Advice for the New Year

Merry

Comrades

A bevy of true humans and actual progressives (Jimmy Dore, Aaron Maté, Ben Norton, Katie Halper, Max Blumenthal, Diego Sequera) rap for three hours about the soon-to-be-installed War Sissy Reich.

Blue Christmas

Chris Hedges and the great Diana Johnstone: "Wrecking the Left"

250!

Happy Birthday, Ludwig!

A fine appreciation by Verena Nees and Peter Schwarz.

Claudio Arrau's immortal "Appassionata."

 

Dark Holiday

James Harvey -- along with Chris Fujiwara, Tom Gunning, David Bordwell, and Raymond Carney (except when Carney's writing about Capra) -- is one of my film writer/historian Gods. There is so much to learn from reading (and re-reading) Professor Harvey's three masterpieces, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood (1997), Movie Love in the Fifties (2002), and Watching Them Be (2015). Word is that Harvey's currently wrapping up a history of the Western to be published by Farrar Straus, and based on Movie Love's astonishing analysis of Johnny Guitar and The Lusty Men it is a release devoutly to be wished for.

The knockout punch for me in first reading Movie Love was the chapter on a forgotten and very hard-to-find (thank you, Karagarga) WWII noir called Christmas Holiday, directed by my favorite noir director Robert Siodmak (Phantom Lady, Cobra Woman, The Suspect, Spiral Staircase, The Killers, Dark Mirror, Criss Cross, Cry of the City) and written by the ever-strange Herman J. Mankiewicz.

Perhaps Siodmak's most famous sequence, Phantom Lady (1944).



Or maybe the opening to The Killers (1946).



James Harvey:

The script that Herman Mankiewicz supplied for Siodmak's Christmas Holiday had some resemblances to his Academy Award-winning Citizen Kane screenplay. It has the same skewed chronology, the same overlapping flashbacks; and entering it is a bit like stepping into a labyrinth (one of Welles's favorite movie metaphors), mostly because it begins so far away from its main story and characters. It's almost fifteen minutes before the star and central character appears or is even spoken of. In the meantime, there are (the opening scene) an OCS graduation ceremony (even a speech); a scene in the barracks with a young lieutenant (Dean Harens) getting a Dear John wire from his fiancée; a passenger-plane flight through an electrical storm; a forced landing in New Orleans; and the soldier getting a room at a hotel where people are all sleeping in the lobby (it's wartime and it's Christmas Eve). In the hotel bar he meets a friendly, half-soused newspaperman, Simon Fenimore (Richard Whorf). You got troubles? I'll take you to the Maison Lafitte, says the newspaperman. What's the Maison Lafitte? "It's a -- well, let's face it -- it's a kinda joint a little way outta town."

It looks like a Wolf Man outtake when we get there: a crumbling porticoed mansion in a raging night storm, overarching trees bent by wind and rain in the foreground of a long shot, as the two men emerge from their car and struggle through the storm onto the front porch. But inside the entrance hall, it's light, with a Christmas tree by the door at the foot of a stairway, and a crystal chandelier overhead, as a maid in cap and apron takes their coats and lightning flashes through the windows, while a Dixieland band rides and rollicks on the soundtrack. And after all the neutral, generic places we've been looking at before this (from the parade grounds to the hotel room), getting to this one -- lush and lively and tacky all at once -- makes you feel the way a good song does when it finally gets to the chorus. Now, we know, we're really at the movies.

Buy the book.

Robert Siodmak's Christmas Holiday (1944).

Nothing

Chris Hedges:

Liberals who express dismay, or more bizarrely a fevered hope, about the corporatists and imperialists selected to fill the positions in the Biden administration are the court jesters of our political burlesque. They long ago sold their soul and abandoned their most basic principles to line up behind a bankrupt Democratic Party. They chant, with every election cycle, the mantra of the least worst and sit placidly on the sidelines as a Bill Clinton or a Barack Obama and the Democratic Party leadership betray every issue they claim to support.

The only thing that mattered to liberals in the presidential race, once again, was removing a Republican, this time Donald Trump, from office. This, the liberals achieved. But their Faustian bargain, in election after election, has shredded their credibility. They are ridiculed, not only among right-wing Trump supporters but by the hierarchy of the Democratic Party that has been captured by corporate power. No one can, or should, take liberals seriously. They stand for nothing. They fight for nothing. The cost is too onerous. And so, the liberals do what they always do, chatter endlessly about political and moral positions they refuse to make any sacrifices to achieve.         

Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates.

This defection, as Nader understood, was the only tactic that could force the Democrats to adopt parts of a liberal and left-wing agenda and save us from the slow-motion corporate coup d’état. Fear is the real force behind political change, not oily promises of mutual goodwill. Short of this pressure, this fear, especially with labor unions destroyed, there is no hope. Now we will reap the consequences of the liberal class’s moral and political cowardice.

The Democratic Party elites revel in taunting liberals as well as the left-wing populists who preach class warfare and supported Bernie Sanders. How are we supposed to interpret the appointment of Anthony Blinken, one of the architects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and supporter of the apartheid state of Israel, as Secretary of State? Or John Kerry, who championed the massive expansion of domestic oil and gas production, largely through fracking, and, according to Barack Obama’s memoir, worked doggedly to convince those concerned about the climate crisis to “offer up concessions on subsidies for the nuclear power industry and the opening of additional U.S. coastlines to offshore oil drilling” as the new climate policy czar? Or Brian Deese, the executive who was in charge of the “climate portfolio” at BlackRock, which invests heavily in fossil fuels, including coal, and who served as a former Obama economic adviser who advocated austerity measures, to run the White House’s economic policy? Or Neera Tanden, for director of the Office of Management and Budget, who as president of the Center for American Progress raised millions in dark money from Silicon Valley and Wall Street while relentlessly ridiculing Bernie Sanders and his supporters on cable news and social media and who proposed a plank in the Democratic platform calling for bombing Iran?

