© 1999-2007 | Dromhast | All Rights Reserved | You are here: Dromhast > DH.Com > Blog
∞ "I Could Go on Singing"
Not much to say about this film (coincidentally released 46 years ago this week) other than — it’s a garish spectacle, of course (alas, without any of the aching colors and overripe embellishments of Douglas Sirk’s garish spectacles; it would have been interesting to see what Sirk would have done with Garland, given what he did with Lana Turner in “Imitation of Life”), with Judy Garland chewing the scenery in a way that would make Bette Davis and Joan Crawford envious. As Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote in his review of the film, “It is sad to say the little lady is not at the top of her form …. Miss Garland tries to play her role with that sort of intense solicitude that is not only patently synthetic but also betrays atrocious taste.”
It’s also kind of grimly fascinating that Dirk Bogarde, given his probable real-life story, played the icy, stern father of a boy that, in the film scenario, he and Garland’s character conceived together. Apparently Dirk Bogarde and Judy Garland were great friends on and off the set, although the film’s director, Ronald Neame, said in an interview with Wheeler Dixon that Garland at one point in the shooting had a fit of anger and hurled a breakfast tray at Bogarde. ★
∞ "The Natural" (Not)
Okay, I’m trying to watch “The Natural,” but the big courtship scenes between Robert Redford and Kim Basinger (she even gives him a greeting kiss with a loud, smacking “MUUUUAAAH!” sound), and the overwrought blue filter that the cinematographer used to fake an air of mystery and to light up the nighttime beach, and the dry ice faking as fog in the background … are all so unwatchable that they are giving me the hives.
Redford’s such a totally passionless cold fish that he actually makes Basinger, no warm-blooded actress herself, look like a simulacrum of a Lana Turner vamp. ★
∞ "Tortilla Flat"
A very strange movie. As Robert Osborne and Chon Noriega pointed out when introducing the film on TCM tonight, “Tortilla Flat,” directed by Victor Fleming, features three main characters, all supposedly “paisanos“ of Mexican ancestry living sometime after World War I in the Monterey County area, and played by: Hedwig Kiesler (Hedy Lamarr), an Viennese Austrian actress; Jacob Garfinkle (John Garfield), a Jewish man from the Lower East Side of Manhattan; and Spencer Bonaventure Tracy, an Irish-Anglo from Milwaukee. The characters all speak in the careful, slow-witted, sing-songy cadence favored by filmmakers portraying Latinos at the time, and the result is even more embarrassing than the iconic “I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges” stereotypes in John Huston’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
The appeal of the John Steinbeck novel seems to be that it is some sort of reworking of Arthurian legend wrapped up in a tale about simpler times and hearts of gold, which is perhaps why the story appealed to my father, a transplant to California from Arizona (he was 14 when Tortilla Flat was published), who was much more sentimental than he ever let on. But to me, the tale comes across as a mess, and the movie itself is nearly incomprehensible, largely a struggle to fight through the horribly belabored fake Mexican accents, the murky cinematography, and the ludicrous bumblings of the bibulous (the sheen of sweat is always on their faces, as if to underline the fact that they’re basically never sober), avaricious, yet supposedly good-hearted/decent characters.
Interestingly, Steinbeck himself seems to have understood that he lost control of his material as soon as he had finished writing it. In 1937, he wrote a furious foreword to Tortilla Flat in which he excoriated those “literary slummers” who had taken his novel as an excuse to make trips to Monterey to tour and gawk at the blue-collar neighborhoods there. He wrote that he was “sorry” if he had done “harm” to the paisanos by unintentionally creating a spectacle out of them, and he vowed that he would never write about paisano life again. ★
∞ "The Hucksters"
According to Lee Server’s biography of Ava Gardner, Clark Gable didn’t want to film 1947’s “The Hucksters,” his second post-war film, at first, because he considered the novel “filthy” and “not entertainment.” He relented and filmed it, but his performance seems completely phoned-in and phony, like a lot of his post-1945 performances were (with the possible exceptions of his gruff big game trapper in John Ford’s “Mogambo” and his final role as a broken-down horse trader in John Huston’s “The Misfits”).
