Desk Set (1957), or, The Post In Which I Strain For A Pet Theory, Reject It, And Get Cranky

Is anyone else really bored here?

If one looks at the WGA list of the 101 Best Screenplays of All Time, one would find more than a few misfires (American Beauty!). Is this because screen writers aren't a very bright bunch? Possibly. But it may also have something to do with our criteria for what makes a script or a story good. I mention this in conjunction with my review of Desk Set now because the things that bothered me about Desk Set I've found common to a number of films on The List that also irk me.

I've been formulating an unscientific study (in my mind) in which I delineate the various irritants and trace them directly to a certain style and/or era and am thus able to create a sort of taxonomy of screen writing wrongness. I got as far as this:

1. the theatre
2. the 1950s

... before I realized I was talking out of my ass.

See, I had this theory that writing in the 1950s had evolved into an unfortunate art form characterized by stilted adaptations of stage plays -- and stagey acting -- overlong run times, bloated production, unnatural dialogue, and a loss of connection with the cinematic medium. Writing for the movies had become respectable and playwrights were imported with disastrous results? Was that it? But they'd been importing playwrights since the '30s, and novelists as well, often with successful results. That broad-strokes solution didn't work.

But since so many films I dislike were produced circa 1950, I thought there HAD TO BE something specific about the 1950s I could point to as a factor in creating these irksome filmed plays. Maybe it was the source material, the theatre itself, that was the problem.

So far I've found very few successful adaptations from theatre to screen, a problem that rests with the writing and the direction, in equal measures. Directors seem content to rest on the "sparkling" dialogue and writers seem content to shoehorn their theatrics into an entirely different medium. Again, these are over-generalizations, but by now I've begun realize I'm not going to make a thorough -- or even remotely fact-based -- study here. These are just a few observations of my own, backed up with a few isolated examples. I'd love to start a dialogue, though, and hear what others have to say on the subject.


Spencer Tracy will not change his expression ...

Back to Desk Set. I was so excited to watch this because I love Katharine Hepburn, usually. (Though I recently re-watched "The African Queen" and was like, how did I not notice before how damn boring this movie is?") And reference librarians are awesome. How could I go wrong? Well, for one thing, I don't think the Tracy/Hepburn combo really does it for me. I was bored by Adam's Rib, too. I just don't feel the chemistry between them, real life romance or no. And something about the laconic way Tracy played it in Desk Set just struck me as lazy. So there's that. And Katie wasn't given much to do either, other than throw away some one-liners and quote a few poems in her Shakespeare voice.

Joan Blondell will languish

After about forty minutes of talking heads I got that familiar feeling. "I bet this was a play, originally," I harumphed to myself. (This was during the rooftop scene.) Sure enough -- adapted from a play by William Marchant ... by the dreaded Ephrons (spawners of Nora). Well, no wonder, I thought. But possibly the worst offense director Walter Lang commits, other than FILMING A PLAY, is giving the brilliant Joan Blondell nothing -- NOTHING -- to work with. I've seen Joan Blondell with funny scripts and good direction, I've seen her paired with James Cagney. I KNOW WHAT SHE CAN DO. And you gave her nothing. Nothing. That I cannot forgive.
Hepburn explains the joke

As I let Desk Set drag towards its inevitable conclusion, I felt my animosity increase. The scene in Hepburn's apartment seems set up for comedy. Shoes in the oven. Men in bathrobes. Interruptions. The stage is set! Comedy MUST ensue! Something MUST happen! But, nope. Everything's fine. Men go home. Shoes come out of oven unscathed. Hepburn and Blondell have a good laugh. The scene is deflated, an anticlimax. And hey, isn't one of the first rules of comedy "There's nothing less funny than watching two characters laugh"? Or the fourth rule. Whatever.

There's one funny scene near the end of the film where the computer, and the electronics expert, start to freak out. I laughed, briefly. Then Hepburn and Tracy (surprise!) decide to get married and the damn dreary thing ends. And I get to thinking.

Like All About Eve (1950) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), Desk Set suffers from my pet afflictions. What other writers -- our friends at AFI and WGA -- have deemed sophistication, wit, dazzling glamour and performance, I take for long, talky, windy, stuffy productions. All About Eve: too much diva, too much drama, too much talking and for far too long. Sunset Boulevard: too much goddamn voice-over! Desk Set: talking heads, flat, phoned-in performances, dull romance, waste of Joan Blondell. African Queen (1951): two boring people on a stupid boat and Hepburn's worst thrall scenes ever (she tends to do this thing where she's really proud at first and then utterly tamed by love, a faintly sickening display).

These particular films just bore me, they lack a lightness, they rely too much on perfs that are supposed to be iconic but fail to thrill. And I know I've got no case for, say, all screenwriting in the 1950s being horrible, or all play adaptations being wretched (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf floored me, although I envied the theatre audience their intermission -- again, I have a problem with anything over 90 minutes, usually ... my own cross to bear). I'm not going to find a formula here. But I think I can say I've identified a tendency in certain films, a fault of the writing, that leads to diminished enjoyment. And that thing, my friends, seems to be dialogue, of a type anyway.

I'm probably just stuck in my whole Leo McCarey/Preston Sturges 1930s screwball thing. Or stuck in my love of the Hawks/Fuller one-two punch (fast, hard, mean, funny, usually over in 100 minutes or less). I just want movies to effervesce all the time, I suppose.

