When The Deal Went Down December 7, 1941- Humphrey Bogart’s “Across The Pacific” (1942)-A Film Review

When The Deal Went Down December 7, 1941- Humphrey Bogart’s “Across The Pacific” (1942)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Across The Pacific, starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, 1942

Free, free at last, good god in Heaven free at last-for the moment anyway. All readers, young and old, recent or longtime, interested or disinterested, movie aficionados or not, but at least breathing will note, or should be expected to note, that one Phillip Larkin did not start out his usually beautifully-etched film review with an expletive (which one for the young, recent, disinterested, not aficionado brethren although I assume still breathing is a book sealed with seven seals). Why? Finally, good God in heaven finally, the divinely-inspired site impresario Greg Green and he hard-working thoughtful minions on the recently established Editorial Board have by unanimous assent permitted me to go through my paces on a real movie review, an Bogie- aficionado drenched review of one of his lesser classics-Across the Pacific.  

For those who have been out of the country, have been hospitalized, have been up the Amazon with no means of transportation or communication here is a quick primer on why what should have been a routine past through quickie review by me is worthy of every hosanna in the book. Through inexperience, newness to this site, or bad advice from that hither-to-fore deadbeat Ed Board our esteemed guru Greg Green had the bizarre idea that I should do kiddie film reviews, you know things like Captain America, The Avengers, Batman. All that silliness that passes for film experiences among the younger set for the simple fact that the eight to maybe twenty-one audience they are geared to do not have the energy or ability to sit for twenty minutes and read a freaking comic book. Instead are popcorn-addled and soft drink-doped for a couple of hours to listen to grunts and two word sentences, physically violent action every thirty seconds warranted or not, and some silly mid-credit come-ons to the next so-called adventure film. The reasoning at the time and I am not sure reasoning is the right word is that unlike the old regime under the now fully deposed, some unkind older writer-types saying purged, and exiled former site manager, my old growing up friend Allan Jackson who let us do whatever interested us as long as we did it well, the whole writing staff should “broaden their horizons by random assignment. Sorry, bullshit, sorry. 

Moreover that whole policy, and I used that word advisedly, was to let the self-designated “Young Turks” who rebelled against the old Jackson regime and led the ugly purging process get to write some decent stuff and not a rehash of what the older writers threw away as drafts. Under Allan mostly stuff about that growing up in the 1960s during that paradise time to be living, Allan and the older writers time which they could have given a damn about. Couldn’t know things about like the Summer of Love, 1967 for the simple fact that were in swaddling clothes or not yet born. In my case I drew that kiddie stuff because Greg fell weak-kneed for the line this young kid, Jesus, twenty-five years old, Kenny Jacobs gave him about how his movie-addled film noir parents dragged his young ass to a bunch of film festival retrospectives when he was about eight. As against my spending real-time, real-time growing up teenager, young adult, adult, old adult time starting on those lonely Saturday afternoon matinees Strand Theater double-features to get out of my turbulent household haunting the retros every chance I got. Won my spurs on doing Bogie, Robert Mitchum, Glenn Ford Gloria Grahame, Lauren Bacall, Mary Astor, Jane Greer, background reviews under the old regime which loved to mix it up with the older material. (Allan Jackson frowned on most of the modern stuff saying that other more informed sources could provide those kind of reviews quite nicely in places like the American Film Gazette where he had started out and that our job was to do films, books, music, culture, etc. which reflected the broader history of the American experience which this site is committed too.)          

Without tooting my own horn too much I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how I got back on top. Maybe provide an object lesson in how to work through the increasing bureaucracy of even barebones on-line operations which supposedly don’t have the hassles of brick and mortar hard copy publications to slow things down and make everybody a speck. At first I resented being “demoted” via the Greg Green so-called democratic new regime from being a longtime Associate Film Critic to just another generic writer. I let that pass figuring eventually the bureaucratic mentality would catch up to the new crowd and they would be handing out titles like candy. What ate at me and I am not afraid to say so now that the situation has been permanently resolved was being pushed aside on my specialty (they wouldn’t dare sent me back to the comics they don’t need the seven kinds of hell I would bring down which would make beautiful super-hero Thor’s hammerings seem like some street junkie’s).

I already gave you what the kid tried to pull with his lame parent story. What I did in response was my classic belly-aching in print, okay in cyberspace, moaning and groaning leaving about three lines for the review (for films probably bam-bam kick worth about two) against that punk kid, Kenny Jacobs, you have seen his weird reviews I am sure. Did it enough to switch gears on the wily young bastard. Got my old route back and here I am ready to dig deep into this low-rent 1940s Bogie pic that will never make his top ten films list but who cares because given the actors lined up in this one I can hit a homerun with The Maltese Falcon and make everybody forget this clunker.            

**********

Everybody, at least everybody over the past few generations has certain touchstone events which affect, even if indirectly, their lives.   

Will know exactly where they were when they heard the news. For mine John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 (informed over the high school PA system by a distraught headmaster). For younger generations 9/11 and you need not say more, need to throw a year date in. For my parents, the ones who came of age in the 1930s Great Depression and slogged through World War II on two oceans, December 7, 1941, the day of FDR’s famous infamy, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor is that touchstone and sets the framework for this film. (And Greg Green, no many how many reviews he oversaw over at American Film Gazette before coming here, must have had blinders on when young Kenny Jacobs begged him to do this review. What possible frame of reference, other than he had seen the film when he was a kid with those film freak parents, could he bring to any such review.)          

