The High White Note Blowing Out To The China Seas-The Film Adaptation Of Pearl S. Buck’s “China Sky” (1945)- A Review

The High White Note Blowing Out To The China Seas-The Film Adaptation Of Pearl S. Buck’s “China Sky” (1945)- A Review 

DVD Review

By Josie Davis

China Sky, starring Randolph Scott, Ruth Warrick, Ellen Drew, Anthony Quinn, 1945

Although I am fairly new to the film reviewing business, to journalism in general having just finished up my graduate program at Boston University’s School of Communications I find it hard to believe what the older writers keep telling me as words of advice.  To watch my back, to watch out for fellow reviewers who will skewer my work just to get ahead, just to beat someone in what they have all called a cutthroat, drag down business. The idea behind their cautions seems to center on the notion that nobody really needs to read a film review, everybody has a subjective point of view on the subject matter of a film and the only way to get out from under the rock is to take dead aim at somebody else’s work in order to do what they call “move up the food chain.”

Here is what is ironic about all of what they say. I was assigned this old- time film, China Sky, by the site manager mostly because nobody else wanted to do the review and because if I messed up, the site manager’s words, nobody would notice some raw rookie errors anyway. After viewing the film I was puzzled, could not figure out how to write the review up since the film seemed very dated and weird. Weird since the film, as the title indicated, was about and set in China during World War II, during the time Japan was trying to make all of Asia its feeding grounds. Yet several of the main actors like Anthony Quinn known to me from a cinema class where we watched and critiqued Zorba the Greek who were obviously not Chinese were made up to look that way rather than have real Chinese actors in the roles.

One day at the water cooler I introduced myself to some older writers who were talking about the modern film Black Panther and when I had an opportunity I asked what I should do about the odd film I had been given to review. Most of them, actually all of them except Si Lannon, walked away after basically telling that it was my problem and that if I wanted to get ahead in the profession I had better figure out a way to deal with the film or they would be more than willing to rip it apart to show me how tough this “racket” really was. Si told me not to listen to them because that was all an act. They just didn’t want to be bothered “mentoring” a rookie on a turkey like China Sky. Si gave me some advice which I think is reflected in this review-if all else fails then use the old “slice of life” fall back. By that he meant if I couldn’t figure a “hook” is what he, they call it to just go on and on about the plotline of the film and move on. Thanks, Si who is proof that whatever else some people in this business are not out to cut everybody else’s throat.         

I remember, because I asked my mother, that my grandmother used to have many of Pearl S. Buck’s books on her shelf. I might have glanced through a couple, I remember one The Good Earth I started to read but gave it up because it was hard to follow when I was a teenager, didn’t speak to me about the China I had heard about. I believe that most of Buck’s books were based on China experiences and represented a Western missionary come to help the heathens to the good life way of looking at that then benighted country. China Sky falls into that same category. I have already mentioned the use of Western actors in some roles as Chinese but also that the Chinese people are portrayed as mere props for the in this case Americans to bring into the modern world.  

Si told me to get the “boy meets girl” part out of the way first. I already knew from the tons of films that I had seen in classes and on my own that an extraordinary number of films, especially from Hollywood back in the 1930s and 1940s depended on that theme. Here that theme got a serious work- out in the relationship between the two doctors, one male, Thompson, played by ruggedly handsome Randolph Scott and one female, Durant, played by quietly beautiful Ruth Warrick. From scene one, where he is absent off in America to raise money for medical equipment everybody and their sister and brother knows she loves him. But that love is thwarted first by their professional relationship and secondly when the good doctor does appear he has a brand- new wife, Laura, played by fetching Ellen Drew. Done for. No, through the course of the film as Laura cannot adjust to the wartime deprivations and misery Doc Thompson starts to see the light, starts to see that he had made a mistake and should have taken his fellow doctor will all hands. But brave Doc Durant will just pine away and be the good soldier.

Of course in the end Laura will fall down and the two fated doctors will come together. There is also a secondary love interest between the Chinese guerilla leader, played by Anthony Quinn in Chinese make-up and one of the nurses, also in Chinese make-up, which will also get happily resolved when the treacherous native doctor she is betrothed to is killed after betraying the hospital and town to a “wily” Japanese POW. 

