This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
The Ghost Of Tom Joad…Dust-Bowl Broken-With The Boston Museum Of Fine Arts Exhibition On Families Conventional And Unconventional In Mind
By Bart Webber
…the ghost of old Tom Joad followed their every footstep, followed their every mile in that broken old excuse for an automobile that sucked the life out of one of his progeny, Prescott Ayers by name, a wheat farmer by trade, huh, by professional except that goddam dust has eaten up that wheat turned it to dust too, turned it so bad Prescott like the Joads before him (and his) from up the road had taken that poor excuse for a car and hightailed it out of the barren Okie hills to head for the promise land wherever that might be and if wasn’t to be then he’d just not have been buried in that fucking flatland anyhow. Yeah, Tom Joad who would have thought that the winds, the wicked heaven-sent winds, oh lord what did I do to deserve this, would have sent him on the road.
Got a West Coast guy, a guy named Johns Steinbeck, a writer out in the docks of sardine-smacked Monterey thinking about that dust, thinking about fleeing and how to get him the hell out before the whole world turns ash-can grey. Got another guy, an Okie brethren out of the reservation territories, out of the veil of tears, Woody Guthrie, a wild boy no question, to signing and humming about that brother Joad like he knew in his heart that going west was the best. Got another guy, a movie director, an oater by trade, John Ford, out in mountebank Hollywood, Hollywood before Ed Ruscha, another Okie tramp, immortalized another setoff hill, thinking it might very well do to let the Saturday afternoon at the Bijou movie crowd see what stuff Mister Joad was made of, what Okie dust turned into out west. Unto the seventh generation, if you don’t believe me, making a Jersey guy, a fucking Jersey guy, used to singing about ’57 Chevy’s and the running kind walk the Highway 101 late at night looking across the arroyo skies for a sign of that father he never knew like something out of a Jack Kerouac novel. Jesus.
…and Prescott Ayers, wheat farmer by professional and owner of a no excuse for a car except he (and his) had to get the hell out before he exploded and wound up in McAlister Prison himself all he got for his sullen efforts was a silly photograph poorly cropped from some Eastern city dame with a high-tail camera by the name of Dorothea Lange who gave his wife Matty a copy (one of the “and his” the others being the boy Lonny, girl Ella, and the girl Martha Jane-Prescott, Junior laid to rest before his second birthday eaten up by wind dust making Prescott damn the day he let Matty conceive him and damning the day he had decided that he wanted a large family to farm that wheat farm and pass on that land, that land that make him cry alone his own veil of tears cry). Matty and that goddam copy which she cherished all the way to Fresno and raisin pining away times as they headed west, headed clunker west in that no excuse for a car. Cherished, unknown to taciturn, no sentiment Prescott, and secretly passed on to Ella upon her death bed long after Prescott laid his head down in raisin valley soil, as long as she drew breathe and had a roof over her head.
The photograph showing Prescott’s Matty all angular and care-worn, slightly slouching, hair not seeing washing or a beautician’s touch for many a mile (couldn’t that photo time since the money all got eaten up buying a new tire when that fixed to perdition tire he was eternally fixing finally gave its last breathe. Wondering, not some 16th century Dutchman’s wondering (her people’s stock coming into New York Harbor, in the days when all you needed to do was show up on the docks to get into the freaking country and start looking for the streets paved with gold, not able to breath, city breath they from out in edam cheese land and farmers by trade, no, by profession, and heading west first to foreboding Kentucky coalmines and hard-scrabble leavings then across the Mississippi and no turning back into God’s country, Okie life), seeing what did that guy from Minneapolis, that F. Scott Fitzgerald who knew the distinction between rich and poor, call it, yes, the fresh green breast of land heading inland but where Lonny, Ella, Martha food was to be found for that night’s hell-broth stew.
And that Lonny, Ella, Martha showing that mother angularity, and that haggard look like even a hell-broth stew would be a feast out in those broken down rutted roads not dreaming child dreams, not dreaming about those left behind (even they, even kids, know enough not to dream dust-bowl dreams) and just wishing that tire would hold up some miles and they with fatty meat could get acquainted. No fresh green breast of land to wound their dreams all to hell. Funny, Lonny destined to be an alienated youth in the post-World War II world firing up big hot rod engines out in the deserted desert roads, chicken run roads, east of Fresno and crashing his dreams in a 1949 Hudson all shiny and bright. Funny, star-struck, endlessly star-struck Ella, driving mother Matty crazy would be serving them off the arm in Phil’s Diner, turning part-time tricks for truckers to pull her own brood over the from hunger hump. Funny, Martha a dreary housewife living with husband and two kids in a ranch house (fake-Spanish design all the rage) on converted farm land wondering why the hell the whole tribe had headed west.
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When (the late) Mister Chuck Berry Told Mister Beethoven To Move Over A New Sheriff Was In Town
Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Introduction
I recently completed the first leg of this series which is intended to go through different stages of the American songbook as it has evolved since the 19th century, especially music that could be listened to by the general population through radio, later television, and more recently the fantastic number of ways to listen to it all from computers to iPods. That first leg dealt with the music of my parents’ generation, that being the parents of the generation of ’68, those who struggled through the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s. This leg, centered on the music of my generation growing up in the Cold War 1950s, is a natural progression from that first leg since a lot of what we were striving for was to make a big musical break-out from the music that was wafting through many of our houses in the early 1950s.
The pitter-patter sound of stuff from Tin Pan Alley and sometimes from Broadway if they were not one in the same once they hit our muffled ears. You know Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, Rum and Coca Cola, Tangerine, I’ll Get By, If I Didn’t Care, tear the goalposts down, grab a Tennessee waltz, and swing and sway with Big Buddha and some guy chomping on the chop sticks. The music of our “square” parents which was driving us to desperation for a new sound just in case those threatened bombs that we kept being warned about actually were detonated. At least that musical jail-break is the way we will tell the story now, although I, for one, have a little more tolerance for some of their music, those square parents still square but maybe there was hope if they listened to the Ink Spots crooning away at about seven million different songs with that great harmony, or the Duke taking that A train or better, much better sweet junkie Billie swaying a dark fruit, day and night, all of me, and whatever else Cole Porter could button up the night with. Some, I said, since I am unabashedly a child of rock and roll, now denominated classic rock. Jesus.
Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant, or frankly, during that hellish growing up absurd teenager time in the 1950s trying to figure out our places, if any, in the cold war red scare world, if there was to be a world, and that was a close thing at times, or whether we cared, our tribal music was as dear a thing to us, we who were in the throes of finding our own very different musical identities. Whether we knew it or not in the big world- historic picture scheme of things, knew what sacred place the music of the 1950s, rhythm and blues, scat be-bop, rockabilly, doo wop, flat out pure rock and roll those tunes held a primordial place in our youthful hearts. That was our music, our getting through the tough times music of post-World War II teen alienation and angst, that went wafting through the house on the living room radio (when the parents were out), on the family record player (ditto on the parents), or, for some, the television (double ditto the parents out, especially when American Bandstand hit us like a hurricane and we breathlessly rushed home every afternoon after school to make sure we were hip to the latest songs, the latest dances, the latest hair styles, boys and girls, and whether that brunette with the boffo hair-do and showing an edge of cleavage was “going steady” or whether we has a dream chance at her, or her “sister,” same boffo hair-do sitting across from you in seventh grade English class), and best of all on that blessed transistor radio, compact enough to hide in shirt pockets but loud enough when placed next to your ear to block out that mother-father-brothers buzz that only disturbed you more, that allowed us to while away the time up in our rooms away from snooping parental ears. Yes, that was the pastime of many of those of us who constitute the now graying fading generation of ‘68.
Some of us will pass to the beyond clueless as to why we were attuned to this music when we came of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which we too like most of our parents had not created, and had no say in creating. That includes a guy, me, a coalminer’s son who got as caught up in the music of his time as any New York City Jack or Jill or Chi town frat or frail whose father busted out of the tumbled down tarpaper shacks down in some Appalachia hills and hollows, headed north, followed the northern star, his own version, and never looked back and neither did his son.
Yes we were crazy for the swing and sway of Big Joe Turner snapping those big fingers like some angel- herald letting the world know, if it did not know already, that it did not mean a thing, could not possibly matter in the universe, if you did not whether your young febrile brain caught any or all of the not so subtle to experienced ears sexual innuendoes that drove Shake, Rattle, and Roll, if you did not rock with or without Miss La Vern Baker, better with, better with, her hips swaying slightly, lips moistened, swirling every guy in the place on Jim Dandy vowing be her man just for that smile and a chance at those slightly swaying hips. Mr. Elvis Presley, with or without the back-up boys, better with because they held the key to the backbeat that drove Elvis just a little bit harder, rockier, and for the girls from about ten to one hundred sexier, belting out songs, knocking down walls, maybe Jericho, maybe just some teen-struck Starlight Ballroom in Kansas City blasting the joint with his Jailhouse Rock to the top of the charts. Elegant Bill Haley, with or without that guy blowing that sexy sax out into the ocean air night in some Frisco club, blowing out to the Japan seas on Rock Around The Clock. Bo Diddley, all banded up if there is such a word, making eyes wild with that Afro-Carib beat on Who Do You Love. A young Ike Tina-less Turner too with his own aggregation wailing Rocket 88 that had every high school girl throwing dreamy nickels and dimes into the jukebox, with or without fanfare. Buddy Holly, with or without those damn glasses, talking up Peggy Sue before his too soon last journey. Miss Wanda Jackson, the female Elvis, with or without the blues, personal blues, strung out blues too, singing everybody else’s blues away with that throaty thing she had (and that long black hair and ruby red lips to make a schoolboy dream funny dreams), that meaningful pause, on yeah, Let’s Have A Party. Miss (Ms.) Patsy Cline, with or without the bad moments, making grown men cry (women too) when she reached that high note fretting about her long gone man on She’s Got You, Jesus. (And you not caring for all the strung-out emotion, or hubris, still wanting Patsy for a last chance last dance close up song to take a whirl at that she you had been eying until your eyes got sore all night.)
Miss (Ms.) Brenda Lee too chiming in with I’m Sorry. Mr. Jerry Lee Lewis doing a million songs fronting that wild piano off the back of a flat-bed truck in High School Confidential calling out, no preaching out the new dispensation to anybody who wanted to rise in that rocking world, with or without a horde of cashmere sweater girls breaking down his doors, putting everybody else to shame. The Everly Brothers, always with that soft -spoken refrain catch that nobody seemed to tire of, getting everybody nervous, everybody who had gone past curfew looking for a little, well, looking okay, and not reflecting enough on damn reputations except in the school pecking order determined first week of ninth grade in the girls’ lounge and boys’ “lav,” doing teary Wake Up Little Susie. The Drifters with or without those boardwalks. The Sherilles with or without the leader of the pack, the Dixie Cups with or without whatever they were doing at that chapel. Miss Carole King, with or without the boys, writing the bejesus out of last gasp Tin Pan Alley. Yeah, our survival music.
We, the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “the greatest generation,” decidedly not our parents’ generation, finally could not bear to hear their music, could not bear to think anybody in the whole universe would think that stuff was cool. Those of us who came of age, biological, political, and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a jail-break on all fronts and that included from “their song” stuff. Their staid Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he their organizer of victory, their gentile father Ike), hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had a nightmare that, he or she, was trapped in some fashionable family bunker and those loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Yelling in that troubled sleep please, please, please if we must die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential.
We were moreover, some of us anyway, and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dreams, ready to cross our own swords with the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby, sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear in this quarter, quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded by the new dispensation and slogged through the 60s decade whether it was in the civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down were kindred. To the disapproval, anger, and fury of more than one parent who had gladly slept through the Eisenhower times. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone.
These following sketches and that is all they are, and all they pretend to be, link up the music of the generation of ‘68s coming of age time (and a few post-coming of age sketches as well) gleaned from old time personal remembrances, the remembrances of old time corner boys whom I hung around with on lonesome, girl-less Friday nights at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys just off Thornton Street in the Dorchester section of Boston, and from remembrances of events and personalities that I, we, heard about through the school grapevine (especially those obligatory Monday morning before school talkfests where everybody, boy or girl, lied, or half-lied about what they did, or did not do, over the steamy weekend), the media (newspapers or radio and television in those days) or through what is now called the urban legend network but then just called “walking daddy” talk.
The truth, the truth of each sketch is in the vague mood that they invoke rather than any fidelity to hard and fast fact. They are all based on actual stories, more or less prettified and sanitized to avoid any problems with lose of reputation of any of the characters portrayed and any problems with some lingering statute of limitations. That truth, however, especially in the hands of corner boys like Jimmy Jenkins, our leader Frankie Riley, Sam Lowell, Pete Markin, Billy Bradley, Dime Store Benny Kidd, myself and the other guys who passed through the corner at Jack Slack’s must always be treated like a pet rattlesnake. Very carefully. Still the overall mood should more than make up for the lies thrown at you, especially on the issue of sex, or rather the question of the ages on that issue, who did or did not do what to whom on any given occasion. The lies filled the steamy nights and frozen days, and that was about par for the course wasn’t it.
