***From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin- The King Of Absurdism- Albert Camus’ Short Stories- “Exile And The Kingdom”

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the French absurdist novelist Albert Camus.

Book Review

Exile and the Kingdom, Albert Camus, Vintage Books, New York, 1957
When I was young and not partially wedded to any defined ideology or specific political perspective I was crazy to read, after Jack Kerouac’s be-bop beat books,* the books, especially the short stories of the existentialists and absurdists like Sartre and Camus. Especially, after a certain time, Camus with his dagger-point little bursts of recognizable absurdity about the situational ethics of living a “normal” life in the modern (now post-modern, maybe) world. The world for me after World War II when one the one hand we faced total extinction on any given day (and still do) and unprecedented opportunities to live ten, no, one hundred times better than previous generations.

That living better, if more dangerously, was at a cost though. The cost of being merged into some vast cauldron of moral indifference, moral vacuity, or worst, as Andre Gide was probe to harp on, immorality by putting on blinkers about the fates of the several billions other humans who inhabit the planet. That is the big picture though. What Camus excelled in with his relatively short novels, and here with the selection of short stories, was the dilemmas of confronting everyday life one person at a time- sometimes winning, sometimes losing and sometimes not being quite sure, that last being a fit category for much of modern existence.

In this little book we have describe for us unhappy wives, adulterous or not, mad men and men made mad under the Algerian desert sun , angry men who are lost in a world not of their making but also one in which they have very little say over, a man who tries to do right but in the end is overwhelmed by movements, historically important movements, who finds himself however on the wrong side of history through no fault of his own, an artist who knows fame and its fifteen minutes and non-fame and its eternity, and even a “happy” ending where a man does right in this wicked old world and does not get beat down for it. Although all of these stories took place and were written over one half century ago on my recent re-reading the dilemmas presented seemed very current, very current indeed. The king of the absurdist writers, Albert Camus, writes with verve all through this set. And you wonder why I was crazy to read his stories back in the day.

(*I was reading Jeanbon’s be-bop beat down, beat around, beatitude stuff partially out of affinity to our common mill town, his Lowell, mine Olde Saco, and French-Canadian heritage, if only to spite my mother, nee LeBlanc, who cursed his name every time she saw me bring one of his books into the family house. And if she had seen Sartre or Camus books she probably would have done the same to them although they were not mill town boys and not F-C.)

Reality needs to know you're out here-Free Reality Leigh Winner Now!

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The support Reality needs most right now Reality Winner’s defense team plans to file an appeal of the ruling in her recent bail hearing, but for the time being, Reality is unjustly behind bars. That’s despite having no criminal record and a spotless record of service in the Air Force, and despite the government’s total lack of material evidence that she poses any kind of threat. To justify keeping her in jail, the government is trying to turn Reality into a larger-than-life symbol, a vague but terrifying “threat to America” that must be locked up and contained, due process be damned. We’ve written before about Reality’s courage and patriotism, but it’s equally important to remember that Reality is just a regular person, like any of us, who is facing extremely difficult and scary circumstances. The government is singling her out for an incredibly harsh and disproportionate prosecution. But beside that, Reality faces the everyday indignities of life behind bars in America’s sprawling prison-industrial complex. Reality and her fellow inmates have had their medical and dietary needs ignored. They’ve been denied necessary medication, medical treatment, and time outdoors. They’ve had visits arbitrarily cut short or denied. And these are not unique or even uncommon complaints about treatment in any jail or prison. Take a moment to imagine if this was happening to your daughter, or your sister, or your close friend. Beyond support for her cause, Reality needs our support as a human being. Let Reality know she's not alone Reality’s family and friends say her biggest need right now is to hear from her supporters. “My sister is being held in a county jail that does not provide her with adequate nutrition or outside time,” Reality’s sister Britty said. “Reality needs to know that she has friends thinking about her and writing to her.” It takes regular people committing extraordinary acts of bravery to fight back against a government determined to keep its citizens in the dark. When people decide to put it all on the line, and then face the consequences, they need to know that somebody will be there to have their back. Can you write Reality a postcard this week? You can find her at this address: Reality L Winner Lincolnton County Jail PO Box 970 Lincolnton GA 30817 Keep in mind that all correspondence is reviewed by jail staff. If you’re able, please donate to Reality’s legal defense fund. She’s committed to proving her innocence in court, and it’s going to be a long haul. Help make sure Reality and her defense team have the resources to go the distance.

