Murder Anyway You Cut It- With The French Film Tell No One In Mind

Murder Anyway You Cut It- With The French Film Tell No One In Mind

By Zack James

Phil Larkin, the locally well-known private investigator from Gloversville about sixty miles west of Boston, loved to go to the National Private Investigators Association (NPIA) annual conventions not so much to inspect the inevitable new technological gizmos which were touted as the P.I.s next best friend by their producers but to gather up old acquaintances and over a few whiskies to find out about some new interesting case one or more of them might be working on. They are not all interesting by any means whatever the individual P.I. might be hyping about by virtue of his or her prowess in solving the riddle of the age –usually some missing husband who was ready to go home after a couple of months with some floozy who spent all his dough and blew for places unknown, a guy who fled town for some reason and wants to remain missing but something got him up from the underground, some scared kid who blew home and is out in Topeka somewhere and can’t get out of the caboose until some adult accompanies him or her home, or a skipper you would be amazed at how much P.I. work is “repo” stuff which keeps many guys in clover and a full scotch bottle in that bottom desk drawer for those long stretches between jobs. Or about a case they might have heard about. That is how he heard from his old friend Artie Shaw about the Beck case, the case that had half the public coppers, gendarmes they call them there, in France baffled and Artie too until things fell into place by virtue of that over-rated prowess that every P.I. hung out like single in front of his or her shabby sixth floor office in some seen its day office building filled with failed dentists, cheapjack insurance agents, seedy repo men (guys who do it full-time) and discount wholesale jewelers.

[By the way for those who are confused, or only know of the more famous American Forensic Investigators Organization (AFIO), the one the famous detectives Jack Dolan, Robert Parker, and Shane Chandler, the latter a distant relative of the crime writer Raymond who practically invented the hard-boiled detective genre that has misled several generations of readers and average citizens about the real lives of P.I.s, belong to, the NPIA and AFIO work two very different tracks. The AFIO had split, an acrimoniously split, from the NPIA over the issue of working with the public coppers. The NPIA historically had deferred, meaning “butted out on,” once a case went onto the police blotter. The AFIO made up of a bunch of “hot-doggers” who spit on the public coppers and their half-ass work went on the premise that all cases were better done through private hands. Phil an old time public cop himself would have been railroaded out of business in Gloversville if he had made step one to mess with the open police cases in that town. Would have been run out of town on a rail if not put under some very loose ground especially when Nick Devine was chief copper in that burg and was so “connected” to the boys with grunts and funny noses that he well might have done it himself-or had it done.]     

Every NPIA member in attendance could hardly wait for the banquet that closed each convention to hear the words, to hear the deep dark secret of the profession that the difference between the actual numbers of cases between the two organizations was minuscule or NPIA’s were better. The reality was that despite the few headline cases like the Galton kidnaping and ransom case which some guy, some almost amateur sleuth named Ross MacDonald solved there was as much co-operation between AFIO and public coppers as the NPIA.             

Artie, originally from Boston, had worked with Phil when he had started out on a couple of cases, key-hole peeping cases which in the 1950s was bread and butter work for most private detectives in the days when getting a divorce was heavy lifting without an army of reasons adultery being the primo reason a court would accept. Phil eventually moved on from that work saying to anybody who would listen that he would rather try to solve mass murder cases, solve serial murder stuff than have to swallow the lies associated with guys and gals shacking up once they got to court and practically accused him of breaking up happy homes or being the fall guy for some kind of abuse.  Less strain on the nerves. Artie, knowing his limitations, always stuck with key-hole peeping which is how in a roundabout way he got the Beck case.

The wife of a big Boston international banker had hired him to get the goods on her husband and his French mistress whom said banker had established, had set up in a Paris apartment for when he travelled there on business. Artie, really a pro then at getting the dope, getting the photos necessary to close a divorce case in court, rapped that one up tight, no problem. What Artie had found out in Paris as the 1950s turned into the 1960s was that there was still much key-hole peeping work to found there through the still pretty much intact cumbersome French Napoleonic civil code and so he stayed around there to pick up the pieces, especially when that Boston banker’s divorcee set up herself in Montmatre.      

That banker’s ex-wife connection got him the Beck case, got it to him at least indirectly through her lawyer in Paris who was also the lawyer that this Doctor Beck had retained once he got into serious trouble, or rather he and his sister, Anne, a devotee of the horsey set, but loaded with dough from her husband’s fortune had retained. The case would have seemed to be on the face of it way over Artie’s head as it involved a “cold case,” a case that the French gendarmes had closed up tight. But the ex-banker’s wife and Beck’s lawyer both agreed that a non-French P.I. would have less hurdles to cross than some Parisian private dick who was bound by law to turn everything over to the coppers under penalty of losing his or her license. (Artie was working off his U.S. permit courtesy of influence with the public coppers by a friend of that banker’s ex-wife).

Artie had moreover gotten on the case after the thing had been dead for about seven, eight years. Years after this Doctor Beck was cleared as far as could be of his wife’s murder out in the country while they were out for a swim on the lake. The doctor’s story then had been that he had been knocked unconscious by a party unknown and dumped into the lake when he heard his wife’s screams. Except he was found on the dock. As such things went the public coppers had to let it go when they couldn’t shake his story and his wife’s father, a public copper himself, identified his daughter’s body and vouched for his son-in-law.           

Then a couple of bodies surfaced in that same area and a couple of cops from the old case started to put two and two together and come up with the doctor. The frame was on but the point was how was Artie to get enough evidence to get the doctor off the hook. As it turned out a couple of pieces of evidence surfaced that got the ball rolling. The doctor’s wife, who along with his sister were seriously into steeplechase horse shows, had been beaten badly by someone a few weeks prior to her death. The coppers figured that Doc Beck did the deed, a wife-beater not uncommon among certain high profile types. As it turned out the wife, Margot was her name, had had his sister take photographs of the wounds but had also swore her to secrecy that this horse set guy, this Phillip Neuville, the son of Baron Neuville, a guy with a pile of money as well had done the beating when she confronted him with evidence of child sexual abuse of a bunch of kids who worked the stables as a part of program she was involved with.     

That confrontation as it turned out resulted in the death of young Philip. The photographs were taken after the Doc’s wife had killed the bastard.  

Switch up to the film made of the Beck case minus, at his request since it might be bad for his business in America do, Artie….

Nowadays in order for a thriller to pass muster there have to be many little twists and turns or else the film get very tedious, get very boring, never gets, as a friend of mine who is into both written and cinematic thrillers has suggested, off the slow-moving track which spells death to the film, makes one reach for the remote very quickly. That is not the case with the thriller under review, the French film, Tell No One, although frankly I thought that the film would in its opening scenes succumb to that slow-moving death every thriller has to dodge.

Here are the twists in this “cold file” case. Doctor Beck’s wife, Margot, had been killed, senselessly killed by a serial killer, several years earlier and he was just beginning to put his life back together when a whole ton of hell started coming down on his head. Reason: a couple of male bodies filled with bullets had been found out in the country where his wife had been killed. Beck had just barely gotten out of the clutches of the law back then since the law thought under the odd-ball evidence in the case that he was the mastermind behind the deed. He had been mysteriously found unconscious on the dock despite his assertions that he had been hit and fallen into the water by the killer being a chief reason that he had been suspected by the cops.    

