Harold Lloyd

Girl Shy

1924 / 80 minutes

Whenever Harold Meadows (Harold Lloyd) encounters pretty girls, he suffers from shyness-induced stuttering which stops only after he hears a whistle. Ironic since he attracts women. He’s not bad-looking and his prospects are stable if dull: he works as an apprentice in his uncle’s tailor shop. Harold’s small-town isolation drives him to a rich fantasy life. As an evening hobby, he writes his own version of The Memoirs of Casanova, which he hopes to sell to a publisher.

On the train from Little Bend to the metropolis, he meets the comely, demure, sweet, and - let’s not forget - wealthy Mary Buckingham (Jobyna Ralston). She’s been forced to travel by rail because of car trouble. Harold helps Mary to smuggle her Pomeranian aboard the train and hide the ornery yipper from the bullying conductor. At first Harold stutters but after hearing the train’s steam whistle he’s able to share his hopes and dreams with her. They part but when by chance they see each other again, they are both overjoyed. Harold's book, however, is rejected by the publisher as an absurd fantasy and he sees any future with Mary go up in smoke. Moreover, a rich guy pressures her and her mother for her hand.

The film contains two parts. First, more than enough time is spent Harold’s embarrassment owing to his stutter. In fact, jokes that hinge on verbal stumbling and stammering seem a stretch in a silent movie. Still, some scenes in this first half will tickle. During his writing scenes, he acts out seducing (or not) a vamp and a flapper. Very funny both on its own terms and our post-modern amusement at that era’s stereotypes of the vamp and flapper. Genuinely poignant are the scenes when the two lovers break it off and his humiliation when all the city slickers laugh at his silly book. I think we connect with Lloyd because he was just a guy, a real guy subject to irrational passions, not a stoic sage like Buster Keaton.

The second part of the film consists of Lloyd’s trademark rough comedy, a.k.a. thrill sequence. Harold must prevent the wedding of Mary to the rich guy. On the way to the ceremony, Harold hijacks a streetcar, carjacks various passenger sedans and commandeers a delivery wagon. Lloyd did his own incredible stunts. Also interesting is that this was filmed in real locations.

City

City - Clifford Simak

This 1944 science fiction novel  is a series of episodes that trace world history in which humans boogie off world after making it unfit for humna life with technology. The planet is left to misfit humans slouching to oblivion and evolved talking dogs and their robotic assistants. 

Sure, there is some quaint anti-technology learnings that we'd expect in an SF novel from that era. Some readers may be put off the by the gentle canine pacifism in the last couple of stories. But I think most of it stands up, making it easy to understand why it is considered one in Top 10 science-fiction novels. 

It was a winner of the International Fantasy Award in 1953. 

 

List of nearly forgotten Christmas songs, for your enjoyment, especially, I wonder, if you're a certain age.

Christmas Roses - Frankie Lane & Jo Stafford

Misteltoe and Holly - Jack Jones

Jingle Bells - Glenn Miller

Hello Mr Kringle - Kay Kyser

Shake Hands With Santa Claus - Louis Prima

I'm Gonna Lasso Santa Claus - Little Brenda Lee

Here Comes Santa Claus - Bing Crosby & The Andrews Sisters

Santa Claus Is Back In Town – Elvis and Wynona Judd

The Coventry Carol – Joan Baez

Holiday In Harlem  - Ella Fitzgerald w/ Chick Webb’s Band

Marshmallow World by Brenda Lee

God Rest ye Merry Gentleman – Barenaked Ladies
Hard Candy Christmas by Dolly Parton.

Jingle Bells – Les Paul and Mary Ford

Suzy Snowflake – Rosemary Clooney

Rudolf – Tiny Tim

Santa Claus is Coming to Town – Alice Cooper

Christmastime in New Orleans - Louis Armstrong

Frosty the Snowman – Cocteau Twins

Merry Christmas Baby – Bootsy Collins

Christmas in Jail – The Youngsters

Jingle Bells by The Singing Dogs
Winter Wonderland by Johnny Mathis
Christmas Time is Here - Vince Guaraldi from A Charlie Brown Christmas
Who Took the Merry Out of Christmas? by The Staple Singers. Who is this "House" guy?

