Whatever I say here cannot compete with my friend Dan Callahan’s superb tribute over on Ebert. He knows her and her way of working and her response to life (a NEGATIVE response) better than anyone. He devoted a chapter to Smith in his amazing book The Art of American Screen Acting (I interviewed him about it here).
I wrote this a while back but I will share it today on what was Maggie Smith’s birthday.
Smith’s performance of Alan Bennett’s 49-minute monologue called Bed Among the Lentils is one of the best performances I have ever seen. Period.
It is done direct to camera and is an astonishing piece of work. As I watched, time stood still. I feel like I didn’t even blink. I couldn’t breathe. The character’s misery and bitterness was stultifying. Crucially, and this is a very Maggie Smith “fingerprint” (if such a dazzlingly versatile actress can have a fingerprint), there is a total lack of catharsis. Maggie Smith was TOUGH. There is no leakage for her own/the audience’s comfort. Near the very end, there’s a tiny glimmer of her sense of loss. It’s just a glimpse, though. The character wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of seeing more than that.
Smith, with her impeccable technique, gives you just a tiny glimpse of the character’s interior world, and you, the audience member, are wrecked. She shows a little bit of what’s there, and you feel ALL of it. This is what total control looks like. Amateurs are not capable of what Smith does here, with text, subtext, gesture (the moment above with the water glass), backstory (even if not expressed), vocal technique – everything. And yet you don’t feel the control. Her control/technique is invisible. You don’t “see the work”. Smith is like De Niro in that way. Pacino in The Godfather. The character isn’t expressive. Therefore the actor isn’t either. The work has been done so you can feel all this STUFF going on inside, but none of it actually comes out. If Smith had lost control of her technique and broken down into stormy sobs during the monologue, allowing herself to express the underlying emotion, it would be a very different experience. Strangely, catharses sometimes alienate audiences. The actor feels so much there’s little room left for the audience to feel.
Civilians (and this includes many critics) are too impressed by the presence of tears, mistaking visible tears for excellent acting. This reminds me of a story my friend Shelagh told me years ago. Shelagh was in an acting class and a girl was up there doing a monologue, and my GOD she was feeling things. You could see her emotions from the space station. Credulous critics are bowled over by tears because it seems like a magical ability to produce actual tears in a make-believe situation. But it’s not magic. The sobbing student finished the scene and after a long pause the teacher said, “You were feeling everything and I am …. curiously unmoved.”
In Bed Among the Lentils, the character is a very unreliable narrator. The only emotion visible to the naked eye is a coiled contempt swimming in a sea of existential boredom. This toxic brew is the only thing she allows others to see … but then … over the course of the monologue, her rigid facade starts to (very subtly) disintegrate. Only once does she let you see what her public persona is hiding. We may have perceived it all along, misery emanates off her in waves, but the character will be damned if she lets you see any of it.
When the feeling rises in her like a volcano, surprising her as well as us, it’s shattering.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
Here’s a roundup of most of the things I’ve written this year: here on my site, for Rogerebert.com, for my newsletter, and for my new column at Liberties Journal. Every year it’s the same thing. I spend so much time feeling like I’m wasting my time or not working hard enough. Then I put together my year-end roundup and have to give myself a stern talking-to. Here’s what I wrote this year, with links out to the pieces, in case you’re interested.
It’s the birthday of Scotty Moore, Elvis’ first guitarist, who played on all of the Sun tracks, who then moved on to RCA with Elvis, and then on to Hollywood (Elvis was loyal). He died in 2016 at the age of 84. His style was influential and – like all great guitarists – “he” is unmistakable: you can recognize him by his playing. Here is the Rolling Stone obituary for Moore, which gives a good overview of his near-century upon the earth.
Moore was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2000 as part of the inaugural class celebrating sidemen, a category that honored “those musicians who have spent their careers out of the spotlight, performing as backup musicians for major artists on recording sessions and in concert.”
He sits there on that crowded little stage in Elvis’ 1968 comeback special.
The two hadn’t seen one another in years. (Eventually, the Hollywood thing – and being a studio musician for all the soundtracks – was too much of a drag and Scotty moved on. Elvis had Scotty – and DJ Fontana – his original drummer – come back for the TV special. Bill Black, the original stand-up bass player, had died just 3 years before. There’s the moment where Elvis “spontaneously” (please. He always knew exactly what he was doing and why) asks Scotty if they can switch guitars. Elvis had been playing acoustic, and Scotty had his gleaming ’64 Gibson. Elvis wanted to be plugged IN, man. (Peter Guralnick is wonderful on this moment in his Elvis biography: how much it blew everyone’s minds to see Elvis playing electric guitar). And of course, Scotty was a way better guitarist than Elvis, but in the context of the 68 comeback special, it doesn’t matter.