Lots of things begin to pop up that had the cops interested in reopening the case, hoping to see the big frame placed around his head. Unaccounted for bruises to his wife’s face on photos that survived, a gun found in secret place in his house, the murder most foul of his wife’s best friend are just some of the examples that dog him. Put those together with Beck’s taking it on the lam to figure out what the hell was going on and for the average cop never mind what country he or she works in and you have an “open and shut” case of consciousness of guilt and an easy and early wrap-up to the cases.

But hold on. This Doctor Beck actually loved his wife, was not faking the trouble he had trying to put his life back together. Something else was going on, some nefarious plot to get him to take the big step-off and let him rot in prison forgotten after a while. Not only was something going on in the frame department but the good doctor was getting information via his e-mail that his wife was still alive. So two trails of events were going on at the same time (always a good sign in a thriller): the net tightening over his head by the coppers and his frenzy to find his wife knowing now that she is not dead. That’s all I will tell you because I have been asked to “tell no one” in order not to spoil the ending, okay. Except old Doc Beck was not crazy, was not wrong in assuming that nefarious forces were out to get him although it would take a while before he learned that it was because of something that Margot had knowledge about shortly before her “death” which had people in high places ready, willing and able to do her in. Watch this award-winning film.    

Releasing Your Inner Michael Feinstein-Amy Adams and Alec Newman’s “Moonlight Serenade” (2009)-A Film Review

Releasing Your Inner Michael Feinstein-Amy Adams and Alec Newman’s “Moonlight Serenade” (2009)-A Film Review

[Occasionally a reader will write in asking how a particular staff member gets an assignment for a particular film. In short has an interest in learning about the inner working of an on-line operation where most of us are not in the same room together making decisions. Most of the time it is pretty straight forward. Films get handled by Sandy Salmon and Alden Riley with Sandy taking the older films that he would have maybe watched when he was younger and Alden the more current films. Although one time earlier this year I overrode Sandy and “forced” Alden to watch and write a review on a documentary about the first Monterey Pops Festival in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love out in San Francisco which we promoted the 50^th anniversary of heavily this year, when he told Sandy that he did not know who Janis Joplin was. I still bristle at that since Monterey in 1967 was where the ill-fated snake-bitten Janis made her smash break-through. But that is the exception.

Another exception is the reviewer of the film here Moonlight Serenade where Seth Garth who usually handles music reviews got the nod from Sandy since neither he, a child of rock and rock in his youth, nor Alden much more attuned to hip-hop and techno-rock had a clue about the American Songbook Tin Pan Alley style. Knowledge of that genre for this film is critical and so Seth drew the assignment. Pete Markin]    

******

DVD Review 

By Seth Garth

Moonlight Serenade, starring Amy Adams, Alec Newman, Harriet Samson Harris, 2009   

My old high school friend and fellow corner boy down in Carver, down in cranberry country in Southeastern Massachusetts, Gilbert Rowland used to kid me mercilessly about my knowing more of the American Songbook than he could ever dream of. He did not know that term “American Songbook” but what he meant was clear. Although I, he, we were indeed children of rock and roll (and it off-shoot the blues a little later and still later folk music during that folk minute in the early 1960s) I knew, would hum or sing what were essentially show tunes, tunes created by those who inhabited mythical Tin Pan Alley like the Gershwin Brothers, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein and the like to the jeers of the corner boys who only cared about what the latest Chuck Berry composition was about, whether Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential was youth nation of the time’s national anthem or whether Bill Haley and the Comets still jumped after Rock Around The Clock. Stuff like that not “sissy” (he, they used a more derogatory word than that but you get the drift) music like our parents might like-or even know about since the heyday for most of that was in their 1930s and 1940s growing up times.  Don’t ask me how I came by it, maybe hearing it on a vagrant radio station sometime up in my room listening to music on my transistor radio and it stuck, but it was surely not around the house much since I was after certain young age not around the house much.

But enough of genesis and get to the why of this assignment since I don’t usually do film reviews. This Moonlight Serenade (title from an old Glen Miller smash hit back in the long ago day) is a quirky little movie that is both a romantic comedy of sorts and a semi-musical since the three main characters are ready to sing at the drop of a hat (and maybe with less prompting). Nate, played by Alec Newman, is nothing but an up and coming Wall Street money manager who has along with his associate Angelica, played by Harriet Samson Harris been selling “short” as a strategy for making tons of money for their clients and plenty of commissions for themselves. Not a strange phenomenon in 2000s New York City. What is slightly, no more than slightly, askew is that Nate is a denizen of a jazz club and also a more that fair piano player which is how he gets his relaxation after those hard-boiled hours hustling stocks around the clock. What Nate plays is not some Jerry Lee made rock and roll piano and not even Fat Domino since no way was he a child of rock and roll, way too young, but the old Broadway and cabaret show tunes made famous by the likes of Billie Holiday and Mabel Mercer and written by Tin Pan Alley legends like Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins and the like.             

That high strung money manager versus his inner Michael Feinstein, the fairly recent famous cabaret performer of this kind of music, is what drives the Nate end of the plotline. Enter Chloe, played by fetching Amy Adams, a hat-checker (formerly hat check girl but that is passé now) at that jazz club Nate frequents and who turns out to be a struggling torch-singer in the mold of Peggy Lee it appears whose paramour and piano player is some strung out junkie. They “meet” while he is singing a song in his open window apartment and she is walking along the sidewalk below and begins a duet (the drop of a hat phenomenon). When they actually do meet though they are frosty, or rather she in the throes of what to do about that junkie boyfriend is, and standoffish although you could tell from minute one that they would hit the satin sheets before long-and they did.

What Chloe needed was a big change and eventually got it at that jazz club when Nate who has been providing the owner with good stock tips for this portfolio gave her a break. Smash home run hit. Except two things are amiss. Nate is torn about taking stab at making a musical career and tearing up Wall Street with his expertise and Chloe has to confront what to do about that junkie boyfriend. In the end you know what happened-or can guess. Here is the big problem for me though having first seen Ms. Adams doing her torch-singer thing in Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day burning up the screen with her version of the old Inkspots’ tune If I Didn’t Care which even I recognized was one of the best versions ever done on that number. Either the song selection here was wrong although there were plenty of can-do Cole Porter tunes which Billie Holiday hit out of the park or Chloe’s jaunty way of performing them was off but except for one torch she didn’t ready hit the mark in the music department. He was off as well although Nate never claimed to be the cat’s meow as a singer. Maybe having imbibed this stuff third-hand (at least given their ages that seems right) their New York 2000s sensibilities saw the tunes differently. Still a good film to hear those old classics getting a workout and seeing the chemistry develop between Nate and Chloe.            

All That Glitters Is Not Gold-The Latest Find From The Crime Novelist Raymond Chandler’s Trove

All That Glitters Is Not Gold-The Latest Find From The Crime Novelist Raymond Chandler’s Trove 

By Book Critic Josh Breslin

A link to an NPR Morning Edition interview in 2017 with the editor of the Strand magazine on his find in the Raymond Chandler trove.

https://www.npr.org/2017/11/17/564752462/new-raymond-chandler-story-takes-on-health-care-industry

Reader in this space know of my great respect for the pioneer work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler in bringing hard-boiled no nonsense basically anti-heroic private detective novels to the fore against the plethora of prissy parlor pink amateur detectives previously dominant in the genre. Guys, okay private eyes,  like grizzly street wise Sam Spade who was ready, willing and able to go the distance with the likes of Briget O’Shaunessey and the “Fat Man” Gutman until the bodies started piling up and he had to send darling Briget over, sent her to the big step-off to clear his own path over some fucking silly bird in The Maltese Falcon or, for example, wily gin-stained Phillip Marlowe skewering one Eddie Mars just to save an old man from believing that he had sired the devil’s own spawn in his wild and wayward daughters in The Big Sleep. Those characters will endure as long as people, young people, young men in particular seek adventurous tales. Hell even Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles in the seemingly endless The Thin Man film series when they have to go mano a mano with some nefarious foes was like a breath of fresh air in its day.         

