The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes- Before The Deluge-Bette Davis’ “Jezebel” (1938)-A Film Review

The Girl With The Bette Davis Eyes- Before The Deluge-Bette Davis’ “Jezebel” (1938)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Jezebel, starring Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, George Brent, 1938

No today I am not going to bemoan the fact that once again I have started on something like my old friend and fellow film critic Sam Lowell called a “run,” a run meaning jumping on a subject, here the films of the girl with the Bette Davis eyes Bette Davis herself, and running it into the ground if that is where it would finally lead. No today I have a bigger idea, an idea about what could and could not be cinematically produced today in quite the same way that it was yesterday as in the case of this film under review Jezebel (a topic which could equally include the role Ms. Davis did not get the classic Gone With The Wind as well). What I am talking about, although I will have to temper this with the recent happenings ostensibly around the issue of preservation of Confederate memorials, is the way the so-called gentile ante-bellum South was portrayed in the film from the cotton is king gentry to the fate of lowly blacks slaves whether in the house or in the field. I won’t belabor the point further since this film passes for a romantic drama of the times except to note that this subject is worthy of some kind of doctoral dissertation if it hasn’t already sparked one.  

So what is the hullabaloo all about. Julie, a strong-willed Southern belle of means who through a guardian, male of course, has a big plantation outside of New Orleans in ante-bellum days (the year the film’s plot is supposed to start, 1852, lets us know that civil war clouds are brewing, that various compromises will come undone before the decade is over although the failure to keep those compromises intact was hardly the problem of why the bloody conflict seared the country asunder-continuing slavery in half the country was). Julie, played by Ms. Davis last seen in this space by me giving her fiancé played by George Brent also starring here the heave-ho to run away with her sister’s husband in In This Our Life, besides being head-strong is leading her beau, Pres, a merry chase. Pres, played by Henry Fonda last seen in this space as Tom Joad fresh from Oklahoma’s McAllister Prison for killing a man getting ready to run out to California looking for Paradise but finding nothing but anguish and once again a need to be on the run from John Law in the film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath, is a son of Southern gentry who through his banking connections has dealing with the cotton-starved North. By the way to round out the leading roles this shameless, hence Jezebel, Julie has thrown over Buck Cantrell, a free-spirit sportsman gentleman reflecting the old values of the Old South, the role that the afore- mentioned George Brent played, for Pres.                   

Of course you can lead a guy, even an ante-bellum member of the Southern gentry on that merry chase only so far before he sends you to the big step-off. The actual event if you can believe this that triggered the adios from Pres was when Miss Julie decided for spite to wear a red dress to some silly cotillion and received nothing but the cold shoulder and humiliation from the assembled guests who were shocked beyond belief that an unmarried woman would break the code and not wear white. That is only the most egregious example of how the gentile slow slavery-drive customary code Southern way of life differed from the Northern busy building factories shoulder to the wheel way of life. The sporting life complete with mint juleps and an off-hand duel when somebody, some man, thought he was being insulted were others. Old Buck Cantrell was the epitome of the old ways that were crumbling a bit even then.     

But back to the core romance. Or rather failed romance once Pres gave Julie the heave-ho and she refused out of vanity, spite, ill-humor or some combination of them all to go after him. That finishes the prologue here. The big deal, the way the coming civil war gets noticed and is played out is when Pres, having gone North to forget Julie and learn some capitalist business skills, comes back after a year with a fresh as a daisy Northern wife a happening which was treated by some of the gentry around Julie, notably Buck, as an affront to Southern womanhood. Of course Miss Julie having pined away for Pres for her transgression is both frantic and bitter when she finds out she has been thrown over for another woman. But this hussy will seek her revenge-seek to make Pres jealous of Buck when she starts playing court to him. No go. Pres is all in for his wife as he makes clear to her constantly. (Here is where a scene that I think would be cut today comes in when now knowing she has lost Pres Miss Julie gathers around her a coterie of slaves and has a sing-along with them dancing and prancing “all the darkies are gay” style as Stephen Foster would put it in a song.)  Moreover dear old Buck knowing that he has been used by Miss Julie in her scheme winds up under a winding sheet having lost a duel to Pres’ younger brother when the lad called him out for his ill-mannered behavior toward his sister-in-law.      