 More.

100!

Happy 100th Birthday to the incomparable Dave Brubeck.

Nation

Shithole

And Thank You, Bob!

Newhart. Thanksgiving Day. Football. Moo goo gai pan. And ties, lapels, and collars you could rent space on. What more do we need?

"Over the River and Through the Woods" from November of '75.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Requiem for a Eunuch

[Please don't waste your cash on the recently expelled flatulence from Barry O's $65,000,000 book deal. Perhaps take a look instead at a repost from January 2017 on this Wall Street pimp and droning mass murderer.]

What a degrading and despairing eight years it's been.

The presidency of Barack Hussein Obama began as the most shameful time in American history ended, a time flanked by two thefts: the first, a presidential election; the second -- through the transfer of over $20,000,000,000,000 from the public realm to the private -- that of the American State itself. In between: the end of habeas corpus and most other privacy rights; the handing-over of major parts of American "defense" to private armies and death squads; the institution of aggressive war as the vanguard of American foreign policy; the dissolution of what small room remained between corporate/government propaganda and establishment media; the de facto end of public education and general public concern on the part of the national government; radical, across-the-board changes in tax policy in order to keep power in the hands of the mutant elite; the packing of federal courts with extreme corporatists; the basic end of a citizen's right to declare bankruptcy; the further narrowing of labor law and its enforcement, making a worker's right to collectively-bargain essentially meaningless; the creation of a world-wide American archipelago of secret prisons; torture as national policy; the destruction of the United Nations as an independent force; the holding of prisoners without identity, legal representation, the naming of evidence, trial, or declared length of sentence; the largest increase in "defense" spending in world history, without a single military threat on the planet; the evisceration of the Freedom of Information Act, and the withholding of normal documents-release from past administrations; the politicization of science; the ending of all financial regulations and oversight; the takeover of environmental, health care, energy, workplace safety, worker safety, and product safety policies by corporate private tyranny; the denying and demonizing of the effects of global warming.

The beginning of 2009 really did feel like America, Year Zero. We were like punch-drunk fighters, too alone and without anything to grasp. The country had the feel of a devastated peasant society after a plague swept it or an army went through and destroyed everything. We had dissolved into an inability to respond.

I think our real hope was a mere wish to return to "normal," however ruthless and self-righteous that normal often had been during the American 20th Century. Of course, many of us hoped for much more. Why not? The country was repulsed by what it had gone through, the economy had collapsed, the out-of-power party during our dark time now had strong executive and legislative control. The decades-long suffocation caused by Free Marketeering was declared over. There was talk of nationalizing banks and other financial institutions. Talk of new public control over the Fed; even of its elimination.

And one national magazine had this on its cover:

Best of all, our new chief executive was a man of enormous political gifts: handsome, eloquent, elegant, brilliant, funny. His whole election campaign promised one thing above all: change. And a promise -- pronounced or implicit -- to reverse, so help him God, not only the ahistorical evils of his immediate predecessor but the larger anti-communal, anti-public course we had been set upon by the originator of the American nightmare, Ronald Reagan.

None of it has happened. Far from returning the country to its "normal" self, the only normalizing Barack Obama has done has been the normalizing -- intensifying -- of all things Bush/Cheney; and an acceleration of the sociopathic direction launched by Reagan. In January 2017, the country is now further to the right than at any time in its history, with a more debased political culture than ever before. More corporatized, with a completely hijacked State. There is more police power, private and public. Less personal and family privacy. Less freedom of movement -- physically, artistically, politically, and in terms of work. The connection between what people vote for and what they get is now completely delinked. Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" -- a complex he allowed to be created by turning over national security policy to the Dulles brothers and to a complex that would murder his successor -- is now a military-corporate-intelligence state in complete control. Bush's wars have metastasized -- while staying exactly the same in effect in Iraq -- into a massive expansion in Afghanistan, a massive expansion covertly in Iran, Indonesia, and Columbia (with the heroic populist governments of Central and South America now in Robert Gates's drone-sights), and new wars in Pakistan and Yemen. Not one perp from the Bush/Cheney crime gang has been gone after. Obama has claimed the right to murder anyone, at anytime, for any reason, anywhere on the planet. There is less control than ever over the gangster state of Israel. The people of Palestine and Gaza are forgotten. As are the poor, desperate, and homeless here in America. NAFTA and GATT have been expanded and hardened rather than reversed. Cap-and-Trade was allowed to be hijacked by Goldman Sachs et al. - then killed. The BP/Gulf horror was not used to shift the country away from energy over-development toward conservation. Obama's Justice Department has Godfathered the public crucifixion of whistle blowers and true public servants such as Julian Assange (while setting Assange up for eventual extradition and Gitmo-ing), while also rewriting rules for use of Miranda warnings. There have been FBI raids on the homes and offices of anti-war activists. The criminal enterprise known as the Pharmaceutical/Insurance/Healthcare "industry" is now more powerful, corrupt, incompetent, and privatized than ever before. The last great industrial union -- Walter Reuther's UAW -- was destroyed by Obama and his henchmen by means which would've made Ronald Reagan blanch. Most state and local governments are bankrupt and abandoned. All public service unions are now on the run in America's new form of McCarthyism. Obama has set us up for the coup de main: the Neo-Feudal dismantling of all public and egalitarian struggles and accomplishments of the past 150 years. Checkmate.