STAND WITH REALITY WINNER ~ PATRIOT & ALLEGED WHISTLEBLOWERc/o Courage to Resist, 484 Lake Park Ave #41, Oakland CA 94610 ~ 510-488-3559 standwithreality.org ~ facebook.com/standwithreality

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From The Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace-"Racketeers For Peace" -A Poem

From The Smedley Butler Brigade-Veterans For Peace-"Racketeers For Peace" 


The "'racketeer" reference is from a statement by General Smedley Butler who after a lifetime of military service as a Marine from grunt to the highest levels of generalship concluded that "war is a racket"-you can find the rest of his statement with those words pominently in it at Wikipedia by Googling his name. 

                 RACKETEERS  FOR  PEACE

For Sev, Pat and Comrades

                      November 16, 2017

                                    I

Since Cain killed Abel countless years ago,

The world has suffered violence and war

As personal and national ego

Push us to murder and make fields of gore.

A second fundamental motive--fear,

Convinces us to fight in self-defense

When great, imagined menaces appear

To threaten us, with or without good evidence.

Demonic greed will often overrule

God-given reason, urge men to ignore

The Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule,

Especially with assists from Emperor.

Patriotism is a shibboleth

That leads poor sheep to slaughterhouse of war,

Whose wealthy stockholders, merchants of death,

Gain gold beyond the dreams of Caesar's whore.

Then countless brave benighted mothers' sons

And fathers' precious daughters fight and die,

Misguided myrmidons and amazons,

Whose needless deaths, most nations glorify.

Poor troops trapped in the labyrinth of war

May relish their adventure for a time,

Until they meet the raging Minotaur

Who murders even warriors in their prime.

That slaughterhouse, that labyrinth, impact

Millions of citizens, both near and far,

Who never plot or fear nor feel attacked

And want no part of useless, senseless war,

But suffer, nonetheless, the insane rage

That shatters lives and cities when it comes,

As mindless armies and armadas wage

War--paragon of pandemoniums.

                                  II

"War is a racket," Smedley Butler said:

"A few men profit while the many pay."

Their costs of business are the masses dead,

Maimed, grieving, homeless--worse in every way.

If General Butler could be here tonight,

He'd recognize and decorate his sons:

Veterans for Peace, determined to fight

The fatal folly of more bombs and guns.

We need to raise a racket for release

From deadly, bankrupting racket of war.

I cast my lot with you brave Vets for Peace,

Who've learned the hard way what's worth fighting for.

Two champions of peace for humankind--

Pat Scanlon, indefatigable man,

And Severyn Bruyn, inestimable mind--

Campaign for peace in every way they can.

These Veterans for Peace have gifts of Orpheus

To soothe the savage heart and pacify the mind:

Composer Sev, bold singer Pat, inspire us

To leave the bloody, so-called "arts of war" behind.

We comrades honor them as Racketeers

For Peace--the kind of citizens we need,

Who work to counter manufactured fears,

Defy the deadly enterprise of greed.

We strive with these prime paladins for peace,

Against the misled partisans of war,

To counter warmongers who want to fleece

The flock, and butcher some, to profit more.

We toast their leadership and zeal for peace,

The end of war´s destruction, death and grief.

Let patriotic theft and murder cease;

Unmask "heroic" war--killer and thief.

Congratulations, Sev, and kudos, Pat,

You guys, politically so incorrect!

May all, like you, heed Smedley's caveat:

The curse of war forevermore reject!