That sets the plot-line frame. The other component is the cohort of actors here led by Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet who the previous year under the original director here, John Huston, who signed on to the Army before the finish, starred in one of the great movies of all time, The Maltese Falcon. Although this veiled propaganda film does not come close the three artists work through the problems presented by such a film fairly well although as I mentioned this will not go down as one of Bogie’s best.  

As my old friend and former boss as Senior Film Critic now retired, Sam Lowell, would say at this point (and encourage us to do so as well) here’s the “skinny.” Captain Leland, Bogie’s role, has been cashiered out of the Coast Guard for some petty crime. All that a ruse so that he can work an operation as a secret agent against those who were working their asses off for the soon-to-be formal enemies, the Japanese, as the war clouds thicken in late 1941. Number one agent is a sociology professor, Doctor Lorenz, out of the Philippines (whose citizens will be treated very badly when Japanese invasion time comes), played by the nefarious slippery Sydney Greenstreet who admires the Japanese way of doing things. The joker in the deck is the good-looking footloose woman, Alberta, played by Mary Astor, not a femme fatale this time but eye candy to Leland’s eyes. The Captain is not sure where she fits in but he takes an under the sheets run at her anyway. Their meeting place, a Japanese freighter which is heading, well, across the Pacific via the short route Panama Canal in the days when that meant a considerably shorter trip than around the Cape, maybe now too since it had been upgraded for the super-tankers.       

Things go along as they do with Leland making it clear to Lorenz he is a hired gun, a mercenary, a soldier of fortune ready to throw lead for the highest bidder. Willing too to tell what he knows about gun emplacements when the time comes. Al the while playing footsie with Alberta and while trying to figure out what the good Doctor is up to. Things start getting dicey when the Japanese ship is not permitted to enter the canal locks and things get hairy with Lorenz and Alberta departing for whereabouts unknown. The day, December 6, 1941 telegraphed through a newspaper popped on screen, so you know something bad is going to happen when all trails lead Leland to a plantation. To a place where it turns out Alberta’s drunken father lives and where the damn Japanese were painfully constructing a torpedo plane piece by piece to blow the strategic canal locks to kingdom come (my father a Pacific War battle-tested Marine never until he died called them anything but Nips, with a snarl, never.)   

Of course you know that is never going to happen as Bogie pulls the plug in the plan blasting every Japanese in sight (not going to happen as it didn’t in history but the reason here one heroic Bogart saving the day). Just like in The Maltese Falcon the evil Greenstreet bites the dust on his dreams. Here though innocent Alberta is not subject to being sent-over, sent to face the big step-off. Hey, I did pretty well with this period piece loser. Yeah I’m back in the saddle.      

And The Choir Kept Singing Of Freedom”- Birmingham Sunday-1963-A Reflection After Viewing "Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project"Photograph Display At The National Gallery Of Art

“And The Choir Kept Singing Of Freedom”- Birmingham Sunday-1963-A Reflection After Viewing "Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project"Photograph Display At The National Gallery Of Art

Richard Farina's Birmingham Sunday 

Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project

September 12, 2018 – March 24, 2019

West Building, Ground Floor

Dawoud Bey, Mary Parker and Caela Cowan, 2012, 2 inkjet prints mounted to dibond, overall: 101.6 x 162.56 cm (40 x 64 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee and the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund

For more than 40 years photographer Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) has portrayed American youth and those from marginalized communities with sensitivity and complexity. Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project marks the National Gallery of Art's recent acquisition of four large-scale photographs and one video from Bey's series, The Birmingham Project, a tribute to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Coinciding with the 55th anniversary of this tragedy, the exhibition focuses on how Bey visualizes the past through the lens of the present, pushing the boundaries of portraiture and engaging ongoing national issues of racism, violence against African Americans, and terrorism in churches.

On September 15, 1963, four girls were killed in the dynamiting of the church, and two teenaged boys were murdered in racially motivated violence. Each of Bey’s diptychs combines one portrait of a young person the same age as one of the victims, and another of an adult 50 years older—the child's age had she or he survived. Alongside these photographs, the exhibition features Bey's video 9.15.63. This split-screen projection juxtaposes a re-creation of the drive to the 16th Street Baptist Church, taken from the vantage point of a young child in the backseat, with slow pans that move through everyday spaces (beauty parlor, barbershop, lunch counter, and schoolroom) as they might have appeared that Sunday morning. Devoid of people, these views poeticize the innocent lives ripped apart by violence.

This exhibition is curated by Kara Fiedorek, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

By Seth Garth

Sometimes things, events, ideas, and such lead into one another. Recently I had written a short piece based on hearing a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where the reporter was ruminating about the effect that folk-singer/songwriter Bob Dylan’s “anthem” The Times They Are A-Changin’ had on her and the Generation of ‘68 when it first hit the airwaves in 1963. That reportage got my attention since I have spent plenty of cyber-ink throughout my journalistic career highlighting various aspects of the tremendous push on my generation, that Generation of ’68 or the best part of it, of events in the early 1960s which were harbingers of what we expected to have occur that would change the world, would turn the world upside down. I thus need not go into detail here about my notion that Bob Dylan’s song set him up as the “voice” of a generation whether he wanted to be that or not. Nor about what effect that song, and songs like his had on us, gave us our marching orders.          

As part of her presentation the reporter mentioned that some events, some events down South around the black civil rights movement against one Mister James Crow like the beatings, the water-hosing and the unleashing of the vicious dogs by the police on innocent protestors had on her growing political consciousness, her desire to work for social change. Although she did not specifically mention Birmingham Sunday, the bombing of a black church killing four innocent children and wounding others that event triggered the activism button of many young people, including myself. 