But enough of that for this series is about our uphill struggles to make our vision of the our newer world, our struggles to satisfy our hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in our youth we dreamed by on cold winter nights and hot summer days.
The Roots Is The Toots: The Music That Got The Generation Of ’68 Through The 1950s Red Scare Cold War Night-When (the late) Mister Chuck Berry Told Mister Beethoven To Move Over A New Sheriff Was In Town
Sketches From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Introduction
I recently completed the first leg of this series which is intended to go through different stages of the American songbook as it has evolved since the 19th century, especially music that could be listened to by the general population through radio, later television, and more recently the fantastic number of ways to listen to it all from computers to iPods. That first leg dealt with the music of my parents’ generation, that being the parents of the generation of ’68, those who struggled through the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s. This leg, centered on the music of my generation growing up in the Cold War 1950s, is a natural progression from that first leg since a lot of what we were striving for was to make a big musical break-out from the music that was wafting through many of our houses in the early 1950s.
The pitter-patter sound of stuff from Tin Pan Alley and sometimes from Broadway if they were not one in the same once they hit our muffled ears. You know Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree, Rum and Coca Cola, Tangerine, I’ll Get By, If I Didn’t Care, tear the goalposts down, grab a Tennessee waltz, and swing and sway with Big Buddha and some guy chomping on the chop sticks. The music of our “square” parents which was driving us to desperation for a new sound just in case those threatened bombs that we kept being warned about actually were detonated. At least that musical jail-break is the way we will tell the story now, although I, for one, have a little more tolerance for some of their music, those square parents still square but maybe there was hope if they listened to the Ink Spots crooning away at about seven million different songs with that great harmony, or the Duke taking that A train or better, much better sweet junkie Billie swaying a dark fruit, day and night, all of me, and whatever else Cole Porter could button up the night with. Some, I said, since I am unabashedly a child of rock and roll, now denominated classic rock. Jesus.
Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant, or frankly, during that hellish growing up absurd teenager time in the 1950s trying to figure out our places, if any, in the cold war red scare world, if there was to be a world, and that was a close thing at times, or whether we cared, our tribal music was as dear a thing to us, we who were in the throes of finding our own very different musical identities. Whether we knew it or not in the big world- historic picture scheme of things, knew what sacred place the music of the 1950s, rhythm and blues, scat be-bop, rockabilly, doo wop, flat out pure rock and roll those tunes held a primordial place in our youthful hearts. That was our music, our getting through the tough times music of post-World War II teen alienation and angst, that went wafting through the house on the living room radio (when the parents were out), on the family record player (ditto on the parents), or, for some, the television (double ditto the parents out, especially when American Bandstand hit us like a hurricane and we breathlessly rushed home every afternoon after school to make sure we were hip to the latest songs, the latest dances, the latest hair styles, boys and girls, and whether that brunette with the boffo hair-do and showing an edge of cleavage was “going steady” or whether we has a dream chance at her, or her “sister,” same boffo hair-do sitting across from you in seventh grade English class), and best of all on that blessed transistor radio, compact enough to hide in shirt pockets but loud enough when placed next to your ear to block out that mother-father-brothers buzz that only disturbed you more, that allowed us to while away the time up in our rooms away from snooping parental ears. Yes, that was the pastime of many of those of us who constitute the now graying fading generation of ‘68.
Some of us will pass to the beyond clueless as to why we were attuned to this music when we came of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which we too like most of our parents had not created, and had no say in creating. That includes a guy, me, a coalminer’s son who got as caught up in the music of his time as any New York City Jack or Jill or Chi town frat or frail whose father busted out of the tumbled down tarpaper shacks down in some Appalachia hills and hollows, headed north, followed the northern star, his own version, and never looked back and neither did his son.
Yes we were crazy for the swing and sway of Big Joe Turner snapping those big fingers like some angel- herald letting the world know, if it did not know already, that it did not mean a thing, could not possibly matter in the universe, if you did not whether your young febrile brain caught any or all of the not so subtle to experienced ears sexual innuendoes that drove Shake, Rattle, and Roll, if you did not rock with or without Miss La Vern Baker, better with, better with, her hips swaying slightly, lips moistened, swirling every guy in the place on Jim Dandy vowing be her man just for that smile and a chance at those slightly swaying hips. Mr. Elvis Presley, with or without the back-up boys, better with because they held the key to the backbeat that drove Elvis just a little bit harder, rockier, and for the girls from about ten to one hundred sexier, belting out songs, knocking down walls, maybe Jericho, maybe just some teen-struck Starlight Ballroom in Kansas City blasting the joint with his Jailhouse Rock to the top of the charts. Elegant Bill Haley, with or without that guy blowing that sexy sax out into the ocean air night in some Frisco club, blowing out to the Japan seas on Rock Around The Clock. Bo Diddley, all banded up if there is such a word, making eyes wild with that Afro-Carib beat on Who Do You Love. A young Ike Tina-less Turner too with his own aggregation wailing Rocket 88 that had every high school girl throwing dreamy nickels and dimes into the jukebox, with or without fanfare. Buddy Holly, with or without those damn glasses, talking up Peggy Sue before his too soon last journey. Miss Wanda Jackson, the female Elvis, with or without the blues, personal blues, strung out blues too, singing everybody else’s blues away with that throaty thing she had (and that long black hair and ruby red lips to make a schoolboy dream funny dreams), that meaningful pause, on yeah, Let’s Have A Party. Miss (Ms.) Patsy Cline, with or without the bad moments, making grown men cry (women too) when she reached that high note fretting about her long gone man on She’s Got You, Jesus. (And you not caring for all the strung-out emotion, or hubris, still wanting Patsy for a last chance last dance close up song to take a whirl at that she you had been eying until your eyes got sore all night.)
Miss (Ms.) Brenda Lee too chiming in with I’m Sorry. Mr. Jerry Lee Lewis doing a million songs fronting that wild piano off the back of a flat-bed truck in High School Confidential calling out, no preaching out the new dispensation to anybody who wanted to rise in that rocking world, with or without a horde of cashmere sweater girls breaking down his doors, putting everybody else to shame. The Everly Brothers, always with that soft -spoken refrain catch that nobody seemed to tire of, getting everybody nervous, everybody who had gone past curfew looking for a little, well, looking okay, and not reflecting enough on damn reputations except in the school pecking order determined first week of ninth grade in the girls’ lounge and boys’ “lav,” doing teary Wake Up Little Susie. The Drifters with or without those boardwalks. The Sherilles with or without the leader of the pack, the Dixie Cups with or without whatever they were doing at that chapel. Miss Carole King, with or without the boys, writing the bejesus out of last gasp Tin Pan Alley. Yeah, our survival music.
