West World (Season 3)

A gorgeous lady-robot is programmed to endure rape and butchery by guests at an Old West theme park.  (Her name "Dolores" is apt.)  After a few hundred iterations of this program, Dolores tires of her serial rape and murder and takes out her frustration on the humans who have come to the park to exploit her.  Along the way, it turns out that all (or at least) most of the other human staff at the Old West park are, unbeknownst to them, also sophisticated automatons.  This is essentially the plot of the first year of episodes of West World.  I have omitted about a dozen subplots too intricate to follow and essentially pointless.  My assessment of the show's first season was that it had promise but that the narrative was attenuated by meaningless digressions chiefly intended to spin a three-hour premise into a 13 hours series.  As she began killing sadistic, if hapless, guests at the park,  Dolores remarks:  "These violent delights have violent ends."

Season Two was awful.  No one could understand the plot.  The motivations of the characters were wholly inexplicable.  Everyone raced around the park killing everyone else, but since all the characters were robots, they were generally resurrected shortly after their demise merely to be killed again.  In my view, Season Two of West World was one of the worst TV shows ever aired, pretentious, sadistically violent, with a narrative constructed with chewing gum and duct tape, so sloppy as to be unwatchable.  I made my way through the series to its bitter, gory end and didn't understand half of what was happening -- I even slept through some of the interminable and pointless massacres.

Season Three starts with an unpromising first episode.  A low-level human (I think) criminal witnesses bad guys trying to once again slaughter Dolores.  The West World theme park premise has now been abandoned in favor of a glistening modern skyscraper world which may or may not be a Matrix-style simulation:  it looks too empty and vacuously flawless to be real.  A lot of conspiratorial whispering among the big muckety-mucks of the simulation industry suggested that the show was about to slide down the rabbit-hole that devoured season two.  But, in fact, the second episode was better and, even, fairly compelling -- the robots, it seemed, have planted a feisty automaton among the top executives of the company that runs the West World (and Nazi World and Raj World among how many other theme parks we don't know) franchise.  It's pretty clear that her agenda is to take revenge for all the misery inflicted upon the robots and coordinate the destruction of the firm with a big robot uprising, something the show has been promising for about 25 episodes and not really delivering. 

The third episode was even better and I hope it presages the trend for the show.  The fierce Dolores is badly wounded (although these robots can't really be destroyed -- a laser welder is just used to suture up their injuries).  The low-level crook, Caleb, has rescued the wounded Dolores and is whisking her to safety when a bunch of bad guys deputized to destroy the "skin-jobs" or replicants as they were called in Bladerunner, the real source for this film.  (The film's ostensible source, Michael Crichton's efficient and lurid novel made into a wonderful low-budget action film starring Yul Brynner as the rogue robot has been left far behind -- and not for the better. The Tv series is infinitely more ambitious and vastly more  pretentious but rarely provides the concentrated B-movie thrills in original material -- which was, also, one should note, the source for the first Terminator movie.) As is her wont, Dolores revives notwithstanding an awful abdominal wound, kills all the humans except her rescuer, Caleb.  Later, Dolores shows an uncanny knowledge of Caleb's miserable past -- his mother was a schizophrenic who simply abandoned him one afternoon in a diner downtown.  She and Caleb walk onto a huge pier more or less redolent of Chris Marker's famous short film Le Jetee.  Caleb wants to know why Dolores is recruiting him for her robot uprising.  She shows him Big Data's file:  he has a social status rating of 2.2, limited employment opportunities, and one of the notes says "Marriage not recommended; children forbidden."  "No one will invest in me," Caleb says sorrowfully.  "That's because they (Big Data) knows the outcome.  By not investing in you, they achieve that outcome."  But Caleb persists in the quixotic notion that he has free will and that he's the captain of his own destiny.  Dolores remarks that she and Caleb are alike:  she was programmed to have no free will.  Caleb says:  "I was born in a cage and they want to keep me in a cage."  And, so, Dolores the lady killer-robot, and Caleb, the working-class hero (in all of the senses of John Lennon's revolutionary song) agree to work together to bring down the tyrannical power of the owners of the sadistic amusement park and Big Dat which are one in the same.  (The big reveal at the end of Season Two was that the simulation-parks existed so that Big Data could perfect its collection of data on the consumer public -- the parks were, in effect, spying on the guests so that their most private predilections, as indulged in the parks, could be accessed, converted into data, and transformed into a means for absolute social control.)  This is pretty promising stuff and stirring enough -- I felt an icy chill down my spine as Dolores and Caleb made common cause -- and I hope that the show follows down this pathway and finally delivers the apocalyptic and cathartic robot- revolution promised from the outset with beleagured working stiffs (the working poor) and the robots joining together to destroy the elite managers, the Lords of Metropolis as it were.  Dolores, after all, is not so different from the femme fatale lady robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis who stirs up the workers in their subterranean Bauhaus dormitories to revolt against the technocrats who run the city.  This was thrilling material in Lang's movie and it promises to be thrilling in West World if the show can only steer clear of the Scylla and Charybdis imperiling the series: hopeless vapid pretension on the one hand and narrative confusion on the other.  

Letter to Three Wives

Initially, Joseph Mankiewicz's script exploring mid-century marriage was entitled a "A Letter to Five Wives" -- this would have been an epic film, the Hamlet of matrimonial misery, but, of course, the studio bosses vetoed the idea.  Mankiewicz streamlined the scenario to a letter to four wives, but, again, the producers thought this excessive and, so, the least interesting couple was surgically excised from the script, resulting in A Letter to Three Wives, the movie that Mankiewicz directed from his screenplay and that was released in 1949.  The picture is a good example of a post-War prestige film, made with well-known actors speaking intelligently scripted dialogue and propelled by a killer premise:  in a small suburban town, the local femme fatale has run off with someone's husband, rather sadistically posting the titular letter to three married women of her acquaintance so that each can spend the day on tenterhooks wondering if the erring husband is her own.  By this contrivance, which is unmotivated and makes no narrative sense, Mankiewicz sets up a series of flashbacks in which three marriages can be anatomized, rather in the nature of a "compare and contrast" essay in some infernal test on marital mores in 1948.  Lest the enterprise become too academic and abstract, the cruel home-wrecker's reticence about the identity of the man that she has misappropriated provides the film with a mildly interesting element of suspense -- the audience doesn't learn the identity of the erring husband until the last five minutes or so.  A Letter to Three Wives won several Oscars and it's certainly entertaining and witty.  It also embodies a number of ideas about marriage and the relationships between the sexes that may be worth considering, at least, by members of our rapidly greying cohort of baby-boomers whose parents, I think, lived (more or less) in accord with the norms portrayed in the film.  The dream of a rational, gracious suburban life with women happily serving as home-makers and men employed as breadwinners is the film's backdrop and the social assumption on which it is based -- although the picture also is honest enough to admit that the dream was never really viable even when shared by much of the population.  In effect, time has made the film its own harshest critic with respect to the once-conventional notions of marriage and male-female relations that it expresses.  Future generations, one supposes, may have trouble even watching a picture of this sort since the conventions that underlay the melodrama are so obsolete.  Or, perhaps, not.

The film is narrated by the ghostly Addie Ross, the woman who has absconded with one of three heroines' husbands.  We never see her although there are glimpses of men interacting with her at the edge of the social gatherings shown in the film.  Every available man in town seems to be smitten with her -- she offers to each a glimpse of the bliss that is missing in his own marriage.  (Although, the film's morale seems to be that this bliss is wholly illusory, as evanescent as the unseen narrator, who whispers aphorisms about the town and its people in the breathy voice that Marilyn Monroe was later to use in singing "Happy Birthday" to JFK.)  After an ingenious and satirical prologue, Addie vanishes (until she utters an envoi to the film in the ghostly last shot), and we are introduced to the three marriages under consideration.  Brad and Debra Bishop are both veterans of World War II.  Brad comes from a wealthy family and is so wholly bland and unctuous that he doesn't register at all in the film -- if he were to vanish, no one would miss him.  His wife is a girl from a humble background and she doesn't really fit into the rather insular suburb said to be "28 minutes" from the Big City (apparently New York) by commuter train.  Rita and George Phipps are less well-off than Brad and Debra, but still, by modern standards, princes of their domain with a spacious house and a servant.  (The picture reminds us that people in certain parts of the country were wonderfully prosperous after World War Two and that, even, middle class families lived in comfort unimaginable in our more straitened and unhappy time.)  Rita writes radio scripts to the dismay of her husband who is a High School teacher, although probably employed in a private Prep School.  Kirk Douglas is cast against type, playing a sort of milquetoast character interested in Shakespeare and Brahms.  Finally, Porter and Lora Mae are mismatched and unhappy.  Porter is a Babbitt, a small-town entrepreneur, about 20 years older than his wife, a former employee whom he has sexually harassed into making a marriage of convenience with him -- as is often true in relations between the sexes, Porter thought he was the aggressor in the relationship; but he was wrong.  Lora Mae comes from a very poor family, headed by a loud, hard-drinking widow with her two sluttish daughters, who live in a flat located right on a railroad line that trembles as if to collapse when trains go roaring by.  Lora Mae is beautiful, hard as nails, and she knows what she wants --that is, a life of  privilege and so she has schemed to seduce Porter into marrying her.  But the couple is unhappy.  Porter bullies the girl and she acts with disdain toward him.  Each of the three husbands is unaccountably absent on the day that the film documents.  The three women meet and take a ferry up the Hudson with about four-hundred boys and girls for some kind of picnic.  There's no telephone and so the three heroines can't call to check on their hubbies.  Just before they board the ferry, a messenger hands them Addie Ross' letter, declaring that she has stolen one of their husbands, but not naming the man.  The three women spend the day at the State Park on the Hudson in a state of suspense.  And sounds that they hear trigger for them, flashbacks as to the dynamics of their marriages.  Each woman is granted one extended flashback that is designed to lay bare the inner workings of her marriage and supply a motive, as it were, to her misgivings about whether her husband has been the one chosen by the fatal Addie.  It's schematic but, actually, very effective as a plot device.  Debra recalls a particularly embarrassing debut that she made at the town's Country Club. (The story is set on the "first Saturday of May" when the local Country Club has its annual prom.)  Rita remembers a disastrous supper party with her boss, the formidable Mrs. Manly, resulting in a terrible quarrel about her work outside the home -- she writes for the monstrous Mrs. Manly's radio show, really just a string of bromides to sell the advertising which is her true interest.  Lora Mae's memory chronicles her mercenary scheming to entrap the hapless Porter who has been married before and doesn't want to repeat the experience.  This part of the film is a virtual museum of devices used by women in that era to trap men into matrimony and it's both amusing and scary at the same time.  Thelma Ritter, who is always great, plays Rita and George's maid and cook -- she's admonished not to announce supper with her familiar "soup's on" but forgets and does so anyway.  Everyone consumes vast amounts of alcohol and a scene at the Country Club dance in which poor Debra gets staggering drunk is so well-designed that it made me feel a little tipsy watching it.