Of course both men have now long gone beyond the pale and no one would have assumed any and all of their work product, finished, scraps, letters, etc. would not have already gone under the microscope of the Dashiell/Raymond academy with nothing left to find. Apparently that is not the case for Chandler. A recent discovery of a short story, a very short story found in the Bodleian Library in England (Chandler was born there) has now been published in the Strand magazine. From what I understand from the interview on NPR with the editor this is a complete story unlike the unfinished Phillip Marlowe Poodle Spring story which the Chandler Estate commissioned crime novelist Robert Parker to complete many years ago.            

The question for me, and the question posed by the interviewer to the Strand editor, was whether he thought that Chandler would have approved of the publication of this little piece at this late date. The editor gave his reasons for saying yes based on what he knew of Chandler’s thoughts about his works and of his literary perspective. I am not so sure. There is an on-going argument among scholars of writers that not every piece of possible scrap written under who knows what conditions and expectations is either worthy of publication or was meant for publication. In the case of Poodle Spring Chandler died before he could complete the novel which showed Marlowe after he had been house-broken, after he had lost some speed or so the nefarious foes there thought, and it can safety be assumed that it would have seen the light of day if Chandler had been able to finish it on his own. This short story was written in the early 1950s, so perhaps he was “doodling” given its brevity and its quick look at the fate of a hapless homeless man spit out by the system. In any case, for good or evil, it is out in the public prints. Still I wish it had been an undiscovered Phillip Marlowe story-finished or not.  

One Less Johnny Rocco, Uh, Johnny Vanning Is Not Worth Dying Over-Bette Davis And Humphrey Bogart’s “Marked Woman” (1937)-A Film Review

One Less Johnny Rocco, Uh, Johnny Vanning Is Not Worth Dying Over-Bette Davis And Humphrey Bogart’s “Marked Woman” (1937)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

Marked Women, Bette Davis the girl with the Bette Davis eyes who put her hips in her back pocket Bette Davis style, Humphrey Bogart last seen uttering those prophetic words about the Johnny Roccos of the world, 1937

Yeah, Humphrey Bogart, a guy who knew a thing or two and a guy who my old flame Josh Breslin who works at this publication still and Sam Lowell the acknowledged king of film noir and black and white films in his salad days idolized had it right, had it figured exactly right when he was down in Key Largo, down in the Keys sweating like a pig and he had to tell some luscious but dizzy dame what was what about guys like Johnny Rocco being always with us, always wanted more, always wanted to run the easy street rackets just like in the old days. (By the way, as an aside, water cooler rumors that Josh and I are an “item” to use an old-time high school term are just that-rumors. After Josh’s three divorces and my two we are in no rush to jump into anything so things are murky. At this time by mutual agreement murky is good, very good.)

Of course, that didn’t stop old Bogie from bang-bang dead Johnny, made Johnny sleep with the fishes when he tried to mess with his woman, with that luscious if dizzy dame. Get this though Mary, what the hell, Mary Smith since these kinds of women have a million aliases, played by the girl with the Bette Davis eyes, was way ahead of him, ahead of Bogie when she cut the deal of deals with another Johnny, Johnny Vanning who wanted what all such Johnnies wanted-more. Had it figured to make herself the best of it as detailed in the film under review, Marked Woman. Had to do what a girl had to do no fooling around.

Of course in post-Code 1937 Hollywood Mary’s profession had to be dolled up, hostesses they called that sort, B-girls, whores really if you want the unvarnished truth working not the streets but the night club expensive booze, some gambling then hit the sheets and make the bastards, the Johns pay through the nose. Yes, a girl has got to do what a girl has to do. Mary had all the angles, had guys like gangster king Johnny Vanning figured as nothing but trouble in a girl’s life if she didn’t work an alliance. So Mary, what are we calling her, oh yeah, Smith went along and got along. What people didn’t know, what her roommate so-called fellow hostesses didn’t know was she was hustling drinks and guys in order to put her sister, her babe in the woods sister through some swanky elite college.     

That little sidebar would change things for Mary in a big way once little sister got into the act, came to visit her not knowing that she was really a call girl, whore, oh well let’s go with the fantasy night club hostess laugh. Yeah a real babe in the woods who would get more, very much more than she bargained for when she saw the glitter of the big city, when she saw that she couldn’t go back to that swanky college once the kids there knew what older sister was doing with her silky sheets nights. Little sister, Bette I think her name was but who knows, got tangled up with the wrong gees, got tangled up with one Johnny Vanning. Took a funny little fall down the staircase at one of Johnny’s swank parties. So Bette too slept with the fishes in some East River dumping ground courtesy of thoughtful Johnny Vanning.

Whore or not if your sister gets wasted you have to do something about it, have to change modes of operation so Mary became a snitch, a stoolie for the Assistant D.A, a guy named of all things Humphrey Bogart in the days before he wised-up, before he knew that one Johnny more or less was not worth dying for. Funny Mary in her salad days had played Bogie for the fool in his attempts to bring Johnny, Johnny Vanning to some rough justice, but it could have been Johnny Everyman for all that mattered when Bogie thought Mary was on the level but who was working for Johnny’s lawyer to foul up Bogie’s case. Nice moves. The little sister thing though choked things off. It didn’t help when Mary decided after finding out what happened to sis to because a snitch that Johnny, sweet as pie Johnny, had one of his boys work her over to make her less talkative.

See even if guys like Johnny Vanning, Johnny Rocco, Johnny Blade from my old neighborhood up in Olde Saco, Maine before that town took a nose-dive after the mills started shutting down and heading first to the South and then off-shore didn’t want to rule the world on the cheap a gal like Mary once the sister thing became known was a loose cannon and Bogie played on that assumption. Brought her around to see that she was going nowhere except maybe hustling on the means streets giving head, blow jobs, in some back alley for dimes and doughnuts (left unspoken in coded Hollywood okay but that was the reality). So Mary talked, talked loud and clear, brought her “hostess” roommates along, and one Johnny Vanning was toast was doing some serious time for the death of little sister. Here is the funny thing as rough justice is done for a minute when Johnny V. tags a few nickels in the big house but somewhere in the big city another Johnny will be working his way up the food chain, will have his “wanting habits” on. In some odd way one more Johnny or one less is not worth dying for-still it was nice to watch Johnny Rocco sleeping with the fishes and Johnny V. heading to the big house for some rest.        