So many of us were fooled. So many of us were tired of being on the outs with our own society, so tired of hating and withdrawing. So tired of not having faith and optimism and good cheer, of not feeling the very human need to belong. We looked to Obama and thought of him as a child of Kennedy. Even the Kennedy family felt that way. We, and they, were had.

For Barack Hussein Obama is the child of Reagan. His first son. They were both born from the dark flow of Kennedy backlash in the early 1960s, Obama physically, Reagan politically -- both conceived, it would turn out, from the swamp of hatred toward what "the 60s" would come to mean: earnestness, optimism, a sense of community, grace, complexity, self-deprecation, hatred of the rich and big business, a refusal to demonize others and puff ourselves up, and (perhaps most important) the assumption that people are basically good -- the actor by cheerleading for Goldwater, and calling for the privatizing of TVA, nuking North Vietnam, eliminating the corporate income tax, and saying things like "Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's 'bold new imaginative' program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut it's still old Karl Marx, first launched a century ago"; Obama by being tossed aside by absent, otherwise-engaged parents. . .

The assumption of Barack Obama cool, collected and calm has been a universal since this arriviste began to gain presidential timber throughout the campaign of '07. The media persona and Obama's two droning books convinced us that this "child of the 60s" was the very opposite of a hip-shooter: deeply thoughtful about most things; no personal experience with physical violence (has he ever been in a fist fight?); abstract and diffident; a professor from the Ivy League; most important, the child of a mother and father who separately personified the best of that glorious decade -- independent, free-spirited, anti-establishment, each with a virulent hatred of war and violence.

Now it seems altogether to the opposite. Rather than the happy product of such a union, perhaps Barry Soetoro experienced those years and those parents in a different way. An absent father, more concerned with his newer family, newer children, and political/diplomatic career than with the boy, to the extent that Obama never met his dad until the child was 10. And the absent mother: dumping her little boy onto maternal grandparents, also more concerned with lifestyle, lovers, and profession.

The baboons of the American Right have made hatred of the 60s their number one obsession for 40 years now. Nixon got elected on the wind of that hatred. So did Reagan. And George W. Bush made lots of hay in the darkness of that collective loathing. But theirs was political/power/values stuff. Not the result of private, everyday resentments, loneliness, confusion and heartbreak caused by the abandonment by two obviously self-absorbed parents. Barack Obama's 1960s hatred is honest and well-earned.

What if under the too-cool-for-school face burns a rage, a life- and self-hatred forever burning no matter what the ego satisfactions of the man's stunning career achievements? What if his whole public life has been little other than vengeance taken on absent parents and all they represented? What if he is just another ego-prick, assassin, liar, user? Now in charge of the greatest criminal enterprise in the history of Man -- Empire USA -- that would explain his spineless slimeball Presidency far more than any Miracle of Hope and Change smothered in its crib. A man whose identity is forever hidden because of his wayward parents grabs the ultimate brass ring by pretending to be an egalitarian Man of Peace, then governs as a Man of Total War, and the most lethal sort of elitist. How long can he contain such outrageous private contradictions on such a public stage?

Yet, eight years on, he still claims support. In fact, we are told he is now on a roll. Who are these supporters? They cannot be ideologues of any kind. (Those who see Nowhere Man as on the left or right of any political spectrum are just cheerleaders for their own brand of narcissism.) Aside from the enormous pride taken by black Americans at seeing a man who looks black at such a center of power, the rest must be that brood of iPad Sandinistas who basically adopt the following persona: "I'm smarter than you are. I'm more educated than you are. I dress better and have far better taste in music and movies. I'm cooler. My career is everything, plus I've memorized every episode of Lost. I'm on my second divorce and my kids are everything, except when they're not. I Twit, Kindle, and Kopi Luwak. And you don't." (Commander Kos would be the poster boy for this wad.) Not exactly attitudes one wants in a Sierra Maestra foxhole. No janitors here, nor watchmen, salesmen, grocers, bus drivers, plumbers, mechanics, railroad clerks, pharmacists, cloth cutters, electricians, security guards, pipe fitters or painters. No, all children of Reagan: a generation faced with no draft, no economic hardship if they play the game well enough (and Obama's remaining Pwog supporters do nothing but play the game), no industrialization, no assassinations, no race or gender revolutions, and remote control wars with no body bags allowed to be seen. And the leaders: a Reagan, a Clinton, and two Bushes.

Obama is King of the Nowhere People: born with looks, height, grace, eloquence. And the insides of a Cray CX1. He smells of nothing, sounds like room tone, makes faces like an Ogilvy & Mather ad director. After all the media pronunciamentos of his Great Speeches (most sickening the hysteria over his flatulent depoliticizing of the Loughner murders), try to remember just one line. (Rain puddles not allowed.) He's from Chicago, they say. Really? He's called a Kenyan? Huh? A product of Jeremiah Wright's Trinity Church. What? He is none of these. He is the Achiever severed from anything beyond the Achievement, a gentrified hologram of rootlessness, a product not only of many private demons but of an America without traditions, myth or meaning beyond the last branding cycle, of a coreless society.

