Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-The Songs of Tom Waits-Take Five

Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night, Christ The Heart Of Any Night-The Songs of Tom Waits-Take Five

From The Pen Of Guest Music Critic  Josh Breslin 

A YouTube film clip of Tom Waits performing Looking For The Heart Of Saturday Night

If you, as I do, every once in a while, every once in a while when the norms of the today’s bourgeois-driven push, you know grab goods, grab the dough, grab some shelter from the storm, the storm that these days comes down like a hard rain falling, to get ahead in this wicked old world have to step back and take stock, maybe listen to some words of wisdom, or words that help explain how you got into that mess then you have come to the right address. Okay, okay on that bourgeois-driven today thing  maybe going back further to Calvinist Puritan avenging angels times with John Winthrop and the Mayflower boys but you best ask Max Weber about that since he tried to hook the boys to the wheel of the capitalist profit, profit for you at the expense of me, system with the new dispensation coming out like hellfire from Geneva and points east and west. But you get the point.

If all that to-ing and fro-ing (nice touch, right) leaves you wondering where you fell off the edge, that edge city (edge city where you danced around with all the conventions of the days, danced around the get ahead world with blinkers on) where big cloud outrageous youthful dreams were dreamt and you took risks, damn did you take risks, thought nothing of that fact either, landed on your ass more than a few time but just picked yourself up and dusted your knees off and done stick around and listen up. Yeah, so if you are wondering,  have been pushed off your saintly wheels, yeah, pushed you off your sainted wheels, and gotten yourself  into some angst-ridden despair about where you went off that angel-driven dream of your youth, now faded, tattered, and half- forgotten(but only half, only half, the wisp of the dream, the eternal peace dream, the figuring out how to contain that fire, that wanting habits fire in your belly dream sisters and brothers), and need some solace (need some way to stop the fret counting the coffee cups that while away your life), need to reach back to roots (reach back to roots that the 1950s golden age of America kicked the ass out of to make us crave oneness, to forget about those old immigrant customs, made us forget that simple country blues, mountain breeze songs, cowboy ballads, Tex-Mex, Cajun Saturday night that make the people feel good times), reach back to the primeval forest maybe, put the headphones on some Tom Waits platter (oops, CD, YouTube selection, etc.- “platter” refers to a, ah, record, vinyl, put on a record player, hell, look it up in Wikipedia, okay) and remember what it was like when men and women sang just to sing the truth of what they saw and heard.

If the norms of don’t rock the boat (not in these uncertain times like any times in human existence were certain, damn, there was always something coming up from the first man-eating beast to the human race-eating nuclear bombs), the norms of keep your head down (that’s right brother, that’s right sister keep looking down, no left or rights for your placid world), keeping your head down being an art form now with appropriate ritual (that ritual looking more and more like the firing squad that took old Juan Romero’s life when he did bad those days out in Utah country), and excuses, because, well, because you don’t want to wind up like them (and fill in the blank of the “them,” usually dark, very dark like some deathless, starless night disturbing your sleep, begging, I swear, begging you to put that gun in full view on the table,   speaking some unknown language, maybe A-rab, maybe gibberish for all you know, moving furtively and stealthily against your good night) drive you crazy and you need, desperately need, to listen to those ancient drum beats, those primeval forest leave droppings maybe, that old time embedded DNA coda long lost to, oh yes, civilization, to some civilizing mission (think of that Mayflower gang or ask Max Weber), that spoke of the better angels of your nature when those angel dreams, half-forgotten but only half remember, ruled your days. Turn up the volume up another notch or two on that Tom Waits selection, maybe Jersey Girl or Brother, Can You Spare A Dime (can you?), Hold On, or Gunn Street Girl.

If you need to hear things, just to sort things out, just to recapture that angel-edge, recapture the time when you did no fear, you and everybody else’s sisters and brothers, that thing you build and from which you now should run, recapture that child-like wonder that made you come alive, made you think about from whence you came and how a turn, a slight turn this way or that, could have landed you on the wrong side. And I have the list of brothers and sisters who took that wrong road, when he wound up face down in some dusty back road arroyo down Sonora way when the deal went bust or when she, maybe a little kinky for all I know, decided that she would try a needle and a spoon, I swear, or she swore just for kicks and she wound up in Madame LaRue’s whorehouse working that bed to perdition, hey, sweet dreams baby I tried to tell you when you play with fire, watch out.

So if you need to sort things out about boozers (and about titanic booze-crazed struggles in barrooms, on beaches, in the back seats of cars, lost in the mist of time down some crazed midnight, hell, four in the morning, penniless, cab fare-less night), losers (those who have lost their way, gotten it taken away from them like some maiden virginity), those who never had anything but lost, not those who never had a way to be lost, dopesters inhaling, in solitary hotel rooms among junkie brethren, gathering a needle and spoon in some subterranean dank cellar, down in dark alleys jack-rolling some poor drunk stiff out of his room rent for kicks (how uncool to drink low-shelf whiskeys or rotgut wines hell the guy deserved to be rolled, should feel lucky he got away with just a flipped wallet), out in nighttime canyons flame blaring off the walls, the seven seas of chemical dust, mainly blotter, maybe peyote (the sweet dreams of ten million years of ghost warriors working the canyon walls flickering against the campfire flames) if that earth angel connection comes through (Aunt Sally, always, some Aunt Sally coming up the stairs to ease the pain, to make one feel, no, not feel, better than any AMA doctor without a prescription pad), creating visions of long lost tribes trying, trying like hell, to get “connected,” connected in the campfire shadow night, hipsters (all dressed in black, mary mack dressed in black, speeding, speaking be-bop this and be-bop that to stay in fashion, hustling, always hustle, maybe pimping some street urchin, maybe cracking some guy’s head to create a “new world order” of the malignant, always moving), fallen sisters (sisters of mercy, sisters who need mercy, sisters who were mercifully made fallen in some mad dash night, merciful sister feed me, feed me good), midnight sifters (lifting in no particular order hubcaps, tires, wrenches, jacks, an occasional gem, some cheap jewelry in wrong neighborhoods, some paintings or whatever is not saleable left in some sneak back alley, it is the sifting that counts), grifters (hey, buddy watch this, now you see it, now you don’t, now you don’t see your long gone John dough, and Mister three card Monte long gone too ), drifters (here today gone tomorrow with or without dough, to Winnemucca, Ogden, Fresno, Frisco town, name your town, name your poison and the great big blue seas washing you clean out into the Japans ), the drift-less (cramped into one room hovels, shelters, seedy rooming houses afraid to stay in-doors or to go outside, afraid of the “them” too, afraid to be washed clean, angel clean), and small-time grafters (the ten-percent guys, failed insurance men, repo artists, bounty hunters, press agents, personal trainers, need I go on). You know where to look, right.

