#Daniel. Riccuito

[silentlondon]

The Dance of Cartesian Dualism

This is a guest post for Silent London by Daniel Riccuito, David Cairns and Tom Sutpen. If you like this, you will love The Chiseler. It is the custom of illuminated manuscripts to transform sacred words into shimmering icons which break, easily, beyond the sensory limitations of simple text, rendering ordinary letters into evocative, animate visual forms that invite the eye to idle awhile at…

[chiseler]

The Chiseler Interviews Jonathan Rosenbaum

The Chiseler’s Daniel Riccuito discusses pre-Code talkies, noir and leftist politics with one of America’s leading film critics.

DR: We share a common enthusiasm for early talkies. Do you have any favorite actors, writers or storylines relating to the period’s ethnic, often radically left-wing, politics? I'm thinking of the way that, say, The Mayor of Hell suddenly busts into a long Yiddish monologue. Or movies like Counsellor at Law and Street Scene present hard Left ideas through characters with Jewish, Eastern European backgrounds.

JR: Both Counsellor at Law and Street Scene are plays by Elmer Rice (1892-1967) that Rice himself adapted, and both are terrific films with very good directors (William Wyler and King Vidor, respectively). It's too bad that Rice's plays aren't revived more often today, although a few years ago, the TimeLine theater company in Chicago put on a fantastic, neo-Wellesian production of The Adding Machine. I also had the privilege of knowing Rice's two children with actress Betty Field, John and Judy, who attended the same boarding school in Vermont, both of whom I remember quite fondly.

Although it isn't as politically subversive as the Rice plays, the delightful Jewel Robbery (William Dieterle, 1932) is still a more radical comedy in its treatment of class and sex — specifically, the sexual lure of being robbed as another way of being sexually possessed and enjoyed — than Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, released a little later the same year. There's also something prophetic about the use of charm, good manners, and marihuana joints to lure the cops away from crime and criminals — another form of sensual appeal, in contrast to the more ethereal romanticism preached by the Lubitsch film, which might be said to value style over content and suggestion over spelling things out. For that matter, even a conservative director like Cecil B. De Mille does amazing things with class and sexual tensions in his melodrama Dynamite (1929) — which deserves to be cherished today at least as much as his subsequent Madame Satan — undoubtedly assisted by at least one Communist (John Howard Lawson) among his screenwriters. Especially in Dynamite, proletarian interests and biases are honored and rewarded at least as much as luxuries and privileges. The convoluted plot may be absurdly contrived, but by getting an heiress (Kay Johnson) married to a coal miner (Charles Bickford) awaiting execution for a crime he didn't commit, the movie gives us archetypes so dialectically opposed that any sexual congress between them virtually guarantees an explosive climax as promised by the title, and De Mille in fact delivers several.

DR: I once compared Elmer Rice's words in the play Counsellor at Law to the final screenplay. There were very definite cuts to his radical (colloquial) language. Bebe Daniels’ character would have put her heart into a (sadly) excised line about police brutality. Rice demonstrated enormous sensitivity to the way everyday people felt and spoke. Do you have a favorite writer — especially where sassy dialogue is concerned?

JR: I wish I did, but that's beyond my range of expertise. However, one name that sparkles for me is Donald Ogden Stewart. He's only one of the four credited screenwriters on Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast's exquisite Laughter (1930) — for me the only early talkie that measures up to F. Scott Fitzgerald in sophistication — along with Herman Mankiewicz and d'Arrast himself, but I like to think that he's the crucial figure.

Donald Ogden Stewart

DR: Oh, I love Laughter! You're making me want to see everything Donald Ogden Stewart ever wrote. You mentioned Harry d'Abbadie d'Arrast and Herman Mankiewicz. Could you expand on your interest in either or both of them? Your answer needn't focus on any particular period.

JR: I've been trying for some time to investigate d'Arrast's work, but it's been almost impossible because of all the lost films (apparently Service for Ladies, Serenade, The Magnificent Flirt, and Dry Martini) and/or unavailable films (It Happened in Spain and The Three Cornered Hat). Pierre Rissient, who knew him, denied the rumors about him being antisemitic and argued that he had a lot to do with Hallelujah, I'm a Bum because of all the work he did on preproduction. The other films that he worked on which I've seen —Wings, A Gentleman of Paris, Raffles, and Topaz--all testify to his special qualities.

DR: Hallelujah, I'm a Bum makes me think of Ben Hecht, naturally, but also of Hecht's friend and sometimes co-writer Maxwell Bodenheim who wrote Naked on Roller Skates, one of my favorite books, loaded with 1930s slang.  A weird mix of pulp fiction and experimentalism. We touched on radical leftism and ethnicity earlier... How do you account for full-on communist films like Our Daily Bread getting made in Hollywood? Or what about the social justice films out of Warner Bros., like Wild Boys of the Road, which features little Sidney Miller hurling "Chazzer!" at a cop. I'm sometimes astounded by the open radicalism one finds in early Sound-era films. I even went digging through the Warner archives hoping to find evidence that senior execs might have harbored radical left dreams and discovered an early script of Heroes for Sale, which compared Richard Barthelmess' character to Jesus Christ — after making him a brick-throwing, cop-fighting member of the I.W.W.!

