The Brown Hills Of California- The Music Of Kate Wolf

The Brown Hills Of California- The Music Of Kate Wolf

CD Review

Gold In California-A Retrospective, Kate Wolf, Rhino, 1986

Well, what goes around comes around, as they say. I have spend much time this year in on this site going through a litany of roots performers, folk revivalists of the 1960s performers and more contemporary performers, folk, root or rock. I have not, as yet, uttered the name, Kate Wolf, in any previous reviews. I make that omission right here.

Kate Wolf is a name that is well known among my musical acquaintances, although frankly, before I reviewed a Utah Phillips album, "Starlight On The Rails", a few years ago I was not familiar with her work at all. And that Phillips connection, my friends, is the key to why Ms. Wolf is being reviewed here today. The imprimatur of the late Utah Phillips, an old Wobblie (IWW) singer/songwriter/storyteller and general gadabout was enough to get me to listen to her. And although I cannot say that she is at the top of my musical list she certainly, based mainly on her lyrics, has my attention.

Unlike Utah, with whom she traveled with to various folk venues when she was getting her start and who cadged her a few of his songs (or ideas for songs), she did not write many overtly political songs (except maybe for some antinuclear ones, dear to the hearts of many Californians at the time, when they were trying to shut down the nuclear power plants there in the late 1970s-early 1980s) that I know of. Mainly, as here, she wrote of love, longing for love, the misunderstandings of love, the traps and travails of love set out in, for the most part, the West, and particularly in those brown hills of California where she called home. Unfortunately, she died young so we will never know how good she really could have been, but off of this compilation of material we surely missed something. Stick outs here are “The Trumpet Vine,” Across The Great Divide,” and “Here In California”.

"Across The Great Divide"-Kate Wolf

I've been walkin' in my sleep
Countin' troubles 'stead of countin' sheep
Wher the years went I can't say
I just turned around and they've gone away

I've been siftin' through the layers
Of dusty books and faded papers
They tell a story I used to know
And it was one that happened so long ago

Chorus:
It's gone away in yesterday
Now I find myself on the mountainside
Where the rivers change direction
Across the Great Divide

Now, I heard the owl a-callin'
Softly as the night was fallin'
With a question and I replied
But he's gone across the borderline

Chorus

The finest hour that I have seen
Is the one that comes between
The edge of night and the break of day
It's when the darkness rolls away

Chorus

“America-Where Are You Now We Can’t Fight Alone Against The Monster”- “Captain America: Winter Soldier” (2014)-A Film Review

“America-Where Are You Now We Can’t Fight Alone Against The Monster”- “Captain America: Winter Soldier” (2014)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Vance Villon

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the previous site administrator Peter Markin was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

Captain America: The Winter Soldier, starring Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel Jackson, Robert Redford, from the Marvel Comic series, 2014   

As I mentioned recently in my very first piece in this space The Dragon Man Goes Awry (check the December 2017 archives) I came into this work post-Allan Jackson the deposed site administrator now situated according to his close friend Sam Lowell, another writer here, out in Utah in what some have called retirement and others have called a “purge,” a controversy I don’t want to delve into because frankly I know very little and the rumor around the blogosphere is that same Sam Lowell is going to gather up all the various strands of the dispute, what did or did not happen, and who was harmed or not and write about it all soon.

The only point at which I intersected with the previous regime other than knowledge of my father-in-law Phil Larkin’s long-time friendship with Jackson, indirectly, was when I approached the new site administrator, Greg Green, and asked him if it would be possible to do a Captain America film review. The first one, The First Avenger subsequently assigned to a younger writer than me Kenny Jacobs is the one I had in mind with the idea of the Captain being the foundation stone as a resistance leader against the troubles laid on humankind by the bad guys who always seem to be with us. Given the nature of the times, the dreaded 2017 real time of this impeding cold civil war in America which might very well turn hot, very hot given the tensions and what one writer using a forest fire as his metaphor called the social timber ready to burn. This civil war business something that as young as I am I could never have imaged would turn up in my lifetime.

I had heard that Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul Markin during his tenure the genesis of which has been explained in previous posts by other writers, young and old, so I need not go into it since it really involves stuff that Phil Larkin would know more about than me) had refused to countenance any writer reviewing anything related to comics. That despite his own well-verified youthful love of comics, and of films related to comic book entries like Superman and Batman. Greg said sure, go ahead but don’t get too heavy on the history of such comics and center on the plot and why such films are made. That is what I had intended to do since I frankly don’t have enough information about those old days and the effect of comics on the youth of America to go into that thicket much.

All of this was before the “controversy” between Phil and young up and coming writer Kenny Jacobs over who was to do the first review in the trilogy although last in the series so far-Captain America: Civil War blew up. In the end neither wanted to do the review but Greg to placate the younger writer and test his range with an old black and white film review had Phil wound up doing the piece. As part of his introduction Phil went out of his way to grouse about why the hell was he doing a kid’s thing review when a kid was getting the plum Bogie movie review which he would have been all over (Kenny did a good job on it). When Kenny wound up doing the review for the first film in the series The First Avenger he, in his turn, groused about having to do a review of something that interested him less than Phil despite his youth. You will not find me either grousing or saying like they both respectively did WFT about this assignment. I wanted it and here it is. Vinny Villon]         

              

****

Like most action packed movies, movies which depend on their very reason for existence on X number (some huge X number) of fast paced action per minute stunts and scenes the film under review Captain America: The Winter Soldier has plenty of that and very little on heavy dialogue or plotline. Except go forward, blindly or not, and crush the bad guys whatever guise they appear under. Of course since this film is the second in the series (which now stands at three) we already know how the character of Captain America came about during World War II. I think Phil Larkin hit the nail on the head (and even disgruntled Kenny used the idea) when he said that they had taken a 4-F runt, a scrawny weakling right off of what would have been then a matchbook cover Charles Atlas kick sand in your face advertisement and made him a he-man. A he-man who could jump high, jump down better, run like the wind even through New York City traffic no mean accomplishment, bump kill bad guys and have time for a nap before lunch. Just the kind of guy who all by his lonesome could eat a Panzer division alive during the big one . Get this though to get through the action of the first film the Captain, after dealing a death blow to a failed mutant experiment named Red Skull, had a moral obligation, at least by his lights to ditch a plane headed to that very New York City carrying horrible energies in as always a small box into the Artic snows to resurface seventy years later after being in a deep freeze for that long. Looking young and a bit bewildered by the sights and sound of New York City.  