It is all of us. Even as recently as one-year ago (in spite of the horror of the appointments, the turgid Inaugural, the already evident backsliding), the feeling was still alive that principle would matter, that the "weak" would have priority again over the "strong." How could we not think that? As Spring follows Winter, surely the fine and honorable part of our spirit would begin again to dominate. But experience does tell. We've been told little but buck up, keep your powder dry, and care only about yourself. "All for ourselves, nothing for others," in the words of Adam Smith. So the honor, the caring for others, the humility, compassion, patience, modesty, self-mocking wit, yes the bleeding heart, the "tender germ of embrace" in Simone Weil's words -- not here.

"The world for which I was made, is not here" - Thoreau.

The post-Bush/Reagan/Cheney/Clinton world this country was ready for, its only salvation from the coming darkness of collapse and terror, could not be made. There was much too much of the other stuff. In fact, it would be difficult to find what was not "the other stuff." Like a child beaten and deprived of all chance to use the sympathetic, empathic part of her heart, when we had to show it, we had nothing to show.

Take the debate over "health care reform." What that sickening and dispiriting process exposed is that there was nothing (on an establishment level) left of "the tender germ of embrace." What we saw was a war between fascist haters and greasy pole climbers. Sarah Palin vs. Rachel Maddow, Cheney vs. Biden, the Tea Party vs. the Salon.com Party, Fox News vs. MSNBC. What was exposed is that both sides are the same: my foot on your throat.

Two years on we now see that the main problem "liberals" were suffering since 2000 was merely being out of power. And now the main priority is keeping it, no matter how much principle is flushed or how many weasel legislative tricks need to be used. (And oh how those precedents will be used to create a Reichstag Fire-type Enabling Act under Palin, Petraeus, or Jeb Bush, when their time has come.)

Barack Obama, it turns out, is not some liberatory or revolutionary spirit. No, just a dime-a-dozen liar and hustler -- an arriviste of smarm -- and so the very appropriate role model for a generation of dick-swinging mediocrities and turncoats. He is our present, and our future: stand for nothing; stand-up for nothing; worship money; discard inconvenient friends and memories; exhaust yourself trying to convince others of your optimism and determination; be civil, compromising, dispassionate and groveling in the face of executioners ("Keep that Hate-o-Rade to yourself!"); make sure everyone thinks you're just swell; slather your face in moisturizer in order to better beam about your wonderful career and how everything is great.

He is Devo, and so are we.

The Wisdom of the Heart

Henry Miller reads from his masterpiece essay, "To Paint is to Love Again."

Rainbow's End

Again, Smoke. If the Kennedy Years were a movie, which one? Like all things great and mysterious, it is a myriad: Psycho and The Birds. Lolita and Strangelove. Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Lilies of the Field and A Child is Waiting. Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, Fail Safe. The Apartment. The Ladies Man and Nutty Professor. One Eyed Jacks and The Hustler. Advise and Consent. Courtship of Eddie's Father.

This is the one; our wound. 'Though made during the time, it breathes with the stunned sense of heartbreak we would feel about the time, about New York City, about adoration and elegance and honor and a way of falling in love, about how people must have been, even if they weren't.

Then and Now

Dr. Michael Parenti from 1990: what the US Vampire State did to Eastern Europe; what the Biden Vampire State will attempt to do to the entire world.

Facing the Music

From 1973 to 1998, Arlene Croce was the world's greatest dance critic and her Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book remains not only one of the premiere pieces of dance criticism, but also one of the most original pop culture books as well.

Here, she writes on what may be the greatest romantic dance ever filmed, "Let's Face the Music and Dance" from Follow the Fleet (1936):

It could be subtitled "A Playlet." Astaire at the gambling tables in Monte Carlo has just lost all his money. The curtains close and reopen on the terrace at the top of the casino. He is elaborately shunned by society. Alone, he takes out a small pistol, but just then Rogers appears at the far side of the stage, twisting a long chiffon handkerchief and gazing out over the parapet. She steps up on it but he prevents the leap. Ruefully he shows her his empty wallet and the gun which she looks at unseeingly, then tries to snatch. He throws both away and sings.

How they get through all this without a laugh is their secret. The song is like one of those brave ballads of the Depression and the mood is awesomely grave. The dance is one of their simplest and most daring, the steps mostly walking steps done with a slight retard. The withheld impetus makes the dance look dragged by destiny, all the quick little circling steps pulled as if on a single thread. A beautiful moment occurs when he promenades her as she holds a pose on half-toe with one lifted knee. Another when they circle the stage, turning first one shoulder then the other toward each other, and when she continues the tiny steps in a series of chaîné turns, her hands uplifted, and he follows with his arms encircling her waist. Still another: they turn away from each other in a swift kneel and as swiftly rise with a light jump, only to sink again on the other knee. Her dress, made of metallic threads and with weights in the sleeves and hem, winds and unwinds, a part of the dance. The exit, unforgettable, is another knee-sink but now side by side. Slowly they rise together and back off in a long fondu. Then: one, two, three, four paces, and they go off in a Jooss-type lunge, backs arched, one knee yanked high. At the suddenness and hugeness of it the audience does laugh, then immediately applauds its audacity.

What I find most moving in this noble and almost absurdly glamorous dance is the absence of self-enchantment in the performance. Astaire and Rogers yield nothing to Garbo's throat or Pavlova's swan as icons of the sublime, yet their manner is brisk. Briskly they immolate themselves. And within the enclosed theatrical setting of the number, everything finds its place.

Don't

The Worse Devil

Abby Says It

Despair

For Catholics, despair is the ultimate sin ~ for by its very nature, despair blames God for all things.

Still, considering where we all are now: how else are we supposed to feel?

Chris Hedges at the Sanctuary of Independent Media, October 16, 2020.