I have detailed elsewhere some of the events like the black civil rights struggle down South, the fight for nuclear bomb disarmament, the emerging struggle against the escalating Vietnam War as acting as catalysts to action. Also tried to convey a more general sense of the mood of the times among young people that the world, a world then on the brink, on as one song had it on the “eve of destruction” was not responding to their needs, was not changing in ways that we could understand. Most of all that we had no say, had not been asked about what had been created in our names. And nobody in power seemed to think that they needed to consult us.  

All of this came to mind as well by a recent visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where on the ground floor there was a small photographic exhibit centered on that Birmingham Sunday bombing. A kind of what if, or rather what would those who were killed or maimed look like today if they had been permitted to live out their precious lives. That got me to thinking the thoughts I expressed in that “voice of a generation” commentary and about the changes in people who did survive, who now have aged, gracefully or not, and who are thinking about, are summing up their lives and what they did, or did not do. Powerful stuff although when one realizes what is what in the world today one has to be very circumspect about the little changes we have made. Not profound but something to think about whatever generation designation.

On The 100th Anniversary (1919) Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leaders Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-*HONOR ROSA LUXEMBURG-THE ROSE OF THE REVOLUTION

Click on title to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archive's copy of his 1932 article, "Hands Off Rosa Luxemburg"

On The Anniversary (1919) Of Newly-Fledged German Communist Leaders Rosa Luxemburg And Karl Liebknecht-Oh, What Might Have Been-*HONOR ROSA LUXEMBURG-THE ROSE OF THE REVOLUTION


By Frank Jackman

History in the conditional, what might have happened if this or that thing, event, person had swerved this much or that, is always a tricky proposition. Tricky as reflected in this piece’s commemorative headline. Rosa Luxemburg the acknowledged theoretical wizard of the German Social-Democratic Party, the numero uno party of the Second, Socialist International, which was the logical organization to initiate the socialist revolution before World War II and Karl Liebknecht, the hellfire and brimstone propagandist and public speaker of that same party were assassinated in separate locale on the orders of the then ruling self-same Social-Democratic Party. The chasm between the Social-Democratic leaders trying to save Germany for “Western Civilization” in the wake of the “uncivilized” socialist revolution in Russia in 1917 had grown that wide that it was as if they were on two different planets, and maybe they were.

(By the way I am almost embarrassed to mention the term “socialist revolution” these days when people, especially young people, would be clueless as to what I was talking about or would think that this concept was so hopelessly old-fashioned that it would meet the same blank stares. Let me assure you that back in the day, yes, that back in the day, many a youth had that very term on the tips of their tongues. Could palpably feel it in the air. Hell, just ask your parents, or grandparents.)

Okay here is the conditional and maybe think about it before you dismiss the idea out of hand if only because the whole scheme is very much in the conditional. Rosa and Karl, among others made almost every mistake in the book before and during the Spartacist uprising in some of the main German cities in late 1918 after the German defeat in the war. Their biggest mistake before the uprising was sticking with the Social Democrats, as a left wing, when that party had turned at best reformist and eminently not a vehicle for the socialist revolution, or even a half-assed democratic “revolution” which is what they got with the overthrow of the Kaiser. They broke too late, and subsequently too late from a slightly more left-wing Independent Socialist Party which had split from the S-D when that party became the leading war party in Germany for all intents and purposes and the working class was raising its collective head and asking why. 

The big mistake during the uprising was not taking enough protective cover, not keeping the leadership safe, keeping out of sight like Lenin had in Finland when things were dicey in 1917 Russia and fell easy prey to the Freikorps assassins. Here is the conditional, and as always it can be expanded to some nth degree if you let things get out of hand. What if, as in Russia, Rosa and Karl had broken from that rotten (for socialism) S-D organization and had a more firmly entrenched cadre with some experience in independent existence. What if the Spartacists had protected their acknowledged leaders better. There might have been a different trajectory for the aborted and failed German left-wing revolutionary opportunities over the next several years, there certainly would have been better leadership and perhaps, just perhaps the Nazi onslaught might have been stillborn, might have left Munich 1923 as their “heroic” and last moment.  

Instead we have a still sad 100^th anniversary of the assassination of two great international socialist fighters who headed to the danger not away always worthy of a nod and me left having to face those blank stares who are looking for way forward but might as well be on a different planet-from me. 

COMMENTARY

HONOR THE THREE L’S-LENIN, LUXEMBURG, LIEBKNECHT

Every January leftists honor three revolutionaries who died in that month, V.I. Lenin of Russia in 1924, Karl Liebknecht of Germany and Rosa Luxemburg of Poland in 1919 murdered after leading the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin. Lenin needs no special commendation. I made my political points about the heroic Karl Liebknecht and his parliamentary fight against the German war budget in World War I in this space earlier (see review in April 2006 archives) so I would like to make some special points here about the life of Rosa Luxemburg. These comments come at a time when the question of a woman President is the buzz in the political atmosphere in the United States in the lead up to the upcoming 2008 elections. Rosa Luxemburg, who died almost a century ago, puts all such pretenders to so-called ‘progressive’ political leadership in the shade.

