European Reading Challenge #3

Sharks and Little Fish: A Novel of German Submarine Warfare - Wolfgang Ott

Based on the author's WWII experience as a young sailor and submariner, Haie und kleine Fische
(S&LF) stands with classic novels of the U-boat genre such as Das Boot by Lothar-Guenther Buchheim and Run Silent, Run Deep by Edward L. Beach.  S&LF gives raw, ferocious accounts of men in dangers posed by the mistakes of crewmates, the incompetence and mania of officers, the relentlessness of weather, water, and salt, and the physical foulness of submarine life.

Wolfgang Ott was almost seventeen when he got called up into the Navy at the beginning of WWII.  As Willi Heinrich fictionalized his experience as a grunt on the Eastern front in the best-selling Cross of Iron, Ott also wrote an autobiographical novel and published it in 1957.

The first half of S&LF finds us with the main character Teichmann, also barely seventeen, on his tour of duty on a mine sweeper. Ott displays control of scene-setting and action, deadpanning his way through brutal, perilous situations but never resorting to a callous or hard-boiled tone.  It’s a rare book whose tone, incident, characters mesh so finely that I, a lover of sleep, stayed up past my bedtime. But I read the first 150 pages or so, enthralled, until my eyes smarted. Such a thing never happens.

With only sometime lapses into overwrought prose, Ott stays matter-of-fact. He implies that the young are too dumb and green to be panicky and that the older, more practiced soldiers and sailors become experienced enough to be scared brickless. Only seventeen as Ott reminds us, Teichmann is too young to recognize as possibilities getting killed and being dead forever. For instance, stuck in a rubber raft and menaced by a half-dozen sharks, Teichmann feels only mild concern till it only gradually dawns on him that he’s really in tight spot. Indeed, the word “sharks” in the title refers not only to the war, which chews almost everybody up, but also to the marine carnivorous fishes with forked tails that will happily munch down a teenage sailor as a quick snack. Mortal danger in this novel takes forms both figurative and literal: on one hand, the caprices of fate and on the other, English bombers and corvettes and destroyers.
 
Against such bad odds – eight of ten U-boats did not return to port – bravery helps only so much. For Heinrich in Cross of Iron, an officer observes why men continue to fight even when the situation looks hopeless, “To fight for a conviction does not require heroism. Heroism begins where the meaninglessness of the sacrifice remains the last, only message the dead can leave behind.”

Ott is more skeptical about heroism. The professional warriors know how and when to fight and they never think of why. They are ironic about their business. When one officer asks another how he spent one of his days on leave, the other replies with a straight face, “Reading Ernst Jünger.” Jünger wrote the solemnly hard-boiled WWI memoir Storm of Steel, which the Nazis kept in print, unlike their banning and burning of All Quiet on the Western Front by anti-war Erich Maria Remarque.

Ringing true is his account of brutal officer training, which came out of the inferiority complex of the German navy of the time. Without being too satirical, Ott exposes the unnecessary and pointless discipline of the naval establishment, who seems to assume mere military formalities will induce esprit de corps and an authentic martial tradition.  Such exalted emotions can’t be imposed, it’s like kidding yourself that something is true because the authorities merely assert that it’s true.

In contrast to Heinrich in Cross of Iron, Ott does not neglect the social and political side of the war. For instance, the midshipmen return to Germany for a couple of Christmases as Germans become poorer and more guarded. Talking about the war and national psychology, the cowed civilians babble ready-made phrases on the order of “If you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to break eggs.” As for the leaders, two sailors dismiss with scorn the “fairy tales” told by the “club-footed Jesuit” of a propaganda minister.

At the time the fictionalized memoir was a best-seller, the heavy-hitting Times Literary Supplement said, "It is as uncompromising, vivid, and unfalsified an account of war-time naval life as has appeared." The book is not a multi-layered classic on the order of James Jones’ The Thin Red Line but it’s better than memoirs of the “I Fought in Okinawa” variety.  Because of the occasional over-writing and melodrama, I’d place it next to Jones’ classic potboiler From Here to Eternity.

Of interest to those into the topic of minesweeper/sub warfare or ambitious fictionalized war memoirs.

