I Like CASABLANCA…but…

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I like the film CASABLANCA.

No, I really like CASABLANCA.

The moment I see that map opening of the film, I stop blinking (except to dismiss the tears) until Rick and Inspector Renaud walk away from the camera into the fog.

Less happily, the moment I see a map opening of any film (Indiana Jones, Mister Moto, Marlin Perkins…), I expect to not blink until Rick and Inspector Renaud walk away from the camera into the fog.

Some days, if I’m asked to name a favorite movie, I will unhesitantly answer; CASABLANCA.

But how many times can you watch it until you have it memorized and inevitably clear every room by singing “As Time Goes By” and “La Marseillaise” with an execrable Vichy accent?

You eventually start longing for more.

Yes…

…more like CASABLANCA.

Thank goodness, they’re out there; films that are liberally flavored with spies, bazaars, boozey night-club piano-players, men in fezzes (who don’t ride miniature motorcycles), crooked police authorities, bumbling Nazis, and beautiful women with a back story that involves Paris. The movie may set in the Casbah, Greece, Portugal, Tangiers, or Martinique, but the beautiful women “always have Paris.” Films like PEPE LE MOKO (1937), THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS (1944), and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944) can assuage the longing to visit Rick’s Café Americaine for a couple of hours.

I’ve recently added two more flicks to this list.

THE GOLDEN SALAMANDER (1950) is set in Portugal and stars Trevor Howard. Mr. Howard’s fine, but others in the cast are more interesting to me. This is one of the first films of Anouk Aimée. She’s 18 years old, and while she’s not yet the luminous beauty she later became, you watch nothing but her when she’s on the screen.

Walter Rilla menaces convincingly, dripping with corruption and lethality. This is not a man I would wish wanted to hurt me or help me…just leave me alone, please.

Wilfrid Hyde-White plays the Hoagy Carmichael/Dooley Wilson piano-player with a soupçon of Walter Brennan. It’s a remarkable departure from the gentle aristocratic characters in which we are accustomed to see him. This ain’t MY FAIR LADY.

One villager rationalizes his lack of protest against the clear evil of local authorities;

“The world has more evil than a dog fleas. We were given eyes, but for our comfort, the wisdom of knowing when to shut them.”

Admirable?

No.

Redolent of segments of today’s American conundrums?

Most certainly.

CANDLELIGHT IN ALGERIA (1943) stars a young James Mason and, again, a wickedly driven Walter Rilla.

But a delightful moment is spun by Pamela Stirling as the tragic Yvette;

“Madame, in love, you can fool a man, you can fool yourself, but you cannot fool another woman.”

In 1943, WWII was still quite in doubt. This closing moment in the film must have been stirring, if troubling;

“I know when I light this candle, I light a flame that will drive the enemy out of Africa, a flame that will be carried across the waters and across the heart of Europe to the very heart of Berlin.”

Feel free to light that candle…and grab a tissue.

Howlin’ at the Moon

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Movie night!

I’m sneakin’ out tonight with my lunatic pup (Chloe) to gaze at the promised micro blue moon. We may howl. We may discuss the opening chapter of Neil Stephenson’s fascinating book; SEVENEVES. It’s my favorite of Stephenson’s novels, but Chloe quibbles with the last third of the piece. She has a fair point.

Then, we shall scurry to the library to watch the 1964 version/vision of H. G. Wells’ FIRST MEN IN THE MOON.

The personnel involved are the main reason to watch this film (Chloe suspects my shallowly buried hope of being chosen the next 75-year-old astronaut might also be a motivating factor).

Nathan Juran is the director. Mr. Juran is an Oscar winner for…Art Direction…for the HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, a beautiful film, but nothing like his directing career. He directed some of my favorite guilty pleasures; THE DEADLY MANTIS (1957) – big bugs…never misses, 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), and ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT WOMAN (1958) – 50-foot Alison Hayes…never misses.

Nigel Kneale is our screenwriter. Mr. Kneale wrote screenplays for serious stuff; THE ENTERTAINER (1960) and LOOK BACK IN ANGER (1959), disturbing British sci-fi; THE STONE TAPE (1972) and FIVE MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1967), and a truly terrifying ghost story; THE WOMAN IN BLACK (1989), not the Radcliffe remake.

Valentine Dyall, the narrator was memorable in HORROR HOTEL (1960), a fine, foggy scare as Jethrow Keane, a hitchhiker to whom you do not want to give a ride. He was also in THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE (1963) as one half of the unhelpful caretaker couple; “No one from town will come after dark…in the night…in the dark.”

