On Dangerous Ground: The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949), Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)

  
The Reckless Moment (Max Ophuls, 1949)

Perhaps everyone desires something similar. Hiding
home-truths as much as falsehoods. Neither unseen
nor unseeing. A historical reference mainly lost on
the white world, never mind it's derivation. Crossing
a bridge connecting Balboa to another world. Behind
dark glasses. To a sleazy hotel, a gambler and mink-
toting blond, bass propped against the wall, just below
a boxing poster. An interloper, not even a femme fatale,
to confront the creep who's messing with her seventeen
year-old art student daughter. Casually exercising a
droit du seigneur bluntness: as in, how much you willing
to pay to make me go away. Tells the tearaway daughter
he's only into her for the money she can generate. She
lashes out. A reasonable reaction, likewise her desire 
to escape her island of surplus capital. He falls, hits his
head. It's not murder, but it's not bad, more a piece of
messy performance art, left to her mother to curate. So
how does the soft-spoken Irish black-mailer hear about
it? Or did I miss something? Inserting himself into her
life until she can produce the cash. Which requires the
approval of her husband, no more than a moan-and-groan
out-of-towner. “Quite the prisoner, aren’t you?" says
the blackmailer, himself barely in the loop, whether
amongst criminals or old-world revolutionaries. Yet
smart enough to know that on this beach of milk, honey,
and good housekeeping, appearances must be maintained.
She's called Lucia, but he prefers Lucy. It's not love but
it's not bad. Less about the danger of not having a man
around than what life is like in the dark, the past like
falling dust and and how easily things can fall apart.   

















Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)

For the meek shall inherit clichés, scams and false
modesty. While, in the shop window, democracy is
once again placed on the auction block. As always,
it's about class, selling the dictatorship of taste and
art world pretentiousness to the masses. Easy targets,
if not for the human element, humdrum never more
than skin deep. Sunday painter, Christopher a sitting
duck gabbled by Kitty in her see-through raincoat,
and amuse-bouche approach: "You know those art
galleries on Fifth Avenue? I saw one little picture that
cost fifty-thousand dollars. They call it, uh, 'Seezan'."
Christopher, his invisible sign- "Another sucker born
of middle-class manners"- hanging from his neck,
"You can't put any price on masterpieces like that.
They're worth, well, whatever you can afford to pay
for them. " Kitty: "I bet I saw some of your pictures
there and didn't know it." Christopher: "Oh no. I, uh...
I don't sell my pictures." Kitty: "Well not in New York
you mean…I bet you get as much for your pictures in
France as those Frenchmen get right here in New York.
You're never appreciated in your own country." Less
a social comedy than an ice-pick to the heart. Whether
gallery fascism or a seller's market, the only guarantee
that everyone will get fucked in the process. A scam, somewhere between a stick-up and Say's Law in broad
daylight. His face, her body, wistful window reflections,
pain and punishment for the person he has become.      

The Manchette Quotes: from Nada (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith)

"Four in the morning. The proletariat was sleeping with one eye open in its suburbs; middle managers for their part were sleeping like dumb logs in their luxury co-ops overlooking the Seine. The late-night pizzerias in Saint-Germain-des-Prés were closing up and shooting out languid, ravishing transvestites. Daughters of the well-to-do, stupified by drink and hashish, were getting fucked in Paris's western outskirts and faking orgasms to mask their nausea. Bums were passing around venereal diseases under the bridges. La Coupole had closed, and intellectuals were parting company at the Raspail-Montparnasse intersection and promising to phone one another. At the printing houses the Linotypists were working away. Headlines concerning the killings of the morning before were being composed. Editorials had been delivered with headlines varying according to the opinion of the particular paper: WHY? or BLOOD or HOW FAR WILL IT GO? or VICIOUS CIRCLE or FOOLHARDY JOE BLOW VS. STORM TROOPERS IN PEAK FORM."

                                            **************

"'I made a mistake," he said abruptly. "Leftist terrorism and State terrorism, even if their motivations cannot be compared, are the two jaws of...'

He hesitated.

'...of the same mug's game,' he concluded, and went on right away: 'The regime defends itself, naturally, against terrorism. But the system does not defend itself against it. It encourages it and publicizes it. The desperado is a commodity, an exchange value, a model of behavior like a cop or a female saint. The State's dream is a horrific, triumphant finale to an absolutely general civil war to the death between cohorts of cops and mercenaries on the one hand and nihilists armed groups on the other. This vision is the trap laid for rebels, and I fell into it. And I won't be the last. And that pisses me off in the worst way.'"