My Kind of Woman

I suppose for all of us -- boy, girl, straight, gay -- there's a moment in adolescence when we see an object, usually somebody we don't know, who crystallizes for us all the lust we have and makes it burning hot. It is a great moment, 'cause from then on we begin to understand what we're attracted to.

For me it happened on a Saturday afternoon in my parents' home, sometime around the age of 11 or 12. I was watching on TV, but not paying much attention to, a colorful 1950s musical called The Band Wagon. About 20 minutes into it, she entered. A Brunette Dream. Eyes like black diamonds, skin clear and golden, goddess-like. Hair jet-black and fine and smooth, glossy as a bird's wing. Long-stemmed, and wearing the sexiest shoes ever created, on the sexiest feet.

I began to pay attention. Toward the end of the movie, there was this:

And my boyhood was gone.

Uptown

Happy October

Wanted for Treason (and Murder)

Why murder him? What did he? By what right? Who told you to?

-- Racine

Released to co-conspirator Lyndon Baines Johnson 56 years ago today: the Report of the President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy -- the Warren Report. A death gas in book form, the Report (more accurately titled the Dulles Report) attacked what wasn't destroyed of the American spirit by the Dealey Plaza gunmen of 11/22/63; and finished it off. The Report carried out its two functions superbly: 1) allowing Kennedy's murderers to go free and undetected; 2) making sure nothing public and governmental would ever be believed again, weakening public power and allowing private tyranny to take over all American life. A takeover now complete.

We turn again to documentarian Shane O'Sullivan. Here, O'Sullivan and researcher Douglas Horne expose the most gruesome element of the Warren/Dulles malignancy, the medical cover-up.

Blood Brothers

On January 20th, 1961, twenty-seven-year-old James Meredith -- nine-year Air Force veteran who had completed two years at "coloreds only" Jackson State college, and inspired by the inauguration of a young American President who'd called that day for citizens to stand up for their rights (and to help each other) -- applied for admission to the public university of his home state: the University of Mississippi ~ "Ole Miss." Since Meredith was black, the application was necessary three times. Denied three times. Led and pushed by NAACP Mississippi Director Medgar Evers, suit was filed in US Fifth Circuit Court on Meredith's behalf, which found in June 1962 that James Meredith had been rejected "solely because he was a Negro." An appeal by Ole Miss to the United States Supreme Court was denied by Justice Hugo Black and Meredith was scheduled to enter the University for the fall term beginning 58 years ago this month.

Five years before, at Little Rock (Arkansas) Central High School, the protection and enrollment of nine black students into the previously all-white campus was commandeered by US Army Major General Edwin A. Walker. Two years later, in a moment of awesome revelation, Walker joined the newly formed John Birch Society and discovered that all civil rights actions were part of the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy. Seeing the light, Walker immediately submitted his military resignation to President Dwight Eisenhower -- refused. Instead, Ike ordered the General to take over the 24th Infantry Division, made up of over 10,000 US troops stationed in Augsburg, Germany. Walker immediately began to indoctrinate his men in the ways of Communism by labeling Harry Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dean Acheson (and possibly Eisenhower himself) as "Reds." In April 1961, new Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara fired Walker and began a court-martial investigation against him. (Charges dropped.) Now a civilian, supported by Barry Goldwater and bankrolled by the H.L. Hunt oil family of Dallas, Walker announced his candidacy for the 1962 Texas Governor's race. (Won by John Connally.)

        
Throughout the summer of '62, the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert Kennedy was in negotiations with Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett to ensure the smooth and safe admission of James Meredith into Ole Miss. As the first day of school, September 20th, approached, agreement seemed to have been reached: Barnett would do what he needed to do politically -- make a paper tiger resistance to Meredith's admission, then -- given the Federal power at hand -- fold. Just in case, the Attorney General ordered first 100, then 600 Federal marshals to surround and protect Meredith. Thinking Meredith's admission into his dormitory was securely accomplished, President Kennedy went on the air.



The brothers were betrayed. As Kennedy spoke, the insurrection began, led by Walker. Governor Barnett made his own TV address, claiming Meredith had been sneaked in by helicopter without his knowledge. The three hundred local cops provided by Barnett for Meredith's safety disappeared into the night. The army of Federal marshals became surrounded by a mob of 3,000 seeking to take Meredith and lynch him. Carrying clubs, rocks, pipes, bricks, bottles, bats, firebombs -- and guns -- they attacked the marshals and whatever journalists they could find. The marshals responded with tear gas, but did not shoot back. The Kennedys ordered in the Mississippi National Guard. Rioting continued through the night. By morning, two were dead (one newsman) and over two hundred marshals and Guardsmen shot. Cars and buildings burned. A stolen fire engine and bulldozer each tried to knock over the walls of Meredith's "secret" dorm. And still Barnett failed to call back the disappeared state police force. What most enraged, and puzzled, the President and the Attorney General was the ass-dragging by their own United States Army, its strange failure to relieve Barnett's missing militia after many calls to do so. Why was the military being so unresponsive to the Commander-in-Chief? "Damn Army!" cursed JFK toward morning. "They can't even tell if the MPs have left yet. Where's the Army? Why haven't they left yet? Where are they?"