Our old friend Miles Malleson is also in this film. His is an amazing career; HORROR OF DRACULA (1958), THR HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1959), and THE BRIDES OF DRACULA (1960) for Hammer, and about a hundred more.

We may howl indeed.

Acting School in Your Own Back Yard

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Actors are silly people.

Wait!

I’m not qualified to make such a sweeping generalization. Yes, I have acted on stage, but as painfully pointed out to me by attendees and reviewers of my efforts as Dracula, and the butler in Feydeau’s “A Flea in Her Ear”……sigh.

However, having had a gaggle of theater folks in the house this weekend (my friend Eric Johnson would modify that to “theater-ish folks”) for Halloween deco, chili-pots, and charades, I can vouch with confidence of the silliness of those actors.

Actors are sensitive…to everything. I know I am. If someone walks by me with a limp, I will pass them by with a pronounced and sometimes accurate lurch to my gait. If you sneeze around me, chances are I will reach for two tissues; one for you and one for me. If you drawl around me I will vocally lurch southwards, again, sometimes accurately. I just watched an interview with the Prime Minister of Jamaica bemoaning the category-five hurricane about to assault his island. I then strolled to back door of our house in Central Kentucky, picked up the remote, and closed our garage door.

Sensitive.

Whence cometh this?

Today it arrived in the mailbox in the form of a battered and tattered 65-year-old book of no immense value, but a treasure none the less.

Elizabeth K. Cooper’s 1958 Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club edition of SCIENCE IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD was an eye-opener to me at the age of nine.

I’ve written before about my mom’s complete devotion to the usefulness of reading. We weren’t rich, but the public library, the bookmobile, Mr. Dennis’s bookstore on North Lime, and the Weekly Reader Children’s Book Club filled a yawning abyss of hunger.

Every month, I devoured every part of every selection; text, introductions, forewords, table of contents, dust wrapper notes… I was saddened by any lack of indices.

The first line of the dust wrapper note for SCIENCE IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD was a question; “Would you like to be an explorer—without leaving your own neighborhood?”

Yes!

Yes!!!

The roster of the first astronauts had just been announced.

I did not see my name on the list.

My neighborhood was all I had.

The title of the first chapter was “Exploring the Yard on Your Stomach.” I did just that. I flopped myself down and asked the questions prompted by Ms. Cooper;

What do you see?

What do you hear?

What do you feel?

What do you smell?

What do you taste?

I filled up my senses.

Chapter Two; Exploring the Yard on Your Back.

What do you see?

What do you hear?

What do you feel?

What do you smell?

What do you taste?

I filled up my senses.

I “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” in daylight, before midnight when the TV stations signed off for the evening. I named clouds. I reached sub-orbital in my mind before Alan Shepard.

I learned to act.

I still run through those questions when rehearsing for a stage production;

What do you see?

What do you hear?

What do you feel?

What do you smell?

What do you taste?

Those ingredients enhanced by the memories they trigger make me as human as I can be in the crucible of pretend.

So yeah…

…the book is of no immense value………except to me.

And by the way, should you wander into the wild kingdom that is our back yard and you see me flopped on the ground;

  1. Check for a pulse.
  2. If I’m on my stomach, it’s OK, I’m still exploring.
  3. If I’m on my back, it’s real OK, I’m still looking at the stars.
  4. Or, I might just be acting.

The power of books, that’s why they want to control them.

Play-Off Ghosts

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In my pre-teen years, in my pre-driving years, I listened to Reds baseball devotedly, especially late night games from Los Angeles and San Francisco. I would tuck my cigarette-sized transistor radio beneath my pillow and listen to Waite Hoyt describing the exploits of Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, Bob Purkey, and Jim O’Toole.

There were only sixteen teams then, eight in each league, no divisions, and no play-offs. If you came in first in your league, you went straight to the World Series. Otherwise, you went straight to your winter part-time job until it was time for the pitchers and catchers to report for spring training. Second place got you nuthin’.

Thus, these early 60’s late night games from the coast meant far less to the baseball world in general than to a burr-headed North Lexington nerd from Bryan Station Junior High. After all, the Reds and the Dodgers could never play each other in the post-season, they were in the same league.

But listen I did…and pretty much stayed awake until the end of the games…and spent my allowance on new batteries the next day.

But now…

…starting at 9:00pm this Tuesday…

…late night baseball from Los Angeles…

…that means something.

Win, and you move straight on, perhaps eventually to the World Series.

Lose, and you go straight to your mansion on a golf course and spend the winter hitting a smaller ball that doesn’t avoid you…usually.