You led us in the church and in the streets,

Brave Racketeers for Peace who boldly say:

War victories are actually defeats.

There has to be….   Peace IS the better way!

 ©   Bob Wire 

To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men (Women Too)!-Build The Resistance!

To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men (Women Too)!-Build The Resistance!  

By Political Commentator Frank Jackman 

To Sin By Silence When We Should Protest Makes Cowards Out Of Men … (and I added women too)-lines from “Protest” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Usually when I want to grab a line or two from some poem it would more likely by from say Bertolt Brecht’s “To Those Born After,” Langston Hughes’ “Homage To John Brown” or Claude McKay’s “Let’s Us Die Like Men (and I would add women here again) and not some relatively obscure American poet but when the point is made so succinctly I could not resist using the damn thing as it disturbed my sleep one night    

Ella Wheeler Wilcox whatever her vices or virtues as an American working the ways of the late 19^th and early 20^th century had it exactly right-had a mantra that we need to live by these dark days on the American frontier (the frontier not Harvard Professor Turner’s old idea about the closing of the frontier once you hit the Pacific Ocean with all its consequences for a restless people ever since but the outer edge of civil society). We must continue to resist the Trump government with whatever resources we have. And whatever hubris we can gather in to keep us from the storm that has gathered right on our doorsteps.

Most of us didn’t want this fight, the older ones of us thinking that maybe we could pass on under conditions of an armed truce with the imperial government. But then the cold civil war descended on us and we had to pick sides, those of us who see the necessity of picking sides when bans are in place, when walls are being built and when the rich, no, hell no, the super-rich have literally stepped up to besieged every social program that our people need to face the next day. And act. Act to build the resistance which these days looks like it will need to be on the order of the French Resistance in World War II.

Do you really want to bend your head down when the deal, the hell train coming, goes down and your kids, if you have kids, your grandkids if you have grandkids, or just your own conscience asks you what did you when it was time to speak up. Remember Ella had it right, right as rain.

Here is Bertolt Brecht's "To Those Born After" if you need further reason-

I

To the cities I came in a time of disorder
That was ruled by hunger.
I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar
And then I joined in their rebellion.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

I ate my dinners between the battles,
I lay down to sleep among the murderers,
I didn't care for much for love
And for nature's beauties I had little patience.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

The city streets all led to foul swamps in my time,
My speech betrayed me to the butchers.
I could do only little
But without me those that ruled could not sleep so easily:
That's what I hoped.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

Our forces were slight and small,
Our goal lay in the far distance
Clearly in our sights,
If for me myself beyond my reaching.
That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Earth.

II

You who will come to the surface
From the flood that's overwhelmed us and drowned us all
Must think, when you speak of our weakness in times of darkness
That you've not had to face:

Days when we were used to changing countries
More often than shoes,
Through the war of the classes despairing
That there was only injustice and no outrage.

Even so we realised
Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.

And in the future when no longer
Do human beings still treat themselves as animals,
Look back on us with indulgence. 

Bertolt Brecht

On The 60th Anniversary- When The King Was “The King”-Elvis’ “Jailhouse Rock” (1957)-A Film Review

On The 60^th Anniversary- When The King Was “The King”-Elvis’ “Jailhouse Rock” (1957)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Associate Film Critic Alden Riley

Jailhouse Rock, starring Elvis Presley, Judy Tyler, 1957

As I have mentioned before sometimes as an associate film critic, meaning a junior member of the staff, you receive the tail-end assignments, not the good stuff which is left to Sandy Salmon (and in the old days Sam Lowell). Sometimes you get an assignment that is something of a so-called “learning experience” like the time I mentioned to Sandy that I did not know who Janis Joplin was when he asked me what I thought of her as part of his Summer of Love, 1967 seemingly endless nostalgia trip and he assigned me to review the D.A. Pennebaker documentary on the first Monterey Pops Festival in that same year where Janis blew the house down. That was not the case with the film under review Elvis’ (do I need to print his last name for the three people in the world who do not know who I am talking about solely by using his first name) Jailhouse Rock from 1957 which played off of his huge record hit of the previous year. I practically begged Sandy for the assignment especially after Sam Lowell decided that he wanted to concentrate on finishing his also seemingly never-ending series on early 1950s B-film noirs put out by the English Hammer Production Company. Sandy demurred suggesting that like with the Janis Joplin episode I could learn something about the days when men and women (think Wanda Jackson) played rock and roll like their lives depended on it- and it and they did.               