We, the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “the greatest generation,” decidedly not our parents’ generation, finally could not bear to hear their music, could not bear to think anybody in the whole universe would think that stuff was cool. Those of us who came of age, biological, political, and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a jail-break on all fronts and that included from “their song” stuff. Their staid Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he their organizer of victory, their gentile father Ike), hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had a nightmare that, he or she, was trapped in some fashionable family bunker and those loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Yelling in that troubled sleep please, please, please if we must die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential.
We were moreover, some of us anyway, and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dreams, ready to cross our own swords with the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby, sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear in this quarter, quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded by the new dispensation and slogged through the 60s decade whether it was in the civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down were kindred. To the disapproval, anger, and fury of more than one parent who had gladly slept through the Eisenhower times. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone.
These following sketches and that is all they are, and all they pretend to be, link up the music of the generation of ‘68s coming of age time (and a few post-coming of age sketches as well) gleaned from old time personal remembrances, the remembrances of old time corner boys whom I hung around with on lonesome, girl-less Friday nights at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys just off Thornton Street in the Dorchester section of Boston, and from remembrances of events and personalities that I, we, heard about through the school grapevine (especially those obligatory Monday morning before school talkfests where everybody, boy or girl, lied, or half-lied about what they did, or did not do, over the steamy weekend), the media (newspapers or radio and television in those days) or through what is now called the urban legend network but then just called “walking daddy” talk.
The truth, the truth of each sketch is in the vague mood that they invoke rather than any fidelity to hard and fast fact. They are all based on actual stories, more or less prettified and sanitized to avoid any problems with lose of reputation of any of the characters portrayed and any problems with some lingering statute of limitations. That truth, however, especially in the hands of corner boys like Jimmy Jenkins, our leader Frankie Riley, Sam Lowell, Pete Markin, Billy Bradley, Dime Store Benny Kidd, myself and the other guys who passed through the corner at Jack Slack’s must always be treated like a pet rattlesnake. Very carefully. Still the overall mood should more than make up for the lies thrown at you, especially on the issue of sex, or rather the question of the ages on that issue, who did or did not do what to whom on any given occasion. The lies filled the steamy nights and frozen days, and that was about par for the course wasn’t it.
But enough of that for this series is about our uphill struggles to make our vision of the our newer world, our struggles to satisfy our hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in our youth we dreamed by on cold winter nights and hot summer days.
Didn’t Your Mother Ever Tell You Not To Talk To Strangers And Not To Cops Either, Not “Projects’ Boys” And That Is No Lie-With Cop Buddies Michael J. Fox And James Woods’ “The Hard Way” (1991) In Mind
DVD Review
By Bradley Fox, Jr. (no relation to the actor listed here but a relation to former and now retired American Film Gazette writer and editor Bradley Fox, Sr.)
The Hard Way, starring Michael Keaton, James Woods, 1991
[The reader may have not seen the name Bradley Fox, Jr. on a by-line at this publication for some time now. For a very good reason. A couple of years back when I was starting out at this publication as a stringer, I locked horns with the previous site manager Allan Jackson, who has recently returned as a contributing editor which is okay as long as he is not my boss. The reason, reasons really but the main one was his insistence that every writer delve deeply into the 1960s counterculture, general 1960s culture for that matter since a number of 50th anniversary commemorations were coming up and Allan wanted blanket coverage. Even from younger writers who didn’t have a clue about the 1960s, could have cared less about that ancient history or had to reach out to parents or in my case grandparents to get a feel for the times. Not good, not good at all.
Greg Green, who Allan had brought over from American Film Gazette to run the day to day operations while he did the big strategic planning and gave out the assignments, knowing how unhappy I was, knowing I would be forever a stringer as long as Allan ran the show, ran it his way “or the highway” as some wag put the matter, got me a job over at Film Today. In late 2017 when all hell broke loose, and Allan was canned I thought about coming back. Problem was I had a two-year non-competition clause in my contract to not write for some other publication which meant that I had to wait it out. And I did. Once the contract restriction expired Greg called me up and asked me back. This is my first assignment back although not my first run at this film since I reviewed it at Film Today as well. Greg wanted me to revise that effort to fit in better with his idea that this kind of film did not need the three-thousand-word gloss that I had put on it. The revised and shortened piece is below minus the extended analysis of the place of “buddy movies,” male buddy movies until recently and now gal buddies as well in Hollywood film history. Brad Fox, Jr.]
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Sam Lowell, the now sort of retired film editor at this publication who still contributes a few pieces and who right now is working on a continuing project about why certain once well-known private investigators, specifically Lew Archer from out in California who wound up peeping through keyholes, never made it to the P.I. Hall of Fame despite some real promise starting out, once told my father when they both were working at American Film Review I think a few good tips about film reviewing. About film reviewing when you are totally without a clue about how to proceed with a review which is in many ways a piece of fluff like The Hard Way but which you must say something about if for no other reason than to keep the wolves from your door (and avoid taking hand-outs, cash outlays, from fathers and mothers as the case may be). Without a “hook” you might as well stay home and have a drink to drown your sorrows. Here are the three life-savers in ascending order-“slice of life” for the time period especially if the theme has been totally superseded by newer social conventions; feature the “buddy” aspect; and, play up the “boy meets girl (or visa versa)” theme which has saved more Hollywood and now world-wide films than it would seem possible to do given some of the lame plotlines.
Today we do the middle life-line (which I used in a feverish pitch when I first reviewed this film at my previous job at Film Today loading up the piece with the history of “buddy movies” in Hollywood since on re-viewing the film for this piece I came up with the same problem as there. A piece of fluff. The difference was that the editor there was looking for “high culture” aspects hence the three-thousand-word minimum requirement. As well as a stringer I was being paid by the word at one of the last publications to use that relic of indentured servitude method of payment for stringers). As usual with buddy films there has to be some conflict of interest that gets resolved and lets them go off hand and hand into the sunset having bonded for eternity, or until the sequel if any. John Moss, James Woods’ character is a hard-nosed, no non-sense and basically politically incorrect public detective, a New York detective who has a major problem on his hands. A major crime problem which is that some new version of American psycho is running around dance halls, barrooms, frat houses, maybe even public restrooms off-handedly shooting people for kicks or some mysterious reason known only to him, as usual. Our Man Moss is bound and determined to bring this cretin to justice-by any means necessary.