Only Deborah Kerr’s swoony, moony performance (“Vic? My darling, where are you?” “I’m at LaGuardia Field. Oh — you sound so warm and sleepy”), so different from the roles in the movies she’d made for Powell and Pressburger, was more false than Gable’s.
Gable is only convincing when he starts angrily hectoring ad magnate Sydney Greenstreet about how tawdry and tyrannical his sadistic management and marketing tactics are, which seems to fit of a piece with his original attitude toward the Frederic Wakefield novel on which the movie is based. Kerr’s lecture to Gable about selling things “you believe in, and sell[ing] them with dignity and taste” ends the movie on a note which may have seemed earnest at the time. It’s hard to tell from such a remove. ★
∞ Break
It’s been wonderfully quiet around campus this week because of spring break. Today was quieter than it’s been all week, save for the sound of the Campanile bells and the occasional roar of ROTC cadets in training exercises. Days like this you can actually walk down the campus, along the long path that leads from the Campanile west to the Grinnell wooded area, without getting run over by bicyclists or having to steer clear of students walking three or four abreast.
Tomorrow I’ll have a day off because of Caesar Chavez Day, and I’m also taking Monday off. The student maelstrom will be back in full force on Tuesday when I return to work. ★
∞ Overheard
On the bus last night:
An out-of-state tourist who was returning to the eastern end of Contra Costa County — staying with relatives, presumably — expressing a slightly distasteful surprise in remembering the turkey and pear sandwich that he’d been prevailed upon to consume while visiting the Financial District in San Francisco. ★
∞ Friends of the Berkeley Public Library Bookstore
It’s tucked away in a little pedestrian alleyway west of Telegraph between Channing and Durant. It’s basically a hole in the wall, staffed by elderly volunteers, most of whom are way more devoted to shelving and tending the collection than they are to the people who happen to wander in to browse and buy their stock. If you’re in the way when they’re shelving, you’ll get a brisk “Excuse me!”
But they have some surprisingly good stuff, for a hole in the wall. I’ve picked up quite a few good buys there recently. And most have been not more than $2 apiece.
One good find was Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. Another was The People’s Almanac, a book which my aunt in Houston sent me for my tenth birthday and which turned me into a lifelong fan of subversive writing — it was probably the most influential book I read as a kid. (I have a feeling that my aunt just picked it up and thought it was a plain old thicker-than-usual World Almanac-type book. Little did she know.) ★
∞ Barnes and Noble (or, in Berkeley, Ignoble)
I ran across an article a few weeks back in the Berkeley Daily Planet that delivered the news that the Barnes & Noble on Shattuck and Durant will close its doors for good on May 31. There followed the usual sighs of relief from independent booksellers like Pegasus (across the street from B&N, on the east side of Shattuck) and Moe’s.
I could insert here the Alison Bechdel 1990s used bookstore versus evil chain “Bunns & Noodle” trope, but I see that even Bechdel has some good things to say about B&N nowadays.
The owner of Moe’s was quoted in the Daily Planet as saying, “Moe’s is like a theatre to the mind. It’s clean, bright and lovely, an absolute pleasure to be in.”
Well, sorry to say, but Moe’s isn’t an absoute pleasure to be in. It’s stuffy, cramped, has narrow aisles, and its system of organization is at best idiosyncratic, at worst chaotic. The counter staff seem to be surly when they’re in good moods, hostile when they’re not. If the store’s crowded, which it can frequently be because there are no other large bookstores in the area, it’s no fun at all.
Moe’s has a wealth of fascinating used books, and it’s a fun place to browse, because it’s got four floors of them. But if you’re looking for new books, which would presumably be the main point of competition with a store like B&N, it’s another story.