The Theft That Made The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Theft Look Like Child’s Play-Burt Lancaster’s “The Train” (1965)-A Film Review

The Theft That Made The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Theft Look Like Child’s Play-Burt Lancaster’s “The Train” (1965)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Leslie Dumont

The Train, starring Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau, 1965

The world, or at least the art world, those interested in art anyway is still in wonder, dismay, confusion about how the robbery of a bunch of extremely valuable paintings including work by Rembrandt and other masters from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston which after all these years still have not resurfaced in public. Wonder how what is something like a half a billion dollars’ worth of art has never seen the light of day. In some quarters, and not just among the street junkies and hipsters you can make serious money betting on who ordered the heist, who carried it out and who has kept the lid on this mystery for so long. Maybe Whitey Bulger went to his recent merciless grave with the secrets intact, maybe Myles Connors who I interviewed one night when he was in one of his short time out of jail moments in the role of President of Rock and Roll when I was a stringer at this publication although that night was about music not artworks, stolen or not, maybe Sid Larry, who is my personal chose if for no other reason that he was one of the great night crawlers of all time and never saw a jail cell. (In the interest of today’s necessary notice of transparency I have a one thousand dollar bet riding on him as the villain with his brother Ned, who I dated for a while after Josh Breslin and I split up.)   

(By the way every time patrons goes to the Gardner they are reminded of the theft by the empty framed spaces where the artwork had been prior to the theft. The interest in what happened that night and how is still high as a local Boston NPR continuing series has yet again explored what happened.) 

After viewing the film under review, The Train, which is based on a French non-fictional book which has documented the thefts by the German Army and other allied forces of major artworks from museums and private collections in France (needless to say and sadly from Jewish art collectors with a vengeance) as they roamed stealing everything not nailed down, and some stuff that was, throughout Europe, roamed particularly through Paris when that city was the epicenter of the art world before World War II that Gardner heist seems like small potatoes. Moreover, the Germans thought that their mere possession of the confiscated property meant that they were entitled to ship the entire looted works back to Germany as the Allies started their serious counter-offensive in 1944 to take back the night from the night-takers. This film details ficticously efforts by the French Resistance to stop the train from leaving the country playing off the real situation where a Free French officer Rosenberg actually did stop a train leaving for Germany with a lot of his art dealer and collector father’s artworks. The real story seems more intriguing in some ways especially since it has taken the equivalent of a legal civil war to get even some of the art works back to their rightful owners.

But the storyline here has its own intrigue and its own sense of logic at a time when the world had gone mad, a time not so very different than our times, or what could be our times if some social tinder gets stoked with the current madness afoot in the land. The whole expedition was planned by one German officer, Waldheim played by Paul Scofield, an art aficionado who apparently did not care that in Germany most works of modern art, meaning art by guys like Otto Dix, George Groz, Picasso, Matisse, damn, even innocuous guys like Degas and Cezanne were “degenerate.” Many a German smoke-filled night saw such works put to the torch. This mad man German officer was a walking bundle of contradictions since on the one hand he had something of a snobbish elitist concept of art and culture as being exclusively the domain of cultured gentlemen like him. On the other he had no problem killing every opponent who tried to stop the shipment’s passage to speak nothing of wasting everybody who got in the way of the German advances to the West, to blood stained Paris earlier in the war when the Germans seemed invincible. He was more than willing, thought it was clever, maybe even a brilliant advance for humankind to have civilian hostages on the locomotive of the train to avoid the damn thing being blown up. Shed not one tear when he ordered the hostages machine-gunned when he plans went awry, when he couldn’t get the art out of the country.    

Of course such a man needed an adversary, a worthy opponent to check his every move. A man or a group, here agents of the French Resistance, who while not having a refined sense of art, maybe even sense that with the world going to hell in a handbasket that some baubles were not worth the effort but who nevertheless made the call to arms when some who saw art, great art or small, an accrual in humankind’s struggle to emerge from the mud took matters into their own hands to stop the looting of French national treasures. That man, Lebite, played by ruggedly handsome Burt Lancaster last seen in this space according to Sam Lowell taking a few unaccounted for slugs over some wayward dame in the film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, no man of culture, a man who could have given a damn about this load of art. Except somebody, some comrades, went back down into the mud on Waldheim’s watch for trying to stop, excuse my English, but my French heritage, my Quebecois heritage is showing, his fucking train full of loot.

So the chase was on between these two uneven forces. Naturally once the line-up was set up, and knowing the outcome of World War II, Waldheim would not be successful in his thefts, although it really was a close thing. In the end nobody could, or should have, shed tear number one when our French Resistance fighter took one glance at those machine-gunned civilians and wasted Waldheim without remorse, walked away. Yeah, that Gardner Museum heist was peanuts when you think about it-and that is the unvarnished truth.       

The Harder They Fall, Indeed-Humphrey Bogart’s “The Harder They Fall” (1956)-A Film Review

The Harder They Fall, Indeed-Humphrey Bogart’s “The Harder They Fall” (1956)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By “Sports Columnist” Fritz Taylor 

The Harder They Fall, starring Humphrey Bogart, Rod Stieger, based on a story of the same name by Budd Schulberg, Columbia Pictures, 1956    

[The film under review Humphrey Bogart’s The Harder They Fall is one DVD in a five DVD package of his lesser films from his Columbia Pictures days mostly in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Not all of the films do credit to Bogie’s major talent and drawing power despite what one female character in Sirocco, another film in this Columbia collection, and I quote, being the ugliest man in town and the most handsome. That estimation seems about right. 

I drafted Frank Jackman, the political reporter in this space (and at the on-line Progressive America site) to do the review of Bogie’s Sirocco since it marginally had to do with the results of World War I and the division of the spoils by the victors a subject Frank has been writing on for a couple of years now as we commemorate the 100^th anniversary years of that bloody fruitless conflict. I have drafted Fritz Taylor, normally a guy who writes about music, veterans’ affairs, and culture to review the film under review here The Harder They Fail a fascinating look at the seamy side of the professional boxing game, circa the “golden age” in the 1950s when the sport hooked up with television to create a mass audience among the plebeians. A look that aside from details about money and the nature of the presentation is probably not far off the mark today as well.     

As I have mentioned earlier this year when Si Lannon talked me into letting him do a couple of pieces on an amateur golf tournament at his golf course in which his friends were competing the American Left History site very seldom treads on the major media of sports reporting or commentary so I had to “draft” Fritz Taylor to do this piece. His “credentials”? Well Fritz, a pretty tough guy in his youth down in Georgia from what I have heard and he has told us, while he was in Vietnam in the late 1960s before he got what he called “religion” on the question of war and peace had been a regimental boxing champion in his 4^th Division. His reason for getting involved in this business was strictly to get out of guard duty, KP, endless patrols and the like for what proved to be little effort on his part. It also however did not save him from a couple of purple heart wounds during his tour of duty. Pete Markin]               

***********

Although I never pursued the manly art of boxing, you know pugilism, hell, fighting and beating a guy’s brains out with your fists beyond teenage Golden Gloves work down in home country Georgia and a purely opportunistic time in the Army in Vietnam as regimental champ in the 4^th Division to get out of bullshit duty I think I know what makes a guy, makes certain guys jump at the change to get out from under. That “getting out from under,” a process still going on in the professional boxing ranks is something guys, tough guys mostly, have been doing in one way or another since Roman gladiator times if not before. You can trace in this country an almost perfect trail of what recent ethnic/racial group is down at the bottom of the heap by who is fighting other guys for a living to grab the brass ring, to avoid having to go down in the factories and sweatshops to earn their livelihood.      