I'm a member of the generation raised in the shadow of the notions of marriage expressed by this film and I can attest that it's true enough.  Unlike a picture by Bergman or Cassavetes, the horrible aspects of marriage are expressed with wit and resignation -- there's no rage in the picture.  The conventions that the film exploits soured into rage twenty years later.  It's an estimable picture and very entertaining.  The best thing in the picture is a single shot showing a forlorn gazebo empty in the park where the picnic took place, a patient-looking and resigned worker sweeping up the debris on a porch overlooking the empty lot from which the buses loaded with kids (and the three wives) have just departed.

Desert Fury

Alleged to be the "gayest film every produced in mainstream Hollywood," Desert Fury (1948) is a baffling, ultimately ineffective movie that straddles genres -- it has something of the frenzied melodrama of a Sirk picture like Written on the Wind, overtly perverse and produced in gorgeous, flamboyant technicolor in a witch's brew of film noir (crime) and Western elements.  Robert Rossen wrote the script with the uncredited A. I. Bassarides, a noir specialist, and the dialogue is tense, aggressively adversarial, and rank with pulp-fiction exuberance.  In some ways, the picture is similar to Sam Fuller's Forty Guns (1957) with Barbara Stanwyck playing a cartoonishly dominant woman and Johnny Guitar (1954) Nick Ray's version of the same Black Widow theme -- in this case, with Joan Crawford playing the part of the devouring, imperious female.  The point that my readers should notice is that the bizarre content of Desert Fury precedes these films by several years --  and Sirk's great romantic melodramas were also produced after Desert Fury presumably baffled audiences.  In reality, the film is sui generis and, when it was made, it explored territory that no one had previously dared -- except, perhaps, some outlier pictures made in the Weimar Republic just before Hitler put an end to cinematic invention in Germany.

First, and foremost, Desert Fury is spectacularly beautiful -- the new blu-ray DVD does justice to the fantastic technicolor cinematography by the great Charles Lang.  An example from the outset of the film may be illustrative:  we see an Old West landscape with sandstone buttes and towering mesas with red and yellow cliffs.  But, instead of a cowboy, the film shows a car wending it's way through the desert.  In the car are two odd-looking men, dresssed in more or less identical suits that 'code' them as gangsters.  The shots in the car are stylized, relying heavily on unconvincing but completely luscious rear-projection.  (It took Hans-Jurgen Syberberg to educate us as to the exquisite and surreal beauty of rear-projection effects -- but once we have become attuned to that aesthetic (from films like Karl May and Ludwig: Requiem for a Virgin King) we return to films like Vertigo and Desert Fury with an eye trained to enjoy this effect which is purely and intrinsically cinematic.  The gangsters stop at a narrow single-lane bridge that leads to a village called Chuckawalla, a place marked by two huge smelter stacks, a bit like Anaconda, Montana, a mining town, although these towering chimneys don't really lead anywhere -- Chuckawalla's industry is gambling, the business that the dominatrix Fritzie  (Mary Astor) operates on Main Street, an enterprise that has corrupted the entire place.  (In the film's oneiric logic the two smelter towers has something to do with the twin phalluses -- phalloi? -- of the gangster Eddie and his boyfriend/henchman, Johnny.)  As the crooks are contemplating the dry arroyo under the bridge, a place where a fatal car crash occurred, a horn honks.  We have seen a maroon sedan with wood sides following the gangsters.  This is occupied by Paula Heller, the film's heroine played by the resplendent Lizabeth Scott.  From the crooks gazing into the ravine, the film cuts to a close-up of the heroine so flattered by the camera that the image almost knocks you down -- it's one of those transcendent glamour shots that are so fabulously beautiful that they push the film off-track, for a moment, into some zone of strange, erotic reverie.  The action seems to be set in the red- or slick-rock desert near Sedona and the landscapes are, also, fabulously beautiful -- too pretty to be true.

Desert Fury cloaks itself in beauty but the story is fairly squalid.  Paula is a rebel, 19 years old, and she has been kicked out of college.  The people in Chuckawalla disdain her because of her mother's business, the local casino.  Returning to town, Paula renews her romance with the town's assistant sheriff, Tom, played by Burt Lancaster.  When Paula's mother offers to pay Tom with a ranch that he covets if he will marry the rebellious girl, the cop, a washed-up rodeo star, takes umbrage and with Paula in tow confronts Fritzie (Paula's mother) with her offer.  This offends Paula and she commences a romance with the thug who has just come to town, Eddie (John Hodiak).  There's several problems with Paula's nascent romance with Eddie -- Eddie's henchman, Johnny,  (played by Wendell Corey in his first role) is in love with Eddie and living with him as his wife.  Johnny resents being displaced in Eddie's affections.  Paula and Fritzie fight and we learn that Fritzie had a love-affair years ago with Eddie.  (There's a kinky suggestion that Paula is, in fact, Eddie's daughter.)  Fritzie vetoes the relationship which causes Eddie and Paula to elope, driving toward Las Vegas to get married in that place.  Johnny is hitchhiking and he stops the vehicle in which Eddie and Paula are riding.  The couple, with the enraged and psychotically jealous Johnny stop at a road house in the middle of nowhere.  Johnny harangues the couple about his love and loyalty to Eddie which leads to a fight and Eddie gunning down his boyfriend.  Tom, the local cop, stops the lovers on the way to Las Vegas -- by this point, Paula has finally figured out what is obvious to all, namely that Eddie is, at least, bisexual if not actively homosexual and that he urged Johnny to murder his first wife, the woman who died in the arroyo when her car was forced off the road.  There's a nocturnal (day for night) car chase -- Eddie's vehicle plunges off the highway at the fatal bridge leading into Chuckawalla and he dies.  Tom and Paula walk into the dawn on the narrow bridge that presumably leads to some kind of marriage between them and an ostensibly happy ending.  All of this is performed with a maximum of histrionic acting -- lots of people get their face slapped in this picture.  (The number of face-slapping scenes inevitably reminds me of Guy Maddin's flamboyantly gay short film, Sissy Boy Slap Party.)  The film is noteworthy for the number of romantic triangles that it posits, all of them revolving around the universal object of desire, John Hodiak's Eddie -- an oddly lackluster and unattractive leading man:  his eyes are too closely placed and his hair is slicked back in an unappealing way and his head seems oddly shaped:  it's impossible to figure out why everyone is in love with him:  the guy is grumpy and churlish to boot.  Fritzie has loved Eddie and is competing with her daughter for his affections.  Tom loves Paula who loves Eddie (at least, thinks she loves Eddie).  Johnny loves Eddie who is taken from him by Paula.

Like many cult films, Desert Fury is more fun to discuss than to watch.  It's actually a fairly lugubrious and tedious vehicle, notwithstanding the gorgeous visuals and the snappy dialogue.  The DVD commentary on the film by Imogene Sara Smith    is better than the movie and, indeed, an excellent accompaniment to the picture.  But that commentary is uniquely weird also -- the speaker recorded her words, which she reads off sheets of paper that you can hear rustling, in a room right next to an elevated train.  Every five to eight minutes, you hear everything rumble and the apartment shakes with the sound of whatever it is that is passing;.  Nonetheless, the commentary is very good and Smith seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of both film noir and fifties melodrama.  Desert Fury is so far ahead of it's time that it doesn't seem to occupy any plausible era at all.  Either it's a bizarre failure or a remarkable and prophetic film.

 