The stakes are serious, and I’ll be listening every night…as long as I can stay awake…hoping the ghosts of Vada, Frank, Waite, Bob, and Jim will pull us through now that it really counts.

Janie just shakes her head and wonders when she married a 12-year-old.

Let the Right One In

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I love horror movies.

Good, bad, silly, gory, American, Spanish, Italian, British, Chinese, Argentinian, Japanese, French, Mexican, German, Brazilian…even Swedish.

Especially vampire flicks.

Why?

I think those seeds were planted early by scarcity.

Through my high school years, we only had the three local TV channels, and Dad essentially controlled the remote. The remote, at that time, was me.

“Roger, go over there and switch it to channel 27.”

After high school, I didn’t have a TV at all until I was 22. I intruded on my friends’ TV’s, or schlepped up to the communal screens on the top floors of the towers at UK. Thus, film viewing opportunities were sparse and sporadic. I didn’t see Bela Lugosi’s DRACULA until I was about 14 (a bleary late Saturday night, installed on the living room floor, armed with a pillow and a hope that the rooftop antenna was aimed in the correct direction). I think I saw my first Christopher Lee bloodsucker in my 20’s and I had that Groucho Marx epiphany; “How long has this been going on?”

Now, that sounds pitiful, but it’s not.

In those years, eight nights out of ten, I was rehearsing a play somewhere, and working to pay the rent during the day. Who had time for movies? Not me, no time…but a pent-up desire musta been a’building.

Since those brutally-deprived days, I’ve tried to make up for lost vampire flicks. Happily, I still haven’t exhausted the historic backlog, and that was proven again last night.

A friend called and invited himself over to watch a film he wanted me to see. It was Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 Swedish film; LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

There was much to like here.

The vampire element of the film is innovative and empathetic. One cares about and frets over the challenges being faced by this 200-year-old/12-year-old child hazard. One cares about and frets over her bullied and neglected 12-year-old/12-year-old neighbor. One cares about and frets over the flawed, ineffective adults around the children’s lives. The only unsympathetic characters are the young school bullies who are simply making Scott Farcas-like decisions with similar results.

The ending is satisfying and troubling simultaneously. It made me long for a sequel just to answer a few questions I’d like to pose.

I really have only two complaints with the film.

  1. I watched a dubbed version. I thought the voices were disconnected and flat from the happenings on the screen. It reminded me vaguely of the dubbing in those awful/wonderful Mexican monster movies of the 60’s. I think I would have preferred subtitles.
  2. It’s full of all that Nordic gloom and snow and cold. This child of American South sun and humidity just can’t………. But that’s me.

This is a real nice flick.

I think you can let it in.

Hey! Look at That!

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Once upon a time, long, long ago there a manager of a retail liquor store. He was a sporadically-educated guy, with longish hair, a gift for learning lines, and a need to pay the rent; a typical actor. But at the time (and for decades after) he was a retail manager. Gotta pay that rent.

His current assignment required two brand new assistant managers. One was a nascent Little Lebowski. He was, as Todd Snider so elegantly describes it; “an alright guy.”

The other was a go-getter. He was quick. He smoked like a chimney. He was reasonably smart. He smoked like my dad. He was willing to do the chores of retail. He was a pack-a-day contributor to the local economy. He was canny. What’s not to like?

Well…

Canny…

The definition of a good retail manager is someone who produces the best results from the available resources. The available resources in this case were young Lebowski who would do what he was instructed to do if he was reminded frequently of what he had been instructed to do. That was not an unusual managerial requirement and could be adequately met with daily chats (paternal or infernal as the case required), do-lists, and schedules. The canny guy’s capacity, however, could accomplish much more than that if his canniness could be channeled into un-terribly-harmful schemes.

What’s the business plan here?

The manager had grandiose visions of morphing his North Lexington Budweiser/Jim Beam oasis into a destination fine wine emporium. A fine wine shop would of course have fine wine sales personnel and fine wine sales personnel would never smoke on the fine wine sales floor. He instituted a no smoking requirement for employees.

The canny guy complained but complied…sorta. The retail manager would drop in at unexpected times and look askance at the hurried discarding of half-smoked violations, and would unhurriedly, but pointedly discard the hidden repositories of ashes. The cat-and-mouse scheming continued harmlessly and relatively happily (except for Canny’s potentially cancerous lungs) and the store prospered.

It thrived enough to lead to the promotion of the manager and the canny assistant took over management of the store. Now in charge and unconstrained and undistracted, his canny angels within six months rescinded the no-smoking nuisance and schemed to embezzle enough to be fired.