As already foreshadowed this film is a wartime romance set in World War II China when the Japanese were fighting for control of the whole vast country and the town where all the action takes place is near where the Chinese partisans have their supply dumps. Since the Japanese are trying to push through holding that position is a must for them. That however means that the town took a terrible beating from the Japanese air forces bombing the hell out of everything that moved-including the American-sponsored hospital. The wartime action spins around that senior Japanese POW who the guerrillas want to put on trial for war crimes. He, as an officer, tried every way to get information back to his side about the location of the supply dumps. Including playing on the racial and romantic animosities of the chief native doctor (who was actually Korean and whose unknown father was Japanese). Naturally the good guys led by Doc Thompson and the guerrilla chief beat back the bastardly Japanese. You already know the love story part where Doc Thompson’s desperate to leave wife acted as a foil for treachery with the Korean doctor in order to get her and Doc out of the country so that part is done.

Final note, footnote, for the “slice of life” idea from Si. We live in an age more concerned about what we call political correctness than back in the 1940s so some of the stereotypes are pretty raw. The superiority of Americans over mainly prop Asians. The contempt for the average people expressed by Laura. The wily treacherous Japanese and the sullen Korean. But above all that use of Western actors in Chinese make-up reminiscent of whites in blackface tells me that this film is certainly a period piece. That is that for a first review. Hope I survive.

The Answer My Friend Id Blowing (No Clipped “G”) In The Wind-The Influence Of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” On The “Generation of’68”-The Best Part Of That Cohort

The Answer My Friend Id Blowing (No Clipped “G”) In The Wind-The Influence Of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” On The “Generation of’68”-The Best Part Of That Cohort

[An encore of two pieces on this subject and like the Summer of Love, 1967 frenzy at this publication, time to move on and let others give their choices without further prompting. S.G. ]

By Seth Garth

No question this publication both in its former hard copy editions and now more so in the on-line editions as the, ouch, 50^th anniversary of many signature events for the “Generation of ‘68” have come and gone that the whole period of the 1950s and 1960s had gotten a full airing. Has been dissected, deflected, inspected, reflected and even rejected beyond compare. That is not to say that this trend won’t continue if for no other reason that the demographics and actual readership response indicate that people still have a desire to not forget their pasts, their youth.

(Under the new site manager Greg Green, despite what I consider all good sense having worked under taskmaster Allan Jackson, we are encouraged to give this blessed readership some inside dope, no, no that kind, about how things are run these days in an on-line publication. With that okay in mind there was a huge controversy that put the last sentence in the above paragraph in some perspective recently when Greg for whatever ill-begotten reason thought that he would try to draw in younger audiences by catering to their predilections-for comic book character movies, video games, graphic novels and trendy music and got nothing but serious blow-back from those who have supported this publication financially and otherwise both in hard copy times and now on-line. What that means as the target demographic fades is another question and maybe one for a future generation who might take over the operation. Or perhaps like many operations this one will not outlast its creators- and their purposes.)    

Today’s 1960s question, a question that I have asked over the years and so I drew the assignment to address the issue-who was the voice of the 1960s. Who or what. Was it the lunchroom sit-inners and Freedom Riders, what about the hippies (which I counted myself as one for a time), was it SDS, the various Weather configurations, acid, rock, folk rock, folk, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Abbie Hoffman, Grace Slick, hell the Three Js-Joplin, Jimi, Jim as in Morrison and the like. Or maybe it was a mood, a mood of disenchantment about a world that seemed out of our control, which seemed to be running without any input from us, without us even being asked. My candidate, and not my only candidate but a recent NPR Morning Edition segment brought the question to mind (see above link), is a song, a song created by Bob Dylan in the early 1960s which was really a clarion call to action on our part, or the best part of our generation-The Times They Are A-Changin’.    

I am not sure if Bob Dylan started out with some oversized desire to be the “voice” of his generation. He certainly blew the whole thing off later after his motorcycle accident and still later when he became a recluse even if he did 200 shows a year, maybe sullen introvert is better, actually maybe his own press agent giving out dribbles is even better but that song, that “anthem” sticks in memory as a decisive summing up of what I was feeling at the time. (And apparently has found resonance with a new generation of activists via the March for Our Lives movement and other youth-driven movements.) As a kid I was antsy to do something, especially once I saw graphic footage on commercial television of young black kids being water-hosed, beaten with police clubs  and bitten by dogs down in the South simply for looking for some rough justice in this wicked old world. Those images, and those of the brave lunch-room sitters and Freedom bus riders were stark and compelling. They and my disquiet over nuclear bombs which were a lot scarier then when there were serious confrontations which put them in play and concern that what bothered me about having no say, about things not being addressed galvanized me.