JR: We have to remember that Communist values were very close to being a mainstream position during much of the 30s. I've long maintained, for instance, that Faulkner's Light in August is a Communist novel, simply because Faulkner, for all his eccentricity and conservatism, was part of the mainstream during the Depression. Our national amnesia tends to factor this out of our history, just as (to cite a more trivial but more recent example) America's love for Jerry Lewis throughout most of the 50s, which enabled him to make two or three pictures a year, is not only forgotten but illogically replaced by the so-called (and mostly imaginary) love of the French, as if this were the reason why Lewis could make so many movies in the U.S. and why Sailor Beware made a lot more money than either Singin' in the Rain or On the Waterfront.

I'm a novice when it comes to Ben Hecht — apart from having read Adina Hoffman's excellent recent critical biography of him — because both his cynicism and his contempt for Hollywood are automatic turn-offs for me. But Bodenheim is clearly, at least for me, a Topic For Further Research.

DR: Speaking of leftism in 1930s Hollywood, what connections do you draw between that period and the emergence of noir, in which the old ebullience of the radical left seems to have soured into (a more realistic?) nihilism and anger. Maybe I'm projecting there. In any event, do you find it useful, or perhaps even inevitable, to make connections between pre-Code and noir? I can't help noticing how many forties and fifties films wind up in sewers, industrial parks and abandoned factories, which all feel like inhuman representations of capitalism. Try and Get Me AKA The Sound of Fury is famously based on Jo Pagano's The Condemned, a book coming out of a hard-left perspective. Or do you find other, less political connections between these periods interesting?

JR: I don't find noir more "realistic" than 30s leftism. Au contraire, I find its defeatism and expressionism far more comforting. Closure, no matter how grim or grimy, is always more comforting than ellipsis and suspension — trajectories into possible futures. I think the popularity of noir today has a lot to do with a doom-laden death wish, a desire to escape any sense of responsibility for a future that seems helpfully hopeless — an attitude that "blossoms," decadently, into the Godfather trilogy, where corruption is seen as "tragically" (that is to say, satisfyingly) inevitable. Once the future becomes foreclosed, we're all left off the hook, n'est pas?

DR: Well said, Jonathan. I hereby spare you my own personal dialectic, which ricochets between radical left politics (love, solidarity, hope) and totalizing disgust with human kind. In fact, I only mention that particular tension as a way of pointing out that my last question spoke to broad tendencies. Ever see Chicago Calling? One of Dan Duryea's finest moments! It seems to me that the film, along with the best "dark" post-WWII cinema, not all of it "noir" per se, manages to ricochet that way. Do you have any favorites from the period? If so, what draws you there?

JR: I haven't yet seen either Chicago Calling or Guilty Bystander (another early and obscure noir I just heard about), both of which I'm currently downloading. (Stay tuned...)

Otherwise, noir is too vast a subject for me to comment on at any length just now, except to recommend James Naremore's (for me) definitive book on the subject, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts.

DR: What do you think of Felix Feist’s work?

JR: Based on what I've seen, I'm not a fan.

(Here, we break so that Jonathan Rosenbaum can watch Chicago Calling)

JR: Now that I've watched Chicago Calling, I can't help but reflect that noir and neorealism, contemporary film movements, may actually be opposite sides of the same coin. (Isn't Open City a noir, and The Sound of Fury an alternate version of The Bicycle Thief?) The key traits that they have in common are "postwar" and "originating in Europe," but the key difference that should be acknowledged at the outset is that "noir" in this country wasn't perceived as such when the films that we now identify as "noir" first appeared. Even in France it had a literary connotation because it was a name derived from a book publisher. So it's a way of reinventing and reinterpreting the past, whereas Italian neorealism was perceived as such from the get-go. It also was fundamentally humanist whereas noir was closer to nihilism and cynicism, and its tendency towards political defeatism obviously has a lot to do with its contemporary appeal — absolving us of any responsibility for the messes we live in.

Chicago Calling is closer to neorealism than it is to noir because of its exciting use of natural locations and its focus on working-class characters. Yet as a hard luck story it seems so overdetermined that at times it becomes metaphysical, which places it closer to noir. Dan Duryea is an actor that we mostly associate with noir and metaphysics, so it's refreshing to find him for once in a neorealistic and physical landscape.

DR: I'm interested in your idea that noir veers into the metaphysical realm. Since we started our conversation in the 1930s, which seem grounded in physical reality, I wonder if you have any thoughts on the evolution of noir, its underlying and perhaps unconscious motives. I vaguely recall a film critic whose name escapes me saying "After the war we needed shadows to hide in."

JR: I'd like to ask that film critic why we need to hide. In my experience, some of the same people who love noir also supported and even celebrated both of the Gulf wars and didn't mind at all if the U.S. was torturing a lot of innocent people as long as the innocent people wasn't them — all of which suggests to me a pretty good reason for wanting to hide. But surely defeating the Nazis — unlike some of the brutalities that arise from capitalism-- isn't a very plausible reason for hiding.

DR: I think it was a Hiroshima reference, not sure.

JR: That makes sense. Even though Truman gave no indication of wanting to hide.

DR: Has the Chicago film scene had any influence on you?

JR: For starters, I perceive New York as a separate country — Manhattan as an island — and Chicago as part of the U.S. I also consider New York and Los Angeles (a company town) as provincial in much the same way that my home town in Alabama is provincial: i.e., if something hasn't happened there, it hasn't happened. Whereas Chicago knows that it isn't the center of the universe. And its film scene is decidedly less competitive and turf-conscious, which I find refreshing. There isn't the same cut-throat atmosphere here nor any of the New York or Hollywood arrogance and rudeness.

DR: I've asked you questions that assume connections between aesthetics and politics. I get the sense that you lean "left". But given that political shorthand can be confusing, I'll try being as concrete as possible: your analysis of fascist aesthetics in Star Wars moved me as a critique cutting across the grain of America's image of itself as a liberating force in the world. What are your politics?