Proletarian Roadkill: Colin's Asher's bography of Nelson Algren- Never a Lovely So Real

WITH THE PROLETARIAT, to a large degree, having morphed into today’s precariat, midcentury writers who sought to align themselves with the dispossessed tend to be a forgotten, if not extinct, species. Which is unfortunate because, until the onslaught of McCarthyism, they were a vital force in American cultural life. These days few people read the work of radical authors like Benjamin Appel, Tom Kromer, Meridel Le Sueur, Josephine Herbst, and Mike Gold, all of whom depicted the conditions of those surviving on the margins — indeed, declared their solidarity with those unfortunates, extolling their virtues and idiosyncrasies. Writers who survived that tradition with their proletarian credentials intact were, to a large degree, those — like Jim Thompson and David Goodis — who were able to convey their portrayals of the underclass via hardboiled pulp fiction. After all, they were themselves working writers, laboring in obscurity, grinding out paperback originals to make a living. By contrast, left-leaning authors such as John Dos Passos, James Agee, John Steinbeck, and Richard Wright had literary connections and writing ability that allowed them access to the upper realms of respectability. Rarer still were those writers who found themselves stranded between proletarian fiction and mainstream literature, yet who could nonetheless sidestep the pay-by-the-word pulp market. Notable among such talents was Nelson Algren, who, no matter how celebrated in his day, would eventually pay the price for adhering to that precarious position.

Born in 1909 in Detroit, Algren (née Nelson Ahlgren Abraham) moved with his family at the age of three to Chicago, where he remained for most of his life. Like many of his fellow writers during that era, he was briefly a member of the Communist Party, dividing his time in the 1930s between professional writing and organizing work for the Communist Party–inspired League of American Writers and the John Reed Club (and later, during the New Deal, for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project). Always a dedicated, if individualistic leftist, he went on to raise funds for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), then, some years later, for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; not to mention voicing his opposition to creeping conformism (code for McCarthyism), the Vietnam War, and the false promise of consumerism. It was during the Great Depression that Algren, inspired by books like Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and Aleksandr Kuprin’s brothel-set novel The Pit (Yama, 1915), as well as by witnessing the plight of ordinary people, kicked off his writing career. Like many during that era, he took to the road, riding the rails and hitching rides, ending up in Texas, where he hooked up with some petty criminals and eventually manned a rural gas station. It was at the local teachers’ college that Algren, seeking to hone his literary chops, stole a typewriter, was arrested, found guilty, and given a two-year suspended sentence.

(You can find the remainder of the review at the LARB website)

On Dangerous Ground: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Pushover (1954)

The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946)

Lana’s lipstick rolls into the future, past 
Garfield, into a land where we forever grow 
bold, then punished for our pains. Where 
luscious legs and white shorts, suggest a 
sleazy tennis queen, rather than a bored hash-
slinger. Where instructions are such that not
even a postman can comprehend. An indelible 
mark in a city where door-bells are essential, but 
ill-used, whether twice, thrice or, if not, Ice. 
Where loose change clinks payment in kind, 
and firewater seeks its own Production Code. 
Chiming noblese oblige: the customary 
murder, a hint of sado-masochism, maladroit 
lawyers and insouciant insurance investigators. 
Living in a less than wholesome world, a sad 
universe ruled by sleight of hand, swerving 
whiffle balls and working stiffs. Where a 
cynical private replaces that indifferent insurance 
investigator, where Frank and Cora are guilty 
as sin, sentenced to tear each other apart. That's 
the American way, insisting the world be set to 
rights, but not caring about the consequences. 
To counter unfavorable publicity, Lana is 
photographed on the set with two-year-old Cheryl. 
Twelve years later, the blood seeps from Lana's
big dong gangster-boyfriend, the stains forming 
question marks of suspicion. Laughter at a post-
shoot party Lana presents Garnett with a fur-lined 
jock-strap, while the ambivalent Cain inscribes 
faint praise in a leather-bound copy of his novel: 
"For my dear Lana, thank you for a performance 
even finer than I expected." Though he had never
expected much. Surely, when the doorbell rings, 
hints of honesty disappears through the letter-box; 
with no special delivery, to assuage the weak,
second-class ignorant, or recalcitrant hoi-polloi.