Ding Dong, Ding Dong by George Harrison. OK, it's a New year's song.
Old Christmas Card by Jim Reeves
Another Year has Gone By - Celine Dion

Christmas Eve (I Wanna Be Santa Claus) by Ringo Starr
Please, Daddy (Don't Get Drunk This Christmas) - John Denver
Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas ? Judy Garland.

I'll be Home for Christmas by Karen and her brother

 

Death Walks in Eastrepps

Death Walks in Eastrepps – Francis Beeding

In the early 1980s Dover Publications reprinted classic British whodunits mainly from the first half of the 20^th century. Their selection criteria guided them to choose well-written stories that had the familiar elements that we mystery readers like to see in Golden Age mysteries: the quiet English village, foggy nights, dotty Dickensian characters, horrid deeds, imperturbable inspectors, plot twists galore with stolen love, impersonations.

Critics say Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) was the best of the over 30 novels written by the writing team of Hilary St. George Saunders (1885-1944) and John Palmer (1885-1944). The most interesting aspect is that the plot is told through many points of view. During the courtroom drama, we view the action from the points of view of the jury foreman, a court stenographer, a constable, and a playwright.

Vincent Starrett (1886-1974), an American writer and journalist, considered this book “one of the ten greatest detective novels.” This was also reprinted more recently (2011) by Arcturus Publishing in their Crime Classics series.

Daisy Miller

Daisy Miller - Henry James

Along with just about everybody little acquainted with Henry James' fiction (I’ve read only Portrait of a Lady), I associate it with difficulty – involved, demanding, too many French words, a lot of work. 

Imagine my surprise when I read Daisy Miller (1878). It’s straightforward, simple, and right up my alley: I’m always willing to read an expatriate story or what they called in James’ time, stories of residence abroad.  The title character is American innocence personified. She cannot conceive that the expat Americans would cut her dead just because she walked the streets of Rome with a man she was not related to, unchaperoned. 

Innocence of the malicious world and ignorance of its censorious ways cause a lot of trouble for Daisy and the narrator, her would-be sweetie Mr. Winterbourne. He is a long-term expat, rich, idle, bored, and empty enough inside to be quite taken by the frank inexperienced and attractive.

The Ides of Perry Mason 19

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

Note. This is another appreciation of an actress that appeared in more than a couple episodes of the Perry Mason TV series. For Patricia Barry, see here.

Lisa Gaye

Auburn-haired. Green eyes. Dancer’s poise. Don’t say “ravishing” until you’ve seen Lisa Gaye. More like “entrancing” because she brought to characters a scent of wildness. The viewer got the feeling that she would be more than a handful if she felt that wasn’t getting what she felt she had coming in the way of attention, admiration, jewels, travel, and the high life. Little wonder she often played the fierce beauty in Perry Mason.

In her first episode, The Case of the Guilty Clients (1961), with passionate strains of Argentina and Ireland coursing through her, her character Lola Bronson is blessed and cursed with a fervent soul. Her husband Jeff says in Argentina, when he saw Lola come riding up looking like a goddess on horseback, he fell in love the minute he saw her. That they became a lovely couple deeply involved with each other we don’t doubt for a second. Unfortunately, as is sometimes the case with ardent souls, the marriage was tempestuous. In divorce court, Lola says that Jeff put her over his knee and spanked her at a barbeque because she messed up the steaks. Though she calls him a sadist during the divorce proceedings, later at the trial where defendant Jeff is facing the gas chamber, Lola stands up and loudly claims that she killed the vic while Jeff cuts her off, claiming he lied about never being in the house, that he shot the vic. Devoted souls indeed. Though we’re thankful we don’t know couples that are liable to spank each other at a barbeque, we’re happy such sweethearts exist.

