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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 7 years ago

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Worth The Whistle

When making ovational pronouncements about their homeland, the Irish are rhapsodic leagues ahead of most nationalist spokesmen. Irish parlance feeds upon the fanciful, and when summarizing their realm of origin, many of Ireland’s offspring--writers in particular--are quick to describe a place that might have been both freshly created and steeped in mythologies long past. The reverence for his country described by novelist and broadcaster Frank Delaney ably captures the painterly affection shared by his tribesmen: “When the sun lights a particular hill in the distance...and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.” [1] In visions of this sort, the extraordinary and the everyday cultivate each other, and even God’s rudest labours can be a source of inspiration. Consider James Joyce, reveling in backhanded salute to the rougher primordial influences upon his stamping grounds: “Isn’t the sea...a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.” [2]

Included on the long literary list of Ireland’s tribute-paying sons and daughters is David A. Wilson, author, editor, and expert explorer of Irish history. Among his books are Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection (1988), United Irishmen, United States: Immigration Radicals in the Early Republic (1998), The History of the Future (2001), and the ambitious biographical doublet, Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Volume 1 (2008) and Volume 2 (2011). A tireless academic, he is also a professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of History and Celtic Studies Program. (Before I continue, the obligatory disclosure is due: though I’ve never met Wilson, there is a familial connection. Also found on his scroll of vocational titles is general editor of The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, a publication whose supervisory editor is my sister, the relentlessly revising Willadean Leo. Though she has throughout her career worked with a wide selection of impressive colleagues, she has also had a number of professional associates whose exploits I wouldn’t bother to acclaim. Wilson, it happily turns out, is not among the latter.)

Wilson allows himself liberal opportunities to praise his native soil and much that it supports in Ireland, a Bicycle, and a Tin Flute (1995), a diverse and diverting account of a solo cycling trip he undertook along the Emerald Island’s summoning coast. He begins his travels and the book that depicts them in Whitehead, a northern seashore town and the setting of his birth. From there he goes on to an engaging assortment of communities, including Islandmagee, a peninsula he cites as “perfect cycling country” thanks to a lack of traffic and a modest steepness to its hills; Corrymeela, an interdenominational locality dedicated to promoting understanding between religious groups; the town of Clifden, known and enjoyed for its annual arts festival, which he finds “crackling with energy”; Dublin, “a cyclist’s nightmare,” where both the streets and pubs are teeming; and Belfast, with its long, inescapable history of political conflict. The book is episodic, anecdotal, and zealously scrutinizing, weaving together impressions of towns and territories, with historical background, political commentary, and mythological colour contributing to the bounty of Wilson’s account. But the journey’s primary pursuit is of music, specifically Ireland’s traditional songs and the many performers who interpret them. His sole companion throughout is a tin whistle, a type of fipple flute, also called a penny whistle. It proves to be excellent rambling company for Wilson, who regards it as the ideal travel instrument (as it’s so easily transported by bicycle) and prizes it for its “brevity and simplicity...a narrow range of notes and a wide range of feeling.”

The book proceeds with an airy bustle as Wilson pedals down rugged roads and up challenging slopes, through blistering rain and lush rural landscapes. Despite the journey’s demands, he’s well-suited to the role of musical detective, maintaining throughout an unflagging spirit of investigation as well as the sputum to gatecrash forbidden territory. In one such circumstance he’s forced to shinny through a high, narrow pub window and drop into the arms of a group of helpful carousers, all for the pleasure of joining a music session after the grumpy proprietor has locked the front door. And, luckily, he has the wiliness needed to dodge potential social jousts as well as outright threats to life and limb--as in an episode in which a group of violent ruffians demand to know if he’s Protestant or Catholic. Wilson casually disentangles himself by replying, “I’m from Canada--we don’t have Protestants or Catholics.” Between social junctures, welcoming or otherwise, his tour yields up a loamy mix of songs, which includes time-honoured Irish, American pop, and the hybrids resulting from the two. (The cowboy standard The Streets of Laredo is derived, it turns out, from a popular ditty about Irish patriot Robert Emmet.) Wilson also delves into the melodious contributions made by Turlough Carolan, a legendary harpist of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, blinded before the age of twenty; Michael Coleman, an influential fiddle player who became a successful recording artist in the United States; and Francis O’Neill, a flutist who emigrated to America, became a superintendent for the Chicago police force, and published a seminal book that endowed posterity with over a thousand folk songs from Ireland.

But it’s in the recountings of the many shows and sessions attended by Wilson that the book is especially shapely and evocative. It’s more than apparent how compelled he is by the mutable nature of music, its fluidity and seductiveness, and the uniting claim it makes upon a crowd, guiding and defining both the musicians creating it and the audience consuming it. The performance of a young accordion player and her band is one of many captivating experiences Wilson reports upon: “She sat on a chair in the middle of the stage, moving from lighthearted waltzes to high-speed reels, deep inside her own world, thoroughly immersed in the music, swaying and smiling with the currents that flow beneath it all. Accordion, fiddle, guitar, and bass were rushing and running together, thundering into a breakneck finish with ‘The Foxhunter’s Reel,’ leaving us shouting and stamping for more.” Despite the exuberant public nature of the many entertainments that he takes in, Wilson is never far from the creative intimacy of such occasions, as well as the recognition that musicianship is its own private caravan, and that music, no matter how penetrable it may be, remains a rich and limitless enigma, something that can never be completely perceived, captured, or explored. It’s during these passages as well as his descriptions of the landscape (also bewitching, overwhelming, and mysterious) that his writing is at its most beckoning, revealing its own quality of music.

Though there’s a current of wonderstruck devotion running from chapter to chapter, Ireland, a Bicycle, and a Tin Flute is overall relaxed and larkish, demonstrating a strong appreciation for mischief and revelry (alcohol is chronically within reach, no matter which town Wilson is visiting), as well as a fondness for the odd, the wayward, and the fantastic. His visit to Whitehead prompts childhood memories of the area’s chilly seafront cliffs and caves and the tale of an outcast madman who took refuge among them and consequently shivered himself to death. And, like a page out of Sheridan Le Fanu, there’s mention made of a true horror story from 1888 in which a northern lake filled up dangerously high during a storm, enough so for its surging waters to gulp down an impatient military man and his driver, coach, and horses after the order was given to “drive on to hell.”

The cumulative effect of this book is of a picaresque adventure following its own abounding soundtrack, with both the journey and its chronicle, to borrow an old phrase, worth the whistle. (A small dissenting note, however: featured on many pages are a series of illustrations by Justin Palmer, and while the sketches have their own energetic virtues, they can’t be called a necessary inclusion. Wilson’s writing is satisfyingly visual as it is, and Palmer’s imagery hasn’t the polish and openness of the narrative it accompanies. That said, the drawings are certainly likable enough and do the book no harm.)

Edna O’Brien, a mercurial talent and an enticing literary companion, has stated that the gift of language has been her bread and wine. The same, I think, should be said of Wilson, who enjoys putting a certain tang in the tale. But music too must be included and highlighted on his aesthetic bill of fare. He knows its pleasures and contradictions too fondly and too well to be a mere sampler at the gathering.

Notes

[1] Ireland, Frank Delaney, Harper Collins, 2005, p518

[2] Ulysses, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, 2011, p5

(Posted: 29/3/18)

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 8 years ago

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Leonard Nimoy as the psychopathic bounty hunter of Sam Wanmaker’s Catlow (1971) is ambushed during his ablutions, resulting in a one-of-a-kind nude Western brawl. A far cry from staid, sensible Mr. Spock, which is likely what sold him on the role.

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 8 years ago

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Bullets From The Bathtub

Movies will often refuse to take you where you hoped to go, but some of them will deposit you where you never thought you’d end up. On these occasions the action will usually proceed with conventional sureness only to veer off into a context or a plot turn that’s just contrary or outrageous enough to put the story on completely new turf. Or stop it dead. This approach, handled with innovation, can result in unanticipated riches. In the case of Psycho (1960), Hitchcock defied the traditional audience perspective when he had Janet Leigh (playing the ostensible heroine Marion Crane and the biggest marquee name in the cast) murdered just forty minutes into the film. The intensity of the attack on her, the unexpectedness of Marion’s demise, and the resulting loss of an identification figure (gradually and prankishly filled by Anthony Perkins) gave death on the screen a new sanguinary bleakness and finality, and a far-reaching milestone in movie violence was established. Even more unpredictable (or, for some of us, crazy and exasperating) is the climax of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), which storms its multiple stories outside their edgy realism with a hail of frogs from the sky. Moments like these are either so potent, so misplaced, or of such freakish distinction that the rest of the film becomes subordinate to, or at least haunted by, that one brave, bullying, or bullshitting moment.

Such an occasion can be found in Sam Wanamaker’s Catlow (1971), an affable Western with Yul Brynner as an effusive outlaw-hero and Richard Crenna as the forbearing marshal with a warrant on him. A minor effort, Catlow follows its formulaic structures and definitions with unsurprising skill and a jaunty air. But briefly, at the half-hour point, the movie offers a scene that springs out of nowhere and steers it into a melee of unforeseen travesty and wildness. Brynner, all smirk and swagger, pays a pugilistic call on his nemesis, Leonard Nimoy, a psychopathic bounty hunter who has taken roost at the local hacienda. He is, when Brynner enters his room, scrubbing down in a full bathtub, with a handy firearm concealed nearby beneath a towel. One might wonder if the cowboy code of honour demands that Brynner allow his adversary to don boots and trousers before gunshots boom forth. No time for all that; Nimoy quickly vacates the tub with bullets blazing. When Brynner disarms him a slugfest takes over, and the ensuing spectacle of a hero in cowboy garb brawling it out with a nude villain has enough rowdy originality to put the film on an abrupt new comic footing; suddenly the Western genre’s ritual machismo is stripped down to a vengeful bareassed burlesque. Punctuating the action with a mirthful round of critical salvos is Daliah Lavi as Brynner’s bandita paramour, roaring with plebeian laughter as she watches the manful opponents duke it out. They throw punches while she pitches shade. Despite his dour villainy, one has to feel some sympathy for Nimoy. A beautiful woman’s amusement is sure to be sharpest when directed at a man, a naked one especially. It nearly seems a plot oversight that he didn’t open fire at her as well.

Nothing else in the movie approaches this episode’s parodistic brutality, but Catlow overall is fairly difficult to dislike. Adapted from a 1963 novel by the doggedly prolific Louis L’Amour, the movie is looser than most Westerns of the 1970′s, though not nearly so buoyant as it aims to be, and with just as many moments that crash as those that jump. The dialogue is sometimes lumpish, and the spoofy staging of a gold robbery is too silly to be either capricious or suspenseful. But the action sequences are generally well done; there’s a spirited score from British jazz composer Roy Budd with threadings out of Elmer Bernstein; and the movie steps now and then past the expected by mocking the cliches of many a horse opera. Both Brynner and Crenna are, for instance, presented as formidable combatants, but when forced to fight the spitfiring Lavi, they more than take their licks. Crenna barely escapes a bullet aimed at his groin, and Brynner is the only Western hero within my recall to be felled by a boot to the crotch. Brynner, accurately defined by Richard Schickel as ”nothing but pure male vanity, but sometimes attractively so,” [1] is friendlier than usual this time, but Crenna is the one to watch. He is the only member of the cast who suggests an inner life (and with no help from the script). Peter R. Hunt, who edited the early James Bond adventures and helmed the vivifying On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), was originally scheduled to direct Catlow. His command of montage, timing, and pace would have made for a faster, better picture.

Notes

[1] Movies, Richard Schickel, Basic Books, 1964, p175

(Posted: 10/12/17)

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 8 years ago

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Maggie Smith as the imperious bag lady Miss Shepherd, who dominates a residential neighborhood by dint of her impoverished status in The Lady in the Van (2015), adapted from Alan Bennett’s play about this most outrageous example of the needy poor.