Diary of a Lost Girl

The sheer perversity of G.W.Pabst's Diary of a Lost Girl (1929) is immediately obvious in the film's first ten minutes.  The picture begins abruptly, in media res with a sequence that is shot with such feral intensity that it seems that the reels of the film are out of order -- are we seeing the movies' climax?  A young woman is on her knees begging while a curiously vapid and indifferent woman, the family's housekeeper denounces her.  An elderly matron looks on with a dour expression of complicit horror -- she knows what is going on but is unable to act.  An older man shrinks from the scene of despair -- he also appears complicit and ashamed, both, that he has caused this catastrophe and that he is now powerless to intervene.  Around the margins of the stark, dismal-looking bourgeouis household, a tall leering figure lurches about -- he's shot like the Frankenstein monster.  And, as an apparition in this chaos, a beautiful young girl enters the scene, dressed like a bride wearing a floral crown -- this is Thymian, the heroine of the film played by Louise Brooks.  The girl gazes at the begging woman and the indifferent bystanders.  The big gorilla offers to tell her what is going on, but only if she will meet him in "the pharmacy" at 10:30 that night.  The virgin (this is her
Confirmation Day) casts a sidelong glance at the tall man that is suddenly replete with unconcealed lewd sensuality.  We don't know what has happened or who is sleeping with whom, but it's obvious that these tableaux demonstrate the outcome of some sort of monstrous sexual misdeed that is about to flower into other sexual catastrophes.  Without showing any skin, but merely on the basis of knowing glances, a network of shifting  furtive eye-lines, lascivious expressions, and grotesque posturing, the film exudes a sense of dank, morbid sexuality that is emetic rather than erotic.  Except for Thymian, the characters, without exception seem grossly unattractive.  Louise Brooks embodies the carnal impulse that drives the film and she's extravagantly beautiful, but there is something militant and alarming about her black helmet of bobbed hair and her glittering eyes and her strangely sculpted androgynous body.  Brooks is intensely desirable but frightening -- she embodies the lure of destructive, socially chaotic sexuality.  Everyone in the film is shown as a sexual being, motivated by lust and cruelty -- but only Brooks is desirable (and scary; everyone else is just scary).  What makes the film remarkable is its harsh objectivity that renders sexual desire as something grimly pathological combined with the weird, alarming allure of the heroine, the film's titular "lost girl" who, indeed, has a diary in which she records her erotic crimes.  We don't know what exactly is going on -- the film's frenetic velocity exceeds are ability to process information. The begging woman is next seen a corpse lying on the sidewalk, her expressionless face wet with the water that has drowned her.  The confirmand, Thymian, goes to her assignation in a sinister pharmacy that occupies the ground floor of the large home where the family lives.  Funereal-looking jars, like crematorium urns, line the shelves of the gloomy apothecary's shop.  The Frankenstein-like pharmacy attendant embraces the young girl and she seems to swoon.  In the next shot, we see the family gathered again, the ineffectual old woman's face once more registering resigned horror, the pater familias shrinking away from the confrontation between Thymian and the new housekeeper, Meta, who has blandly replaced the previous drowned governess both in her duties with respect to the young woman and in the master's bed -- it seems assumed as a matter of course that the housekeeper/governess' job includes sleeping with Dad.  There's a cradle in the center of the room and it takes us a few minutes to catch-up with the breakneck pace of the sordid things happening -- Thymian, it turns out, has just delivered a child, the result of her unfortunate liaison with the monstrous pharmacy clerk.  Meta doesn't want any competition in the household -- it's implied that if Thymian stays around, Dad will inevitably get around to having sex with her.  And, so, Thymian's baby is literally sold to a filthy-looking Hebamme (wet nurse) and Thymian herself gets peddled to a vicious dominatrix who runs a home for delinquent girls.  From this point, things get even nastier.  The dominatrix has, as a sidekick, another demented-looking giant, a huge bald thug who pushes the girl's around but seems pre-sexual -- at one point, he slathers red lipstick confiscated from one of the sluts in the reform school all over his full, lascivious lips.  The girls, who all seem to be either retarded or Lesbians or both, have to eat their gruel, a filthy-looking soup to the beat of a metronome -- everything in this home for unwed mothers is done to a militaristic beat, including punitive calisthenics that are led by the dominatrix beating a gong. The remarkable aspect of the film is that Pabst doesn't try to create any empathy with his victims -- everyone is corrupt and deserves what they get.  The girls in the military reform school are all vicious themselves -- a quick pan through the dormitory shows them smoking, drinking, settling down for some Sapphic group sex, or quarreling with one another.  The heroine stirs up a revolt in the home for unwed mothers and the girls like Bacchantes seize the dominatrix and the big bald goon and beat them in time to the gong that one of the girls has seized.  Thymian with a depraved inmate of the reform school flee the institution, ending up, of course, in a high-class brothel.   Here the madam is an immense fat woman who first seems pleasantly compassionate, but who turns out to be a monster of rapacity and exploitation in her own right.  She casts sidelong glances at Thymian, knowing that she'll be a gold mine for the whorehouse and immediately sets out to auction her off to the highest bidder.  A completely feckless nobleman named Osdorrf has now joined Thymian and her guide to the brothel, Ericka.  (Osdorrf is so useless he can't manage to milk a cow -- and Pabst is so perverse that he makes the milking scene into a sequence of utter sexual depravity.)  Thymian thrives as a prostitute.  At an exclusive night-club, she's raffled off to the highest bidder -- Dad is present as well as the monster from the pharmacy; both of them are a little nonplussed when they see Thymian dancing energetically with a huge fat man who looks like something out of the sketchbooks of George Grosz -- but they're not really surprised and don't do anything for her, but slink out of the place.  Meta, who is with them, smirks but she's protective -- she knows that without her imposing some limits on the boys they would be trying to buy Thymian's services as well.  Everything moves with tremendous velocity.  A title informs us that Dad has died.  Thymian goes to the reading of the Will (it's clear that she has some money coming to her from the Estate).  Meta is there with two ugly children (Thymian's half-sisters).  The lurching gorilla from the pharmacy has bought the house and is happily putting Meta out on the street along with her kids.  Thymian decides that she doesn't want her half-sisters to become whores like her and so she impulsively gives her share of the Estate to Meta's kids.  The oddly expressionless and gruesome Meta doesn't so much as thank Thymian for her generosity.  Back at the brothel, Osdorrf demonstrates his disappointment that Thymian, who's been supporting them all anyway with the proceeds of her tricks, hasn't brought home any cash by hurling himself out a window.  He is disconsolate that the plans he has devised for a bigger, better, and more luxurious brothel, can not be realized and, so, he commits suicide.  At his grave, Thymian encounters Count Osdorrf's respectable uncle, a Baron. He agrees to take care of Thymian -- what exactly this means is left ambiguous.  Osdorrf's withered sisters turn out to be benefactors of the repulsive house-of-horrors girl's reform school.  The freshly respectable Thymian attends a meeting of  the nasty female board of directors, insults the matron, and stalks out -- Osdorff humbly follows her remarking nonchalantly:  "If there were more love in the world, no one would be lost."  It's not clear what he means by "more love" since the film hasn't shown any love of any kind whatsoever -- even Thymian's relinquishment of her small fortune to her half-sisters is shown to be a quasi-reflexive and whimsical act of sheer impulse; there's no cognizable emotion behind it except caprice.  When Thymian's infant is sold to wet nurse, it's pretty clear that the baby has been handed-over to someone who's job is to kill the child.  Later, we see Thymian anxiously ascending the steps to the tenement where the sinister wet nurse lives.  She passes a wizened old dwarf hauling a tiny casket down the steps.  Thymian tells the expressionless Hebamme that she wants to see her child.  "Oh, he died," the wet nurse says shutting the door in her face.  Thymian goes down to the street, weeps two crystalline tears into the gutter, and, then, goes about plying her trade as a Berlin whore. 

Pabst is a great director.  Every shot is surprising and the way that the images are edited together is also extraordinary.  The film is brilliantly made, probably one of the greatest exemplars of the sordid Neue Sachlichkeit ("the new objectivity") that reigned in German films at the time.  The grotesque faces assembled for this film rival the work of Fellini -- some of the figures like the fat madam with her pearls, the pharmacy-clerk rapist, the bald man-child in the reform school,  once seen can't be unseen.  The film is so flamboyantly grim and cynical that it achieves a certain gutter poetry-- the picture is clearly an influence on Fassbinder and many of the scenes seem to be templates for sequences that Fassbinder later re-stages in contemporary costume.  (The strange, compromised ending is an imposition by the censors.  Pabst wanted to show Thymian using her legacy to found a particularly fine and elegant brothel, but couldn't get this approved -- nonetheless, he manages to make the relationship between Thymian and the much older Baron Osdorrf as squirm-inducing as possible.)  Of course, any film with Louise Brooks, the siren from rural Kansas, is worth seeing -- she manages to incorporate an inviolate sense of innocence with the utmost in carnal implication.  How she accomplishes this feat is almost impossible to determine.  Pabst worshiped Brooks and films her like a goddess and, of course, was obsessed with the actress.  To fend him off, she had a muscle-man boyfriend with her at all times on the set.  Pabst tried to make her jealous by bringing his current girlfriend to the studio as well -- this was a beautiful and athletic would-be movie star and dancer, Leni Riefenstahl. 

Three Comrades

Frank Borzage is little known today.  But he was an important and influential director during the late Silent period and made many estimable films in the thirties and forties.  According to David
Thomson, Borzage ended his career with an unbroken succession of films that were either bad or forgettable (the exception is his 1948 Moonrise) -- as a result, there was a bad odor around his name when he died:  audiences knew him as a studio hack.  In fact, memories are short:  Borzage won the first Academy Award ever bestowed for Best Picture for 1927's Seventh Heaven; he won another Academy Award a few years later for Bad Girl  (1931 Best Director). Another reason for Borzage's eclipse is that his most memorable films are all intense melodramas -- a genre once derided as "woman's pictures", and, generally, without honor among film critics (who have been mostly men -- and I include the formidable Pauline Kael in this assessment.)  Modern film criticism authorizes melodrama only when it is "ironic" -- as in Sirk and Fassbinder; Borzage plays melodrama straight and so may be an acquired taste for some viewers.

Three Comrades (1938) is adapted from a novel by the German writer Erich Maria Remarque (best known for Im Westen Nicht Neues -- All Quiet on the Western Front).  The film was written, in part, by F. Scott Fitzgerald and there is a distinct quality to the dialogue that seems characteristic of the American novelist -- the characters are all wonderfully gallant, cynical, and doomed and they express themselves in pithy aphorisms.  The film is excellent if, perhaps, too sad to be entertaining -- it's a three- or four-hankie weeper and I defy any one of my readers to watch this picture without getting a little moist at its climax.  The three comrades are hardened World War One veterans struggling to survive in Weimar Germany.  Gottfried (Robert Young) has somehow retained his idealism; he seems to be a socialist.  Erich (Robert Taylor) is an earnest everyman and the film's romantic lead.  Otto (Franchot Tone) is a crack mechanic:  at the outset of the film, he learns that his fighter plane, "Baby" ( it's marked with a tag showing a noble-looking Dachshund) is going to be disassembled on the morrow and, so, unable to bear the insult to the faithful machine, Otto throws a grenade in the cockpit and blows it up.  Later, Otto's prowess as a mechanic and driver, piloting his sedan (also called "Baby") is key to the film's plot.  The three war buddies open a garage and repair cars for a living.  All is not well in Germany -- we see glimpses of street violence and Gottfried is involved with some subversive left-wing elements who are battling right wing thugs.  Gottfried, in order to devote his time to the garage business, abandons his affiliation with the Leftist groups -- but it doesn't avail him in the end.  Otto declares that the trauma of war has left alive only Erich -- he and Gottfried are already dead, casualties of the conflagration. 

