Remembering

Somewhere

Both singers are dubbed and both are singularly limited as movie actors. (Yet who else could go from playing Tony in West Side Story (1961) to playing -- 30 years later -- Benjamin Horne[!] in Twin Peaks?) And yes Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer hated each other on set, since Wood wanted then-husband -- and future-murderer -- Robert Wagner as Tony. Plus the movie is not light and funny, nor a showcase for star performers in their best routines. Still. . .

Where did all this go? What happened to it? This quiet and warmth. This full-bodied belief in transcendence, heartbreak, longing. This sense of doom coming not from covens of corporate vampires creating a world frozen in dread, cynicism, and corruption; rather, a tragic forboding arising from the nature of things, as if one is never in so much danger as when happy and/or alive -- that is when the devils seem to have their day, and hawks steal something living from the gambol on the field. . .

West Side Story can now be seen, 60 years on, as a bleeding-heart opera of the Kennedy Years, filled with a faith in endless possibility and joy, undercut by distant drums -- a movie with a vanished New York City of movement, color, good humor, fellowship, and a loathing of pretension and power at the center of its tender heart.

Let it bleed.

Good Man

Happy 60th Birthday to one of 21st-century Hollywood's very few good guys. [In spite of his continuing support for the criminal organization known as the Democratic Party.]

In this nauseating MarvelComix movie era (going on 40 years now), to experience a classical liberal film is a bracing and uplifting experience. Works such as Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) were pretty much standard fair and what socially-sensitive filmgoers of the late-50s and early-60s would expect from Hollywood: Seven Days in May, Fail Safe, A Child is Waiting, Lilies of the Field, Anatomy of a Murder, Americanization of Emily, Manchurian Candidate, The Miracle Worker, Advise and Consent, Days of Wine and Roses -- but has been a genre so long ignored that it's heartbreaking to see it once more. People can, and should, treat each other decently -- that's the theme of the work. How revolutionary it now seems, when the face of U.S. power and culture appeals to the worst and assumes the very worst about humanity.

A chamber piece that believes its audience (probably a mistake) knows enough about the McCarthy Era to move right into the human element of the time, Good Night embodies the dream of good people working together doing good things; and it works so well because that's what director Clooney achieved on his set. All the actors are quiet, devoid of the usual ET narcissism, and one comes away aching for a group of co-workers doing serious things, treating each other with respect, and feeling safe about it all. (Another dream stolen from us by the corporate totalitarians.)

The picture has its flaws. Perhaps a brief prelude of what was going on in the early 1950s may have helped people jump into the human aspects more readily. (Stone did a great job of that with the Charlie Sheen-narrated prelude to JFK.) The subplot with the secretly-married Robert Downey, Jr (who's particularly good here, as usual) and Patricia Clarkson (who's not, as usual) should've been dumped. And replaced with much more background on the monstrous William Paley (Frank Langella). The director hints at where he could have gone, in the scene where Paley tells Ed Murrow: "I gave you that house of yours. I put your kids through school. I've given you everything you have." It is, of course, entirely the other way around. The Paleys of that world -- and especially in our own -- have what they have because of the blood of people like Murrow, Fred Friendly, Don Hollenbeck, and George Clooney. Paley's bellowing is exactly the way the vampire class always feels about itself. Which is why it must be destroyed. But now I'm arguing for a different kind of film. . .

A generous-hearted actor and director, what Clooney gives us remains special, with an opening as lovely as one of his aunt's songs.

Awakenings

Japan's first movie-kiss occurred on screens in late 1946, in Yasushi Sasaki's Twenty-Year-Old Youth (Hatachi no seishun). Post-surrender reforms imposed on Japan by Douglas MacArthur's "Supreme Commander of Allied Powers" (SCAP) were less economic and systemic in effect, than they were stylistic and emotional. Real power remained basically where it'd been before the Japanese military went insane. (An insanity ignited by the 1930s economic war waged on Japan by white Western forces.) SCAP instead went after the underpinnings of culture both popular and traditional, and blew them, after a period of time, apart: zaibatsu still ran the country; everything else changed. Most dramatically, the role of women. A gradual shift from a culture of tradition to one of youth. Dress. What was acceptable in fiction, journalism, and music. Popular dancing. Ideas of romance and marriage. And sex.