I really, really don’t like the policy B&N’s counter staff have of having to constantly ask you whether you have a B&N Member card yet. I would agree with Moe’s owner that the fountain in the middle of the Berkeley B&N store was unnecessary.
I’m not a B&N booster, particularly. But I could find good, informative, fascinating tech books there — books on Web design, for instance — and buy them without having to wait for Amazon shipping.
I’m sure that there are good bookstores on Fourth Street that I haven’t explored (though how many of them are independent bookstores?). But if you don’t have a car or bike at the ready, west Berkeley is not a short trip from downtown.
So at the risk of sounding counterrevolutionary, I will miss B&N not being in downtown Berkeley. And I still miss Cody’s, which closed last July (Cody’s still has a store on Fourth and Virginia, but the store on Telegraph and Haste was its flagship). It did have an excitingly heterodox collection of new books, and its absence left a huge hole in downtown Berkeley that has yet to be filled. ★
∞ Anthro Library (and a digression)
Toured the Anthropology Library here at UC Berkeley this morning. I’d been before (mostly to poke around the stacks and to pick up the only available campus copy of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory), but not as part of a formal tour group.
I like this library a lot. I like its cramped stacks and its narrow stairwells and passageways. I like the fact that it has a dumbwaiter. But that’s me speaking as a library user (and an increasingly rare one at that) who has a stubborn love for antiquated libraries and their often byzantine physical setups.
The one time that I had the privilege of visiting (and using for research) the Bodleian Library 20 years ago, I was in absolute awe of its grace, its antiquity, and its fussy fustiness, but in the transformational era of the internet, there are increasingly fewer and fewer library users who are enamored of that set of qualities.
Even the glorious grand Bodleian now has a website, and it also has a mission statement, part of which says that the library will “always aim to develop and maintain an understanding of the needs of its users and potential users and respond to them.” How long that mission statement has been in existence I don’t know (seems like 1995, judging from the webpage), but it’s hard to believe that it was in place when I was using the library and had to read and sign the following declaration, handed to me by a stern porter, just to gain admittance:
I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.
And that was before I’d even filled out all of the other paperwork and made all the proper curtsies that I needed to make in order to handle within authorized eyesight the volumes that I wanted to peruse. An experience not to be missed (in my opinion), but partly because of the exquisite frisson of terror in it, the feeling that I was a common interloper treading on hallowed ground who needed to have my place in the scheme of things severely underlined and bolded.
It was really in some ways akin to that wonderfully terrifying scene from “Citizen Kane” in which Jerry Thompson visits the Thatcher Library and the forbidding crone at the entrance does everything short of asking him for a pound of flesh before she lets him through the crypt door.
Anyway — back to the Anthro Library. The library has 91,000 items in its collection, some of which it’s having to move off-campus to storage because of the campus’s chronic space shortage problem.
The librarian pointed out that this is only one of three formally instantiated anthro libraries in the US — the others being at Harvard and Penn — a fact that surprised me. It’s neat to work on a campus with one of the few operating anthro libraries still around.
Oh, and updating the last post — Pasadena did eventually pass the library tax renewal. Good for them. My hometown did the right thing. ★
∞ Libraries and (cultural) capital
Interesting juxtaposition. Tomorrow, voters in my hometown, Pasadena, California, will be deciding whether to pass a tax to help support the public library system there. (Actually, what they’re voting on is whether to extend a “special tax” that was already approved in 1993 and then extended in 1997.) If the tax extension doesn’t pass, the funding stream provided by the tax will dry up at the end of June 2008.
Meanwhile, in Jackson County, Oregon, it looks like the entire county-wide library system will close next month because federal funding has dried up. (The direct cause is Congress failing to re-authorize an annual subsidy for timber-dependent counties in 41 states under the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000, signed by Bill Clinton in his last months in office.)
Libraries as cultural capital: or, considered more directly, libraries as capital. Will we get to the point, when people no longer consider libraries to be worth their weight in cultural capital, that the only way a public library will be able to stay open anymore will be through the auspices of a federal subsidy? ★