But enough of the amateur sociology and on to the film here which gives a pretty good view of what the sport was like in the 1950s “golden age” of boxing in America. A time when with the advent of television guys like my father, Hugh Taylor, fresh from World War II service in the Pacific and bogged down in a job he did not like in a textile mill that had moved from Nashua, New Hampshire to Athens, Georgia for the cheaper labor costs they say, was able to sit at home on a Friday night and watch, beer in hand, maybe better beers in hand, and see serious fights from places like New York’s Madison Square Garden. I think he may have gone, with his work buddies, a few times to Atlanta to see the fights in person as well but don’t hold me to that. The main thing is that working class guys mainly, although there was a certain celebrity tinge as well when guys like Ernest Hemingway or Norman Mailer would attend such fisticuffs, formed the audience for these bouts.          

As the old-time film critic in this space, now emeritus, Sam Lowell, was fond of saying when he wanted to give a summary of a film here is the “skinny” on this one. Humphrey Bogart, Bogie, last seen in this space according to what Frank Jackman said in his review of another film in this Columbia Pictures package Sirocco as the leading character in Zack James’s commemoration series of the 75^th anniversary of the opening of the classic film Casablanca , plays Eddie Willis a has-been sports writer thrown on the scrap heap from a newspaper that had gone under in the shrinking newspaper wars world who “from hunger” takes a job as publicist from the long-pursuing shady boxing promoter and fixer man Nick Benko,  played a little over the top but with some credible flair by Rod Steiger. (Bogie seems to have alternated in his career between serious shoot ‘em up and ask questions later bad guys like Duke Mantee in Petrified Forest to tough nut Phillip Marlowe trying to save an old man’s dignity and keep his wild side daughters in check in The Big Sleep to under the rug rat Eddie here working for his dally wages anyway he could.)

Nick was well known in New York and elsewhere for having a stable of run of the mill boxers who kept him and his in clover, kept him and his organization in business by knocking other guys on the noggin and keeping him in high end suits, swank apartments, and easy party women on the side. Like a lot of guys who are stuck in the pile he wanted a champion, wanted to have a shot at the brass ring one of his guys could bring him. Nick’s play, his proposition to Eddie was simply, simply for the talented if balky Eddie, play up, Toro, this giant, this glass-jawed and fragile boxer from down in South America he had discovered to the hilt to draw crowds and draw a chance at the heavyweight championship of the world.  No mean task even for the adroit for Eddie with an ungainly giant on his hands who couldn’t bat a fly without knocking himself out. After balking at first Eddie buys into the deal though so he can keep himself and his fetching wife in clover. That first compromise leads to a million others and as the film progresses he goes down Nick’s slippery slope with only a few swallows. 

Of course Nick has no scruples, wouldn’t know what the word meant, didn’t give a fuck about whether this sunny senor could box or not it is all theater anyway, just entertainment for the sit on your ass masses and no skin off of his nose. Still to get to the top you have to get pass step one. That glass jaw and sissy punch would get him knocked out in minute one of round one except for one little handy trick. Get the opponent to take a dive, go in the tank, play dead fast for quick dough and no questions asked. And Eddie was there pushing the bullshit, rolling that stone up the hill. Making this guy the greatest thing since old Prometheus started his trek. Not without qualms, not without balking, but still going for the clover for him and the wife off this gaucho’s back.          

A big stretch of the film is the rise of this holy goof, as Seth Garth would call him reminding him of some junkie has-been out of Kerouac when he asked me what I was writing about, from nobody from nowhere to contender all courtesy of Nick   the friendly fixer man (and as with all such schemes with willing tank town managers, where do you think they got the expression from beyond that railroad watering spot origin, getting their nowhere boys to take the “tank’ for this monster). Finally as they head East to Chi town Senor Toro gets a crack at an over the hill, taken one or more too many punches, ex-champ which will pave the way to the big payoff championship fight in the Garden. (One too many hits which makes you wonder what their concussion brains looked like at the end of their careers now that professional football players have been found to have taken some horrible beatings over the head during their playing careers and suffered horrible damage and shortened lives because of it.) Except this ex-champ, this guy who took one too many punches couldn’t take one more, couldn’t take a Toro tap even while taking the dive. DOA.

In Nick’s scheming though this has-been boxer’s death would only made Toro a bigger draw when he hit the big time in New York against the champ. Nick tried to “negotiate” with the champ but the champ wouldn’t bite, wouldn’t make the dance of the ring go round. He wanted to murder this Toro, put him under, let him kiss the canvas floor for a while. No problem, no problem for Nick just bet against his glass-jaw sissy punch fighter and clean up. The kid took it on the chin, looked like holy hell when the champ went into overdrive, got his jaw busted up good and got less, much less than chump change for his efforts so he could finally get home and take care of his family.        

    

This bastard Nick though was a beau, had sold his contract on Toro to some tank town manager who after the kid proved to have no talent, none, would be fodder for the locals out in Podunk to begin their own career rises on. This is where Eddie finally balked, finally gets “religion” about how bad the fight game was just like I did with fucking war and got the kid the hell out of New York and home with, guess what, his, Eddie’s, share of the dough that Nick skimmed from the kid’s purses. Ugly. Of course that sets up Saint Eddie of the dreams for Nick’s hatchet. Or it seemed so but when as I can tell you a guy gets religion on something nobody can destroy him. Can’t buy, steal or put him under. Eddie in the last scene is ready to do battle to get the murderous sport of guys beating guys senseless for dough for fixers like Nick banned one way or another. Nice work if Eddie survives some back alley assault. 

[Fritz balked at saying anything about the author of the book The Harder They Fall by Hollywood “prince” Budd Schulberg (his father ran Paramount Studios) from which the screenplay of this film was taken but candor and a rather innocuous short statement in his bio in Wikipedia requires that I say something about this snitch. Snitch before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) when after he had been “outed” as an ex-Communist Party member by a fellow screenwriter he sang like a canary to save his own miserable ass by naming names of others he knew back in the day, back in the Popular Front and World War II days when such a thing as party membership was okay but in the dead of night, red scare Cold War 1950s could get you jail time witness the Hollywood Ten, witness Dashiell Hammett and others who didn’t know how to sing. Bogie for that matter telling the committee to go to hell. It must have been old home week when Schulberg, and fellow snitches Lee J. Cobb and Elia Kazan got together on the On The Waterfront film. They could have formed a singing trio. Jesus their names should live in infamy when the word cowards hits the page. Sorry Fritz it had to be said as an act of elementary hygiene. Frank Jackman]   

After The Fall-Humphrey Bogart’s “Sirocco” (1951)-A Film Review

After The Fall-Humphrey Bogart’s “Sirocco” (1951)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Special Guest Commentator Frank Jackman

Sirocco, starring Humphrey Bogart, Lee J. Cobb, Columbia Pictures, 1951

[This review to the extent that it is a film review is based on a five DVD package of films that the legendary craggy-faced actor Humphrey Bogart did for Columbia Pictures mainly in the late 1940s and early 1950s-Frank Jackman]

I do not normally do film reviews in this space but recently Pete Markin, the administrator on this site, asked me if I would be interested in reviewing Humphrey Bogart’s Sirocco since it involved two things that he knew I was interested in-Bogart and the in many ways decisive results of World War I for today’s world troubles, the ‘war to end all wars” which I/we are in the midst of commemorating the final bloody 100^th anniversary year of here and elsewhere. I accepted mainly on the latter premise but as it turned out also because although I have seen a ton of Bogart films this 1951 effort for Columbia Pictures had escaped my attention and while I am bound to do the review for other reasons I don’t think this one measures up as a prime Bogie flick.      