The early Marxist movement, like virtually all progressive political movements in the past, was heavily dominated by men. I say this as a statement of fact and not as something that was necessarily intentional or good. It is only fairly late in the 20th century that the political emancipation of women, mainly through the granting of the vote earlier in the century, led to mass participation of women in politics as voters or politicians. Although, socialists, particularly revolutionary socialists, have placed the social, political and economic emancipation of women at the center of their various programs from the early days that fact was honored more in the breech than the observance.

All of this is by way of saying that the political career of the physically frail but intellectually robust Rosa Luxemburg was all the more remarkable because she had the capacity to hold her own politically and theoretically with the male leadership of the international social democratic movement in the pre-World War I period. While the writings of the likes of then leading German Social Democratic theoretician Karl Kautsky are safely left in the basket Rosa’s writings today still retain a freshness, insightfulness and vigor that anti-imperialist militants can benefit from by reading. Her book Accumulation of Capital alone would place her in the select company of important Marxist thinkers.

But Rosa Luxemburg was more than a Marxist thinker. She was also deeply involved in the daily political struggles pushing for left-wing solutions. Yes, the more bureaucratic types, comfortable in their party and trade union niches, hated her for it (and she, in turn, hated them) but she fought hard for her positions on an anti-class collaborationist, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist left-wing of the international social democratic movement throughout this period. And she did this not merely as an adjunct leader of a women’s section of a social democratic party but as a fully established leader of left-wing men and women, as a fully socialist leader. In fact one of the interesting things about her life is how little she wrote on the women question as a separate issue from the broader socialist question of the emancipation of women. Militant women today take note.

One of the easy ways for leftists, particularly later leftists influenced by Stalinist ideology, to denigrate the importance of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought and theoretical contributions to Marxism was to write her off as too soft on the question of the necessity of a hard vanguard revolutionary organization to lead the socialist revolution. Underpinning that theme was the accusation that she relied too much on the 'spontaneous' upsurge of the masses as a corrective to either the lack of hard organization or the impediments reformist socialist elements throw up to derail the revolutionary process. A close examination of her own organization, the Socialist Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, shows that this was not the case; this was a small replica of a Bolshevik-type organization. That organization, moreover, made several important political blocs with the Russian Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the defeat of the Russian revolution of 1905. Yes, there were political differences between the organizations, particularly over the critical question for both the Polish and Russian parties of the correct approach to the right of national self-determination, but the need for a hard organization does not appear to be one of them.

Furthermore, no less a stalwart Bolshevik revolutionary than Leon Trotsky, writing in her defense in the 1930’s, dismissed charges of Rosa’s supposed ‘spontaneous uprising’ fetish as so much hot air. Her tragic fate, murdered with the complicity of her former Social Democratic comrades, after the defeated Spartacist uprising in Berlin in 1919 (at the same time as her comrade, Karl Liebknecht), had causes related to the smallness of the group, its political immaturity and indecisiveness than in its spontaneousness. If one is to accuse Rosa Luxemburg of any political mistake it is in not pulling the Spartacist group out of Kautsky’s Independent Social Democrats (itself a split from the main Social Democratic party during the war, over the war issue ) sooner than late 1918. However, as the future history of the communist movement would painfully demonstrate revolutionaries have to take advantage of the revolutionary opportunities that come their way, even if not the most opportune or of their own making.

All of the above controversies aside, let me be clear, Rosa Luxemburg did not then need nor does she now need a certificate of revolutionary good conduct from today’s leftists, the reader of this space or this writer. For her revolutionary opposition to World War I when it counted, at a time when many supposed socialists had capitulated to their respective ruling classes including her comrades in the German Social Democratic Party, she holds a place of honor. Today, as we face the fourth year of the war in Iraq we could use a few more Rosas, and a few less tepid, timid parliamentary opponents. For this revolutionary opposition she went to jail like her comrade Karl Liebknecht. For revolutionaries it goes with the territory. And even in jail she wrote, she always wrote, about the fight against the ongoing imperialist war (especially in the Junius pamphlets on the need for a new International). Yes, Rosa was at her post then. And she died at her post later in the Spartacist fight doing her internationalist duty trying to lead the German socialist revolution that would have gone a long way to saving the Russian Revolution. This is a woman leader I could follow who, moreover, places today’s bourgeois women parliamentary politicians in the shade. As the political atmosphere gets heated up over the next couple years, remember what a real fighting revolutionary woman politician looked like. Remember Rosa Luxemburg, the Rose of the Revolution.

When You Are A Jet You Are A Jet All The Way- The Centennial Of Composer- Conductor Leonard Bernstein’s Birthday-When The Acre Corner Boys Went Down And Dirty-In Memory Of Corner Boy Sergeant John “Johnny Blade” Rizzo, (Born North Adamsville, Massachusetts, 1946, Died, Central Highlands, South Vietnam, 1967)

When You Are A Jet You Are A Jet All The Way- The Centennial Of Composer- Conductor Leonard Bernstein’s Birthday-When The Acre Corner Boys Went Down And Dirty-In Memory Of Corner Boy Sergeant John “Johnny Blade” Rizzo, (Born North Adamsville, Massachusetts, 1946, Died, Central Highlands, South Vietnam, 1967)     

By Seth Garth

Recently in a quick acknowledgement of the centennial of American composer Leonard Bernstein’s birthday I mentioned that I don't know much about the man but I did know his breakthrough West Side Story and could relate to the turf warfare in the piece from my old corner boy days when we defended our turf just as fervently as any New York City kid.  Any Jet, any Shark.