Now everybody knows, or should know since I am an associate critic and thus much younger that those reprobate rockers Sandy and Sam who were as Sam put it one time “present at the creation,” that I am at least a decade if not more removed from having been, as Sam Lowell would also put it, washed clean by the rock and roll wave that swept American youth in the mid-1950s. But that fact does not mean that unlike the Janis Joplin episode that I am unfamiliar with the work of “the King” when he was in the king in the 1950s dawning light. The link? I grew up in a rather tepid household in New Jersey anchored by staid and respectable parents, my father a civil engineer and my mother, Mildred eternally called Milly, nothing but a great and resourceful housewife as befit a professional man’s wife in those days if not now. Except that Milly was wild for Elvis back in her teenage maiden days. The days when Elvis made all the women sweat. So against staid respectable housewifely type-cast all day long on some days especially when Pa was away she would play whatever Elvis tunes hit her fancy just then. And dance to some of them to my embarrassment when I was younger since it seemed kind of provocative to me although I didn’t know what that word meant then. The long and short of it though is that love of Elvis must have been in my DNA since I have always been a fan of his early music if not the horrible films that he got talked into after Jailhouse Rock or the muted musical life of a stuffed animal Vegas head-liner. Yeah, the classic age of Good Rockin’ Tonight, It’s Alright Mama, One Night With You (better the version that has One Night of Sin to the same melody-what he might have been if he followed down that path a bit), Heartbreak Hotel,  and of course the progenitor of the film under review Jailhouse Rock.  The songs that when you look at YouTube versions makes you understand why he made women like my mother sweat and scream their frustrations away in their teenage fantasies.       

I am sure that I had seen the film Jailhouse Rock sometime in my youth since I am sure my mother had it on some revival retro television station or we saw it at the retro-movies downtown but I was foggy about the details enough tin this watching that I soon realized that I didn’t recall much of the plotline. After viewing I had come away really wishing that Elvis had not done another movie because none compares with the snarly, sullen, youth he portrays speaking for a whole lost post-World War II generation who had been too young for that war but had immersed in the frightening Cold War night that froze the American landscape and which even I caught the tail-end of myself.

From scene one in some drunken back alley barroom when sullen, sulky construction worker Vince Everett (Elvis’ role) gets into a fight with some irate customer and winds killing him drawing two hard years in the state pen Elvis lights the screen up. Sure there were a million sullen youth out in places like La Jolla sucking up the surfboard seas, hot rodding down midnight Thunder Roads in Mill Valley, motorcycle helling with angels like Marlon Brando’s Johnny Too Bad tearing up the holy landscape with nothing going but Elvis spoke to them. Spoke to guys like Sam Lowell and Pete Markin in Podunk North Adamsville and a ton of places like that. And he would have stayed sullen and snarly forever, would have measured his sappy life by prison stretches except that jailbreak-in bought him in contact with a guy like Hunk, his bunkmate, a lifer-type jailbird who happened to have been a small something in the music industry before the inevitable woman got him thinking crazy about whiskey and blowjobs and got him a long stretch from a stinking two bit robbery.          