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 8 years ago

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Diva of the Dustbins

The poor are always with us, especially if they’re sly, crazy, uppity, and usurious. This is very much the case with Mary Shepherd, the grubby heroine of The Lady in the Van (2015). An elderly, unwashed vagrant, craftily deranged and garbed in rags, she makes her residence in a rattletrap van stuffed with layers of filth and rubbish. Accustomed to having her own way and nothing else, Miss Shepherd has her demands rewarded by playing on the sympathy of strangers, pillaging their sense of reluctant decency, and repaying their charity with disdain. Reigning over her surroundings from her motorized cat box, she is, in her prickly, contrarian fashion, an inverted success.

Directed by Nicholas Hytner, the film adaptation of The Lady in the Van is the most recent version by Alan Bennett of his lengthy acquaintance with Miss Shepherd, which began in the late 1960′s. His first recounting of her puzzling life and times took the form of an essay, published in 1989 in The London Review of Books. He then went on to write it up as a factual novella, put on the market in 1999 by Profile Books; a play which had its premiere in the same year at the Queen’s Theatre in London’s West End; and a 2009 radio play for BBC Radio 4. The relationship between the lofty vagabond and the diffident author made its start when she beckoned him to push her van through the London burough of Camden to which Bennett had recently moved. Prefacing much toil to come his way, he accommodated her. Their acquaintance continued when she settled in his street, parking for indefinite periods before his neighbour’s homes, to their tolerant liberal distaste; then, finally, she bunked in front of his address. Thereafter he observed from his writing desk her comings and goings, her tantrums and waywardness, and the many wrangles she instigated with the locals, all of which became neighbourhood business as usual. But after Bennett more than once witnessed her being bullied on the street by passing hooligans, he offered Miss Shepherd refuge in his driveway. A kind and Christian gesture? No, apparently; he claims to have been motivated by his own interests, as the disruptions aimed at her were interfering with his work. The arrangement, he assumed, would last a short while; then surely she would move on, as was her habit. She parked her van in his front yard and stayed there for fifteen years.

What ensues in the film’s account of Miss Shepherd’s residency at 23 Gloucester Crescent is a dual set of duels. One is between Bennett, impersonated with ace aptitude by Alex Jennings, and his unsanitary tenant, played in a whirl of insolent bravura by Maggie Smith. The other is between Bennett and himself. In Bennett versus Shepherd, the victor is clearly the old lady, who infringes on her host’s life without a moment’s hesitation and nary an apology. Regarding him with the gaze of an imperious tortoise, she makes it plain that it’s she who tolerates him, not the reverse, and expects further accommodation, including the use of his electricity (for light and heating inside the van) and his bathroom (which she pollutes with scattershot feculence, often). He in return is torn between indulging her expectations and fuming at her arrogance. In Bennett versus Bennett we have duplicate versions of him in the split screen tradition: one is Bennett the man who interacts with the world at large, if, much of the time, barely; the other is Bennett the writer who takes care of the literary duties and interacts only with Bennett the man. A sort of West Yorkshire chorus--Bennett was born in Leeds--the inky-fingered Alan is forever dashing out text while challenging his other self to abandon his proper, passive existence and go have a real life. Personifying this bickering duo, Jennings literally co-stars with himself. This clash is pretty much a tie, with both Bennetts getting their jabs in, though the wordsmith is the more acidulous of the two.

Inevitably, it can be said that Maggie Smith plays Miss Shepherd for all time; the part was written for her and she originated it under Hytner’s direction in the play’s first production. She’s in her customary wondrous form here, turning throwaway lines into intonational near-zingers, peering suspiciously at Jennings through a tangle of wrinkles, and hobbling amok with a stiff, waddling gait. There’s no doubt that she makes the role hers, but I’m not entirely convinced it was worth her while to do so. Miss Shepherd’s reliance on her grab bag of survival tactics--her wheedling, dictating, and deflecting--is perfectly understandable; those who have nothing are forced to undertake desperate unpleasantries, not just for the sake of survival but for mere conveniences too. But she, like all manipulators and monomaniacs, becomes tiresome before long. Habitually dismissive and ungrateful for help and kindness, she milks her every opportunity to take advantage of others, and with no shortage of prim justification. “I’m a sick woman,” she’s fond of saying. “Dying, possibly.” The word “possibly” is employed frequently, all part of her ongoing refusal to be pinned down on anything. Her nuthouse utterances (like her claim that she’s been chatting at the post office with the Holy Virgin) pile up quickly and thickly, and though Maggie Smith keeps this diva of the dustbins knobby and lively, Miss Shepherd is, I think, too narrow, too reflexive to be truly interesting, and in her rare moments of happiness, she’s rather a bore--so skewed toward the adversarial that good humour produces nothing distinctive in her. Nor is her bountiful contribution of fecal matter of any great fascination. Her mephitic leavings seem to end up nearly everywhere: in her host’s toilet, on his floor, in his front yard, and Lord know where else. Bennett must have been exhausted by her, and, even worse, bored with her. (Those who serve emotional tyrants long enough are likely to find themselves depleted by boredom, even more so than by resentment.) No improvement at all is a moment of truce she has with Bennett when he consents to push her up the street in a wheelchair and she revels in a surge of childlike exuberance while rolling down the hilly pavement. It’s a needless sop to the audience, this episode; buffing her claws doesn’t redeem her in the least. There is also a worthless subplot wherein she’s persecuted by a former policeman (Jim Broadbent) who’s privy to a threatening incident from her younger days. This bit of narrative can be safely overlooked; it feels thoroughly fictional, and it is.

It’s not until late in the story that Miss Shepherd’s past comes into focus, and a diverse one it is. She was, Bennett learns, a talented pianist, and during her youth had studied under Alfred Cortot in Paris. Further to this, she had been a nun as well as a wartime ambulance driver, and was committed by a relative to a hospital for mental illness. All this, too, has a faintly ersatz slant, though it’s factual, and dramatically welcome. In the end, Miss Shepherd’s previous life is the component that opens her up as a character. It’s when, for example, she’s depicted playing a piano searchingly after a lengthy absence from musical activity that she becomes compelling. This time she’s exploring, not exploiting, and for once she’s confronting someone--herself--quietly and honestly. Similarly, she becomes affecting near the movie’s conclusion when speaking with fragile openness about her former existence, telling Bennett what music and its absence have meant to her. In these situations, she becomes a person, not a germy set of strategies and defenses, and finally this mismatched pair--both of them odd, intelligent, and isolated, both spawn of the arts--seems fitting company for each other. Even so, within Bennett’s literary archive, I much prefer the sportive political scrimmage undertaken by Guy Burgess (Alan Bates in top form) and Coral Browne (superbly cast as herself) in An Englishman Abroad (1983) and the ambiguous debate on aesthetics and identity between Anthony Blunt (smoothly represented by James Fox) and Elizabeth II (a savory comic triumph by Prunella Scales) in A Question of Attribution (1991), both among Bennett’s best scripted works.

As for the standoff between the two Alans, it proves to be more speculative and entertaining than the clash with Miss Shepherd. Putting both halves of himself outside the narrative as they interact, Bennett is depicted as a pair of squabbling twins with no authority figure to whom they can complain about each other. Miss Shepherd, in her way, is the closest they get to having a mother. She inhabits her own delusional fantasy kingdom as much as the two Bennetts belong to their imaginary sphere of existence, and they grouse and gossip about her as kids will do when a shared parent goes out of favour. Ultimately, it’s Bennett the writer--the one who stays out of her way--who understands her best. “It’s will, pure will,” he vents of her domination of the Bennett household. “She’s known what she wanted all along.” Weaving throughout all this are a number of thornily involving dynamics, such as the artist’s preference for the making of fiction over the duties of regular life. Also: how private thoughts and hidden emotions are aired in one’s creative output under dramatic cover, making it a more authentic portrait than what it’s presented to be while real life is managed with evasions and fabrications of all sorts and sizes, thereby rendering it an incomplete and faintly false version of itself. And further still: how casually and uncritically revisionism in general makes its way into our emotions, perceptions, and statements. “Will you write about me?” Miss Shepherd, momentarily withdrawing from her official spot within the story proper, asks the everyday Bennett. He looks to his literary doppelganger, exclaiming, “She didn’t say this.” Alan the scribbler is unpersuaded. “No,” he agrees, scrawling down the exchange. “But why shouldn’t she?” The Pirandellian layers are pretty much perfect: the actual Bennett has not only written about Miss Shepherd, he’s also written about writing about her--as does one of his fabricated reflections. The concentric gradations of all this could be endless, but the script keeps them in line, on the mark, and briskly incisive.

Ineffably English, Bennett is by now something of an aesthetic diagnostician of his country’s class perspectives and commonplace emotional adventures. Ever watchful, he brings a prodding, prosaic authenticity to the depiction of intimate disappointment and those small, revealing incidents that slip past but nag forever after from the sidelines. It’s this penchant for the narrow, stubborn dramas within conventional life that steers much of his work. We find it here during the uncomfortable, sidestepping interactions by Bennett and his de facto mother Lilian (referred to here only as Mam), who is sinking into depression and dementia and slipping out of his life, just as Miss Shepherd is burrowing deeper into it. Within their scenes together, there’s an expansive, troubling topic at work, that of the detachment via time and aging between parent and child, with its numerous insoluble dilemmas: the silently shared anxieties, the habits and burdens of blood loyalties, the sense of mutual avoidance and sentimental failure. He asks at one point if she’s been taking her medication, and she, with a trace of dodging discomfort, looks away and says, “When I remember...” It’s the most candid and emotionally costly moment we see her having with her son--reassuring him while admitting with resignation that she knows she’s slipping. This is a brief, finely judged performance by Gwen Taylor, one deserving of more screen time.

Even with such depictions of emotional wreckage, this film is a less doleful, more congenial effort than much of Bennett’s output--it hasn’t the loquacious desperation of his Talking Heads monologues--and it canters past likably enough, with a self-mocking conclusion in which a deceased Miss Shepherd, assisted by computer animation, is whisked beaming into the arms of God. But throughout the previous stretch of the storyline, there’s been a querying undercurrent of practical urgency: what is to be done with Miss Shepherd’s disassociated tribe--those who are castoff, defeated, addicted, and beset by mental illness, whose behaviour is difficult, unpredictable, and alarming, who don’t conform to expected standards or recognize the status quo, and are primarily viewed by many as a financial hardship? If they aren’t welcomed anyplace, where do they go? And how much do we involve ourselves in their misfortunes? The situation is of massive proportions, as old as humanity, and ignored by the majority of us--and no one in this part of the story finds anything resembling heaven.

Books

Writing Home, Alan Bennett, Faber & Faber, 1994

(Posted: 05/11/17)

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 8 years ago

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Gary Giddins, jazz scholar and cinema scribe, puts to work his sharp antennae and vigourous pen in Warning Shadows, a collection of film reviews in which he cheers and challenges established and forgotten classics, as well as the obscure, the arty, and the awful.

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 8 years ago

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Shadow Hunter

Like Orion, Gary Giddins is a hunter of shadows--time and again, he's drawn to those overcast aesthetic zones where the best alchemic prizes can be found, fondled, and fathomed. An admired critic with a remarkable body of work, his fondest preoccupations are jazz, that supremely shadowy realm of music, and movies, an art form that blooms most beautifully in the dark.

A native New Yorker, Giddins has been most prolific in his written scrutinization of jazz, a fascination that's kept him perceptively busy for decades. From 1974 to 2003, he wrote the jazz column Weather Bird for The Village Voice, and has authored eight highly-regarded books devoted to the topic. Among them are studies of Charlie Parker (Celebrating Bird, 1986) and Louis Armstrong (Satchmo, 1988); the monumental 700-plus pages of Visions of Jazz: The First Century (1998), winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award, and hailed as a "the finest unconventional history of jazz ever written" [1]; and Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams (2001), a "must-read" [2] exploration of the singer's musical legacy, which includes a significant authority in jazz technique. (Two of Giddins’ eleven publications, the 1996 Faces in the Crowd and the 2006 Natural Selection, can’t be described as solely jazz books since they explore some of the other arts--films, literature, comic books--as well as a selection of their outstanding representatives.)