But that was mostly old hat by now. Obviously, mutant or not, a guy with the Captain’s powers is something worth having on your side. Here Captain America played by Chris Evans is working for the big time espionage agency S.H.I,E.L.D which is trying  to on the face of it bring world peace or something like that via getting rid of bad guys and settling for less than paradise in the process. That operation is opposed by the remnants of that nasty Hydra criminal enterprise that Red Skull had played a central role in who are up to their old tricks of trying to grab the latest technologies to control the world assuming humankind preferred stability and peace through a strong security apparatus than fudge along not knowing what will happen at any given moment. The key leaders Fury, played by Samuel E. Jackson and Pierce, played by now hard to view ex-beauty mummified Robert Redford who in his day would have probably had the Captain America role handed to him on a platter.            

Of course the Captain is not working solo these days for a high-flying intelligence operation as he has a wingman and a jumping jack played by ubiquitous Scarlett Johannsson. Fellow mutants to work the means streets.  The task is to prevent Hydra from grabbing some very high-end helicopters which can direct massive fire wherever whoever is guiding the thing wants. And guess what Hydra’s enforcer in chief is- the winter soldier, a bad ass dude no question who just happens to be an old Brooklyn growing up buddy of Barnes, played by Sebastian Stan, who wound up working, for or against his will it is never quite clear, for Hydra. And doing a very good job of it.

That turning to evil purposes by old Barnes, by the transformed winter soldier makes perfect sense. Especially as if as claimed he was subject to Soviet-era brainwashing. What I had, have, a hard time getting around is the fate of Pierce, of Robert Redford, who as it turns out was a Hydra “mole,” working the espionage racket. A guy who went to the mat with Butch Cassidy to waste the bad guys in the old West, a guy who put a greedy New York stockbroker into cheap street working the old con in The Sting turns out to be nothing but a cheapjack secret agent for the nefarious forces loose in the world. How the mighty have fallen. Therein lies one cautionary tale. The other don’t trust anybody from Brooklyn-or Queens if you know what I mean.   

How The Mighty Had Fallen On Hard Times-The Decline And Fall Of The Late Famous Late Private Detective Lew Archer-With The Chalmers Case In Mind-A Book Review-Sort Of

How The Mighty Had Fallen On Hard Times-The Decline And Fall Of The Late Famous Late Private Detective Lew Archer-With The Chalmers Case In Mind-A Book Review-Sort Of       

By Sam Lowell

The Good-bye Look, Ross MacDonald, 1969

[To be honest I had originally no intention of writing this bracketed introduction but am doing so now as the request, damn, make that order of site manager Greg Green. That little command despite the fact that I am chair of the Editorial Board of this publication and am in theory at least his boss, or one of his bosses. However Greg has pulled rank on me since there was great deal of blowback from readers and reviewers from other publications on my previous efforts to understand the demise of a man who would have been the greatest of all the private eye detectives Lew Archer. I had assumed that as a hard-hitting publication seeking the truth no matter I was on solid ground. I had freely posited that Lew’s trouble began (and ended) with his hushed-up sexual impotence sending him to the minor leagues where chasing skirts as well as criminals didn’t matter that much to a P.I.s reputation since that was mainly repo work or security stuff. The blowback mostly was why was I “defaming” a long-gone dead guy who had had some great successes. But they fail to  mention in the end a guy who through the breakthrough Hardman case and a few others looked like he was a shoo in for the P.I. Hall of Fame wound up peeking through keyholes in seedy U.S. 101 motels before “no-fault divorce” put and big crimp in that P.I. money-maker and then after he go this license yanked wound up shagging golf balls at the Bel Air Country Club for an ex-client who felt sorry for him.  

I would have let the whole thing fade to oblivion, easily fade to oblivion except I ran into Lew’s lawyer, his last lawyer who was sitting in a San Francisco gin mill when he spotted me and after the obligatory exchange of a few drinks which will always loosen up tongues he posed the question of questions about Lew’s demise. And like all lawyers thought he had the answer to before he asked the question. See I knew Lew in the old days, in his old age just before the hammer came down from the State of California that maybe for the good of the profession he “retire” meaning they were not going to renew his license after he got caught planting so-called evidence in the Miller case, a missing child case which never did get solved. Knew Lew from the time that I interviewed him for the East Bay Other as a young free-lance reporter interested in the wild crops of private eyes who populated the Left Coast (not called that then but later). Had an intense interest on film private eyes too as I was beginning to start my first steps as a film reviewer and wanted to compare Lew with some earlier immortals like Phil Larkin, Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe, all three easily inducted into that hall of fame.          

Look, in the old days the cops, the DA, the police reporters and everybody else would cover for somebody like Lew who had started out as a public copper but those hero-worshipping days are long gone, long gone for guys whose feet were made of clay. Although those days are long gone and now every reporter, young or old, has to have a “hook” to stay in place even on the food chain of this cutthroat business I was prepared before I got this inside information to move on to other pursuits. Since I am “outing” Lew who was exceptional in that he tanked early I might as well mention that a guy like Phil Larkin was actually arrested as a “peeping Tom” on his last case and had to register as a sex offender in Pennsylvania where his graduate student girlfriend met on-line was doing her doctoral dissertation at Penn State. Sam Spade passed on in a mental hospital, that is what they called them then screaming out the name “Brigid” over and over again. Phillip Marlowe after he married Vivian Sternwood of the oil money billions and moved to Poodle Springs lost his edge. Took only high-end clients and cases until Vivian tossed him out after she caught him fooling around with younger sister Carmen in Las Vegas (that before he ran into Dotty Malone, the famous screen-writer who he would later marry). Not a word below has been changed as a result of the “boss’ command so read on.   Sam Lowell]     

***********

Lew Archer had been impotent, sexually impotent, which explains a lot about why he never entered the pantheon, the P.I. pantheon. The famous, or rather almost famous, Hollywood private detective who was expected to light up the 1950s professional firmament after guys like Philo Vance, Same Spade, Phillip Marlowe. Phil Larkin, even Nick Charles, stopped peeking through keyholes or cashed their checks whichever came first. Except poor Lew could not cut the mustard as we used to say in the old North Adamsville neighborhood when we had time on our hands and tried to figure who was homo, a fag, you know “light on their feet, ” a mama’s boy, a Nancy and some stuff I refuse to say in my old age after having learned a thing or two -including it ain’t  my business, or yours, who somebody loves. Except nobody, and I don’t here, is trying to “out” Lew at this late date nor do I think he was into same-sex relationships. I think he just lost steam, lost some sexual desire after maybe taking one, or twenty, too many hits on the noggin, a few off-hand slugs and maybe had some other physical problems like erectile dysfunction in those Viagra-less days as he grew older.