The Skeleton in the Cupboard

Note: Maugham has been popular with hardcore pleasure readers (like me!) for going on a century now. In the parables The Razor's Edge, The Painted Veil, and The Moon and Sixpence, he gives implicit advice on how to live a flourishing life.  Where else will busy readers be exposed to Epicureanism? Life is short, so live and let live, and seek out delight as often as you can.

Cakes and Ale: Or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard - W. Somerset Maugham

Set in England, this novel’s time periods are the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, as seen from a writer looking back from around 1930.

The death of elderly writer Edward Driffield, by 1930 esteemed as the Last of the Victorians and recognized as an inimitable man of letters, gives the high-minded widow the opportunity to commission a biography that will relate the life and times with proper reverence. Having selected a best-selling writer to assist her, the two pump for background information a third writer - the narrator Willie Ashenden - one of the few still among the quick, of proper taste and station, to have known Driffield in youth.

The interview prompts Willie to hark to his youth and to his first meetings with Driffield in the 1880s, when Ted was still just an unknown with a passion for writing and his masterpieces were far from anybody’s wildest fancies.  Willie also reflects on Driffield’s first wife Rosie. Though the widow and the hack want Rosie conveniently forgotten, it is the mysterious Rosie who plays a major role in Willie’s story and in the story of the famous writer himself.

A free spirit, Rosie liberates Willie from small town conceit, pig-ignorance, and quirkiness. Her bolting also gives another woman the chance to work her PR magic to make Driffield the famous man of letters. Maugham hints we can’t always be sure about what is good or bad in every situation nor can we predict whether things will turn out good or bad in the long run.

The first-person narrative persona (the mask is maybe the most prominent modernist thing about Maugham) reveals the rest of the story of the skeleton. At first, we readers are made to think that there is not much to this tale but a Forster-like tweaking of respectability (Howards End) and advocacy for individual freedom (Where Angels Fear to Tread).

We soon find ourselves dealing with twists, however. The prose is spare, which contrasts with muddles and tangles the characters land themselves in.  The world-weary Maugham persona provides urbane asides about literary fashions, style, taste, and so-called Beauty (as subject to fashion as clothing). On the happy citizens of the Land of the Free:

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [ready made phrases*] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment's reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

Maugham started his career in the late Victorian era and is one of the few major figures whose writing career spanned so much change. A doctor, Maugham brought to his narrative persona a matter-of-factness about the body and its vagaries; unsentimental about birth, death, and marriage; and for 1930 frank about women’s sexuality. Of the modest persons, gentlemen of small means, clergymen, retired officers in the countryside in the 1890s, candid Maugham says:

…People who were condemned to spend their lives within a mile of one another quarreled bitterly, and seeing each other every day in the town cut one another for twenty years. They were vain, pig-headed, and odd. It was a life that perhaps formed queer characters; people were not so like one another as now and they acquired a small celebrity by their idiosyncrasies, but they were not easy to get on with.

The skeleton in the cupboard of the sub-title is Rosie. Her free and easy ways express a tolerant attitude about life in this uptight and messed-up world. At the end of chapter XVII pleasure-seeker Rosie reasons Willie out of his irrational jealousy over her sexing it up with other men. She argues by obsessing about her other affairs, Willie himself undermines the sexual satisfaction and emotional contentment he can get in the here and now. She argues her affairs don’t offer him any harms or threats so he is much better off not worrying about concerns that are none of his business.

Rosie advises that Willie had better take the long view. Soon enough, everybody we know will be gone and the things we thought so important will be dust. Nothing is so important that we need to make ourselves miserable and self-pitying and frustrated by fretting and stewing and ruminating about it. Nothing.

Take other people as they are, life as it really is. The tolerant acceptance of reality, both good and bad, will inspire and set Willie free. He had better focus on managing his own responses to his feelings, other people, events, and then nothing can hold him back. 

Maugham is often beaten up for his alleged icy detachment, his harsh cynical take on ordinary people who do their best only to screw up time after time. But I think he implicitly advocates the ideas above – being present, minding your own business, view from above (a.k.a. taking the long view), disputing irrational beliefs, using free will to embrace necessity - as reasonable ways to deal with the inevitable troubles life throws in our path. And Maugham’s enduring popularity with hardcore readers like us - outsiders, dreamers, rebels, seekers, malcontents, beats, scamps, and slackers – is due to his focus on the ethical question, “How should we live.”