JR: Star Wars fosters the idea of a bloodless genocidal massacre, which is part of what made both Gulf wars so popular in this country — seeing war as a video game.

I'm basically a Bernie Sanders socialist who would be happy with an Elizabeth Warren presidency, and I'm also a pacifist. DR: Do your politics relate in substantive ways to your early movie-going experiences? I heard that your father owned a movie theater. I'm also thinking of the distinctions you draw among the various American movie scenes. Was the physical landscape you grew up in an influence on your aesthetic and political values?

JR: My politics were probably affected more by my almost eight years of living in Europe (Paris and London) than by my first sixteen years of living in Alabama. My paternal grandfather owned a small chain of movie theaters, and my father worked for him until the chain was sold in 1960, at which point he became an English professor. He was never a cinephile, but the fact that he'd wanted to be a writer clearly influenced my becoming one.

Growing up in a house designed for my parents by Frank Lloyd Wright also undoubtedly affected my aesthetics, but not my politics, which were formed in part by my 60s involvements in the civil rights and antiwar movements.

As for my view of America's role in the world, I think we tend to be handicapped in our good intentions by the delusion that only three kinds of people exist —Americans, anti-Americans, and prospective Americans — which means that we tend to exclude most of humanity from the playing field.

This interview was conducted via email.

[chiseler]

Vegetable Magnetism

Vengeance is a tool for the powerless.

And what better revenge could a 1930s movie-going public muster than the absurdist act of turning stars into nourishment?  Take that vision of hate and spittle, Ned Sparks, pulling faces never before seen on the front of a human head. Sparks was the Great Depression’s favorite specialty item: a purple carrot.

Arguably a sweet onion, Frank McHugh had bone-weary audiences drooling in the aisles.

John Litel made a fine rutabaga.

Hand-carved parsnip, Edward Everett Horton, gave our pre-Code vegetable garden nuance.  But mainly we craved cartoon food – entertainment that mixed problem-solving and problem-salving for a seventy-five to eighty-minute span.  We liked excitable, doughy screen personas as stand-ins that brought our truth to new lows.

Coming Soon!

Pat O'Brien as Spud.

by Daniel Riccuito and David Cairns

Art by Tony Millionaire

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The Chiseler’s Daniel Riccuito interviews melodist David Amram about his work on Elia Kazan’s film The Arrangement. At 90, Amram has produced more compositions than we could possibly catalogue here, including such monuments as Final Ingredient: An Opera of the Holocaust as well as musical scores for Splendor in the Grass and The Manchurian Candidate. We hope you will appreciate Mr. Amram in his role as human repository of previously untold personal tales, interweaving seamlessly with Hollywood history. It cannot be denied: the man displays stupendous gift of gab.

The Great David Amram

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Babs

By the Sixties new waves were crashing everywhere. The frisson of La Nouvelle Vague should be understood in a tempest of plurality that shook Hollywood, whose producers, trained in the relative stasis of studio-system majesty, were being tossed willy-nilly on the backs of Italian, British and German breakers. And, emerging from this unpredicted deluge of international currents, spawning endlessly exploitive countercurrents, came Barbara Steele, a castaway or, as she herself puts it, “an unwilling immigrant” in the heart of Hollywood-land where she unhappily resides today. More than six decades have passed since she played an avenging witch in Black Sunday, but no matter how stubbornly Steele refuses to claim her title as Italy’s reigning Scream Queen, the aura of dry ice and stage blood lingers in the cinematic unconscious, trailing her in gory wreaths. She remains a prisoner of her proudest memory, Fellini’s Otto e Mezzo, compared to which her genre horror films — The Long Hair of Death, An Angel for Satan, Terror Creatures from Beyond the Grave — essentially amount to the gothic flop house of cinema history. Or so the self-tormenting diva chooses to believe. The Italians would dragoon her immaculately virgin-white screen image, from England’s ashen shores to their own sun-kissed and suggestive peninsula. From whence Barbara Steele’s stolen likeness, now the ultimate (cosmic) femme fatale, would commence irradiating Southern peasants with previously unknown iconographic power. Steele, in other words, weaponized what Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda had bestowed upon her as the greatest, and most acquisitive, directors of Italian genre horror: that exalted say-so reserved for goddesses. Black Sunday will never be classified as “New Wave”, nor will Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face. Nor will any category of filmmaking moored to genre (whether it be horror, science-fiction or le cinéma fantastique) gain admittance to the brick-and-mortar Canon, whose location and visiting hours remain the jealously guarded secrets of custodial film critters. And while I don’t begrudge Cahiers du Cinéma its fun concocting nomenclature, I do prefer celebrating the 1960s for its intrinsically unnamable dissonance. Making her Italian screen debut in Black Sunday in August 1960, Barbara Steele glowered into Mario Bava’s lens, and at that pivotal moment in cinema’s manic history something shone forth so ancient that even the most devout heretic experienced inchoate shivers of remorse. The mod summertime of the new decade was arrested, plunged backward, whereupon a strange, atavistic transformation occurred: the audience, pious enough to register shock at the intended effects, was nevertheless unprepared to confront the triumph of alchemy and necromancy over mere sackcloth and ashes. Shamefaced in the dark like Catholic schoolchildren remembering all they had been taught, the audience stared back at Steele’s eyes — a pair of druid’s eggs, bestowing true and everlasting illumination, as opposed to religion’s metaphorical kind — and shuddered inwardly at things no mere mortal could comprehend.

by Daniel Riccuito

[chiseler]

The Chiseler Asks Noam Chomsky About Israel-Palestine

Yesterday, May 24, 2021, Daniel Riccuito of The Chiseler conducted the following email interview with Noam Chomsky.