In her second outing, The Case of the Travelling Treasure (1961), Gaye plays gangster moll Rita Magovern. Her crook husband Karl is excellently portrayed by Arch Johnson, who brings to the role just the right mix of loud bad temper, unreasoning tyranny and violence restrained only by the fact he is confined to a wheelchair due to a broken leg. In a nice noir moment after Karl gets his just deserts via poison, Rita frankly admits to Perry and Paul that she’s “one of those women who always love the wrong man,” and that Karl was “planning a half million dollar robbery, and he wouldn't even give me enough to pay the gas bill.” We sympathetically suspect that she just wants a quiet modest life with all the bills paid on time, whether or not funded by ill-gotten gains isn’t her department.

In The Case of the Two-Faced Turn-a-bout (1963), she plays Alyssa Laban, the daughter of a Slavic immigrant caught up in the political troubles back in his old Balkan home. Even in black and white, those green eyes call to mind the comely charmers of Kyiv. Putting to use her talent with accents, Gaye also has down-pat the whole brooding, smoldering, quietly melancholy and turbulent manner (this writer’s Slavic genes connected with the part, anyway). No wonder the guest star Hugh O’Brian tries to claim her at the end, in the unlikely event that she’d be willing and happy to be carried off like a trophy to mark a victory in the cold war. As if. This is one of the episodes without Raymond Burr for a reason that has been lost in the mists of time. Loyal fans say contract dispute. Rude fans say recovery from liposuction.

In The Case of the Wednesday Woman (1964) Gaye’s character, Joyce Hadley, is a stock Mason baddie, the secretary who is also an ambitious conniver. Despite her smart and relentless scheming, we feel that she is more sinned against than sinning. She is harassed at work by a lab technician nerd. She is blackmailed into sex by a creep played by smoothie Douglas Dick, who often played handsome heartless cads on Perry. Also monstrous was Queen of the B Movies, Marie Windsor, who studied the Stanislavski Method under avatar Maria Ouspenskaya. In fact, the outstanding feature in this episode is that all the characters are monsters doing a lot of harm to themselves and others. But they all think they are carrying out the best decisions they can given the circumstances. Watching this episode is like kicking over a rock and watching all the disgusting little roaches scurrying about eating drinking screwing plotting thinking they got a real good bead on things. Yuck.

The Case of the Nautical Knot (1964) is interesting because it has two noteworthy actresses besides Gaye. In a part not as expansive as we’d like, our subject’s character Pamela Blair acts as tempting bait to a guy who is so inattentive he doesn’t even notice he’s the object of feminine wiles. Pamela Blair plays Assistant Bad Girl to Barbara Bain’s Mean Girl, a catty socialite that has no respect for nurses and first responders. Bain has that kind of shiny exquisiteness brightened up with lots and lots of money. In contrast to the splendor of the two society women, we have the third actress, Anne Whitfield. Her blonde freshness, open manner, and unique face with easy-to-read, kind of dopey blue eyes made her a must to cast for ‘girl next door’ parts. She was well-cast to be the goody-goody nurse who ends up accused of murder.

The appeal of this episode is the solid story, which was a relatively rare phenomenon by season eight. A second unusual point is the vic was a harmless old guy, not at all the usual despicable brute that had it coming, such that he’d be rushed to his eternal desert of, hopefully, slow roasting. Finally, what’s really odd is that Perry is called as a prosecution witness by Burger.

In her last episode, The Case of the Vanishing Victim (1966) she plays bad girl Laraine Keely. In the scene that reminds us how much the writer were flailing for ideas by season nine, Mason enters Laraine's apartment while she is showering. We get a shot of her drying her calves and ankles. Be still, beating heart, think only of deplorable pandering to low audience desires. Wearing only a towel, Laraine is angry to find him there, scolds him for being a masher while unflappable Perry in unfailing polite, as usual, this not being the first time he has disturbed a female en déshabillé in her own pad. In a huff, she exits to dress. While Perry is tossing her place for evidence, Laraine sneaks out and drives away. A tough shrewd one, for sure.