Pushover (Robert Quine, 1954)

You don't have to be a sleaze-bag to carry a
torch for Kim, twenty-five years Fred's junior,
strutting that June-bugged street where you 
live. A cop with a hard-on, so why wouldn't
she keep him on a short lead, playing him for 
far more than he's worth. Anything to off her 
crooked boyfriend, grab the cash and fade like 
bad surf. With the line: “Money isn’t dirty, just 
people.” Yeah, but,  if it isn't dirty, why bother 
to launder it? Reeling him in, the bait and 
switcheroo, forget the dosh, it's really love. 
That might play in Azusa, but it's a sucker-punch 
on the demeaning streets of Burbank, a push-over,
knowing it's only money through which  he can 
possess- I mean, own- her. That story has been 
rehashed so often it might as well arrive with 
its own breakfast menu. Looking up at her, 
the wounded Fred says: “We really didn’t need 
the money, did we?" Kim scoffs, would that be
rhetorical, or you just happy to see me. Stopping 
short of stupidity, not quite laughing, much less
spitting, in his face. A scene straight out of 
The Indiscreet Charms of the Petit-Bourgeoisie. 
But, wait, one mustn't ignore the sub-plot: Dorothy 
Malone, stalked and spied upon by another cop, 
the weird Phil Carey, who works overtime to turn 
Dorothy into a suburban homemaker. No wonder 
it's not to him, but her hostage taker, the wounded 
MacMurray,  to whom she scurries. As though 
Stockholm Syndrome has become a cultural 
necessity. A revealing moment, but no more so than 
Kim’s dress, an ideal commodity for scum-sucking 
purveyors of public decency, or those who seek 
clean surfaces,  in a Pat and Mamie kind of way.

What I Learned from Bruce Cornforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow's Up Jumped the Devil- The Real Life of Robert Johnson

I would bet against there ever being a better and more informative Robert Johnson biography than Bruce Cornforth and Gayle Dean Wardlow's Up Jumped the Devil. Impeccably researched- something one has  come to expect from Wardlow in particular- the book sets out  to tell the story of Johnson's short life, and, in the process, fill in the various gaps in what is known, and to address those parts of his life that have remained a mystery. To the authors' credit, they have accomplished this, and, in doing so, have put together a highly readable and informative narrative. And it's about time. After all, Johnson has long been one of the greatest of the Delta bluesmen, but, at the same time, overly romanticized something which has  tended to obscure his place and even importance in the history of the music.

 In setting the record straight, Cornforth and Wardlow track Johnson from birth to death. They do so by citing friends, family, and Johnson's contemporaries, including the likes of Johnny Shines and Calvin Frazier, who not only knew Johnson first hand but played alongside him. Some of the material here has been collected by others and has appeared in past publications. However, there is a great deal here that is new here. And nothing, according to the authors, that is not corroborated. Although I've read most of what has been written about Johnson over the last fifty years- until this book, the best being being Elijah Ward's Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues- Up Jumped the Devil is going to be invaluable to anyone interested in Johnson or Delta blues. Having said that, I thought I'd put together, pretty much off the top of my head and in no particular order of importance, a list of what I learned, or maybe knew but  forgot, from reading Cornforth and Wardlow's book: 

Son House

-Johnson was already proficient on guitar when still a teenager- though he was playing what is described by Cornforth and Wardlow, or their informantm as folk blues, rather than the deep blues with which he is  commonly associated. That Son House's famous assessment of RJ had  to do with the sudden realization that he now faced a competitor in RJ.
-That RJ went by a variety of names and nick-names, that he was subjected to what amounted to physical abuse by his step-father Dusty Willis. The latter wanted young Robert to work in the fields instead of playing music. Not surprisingly, RJ hated field work. Also, he enjoyed school, liked to read and was  sophisticated in his taste in music. 
-That RJ was capable of playing complex chords, had a near perfect ear, could hear a piece of music on the radio and reproduce it at gigs later that evening. He was also capable of playing in the jazzier style of his musical hero Lonnie Johnson. According to Calvin Frazier and Johnny Shines, RJ could play practically any type of music, would play  tarantellas at Italian weddings, Jewish music at at Jewish weddings, etc..
-Though RJ heard an array of Delta musicians, including House and Patton, and learned from them, his main influence was a local musician, Ike Zimmerman.
-That RJ  traveled widely, not only to Memphis, where he had immediate family, and Texas where he would record, but Chicago, Kentucky, New York, Detroit, Canada both on his own and in the company of Shines and  Frazier, to play music.
-That RJ kept a notebook, worked out renditions of songs and rarely varied the lyrics or melody.
-That RJ turned against religion after the death of his first wife and child while giving birth. He was nineteen at the time.
-That RJ's ambition was to play on Ted Mack's Amateur Hour, in the hope that it would be a springboard to national notoriety.
- That RJ didn't face the wall during his recording sessions out of nervousness but because he wanted to hide what he was doing from a group of Mexican musicians. He is reported to have often turned his back on musicians if he thought they were trying to steal his licks.
-That John Hammond Sr  kicked-off the misinformation surrounding RJ in his article that followed on from his Spirituals to Swing concert.