Not long after the release of Twenty-Year-Old Youth, Mikio Naruse became the first prestigious movie director to show the (attempted) physical act of love on screen, and it is a moment of terror. From the point-of-view of 2021 and a world of general human and cultural decomposition, the corporate devouring of myth and consequence ~ and Rin Sakuragi ~ Naruse's Spring Awakens (Haru no mezame) is very hard to believe. Did this world really exist? Watching the movie feels like touching the pre-historic. This isn't Imperial Rome or Renaissance France. My daughter's grandparents lived this world when they were Saya-chan's age. . .

Three pretty high school students genuinely (and believably) know nothing about sex, or how babies are born. (In a movie filled with many small miracles of gesture and nuance, this is the large one.) Two years after the destruction of the country, where is the Year Zero barbarism? (See Mizoguchi's Women of the Night.) Three boys are their friends: an artist, a writer, and a doctor's son. The boys and girls are surrounded by their own confusions: the maid in Kumiko's household must be dismissed for having a black-marketeer boyfriend; Koji's adored older sister is getting married; a "dirty picture" is found in one schoolgirl's desk, causing the ransacking of all the girls' desks. And Akiko must leave school because of a pregnancy, a pregnancy we are are led to believe will soon be terminated.

The boys and girls (and we) are also faced with intense and continuing sensuality: the explosion of spring and summer, as if nature is holding the small town as one holds a bee between the palms of the hands, when it is benumbed; Kyoko and Kumiko lying close together on the hillgrass, one girl in kimono, the other in western clothes; Kumiko thinking about where babies come from and Naruse fading on her upturned swinging bare feet; the physical at the girls' school; the boys-and-girls Sunday picnic; Hanae and Kyoko hiking up their skirts -- again one girl in kimomo, the other not -- in the river as they play with a family of ducks and as they try to avoid rocks playfully tossed at them by the boys.

The scene where Noshiro (the artist) forcefully kisses Kumiko, because it came from such a famous director, instantly became legend. Yet the following sequence, during a lightning-and-thunder storm, is the film's greatest. Kyoko and her friend Hanae's older brother are in love. She is terrified of thunder, the sound of falling bombs. Has any other movie sequence better captured a young girl's sexual torment and longing? What would've happened if Hanae had not returned home? And Hanae -- who also loves Koji, who only has eyes for Kumiko -- senses what she may have interrupted. . .

Yet the sadness of the film. (The relationships between Kumiko and her little sister, and Koji and his older sister, are especially moving.) My favorite moment: Kumiko and the doctor's son have loved each other since childhood. At one point Koji's soon-to-be-married sister gives him a memory album for him to keep. One photo is of herself, and Kumiko and Koji as children.

Later, on the morning of the sister's wedding, Koji and Kumiko walk together, discussing nothing in particular, and at the end of their walk, as both feel the other's growing attachment, Koji kicks a stone ahead. Watch the cut.

Another spring, another wedding, two years later. Another shot embodying the love for a girl-as-she-was, this time from a father about to lose her.

The same deep sadness from Ozu and Naruse (and many other places), as if the pain of what has happened and what was happening to Japan was too overwhelming to be numbed by even the most beautiful and most human of dreams.

Naruse's Spring Awakens (1947).

Twain

The 111th anniversary of the passing of America's greatest writer.

There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive's new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land. . .

True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us; we have stamped out a just and intelligent and well-ordered republic; we have stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of a guest; we have bought a Shadow from an enemy that hadn't it to sell; we have robbed a trusting friend of his land and his liberty; we have invited clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit's work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America's honor and blackened her face before the world. . .

And as for a flag for our newly conquered land, it is easily managed. We can have a special one--our States do it: we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.

Can You

"Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" wonder Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Bob Bates, and Joe Dodge.

Conspiracy and Class Power

Dr. Michael Parenti from 30 years back.

Fresh as a daisy. . .

Mondo Coco

Here the sexiest cartoon character around talks to squirrels, becomes a tutor, an inspirational speaker and author, a reggae singer, an airplane pilot, a supermodel, a Japanese TV celebrity who becomes Prime Minister, and falls in love with a yeti in a mad episode of Foster's Home for Imaginary Characters, April 2008.