* We're still good at them <sigh>: the bottom line; it is what it is; at the end of the day; iconic; silver bullet; obsessed; side-hustle; and wait for it.

The Crooner Lay Dead...

Note: Gail Patrick's film debut was in 1932, a scene in If I had a Million. After a couple of uncredited parts in 1933, she got a speaking role Murders in the Zoo. In the movie reviewed here, she plays a cheerful optimistic woman that must choose between marriage and a singing career. Radio was filled with live programming in the days before widespread recording so it is in fact conceivable that singers, no matter in what genre, could make a living in big cities. Gail Patrick Jackson found retirement tedious in the 1950s, so she became the executive producer of the greatest courtroom drama ever Perry Mason.

The Phantom Broadcast
1933 / 1:12
Tagline: "The Crooner Lay Dead...Yet His Voice Haunted 20,000,000 People!”
[internet archive]

Grant Murdock has become a radio star with song and charm that entrance women of all ages. He’s earning so much money that gangsters want to take over his management and skim his earnings. After all, they are facing a loss of revenue due to the Repeal of Prohibition in December and mobsters have bills to pay too. To accomplish this end, the mugs must knock off Norman Wilder, Grant’s business manager, accompanist, and singing coach.

Ironically, the hoods don’t know that killing Wilder would tank Grant’s career. Wilder, in fact, is the singing voice behind Grant, since this kind of faking was easier to pull off in the bygone days before Milli Vanilli stole our innocence. Not explained was how sensitive sensible ethical Wilder got himself neck deep in such a sham. Maybe he got sucked in because he loved singing so much and he knew music brought comfort to Americans hard-pressed by the Depression. A noble artist! An idealistic soul!

Grant, not an artist but a star, is a total ingrate and brute, mocking Wilder’s spinal deformity which makes it impossible for him to become a heart throb. Inserted in this talky drama for the sake of a modicum of action, an attempt is made on Wilder’s life involving a car chase and tommy guns. The attempt fails but gallant Wilder finds himself implicated in another killing.

As a fickle puritan, I must opine on the Pre-Code aspects of this picture. While Wilder is a paragon of the lofty and high-minded, morally iffy is the gangsters having Elsa sleep with Grant in order to insert a wedge between Grant and Wilder. Much to the mobsters’ disgust at mixing business and pleasure, Elsa falls in love with Grant, who treats her like trash because, in the tradition of "ladies' men," he holds women in contempt. Plus, Grant has hit on the grubby idea to defile wholesome Gail Patrick.

Also lowering the moral tone is everybody mocking the afflicted Wilder for his kyphosis. On the upside, Wilder takes these insults philosophically, since it is easy to assume that he has been hearing put-downs about his body his entire life. He would have had to develop a thick skin to stay sane.

Bold is the sexuality of the characters played by Vivienne Osbourne and Pauline Garon. They both move like women who know they are free, though Osbourne’s Elsa is using her charms with an eye to future big bucks, furs, diamonds, etc. Most shockingly, the culprit gets away with murder. Getting a movie-goer to pull for a culprit to get away with it is about as Pre-Code you can get, I imagine. I’m down with the guilty party walking away every once in a while, just for the contrast to the glop and pap Hollywood was later to so cautiously churn out.

Hey, I said I was fickle.

Attractions include not only sophisticated Art Deco decorations in Grant’s apartment. The acting and writing make up a garland of antique charms. The acting has carry-over from the silent era, with lengthy shots of overwrought faces expressing profound emotions. Actors talk real slow, as if the audience were not used to voices coming from the big screen yet. The ending is as corny as Kansas in August. There are many weak lines that call to mind short stories in romance magazines. “A heartening phrase.”  “To reach people you must have sympathy.” As a budding star torn between career and marriage, Gail Patrick does what actors have to do, i.e. make feeble lines persuasive: “I've reached a crossroads.” “Music is a zealous master,” Wilder sagely warns her.

