang), whom she increasingly treats as the help.

That’s why there’s a bit of a “Who shot J.R.?” vibe after Shosho is murdered. So many people could’ve done it. The only one we don’t suspect is Victor Smiles.

E.A. Dupont’s “Piccadilly” was a British International Pictures silent film released in June 1929, so it suffered from bad timing, since talkies were the rage. It was quickly re-released with a talking prologue, a score, and sound effects, but nah. It’s mostly known today for the star turn from Anna May Wong. She was a bit like Josephine Baker this way: She had to escape to Europe to become famous.

Yer know that’s not allowed
The opening credits are clever. On the titular street in London, double-decker buses roll by with the players:

If you’re wondering about Charles Laughton sandwiched between the two Chinese stars, this is only his fourth film and he’s barely in it. He plays a man eating voluminously in Valentine’s nightclub, prefiguring Terry Jones’ Mr. Creosote in “Meaning of Life,” whose loud complaints about a dirty plate turn attention away from Mabel’s dancing and toward him. And eventually toward Shosho.

I like how everyone passes the buck as Valentine investigates the dirty dish problem. “The restaurant is the restaurant,“ the restaurant manager tells him, ”and the kitchen is the kitchen.“ So he goes to the kitchen, where it becomes, “The kitchen is the kitchen, and the scullery is the scullery.” That’s where Valentine finds Shosho, dancing, and mesmerizing the dishwashers enough that dishes aren’t cleaned properly. She's canned. “Imagine,” he says to himself, “the whole place being upset by one little Chinese girl in the scullery.” Yes, imagine.

It's at this point he also fires Victor, Mabel dances solo, and the receipts fall off. So how can he get the crowd back again? We wait for the other shoe to drop. Shosho has even danced for him in his office upstairs, and he’s playing with a gift she left him, a small Buddha, when, finally, light bulb.

The job offer is filmed cleverly. In his office, Valentine is sketching Shosho, but the camera remains on her, and the intertitles are just her part of the dialogue:

• I don’t mind trying, sir, if you want me to.
• Oh no, sir. I’m sure I shouldn’t be frightened.
• I did dance once in public—in Limehouse. I live down there.
• They wouldn’t let me dance again, sir—there was trouble between two men—knives, policemen…

Limehouse is where she suggests he buy her costume, some silly Oriental headdress, for which Valentine is charged an arm and a leg. Is he getting took? To be honest, once we see her on stage, her dancing isn’t anything to write home about, just a lot of hand flutterings; but I guess it beats Mabel’s “drunken flapper,” and it’s a hit. To the consternation of Mabel and Jim. And the bigger she gets, the closer she gets to Valentine.

At one point, they go to a club together, where a white woman dances with a black man, and there’s a scene. “Yer know that’s not allowed in my place—dancing with a white girl!” he’s told. The woman is shamed, and Valentine and Shosho leave, suddenly realizing their predicament. (Which isn't quite the same, but onward.) She then invites him upstairs, where she presses close: “You are the first visitor to my new rooms.” He’s going to kiss her hand, she wants more, and … the camera cuts away. Because it’s kissing between different races? One assumes. Yer know that’s not allowed… We’re all part of the same hypocrisy, Senator.

Once he leaves, and once Mabel rushes in to beg Shosho to leave Valentine alone, we get some good catty dialogue:

Shosho: Oh, you want me to give you back what you couldn’t keep.
Mabel: I’m desperate! I love him. You don’t—and he doesn’t really love you. … He’s too old for you.
Shosho: He isn’t too old for me. ... But you’re too old for him.

Wow. At which point Mabel pulls a gun. At which point we get headlines about Shosho’s murder. But it’s Valentine who’s charged, since it was his gun.

During the trial, Jim takes the stand, and Valentine takes the stand, and he admits that it’s his gun. As he’s about to be sentenced, Mabel, veiled, makes an appearance and proclaims, “Not till you’ve heard me!” She admits she brought Valentine’s weapon to Shosho’s place. It was in her purse. And when she went to get a handkerchief, Shosho saw it, got a knife down from the wall, but she blanks on what happened next. She just remembers running down the street.

Asked if she forced her way into the apartment, she admits Jim let her in. That’s enough to turn everyone’s attention to Jim. “Where is the Chinese boy?” the Judge cries. “Either he or this witness is committing perjury!” Not really, but onward.