If you need to be refreshed on the subject of hoboes, bums, tramps (and remind me sometime to draw the distinction, the very real and acknowledged distinction between those three afore –mentioned classes of brethren once told to me by a forlorn grand master hobo, a guy down on his luck moving downward to bum), out in the railroad jungles in some Los Angeles ravine, some Gallup, New Mexico Southern Pacific  trestle (the old SP the only way to travel out west if you want to get west), some Hoboken broken down pier (ha, shades of the last page of Jack Kerouac’s classic), the fallen (fallen outside the gates of Eden, or, hell, inside too), those who want to fall (and let god figure out who made who fall, okay), Spanish Johnnies (slicked back black hair, tee shirt, shiv, cigarette butt hanging from a parted lip, belt buckle ready for action, leering, leering at that girl over there, some gringa for a change of pace, maybe your girl but watch out for that shiv, the bastard), stale cigarette butts (from Spanish Johnnie and all the johnnies, Camels, Luckies, no filters, no way), whiskey-soaked barroom floors (and whiskey-soaked drunks to mop the damn place up, for drinks and donuts, maybe just for the drinks), loners (jesus, books, big academic books with great pedigrees could be written on that subject so let’s just pass by), the lonely (ditto loners), sad sacks (kindred, one hundred times kindred to the loners and the lonely but not worthy of study, academic study anyway), the sad (encompassing all of the above) and others at the margins of society, the whole fellahin world, then Tom Waits is your stop.

Tom Waits is, frankly, an acquired taste, one listen will not do, one song will not do, but listen to a whole record (CD okay) and you won’t want to turn the thing off, high praise in anyone’s book, so a taste well worth acquiring as he storms heaven in words, in thought-out words, in cribbed, cramped, crumbled words, to express the pain, angst and anguish of modern living, yes, modern living, looking for busted black-hearted angels (who left him short one night in some unnamed, maybe nameless, gin mill), for girls with Monroe hips (swaying wickedly in the dead air night, and flaming desire, hell lust, getting kicked out of proper small town hells (by descendants of those aforementioned Mayflower boys promising the world for one forbidden night), get real, and left for dead with cigar wrapping rings, for the desperate out in forsaken woods who need to hold on to something, and for all the misbegotten. 

Tom Waits gives voice in song, a big task, to the kind of characters that peopled Nelson Algren’s novels (The Last Carousel, Neon Wilderness, Walk on the Wild Side, and The Man with the Golden Arm). The, frankly, white trash Dove Linkhorns of the world, genetically broken before they begin, broken before they hit these shores (their forbears thrown out of Europe for venal crimes and lusts, damn them, the master-less men and women, ask old Max about them too), having been chased out, cast out of Europe, or some such place. In short, the people who do not make revolutions, those revolutions we keep hearing and reading about, the wretched of the earth and their kin, far from it, but those who surely, and desperately could use one. If, additionally, you need a primordial grizzled gravelly voice to attune your ear and occasional dissonant instrumentation to round out the picture go no further. Finally, if you need someone who “feels your pain” for his characters you are home. Keep looking for the heart of Saturday night, Brother, keep looking.

*

Songs To While Away The Resistance By-Back When We Tried To Turn The World Upside Down-From The Doors

Songs To While Away The Resistance By-Back When We Tried To Turn The World Upside Down-From The Doors

Frank Jackman comment September 2017:

A while back, maybe a half a decade ago now, I started a series in this space that I presented under the headline Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By where I posted some songs, you know, The Internationale, Which Side Are You On?, Viva La Quince Brigada, Solidarity Forever and others like Deportee, Where Have All The Flowers Gone, Blowin’ In The Wind, This Land Is Your Land  while not as directly political had their hearts in the right place, that I thought would help get us through the “dog days” of the struggle for our socialist future. Those “dog days” in America anyway, depending on what leftist political perspective drove your imagination could have gone back as far as the late 1960s and early 1970s when all things were possible and the smell of revolution could be whiffed in the air for a while before we were defeated, or maybe later when all abandoned hope for the least bit of social justice in the lean, vicious, downtrodden Reagan years of unblessed memory or later still around the time of the great world- historic defeats of the international working class in East Europe and the former Soviet Union which left us with an unmatched arrogant unipolar imperialist world. That one pole being the United States, the “heart of the beast” from which we work. Whatever your personal benchmark they were nevertheless if you had the least bit of political savvy clearly dog days.        

I began posting these songs at a time, 2009, when it was touch and go whether there would be some kind of massive uprising against the economic royalists (later chastised under the popular sobriquet “the one-percent”) who had just dealt the world a blow to the head through their economic machinations in what is now called the Great Recession of 2008. Subsequently, while there were momentary uprisings, the Arab Spring which got its start in Tunisia and Egypt and enflamed most of the Middle East one way or another, here in America the defensive uprising of the public workers in Wisconsin and later the quick-moving although ephemeral Occupy movement, and the uprising in Greece, Spain and elsewhere in Europe in response to the “belt-tightening demanded by international financial institutions to name a few, the response from the American and world working classes has for lots of reasons if anything further entrenched those interests.