Also of interest to movie-goers into the history of pop culture, the word “crooner” is twice used indignantly in “He’s not a crooner.” By the early 1930s, the term “crooner” and “crooning” had taken on a pejorative nuance. Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston and the New York Singing Teachers Association (NYSTA)* both denounced crooning in the papers. Perhaps fearing that women would be emotionally manipulated by libertines who sang in that style, Cardinal O'Connell called crooning “base,” “degenerate,” “defiling” and “un-American,” with the NYSTA adding “corrupt.” Other culture mavens stigmatized crooners as gender and sexual deviants. The loyal assistant of Wilder, Sandy, sourly observes of Grant “When all the dames are gaga about a guy, there's usually something wrong with him." 

* Still in existence, NYSTA is the oldest continuing singing teachers organization in the world.

Today is Vernal Equinox Day

春分の日 Shunbun no Hi. This national holiday was established in 1948 as a day for enjoying nature and cultivating love for all living things. Prior to 1948, the vernal equinox was an imperial ancestor worship festival called Shunki kōrei-sai (春季皇霊祭) - in other words, it had lots of ultranationalistic overtones that the post-war Japanese felt uneasy about. Let's celebrate spring by reading a non-fiction book about Japan.

Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Modern Japan – Alex Kerr

The author’s Japanese is so proficient that he writes and publishes in it, a rare ability in a foreigner. His second book Dogs and Demons was released in 2001 and has been recommended as a must-read ever since. The title is from an old Chinese story. The emperor asked his court painter what's easy and what's difficult to paint. The artist answered that demons are easy but dogs are difficult. The artist meant that the quiet low-key things in the environment are hard to get right but flamboyant eye-catching things are easy. It was Kerr’s ambition to explain dogs - what's in front of everybody's nose but hard to see.

Kerr’s basic thesis is that Japan has been mired in economic woes since 1990 because politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders have been unwilling and unable to change their old ways and meet today's challenges.

For more than two decades, Japan's national debt has floated above 100% of its GDP. In fact, as of the second quarter of 2022, Japan's debt-to-GDP ratio was 226%. Debt is out of control because of government spending on public works projects that feed the largest employer in the country and raise demons, i.e., flashy projects that are easy to point to. For instance, the construction industry piles unsightly tetrapods one upon another along about half of the Japanese coastline. Studies done on US coasts have shown that instead of protecting beaches, the 50-ton concrete thingies in reality promote erosion.

To spend down budgets lest they be cut the next fiscal year, the Japanese equivalent of the Department of the Interior pays millions and millions to the construction industry to mold the tetrapods and plop them on the beaches. Kerr paints an unsettling picture of a bureaucracy turned spending machine for which nobody can find the off switch. As often happens among federal bureaucrats in the US, Japanese officials retire from government at the mandatory age of 55, and then they find jobs in the very industries they used to regulate.

Kerr builds a strong case because the book is solidly researched. Figures and examples support his assertion that bureaucrats in Japan collude with industry to construct boondoggles and white elephants (demons) instead of making the small particular changes (dogs) necessary to solve problems.

Using his ability to read Japanese, Kerr provides an insider’s view of the environmental degradation of Japan, the disappearance of the Japanese movie industry and the failure of internationalization. The one qualm I have with this treatment is that although he argues that plenty of Japanese are becoming concerned about the ecology, he doesn't say much about the complacent voters who are happy to receive government pork for schools, community centers, paved roads, train lines and communication towers.

The chapter on the Japanese attitude toward information is fascinating mainly because I have first-hand experience with the Japanese tendency to equivocate, prevaricate, cover, and generally mishandle information. One tiny story. When I taught in Okinawa I noted a couple of times on campus an English professor toting around a camera. I asked him on two different occasions what he was taking pictures of and both times he clowned to avoid telling me. I found out from a third party a simple explanation. For a committee the English prof was taking shots of illegally parked cars to collect evidence that the campus lacked adequate parking space. I heard the explanation only after I angrily stopped being curious, figuring “F**k it I'm not gonna give a s**t if he's got such a f*****g problem giving me the a f*****g answer to a non-sensitive f*****g question,” so incensed was I over nothing (my last two years of six in Japan I often needed more self-control than I could muster for a high-context culture). Kerr says the slow pace of Internet adoption and the waste of time that is the Japanese Internet is the result of this aversion to openness.

Anyway, Japanophile Kerr ends on a cautious but pessimistic note. This is a powerful book and well worth reading for those interested in what happened to Japan in the 1990s. Kerr not only quotes modern scholars and journalists but quotes great opinion leaders in the past to get the long view. This book is still worth reading.