The song “spoke to me” as it might not have earlier or later. It had the hopeful ring of a promise of a newer world. That didn’t happen or happen in ways that would have helped the mass of humanity but for that moment I flipped out every time I heard it played on the radio or on my old vinyl records record-player. Other songs, events, moods, later would overtake this song’s sentiment but I was there at the creation. Remember that, please.   

***********

Once Again Haunted By The Question Of Questions-Who Represented The “Voice” Of The Generation Of ’68 When The Deal Went Down-And No It Was Not One Richard Millstone, Oops, Milhous Nixon

By Seth Garth

I have been haunted recently by various references to events in the early 1960s brought to mind by either seeing or hearing those references. First came one out of the blue when I was in Washington, D.C. on other business and I popped in as is my wont to the National Gallery of Art to get an “art bump” after fighting the drearies at the tail-end of the conference that I was attending. I usually enter on the 7^th Street entrance to see what they have new on display on the Ground Floor exhibition areas. This time there was a small exhibit concerning the victims of Birmingham Sunday, 1963 the murder by bombing of a well-known black freedom church in that town and the death of four innocent young black girls and injuries to others. The show itself was a “what if” by a photographer who presented photos of what those young people might have looked like had they not had their precious lives stolen from them by some racist KKK-drenched bastards who never really did get the justice they deserved. The catch here, the impact on me, was these murders and another very disturbing viewing on television at the time, in black and white, of the Birmingham police unleashing dogs, firing water hoses and using the ubiquitous police billy-clubs to beat down on peaceful mostly black youth protesting against the pervasive Mister James Crow system which deprived them of their civil rights.

Those events galvanized me into action from seemingly out of nowhere. At the time I was in high school, in an all-white high school in my growing up town of North Adamsville south of Boston. (That “all white” no mistake despite the nearness to urban Boston since a recent look at the yearbook for my class showed exactly zero blacks out of a class of 515. The nearest we got to a black person was a young immigrant from Lebanon who was a Christian though and was not particularly dark. She, to my surprise given where she came from, had been a cheer-leader and well-liked although I only knew her slightly since she was “in” with the social butterfly crowd which we Acre boys avoided like the plague, or they avoided us take your pick). I should also confess, for those who don’t know not having read about a dozen articles  I have done over the past few years in this space, that my “corner boys,” the Irish mostly with a sprinkling of Italians reflecting the two major ethic groups in the town I hung around with then never could figure out why I was so concerned about black people down South when we were living hand to mouth up North. (The vagaries of time have softened some things among them for example nobody uses the “n” word which needs no explanation here and which was the “term of art” in reference to black people then to not prettify what this crowd was about.)

In many ways I think I only survived by the good graces of Scribe who everybody deferred to on social matters. Not for any heroic purpose but because Scribe was the key to intelligence about what girls were interested in what guys, who was “going” steady, etc. a human grapevine who nobody crossed without suffering exile. What was “heroic” if that can be used in this context was that as a result of those Birmingham images back then I travelled over to the NAACP office on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston to offer my meager services in the civil rights struggle and headed south to deadly North Carolina one summer on a voting drive. I was scared but that was that. My guys never knew that was where I went until many years later long after we had all gotten a better gripe via the U.S. Army and other situations on the question of race and were amazed that I had done that.         

The other recent occurrence that has added fuel to the fire was a segment on NPR’s Morning Edition where they deal with aspects of what amounts to the American Songbook. The segment dealt with the generational influence of folk-singer songwriter Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as an anthem for our generation (and its revival of late in newer social movements like the kids getting scared out of their wits with guns running amok and getting  serious about gun control). No question for those who came of political age early in the 1960s before all hell broke loose this was a definitive summing up song for those of us who were seeking what Bobby Kennedy would later quoting a line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson call “seeking a newer world.” In one song was summed up what we thought about obtuse indifferent authority figures, the status quo, our clueless parents, the social struggles that were defining us and a certain hurried-ness to get to wherever we thought we were going.

I mentioned in that previous commentary that given his subsequent trajectory while Bob Dylan may have wanted to be the reincarnation Plus of Woody Guthrie (which by his long life he can rightly claim) whether he wanted to be, could be, the voice of the Generation of ’68 was problematic. What drove me, is driving me a little crazy is who or what some fifty plus years after all the explosions represented the best of what we had started out to achieve (and were essentially militarily defeated by the ensuing reaction before we could achieve most of it) in those lonely high school halls and college dormitories staying up late at night worrying about the world and our place in the sun.