Hollywood though as I just learned recently from Seth Garth, a fellow writer at this publication and one of the guys who gay-baited with me in the old Acre working poor days when we had nothing but time on our hands for such foolishness was very protective of its own back in those same 1950s days. The recent comments he made in this publication in doing a quick review of a new biography about male icon and AIDS victim Rock Hudson and other well-known male hunk figures like Tab Hunter and Rory Calhoun show how well all that stuff was kept from the public in the interest of illusions and profits. At who knows at what cost to the actors and others involved. Hollywood, as is less well known, was as protective of its private investigators as its movie stars so it is understandable that Lew’s reputation as a “lady’s man” lasted so long. (Ironically, no, sadly Hollywood was not so protective of its personnel who were being tarred with the “commie, red” brush in the heart of the Cold War purges orchestrated by the U.S. government. They fed the grist mill with all hands in those days.)        

Naturally anybody would want proof or at least informed speculation to go with the “accusation” against Lew at this far remove and I would suggest that beginning with the Galton case, the case that made him very famous, Hollywood famous and thus fleeting he lost his way. And I will provide proof in due course but first it is necessary to set Lew and his manly failure up against what the public, hell, what the profession expected of its own practitioners. Guys like Phil Larkin, Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe, hell, even married to Nora Nick Charles when Nora wasn’t looking, set a high bar for grabbing some serious femmes in their time. Hell a guy like Phil Larkin was still pushing himself forward, and succeeding, with young lovelies, with as the term went, or one of the terms for desirable women went, the frills, grabbing a foxy twenty-something graduate student, a Glennon daughter, when he was almost seventy after the Glennon murder case wrapped up. And Phil was a lesser light in the profession then.     

The two big guys in the profession though who I want to highlight here to set up Lew’s problem were one Samuel Spade whose mother raised no fool and the ubiquitous Phillip Marlowe. First to Sam who, with or without his partner Miles Archer, no relation to Lew, solved many cases including that got him in the P.I. Hall of Fame the Astor case, the case where by the skin of his nose he avoided the noose, the big step off and sent a femme, his femme, Brigid who the hell knows her last name she used a million aliases to face the music. Beautiful and every private detective program from those established by the Pinkertons to those you used to see advertised on match book covers about learning the profession in ten easy lessons without leaving the comfort of your armchair (but leaving a few bucks behind as usual).

That Astor case is informative for it is the first time in public that a P.I. slept with a client, a lying bitch of a client but still a client under most state licensing rules and then turned her over the coppers after she nearly blew his brains out, and few other guys too. The point here being that with a wild one like the Astor dame you had better have, what did we call it up above, plenty of mustard if you are going to go the distance and not fall down in the cracks. I won’t even mention that Chinese beauty over in Chinatown that cleans his whistle in the Tong Wars case or what in the profession was called the “flute-player case,” although in public called the Bergman case, when this Scandinavian femme tried to leave him flat to take yet another fall after doing her thing with him. Great almost heroic mode stuff.      

If Sam set the standard, set the bar high, Phillip Marlowe, another P.I. Hall of Famer, went wild with the women once it didn’t matter, nobody gave a fuck as one wag had it whether you played it straight with the client or jumped immediately under the satin sheets with the femme. Had two sisters going at one point, the younger wilder one, Carmen, Carmen Sternwood, dropping in his lap even before he took his hat off. It is not clear whether he went under the silkies with both her and the older sister, Vivian whom he married for a while mostly for the sex and dough then blew their Poodle Springs mansion for the next best thing. Bopped swell Velma against all odds and against the mammoth client who would have put him six feet under if he got a whiff of that scent she gave off when Phillip came a-calling. Grabbed Honey in the big Hollywood star murder case no problem. I could go on and on but you get the message. Cut the mustard or get the hell out of town.  

Now to the case against Lew, why he didn’t measure up, why he was never even close to being voted into the P.I. Hall of Fame despite a fistful of nominations. There was a lot of speculation around over the years that Lew was never the same after the, what did they call it, oh yeah, the Ivory Grin case where he got egg all over his face when he was unable to figure out what happened to the guy his client was looking for. The client a fox if there ever was one but Lew never got to first base with her, never tried to get to first base which is worse from the story I heard from a very reliable source who knew the client and knew the guy she was looking for and couldn’t find through Lew. The public coppers wrapped it up in a week once there was another murder committed by the same warped doctor who couldn’t keep his hands off the women, some other guys’ women.       

Personally, and bear me out on this I think the turning point was when he balled up the Galton case, couldn’t connect the dots, couldn’t navigate the bevy of dames who passed his way and if that was the case then no way could he solve the case. As mentioned before, and if not then now, the public coppers had to come and save his bacon, Jesus, against a guy who hung himself rather than go back in stir, rather than face the inevitable California big step-off.

Funny how you will get information on the subject you are reporting on, the back channels connections that never get made public, by you or any reporter made public, not if you want to move up the tough racket food chain that is journalism the toughest racket of all except maybe film critics, reviewers whatever they call themselves these days. The operative word is you “dug” the nuggets out by the sweat of your brow like some coalminer rather than having it handed to you by some poor drunk like happened in the Johnny Cielo case down in Key West back in those same 1950s. But at this far remove I am not telling any tales out of school by saying that impotence theory was the opinion of a well-known lawyer who should know and whom I met when I was just starting out as a journalist at the East Bay Other, a place where a few other writers here did some free-lance work. Hell, it was all free-lance or free then since you never knew if you would get paid or not, paid enough at least to keep the wolves from your door. I had been sitting with that lawyer having drinks at the notorious KitKat Club in San Francisco in the days when “drag queen” culture was very much underground, and I was on assignment to write about it for the Eye. He was defending the establishment and the exotic entertainers against the city and against various violations of the health moral codes then existing. This in the days before Timmy Riley was the owner, when he was just working out his act, doing a lame impersonation of Miss Bette Davis and hardly keeping the wolves from his door. Somehow the subject of great private detectives came up, probably I brought it up since I knew that he had defended a number of famous private eyes, famous California ones anyway when they got into legal trouble.

Got Phillip Marlowe, yes that Phillip Marlowe from the Sternwood case P.I.s still talk about, still do case studies on in those matchbox cover ads touting how to be a detective in ten or so easy lessons-for hard cash and no refunds, buddy- out from under the big step off when they tried to wrap old-time gangster Eddie Mars’ murder, murder by his own bodyguards on Marlowe when he, Marlowe,   was allegedly doing a burglary of one of Eddie’s properties. Got Phil off in a million other cases too like the time he wasted some doctor, some pill-pusher who filled him up with junk to get him to spill where a guy named Moose Malone, no relation to Dorothy below, was to stop him from finding some femme who did not want to be found-by giant Moose anyway. From a million other cases and who I had found out later at that time had been married to Dorothy Malone, the famous screenwriter who just died this year at 98 and was the last living link to the great Marlowe legacy.