The story has been told many times in this publication by me and others about growing up, particularly that high school coming of age corner boy scene that animated our lives, gave us a certain tribal identity, in the impoverished Acre section of working-class North Adamsville south of Boston but Josh Breslin has told me that the same fierce defenses applied in the Ocean View section of Olde Saco up in Maine, Ralph Morris the Tappan Street section of Troy in New York and Sam Eaton ditto down the Bog section of Carver also south of Boston. Mostly those youthful stories have been given a positive spin, or have been sweetened up for public consumption, but there was a dark side, a very dark side to much of what went on-and how we related to our poverty and other corner boy aggregates. 

Maybe the single best way to describe this dark side is to give the event that made the late Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe, take this corner boy stuff, this from hunger stuff to heart. Before he met most of us, except I think Sam Lowell whom he had known since elementary school when they would hustle the younger kids out of their milk money, the Scribe used to hang around a spot familiar to all of us-mainly to stay away from-Harry’s Variety Store since Harry had a great pin-ball machine there and a very cool ice-filled container of all kind of soft drinks. Being a kid and if you saw Scribe then you would know he was no threat to anybody, in the physical sense, to the guys who hung around Harry’s, that corner’s corner boys and so he was something like a mascot to them. Would run errand for them, and in turn they would give him some of their free games which they inevitably won since they were wizards at the game, knew how to sway the thing just right, especially when some young girlfriend was tucked in between his arms.

The funny thing is that this group, these guys were nothing like what Scribe and others would do and put together when their corner boy time came up at Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. These Harry’s guys were hoods, hoodlums, bad-ass motorcycle guys, guys who nobody, and according to Scribe nobody messed with. Their leader was one Harold, never called that under penalty of broken bones, “Red” Riley, a guy who lived near Scribe’s grandmother, another reason why he may have been taken on as a mascot, was the baddest of them all. Nobody challenged his authority, not and be able to tell anybody about it. The corners, the corners with corner boys, in the Acre in those days sprawled out to maybe half a dozen locations, all protected by their members. That was the rules and you lived or maybe died by them. One day Scribe saw what Red could do when somebody from another corner even came near Harry’s. This guy who Scribe swore did nothing except walk across the baseball field the other side of Harry’s. Somehow Red knew though that the guy was from another corner, a different turf. Without word one Red pulled out his whipsaw chain, went up to the guy and beat his mercilessly leaving him a lump on the ground. Somebody called the cops and they called an ambulance which took the guy away a bloody stump. Get this-the guy never finked on Red, hell, the cops who actually used Harry for his real purpose at the store to make book-to gamble on the horses-never even asked what happened. Asked if there were any witnesses. Nobody, not Scribe, nobody said word one with that bloody stump in their minds. So the Sharks and the Jets had nothing on the Irish bad boys around Harry’s.

Scribe, or really Frankie Riley who was the real leader of softer and younger Irish boys, mostly in high school where Frankie’s con artist, grifter ways were quickly recognized even by Scribe who couldn’t have organized his socks despite his brilliant plans and dreams, of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys once he told him the Red Riley story, always made sure to have a tough guy or two hanging around in case some assholes  wanted to rumble, to cut our turf. Enter one Johnny Blade, Johnny Rizzo really who was one of the few Italians allowed on the corner as a favor to Tonio who was Johnny’s uncle but really by his saving grace that his mother was Irish, a Doherty who had also grown up in the Acre. Johnny Blade, nobody ever said the Johnny without the blade even a couple of industrial arts teachers at school, the track they threw Johnny on, who heard about him early on. I hope I don’t need to explain how Johnny got the blade part but for those who might not be quite sure Acre boys at some point, maybe about puberty, sixth grade somewhere around there became fascinated with knives, jackknives at first which everybody had and the more dangerous ones, the kind Johnny carried around from early on-and used.

Johnny Blade maybe could have gone a different root, that Irish-Italian mix made an Acre girl’s dream and he could have if for no other reason that by force of will had whomever he wanted, some older girls too, college girls later so he had something. The thing is Johnny Blade loved his knife (knives really but only carried one at a time by law I think). Like I said Frankie, larcenous Frankie Riley, funny to say now, maybe, since he has been a very successful lawyer in Boston for many years, knew that Johnny Blade was just what we needed to defend our turf if trouble came. Naturally when a guy gets a tough guy reputation somebody is bound as if by osmosis to challenge him, test him. Usually the excuse would be looking at some girl, some “spoken for” girl the wrong way and the boyfriend had to assert his prerogative. This time, this time I speak of which shows not only Johnny’s usefulness but Frankie’s via Scribe’s wisdom to have a “hitman” on board, it was Mother Goose, a member of Red Riley’s corner boys, an older guy like Red and most of his boys, a twenty something although nobody said that then, who took umbrage ( I am being polite) that Cecilia Duggan had caught Johnny’s eye, or more probably she had glanced his way. Bad blood, bad blood no question. (By the way nobody knows why he was called Mother Goose except maybe he never had a mother because he was one tough and fierce looking guy who I would cross the street when I saw him approaching me.       