I am triggered to recall this by the current news.

I am feeling triggered to outrage by yo-yo tariffs, roller-coaster stock markets, DOGE extremes, Nobel Peace Prize nominations, and Schroedinger/Epstein files. But shouldn’t I be more concerned about less fixable things; crypto destroying our currency, or a Justice Department yesterday requesting voter roll info from individual states, or a president who threatens to remove citizenship from a disliked American citizen.

But then I can’t keep up with all the schemes.

Maybe I should start smoking.

Where did I put those ash repositories?

Swamp Dreaming

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It seems like a good night to pull my eyes and ears and head out of the 24/7/365 news apocalypse, and instead, sail into some YouTube videos of Blossom Dearie, Oscar Peterson, and Thelonius Monk…and perhaps visit a while with Pogo Possum.

Pogo and his friends invariably slow me down, charge me positively, and make me smile…not from a distance, but sittin’ right next to the Okefenokee denizens relaxin’ on the same log. I can smell Albert’s awful cigar and wince when he gulps Pogo’s bowl of wax fruit in its entirety before recognizing the fruit’s ersatz-ness. No problem, just a fine excuse to move into Pogo’s house (and larder) for a few days convalescence. Pogo don’t mind.

The first house I owned was on the north side of Lexington about a block from Louden House in Castlewood Park and it had a bit of that casual feel about it. I grew up in that neighborhood and felt cozy there.

Janie and I made our early discoveries together with each other there. In fact, I still believe it was my first tortoise-shell, Scandal, who convinced Janie that I might be worth taking a chance on. We would open a champagne bottle, take the foil, and roll it into a small ball, toss it, and Scandal would trot after it and return it to me. Who on this planet could resist a champagne-fetching cat?

However, not all the discoveries were pleasant in this 50+ year old (in the 1980’s) house. The morning Janie looked up in her bath and instead of the ceiling, saw a lovely azure sky was a challenge, and the unheated bedroom was a challenge of a different sort…though the latter had its upside.

But the Okefenokee-ness of the nest came from the friends who dropped in. I remember Paul Thomas coming by to help move Janie in by ordering pizza. I remember Eric and Becky Johnson watching “White Christmas” with us, and continuing to watch it to the end with Janie even though I had slunk off to bed halfway through (Hey! I was a workin’ guy!). I remember Chuck and Julieanne’s après wedding do-dah in the parlor. I remember Vic Chaney brutally critiquing my meagre collection of record albums (remember those?). I remember Gene Arkle pondering for over an hour before he made his next tragic chess move in a series of tragic chess moves. I remember Joe Gatton bouncing into our Sunday breakfast on the porch and helping us plow through the Sunday papers, about the only news we consumed those innocent days.

No, we didn’t eat the wax fruit, and the cigars weren’t awful, they were non-existent. But the company was easy. There were no conversational land-mines of which to be wary. Outrageous and wildly inaccurate things were said and then laughed away. Offense was rarely taken.

We had little…

…and thus, little to lose…

…and thus, little to defend.

We had each other…

…inside decrepit brick walls…

…a fragile and powerful bubble of heedless good will.

We had it all.

Japanese Noir…Kurosawa-Style

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Akira Kurosawa is perhaps best known for his mighty Shakespearean films; RAN (1985), THE HIDDEN FORTRESS (1958), and THRONE OF BLOOD (1957). His Samurai Trilogy was exciting. His SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) and YOJIMBO (1961) inspired a whole genre of European westerns, plus a little flick called STAR WARS (1974). His RASHOMON (1950) is a masterpiece of storytelling.

But that storytelling skill is also happily evident in his less grandiose crime dramas; STRAY DOG (1949), LOWER DEPTHS (1957), and tonight’s HIGH AND LOW (1963).

In HIGH AND LOW, we see a Yokohama in the swirl of Japan’s amazing recovery from WWII. It’s not the Japan of Lafcadio Hearn, Shinto temples, and tea ceremonies. This is a roiling time of factories, trains, smokestacks, efficiencies, and cutthroat board battles. It is a time to make fortunes…for yourself……or for others. The income gap is wide and widening…sound like anywhere else you’re living in today?

A brutal kidnapping occurs.

Toshiro Mifune is pathetic as he agonizes over whether to destroy his privileged life to possibly save the life of the child.

Tatsuya Nakadai as Chief Detective Tokura and his sweating team of investigators, salvage and assemble clues leading through murder and drug-infested dens that will never be documented in haiku, till they inevitably run the kidnapper to capture.