Pop Evolutionary Psychology

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology & Everyday Life – Robert Wright

Through the lens of human evolutionary psychology, this book examines one, the life of Charles Darwin in terms of his theory and two, nature as it is expressed in human behavior. The theory, I think, posits us as animals with morals, with our impulses and instincts formed millions of years ago when we were human primates, long before we were influenced by the culture of our hunter-gatherer forebears.

Much good in this mean old world is a result of natural selection even when our intentions to be cautiously skeptical, favorably accepting, gratefully generous are not ideally carried out, even for the sake of passing on our genes to the next generations. Wright asserts:

The one thing one can't do, I submit, is argue that evolutionary psychology is irrelevant to the whole discussion. The idea that natural selection, acutely sensitive to the most subtle elements of design in the lowliest animals, should build huge, exquisitely pliable brains and not make them highly sensitive to environmental cues regarding sex, status, and various other things known to figure centrally in our reproductive prospects - that idea is literally incredible. If we want to know when and how a person's character begins to assume distinct shape, if we want to know how resistant to change the character will subsequently be, we have to look to Darwin. We don't yet know the answers, but we know where they'll come from, and that knowledge helps us phrase the questions more sharply.

We know it must be the genes because the same stuff pops up in many cultures around the world. Most infanticides are committed by stepfathers.  Men find women with large eyes and small noses more beautiful. To be human is to gossip. No culture admires its members who are cheap but universally people are stingy when they know they can get away with it. We most of us would take a bullet for the same sibling that we’d gladly strangle during a fight over an inheritance.

These and many other crucial questions about human behavior are explained with evolutionary biology. Evolutionary biology used to be called sociobiology, but back in the day sociobiology attracted so much gleeful politically incorrect attention from fascists, clansmen, and fundamentalists that decent people ran away the word, if not the field.

And Wright is quite a good writer, able to explain hard concepts in prose a reader of average intelligence (like me) can comprehend. Wright is a science journalist, not a biologist. But his is a good read for people that are interested in our evolutionary path and the latent drives that motivate our feelings and responses, as well as the environmental conditions that have shaped human nature over millions of years.

The Ides of Perry Mason 75

Note: In the old Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the beginning, middle, and end of a month's counting period. In hat tip to those tough old Romans, on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, we will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's various contributions to the mystery genre. So many are in the can, and it's not like I'm kidding myself I'm exempt from the universal experience of humankind. Below are the memorable episodes from the initial season of the Perry Mason TV series that ran from 1957 to 1966, in 271 episodes.

The Best of Season 1 (1957-58)

The Case of the Restless Redhead. The very first episode features two-gun switcheroos that don’t add to the plot or the reveal but show Mason’s inventiveness in manipulating circumstances, cops, and persons of interest sometimes blew up in his face. Stunning Whitney Blake as the titular redhead puts in a convincing performance as the every-woman waitress who’s not getting any breaks. Her gripping tale is an example of “innocence exonerated,” a theme Gardner knew his audience loved. Whitney's tears of gratitude when Mason gets her off really are wonderful to behold. Vaughan Taylor appears as the motel-keeper who wants out of his go-nowhere existence and boring marriage to harsh pioneer woman Jane Buchanan. It was his first of eight appearances on the show, four as a deceptive guy and then defendant, murderer, and twice the victim who had it comin’. I like this one because it’s emblematic of the noir look of the first couple seasons.

The Case of the Vagabond Vixen. After he picks up a young female hitchhiker and gets her a job, a movie producer lands in trouble deep. Carol Leigh plays the kitten with a whip to perfection. Cast as the vixen’s mother, Barbara Pepper (Arnold the Pig’s mother in Green Acres) plays her usual salt of the earth type. When Perry conceals her in a hotel room he says, “Your stay here is on me so get anything you want,” to which she replies, “That's good. I need a beer.” Catherine McLeod was another fine actress the casting department hired, this time playing a sympathetic person so dedicated to the cinematic arts that she commits terrible crimes for them. After his devastating cross-examination of the wayward girl, Perry offers noir advice “You ought to tell them if they're ever tempted to pick up a lady on the highway, don't. If she's no lady, it could be murder.”