So as the “dog days” continue now under the extreme retro Trump administration I have resumed the series. I do not vouch for the political thrust of the songs selected; for the most part they are done by pacifists, social democrats, hell, even just plain old ordinary democrats. And, occasionally, a communist, although hard communist musicians have historically been scarce on the ground. Thus, here we have a regular "popular front" on the music scene. While this kind of formation would mean political death for any serious revolutionary upheaval and would not be acceptable for our political prospects it will suffice for our purposes here. I like to invite others to make additional comments on certain pivotal songs, groups and artists and here is one by my old friend Josh Breslin, whom I met out in California during the heyday of the summer of love 1967, that reflects those many possibilities to “turn the world upside down” back in the 1960s and early 1970s before the “night of the long knives” set in:

WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

My old friend from the Summer of Love, 1967 days, Peter Paul Markin, always used to make a point then of answering, or rather arguing which tells a lot about the kind of guy he was when he got his political hind legs up with anybody who tried to tell him back in the day that “music is the revolution.”  Strangely when I first met him in San Francisco that summer you would have been hard-pressed to tell him that was not the case but after a few hit on the head by the coppers, a tour of duty in the military at the height of the Vietnam War, and what was happening to other political types trying to change the world for the better like the Black Panthers he got “religion,” or at least he got that music as the agency of social change idea out of his head.  Me, well, I was (and am not) as political as Markin was so that I neither got drowned in the counter-culture where music was a central cementing act, nor did I  have anything that happened subsequently that would have given me Markin’s epiphany.

I would listen half-attentively (a condition aided by being “stoned” a lot of the time) when such conversations erupted and Markin drilled his position. That position meaning, of course that contrary to the proponents (including many mutual friends who acted out on that idea and got burned by the flame, some dropping out, some going back to academia, some left by the wayside and who are maybe still wandering) that eight or ten Give Peace A Chance, Kumbaya, Woodstock songs would not do the trick, would not change this nasty, brutish, old short-life world into the garden, into some pre-lapsarian  Eden. Meaning that the gathering of youth nation unto itself out in places like Woodstock, Golden Gate Park, Monterrey, hell, the Boston Common, or even once word trickled down the way the word has always trickled down to the sticks once the next new thing gets a workout, Olde Saco Park, in the town up in Maine where I grew up would not feed on itself and grow to such a critical mass that the quite nameable enemies of good, kindness starting with one Lyndon Johnson and one Richard M. Nixon and working down to the go-fers and hangers-on, and leave us alone would sulk off somewhere, defeated or at least defanged.

Many a night, many a dope-blistered night before some seawall ocean front Pacific Coast campfire I would listen to Markin blast forth against that stuff, against that silliness. As for me, I was too “into the moment,” too into finding weed, hemp, mary jane and too into finding some fetching women to share it with to get caught up in some nebulous ideological struggle. It was only later, after the music died, after rock and roll turned in on itself, turned into some exotic fad of the exiles on Main Street that I began to think through the implications of what Markin, and the guys on the other side, were arguing about.

Now it makes perfect sense that music, or any mere cultural expression standing alone, would be unable to carry enough weight to turn us back to the garden (I won’t use that “pre-lapsarian’ again to avoid showing my, and Markin’s, high Roman Catholic up-bringing and muddy what I want to say which is quite secular). I guess that I would err on the side of the “angels” and at least wish that we could have carried the day against the monsters of the American imperium we confronted back in the day. (Although I had a draft deferment due to a serious physical condition, not helped by the “street” dope I was consuming by the way, I supported, and something vehemently and with some sense of organization, a lot of the political stuff Markin was knee deep into, especially Panther defense when we lived in Oakland and all hell was raining down on the brothers and sisters.)                  

Thinking about what a big deal was made of such arguments recently (arguments carried deep into the night, deep in smoke dream nights, and sometimes as the blue–pink dawn came rising up to smite our dreams) I thought back to my own musical appreciations. In my jaded youth (if one could be jaded in Podunk Olde Saco, although more than one parent and more than one teacher called me “beatnik” back then whatever that meant to them) I developed an ear for roots music, whether I was conscious of that fact or not. Perhaps it was some off-shoot DNA thing since my people on my mother’s side (nee LeBlanc) were French-Canadian which had a deep folk heritage both up north and here although such music was not played in the house, a house like a lot of other ethnics where in the 1950s everybody wanted to be vanilla American (Markin mentioned that same thing about his Irish-etched parents). So it initially started as a reaction to my parents’ music, the music that got them through the Great Depression of the 1930s and later waiting for other shoe to drop (either in Normandy where my father first went to Europe under some very trying conditions or at home waiting in Olde Saco), and that became a habit, a wafting through the radio of my childhood home habit. You know who I mean Frank (Sinatra for the heathens), Harry James, the Andrews Sisters, Peggy Lee, Doris Day and the like. Or, maybe, and this is something that I have come closer to believing was the catalyst along with the DNA stuff I already mentioned, my father’s very real roots in the Saturday night mountain barn dance, fiddles blazing, music of his growing up poor down in Appalachia. (Again such music except every once in a while Hank Williams who I didn’t know about at the time was not played in the house either. Too “square” I guess.) 

The origin of my immersion into roots music first centered on the blues, country and city with the likes of Son House(and that raspy, boozy country voice on Death Letter Blues), Skip James ( I went nuts over that voice first heard after he had been “discovered” at the Newport Folk Festival I think in 1963 when he sang I’d Rather Be The Devil Than Be That Woman’s Man on the radio after I had just broken up with some devil woman, read girl), Mississippi John Hurt (that clear guitar, simple lyrics on Creole Belle), Muddy Waters (yes, Mannish-Boy ), Howlin’ Wolf ( I again went nuts when I heard his righteous Little Red Rooster  although I had heard the Stones version first, a version originally banned in Boston) and Elmore James ( his Dust My Broom version of the old Robert Johnson tune I used to argue was the “beginning” of rock and roll to anybody who would listen). Then early rock and roll, you know the rockabillies and R&B crowd, Elvis (stuff like One Night With You, Jailhouse Rock and the like before he died in about 1958 or whatever happened to him when he started making stupid movies that mocked his great talent making him look foolish and which various girlfriends of the time forced me to go see at the old Majestic Theater in downtown Olde Saco), Jerry Lee (his High School Confidential, the film song, with him flailing away at the piano in the back of a flat-bed truck blew me away  although the film was a bust, as was the girl I saw it with), Chuck (yeah, when he declared to a candid  world that while we all gave due homage to classical music in school Mister Beethoven better move on over with Roll Over Beethoven), Roy (Roy the boy with that big falsetto voice crooning out Running Scared, whoa), Big Joe (and that Shake, Rattle and Roll which I at one point also argued was the “beginning” of rock and roll, okay, I liked to argue those fine points)   and Ike Turner (who I ultimately settled on with his Rocket 88 as that mythical beginning of rock and roll) Then later, with the folk revival of the early 1960’s, the folk music minute before the British invasion took a lot of the air out of that kind of music, especially the protest to high heaven sort, Bob Dylan (even a so-so political guy like me, maybe less than so-so then before all hell broke loose and we had to choose sides loved Blowin’ in the Wind), Dave Von Ronk (and that raspy old voice, although was that old then sing Fair And Tender Ladies  one of the first folk songs I remember hearing) Joan Baez (and that long ironed-hair singing that big soprano on those Child ballads), etc.

