Angels Flight

Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

-- Christina Rossetti, Remember

“There’s a new art in the world and this doctor’s starting a collection.” – Velda

That Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) is a great American film, one of the greatest ever made, only a rash or foolish person will deny. While its greatness seems now to be generally recognized (contemporary critics of the 1950s all trashed it), the core of the greatness appears not to be. It is normally taken up by the Quentin Tarantino / Martin Scorsese types who embrace it as little more than director Aldrich, in this only his third big studio picture, sneering around with private eye / tough guy / sexy girl genre works of the post-WWII period ~ a meta P.I. movie. It is way beyond that. Kiss Me Deadly seeks to capture and does, via early-50s Los Angeles and the private eye and science fiction genres, a moment caught between a dying Deco / FDR culture -- a culture which intensified the individual while strengthening the community beyond -- and the cold technical Modernist world to come.

The movie is based on one of the better jobs done by the most popular hack writer of the time, Mickey Spillane. Erstwhile Mike Hammer picks up a hitchhiking girl on the highway, a lovely girl wearing nothing but a trench coat. After gassing up and moving through police checkpoints, they're immediately hijacked, the girl killed, Hammer left for dead. It seems the girl (Berga Torn in the book, Christina Bailey in the movie) knows something very important and everyone wants to know what it is: the "Great What's It?" in the movie's words. Practically everyone (and in Robert Aldrich's original movie ending, everyone) winds up dead. The differences between the Spillane world and Aldrich's are enormous. In the movie, New York City becomes Los Angeles. Four-million dollars in heroin becomes a box of atomic power. The Mafia becomes the Dulles Bros. national security state. Most important, Spillane's thematic vacuum becomes a work about one era dying and something sinister and incomprehensible struggling to be born.

Aldrich is the anti-Carl Dreyer. Rather than stripping down all decor until one finds a purified essence, Aldrich floods the film with an excess of mid-50s urban Modernist detritus -- architectures, automobiles, ladies clothes; the interior designs of apartments, hospitals, business hallways -- making all of it seem radioactive, in what may be the first movie to be usefully called a film blanc. (Aldrich's '55 follow-up The Big Knife would also qualify.) While at the same time -- in a vertigo of decoration -- placing us firmly in a destroyed and desiccating Los Angeles: Kaiser Hospital, born in the 30s, seemingly refurbished by Mark Rothko; sweet Nick's dumpy garage where he works on Mike's white '51 Jag, then his '50 MG convertible, and dies working on the Hammer '54 black Corvette; a zinc-white Calabasas gas station; a haunted mansion on what was once called Hill Place; Bunker Hill, all of it, especially Angels Flight and the flophouse once home to Christina and roommate Lily Carver; the Hillcrest Hotel; Club Pigalle; Hollywood Athletic Club; Hotel Jalisco. All gone. Classical 20th-century Los Angeles, the L.A. of Raymond Chandler and Lew Archer, being destroyed as Kiss Me Deadly was being made, or soon after. In Aldrich's world, Mike Hammer seeks meaning and clarity, similar to Philip Marlowe in Chandler's "The Long Goodbye" from the same time, in a vanishing L.A. of the foreign, the frightened, the lost, the individual (while the authority figures all try to hold it together -- and all authority here, "criminal" or "the law," are interchangeable).

Into a normally muscular and artless genre (especially artless under the insanely butch hand of Spillane), here we are given the feminine and creative: poetry, opera, painting, ballet, sculpture, music both classical and jazz, writings. (Christina's stunning apartment inside the Bunker Hill dive is museum-like in her artworks and books and music.) And the movies. Aldrich and director of photography Ernest Lazlo, from the glowing titles which move backward, as Mike's rocket-ship car (and Nat Cole) moves him and Christina back into the past and toward the future simultaneously, a vertigo of time, an astonishing start to a movie (meaninglessly ripped-off by hack George Lucas to begin his Star Wars) -- from this opening shot everything is made strange, mysterious, beautiful, and unique. Throughout Aldrich intensifies Hammer's confusion and estrangement by intensifying the palette of his own form: extreme cuts and angles, dissolves and freezes and fades and his deep use of sound: the music and the soft protected sounds of homes and apartments, traffic noises always beyond the windows, Hammer's sorrowful wall answering-machine, echoing stone hallways and stairs, concrete sidewalks, the sounds of science and technology, the hollow under-furnished echoing of "Lily Carver's" terrible place. And Frank DeVol's overall score: Caruso, Chopin, Schubert, Johannes Brahms, his own. It is only extreme camera movement which Aldrich foregoes, as his main figure Hammer is frozen between Scylla and Charybdis.

Mike's journey -- movingly played in as beautiful a manner as it is brutal by Ralph Meeker -- is a despairing and failed one, however much he struts and smirks, however much he seems to have a magical power to get himself out of jams and to knock people out or to kill them. There's a greater magic against him, a State of anti-Grace, an occasion of sin. Mike's great love is for cars (and possibly for his sexy operative Velda) and yet most of the people he contacts die via car -- Christina Bailey, Nick the mechanic, boxer Lee Kawolsky, Nicholas Raymondo, the real Lily Carver. Those he touches who don't die by car, die anyway, including Velda and himself in Aldrich's original end-of-the-world ending. Mike Hammer stays tough and super confident, until he doesn't, until by the end he becomes a stunted wounded zombie -- dead too, in a way. Dead to all he knows.