And on the subject of movies? Giddins’ output is less voluminous--only one of his books deals exclusively with matters cinematic, the 2010 Warning Shadows: Home Alone With Classic Cinema. But Giddins the movie scribe delves into film culture with such adept enjoyment that he all but promises to one day catch up with his musical self. Written with tireless flair and commitment, Warning Shadows has kept me gladly engaged of late and hoping there's another of its kind in the works.

Covering countless vintage productions released on DVD and Blu-ray, Warning Shadows is a compilation of reviews and profiles, most of which originated in The New York Sun, a daily broadsheet published from 2002 to 2009. Others found their place of introduction in DGA Quarterly, The New York Times Book Review, Film Comment, and The Criterion Collection. Commencing on a historical slant, Warning Shadows whisks us into a fifteen-page examination of how we've watched movies over the years, focusing on each cycle's ways and means of exhibiting filmed works. Thomas Edison's rudimentary but revolutionary kinetoscope (a peephole machine which allowed a single viewer to watch "moving pictures, fluid as life") gives way to a sweeping industrial shift toward theatres (with the popular storefront nickelodeons rapidly superseded by the early rococo picture palaces sporting domed ceilings and lobbies brightened by chandeliers). The current dominant practice of home viewing concludes the saga as television, videotape, laserdisc, and DVD get their moments of mass production and cultural influence. Approaching moviegoing in environmental terms, Giddins touches on the impact of various forms of motion picture display, our responsiveness from format to format, the resulting changes in how movies were made, the technological innovations, our expectations according to different mediums, and the alterations in our habits of consumption. Yet for all the art, science, and commerce that have shaped films, the most immersive approach was discovered early on when celluloid shows were unveiled for eager crowds of onlookers. "DVD and Blu-ray," Giddins states of the current phase, "are substitutes for the intended experience." The collective response, I agree, is the most emotive and memorable, and watching movies, no matter what the era or its controlling presentational modality, is ultimately a tribal sport.

Movies, like jazz, set Giddins alight as a writer, and Warning Shadows is an energizing read, divertingly pacey and alive with word sense and pictorial memory. Blending a scholarly informality with an addict's allegiance, Giddins can isolate filmed sequences, moments, and qualities with a deftness that accelerates one's remembrance of them. He launches the hues, textures, and design of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Tales of Hoffman (1951) into our quickened recollection when he states that "the décor and the actors are drunk with colour." In that potent bit of tribute he captures the fullness of the images as well as the riskiness of their abundance and the almost supernatural command the dancers have over their own physicality. Giddins has sharp antennae and a vigourous pen, and his writing can be winningly descriptive: his encapsulation of actor Simon Russell Beale's unpleasing mug in the 1997 British mini-series Dance to the Music of Time conveys a contemporary Dickensian prickle, and his appreciation of cinematographer Edward Cronjager's lustrous lighting in H. Bruce Humberstone's I Wake Up Screaming (1941) may very well prompt you to check it out.

A true believer as well as a permissive fan, Giddins sometimes indulges movies almost as much as he reveres them, and their fealty to the formulaic and the endless happy endings they offer can, under the right circumstances, be as pleasing to him as the stylistic surprises and emotional ambiguities found in films of a higher order. Of Peter Watkins' ambitious structural technique in Edvard Munch (1976) he approvingly writes: "These are not explanatory flashbacks of the kind running amok in recent biopics. They are integrated glimpses of the past woven into a narrative mosaic, and they have the effect of flattening perspective, as Munch did on canvas." But: commenting on Sophia Loren's luxuriant appearance while languishing in a medieval prison in Anthony Mann's El Cid (1961), Giddins notes: "Clearly jailors have been smuggling in lipstick, rouge, mascara, and other concealers, and who would want it any other way?"

Warning Shadows covers a good deal of turf, zeroing in on the best and the brightest as well as the odd, the esoteric, and the awful. Influential classics get their due praise, seasoned with filmic associations, background data, and memorable summings up. Giddins surprises with an unexpected visual link between the Korda mounting of The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959), and he tweaks one's curiosity with the statement that Orson Welles was never more charismatic than as the mystery figure of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), not even in one of his own films. (What was Welles unable to find in himself that Reed perceived, empowered, and snared for his own purposes?) Giddins' enthusiasm for buried beauties and neglected orphans has him finding noteworthy viewing in drive-in fare and grindhouse leavings. He bids welcome to Curtis Harrington's macabre resurrection of Ann Sothern and Ruth Roman in the little-seen The Killing Kind (1973), tips his hat with a slight tremble to the crawly Spanish curio Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), and allows an amused, tolerant nod for a series of silent films starring Harry Houdini, the King Kong of escape artists. A new cut from Criterion of Orson Welles' troubled Mr. Arkadin (1955), haunted for decades by its many multiplying versions and the attendant inconsistencies and convolutions, is, like all previous prints, "mangled, contentious, and undying." But this latest release nevertheless makes a case for itself as "a genuine Wellesian achievement." He also covers some Absolute Essentials of long ago: his entry on Buster Keaton's The General (1926) charmingly evokes the film's beautiful sense of movement, timing, surprise, and the director-star's creative ownership of the material. Even if you've habitually seen whatever film is under discussion, Giddins is likely to make it seem fresh again, which is almost like making it new.

Which isn't to say that he's without the occasional missteps. He sometimes makes his case by overstatement, such as: "No one knew more than the spellbinding Edward G. Robinson about how to hold and control a scene." It may seem that way when watching him, and there's no denying Robinson's power and distinction. But there have been plenty of actors who could go fifteen minutes in the thespic ring with Edward G. and match him, or even, in certain respects, knock him cold. (The list of contenders is probably too long and varied to bother with here, though Brando and Bogart leap promptly to mind.) But in such moments Giddins errs on the side of enthusiasm and aesthetic loyalty--not such a disgraceful guilt if you possess the critical skills to match your dedication. Fortunately, he does, and with much to spare. His wit and insight are as evident as his amazement at the power of films and his delight in understanding them. Gary Giddins is a bracing reminder that being overwhelmed by movies is irresistible, but figuring them out is sometimes the best fun of all.

Articles

[1] "All That You-Know-What," Alfred Appel, Jr., "The New York Times," October 18, 1998 http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/18/books/all-that-you-know-what.html

[2] "Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams, The Early Years 1903-1940 by Gary Giddins" Bill Milkowski, JazzTimes https://jazztimes.com/reviews/books/bing-crosby-a-pocketful-of-dreams-the-early-years-1903-1940-by-gary-giddins/

(Posted: 31/07/17)

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 8 years ago

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Tony Musante (trapped in the vestibule) and Eva Renzi (prone on the floor) occupy their own horror-movie-within-a-horror-movie in L'ucello dale plume di cristallo (aka The Bird With the Crystal Plumage), a scene containing a hidden exploration of the inescapable power of watching movies (those of the horror genre especially).

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 8 years ago

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I Am Incurious: Giallo

Well, giallo....

For the uninitiated: a category within Italian horror movies, giallo films are primarily taken up with the synthesizing of the horror and crime genres, and are named for the practice by Mondadori, Italy's largest publishing house, of marketing mystery and thriller paperbacks in bright yellow covers (giallo being Italian for yellow). Officially beginning with Mario Bava's 1963 La ragazza che sapeva troppo (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much and The Evil Eye), the onscreen gialli in general employ a number of tropes that are pervasive within the subgenres's visione del mondo. They include phallic knives and blood-smeared razors, black leather gloves and trenchcoats, eyes that follow intended victims with fixated fascination, and a multitude of corpses resembling nubile starlets. Though its adherents are among the most genuflecting of genre enthusiasts, giallo, I have to confess, is a branch of the horror thicket that produces little curiosity or enticement in me. The films are nothing if not exploitative, offer little in the way of vigor, pace, and individuality, and are almost impatiently indifferent to storytelling clarity. (Italy's horror films are not unlike its operas; the narrative is nothing, the set pieces--the murders, usually, and the gaudier the better--are all.)

However. If Bava can be credited with bringing a certain level of art to the combination of pulp, paranoia, and pasta, then Dario Argento, that overstimulated madman, has taken the giallo approach over the top, kicked it down the other side, and smashed it to bloody, derivative bits. It's often stated that he hit his filmmaking peak with the 1977 Suspiria, an occult thriller that its long-ago viewers sometimes mention with an almost ghostly sense of recall, the way many of us remember old, puzzling dreams. But it's Argento's 1970 directorial debut, L'ucello dale plume di cristallo (aka The Bird With the Crystal Plumage), that interests me (in shards, at least). More than most gialli, this one is directly rooted in crime novels--it's an uncredited adaptation of the 1949 pageturner The Screaming Mimi by Frederick Brown, a highly entertaining paperback author whose specialties include detective thrillers, science fiction, and casually derogatory dialogue that's terse, smart, and chewy. The Screaming Mimi was first filmed by Gerd Oswald under Brown's title in 1958, to no great advantage. That version's few distinctions: the blonde, vavoomish female lead, Anita Ekberg, is terrorized in a shower a mere two years before Hitchcock staged the same scene for all time with another, better blonde, Janet Leigh; it was shot in uncostly circumstances by a resourceful cinematographer, Burnett Guffey; and is enlivened by an intense performance from Harry Townes who plays a shifty psychiatrist and seems to be occupying a far more astringent production than the one his costars are struggling through.

Argento's remounting isn't very much better overall, but it has two points of intense interest. The first is a sequence in which the hero, an American writer (Tony Musante) living in Rome, witnesses a murder attempt taking place in an art gallery, and tries to assist the victim (Eva Renzi) who is stabbed and left for dead by her attacker. While entering the building, Musante becomes confined in its foyer between two sets of glass doors, both locked. With no way of reaching Renzi, who has collapsed and is bleeding copiously, he keeps an anxious eye on her and monitors the street for passers-by, hoping someone will appear and summon the law. Until then he can only wait and watch as Renzi, shedding blood, cries out for help. A promising scenario for suspense, yes, but the most significant aspect deals with the dimensions of the setting. The gallery's interior is rectangular and its walls are white--it resembles a movie screen, and the various pieces of statuary within it (contorted, grotesque figures, a gigantic set of bird claws) are like visions from a horror film. With either much conscious cunning or obsessive, unwitting creative drive, Argento has given us his own distillation of the moviegoing experience, and has constructed his striking tableau around the premise that watching films is a helpless, hypnotic undertaking, as well as its own form of entrapment. The entire setup is one of the few superbly inventive components of the movie, and truly Hitchcockian, evoking the dilemma faced by James Stewart in the 1954 Rear Window: while snooping on his neighbours, Stewart uncovers a homicidal situation in the apartment across the courtyard, but is unable to prove it. He, like Musante, is watchful but powerless, and caught up in his own private movie, one that’s come to life. (Especially redolent of Hitchcock's technique is the way in which Argento's art gallery episode secretes its own compound character.) L'ucello dale plume di cristallo, with its preponderance of spying, staring, and the dangers of observation, appears to be all about viewing horror movies. (Its other predominant subject, an uninvitingly tutorial one, seems to be How To Kill Pretty Girls, but movies, especially those with horror subjects, are incorrigible about mixing their gems with their garbage.)