One day while racing along rural roads, Otto and the boys get into a road race with a fat, nasty industrialist, Herr Brewer.  Brewer is trounced.  He has riding with him a beautiful young woman, Patricia played by Maureen Sullavan.  Erich asks Patricia out on a date.  She's the heiress to a fortune lost in the war and the film suggests that she's Herr Brewer's kept woman.  In any event, Erich falls in love with her and they marry.  Patricia has been concealing from the three comrades that she suffers from tuberculosis.  On her honeymoon, the tuberculosis returns and she almost bleeds to death -- Otto has to drive "Baby" at 95 miles an hour to reach the seaside resort with a terrified doctor in tow.  The doctor tells Otto that Patricia must be hospitalized in  a sanitarium as soon as it is cold in October.  Although Patricia doesn't want to be separated from Otto, at last, she agrees to enter the Sanitarium in the Alps.  Things don't go well with her and a gruesome-sounding operation is scheduled -- something about grafting spinal bones into her decaying rib cage.  Back in the city, there's more fighting and an assassin guns down Gottfried.  Otto implacably seeks revenge and, finally, kills the assassin.  By this time, Patricia is dying.  Erich visits her in the sanitarium where she tries to be gay and nonchalant but knows that she is doomed.  Otto sells "Baby" to finance the operation which the audience suspects will not go well.  No one dares tell Patricia that Gottfried has been killed -- although she intuits his death.  After the surgery, Patricia is told that she can't move at all or the results will be fatal.  When Erich bids farewell to Otto, Patricia staggers out of bed, waves goodbye to them, and, then, falls down dead.  At her grave, Otto and Erich vow to go to South America -- the film features a running gag about Erich lying about adventures that he supposedly had in Rio and the Amazon.  We hear gunfire.  One of two men gravely announces:  "There's fighting in the city," the film's last scrap of dialogue.  We see the two walking away from the cemetery with ghostly versions of Patricia and Gottfried at their sides. 

The film is brilliantly, if obtrusively, written.  Patricia yearns for a life in a different era:  "One of reason and contentment."  Erich replies:  "This minute is enough."  The film exploits various leit motifs -- Erich's lying about South America becomes, by the film's end, a vision of heaven, a paradise in which the friends will be reunited.  Patricia has a silver evening gown that serves as an important symbol in several scenes, although it never loses its slinky physical allure as well.  Otto's relentless pursuit of Gottfried's smirking assassin has a nightmarish quality -- in the final shoot out that takes place in a squalid snow-covered alleyway, each shot knocks down little avalanches of snow.  There's an image of Patricia as she bleeds from the hemorrhage that is truly awful -- we see one supplicant eye while the rest of her face is covered in some kind of coarse burlap.  There are innumerable poignant or memorable details -- at their wedding, Guy Kibbe as Alfons, the avuncular host of a tavern that the characters frequent, orders a feast of pork chops, platters piled high with the meat.  Earlier, Alfons has boasted about a wonderful pig that he says "I killed myself".  Patricia praises him as a man "who really appreciates meat."  Everyone drinks all the time and half of the characters are always drunk.  A maimed war veteran in Alfons' tavern keeps the date by recalling battles in the war -- they are more important to him than birthdays.  When the dying Patricia hears the tick-tock of Erich's watch, she cries out and he flings the watch away in horror.  Borzage probably could have been a first-rate action director -- he stages the scenes of street violence with appalling authority and several of the road-race sequences involving "Baby" have hair-raising images..  In this kind of film, trick-shots have a sort of dream-like intensity -- during Erich and Patricia's honeymoon, they embrace on a beach.  Their hotel is painted on the lens as a matte-effect -- it appears an inaccessible Gothic redoubt on a promontory.  Of course, the inaccessible quality of this haven is the whole point -- they can see it but can't really get to it.  A movie like this is not to everyone's taste and there are aspects of the film that are overblown and, even, ridiculous -- but the film isn't afraid to jerk tears from its viewers and succeeds in this endeavor and, by and large, the acting and direction are beyond reproach.  There isn't a dull frame in the film.

Ride a Pink Horse

Set in Santa Fe (dubbed San Pablo in the movie), Ride a Pink Horse is unusual film noir, made in 1946 and directed by its star, Robert Montgomery.  Montgomery had earlier made The Lady in the Lake ( ), also a crime film and remarkable for being shot with a moving subjective camera (first person) in long takes.  Montgomery has some interesting ideas and Ride a Pink Horse is exemplary in one sense -- many film noir invoke war-time experiences as the basis for the nonchalant viciousness of leading characters:  these protagonists are hard-boiled because of the horror that they have endured.  The French first noticed this trait in post-war (and, even, war-time) American crime pictures -- so-called film gris before the tone darkened to noir.  Ride a Pink Horse renders explicit the connection between war-time trauma and post-war crime:  the protagonist, a nasty anti-hero named Lucky Gagin has come to Santa Fe to revenge a war buddy.  Gagin's friend discovered graft involving war profiteering and, apparently, seized as evidence a check written by the military-industrial magnate to a Senator.  The profiteer, Mr. Hugo, ordered the murder of Gagin's friend, a killing left unsolved by a Washington D. C. inquest and so Lucky has come West, riding a Greyhound Bus to San Pablo where the bad guy is holed-up.  Thus, the plot hinges on the unresolved legacy of the World War and the hero's quest for revenge.  Lucky Gagin is not the only guy on Mr. Hugo's tail -- an elderly FBI man, Retz, is also pursuing him.  Another aspect to the plot is the theme of legal versus illegal revenge -- Gagin, acting as a vigilante, plans to take justice into his own hands and, therefore, cheat the government of its rightful prey.

Montgomery plays Gagin, intially, as tough-as-nails, rude, casually racist, and brutal.   He has a nasty metallic cackle for a laugh.  Gagin insults the local women (who, nonetheless, have a hankering for him), calls a teenage girl who pursues him for enigmatic reasons "Sitting Bull" because she seems to be part Indian, and lovingly caresses his "soldier gun" as one of the Hispanic men in town calls it.  The teenage girl seems to be psychic -- she somehow senses what is going on, fears that Gagin will be murdered, and donates to him a little kachina god, a charm against death. (Gagin says his revolver is his "charm against death.")  The action is set during the great festival in Santa Fe and Gagin has no place to stay.  He cruises a cantina called Tres Violetas, and, after a tense initial stand-off, makes friends with a heavy-set Mexican named Pancho.  After the two men get drunk together and bond, Pancho takes the hero to his shack (it's just a lean-to with a cot) and Gagin spends the night.  In the middle of the night, "Sitting Bull", the wraith-like little girl, appears and demands that Pancho, who runs a children's carousel, give her a ride -- this is source of the film's title.  Along the way, Gagin has an encounter with Mr. Hugo, an occasion for fantastically witty and hard-boiled repartee (written by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) -- Gagin bitterly says that he was "getting a tan in New Guinea" while Hugo was making a fortune off the war; Mr. Hugo is unapologetic.   Hugo's squeeze, a dame with shoulder pads like a fullback, tries to seduce Gagin -- she invites him to "frisk" her but gets nowhere with the invitation.  Gagin is a man on a mission.  Later, Hugo's girl plots an alliance with Gagin -- the film's "MacGuffin", the check to the senator, is worth a million, she says, and she wants Gagin to be more aggressive in his negotiations with the boss.  With the fiesta in full spate, Gagin is lured by Hugo's moll into a dark alcove and there's a knife fight. Gagin kills his assailants but is badly wounded.  With Sitting Bull's help, he staggers away from the brightly lit and festive parade into the gloomy barrio where Poncho protects him from the thugs on his tail -- Poncho takes a beating while Gagin rides the carousel under a blanket hiding him in a carousel pew where the prophetess sits beside the wounded man.  This part of the film is genuinely nightmarish, a counterpoint between the indifferent joyous crowds and the dying man staggering around in gloomy alleyways.  Gagin becomes delirious and mistakes Sitting Bull for his war buddy from New Guinea, the man murdered by Hugo.  At the climax, Gagin who is hallucinating confronts Hugo and his thugs -- this being a highly literate film with script by Hecht and Lederer, the fireworks at the climax are mostly verbal:  Hugo delivers a tirade about the chumps like Gagin who do the right thing but end up losers anyhow.  The FBI man is present and gives a speech too and, then, Gagin, of course, surrenders the evidence (it's concealed in Sitting Bull's brassiere) to the G-man and the film ends.  In the last couple scenes, Gagin, somewhat repaired, has breakfast with the government cop who says that he "loves to eat with his hands"  -- he's tearing through a big stack of tortillas with huevos rancheros in the Tip Top Cafe.  Gagin goes to see Sitting Bull for the last time and, although the scene is set up for a romantic denouement,   the ending is better and more surprising -- Sitting Bull is too young for the badly damaged war veteran, Gagin, and she ends the film with a flourish of Spanish, re-telling the story of the strange gringo and his adventures to her friends.  Eddie Mueller, who presents the film on his TMC show Noir Alley, says that the ending changes the whole film -- we thought it was about Gagin, but the story turns  out to be about the girl and, in fact, is narrated in a language that most of us don't know.

The picture is well-shot -- a particularly noteworthy sequence-shot involves thugs beating up Pancho while the camera focuses on Sitting Bull hiding Gagin in a pew on the carousel; with each rotation, we see that things are getting worse and worse for Pancho.  But Pancho, of course, is a true friend, unlike the false friend of the dame with Hugo, and he's the film's resident philosopher -- a little of this goes a long way, but it's effective nonetheless:  Pancho (Thomas Gomez) knows that life is suffering and that it's only reliable pleasures are tequila and friendship.  Hugo is spectacularly malevolent -- but he's an odd villain as well, rather polite, articulate, and forced to use a hearing aid (when he talks on the phone he shoves the receiver against a little black box dangling from  his chest.)  The picture is exciting and well-written -- it's a little-known gem.  The movie's producer, a woman named Joan Harrison, worked with Hitchcock and the film has some of the Master's elan.  But the film seems to me to have been quite influential -- the mask-like enigmatic face of Sitting Bull as she prophecies seems to me to be the source of Marlene Dietrich's fortune-teller in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (also shot by Russell Metty -- the extended take in the opening scene in the San Pablo bus station is also echoed by the famous long-take at the beginning of Welles' thriller.)  The scenes of violence concealed within a festive crowd resonate with similar sequences in Hitchcock films (for instance the beginning of The Man who knew too much) and have been much imitated -- the climax of Brian de Palma's Blow-Out during the Independence Day festivities in Philadelphia, for instance, is an example of a sequence in which the danger faced by the heroine is contrasted with a parade, fireworks, and mobs of happy revelers.  Ride the Pink Horse is an interesting picture, surprising on all levels, and very effective as a thriller.