Scotty Moore was such a legend that guitar players from all over the world would make pilgrimages to see him, to talk with him, to play with him.
Listen to Elvis’ first track, “That’s All Right,” recorded on the fly, practically, based on Elvis goofing around in between recording. This is the track that shook the world, that started it all, and listen to what Scotty’s doing in the background. Elvis really couldn’t play the guitar, beyond rudimentary strumming. Scotty’s presence was essential.
After they recorded that song on July 5, 1954, Scotty remarked, “They’re gonna run us out of town for that one.” He knew. He knew they were onto something BIG.
Mark Knopfler, who – along with Eric Clapton, Albert Wood, and a couple of others – did a concert with Scotty Moore (one clip to follow), was interviewed about Scotty Moore.
From Keith Richards’ great autobiography Life, on the first Elvis Sun tracks:
That Elvis LP had all the Sun stuff, with a couple of RCA jobs on it too. It was everything from “That’s All Right,” “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, “Milk Cow Blues Boogie.” I mean, for a guitar player, or a budding guitar player, heaven. But on the other hand, what the hell’s going on there? I might not have wanted to be Elvis, but I wasn’t so sure about Scotty Moore. Scotty Moore was my icon. He was Elvis’s guitar player on all the Sun Records stuff. He’s on “Mystery Train”, he’s on “Baby Let’s Play House”. Now I know the man, I’ve played with him. I know the band. But back then, just being able to get through “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone”, that was the epitome of guitar playing. And then “Mystery Train” and “Money Honey”. I’d have died and gone to heaven just to play like that. How the hell was that done? That’s the stuff I first brought to the johns at Sidcup, playing a borrowed f-hole archtop Höfner. That was before the music led me back into the roots of Elvis and Buddy – back to the blues.
To this day there’s a Scotty Moore lick I still can’t get down and he won’t tell me. Forty-nine years it’s eluded me. He claims he can’t remember the one I’m talking about. It’s not that he won’t show me; he says, “I don’t know which one you mean.” It’s on “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” I think it’s in E major. He has a rundown when it hits the 5 chord, the B down to the A down to the E, which is like a yodeling sort of thing, which I’ve never been quite able to figure. It’s also on “Baby Let’s Play House.” When you get to “But don’t you be nobody’s fool / Now baby, come back, baby …” and right at that last line, the lick is in there. It’s probably some simple trick. But it goes too fast, and also there’s a bunch of notes involved: which finger moves and which one doesn’t? I’ve never heard anybody else pull it off. Creedence Clearwater got a version of this song down, but when it comes to that move, no. And Scotty’s a sly dog. He’s very dry. “Hey, youngster, you’ve got time to figure it out.” Every time I see him, it’s “Learnt that lick yet?”
Happy birthday to one of the greatest sidemen of all time.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
When I interviewed Dan Callahan about his book The Art of American Screen Acting, we discussed Marlene Dietrich. He has been obsessed since college, and also obsessed with trying to put her into words. What exactly is she doing. Why does she get the effects she does? HOW does she do that? Movie magic, okay. Collaboration with Josef von Sternberg, a director absolutely OBSESSED with her, obsessed to the point of emotional torture. Okay. He set her up properly so she could be perceived. But she’s DIFFERENT from other stars of her day (well, they were all different from each other. Now, so many “stars” have a sameness to them. They can interchange roles. Back in the day, though, you couldn’t put Barbara Stanwyck in a Carole Lombard vehicle. You couldn’t swap out Marlene Dietrich for Katharine Hepburn. Or Garbo.)
At any rate, I think Callahan’s chapter on Dietrich in his book is a major piece of writing, since it comes at it from a performance standpoint. He refers to her as “postmodern” – which I found fascinating and which we discussed.
And just for fun, here she is with John Wayne. They had an affair. I mean, God, can’t you tell?
Marlene Dietrich was one of the great sexual personae, to borrow Camille Paglia’s phrase, and taking on Paglia’s idea that all the great personae were (and are) androgynous, an idea Dan discusses as well.
The Blue Angel
by Allen Ginsberg
Marlene Dietrich is singing a lament
for mechanical love.
She leans against a mortarboard tree
on a plateau by the seashore.
She’s a life-sized toy,
the doll of eternity;
her hair is shaped like an abstract hat
made out of white steel.
Her face is powdered, whitewashed and
immobile like a robot.