My remaining complimentary remarks are for composer Ennio Morricone, whose score has moments of cold, airborne eeriness, and particularly for the cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, who gives the film its only other great highlight: a nocturnal chase scene, smartly shot and edited. At the core of it are Musante, who has been investigating the murders on his own, and his paramour, Suzy Kendall, both of whom are being chased by a hired assassin. (Why the killer, who has no difficulty in dispatching each female victim, would risk engaging a sidekick to dispose of the hero and his girl isn't explained, but neither is a good deal else.) Though Argento, for the most part, doesn't give the film much oxygen, Storaro provides plenty of welcome atmosphere. Under his touch, Rome becomes a contrarian spectacle in which urban decay becomes vividly decorative. A shot of a timeworn building has a ruined, eye-catching splendor; the harsh street light and discoloured old stone create a sly, almost painterly effect (the stains creeping down the walls might have been borrowed from a handsomely debauched watercolour). In some images the dark appears to have condensed into a rarefied, burnished blackness, and Storaro's fog looks both gauzy and murky, as if it drifted in from two different sources. His tony treatment of the locations in this segment catches up with the lead performers too as Musante, an actor too good for the nonsense at hand, and Kendall, one of the most poised British starlets of the day, acquire an intent, headlong snap as they dash across the cobblestones and prowl through the gloom. They become more fun to watch (and somehow more licentious) while sprinting for their skins than when grinning fondly as they nuzzle in bed.

Otherwise? All else in this movie is done for either sheer effect or unconcerned sequential necessity, and the director's eroticization of the murders is too stupid and rebarbative to be worth discussing. Having said this, I should perhaps admit to a grudging fondness for Argento's 1993 Trauma, which is more or less a comedy about decapitation, though I can't actually defend it.

And, possibly, of some minor incidental value: in 1992, I interviewed Argento for a now-defunct video magazine, and was unsurprised to find him a most pleasant man. Every professional Hyde requires a serving of social Jeykyll to call upon, surely...?

(Posted: 08/04/2017)

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 8 years ago

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Stephen Becker, gifted author, translator, editor, essayist, and academic, achieved bestseller status with the 1964 novel A Covenant With Death, an existential crime story. It was adapted into a 1967 movie with George Maharis (who wins the scuffle) and Earl Holliman (who scores highest in the cast with a standout performance).

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 8 years ago

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"...and with hell are we at agreement..."

One of the harshest of equalizers within literature is the certainty that a vast number of admirable books never find their moment in the spotlight. And most that do are scheduled all the same to fade from the collective memory as readily as many inferior written works (with the equivalent precept existing, of course, in any other field of art). Given trend, time, and tide, the majority of writers and their publications are eventually consigned to the cultural void, with artists and hacks alike languishing on the same dusty shelves in shunned flea markets and unwelcoming powder rooms everywhere. Excellence in publishing produces many results, but immortality isn't often among them.

Recognizing this, it remains something of a cultural offense that Stephen Becker, one of the most noteworthy and ambitious American writers of his generation, appears to be seldom read anymore, and his name isn't generally recognized. Yet his talents were significant, his reviews extolling, his output not only versatile but prolific, and his background as enterprising as those of the pathfinding heroes within his books. The son of a pharmacist, he was born in 1927 in Mount Vernon, New York, and quickly evolved to the status of child prodigy, reading from the age of three and winning a Harvard scholarship at sixteen. Living at various times in China, France, the British Virgin Islands, the Guianas, and assorted American states, including Alaska, Becker received his education not only at Harvard (1943-47, B.A.) but Yenching University (1947-48, graduate studies) in Peking (now Beijing) as well. During this period he also served as a U.S. marine. A dedicated academic fluent in French and Chinese, he was an instructor at Tsing Hua University, also in Peking, and later taught at a number of American schools, including Massachusetts' Brandis University, Hollins College in Virginia, and the University of Central Florida. As a novelist he produced eleven books from 1951 to 1987, with translations into sixteen languages, including Finnish, Japanese, and Bengali. In 1954 a Guggenheim fellowship in creative writing was awarded him. He lost the use of his legs in 1959 from Guillen-Barr Syndrome, the freak result of a polio booster shot, which diminished his productivity not at all. Donning the mantle of pop historian, he wrote Comic Art in America (1959), an "absorbing study" [1] of comic strip aesthetics, lauded by Samuel Irving Bellman as "extremely useful to the student of contemporary American life and art." [2] In 1964, he gave us Marshall Field III, described by the author as "a partisan biography, in which adverse criticism is restrained, though not silenced by affinity." [3] A gifted translator, Becker also undertook a series of highly-praised English editions of an assortment of Europe's literary giants, including Elie Weisel, Romain Gary, Pierre Dominique Gaisseau, and Augustin Gomez-Arcos. He even had time to work as an editor and write short stories, articles, introductions, and reviews, as well as co-script the 1977 French film The Accuser. He died in 1999.

And the novels? Stephen Becker, more than many, was an artist consumed by the inherent conflict between the individual and society, by the reach and complexity of man's actions. His writing recurrently deals with bravery and the struggle for insight; social and personal responsibility; and the definitions of and differences between law, justice, and morality. At his best, his intelligence and commitment in the exploration of human nature have a masterly progression, and his prose offers the qualities that great writing is supposed to give us, a sense of immersion and discovery.

Among his works of fiction, A Covenant With Death (1964) is likely the one most renowned in its time, having been a bestseller, a critical success, and a Book of the Month Club selection. It begins with an archetypically dramatic situation, the sort that's launched the plots of countless mysteries, thrillers, and handwringing dramas: the murder of a beautiful young woman. Within the first two sentences of chapter one we're told with scrutinizing detachment what waits for her: "Louise Talbot chose to spend the last afternoon of her life lounging in the shade of a leafy sycamore at the split rail fence before her home. She was surpassingly alive and exuberantly feminine and did not know that she was to die." Becker then proceeds with the customary demands of plot and characterization while journeying far past them into queries and challenges on how we confront the world and ourselves.

The title comes from the Old Testament: "We have made a covenant with death, and with hell are we at agreement." (Isaiah 28:15, King James), a warning against complacency and apostasy. The year is 1923. The setting is Soledad City, a small American town in a southwestern state whose frontier days are not so far past. (The state, though unnamed, seems to be modeled on New Mexico, given its geographic placement and recent entrance into the Union.) The narrator is also the hero: Benjamin Morales Lewis, a twenty-nine-year old county judge of Welsh and Mexican descent. Largely untested in his profession, his working life is one of bureaucratic puttering: "There were wills to probate and an occasional divorce to maneuver; there were town ordinances to uphold and neighborhood bickerings to resolve and imprecise surveys to adjudicate; and there was local politics. Otherwise it was a quiet life." The quiet is banished when he's thrust into the center of the homicide case, and it's Ben's senior self, the elderly, venerated Judge Lewis, who in 1964 recounts the events following the long-ago slaying, the two resulting trials, and his part in them.

Shortly following the crime, the victim's husband, Bryan Talbot, is indicted on circumstantial evidence. The elder of the town's two county judges, a veteran of the bench named Hochstadter, presides over the trial. It concludes with a guilty verdict and Talbot is condemned to hang. So far, so tidy. Then comes a brilliant series of corkscrewing developments. Talbot, bewailing his innocence, is dragged to the scaffold. Moments before the noose is to be placed about his neck, he attacks his executioner, with both of them tumbling from the platform. The hangman, striking his head against a cobblestone, dies. The sentence is rescheduled for the next day, and another professional lyncher is summoned. But before morning breaks, evidence exonerating Talbot in the killing of his wife is uncovered. Cleared of one death, he is then charged with murdering the man who was commissioned to legally destroy him. Further complicating the matter, Judge Hochstadter departs on a lengthy vacation just before the start of the new trial. This leaves Ben, young and relatively unproven, to preside over his first criminal case, one in which there's cumbersome controversy and scant, if any, precedent in state law.

Ben, it turns out, is less than confident of his own judicial capabilities, intimidated by the case, and sceptical of his profession. "I don't mind responsibility up to a point," he admits. "But I don't like power. I don't trust it." He's also addled by a jumble of personal conflicts. Sex is a big quandary, leaving him distracted by two blue ribbon beauties--Rosemary, a demure blonde of Swedish descent with a Lutheran conscience regarding bedroom horseplay, and Rafaela, the daughter of a Mexican aristocrat and for Ben "the only woman I ever knew with whom love was friendly." There's also his mother, the forthright Eulalia, an emancipated Mexican matriarch with a fondness for cigars and a knack for censure. She is Ben's unchosen conscience, emotional confederate, and welcome sparring partner, quick to challenge him and fearful that he's not prepared for what's expected of him professionally. And there's the local citizenry, many of whom are righteous or cynical or both regarding the Talbot murder, and eager to pass their own judgements. "The people of this state are the boss," Ben says as he considers the dimensions of both his profession and the case, "and it doesn't matter that sometimes I have little use for them."

The first trial and its particulars are well-delineated and absorbing, taking place as Ben, observing from his gallery seat, follows the disputatious posturing of the opposing counselors as well as the prurience of those who've come to watch. This is the lengthiest segment of the book, imbued with a struggling ritual momentum--enough so for the proceedings to seem both intimate and remote, and unstoppable in the way of official calamities. Adding to the conflict are moments of knotty humour as Dietrich (the district attorney) and Parmelee (lawyer for the defense) thrust, parry, and provoke. While each man establishes his individual vigor and substance, they share a professional doggedness that makes them as similar as two veteran clubmen still engaged in debates from years gone by. The witnesses too have their shimmers of distinction. The depiction of Rawlins, the murder victim's lover, is a briskly amusing example of Becker's sense of detail and economy. He presents the character's possible future based on his current characteristics, compressing him into a synthesis of then and now: "He was handsome, well set up, with wavy dark hair, dark brows, small eyes, a blunt nose, a square chin. Twenty-seven years old; he might have been a mechanic who had just been promoted to salesman and would someday own the agency and carry his then two hundred pounds to Rotary meetings and smokers." Ben's own limitations and indulgences come into play as well. He fights his way through ponderous stretches of strategic verbiage by distracting himself with erotic fantasies, and when Dietrich and Pamelee--stoutish, respectably agamic middle-aged men--wrangle over the sexual content of a question, he is distantly amused. (He is young, after all, and smug regarding his own rutting verve.) And, aptly, the peculiarities and imbalances of the initial trial are reflected in the architecture of the very structure containing it. The courthouse has a floor that is, thanks to a mishap of renovation, four feet higher at the front. This results in slanted wooden pedestals under the restroom toilets and a sloping courtroom floor comparable to that of an amphitheatre. The overall effect on the building is what Ben calls "a carnival atmosphere, like a drunken woman in high heels." More than that, the physical foundation of justice is literally askew, not unlike the jury's conclusion and much of what leads up to it.

Among many lawful elements scrutinized by Ben in the courtroom, especially pertinent to him is the act of judging: its nature, man's predisposition to it, and the duty and power that it represents. As the verdict is about to be read, Talbot and the jury are instructed to look upon each other. "And that was honourable," Ben notes. "Every hour we judge one another; and how often do we look?" When the second trial takes place, it's by the Court, not by jury--the issues this time being more of law than fact. And without the usual twelve men good and true, the burden of Talbot's fate falls to Ben. Finally he is unavoidably required to step outside his multifold doubts, most of all those about himself. (Critical to his evaluation and ruling of the second murder case is his estimation of his own cut and character.) This is the lonely juncture that Becker's protagonists inevitably reach: the struggle for self-knowledge, accountability, and a sense of decision.

As expected, the novel arrives at its climax when his ruling is given. Unlike the turning point in standard murder stories, there are no chases, fisticuffs or thunderclap confessions; only a young man in court dress, seated before a mixed group in a lopsided courtroom, reading aloud an adjudicative document...and determining the outcome of a life and death situation. For eight pages, then, the hero of this novel and the man who wrote it bare their philosophical souls and Hobbesian vitals while addressing a litany of considerations, among them the maintenance of and by the law, the bargains we make with society in the name of survival, and the right to self-preservation (this last abstraction is much associated with Hobbes' Leviathan, which is quoted). This is not the sort of peak moment that many readers of crime stories are willing to brave, but it's worth it here to do so. What Becker provides is far more demanding and consuming than mere thrills and chases. He means to draw us deeper into the conflicts visited upon both the accused and his judge by the use of legal perspective, intellectual force, moral logic, and the counterpoise required to juggle them all. It's not what Hammett, Chandler, and their numberless pulp offspring would have attempted in the closing pages of any of their works, but Becker's design provides its own edge and impetus. He dramatizes the drive and efficacy of ideas and mental construction, the inborn charge in discovering the connections between patterns of thought. These are Ben's weapons in solving the aftermath of the hangman's killing, if not the killing itself. Not so neat and noirish as many of us prefer our crime stories to end, but this is a novel whose restless hero states: "I did not believe...that facts ever spoke for themselves--never accurately, never fully."