For a long time, probably far longer than was sensible I believed that it was somebody like Jim Morrison, shaman-like leader of the Doors, who came out of the West Coast winds and headed to our heads in the East. Not Dylan, although he was harbinger of what was to come later in the decade as rock reassembled itself in new garb after some vanilla music hiatus but somebody who embodied the new sensibility that Dylan had unleashed. The real nut though was that I, and not me alone, and not my communal brethren alone either, was the idea that we possessed again probably way past it use by date was that “music was the revolution” by that meaning nothing but the general lifestyle changes through the decade so that the combination of “dropping out” of nine to five society, dope in its many manifestations, kindnesses, good thought and the rapidly evolving music would carry us over the finish line. Guys like Josh Breslin and the late Pete Markin, hard political guys as well as rabid music lovers and dopers, used to laugh at me when I even mentioned that I was held in that sway especially when ebb tide of the counter-cultural movement hit in Nixon times and the bastinado was as likely to be our home as the new Garden. Still Jim Morrison as the “new man” (new human in today speak) made a lot of sense to me although when he fell down like many others to the lure of the dope I started reappraising some of my ideas -worried about that bastinado fate.  

So I’ll be damned right now if I could tell you that we had such a voice, and maybe that was the problem, or a problem which has left us some fifty years later without a good answer. Which only means for others to chime in with their thoughts on this matter.         

In The Age Of Tweeter Rant-Defend The Enlightenment Like Your Life Depended On-It Does-“A Royal Affair” (2012) Better-“En Kongelig Affaere”-A Film Review

In The Age Of Tweeter Rant-Defend The Enlightenment Like Your Life Depended On-It Does-“A Royal Affair” (2012) Better-“En Kongelig Affaere”-A Film Review

DVD Review

BY Fritz Taylor

   

“A Royal Affair” Better-“En Kongelig Affaere”

I have on more than one occasion mentioned that I am a child of rock and roll, a child of the classic age of rock in the 1950s which was the first jailbreak movement that led my Generation of ’68 “astray” (in the very best sense of the word). I am, as becomes more necessary to declare each day in this crazy world of alternate facts, lies, and low-grade bullshit as my grandfather was fond of saying when he was pissed off at what passed for civil discourse in his time, a child of the Enlightenment. Yes the 18^th century movement of men and women who under great pressure (and maybe the pains of torture and exile) tried to bring some rational discourse to the way people were governed, the way people in civil society dealt with other and some kind of funny idea that equality of person was something humankind could and should aspire to achieve.   

Now being a good old boy growing up from down in Fulton County, Georgia there was no way that I started out life as a child of the Enlightenment unlike the ease which I slipped into being a child of rock and roll. That my friends came courtesy of Uncle Sam, specifically his “request” that I lay down my life for him in the jungles of Vietnam back in1966-1967. (That “request” business really a gag since I volunteered under duress, the duress being directed from a military proud grandfather, the same one fond of saying low-grade bullshit when he was pissed, although subsequently I would come to understand that almost every young man of my Generation of ’68 made decisions under duress under the thunder clouds of a seemingly endless war.)

I was as gung-ho as any previous generation of Taylor male-until-until I got over there, got in -country and came to realize before my eighteen months tour was over (I extended for another six months against the normal year to get an early out they were offering both to get re-ups and to get grunts to stay in country against all good sense) that I had no quarrel with these people and nobody else really did either. That would lead to my post-military service “conversion” to getting on the right side of the angels, getting to understand a whole bunch of stuff like the Enlightenment, a word when I was a kid I had probably never heard of-certainly didn’t act upon any of its ideas. Those lessons though just didn’t come out of the blue but through my involvement with Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), you know, the organization ex-Secretary of State John Kerry helped organize in his sunnier days and through coming north to Boston and then west to Frisco. My first “tutor” has a name, the late Peter Paul Markin who I met down in Washington on a G.I. anti-war march and when he fell down of his hubris and what he called “wanting habits” writers here like Sam Lowell, Seth Garth and Josh Breslin picked up the slack.           

Now what does all of this talk of Enlightenment have to do with reviewing a Danish film, in English A Royal Affair assigned to me by site manager Greg Green for whatever reason he thought I would be suitable for doing such heavy lifting. Folks that have seen my name here know that I am something of a military and social justice writer and not a damn film reviewer like Sam Lowell who has spent his whole freaking career blasting out pieces about every kind of god-awful film. The “hook” Greg used was that part of the plot-line of the film was an attempt by people at the Danish court, royal or otherwise to bring Enlightenment values to that benighted country out in the boondocks of Europe and others with vested property and proprietary interest to stop them. I accepted the assignment on that basis maybe in the back of my head figuring I could control my ranting about the damn tweeter storms that have racked civil society in America to its core.

