Starting the Day. . .

At Umineko Shouten.

The Passion of Rose Balestrero

"He knew how she was, didn't he?

 Sure, he knew how she was. . ."

-- Katharine Anne Porter

25-year-old Vera Miles signed her non-exclusive personal services contract with director Alfred Hitchcock in the spring of '55. Born Vera June Ralston, she was crowned "Miss Kansas" in 1948 and took off for Hollywood in 1950. After lots of cheesecake and a handful of meaningless bit parts (and a wedding to Hollywood Tarzan Gordon Scott), she signed with Hitch; but their professional relationship would be limited to The Wrong Man (1956), Marion Crane's sister Lila in Psycho (1960), two episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Hitch's 1955 television debut "Revenge," which kicked off the premiere season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

For all the myths of cold-hearted calculation, hatred of women, and audience manipulation, Alfred Hitchcock gave us a three-decades embrace of female suffering, caused (intentionally or not) by cold, manipulative, sex-hating men. Most intensely: Joan Fontaine in Rebecca (1940), Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946), the butchered wife and Miss Lonelyhearts in Rear Window (1954), Barbara Bel Geddes in "Lamb to the Slaughter" and Vertigo (1958), Vertigo's Novak, Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest (1959) (a lighter version of Notorious), Marion Crane, Suzanne Pleshette and Tippi Hedren in The Birds (1963), Tippi Hedren as Marnie (1964). A list worthy of Ophüls, Dreyer and Mizoguchi. Yet unlike the warm sorrow of Ophüls, who sees Time and the Light of the World as the source of female agony; or Mizoguchi who places it within patriarchy and an overall emotional Japanese repression -- it is Dreyer who comes closest to Hitchcock, in projecting the heart of the pain: romantic and sexual longing and its denial by failed men.

Regarding Miss Lonelyhearts, here's my choice for the coldest moment in Hollywood history -- James Stewart's "toast."



Personal services contract signed, Hitchcock chose the untrained and inexperienced actress to lead one of the strangest (and nastiest) half-hours in television: "Revenge," beginning with John (Psycho) Russell's ominous beachfront stillness.



At this point Miles is not much of an actress, as she's used here by Hitchcock more as a Bressonian "figure," yet what does he highlight within her figure? Miles's debauched insanity. Elsa Spann is a newlywed, a retired ballet dancer, and a breakdown victim. She and husband Karl Spann (Ralph Meeker, literally just off the Kiss Me Deadly set) have arrived in Southern California because they have "moved away" -- we sense to escape the consequences of her derangement (and perhaps not for the first time). He begins a new job in the exploding armaments industry of SoCal, leaving his young wife to the warmth of the sun (and the lustful ogling of Aunt Bea).

Karl returns from his first day at the bomb factory to find his wife "raped" and broken-down.  A man came up from the beach: "tall and dark." Watch her eyes and hear her voice as she says: "He killed me... he killed me. . . he killed me!" Fear; or ecstasy? (Dreyer would use the same connection to erotic effect that same year: the sounds of Inger's childbirth from Ordet could just as well be cries of orgasm as they are shrieks of pain.) How many men have "killed" this newlywed? Husband Karl is on the case: "Would you know him if you ever saw him again?" The lights come on again in her eyes: "Yes! Oh... yes. . . ."

Elsa Spann is a sex maniac, a very practical girl, and a murderess. As she and Karl search for the tall dark man who came up from the beach, she -- in full black widow mode -- wants the one who "killed" her to become dead, for real. When we see the man whom Elsa picks out on the street, he turns out to be a poop-a-doop: beautifully dressed, soft all over, stupid mustache. Four pops in the head with a small wrench -- and he's dead? What kind of beach stud is that?

The husband murders for her, and the natural born killers move on. Elsa is Rose Balestrero with a sex life and a real man (even the name "Spann") as husband. But this only seems to lead to the same suffering shared by Rose. . .

*

As we know, The Wrong Man is based on a real case: Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero is falsely accused of armed-robbery because he looks like the real criminal. And the critical takes on the work invariably focus on questions of guilt, Catholicism, miracles, the police and justice system, bureaucracy. The "social issue" focus always underlines the victimization of the wrong man, and indeed -- from that POV -- he is victimized. But never so intensely as by the director himself.