Becker gives the reader a magnetic, beautifully abundant legal adventure, one of its key rewards being his command as a stylist. He commingles the contemplative and the visual, with many scenes vividly atmospheric and highlighted by surprising turns and quicksilver impressions. One such: a brief sequence set in a cantina in which Ben spends an afternoon of amicable drinking. A lazy, hallucinatory quality overtakes him, and the colours of the room undergo metamorphic revisions until "even the voices took on tints." With a fine fluidity, Becker creates a woozy, suspended viewpoint that suggests both remote, singular memories and dreams that haven't entirely arrived. As for the story's primary setting and its inhabitants, Soledad City comes to prosaic life as a well-stocked collection of mundanities and eccentricities, all quite inseparable. "Tawdry and provincial," Ben particularizes the town, "but not ignoble." His personal and vocational satellites are a lively, memorable bunch, more than a few of them blessed with Dickensian names and each placed firmly within his profession: Harvey Bump (court clerk), Bosco Boscovitch (grocer), Alfred Harmsworth (police chief), Edgar Musgrave (newspaper proprietor), George Chillingworth (laundry mat owner), Sebastian Oates (retired colonel), Geronimo Goldman (drug store owner and a self-avowed Jewish Apache), Milton D. Cathcart (mayor), Clement Hoyers (railroad ticket agent), Francis X. Gorman (prohibition agent), Willie Waite (the unfortunate hangman). And there are even a few literary knicknacks to be discovered thanks to Becker's attachment to unorthodox words such as lallations (infantile speech), laetificiant (pertaining to medication that stimulates), and the slightly startling boryborygmus (that old burbling uproar from deep within the intestines). My favourite: gossipacious (inclined to gossip; one of the few that might actually come into use someday).

In technique and topicality, A Covenant With Death is to a great degree a work of writerly interests. Throughout Ben's account, literature operates as a dominant influence, from the law books he pores over to the editions of classic works that crowd his study to the many quotations he offers from history's great scribes: Gibbon, Aristotle, Sophocles, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Tacitus, et al are given their moments of rational luster. (The comedian in the group appears to be George Moore, who is quoted as musing: "I wonder why murder is considered less immoral in literature than fornication.") These pronouncements from the scholarly dead serve entertainingly as underscorings of Ben's outlook, but they're also part of the author's ecumenical scope, his use of narrative dips and tributaries that add by degrees to the portraiture of Ben and his environment. Outstanding in particular is the instance when his future self, the senior, narrating Judge Lewis, directly addresses the reader, us, the society he has come to know too well. "I do not like you," he begins. "You have submitted yourself to things, and soon they will kill you." And down he goes through his list of man's ruthless complacencies and various breeds of abstract suicide. This is a passage confrontational enough to briefly break the literary fourth wall, and it takes you slightly aback even as it pulls you in. A Covenant With Death is a book as much about communication and the mastery of language and thought as it is about murder, justice, love, and human endeavor. And it's seemly that a novel so driven by literary devotion and existential concern should conclude with a man reading a speech laden with principles and profundities before a public gathering. Becker's depth and accomplishment are genuinely singular, and I court no hubris by limning him as one of the best prose artists of his day.

******

None of this, or not very much, could survive a movie adaptation. But one came about anyway. It isn't difficult to see why. The book promised sufficient profit-making allure to warrant an attempt, surely? The sales points: its bestseller status. A sensational fatality by foul play. A pulchritudinous corpse. A lusty, rebellious central figure, with two fetching females to make his life a thing of misery and joy. A criminal trial, always a dramatic draw, especially if capital punishment is attached. And, most promising of all, that sensational plot twist in which a second killing eclipses the first, bringing with it a new range of worries for our struggling young judge and the man whose existence depends upon him. Rounding it all out: a follow-up trial to double the suspense and wrap up the drama with a big, ropelike ribbon. How, the money men must have murmured, could it miss?

In a number of ways it did, and it couldn't have pleased Becker, who in later years referred to it slightingly as "a mainstay of various late-late shows." [4] Does the film replicate the novel adequately? Of course not; I can't think of an instance where the transition of a written work into a filmic one didn't result in a significant divergence from its source. The very change from one medium to the other is a vast alteration of literary material in the most immediate, organic way. Movies and books don't operate in the same aesthetic universe, and a distinctive literary voice can't be converted into a visual equivalent any more than a page of text can match the wealth of optical detail that can be captured on film in seconds. A novel is essentially more internal and open than a movie, and even in the best of circumstances a filmed adaptation is neither child nor sibling of the publication it resembles, but a mere cousin of bastard status, removed by who knows how many generations of rewrites. While the film version of A Covenant With Death (1967) is certainly not within a comparable vision, aim, or scope as the novel, I'm rather glad that the adaptive effort was made. It's not without certain rewards, some of them wayward but appealing, and more than a few genuinely impressive. But the intellectual life of the narrative and the inner dialogue that Ben has with himself and us are integral to the story's mettle...and how, cinematically, do you present any of it?

You can't, of course, but that stopped no one involved in the production from going ahead with it. A Covenant With Death, produced by Warner Bros., was the directorial movie debut of Lamont Johnson, who began his career while still in school in the 1940's, working at various points as a disc jockey, a news announcer, and an actor, with plenty of airtime emoting for radio productions. He took up directing for the stage with student productions in Southern California, then during the early 1950's continued as an actor in New York City in radio (playing, most notably, Tarzan), the theatre, and television. Later that decade he settled into the director's chair for a few operas and a selection of plays whose creators ranged from John Ford and Dylan Thomas to Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. During this period he was also directing for the tube, beginning with umpteen broadcasts of live TV dramas for Matinee Theatre. Before long he branched into episodes of a good many popular series, including Have Gun, Will Travel, The Twilight Zone, Peter Gunn, The Rifleman, Dr. Kildaire, Naked City, and The Name of the Game. Among movies, those most often cited as his best are The McKenzie Break (1971) and The Last American Hero (1973). But Johnson's most highly-regarded achievements can be found in a series of post-sixties TV productions with forceful social themes: the interracial love story My Sweet Charlie (1971); That Certain Summer (1972), the first telefilm to deal sympathetically with homosexuality; The Execution of Private Slovik (1973), based on the downfall and death of the last American soldier put before a firing squad for desertion; Wallenberg: A Hero's Story (1985), a mini-series about the Swedish diplomat who became a Holocaust hero; and Lincoln (1988), a two-episode adaptation of Gore Vidal's sizeable historical drama. All told, a busy and distinctive career, yet gatecrashing into movies was a fraught procedure for Johnson even after his television reputation was established. Though he'd apparently declined four offers to direct for Warner Bros., he was "absolutely frantic to make a feature." [5] He may have had a special interest in stories dealing with homicide; he was announced in 1965 as helmsman for Witnesses to the Crime, a proposed treatment of the notorious Kitty Genovese slaying. The project was never filmed, and by the time he accepted A Covenant With Death, also a murder tale, he must have felt that it was no longer prudent to decline the next offer or see another project evaporate. Looking back at the film ten years after its release, he misremembered the profession of Ben Lewis, but he was quite clear on where the film went wrong: "It wasn't a very good picture; it was an awfully good book, but it didn't adapt. It was largely a...subjective narrative of the interior experience of a young lawyer...We had to go to too many excesses to make it cinematic." [6]

One of the most jarring excesses was the truncation of Ben's recitation of his judgement. The script, credited to Larry Marcus and Saul Levitt, shaves Ben's eight pages of finalizing resolve and fitting persuasion down to a hurried ninety seconds in which we hear a few leftover pronouncements from the novel--enough to let us know the bare basics of what's been mandated and why. In the book, everything has been aimed at preparing us for Ben's summation, his act of redemption. But a man reading a lengthy speech plentiful with legalese is not exciting viewing for most people, and movies have always specialized in visual action, not the mental variety. So the substance of Ben's self-actualization is skipped past, leaving a blank patch where a conclusion should have been. Elsewhere his crisis of commitment is demonstrated by bad temper, irony, or skittishness, with minimal dramatic headway. A query from a local crony on the first trial's possible outcome prompts a displeasured outburst from Ben with a loud reminder that he's not the judge on the case. During a rodeo interlude he makes a furious attempt at bronco busting, an incident meant to demonstrate his frustration with his irresolution and his need to conquer it; but getting bounced off a horse repeatedly isn't much of an emotional magnifier. And there's a scene late in the story with great potential for intimate dynamism: Ben, after bearing Eulalia's criticism for too long, rounds on her and fires back, forcing her to see that her apprehensions about him are only feeding his own. What ought to be a rebellious salvo with shadings of affection is delivered as a bromidic domestic lecture. It's at these points that the movie is visibly working to bring the central drama to life, but it never entirely does.

Another limitation is the casting of the leading role. George Maharis would have seemed a promising commercial choice to play Ben Lewis given the keen following he'd generated during his three years on television's Route 66. His popular turn on the wanderlusting series had shown his imagistic strengths to considerable advantage, making him the show's primary presence. Guardedly good-looking, Maharis had a natural countercultural presence and a watchful aura indicating an intuitive grasp of his surroundings. Cruising from one weekly adventure to the next, his casually standoffish manner made him seem hip, independent, and unpersuaded by humbug. (He didn't at all seem like the sort of fellow who lived in the suburbs and worked for a bureaucracy.) There was just enough Kerouac Lite in him to intrigue viewers (young females especially, and, I assume, gay males), but not so much to invoke the thrum of bongos and the smell of hashish. As Ben, it's an attractive sketch he offers--aloof but approachable, physically graceful, full of glossy carnal health. There isn't, however, much inner tension in his work here, nor the cerebral drive needed for the character's evolvement. A scene in court in which he quashes a declaration of impertinence from the district attorney, Dietrich (John Anderson), should have delivered a cuff of leonine affront, but Maharis only skims the conflict's surface. He is, fleetingly, in better form when bedding the patrician wench Rafaela (Wende Wagner, ravishingly pretty), opening his jaw while nuzzling his way along her neck, as if promising a bite among the kisses. And he begins to suggest an angry eloquence in a confrontation between Ben and his radiant but middlebrow Rosemary (the statuesque Laura Devon, who was born for the camera if not the scripted word). As she lists her demands (kids, a house, a sensible car), he watches her with chilly irony as the last of his small, impatient fondness for her dies. It's an evocative glimpse of erotic disillusionment completing itself, but a glimpse only. The exchange then crumbles into a bit of bickering and, clumsily, the insertion of an abridged version of the book's crowning statement, a plea for enlightenment and honest living by and for all. As presented by Becker, the speech is moving, very much so, but quite out of place on film as a terminating rebuke by a man anxious to be rid of his luscious but puny-minded girlfriend. Who might have been better cast? A young Brando or a Hispanic Pacino might have saved the day, but I doubt any actor could have fleshed out the part completely. Too much of the character was left behind.

So: more than enough missteps to submerge the story, but it's surprising to find how much of the film engages. Despite all the vital content that's abandoned--the book's copious food for thought--there's a fair amount of material here that's worthy of attention. Though Johnson wasn't happy with the film and his own work in it, his care with actors and the definition of their roles--chief among his strengths--is evident, as is his interest in locale and how it highlights the play of relationships and the status of the characters. The first time we see Ben and Rosemary together is a case in point: she, romantically drawn to him but disapproving of his hedonistic ways, occupies a position of superiority, looking down at him from an upstairs landing, her smile both inviting and remote. A later scene featuring Ben on a reluctant, solitary walk down the main street of town to attend (as a court functionary) Talbot's hanging is brought about in a descending high-angle shot, with the distant perspective, the street's emptiness, and the sun's stark glare emphasizing his aloneness. This moment, informed by dreaded duty and strained obedience, provides a faint harbinger of the justly famous sequence, also lonely and moving toward a painful conclusion, in That Certain Summer wherein Hal Holbrook and Scott Jacoby, likewise shot from a lengthy remove, walk down a hill together as Holbrook leads up to his anguished revelation to his son that he is homosexual.