Naturally the case in widely publicized as are Moss’ relentlessly baiting remarks about that psycho. Meanwhile Nick Lang played by Michael J. Fox as a movie star out in Hollywood is in a funk. You might remember Nick from back a couple of decades ago when everybody was touting him as the next Errol Flynn, on film not in personal life, an action movie guy bringing in big studio grosses for little dough but apparently only spending about six dollars on script-writers. Nick was having a mid-career crisis like a lot of people when he came up with either a brilliant idea, or one of pure genius. He would hook up with this John Moss and learn what it was like to be a real action guy, a real cop. Pulling a few thousand strings, or maybe the studio doing so he is in.
Of course our serious cop John is outraged that some punk movie star who has the liberty to endlessly shoot fantasy bang-bang scenes is going to play copper, play out in the mean streets of New York while this psycho is running amok. Nick, as expected made every mistake in the book, maybe more in real cop line of duty. Which only infuriated Moss more. Meanwhile the psycho is pulling their chains, has them looking in all the wrong places. Along the way, as expected as well, John lightens up a little on Nick although he is still desperate to get him out of town. (Probably the best scene in the whole film was when trigger-happy Nick “shoots” an innocent by-stander while they are on the trail of Mister Psycho. It turns out this was a scam way that Moss tried to get Nick out of town by setting up the scene with fellow coppers-sorry for the egg all over your face Nick.) In the end Nick will redeem himself by taking a few stray bullets as they go in for the kill after psycho kidnaps Moss’ estranged girlfriend out in Time Square and there is final action on a 3-D billboard touting some film Nick had made. The psycho goes down and is chalked up as no great lose. Yeah, thinking about it again I am glad Greg gave the okay to make this dopey film a subject for short review. I don’t believe even with padding I squeezed well over three-thousand words out of this mildly funny film.
Tongue And Cheek In The Victorian Age-With The Film Adaptation Of Oscar Wilde’s Play “An Ideal Husband” In Mind (1999)-A Film Review
DVD Review
By Leslie Dumont
An Ideal Husband, starring Julianne Moore, Jeremy Northam, Minnie Driver, Cate Blanchett, Rupert Everett, 1999
Oscar Wilde certainly took a beating, a serious beating including some jail time in Reading Gaol which he wrote about, for his sexual preferences in late 19th century Victorian England. Stuff that today would draw a yawn in most quarters but which then was scandalous. (As we all know not everybody is on board with the idea that you should be able to love whomever you want to love even in the 21st century.) Moreover showing the sheer hypocrisy of the times Mr. Wilde took a beating for doing what a good portion, a greater portion than I would have thought, of the gentry and ruling class were doing themselves, especially coming out of the segregated by sex public schools (in America private schools). And nobody thought much about it except you had best stay in the closet-or else. A whole identification underground sub-culture grew up around that closet for both same-sex attraction cultures.
Before I get to the review of the film adaptation of Mr. Wilde’s ironic take on the courting rituals and expectations of late Victorian society among the straights, An Ideal Husband, in the interest of transparency I should note that growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid- 1970s I shared all the prejudices that were prevalent in my neighborhood on the question of sexual preference. That despite, and maybe because of, Cambridge a progressive center for gay and lesbian rights and life-style in the post-Stonewall riots world. I am ashamed to admit now that back then I had a boyfriend, a high school boyfriend, who with his buddies would go down to Provincetown, a historically friendly summer watering hole for gays and lesbians from elsewhere, for the sole purpose of taunting and beating up gay guys in back alleys. And, then, I thought nothing of it. Well, as Josh Breslin my old companion and current fellow writer here loved to say “you can learn some things in this wicked old world.”
On to the story now, the idea behind the sardonic appearances of the ideal husband when among the upper crust making a good marriage for every reason except maybe love was in order. One stem of this plot revolves around the role of women in late Victorian society. On the one hand Lady Chiltern, played by Cate Blanchett, is something of a suffragette, independent political factor and high end moral force on the other she is subordinately devoted to husband Sir Robert’s, played by Jeremy Northam, rising political career. On the one hand Mabel Chiltern, Sir Robert’s sister, played by Minnie Driver, is a strong and determined independent young women and on the other she is fatally attracted to cad and gadabout Lord Goring, Sir Robert’s close friend, played by Rupert Everett. He, in turn is a committed gadabout but also a pillar of friendship to his friend Sir Robert when the deal goes down.
A second stem is the duplicity of politics and political power when a worldly and wary Mrs. Cheveley, played by Julianne Moore, enters the lists with a bogus proposition about governmental funding of another one of those can’t miss canal schemes which dotted later Victorian life as the British Empire reached it high side. To grease her skids she has damming evidence against the upstart Sir Robert whose original sin was that he had insider knowledge of deals going down and made the killing on the stock market that started his upward career march. Lastly this is also a send-up on class, on the strange mores of the upper crust, their mating rituals, and their willingness to bend with the breezes to keep their respective places. That attitude and an undertow by Wilde who would soon see just how that high society could be the frivolous existences that a goodly number of the upper crust lived.
Yes, Oscar Wilde knew what castles he was setting on fire with this look (and with The Importance Of Being Ernest), although he probably didn’t know that they would break him, that those works would be the high side of his literary output.
Smokestack Lightning, Indeed- With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf Coming Up The Mississippi From The Mister James Crow South And Blowing High White Notes In Mind
Sometimes a picture really can be worth a thousand words, a thousand words and more as in the case Howlin’ Wolf doing his Midnight creep in the photograph above taken from an album of his work but nowadays with the advances in computer technology and someone’s desire to share also to be seen on sites such as YouTube where you can get a real flavor of what that mad man was about when he got his blues wanting habits on. In fact I am a little hesitate to use a bunch of words describing Howlin’ Wolf in high gear since maybe I would leave out that drop of perspiration dripping from his overworked forehead and that salted drop might be the very thing that drove him that night or describing his oneness with his harmonica because that might cause some karmic funk. So, no, I am not really going to go on and on about his midnight creep but when the big man got into high gear, when he went to a place where he sweaty profusely, a little ragged in voice and eyes all shot to hell he roared for his version of the high white note. Funny, a lot of people, myself for a while included, used to think that the high white note business was strictly a jazz thing, maybe somebody like the “Prez” Lester Young or Duke’s Johnny Hodges after hours, after the paying customers had had their fill, or what they thought was all those men had in them, shutting the doors tight, putting up the tables leaving the chairs for whoever came by around dawn, grabbing a few guys from around the town as they finished their gigs and make the search, make a serious bid to blow the world to kingdom come.