Hitchcock takes the always hale-and-hearty Henry Fonda and weakens him in every way. Beginning with the diminutive "Manny" (Mann-eee); Fonda's intimidated stoop and strange, minced way of walking; his defensive voice; his mealy and closed public face, quarter-smile, pursed lips, unfocused wandering eyes -- meaning nothing. A degraded and clogged personality.

Near dawn, carrying in bottles of milk, the husband comes home into a hallway draped with Caspar David Friedrich prints. First we're with Manny at The Stork, where the house combo plays beneath a grapes-like conglomeration of balls, and where the sense of the club is that the future hangs over Manny like a great sullen hopeless sky. It's four o'clock in the morning and he stops off for tea and toast. (Has any other movie captured so well the cold dreariness of New York subways at night?) For all his lankiness, Manny's consistently reduced in scale by Hitchcock, before the arrest -- with angle and placement, similar to Hitch's own tiny figure in the movie's prelude.    

He enters her room as if entering the Bates Mansion, sits and looms above her, as she complains of a tooth-ache (in a work about erotic frustrations, everyone seems to have impacted teeth), the husband looking from behind like nothing human: we seem to be looking into a gashed, hollowed-out skull -- she always at odd angle, as if about to fall out of the frame (or out of Manny's life). As he moves toward her through the scene, then away again, the cuts make it seem as if there's great distance between them. The way Rose looks at Manny as he says: "Sure we are (lucky). We're in love." Doesn't he see what we see in her eyes? And she's so frightened of him coming home -- frightened of what? Maybe his arrival. They are on separate moons, only Manny doesn't know it. As he kisses her, she hears five bells: 5:00am. Then turns away from his kiss, to sleep. She asks him: "Will you sit here for awhile?"

Where is he going? To a separate bedroom. The husband rises from the rejection, sullen and peeved. Glances at the racing sheet: This is what she's turned me into, a tout with no money. He swoops down on her neck like a vampire, as we fade on what is surely one of the most unsettling husband/wife scenes ever filmed.

Before his arrest.

*

Manny is a good father. Rose doesn't care. Next morning, the telephone rings and as soon as Rose realizes he's talking to his mother, she walks toward the conversation like a revenant moving toward doom. Manny leaves the house announcing his "errands" and she calls out "good!" -- but Hitchcock undercuts her approval with the sounds of a raging El-line.

He walks into a den of hysteria. The most hysterical being an obvious spinster, but surrounding her is a bevy of choice 1950s gals: the blue-eyed brunette who greets Balestrero; the sleek office manager with the pulled-back honey-blonde hair; the sassy fox with glasses fresh from a Monk set (and whose eventual aggressive identification hangs Manny). My! how Balestrero brings out the loathing in lonely, sexually-frustrated women. They conspire after he leaves, and bring in the two "men" of the den: Mannys both. Then the girls bring in the pigs.



Out of the den, Manny's picked up by the police, taken on a tour of some of the grungiest liquor stores in Queens, brought in to precinct for booking, then locked up for the night (with Detective Jack Ruby giving the arrest order). But not before he's accused of having a high old time at the fertilizing Stork: "women, drinks, dancing!" "I don't drink," Manny proudly proclaims (as he later boasts of never having any money). And he doesn't dance. Left out of his denials is the women charge. Is Manny a Man at the Stork? Does his possible extra-marital satisfactions deepen his wife's torture? These scenes, apart from Rose, are terrifying and have monopolized critical attention. Fonda is particularly special here, a movie actor containing within him both Manny Balestrero and Wyatt Earp.

At last, Rose gets the call, and we see -- before the brother-in-law announces what has happened -- she is already holding and comforting her left arm.



Rose leaves the first meeting with Frank O'Connor (beautifully underplayed by Anthony Quayle) relieved about Manny's case; and clearly attracted. And the tall, dark, dignified, and handsome attorney watches her walk away, but not before he says, with a glance at Rose: "Let's not think about [money] right now." What does he have in mind? And why is this couple trusting such an important matter to a lawyer with little trial or criminal experience (and who does wind up making a boob of himself in court, to the point where a juror stands up and yells at him, causing a mistrial)? Perhaps the strangest moment in the scene is the way Rose seems when she forcefully announces: "[Manny and I] haven't been separated for more than two days at a time."