Daniel Riccuito: This latest assault against Gaza seems contradictory: both part and parcel of Israel's abiding agenda and more obviously cynical, bearing no relationship to the usual talking points about national defense, etc.  Is it wrong to overestimate public opinion as surprisingly informed, seeing through Israel’s state propaganda more swiftly this time around?

Noam Chomsky: Each time Israel launches some barbaric act of terror, its sophisticated Hasbara system faces a more difficult task of justification, and its grip on popular opinion weakens.  The horrors of Israel’s latest war against the civilian society in its Gaza prison are impossible to suppress, so propaganda seeks to restrict attention solely to Hamas rockets attacking innocent Israel in an act of unprovoked aggression:  every country has a right to defend itself, and in self-defense Israel has been remarkably restrained considering the nature of the Hamas attack.

That still works in some circles, but fewer than before.  Though the media do not convey anything like the hideous reality of Israel’s murderous strangulation of Gaza or the regular brutality of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, nevertheless a fair amount is seeping through, a good deal more than before, enough for many to dismantle the propaganda line.

Yes, Hamas is a pretty awful organization and Palestinians deserve much better. But there are ways to deal with its rocket launches.  The narrow answer is to eliminate the reason for them.  Many are aware that they were fired in retaliation for Israeli crimes in Jerusalem, particularly the military attack on worshippers in Al-Aqsa.  Hamas announced a deadline saying that unless the attacks stopped by then it would retaliate with rockets.

The more fundamental approach is to end Israel's vicious imprisonment of Gaza, which has rendered it virtually unlivable, without even potable water, let alone any hope for decent survival.  A brutal jailer and torturer is hardly in a position to ask how to defend himself from occasional resistance by the prisoners.  I think more and more people are coming to understand that, despite intensive suppression of the background, which continues.

Along with the limited reporting of the barbarity of Israel’s periodic assaults, the deepening recognition of Israel’s exploits in the illegally occupied territories and within its borders is making it harder to sustain the image of the embattled guardian of democracy and righteousness in the region.

Daniel Riccuito: Is the solidarity among geographically divided Palestinians (East Jerusalem, Gaza, the West Bank, and within Israel) wholly unprecedented?

Noam Chomsky: Not unprecedented, but taking new forms as circumstances change.  One change, which has received some notice, is the further “Judaization” of the few cities where there still are remnants of the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, “mixed cities,” so-called.  Resentment of the further marginalization and repression of the Palestinian minority seems to have been a factor in the protests there against the Israeli actions in Greater Jerusalem, initially dispossession of still more Arab families in Sheikh Jarrah, then the assault on Al-Aqsa worshippers, among other events.  One was Israel’s decision to prevent East Jerusalem participation in forthcoming Palestinian elections for the first time, in violation of its commitments under the Oslo accords, another step in Israel’s imposition of its nationalist-religious agenda in the Greater Jerusalem it has established, a core part of the Greater Israel project it has imposed throughout the West Bank.

Daniel Riccuito: I won't ask for predictions, but are there specific opportunities available, here and now, to those committed to seeing a semblance of justice for Palestinians?

Noam Chomsky: There definitely are opportunities.  For the first time, there are calls in mainstream media for cancellation of US military aid to Israel along with congressional legislation calling for conditioning such aid (Betsy McCollum).  These are openings that can be pursued well beyond.  This unparalleled aid to Israel is in violation of US laws that bar aid to military units engaged in systematic human right abuses.  The IDF provides many candidates.  Many Americans can come to understand that.  Even a threat to the huge flood of aid could have major policy repercussions.

A more far-reaching issue that should be highlighted is Israel’s nuclear weapons programs.  The US pretends not to know that they exist, for good reasons.  Abandon the pretense, and serious questions arise about whether all US aid to Israel is illegal under US law because of Israel’s development of nuclear weapons outside the framework of international arms control agreements.  By bipartisan agreement, and media complicity, that crucial matter has been effectively suppressed.

And it is crucial.  A lot is at stake, quite apart from the legality of US aid to Israel.  One obvious matter is a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East.  That has been strongly supported for years by the Arab states, Iran, the Global South (G-77), with general support in Europe. It is regularly vetoed by the US, most recently Obama.  The unspoken reason, of course, is what I have just described: protecting Israel’s illegal nuclear weapons system, and arguably illegal US aid to Israel.

A ME NWFZ with effective inspections is entirely feasible, as we have seen before Trump dismantled the Joint Agreement on Iranian nuclear programs (JCPOA).  It would go far beyond the JCPOA in ending alleged concerns about an Iranian nuclear threat.  It would end any shred of justification for the vicious US sanctions on Iran, to which Europe is compelled to conform.  It would end a very serious threats of escalation to major war.  It would lay the basis for punishing Israel for its campaign of assassination and sabotage against Iran, and its threats of much worse.

In brief, such initiatives could have major consequences.  All matters that would be of much concern to Americans if they knew about them.

There is a lot more that can be done.  Choice of tactics is no trivial matter, a consideration that should be second nature to activists.  The choice must be based on realistic assessment of existing circumstances – not what we might like them to be, but what they are.