Hours had now passed since the President ordered the 503rd Military Police Battalion -- the Army's riot-control unit -- to move from Memphis to Oxford, Mississippi. Twenty phone calls from JFK to the unit commander failed to speed things up. The military was washing its hands of the Kennedys. It claimed to not know where to land its helicopters on the Ole Miss campus. So the President was forced to play air-traffic controller. He spoke directly to a sergeant on the ground to ensure there would be trucks available when the Police Battalion arrived. And it did arrive. Five hours late. Afterwards, Kennedy would demand an investigation of the timing of each call placed from the White House to the Pentagon, the time such orders were implemented, and an accounting for each minute in between -- causing a penultimate break between the President and his military leaders. (The final break would come several weeks later, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.) And once the flow of troops began, the Army ensured it would gush, a deliberate overkill: 25,000 men descended on the University. A number exceeding the troops dispatched by John F. Kennedy to Berlin, Cuba, Laos, South Vietnam, and Indonesia during his Presidency -- combined.

The mob was dispersed; the town was quieted; several hundred rioters were arrested. James Meredith was officially registered and began classes that week, starting his own, daily ordeal. He would graduate in August 1963, despite having to be escorted to and from class by a squad of marshals, his father's house being three times firebombed, and endless reprisals attempted against his family.

Due to his "leadership" during the battle, Edwin Walker was arrested on the orders of Robert Kennedy the morning after the riot. He was flown to a Missouri psychiatric prison, charged with sedition, rebellion, and insurrection. Claiming himself to be "America's first political prisoner," Walker was released one week later, with the charges again eventually dropped. In April '63, he was the target of an assassination attempt as he worked at home in his study. The rifle bullet exploded above his head as he reached down to pick up a fallen paper. The Warren Commission, in its Oswald framing frenzy, would claim that the shot was fired by Lee Harvey Oswald. (An idea pronounced "ridiculous" by Walker himself.) Mississippi NAACP Director Medgar Evers -- the man who drove James Meredith's court case all the way to the Supreme Court -- was assassinated before his family's home by a shot to the back, on June 12, 1963 -- the day after Kennedy's call for a "moral revolution" in the area of civil rights.



In June 1966, while leading the March Against Fear from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, James Meredith was shot from behind by a hidden sniper firing from some bushes.

Survived.

A Tale of Two Boo-Boos

Yogi and Boo-Boo Bear, fifty years ago.



From more recent times -- Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.

Out!

Maggie

In Centre Stage (1991), the greatest of all Hong Kong movies, Maggie Cheung plays herself, plays immortal silent-screen star Ruan Lingyu, and plays Ruan Lingyu playing various tragic heroines. Yet we are always watching Maggie. How could we not?

Centre Stage is one of the rare viewing experiences which restore and deepen one's love and understanding of movies. From a negative point-of-view, the film reminds us (by embodying a whole other approach) of the tawdriness and triviality of US movies and pop culture generally. What if this were an American movie about an American female icon (Monroe, Gloria Swanson, Margaret Sullavan, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland)? The character (and no doubt the approach taken by the woman playing the character) would be defined by whom she slept with, whom she didn't sleep with, what sort of drugs she took, how many times she beat up her kids, how many times she showed up drunk on the set. "Truth" defined as filth. Yet (of course) the movie would end with some sentiment telling us how terribly misunderstood the American legend was and how basically good she was. Most important, there would be no connections made between the woman, her life, and the power relations surrounding her.

Positively, Centre Stage is pure tenderness -- pure joy, heart, and magic. Cheung, one of the most beautiful women of her time, also happens to be one of the greatest movie actresses (the greatest?) of her time. Her look is always mesmerizing, but Centre Stage is another place entirely: the 1920s and early 30s visions she embodies as Ruan Lingyu make her unearthly -- director Stanley Kwan's desire: for Kwan defines Lingyu in purely spiritual terms -- as a great, beautiful soul: great because entirely moral: incapable of evil, or rudeness, or anything degrading of life: beauty outside because beauty inside. Kwan tethers physical beauty and grace to moral and spiritual grace. But of course it's as much Cheung as Kwan. Perhaps she is as strong a moral agent on set as was Cary Grant. Here, she makes the movie glow with holiness, she and Kwan rejecting postmodern morality, particularly as it applies to private life.



One of the most beautiful women of our time turns out to be one of the strongest movie forces for "goodness" in our time. Maggie Cheung is the anti-Madonna. (Or, actually, the true Madonna. . .)

Requiem for the Real

Looks like NBC has re-re-rebooted the vomit-inducing idea of a NEW "Rockford Files," formerly with some oatmeal face by the name of Dermot Mulroney, then with Hugo Boss model Josh Holloway, now with who knows?? Maybe Macaulay Culkin...

The real thing. One of the great episodes of this or any other TV series, "Requiem for a Funny Box."

Joe Santos, R.I.P.

Honor Man

In 1961, Patrick McGoohan turned down the movie role of James Bond because he thought Ian Fleming was a "talentless smut peddler." Then recommended best friend Sean Connery for the part. In his own masterpiece John Drake series trilogy, a trilogy about the intelligence world of the 1960s -- Danger Man, Secret Agent, The Prisoner -- he refused to shoot and/or kiss anyone. He was born in Astoria, Queens to Irish immigrant parents, quickly moved as a toddler to Mullaghmore, Ireland -- then to Sheffield, England as a boy. Married actress Joan Drummond in his early 20s, wrote love notes to her every day, and stayed with Drummond until his death in 2009, at the age of 80.

Patrick McGoohan is my favorite TV actor -- no one else comes close: he's always the most intelligent, elegant, interesting, courageous, and thoughtful man in the room. And the least egotistical. Watch him here in a scene from "Identity Crisis," one of two Columbo appearances for which he won an Emmy. The great Peter Falk is closing in, suspecting that a man called "Steinmetz" is actually an invention, actually Patrick McGoohan himself -- the real murderer -- in disguise.