They revisit their "vacation": the rain and cold and drabness; a dilapidated inn; playing cards with strangers on the porch. Suddenly, the head and hands of this lovely young woman (Miles was 26, Fonda 51) are covered, as Rose gives comfort to her left arm. And as the arrest intensifies the memories and experiences of her life with Manny, she begins her descent -- represented by looming waterfront bridges and ships. (A patterning: Stewart 46, Grace Kelly 25; Grant 51, Kelly 26; Stewart 50, Novak 26; Grant 55, Eva Marie Saint 35.)



Again with O'Connor, Rose gazes at the lawyer with open, glistening eyes. She is all his -- doesn't he notice? When we see her again, when she realizes her longing again is blocked, she is gone. . .

O'Connor: Is this usual?
Manny: No, I don't understand it.

This man was on the landing with her when they learned of Molinelli's death. He was in the kitchen with Rose as she blamed herself for everything. And he was just sitting next to her throughout enormous pain. I don't understand it. . . .

One of the most moving scenes -- and perhaps the strangest -- in all of Hitchcock.



(Hitchcock and lamps.)

Manny comes home again at pre-dawn, carrying milk -- impervious to the collapsing world around him -- and enters her haunted room. She is still now, exceedingly, like a flower that’s blossomed in a shadowy place; her voice sounds as if she were speaking across to the spirits. The world hangs livid 'round her, a level sheen of silver light, black clouds across white sky. The darkness is falling like a shutter. The world is now a ghostly shadow.

The mirror cracks. He looks at her with disgust. When she needs him the most, he puts her away.



The real robber, it turns out, looks little like Manny; more like a masculine version -- leaner, tougher, stronger -- of the husband. Manny barks out at him: "You realize what you've done to my wife?" Or what you have not done, Mr. Balestrero.

 
The final Stations of Rose's Cross are some of the most painful scenes in American cinema. What is she trying to confess to the shadowed doctor? As she follows her madness, Manny stays the same: weaker and weaker, more and more prosaic, as she wants blood; she wants everything. (Manny drops her off at the sanatorium as if taking her to the dentist for a monthly check-up.) From where is Vera Ralston/Miles retrieving this pain? From which Kansas memories? Or is it all Hitchcock? And how incomparable is he? Getting greatness from Miles, otherwise an emotionally dull actress (Ford got nothing from her); and then -- in the happiest accident in movie history -- igniting Kim Novak's natural greatness. Back-to-back.

Before we enter her final agony, we should ask: how would Vertigo have been different if Miles had not backed out due to pregnancy? Having seen Vertigo dozens of times, my initial reaction is: it would have been much less. Since the movie -- one of the great works of 20th Century art -- depends on a reversal of identification midway through, what would we enter if Miles were Judy? When we enter Kim Novak's Judy, we enter a world of longing, loneliness, sorrow, guilt, and a consuming desire to be with Scottie. Coming off "Revenge" and The Wrong Man, it is not possible to imagine Hitchcock using Vera Miles in this way. At least not toward James Stewart. For isn't Stewart a more cosmopolitan, comfortable, and relaxed version of Manny Balestrero? There is no sexual chemistry between Stewart and Novak in Vertigo. (Even though she had the body and the reputation to match, Novak's movie presence is a sweeter and more innocent one than is Miles's.) Once getting "her" back, Scottie's only physical attitude toward Judy borders on revulsion. His only thing is possession; and after he realizes the plot against him -- revenge. It is Novak who is the true romantic. Miles as an earnest romantic toward this elderly and rather dry man? No. (See The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.) So Hitchcock may have gone in a radically different -- and lesser -- direction: something more along the lines of Fritz Lang's Scarlet Street: Stewart in the Edward G. Robinson cuckold role; Gavin Elster as Johnny-the-stud (and what a performance in SS by Dan Duryea!); Miles as Joan Bennett's bitch. This may have opened Hitchcock up to all sorts of misogynist avenues, rather than creating one of the most intense anti-misogynist statements in art. But that depended on Novak. Or on Ingrid Bergman in Notorious: Cary Grant's despicable torture of her in that film, leading to his final redemption (unlike Manny -- "I was just a stupid guy, full of pain"), emerges from a similar three-way emotional relationship. Even if Vertigo were re-cast along those lines -- Madeleine/Judy forced to be with Scottie, with Elster highlighted, hovering and directing things from the shadows -- it still would have depended on Miles. And would James Stewart let himself play Claude Rains? (His rage at the end of the real Vertigo suggests he thinks he was played that way. He doesn't even see Novak.) Or switching Stewart to the Elster role. But again -- where's the sex, especially with Miles around? Perhaps we can imagine Sean Connery's Mark Rutland as Elster: Miles caught between a rejecting young and ripe Connery, and the dry and middle-aged obsessed Stewart; Miles using Stewart to try and move Connery. It is still less.