Existing circumstances in Israel-Palestine are not obscure.  For 50 years, Israel has been systematically creating a Greater Israel in the West Bank in which it takes for itself whatever it finds of value while bypassing Palestinian population centers so as to avoid the dread “demographic problem”: too many non-Jews in a “democratic Jewish state,” an oxymoron more difficult to sustain with each passing year.  There is no need to run through the details, evident on the ground.  Greater Israel is so closely integrated into Israel proper that Israelis are barely aware of the international border.  The creation of Greater Israel has been undertaken in brazen defiance of Security Council resolutions and in perfectly conscious violation of international law.  It has been advanced across the Israeli political spectrum, with only marginal opposition.  Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, for example, were among its most forceful proponents.

Discussion of tactics and options is meaningless unless this reality is recognized.  In particular, current 1-2 state debates are empty unless the Greater Israel option is recognized.  As long as the option exists, we can be confident that Israel will never consider disappearing in favor of “one state” --- that is, a Palestinian state with a Jewish minority.  Nor is there any force in the world supporting this, or likely to be such a force in the foreseeable future.

Tactics therefore have to be directed at undermining the Greater Israel option. There are many possibilities: an arms-trade embargo conditioned on terminating this project, for example.  Insofar as that can be accomplished, other options can be considered.  I won’t proceed here but it takes little thought to recognize what the possibilities are.  What is important is to keep all of this clearly in mind in devising ways to reach some tolerable settlement, one that can be a basis for moving on to something better.

[chiseler]

Echoes

One book from my childhood has always haunted me. Cursed Be the Treasure, by H. B. Drake, didn't just get under my skin, it crawled inside and gnawed. An "adventure" tale of smugglers and pirates, of guilt and vengeance, it was a cold soak in an alternately reality that I could believe with all my heart.

My mother presented it to me at I'd guess age 10 or 11. Probably it had been in our collection all along. I assumed it was from her own teen years, so in the 1910s. I never knew where my mother came by such things, she seemed to absorb offbeat, peculiar works through some etheric transfer.

Over the years, I remembered little of the plot – just two incidents so horrific that they hung on me like literary albatrosses.

Perhaps five years back, that haunting returned and I felt the need to find that book again – the original had disappeared into the mists of yesteryear. I bought a copy online – a mere $3.50 if I remember rightly – a ratty-spined hardback. I immediately determined not to read it. I couldn't face the possibility that it would be just another "young adult" monstrosity that had overwhelmed my feeble mind. That would be a gut stab.

But with Daniel Riccuito's strong-arm encouragement, looking for an "unusual" book from the '20s or ''30s – my pick – I immediately thought of Cursed Be the Treasure... but "uh-oh, wrong decade." Yet when I flipped back the creaky cover, I found the copyright was 1928. So I committed to reading it again, with dripping trepidation.

And...? It resonates with the "now" of me as solidly as with the "then" of me; it's left an unusual sense of wonder, a "how can the universe work this way?" that I pooh-pooh in daily life.

Before getting to that: Who was H. B. Drake?

I've found minimal online biographical info on Henry Burgess Drake, who had two (at least) parallel careers. Born of British missionary parents in China in 1894, the next to last of seven children, he served in WWI, then taught English in China, Korea (at a Japanese university) and England, sometimes alongside his younger brother, Eric – this bio snippet, an aside to a longer one of Eric, does not mention Henry's writing. During (or before?) WWII, Henry served in the British Intelligence Corps, "to recruit spies to penetrate Japanese held territory" in China.

Of his alternate existence, fantasy and SF sites note him mainly as author of The Shadowy Thing, which had a strong influence on H. P. Lovecraft. You can purchase a 1928 hardback edition online for $967; I don't plan to. Beyond that and Cursed, he penned a few sea and other adventure tales (sometimes as Burgess Drake), and a five-volume Approach to English Literature for Students Abroad during the '40s and '50s. He died in 1963.

I've had little truck with adventure stories. The Conan tales bore me silly – great gnarled nonsense. I recently downloaded a humongous boulder of public-domain fantasy/SF/adventure (many of them novel-length), looking for a simple, non-challenging read. The first four I staggered through were almost malignantly bad – cumbersome slagheaps of adjectives, mostly multi-page descriptions of otherworldly scenery, including, so help me, two travels through nothing – quite literally a void interrupted by different-colored lights. They showed less imagination than an addled exterminator.

It's turned out that what I was looking for in that muck, without knowing, was Cursed Be the Treasure, which harks back to lesser-known works such as R. L. Stevenson's The Wrecker, about a ship ("The Flying Scud") in which the adventure is as much inside the narrator as mired in convoluted events wavering beyond the written horizon. I think Drake also took inspiration from Dickens, especially Nell's wanderings through the countryside with her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop. (Though unlike Dickens with his often black and white characters, all of Drake's emanate shades of moral grey.)

The first-person narrator of Cursed is Tommy, recalling his youth from age 6 to roughly 17, consumed in continual flight with his father from the vengeance of what his father calls Shadow-of-Fear. During their flight, they are briefly "trapped" by a witch-like figure, Bite-in-the-Dark, whom Tommy kills by accident. Then the flight continues, because... who or what is Bite-in-the-Dark, and can the greater Shadow-of-Fear be killed?

Baldly stated, this can sound silly. But it's written with a riveting intensity of isolation and unfocused fear. His father will run forever to protect Tommy, but does not feel he can, himself, escape the inevitable. And there are also the magically bright summers at the Dolphin Inn, where Tommy investigates the caves and rock ledges of the coast, the supposed refuge of smugglers, uncovering secret passageways leading to... what?