I am, and have always been after that Podunk growing up experience a city boy, and an Eastern city boy at that. Meaning rootless or not meaningfully or consciously rooted in any of the niches mentioned above. Nevertheless, over time I have come to appreciate many more forms of roots music than in my youth. Cajun, Tex-Mex, old time dust bowl ballads a la Woody Guthrie, cowboy stuff with the likes of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, Carter Family-etched mountain music (paying final conscious tribute to the mountain DNA in my bones) and so on.

All those genres are easily classified as roots music but I recall one time driving Markin crazy, driving him to closet me with the “music is the revolution” heads he fretfully argued against when I mentioned in passing that The Doors, then in their high holy mantra shamanic phase with The End and When The Music’s Over epitomized roots music. That hurt me to the quick, a momentary hurt then, but thinking about it more recently Markin was totally off base in his remarks.

The Doors are roots music? Well, yes, in the sense that one of the branches of rock and roll derived from early rhythm and blues and in the special case of Jim Morrison, leader of The Doors, the attempt to musically explore the shamanic elements in the Western American Native- American culture that drove the beat of many of his trance-like songs like The End. More than one rock critic, professional rock critic, has argued that on their good nights when the dope and booze were flowing, Morrison was in high trance, and they were fired up The Doors were the best rock and roll band ever created. Those critics will get no argument here, and it is not a far stretch to classify their efforts as in the great American roots tradition.  I argued then and will argue here almost fifty years later when that original statement of mine was more prophetic The Doors put together all the stuff rock critics in one hundred years will be dusting off when they want to examine what it was like when men (and women, think Bonnie Raitt, Wanda Jackson, et. al) played rock and roll, played the people’s music, played to respond to a deep-seeded need of the people before them, for keeps.

So where does Jim Morrison fit in an icon of the 1960s if he was not some new age latter day cultural Lenin/Trotsky. Some icon that Markin could have latched onto.  Jim was part of the trinity, the “J” trinity for the superstitious – Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix who lived fast, lived way too fast, and died young. The slogan of the day (or hour) – “Drugs, sex, and rock and roll.” And we liked that idea however you wanted to mix it up. Then.

Their deaths were part of the price we felt we had to pay if we were going to be free. And be creative. Even the most political among us, including Markin in his higher moments (you figure out what that “higher,” means since you are bright people) felt those cultural winds blowing across the continent and counted those who espoused this alternative vision as part of the chosen. The righteous headed to the “promise land.” Unfortunately those who believed that we could have a far-reaching positive cultural change via music or “dropping out” without a huge societal political change proved to be wrong long ago. But, these were still our people.

Know this as well if you are keeping score. Whatever excesses were committed by our generation and there were many, many made by the generation that came of political and cultural age in the early 1960s, the generation I call the generation of ’68 to signify its important and decisive year internationally, were mainly made out of ignorance and foolishness. Our opponents, exemplified by outlaw big cowboy President Lyndon B. Johnson and one Richard Milhous Nixon, President of the United States and common criminal, and their minions like J. Edgar Hoover, Mayor Richard Daley and Hubert Humphrey spent every day of their lives as a matter of conscious, deliberate policy raining hell down on the peoples of the world, the minorities in this country, and anyone else who got in their way. Forty plus years of “cultural wars” in revenge by their protégés, hangers-on and now their descendants in Trump land has been a heavy price to pay for our youthful errors. And Markin would surely have endorsed this sentiment. Enough. 

In Honor Of Those Who Cannot Boil Water-In The Midst Of The Things Culinary Craze-Too Many Cooks Spoil The Broth -“Love’s Kitchen” (2011)-A Film Review

In Honor Of Those Who Cannot Boil Water-In The Midst Of The Things Culinary Craze-Too Many Cooks Spoil The Broth -“Love’s Kitchen” (2011)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Lance Lawrence

Love’s Kitchen, starring Claire Forlani, Dougray Scott, 2011 

Sometimes a film reviewer like me knows exactly why he or she gets an assignment. And I can tell you exactly why since under site editor Greg Green we have been encouraged to give a little “inside scoop” stuff about the workings of the on-line publishing business. My tale is simple. I happened to mention in response to I think fellow critic Sarah Lemoyne who was talking about the incredible increase in all things culinary both on-line and in the theaters that in all things culinary I could not boil water. Somehow Greg found out about my withered statement and called me in to tell me that I was the primo candidate to do the British film under review. Love’s Kitchen. Although Greg himself thought along with many of the British critics who panned the film this was a “turkey,” pun intended, he wanted to ride the culinary interest wave and have the film reviewed, reviewed by a guy who “kitchen sink” eats prepared foods a lot.  

Sarah, her mentor Seth Garth and I sat through this thing and were scratching our heads to make sense of it other than to cash in on the cheap in the culinary craze bonanza. See what this film is really about is not food, Jesus, not English food like Welsh rarebit which even I draw the line at, but the twelve millionth reincarnation of the “boy-meets-girl trope that Hollywood and now the whole cinematic world has latched onto when you have a turkey that leaves people scratching their heads. That interplay has saved more than one film although not this one.