Moby Dick

Moby Dick (1930) is profoundly strange re-imagining of Melville's novel, adapted for the requirements of early sound-era Hollywood.  Curiously, the film shows no reverence for its source materials and ruthlessly changes plot elements, characters, and, indeed, much of the whole mood and texture of the original novel.  By contrast, John Huston's version starring Gregory Peck was a rigorous and faithful adaptation of the book -- the product, it seems, of a very different era.  Moby Dick wasn't well-known in the early part of this century and the book was regarded by many, including most critics, as a sort of sea-tale (on the order of Dana's Two Years Before the Mast) ruined by Melville's extravagant style.  The 1930 film feels minor on most levels -- it's not ambitious and doesn't take itself seriously:  the film seems cheaply made and doesn't aspire to art.  Rather, it's just a raunchy pre-code movie similar to the populsar Lon Chaney vehicles made around the same time that it resembles -- this version of Moby Dick is a rambunctious comedy mixed with some horror elements; it doesn't bear much resemblance to Melville's book.

Directed by Lloyd Bacon, the picture is generally shot as a silent film -- it has dialogue but the words are hard to hear, and, in fact, sometimes botched as delivered.  The movie is vehicle for John Barrymore who plays the showy part of Ahab.  Joan Bennett plays the romantic interest -- something that might puzzle you:  how can it be that you have forgotten about a love affair between Ahab and Father Mapple's comely daughter?  Well, of course, you haven't forgotten those chapters in the book -- they don't exist and the love affair is simply invented from the whole cloth.  This movie has no Ishmael -- Ahab is, more or less, the hero.  It's particularly baffling that the book has no white whale either -- although Moby Dick is said to be white, he appears jet black or, at least, grey in the scenes in which he is featured.  The picture is a sort of prequel to the action narrated by Ishmael in the novel.  A whaling vessel docks at New Bedford -- a simian fellow is doing monkey-bar athletics high atop the main-mast.   This turns out to be the leering and womanizing Ahab played by Barrymore.  Derek is Ahab's long-suffering and conventional brother -- he is romancing Father Mapple's daughter.  But the girl rejects his proposal of marriage in favor of her true love, the rounder and charming sea scoundrel, Ahab.  There's some amusing byplay with a cute Saint Bernard puppy and a romantic misunderstanding -- Ahab is not willing to steal his brother's fiancee and so he pretends not to like the beautiful young woman even though she is clearly enamored with him.  (This is a pre-code film and so there's a blowsy prostitute who tries to seduced Ahab; Ahab's arm is covered with obscene tattoos of nude women and, at one point, he slaps a fat girl on the rump making some kind of unseemly comment about "liking her blubber.")  After the preacher's daughter declares her love to Ahab, he agrees to marry her when he comes back from a three-year whaling voyage.  During this trip, Moby Dick gnaws off Ahab's leg.  We see some gory images of the mutilated leg and, then, there is a harrowing sequence in which a blacksmith cauterizes the stump with a red hot harpoon.  Ahab now feels that he has been maimed and can not marry his fiancee -- there's are some Lon Chaney-style scenes in which he tries to jam his bleeding stump into a prosthetic peg leg.  The film shows lots of suffering and has a subtext that Ahab's fiancee, probably like many young women after the First World War, will have to overcome her repugnance at her fiancee's mutilation in order to marry him.  Ahab is bitter and concludes that his fiancee has abandoned him -- he goes to sea again seeking vengeance on the white whale.  This time Ahab has staffed his ship with miscreants shanghaied from "dram shops and brothels" and the crew is, indeed, a motley group of cut throats -- including Ahab's loyal factotum and lieutenant, the heathen Queequeg played brilliantly by the famous African-American actor, Noble Johnson.  Unbeknownst to Ahab, the crew includes his disgruntled brother Derek who has become a drunk since losing his fiance to his brother.  There's a spectacular storm at sea with a pale water-spout spooking its way over the tumult of wind and wave -- Ahab gets into a brutal fight during the tempest with his brother and ends up breaking his back.  The next day, Moby Dick breaches and Ahab goes in pursuit of the whale, finally killing the beast in a gory scene.  Ahab comes back to New Bedford, his thirst for revenge slaked.  He can now marry Joan Bennett and all's well that ends well.  (The film inexplicably forgets about poor Derek, left with his back broken after the titanic affray with Ahab.)

The movie is only 71 minutes long.  The special effects involving the whale seem to involve a boat powered by a outboard motor concealed within the shell of a whale's head and fins.  There's a lot of unconvincing rear-projection.  The creature effects are limited because the whale is singularly unconvincing from all camera angles.  The horror movie aspects of the film are quite emphatic -- we see Ahab limping around, a miserable black shadow that looks a little like the vampire played by Lon Chaney in the lost film London after Midnight.  The film's pre-code elements are startling -- there's a scene with a hootchy-kootch dancer in Singapore that is inserted in the film just to show an exotic Chinese whore house and some skin.  Ahab himself sneers at the whores.  Joan Bennett is fantastically beautiful and appealing in her role, but it's underwritten and consists of her saying hello and, then, goodbye to Ahab on two occasions, ending with falling into a clinch with the embittered 

Ahab who has now been domesticated into a sort of house-husband, just a regular guy.  Before this ending, Ahab shakes hands with Queequeg and says he's a "damned good heathen."  The film is an interesting curiosity and worth seeing, perhaps, for some of its pre-Code bawdiness but there's not much to the movie.

Niall Ferguson's Networld

When the tidings are all bad and scary, its exhausting to watch the cable networks and, even,dispiriting to turn to the local news.  Better, it seems, to watch documentaries on public TV, preferably nature shows featuring appealing and winsome rodents, fierce predators, amusing monkeys and ferocious insects, all of these creatures dwelling within vast and wonderful landscapes adorned with coronets of snow-capped mountains, pearl-opalescent waterfalls, and misty cloud-forests full of jagged limestone gorges with caverns inclining downward to the secret lakes and seas in the hollow earth.  With coronavirus abroad, the works of man seem fragile, suspect, built on foundations readily swept away.  Who wants to contemplate sickness and death?

So, with a sense of relief, I sat down to watch Niall Ferguson's Networld, a three-program series on public TV, about networks and their effects on human history.  This subject would be, I thought, a welcome diversion from the accounts of plague and hysteria.  Unfortunately, Networld is both very interesting and depressing -- it's no refuge  from the viral storm.  To the contrary, the show is almost nightmarishly alarmist.  This program will inject worries into your psyche that you didn't  even know you should have -- so it's part of the current typhoon of bad news, not a serene message from another less potentially tragic world.

Niall Ferguson is a conservative historian.  He's front and center in this show as "presenter", the term used by the BBC for the hosts of this sort of program.  (Although Ferguson is from Scotland, he was naturalized as an American citizen in 2018.)  Ferguson is one of the neo-cons who supported the war in Iraq and, most notorious as an apologist for the late and great British empire.  He has been an unabashed admirer of the civilization of the West and, therefore, an enemy of the caliphate in all of its forms.  (He is married to the Dutch legislator and critic of the Islamic world, Ayaan Hirsi Ali)  Ferguson is a good-looking fellow with the demeanor of a successful politician and he's clearly intelligent and knowledgeable on the topic of "networks", a subject that he attacks from a mathematical/scientific standpoint that morphs into a business /sociological approach and, finally, ends in the mode of chronicling a "world war" -- that is, an international conflict -- arising from competing networks.  The form of the show apparently derives from Ferguson's book,The Square and the Tower.

The first hour of Networld is the best because it focuses on the mathematics of networks, an interesting subject that hasn't been previously considered in a documentary (or any other) format.  Ferguson uses as his exemplars two examples of networks prevalent in the latter part of the renaissance.  He begins with a glance at the Protestant Reformation which he attributes to the publishing network that arose in Europe during the generation after Gutenberg's invention of movable type.  According to Ferguson, networks disseminating the printed word promoted Luther's ideas and elevated the German monk into an international celebrity -- these same mechanics underlie the "Arab Spring".  But for every revolution that purports progress in human rights, there are counterrevolutions just as swiftly promulgated -- in this case, the Catholic counter-reformation and the rise of right-wing regimes in the Middle East.  And, not only good ideas are spread by networks.  Ferguson discusses the witch-hunting craze that arose parallel to the Protestant reformation, an example of a contagion of "fake news," as it were, infecting the web.  In developing these concepts, Ferguson tells us about homophily (the tendency of networks to develop into groups of closely affiliated like-minded members), the resilience of networks as structures that provide social structure without a rigid top-down hierarchy, and the idea of contagion -- that is, the uncontrolled spread of disinformation across communication webs.  In this context, Ferguson notes that gaudy memes, mostly lies, will always triumph over more sober (and truthful) assessments of the situation -- apparently, this can be mathematically demonstrated.  This part of the show is illustrated with shots of flamingos (birds of a feather that flock together), whirling clouds of data, nasty social network memes, images of European cities where Luther was active, counter-reformation and baroque churches and sculptures, and, even, a description of the famous topology riddle, Koenigsberg's "seven bridges problem" -- to remind us that networks are made of nodes and connecting links (bridges).  All of this is interesting, but the application to the spread of a deadly virus is also, more or less, evident, unmistakable, and disheartening.