Some nights they were on fire at blew that big note out in to some heavy air and who knows where it landed, most nights though it was just “nice try.” One night I was out in Frisco when “Saps” McCoy blew a big sexy sax right out the door of Chez Benny’s over in North Beach when North Beach was just turning away from be-bop “beat” and that high white, I swear, blew out to the bay and who knows maybe all the way to the Japan seas. But see if I had, or anybody had, thought about it for a minute jazz and the blues are cousins, cousins no question so of course Howlin’ Wolf blew out that high white note more than once, plenty including a couple of shows I caught him at when he was not in his prime.
The photograph (and now video) that I was thinking of is one where he is practically eating the harmonica as he performs How Many More Years (and now like I say thanks to some thoughtful archivist you can go on to YouTube and see him doing his devouring act in real time and in motion, wow, and also berating father Son House for showing up drunk). Yes, the Wolf could blast out the blues and on this one you get a real appreciation for how serious he was as a performer and as blues representative of the highest order.
Howlin’ Wolf like his near contemporary and rival Muddy Waters, like a whole generation of black bluesmen who learned their trade at the feet of old-time country blues masters like Charley Patton, the aforementioned Son House who had his own personal fight with the devil, Robert Johnson who allegedly sold his soul to the devil out on Highway 61 so he could get his own version of that high white note, and the like down in Mississippi or other southern places in the first half of the twentieth century. They as part and parcel of that great black migration (even as exceptional musicians they would do stints in the sweated Northern factories before hitting Maxwell Street) took the road north, or rather the river north, an amazing number from the Delta and an even more amazing number from around Clarksville in Mississippi right by that Highway 61 and headed first maybe to Memphis and then on to sweet home Chicago.
They went where the jobs were, went where the ugliness of Mister James Crow telling them sit here not there, walk here but not there, drink the water here not there, don’t look at our women under any conditions and on and on did not haunt their every move (although they would find not racial Garden of Eden in the North, last hired, first fired, squeezed in cold water flats too many to a room, harassed, but they at least has some breathing space, some room to create a little something they could call their won and not Mister’s), went where the big black migration was heading after World War I. Went also to explore a new way of presenting the blues to an urban audience in need of a faster beat, in need of getting away from the Saturday juke joint acoustic country sound with some old timey guys ripping up three chord ditties to go with that jug of Jack Flash’s homemade whiskey (or so he called it).
So they, guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Magic Slim, Johnny Shines, and James Cotton prospered by doing what Elvis did for rock and rock and Bob Dylan did for folk and pulled the hammer down on the old electric guitar and made big, big sounds that reached all the way back of the room to the Red Hat and Tip Top clubs and made the max daddies and max mamas jump, make some moves. And here is where all kinds of thing got intersected, as part of all the trends in post-World War II music up to the 1960s anyway from R&B, rock and roll, electric blues and folk the edges of the music hit all the way to then small white audiences too and they howled for the blues, which spoke to some sense of their own alienation. Hell, the Beatles and more particularly lived to hear Muddy and the Wolf. The Stones even went to Mecca, to Chess Records to be at one with Muddy. And they also took lessons from Howlin’ Wolf himself on the right way to play Little Red Rooster which they had covered and made famous in the early 1960s (or infamous depending on your point of view since many radio stations including some Boston stations had banned it from the air originally).Yes, Howlin’ Wolf and that big bad harmonica and that big bad voice that howled in the night did that for a new generation, pretty good right.
In The Hills And Hollows Again- With Mountain Music Man Norman Blake And Satruday Red Barn Dances And White Lightning Dreams In Mind
Recently in discussing Sam Lowell’s relationship with mountain music, the music from down in the hills and hollows of Kentucky where his father and his people before him had lived dirt poor for generations eking almost nothing out of the land that had been abandoned decades before by some going west driven spirits who played the land out and moved on, some moving on until they reached ocean edge California, Bart Webber noticed that he had concentrated a little too heavily on Sam’ s father’s Kentucky hills and hollows. There were places like in the Piedmont of North Carolina with a cleaner picking style as exemplified more recently by Norman Blake who has revived the work of performers like Edda Baker and Pappy Sims by playing the old tunes. Also places like the inner edges of Tennessee and Georgia where the kindred also dwelled, places as well where if the land had played out there they, the ones who stayed behind in there tacky cabins barely protected against the weathers, their lack of niceties of modern existence a result not because they distained such things but down in the hollows they did not know about them, did not seem to notice the bustling outside world.
They all, all the hills and hollows people, just kept plucking away barely making ends meet, usually not doing so in some periods, and once they had abandoned cultivating the land these sedentary heredity “master-less men” thrown out their old countries, mainly the British Isles, for any number of petty crimes, but crimes against property and so they had to go on their own or face involuntary transportation they went into the “black god” mines or sharecropping for some Mister to live short, nasty, brutish lives before the deluge. But come Saturday night, come old Fred Brown’s worn out in need of paint red barn the hill people, the mountain people, the piedmont brethren, hell, maybe a few swamp-dwellers too, would gather up their instruments, their sweet liquor jugs, their un-scrubbed bare-foot children or their best guy or gal and play the night away as the winds came down the mountains. This DNA etched in his bones by his father and the kindred is what Sam had denied for much of his life.
But like Bart said when discussing the matter with Sam one night sometimes what goes around comes around as the old-time expression had it. Take for example Sam Lowell’s youthful interest in folk music back in the early 1960s when it had crashed out of exotic haunts like Harvard Square, Ann Arbor, Old Town Chi Town and North Beach/Berkeley out in Frisco. Crashed out by word of mouth at first and ran into a lot of kids, a lot of kids like Sam, who got his word from Diana Nelson who got it from a cousin from North Adamsville nearer Boston who frequented the coffeehouse on Beacon Hill and Harvard Square hipped her to this new folk music program that he had found flipping the dial of his transistor radio one Sunday night.
See Sam and Diana were tucked away from the swirl down in Carver about thirty miles as the crow flies from Boston and Cambridge but maybe a million social miles from those locales and had picked up the thread somewhat belatedly. He, along with his corner boys, had lived in their little corner boy cocoon out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner figuring out ways to get next to girls like Diana but who were stuck, stuck like glue to listening to the “put to sleep” music that was finding its way to clog up Jimmy Jack’s’ hither-to-fore “boss” jukebox. Christ, stuff like Percy Faith’s Moon River that parents could swoon over, and dance to. Had picked the sound up belatedly when they were fed up with what was being presented on American Bandstand and WJDA the local rock station, when they were looking for something different, something that they were not sure of but that smelled, tasted, felt, and looked different from a kind of one-size-fits-all vanilla existence.