One dark, probably weekend night I forget now, Mother came strutting, or maybe lumbering is better, into our Tonio’s space not looking for pizza but Johnny. Called Johnny out, started talking the talk that tough guys talk and guys who want to be tough guys have to respond to. I think Johnny was in having pizza or listening to the already mentioned fabulous Tonio’s jukebox (placed there as we later learned by the local Mafia who controlled all that kind of action then, maybe now too for all I know) when he heard the clarion call. He went up to Mother said something like “let’s go out back” who knows but that sounds right. That back was the alleyway between building in the commercial section of the Acre, the area where Tonio’s was located, dark, dark as the dungeon. They went out back together, alone (frankly most of us, whether we admitted it or not, would have freaked out if we had to watch this hand to hand combat in person). Several minutes later Johnny Blade came out breathing heavily, sweating from his forehead and maybe a little peaked. All he said was “maybe somebody should call an ambulance.” Somebody, I think Tonio but don’t quote me on that, did call and the cops and ambulance came. Mother had been cut up badly, a few deep gashes although mostly arm and leg wounds, nothing life threatening. Mother, eyes looking right at Johnny Blade when asked by a cop who had done this horrible deed said he had not been able to identify his assailant. Followed the time-honored, time-worn code of not finking out, ratting out to the coppers. Funny the cops never asked anybody if they knew anything, saw anybody run since they also knew they would get the time-honored, time-worn didn’t see a fucking thing. Didn’t ask sweated Johnny Blade anything.

We expected some blow-back, serious blow-back when Red Riley found out what had happened to Mother and by whom, but he may have been in shock that anybody would waste one of his corner boys and that person must have been a mean mother, meaner than Mother indeed. Or maybe it was just “collateral damage,” another term not used then in the turf wars since Mother had chosen, wisely or not, to confront a corner boy on his own turf. A few years later Red Riley, motorcycle at the ready and motorcycle mama in tow, got wasted by some redneck cops down in some freaking White Hen store in North Carolina trying to rob the place.

Johnny Blade Postscript: After high school we went our various ways as usually happens, and Johnny Blade whether he finished high school or not I am not sure I know he had been kept back at least one year, went his way. The story goes around the old neighborhood that Johnny Blade almost killed a man, by knife of course, in Riverdale out west of Boston, got caught and was given “the choice.” The choice in those days given by a judge was a nickel in the state pen or go in the Army. Johnny Blade, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, took the latter course and laid down his head in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in 1967. He forever has his name etched on the Adamsville town memorial wall and down in that black granite-etched wall in Washington, D.C. Every time I go down there, I go to the wall and shed a tear for him (and Frank White). Thanks for defending your corner boys. RIP, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, “Johnny Blade” (1946-1967)

Once More Into The Lion’s Den- Not Fit For Hallmark Channel Prime Time, Maybe -Paul Newman And Bruce Willis’ “Nobody’s Fool” (1994)- A Short Film Review-Of Sorts

Once More Into The Lion’s Den- Not Fit For Hallmark Channel Prime Time, Maybe -Paul Newman And Bruce Willis’ “Nobody’s Fool” (1994)- A Short Film Review-Of Sorts   

[In a recent introduction to this new series, a series based on short film reviews for films that deserve short reviews if not just a thumb’s up or down I noted that Allan Jackson, the deposed previous site manager, required his film reviewers to write endlessly about the film giving the material an almost cinema studies academic journal take on it. That caused a serious decline in the number of reviews over the years which I hope to make up with a flurry of snap reviews for busy people. To see in full why check the archives for November 28, 2018- Not Ready For Prime Time But Ready For Some Freaking Kind Of Review Film Reviews To Keep The Writers Busy And Not Plotting Cabals Against The Site Manager-Introduction To The New Series. Greg Green]

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Nobody's Fool, starring Bruce Willis, Paul Newman, Jessica Tandy, 1994  

I will not kid the reader that I expected a certain amount of blowback when I even lightly compared a 1930s film Mr. Ibbetson to the fare on the Hallmark vanilla insomniac movie channel. My point had been simply enough to note that that channel did not have a monopoly on dreamy scenes and happy-ending plotlines, especially the ubiquitous Christmas stuff that goes 24/7 full steam ahead with about one variation between the first and last product (usually whether the lead female character dumps her wrong gee beau or he her). I have since learned that about four actresses, the focus of the shows reflecting the demographic, wind up as an unintentional ensemble for a couple of dozen shows. Be that as it may the gist of each show is really a quaint formula some up and coming young professional woman, white, heads home to small town Bing Crosby White Christmas America (and emphatically not 1970s South Boston White Christmas) after having dumped or been dumped by Mr. Wrong.

At home after the obligatory warming up to the old time Christmas spirit she meets some old flame, if not physically the boy next door she grew up with and rejected or ignored on her way out of town she reconsiders her options and the whole thing is sealed by the truly obligatory ending chaste kiss (after several almost attempts). Nice innocuous fare for tough rainy or snowy days or a hard shopping tour. I merely mentioned that one could grow very tired of such fare on the seventh incarnation. That slight comment drew first the ire of my longtime companion Laura Perkins, who is a writer here as well, and an avid devotee of these films.

Laura saw no comparison worthy of the breath between the Hallmark episodes and the fairy-tale -horror show romance between the two ill-fated lovers in that 1930s film. Nor apparently did the enraged mob, mostly female, remember that demographic thing, who bothered, no, pelted our esteemed site manager Greg Green about the comparison asking for my head on a platter or any other surface if necessary. Greg in turn pelted me with a request no, a command, a military style command to back off on Hallmark Channel light as air fare references.

Needless to say, since I am still technically his boss, being the current chair of the Editorial Board established a couple of years ago after an internal fight at this publication in order to insure against site manager overreach, I will nevertheless bring forth another candidate for the Hallmark market and see what flies. Lately that candidate, Nobody’s Fool starring the late Paul Newman (take fair warning on that title sentiment), sort of slapped Laura and me in the face. Meaning whatever ire she showed when I “dissed” that Christmas formula stuff is gone and forgotten now that we have a case we can both support for a Hallmark moment kind of show. Hell, a word not used on those shows in fact nothing stronger than “darn” gets through the stolid screenwriter’s fist, the whole film takes place in deadass winter (note the comment just above) in up-county North Bath, New York during the period between Thanksgiving and the new year.  Ah, Christmas too.    