Anyway, yes, Jim is the murderer. They find him dying of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, lying beside his love, Shosho, in the mortuary.

The ending recalls the 1927 silent “Chicago.” Once acquitted, Valentine (and Mabel) cease mattering. Do we even see them on the courthouse steps? Instead, a guy buys a newspaper with the big inquest headline but turns to a back page and shouts, “I won a fiver on the three-thirty race!” His tossed cigarette is then picked up by a man with a sandwich board advertising the latest sensation, in case you haven't gotten the message yet:

“LIFE GOES ON”
To-night at 8:30
New show at THE SCALA

In a better world
It’s “All About Eve,” isn’t it, underlined, since our experience watching it mirrors the story. Eve may have trumped Margo in ”Eve" but Anne Baxter never trumped Bette Davis. I mean, good luck with that. But here, yes. Gilda Gray was a big deal in the 1920s, popularizing “the shimmy,” and starring in “Aloma of the South Seas” and “Devil Dancer,” among others. That’s why she’s top-billed. She’s the star. Until she isn’t.

Because Anna May Wong just pops. She’s believable and sexy in all of her character's iterations: from fun-time scullery gal to nightclub diva. With the former, you feel her boredom; with the latter, you feel her sensing her power. Some might worry she leans too close to a Dragon Lady caricature at the end, but it’s also just Catty 101. Mean girls know no race.

Gray’s real-life fall was swifter than Mabel’s. This was her second-to-last feature. Did she not translate to talkies? She was born Marianna Michalska in Krakow, Poland, so maybe it was the accent? Except her family moved to the states when she was young, so ... probably not? So maybe she aged out? By this point, she was mid-30s, old for a glamour queen, and maybe too associated with the 1920s, which didn’t sit right during the Great Depression. She did a short in 1931 (“He Was Her Man”) and in 1936 was seventh-billed in a Nelson Eddy-Jeannette MacDonaldl romance, and that was it. Throughout, she had financial problems, health problems, man problems. She died of a heart attack in LA in 1959 while visiting a friend.

Jameson Thomas is probably best known for playing the fortune hunter Claudette Colbert leaves at the altar for Clark Gable in “It Happened One Night,” but increasingly his billings slipped and his credits went uncredited. He died young, too, from TB in 1939, age 50.

King Ho Chang? His first and second-to-last film. He was a London restauranteur. But he’s good. In a better world, he would’ve made more movies. 

In a better world, so would Anna May Wong. Before this, she’d become a star in Weimar Germany (“Wasted Love” and “City Butterfly”), and afterwards she hit the London stage; but while her roles in Hollywood went from supporting to starring, they were of a type: “Daughter of the Dragon,” “Tiger Bay,” “Java Head,” “Limehouse Blues.” Each of them seems to ask: Do we trust her? Do we love her? Will she and this pasty white dude live happily ever after? She deserved better.

Joe: Seattle? Seattle's ... [trying to convince himself] ... good. I mean, I think Seattle's good. But man they've gotta find a way to score runs over there. 
Mike: That would help. Yeah. It would help if they had anyone who could hit on their team.

-- Joe Posnanski and Michael Schur on their annual 98.6%-accurate baseball preview episode of the Poscast. Always a delight and Mike's line made me laugh out loud. Even with that, though, even knowing what he knows, he let his underdog-love get away from him and went Mariners vs. Padres for the World Series with the M's winning it all. (I think that's the 1.4%.) Joe more smartly trotted out a rematch of '66, Dodgers vs. Orioles, which could be fun. The moneyed MVPs vs. the unmoneyed kids.

The episode was recorded at the end of March. It's a week later now, and how are the World Series-bound M's doing? Tied for 11th place in the league (out of 15), with the 13th-worst run differential. It's early, but ... it would help if we had anyone who could hit on the team.

Shoutout to the headline writers at The Toronto Star. This is brilliant. Or at least a breath of fresh air.

Not a good day today. Or yesterday. Or the last five days. Or year. Or century, really.

Not sure when I began to panic with how Trump's tariffs were roiling the stock market. Might've been when the Dow plunged and he went, “Yeah, that's right, that's what I'm doing!” First term, it felt like he viewed Dow Jones like it was TV ratings or something, a reflection on him, and now not so much. Made me feel like the ant in the ant and grasshopper fable, except at the end, when the ant has spent his lifetime working to provide for the winter, a BIG FUCKING DOOFUS comes along and smooshes everything.