Johnson's death certificate

 -That much of the material on RJ in Alan Lomax's The Land Where the Blues Began is, for whatever reasons, fanciful.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There is clearly a great deal more in Up Jumped the Devil that's both surprising, illuminating and new. Interestingly, rather than simply debunking the various myths surrounding Johnson's life- meeting the devil at the crossroads, etc.- Wardlow and Cornforth spend time investigating the various beliefs common to the African-American culture at that time and in that place that behind such stories. Likewise, they do the same for some of Johnson's more obscure lyrics. While it remains debatable as to whether Johnson is the greatest of Delta bluesmen, when you finish this book you will not only know more about him, but you will definitely have a greater appreciation of him as a musician.

On Dangerous Ground: Phantom Lady (1944), Point Blank (1967)

“Ontology! I’m just

  telling you a story

  about this projector, that’s all.”

                   Edward Dorn, Gunslinger, Book II

Phantom Lady (Robert Siodmak, 1944)

Oh, Phantom Hat, worn on the 
wrong side of a disturbed mind.
Even poor Henderson, cops
lingering in his apartment, wife
strangled, recalls a hat no one
will corroborate, reduced to:  
"Maybe I only imagined that
woman."  Hats like nobody's
business, blatant, yet universal,
real, if fanciful, with a credit of
its own. Chapeau-noir worn at 
a non-existent angle by Jack, his
psychopathic pal. A euphemism
for bonkers? If not those who 
bonk? Like Kansas, the secretary 
not the state, more than a match 
for Cliff, the drummer not the
precipice, who, having absconded 
with Jack's money, paradiddles 
himself into a frenzy. More 
perturbing is that fucking cop, 
Burgess, who, like a spit-roasted
Republican switches sides with  
the flimsiest of alibis. Perhaps it's 
the heat, back when courtroom 
settings had not yet been turned 
into a  series of air-conditioned 
nightmares. No sweat, but saturated 
shadows and oblique confrontations. 
None so unsettling as Burgess's reply 
to Jack's suggestion- self-flattery, of 
course- that the killer might well be 
a genius. "No," says Burgess, "he's a 
paranoic. It's not how a man looks, 
but how his mind works. Some day 
we'll have the sense to train the mind 
like we train the body." To which one 
might reply, if the hat fits, why in the 
world would anyone want to wear it. 

Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)

If it really does all take place in his mind, had he, 
or the film, not been shot on Alcatraz. Or turned 
to pulp by a literate projector (invented by E. 
Dorn, circa 1970). "A dream, a dream." In a land 
of sleep-walkers, where only the exhausted will 
be culpable and insomniacs reign supreme. Every-one else, irrelevant or speed-balling down the interstate. Riding shot-gun alongside a bevy of
eroticised women, their eyeballs drawing circles, 
drugged, then examined for flaws. A tin ear for 
Walker's footsteps echoing through LAX, planes 
whining like badly educated mosquitoes. A woman's voice: “Can’t sleep, haven’t slept, keep taking 
pills, dreaming about you, how good it must be 
being dead.” What about that under-achieving 
nightclub waitress: "Walker, are you still alive?" Or Angie, switching on every produit blanc, ecstatic 
under the sign of commodity fetishism, advising 
Walker, “Why don’t you just lie down and die.” No, not until he wreaks havoc on the corporate world: 
gangsters, outsourcers, accountants, and a car sales-
man. With glass partitioning the cruel from the 
sadistic, the kind from the  catatonic, and Walker 
from a freight train of thought. Through a glass half-
empty, elliptical as a  Borgesian tango. Chasing 
a shadow fading to all points blank, the money 
just yards away, untouched, a torch song turned 
to ashes, swept out in the mourning, this ghost of 
a chance, inherited hardboiled America forever.