As to the other reasons as just mentioned we are in the midst of the 100^th anniversary of the bloody seemingly endless butchery of World War I. As I have pointed out elsewhere some of the results of that war were the various stages of the Russian Revolution which brought down the Czarist regime, the defeat of German and its lesser ally Austria bringing down two more empires and most importantly for us here also the fall of the German-allied Ottoman Empire. I have described the first three falls in great detail as to the their contribution to the world we face today elsewhere but the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its aftermath are still very much with us as even slight perusal of the daily news will confirm in places like Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Syria all lands formerly part of that decayed empire.          

   

Of course we all know, or should know, that ever since wars have been started that “to the victor belongs the spoils” and that was exactly the situation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The British and French decided to carve up the old territories of the Middle East to suit their conveniences, or the conveniences of their emissaries. Maybe conveniences is too strong a word and whim would be more appropriate. During this time we have the Balfour Declaration proclaiming British commitment to creating a Jewish state in that area, the division, the quite arbitrary decision, to carve up the area not by traditional boundaries or allegiances but colonial convenience under the well-trodden colonialist “divide and conquer” stratagem. Those conveniences (whims) which would come back to haunt them especially after World War II when the colonial masses were struggling for liberation from their respective colonial powers after World War I included giving the French a mandate in what was then and now Syria. Today just to mention the name of that benighted country tells much about how little has changed in the post-colonial period.               

What does all this have to do with Bogie and this film. Well the story line here is set in Damascus in 1926 when the French Army was in deep trying to put down a national liberation struggle by the indigenous people led by an Emir who was ready, win or lose, to get the French all the grief they could handle. Bogie, last seen in this space I believe as one of the lead actors in the classic film Casablanca which is commemorating the 75^th anniversary of its opening this year as well, is nothing but an opportunist businessman of sorts selling guns and ammo to the colonials, to the liberation fighters for a pretty profit. (I am willing to bet as will be detailed a bit below that Bogie, or rather Bogie’s character here Harry Smith, wished as Rick of Rick’s Café Americian he had never left old Casablanca where running a gin joint and being the conduit for some letters of transport which helped one Victor Lazlo, the famous Czech liberation fighter against the Nazi night-takers, get out of that stinking hole and on to fight another day. Even though that meant giving up lovely Ilsa, his “we will always have Paris” flame. There is a lot in this film which has the feel of the earlier film but lacks energy, plotline and even scenes to match that epic.)

Naturally the French Army commander General LaSalle, played by Everett Sloane, wants this traffic stopped and the uprising suppressed by any means necessary. His strong inclination is to level Damascus to the ground and execute everyone that his troops can round up if necessary to suppress the rebels. Periodically though he gives into the ideas of his chief of intelligence Colonel Feroud, played by Lee J. Cobb, last seen in this space playing the corrupt union leader in On The Waterfront and snitching on every fellow actor he could before the 1950s red scare House Un-American Activities Committee, who thinks that he can buy time and maybe peace by negotiating with that Emir and his underlings.      

The story line goes back and forth based on that idea. Where things get dicey for Bogie, like I said the Harry Smith in this film, is when the good Colonel through snitches is able to grab Bogie before he can leave town. Ready to face the firing squad he makes a deal with Harry to get him out of town if he can lead him to the Emir rather than face a messy death. Done. Done except in trying to save the Colonel’s life by coming up with the idea to the General of paying ransom he forfeits his own since the rebels no longer trust him. So all Harry gets for his troubles is a big step-off, a summary execution.  

[A little romance on the side is always the order of the day in these type films. Here there is an underlying tension between the good Colonel and Harry over the Colonel’s bored and flirty mistress, Violette, whom the Colonel loves to distraction. Nothing comes of her using Harry to get out of town and Feroud’s life since he bought the big step-off by trying to do right once in his ruthless life.]

You Don’t Need An Easter Bonnet To Know Which Way The Wind Blew-And It Ain’t Toward Fifth Avenue-Judy Garland And Fred Astaire’s “Easter Parade” (1948)-A Film Review

You Don’t Need An Easter Bonnet To Know Which Way The Wind Blew-And It Ain’t Toward Fifth Avenue-Judy Garland And Fred Astaire’s “Easter Parade” (1948)-A Film Review  

DVD Review

By Lance Lawrence

Easter Parade, starring Judy Garland the envy of every drag queen in the world including writer Seth Garth’s old neighborhood corner boy Timmy Riley who perfected his Judy Garland act into the biggest draw in North Beach once he got out of the closet of the Acre in North Adamsville, Fred Astaire, and assorted dancers and hoofers to make a man weep, with Peter Lawford before his stint as Nick Charles in the television version of the Thin Man and male escort to one of the Kennedy fortune women, the Jack Kennedy generation women so there is no confusion, 1948     

Easter, Easter parades via the television with the Mayfair swells, a term totally unknown to me at the time, strutting up and down Fifth Avenue in the heart of Manhattan, meant nothing to me, nothing at all. The simple fact was from an early age I, my family, and especially my four older brothers shunned that so-called holiday since rather than a time to strut our stuff I, we tried to bury the occasion. (I won’t go into the meaning of the holiday to us then, the Christian holiday, where Jesus arose from the dead and went heaven-bound since this screed is about more earthly, plebian and mundane things, rough-hewed sociology if you like not theology.) Bury it for the simple reason that the day represented one of the two times in the year that we received new clothes via my hard-pressed father’s always inadequate paychecks (that “inadequate” something I also didn’t know at the time but probably would not have mattered in the social sense which is what this is all about). The other time of course the start of the school year.         

What is the big deal lots of people, working people, back in the 1970s were hard -pressed to provide their kids and themselves adequate and varied clothing. Half the writers at this publication, for instance, faced the same situation or something roughly approximate which is probably why these many years they are still writing stuff about those times in this space. The big deal is what those clothes were like, what made other kids laugh at me, us when we went to Easter Mass or the next day when we went to school an occasion when everybody, everybody who celebrated Easter which meant just about everybody in the Heights section of Troy in upstate New York. 

See, my, our mother, besides being a bad cook which led me more times than I can count over to my grandmother’s house where she always had something on the old-time cast iron stove that in itself made the food that much tastier, had no taste in clothes. No sense of what growing young boys would want to wear. To emulate whoever were the male fashion-plates or just cool.

Part of her lacks was the lack of money to clothe five strapping boys but part of it was where she shopped. These were the days before Wal-Mart expanded a lot from the South and so what she went to shop was the local equivalent of that type of store called the Bargain Center. The place, a one store operation, was the graveyard for last year’s or maybe the year before’s styles which in the fast changing fashion world of youth meant not cool, not cool at all. Moreover, if it wasn’t outdated fashion it was overstocked or unsaleable goods. I will give my forever classic example. One year, a year when pin-striped shirts were out of fashion and the color purple never in fashion she bought each of us matching shirts like that. I could hear the titter in the pews as the five of us cam marching down the church aisle. The next day was worse, much worse. Thinking back on it I would have had no trouble with one of the lines that I believe the late rapper Biggie Small put out-“birthdays were the worse days, Christmas kind of missed us.” Easter, sad sack Easter too, brother. But enough. 

Now onto a review of high society Fifth Avenue Easter Parade which has nothing to do with what I just mentioned above but which new site manager Greg Green has encouraged us to mention as we go about our reviewing chores to let the reader know more about us and here why Easter stuff makes me blue even now. Of course, it may be a good luck sign, despite the blues, that this musical hit of 1948 is only marginally about Easter, or Easter Parades. Rather the film as to be expected when names like Judy Garland and Fred Astaire are atop the marque is about song and dance. Here is the play by play or rather the Irving Berlin playlist which is really what every musical is about. Well that and the inevitable happy ending to the eternal boy meets girl trope that has not only saved many a Hollywood film, not necessary on this one, but has been the bane of the Western literary canon and hard to topple as mightily as we have tried to wean the damn idea from the list of story-line idea.          