Ironically, I find this romantic

According to imdb.com, Guillermo Del Toro "hates romance." This headline makes me smile, since I've very little patience with any sort of romance that isn't blended with laughs, and not in a Nora Ephron way, either.

"Sleepless in Seattle can go f**k itself," says my long-time crush, concurring with me.

"Monsters," he continues, "are the most beautiful creatures in the universe. I have no interest in everyday life, except through a twisted mirror."

Me neither! But wait, there's more:

"When you have the intuition that there is something which is there, but out of the reach of your physical world, art and religion are the only means to get to it."

Religion, meh. But definitely: art, fiction, ghosties, dreams ... insects, fauns ... mysteries.

Mystery on Fifth Avenue!

I wish I lived in a puzzle house ...

Hatari!

Saw Hatari! last week, and, as predicted, I liked it. First off, I like any film title that ends with an exclamation point! Secondly, I like any sequence that includes the following in combination:

1. Monkeys
2. Rockets
3. Red Buttons

I was going to stick around for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but was too sleepy -- plus I had to shuffle off to Buffalo the next day. I was sorry to miss it, but the business at hand was rather important. Once Saturday night came and said business had been dispatched, I returned to my hotel room only to find it playing on television (on the CBC, no less). I was just in time for my favorite scene.

An omen? Possibly. I'll take it as one.

A conversation about science ensued ...

Reading this made me happy: A government watchdog says NASA's press office "marginalized, or mischaracterized" studies on global warming between 2004 and 2006. This was in the news years ago, but it's only now the official reports are being released, confirming that government moles did indeed suppress new global warming data (some say it was initially suppressed because they didn't want it released during the 2004 presidential campaign). Anyway, I'm just glad this information was released. And to one colleague I spoke with today who said, "Who cares? We already know about global warming!" I have the following rebuttal for you:

"It’s striking that science is still widely viewed as merely a subject one studies in the classroom or an isolated body of largely esoteric knowledge that sometimes shows up in the “real” world in the form of technological or medical advances. In reality, science is a language of hope and inspiration, providing discoveries that fire the imagination and instill a sense of connection to our lives and our world."

That's from Brian Greene, a scientist a Columbia University. If he's good enough for Stephen Colbert, he's good enough for you. If you need me to spell out the connection, the point is that science enriches our lives and connects us to the rest of the universe. It has implications for the way we live our lives and, in this case, the way we treat our planet. To suppress new data or information for political or financial purposes is criminal. The fact that NASA exposed and fired the political plants working to countermand their institution's duty to the American public is great news to me.

In other news: I really want to attend this NYHS exhibit on the Cholera Plague of 1832.

Still Lives

I just finished Still Life by Louise Penny, which I started on Tuesday night. I'd heard so many good things about it and I really must say it (mostly) lives up to the hype. It's a classic cozy set in rural Quebec and it captivates, with its taut, clever puzzle and refreshing sense of place. Plus, it has a spinster!

The author clearly likes W.H. Auden, as she quotes him all the time, which was very timely and interesting to me because I just read an essay of his (more on that later) so I had Auden on the brain anyway. Penny adroitly works in numerous literary references into her book without seeming snotty about it, though her gay characters constantly referencing Oscar Wilde seems a little on the nose. (Her depiction of gay men is quite funny. Apparently they like Bed and Breakfasts, antiques, Wilde, and "It's Raining Men." Who knew?)

"Evil," says Auden,"is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table." This sentiment seems to be the driving force behind the book and it is still singularly chilling no matter how accustomed we may have grown to the idea of evil in a small town. Other themes are explored, like greed and avarice, which are resoundingly condemned as the ultimate evil. There's a marvelous character named Yolande who embodies pretense, avarice and all things evil, as evidenced by her too-clean house (Lemon Pledge = pure evil).

Penny's character of inspector Gamache has drawn praise from authors like Reginald Hill, who compare him to Inspecteur Maigret, and he's not far off the mark. Both inspectors share an endearing humbleness and humanity, a gentle optimism in the face of unspeakable crimes. Penny also introduces another element to the team of police trying to solve the case: Agent Nichol, a rookie who actually stymies the case with her pig-headedness and bad attitude. I found myself wondering if this type of personage had appeared in other detective novels, if there was precedent. I wondered about her role in the case and if she would ultimately find redemption. She was a very interesting foil to Gamache, and created a great deal of suspense by blundering the case. If anyone knows more about her character I'd love to hear it. It would be the first question I'd put to Penny, actually.

So, while Still Life conforms to the rule of the cozy sub-genre closely enough to satisfy even Auden, it also manages to bring number of new and refreshing angles to the narrative. I'm also interested in reading the Temperance Brennan series now, since apparently she's a forensic investigator in Montreal. I guess I'll stay on my Quebec kick for a while. (Also, I guess the author of the books was the inspiration for the character in Bones, a show I'd love to watch if only I had more time ... sigh. Note to self: quit job and become full-time blogger/TV watcher. Pay bills later.) Quebecois crime has been in the news lately too, which makes everything seem all the more timely. This fun Jezebel commentary has lots of cute people exclaiming, "You guys have crime in Canada? How quaint!" To which I say, yes, duh, we have crime, both organized and random. But it's all in the spirit of fun: Canuckisms are always entertaining, and I enjoyed stumbling upon them in Penny's book, like when characters say "Tabernacle" and stuff, which is pretty much the best swear word ever.