Here is why. Rising chef in the British culinary world Rob Haley, you have probably if you have been to London lately since one of his gastropubs that are seemingly popping up in every corner of the kingdom, played by Dougray Scott, lost his wife to a fatal automobile accident. That event crushed him (and his coming of age daughter) and he wound up working in some dung heap serving kippers and other such swill to the unknowing clientele. Not in obscurity though since his efforts were panned by a well-known American food critic Kate Templeton, you have probably read her searing and truculent reviews yourself or seen her as the beautiful winsome judge on some Food Channel production, before you got snagged into this lemon. Eventually our boy Rob snapped out of his morass and began a reclamation project on an old pub that he purchased out in the English boondocks. For those who thought this would be a place to learn how to cook or get a tip on spices from a real pro forget it since fixing up the pub to be ready for the carriage trade is the high point of the culinary intrusion.

Back to the plot. At first things don’t go well since Rob refuses to let any critic within a mile of the place. Enter Kate Templeton, Rob’s arch-enemy from that thumbs down review who immediately forms a pole of attraction to the lonely Rob. Here is what I didn’t know about Kate though she was the daughter not only of an American mother but of Sir Max Templeton, yes, that Max Templeton who before knighthood, before OBE time was ransacking taking no prisoners every home in America who had any young women within. Maxie had met his soon to be wife in the American wild 1960s be-bop night of “drugs, sex and rock and roll” of which he was a master of all three. For those who don’t remember Maxie or are too young go on YouTube to see what it was like when men and women played rock roll for keeps. Google Little Red Rooster the Chicago blues tune written by Willie Dixon and charted by Howlin’ Wolf which Maxie and the boys covered and made the first of several big hits on. That was then though now Maxie, Sir Maxie, is a cranky, creepy, crusty, cruller of a man who wants nothing but calm and contentment. Certainly not the crowd that would gather at a top-notch restaurant out in the English country side. He will make trouble for Rob through a willing confederate smitten by Kate but mainly act as a side-show of remorse for abandoning Kate as a child.

Pretty far removed from recipes for crepes or casseroles, right. It only gets worse as Kate beguiles Rob’s daughter and then on cue beguiles her father. Funny, what gets her home, what gets her under her silk sheets with the man he had to show her the proper way to dice carrots that one would think even an American college professor of culinary studies would know how to do before entering the lists as a critic is her shining light review of his menu. So be it. Once the satin sheets are messed as also on cue there is a moment’s misunderstanding when Kate unbeknownst to her has to take the heart for her father’ s hatchet-handed attempts to shut the joint down. Not to worry remorseful Maxie drops the complaints, his agent is gone to ground and Rob hurries off to the arms of the gallant Kate. If you were looking to see what it was like when men and women keep kitchen for keeps look elsewhere.        

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

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

DVD Review

By Associate Film Critic Alden Riley

Jailhouse Rock, starring Elvis Presley, Judy Tyler, 1957

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All That Glitters Is Not Gold-Sean Connery’s 007-“Goldfinger” (1964)- A Film Review

All That Glitters Is Not Gold-Sean Connery’s 007-“Goldfinger” (1964)- A Film Review

DVD Review

By Guest Film Critic Si Lannon  

Goldfinger, starring Sean Connery, Honor Blackman, Gert Frobe, based on the James Bond character by British spy thriller novelist Ian Fleming, 1964

I have only myself to blame for this one, for this review of Goldfinger after having reviewed the first film in the James Bond 007 series Doctor No based on master spy thriller novelist Ian Fleming’s iconic character. I find myself, as on other recent occasions, going on what my old friend and colleague Sam Lowell called a “run.” That is grabbing everything one can in a series on some subject, here the Sean Connery James Bond films, and playing out your hand. I suppose I could shift the blame and lay my new tendency on that old curmudgeon Sam since he is notorious in film critic circles for going crazy when he goes on a “run.” I will nevertheless take full credit/blame here since what these Bond films evoke in memories of 1960s drive-in theater antics-and sexual longings of course. [For a recent example of his influence although he is no longer in charge of day to day operations but now working under the title of film critic emeritus Sam has been on something of a tear having already done five or six reviewing 1950s B-film noirs from the ten film Hammer Production series. Pete Markin]        

When I reviewed Doctor No, the first Bond film by Connery, there was a great deal of anticipation built up by the advertising campaign promoting the film. Especially of the sexy young women who would be catnip for Bond. That was one draw although not the biggest one. The biggest one was to see that film at the local drive-in theater where, well, where the real live girls were. I have already mentioned our poor boy working-class roots where we were always seeking some small time con/scam to do things for little money from guys who had no serious dough. For the drive-in experience that was in the days before the theater owners got wise and started charging by the carload when they charged single admissions to load up the car with say six guys and only have maybe three showing (with the other guys in the trunk or down on the backseat floor).

That same scam was done once again in order to see this Goldfinger film which was if anything more hyped up that the initial offering since part of the draw was showing a gold-plated young woman who got caught in the deadly Midas touch. But the “real deal” was that we were now older and less shy about “hitting” on the young women who were hanging out at the well-known area in back of the refreshment stand who also came through in the same carload manner that we did. So the innocence of the first film gave way to more foggy windshields, sighs (you know what I mean) and such.                

Thus this recent viewing of Goldfinger was the first time I actually saw the film all the way through. Needless to say I didn’t remember most of what happened, how could I, except that mesmerizing gold-painted young woman and that great lead-in title song by Shirley Bassey. Here’s the play this time around. In the day (before 1971) when the benchmark dollar and pound were pegged to the price of gold the British Treasury Board of Governors was worried about controlling the flow of that precious metal and efforts by rogue elements like the Auric Goldfinger of the title to corner the market. So 007 James Bond was on the case to figure out how this character was getting his gold around the various international restrictions. The chase was on but not before our boy James gets a very rude awakening (literally) finding a young woman he was having a quick roll in the hay with all gold-plated as a warning signal for him to back off. (Forgetting that such as desecration would only bestir our man to greater revengeful deeds especially after that gal’s vengeance seeking sister laid her head down trying to off the bastard.)        