Now Ms. Davis may have done an Oscar-worthy performance in this film although I think she was robbed when she played the tart/waitress in the film adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and failed to get the coveted award but apparently those who directed and produced the film could not leave her as a fallen sullen Jezebel. They needed some redemption for her. The way Miss Julie was able to rehabilitate herself was by nursing Pres when he came down with the yellow fever that periodically swept the city and surrounding areas of New Orleans when the authorities, mimicking today’s climate change deniers, failed to drain the swamps and take other precautions. Not only did she nurse him but arguing with Pres’ wife that she should accompany him to the deserted island where the known yellow fever cases were dumped. That wife relented and Miss Julie got to pay penance. Not Ms. Davis’ best picture despite her performance but good. You can think through how such an ante-bellum scenario it would be set up today.      

The Russian Revolution and World Socialism (Quote of the Week)

	Workers Vanguard No. 1165	15 November 2019

TROTSKY

LENIN

The Russian Revolution and World Socialism

(Quote of the Week)

November 7 (October 25 by the calendar then used in Russia) marked the 102nd anniversary of the Russian Revolution, which overthrew capitalism in that country. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin wrote the statement below at the request of the Swedish Left Social Democratic Party shortly after that revolution and as World War I continued to engulf Europe. He stressed that the solution to the crying needs of the world’s exploited and oppressed—an end to mass hunger and imperialist slaughter—required the proletarian seizure of power internationally, crucially in the advanced capitalist countries.

Two questions now take precedence over all other political questions—the question of bread and the question of peace. The imperialist war, the war between the biggest and richest banking firms, Britain and Germany, that is being waged for world domination, the division of the spoils, for the plunder of small and weak nations; this horrible, criminal war has ruined all countries, exhausted all peoples, and confronted mankind with the alternative—either sacrifice all civilisation and perish or throw off the capitalist yoke in the revolutionary way, do away with the rule of the bourgeoisie and win socialism and durable peace.

If socialism is not victorious, peace between the capitalist states will be only a truce, an interlude, a time of preparation for a fresh slaughter of the peoples. Peace and bread are the basic demands of the workers and the exploited. The war has made these demands extremely urgent. The war has brought hunger to the most civilised countries, to those most culturally developed. On the other hand, the war, as a tremendous historical process, has accelerated social development to an unheard-of degree. Capitalism had developed into imperialism, i.e., into monopoly capitalism, and under the influence of the war it has become state monopoly capitalism. We have now reached the stage of world economy that is the immediate stepping stone to socialism.

The socialist revolution that has begun in Russia is, therefore, only the beginning of the world socialist revolution. Peace and bread, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, revolutionary means for the healing of war wounds, the complete victory of socialism—such are the aims of the struggle.

—V.I. Lenin, “For Bread and Peace” (December 1917)

*A Snapshot View Of The Leaders Of The 1917 Bolshevik Revolution- Joseph Stalin

Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the 1917 Bolshevik revolutionary leader Joseph Stalin.

Markin comment:

Once again, before everyone starts yelling, Stalin, although not the puffed up 1917 revolutionary leader that he had his Communist Party political apparatus make him out to be, was a central leader (including being on the Bolshevik Central Committee that decided to seize power on behalf of the Soviets)of the 1917 revolution. We will leave the falsification of our precious common Communist history, in this case by an unforthright omission where acknowledgement is necessary, to the Stalinist remnant and others who still get weak at the knees on hearing his name.

The Moon Is In The Fourth House-Jupiter Aligns With Mars- The Conundrum Of The Western Literary Canon-What Goes Up Must Come Down-Lady Gaga And Bradley Copper’s Reincarnation of “A Star Is Born” (2018)-A Film Review

The Moon Is In The Fourth House-Jupiter Aligns With Mars- The Conundrum Of The Western Literary Canon-What Goes Up Must Come Down-Lady Gaga And Bradley Copper’s Reincarnation of “A Star Is Born” (2018)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sarah Lemoyne

A Star Is Born, starring Lady Gaga, Bradley Cooper, Sam Elliott, 2018

Yes, today the moon is certainly in the fourth house, or at least the fourth, count them, rendition of the classic movie formula film A Star Is Born. Okay, okay I have in previous incarnations gone on and on about Hollywood and now the world cinema “community” pulling the classic of Western literature out of its satchel when pressed-the old boy meets girl routine which has saved more than one film. While that is a factor here in the fourth incarnation of A Star is Born this one does not need such help. Why? Don’t forget that other chestnut from the Western literary canon which is about the falling of some of the gods-and the rise of others-even humans if you can believe that in the Christian era. Hollywood speak translation: one star rises, and the other falls make a compelling story even if as in this plot-line neither party is trying to bring the other down like those Greek and Roman gods liked to do as they tussled with each other.