Jutting out of her temple, by an eye,
is a little white key.
She gazes through dull blue pupils
set in the whites of her eyes.
She closes them, and the key
turns by itself.
She opens her eyes, and they’re blank
like a statue’s in a museum.
Her machine begins to move, the key turns
again, her eyes change, she sings.
—you’d think I would have thought a plan
to end the inner grind,
but not till I have found a man
to occupy my mind.
Marlene Dietrich’s screen test for The Blue Angel
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Jean Toomer was born in 1894 on this day and died in 1967.
Toomer’s family tree encompasses all of pre-and-post-Civil War South: slaves, freemen, black, white. His father, Nathan Toomer, was born into slavery. After the war he continued working for his former master, taking the man’s last name. Nathan Toomer became a farmer and married multiple times. His third wife – Nina Elizabeth Pinchback – was Jean Toomer’s mother. Nina’s father was mixed race, raised by his white planter father, eventually becoming governor of Louisiana (the first Black person in the United States to serve as a governor). During the chaotic Reconstruction era, Democrats made ominous inroads, establishing what would be known as the Jim Crow laws. Toomer’s parents felt which way the wind was blowing in Louisiana and moved to D.C., where they joined the community of wealthy people of color. By this point, Jean had been born. And then Nathan abandoned his wife and child. This event had a huge impact on young Jean, intensified by the issue of his name. Jean Toomer’s birth name was Nathan Pinchback Toomer, but his mother’s family refused to call him “Nathan” (they disapproved of Nathan Senior), and instead called him “Eugene” (his godfather’s name). He only “became” Jean Toomer when he started getting published. He chose a pen name free of all this inherited baggage.
There are interesting questions of identity through all of this. Identity is not solid. Identity is a hundred little tributaries all coming from different sources eventually pouring into the same river. Identity is turmoil, there are rapids, ripples, strong currents, all churning around in one man. Add to this turnoil the era’s timeline, the events and cataclysms shared by the generation who came of age in and around WWI, who experienced the birth of Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, etc.
Jean Toomer attended some all-white schools and some all-black schools. There has been a lot of recent commentary about whether or not he could pass as white, and the degree to which he used it. He did not want to identify himself either way. He said, over and over and over again, that he wasn’t black, he wasn’t white. “American” was how he identified. He bounced around to different colleges, never got a degree, but studied widely and deeply. He got a job as a school principal in Georgia, where he witnessed racism to a degree he hadn’t seen before, at the very same time he discovered the degree to which he could “pass.” This gave him a slightly askance perspective that would inform his writing. While in Georgia, he wrote a series of short impressionistic pieces which would eventually turn into his novel Cane, published in 1923. One of Toomer’s idols was T.S. Eliot, and The Waste Land (published in 1922) had a clear influence on Cane.
The book was well-received, by black critics and white, although its stature wasn’t immediately recognized. (It’s now regarded as a Modernist classic.) Langston Hughes recognized immediately the Toomer’s accomplishment, and name-checked it in his manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Hughes theorized that one of the reasons the book was ignored – or at least not embraced – is that it did not present the “Negro” as white Americans imagined him. Toomer’s vision was three-dimensional. Toomer was rural AND he was Jazz Age urban. Critics had a hard time reconciling these two things, they preferred stricter labels (audiences did too).
In Cane, America is the Southern farmlands and the northern cities, and these geographical areas weren’t strictly separated, there was a lot of movement between the two. Industrialization was wreaking havoc on the South and everything was in flux, including class, race, and sexuality. Cane has the fragmentation of High Modernism, with its blend of narrative and documentary, its fluidity of styles: prose and poetry, vignettes, ballads…all of which give a panoramic view of America as seen through the eyes of someone like Toomer who had lived in the deep South, lived up North, experienced the South through Northern eyes, while not really being a part of either. When the publisher asked Toomer to mention his exact racial makeup for the author’s bio, Toomer was outraged. Toomer was conflicted on the American insistence on prioritizing race, even if it was in a complimentary way (“he is the best Negro writer today,” etc.)
Toomer found American focus on race stifling. He traveled widely, moving to France to study with spiritual guru George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, a big influence on him. Predating the Beats’ spiritual quests by 20+ years, Toomer traveled to India in the late 1930s, seeking spiritual enlightenment. In the early 30s, he married Margery Latimer, a white woman who was a well-known novelist and feminist. Their marriage received a lot of vicious press and they took heat from all sides: Black people considered it a betrayal, whites considered it miscegenation. You can kind of see why Toomer’s overall attitude was, “The hell with all of you.”