Fred, let’s use their real names since nobody cares about the various stage names because the music and dance are their real calling cards, had been partnered up with Nadine in a dance team around 1912. Did pretty well, career-wise and between themselves, maybe even lovers. But Nadine wanted to go solo, go to the “bigs” alone making me, and maybe others, wonder about that love stuff between them. After pouting for a while, really after being in his cups Fred figures he can make a star out of any hoofer and to experiment he picks up Judy out of nowhere. Teaches her plenty, makes her okay, just okay because what he did was teach her to be a Nadine wannabe. No good.  

Once he lets Judy go through her paces though they also are ready for the “bigs” figure to be in one of Nadine’s shows. Not a good idea because if Nadine does not want Fred she also does not want what she sees as rival Judy’s growing love for Fred. Wants him pining for his thwarted love. Figures. Not to worry though before this thing is over, before Judy and Fred promenade down, or is it up, Fifth Avenue in their beautiful clothes (not a pin-stripe or purple shirt in sight) to not give lie to the title of the film Fred realizes that he is not pounding his heart for bitch Nadine but love for Miss Judy Garland. Some great but probably now not well-known songs except by serious American songbook aficionados from Irving Berlin. Except as well you can bet your Easter bonnet or top hat people still know Easter Parade. Still doesn’t take that childhood sting away, probably never will.     

The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-With Lowell’s Bette Davis And Jack Kerouac In Mind

The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes-With Lowell’s Bette Davis And Jack Kerouac In Mind

By Special Guest Writer Greg Green   

  

[Greg Green, a writer well known to me in this space for his articles on his and others experiences in the devil’s war, the Vietnam War, that carved a nation in two, maybe more and from which at least culturally it has never recovered mentioned to me one day when he was getting ready to review an old time black and white movie Of Human Bondage for the American Film Gazette for which he writes occasionally that the female star Bette Davis had been born in Lowell, Massachusetts. Something that he did not know although he grew up a few towns over in leafy suburban Westford. Greg has been a longtime admirer of another Lowell native Jack Kerouac who torched a placid post-World War II world with his On The Road some sixty years ago (and which we have as Seth Garth mentioned “seemingly endlessly” and he may be right commemorated in this space recently on the sixtieth anniversary of its publication). That got Greg thinking that there must be some connection that he could draw between two such iconic celebrities from an old dying mill-town (dying even back then as the mills headed cheap textile labor south and then cheaper foreign shorts worldwide-in their respective birth times 1908 and 1922) that had seen better days beside the inevitable “there must be something in the water” theory. So he asked me to let him do a little piece trying to make some cosmic connection between the two icons and the town. Pete Markin]             

A river runs through it. The great rushing from the New Hampshire mountains, at least that is what I have been told is source ground zero of the broken down millwheel towns to the seas and unto the great cold wash Atlantic and there to homeland (homeland before Lowell migration and Quebec flee failing farms up north looking for factory river work) Europe left behind from desolation days Merrimack. Merrimack some potent Indian signifier (excuse me Indian when Indian was the name spoken and not the correct Native American or even better indigenous peoples who can  stake serious and legitimate claim to sacred ground now ill-trodden over by umpteen generations and no reparations in sight) long before the devils came in their blasted wooden hull ships from across that briny North Atlantic no high note in sight unlike the great big blow out in Frisco town when a skinny black kid blew that one to perdition. Great rushing river dividing the town between the remember “fake natives” and the on-coming foreigners come to pick up the slack in the bottomless spinning wheel pits (the noise drowning out sing-song voices and whiskey hoarse alike and maybe that is where the sober siren sought his Jack strange mystifying voice and he his throbbing pace that in the end wound up like whiskey breath).        

River, two forked river come flowing from the great ices of New Hampshire hills laying down sediments (and sentiments) along a path unto the great turn and rock formation by Pawtucketville Bridge-dividing that town even further (or is it farther) pushing out Highland visions of august majesty. Then a poor besotted girl emerges, emerges out of the dust hitting the high trail west landing forlorn and mystified in some fallen angel diner and a gas station town near the Petrified Forest (trees so ancient, think about it, that they have turned to stone some kind of metaphor there-something about staying in one place too long) in the Arizonas, out off of Route 66 heavy-travelled in the next generation by hungry guys tired of diner and gas stations at home drift to the cities but need to catch some dust and grit although what they thought of benighted stone trees who  knows in between those expansive cities). There some Papa generation before her came out looking for El Dorado or gold something different and landed in two bit desert stretches and kind of got stuck, got good and stuck there. (Not everybody made it as the skeletons along the way of cattle, horse, and human set among the bramble and down some aching arroyo tell every daredevil passer-by and every sensational dime store penny a word novelist in the days when that “contract” ruled writers on “spec” too.)

And there abandoned by a big city dream mother and an ill-defined no account wimp father she came of age dreaming the dreams, funny city girl dreams of faraway places away from the dust and those fucking stoned trees when the wind howls through the crevices (making one think of other social howls and wolves and Molochs and white-dressed nurses in mental wards and of cool jazz man hipsters and Times Square con artists working the rubes), her father the king of the species all dressed up and cowardly when it came right down to it. Dreaming book dreams, small printed page books sent from far away by those who could not take the dust, the heat, those howls and once again those fucking night-blinding stone trees which tourists would pay a pretty penny for a clip, a sliver. Jesus. Dreamed fourteenth century or was fifteenth dreams of mad man con man rabble Villon out of some Balzac French novel but real enough speaking about how he could not stay with civil people but sought solace among the petty thieves, the cut throats, the man murderers (little did she know who would come through door to marvel at her bug-eyes and blinkers making sorry Villon nothing but a second-rate Time Square hustler, hey, pacifist even) , the flotsam and jetsam among the people who lived outside the moat, who did not dream but planned.         

          

“Hey there stranger” she spoke quickly to that stranger with the strange pale voice and the paler skin despite walking the sun-drenched walk of the tramp no better than Villon’s men outside the moat and who looked like he had not had three squares in many a moon so that is what she thought when he first came in, came in and recognized in that small book, that funny thought poem by mad monk gone astray Villon and thus was kindred against the Papa silliness and some gas station jockey who tried to make love to her before her time. So they talked, he called it conversation, and told her that the night-takers descending on the flat land earth, out even in the freaking (his term not hers) stone tree desert filled with arroyo-seized skeletons that the day for conversation was quickly coming to froth, was dangerous beyond whatever small thoughts she had ever had out in that vast night sky thunder-blazed desert. She thought him the new Messiah come that she has heard about over the blaring radio that made the diner hours go by more quickly so she could retreat into Villon’s manly dreams without distraction. He, the stranger he, laughed and said no vagabond who was out filching (cadging in what he meant she thought) free eats in dust-bitten rocks could claim Messiah-hood, could survive the new age coming and coming quickly right through her door. Her bug-eyes blinkered at that, at her silly illusions when she thought about it later after he was gone, gone to who knows what savior-driven place.          