Things get even darker in the two succeeding episodes.  The early internet was designed as a completely democratic system for dissemination of knowledge and opinions.  Therefore, how do we account for the fact that that internet has fostered a business system that accumulates all wealth and power in only three nodes in the West (Facebook, Google, and Amazon)?  Mark Zuckerberg's smirking and curiously bland (artificial and robotic) face illustrates the extraordinary concentration of power in these network giants.  Apparently, there is another mathematical truism at work here -- the so-called "Matthew effect" (from Matthew 25:29) -- for those who have much, much more will be given; for those who have little, all that they have will be taken.  The principle, ultimately, requires that all wealth be concentrated into only a very few hands.  And, Ferguson reminds us, that the tremendous wealth of Google, Zuckerberg, and Bezos comes at our expense -- these companies mine our data (shown as translucent streams pulsing up into the cloud); they profit even as they establish a surveillance State in which no one can have any real claim to privacy.  Here, Ferguson reads dire paragraphs from Orwell's 1984.  In this part of the film, other illustrations of network moguls are supplied by reference to the tycoons of the gilded age, particularly the railroad king, Jay Gould.   .

The last and most depressing episode relates to China.  Ferguson, who sees the world in terms of inevitable conflicts, posits a world war between the West and China, that is, a mighty clash of networlds (feuding networks).  As it happens, China is ahead of the West, although its development is a crazy-bizarro world of enterprises similar to those in Silicon Valley:  China's Ali Baba mirrors Amazon; Ten Cent is an internet platform like Google; and so on.  Again Ferguson reads from Orwell.  The most sinister and depressing aspect of this show is that the cheerful Chinese youth, prosperous and sleek, all are enthusiastic supporters of government surveillance.  In one chilling episode, Chinese twenty-somethings loudly express their support for phone-apps that tell them how many "deadbeats" -- that is, persons behind in payment of their debts are around them.  It seems that the Chinese all think its a good thing for the government to monitor everyone's purchases, travel, and opinions in order to serve the common good.  At one point, some noxious Chinese flack notes that America is governed by lawyers -- the Chinese have chosen to trust their fate to technocrats.  I had no idea that China is so repulsive -- although I sort of suspected there was something wrong with the place.  On the other hand, China produces 3.6 million engineers a year -- the US is lucky if it can eke out 200,000 annually.  The program ends on the merry note that Huawei, the "Chinese tech giant" as it is called, controls most of the technology infra-structure on earth.  The company employs an army of engineers, all better paid than their American counterparts, and better fed as well -- they have fifty restaurants on campus to choose from when it's time for a lunch break.  So Ferguson concludes the program by declaring a world war over network technology that the US has already lost.

The worst thing about this show is the sequence showing Chinese yuppies gloating about their phone apps persecuting those who don't pay their debts -- the app shows you the proximity of the dead beat, the person's identity complete with a picture (you would lose "social currency" by consorting with such a person) and, even, a  helpful summary of the amount of the debt owed and to whom.  The app is wonderfully popular.  I hope that this sequence was deceptively edited and that more Chinese "men on the street" expressed concern about the phone app and the government surveillance -- indeed, the very vice of such a repressive system is that people are afraid to speak out against such measures.  But the folks shown in the program seem so positively jolly about the phone app that the whole thing is literally terrifying -- it gave me nightmares. 

The Souvenir

When I was young, more than 40 years ago, the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder were gradually making their way to the United States and the campus of the University of Minnesota where I was studying.  I didn't like Fassbinder's films then -- they were staged in a style that was alien to me, the characters were off-putting, and the movies seemed tedious.  But I appreciated that there was some quality about these films that urged me to grit my teeth and see them -- and many sequences from those movies have remained with me all my life.  In the last twenty years, I have developed an appreciation for the "music" as it were in those movies and, now, not only admire but enjoy them.  Joanna Hogg's films have a similar effect on me -- I find them off-putting, weirdly rigorous in ways that are boring, full of coy inside jokes and allusions, and privileged to the point of being nauseating.  But I can also perceive that the movies are brilliant and, I hope, that it will not take me another 25 years to warm to them -- I don't have 25 years left.

The Souvenir (2019) is Hogg's most recent film and, when properly understood, it is a work of genius.  The movie interposes certain obstacles to being grasped adequately -- the lead character is a fantastically rich young woman with the unsettling ambitions of an attractive girl who has never been told that she can't have something, including, in this case, a spectacular Knightsbridge flat and a career as a "feature film" maker (she's all of twenty when she announces her desire to make "feature films).  Initially, the characters aren't appealing and, although they are distinctly upper-crust, they speak with largely impenetrable accents.  The film mostly elides all explanatory, narrative material and presents the story as a series of disconnected tableaux.  Tilda Swinton, who is an acquired  taste herself, is important in the film.  Furthermore, the movie is ambiguous as to whether the heroine's complicity in the heroin addiction of her boyfriend is intentional or merely naive.  (The casting is rather inexact also -- the heroine's lover is supposed to be much older than her, but Tom Burke, who plays the man, doesn't really seem materially older than Honor Swinton Byrne who has the role of the protagonist.  Certainly, no one in the film treats the swain as significantly older than the heroine.)  The movie is subtle in all respects and, probably, has to be seen once with the commentary turned-on.  You can't fully appreciate the picture unless you are British and with a certain social prestige or have the commentary to explain details that might otherwise be obscure.

Simply stated, the film's plot is negligible.  A young woman from an exceedingly wealthy family meets a rather mysterious older man at a party.  He courts her by sending extravagantly worded letters in the nihilistic, rather self-pitying style of Lord Byron.  The young woman falls into a love affair with him.  Gradually, she learns that the man, who says he's in the Foreign Service, is a heroin addict.  The young woman, who wants to make "feature films" in the austere style of the Italian neo-realists (black and white and with working class subjects) can't write the script -- needless to say, she knows nothing about her purported subject.  She attends film school, learns some things, and works on several student pictures.  The girl, Julie, travels to Venice with Anthony, her older lover.  He has somewhat exotic sexual tastes (he dresses her up in French underwear with an elaborate system of garters), listens to Bartok obsessively, and swans around their apartment wearing a frock coat that looks like something Goethe's Werther might affect.  Anthony attends rehab but can't kick the habit.  Julie throws him out of the apartment.  She has a love affair with another young man.  Anthony returns to her life only to overdose and die. Julie completes her film called "The Rehearsal" and, in the final scene, leaves the studio, an enormous and abandoned airport hangar, through a huge door that opens onto a lush, green landscape that we have seen several times before but never understood where it was located.  The sense is that she is both freed from her oppressive relationship with Anthony but that the landscape, shown while she reads aloud his letters, will always remain with her -- Anthony, like Auden's Freud, is less an influence than a climate and an entire world.  "The Souvenir" refers to a tiny painting by Fragonard in the Wallace Collection in London, an image that Anthony has sent to the heroine by post card, and that re-occurs in the film.  The picture ends with the promise that "The Souvenir Part II" will be forthcoming.   The film is obviously autobiographical in a very exact way.  The action takes place in the early 80's to the counterpoint of IRA bombings -- including the famous 1983 bombing of Harrod's in Knightsbridge. 

Hogg shoots the film in a bewildering mixture of formats -- there are still photographs showing the blue collar subject of the proposed "feature film", 8 mm footage that Hogg actually made at the time of the events shown in the movie, 16 mm color and black-and-white footage, 35 mm, and digital as well.  The story is developed obliquely, by hints and rumors.  Hogg is a great maker of images -- there are many astonishingly beautiful tableaux.  The audience must be patient and wait for the meaning of images to be revealed -- there is a striking image of Venice reflected in a canal (it looks like Monet) that isn't ever explained as a part of the plot but that prefigures the couple's trip to Venice and several swooning shots of a garment with an immense train that Julie wears when they attend the opera.  A remarkable image of a landscape with four clumps of trees under  a sky that occupies 9/10ths of the frame is not "placed" until the film's beautiful last image.  This image suggests Anthony's specious allure and is shown when the heroine reads in voice-over from her lover's letters.  Hogg very rarely moves the camera but when she does the effect is overwhelming and palpable -- in the penultimate scene, we see the heroine gravely directing her student film "The Rehearsal" in which an actress reads a funereal poem by Christina Rosetti:  the heroine's camera dollies in toward the actress on-screen while Hogg's camera slowly dollies forward toward Julie.  Julie, who is exquisitely lit, turns to the camera and impassively regards Hogg's lens.  The effect is hard to exactly describe, but, in context. the two aligned camera-movements, the dark room, the faces illumined against the darkness all create an overwhelming sense of grief, of mourning, and the images are like an elegy.  Tiny details are significant.  In an early scene, we see Anthony scribbling on a bill for an expensive lunch in a luxury hotel -- as he signs, the camera shows his hand and the bill in close-up.  We wonder why this detail is emphasized but, later, we are shown a similar scene in which Julie is signing a bill in an ultra-expensive restaurant - the point is that Julie is now hemorrhaging funds to the profligate and penniless heroin addict, Anthony.  The roles have become reversed.

Several thematic nodes are developed.  Julie is forever cadging money from her parents to make her films.  Anthony just assumes that he has the right to Julie's money and we see him borrowing cash from her, presumably to buy smack.  Directing movies is apparently a little like caring for a drug addict -- lots of cash is required as well as great attention to detail, endless patience, and, even, solicitude.  IRA bombings are also linked to Anthony's drug habit -- this creates a sense of impending doom that haunts the film.  Anthony is unpredictable -- so is the IRA. 