"The T-33. . . . Silver Star": the moment when McGoohan realizes he's done, that his protected life -- again here the life of a top intelligence agent -- is over, yet his voice and eyes become modest and respectful ("I'll get your coat"): the better man has won. McGoohan's devotion is never primarily to himself, but to something outside and higher.

*

Danger Man premiered in Britain in 1960 (with American financing), ran for 39 episodes at 26 minutes per, and -- in spite of its enormous popularity throughout Europe -- was canceled when the US financing dried up. McGoohan plays unarmed undercover agent John Drake, working at times for British intelligence, French intelligence, NATO, and CIA.

One of the first incarnation's earliest and best, "View from the Villa," from September 1960. (The villa's location, by the way, is Portmeiron, North Wales -- The Prisoner's goofball setting.) And as we can see, Mr. McGoohan was an amateur middleweight champion.

Drake would return three years later under the same series title in Britain, called Secret Agent everywhere else. The running time for each story was now doubled to 50 minutes (with many two-parters), but the most significant change would be Drake himself. Now more of a le Carré-type character -- sick of his "professionalism" and sick of what it is he's supposed to be protecting.

"You're Not in Any Trouble, Are You?" from October 1965 (with Susan Hampshire as the very fetching dish).

Then came The Prisoner. . .

For me, no. Despite McGoohan's elegance, fascinating confusion, and very good humor, watching it is like being forced to wear a Nehru jacket, listen to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," watch Skidoo, and drink Tang all at the same time.

For a funny overview of every Prisoner episode, go here.

It is impossible to think of Patrick McGoohan without affection -- his ever-changing accents, his grace, his timing and nonchalance -- his wonderful pleasure in performance. His pride in craft. McGoohan embodies a vanished time when we had a more direct relationship to a performer. A generous-hearted actor (and man); a glamour without narcissism. He always seems to be in a blissful present, with an expression that says "You can’t imagine what it’s like being in this room and performing these words.”

Actually, watching him, we can.

Why Not?

As Long As I Have You

The corrupt thieving bore known as The Artist (2011) -- a product with syntax much closer to an Absolut Vodka "White" pimpery than to anything from 1927 -- puts me in mind of Zelig (1983). (The differences in wit, movement, understanding and sincere interest in its time, formal inventiveness -- as opposed to mere decoration -- is tragic.) While I stopped being a Woody Allen fan about the time it became clear he wasn't going to go anywhere upsetting to his mummified, contented audience -- the same audience, both in the seats and in the media, fooled by Michel Hazanavicius's fakery -- certain gems glow brighter as the years go by, as the 70s / Keaton works dim, and as US movie culture becomes more and more the result of Cranial Rectal Embedment (CRE).

It is sweet and honest and in mad love with the Twenties. And very funny. Allen's adoration of his co-star, now seen as tawdry and a cause for snickering because of the bizarre later happenings in the private lives of both Allen and Miss Farrow, deepens Zelig's heart and humor. As it does Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), his best three movies. Farrow was better for Allen's art than was Keaton, and surely better than what came after. . .

And. . .

A radically different view of the American 1920s.

"The common man would now have to find his one-eyed way in the Kingdom of the Blind." -- Dos Passos

While literati such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Miller move their feasts to Paris and gaze at their navels -- taking full advantage of the gap caused by the WWI deaths of half of all French males between the ages of 15 and 30 -- the pygmies known as the American Oligarchy regain full control, flushing whatever remains of late-19th / early-20th Century humanism, and roar their way through the Twenties, the decade of Prohibition, massive coast-to-coast KKK rallies, eugenics, the birth of Organized Crime, and major financing by American bankers of fascist movements across Europe. When things fall apart at the turn of the 30s, FDR steps in and saves US capitalism from (and for) the capitalists.

Who don't see it that way. . .

Apart

We've all heard Kind of Blue ~ one of the great achievements of 20th Century music ~ many times, on vinyl, tape, CD. "Legacy Edition" is best. . .

What's overwhelming is the quiet, the spacing, the stillness. . . and the growing sense of separation and aloneness among the men as we move through the five main pieces. An absolute must have.

Back to the Future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For Whom the Bell Tolls

In honor of the convention month where the corporate totalitarian regime will shove the presidential race of Trump/Pence/Biden/[fill in name of female of color, anyone will do] down ours throats, the best English language documentary on the rise of Nazism.

Part One:



Part Two:

The Day 2020 Was Decided

Carlson on that ultimate mediocrity and greasy pole climber, Kamala Harris.

This Could Be the Start of Something Big

At last, they begin to emerge. And with timing almost as brilliant as Mr. Allen's.

Until now, nothing of Steve Allen's late-night TV work of the 50s and 60s had been available on DVD. Nor on places such as YouTube. And not much now either, but we do have a start.  What with the ongoing late-night wars, and especially with a flyspeck such Jimmy Fallon not only taking over Steve's old show but doing it in the very same NBC midtown studio space -- well, as Nixon used to say, now more than ever. . .