Got Nick Charles into a 12- Step program after he had attempted to “fly,” Nick’s drunken sot term on the QT after a million DUIs without his wife Nora, his mistress Jenny, or any Frisco cops who had an interest knowing about it. Got one Samuel Spade out from under about six felonies and the loss of his license when some twist named Brigit, Mary, who knew in the end what her real name was pointed the finger at him. That was the one where that Brigit femme walked to the big house and took some gaff for stuff, a fistful of murders, that she had attempted to tie to our boy Sam. So that lawyer and if you don’t know who he is by now then you just don’t lawyers who make their kale off the troubles of private detectives and giving the name would mean nothing to you knew from whence he spoke.

What would mean something, name or no name, was that lawyer’s theory about private detectives, and here he zeroed in specifically on Lew Archer and how he blew the Galton case, a few others too but the Galton case was pure fuck-up and made his point. What that big-time lawyer said was that any P.I. who wasn’t half crazy trying to get under the silky sheets with some femme is strictly impotent, can’t get it up. Not gay, asexual, intersexual, bi-sexual or anything like that that stuff is okay, was okay for him back then since he was hanging around such people in the KitKat Club before Timmy Riley, aka Miss Judy Garland, broke out of the pack with the Garland gag, took over and made the place a Mecca for tourists who wanted to take a quick walk on the wild side.

The funny thing as our lawyer described it was that Lew had about five opportunities to bed some dame starting when he first got on the case with Mrs. gallons of oil money Galton’s home companion, Ava, who was a knockout from the photos of her in a swimsuit when the case went to court (the case of officially adopting Granny Galton’s lost grandson as her sole heir not the murder case of her son which some lawyer had forced her to look into and which was a cold case, a frozen solid cold case when Lew put his grimy paws on the thing and screwed almost everything up before he was done and the public coppers had to come in and solve the damn thing, a rare occasion indeed then but the start of the downward spiral, the road to repo and keyhole peeking work). Then there was the guy who fingered Mrs. gallons of oil money son back in the 1930s whose wife, since remarried, practically threw herself at Lew to avoid her second husband, a good man according to all parties including Lew, finding out she was married to a shiftless bum, a con artist and accessory to murder of that Galton son. Passed her by.

We won’t even speak of the easy pickings he would have had, could have had if he had paid the least bit of attention to the wife, the second wife of the lawyer who hired Lew to find Mrs. Galton’s son (I won’t continue with that “gallons of oil money” gag you know who I mean now). Not only was she drugged to the gills, half naked at least half of the time in his presence at the nursing home she was placed in after she had a nervous breakdown over her role in the murder of that guy who fingered Galton’s son for the executioner’s ax back in the 1930s but she believed, when her lawyerly husband brainwashed her to perdition, she had killed that ex-lover. A piece of cake. Blown to perdition.

It doesn’t end there, and maybe I will miss a few other opportunities today when I think about the long-ago case but I will give you enough examples that my lawyer friend gave me to condemn Lew to strictly third-rate private detective-dom. There was the grandson’s college time, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan girlfriend who had enough dough to sink a ship, was ready to give the kid cars, and whatever else he wanted. The kid walked away, went to greener pastures. When Lew interviewed the twist, trying to find out what she knew about the kid’s whereabouts, what made him tick, and why he was the pawn in some nefarious scheme to dupe Mrs. Galton into believing that he was really her grandson, she was as ready to have a soft shoulder to cry on as anybody in the world. Lew walked. Wouldn’t give her the time of day, made some excuse up about his time of the month, male version. Hell even ancient Phil Larkin, he of the famed Simmons case which made his name, grabbed some twenty-something graduate student from Penn State, led her a merry chase, and he was almost seventy. Poor Lew.

(My lawyer checking into that Big Blue dame’s fate just because he was interested, maybe grab her on the rebound told me she already had a new boyfriend about five days after Lew talked to her although he still was able to get a date with her since she and the new lover were not “exclusive,” whatever that meant.)  

Now I think that the next women Lew passed on maybe he wasn’t wrong to not take a run at although my lawyer was infuriated that I would say such a stupid journalist kind of thing. This was a dame, an older dame but not that old who frankly didn’t keep up her appearances as they used to say in the days before body-shaming became taboo, very taboo whether for good or evil. She would have been easy pickings too, maybe a one-night stand but here is what she was about. She had actually been married to Mrs. Galton’s son, has seen him killed out on the coast south of Frisco where they were staying, had had an affair or two with the finger man and her husband’s murderer before under threat of murder to her son, that Galton heir grandson, she had married the guy and fled to Canada with him. Stayed with him trying to protect her son she said-likely story. No go for Lew though even though she had locked the door behind them when he was “interviewing” her. No, not poor Lew, sad sack Lew.

Here is the one I don’t figure, the one he should have taken a run at with all hands. Once Mrs. Galton found out that her son had been murdered but that she had a grandson who had been missing for years and who turned up during Lew’s tenure as her private investigator that case was over. Still there were plenty of people who for their own reasons believed the kid, John was the name he used but as usual any name will do since they are all aliases, was an impostor, was in it for the big payoff when Granny croaked. One was Mrs. Galton’s doctor who had a young daughter whose was at just that age when she was as flirtatious to older guys as young guys. The doctor wasn’t happy when he found out that said daughter was having an affair with John after Lew basically frosted up on her. Jesus how many chances can a guy have and flub everyone.

My lawyer friend also had a theory about the cause of Lew’s impotency which led to his royally screwing up the case so badly. It is tough being third or fourth fiddle in the private detective game (and that was only in California we won’t even discuss the whole country). Lew tried I think, maybe to be a lady’s man but it didn’t work, so he tried a different route, the no sex with clients or persons of interest. It didn’t work but that is that. It now makes perfect sense that he didn’t believe John was the real deal, that the lawyer who hired him played him like a yo-yo. That everybody lied through their teeth to him and he bought it, or at least followed more false flag leads than you could shake a stick at. The funny thing was that all the loose ends got collected up without him. The Galton son's murderer hung himself rather than going back to jail. The finger-man’s ex-wife got redemption from her second husband. John got his girl and his mother’s forgiveness. Mrs. Galton got her real heir, despite the murderous machinations of her scoundrel lawyer and his bedazzled wife got a clear conscience. Lew, well, Lew got egg on his face, lots of egg and a lonely roll-away bed in his low-rent rooming house.                     