Auden says, in his essay "The Guilty Vicarage," that we like detective stories because they return us to Eden, a state of innocence (everything is rectified after the fall) and that in turn this desire is born out of guilt: "The magical satisfaction [the detective story provides] ... is the illusion of being dissociated from the murder. The magic formula is an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt; then a suspicion of being the guilty one; and finally a real innocence from which the guilty other has expelled, a cure effected, not by me or my neighbors, but by the miraculous intervention of a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt."

To which I say, perhaps. But this is rather highfalutin. I just like something that absorbs me completely on my long, dreary commutes. And I found that, prior to getting really into the genre, I was beginning to suffer from narrative fatigue. I was growing tired of books where people share and grow and learn and talk about their feelings and families and angst. I was tired, more than anything, of any story with a romantic angle. I was tired of stories that went nowhere, dammit. Mysteries, I found, had an inherent narrative drive, and could not, must not, meander slowly and pointlessly and navel-gaze solispsistically at the main characters' interior impulses and drives, or else they would be ... suspense thrillers. I just very quickly and suddenly developed extreme impatience with anything that didn't

a) make me laugh
or
b) tire me out with relentless and rapid page turning

I became the human equivalent of Homer Simpson sitting on the couch yelling at the TV during an episode of McGarnagle -- "It means he gets results, you stupid chief!"

And, although Auden denies it, I think we still do watch/read mysteries because of that whole catharsis thing. As Rex Banner says, "It's not up to us to choose which laws we obey. If it was, I'd shoot everyone that looked at me cock-eyed." See? Everything in my psyche can be explained by the Simpsons.

I prefer Bombay Sapphire

According to a report published Monday in The Journal Of Gender Studies, many American women are bucking centuries of traditional gender roles by placing stunted, emotionally unfulfilling relationships on hold in order to pursue mind-numbing careers devoid of any upward mobility.

Dr. Gillian Detweiller, a professor of women's studies at the University of Maryland and coauthor of the report, said that the data suggests a cultural sea change in how women choose to experience lifelong disappointment.

Once again, The Onion manages to laugh at life's horribly depressing realities.

Though a greater number of women have decided to waste their fleeting youth toiling away in unrewarding jobs, other statistics have shown that a growing faction are embracing the more traditional alternative of slipping quietly into a painless death with a handful of sleeping pills and a bottle of Gordon's gin.

What A Joy it is to Dance and Sing!*

The late works of Howard Hawks series is coming up at Anthology. I'm planning to sit through a double bill of Hatari and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and I'll try to restrain myself from singing along to the latter. Speaking of singing, there's a nice defense of "My Rifle, My Pony and Me" in Rio Bravo in the AV Club:

"It’s front and center and performed by the actors, with no apparent deeper meaning beyond the pure enjoyment of watching them. I don’t think the actors are even supposed to be in character here. We’re not meant to see Dude and Colorado, we’re meant to see Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, and bask in the effervescent glow emanating from their collective star power. "When you've got some talent, your job is to use it,” Hawks said of the scene, deflecting criticism he was being self-indulgent with his stars by shoehorning an unnecessary musical number into a western. Of course Hawks was being self-indulgent. Why would Hawks let a little thing like plot get in the way of giving the audience pleasure?"'

So true. I love song and dance numbers, or even just songs, in my movies -- and I feel no real need to defend them, due to the fact that anyone who can't enjoy them is too dull to bother with. If I had to rank my favorite songs in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I'd have to say "When Love Goes Wrong" is right up there, just because I love how seamlessly it's woven into the scene in the cafe in which our heroines commiserate over being broke with broken hearts. The big showstoppers are great too, but I can't help loving the scene where Lorelei and Dorothy cheer themselves up with a little song and dance number in a cafe.

* Angela Carter, "Wise Children"

Birthday Resolutions

As is my custom on my birthday (and most of my unbirthdays), I got tipsy at dinner. Sobering up now, I notice I wrote the following on a scrap of paper while mildly inebriated:

Birthday resolutions:

1. Touch toes

2. Organize photo albums

3. Be more businessy

I think these are all very sound.

Widdershins

I'm feeling very scattershot today, seemingly without the ability to concentrate on anything. As such this post will be appropriately unfocused.

I've been reading short stories; I read an Ellery Queen story in which the perp was a man named Harry Potter. This pleased me. I never know when I read these stories if it was written by the "real" Ellery Queen (two cousins from Brooklyn) or one of the many hacks they farmed the house name out to. Resorting to Wikipedia for research purposes doesn't help, but it does yield this little tidbit:

"In earlier novels he is a snobbish Harvard-educated intellectual of independent wealth who wore a pince-nez and investigated crimes because he found them stimulating. He derived these characteristics from his mother, the daughter of a rich aristocratic New York family who had married Inspector Queen, a bluff, man-in-the-street New York Irishman, and died before the stories began. His mannerisms in the first nine or ten novels were apparently based on those of the then-extremely popular Philo Vance character of the same era. As time went on, however, these mannerisms were toned down or disappeared entirely."

Which leads me to ...