Along the way, he and his father stop at a supposed haunted house. Tommy sees a ghost (does he?) and encounters a skeleton (he does).When his father must leave on for an extended period, Tommy goes to school for the first time – his father's extensive, intensive knowledge had been enough to meet his educational needs.

Tommy makes friends with Worthing, an older, rule-bound student (who faults Tommy's adventuresome ways). Tommy invites Worthing for a stay at the house, during which Tommy finds a hidden passage and loses it again. In a later stint at the house, he meets Captain Field and his daughter. She, like Tommy, is traveling alone with her father, and like his father, the Captain is haunted by an implacable enemy.

Why no mother for either of these near-bewitched children? The word "mother" never appears in this tale. For both, the single parent and the single child have always been thus.

From here on, I'll leave the plot alone, because it's the method of telling and the near-perfect pacing that make this book, in my mind, close to a masterpiece. Reliving it, retrieving the incidents I forgot through the years, was unlike any other literary experience I've had; 70 years between readings, and it holds the same searing chill. And those two remembered incidents that I did recall – I can't talk sanely about them. The second details perhaps the worst mistake any human being could make.

There's nothing overtly supernatural in the telling, but the possibility of it hangs like a torn curtain. As Tommy slowly uncovers clues, a more enmeshed tale emerges, tying together disparate elements –almost typing them together. Certain small details don't quite fit... but not because Drake is lax. It's because nothing here can be complete, wholly true or fully whole. A "definitive" through line would only cheapen the tale. The passageways by the Dolphin Inn lead to no found end; the lost treasure is truly cursed – through the intertwined vengeance of those who fought and killed for it, and the inescapable guilt with which each must live.

That's the book, as written. But its effect on me goes beyond the words. It reaches something in me as inescapable as Shadow-of-Fear, like a reflected study of my life. Not Tommy's flight – the entire tale. I have none of Tommy's robust, adventuresome spirit... at least not externally. But something of my mind works the way this story works, with the details incomplete, the compounded feeling of guilt, the need for everything to be different, released. It was somehow like I was reading myself.

But a few details....

The novel I've been working on for the past couple years (before I reread Cursed) encapsulates a woman in her early 30s:

raised by her father, from the ages of 4 to 16

haunted by the past and her eerie effects on the present

with no direct memory of her mother, though unlike Tommy, the not knowing torments her

her name is Jenny; Captain Field's daughter's name is Jenny

This litany of congruence rattles my innards.

Did those plot details from Cursed that I thought had been lost remain hidden in the far reaches of my mind?

I don't think so. On rereading, the early chapters seemed fully new to me.

Are there cosmic associations that exhibit when we least expect them, in the least likely ways?

I think that even less.

I see the world as a grand accumulation of circumstances, ruled by laws that we can never directly experience or untangle as they apply to the minute incidents of life. Sometimes these circumstances heap in symmetrical piles that can delight or terrify, as did the Dolphin Inn and Shadow-of-Fear for Tommy.

In my case, the dovetailing of this marvelous tale with driving events in my life is an overwhelming gift.

I refuse to question it.

by Derek Davis

[chiseler]

Bezark

“Bezark” is 1930s underworld lingo for “woman”, equating with “pansy” when applied to men. Listen carefully and you’ll hear the word – sometimes pronounced “bee-zock” – in films such as The Mayor of Hell (1933), Me and my Gal (1932), and The Torrid Zone (1940). Special thanks to Richard Polt for hammering out “bezark” on several of his antique typewriters.

From top to bottom:

Royal KMM (‘40s)

Underwood 5 ('20s)

Olivetti Lexikon 80 ('50s)

Voss DeLuxe ('50s)

Everest 90 ('30s)

Smith Corona Silent-Super ('50s)

by Daniel Riccuito

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DEPRESSION LESSONS #1

Suddenly, with sync-sound, movies learned to spit—and the power of words positively erupts from William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road (1933). Today, audiences might balk at such openhearted depictions of formerly middle-class teens "on the bum," and part of what grounds this story in reality is the Depression vernacular of the teens and those they encounter. Eddie, Tommy, and Sally join other "boxcar boys and girls," swarming freight trains in an endless search for work. What lies in wait, however, is a system dreamed up by adults that can thwart, maim, jail, and (in one case) rape these cursed and criminalized wanderers. On the way, an older "bindlestiff"—slang for vagabond—asks the crucial question: "You got an army, ain't ya?" This transparent allusion to America's "unemployed army" (and kids to boot!) should give us chills, a tingling sense of subversion, solidarity and courage.

by Daniel Riccuito

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DEPRESSION LESSONS #3

Here I present a work-in-progress lexicon of depressed speak. Sadly and magnificently, the tell offs and witticisms are almost entirely specific to the time when automats, dances and Dempsey were tradable cultural vernacular—but nevertheless! I encourage you to adapt these to make them your own in our time and bring them out to the streets again.

Care to dance?: "How about you and me steppin' on each other's feet?" —Docks of San Francisco (1932)

I could eat: “It’s gettin’ so my stomach does nip-ups every time it hears a nickel drop in the automat slot.” —Parachute Jumper (1933)

Greetings: "H'llo Jack Dempsey—how's fightin'?" —Docks of San Francisco (1932)

Agreed: "That suits me down to the ground." —Docks of San Francisco (1932)

I need new shoes: "Worn so thin I could stand on a dime and tell you whether it was heads or tails." —Central Park (1932)

by Daniel Riccuito

[chiseler]

DEPRESSION LESSONS #6

When Earl Baldwin died in 1970, he rated a few perfunctory lines in Variety. I'd like to rectify in some small way the injustice of it all—you see, Baldwin wrote for Hollywood when the studio system was cranking out generic masterpieces by the dozen. Today's lesson concerns the neglected scribes whose gift of gab helped put a beat behind the Depression."Kidding on the level," they used to call it, honest finger-pointing that masquerades as harmless fun.