My initial response to the film was simplistic and wrongheaded -- but this response arises from a misunderstanding, or better put, ambiguity that is central to the movie.  Anthony is a pig.  He's unkind and condescending to Julie from the outset, sexually exploitative, and demanding -- Anthony is infinitely needy and Julie gives and gives to him without much in the way of recompense.  Although Anthony may have some kind of sly appeal to wealthy London debutantes (actually Hogg was from Tunsbridge Wells, a conservative suburb -- her father was as wealthy insurance executive), his appeal goes missing to American audiences.  The guy seems to be a malicious twit, pretentious and physically unattractive.  Burke has a scarred upper lip, a pugnacious jaw, and the features of bullfrog -- he's not anyone's idea of an appealing leading man and, to his credit, the actor makes no attempt to be even remotely likeable.  He's a pathetic bully when he's not whining for Julie's attention.  In one scene, in which he loots her apartment to find money for a fix (he makes it look like a home invasion), Burke looks bloated, half-dead.  Julie seems to not understand that the man is a heroin addict despite various traces and clues -- at one point, she even kisses needle-tracks on his arm without exactly knowing what the bruises mean.  The viewer comes to the immediate conclusion that Julie is too dumb to live -- her naivety is annoying; how is it that this intelligent young woman doesn't grasp that Anthony is a vicious addict who will do anything for a fix and who's entire modus operandi is to intimidate her into doing what he wants?  Either the film is a study in egregious stupidity or an account of obsessive amour fou.  In fact, on second viewing, the film emerges as the latter.  Julie probably knows that Anthony is a junkie at an early stage in the narrative (although this is never made clear); she's beautiful and talented and it's obvious that Anthony is abusive and, in fact, maliciously destroying her life.  (In the commentary, Joanna Hogg notes that she didn't really make friends in film school and ended up losing five years of her life to this destructive real-life relationship.)  Julie is too good for Anthony but she is somehow emotionally dependent upon him. The film is about something inexplicable -- a relationship founded upon obsession.  We see Julie attending a Narcotics Anonymous meeting -- of course, Anthony would never bother to attend such a group.  Whatever it is about Julie that will be nurtured into great art (and this when she is on the border of Old Age -- The Souvenir was made when Hogg was 62) is somehow implicit in her self-destructive relationship with Anthony.  And, in the sex scenes, understated but still powerful, we grasp that Hogg's intimate connection with Anthony has never been fully resolved -- she is still carrying a torch for him 35 years later.  I watched the film the wrong way on first viewing:  I intuitively disliked Julie for her privilege and pretentiousness and I thought the film was somehow satiric -- this young woman is too stupid to understand, despite all the evidence, that her boyfriend is a doomed junkie.  On second viewing, I came to grasp that the relationship is an example of "mad love" -- it's obsessive and doomed and flies in the face of reason and no one can understand it unless they are participants in this dance of death.  

Queen and Slim

A raw piece of agit-prop, afflicted by murky wishful thinking, Melina Matsoukas Queen and Slim (2019) demonstrates the power that even an ineptly made film can achieve on the basis of its historical moment.  You can't simply dismiss Queen and Slim although it's unsuccessful, naive, and sentimental -- the movie, which takes police shootings of African-Americans as its theme, has the courage of its convictions:  it doesn't make sense, seems implausible, and is formulaic in its plotting and imagery, yet the acting is engaged with the subject matter, and the crude filmmaking is sporadically engaging.

For some inexplicable reason, a successful female criminal defense lawyer goes on a date with a Black clerk who works at a Costco.  The two are mismatched and, later, one of them remarks that there wouldn't have been a "second date" if events hadn't ensued so catastrophically as shown by the picture.  The man (played by Daniel Kaluuya) is religious; he prays before eating.  He has selected a trashy cafe for their meal -- an inexplicable choice for a first date which he justifies as saying that the business is "black-owned."  The two are driving away from the cafe when the woman, tinkering with the man's cell-phone, causes him to get distracted and swerve erratically on the snowy streets of Cleveland.  A White cop pulls them over and bullies both of them in a vicious way.  A struggle ensues and the man ends up grabbing the cop's gun and shooting him in the head.  It's not really the fault of the Black man and woman -- the cop shot first, wounding the lawyer.  All of this is captured on the dash-board video in the squad car and, of course, to White viewers, it seems that the shooting is clearly defensible from the standpoint of self-defense -- the Black couple didn't do anything wrong.  I assume, however, that Black audiences would view the situation differently.  Although the man counsels that they wait for the police to come, the criminal defense lawyer, attuned to what she regards as the practical realities of the situation, urges them to flee.  And, so, the couple set off on their adventure, mismatched and suspicious at first, but, as the road movie, ensues, ultimately falling in love.  Hailed as the romantic Black "Bonnie and Clyde", the couple is embraced by all African-Americans that they meet as courageous freedom-fighters -- the cop killed in the affray has earlier gunned down an innocent Black man and been acquitted of those charges.  After a series of adventures, the couple are betrayed by dope-smoking Black Judas -- the authorities have offered a 250,000 bounty on each of their heads.  Just at the point where we expect the protagonists to escape by plane, the inevitable occurs as an army of White cops converge on the airstrip.  The movie is completely predictable down to the final showdown and there is a big sex scene that is wholly gratuitous but certainly erotically charged and picturesque.  The odd couple have exchanged roles -- now the cool lady lawyer is passionate and religious; the unassuming clerk from Costco has grown into his role as cop-killer and Black avenger.  After their death, the two are famed and tee-shirts showing their features proliferate throughout the ghetto and, at last, a big mural celebrating them is unveiled on the wall of a slum Baptist Church.   The script is crude, as if written by crayon, but parts of the film are undeniably effective and the genre formula of the doomed lovers pursued by squadrons of heartless cops but protected by the local folks is engaging whatever the qualms that one might have with some (many) of the details.  The story is sure-fire  --  Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise and Fritz Lang's They live by Night -- even if the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

The film indulges itself in racial stereotypes that should be overtly offensive, even though the film-maker seemingly identifies as African-American.  For instance, there's an awful caricature of a Black pimp with his stable of supplicant "foxy ho's" -- a sort of retrograde minstrel show characterization that White directors wouldn't even suggest, let along portray in living color.  The picture tries to hedge its bets -- there 'complication' and 'ambiguity' read as timidity.  A little boy inspired by the couple's exploits joins a Black Lives Matter rally,  tear gas is thrown around, and the child ends up shooting a Black cop -- this is supposed to balance out the message (Blue lives matter too.)  The coup de grace to the attractive lady fugitive is administered by a white female cop who gets hysterical and pulls the trigger too soon -- is this supposed to show that female cops are unreliable?  By far, the best part of the movie is the beginning 40 minutes -- there's a horror film atmosphere to the build-up to the first cop-killing.  The very real terror and confusion that the fugitives show at the outset is scary and compelling.  The first few vignettes, involving an aggressive fat Black man who salutes the cop-killers as heroes and a terrifying teenage C-store attendant, are the best things in the movie.  The couple bicker mercilessly and the camera is positioned to never show them in the same shot -- a dislocation from our expectations that is particularly effective given the characters' tight confinement in the car.  The messages take over in the second half and things grow increasingly implausible.  The fugitives stop to dance to the slow Blues at a juke joint in the deep South -- it's a pretty sequence but destructive to the film's narrative impetus.  Later, the fugitives pause to ride a horse (shades of the ending of John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle) and the big, spectacular sex scene intercut with the little Black kid killing the cop at the rally, is just dimwitted and tasteless.  A scene with Chloe Sevigny at at a sort of "underground railway station", a safe-house in Savannah, makes no sense and is complicated by a pointless sequence in which the lady lawyer jumps out of the back upper story of a house (for no good reason), dislocates her shoulder and, then, has to have the injury "snapped back in place" by the Costco clerk.  The ending is an exercise in sheer bathos and, although, impressive in a primitive way, won't stand any close analysis.  In summary, aspects of the film have the nasty, pulp edge of early Gregg Araki, but the picture loses its way after a strong beginning and the end is meretricious nonsense.  Nonetheless, the film's themes are engaging and topical and the movie's sheer earnestness is compelling, at least, at first.

Yesterday

Yesterday (2019) is a romantic comedy twisted around a promising premise that, unfortunately, has nothing to with the film's love story.  A handsome young man, apparently of Pakistani ethnicity, performs songs that he has composed as a street busker and at low energy, low profile festivals.  His career as a musician is going nowhere notwithstanding his enthusiasm and the assistance of a perky and beautiful school teacher who serves as his "manager" --as the film shows us, there's really nothing to manage.  The young musician is in love with the school teacher, although he's too self-centered to understand his emotions and the girl is too proud to force the issue.  Through an inexplicable chain of events, the young man becomes a famous pop star.  Fortune and glory tug him in different directions.  The course of true love, as is said, never runs true.  But after some trials and misunderstandings, the young man expresses his love for the girl, marries her, and lives happily ever after, relinquishing his fame in favor of his relationship with her.  (The film doesn't persuasively explain why the young man's fame is necessarily inconsistent with his love for the school teacher --this is simply a convention of a movie like this which we must accept on faith.)  The story isn't particularly compelling although the players are young, pretty, and convincingly ardent.  I have outlined the gist of the film in this nutshell.