His spiritual quest led to him becoming a Quaker. He lapsed into “retirement.”
Here’s one of the most famous passages from Cane, a poem called “Harvest Song.” This is from the Southern-rural section, with its rhythm of slave songs and spirituals, thrumming with repetitive gestures from planting, all reflective in the rhyme. After this, I’ll post something from the Northern-urban section so you can see the difference in style. Cane is dazzling.
Harvest Song
I am a reaper whose muscles set at sun-down. All my oats are cradled.
But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger.
I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it.
I have been in the fields all day. My throat is dry. I hunger.
My eyes are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
I am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack’d fields
of other harvesters.
It would be good to see them . . . crook’d, split, and iron-ring’d handles
of the scythes . . . It would be good to see them, dust-caked and
blind. I hunger.
(Dusk is a strange fear’d sheath their blades are dull’d in.)
My throat is dry. And should I call, a cracked grain like the oats
. . . eoho—
I fear to call. What should they hear me, and offer me their grain,
oats, or wheat or corn? I have been in the fields all day. I fear
I could not taste it. I fear knowledge of my hunger.
My ears are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time.
I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose
throats are also dry.
It would be good to hear their songs . . . reapers of the sweet-stalked
cane, cutters of the corn . . . even though their throats cracked, and
the strangeness of their voices deafened me.
I hunger. My throat is dry. Now that the sun has set and I am chilled.
I fear to call. (Eoho, my brothers!)
I am a reaper. (Eoho!) All my oats are cradled. But I am too fatigued
to bind them. And I hunger. I crack a grain. It has no taste to
it. My throat is dry . . .
O my brothers, I beat my palms, still soft, against the stubble of my
harvesting. (You beat your soft palms, too.) My pain is sweet.
Sweeter than the oats or wheat or corn. It will not bring me
knowledge of my hunger.
Seventh Street
Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,
Bootleggers in silken shirts,
Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.
Seventh Street is a bastard of Prohibition and the War. A crude-boned, soft-skinned wedge of nigger life breathing its loafer air, jazz songs and love, thrusting unconscious rhythms, black reddish blood into the white and whitewashed wood of Washington. Stale soggy wood of Washington. Wedges rust in soggy wood. . . Split it! In two! Again! Shred it! . . the sun. Wedges are brilliant in the sun; ribbons of wet wood dry and blow away. Black reddish blood. Pouring for crude-boned soft-skinned life, who set you flowing? Blood suckers of the War would spin in a frenzy of dizziness if they drank your blood. Prohibition would put a stop to it. Who set you flowing? White and whitewash disappear in blood. Who set you flowing? Flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street, in shanties, brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets? Eddying on the corners? Swirling like a blood-red smoke up where the buzzards fly in heaven? God would not dare to suck black red blood. A Nigger God! He would duck his head in shame and call for the Judgement Day. Who set you flowing?
Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts,
Bootleggers in silken shirts,
Ballooned, zooming Cadillacs,
Whizzing, whizzing down the street-car tracks.
A couple more of his poems, filled with rich imagery, diverse associations from history, fine art, poetry, music, nature.
Portrait in Georgia
Hair–braided chestnut,
coiled like a lyncher’s rope,
Eye–fagots,
Lips–old scars, or the first red blisters,
Breath–the last sweet scent of cane,
And her slim body, white as the ash
of black flesh after flame.
Song of the Son
Pour O pour that parting soul in song,
O pour it in the sawdust glow of night,
Into the velvet pine-smoke air tonight,
And let the valley carry it along.
And let the valley carry it along.
O land and soil, red soil and sweet-gum tree,
So scant of grass, so profligate of pines,
Now just before an epoch’s sun declines
Thy son, in time, I have returned to thee.
Thy son, I have in time returned to thee.
In time, for though the sun is setting on
A song-lit race of slaves, it has not set;
Though late, O soil, it is not too late yet
To catch thy plaintive soul, leaving, soon gone,
Leaving, to catch thy plaintive soul soon gone.
O Negro slaves, dark purple ripened plums,
Squeezed, and bursting in the pine-wood air,
Passing, before they stripped the old tree bare
One plum was saved for me, one seed becomes
An everlasting song, a singing tree,
Caroling softly souls of slavery,
What they were, and what they are to me,
Caroling softly souls of slavery.
QUOTES:
Langston Hughes, from his “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”:
“O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we are,” say the Negroes. “Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,” say the whites. Both would have told Jean Toomer not to write Cane. The colored people did not praise it. Although the critics gave it good reviews, the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the works of Du Bois) Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson it is truly racial.”