Looking at the pedigree of the writers who have worked through the various renditions of this film makes my small observation about its genesis way back in the depths of Western literary tradition very much to the point. How about this listing, Dorothy Parker, David Selznick, yes, the big-time producer back in the day, Ring Lardner, Jr. Budd Schulberg and a host of others. So the writing is no question solid. The 2018 version follows suit since with very few exceptions it follows the outlines of the previous renditions going back to the 1937 original with Janet Gaynor and Frederic March.    

There is clearly a divide perhaps reflecting the times between the four versions, the first two centered on Hollywood with Gaynor being a rising movie star and March in decline. The 1954 Judy Garland-James Mason version likewise. With 1974’s Barbra Streisand-Kris Kristofferson’s version we update to a musical theme with the female role a rising singer and the male in decline due to alcohol addiction and hubris. This latest version takes off on the latter combination with Bradley Cooper, as Jackson Maine, however, seemingly channeling the ghost of Kristofferson with his performance. Lady Gaga however is her own self and is nothing like what now seems like a demure performance by Streisand. We are now off to the races.

Our man Jackson still has some musical energy left when he meets Ally, Lady’s role, in a drag bar, a new touch which probably would set Selznick’s hair on fire back in the day. He is immediately attracted to her personally and can see, as we can, that milady has musical talent. (Never having followed Lady Gaga in her musical career other than continually hearing about outlandish costumes and performances I was actually surprised that she is a very fine singer, can hit the high white notes when she wants to which is high praise in my book.) While Jackson is wooing her in his gee, gosh manner he helps her career in fits and starts. She eventually connects with a big-time producer who manages her career although leading her away from the simpler style she had started out with in favor of lots of pizazz along the lines of a Lady Gaga production from what I can tell. Along the way they get married.

That marriage does not alleviate whatever is stirring inside Jackson who is progressively falling apart, drinking and doping more heavily as his star starts to fade and he can’t get the gigs he used to get. Meanwhile Ally tries to hold onto him for dear life, ready to give up her own career to see him over the hump. He goes to the bottom at her high moment receiving a Grammy making a fool out of himself before realizing he needs help. That hump a recovery program which seemingly helps-for a while. Somewhat inexplicably, given his recovery status, a situation not presented in the other versions where the male lead falls down without help, Jackson commits suicide. End of story except Ally, as with all the previous female leads, has to pay post-mortem homage to her late spouse. See this well-done version with a great soundtrack.           

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Alex Nichol And Hillary Brooke’s “Heat Wave” (1954)

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Alex Nichol And Hillary Brooke’s “Heat Wave” (1954)

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

Heat Wave (released in Britain as The House Across The Lake, starring Alex Nicol, Hillary Brooke, Hammer Productions, 1954

Apparently I have lost a step or two (some like the guy who has taken my place as senior film critic my old friend and colleague Sandy Salmon would up those numbers by a few) in the reviewing department. I have long been known to regular readers of this space (and previously at the hard copy edition of American Film Gazette where I first worked with Sandy) as an aficionado of film noir and that is still true. I have also been known in general when I find something of interest which has other material of interest along with it to go on a “run,” to grab every possible combination and write about those things as well. That has been the case with the series that I have been presenting in this space (and on-line at the Gazette) with the headline The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir. This series of ten films from 1950 to 1955 (a long time of collaboration in the film industry on any project) was the collective endeavor of American producer Robert Lippert and the Hammer Production Company in England to produce a bunch of noirs on the cheap using “has-been” Hollywood actors. Guys like Alex Nichol who stars in the film under review here Heat Wave (that juicy and come on title the way the film was released in America bringing images of sex and violence and in England, Great Britain, the British Isles, the Commonwealth or whatever they are calling themselves these post-Brexit days as the understated The House Across The Lake which seems more appropriate since the serious action, well, takes place across the lake from star Alex’s abode). Other faded stars such as Dan Duryea and Dane Clark have also been enlisted in these efforts along with British character actors filling out the roster. Like I say on the cheap to fill up that craving for noir on both sides of the Atlantic without heavy expenses.           

Getting back to the reason why I believe I have lost a step or two is that as this series has progressed some readers have commented that I have “mailed in” the reviews. “Mailed in” here meaning that I have used a basic format for each review which contained a general appraisal of the series and then a short summary of the plot line.