But, of course, the film's hook --  it's gimmick, as it were -- is the manner in which the unprepossessing musician achieves fame.  This is the film's other premise which is fertile, but not effectively worked-out.  Through some kind of international and world-wide power outage, reality is subtly warped -- certain aspects of pop culture simply vanish without a trace.  The young musician is hit by a bus in the black-out, loses some teeth and has to be hospitalized.  When he is released from the hospital, his friends give him a new guitar to replace the one lost in the accident with the bus.  He tries out the guitar, playing the Beatles' song "Yesterday". Remarkably, no one knows the tune.  The black-out has erased the Beatles and all their songs from history.  Gradually, the musician discovers that he can reconstitute hits by the Beatles to win world-wide fame and fortune.  And, so, this is how he becomes an international pop sensation.  This situation (it's really not a narrative plot)is rife with potential, but the movie is too cautious and simple-minded to exploit the various aspects of this concept that present themselves.  Instead, the movie opts for the most uninteresting approach to the material -- everyone immediately recognizes that the Beatles' songs represent genius of the highest order and the hero becomes almost instantaneously famous.  But is this really plausible?  As I have argued elsewhere, success in music involves an enormous number of factors and, although Lennon and McCartney were undoubtedly geniuses of the highest order, there are a probably a thousand people with similar gifts languishing unknown today -- it takes luck, grit, exposure, and stage presence or charisma to create a pop sensation.  Therefore, it is certainly fascinating to consider that, perhaps, the Lennon - McCartney songs would have not succeeded without the boy-band success that the Beatles' initially garnered with their bubble-gum hits, weird but striking bangs, and their appeal to 13 year old girls.  Some great musicians remain unheard because they have no charisma, don't appeal to teenagers, and don't have any sort of physically distinguishing characteristics.  In fact, a large part of the Beatles' success was specifically cinematic -- the lads were put into movies by a film maker of genius himself, Richard Lester, and a large part of their success related to that successful (cinematic) marketing campaign.  Furthermore, the film's stance toward the popular arts is resolutely ahistorical.  Are we really sure that the Beatles' pastiches of British pub culture, their parodies of earlier songs and genres (for instance,"the Hollywood blues"), and, then, their development running concurrently with the expansion of psychedelics into youth culture would translate into this present moment in history?  The kids who are enamored with rap music are not likely, in my estimation, to admire something like "Ob la dee, Ob la dah" or reflective ballads like "In my Life"or "Long and winding road", songs that owe more to the crooner culture of Frank Sinatra than to Bo Diddley or Buddy Holly.  The Beatles' ouevre is now classic -- but it wasn't always classic; there was genuine perplexity about songs like "Revolution" and "Helter Skelter". The Beatles represent the crest of the post-War baby boomer influence on the popular arts and, although we think of their music as timeless, it isn't necessarily so -- their triumph looks obvious only in retrospect.  Accordingly, there's a biting satiric film lurking in the premise -- the idea that the success of the Beatles, in fact, might not necessarily be something that could be instantly replicated in this day and age.  And, in fact, the hero simply performs the songs like Lennon and McCartney -- it's as if the film has erased The Clash, the Sex Pistols, the later work of Bob Dylan and Neil Young as well as rap and hip-hop.  Wouldn't current  performances of Beatles' songs necessarily implicate influences occurring after their heyday?

There's a glimmer of a highly intelligent film on these subjects in the performances of SNL comic Katherine MacKinnon.  As a rapacious, steely agent, she dominates the latter half of the film and provides some relief from the picture's saccharine tendencies (which prevail in the end). MacKinnon looks like killer robot or some sort of bird of prey -- her eyes stab her victims.  She's the best thing in the movie, but a leading player in a much more interesting film that was never made. 

Yesterday contains some fine, nostalgic renditions of Beatles' songs and it's amusing.  There's a good scene when the hero visits  the elderly John Lennon, living in isolation in a picturesque home on the coast.  (There should be a moratorium on using isolated cottages on the sea-side as sets for reclusive geniuses -- every time I've seen the coast, it's all built up with condominiums and luxury hotels and no scenic cottages are anywhere in sight.)  The scene with the old Lennon, although sentimental, also belongs in a better, more interesting picture.  The movie stars Himesh Patel as the musician and was directed (colorlessly) by Danny Boyle.   

Blues in the Night

In some self-help book that I perused years ago, I read the startling comment that the most tragic of all destinies was to desire to become a professional musician.  Human ingenuity and determination is so powerful that many, many thousands of young people achieve virtuosity on the piano, or as singers, or playing instruments.  In every little town in the US, for instance, there is a local guitar hero, as accomplished as Stevie Ray Vaughn, a village virtuoso that you have never heard of and who will never achieve any sort of fame.  Only a tiny minority, the merest fraction of these immensely talented people, can earn a living by pursuing their dreams to be professional musicians.  Most will fail and, in fact, find their lives stunted by the very talent that they have so assiduously cultivated.  It's a melancholy truth that, for the vast majority of talented people, the 10,000 hours spent mastering an instrument or voice or dance would have been better devoted to studying accounting or carpentry.

This truth lies close to the heart of Anatol Litvak's strangely unsettling and purgatorial Blues in the Night (1941), an odd and disturbing musical.  The film begins with an indirection -- we see a young law student enthusiastically praising the jazz piano work of a dark-haired and dark-eyed man named Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf).  The law student, played by Elia Kazan, seems to be Jewish and repeatedly talks about his mother to whom he is ardently devoted (we never see her -- it's a tic of the sort that Hollywood thought showed "character" at the time this film was made).  At first, we think the law student who proposes to form a real jazz band with Jigger is the main character -- we suspect that as in The Jazz Singer, the subject will be the young clarinetist disappointing his parents to pursue a career in the tawdry world of pop music -- and, then, inevitably achieving fame.  But the film doesn't go in that direction.  Jigger and his boys get into a fight with a patron who wants them to play "champagne" music, the "bubbly stuff".   They end up in jail where the boys encounter another man, a huge guy, who is also a musician.  In those days, the world was segregated -- the Black prisoners in the hoosegow are across the hall and they sing the blues mournfully, the title tune "Blues in the Night."  The white musicians listen in awe and resolve that they will form a band, a "unit" with five members like a hand in a glove, to play Jazz.

Along the way, the band picks up an egotistical trumpet-player -- a self-proclaimed heel with a pretty blonde girlfriend named oddly "Character."  The band travels to New Orleans and listens to real Black musicians playing jazz in a juke-joint.  (The film expresses obliquely a real anxiety about the fact that the white protagonists are culturally appropriating -- to use today's terminology -- African-American art.)  The trumpeter boasts he can play as good as the Black musicians -- so, on a bet, he takes up his trumpet and, unable to share the stage with the Black performers, plays a duet with them from the audience.  (Again, the specter of strict segregation rears its ugly head -- at the time,apparently, it was forbidden to show White and Black musicians on the same stage.)  The band plays various gigs but makes almost no money.  They have to travel from place to place by hitching rides in box cars.  This is all depicted by astonishing montages that were apparently the work of Don Siegel, later to become the famous director of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dirty Harry.  A kindly railroad yard guard lets the kids stay in the box-car where they merrily play and sing -- Character is the band's girl singer.  A gangster hitches a ride in the same box-car and coldly robs the band of its tiny reserve of funds.  Later, the young people arrive in Hoboken, near the George Washington Bridge, where they are hired to play at a gambling joint called"The Jungle".  This dilapidated venue is operated by the gangster, Del, who true to form, has a sluttish, big-eyed babe as his moll.  This woman, the film's femme fatale, is a little like Marlene Dietrich's trashy chanteuse -- she has humiliated ex-lovers in her service who help her with putting on her stockings and act as her body-servants.  One of these disgraced men is a former rodeo star, now a cripple, named  Brad.  An actress unknown to me, Betty Field, plays this part and she exudes raw sexuality in a disturbingly charismatic manner -- you can understand how she has destroyed the men around her.  Kay, as this woman is called, is hopelessly in love with the brutish Del.  Poor Character, the band's girl singer, is pregnant with the trumpet-player's child.  She has trouble with the pregnancy and has to refrain from performing.  The band leader, Jigger Pine, falls in love with Kay who is simply using him to make the gangster, Del, jealous.  Kay is so wicked that she breaks up the "unit" of the band.  She seduces Jigger who leaves the band to pervert his talents with a popular Big Band in Manhattan -- this show-band features a girl-singer who babbles pig-Latin and baby-talk while tap-dancers cavort atop Jigger's piano.   Jigger can't tolerate his life as a sell-out and,.when Kay cruelly leaves him, he has a spectacular nervous breakdown.  (Siegel shows this with multiple superimpositions of Kay's demented sneer -- the woman multiplies to become hundreds of identical musicians and, then, she frantically tap-dances as a miniature devil doll on Jigger's hallucinated keyboard.) Jigger's band members save him, and Character nurses him back to health.  (He isn't told that Character's baby was still-born.)  Playing a gig at the gambling hell, "The Jungle", Jigger glimpses Kay stalking about in a wild lightning storm.  He goes to her and pleads to be her lover again.  As she is coldly dismissing him, Del appears, knocks her around, and, then, after a ferocious fight between Jigger and the gangster, Kay seizes the bad guy's dropped gun and shoots him to death.  Brad, the humiliated rodeo clown, has been lurking around the edges of this scene.  He drags Kay to a sedan and drives wildly into the storm, vowing to put an end to their misery.  The sedan crashes and there is a fiery explosion.  The band, restored as a "unit", leaves Hoboken.  In the final scene, a box-car is towed into a railcar switching yard late at night.  Music is heard and the kindly night watchman comes to the freight car and finds the band members playing and singing in their miserable lodgings.  He walks away and the film ends.

The picture is noteworthy because there is no happy ending, not even a vestige -- in a picture like this, the audience expects the band to achieve some modicum of fame and fortune.  But this is not the case in Blues in the Night -- in fact, the band achieves no success at all.  We last see them impoverished, still riding the rails, and unable to live except hand-to-mouth.  The sets are expressionistic murals, black tableaux that resemble the woodcuts of Frans Masereel -- the train-yard is a gloomy angular mass of shadows near a skeletal-looking grain elevator; Manhattan is an inaccessible range of lights beyond a huge shadowy bridge.  The film's acting is extremely broad and cartoonish -- the creator of The Simpson's, Matt Groening says that this is his favorite film.  But the playing is effective and brisk.  Major plot points, for instance, the death of Character's baby, are merely glanced at, the subject of a stray allusion.  I have called the film purgatorial because it suggests the hopelessness and unsustainability of the lives of these nomadic musicians and, yet, their dogged devotion to their impractical and impoverishing vocation.  The song-and-dance numbers are all very good and, even, thrilling in their different ways.  The desire to perform and create music is infectious and inspiring -- but it leads to playing miserable gambling parlors, sleeping in a barn, cold and hunger, and, at last, riding the rails to nowhere.

(As extras, the DVD contains two amazing short films devoted to African-American musicians, as if in recompense for the deficits in the feature.  One of them, "Jammin' the Blues" features Lester Young and company and it's really wonderful; the other shows a Black big band and is also astonishing.  There are some very fine Warner Brother's cartoons selected because they each briefly advert to "Blues in the Night", a song by Johnny Mercer that became a hit after this film.  The movie was released the week of Pearl Harbor and sank like a stone at the box office.)