At the end, Manny comes to her uncomprehending, totally complicit in her agony, babbling on about moving, the boys, the Stork Club and Sherman Billingsley, he being "not guilty" and what is he going to do without her? Her face in the light of the sanatorium room is now almost phosphorescent, eyelids heavy, voice half-averted and unconscious. In spite of the unfortunate "happy ending" title card, Rose Balestrero will never leave that room, gazing out her window, holding herself steady in the striped cloth of her dress, inaccessible forever to Manny, the wrong man.

Fear and Pharma and War and Censorship

That's what the Democratic Party has become: "Neocons with Woke Bobbleheads." 

The solution:

Patsy

Steel

"My father always told me all businessmen were SOBs. But I never knew how right he was until now. . ." -- John F. Kennedy, April 1962

January 17, 1961: Dwight Eisenhower says goodbye by laying down a warning.

The Military Industrial Complex . . . the very Complex Ike allowed to be created by the Dulles Wasp Mafia -- a Complex Eisenhower never sought to control or to contain.

***

As 1962 began, American steelworkers threatened a nation-wide strike once their union contract expired in May, similar to the 1959 walk-out which crippled financial markets for weeks. New president John F. Kennedy was particularly concerned with the prices of raw materials, which he saw as key to the problems of inflation and to the balance of foreign payments, as the U.S. was still then in a home-grown, industrialized economy. Kennedy and Labor Secretary (and former Steelworkers general counsel) Arthur Goldberg jawboned the workers and their leader David McDonald into accepting the most minimal settlement agreed to by a 20th-Century industrial union: an agreement with no wage hikes and a mere 2% rise in fringe benefit costs -- in exchange for Big Steel not increasing prices for a period of two years. (In the ten years prior to Kennedy's inauguration, steel prices had more than doubled.) The contract was signed on April 6, 1962 and with the new bargain, growing competition from lower costs of competing metals, and skyrocketing industry sales and capacity numbers, most establishment economists pushed for substantial reductions in the cost of steel.

On April 10, 1962, United States Steel President Roger Blough announced -- in a face-to-face Oval Office meeting with Kennedy, while the same announcement was being mimeographed to the Press -- the double-cross: U.S. Steel, Bethlehem Steel, plus four other companies would increase steel prices by over 4% per annum, $6 per ton.

As President of the United States, John F. Kennedy refused to send troops to South Vietnam, Indonesia, Laos, the Berlin Wall and Cuba -- opportunities presented and backed with full force by most members of his own government. Kennedy (with his Attorney General brother) did send troops to deport Santos Trafficante, John Rosselli, Sam Giancana, and Carlos Marcello off the streets of America. They sent troops to the University of Mississippi in September 1962 and to the University of Alabama in June 1963 to protect the entrance there by young black students. And in the Spring of 1962, troops were sent to kick Big Steel executives out of their beds in the middle of the night. . .

Among other actions:

1. Kennedy ordered the cancellation of all existing or soon-to-begin contracts between the U.S. Defense Department and the six treacherous Big Steel members, shifting the work to companies not in violation of the settlement -- cancelled contracts making up over 10% of the Big Six steel companies' budgets.

2. Ordered Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to shift future steel orders to foreign overseas companies if necessary to keep work away from Big Six.

3. Attorney General Robert Kennedy convened a Federal grand jury to investigate price fixing within the Big Steel network.

4. RFK convened a separate grand jury to investigate the violation of anti-trust laws by Big Steel.

5. Aftering ordering a cadre of reluctant FBI agents to wake up the top steel executives (including Roger Blough) in the middle of the night, RFK ordered these same agents to ransack the execs' business offices and nearby areas the next morning. Subpoenaed were expense accounts, travel records, compensation records, company accounts.

6. The Federal Trade Commission was ordered to open an investigation into monopolistic practices within the steel business.

7. IRS audits were launched against steel executives and their companies.

8. Legislation was submitted to Congress -- called the Steel Price Emergency Act of 1962 -- eliminating Big Steel's investment tax credits and depreciation allowances.