Yeah, old Hunk was always looking for the angle, for the next best thing, saw in the kid something, saw a meal ticket and so he made Vince sign a pact with the devil, take a chance to break out of that “from hunger” world that guys like Sam, Pete, and even Sandy talk about in their poor boy working class days when they too might have taken one wrong turn too many. I know Sam has told me a million times it was a close thing with him (a couple of his brothers didn’t make it-wound up inside the pen more than outside). So sullen, surly too after a deuce in stir Vince takes the air on the outside thinking maybe he can make it as an entertainer not small potatoes like Hunk but big, with that big red convertible of his dreams.     

But a million guys back then had that like a million other guys sound borrowed from Hank Williams or Big Joe Turner or Frank Sinatra, hell, guys were even borrowing styles and form from hokey Mickey Alba who knocked the women for a loop-for a minute and then they went back to sleep. No soap, no soap for Vince except maybe cadging drinks for a tune or coffee and. That is until he met record hustling insider Peggy who sets him up on the road to dough although never giving him a tumble. Never buying into that from hunger need Vince exuded since as bright as she was she was strictly suburban middle class and sullen and snarly in that milieu only played in sociology classes or in the magazines.   

Vince and Peggy wash out until two things happen, happen in the small company world of records in the days before big operations like RCA and Columbia sucked all the air out of Mom and Pop operations. First Vince got told via a tape-recording that he sounded like a lonesome cowboy singing to and for himself. No feeling, no jump until Peggy blasted him. Made him jump feel the song. Second Vince figured that he still had a shot at the bigs by producing and hustling his own records and it worked. Once a Peggy-friend DJ spun his platter the girls went crazy, went Milly and fantasies crazy. The rest was history.

Well almost history since our boy Vince had a thing for Peggy but couldn’t express it, couldn’t figure a way to get to her and Hunk came out of stir looking for his cut. He got it alright and in the end Vince got Peggy too but that was a close thing. Here’s the real play though since every Hollywood production, or most anyway, have some boy meets girl conflict that must be resolves by the end or else just like here. What you want to watch this movie for and if you can’t get it go to YouTube to watch is that Elvis scene when he is doing Jailhouse Rock for a television show. Watch (forget the lip synched song) Elvis go through his paces, watch him make the moves that later guys would imitate although they couldn’t surpass. Watch what made all the young things sweat, hell, all the grown women too. Watch why my mother in her sainted sanitary home kept her girlish fantasies alive listening to the king when he was the king do his stuff. Yeah, watch when men (and women too) played rock and roll for keeps.        

An Encore -He Saw Starlight On The Rails-With The Irascible Bruce “Utah” Phillips in Mind

An Encore -He Saw Starlight On The Rails-With The Irascible Bruce “Utah” Phillips in Mind

From The Pen Of Bart Webber

Jack Dawson was not sure when he had heard that the old long-bearded son of a bitch anarchist hell of a songwriter, hell of a story-teller Bruce “Utah” Phillips caught the westbound freight, caught that freight around 2007 he found out later a couple of years after he too had come off the bum this time from wife problems, divorce wife problems (that "westbound freight" by the way an expression from the hobo road to signify that a fellow traveler hobo, tramp, bum it did not matter then the distinctions that had seemed so important in the little class differences department when they were alive had passed on, had had his fill of train smoke and dreams and was ready  to face whatever there was to face up in hobo heaven, no, the big rock candy mountain that some old geezer had written on some hard ass night when dreams were all he had to keep him company). That “Utah” moniker not taken by happenstance since Phillips struggled through the wilds of Utah on his long journey, played with a group called the Utah Valley boys, put up with, got through a million pounds of Mormon craziness and, frankly, wrote an extraordinary number of songs in his career by etching through the lore as he found it from all kinds of Mormon sources, including some of the dark pages, the ranch war stuff, the water stuff not the polygamy stuff which was nobody's business except the parties involved of those latter day saints.