Oh yes, I better confess if that is the right word that beside being a child of rock and roll and of the Enlightenment I am a child of republican (small “r” please note) meaning I defend various forms of republican governmental rule against monarchies, constitutional or otherwise, royalty, the nobility and every damn hanger-on who floats to the surface. So why accept the assignment. Simple that republican ideal was not so-widespread in the middle of the 18^th century the time of story-line of this film. At that time Enlightenment ideas were just raising their head in the world and got germinated in the bowels of the old society by certain free-thinking people. So this hatred of the monarchy, remember please King George III all you Jacks and Jills who devour everything coming out of English court-life these days has been an acquired taste for generations coming down to me. The characters here, some of them commoners some royal, don’t question that aspect of governance-that is for later times and larger uprisings than court intrigues.

I have taken a particular slant on this production based on some historical truths around bringing Enlightenment ideas to backwater Denmark. The film itself based on a Danish historical novel about the times-about the sullen reign of mentally disturbed King Christian VII, his English princess wife and a commoner, a doctor goes into another direction and I could if I was Sam Lowell, better, Laura Perkins, have dwelled on the menange between the three chief characters and left it at that. The frame for this one cries out for that treatment since the whole affair, royal or otherwise, is presented from Queen Caroline Matilde’s point of view as she writes to her children on her deathbed about why she has not seen them for a long time.

I have had my say so as Sam always says a little summary is in order. Christian and Caroline, who are cousins, but what else is new with European royal in-breeding. Those interconnections never stopped them from cutting each other to bits. World War I could have just as easily been called the “Cousins’ war” which for its time was the bloodiest conflagration ever seen. A betrothal was arranged and Caroline became the Danish queen having a son by the king. The king who was probably every psychiatrist’s poster child for an assortment of strange mental disturbances was more of a whoremonger and frill than a husband to the well-educated and talented Caroline. That is the predicate for the personal tragedies that follow. Doctor Struensee, a commoner, a German which meant a foreigner then, a low-key man of the Enlightenment was brought in to attend to the king. They became fast friends once the good doctor saw he could have influence over the erratic king in order to push his agenda. Problem, big problem, is that over time Struensee and Caroline become fast friends, very fast indeed, having a child together, a girl who is passed off as the king’s progeny.      

That cuckolded king notion lets the anti-foreign, anti-reform  nobility and another arm of the royal family take the high ground spreading rumors among the common folk that the doctor is running the show and the Queen is egging him on. In the end the threads favoring the Enlightenment were too weak to hold against the old regime and so the doctor and Queen meet bad ends, bad fates. Her losing her children and exile and the Doc having his head taken from him by the executioner’s axe. The only hope is for the future-that the younger generation in the person of the royal prince will do better. And he does. Such are the vagaries of history. Well-done with English subtitles, a tight script and beautiful film work. 

Fast Cars and Fast Women, Okay A “Fast” Young Woman- With Josh Breslin’s Film Review Of Nicolas Cage’s “Gone in Sixty Seconds” (2002) In Mind

Fast Cars and Fast Women, Okay A “Fast” Young Woman- With Josh Breslin’s Film Review Of Nicolas Cage’s “Gone in Sixty Seconds” (2002) In Mind 

By Laura Perkins

I loved fast cars as a young girl, young woman, still do. I will give details in a moment about why and what happened but let me tell you how that youthful excitement came on the radar of late. You never know what kind of conversation you will get into around the water cooler at this publication except maybe if you are there when my fellow older writers are sipping it will center on some youthful adventure back in the prehistoric 1950s and 1960s. That time frame important since that era was something like the golden age of the automobile and certain rites of passage around cars went with it for young men and women. Today’s generation apparently in the age of the lime bicycle, Uber and Lyft don’t have anything like the same experiences we had when car was king and to be a queen, to be seen in some cowboy’s “boss” care (a lost term of art which every other older writer I mentioned the term to immediately recognized as such) you had to have some respect for the vehicles. Otherwise you would find yourself, especially as a young woman sitting frantically by the midnight phone while others were cavorting in the night. That cavorting can best be left to the reader’s imagination not because of any prudery on my part but because the demographics of the sustaining readership tells you we all know what that meant whether it was out on some back country lovers’ lane road, up on Eagle’s Pass far from prying eyes and the snooping authorities or down by the shore shifting sand watching as Sam Lowell put it ‘watching the submarine races” the local term for the why of those fogged up cars along the boulevard. Of course, Sam my long-time companion and fellow writer have spent many hours regaling each other with our kid’s stories but I still say that down by the seashore for a farm brought up girl sounded very interesting, very interesting.     