Naturally Bond is ready for anything including that attempt by the dead woman’s sister to kill Goldfinger and gum up the works. What Goldfinger was up to in collusion with the nasty Red Chinese (in the days when the People’s Republic was called Red China in Western terminology) who provided men and technology in aid of Goldfinger’s nefarious plan was to neutralize the gold at Fort Knox and make a killing on the steeply increased value of his gold holdings not by stealing it but by making it unusable by making it radioactive-nice touch, right. James of course learns of this plan while he was a prisoner of the greedy Goldfinger. The idea was to have Goldfinger’s confederate Pussy Galore (a very suggestive name and the subject of lots of sexual jokes among the corner boys in my neighborhood hang-out spots), played by Honor Blackman, and her all-female team of pilots spray deadly gas in the area knocking out everybody. Then blowing the gate at Fort Knox unobstructed and putting a radioactive devise in the vault with all the gold bars making them useless as a currency. Goldfinger’s whole plan went asunder when handsome Johnny James Bond snagged Pussy and made her his ally faking the deadly spray and leaving the American troops to fight off the Chinese invaders (sound familiar). In the end Goldfinger lost his life as expected by trying to go mano a mano with Bond. Bond and Pussy go under the sheets once again as the film ends. You know I am glad based on this story line that I spent my first time dealing with this film fogging up car windshields-okay,       

Once Again-For the Umpteenth Time There Really Is No Honor Among Thieves -Just Ask Robert Mitchum A Guy Who Should Know-Jane Greer And Robert Mitchum’s “The Big Steal” (1949)-A Film Review

Once Again-For the Umpteenth Time There Really Is No Honor Among Thieves -Just Ask Robert Mitchum A Guy Who Should Know-Jane Greer And Robert Mitchum’s “The Big Steal” (1949)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

The Big Steal, starring Jane Greer, Robetr Micthum, William Bendix, 1949

This film review of The Big Steal, an encore performance by Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum who lighted the screen on fire in their dance of death in the film adaptation of Out Of The Past (along with a young Kirk Douglas as the fall guy, or at least the guy who fell-first) was supposed to go to Seth Garth who did the original review of the latter film and was to compare the energies of the two filmed performances. After we, Seth is something like my mentor even though I have my by-line now after taking down old-time film reviewer Sam Lowell a peg or two, and site manager Greg Green watched this film one evening Seth told us that perhaps I was better able to write this one since he would be in mourning for his lost youth when this pair were as likely to kill each other as to go under what he called “the silky sheets” and what I called having sex. Seth said he knew that Jane and Robert had gone soft after their last set-to and while he liked this film, he had some psychological energy committed to their being star-crossed lovers for eternity.     

I could see what he meant if I didn’t fully understand why since he has written tons of reviews of films where things got switched up in the sequels or another film. But I liked the film, liked the fast-paced energy that seems to be missing in many of today’s action-adventure pseudo-noir productions. Before I go on though Seth insists that I explain quickly what he couldn’t face doing the review. Simply put in that Old Of The Past  which also passed through sunny Mexico as here Jane and Robert became lovers, lovers who should have gotten the hell out of Dodge when old Kirk came looking for them, came wondering a little why he was the fall guy, why he big-time mobster was made to look like a chump when they fled without him getting what he wanted from Robert whom he hired to track Jane down and bring her back to Reno. But the biggest problem was that Seth couldn’t get over Jane’s outstanding performance there as a gun-simple femme fatale who shot first and asked questions later.

The reader does not have worry about Jane here as sedate and street smart Joan shooting every guy in sight since while she starts out not trusting Duke, yeah, Duke Halliday, you may have seen the headline where he got robbed of an Army payroll and looked to be the patsy to take the fall. He will get well by recovering the dough and meting out a little rough plebian justice while doing so. See the Army, the Army in the person of an officer named Bill Bendix who had spent a career cleaning up the Army’s messes, thought that Duke, beautiful broad-shouldered and barren-chested Duke with the jutted jaw that drove my mother crazy when she used to go to the Saturday matinees to see Robert Mitchum what she called strut his stuff, had been part of the scam, had been involved in the payroll robbery.  

That premise sets everything else in motion down sunny Mexico way where Duke to save his hide has gone looking for the bad guys who did him wrong. Mainly a guy named Jim Fiske who from one report was from one of the branches of the 19^th century robber baron Fiske family and so an armed robbery or two didn’t seem that out of the ordinary. This Fiske though was a slippery character and led Duke a merry chase. Had led dear Joan up a tree as well with some scam he ran on her to get some dough for whatever reason con artists use to grab dough. So that sets up the paring of Duke and Joan looking to get a little rough justice in the world on their own. Set them off across Mexico in pursuit of Fiske in the meantime and dodging and being followed by Bill Bendix. See Fiske is looking to get well by unloading his cash on a fence out in some isolated desert who will give him a percentage of the value no questions asked and that would be that.

Here is where the “no honor among thieves comes in.” Duke was slated to be the fall guy, the guy to take the big step-off if necessary, since Bill Bendix was in cahoots with Fiske. Nice right. Nicer still is that the two confederates didn’t trust each other and rightfully so since hard-pressed Bill facing some cheapjack pension and nothing more wanted the whole bundle for himself. As if Brother Fiske. No go, Joe. After he blasted Fiske Duke and he tussled, and he lost. And Duke and milady Joan walk off into the sunset holding hands. That has to be better than Robert taking two or three quick gun-simple slugs from an irate Jane when she realized that Robert has called copper on her in Out Of The Past. Still a good film although looking at a photograph from that film Seth showed me after I took this assignment when he wanted to show why he didn’t want of Ms. Greer looking very sexily provocative makes me see his point a little better.