Of course, any film starring Paul Newman (and Bruce Willis) is going to be filled with manly male talk and actions, especially since this Paul character Sully is an aging working- class guy who has strike out more times in life than had hits from an ill-fated marriage to an abandonment of his son. The whole thing is wrapped around various relationships from frosty (ex-wife) to feisty (ex-boss Willis) to funny (work partner) to fulsome (son) to funky (sex eyes and plays for boss man’s wife). So yes there is nudity, briefly, foul language, on all sides, and some sophomoric tantrums and inside jokes (over stealing boss man’s snowblower). But there is also sincerity (Paul’s landlady’s compassion and wit) and some sense that the world has passed our boy by. Here is the clinching argument though for inclusion in the Hallmark pantheon-Paul had a chance, a once in a lifetime chance to take off with the boss’s wife who was more than willing to fly the coop but he is so wedded to North Bath when the deal goes down he passes on the icing on the cake.

The more I think about it though except for the wintertime visuals this saga of the trials and tribulations of an older man seeking some meaning to his life would not make it pass the Hallmark dream censors. And I am willing to take plenty of heat on that score.                     

An Encore- When You Are A Jet You Are A Jet All The Way- The Centennial Of Composer- Conductor Leonard Bernstein’s Birthday-When The Acre Corner Boys Went Down And Dirty-In Memory Of Corner Boy Sergeant John “Johnny Blade” Rizzo, (Born North Adamsville, Massachusetts, 1946, Died, Central Highlands, South Vietnam, 1967)

An Encore- When You Are A Jet You Are A Jet All The Way- The Centennial Of Composer- Conductor Leonard Bernstein’s Birthday-When The Acre Corner Boys Went Down And Dirty-In Memory Of Corner Boy Sergeant John “Johnny Blade” Rizzo, (Born North Adamsville, Massachusetts, 1946, Died, Central Highlands, South Vietnam, 1967)     

By Seth Garth

[I have already mentioned in an earlier comment (see below) that I knew very little about Leonard Bernstein beyond his classic West Side Story which resonated with me since I shared that sense of being out of the loop growing up (and a few other writers here who also grew up in the Acre section of North Adamsville and who had been corner boys as well). Recently I had a chance to listen to a Christopher Lydon Open Source program on NPR which featured plenty of scholarly banter about the creation of the production and other aspects of Bernstein’s life and work so here is a link to finish up the centennial year of his birth.

  http://radioopensource.org/lenny-at-100/

Recently in a quick acknowledgement of the centennial of American composer Leonard Bernstein’s birthday I mentioned that I don't know much about the man but I did know his breakthrough West Side Story and could relate to the turf warfare in the piece from my old corner boy days when we defended our turf just as fervently as any New York City kid.  Any Jet, any Shark.

The story has been told many times in this publication by me and others about growing up, particularly that high school coming of age corner boy scene that animated our lives, gave us a certain tribal identity, in the impoverished Acre section of working-class North Adamsville south of Boston but Josh Breslin has told me that the same fierce defenses applied in the Ocean View section of Olde Saco up in Maine, Ralph Morris the Tappan Street section of Troy in New York and Sam Eaton ditto down the Bog section of Carver also south of Boston. Mostly those youthful stories have been given a positive spin, or have been sweetened up for public consumption, but there was a dark side, a very dark side to much of what went on-and how we related to our poverty and other corner boy aggregates. 

Maybe the single best way to describe this dark side is to give the event that made the late Peter Paul Markin, the Scribe, take this corner boy stuff, this from hunger stuff to heart. Before he met most of us, except I think Sam Lowell whom he had known since elementary school when they would hustle the younger kids out of their milk money, the Scribe used to hang around a spot familiar to all of us-mainly to stay away from-Harry’s Variety Store since Harry had a great pin-ball machine there and a very cool ice-filled container of all kind of soft drinks. Being a kid and if you saw Scribe then you would know he was no threat to anybody, in the physical sense, to the guys who hung around Harry’s, that corner’s corner boys and so he was something like a mascot to them. Would run errand for them, and in turn they would give him some of their free games which they inevitably won since they were wizards at the game, knew how to sway the thing just right, especially when some young girlfriend was tucked in between his arms.

The funny thing is that this group, these guys were nothing like what Scribe and others would do and put together when their corner boy time came up at Tonio’s Pizza Parlor. These Harry’s guys were hoods, hoodlums, bad-ass motorcycle guys, guys who nobody, and according to Scribe nobody messed with. Their leader was one Harold, never called that under penalty of broken bones, “Red” Riley, a guy who lived near Scribe’s grandmother, another reason why he may have been taken on as a mascot, was the baddest of them all. Nobody challenged his authority, not and be able to tell anybody about it. The corners, the corners with corner boys, in the Acre in those days sprawled out to maybe half a dozen locations, all protected by their members. That was the rules and you lived or maybe died by them. One day Scribe saw what Red could do when somebody from another corner even came near Harry’s. This guy who Scribe swore did nothing except walk across the baseball field the other side of Harry’s. Somehow Red knew though that the guy was from another corner, a different turf. Without word one Red pulled out his whipsaw chain, went up to the guy and beat his mercilessly leaving him a lump on the ground. Somebody called the cops and they called an ambulance which took the guy away a bloody stump. Get this-the guy never finked on Red, hell, the cops who actually used Harry for his real purpose at the store to make book-to gamble on the horses-never even asked what happened. Asked if there were any witnesses. Nobody, not Scribe, nobody said word one with that bloody stump in their minds. So the Sharks and the Jets had nothing on the Irish bad boys around Harry’s.