 Tsutomu Yamazaki as the kidnapper confronts Mifune;

“I’m not interested in self-analysis. I do know my room was so cold in winter and so hot in summer I couldn’t sleep. Your house looked like heaven, high up there. That’s how I began to hate you.”

Allow me to paraphrase Thornton Wilder here;

The difference between enough money and not enough money is really quite small…but it can change the world. The difference between enough money and a whole lot of money is also quite small…but it too…can change the world.

It crept into my Hearn/Shinto/tea/haiku mind as I watched the film, that perhaps we should consider Thornton Wilder and the kidnapper the next time we condescend to ask presidential candidates about raising the minimum wage.

On a lighter note, I was arrested by a cameo performance by Ikio Sawamura as an expert in the sound of various trolleys in Yokohama. Mr. Sawamura had a long film career in a number of Kurosawa’s films, and also appeared in a number of films that made a serious cultural difference in the world of a wide-eyed young film-goer in Kentucky;

1963-KING KING VS GODZILLA (witch doctor) and ATRAGON (taxi driver)

1964-MOTHRA VS GODZILLA (priest) and GHIDORAH, THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER (honest fisherman)

1965-FRANKENSTEIN VS BARAGON (man walking dog)

1966-THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS (fisherman #1) and EBIRAH, HORROR OF THE DEEP (elderly slave)

1967-KING KONG ESCAPES (Mondo islander)

1968-DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (old farmer)

1969-ALL MONSTERS ATTACK (bartender)

1975-TERROR OF MECHOGODZILLA (silent butler)

Whatta resumé!

The Wild Kingdom?

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Tonight…

Ah, tonight.

Sitting out in the golden sunset, under a quarter moon in an eggshell sky…a sky worth way more than Emmylou Harris’s ten cent evaluation.

Sitting surrounded by life.

The trumpet vine hedge undulates, a dark and lush shelter fifteen feet in the air. The vines are 20+ years old, contained and restrained, but as yet undefeated. They still promote a network of volunteers 30-40 feet in every direction that have to be corralled every day.

The bank of knockout roses are rolling into their second expression of the season.

The daylilies are roaring their various résumés as they clamor for best-of-the-year honors (the Nefertiti’s are currently leading, but the Bela Lugosi’s have yet to make their play).

Chloe, the Wonder Pup and I sit on the worn bricks of the tiny black lagoon. We’re waiting for Janie to return from her weekly knitting bee at Chez Spence. The frogs occasionally break the water’s surface to see if we’ve gone inside yet. They’re eager to completely emerge and begin their nightly serenade.

We are snugly enclosed by ramparts of holly and bamboo and exuberant ferns.

And now…

…lightnin’ bugs begin their twilight gavotte…

…a pas de drift…

…a doh-see glow.

Chloe asks if I can see Janie yet (insert sigh).

The light finally fades and the pup and I relent and go indoors to give the frogs their chance.

I’m in the library for two minutes and the croaking chorale commences. It’s beautiful, but the Lexington Singers have nothing to fear from this rasping and barking.

And to finally give the noble dog her answer; “No, Chloe, I don’t see her yet.”

June 12, 2024

Rule #51

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I have binging of late on reruns of NCIS.

I can’t explain or defend the habit. I blissfully glide along as the team “grabs their gear” to investigate each implausible case. I mentally note who makes the elevator walk to open each episode. I participate by precipitately guessing wrong on the solution to every problem. I blindly delight in the grade school badinage between these defenders of democracy as they struggle to thwart the myriad smart bad guys of the world.

Mostly though…

…I am intrigued by Jethro Gibbs’ striving to apply a numbered set of rules to the chaos he and his team seem to face daily.

These are rules he has mostly assembled from the wisdom of his dad and his first wife.

Mostly…

One rule comes late in the run of the show and it derives from Gibbs’ personal adult experience.

It’s Rule #51:

Sometimes you’re wrong.

It took me about 28 years to understand that rule. Soon after this dour epiphany, I recognized with some trepidation that it had taken me almost 30 years to reach the point where I believed I was making six of ten decisions correctly. That was humbling. Even more humbling was suspecting I would never achieve a seven out of ten success ratio. 40+ years later have confirmed my suspicions.

Luckily, one of the correct decisions was to surround myself with other people who also make six out ten decisions correctly and strive to get out of their way. Thus, I was mostly protected from many of my foolish moments.

Mostly…but not always…

Many…but not all…

Rule #51:

Sometimes you’re wrong.

As I age, I find when I acknowledge this rule and try to be righter, the world is generally a very generous place and space is made for me to do so.

I humbly suggest that members of congress might also find this to be useful…and right.