The Case of the Lonely Heiress shines because of the force of nature  Anna Navarro. She so convincingly plays her character as a victim of her own muddled thinking that we are reminded of the risks of interpreting what other people say and do through the narrow template of anger and anxiety. When her character on the stand asks Perry in a hurt bewildered voice, “Do you think I’m a bad girl,” we think, “Well, while I usually say that we’re all just people who sometimes do bad things, with your greediness, yelling, dish-throwing, larceny, blackmail, lying, cruelty, exploitation of the vulnerable, battery, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder, yeh, I’d have to say you’re a very bad girl.”

Homage to the Golden Age

Murder in a Mummy Case - K.K. Beck

Harken back to the kinder gentler traditions of the Golden Age whodunit. This 1986 effort is charming and delightful, though the author would go on about clothes: “dressed in a smart two-piece golf ensemble, aquamarine wool knit with a band of orange at the neck and in the gores of the skirt.”

Gores? Luckily I married a weaver and sewer, she knows about these things.

Set in the late 1920s, Stanford co-ed Iris Cooper has received permission from her parents to spend Easter Break with gentleman friend Clarence Brockhurst and his wealthy family. The high society setting will bring to mind Charlie Chan novels by Earl Derr Biggers. The characters are wealthy enough to afford eccentric hobbies and maintain wacky hangers-on. Mrs. Brockhurst employs a spiritualist medium and her entourage of assistant Mr. Jones and a lady’s maid who turns out to be The Victim. She has also taken in a poor relation Aunt Laura and a dispossessed White Russian Count Boris. Son Clarence has the resources to indulge his hobby of Egyptology and even keeps a mummy in the house, which the psychic blames for evil emanations.

Mystery fans and fans of B-movies by Poverty Row studios will recognize the stock characters.  Iris is smart and sweet, and plucky in the pinch. Brassy and bold she is not but those are covered by Clarence‘s sister Bunny, a free-spirited flapper. Iris’ other possible BF is a walking checklist of traits of a young newshound: brash, quick witted, wisecracking, and prone to jump to conclusions. Clarence is the huffy pompous mooncalf who woos his lady love with the promise to teach her how to read hieroglyphs.

Beck deals in comic allusions too. The butler, who is assumed to have Done It, is a Chinese named Charles Chan. Even the characters look askance at that. At the beginning, she has Iris say, “Had I but known that my request would lead me into another adventure, my anticipation would have been even greater,” which is a send-up of the standard melodramatic “Had I but known” foreshadowing of mysteries and gothics in the first half of the 20th century. At the end, a character marvels at his luck, “Imagine, I almost invested a fortune in some worthless little town in Southern California, Palm Springs it was called.

Beck must have read her share of cozy puzzlers of bygone days not only to spoof them but also to feel affectionate about the whole genre. Nostalgia buffs will like the dumbwaiter, speakeasy, and chaperones and other such artifacts, institutions and customs that went they way of the dodo before our grandparents checked out of this vale of tears.

Readers on the look-out for a light and entertaining mystery will not go wrong with this one.

Classic Travel Narrative

The Sea and the Jungle – H.M. Tomlinson

In 1910, Tomlinson sailed on the English tramp steamer Capella from Swansea to Porto Velho, Brazil, near the cataracts of the Madeira River.

He was the purser with light duties on the two-thousand ton steamship, which carried supplies for the construction at Porto Velho of the eastern terminus of the new Madeira-Mamore Railway. The steamer went upriver and Tomlinson also took some jaunts into the Brazilian rain forest some distance from the ship.

This classic travel narrative was only one of the author’s 30 book-length works. Tomlinson was one of the most respected writers of the first half of the 20th century, but he is little read nowadays.

My praise cannot possibly do justice to Tomlinson’s prose, such as this, on the rewards of travel:

They are no matter. They are untranslatable from their time and place; and like the man who unwittingly lies down to sleep on the tumulus where little people dance on midsummer night, and dreams that in the place where man has never been his pockets were filled with fairy gold, waking to find pebbles there instead, so the traveller cannot prove the dreams he had, showing us only pebbles when he tries.