For those who do not know the language of the road, not the young and carefree road taken for a couple of months during summer vacation or even a Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac-type more serious expedition under the influence of On The Road (what other travelogue of sorts would get the blood flowing to head out into the vast American Western night) and then back to the grind but the serious hobo “jungle” road like Jack Dawson had been on for several years before he sobered up after he came back from ‘Nam, came back all twisted and turned when he got discharged from the Army back in 1971 and could not adjust to the “real world” of his Carver upbringing in the East and had wound up drifting, drifting out to the West, hitting California and when that didn’t work out sort of ambled back east on the slow freight route through Utah taking the westbound freight meant for him originally passing to the great beyond, passing to a better place, passing to hard rock candy mountain in some versions here on earth before Black River Shorty clued him in.

Of course everybody thinks that if you wind up in Utah the whole thing is Mormon, and a lot of it is, no question, but when Jack hit Salt Lake City he had run into a guy singing in a park. A guy singing folk music stuff, labor songs, travelling blues stuff, the staple of the genre, that he had remembered that Sam Lowell from Carver High, from the same class year as him, had been crazy for back in the days when he would take his date and Jack and his date over to Harvard Square and they would listen to guys like that guy in the park singing in coffeehouses. Jack had not been crazy about the music then and some of the stuff the guy was singing seemed odd now too, still made him grind his teeth.  but back then it either amounted to a cheap date, or the girl actually liked the stuff and so he went along with it.

So Jack, nothing better to do, sat in front of guy and listened. Listened more intently when the guy, who turned out to be Utah (who was using the moniker “Pirate Angel” then, as Jack was using "Daddy Two Cents"  reflecting his financial condition or close to it, monikers a good thing on the road just in case the law, bill-collectors or ex-wives were trying to reach you and you did not want to reached), told the few bums, tramps and hoboes who were the natural residents of the park that if they wanted to get sober, if they wanted to turn things around a little that they were welcome, no questions asked, at the Joe Hill House. (No questions asked was right but everybody was expected to at least not tear the place up, which some nevertheless tried to do.)


That Joe Hill whom the sobering up house was named after by the way was an old time immigrant anarchist who did something to rile the Latter Day Saints up because they threw he before a firing squad with no questions asked. Joe got the last line though, got it for eternity-“Don’t mourn (his death), organize!”                   

Jack, not knowing anybody, not being sober much, and maybe just a tad nostalgic for the old days when hearing bits of folk music was the least of his worries, went up to Utah and said he would appreciate the stay. And that was that. Although not quite “that was that” since Jack knew nothing about the guys who ran the place, didn’t know who Joe Hill was until later (although he suspected after he found out that Joe Hill had been a IWW organizer [Wobblie, Industrial Worker of the World] framed and executed in that very state of Utah that his old friend the late Peter Paul Markin who lived to have that kind of information in his head would have known. See this Joe Hill House unlike the Sallies (Salvation Army) where he would hustle a few days of peace was run by this Catholic Worker guy, Ammon Hennessey, who Utah told Jack had both sobered him up and made him some kind of anarchist although Jack was fuzzy on what that was all about.

So Jack for about the tenth time tried to sober up, liquor sober up this time out in the great desert (later it would be drugs, mainly cocaine which almost ripped his nose off he was so into it that he needed sobering up from). And it took, took for a while.        

Whatever had been eating at Jack kept fighting a battle inside of him and after a few months he was back on the bottle. But during that time at the Joe Hill House he got close to Utah, as close as he had gotten to anybody since ‘Nam, since his friendship with Jeff Crawford from up in Podunk Maine who saved his ass, and that of a couple of other guys in a nasty fire-fight when Charley (G.I. slang for the Viet Cong originally said in contempt but as the war dragged on in half-hearted admiration) decided he did indeed own the night in his own country. Got as close as he had to his corner boys like Sam Lowell from hometown Carver. Learned a lot about the lure of the road, of drink and drugs, of tough times (Utah had been in Korea) and he had felt bad after he fell off the wagon. But that was the way it was. 