I've been watching season one of "Hart to Hart," the 80s television series and brainchild of Aaron Spelling, and it rather neatly epitomizes the genteel amateur detective, a figure without whom the genre as we know it would not exist. Wealthy industrialist John Hart and his wife Jennifer (a sassy jet-setting author) solve crimes in their ample spare time, aided by their butler, Max. Definitely a fun series. In the last episode they foil a corrupt health farm rife with blackmailing, murderous hypnotists, cheat at a hand of poker and bilk a wealthy sheik out of gas money to propel their private jet to the diamond mines of South Africa, where more adventure awaits.

Update: Watched two more episodes of Hart to Hart and decided I like Jennifer Hart very much. She's quite sassy. Am also inspired to watch The Thin Man now, which I have bumped to the top of my queue. Husband-and-wife sleuthing teams are very much of interest to me right now.

Marge: Is this what you thought marriage would be like?
Homer: Pretty much. Except I thought we'd drive around in a van solving mysteries.

Je Suis Retournee!

I've just completed my Mabel Normand script. After ten months of investing countless molecules of emotional energy into creating a parallel universe in which Mabel Normand solved a series of murder mysteries in Hollywood in 1917 (yes, you read that right), I feel empty and drained, somehow on the verge of tears. This project meant a lot to me and now that it's over I can't imagine what I'll do with my mind, where it'll want to wander in moments of leisure. No longer needing to endlessly restructure and tweak my little film, what will I do to fill the empty spaces in my cerebellum?

What does one do when one is no longer completely consumed? As Rupert Giles says, I believe ice cream is usually appropriate for these sorts of things. Though even ice cream makes me think of Mabel! So I will watch "The Extra Girl" and clips on YouTube instead:



I will also share with you one of my favorite Mabel Normand quotes, from a Photo Play World interview in 1918:

"Nothing in the world is more vital to me at this moment than chocolate cake. I am expecting a four-storied one from the only shop I trust -- or that will trust me. But there is a maddening doubt in connection with it. "Will it or will it not,” I ask myself, "be iced on the sides as well as the top?” The sugar shortage forces economy and I have been warned to expect the worst ... Please go. I must be alone when is arrives. With great sorrows or great joys I seek solitude. I am not like other girls, you understand."

I know what I said, but ...

... I have to take a brief hiatus hiatus, because who can resist:

1. James Cagney's charm

and

2. Muppets and Jason Segal:
"It's gonna be an old school Muppet movie like The Great Muppet Caper or Muppets Take Manhattan. Basically the Muppets have to put on a show to save their studio. And in the intervening years, there's been a Muppet Diaspora, so the main Muppets need to go off with Jason [Segel] and collect other Muppets from all around the world."

Snow Queens, Deadlines, and a Brief Vacation

I've got a very important deadline coming up, so this blog is taking a little nap until May 1st.

But before I abandon my pretty spinsters for a fortnight, I'd like to leave them with a little gift.

Last night at Light Industry I saw two beautiful short films: Michael Robinson's "All Through The Night" (2007) and Phil Solomon's "Rehearsals For Retirement" (2007). Solomon's piece takes fragments from Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas and creates a haunting shadow-narrative in which we follow a man through a misty dreamlike landscape. I've always been fascinated by video game animation, which I find frighteningly sophisticated, and appreciated that it has a certain beauty; Solomon's film explores its fullest potential. I'm not sure where the film is screening next but if you ever get a chance to see it, do. This article from CinemaScope does the work more justice and explains it much more cleverly than I can.

"All Through The Night" is a gorgeous 4 minutes featuring manipulated clips from Snezhnaya koroleva, the Russian animated version of The Snow Queen (1957), swirling snow, and Cyndi Lauper. There's an interview with the man in (again) CinemaScope wherein Robinson describes how "Romanticism’s linking of the natural world to spiritual exchange and transformation" partly inspired his use of clips from a story which features things changing into ice, and roses. Anyway .... I adore this story, I love what Robinson has done with the footage, and I loved the sound bridge at the end where the thrumming of a sped-up baseline merges deftly with the gentle sounds of Cyndi, singing sweetly as the world rights itself again. As it will do, at the end of a fairy tale.

See you on May Day.

Les Fans de Maigret

Symphony Space is hosting a discussion on the great novelist Georges Simenon, "Inspecting Inspector Maigret."

For those Maigret fans in the NYC area with a few hours and 25 clams to spare.

The Topper: Photonarrative Set To Music

Would a series of still photographs be complete without a La Jetee-style montage?
I didn't think so.

Hemlines Rise In The East

Czechoslovakia, the dream and the reality; Our growing interstate highway system; Sharks, wolves of the sea; Ecuador-low and lofty land astride the equator. These were the stories in the February 1968 issue of National Geographic, which featured, among other things, a photograph of my mother in a homemade mini-dress in Wenceslas Square. My sister and I have always loved this photograph . One day she told me a story about when mom was young and she saw The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night something like seventeen times. The Beatles were one of the few western rock bands around in the Soviet-ruled land in those days, and she was a huge fan.

Finding this idea captivating, I re-created the scenario (and attempted to re-create the outfit) and took two friends to various NYC locations that, we imagined, could stand in for communist Czechoslovakia circa 1968. While we played fast and loose with history, there are a few things that are true. The movie wasn't released until around 1968 even though it had been released in 1964 worldwide. My mom was a huge Beatles fan (still is). And her style was pretty fly. The sad ending to the story, of course, is that tanks rolled in by the end of the year, leading to twenty more years of bullshit for the Czech and Slovak people. My mother went to Switzerland shortly after, and never went back.