I have done this on many occasions when I am on a “run.” In this series I have emphasized why these ten films are B-films contrasting them with the Hollywood-produced classics where you can remember a ton of lines, and remember the lessons learned about crime not paying and such. Had run through for examples a few classics for instance the sadder but wiser Sam Spade after Mary Astor had run him a merry chase and he had to send her over once the bodies stared piling up over a freaking black-etched bird in The Maltese Falcon. Ditto when Jane Greer got seriously trigger-happy and took down Robert Mitchum (and Kirk Douglas) with her once she saw that he had doubled-crossed her in Out Of The Past. Ditto Phillip Marlowe trying to salvage an old man’s illusions that he had not begotten Satan’s two daughters in The Big Sleep. And so on.    

One reader had actually if you can believe this, accused me of padding these reviews because and I quote “I must get paid by the word.” Oh the woes of film review-dom. Worse though was that these comments got back to the “boss,” to Pete Markin, the site administrator who actually sided with those readers (although except for a chuckle not the “paid by the word” comment reader since the reader obviously didn’t know that penny-a-word went out with dime-store novels and that nowadays you submit on “spec” and are either taken or don’t get even a penny for your efforts.). Now I have been asked to just give the “skinny” and forget the rest. Here goes.

As I have noted the quality of these Hammer film while purely B-film stuff have a range from almost A to much worse including one, Wings of Danger, which I did not review because it never got to even B-level. The film under review Heat Wave (as noted above released in Great Britain as more accurately The House Across The Lake) almost makes it to A-level mostly because of the acting and not the plotline which has been used in noir almost as much as the boy-girl  meet-up thing in romantic comedies and the like. Mark, played by Alex Nichol, is a pulp fiction writer on the skids, getting ready to go down in the mud was the epitome of 1950s “cool”-detached, street smart, wiseacre, and with a gift of gab (when he wants to). Something out of a Mickey Spillane crime novel if he was a private detective. And a lady’s man as they used to say in the old days. The latter as usual with such guys will get him up to his neck, hell, maybe over his head in trouble. That “trouble” coming from across that fatal English lake is one dishy busty blonde (just the way he likes them), Carol, very married Carol, played by Hillary Brooke. She the epitome of 1950s femme duplicity and so the acting works the film to a higher level.

Not so the plotline which is pretty conventional. Mark eyes high –style wealthy party-girl, very married party girl, Carol having, well, a party, from his rented digs across the lake. They meet via that very party amid a drink and some banter. Mark, like I said a lady’s man, was smitten from the first by this dishy, busty blonde who was free with her favors, sexual or otherwise. The problem though is her husband who Mark likes, likes and befriends. That didn’t stop his downy billow thoughts of milady Carol. This husband, Beverly, was the second time around married very liberal toward Carol’s philandering-up to a point. He was ready to foot the bill, her very expensive bill as his trophy wife but was going to cut her off once he passed on. Which according to the doctors was not long if he kept up his frantic life-style.

Enter the evil plan-Carol’s plan. Good old Beverly had a serious accident at sea while he, Mark and Carol were on board. Carol saw her chance and tried to convince Mark to give him the old heave-ho to the briny bottom, No go. So our brave Carol does the nasty deed. Here’s where our boy Mark went off the skids. Carol convinced him to tell the tale that the whole thing was an accident and he and she could live happily ever after. He buys into the deal and expects to get the pay-off soon. That was the story he told the coppers when they figured out something was wrong with whole setup and let sucker Mark find out that Carol had secretly married and fled that sinkhole house across the lake leaving him holding the bag. He confronted Carol who laughed at him and his stupid American gullibility. Mark got the last laugh of sorts, he like Sam Spade and a million guys before him sent her over, let her, despite his own culpability take the fall, take the big step-off. A hard way to learn to stay away, way away from dishy, busty blondes.

I hope this short bare-bones “skinny” will appease that reader who claimed that I was getting paid by the word. Enough said.                                        

    

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

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

From The Pen Of Guest Music Critic  Josh Breslin 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

Frank Jackman comment September 2017:

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

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

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

WE WANT THE WORLD AND WE WANT IT NOW!

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DVD Review

By Lance Lawrence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DVD Review

By Associate Film Critic Alden Riley

Jailhouse Rock, starring Elvis Presley, Judy Tyler, 1957

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DVD Review

By Guest Film Critic Si Lannon  

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

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

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

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

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

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