No sooner had the stranger taken his filched food (she still insisted it was cadged and would whenever anybody asked her if she had actually seen the savior, had maybe slept with him for good measure) when the night-takers stormed in (stormed in more than one way bringing half the desert hell with them as boon companion) and made her savior stranger sit on his ass on the floor. Made hell come to pass before the night was through. (He, the stranger, would comment that the night-takers took their sweet-ass time whenever they descended and that those descended on took their sweet-ass time figuring out how to get rid of the bastards). Sweet manna. Then that forlorn stranger had an idea, a good one if somebody beside her thought about it later that he would go mano a mano with the night-takers, would play the gallant when all was said and done (giving lie to the idea that he didn’t have any ideas about the night-takers except their time had come). Naturally he lost, better won/lost and left her with her book, her small Villon book, a guy from the fourteenth century or was it the fifteenth and her dreams kind of intact. A few years later some guys in a 1949 Hudson (or was it Studebaker) tired of the Route 66 road came by looking for grub, looking for free eats and some whiskey but by then she was long gone to some city that Papa and father could not fathom            

[On in the frozen Western night the no longer girlish girl hung up on old time French bandit-poets, con men, desolation angels, and holy fools, and lost in thought time of the intellectuals far from the blessed stone trees, as far away as she could get to Southern California and so “frozen” ironic she picks up a book, a paperback left on the counter by a forgetful customer who after paying for his Woolworth-quality lunch must have given up all hope. She flips it into her pocketbook to either wait on his owner’s return or for something to read that night, that lonesome stone tree wilderness night that never left her thoughts. That guy, or whoever it was, never returned and so that night she read, read until the early morning hours and then read some more.          

Read about a guy, although in her mind it could have be a girl, who had the same wanderlust that drove her west, drove her to the great blue-pink American western night he called it looking for some father that he had never known, looking forlornly, for that father from some oil-spilled New Jersey shore river to the wind-swept China seas before the Golden Gate Bridge. Looked high and low for the missing brethren who long ago had crossed her path out in the hard stone tree night when everything was possible but the intellectuals then flabby and ill-disposed to fight the night-takers even to a draw abandoned all hope, decided that primitive man would take the day and crush any free spirits. This guy though flush with the expectations of many new adventures once the night-takers were put to the sword took to the road, took a chance that he could find that father some fucking place-maybe Latimer Street in Denver, maybe Neola, Grand Island, Reno, Winnemucca, Tulsa, Fargo (although give up all hope if you wind up in that locale). She wondered that maybe he had stolen her dreams. Maybe he had stared at the same rivers that drove her desires, yes, just maybe that was the case.]    

A young boy only spoke patois until he went to school played hooky one day and sat in the lost souls library hoping to find something that would challenge his fevered brain and slip-slopped over to the poetry section and found this guy Villon, a poet of the fourteenth or was it the fifteenth century, who spoke of dreams and crashing out (spoke too of ruffian petty larcenies outside the moat but the boy let it pass because he knew all about that, knew that poet kings only spoke of such to work up a sweat, to deal better with hipsters, con men, sullen fallen women, junkies and assorted felons riding on the railroad jungle tracks. Knew he had kindred in that long ago poet king and sought out fellows who could understand such dreams, could understand too the patois that he thought in. Would find plenty of hipsters, cons, con men, Molochs, holy goofs, cowboy angels, a teenage Adonis is spar with his brethren soul. Find Moloch, insanity, the clap, jungle fever, whiskey shakes, penniless forsaken highways, lost boys, sullen youth, Zen, chicken shit and on some days, but only some days, he wished he never left that fucking river, that holy of holies Merrimack and those wistful eyes that he remembered out in cold Winnemucca, Neola, Grand Island, Big Sur nights          

[Weird thoughts along the Merrimack lifeline (remember like bodies make-up filled with arteries and canals) a fervent solemnly disciplined fourteen year old boy armed with Woolworth’s ten cent notepads and chewed raw No. 2 pencils, sits arms akimbo, strange gangling not yet athletic fourteen year old position like some latter day saint Buddha seeing all knowing all with hashish pipe tucked into some secret place sitting out with cans of beans and rat shit on desolation row waiting for fires and damnation, in a silent black back row orchestra seat (no red dress girl singing swinging Benny Goodman songs that night to come hither him to perdition and have to ask the eternal boy-girl question-orchestra or balcony-and he would know the answer always know the answer balcony of course she silly why else would I come into the shadows with you) of the of long gone to condos or cute shops Majestic Theater off of Bridge Street staring intensely at the big white screen suddenly turned to magic motion pictures with a dust storm brewing out in some fucking petrified forest and some girl not his holding off some ragged sweater gas jockey, and dreams too.   

Waiting, eternally waiting like that fervent fourteen year old boy for something to happen, for some kicks, for something better than listening to the average swill the customers brought in the door, waiting she thought for culture, or her idea or culture anyway. What grabbed that poor boy boy though was that scene out of some latter day great American West night when he thought he would be able to choke the Eastern dust from off his shoes and live-and write, always write. So kindred, kindred too when some holy goof hobo, tramp, bum angel Buddha comes traipsing down the road looking for hand-outs and God Jesus that would be the life. He, she, they make small kindred talk and speak of that damn poet, that Villon who knew more than he should about the human condition, more than any fourteen year old boy anyway. 

But before long the dream shattered, the night-takers released from their caves come swooping down like hell’s avenging angels, avenging the lost paradise that he had read a guy by the name of Milton, half-blind had gone on and on about in some heaven’s battle and they the losers-and what of it. But when you take on the night-takers you better realize that you will take some casualties, take some holy sacred blood from the holy earth returned and that ain’t fair, ain’t fair at all but who knows maybe Buddha, Rama. Zoroaster, Jehovah, the unnamed one, planned it out that way. Out the door of that no longer silent black back row orchestra seat he was glad that he had not had some red dress come hither girl to bother him. For he wondered, wondered as he sank his eyes into the white froth of the mighty Merrimack below whether she, that Western tableau girl would ever acknowledge him, ever read his mind like he read hers.]  

Ha, as he tried to climb Bear Mountain with a dollar and a quarter in his stained dungarees (not called jeans then, not around him anyway) splattered flannel shirt and broken toe boots looking for that father he never knew (although his own father had passed on before he knew that he was looking for another father somewhere along the wino camp tracks, some arroyo bush or in some county jail working out a scheme). Had Route 66 cold because if he could search that highway he would miss some connection, some angst the shrinks called it among the hot rod car, surf board, motorcycle lost winding in stir and some rough trade honey to some beast, boys he would meet out in the great blue-pink American Western night. As he pulled his thumb out of his back pocket he finally relaxed and dug the scene. Hit long rides and short, mostly lonely truckers looking for company and searching for the sons they had never known, tramp diner stops, railroad stews on nights so cold his broken toe boots seized up on him, grabbed a couple of big rides with big blondes looking for some max daddy to be-bop with and leave in Doc’s drugstore while they waited to be “found” by some Hollywood agent. Took tokay swigs with the best of them, met up with rabid New Jersey poets, New York City Times Square gangster dope peddlers and sainted poets (funny always the poets driving him forward he would have to write that down, Ivy League junkies on the nod, and finally the Adonis of the western night whom he would be-bop with unto the San Francisco Bay dropped that high white note out in the China seas. Yeah, he had it all except maybe those bug eyes from childhood lost in some flophouse. Still on some days, and only on some days, he wished he never had left that fucking river, never that sacred ground river. He wondered if she though that same thought.