Then there's the cinematographer, Robert Burks, who is inseparably associated with the ubiquitous Hitchcock, for whom he shot a dozen movies, starting with Strangers on a Train (1951) and ending with Marnie (1964). True, his images this time around haven't the flair and vibrancy of anything in Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1957) or North by Northwest (1959), and some of the backgrounds (the entrance hall of Eulalia's home and the exteriors of the Talbot house by night) are unmistakably sets, rather dull ones, inadequately lit. There are, however, scenes where his colour sense comes through pleasingly (the yellows and greens in Eulalia's dining room are festively right), and he finds an intriguing resonance in nocturnal settings. The courtroom by daylight is visibly scuffed and neglected, with scratched woodwork and dingy walls. But during a visit from Ben after sundown when the room is bedimmed and deserted it acquires a declining dignity. Especially effective is a small eventide sequence wherein Ben leads Rosemary from Eulalia's courtyard through his shadowy study to his twilit bedroom. Burks emphasizes the sensuality of their mutual intent by juxtaposing the textures of rough stone walls and old wooden surfaces against the dusky light, Ben's sleek dinner garb, and Rosemary's spun-gold hair and white lace dress. The heightened contrasts are seductive, and though brief, this is one of the most visually expressive interludes in the film.

And there's the dialogue, too. Much of it isn't just serviceable, it's pointed and entertaining, and it ought to be---the bulk of it is from the book. Not the least of all is the cast, a rich one packed with practiced scene-stealers. Lonnie Chapman, of bantam stature and eager delivery, has a visibly good time as the newsman Musgrave, set forth in the book as "a man of pepper and probity." That's just how he depicts him. A valuable character player with a robust career in the theatre, Chapman would have been an invigorating force in live performance, with every eye in the house steadily upon him. John Anderson, whose bass pipes were destined for public declamations, is a superb adversary as Dietrich. Unshakably intent on getting Talbot convicted not once but twice, Dietrich goes from each turn of the law to the next boomingly adamant that state legislation be appeased, regardless of the human cost. Anderson, a shrewd performer and an imposing presence, endows this orotund taskmaster with the denouncing gaze and buckram posture of a man more resolute than reasonable. Katy Jurado, the most prominent Mexican actress in American films at that time, was the inevitable and appropriate choice for Eulalia (though she was only four years older than Maharis). Becker, with facility, presented her as a maternal bawd and, where her son is concerned, a rebuking chorus; these attributes survive nicely in Jurado, who had the good taste to play them, for the most part, matter-of-factly. Also, as in the book, this Eulalia is markedly tougher than Ben and unafraid to show it. Though she's given a few scenes verging on the tempestuous, Jurado keeps the banter more needling than spitfired, and she and Maharis are amusing together when squabbling on their way to a family gathering. Also--an excellent bonus--Jurado is sexy, especially when puffing dismissively on a stumpy parejo. Cast as Parmelee, Kent Smith, resembling a mix of elder statesman and matinee idol, is a far throw from the defense attorney of Becker's imagination, who is introduced as "a prissy man with minimal hair...and his voice was huge, always a surprise; a great operatic basso, though he looked like a breathless, paunchy tenor." On the page, he's a tireless fighter and a compelling orator. In the film, we never see him in action during the first trial; its activities are eliminated to keep the plot moving, the pace steady, and the running time manageable. But never mind--Smith and the screenwriters create something more interesting than the usual firebrand lawyer of many hundreds of dramas. His Parmelee is on the earnest side, often with a doubting air, anxious for his client, and moved to shame when his appeal for Talbot is rejected. Here, for a change, is a movie lawyer who is perhaps too decent for the indecent business of law and order. An unexpected delight is a funny, pre-stardom turn by Gene Hackman as Harmsworth, the harried police chief. (In Hollywood's earlier days, a character with such a surname would have been a crook, not a cop.) Chronically speckled with sweat and looking as if the worst is on its way, he seems not so much an authority of the law as one of its whipping boys. In a warmup for the black humour of Bonnie and Clyde (released later that year), he delivers a jot of macabre folksiness in the execution scene, dragging a struggling Talbot closer to the rope while chiding him for holding things up. After the hangman's death, Hackman charges into the comedy of frustration with a furious, serrated squeal during a verbal clash with Smith. Throughout the film, he sustains a welcome comic key as a man all too often out of key, both socially and professionally. Sidney Blackmer, as the gossipacious (there!) Colonel Oates has a tedious role, that of the bad-mouthing small town geezer. But Blackman, a cagey artist, gives this blatherskite his morsel of comic value by delivering his sourpuss statements as both pleasured and pained, stuck between a complaining purr and a condemning grunt.

The standout in the cast, however, is Earl Holliman as the sinned-against Talbot. A judicious talent, Holliman has shown a generous openness and reach as paragons of various virtues, notably Katharine Hepburn's coltishly innocent brother in The Rainmaker (1956), the fearful but tenacious John Doe of "Where is Everybody?" (1959; the premiere episode of The Twilight Zone), and, in a 1973 Los Angeles production of A Streetcar Named Desire, the role of Mitch, this time more gentle than shy--an interpretation summarized by Philip C. Kolin thusly: "Holliman's Mitch, on the other hand, was magnificent...The innovations Holliman poured into the role worked." [7] He's also enjoyed some fine jagged times as wrongdoing renegades, like the boyishly lethal hitman in The Big Combo (1955), the inebriate deputy of The Trap (1959), and the privileged killer in Last Train From Gun Hill (1959). Here he plays both aggressor and scapegoat, going well past the book's nearly elliptical account of Talbot. Becker kept the character a moderately distant figure, small in significance to the residents of Soledad City, somewhat undefined by his own lack of marrow, and in Eulalia's words a husband who "never looked like much." Ben, in chapter three, sums him up as "pleasant enough; I liked him all right...He had a shrewd mind, but he drank too much and was not steady." Keeping him just out of close range, Becker allows the accusant sufficient mystery for the reader to engage in his own debate on the question of his guilt. The movie, however, holds a broad critical lens up to the author's balanced outline, with Holliman cast as a nervy, neurotic hothead and blowhard, an attention-seeker more expansive than confident who knows he's not liked and still can't modify his drinking or his own worst behaviour. Yet despite his regressive approach to himself and others, he gains through adversity a degree of moral relevance--an interpretation present in the novel when Ben suggests that Talbot "is, in a twisted sense, the hero of this narrative." His victimization by both the law and himself ultimately wins our speculation and sympathy, despite his appalling indulgences. Drawing from both borders of the dramatic spectrum, Holliman is expertly in charge of this adaptation's most troubling and involving character, the one whose future life you might wonder about when the film is over. (How would someone so mauled about by the legal system recover to any degree?)

His performance reaches a jangling peak in the execution scene, which calls for him to vault through a range of emotions as Talbot makes a terrified attempt to convince those present (including Ben, Dietrich, and Harmsworth) that he's innocent of his wife's death. Holliman nails the scene, poignantly. It's a big showy sequence, the sort that often wins awards for actors, and one might have come his way if anybody had seen the film. But A Covenant With Death was barely noticed during its theatrical circulation, and hasn't developed a viewership in the decades since. Among the more than half-dozen reviews from 1967 that I've come across, only one mentions his contribution. It's from The Globe and Mail, written by Joan Fox, who, with thumb raised, states: "This man Talbot is played with acute honesty by Earl Holliman, who almost steals the show with his showdown scenes." [8] I submit that he does steal the show, not just with emotional voltage, but also silence and a sparing use of gesture. Shortly following the execution attempt, Talbot is shown in his jail cell, folded on his cot into a brittle fetal curl. The distant chugging of a passing car becomes audible, and the moment acquires a small, hair-raising tingle as he slowly sits up, overcome by pensive horror as he realizes that another hangman will soon be there.

Holliman is so secure in his creative trajectory that he even survives a scene that is easily the most ill-advised of the excesses referred to by the director. It goes as follows: during the period when he is labouring over his edict, Ben crosses paths with Talbot, who is out on bail and belligerently drunk. The encounter veers into a fight in the street, and concludes when Ben, defending himself, smashes Talbot's head into a car headlight. The episode finds its reductionist climax in a flare of panic for Ben when it appears that he's killed his attacker, only to breath freely again when Talbot stirs and opens his eyes. This approximation of the hangman's death is offered as the deciding nudge required by Ben to consolidate his decree, and legal acumen, lawful precedence, and metaphysical wisdom are rendered secondary to a surprise slug-out, a lesson-learning scare, and a bit of old-fashioned empathy. Further muddying the plot's logic is a moment in the brawl when Talbot attempts to bludgeon Ben with the car's hand crank--a flourish completely incompatible with his moral flow within the story, hurling him outside of his position as an underdog as well as the viewer's compassion. It could be argued, if you must, that his ordeal may have turned him into the very thing of which he was blameless: a killer, or a potential one at least. This possibility, however, is never pursued, and for the better; it would have been one twist too many. As it is, nothing further is made of the conflict, which evaporates without significant comment. There is, of course, nothing like this bit of plotwork in the novel, and Becker must have made a hurried, howling exit after witnessing it. The only component that makes it watchable is Holliman's participation. He rips through the utter nonsense of it in a vivifying fury. Wearing a soaked squint and a gross, wet-chinned hostility when he spots Maharis, Holliman sends Talbot after him with dropped shoulders, tilted posture, and a plodding, threatening gait, all adroitly managed. Though the performance belongs to a film that's never mentioned when Holliman's career highlights are listed, this is one of his most memorable and confrontational efforts.

Peter Bogdanovich has said (often, I'm sure) that so many things can go wrong while making a movie that it's a miracle when any one of them turns out right. I'm tempted to suggest that A Covenant With Death might have been more effective if it had strayed even further from the novel by switching the focus of identification away from Ben and concentrated on Talbot's dilemma, making him the central figure and not merely a discretional hero. But that would have been further cinematic insult to literary injury, and many an ambitious mess has been worsened by a surfeit of solutions. Ultimately this movie never makes a creative covenant with its source (though it does pay the book, via the efforts of its director and cast, as much praise as the circumstances permit). It could be called a victim of its own aesthetic and intellectual inheritance, one that's as preoccupying for what it was able to do as it is for what it could never do.