Several years later after getting washed clean from liquor and drugs, at a time when Jack started to see that he needed to get back into the real world if he did not want to wind up like his last travelling companion, Denver Shorty, whom he found face down one morning on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge and had abandoned his body fast in order not to face the police report, he noticed that Utah was playing in a coffeehouse in Cambridge, a place called Passim’s which he found out had been taken over from the Club 47 where Sam had taken Jack a few times. So Jack and his new wife (his and her second marriages) stepped down into the cellar coffeehouse to listen up.


As Jack waited in the rest room area a door opened from the other side across the narrow passageway and who came out but Utah. As Jack started to grab his attention Utah blurred out “Daddy Two Cent, how the hell are you?” and talked for a few minutes. Later that night after the show they talked some more in the empty club before Utah said he had to leave to head back to Saratoga Springs in New York where he was to play at the Caffé Lena the next night.         

That was the last time that Jack saw Utah in person although he would keep up with his career as it moved along. Bought some records, later tapes, still later CDs just to help the brother out. In the age of the Internet he would sent occasional messages and Utah would reply. Then he heard Utah had taken very ill, heart trouble like he said long ago in the blaze of some midnight fire, would finally get the best of him. And then somewhat belatedly Jack found that Utah had passed on. The guy of all the guys he knew on the troubled hobo “jungle” road who knew what “starlight on the rails” meant to the wanderers he sang for had cashed his ticket. RIP, brother.

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Dane Clark’s “Blackout” (1954)

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Dane Clark’s “Blackout” (1954)

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

Blackout (released in England as Murder By Proxy), starring Dane Clark, Belinda Lee, Hammer Productions, 1954

Wouldn’t you want a long-time film reviewer like me, or my colleagues in this space who are the regular reviewers, Sandy Salmon and Alden Riley, to draw a map for you, let you know what is what about any particular film in relationship to others in the genre. As the headline to this review notes (and has on other occasions in this ten film series) I am reviewing a series of B-film noirs from the 1950s produced by the Robert Lippert organization in conjunction with Hammer Productions in England. The idea, at least this is what I have been able to gather from various readings and speculations after now having reviewed scads of these efforts, by Lippert was to grab some faded Hollywood star who either needed the dough or was looking for some film, any film to satisfy whatever stardust lust drove him or her to the studio lots in the first place and back him or her up with an English cast, do the production in England and get away with costs on the cheap. If you knew that and then somebody, me, came along and told you that these efforts didn’t compare, didn’t compare at all with classic noirs, you know Out Of The Past, The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, The Last Man Standing and others that you almost know all the lines from since you have seen the films so many times, wouldn’t you appreciate that knowledge   

You would think so but you would at least in one case, actually more, but the reader I am thinking of as I write this has become something of a thorn in my side, my efforts to draw comparisons have given me nothing but grief, and had hung on me the title of “penny a word” writer as a joke by my colleagues. 

In noted in my last review in this series, The House Across The Lake, that in my long career in the film reviewing racket, a profession if you will which is overall pretty subjective when you think about it, I have run up against all kind of readerships and readers but my recent escapade with one reader takes the cake as they used to say in the old days. That is the person I am thinking of right now as I write yet another screed against the injustice done to be by that person. To cut to the chase a B-grade film noir is one that is rather thin on plotline and maybe film quality usually made on the cheap although some of the classics with B-film noir queen Gloria Grahame have withstood the test of time despite that quality. I have contrasted those with the classics like The Maltese Falcon, Out Of The Past, The Big Sleep, and The Last Man Standing to give the knowledgeable reader an idea of the different.

I have as already noted done a bunch of these (excluding a couple which I refused to review since they were so thin I couldn’t justify the time and effort to even give the “skinny” on them) using a kind of standard format discussing the difference between the classics and Bs in some detail and then as has been my wont throughout my career giving a short summary of the film’s storyline and maybe a couple of off-hand comments so that the readership has something to hang its hat on when choosing to see, or not see, the film. All well and good until about my fifth review when a reader wrote in complaining about my use of that standard form to introduce each film. Moreover and this is the heart of the issue she mentioned that perhaps I was getting paid per word, a “penny a word” in her own words and so was padding my reviews with plenty that didn’t directly relate to the specific film I was reviewing.