"I see the film again and again and I am in love"

She Goes To The Cinema

Found Photographs, Part III

Found photographs, Part II

Found photographs, 1967

These appear to be somewhere in Czechoslovakia ... the back of the photo says 1967.


I love how this girl is dwarfed by concrete blocks ...

I'm not sure who this girl is. She looks like my mother ...

Springlikeness

As it feels exceptionally springlike today, I thought I'd post this picture of A Hare In The Forest (1585), which I found via Old Paint.

Guest Blogger Martha Stewart on "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles"

Watching the Belgian avant-garde'feminist masterpiece "Jeanne Dielman" is a great way to spend an evening. It's a canonical movie that everyone interested in cinema should see, and I felt sure I was doing something very good by watching it.

During the inevitable moments when I found my mind wandering -- it's three and a half hours long! -- I noticed one or two errors in Jeanne's otherwise impeccable housecleaning techniques. I thought I'd list them here because I didn't found a lot written about them when I did a little reading up on the movie.

1. There is a very famous scene where Jeanne overcooks the potatoes, has a moment of anxiety and panic, and runs out to get new ones -- because she always has veal cutlet, potatoes, peas and carrots on Wednesdays. Fine. Many household cooks have a routine. But it's essential to vary it from time to time so your loved ones don't get bored with predictable cuisine. What's more, the home cook must be prepared for these inevitable little emergencies and use her ingenuity and creativity to work around them. Butter noodles, for instance, would have complemented her breaded veal cutlets perfectly! The truly prepared chef should always have some noodles on hand for just such an emergency -- dried goods like this are the hallmark of a truly well-stocked pantry. As soon as she ran out to the store to get another bag of spuds I thought, oh Jeanne, it's far too late to start that now! Whip up a batch of egg noodles and you wouldn't have risked drying out the cutlets on a "low burn" as you did (frankly, the cutlets looked almost charred) and you could have saved dinner, and your sanity.

2. Jeanne only rinses her hands after handling raw meat, then wipes them dry on her every-day towel. She should use soap and hot water, scrubbing for thirty seconds minimum before handling anything after preparing raw meat. If you are going to merely rinse your hands, which you shouldn't, then at least use a different towel provided expressly for that purpose.

3. I noticed her bedspread didn't have a removable, washable cover. That means she'll have to dry clean it to get it really clean. It's much easier to have a removable cover in cotton or linen for frequent, easy washings (and the use of the unsightly white rag could have been avoided as well).

4. Finally, one little nitpick (and this is really more of a personal choice): Jeanne cleans the tub immediately after washing. It's actually far better to clean it immediately before, that way you can be sure you're getting into an absolutely clean tub! And you don't work up a sweat scrubbing the tub right after you've enjoyed your refreshing bath! While that's really just my preference, one thing's for sure: using Ajax or another bleach cleanser while wearing a black skirt is a big no-no; you're just asking for stains.

I think that, if Jeanne had followed these few simple tips, she might have fared better. She'd feel better, her home would be cleaner, more sanitary, and dinner disasters could, with a little foresight, been avoided. Routine is important for efficiency in home cooking, but Jeanne, a little adaptability and improvisation could have done you wonders.

"Cheese" (2007)

Mika Rottenberg's video installation currently on view at the Whitney Biennial "conflates farm-girl imagery with the fairy tale 'Rapunzel' into a story loosely based on the Sutherland Sisters, renowned for their extremely long hair" and also blows my mind.

A teaser:

Ghosts I Have Been

Richard Peck's "Ghosts I Have Been" left a formidable impression on me when I read it as a youngster. I picked it up again last week with much excitement, read it in a night, and can happily declare it thoroughly un-disappointing (except for the new cover illustration, which sucks, compared to the original, by Rowena). What still delights me as a jaded adult is the protagonist's voice, the pithy, wise-crackin' turn-of-the-century heroine, Blossom Culp.

"Many's the ignorant person who claims that spirits and haunts have forsaken the modern age in this new twentieth century," she opines in the book's prologue, "But what they do not know would fill a book. And this is the book." This book is set in the early part of the teens, a preferred era of mine (for some reason), and features details (some wonderfully random and vivid, like the Pope-Detroit Electric brougham) and dialogue that feel authentic in ways that seem more lived than researched, as if the author had spent some quality time with his grandpa rather than getting things out of books. Or, rather, maybe he spent some quality time with a sassy grandma or maiden aunt, because the best-drawn characters in this book are all female, and many of them are that finest of female specimens, the spinster.

Blossom herself is firmly outside the mainstream, living with her half-gypsy mother down in a shack on the wrong side of the tracks. "There are girls in this town who pass their time up on their porches doing fancywork on embroidery hoops," she says by way of introducing herself. "They're all as alike as gingerbread figures in skirts. I was never one of them. My name is Blossom Culp, and I've always lived by my wits."

Blossom finds herself in stuck-up Letty Shamabaugh's house one day after school (how she gets to be there is another story) and has a sudden visitation from the Second Sight -- inherited from her mother's gypsy blood -- while in the middle of a fake seance designed to amuse (herself) and frighten the gingerbread girls. In the midst of pretending to see a vision, there it is: a very real flash of something beyond knowing. "Newton Shambaugh has just been run over by Miss Gertrude Dabney's Pope-Detroit Electric auto," she announces in her haze, sending Letty and Mrs. Shambaugh out the door screaming, looking for poor dear Newton (Letty's little brother).