What a precarious career acting is. Especially for actresses over 30 years old. Despite her success in television, by the late 1960s, her career just stopped. She said in an undated interview, “There were shows I never did—‘Bonanza’, ‘Star Trek’, yet when I’d watch them on TV, I would say to myself ‘I could have done that!’ … I couldn’t walk through the door at Paramount—so I changed agents. Then, it was like I never worked again!”

She moved to Texas to raise her daughter and be closer to family. She worked as a receptionist for 19 years at a local religious television station and sang in the Evangelistic Temple Church’s choir. Lisa Gaye passed away in 2016, at the age of 81, in Houston.

John LeCarre 1931 – 2020

The British author of espionage novels has died at the age of 89. I’ve been reading his novels since the late Seventies. I first read The Honorable Schoolboy in 1979, when I was in Japan. We foreign students passed that novel around, hand to hand.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Call for the Dead -

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy –

The Honorable Schoolboy -

Single & Single –

The Perfect Spy –            

The Secret Pilgrim -

Smiley’s People -

The Russia House

A Night of Errors

A Night of Errors - Michael Innes

Calling to mind Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors, this mystery presents a convoluted puzzle. It seems as if Innes the writer is wondering what will happen if he blends the conventions of the 20^th century police procedural with the mix-ups and confusion of the Bard’s early play.

The result? A parody of the complicated mysteries of Hammett and Chandler, both popular when this mystery was written in the late 1940s. Not to mention that Innes names an old lady character who lives in a village Mrs. Marple.

… Mrs. Marple dried her soapy arms on her apron, scattered the curs with two well-directed kicks, delivered a number of threatening remarks in the direction of the now silent cottage and led the way into what she evidently regarded as the scene of an important crime. Three nights before, the sleeping quarters of the Khakis had been broken into and two of the birds removed. “Felony!” said Mrs. Marple with a dramatic gobble. “Felony stalking my own ‘earth and ‘ome. ‘Itlermism in the midst.”

This 1947 novel features the series hero John Appleby, now in retirement having married money. His wife Judith is away, so his personal life takes a distant second to his detective skills in this one. As usual for the Appleby books, the action is compressed, taking place over only two days. The human drama is tragic and over the top, but it works out to a reasonable reveal with plausible motivations, blood and thunder and flame and exhaustion and muddle aside.

“Michael Innes” was the pen name of J.I.M. Stewart. An Oxford professor, Stewart wrote mysteries under the pen name to protect his academic reputation and supplement his probably lowish income as a prof. As we would expect from an English professor, the use of language, while playful, will engage bookish people at home with all kinds of writing from the backs of cereal boxes to Elizabethan melodrama.

Under his own name, Stewart wrote academic explications of literary figures and literary fiction. He must have loved writing fiction because he wrote 20 novels between 1954 and 1985, beside the 40 or so mysteries and crime novels. Considering how laborious creative writing must be, it is an incredibly prolific output.

Why Buddhism is True

Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment – Robert Wright

This book examines the science behind the claim that a mindfulness practice such as meditation has benefits such as a sharper attention span and decreased stress, anger and depression.

Wright, a professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary, is an authority on evolutionary psychology, having written The Moral Animal and The Evolution of God. This branch of psychology theorizes that memory, perception, language, moral foundations are the functional products of natural selection. Wright contends that evolutionary psychology echoes important themes in Buddhism.

For instance, Buddhism claims that the reason we suffer and make other people suffer is that we don't see the world clearly. Having illusions about ourselves, about others, and about the world leads to suffering. Evolutionary psychology says that the human mind was not designed to see reality clearly.  In fact, in some cases, natural selection actually favors illusions. Natural selection favors traits that will get the animal’s genes into the next generation. For example, naturally a middle-aged man will have illusions about having the charm, looks, and sex appeal that will attract a comely female half his age.

Lots of awkwardness – and suffering - just to get one’s genes into the next generation but that’s the way it goes. Having an illusion – i.e., a distorted view of yourself or of other people or of the world - has propelled genes into the next generation, so then distortion can be built into the human mind. The other problem, of course, is that our brains were designed to get along and prosper in hunting/gathering cultures in the Horn of Africa, not being efficient at project management in Zoom meetings.