Once Again, The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-Bette Davis’ The Golden Arrow” (1936)-A Film Review

Once Again, The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-Bette Davis’ The Golden Arrow” (1936)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon 

The Golden Arrow, starring Bette Davis, George Brent, 1936

Of course when I mention as in the title above Bette Davis’ eyes I am not considering the song made famous by Kim Carnes Bette Davis Eyes but the real Bette Davis and she is the girl with those dewy eyes I am referring to. Here is something funny, actually something of a confession for a film critic who has in his long career reviewed many films like the one under review here The Golden Arrow, I had never seen or certainly I do not remember from childhood a Bette Davis movie before I hear folk-singer/songwriter Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row in 1965 where he sang as part of the lyrics “and puts her hands in her back pockets Bette Davis-style” and that got me intrigued about her old time black and white movies appeal (although whether she ever really put her hands in her back pockets Bette Davis-style is still an open question). That interest got me doing as my old friend and colleague endlessly reminds when I follow his lead a “run” on her films most notably All About Eve. It also got me interested in her biography enough to find out that she was born in Lowell, Ma about fifty miles from where Sam Lowell grew up the same town where Jack Kerouac came of age (and fled) before making his big dent on his (and my) generations with the timeless On The Road which Sam, book critic Zack James and I have spent the last few month commemorating the 60^th anniversary of with various appreciations. Must be something about that mill-town Merrimack River cascading down the rushes.            

But enough of biography and old-time lyrical references except to mention that looking back in my files (both old-time hard copy and work processor saved which tells the tale of how long I have been writing this stuff for a living) I did a number of reviews, six, of Bette Davis movies back in 1965-1966 when I was doing that “run” and have not done anymore since then until now. The “now” a result of Sam Lowell in his role of film critic emeritus (he hypes it up to film editor but I will let that pass out of our old-time friendship) deciding that he didn’t want to review the assigned by Pete Markin The Golden Arrow to concentrate on finishing up his “run” on a series of B-film noir movies produced in the 1950s by the English Hammer Production Company and foisted the assignment on me. I am not complaining or only a little but I have a feeling that I will also be on a “run” with Ms. Davis’ long list of screen credits.    

Mention of a long and illustrious career brings the inevitable question of what was good and what was not in that career. I have long ago under Sam Lowell’s guidance I will admit given up on understanding why perfectly good actors, and Ms. Davis is one with two Oscars and ten nominations up her sleeve, succumb to less worthy film scripts. Not that The Golden Arrow is horrible quite the contrary it is a nice slim little romantic comedy but it hardly let’s Ms. Davis show her stuff, show those Bette Davis eyes to good effect.

I might as well give you, as Sam Lowell made a long career out of saying, “the skinny” on this slender piece and you decide. Daisy, the role played by Ms. Davis, is a high-end society heiress who is whiling away the hours until the next best thing comes along avoiding newspaper reporters like the plague, like seven plagues. Along comes “penny a word” down at the heels reporter Johnny Jones, played by George Brent last seen in this space when my associate Alden Riley reviewed In This Our Life when the affable Brent was given the heave-ho no go engagement by Ms. Davis so that she could run off with her sister’s husband, to try for an interview under mistaken circumstances.

Despite Johnny’s horrible but honorable profession and his personal ethics (he will not publish the results of their conversation) Daisy likes him. Likes him enough that she proposes a deal-they get married so she can avoid the paparazzi and gold-diggers after her so-called fortune and he can write that great American novel he had in him and which is thwarted by his struggle for daily bread working the newspaper gag. He buys in. Except he doesn’t buy into Daisy’s board of directors who want to control his actions. Rebellion takes the form of dating another high society dame to fend off the feelings he has for Daisy. Daisy who seemed indifferent suddenly realizes that she loves the poor bugger penniless reporter. What to do. Well what to do was using her feminine wiles to get him jealous. And in the end when Johnny finds out that his Miss Daisy is not rich but just employed an advertising ploy to sell soap they unite and head off into the sunset. If you only watch one Bette Davis film this is not the one. After re-watching that All About Eve that I had reviewed many years ago watch that. If you have time on your hands then watch this one.                

After Charlottesvile -The Greensboro Massacre 1979- Never Forget

After Charlottesvile -The Greensboro Massacre 1979- Never Forget

A YouTube film clip about the events of that day in 1979 when right wing thugs in Greensboro, North Carolina murdered five communist workers.

COMMENTARY

This is a repost of last year's commemorative commentary. The struggle remains the same.


REMEMBER SLAIN LABOR MILITANTS-CESAR CAUCE, MICHAEL NATHAN, BILL SAMPSON SANDI SMITH AND JIM WALLER





For those too young to remember or who unfortunately have forgotten the incident commemorated here this is a capsule summary of what occurred on that bloody day:

On November 3, 1979 in Greensboro, North Carolina, five anti-racist activists and union organizers, supporters of the Communist Workers Party (CWP), were fatally gunned down by Ku Klux Klan and Nazi fascists. Nine carloads of Klansmen and Nazis drove up to a black housing project-the gathering place for an anti-Klan march organized by the CWP. In broad daylight, the fascists pulled out their weapons and unleashed an 88-second fusillade that was captured on television cameras. They then drove off, leaving the dead and dying in pools of blood. From the outset, the Klan/Nazi killers were aided and abetted by the government, from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent who helped train the killers and plot the assassination to the "former" FBI informer who rode shotgun in the motorcade of death and the Greensboro cop who brought up the rear. The five militants listed above died as a result. The Greensboro Klan/Nazis literally got away with murder, acquitted twice by all-white juries.

This writer has recently been raked over the coals by some leftists who were appalled that he called for a no free speech platform for Nazis and fascists (see below) and argued that labor should mobilize its forces and run these vermin off the streets whenever they raise their heads. Despite recent efforts to blur the lines of the heinous nature of and political motivation for these murders in Greensboro by some kind of truth and reconciliation process militant leftists should etch in their brains the reality of the Klan/Nazis. There is nothing to debate with this kind. The niceties of parliamentary democracy have no place in a strategy to defeat these bastards. The Greensboro massacre is prime evidence that any other way is suicidal for militants. No more Germany, 1933's. No more Greensboro, 1979's. Never Forget Greensboro.