Since the studio style more or less dictated how films moved, screenwriters found themselves not only camouflaged but pretty well subsumed. With this in mind, I'll limit my panegyric to a sad and sweet indictment wrapped in a programmer, 1933's Blondie Johnson. Baldwin wrote the original story and screenplay, which dovetail with the schematic plot one might expect from Warner Bros.—it's a picture about a decent girl who, losing her mother to poverty and illness, grows cynical and turns to crime.

In the hands of Earl Baldwin, fresh dames and tough guys are pared down; instead of becoming mere archetypes, they emit sincere nervous energy—a personal angst that brings me up short every time, as if I'm being confronted all at once by a cast of battle-scarred biographies. It's "Blondie" of course (the typecast Joan Blondell) who gives Baldwin's screenplay the most punch. She doesn't exude sex so much as steely conviction, spitting out broadsides against "The Dirty Thirties."

There's a shorthand in the dialogue, a palpable sense that everyone's screwed. Hard to know how many of the nuances belong to Baldwin, but I'll briefly mention a few other screenwriting credits here: Wild Boys of the Road (1933), Life Begins (1932), and The Widow from Chicago (1930).  Baldwin earned an additional dialogue credit for Widow, and I can confirm that the language really swings. 

by Daniel Riccuito

[chiseler]

Mina

Count Dracula (1977) is a British television adaptation of Bram Stoker’s canonical vampire tale. For Tim Lucas, who recommended I check out this awkward video/film hybrid, it does greater justice to the original Dracula than any other filmic version. “Judi Bowker,” claims Lucas, “is the only real Mina ever represented in film, and it makes her corruption all the more tragic.” Dracula isn’t the central focus. This gives Bowker’s Mina Harker — who might accurately be described as a doll-like, even pat incarnation of honey-haired innocence  — the chance to evince a modern paradigm, becoming, by immeasurably small degrees, a model of high-minded vampirism. Mina communes, unprotected, with madness AKA the fly-eating menace called Renfield. Surviving the encounter with her true opposite number (normally Dracula himself), she does so by moving him with frankness: “I was very interested in what you were saying about Eternal Life… I feel we understand each other”. It’s a finely turned performance echoed satisfyingly by the soundtrack’s Ondes Martenot, more human and throaty than any other electronic instrument, here centralizing a woman’s existential experience — drawn from, but not solely dependent on, Stoker’s original late-Victorian metaphysics. Even Count Dracula’s hybrid format, then-standard for English television, seems appropriate to Mina’s curiously doubled existence as she glides along an ethical Mobius strip like an enlightened somnambulist.

by Daniel Riccuito

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DEPRESSION LESSONS #4

I just watched a little bauble with George Raft and Joan Bennett which could only have been made during the Great Depression. If there's a how-to or a lesson embedded in this potso, cattywompus mixture of comedy and horror, it's beyond my limited powers of description. Wallace Ford gets brutally murdered; an old man dies of a broken heart in prison. We feel these deaths, the excruciating physical pain of them. In comes Joan Bennett and, surprise, we get a romantic comedy that never stops, that can't stop moving—She Couldn't Take It (1935) is the snake's hips. Raft gives this amazing speech to Joan that should be dripping with self-pity but instead soars because it's so quick and slangy—so maybe the lesson is speed, speed speed! The speech is a cliché about growing up poor and how it robbed him of the chance to be with a decent woman. And it makes you cry! Until a moment later when the conversation pulls up short with a gag in pig-latin. 

by Daniel Riccuito 

[chiseler]

DEPRESSION LESSONS #8

Today’s Depression Lesson concerns chorus girl hunger.

Mabel wants to throw Minnie down a flight of stairs during the extended tap number. But put Mabel in a fedora in some greasy alley and call it hardboiled—art is born! Or at least “cinema history.” How else to describe that slyly overdetermined look in his eye? He’s the honeysuckle knuckle. Yes, James Cagney as chorus girl! The out-of-breath little bulldog, gnawing at the curtains. (He eats curtains for breakfast and shits thumbtacks.) Imploding/exploding rotating choreography, a screen presence momentarily in the shape of a tough guy—is he looking for trouble? Or the right shade of nail varnish? We can’t say for certain why in his personal life he did things like call his wife “Bill.” And yet, presence is legible… Sort of… Angry mincing ballerina steps as he circles his opponent. When Jimmy glims a beautiful dame, is he thinking about sex? Or wondering how he’d look in her cunning frock?

He turns the Kinsey Scale into a goddamned Möbius strip.

Mr. Twinkle Fists.

Bottom ponce with a pit bull stance.

Yes, on the spectrum of human sexuality, he was off the edge. But who was this unbroken hurricane against the crenulated fortress of mainstream consensus narrative? And why even now do his die-hard fans—gay, straight or what have you—resist the idea that James Cagney, America's greatest actor, was in no way "classic"? Are they fearful that, minus the baseline certainty of Cagney's tough-guy status, they themselves might suddenly evanesce?

"He just isn't, that's all."

Isn't what... the toughest street queen ever to bust out of the cansky?

Oh, yes, his every spasm lays waste to prison walls.