Natural selection has not designed us human beings to be happy. If being unhappy, anxious, frustrated, dissatisfied, or restless has gotten genes into the next generation over millions of years, then those things will be encouraged by natural selection. Once we get what we think we want or need, we are prone to become discontented quickly and easily and want more or different.

The Buddha, Wright says, had a good bead on the connection between seeing the world in a faulty way and craving for more and novel and seemingly satisfying. We keep seeking more because the resulting gratification never lasts. We suffer from the illusion that it will last longer than it does.  “I’ll be happy now that I’m rich.” Then: “Gotta watch these employees every second. Frickin’ everybody thinks I’m the one who’s gonna pick up the tab. Cadging relatives. Taxes. Red tape. Everybody wants my money. But it’s mine!” According to Buddhism, not thinking about how fast the rush of accomplishment going to evaporate and how you will return to your normal amount of happiness is parts of illusion.

Meditation is method to break out of illusion and craving.  Mindfulness meditation in particular helps us develop a different kind of relationship to our feelings. While focusing on our breathing, our mind gets calmer and we become able to look coolly at feelings that normally we would just react to and go into suffering mode by ruminating, fretting, craving, whatever. It is not a matter of shutting hatred, anger, envy, sadness down but observing it. By paying attention to it, it has less of a grip on you, the less it is going to push you around, the less you are going to let it push you around.

So the less we see our minds as being the coach/CEO in total control, the more control we have over our feelings. May be worth thinking about, getting through the next six months.

Mr. Thatcher at the Olympics

Going for the Gold - Emma Lathen

This 1981 mystery is set at the same Lake Placid Olympics where the US men’s hockey team beat the USSR in the Miracle on Ice. Lathen – that is, the writing team of economist Mary Jane Latsis and attorney Martha Henissart – probably attended those Winter Games since they vividly capture the panopoly and excitement.

Being canny businesswomen, they also knew they were seeing the world change: the process in which mass media and intense public interest were turning sports into the economic and cultural behemoth that it is today. On a more relatable basis, the authors prove their State of New York street cred by realistically describing a massive blizzard. The storm also serves the plot because it paralyzes daily life for a couple of days, thus throwing off the time-table of the fiendish sniper who took down a French downhill skier in mid-flight.

Also consistent with genuine human behavior, Lathen has a Danish female skier, falsely accused of taking drugs, pressured by two men who think they know what is better for her than she knows herself. Protesting the false accusation of doping, Swiss athletes kidnap the narrow-minded president of the IOC and imprison him in a funicular hanging half-way up the mountainside. Another subplot involves a scandal in procurement thievery for the purpose of extracting kickbacks.

The series hero, John Putnam Thatcher, is a senior vice-president at the Sloan Guaranty Trust, the third largest bank in the world. Thatcher in fact runs the Sloan because the muddle-headed president, Bradford Withers, is a social butterfly who spends little time at the bank, much to the relief of his senior executives. Thatcher’s main task is dealing with a flood of counterfeit Eurochecks which might cost the Trust a half-million dollars. He is assisted by the touchy and testy stickler for detail Everett Gabler, who is always a superbly drawn character.

 

Eden

Eden – Stanislaw Lem

The plot of Eden, which Stanislaw Lem (this site is how the web looked 25 years ago – gasp, sigh!) wrote early in his career, is simple. Spaceship crash-lands on planet Eden and Captain, Engineer, Physicist, Chemist, Cyberneticist and Doctor must make repairs and get the hell off. 

While exploring the planet, the crew members encounter a totally alien world that employs bio-tech such as nano-technology and genetic engineering. The locals also seem to be performing experiments on their own kind. The Earthers are by turns revolted, fascinated, and astonished. 

The interpretations of what is going on often depend on what kind of personality the interpreter has, a theme Lem was to return to in later novels. Lem’s creation of alien world captures the strangeness of it all without being as notoriously hard to read as Solaris, a much more renowned novel with similar themes that he wrote a couple years later.