Books

A Literary Cavalcade I, Robert A. Parker, Lulu.com, 2013

Marshall Filed III: A Biography, Stephen Becker, Simon & Shuster, 1964

Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Philip C. Kolin, Cambridge University Press, 2000

Articles

"A-: Lamont Johnson," Eric Orner, Film Comment, September-October, 1977

"After the Trial One Man Must Judge," Granville Hicks, Saturday Review, January 9, 1965

"Anatomy of a Judge, Not a Murder," Robert Traver, Life, January 8, 1965

"Becker Brings a World of Experience to his Work" (Part One), Andy Companaro, Central Florida Future, November 10, 1988

"Becker Brings a World of Experience to his Work" (Part Two), Andy Companaro, Central Florida Future, November 17, 1988

"Becker Remembers a Lifetime of Adventure," Ed Hayes, Orlando Sentinel, December 7, 1986

"Becker, Stephen (David)," uncredited, Contemporary Authors, Volumes 5-8, 1969

"Books and a Movie From Former Fellows," uncredited, The Rotarian, February, 1965

"Books Briefly Noted," Arlene Croce, The New Yorker, January 1, 1965

"By Humanity Possessed," uncredited, Time, January 8, 1965

"Completing the Circle," uncredited, The Rotarian, November, 1982

"A Covenant With Death," uncredited, Monthly Film Bulletin, January 1, 1968

"Covenant With Death," Murf, Variety, January 11, 1967

"Covenant With Death," Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, February 16, 1967

"A Covenant With Death," Joan Fox, The Globe and Mail, April 24, 1967

"A Crisis of Character," uncredited, Time, February 24, 1967

"Hollywood has a Warm Welcome for an Influx of New Directors," Peter Bart, The New York Times, June 11, 1965

"Johnson, Lamont," uncredited, Museum of Broadcast Communications (www.museum.tv/eotv/johnsonlamo.htm)

"Lamont Johnson, Emmy-Winning Director, Dies at 88," Dennis Hevesit, The New York Times, October 27, 2010

"A Man Must Decide," William M. Kunstler, The New York Times Review of Books, Volume 70, 1965

"Marshall Field III: A Biography," James Brown IV Social Service Review, Vol. 38, No. 4 (December 1964)

"A Professor of the Old School," Sam Hodges, Orlando Sentinel, May 5, 1992

"Product Digest," uncredited, Motion Picture Herald, February 1, 1967

"Reviews," Graham Clarke, Kinematograph Weekly, November 9, 1968

"Stephen Becker, Comic Art in America," Samuel Irving Bellman, American Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 110 (Spring, 1960)

"A Town and Murder," H. W., Montreal Gazette, March 6, 1965

"TV Apathy Vexes Creative Staff," uncredited, The New York Times, March 31, 1965

Notes

[1] "Stephen Becker, Comic Art in America," Samuel Irving Bellman, American Quarterly, Vol. 12, No.110 (Spring 1960), p110

[2] "Stephen Becker, Comic Art in America," Samuel Irving Bellman, American Quarterly, Vol. 12, No.110 (Spring 1960), p111

[3] Marshall Field III: A Biography, Stephen Becker, Simon & Shuster, 1964, p11

[4] "Completing the Circle," uncredited, The Rotarian, November, 1982, p47

[5] "A-: Lamont Johnson," Eric Orner, Film Comment, September-October, 1977, p20

[6] "A-: Lamont Johnson," Eric Orner, Film Comment, September-October, 1977, p20

[7] Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Philip C. Kolin, Cambridge University Press, 2000, p93

[8] "A Covenant With Death," Joan Fox, The Globe and Mail, April 24, 1967, p18

(Posted 07/01/2017)

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pawprintsandthumbnails-blog · 9 years ago

Text

Graveyard Shift

Authors Evelyn Waugh (above) and Charles Wilkins (below), both known to tweak the metaphysics of the graveyard.

Death may sting like a bastard, but comedy keeps it in its place. Among the Grim Reaper's deftest and most amusing handlers are Evelyn Waugh, a class-conscious traditionalist, a Catholic convert, a sworn elitist, and an unsparing satirical force, and Charles Wilkins, literary nomad, memoirist extraordinaire, and an heir of sorts to Stephen Leacock. Both have had their merry moments tweaking the metaphysics of the graveyard, and each in his way is known to have brandished wit and wordplay at His Deathliness like the proverbial whip and chair. (For Waugh, an Englishman who came into being at the close of the Victorian era, nothing less than a Queen Anne wingback and a hunting lash with a fine malacca handle will suffice. For Wilkins, a Toronto-born boomer, a 1960's lounge seat and a cracking leather strap donated by a helpful dominatrix would be about right.)

Like Muriel Spark, his peer in caricature and Catholicism, Waugh took his view from a lofty, damning platform, neatly recording all manner of things fateful and merciless. He was, as claimed by Malcolm Bradbury, obsessed with "the grim comedy of the memento mori." [1] Also subject to his fascination was our collective attitude toward our own demise, which he believed to be a barometer of man's approach to living, exemplified in his claim that "the great cultural decline of the twentieth century was first evident in the graveyard." [2] (Why the introductory signs of social decay would appear in a setting that most people avoid or ignore, I can't say, so my assumption is that Waugh allowed more credit to the Big Sleep than properly earned. But it's not so unreasonable, my assumption further goes, that a European who grew up during the Great War would give death somewhat more than its due.)

Within Waugh's early novels, death is often nearby and loitering with intent. The final chapter of Vile Bodies (1930) sees its hero on a World War I battlefield surrounded by utter desolation; moves on to his discovery of a filthy old general and a goodtime girl who delivers a dizzy litany of battle-scarred misfortune that peaks with the exclamation: "My, isn't war awful?"; and concludes the tale with the comic-ominous sentence: "And presently, like a circling typhoon, the sounds of battle began to return." In Black Mischief (1932), set in a fictional chunk of Africa, more than a few of its primary characters are hurried into oblivion, and the entire narrative is most unsentimental regarding prankish annihilation. The book's culmination of macabre comedy proves to be an act of cannibalism, the victim having been "stewed to pulp among peppers and aromatic roots" and consumed unwittingly by the hero, her former paramour.

Taking up military service in World War II, Waugh gained a frontline view of armed conflict. Starting out as a captain in the Royal Marines, he was later an intelligence officer within a combat unit. It was an experience that well served his future war novels, notably the esteemed Sword of Honour trilogy, comprised of the 1952 Men at Arms, 1955's Officers and Gentlemen, and, from 1961, Unconditional Surrender, also published as The End of the Battle. The results cut a vivid, violent literary arc, with welcome jabs of wit ranging from tart to bitter. Indeed, as the triptych progresses, both satire and drama become, book by book, bleaker and bloodier, with most of the characters swept off to their dubious reward, and military life shown to be a quagmire of confusion, connivance, incompetence, and moral poverty.

But the Waugh work that most thoroughly addresses the indignities and inanities of death and man's attempts to cope with it was prompted not by the ravages of combat but the fleshpots of Hollywood: The Loved One.

In 1947, Waugh travelled to Los Angeles to negotiate with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer a proposed film adaptation of his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. The project failed to materialize and Waugh loathed L.A., but while there he lit upon an unexpected source of inspiration: Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, a lavish burial centre and sightseeing attraction with an appallingly banal blockbuster mentality. Then, as now, Forest Lawn was a Hollywood construct, one devised to render mortal loss sweet and harmless by way of ceremonial prettifying, homiletic sentimentality, and pristine shamelessness. To Waugh's delighted horror, Forest Lawn featured only evergreen trees because they shed no leaves; popular tunes soothingly piped throughout the grounds; the twittering of caged birds, the wild variety being unreliable vocalists, taking wing as they please; a jumble of European architectural styles; various burial sections with nursery names like Slumberland, Sweet Memory, and Babyland (a heart-shaped patch of ground for the interment of infants); a kitschy stained glass replica of The Last Supper; the deceased lying in state on restful sofas, in coffins with bassinette-frilly silk pillows, and in luxuriant chambers called Slumber Rooms, designed to resemble swank hotel lodgings; and a gigantic plaque upon which sits The Builder's Creed, the philosophy of Forest Lawn's gasbag founder, Dr. Herbert L. Eaton, who proclaims the surroundings to be "a place where lovers new and old shall love to stroll and watch the sunset's glow...where artists study and sketch...where school teachers bring happy children to see the things they read about in books..." Waugh noted with mirthful scorn: "There is more than a hint indeed throughout Forest Lawn that death is a form of infancy, a Wordsworthian return to innocence." [3] Later that year his impressions of Dr. Eaton's backwoods Xanadu were shared with all in "Death in Hollywood," an article penned for Life. In February 1948 The Loved One appeared in the British publication Horizon, taking up the magazine's entire issue. Promptly sold were all 9,500 copies.

In The Loved One, Waugh gives focus to two divergent communities: California's funeral circuit and the American film industry's British colony, a now-bygone collection of English expatriates whose unofficial leader was tweedy character actor C. Aubrey Smith. Members of the group, which eventually came to be known as the Hollywood Raj, included performers (among them Ronald Coleman, David Niven, Errol Flynn, Leslie Howard, Joan Fontaine, Olivia de Havilland, Boris Karloff, Gladys Cooper, Basil Rathbone, and Nigel Bruce), writers (P. G. Wodehouse prominent among them), and directors (such as Charles Brabin and Colin Campbell). Though it was for many years a thriving menagerie, Waugh depicts Hollywood's Brit community as a way station for creative vagabonds and parodic flunkees. Among them is his own Sir Francis Hinsley, a burnt-out screenwriter who possesses "a sensitive, intelligent face, blurred somewhat by soft living and long boredom" and is blandly resigned to his digressive, wasted career at Megalopolis Pictures. "I was always the most indefatigable of hacks," he says. Also a resident of Hollywood's England is The Loved One's central figure, Dennis Barlow, a budding poet who is Hinsley's nephew and must earn his keep on the night shift at a pet cemetery. This proves to be an appropriate setting for Waugh's young hero, who "came of a generation which enjoys a vicarious intimacy with death."

This intimacy increases greatly for Dennis when Hinsley's contract with Megalopolis is dropped and he is shown the door. He summarily hangs himself. In the course of arranging his uncle's funeral, Dennis discovers Whispering Glades, an elaborate necropolis in which display supersedes meaning--based, of course, on Forest Lawn. It's in this setting that the term Loved One is bandied about reverently, being the fond euphemism allotted to the corpses awaiting disposal. Among the indulgences Dennis finds there: golden gates, freshly gilded; a parody of the Builder's Creed carved in a marble wall with the instructions ENTER STRANGER and BE HAPPY; mechanical bees to provide restful humming without stinging; an ersatz English manor insured against fire, earthquake, and nuclear fission; and in the middle of a lake, a verdant island habituated by frisky lovers in need of a rendezvous spot.

The most encouraging revelation for Dennis, however, is Miss Aimee Thanatogenous, a beauteous beautician proudly employed by Whispering Glades. Her devotion is to the cosmetic enhancement of the deceased--a transfiguration, she calls it, utilizing powder, creams, and shampoo--and to the senior mortician, Mr. Joyboy, whom she considers "kinda holy." He too takes an active hand in sprucing up the cadavers in his care: massaging blood from congestive areas, manipulating rigid features into benign smiles, inclining body parts this way or that to conceal pesky sutures. A cozy martinet, Joyboy's devotion is, in descending order, to the art of embalming, his harridan mother, and Aimee. Dennis' devotion, too, is reserved for her, but on his terms only. A competition is soon set in motion. Death determines the outcome.

Throughout this short novel (a novella, actually), Waugh employs a remote, ironic narrative in the third person, and no one save Dennis is spared judgement. And though the beliefs and behaviour for which he condemns his characters must have seemed bizarre in 1948, they now justify his displeasure all the more by comfortably belonging to our current collection of madnesses. The fanatical dedication at Whispering Glades to the glamorization of the dead seems no less outlandish than our present obsessions with physical fitness, fad diets, plastic surgery, tattoos, piercings, and the many further horrors of serving an image. Shallow self-improvement is one of man's fondest rituals, and the waggish authority in Waugh's depiction of appearance at the expense of reality has a truly droll dreadfulness. Dennis' erotic inclinations are likewise convincingly presented, and with a marvelous brevity. When he meets Aimee and falls under her spell, he notes that her eyes are "greenish and remote, with a rich glint of lunacy." A sane, sound woman can be a relief and a reward; a deranged female, however, is a temptation if not a treasure.

If Dennis himself is not quite deranged, he is more than a little wanting in rectitude. Early on he is characterized as "a young man of sensibility rather than sentiment." This is Waugh's aloof, airy way of saying that his fledgling hero is much less heroic than he could be. From one turn to the next, Dennis exhibits a trickster's caddishness, and without apology. He thumbs his nose at death and mourning by composing a vicious poem to be recited during his uncle's last rites. He takes credit for literary achievements that aren't his, deceives the girl he claims to love, and indulges himself in a handy spot of blackmail. Waugh made a habit of prickly protagonists; among them Dennis is particularly noteworthy for his unhesitating audaciousness (a quality that Edmund Wilson applied with shrewdness to Waugh: "He has himself made of audacity a literary technique.") [4] Though Dennis is only a few fleas short of being a dirty dog, Waugh prefers to find him otherwise, positioning him as not just a scoffing wit, but a natural outsider, something writers tend to be (significantly, he is without friends and never laments or seems to notice his own isolation). He is, welcome him or not, a satirist of the corrosive kind, like the author who created him.