9. Anti-trust actions were entered into the courts seeking the break-up of Big Steel.

10. Senator Estes Kefauver began hearings of his Anti-Trust subcommittee citing top steel executives for refusal to reveal cost data.

***

In the words of poet Robert Frost: "Oh, didn't he do a good one! Didn't he show the Irish all right?" All members of the defiant Big 6 eventually backed down, reversing the increase. Kennedy also backed down, in public, regarding all businessmen being sons-of-bitches. In private he told aide Arthur Schlesinger: "They are a bunch of bastards -- and I'm saying this on my own, not because my father told it to me."

Schlesinger continues:

"It was true that he accepted an economic system founded on private ownership and that his policies were designed, in effect, to lure business into investment and growth. But this was not enough. The fact remained that he was outside the business ethos, that he did not regard the acquisitive impulse as man's noblest instinct nor the pursuit of profit as man's highest calling, that he was unimpressed by great accumulators of wealth, that he did not consider successful businessmen as the best brains or the most enjoyable company, that he saw then as a faction to be propitiated and not as a force to be followed, that he brought few of them around in the evening."

The reaction of the political and financial establishment was explosive. Kennedy was seen as an anti-capitalist dictator. The Wall Street Journal: "The Government set the price. And it did this by the pressure of fear -- by naked power, by threats, by agents of the state security police." U.S. News and World Report: "We reject all those who believe in a planned economy and reject the President acting like a Soviet commissar. " The Republican National Committee: "The Kennedy brothers are using Gestapo tactics." Richard Nixon: "I think we should be able to solve crises such as this one without using the third degree at 3 o'clock in the morning." Time Magazine: "He has never attacked Khruschev, Castro or any other enemy half as hard as he attacked our own businessmen, " while those businessmen wore "S.O.B. Club" buttons on their lapels and "Help Kennedy Stamp Out Free Enterprise" bumperstickers on their cars. Yet the steel price hike was rescinded. The steel companies backed down.

Yet. The lead editorial in the May 1962 Fortune Magazine asked the question: "Why did the financial interests behind U.S. Steel announce the price increase in such a way and at such a time as to deliberately provoke the President of the United States into a vitriolic and demogogic assault?"

Fortune's editorial answered its own question:

"There is a theory -- unsupported by any direct evidence -- that Blough was acting as a business statesman rather than as a businessman judging his market. According to this theory, Kennedy's prior appeal to steel executives not to raise prices, leading to the contract settlement between company and union, had poised over the industry a threat of jawbone control of prices. For the sake of his company, the industry, and the nation, Blough sought a way to break through the bland harmony that has recently prevailed between government and business. That the threat of jawbone control was no mere bugaboo was borne out by the tone of President Kennedy's reaction and the threats of general business harassment by government that followed the so-called affront."

As Julius Caesar was warned of his coming assassination: "Beware the ides of March" -- Fortune gave the title of its editorial: "Steel: The Ides of April."

***

Two months after the crisis, in a funny and impassioned commencement address at Yale University, JFK spoke about the role of government in a civilized and humane society.

Jazz Trio

Death by Capitalism

Mark Twain:

"There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."

Golden Nichols

Herbie passed 60 years ago today, at 44 of leukemia, unmourned and unremembered. He died very much alone, foretold in his music.

Two of his greatest, of many.

"Double Exposure"



"Cro-Magnon Nights"

Your Tax $$$ at Work

Joy

"There is one thing that I do not believe; that is that any one deliberately wants us to be unhappy. I think that things were made so that everybody can be happy. I think that our unhappiness is a sort of disease which we create ourselves, with big chills-and-fever, with bad water, and with the evil that we catch from each other in breathing the same air. I think that if we knew how to live, perhaps we wouldn't be ill. With the habits we've gotten into now, all our life is a struggle; we strike out in the water, we fight, to keep from going under. Our whole life long. Whether it be your animals, whether it be your seeds, your plants, your trees, you've got to police against them all. What we want, it seems that the entire world does not want. They seem to do it on purpose. That must have given us a distaste for everything, in the end. That must have forced our bodies to produce any old way, how can we tell? . . . The world forces us to shed blood. Perhaps we are unconsciously creating a special kind of blood, a blood of distaste, and instead of there flowing through our bodies, everywhere -- in our arms, in our thighs, in our hearts, in our stomachs, in our lungs -- a blood of desire, our great pipe system washes us with a blood of disgust."  -- Jean Giono, The Joy of Man's Desiring