And this:

When you sight your first mountains, a delicate and phantom gleam athwart the stars, are you reminded of the substance of the hills? I have been watching it for so long, this abiding and soundless forest, that now I think it is like the sky, intangible, an apparition; what the eye sees of the infinite, just as the eye sees a blue colour overhead at midday, and the glow of the Milky Way at night. For the mind sees this forest better than the eye. The mind is not deceived by what merely shows.

Whole paragraphs and pages feature this kind of writing. By the end, a certain "Nobody who's not done it can imagine what I've seen" tone creeps in, but so what, with prose like this?

Tomlinson went to Brazil on the freighter to get away from the humdrum craziness of working in the city so the reader had better try to avoid reading in the jangled mood that comes after a day at work.

The Nones of Perry Mason 74

Note: Buffs of classic Hollywood know that Raymond Burr played the murdering husband identified by apartment-bound James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. But only hardcore readers who have somehow found their way to this blog know that before he landed the Perry Mason role in 1956 that was to be his ticket to immortality, Raymond Burr was the Portly Prince of Noir.

I Love Trouble
1948 / black and white / 1:35
Tagline: “Five Lovelies Leave a Trail of Perfume … and Murder!”
[internet archive]

Our buddy Burr has two lines in one scene – with shadow covering half his grim visage. His bulk compels our attention as he sizes up with his spellbinding eyes hero Franchot Tone. Burr seems to be measuring Tone for a beating. Tone has been hired by a well-connected LA realtor-politician to identify the blackmailer of his wife. After Tone pursues leads in Portland, the wife’s natal city, he returns to LA to dead bodies, edgy police and thugs that roughly request the information he gathered.

Franchot Tone saves his dignity by delivering noir one-liners with style and grace. He may be feeling that old “coming down in the world” feeling due to having to appear in a B movie, but he’s a true professional. What’s curious about his ambiguous character is that the viewer can’t guess how he is going to approach an interview, especially with women.

Burr’s disheveled partner in crime is John Ireland. He made a career of looking tough and at least half-way down the road to PsychoVille. Though the formidable one, it is Burr’s role to ensure that Ireland doesn't get carried away and kill anybody in the heat of the moment.

For comic relief, we get two wonderful actors. Glenda Farrell cracks wise as the tough city girl, game, canny, reliable as the PI’s ever faithful secretary. Tone asks her, “Ever have the feeling you're being watched or followed, and she replies sourly, “Not nearly enough.” Sid Tomack plays a wise-cracking bistro owner who comes to an unhappy end because he knows too much and wants to monetize his excess of knowledge. Appearing three times on the classic Perry Mason, Tomack was especially great in a satirical scene in The Case of the Envious Editor.

The main draw, however, is the bevy who possess a similar beauty. This feeds into the noir themes of doubleness, identity, and misdirection. Janis Carter and Lynn Merrick both shanghai a movie-goer’s attention wherever they enter a scene.  Janet Blair, a breathtaking pin-up, is the nice girl we’d take home to ma and warn pa to heed his better angels. Adele Jergens is the Jezebel we’d keep secret from the homefolks.

All this but we movie-goers are treated to location shots of Late Forties L.A., with brutal concrete buildings on Hollywood Boulevard. Venice Beach used to have clam chowder shacks where proprietors would say, “You can have clam chowder and clam chowder,” to which you would reply laconically, “I’ll have clam chowder” like a real noir hero. Oil derricks in Santa Monica, so cool. I like mid-century industrial infrastructure probably I grew up in a house a five-minute walk to the Rouge Plant. 

Though complicated, this diverting movie is redeemed by its Chandleresque writing. Caretaker of the mansion, where the kidnapped PI was kidnapped, drugged, beaten, and interrogated, when asked what the place is called, “733, that’s all. Places like this don’t have a name.” PI: “That’s what you think.”

She was a Good Girl in a Bad Joint!

Sensation Hunters
1933 / 73 minutes
Tagline: “THERE WERE PITFALLS AT EVERY STEP ---AND SHE DIDN'T MISS A SINGLE STEP!”
[internet archive]

The “Pre-Code” Era was roughly 1931 to 1934, when American movies were at their most spicy, a time when illicit sex and violence were common themes. The Poverty Row studio Monogram flirted with the exploitation genre. And this odd antique was the result.