Of course other than to cut me to the quick “penny a word” went out with the dime store novel and I had a chuckle over that expression since I have had various types of contracts for work over the years but not that one since nobody does that anymore. The long and short of it was that the next review was a stripped down version of the previous reviews which I assumed would satisfy her complaint. Not so. Using the name Nora Charles, the well-known distaff side of the Dashiell Hammett-inspired film series The Thin Man from the 1930s and early 1940s starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, she still taunted me with that odious expression of hers. (I also mentioned there as an aside that one of the pitfalls of citizen journalism, citizen commentary on-line is that one can use whatever moniker one wants to say the most unsavory things and not fame any blow-back). Now Sandy, Alden, Pete Markin, the administrator of this space and a few others have started to call me that as well-‘hey, penny a word.” That has made my blood boil on more than one occasion but I have calmly put up with it rather than blow-up and threaten murder and mayhem to them-and to Nora.      

But enough of that or Nora will really have case about me “padding” my reviews. Here is the “skinny” on the film under review Blackout in any case as is my wont and let dear sweet Nora suffer through another review-if she dares. (This film was released in England and on the continent as Murder By Proxy which unusually in this series is not closer to the nub of the plot since in fact a the lead man character, Dane Clark, does blackout and face serious consequences for that hard fact and has to face all kinds of hell) A down and out drunk Casey, the role played by down and out faded Hollywood star Dane Clark picked up on the cheap by Lippert and who was so “from hunger” he starred in a few of these B-babies not necessarily to his career advantage) was sitting in a bar (a nice bar, maybe classy too, since it had a female blues torch singer up on stage as the film begins which may have been the cinematic and thematic highlight of the whole venture) putting a load on when a beautiful young woman, Phyllis, played by fetching Belinda Lee, comes up to his table and before long makes him an offer he can’t refuse. No, not that, not something sexual which would be catnip for most guys once they got a look at her but an offer for him to marry her for a pile of dough so she can grab some inheritance money from a stingy father. Offers him serious dough, serious dough then anyway but as I have mentioned more than once in previous reviews nothing but cheapjack walking around money these days. Offers him five hundred pounds, pounds sterling which in those heady English days was maybe twenty-five hundred US, and I don’t know and it doesn’t matter now post-Brexit how many Euros. He bites and she drags him out of the gin mill and to a preacher man or justice of the peace maybe better to tie the profitable knot.

Easy dough, real easy for a down and out guy who had a drinking problem and was out of cash-flush. Easy, except for one problem, he winds up in a Gainsborough apartment, you know an artist’s apartment, female, an apartment of a woman who had started a portrait of Phyllis and can’t remember a thing about the night before except he had blood on his coat. Which is not good, very not good, since Phyllis isn’t easy to find and moreover her father had been murdered by a party or parties unknown that night before. So yes the coppers and everybody else have him set up as the fall guy, as the guy to take the big step-off, the guy to be hung high as they used to say. But not so quick because under the threat of the gallows Casey gets “religion” gets on the case to find out who actually did kill poor Phyllis’ father. Through a series of twists and turns with various shady characters he eventually finds out the real killer-the wife, the mother, as usual since she would be left out of the goodies if Phyllis grabbed all the dough. Here is the funniest twist old Casey after having more than a few suspicions about Phyllis winds up in the sack with her (and her bag of dough) which is okay for 1950s film censors since remember they were married- a legal marriage at it turned out.                

For a while the film took turns like a real thriller but the dialogue and the wooden acting by the Brits (and by faded Dane in spots too too) make this thing a holy goof. As I have mentioned before in other reviews where things looked promising at the beginning here despite the come hither title and the titillating advertisement poster (see above) for the film this one fades away on its own dead weight. B-noir but seriously B not heading to classics-no way.