It never really got better for Lew as the cases got fewer, as the femme world got the cold shoulder fast even before they could coo a few words. Take the odd-ball Shafer case, an odd-ball case because he took the thing on “spec” from his lawyer who was trying to help a long time neighbor and his wife, The Chambers, whose son had been off the rails, had been as they said in those day, looney, cuckoo ever since he had been abducted as a child had killed the abductor the minute he got a chance. This neighbor, Jim, the man had bags of money either inherited from his late mother or gathered from some unknown sources, and had been too boot a war hero, World War II version, as a pilot out in the briny Pacific death traps. Jim had a wife, a beauty named Oona, nice right who once Lew got on the case could tell was not in love with her husband, was going through the motions. She had looked Lew up and down the minute he came into view but despite being in her presence for a goody part of the case, passed.     

Jim and Oona’s kid really was in a bad way after two events one the so-called robbery of a bunch of his father’s letters to his mother and the stacking up of bodies like cordwood anytime Nick was within fifty miles on any murder. He blamed himself and found his way into the nearest mental hospital which just so happened to be run by a psychiatrist, and his wife Moira, more on her in a minute, trained as a social worker whose benefactor, whose “angel” in funding the clinic had been Jim after Nick got away from that bad ass abductor. Of course anytime the Nick name came up in Lew’s lawyer’s presence he went apoplectic since he did not want his young daughter, young at twenty-five several years younger than Lew but very appealing. She was looking for a shoulder to cry on, another unhappy California woman who seemed to have populated Lew’s life. She could not have been more obvious about her needs but again Lew turned his face away. 

We need not go into the stack of dead bodies that Lew always wound up having to figure out who the murderer was, in the early days he would have had this thing nailed down before sunset by he was clueless for a long while, just like that horrible end to the Galton case when started him down the road to cheap street. What was important though is that he ran through about three other women who would not have turned him down with slightest encouragement. By now you know the drill though.  

I mentioned that Moira, that buxom, curvy woman, Lew’s description not mine I never saw her, married to the shrink who was treating young Nick, the natural fall guy for any bad stuff in the neighborhood. No question she was brighter and kinder than her husband whom she hated with a passion since he went off the deep end running the clinic factory. She was ripe for Lew’s arms, ready to “do the do” as we used to say in the old neighborhood. Why I bring this up with what we know about Lew’s state of mine at the time one story that was circulating at the time was that they, Moira and Lew let’s be clear, went off to some vacant clinic bed and did the “deed.” That was the story then then went around and people were relieved that at least Lew was back on track to be a real private detective.

Baloney, the real story that my lawyer friend who gave me the skinny on the Galton screwups ran into Moira one night in some gin mill in Brentwood. Since he knew her slightly from sending some of his clients to her husband’s in attempts to make a mental incapacity case for them when all else failed he bought her a drink and the subject of Lew Archer and the Shafer case came up. She turned seven shades of red and probably knew right there where the discussion would lead. My guy brought up the subject by way of thanking her for saving Lew’s reputation, for bringing back his “ladies’ man reputation which every serious P.I. needed or got knocked down to repo work or worse. She told him the real story, the story Lew made her tell certain persons who would make sure it got around. Despite about six different attempts arouse him usually every trick she knew from the Kama Sutra nothing. Being a kind if sexually frustrated by the encounter she went along with his wishes. That night hubby got a joy ride she blurted out.  

As for the fate of poor Nick, well, things got better for him once he figured out he was no stone-cold killer. The solution as Lew’s lawyer figured out and passed on to the coppers was simplicity itself, P.I. 101. Nick was set up by somebody who knew he was vulnerable and knew he knew “what was what” about the stolen letters. His “father” Jim had set the poor kid up having committed a burglary of his mother’s house for dough and those damn letters. Jim was a fake, was not Nick’s father, was a worse fake in general because he was one of those “stolen valor” guys, had washed out of pilot school because he got airsick or something. Wound up doing KP, shining officers’ shoes, and policing the grounds around the naval station in San Diego being laughed at by real pilots who had flown serious missions in the Pacific. The only good thing he did when exposed, or about to be, was to slit his worthless throat. As for Lew he got a reprieve from his fading reputation and that was it. Tough slide for a guy who could have been a hall of famer. 

Present At The Creation- Marvel Comics “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011)-A Film Review

Present At The Creation- Marvel Comics “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Captain America: The First Avenger, starring Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Tommy Lee Jones, 2011, Marvel Productions

[Now it is my turn to say WFT, although I could have probably gotten what the initials stood for long before my fellow reviewer on this site long time contributor Phil Larkin decoded the latest shorten terms in modern text-twitter-Internet world. His WTF reason, Phil’s, was that he went here on this site publicly to grouse about having to do another film in this so-far Captain America trilogy rather than what he considered should have been his plum assignment doing a review of his hero actor Humphrey Bogart’s  in one of his lesser later films from the 1950s Deadline-USA. A film about the even then declining (against television) newspaper racket’s struggle for the big story and how to beat off the stiff competition of the other news sources in the big cities.     

Under the new regime, manager Greg Green and the newly instilled Editorial Board, which Phil showed great disrespect for by calling that panel toadies of Greg’s, each writer has the option of airing his or her grievances in the introduction to their articles. With no particular role for either Greg or the board except as something like “gatekeepers” to avoid letting any personal obscure animosities spill into cyberspace. New as I am to this site I have no quarrel with that policy which seems right after what other writers have told me the previous manager Allan Jackson’s never-ending attempts to sweep any writerly controversies under a very deep rug. I have no quarrel either with Phil grousing in public about how he was short-shifted on what he expected to be his assignment. What I do object to and feel a need to mention if only in passing is my “cred” to do the Bogart review.        

Phil seems to believe that if you were not at least alive, as neither I nor my parents were, to have seen the film you are reviewing then that mere fact disqualifies you from reviewing the damn thing. He probably got that idea, an old idea in any case, from his buddy-buddy relationship with Allan Jackson and the coterie of older writers he surrounded himself with until a few years ago. Jackson  seeing the writing on the wall that the older writers were either running out of creative steam or were so hung up on the 1960s when most of them came of age, including Jackson, that they needed younger writers to stop the drainage of younger reader away from the site. While, in general, we younger writers will write material reflecting our coming of age experiences I reject the idea in this specific case that Phil was the only one who could do justice to the Bogart piece.