Oh sure, as Bart recognized once he thought about it for a while, every generation in their youth since the days when you could draw a distinction between youth and adulthood a century or so ago and have it count has tried to draw its own symbolic beat but this was different, this involved a big mix of things all jumbled together, political, social, economic, cultural, the whole bag of societal distinctions which would not be settled until the end of that decade, maybe the first part of the next. That big picture is what interested him. What Sam was interested then down there in Carver about thirty miles south of Boston was the music, his interest in the other trends did not come until later, much later long after the whole thing had ebbed and they were fighting an unsuccessful rearguard action against the night-takers and he was forced to consider other issues. And Sam had been like that ever after.
The way Sam told it one night a few years back, according to Bart, some forty or so years after his ear changed forever that change had been a bumpy road. Sam had been at his bi-weekly book club in Plymouth where the topic selected for the next meeting was the musical influences, if any, that defined one’s tastes and he had volunteered to speak then since he had just read a book, The Mountain View, about the central place of mountain music, for lack of a better term, in the American songbook. He had along with Bart and Jack Dawson also had been around that time discussing how they had been looking for roots as kids. Musical roots which were a very big concern for a part of their generation, a generation that was looking for roots, for rootedness not just in music but in literature, art, and even in the family tree.
Their parents’ generation no matter how long it had been since the first family immigration wave had spilled them onto these shores was in the red scare Cold War post-World War II period very consciously ignoring every trace of roots in order to be fully vanilla Americanized. So their generation had had to pick up the pieces not only of that very shaky family tree but everything else that had been downplayed during that period.
Since Sam had tired of the lazy hazy rock and roll that was being produced and which the local rock radio stations were force- feeding him and others like him looking to break out through their beloved transistor radios he had started looking elsewhere on the tiny dial for something different after Diana had clued him in about that folk music program. Although for a while he could not find that particular program or Carver was out of range for the airwaves. But like a lot of young people, as he would find out later when he would meet kindred in Harvard Square, the Village, Ann Arbor, Berkeley he fortunately had been looking for that something different at just that moment when something called folk music, roots music, actually was being played on select stations for short periods of time each week and so it was before long that he was tuned in.
His own lucky station had been a small station, an AM station, from Providence in Rhode Island which he would find out later had put the program on Monday nights from eight to eleven at the request of Brown and URI students who had picked up the folk music bug on trips to the Village (Monday a dead music night in advertising circles then, maybe now too, thus fine for talk shows, community service programs and odd-ball stuff like roots music to comply with whatever necessary FCC mandates went with the license.) That is where he first heard the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Dave Von Ronk, a new guy named Tom Rush from Harvard whom he would hear in person many times over the years, and another guy, Eric Von Schmidt whom he would meet later in one of the Harvard Square coffeehouses that were proliferating to feed the demand to hear folk music. Those coffeehouses were manna from heaven, well, because they were cheap for guys with little money. Cheap alone or on a date, basically as Sam related to his book club listeners for a couple of bucks at most admission, the price of a cup of coffee to keep in front of you and thus your place, maybe a pastry if alone and just double that up for a date except share the pasty you had your date deal all set for the evening hearing performers perfecting their acts before hitting the A-list clubs.
He listened to it all, liked some of it, other stuff, the more protest stuff he could take or leave depending on the performer but what drew his attention, strangely then was when somebody on the radio or on stage performed mountain music, you know, the music of the hills and hollows that came out of Appalachia mainly down among the dust and weeds. Things like Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow, Gold Watch and Chain, Fair and Tender Ladies, Pretty Saro, and lots of instrumentals by guys like Buell Kazee, Hobart Smith, The Charles River Boys, Norman Blake just starting his rise along with various expert band members to bring bluegrass to the wider younger audience that did not relate to guys like Bill Monroe and his various band combinations, and some other bluegrass bands as well that had now escaped his memory.
This is where it all got jumbled up for him Sam said since he was strictly a city boy, made private fun of the farm boys, the cranberry boggers, who then made up a significant part of his high school. He furthermore had no interest in stuff like the Grand Ole Opry and that kind of thing, none. Still he always wondered about the source, about why he felt some kinship with the music of the Saturday night red barn, probably broken down, certainly in need of paint, and thus available for the dance complete with the full complement of guitars, fiddles, bass, mandolin and full complement too of Bobby Joe’s just made white lightening, playing plainsong for the folk down in the wind-swept hills and hollows.
Then one night, a Sunday night after he had picked up the Boston folk program station on the family radio (apparently the weak transistor radio did not have the energy to pick up a Boston station) he was listening to the Carter Family’s Wildwood Flower when his father came in and began singing along. After asking Sam about whether he liked the song and Sam answered that he did but could not explain why his father told him a story that maybe put the whole thing in perspective. After Sam’s older brother, Lawrence, had been born and things looked pretty dicey for a guy from the South with no education and no skill except useless coal-mining his father decided that maybe they should go back to Kentucky and see if things were better for a guy like him there. No dice, after had been in the north, after seeing the same old tacky cabins, the played out land, the endless streams of a new generation of shoeless kids Sam’s father decided to head back north and try to eke something out in a better place. But get this while Sam’s parents were in Kentucky Sam had been conceived. Yeah, so maybe it was in the genes all along.
Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind
A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s. After some thought I pinpointed the first time to a seventh grade music class (Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called Dasher the Flasher just for rhyming purposes but which with today’s sensibilities about the young would not play very well) when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of music made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land.
In thinking about when I first heard Pete Seeger sign I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time I heard the emerging folk minute. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being play in the fall of 1962 on the Boston stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.
After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene. In those days, the early 1950s I think, The Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare brush. Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized. Interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday jug and head to the juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle. Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook.
You Have Come A Long Way, Baby-Maybe-Traversing The Woman Question, Circa 1940-With Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell And A Fistful Of Notable Lesser Female Stars And Starlets-No Men-“The Women”(1939)-A Film Review, Maybe
DVD Review
By Leslie Dumont
The Women, starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell and the above mentioned fistful of lesser stars, starlets, fashion models, some producers’ mistresses, a few tramps, a couple more who look like they came out of a high-end bordello in the high rent district of New York City, a couple of taxi dancers, a few lap dancers and at least half a dozen gold-diggers and not necessarily those lesser females, directed by George Cukor he of the trio of directors who made the classic age of romantic comedy classic, adapted from a play by Claire Luce, she of the Luce of Time magazine founder, screenplay by Anita Loos, she of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes adage (sparked by Dorothy Parker’s Big Blonde the prototype for all subsequent blonde worship and hair rinses), 1939
Why the hell have I been forced marched into writing a freaking, Sam Lowell’s favorite expression more on him in a moment, silly review about the fantasy lives of the rich upper-crust, the Riverside Drive set, in late Great Depression New York, the film The Women, which I dozed off on at least a few times without missing a beat. More on that in a moment, and hopefully the new policy instigated by site manager Greg Green that some films, some turkeys can be dispensed with by a short brutish swipe and then more on. What I feel compelled to explain is why me, Leslie Dumont, out of the blue has received this loser as her latest assignment.