Jean Toomer:
I realized with deep regret, that the spirituals, meeting ridicule, would be certain to die out. With Negroes also the trend was towards the small town and then towards the city—-and industry and commerce and machines. The folk-spirit was walking in to die on the modern desert. That spirit was so beautiful. Its death was so tragic. Just this seemed to sum life for me. And this was the feeling I put into Cane. Cane was a swan-song. It was a song of an end.
Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn on “Georgia Dusk”:
The scene is the Deep South in the early twentieth century. The Civil War has receded in time, but its painful legacy remains. Black Americans, now emancipated day laborers, are making their way through an uncertain and still dangerous world. The “Georgia dusk” of Toomer’s title is a moral twilight: fantasies and delusions linger from the antebellum Old South with its genteel, chivalric dreams (compare the sun’s “tournament for flashing gold”. But the tranquil rural routine is marred by bursts of brutality and barbarism: “a feast of moon and men and barking hounds.” Dogs once tracking escaped slaves have become jeering mobs who burn and lynch for sport. It’s a holiday “orgy,” a sadistic mass entertainment. But darkness brings terror for those who are not guests but ritual victims, the main course at the “night’s barbecue.”
Robert Littell, 1923 review of Cane:
“Cane does not remotely resemble any of the familiar, superficial views of the South on which we have been brought up. On the contrary, Mr. Toomer’s view is unfamiliar and bafflingly subterranean, the vision of a poet far more than the account of things seen by a novelist.”
Jean Toomer, letter to his brother:
From three angles, Cane‘s design is a circle. Aesthetically, from simple forms to complex ones, and back to simple forms. Regionally, from the South up into the North, and back into the South again.
Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn on “Georgia Dusk”:
The voice of Toomer’s rueful pastoral is itself a victory over grim reality. After the unsettling opening stanzas, with their hallucinatory assault on the senses, the mood is one of hushed relaxation. The easy, regular rhythms (helped along by the sixth stanzas’s swatches of exapnsive dots) gradually slow our pulse until we attain a meditative serenity. Like Blake’s “London,” “Georgia Dusk” sets anonymous members of the working class against an epic sweep of nature and history. But it exorcises resentment: Toomer will not rage or condemn. As they break for the night, his singers enter an enchanted mental zone where spirit and sensuality commingle. With its strict rhyme scheme and courtly, flowery diction, “Georgia Dusk” more resembles Victorian than modernist poetry. Its style too is enticingly “cane-lipped,” meshing with the spontaneous music making of its stoical, questing characters.
Introduction to the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry:
Other African American poets drew simultaneously on the techniques of Euro-American modernism and of black “folk” culture. In poems of the loosely knit collection Cane (1923), Jean Toomer pays homage to a disappearing African American way of life in the rural south, drawing on the ritualistic repetitions of black oral culture. Sometimes, Toomer takes up and recasts Imagist technique in free verse poems of metaphoric juxtaposition: “Portrait in Georgia” begins, “Hair–braided chetnut, coiled like a lyncher’s rope,” and continues to oscillate violently between a description of a white woman’s face and the lynching of a black man.
Camille Paglia, Break Blow Burn on “Georgia Dusk”:
The main body of “Georgia Dusk” is neatly structured in three groups of linked stanzas. In the first pair of stanzas, the panorama of nature “darkens” and contracts to ominous intimations of passion and confusion. The second pair is set at the sawmill; the third, is the swamp. The concluding stanza is a valediction or blessing, like the climax of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey.”
Poet Kenneth Rexroth:
“Toomer is the first poet to unite folk culture and the elite culture of the white avant-garde, and he accomplishes this difficult task with considerable success. He is without doubt the most important Black poet.”
Gerald Strauss, 2008:
[Cane] is similar to James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), two other thematically related story collections that develop unified and coherent visions of societies. It also echoes Edgar Lee Masters’s poetry collection Spoon River Anthology (1915) … Toomer surely was familiar with the Joyce and Masters books, and he knew Anderson personally.
(Toomer had corresponded with Sherwood Anderson.)
W. E. B. Du Bois, 1924 review of Cane:
Toomer does not impress me as one who knows his Georgia but he does know human beings…I cannot, for the life of me, for instance, see why Toomer could not have made the tragedy of Carma something that I could understand instead of vaguely guess at.”
Gorham Munson:
Toomer has founded his own speech.