This bizarre happening sets off a chain of events that will lead her to great fame and a reputation as the country's leading psychic, take her aboard the ghost-ship of the Titantic, and eventually, into the drawing room of the Queen of England, along with her new companion, Miss Gertrude Dabney, an Angolphile who who wishes America had never won the Revolutionary War.

Miss Dabney, who "had a reputation as the town character and lived up to it," takes Blossom under her wing after the electric auto incident. She has her over to her house one day for tea, cakes, a little chat, and a brief exorcism. During tea, she asks the psychic children to help her with a ghost in her kitchen. It turns out to be the ghost of Minerva, a plain, raw-boned hired girl who killed herself out of unrequited love for Miss Dabney's father. Once Blossom assures Minerva that all is forgiven, the ghost becomes a helpful servant girl and bakes spectral scones for the grateful spinster.

Some weeks later, Miss Dabney gets it into her head to expose a traveling roadshow charlatan as a fake, with Blossom's help. They attend a seance where, despite her noble intentions, Dabeny is promptly flummoxed out of her watch by the trickster, who pretends to be the ghost of her dead father. Blossom sneaks back into the Odd Fellow's Hall at night to recover it. In a delicious scene, she discovers the professor's hollowed-out cabinet, complete with secret cupboards and compartments, and a young English waif who plays the ghosts while the public's in the house. Here, Blossom and the waif, Sybil (of the Berdmondsey Road), have the following exchange:
''We travel at night. I ain't seen daylight in two years.'
'You look it,' I remarked.
'You're no American Beauty Rose yourself.'
There's nothing like swapping insults to clear the air."

Blossom convinces Sybil to hightail it out of there and decides to perform the ceremony herself the next day. She also convinces Miss Dabney to show her face in public again, despite her embarrassment at her conduct the day before, in this particularly touching scene in which Miss Dabney says,"'I am nothing but a feather-headed old maid.' Tears zigzagged down her face. 'Don't call yourself names,' I said in a small voice. 'We are a couple of ... unmarried ladies. And we have to stick together.'"

Blossom's triumphant performances as Sybil is somewhat dampened when her teacher, Miss Spaulding, catches her in the act. Miss Spaulding is another marvelous character -- a spinster schoolteacher -- who is wonderfully described as "slender as a wand and ladylike, [with] an arm on her like a bartender." Miss Spaulding takes Blossom back to her office not, as one would imagine, for a good thrashing, but rather for an audience with local newspaperman Lowell Seaforth. (She figures she'll get Blossom's need for attention out of her system.) Lowell Seaforth asks her to go into a trance on command, and, boy does she deliver. She travels astrally on board the Titantic where she witnesses the tragic tale of Lady Beatrix and her son Julian Poindexter. Chillingly, the blanket from the ship appears in her hands as she awakens from her trance drenched in seawater, and determined to intervene in Julian's fate.

Ghosts I Have Been is remarkable not only for Blossom's wit and voice, or for its sense of time and place, but also for its delightfully eccentric and self-sufficient female characters, from our heroine and her ma to Sybil to Misses Dabney and Spaulding. I'm glad to say that, nearly twenty years after reading it for the first time, Ghosts I Have Been remains on my list of favorite YA novels (along with A Swiftly Tilting Plant, The Westing Game, and The Long Secret). It's definitely the kind of book I'd be happy to re-read periodically, because, as dear old potty Miss Dabney says, "It is ritual that gives shape to life." And as Blossom also says, "There are many kinds of wisdom in this world and Miss Dabney is very wise in her way. "

Dream Lobsters

He Did and He Didn't (1916) is a dark little film directed by and starring Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and the fabulous Miss Mabel Normand. Films like this draw me to the more grotesque comedies of the silent era, representing, as they seem to do, a sub-genre fraught with unconscious dream symbolism and unspeakable violence (Keaton's Convict 13 is another).

He Did and He Didn't showcases Arbuckle the director at his best. He was less a slapstick/physical comedy genius (though he can gracefully wiggle his butt to great comic effect) and more of a director who made excellent use of his sets, framing and staging the action beautifully. In addition to really working the mise-en-scene, he continuously elicits some of Mabel's best performances, showcasing her cuteness to beat the band.

The plot unfolds thusly: Fatty, a prosperous physician, is married to pretty Mabel. One night, Mabel's old school-friend Jack comes to dinner. Fatty becomes consumed with jealousy as Jack and Mabel flirt and reminisce. Fatty becomes frustrated:

After a rich lobster dinner, Fatty and Jack both have dark and violent dreams about Mabel, sex, strangulation and gunplay. They awake simultaneously and run to Mabel's room, where she is fast asleep safe and sound. Jack retreats to bed while Fatty creeps into Mabel's room and closes the door, after flashing a devilish grin at the audience.

Considered unusual comedy fare then as now, I'm sure, there's something uniquely disturbing about the imagery of this film (in addition to the obviously disturbing nature of the violent sequences that are played for uncomfortable laughs, such as the scene where Fatty physically abuses his butler, or menaces Mabel, or, well, strangles Mabel). The version I watched also has multi-hued toning (alternating, mostly, between twilight purple and mustard yellow) which adds to the overall disorienting effect. And yet, it's completely marvelous, and I enjoyed it a lot more than the usual Keystone romps-in-a-park. There are some great moments where one absolutely has to appreciate Arbuckle's use of the medium, such as a dissolve in which the two lobsters the men ate for dinner are super-imposed over them as they wake from their nightmares and discover the cause.