This is where Sam Lowell comes in, comes in on the negative side where later when actually dealing with the film after I have had my bilious say he will be redeemed, for now. Greg Green, always Greg Green when stupid stuff happens at this publication, has had a bee up his bonnet around the lack of reviews about art in this publication indirectly pointing the finger at previous site manager Allan Jackson who before he went over the edge a couple of years ago around commemoration of all things 1960s assigned tons of political commentary and film, book and music reviews. (Somebody asked Allan recently on his return here as a contributing editor, whatever that is, if he had ever gone to an art museum, he gave that sly sideways glance when he was in his “don’t suffer fools gladly” mood meaning WFT.
Sam who had actually been heading toward an art career, had been pushed by his high school art teacher who had paved the way for him to be admitted to art school had always dreamed of being an artist. Having grown up desperately poor his stern and practical Irish Catholic mother who had lesser visions eventually talked him out of that path hoping instead he would get a nice white- collar civil service and push the family fortunes up a notch. He didn’t do that either. Nevertheless, having haunted art museums for years, he was the logical choice to take the continuing assignment, a gravy train assignment meaning he would have had to travel to various art museums and the like. No go though since Sam of late has been knee- deep in his other love writing about the fates of various private detectives and currently why they have or have not been inducted in the P.I. Hall of Fame. He is hot on the case of famous California P.I. Lew Archer who despite a great start in the profession never made the cut. Sam has a theory, a theory about Lew’s sexual impotency which was the major cause of his failure to thrive as he ended up doing “repo” work and peeping through keyholes when that was lucrative divorce work. Greg Green has given Sam a bye on the art front to pursue those leads.
Now things get dicey. Greg desperate to get started on this projected continuing series cornered me at the water cooler one day and asked me if I wanted the assignment. No way, not interested, never been to an art museum since about high school when we took at trip from Trenton to the Met in New York City. Me and my then boyfriend snuck in some back halls and made out until we were ready to get the bus back to Trenton. To hold Greg off I mentioned that Laura Perkins, a fellow writer here and Sam’s longtime companion, had told me once that she had taken art classes in high school and college and had been to at least one art museum. So, yes, I, according to her “ratted her out.” But revenge is sweet and now that she is herself knee-deep in doing art research and articles and immune from other work, she has put the word in to Greg, who is her poodle now, to give me crazy film assignments like the brain-dead thing I am being forced to review, and review right now.
At this point Sam Lowell redeems himself for a very simple proposition-if you are at a loss, a total loss for a “hook” which every storyline needs to float then go back to tried and true “slice of life” when as here you have an old-time film. And frankly that is the only way that I can figure to say two words, positive or negative, about this film despite the fact that it has an all-female cast. Actually, that may be what is wrong with the thing, with the concept behind Ms. Luce’s original intention. To 2018 eyes which have gone through a few phases of feminism this thing doesn’t fly. For lots of reasons. Here is where I probably should make an act of contrition about any bottom-dwelling I have said about the 24/7 Christmas-etched films which have recently ended on the Hallmark channels. With the lame slapstick and over-the-top sudsy melodrama every Hallmark venture looks like an Academy award nominee.
Okay, slice of life time (thanks again, Sam). This is about the rich and spoiled women who despite the Great Depression still in full blast (it would not really abate until the cataclysmic beginning of World War II in the Pacific for this country) had nothing but time bile on their hands. “Catty” is the word that came to mind very early as the vultures flocked around the latest victim to scavenge. That being pure as the driven snow, Mary, played by super-melodramatic Noma Shearer who made a career doing this tearful muck. Mary, who in real life is the appendage of one Stephen Hanes. One Stephen Hanes, unseen as are all other men from minute one to the end, at least breathing men although the whole plot stinks of men and their perfidy, has left the reservation. Who is having an affair, who is paying the rent for some hat check girl. No, for a damsel in distress met at the perfume counter of Black’s Department Store which I believe is now part of the Macy’s chain but which in its day was the place of places for the high-hatted high-toned set, female division. Middle life crisis Stephen has a yearning for exotic Chrystal, played by Joan Crawfish, oops, Joan Crawford, I am under the influence of a Jack Kerouac short story about a film she did in San Francisco which he witnessed and wrote about. (By the way this is the 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s too early death.)
The sweet Mary, sultry Chrystal axis will drive the film’s ups and down, ups and downs aided a cluster of chucking hens led by Rosaline Russell who will convey far and wide at the drop of a hat, maybe just a hefty tip to the all-knowing wait staff at the exclusive combination beauty parlor and health spa where they all go to get refueled for the next bouts whose marriage is on the chopping block. Tough work between sitting through exotic (and truly over-the-top) fashion shows, long martini lunches and back to the exercise room. Tough work too the little witty bon mots and flaming arrows thrown around without discrimination for the truth of the matter or how hurtful it might be to the victim of the latest “be-heading” (the only discrimination, real , is the shabby second-rate treatment of the working class white and black female help which would make one hard pressed then, maybe now to, to believe that every woman is part of one sisterhood)
Naturally younger gold-digger Chrystal will win round one, will win it almost without a fight which is something these high society dames seem incapable of when the deal goes down. Mary is out on streets. No, that is not the way of that world. She just goes to the West, to Reno for a sweet divorce with all the trimmings. Chrystal wins round two as well snagging Stephen into the marriage bed and easy street. But see Chrystal both overplayed her hand and is nothing but a gold-digging tramp who once she snagged Stephen started lining up the next best thing. Even Stephen got wise by then. And Mary when she got the word drew some from nowhere inner strength to go after her man. Round three to Mary although why she wanted back with her lover man I don’t really know, maybe he made her toes curl in bed, although in 1939 Code world we can’t even think such sexy thoughts. Maybe in the end this is really just another variation on the “boy meet girl” trope that has carried many movies and is another “hook” when you are desperate. I will stick with “slice of life,” circa 1940 since no way would a film like this be produced, not even on the Hallmark channels.
Finally, and this might sound crazy but when I watched this film, watched it with Josh Breslin and yes, we are friends and let’s leave it at that for the rumor-mongers on the Internet, he blurred out that this film should be reviewed by a male, by a man. I agree.