Gil Scott-Heron’s “Cane” is based on two of the characters in Toomer’s novel:
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
What an unlikely movie star, on the face of it. He was short and balding. He had a slight speech impediment. He was not classically good-looking in a smooth and/or accessible way. He got his start playing heavies. Gangsters and bad guys. Pre-Code prohibition-era crime movies. He usually was shot dead. Nobody felt bad about it. Stardom was not in the cards. He was a working actor. He had a “look”. Then came The Petrified Forest on Broadway.
Bogart on the far left, five o’clock shadow visible from the cheap seats.
It’s not an overstatement to say Bogart caused an absolute sensation with his performance. It was not Bogart’s debut. He had played small parts on Broadway before, but his reputation early on – if you can believe it – was as the youth sashaying into the parlor saying things like, “Tennis, anyone?” He played pampered prep-school boys. Fascinating. He was not unknown to Broadway audiences, and so nothing could prepare New York for Petrified Forest. This was a theme in Bogart’s life: the shifting personality, the experimentation with his strengths, finding what would “hit” an audience, and the public’s perception changing as he took on deeper and better parts. It’s hard to imagine Bogart saying, “Tennis, anyone?” now.
Petrified Forest launched him into the realm of serious Hollywood players (because, of course, the Broadway production was turned into a film). The character of Duke Mantee was a psychopath. In the film, Bogart seems like an emissary from the future, if you compare to how other “villains” were played at that time. Duke is irredeemable, but you can’t take your eyes off of him. Bogart worked hard on that part, creating Duke from the ground up – how he walked, how he talked, how he DIDN’T talk, Duke’s body language, gestures. Everything had to be perfect.
Bogart in the film of The Petrified Foest
After Petrified Forest, he played heavies. Can we count the number of times he was killed by Edward G. Robinson? He played sidekicks, like in The Roaring Twenties, with James Cagney as the lead. (The phrase “Don’t bogart the joint” – while obviously referring to Bogart’s ubiquitous cigarette – also seems to me to have as its reference the foxhole scene in Roaring Twenties, when Bogart hogs the shared cigarette).
Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney in “The Roaring Twenties”
Bogart did not move on to play leading roles after Petrified Forest. He was second lead. He was in movies with names like San Quentin, King of the Underworld, You Can’t Get Away With Murder, Racket Busters, Crime School – typical Warner Brothers “ripped from the headlines” fare. He was shot in shabby 1920s hotel rooms, he staggered to the couch, he fell down the stairs. He was a bootlegger, a conman, a thief. He was also, incidentally, expendable. We might cry when Cagney died, but we didn’t care when Bogart died.
It’s interesting to watchthese “in between” movies in the decade of the 30s, like Bullets or Ballots and others, when Bogart plays second-banana. It helps underline what might not be obvious: his giant mythic stardom was NOT guaranteed, or obvious. He was not being groomed for it, and it was not what the public wanted from him. His Duke Mantee made such a huge impression: Bogart could have had a whole career playing villains and hypnotic bad guys … but look at what happened! Look at how things shifted! Amazing!
A couple of parts paved the way for Casablanca.
In High Sierra, he plays Roy Earle, another villain, with a crucial difference in shading. In High Sierra, his criminal has a soft underbelly, a hidden tenderness. You rooted for him (in a way you did NOT root for Duke Mantee). John Huston wrote the screenplay for High Sierra (and the same year was given his first directing opportunity, The Maltese Falcon. Bogart, having already gotten to know Huston on High Sierra, decided to take a chance with the untried director, which Huston appreciated). Roy Earle in High Sierra is one of Bogart’s best roles, and it’s important as a transition in his career: we can see the other persona, the one we all now know, start to be developed: the wry-faced cynical guy, but with a mother-lode of moral character within. A crucial Bogart VIBE is his characters don’t want to be congratulated for his moral character: he’d rather you not notice it at all. In this way, Bogart resists sentimentality.
Ida Lupino and Humphrey Bogart in “High Sierra”
In High Sierra, Roy ends up doing the right thing, even though it means he’ll lose the girl. Such a departure from Duke Mantee! I love to look at a career and see fortuitous turns, turns it didn’t HAVE to take. Katharine Hepburn was a star leading lady immediately. It was instantly apparent she could never play a sidekick. As weird as she was, she had to be center stage. It was different with Bogart. You get the sense with Bogart that it might NOT have happened. Bogart was not an obvious movie star and his journey is full of accidents, coincidences, and giant leaps of faith.
His Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon solidified his position as a valid leading man, which really worked since the story was a noir, and so his tough-ness could still operate. Whatever softness Bogart had was expressed in spite of himself and that really works for him.