As I mentioned in my review, and either Phil missed or consciously ignored, I was spoon-fed on Bogie movies as a kid because my parents who met in the 1980s in Ann Arbor were crazy for Bogie (and for the four films with his honey Laruen Bacall especially) after having gone to the campus film department’s periodic retrospectives on the age of black and white films. Later too when they had their version of nostalgic for Bogie they would traipse me along with them to some commercial retro-theater like the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts when they were graduate students. So I will special plead my “cred” on that film. In any case Greg, to placate Phil I guess although that era was supposed to be over with the departure and what some writers have called the exile of Allan Jackson, has assigned me what was supposed to be Phil’s second review in the Captain America trilogy. Truth is I know and care less about that whole Marvel comic book operation than Phil could ever know but being a good sport and also able to feast off of his first review to avoid any heavy lifting I consented. I am, unlike the apparently more paranoid Phil, confident that this introduction will see the light of day. Kenny Jacobs]          

********

Phil Larkin in his review of 2016’s Captain America: Civil War made the appropriate point that these basically mutant creations of humankind’s off-beat fantasies who squared off in that film pale in comparison with a guy like hard-boiled no nonsense private eye Phillip Marlowe, sea-worthy Captain Harry Morgan, closet anti-fascist resistance fighter Rick of Rick’s Café Americian out in the Kasbah, or for that matter unjustly convicted for murder escapee Vincent Parry Bogie. See I am stealing Phil’s stuff already. I won’t deal with the other mutants here since they, except for bad guy Winter Soldier, played by Sebastian Stan and a cameo by youthful inventor Stark aka Ironman, play no role here in The First Avenger saga but this Captain America specimen aka Steve Rogers out of Brooklyn, played by hulky Chris Evans, is a good example of why I shunned such matter when I was a kid. Phil was beautiful in noting that the idea of taking a ninety-eight pound weakling right out of a matchbook cover Charles Atlas “kick sand in your face” advertisement and turning him in 1945, or anytime, in a humanoid monster and then conveniently deep freezing him is kind of a hoot. Filling him up with a ton of what were, are, probably toxics did wonders for his ability to leap, do the 400 meters fast, and collide into people with his trusty shield but left his short on the brains side. Strictly a bronzed beauty-male version in a tight outfit for all the girls, young women, regular women in the theater audience to ogle over.      

Well enough of bursting the bubble and let’s take what we are given for a plotline which Greg Green, the managing editor, now rather irritatingly,  has again insisted that I make sure to outline to give the reader a leg up on what the thing is about. So using the “present at the creation” 1945 motif from the headline let’s get to how this whole mess started when the kid who used to have sand kicked in his face by girls or get his ass whipped by guys got to be on humanity’s short-list of saviors. First off blame it on some screwy doctor who convinces the scrawny weakling to be a trial balloon in one of his experiments to make super-human fighters by the bushel load to fight the bad guys, real bad guys the Nazis and their friends and hangers-on. Bingo he is in although not knowing he was not the first to go into the program. A Frankenstein, who will go by the name Red Skull once he arrives on the scene, is running amok trying to seize some advanced technology which will make him the numero uno bad guy pulling guys like Hitler and Mussolini off their pedestals.

So the quest for the golden fleece, for the fountain of youth, or whatever they are searching for is on. In this case a super-powerful energy source to do the do with Red Skull’s mad scientist colleague’s mad world-controlling inventions. Red Skull has it but not for long as the newly minted Captain America chaffing under the bit doing war bond drives instead of off-handedly saving the world (and creating as Phil noted many more innocent casualties than lowering the count on bad guys). So he moves off dead center and goes mano a mano with Red Skull finally grabbing the valuable energy elixir in a big air fight in which Red Skull comes up with the short end of the stick. Problem is our good Captain is left to guide the plane to safe harbors but can’t avoid crashing into big cities if he does so he “falls on his sword” taking the plane down in the Artic to wake up some seventy years later a stranger in a strange land-New York City. To continue saving a world even wackier than when he wound up in that deep freeze. End of story.

No, not quite, because comic he-man adventures or not there has to be a love interest here his Peggy, a British intelligence agent and all around whizz which naturally fizzles out when duty calls. As well we have a preview of what will come up in future episodes when his high school buddy, Barnes, who is presumed dead, will give his old buddy the masked man more trouble than he could shake a stick at. Yeah, I am with Phil, WTF, yawn.     

I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s "Shadows In The Night"CD In Mind

I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s "Shadows In The Night"CD In Mind

By Sam Lowell 

Recently I did a review of Bob Dylan’s CD, Shadows In The Night, a tribute to the king of Tin Pan Alley Frank Sinatra. (No, not as part of the never-ending and getting weird for material bootleg series which I believe is up to volume thirteen or some such number with outtakes and such overriding any real music certainly nothing that hasn’t been done better on the long list of classic album CDs like Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing It All Back Home) I noted that such an effort was bound to happen if Dylan lived long enough. Strange as it may seem to a generation, the generation of ’68, the AARP generation, okay, baby-boomers who came of age with the clarion call put forth musically by Bob Dylan and others to dramatically break with the music of our parents’ pasts, the music that got them through the Great Depression and slogging through World War II, he has put out an album featuring the work of Mr. Frank Sinatra the king of that era in many our parents’ households. The music of the Broadway shows, Tin Pan Alley, Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ the Gershwins’ and so on. That proposition though seems less strange if you are not totally mired in the Bob Dylan protest minute of the early 1960s when he with Blowin’ In The Wind, The Times They Are A-Changin’, whether he wanted that designation or not, was the “voice of a generation,” catching the new breeze a lot of us felt coming through the land.

What Dylan has been about for the greater part of his career has been as an entertainer, a guy who sings his songs to the crowd and hopes they share his feelings for his songs. Just like Frank when he was in high tide. What Dylan has also been about through it all has been a deep and abiding respect for the American songbook (look on YouTube to a clip from Don’t Look Back with him doing Hank Williams’ Lost Highway or stuff from the Basement tapes with everything for Williams to Johnny Cash to some old stuff he must have heard coming up in growing up Hibbing, Minnesota). In the old days that was looking for roots, roots music from the mountains, the desolate oceans, the slave quarters, along the rivers and Dylan’s hero then was Woody Guthrie. But the American songbook is a “big tent” operation and the Tin Pan Alley that he broke from when he became his own songwriter is an important part of the overall tradition and now his hero is Frank Sinatra as well.

I may long for the old protest songs, the songs from the album pictured above, you know Blowin’ In The Wind, The Times Are A Changin’ stuff like that, the roots music and not just Woody but Hank, Tex-Mex, the Carters, the odd and unusual like Desolation Row or his cover of Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow Night but Dylan has sought to entertain and there is room in his tent for the king of Tin Pan Alley (as Billie Holiday was the queen). Having heard Dylan live and in concert over the past several years with his grating lost voice (it was always about the lyrics not the voice although by comparison that young voice seems not to bad if not always on key) I do wonder though how much production was needed to get the wrinkles out of that voice to sing as smoothly as the “Chairman of the boards.” What goes around comes around.             