Why is it that Fatty is much funnier strangling people and grinning evilly than he is falling into ponds? Perhaps I don't want to answer that. In any case, it's definitely one of the more memorable Keystones, and I'd highly recommend it to anyone who likes their slapstick comedy rough, and indeed, anyone interested in some of the better uses of the medium in early comedy. Really -- the image of the dream lobsters is quite indelible.

Highsmiths

Having never read any Highsmith other than her immensely handy and practical manual on how-to-write-thrilling-bestsellers, I was hoping her body of fiction work would justify all the advice I've been taking from her lately. So I read The Animal-Lover's Book of Beastly Murder, which had me in tears by page three, and The Talented Mr. Ripley, which kept me up way past my bedtime on a schoolnight and, suffice it to say, I was not disappointed.

Apparently Highsmith was a loner and a misanthrope, and it totally comes across in these books -- she may have been the only spinster crankier than myself. In The Talented Mr. Ripley, the title character hates the vulgar people he lives with in New York, and isn't particularly enamored of the ones he meets in Europe. What makes him happy there is the lifestyle, the possessions, the ability to live like a king. He's not even particularly wedded to the Tom Ripley he knows, and willingly sloughs him off at the first opportunity. He throws on Dickie Greenleaf's identity like a new suit, with no regard whatsoever to the human being behind the attractive package. Some wonder if Tom is in love with Dickie, but it's so clear he's a total sociopath, with no capability for love or empathy. He identifies not with the humans, this Ripley.

Highsmith's talent lies in taking a chilling, murderous sociopath and making him utterly understandable. Who wouldn't rather relax in their Italian villa reading books till four in the morning rather than go to work at some dull job in dull old New York City? And if you should have to kill one little person (oh, come on, Freddie Miles doesn't count as a person!) to make that happen, so be it. One little silly person who doesn't deserve to be living the life you'd appreciate so much more than he would, who's not even a good painter! Utterly worth it. It's not fair that some dullards are born into wealth while those who truly deserve it actually have to work for it. Somehow, all this because plausible, and we root for Ripley, we want him so badly to get away with it, and when he does, it's the happiest feeling in the world.

That same malice is turned on the human protagonists in Beastly Murder, where you can't wait, you absolutely can't wait, for the animals to get their revenge on the humans who tortured them so brutally. I found myself skimming over all the bits where the poor animals were building up their rage and resentment, and getting straight the parts where their nasty old owners got it right in the gut.

There's something so satisfying about entering Highsmiths' world of pure spite and malice, like stepping on someone's toe in the subway after they've taken your seat. They say this reclusive misanthrope lacked humanity; au contraire, she was the very dark, shriveled, petty soul of humanity itself.

"Christie Done It!"

Initially I dismissed 10 Rillington Place as the kind of movie I'd recommend watching only if it came on TCM, not one that warranted going out of one's way to see. But I've been thinking about it since I saw it a week ago and I have to admit: it's crept up on me.

10 Rillington Place is Richard Fleischer's 1971 suspense thriller/biopic, the story of murderer John Reginald Christie, who lured seven women to their deaths over the course of two decades. It ran briefly at Lincoln Center as part of an ad-hoc mini-retrospective of Fleischer's films (along with Mandingo and "Violent Saturday" at Film Forum, which is also awesome and deserves its own post).

Dave Kehr writes, "Fleischer [films] don’t invite the spectator to identify surreptitiously with the power and impunity of the murderer, but neither are they simple expressions of moral outrage. They focus, with sober detachment, on the details of crime and the working of the criminal mind, expressing no more shock than would a documentary on the functioning of the Ford assembly line..."

This deceptive blandness is what makes the figure of John Christie and his domestic murders so terrifying. There's something so mundane about Christie, and in this particular version of the story that is much more effective than an attempt at a sensational retelling might have been. The dull complacency, delusion and self-absorption of those around Christie allow him to commit his crimes virtually unnoticed for years: Vincent Canby's original review in the NYTimes attributes Christie getting away with it (for a while) as "not due to a lunatic brilliance but to incredible luck and to the incredible stupidity of the people around him."

The film doesn't sensationalize the murders, but chooses instead to devote a lot of attention to the details of working out the crime. It also allows us to spend some time with Timothy Evans, the husband of the murdered woman Beryl Evans, a simple, rough, somewhat brutish man who blundered his way into involvement in Christie's crime. It's his helpless refrain, "Christie done it," that I can't get out of my head. Evans stares blankly at the policemen, judge and jury, unable to articulate any defense, saying only over and over again in bewilderment as case-workers imperviously jot down notes on his mental fitness, "Christie done it!"

The Other Boleyn Girl Surprisingly Doesn't Suck

While the novel was apparently an over-researched Harlequin that evoked deepest hatred in my smartest friends, the film adaptation doesn't overreach; content to be an entertaining bodice ripper and studio-slick historical drama, it ends up delivering on all levels.