The roles Bogart got after Maltese Falcon were after America’s entry into the war in Europe: Across the Pacific and Casablanca … he was now a valid lead, and one of the most compelling movie stars working at the time.
Humphrey Bogart in “The Caine Mutiny”
Later in his career, he could “experiment”, in films like The Caine Mutiny and The African Queen, not to mention the mighty In a Lonely Place. You could see it in Treasure of the Sierra Madre too. He was so good when he was close to madness, or tipping right over into paranoia, mania, greed – or, In a Lonely Place – a scary obsessed stalker. In a Lonely Place is his very best. He has a moment where he lashes out and knocks the glasses off of his agent’s face and it is painful to watch.
Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in “In a Lonely Place”
Here’s an excerpt from Nathaniel Benchley’s Humphrey Bogart about Bogart’s performance on Broadway in Petrified Forest: (KUDOS are due Leslie Howard, as is obvious in this excerpt):
When Humphrey Bogart walked onstage as Duke Mantee there was a stir in the audience, an audible intake of breath. He was a criminal; he walked with a convict’s shuffling gait, and his hands dangled in front of him as though held there by the memory of manacles. His voice was flat and his eyes were as cold as a snake’s; he bore an eerie resemblance to John Dillinger, to whom killing a person meant no more than breaking a matchstick. Sherwood’s summary of Mantee in the stage directions described Bogart perfectly: “He is well-built but stoop-sholudered, with a vaguely thoughtful, saturnine face. He is about thirty-five, and, if he hadn’t elected to take up banditry, he might have been a fine leftfielder. There is, about him, one quality of resemblance to Alan Squier [the hero]: he too is unmistakably doomed.”
The play opened at the Broadhurts Theatre on January 7, 1935, with Leslie Howard starring as Alan Squier and Peggy Conklin as Gabrielle Maple, the heroine. (For those interested in trivia, the part of Boze Hertzlinger, which had almost been Humphrey’s, was played by a youth named Frank Milan.) …
The critics threw their hats in the air. Brooks Atkinson wrote that “Robert Sherwood’s new play is a peach … a roaring Western melodrama … Humphrey Bogart does the best work of his career as the motorized guerrilla,” and Robert Garland said that “Humphrey Bogart is gangster Mantee to the tip of his sawed-off shotgun.” The play, clearly, was in for a long run…
Once rehearsals were under way, Humphrey … concentrated on becoming as convincing a gangster as possible. He walked, talked, and lived Duke Mantee; he wore a felt hat with the brim turned down, he talked out of the side of his mouth, and he built a set of mannerisms to go with the character. There are very few shows that don’t have some sort of trouble or conflict prior to (and sometimes after) opening night, but Hopkins had chosen his cast well. A short, round, brown, slightly bowlegged little man, he quietly mesmerized the actors into doing what he wanted, and since in many instances he had intuitively cast them against type (as in Bogart’s case) the results were often electric. He told them that he collected casts the way other people collect books, and that this was the perfect cast; there was not one person in it he’d think of changing…
Their first night in front of an audience was in mid-December at the Parsons Theatre in Hartford, and there were two things that astonished the company. One was the amount of humor in the script – lines took on a new meaning, which they’d missed in rehearsal – and the other was the literal gasp that went up when Humphrey made his entrance. Dillinger was very much in the news at the time, having recently escaped from prison, and to some people it seemed that he had just walked onstage. The prison pallor, the two-day’s beard, the gait, the mannerisms – everything about him was menacing, evil, and real. The company was to hear that gasp every night throughout the run, but the first one was the one they still remember. They went on to Boston, where they opened Christmas Eve, and then to New York in January. They played until June 29 of that year.
For two reasons, Humphrey disdained the use of makeup. The first was that the desired effect of prison pallor made makeup unnecessary, and the second was that to fake a two-days’ beard would be obvious. His was his real beard, and he kept it trimmed during the week with electric clippers, thereby becoming one of the earlier electric shavers. After the Saturday night performance he would shave, singing and lathering himself and having a grand old time, and he would come into Miss Leeming’s dressing room, which adjoined his, and spread his good cheer around with a lavish hand. She remembers him as being generally quiet and gentle, and scrupulous in his behavior to the female members of the cast – a trait that was by no means shared by the star.