When Super-Heroes Go Mano a Mano-“Captain America: Civil War” (2016)-A Film Review

When Super-Heroes Go Mano a Mano-“Captain America: Civil War” (2016)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Phil Larkin

Captain America: Civil War, starring Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Evans, Sebastian Stan, Scarlett Johannsson, 2016

[WTF and anybody who is ready this freaking review will know exactly what I am saying and not worry about the kids, since kids don’t come anywhere near this site because they are way too busy texting each other or doing some unearthly social media vamping. Yes, WTF am I, a guy who has shaded three score and ten doing reviewing a Marvel Comic film production about some silly guy who had been frozen since about 1945 and ever since being defrosted has been running his ass off (remember it is okay-no kids will see this) trying to save every American city that he can from various evil parties, parties from a place which bear a striking affinity to the late USSR, the Soviet Union today’s just plan Russia-and Crimea. And now in a brawl with other super-heroes over turf and policy Yeah, what the hell. 

Here is my take and it burns me up because a film that I should have naturally reviewed, Deadline-USA, a late effort by legendary actor Humphrey Bogart which while not his best or most classic work (Casablanca, To Have And Have Not, The Big Sleep, Key Largo are in my book) should have been mine by right. I, who spent many a Saturday afternoon double film matinee with one stretched out bag of popcorn in the second-run Strand Theater in North Adamsville about forty miles south of Boston watching and many times more than once to get out of the chaotic household I grew in at least am old enough to have seen the films before the dust settle on them. Unlike the kid, the young man, this Jacobs kid, who new site manager Greg Green had assigned to do the review, his first, and who came right out and said that he went to the re-run theaters in Michigan with his parents, his parents for God’s sake, when he was nothing but a kid, Didn’t even understand half of what was going on. 

   

No. This coup has all the earmarks of new site manager Greg Green’s work although I am sure he will deny this simple truth as will this new toady Editorial Board who has bowed to his every wish getting even with me for supporting one hundred per cent, and still supporting, the recently deposed long-time site manager and a childhood friend Allan Jackson. I don’t expect this comment to see the light of day. Probably I will be pieced off with one of those not enough space excuses and told I can have it to introduce my next article when again space limitations will be cited and I will be pieced off until infinity or the end days come around. Bullshit (don’t worry even a stray curious kid has long ago stopped reading this screed as some meanderings of an old three score and ten guy if they know how much that is and that is not a given). But onto the review. Phil Larkin] 

Frank Jackman who writes here now on anything as per the new so-called Editorial Board rule but who used to be the senior political commentator under Jackson and a good one has spent most of the last year proclaiming to everybody who will listen or read that we are in the age of Trump in a cold civil war situation for real. And there is plenty if not definitive proof of that escalating this year rather than as Trump publicity hounds would have it become a dead issue. Compare that real not “fake” storyline with the stuff that this film is throwing your way as Captain America yet again bounces of buildings and people with maybe a scratch or two since they took him out to defrost a few years back comes firing at you (having been in deep freeze since 1945 if you can believe that therefore unlike three score and ten me looking like about twenty-five or whatever graphic the studios are shooting for).   

That said and I hope you can hold your ability to suspend your disbelief long enough for me to give you what my old friend Sam Lowell calls the “skinny” here  (a guy who nevertheless stabbed his old friend Alan in the back by voting with the kids to send him packing).  I will grant no question the super-hero grift is a tough racket. Even with a motley of those with some specialized skills like speed, iron, being good with a bow and arrow, spidery, flame-throwers, robotic, double- flip artists who have the ability to fend off the bad guys they are too few in number to keep the world save from the creeps for long. Moreover for every action they, these so-called avengers, take against the creeps, usually not many at least in the leading cadre  there is “collateral damage” as they say, innocents by the scores, hundred, thousands,  get wasted through no fault of their own.

The question becomes, ever for those running kinds who make up the avenger herd, a moral one. Against cutting off a few bad guys who will just be replaced by another crop how many innocents must die. That is the premise behind the duel to the death here not only against the bad guys but with a falling out among the good guys when push comes to shove between the immoral rogues and the guilty accommodators. And it will be push come to shove when the various super-heroes pick up sides. Those who are willing to come under some international control commission to become essentially a super elite special forces operation working under instructions and those who want to roam free and kill whatever they can and let the devil take the hinter-post.       

Leading the rogue element, the don’t give a fuck about casualties, is this former ninety-eight pound weakling out of an old matchbook Charles Atlas kick sand in your face advertisement who gets boosted up like crazy so he can run, fight and bounce off walls is the aforementioned Captain America played by bean-head Chris Evans. This is the third film in the series so we already know his bio-and his trail of destruction. He can do everything but think beyond the killing fields he has created. Leading the civilized avengers, a brainy guy who can actually think before he acts Stark aka Ironman, played by Robert Downey, Jr. who is, catching on about that collateral damage outweighs whatever bad guys get wasted argument, willing to take himself and some others into that elite unit under international control. That is how the good guys divide up and since they all have checkered pasts the line-up splits down the middle. Of course the joker is the bad guys led by the totally berserk Winter Solider, played by Sebastian Stan, who is really an old buddy of the Captain’s who has been brain-washed by the Russians to do their dirty work. A little Cold War I scenario familiar from Le Carre novels and James Bond films.      

So the so-called tensions between the two factions mount especially when Winter Soldier allegedly blows an international conference building to smithereens with heavy causalitie. Wrong fall guy as it turned out and when he is captured miraculously he goes over the Captain’s side just like the old days once he is out of range of his handlers and their nefarious skills. But there are still those government toady avengers to deal with and so the two sides go mano a mano until, well, until it is discovered that some over-the top nefarious fourth party, a Doctor Zemo has been manipulating the whole controversy for his own sense of revenge. So all the old gang get back together after waylaying each other in such a manner that mere mortals would have gone beyond the pale long ago-or held some serious long-standing grudges. Yeah, now you know why I said WTF. Give me a hard-boiled rough-edged private detective, a salty sea captain ready to do his bit for the cause, ditto a nightclub/café owner in the Kasbah, or another private detective who sends a gun-simple femme fatale over for the big step-off Bogie just regular anti-hero any day.        