Of all great movies, Kiss Me Deadly is perhaps the one that captures its moment in time the most deeply, beautifully, and mysteriously -- and most shocking: the most concretely. Until at the finish, when the Point Dume beach house explodes and the world ends, we are left with a giant, flaming, American Medusa unearthing her hideous face, freezing us -- as she had Mike throughout -- with an oracle of things to come.

Sympathy for the Devil

NOT the devil.

 

Beau Coup

There's been a recent rush in both interest and information about that most magical of American events ~ Watergate, as we approached the 50th anniversary of the "failed" break-in. John Dean over at Counterpunch revisited Woodward & Bernstein's reporting, and found it very strange. Nixon's treasonous dealings with the South Vietnamese government just before the 1968 election -- attempting to block a Johnson/Humphrey peace treaty -- is connected up to the creation of the Plumbers unit by the late Robert Parry. A new biography of Washington Post grandmaster Ben Bradlee makes the case that Bradlee never bought the "official" explanations of what was going down; and a newly discovered memo, called the Z Memo in beautifully Le Carrean fashion, strongly suggests Woodstein's editor-in-chief also didn't buy the existence of Deep Throat. The great journalist Jim Hougan, author of the best book on the scandal Secret Agenda, proves flat-out that if indeed Deep Throat did exist, he certainly was not FBI Associate Director Mark Felt. The scandal's "Final Mystery" is pondered by investigative reporter Jefferson Morley. And Robert Redford has put the finishing touches on a Watergate documentary.

Clearly, Richard Nixon was set-up, most likely by the same elements of the corporate-national security state who murdered John F. Kennedy a decade before, and for the same reasons: both men -- in very different ways and with very different motives -- sought to end the assumptions and structures known as The Cold War.

How Nixon handled the set-up, however, is a wholly different matter. Those who explain him as some sort of far-seeing political genius -- Hunter Thompson and Lew Lapham to the contrary -- only need to look at his endless gaffes and goofs throughout 1973 and 1974: letting Haldemann, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell -- his Palace Guard -- go much too soon; his extremist antagonism toward all levels and types of the by-nature lap-dog and gutless mass media; not burning the tapes (but of course he didn't because the men who set him up also had copies); refusing to pay sufficient hush money (when there was loads available) to every spy, saboteur, con man, extortionist, forger, imposter, informer, burglar, mugger, and bagman in his employ; not fighting hard for Vice President Spiro Agnew, instead throwing him to the wolves, when an Agnew Presidency-in-waiting would've snuffed out all talk of Nixon's removal; replacing Agnew with a favorite of the very body that controlled impeachment, Congressman and Establishment Waterboy -- and accessory after the fact in Kennedy's murder -- Gerry Ford; bending to requests for a new Special Prosecutor after the firing of Archibald Cox; not fighting against Leon Jaworksi, an LBJ hitman, as the new SP; running from rather than leaking information that he was an "unindicted co-conspirator" in Jaworksi's grand jury probe, at a time when the country was nowhere near ready for such a shock; not paying much attention to the make-up of the Ervin Committee; pressuring hapless FBI director L. Patrick Gray to bribe Matthew Byrne, judge in the trial of Daniel Ellsberg, with a high government appointment, causing Byrne to immediately dismiss Ellsberg's trial; not appointing a stooge as Attorney General in replacement of future felon Richard Kleindeinst, instead appointing Rockefeller liberal Republican Elliot Richardson; not justifying his cover-up of the "smoking gun" June 23rd tapes by explaining what he and Haldemann were really whispering about in the Oval Office: CIA involvement in Dallas; not taking full responsibility for the "18 1/2 minute tape gap" on the grounds of extreme National Security -- again what was erased going straight back to JFK's murder; appointing treacherous Alexander Haig as Haldemann's replacement as White House Chief-of-Staff; not blackmailing Israel to extend and widen the October '73 war by threatening to expose its involvement and motives in the USS Liberty massacre. Mistake after mistake after mistake. . .

But he was set-up. Russ Baker is that most special of characters: an old-style journalist. His book Family of Secrets examines in lengthy detail the very dirty history of the Bush Crime Family. His vibrant website WhoWhatWhy takes on investigations collaborators such as CNN or the New York Times would never go near. (WWW's recent take on the public destruction of John Edwards is a must read.)

Baker has posted a three-part history of what was really happening to Nixon, and to us, in the giddy days of the early 1970s. Again -- a must read.

No Exit

Each man trying to outrun his past, by returning to it: David Janssen at his warmest and most intimate; and a middle-aged Mickey Rooney, very special. "This'll Kill You" from January 18, 1966.

TV noir at its best, directed by Alex March. (With the young and luscious Nita Talbot.)

Sometimes Not

You really want to know what Bob Kennedy was?

He was fucking beautiful. -- AP reporter Joe Mohbat

Sometimes, it just all works out. . .