(By the way, speaking of today’s generation, the so-called millennials, a couple of my grandchildren don’t even have driver’s licenses and they are in their mid-twenties. Damn, we were out learning how to drive even before we could legally do so and thought nothing of it, especially in my growing up farm country where maybe you learned to drive a tractor or truck at fourteen before you ever got behind the wheel of a car, boss or otherwise.)

But getting back to the water cooler talk after my little intergenerational pithy social analysis one day Josh Breslin was talking about his latest assignment, his latest film assignment Nicolas Cage’s 2000 car boost classic Gone In Sixty Seconds where the legendary car thief Memphis Raines, whose photograph was up on my bedroom wall when I was a kid because a boyfriend had given it to be as a present, as a sign of his affections, such things meant a lot to an isolated girl, me,  had to steal something like fifty cars in a short period or else his brainless brother would be toast on the say so of the villainous enemy gangster character in the film, some nefarious Brit. Josh mentioned he was not sure why site manager Greg Green had assigned him the film since he had not been all that much of a car freak when he was young.

Josh did mention that he knew that his boyhood friend Peter Paul Markin had been, against all form, against his nerdish absent-minded professor appearance the greatest “hot wire” guy he had every known. After viewing the film and in his review Josh declared that Markin, always reverently called Scribe by the clot of older writers who work here and who knew him before he fell down at a too early age back in the 1970s over some busted drug deal that nobody to this day knows why went awry down in Mexico, could show old Memphis a thing or two. He mentioned a time when he first met Scribe out in San Francisco in the Summer of Love, 1967 and he went up to him to ask for some dope, and got it, starting a too short lifelong friendship while Scribe was sitting in a boss Camaro. It was not until much later that Josh found out that car turned out to belong to the mayor’s son and he had boosted it right in front of City Hall Plaza with a half dozen cops looking on. (By the way for the stray Generation X and millennials who might have found this publication the “boost” was a term of art for stealing cars and “hot wire” was the way it was done without keys and without muss or fuss by grandees like Scribe.)

Back at that cooler I startled Josh, and maybe Leslie Dumont (an old flame of his, and maybe they have rekindled from what I have also heard at another water cooler conversation and by my keen powers of observation when they seem to be constantly smiling at one another for no apparent reason a sure sign known since childhood on my part) who has just retired from her big by-line at Women Today and is once again a contributor here now and young Will Bradley, fresh from his “wars” with Seth Garth over who is who in the film noir detective world, who were also privy to the conversation when I mentioned that I loved cars growing up, or rather loved to be seen in cars, or better sitting beside some guy in a “boss” car ready to do battle for me, for my “favors” in a “chicken run” (another “term of art” to be explained below).

They were astonished given what they have long known of my personally quiet adult demeanor and all that they know about me and about my very sedate lifestyle of late. Here’s where looks and style are deceiving. Where an ex-professor’s look hides more than one would think. I was raised in farm country in upstate New York outside of Albany in Mechanicsville, Dutch country, Dutch country as they came up the Hudson from New York City, then New Amsterdam, and populated the area once the wonder of the first load of sailors who saw that Fitzgerald “fresh green breast of land” got themselves land-locked and moved up river. (That Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby final paragraph courtesy of Sam Lowell who is crazy for the guy’s works and who smiles at me for no apparent and me back too.)        

Yes, so I knew how to drive a pick-up truck before I ever knew how to drive a manually- clutched automobile. Knew how nice it was to be mobile like that. Of course, that all had nothing at all to do with the social scene among the young in that country atmosphere in the 1960s when all hell was breaking loose elsewhere. What it had plenty to do with was getting out of the farmhouse, getting out on weekends. See every guy who was anything also knew how to drive, how to “soup-up” a car and how to have some young thing sitting next to him come that Friday or Saturday night. That was how I started to be seen with Indian Jack, the “king” of the chicken run night out our way in the back roads of roads leading out of Albany. (Indian Jack was for real an Indian, or part Indian, now Native American or a member of an indigenous tribe, in his case the Mohawk tribe which had been in the area long before those land-locked Dutch sailors ever saw the place.)