Movies are all people know—and Cagney's characters are Cagney. Well then, I say let's look closer at Jimmy's pre-Code incarnation. We have two—and only two—possible sources where history’s concerned. On the one hand, sanctioned mythology; on the other, reality-informed dispatches scribed by marginalized parties. (In essence, more truthful fantasies.)

Boundary-erasing fluidity flies under, around and over the censor’s dizzy bean. And therefore doesn’t register as “subversive.”

Walking, All Talking Freudianism. It went over our heads too. And so, amid a Hollywood product like 1932’s Taxi!, the unofficial story was written without readers to soak up this gay, Yiddish-speaking Irishman—wazzat?

Bits of comic business, playing fay for a laugh, was kidding on the square. We must now reinterpret the entire crime oeuvre of 30's 'noir' as performance art by a lavender gang, brought forth by the irresistible light of film itself to an audience not yet born.

by Daniel Riccuito

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Jonathan Rosenbaum: The Anti-Capitalist Aftermath of George Floyd’s Murder

Once again, The Chiseler’s Daniel Riccuito fires off an adrenal email to Jonathan Rosenbaum. It would seem that current protests, spreading globally, fuel both men with hope -- as opposed to handwringing dismay.

DR: One of my pet worries has been that Me Too operates within the same bourgeoise comfort zone that always seems to define (and even helps establish adamantine parameters around) the most represented form of "Feminism" -- the word itself has historically been equated with American whiteness, racism and elitist "glass ceiling" (a metaphor that reveals all) politics. Ask Angela Davis. The glorious thing about our current global "crisis" (I call it "OPPORTUNITY!") is that we can no longer avoid socio-economic class -- i.e., the intrinsic relationship between capitalism and racism. When we focus on black people and ask "What could possibly make life fairer," ALL the issues automatically come into play: environmental racism, mass incarceration, unacceptable poverty rates, race-based joblessness, lack of medical care, defunded education -- we are COMPELLED to attack capitalism at its roots.

JR: I share your optimism. This is anti-capitalism without much of the privileged white delusion of 60s radicals that we need to wipe the slate clean and start all over again from scratch (as if any of us even knew what scratch consisted of). Sharpton's address at the George Floyd memorial brought me back to the unparalleled experience I was fortunate to have in the late 50s of attending a black funeral in rural Alabama--the collective vibe that made grief and joy two sides of the same coin (and not capitalistic coin, either), pinpointed by the preacher’s poetic intuition that “we are all graveyard travelers, traveling to the grave…” Both the eloquence and the practical wisdom of the black discourse around the demonstrations are what impress me the most.

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Jonathan Rosenbaum Responds

As a lark, Daniel Riccuito sent friends and colleagues his angry screed on Joe Biden. Jonathan Rosenbaum brought him up short with a surprisingly reasoned, and typically eloquent. response.

DR: Please name the most recent Democratic nominee for president who was even more repellant than Joe Biden. I'm speaking wholistically, taking into account Biden's political record, his rhetoric, his documented public groping of women and girls -- all of it. I'll start by answering that nobody comes to mind. And, without immediately avoiding a direct answer by uttering "BUT... Donald J. Trump!", please confront the facts as they pertain to Biden himself. On an objective basis, he is the most anti-Choice nominee since Roe became law (Gore is a close second, though his progressive shift was sharp and consistent, not so Mr. Biden's). The infamous Crime Bill flowed directly from the successful launch of mass incarceration which Biden, moving to Reagan's political right, started in the 1980s. Ok, I'll stop loading up the question and ask again: Who the fuck (in recent decades) was worse than this schmuck? I lied. A few more words: Bill Clinton is my idea of the worst US President in history on the basis of NAFTA alone, which fundamentally altered capitalism and made unions largely irrelevant -- not to mention whatever broken shards of representative democracy were extant pre-NAFTA. Still, I claim that what we didn't yet know about Clinton at the time of his nomination made him less repellant than the incarnation of Joe Biden who now stands before us. PS-I'm a lousy pollster.

JR: For me, Joe Lieberman may be more repellent than either Biden (who always makes me think of a Gershwin tune: "I'm Biden my time...") or Bill Clinton, but that doesn't make Clueless Joe any sort of gift to the public. Today I just received a hypocritical questionnaire from the Trump team about "illegal aliens" voting illegally  that is really just a request for money, and in this respect it's almost identical to the similarly insulting "questionnaires" sent to me daily or more often than daily from the Democratic Party that are also just requests for money, always checking off on my behalf whether I'm willing to hand over moolah and thus proving that they're not really interested in my opinions at all. In the case of the Trump questionnaire, I actually went to the trouble of telling them that I believe illegal aliens should be able to vote and am about to mail this to them, minus any money. But saying this much necessarily ignores the fact that I regard Trump as the true illegal alien who shouldn't be allowed to vote--unlike Latinos who sneak across the southern border, whose risk-taking already should qualify them existentially as true-blue citizens.

The Democratic Party's rejection of Sanders, Warren, and all the people like me who supported them (a considerable portion of the population) only proves that they ultimately share the same sports metaphors as the Trump team, not to mention the same Roy Rogers/Gene Autry/Star Wars/playpen metaphysics about the "good guys" versus "bad guys" that John McCain took seriously as a grownup, whereas for me anybody who thinks in those infantile terms is already a dangerous imbecile. So as long as the Democratic Party keeps breaking its back to prove it can be just as simple-minded and just as venal as Trump, it seems to be begging sizable portions of the electorate not to vote for anyone, which clearly would be a mistake. But surely allowing us to have a more reasonable choice would be a big improvement.