Waugh was disappointed by the fall of tradition, the secular shift of things, the mediocrity of American life, and the creeping vulgarity of the twentieth century. Snob, you might say, not incorrectly. But there are shadings here too of a crusty Cassandra. With The Loved One, he wasn't simply scowling at the defection from the days of colonialist, class-conscious yore. He was also giving warning against our gaudy future in which the Hollywood sensibility becomes the dominant one. I don't entirely discount Joseph Epstein's contention that the mocking of California culture is too facile an undertaking to be worth the effort. But The Loved One all the same is pitilessly funny, ending on a contrapuntal high stroke with a closing glance at its rogue hero. Dennis, having explored and abandoned the abyss within, has seen humanity as it is. He has looked death in the eye without blinking and has passed through experience. He now has no choice but to be an artist, a true one. In this moment, the last paragraph of the book achieves a moving, even lyrical completion. For once the author is satirizing nothing, expressing instead a belief in something worthy of fealty: the pursuit of creation and the mystery of art. Waugh saved his best flourish till last, and death for a moment isn't just rendered wickedly amusing. It's dismissed. Oblivion, the finishing page reminds us, simply removes. Humour detonates. Art redeems.

***

Shifting to another graveyard, we have Willowlawn Everlasting, a corporate cemetery with a certain white trash verve, situated in the suburbs of Toronto. If Whispering Glades/Forest Lawn is/are the Disneyland of Death, then Willowlawn is more or less an underground trailer park for the dearly departed and the indifferently discarded. It's there that nineteen-year-old Charles Wilkins worked as a gravedigger in the summer of, yes, 1969, a season of echoing milestones (Woodstock, Apollo 11, Chappaquiddick, Stonewall, Manson). The resulting book, In the Land of the Long Fingernails, published in 2008, reveals Willowlawn to be the milestone experience of the author's early life. Shortlisted for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, the Trillium Book Prize, and the Toronto Book Award, Wilkins' recollections of a curious and fecund period of his youth are entertaining, confounding, revealing, repugnant, farcical, and altogether worth savouring.

A canny synthesis of the Hippocrates smile and the Cheshire cat's grin, In the Land of the Long Fingernails shares a number of topics with The Loved One: extinction, alienation, insularity, the incongruity of human behaviour, the comedy of mortality. Willowlawn, we learn very quickly, is more than just Boot Hill in the 'burbs. For Wilkins and his fellow employees, this seemingly unremarkable resting site is its own private oddball society, a what-the-fuck Wonderland defined by hostility, duplicity, alcoholism, recreational drugs, criminal chicanery, covert chaos, penny-pinching, power plays, swagger talk, pooch screwing, and cheerful cynicism. Drifting through these promising circumstances are the opposing aromas of decay and disinfectant, as well as an assembly of misfits, misanthropes, loose cannons, and emotional mutants. They include Scotty, Willowlawn's manager, "a snappish, slug-eyed little general" who is never far from his next drink; Luccio, a spade-stabbing literary connoisseur with an endless supply of marijuana and a fond insult for everyone; the light-fingered Hogjaw, referred to as the rag-and-bone man and known to have lifted a Rolex watch off the wrist of a dead dentist; and a sleazebag undertaker who once sewed a decapitated head back on the corpse that gave it up, further securing it thereafter with duct tape.

Taking its title from that old bit of disproved nonsense in which hair and nails are said to continue to grow after death, this book is more a record of incidents and offshoots than a traditional tidily-layered biographical work, and just as well too. Wilkins didn't need to prune Willowlawn's activities down to a measured, manageable plot timetable to make the place worth discovering. The various narrative strands within his recollections have sufficient snap to make wandering through Willowlawn a strangely scenic, buoyantly mordant tour. Among the episodes that snake about, overlap, and find their place in the mix are a gravediggers' strike, a gardener who goes missing, a brief, erotic hookup between Wilkins and a nubile female gravedigger, and the death of Scotty's wife, who ends up buried in her husband's professional turf. (A grim little case of not bringing work home but instead transferring one's domestic life to the office...?) There are as well numerous vignettes that add extra tincture and a shot of the unexpected to the book's offhanded explorations. A hooker becomes a regular presence by gratifying her johns at the cemetery. Bikers gatecrash an interment and pour beer on the coffin as it's lowered into the earth. During a funeral a long-stemmed young woman in a black mini-dress sings a hymn with contralto commitment and then rips into an old Bing Crosby crowd-pleaser. Particularly memorable is the moment in which Wilkins witnesses a crow, rejected by its flock, being pecked to death. The bird, with eerie patience, seems to accept its sentence of execution and waits for its lonely finish. (Wilkins later learns from a zoological publication that crows have their own judicial system and are known to reject and attack members for deviant behaviour or physical incongruities.)

Because we're repelled by the death industry and its dire, tidying customs, we're naturally intrigued by it as well. As claimed with pulp polish by John Dickson Carr: "The man must be dead and buriable who does not respond to a healthy curiosity about things morbid." [5] This is as true for Wilkins as for any of us, and his book has one of its keenest strengths in showing us what daft and unseemly doings might be taking place behind the primp and circumstance of funerals we've attended--the stress and resentment of those trapped in the business of burial, the venality and apathy of professionals who have coordinated too many subterranean sendoffs, the technical and monetary demands, the misunderstandings, secrets, and fuckups that can never be revealed or acknowledged. Not to mention the possibilities for outright spivvery. Among the comically disquieting scenarios shared: the manipulation by salesmen of buyers into overspending on a plot, accomplished by stoking fears that relatives might buy them a cheap dirt corner and leave them to lie among the hoi polloi. One of the grubbiest practices at Willowlawn is the emptying and reselling of plots that have seen no visitors or maintenance. Once removed, the bones of the neglected dead are hidden in an on-site crater known as the quarry, curtained by plush white cedars and safely out of sight. Even the mafia makes a shadowy passing appearance when mortuaries under mob control send in caskets containing dual compartments: one for the official remains and one containing a crime casualty who must be made to disappear. And so to avoid courtroom legalities and preserve Wilkins' personal safety, Willowlawn is a mere but necessary pseudonym. In the author's words: "To call it by its real name in this era of inquisitional conformity would be an open invitation to, at best, a law suit, at worst a hit contract--on me."

Keeping the many outrages described from seeming too outrageous is Wilkins' sardonic fondness for what he calls "our own illustrious boneyard." His enjoyment of the eccentricities within his summer job and his punchy word sense provide the balancing bite that his retrospections deserve. There's a love of funky repartee in his writing that sharply accommodates the verbal fire among Willowlawn's workers: hardboiled bantering, snarling badinage, friendly spite, competitive wisecracking--an insiders' language of the sort created by contentious families, sceptical cliques, and professional cronies long exhausted by their paid drudgery but still somehow engaged by it. Active too within the spoken buckshot is a ridiculing graveyard argot. Among the shorthand terms batted from one jeering tongue to another: slurpee (a waterlogged grave), sinker (a grave that's caved in), bobber (a drowned cadaver), crisper (a burning victim), and cracker box (a cheap coffin). Wilkins' descriptive powers, however, cover more than just graveyard palaver. With a flair for the brazen and a nose for the noxious, he attains a pop-Rabelaisian level with fine, gamy prose about the world beyond Willowlawn. His description of a skunky old taproom nearly invades your nostrils: "the atmosphere inside is not so much air as a sort of air-conditioned toxicity--cigar ash and brewery mold, the armpits and ass cracks of any number of old hopheads who have sat in the place over the years in a thousand variations on what is possible on the descent into potters fields." Elsewhere he finds a fleabag hotel to be "one of those fart-ridden peculiarities of Canadian hostelry." And even a bit of mealtime garnish is found to be edgy and riskily odoriferous: a visit to a deli is distinguished by "dill pickles no bigger than shotgun shells, but mighty with garlic." Also oddly pleasurable are resonant little blips of interaction, penetratingly described, when thought or emotion are seen translated into a look or a gesture, as in a tense exchange between Wilkins and Norman, a fellow gravedigger, whose answering silence is accompanied by his foot "kicking at the edge of the lawn, as if attempting to toe a dime beneath a carpet."

Willowlawn is only one of a number of testing journeys taken by Charles Wilkins into his personal mythology, but it's not the only one that he's built a book around. Among his published works dealing with geographic and perspectival travel are: The Circus at the Edge of the Earth (1998), which chronicles his time touring with the Great Wallenda Circus; Walk to New York (2004), a replay of his trek on foot from Thunder Bay to the Big Apple; and most recently, Little Ship of Fools (2013), his account of an astonishing trip across the Atlantic from Morocco to Barbados in which he paddled from one to the other in a specially designed rowboat with a crew of fifteen. With In the Land of the Long Fingernails, however, he's taken on an especially dicey burden of self-presentation. As well as the many associates he's called back for inspection, he has his teenage self to deal with too--not an enviable task. The romances and calamities of youth are often the slapstick of now, and looking back at the outset of one's life can be of dubious accuracy, enlightenment, or comfort. Wilkins, however, has summoned up what's likely the best there was in his emotional repertoire during his late teens, a blend of neophyte cockiness and enquiring empathy. He keeps the mix an honest one, with a yearning quality at the edge of his ruminations. Though he enjoys the friction and irregularities of Willowlawn, he remains on the watch for the saner side of existence, hoping to get some legitimate answers. From sex, for instance. "You're nineteen years old," says a mature woman he lusts after. "You think every longing has to be satisfied." The conversations he has with death are even less satisfying. While burying a seventeen-year-old girl carried away by illness, he experiences "the same paradoxical mixture of relief and guilt that I had known as a kid after witnessing some baleful violation of the natural order. She was dead of cancer--I wasn't. Meanwhile, I wondered what nightmarish forces had exploded in her skull when she found she had the disease. Wondered what unbridgeable loneliness and despair she had endured with the awareness that she was going to die...I wondered if she had ever had sex." Moments like these are worth recalling; one never leaves them behind completely. While putting them to paper, Wilkins retrieves his youth with a sane, simple poignancy, respecting his past enough to avoid self-indulgence. For this kindness to himself and us, much thanks.

Books

Classics and Commercials, Edmund Wilson, Farrar, Straus and Company, 1950

Evelyn Waugh, Selena Hastings, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994

Fathers and Sons, Alexander Waugh, Headline Review, 2004

The Ironic World of Evelyn Waugh, Frederick L. Beaty, Northern Illinois University Press, 1994

The Life of Evelyn Waugh: A Critical Biography, Douglas Patey, Wiley-Blackwell, 2001

The Moon's a Balloon, David Niven, Coronet Books, 1971

The World of Evelyn Waugh, edited by David Pryce-Jones, Little Brown & Company, 1973

Articles

"Death in Hollywood," Evelyn Waugh, Life, September 29, 1947

"The Loved One," Orville Prescott, The New York Times, June 23, 1948

"Oh, Bury Me Not..." Mary Roach, The Globe and Mail, November 22, 2008

"The Outrageous Mr. Wu," Joseph Epstein, The New Criterion, April 1985

"The Satirical World of Evelyn Waugh," Gore Vidal, The New York Times, January 7, 1962

Notes

[1] "America and the Comic Vision," Malcolm Bradbury, The World of Evelyn Waugh, edited by David Pryce-Jones, Little Brown & Company, 1973, p168

[2] "Death in Hollywood," Evelyn Waugh, Life, September 29, 1947, p73

[3] "Death in Hollywood," Evelyn Waugh, Life, September 29, 1947, p84

[4] "Never Apologize, Never Explain," Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials, Farrar, Straus and Company, 1950, p143

(Posted 11/06/2016)

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