Indian Jack prided himself on two things, always having the fastest car in the county and always having a pretty girl sitting next to him in that fast car. Not that I was the prettiest girl Indian Jack ever had although I was “Queen” of my Senior Prom at Half Moon High but that was as much my sociable personality and intelligence as beauty but I did keep up my appearances since that counted and I wanted to be counted in. Thelma McGraw was the prettiest girl Indian Jack ever had sitting next to him but she was an “ice queen” and kind of stuck up so nobody missed her when I took over her seat. You should also know that the average “chicken run” won girl was not like me, not like me at all. They ran to buxom big breasts, tight cashmere sweaters, short revealing tight skirts, heavy mascara, chewing gum and serious reputation for sexual activism to put the matter politely. I was something of an outlier, was not liked by that part of the tribe, although I was by the regular country girls who just wanted to get off the farm, get out of the house and breathe whether they liked fast cars or not. They as it turned out were happy that I was Indian Jack’s girl (although that did not stop them from trying to beat my time with Jack, trying to get their young asses in that passenger seat).        

I might as well stop and tell how I got to be Indian Jack’s girl since I mentioned how he “won” me which will tell a lot about the social milieu among the fast car set (the fast women aspect can be left to your imagination although I was pretty naïve about sex both before Indian Jack and afterwards too). See I had started out as Moon Mooney’s girl, a guy in my class in high school who was also a farm boy from the next farm over whom I had known since kindergarten, and who had a great 1956 Chevy Impala if I recall correctly, two-toned white and green with those aerodynamic wings and very comfortable cushy seats (not the bucket seats of today but a one piece operation which allowed a girl to sit right next to her guy, maybe head on his shoulder or to have three across but who cared about that on date night when it was one on one).

Moon, real name Jeffrey, was crazy for cars, was crazy to race too although the few times I had seen him do so did not seem like he was built for heavy running the roads. But that is where the “culture” comes in. Guys were always egging each other and themselves on about who had not only the “boss” car which might only be the best-looking car like the vaunted 1957 Chevy when that was king of the schoolboy night but the fastest.        

Moon was no exception to that draw. Thought he could take on anybody after beating “Wreck” Phillips and “Dink’” Monroe on the “chicken run.” Strictly amateur stuff as it turned out but the stuff that dreams are made of as Humphrey Bogart said in some movie which I don’t remember the name of. This chicken run business is just what it sounds like and whether they are still doing it in the back- country roads it is still the same. Pick some Two AM weekend morning back road like New York 146 in my youth or after U.S. 87 took a ton of traffic away U.S. 9 near my house and let two guys start from zero and beat the other guy no matter what was in the road ahead, especially what might be on the road ahead. That was what we spent our late-night times as much as working the lovers’ lane wrestling matches we found ourselves in.

Sometimes this was for money, sometimes for the other guy’s car (a trade-off) and sometimes for a guy’s girl. That latter was the way Indian Jack swept me off my feet. He had heard that Moon was looking to race him and had heard that I was pretty so one Saturday afternoon when Moon and I were at the A&W for hamburgers Indian Jack came up in back of us in his souped up 1949 Hudson. Moon made the mistake of sort of, only sort of, guffawing when he saw Indian’s auto and that was enough for Indian to make the wager the winner takes the girl (in those days the girl was strictly window dressing in the decision department but truth be told I was very interested in big handsome Indian and got some funny feeling when the whole idea of being the prize swept over me-like I say truth to tell). Needless to say that Thelma was not happy about the matter but like I said no girl was asked about the matter and I never heard any girl refusing to be the bet, or not walking away with the winner if it was not her current guy. And needless to say Indian Jack blew Moon’s crate off the road (literally with me in the passenger seat).

When the dust settled and Indian Jack came back to claim his “prize” I got out of Moon’s busted up car, Thelma got out of Indian’s and I slid nice as could be beside him. I am not sure how Thelma got home or how Moon got his jalopy back home but I did see him several days later after school at the Dairy Queen talking to some freshman girl.  As for Indian Jack he was my first guy, my first serious sexual experience, and while he could be rough-handed he also could be gentle. It was only by way of an armed robbery of the Midnight Diner that broke us up since he was going up for two to five and my parents practically kept me locked up in the house until Senior Prom night when Wayne Sellars escorted me to my throne. I can still feel the wind in my hair when those cars were going full out, still turn my head when I see a classic car on the road or at a show.          