Resnais

The word "great" is thrown around in the world of movie directors the way condescending smirks are thrown around among a Cohn Bros© movie audience. One of those who was truly great was Alain Resnais. David Walsh with a brilliant and complex appreciation.

One of Resnais's many short masterpieces, Guernica (1950).

Resnais II

His stunning short on the birth of French plastics, Song of Styrene (1958).

Ethel Waters

And Vincente Minnelli in his first direction. . .

The Anchor

 The beautiful Maria Zakharova tells us what's what.

 

Near Dark

But first the light. The Kennedys at their Virginia country home, 11 days before Dallas.

No sound, plenty of heartbreak.

Capitalism is Your Friend

Not so, says Abe Polonsky, who was immediately blackisted after creating this 1948 masterpiece. As was the great John Garfield, who died soon after. . .

 

The Market always knows what's good for you.

Hell without End, Amen

Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, in a way Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and that government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. He tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want spirit, we want likability, we want a return to the sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.
-- Barry Obama

We know better.

America's Big Dark descended (and continues to deepen) on November 4th, 1980 -- the night Reagan was elected President. It was the beginning of everything that WASP devil brought to the "spirit" of the country, as one-by-one the lights went out: the demonizing of all things communal, subtle, kind, and modest; the hatred of one’s own government, local, state, or national; the solidifying of the malignancy known as American Exceptionalism; the collapse of Hollywood and the takeover of genuine anti-Hollywood independents (do we need even ten fingers to count the number of great American movies since the early 80s? Five fingers?); the destruction of unions; the destruction of anti-trust laws, financial regulations, and the Fairness Doctrine; the transformation of “Christianity” into a theology of corporatism, violence, and privatization; the destruction of Liberation Theology (his time begins with the assassination of Archbishop Romero and ends with the massacre of the Salvadoran Jesuits); the worship of the psychopathically ambitious over the human. He oversaw an Administration of sex haters, race haters, Christ-Firsters, America-Firsters, Israel-Firsters, oil junkies, S.S.-worshipers, mob guys, fascist intelligence agents, military dictators, tweed-covered garbage such as Bill Casey and George H.W. Bush, death-squad commanders, right-wing publishers and editors, drug executioners, psychopathic politicians, Birchers and Goldwaterites. Mister Conservative opened the floods for the wounding and murder of the local, the varied, the traditional, the patient, the folk, the truly mythic – for all that cannot be commodified. He turned the mythic into the Mythomaniacal, style into Styling, the rooted into MadAve-stroked envy. He was the set-designer for the workplace and schoolplace massacre. (The best book ever written on Reaganism is Mark Ames's Going Postal.) After 40 years of moral vomit, we have yet to turn away. Far from it. We celebrate him. So in our Obama-ian/Trumpian/BiteMe culture, this incubus haunts us more than ever. Every busted highway and closed library: Reagan. Every crappy little product we take home and swear at: Reagan. Every over-crowded classroom: Reagan. Every price we can't find as we move through the grocery store aisles: Reagan. Every second of air-time spent on meaningless celebrity. The suffocations and anxieties of the office. The humiliations felt by all who must face every day the sniffers capable of judging only by externals and bizniz cards. The somnolence and passivity in the face of endless war. The narcissism which has narrowed US politics to the range of A to B, FoxNews to MSNBC, DailyKos to the Drudge Report. And the lies. The endless lies!

Reagan walks through The Killers (1964), his last movie, with a look of little but lemon-sucking petulance on his face. Even without having to confront Lee Marvin, it is a face Reagan would often make throughout the 1980s, for he was a monster of sexual sterility. Far more than Nixon (within whom one can feel a deep sexual and emotional longing, unmet), Reagan was the political equivalent of a sex doll without organs, the sire of our current corporate environment where there’s about a 1% difference between the sexes. Reagan, the first Metrosexual. Not even that. He was the Anti-Man. Take responsibility for nothing. When caught, exposed or challenged: lie and forget. Never admit a mistake. Never show regret or remorse. Demonize all who disagree with you or get in your way. Demonize your own past, if it suits the needs of your endless present. He was the ultimate confabulator. The huckster who made his political bones by dumping on imaginary welfare cheats and “professional victims” is the one who made permanent a national belief in victimization: we do nothing to others – it’s all done to us.