Scribe, or really Frankie Riley who was the real leader of softer and younger Irish boys, mostly in high school where Frankie’s con artist, grifter ways were quickly recognized even by Scribe who couldn’t have organized his socks despite his brilliant plans and dreams, of the Tonio’s Pizza Parlor corner boys once he told him the Red Riley story, always made sure to have a tough guy or two hanging around in case some assholes  wanted to rumble, to cut our turf. Enter one Johnny Blade, Johnny Rizzo really who was one of the few Italians allowed on the corner as a favor to Tonio who was Johnny’s uncle but really by his saving grace that his mother was Irish, a Doherty who had also grown up in the Acre. Johnny Blade, nobody ever said the Johnny without the blade even a couple of industrial arts teachers at school, the track they threw Johnny on, who heard about him early on. I hope I don’t need to explain how Johnny got the blade part but for those who might not be quite sure Acre boys at some point, maybe about puberty, sixth grade somewhere around there became fascinated with knives, jackknives at first which everybody had and the more dangerous ones, the kind Johnny carried around from early on-and used.

Johnny Blade maybe could have gone a different root, that Irish-Italian mix made an Acre girl’s dream and he could have if for no other reason that by force of will had whomever he wanted, some older girls too, college girls later so he had something. The thing is Johnny Blade loved his knife (knives really but only carried one at a time by law I think). Like I said Frankie, larcenous Frankie Riley, funny to say now, maybe, since he has been a very successful lawyer in Boston for many years, knew that Johnny Blade was just what we needed to defend our turf if trouble came. Naturally when a guy gets a tough guy reputation somebody is bound as if by osmosis to challenge him, test him. Usually the excuse would be looking at some girl, some “spoken for” girl the wrong way and the boyfriend had to assert his prerogative. This time, this time I speak of which shows not only Johnny’s usefulness but Frankie’s via Scribe’s wisdom to have a “hitman” on board, it was Mother Goose, a member of Red Riley’s corner boys, an older guy like Red and most of his boys, a twenty something although nobody said that then, who took umbrage ( I am being polite) that Cecilia Duggan had caught Johnny’s eye, or more probably she had glanced his way. Bad blood, bad blood no question. (By the way nobody knows why he was called Mother Goose except maybe he never had a mother because he was one tough and fierce looking guy who I would cross the street when I saw him approaching me.       

One dark, probably weekend night I forget now, Mother came strutting, or maybe lumbering is better, into our Tonio’s space not looking for pizza but Johnny. Called Johnny out, started talking the talk that tough guys talk and guys who want to be tough guys have to respond to. I think Johnny was in having pizza or listening to the already mentioned fabulous Tonio’s jukebox (placed there as we later learned by the local Mafia who controlled all that kind of action then, maybe now too for all I know) when he heard the clarion call. He went up to Mother said something like “let’s go out back” who knows but that sounds right. That back was the alleyway between building in the commercial section of the Acre, the area where Tonio’s was located, dark, dark as the dungeon. They went out back together, alone (frankly most of us, whether we admitted it or not, would have freaked out if we had to watch this hand to hand combat in person). Several minutes later Johnny Blade came out breathing heavily, sweating from his forehead and maybe a little peaked. All he said was “maybe somebody should call an ambulance.” Somebody, I think Tonio but don’t quote me on that, did call and the cops and ambulance came. Mother had been cut up badly, a few deep gashes although mostly arm and leg wounds, nothing life threatening. Mother, eyes looking right at Johnny Blade when asked by a cop who had done this horrible deed said he had not been able to identify his assailant. Followed the time-honored, time-worn code of not finking out, ratting out to the coppers. Funny the cops never asked anybody if they knew anything, saw anybody run since they also knew they would get the time-honored, time-worn didn’t see a fucking thing. Didn’t ask sweated Johnny Blade anything.

We expected some blow-back, serious blow-back when Red Riley found out what had happened to Mother and by whom, but he may have been in shock that anybody would waste one of his corner boys and that person must have been a mean mother, meaner than Mother indeed. Or maybe it was just “collateral damage,” another term not used then in the turf wars since Mother had chosen, wisely or not, to confront a corner boy on his own turf. A few years later Red Riley, motorcycle at the ready and motorcycle mama in tow, got wasted by some redneck cops down in some freaking White Hen store in North Carolina trying to rob the place.

Johnny Blade Postscript: After high school we went our various ways as usually happens, and Johnny Blade whether he finished high school or not I am not sure I know he had been kept back at least one year, went his way. The story goes around the old neighborhood that Johnny Blade almost killed a man, by knife of course, in Riverdale out west of Boston, got caught and was given “the choice.” The choice in those days given by a judge was a nickel in the state pen or go in the Army. Johnny Blade, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, took the latter course and laid down his head in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam in 1967. He forever has his name etched on the Adamsville town memorial wall and down in that black granite-etched wall in Washington, D.C. Every time I go down there, I go to the wall and shed a tear for him (and Frank White). Thanks for defending your corner boys. RIP, Sergeant John Richard Rizzo, “Johnny Blade” (1946-1967)