It’s not nearly as disposable as silly things like Reefer Madness. It has genuine actors and actresses. The writers worked in character development and a moral with a little heft to placate puritans like me. In his debut, the director Charles Vidor added artistic touches. Vidor was not a hack and went on to have a respectable career. Hey, he was Hungarian so he must have been cool (my grandmother was Hungarian).

The opening sequence, set on a cruise ship from San Francisco to Panama City, features one woman in hot-pants and another in a bathing suit. A middle-aged man with a fake English milord accent and, worse, a travesty of a country shooting outfit tosses a coin on the floor so he can have a cover story if he is busted looking through keyholes. To fulfill the educational purpose of this production, we get a camera shot through a keyhole to see women changing, in case we weren’t quite sure what he was doing.

Due to the pandering content and the poor quality of the print (like sound drop-outs due to lost frames), I, my mother’s uptight son, was tempted to give up about 15 minutes into it. But the characterization got me more interested in the story and less bothered by the blemishes.

Upper-middle-class woman (Marion Burns) for reasons that are not made clear, signs up as singer in a troupe of dancers and b-girls. The troupe works in a notorious cabaret called The Bull Ring in wild, wide-open Panama City. Her working-class roommate, perennial best friend Arline Judge, is puzzled why such an elegant woman as Marion, brought up in affluent circumstances would take up such a job.

The Mama is played by a silent screen heroine Juanita Hansen, a Mack Sennet protege. Not above smacking the girls around to enforce her expectations, she is crude and bossy and all too effective in this role. The male actors, as usual, are nothing to write home about, but Walter Brennan has a small part in which he stutters in that injured voice he was saddled with after he was gassed during World War I. It was an era in which communicative disorders were played for laughs.

The action moves along briskly, but the real attraction is the setting of the down-at-heels cabaret, the third-rate hotel rooms, and people one does not meet in the normal course of life. Warner Bros had the rep for gritty settings but clearly the Poverty Row studios could render reality in all its romping glory to make us think, “My place is home with mother, but that sure does look fun.”

I’m a Thirties buff so I like anything that gives me a sense of what the time looked and smelled like. I’m also a moralist so I was placated that this movie, while not what I would call prim, was not as saucy as I was fearing. Unless I was reading into (I'm a meaning-seeking animal), I got the message to be careful what kind of people, places, and conditions you settle for since we set bars lower and lower insensibly until one fine day we wake up and realize we’re hanging out with the likes of people Mother wouldn’t have had in the house, I’m sure.

The Kalends of Perry Mason 73

Notes: In the ancient Roman calendar, the Kalends, Nones, and Ides were three special days that marked the beginning, middle, and end of a month's counting period. In hat tip to those Stoic Romans in late antiquity, on the first, fifth or seventh, and the fifteen of every month, we will run an article about Erle Stanley Gardner's various contributions to the mystery genre. Running pieces more often because many articles are in the can and it's not like I'm exempt from the universal experience of humankind.

The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde – Erle Stanley Gardner

“The lawyer is like a doctor,” says criminal lawyer Perry Mason to Della Street to open this 1944 mystery, “only for justice.”

Perry Mason sees a parade of iffy clients in his office - but Diana Regis is probably one of the iffiest. She arrives in Mason’s office clad only in a fur coat and a dressing gown, besides the shiner of the title. It turns out that she had been pressured into a date with her employer’s stepson. Not playing the game "put out or walk home" when she refused the stepson’s advances, in the tradition of many players at the time, he tossed her out of the car, forcing her to hike home. Meeting again at the house (she’d been living with her employer’s family), he smacked her when she called him out. On top of this abuse, he colluded with his mother to accuse Diana of theft.

Seeing herself in a vulnerable position, she hoofs it over to the office of Perry Mason. The casual brutality bothers Perry and Della. In court, Perry’s deft questioning shows the stepson to be a lieclops. Everything is quickly resolved – the alleged theft can be explained. Diana Regis receives handsome compensation.

And when - seemingly – the door can be shut on a nasty incident, the plot gets thicker. And poor Diana ends up in in the dock.

This is a good detective story. The twists are intricate, the action doesn’t let you to break away for dinner, and the dueling between the operators of the criminal justice mincing machine and Perry, Della Street and PI Paul Drake is played for high stakes.