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Actions-Gary Cooper’s “Beau Geste” (1939)-A Film Review

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Actions-Gary Cooper’s “Beau Geste” (1939)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Fritz Taylor

Beau Geste, starring Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Robert Preston, Susan Hayward, 1939

As a kid I never wanted to be a French Foreign Legionnaire. Period. Never liked the idea of being out in the freaking hot desert with a bunch of dead-end guys whose only common trait is that they had to hightail it from some place-usually fast. In my neighborhood there were dead-beat guys hanging on the lamp posts in every street and I knew most of them, had been on a few capers which are better left unspoken about at this time since I have been clean for many years but some silly relative might this and putting two and two together try to blackmail me.

Okay, I wanted to be at times a cowboy defeating Indians (now Native Americans or indigenous peoples), a knight around King Arthur’s Roundtable, a swashbuckling pirate a la cinema’s Errol Flynn or a Three Musketeer but unlike the older boy Beau Geste character in the film under review of the same name never a Legionnaire. And not from any scruples like I developed later when I got political and would have seen this cohort of desperadoes as front-line agents of French imperialism, colonialism against the native peoples of the various colonies they lorded it over. If I had watched the film as a youth I would have been put off by those dry endless desert expanses and that was that. Now I would be put off more by the fact that the Arabs massed armies had no speaking parts, that the whole thinking beyond the plot-line was strictly from the Western and French perspectives.

That said the Foreign Legion exploits and desires just kind of an adventure backdrop to the front-end story which is what happened to an expensive piece of jewelry which went missing from its location in a box in the house, manor house really, of Lord and Lady Brandon in Merry Olde England. Problem: none of the three young charges, the Geste boys will own up to the theft, will claim responsibility. These three are had been orphans in the charge of Lady B. Lord B was some kind of spendthrift who would have sold the jewel to pay for his profligate ways leaving nothing except debt and craziness for Lady B. Next morning Beau, played by High Noon sheriff Gary Cooper, split for parts unknown. So did Digby, played by Music Man Robert Preston and subsequently the third pseudo-musketeer John, played by lost weekend Ray Milland. The former two had left confessions so who the hell knows who stole the freaking jewel.           

This is where the French Foreign Legion part makes a certain among of sense, at least for the guy who committed the heist. Get far away from manor houses, from England, from civilization. Wrong move though one late arriving John joins up and the three are in for a dime, in for a dollar. Enter a Sergeant Markov one hell of a bitch of lifer who has dreams of going up the food chain to officer land and medals by keeping his foot on the heads of all his underlings. Not a nice guy, no way. His idea of discipline, fun, was to send two guys who had deserted, and were captured back out into the desert without water to die. Even my sergeants in Vietnam would have been hard-pressed to top that for guys who were on the same side, tough as those latter guys were. Since all the Legionnaires were desperados and not out in the freaking desert  for the waters one guy started mutiny talk once they find out Sarge is going to be in charge.

Sarge was able to put down that mutiny with the help if you can believe this of Beau and John. Digby is in some other hell-hole fort miles away. Before this some stoolie told Sarge that one of the guys, Beau had a valuable jewel so he was dead meat if Sarge had his way. So no love lost between them and no love lost either when Beau and John refused to be the execution squad to murder the mutineers. Save by the bell any way since the restless “natives” started an attack just as all hell was breaking loose in the fort. The massed attacks came in waves and ultimately most of the soldiers in the fort were killed. This is the kind of guy Markov was though to create a feign for the enemy he had dead soldiers looking out on the attackers making it look like there were more guys than there were. Before the end of the attacks though Beau was killed.

This gave Sarge an opportunity to grab the jewel and use Beau as massed enemy rifle practice. John disagreed and Sarge went down for the count. John blew town, or rather hit the desert -with water in hand. Digby showed up with a troop of reinforcements from the other fort, finds the dead Beau, gives him a warrior’s send off and as he blows town, or rather hits the desert he runs into John and they are ready to head off except those pesky natives launch another attack and Digby falls on his sword. John is the only one left to go back to Brandon Manor and sad news Lady B. and with the jewel. Except there is no jewel, nothing but a fake jewel since Lady B. to keep the household running sold the damn thing years before. Beau had witnessed the transaction and to protect Lady B. from hubby and/or the law staged this schoolboy theft.  Strange film about strange guys turning into strange soldiers. Watch it though as the three amigo brothers go through their paces.