REPOST FROM SEPTEMBER 15, 2006

In a recent blog (dated, September 4, 2006) this writer mentioned that one of the Klan groups in this country held a demonstration at the Gettysburg National Cemetery over the Labor Day 2006 weekend around a list of demands that included bringing the troops home from Iraq in order to patrol the borders. Symbols mean a lot in politics and the notion that Klansmen were permitted to demonstrate at a key symbol in the fight to end slavery and preserve the union raised my temperature more than a little. As I said then Gettysburg is hallowed ground fought and paid for in great struggle and much blood. At that time the writer posed the question of what, if any, opposition to the demonstration leftists had put together to run these hooded fools out of town. In response, this writer was raked over the coals for calling for an organized fight by labor to nip these elements in the bud. Why? Apparently some people believe that running the fools out of town would have violated the Klan's free speech rights. Something is desperately wrong here about both the nature of free speech and the nature of the Klan/fascist menace.

First, let us be clear, militant leftists defend every democratic right as best we can. I have often argued in this space that to a great extend militant leftists are the only active defenders of such rights- on the streets where it counts. That said, the parameters of such rights, as all democratic rights, cannot trump the needs of the class struggle. In short, militant leftist have no interest in defending or extending the rights of fascists to fill the air with gibberish. Now that may offend some American Civil Liberties Union-types but any self-respecting militant knows that such a position is right is his or her 'gut'.

In the final analysis we will be fighting the Klan-types on the streets and the issue will no be rights of free expression (except maybe in defense of ours) but the survival of our organizations. A short glance at history is to the point.
One of the great tragedies of the Western labor movement was the defeat and destruction of the German labor movement in the wake of the fascist Hitler's rise to power in 1933. In the final analysis that destruction was brought on by the fatally erroneous policies of both the German Social Democratic and Communists parties. Neither party, willfully, saw the danger in time and compounded that error when refused to call for or establish a united front of all labor organizations to confront and destroy Hitler and his storm troopers. We know the result. And it was not necessary. Moreover, Hitler's organization at one time (in the mid-1920's) was small and unimportant like today's Klan/Nazi threat. But that does not mean that under certain circumstances that could not change. And that, my friends, is exactly the point.

The Rich Really Are Different, Very Different From You and I, Me, And That Ain’t No Lie-Audrey Hepburn And Humphrey Bogart’s “Sabrina” (1954)-A Film Review

The Rich Really Are Different, Very Different From You and I, Me, And That Ain’t No Lie-Audrey Hepburn And Humphrey Bogart’s “Sabrina” (1954)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Fritz Taylor

Sabrina, starring Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, directed by Billy Wilder,  1954

How the hell did I get this assignment, this woman’s fairy tale romance assignment from site manager Greg Green? And that is posed as a question with about seven riddles since I am basically a stringer, an occasional writer in this publication and moreover when I do write it usually is about some military matter stemming from my now long- ago Vietnam War hell on wheels service. What got me this assignment if you can believe this though from what Greg said was that I had done a good job on a previous film review I was asked to do to give a side glance view of another film and so he thought that I would be ideal to go through my paces on a “women’s film” from back in my youth. Hence my review of Sabrina forthwith.

Since I don’t have much experience with getting what Sam Lowell, a now retired film editor and occasional contributing writer has called “the hook”, the way to lure the reader in to what the film is all about I asked old friend Seth Garth to help me out one day when we were standing around the office water cooler and I was perplexed for an angle on the film. He almost automatically, having seen the film many years ago, threw out the idea gathered from F. Scott Fitzgerald that here was yet another example of the rich, meaning to both Fitzgerald and to Seth the very rich, the old money Yankee-Dutch rich and not the latter day new technology rich like Bezos, Jobs, Musk and that lot who are still wet behind the ears in getting adjusted to the ways of that segment of the ruling class that actually made things and have prospered since Mayflower/Half Moon times.

Funny once Seth grabbed that idea the rest was easy except of course the romance among the Mayfair swells part and Billy Wilder’s ironic and sardonic look at the mores of in this case the New York upper gentry living out in Long Island and not in Manhattan. The plot is simple enough beyond what Seth also called, in the end “the boy meets girl” trope that has saved more than one Hollywood production when the going got slowed down. Sabrina, to the stable born via her father’s job as chauffer to the ultra-rich family, played by sparking vivacious girl next door with a bit of the devil in her eye Audrey Hepburn who almost any guy from my generation would have had at least a momentary crush on, is in love with the younger son, David, a scion to that family wealth played by ruggedly handsome pretty boy William Holden last seen in this publication according to Sam Lowell face down in ancient film star Norma Desmond’s swimming pool in anther Billy Wilder classic Sunset Boulevard and doing the dance of sexy dances with young Kim Novak as an iterant in Picnic. David, starting out anyway has no eyes for her and so that seems like a lot of things about the lives of people to the stable born the end of it.

Except that through a strange twist of funny fate Sabrina is sent to Paris to learn to become, well, a cook well within her station in life. 

But you know as well as I do that Audrey Hepburn is not going to be slaving over hot stoves and steaming kettles for long and she didn’t by virtue of an acquaintance with a French aristocrat of the old school. When she returns to the estate David has nothing but eyes for her as she has become a sophisticated young woman. He is ready to dump everything for her, including a Mayfair swell gal whose family just happens to have extensive sugar cane interests. Enter Linus, the older brother played by aging Humphry Bogart last seen again according to Sam either sending Mary Astor over to save his ass in some stuff of dreams caper in The Maltese Falcon or getting waylaid by come hither young Lauren Bacall in the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s  To Have Or Have Not.  

Business is business to old Linus and abandoning that sugar interest for some dazzling fairy princess from Paris is not in the program so he is committed to sabotaging David’s plans whatever the cost. Including taking a run at Sabrina himself. 

That would eventually be his undoing and his break from the man in the grey flannel suit 1950s business chain gang existence. See Linus went too far, fell for the much younger Sabrina (Bogie remember had that thing for Lauren Bacall on and off screen, so this was nothing new) but that is where things get interesting. His falling in love complicated things to such an extent that Sabrina agreed to head back to Paris and forget this cagey pair. Then Linus does a double reverse maneuver attempting to send David to Paris with Sabrina but David decided to do the family right thing and confronted Linus with his hangdog look and told him that he would marry that convenient heiress after all and booted Linus out the door to grab the ship to Paris with Sabrina. Yeah, the rich are very different in lots of ways even the way they romance among themselves.