Westinghouse. August 15, 1962. Amid spacious views of early-60s nighttime L.A. and its cars, Steve plays piano on top a 75-foot flagpole while peeking into neighboring hotel rooms, talks to the passing KTLA traffic copter, and tosses down salamis to his waiting fans on Vine Street. Back in the studio, Steve does a duet with an audience member, teases a pregnant lady, gets involved with a gas experiment that falls flat, teaches us about Mexican jumping beans (there are worms inside?). Introduces his guests: singer Bill Kerry (?), the great and sadly forgotten Slim Gaillard (look at those hands!), and the very young Barbara McNair. Steve finishes by sharing mattresses with a very fetching blonde baby doll (without a single dirty joke), and lets the baby doll take over the show by letting Miss Mattress call her law student husband (who had a very important test that day), and then lets her belt out a rockin' version of "Hallelujah, I Love Him So." Little is planned, or what's planned is turned on its head. Nothing is locked in. Steve takes us wherever the moment takes us.

Just an average Allen show. No topicality, meanness, elitism, condescension, cynicism, or hate. In their place ~ good cheer, silliness, and lots and lots of smart. (Those thinking there's a connection between comedic smarts and Knowingness deserve garbage such as Fallon.)

When we were carefree. . . .

The Last Liberal

46 years ago today, Richard Nixon said goodbye.



Was he the last man standing against corporate totalitarianism and the complete political takeover by the National Security State (yes, on the backs of millions of dead Southeast Asians)?

Three views.





And Chris Floyd's masterpiece essay.

Capitalism is Your Friend

Running

In my post about the great Kim Novak, I mentioned the way of Hollywood and miracles. Novak and many classical stars were the result of happy accidents only possible in an isolated creation chamber where all bets were covered cold. So one could take a chance on an awkward, shy girl from Chicago who came to LA for she knew not why. Or on a rodeo rider/poker player/roustabout just wandering in from the rails, and turn him into Robert Mitchum. Archibald Leach was a trapeze artist from England. Poof! he’s Cary Grant.

And the movies. Can one imagine Detour (1945) being born under any other kind of system? Gun Crazy (1949), Johnny Guitar (1954), The Marrying Kind (1952), The Big Sleep (1946), Holiday (1938), Lady from Shanghai (1948), Out of the Past (1947), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), My Darling Clementine (1946), Angel Face (1952), White Heat (1949)?

Or Some Came Running (1959). Looking at the push novelist James Jones made as he proposed a $1,000,000 sell price for his yet-to-be-completed novel (by far the largest asking price in Hollywood history, eventually purchased for $200,000); looking at the best seller craze which dominated – and in many cases suffocated – 40s and 50s Hollywood; and looking at the seemingly too-cool-for-school cast, one might think the movie, hoping to catch From Here to Eternity lightning-in-a-bottle, would be just another middle-brow social issue project come down with elephantiasis.

Enter Vincente Minnelli. One would be hard pressed to find two male sensibilities as opposed as those of Minnelli and James Jones: Jones a brawling small town southern Illinois street kid who knew little beyond the military and the men in it; Minnelli the complete urban sophisticate, far more in touch with style, beauty, female sensibility, and affairs of the heart. Not a chance in heck that a director such as Minnelli (if we had one) would be brought together with a novel almost exclusively concerned with the problems of men, in the end-of-cinema Branding/Marketeer miasma we now must suffer. But it was possible in 1958. And it is this melding and confrontation between the two sensibilities which gives us the miracle of Some Came Running: a swaying back-and-forth, beyond the control of Minnelli, the true "story" of the film, a thematic resolution unresolved. Until it is.

James Jones – perhaps because of the money and because he was allowed to hang with the Rat Pack – seemed pleased with the movie adaptation of his 1,200 page opus. Which is kind of strange because Minnelli not only works to reverse the meaning of the novel, but challenges just about every part of Jones’s macho value system. Poker, drinking, broads, brothers, cars, back alley fights, the writer-as-warrior – all here, and all eventually trumped by a silly, stupid, madly-in-love girl named Ginny.

Veteran David Hirsch (Frank Sinatra) has decided to return home to Parkman, Indiana after 16 years away and a long hitch in the Army. Arriving from Chicago with a $5,500 poker bankroll burning in his pants, he learns he has arrived with something else as well.



Shirley MacLaine, here so natural and warm and lovely. . .

But for Dave Hirsch, other things. His successful older brother, mostly. In a beautiful mix of sequences, Minnelli shows how much a part of mid-20th Century American male ethos Hirsch is, almost to the point of caricature. Not quite. Minnelli (helped by Elmer Bernstein's fine score) temporarily embraces the ethos, particularly in the strange and moving shot of Hirsch's favorite books. And in the character of gambler Bama Dillert (Dean Martin).



Hirsch meets a girl with the appropriate name of Gwen French (Martha Hyer), the daughter of a famous poet. She's also the teacher of a respected writing class at the University. And she's madly in love with Dave's talents as a writer. As a writer.

Dave's already way past that.



She won't have it. So Dave does what any red-blooded American male would do in the face of female resistance: run off to Terre Haute for girls and gambling. (And to learn of Bama's hat obsession.)



Upon Dave's return to Parkman, Gwen French receives two visitors.



At last, David Hirsch sees the light. And loses his best friend.



In the most famous and bizarre sequence, the work's contradictions erupt into a holocaust of color and movement. The sins are paid for. And in a final gesture of pure cinema, Some Came Running resolves itself.

Portland!

Neat

Superman Came to the Supermarket

In the midst of the conspiratorial cowardly betrayal known as the 21st-century Democratic Party -- a real man, 60 years ago this month.

Cancel Cancer

First, the queasy letter signed by every Neo-Con/Neo-Lib scumbag imaginable.

Then, Aaron and Max.

Bernie Redux Again

An astonishing discussion on Bernie the Coward and that pathetic wad of pseudo-hipsters and narcissists pretending to be the U.S. left. (Don't forget to wear those masks!)