While he roasts for eternity over on open Hades fire, Reagan continues to choke us every day. So on the 110th Anniversary of his spawning, let us celebrate him for what in fact he is: The Father of the Great American Shitpile.

Lee Marvin for President.

I Heard Voices. . .

"There's something sinister about film. In film we remember events as if they had taken place and we were there. But we were not." -- Norman Mailer

Can any currently working Western director even approach this moment?

Not a chance.

Terence Davies is the greatest British filmmaker we've had, not named Hitchcock. Beginning in '76, his output is spare: three shorts, five features, and a documentary. (Almost paralleling the greatest living U.S. director, Charles Burnett, also since the 70s: six shorts, six features, two docs. The Coen Boys and Ronnie Howard? 52 features combined since '84. )

Has any other director ever shown such awe and respect before the magic and transfigurations of popular culture -- popular culture at its most earnest, passionate, beautiful, sweet, and simple? Such love of particular place and time, misshapen faces and bodies, of the individual voice?

His first feature is a masterpiece of memory, a ribbon of immanent moments, before which the director's cranes, tracks and tableaus genuflect: Davies's Liverpool family of the 1940s and 50s.
 
We'll never see the likes of this again.

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)

Time

20 years after Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), director Terence Davies revisited his beloved Liverpool, in documentary form.

Back to the Future

The great Henry Wallace predicts America's corporate fascist future ~ April 1944:

·  On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:

1. What is a fascist?
2. How many fascists have we?
3. How dangerous are they?

·  A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

·  The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

·  The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

·  If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

·  American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.

·  The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America. The effect of the war has been to raise the cost of living in most Latin American countries much faster than the wages of labor. The fascists in most Latin American countries tell the people that the reason their wages will not buy as much in the way of goods is because of Yankee imperialism. The fascists in Latin America learn to speak and act like natives. Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States. Following this war, technology will have reached such a point that it will be possible for Germans, using South America as a base, to cause us much more difficulty in World War III than they did in World War II. The military and landowning cliques in many South American countries will find it attractive financially to work with German fascist concerns as well as expedient from the standpoint of temporary power politics.

·  Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.

·  Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after "the present unpleasantness" ceases:

·  The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups. Likewise, many people whose patriotism is their proudest boast play Hitler's game by retailing distrust of our Allies and by giving currency to snide suspicions without foundation in fact.

·  The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism. They cultivate hate and distrust of both Britain and Russia. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

·  Several leaders of industry in this country who have gained a new vision of the meaning of opportunity through co-operation with government have warned the public openly that there are some selfish groups in industry who are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. We all know the part that the cartels played in bringing Hitler to power, and the rule the giant German trusts have played in Nazi conquests. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.

·  It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. It was Mussolini's vaunted claim that he "made the trains run on time." In the end, however, he brought to the Italian people impoverishment and defeat. It was Hitler's claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany. Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.

·  Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to "make the trains run on time." It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outran our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.

·  The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan. Democracy can win the peace only if it does two things:

1. Speeds up the rate of political and economic inventions so that both production and, especially, distribution can match in their power and practical effect on the daily life of the common man the immense and growing volume of scientific research, mechanical invention and management technique.
2. Vivifies with the greatest intensity the spiritual processes which are both the foundation and the very essence of democracy.

·  The moral and spiritual aspects of both personal and international relationships have a practical bearing which so-called practical men deny. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.

·  Fascism in the postwar inevitably will push steadily for Anglo-Saxon imperialism and eventually for war with Russia. Already American fascists are talking and writing about this conflict and using it as an excuse for their internal hatreds and intolerances toward certain races, creeds and classes.

·  It should also be evident that exhibitions of the native brand of fascism are not confined to any single section, class or religion. Happily, it can be said that as yet fascism has not captured a predominant place in the outlook of any American section, class or religion. It may be encountered in Wall Street, Main Street or Tobacco Road. Some even suspect that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac. It is an infectious disease, and we must all be on our guard against intolerance, bigotry and the pretension of invidious distinction. But if we put our trust in the common sense of common men and "with malice toward none and charity for all" go forward on the great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail.

Word

Sixty years ago ~ 22° with a wind of 20 mph, making it feel like 5°.

The ice was broken.