From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars-From Some People Who Know About Endless Wars

From The Veterans For Peace- The Twelve Days, Maybe More, Of  ......The Struggle Against The Endless American Wars-From Some People Who Know About Endless Wars

Keep The Presses Rolling-Humphrey Bogart’s “Deadline-USA” (1952)-A Film Review

Keep The Presses Rolling-Humphrey Bogart’s “Deadline-USA” (1952)-A Film Review   

DVD Review

By Kenny Jacobs

Deadline-USA, starring Humphrey Bogart, Ethel Barrymore, directed by Richard Brooks, 1952 

I am thrilled to be doing my first review, first film review, in this space of a film, Deadline-USA, starring Humphry Bogart an actor whom my parents would forever be quoting lines from one of his films like “Play it again, Sam,” “We will always have Paris” stuff like that since they had “discovered” him at a second-run artsy theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan where they met and went to school back in the 1980s. Of course Bogie (and his sweetie wife Lauren Bacall) was, is a legend, somebody to watch go through his paces whatever your age. Whenever they got nostalgic for their youth my parents would find some re-run retrospective theater and they would take me in tow to see things like The Big Sleep (which would make me hungry later for everything crime detective novelist Raymond Chandler ever wrote), Dark Passage (a film I never understood what with the face change and all in some back alley with a doctor who looked and acted more like a barber), and To Have And Have Not (where he and Bacall steam up the screen with some of the sexiest stuff with clothes on you will ever see but that observation was not made until much later-post puberty later having seen the film a few more times). Although Deadline is nowhere in the same category as the aforementioned films it nevertheless has a plotline about the fate of the modern newspaper business and freedom of the press that interests me.    

Now freedom of the press as my father, Lester, an editor of the famous These Times when he was in college said the best lesson he ever learned about press freedom  was given to him by an old English professor who had been through the red scare of the 1950s (the time frame of this film although none of those press self-censorship and acting on governmental directives issues were addressed by this film), had been something of a radical and had suffered the fate of plenty of people in those day not being able to find work in newspapers. That professor, I forget his name, told my father that freedom of the press was important to those who owned the presses the rest of us want to defend the freedom of expression part wherever we land. For a long time I thought that myself but this film brought out something else that professor had not mentioned and that was the death of the presses was the death of democracy. Although non-linear social and commercial on-line media is now a primary and growing place for people to get their news and that has dramatically portended the ellipse of the hard-copy versions that point is still worth thinking through.          

Some film critic when I was doing background for this piece, Roger Evans from the American Film Gazette I think, has called Deadline the best film about the inner workings of the hard copy newsprint industry ever made. Maybe he is right although every filmed newspaper story, and that includes sent-ups of front page sensationalism like The Front Page, serious investigative journalism like the Watergate expose All The President’s Men, and the recent The Post about the fight to publish Daniel Ellsberg’s The Pentagon Papers has extolled the notion of the big story which motivates the newsrooms and makes careers driving the plotline to culmination. Deadline is no different in that regard and so maybe that critical remark should be the beginning of further research rather than the last word on this film.

Greg Green, the site manager here, knowing this is my maiden effort has asked me especially when reviewing older films, in this case a film when I wasn’t even born and my parents weren’t  either to give a few details about the film. This is truer still of Deadline which in the great Bogie list of film credits had almost disappeared from sight until last year when it was released on Blu-Ray. A little against type considering such roles as the hard-boiled private detective Phillip Marlowe, the old salt Captain Harry Morgan and the framed-up escaped con Victor Parry Bogie plays the idealistic, if heavy-handed, crusading editor, Hutchison, of a major daily newspaper in what is New York City in the days when there were many newspaper for every taste and readership competing dog eat dog for the public’s acceptance. As stated in one of the dialogues between Hutchison and the hard-pressed owner, played by Ethel Barrymore, he was all newspaperman and would have as she said “married the paper if it had legs” (which is true since he was estranged from his actual wife until late in the film).    

      

That hard-pressed publisher had trouble keeping up with what was needed and so a lot of the story revolves around that aspect of the business and her decision to sell the paper which would be sold to parties who would close it down tight. The other big part, the part that sells newspapers by drawing the public to the headlines created is “the big story.” Here the big story is not the red scare effects like I mentioned above or the world going to hell in a hand-basket but your “bread and butter” crime and corruption story. The crime. A young woman who turns out to be connected to a known mobster, a bad guy to mess with, is found murdered after she would not reveal where the money he had given her to hold to pay off some crooked politicians in her apartment. Hutchison sends out his investigative reporters to sniff around. They make the connections, dot the i’s and cross the t’s and come up with a big story connecting that mobster to the murder and the corruption. That despite all kinds of threats against hard guy Hutchison by him who keeps spouting Fourth of July picnic oratory about the beauties and hard-fought struggles to keep that free press intact against all the pressures to fold up shop and run. A story that seemed very appropriate today what with all the talk about the press being “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” Yeah, very much a film for these times.            

In The Beginning Was The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

In The Beginning Was The Jug- The Jim Kweskin Jug Band

As told to Alex Radley

Who knows how it happened maybe somebody in the band looked up some songs in the album archives, or found some gem in some record store, an institution now on the ropes what with Amazon and every other on-line music site to tear into the very marginal profits of record store brick and mortar operations, that sustained many for hours back then in the cusp of the 1960s folk revival when there were record stores on almost every corner in places like Harvard Square and you could find some gems if you searched long enough. That is where Si Lannon found Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (although sometimes the search was barren or, maybe worse, something by Miss Patti Page or Tennessee Ernie Ford stared you in the face and you got pissed off that those selections were even in a record store). From there they found, maybe Cannon’s Stompers, the Mississippi Sheiks or the Memphis Jug Band, saw they could prosper going back to those days if they kept the arrangements simple, and that was that.

See, everybody then was looking for roots, American music roots, old country roots, roots of some ancient thoughts of a democratic America before the robber barons and their progeny grabbed everything with every hand. And that search was no accident, at least from the oral history evidence, from Si Lannon in this case, having grown up with rock and roll and restless for something new, found in that minute that genre wanting.  Some went reaching South to the homeland of much roots music and found some grizzled old geezers who had made a small name for themselves in the 1920s when labels like RCA and Paramount went out looking for talent in the hinterlands.

So there was history there, certainly for the individual members of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band, Jim, Geoff Mulduar, Mel Lymon, Maria Muldaur, Fritz Richmond , all well-versed in many aspects of the American Songbook (hell, I would say so, even old tacky Tin Pan Alley Irving Berlin and Cole Porter got a hearing), history there for the taking. All they needed was a jug, a good old boy homemade corn liquor jug giving the best sound and so they were off, off to conquer places like Harvard Square, like the Village, like almost any place in the Bay area. (That Bay Area a few years later a hub for all kinds of rock but also saved space for the Kweskin Band as a number of poster art concerts now considered high art would testify even in that Summer of Love craze, maybe because of it.)  And for a while they did, picking up chimes, kazoos, harmonicas, what the heck, even standard guitars and they made great music, great entertainment music, not heavy with social messages but just evoking those long lost spirits from the 1920s when jug music would sustain a crowd on a Saturday night out in the hinterlands. Yeah, in the beginning was the jug…