Stripped of the novel's lousy prose by screenwriter Peter Morgan, The Other Boleyn Girl emerges as a rich genre piece that looks good, entertains, thrills with its vicarious peeks into court life, and is surprisingly well-cast -- considering I originally didn't buy Natalie and Scarlett in those roles, I was surprised at how much I ended up liking them both. I enjoyed watching Natalie act like a total manipulative bitch for the first half of the film (and completely desperate during the second, when she realizes producing a male heir on demand is harder than she thought) and found myself growing increasingly fond of ScarJo's ingenuous sweetness. Ana Torrent was wonderful as Catherine of Aragon, all quiet, righteous anger, and Kristin Scott-Thomas delivers a fine performance as Mrs. Boleyn.

One thing I will admit to: when the dialogue got a bit too "costumey" for me (if you know what I mean by "costumey dialogue") I did resort to adding little voice-overs in my head to amuse myself. Also, in my head, the movie is called, "I Boned The King of England."

Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun at The Met

Came for the Poussin, stayed for the Vigee le Brun.

It's Rue McClanahan's Birthday for Five More Minutes!

Come on, you have time for one more drink! I raise my glass to thee, Blanche Deveraux.

I'm a Pushover for Streptococcus

People say Ball of Fire is one of Hawks' lesser works, but I don't buy that. Lesser-known, maybe, but it's certainly a marvelous comedy: to say it isn't as good as the others only goes to show how brilliant the others are. Interestingly, some people also have a problem with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which is another one of my favorites, so frankly, I can only conclude that these people are idiots.

So there.

Now, on to the film. Seven adorably nerdy old professors, and one young, handsome (and still adorably nerdy) grammarian played by Gary Cooper, all live in a big Upper West Side house researching and writing an encyclopedia. When Cooper ventures out into the field to collect new data on the latest slang, he becomes entranced by singer Sugarpuss O'Shea (Barbara Stanwyck). He introduces himself to her and leaves his card, asking her to join him for a round-table discussion the following morning. Sugarpuss blows him off, but later changes her mind -- it turns out she has to hide out from the cops for awhile, because her boyfriend, Joe Lilac (Dana Andrews) is in trouble with the cops, who want to drag her in as a witness. And where better to hide than in a musty old house full of dusty scholars?

The dear old gentlemen quickly become entranced by her, and she ends up falling for Cooper, naturally. I won't spoil the ending -- it's available on Netflix, so just rent it already.

It's hard to convey the general awesomeness of this movie without quoting nearly every line (though hopefully the premise has conveyed to you some idea of it) so I'll just run down some moments in particular which delighted me.

I love the early scenes with Cooper out collecting slang, leaning in to catch people's conversations on the subway and jotting down what they say in his notebook. I love it when he asks the waiter at the nightclub the name of the song Stanwyck sings, and he replies "Boogie" and Cooper says, "What does 'boogie' mean?" and everyone laughs at him. Oh, and I love the roundtable discussion of the word "corny," complete with diagrams! Hell, I love all the old-timey slang in general, which I guess makes me a bit of a loose-tooth. As such, I find the dialogue to be simply divine throughout, especially Stanwyck's lines (hey modern directors, here's an idea: give the girls a funny line every once in a goddam, while). I particularly enjoy the scene where she's convincing Cooper to let her stay overnight in the house, claiming she's too sick to go out in the night and the rain.

Stanwyck: Look at this throat, what do you see?
Cooper: A slight rosiness?
Stanwyck:It's as red as The Daily Worker, and just as sore!

Then she claims she catches cold easily, and that she's "a pushover for streptococcus." At which precise moment I inwardly declared my everlasting love for this movie. Any movie that can work in a reference to a genus of spherical bacteria holds my heart forever.

Cooper gets his lines in too, though. When he asks Sugarpuss to leave, he says, "Make no mistake, I shall regret the absence of your keen mind; unfortunately, it is inseparable from an extremely disturbing body."

The repartee between Stanwyck and Cooper is effervescent, and both their performances are great, but Stanwyck, of course, steals this movie. She's the center of attention, and rightly so. Some elements of the plot are loosely based on the Snow White story -- the seven professors, the charming, girl who breezes into their lives and makes them love her -- but with a modern twist, of course (this Snow White doesn't clean house, she cha-chas).

There's also a genuine sweetness to this film that makes me love it all the more -- never are the dear old professors objects of derision (jokes are made at their expense, of course, but they're more like a gentle poke, friendly-like). One particularly sweet scene stands out in which they old sing a nostalgic song for Professor Oddly, as he remembers his dead bride during a bachelor party anecdote. Their friendship and camaraderie are so innocent and touching, they've been known to bring a tear to a grown man's eye. In an interview, Hawks defended this scene, saying, "When you're doing a story about old people, you can afford to be sentimental." Professor Oddly, by the way, was played by Richard Hadyn, who voiced the Caterpillar in Disney's Alice in Wonderland, one of the few Disney movies I actually adore.

Funny Ha Ha or Comical Education of Young Girls

There's a film series screening in London England right now devoted entirely to comediennes of the silent era -- sweet!

Called Clowning Glories and Screwball Women, it features films in which Mary Pickford makes 'em laugh, and couple of gems starring my personal heroine, Mabel Normand! Hurrah! Now make this a traveling road show already and bring it over to New York City!

In other news, check out Scarlett Cinema's Women Aren't Funny, a weeklong series devoted to women in comedy: up-and-coming filmmakers and comics, reviews of all-female comedy shows.