The play could have run for a much longer time, but Howard grew weary of playing it. He had enough muscle with the producers (he was a coproducer with Gilbert Miller, in association with Hopkins) so that he could forbid anyone else to take his part, and also to prevent its going on the road. Warners had by this time bought it, and Howard announced that a road tour might hurt the box office for the picture. So they closed the end of June, while still doing booming business; Howard went home to England, and the others went looking for jobs…
One of the good things Howard did, however, was to say that he would do the picture only if Bogart played Mantee, and he was as good as his word. Warners had Edward G. Robinson under contract, and saw no sense in using someone they’d already had a few unspectacular dealings with, so they blithely announced they were making the picture with Howard and Robinson, and with Bette Davis playing Gabrielle. Humphrey, understandably upset, cabled the news to Howard, and Howard cabled Warners that without Bogart he wouldn’t play. They gave in, and Humphrey was signed to another Warner Brothers contract.
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I’ve been really looking forward to this one, especially because it’s what is known as “divisive”. It’s fun to finally see it and make up my own mind. I’ve been writing about Harris Dickinson since he first arrived in 2017’s Beach Rats and have reviewed most of his films (Beach Rats, Postcards from London, Matthias and Maxime, Scrapper) – and this is definitely not just a culmination but the opportunity to show his very unique stuff on a much wider stage. One of the most exciting young new actors working today. Along with Paul Mescal.
At any rate. I dug Babygirl. It’s funny. I have some experience in this sort of thing, and the film captures a certain VIBE, which may not be comprehensible to people from the outside. “Female masochism is just a male fantasy,” says the husband in Babygirl. Uh-huh. Okay. And that’s what I’ll say about THAT. So many films like this position the kinky sex as dangerous and threatening to the status quo, to the conventional, the expected life-path for straight people. But if you’ve never fit in with the status quo, if you don’t value the rules of the status quo because they don’t work for you (like, at all), then all other kinds of things are possible. Like fun. And funniness. And yeah, there IS a status quo in Babygirl but the film positions it in an interesting way.
I read a review where the (male) critic referred to the relationship between the CEO and her intern as “toxic”. Maybe to you, ya normie. The only “toxic” relationship here was between the CEO and her husband.
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When the avant-garde filmmaker (he referred to himself often as a “film diarist” died at the age of 96, the outpouring of tributes was overwhelming (and, in many cases, instructive. There was a lot I didn’t know.) My fellow NYFFC member Bilge Ebiri interviewed Mekas in 2017 for the Village Voice – a fantastic interview (and incidentally, Mekas was the paper’s first film critic). There is so much to be said about Mekas, his life, his work, his vision. He moved along with the technology, keeping up to date, and spoke eloquently on how different kinds of cameras affected his approach and the result. He worked until the end. He ran his own website, and uploaded his fragmentary clips on a daily basis. He was the essence of independent.
For my purposes, here on this personal blog, I gotta write about Jonas Mekas and Elvis.
In 1972, Mekas attended the final show of Elvis Presley’s 4-day gig at Madison Square Garden (the 4 shows sold out in minutes, unheard-of at the time). Mekas brought with him a 16mm camera, smuggled under his jacket. He shot what he could. He did not have official clearance to be filming this epic event. The footage he got was wild and chaotic. There is no sound. He did not make any attempts to sync up anything. He said, “Some of it was filmed normal 24fps speed, some not.”
Decades later, in 2001, the Viennale International Film Festival asked Jonas Mekas to prepare a trailer for the festival. He could do whatever he wanted with the trailer, obviously, because he’s Jonas Mekas. “Go for it” was the basic assignment.
Mekas used his Elvis footage.
He spoke later about why he created the trailer in the way that he did:
I was lucky enough to see Elvis Presley’s final concert at Madison Square Garden in June 1972. Usually, you are not allowed to bring a camera to a concert. But the audience and the entire event were so wild that no one paid any attention to me. Over the years I watched the footage again and again. Then the Viennale called and I immediately thought of my Elvis material. The only problem was that I didn’t know what kind of musical soundtrack to use. I tried everything and was close to giving up when I happened to hear a Viennese waltz on the radio. That was it! What could be better – or funnier – than Elvis and Strauss?
“What could be better – or funnier – than Elvis and Strauss?” — Jonas Mekas
The trailer is so beautiful, and weirdly emotional.
This post stands as just a small portion of gratitude to Jonas Mekas from a hardcore Elvis fan.
Thank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0, if you’d like to subscribe.
“Cornell is superb. I first saw the Medici Slot Machine when I was in college. Oh, I loved it. To think one could have bought some of those things then. He was very strange. He got crushes on opera singers and ballet dancers. When I looked at his show in New York two years ago I nearly fainted, because one of my favorite books is a book he liked and used. It’s a little book by an English scientist who wrote for children about soap bubbles [Soap Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces Which Mold Them, by Sir CV Noys, 1889]. His sister began writing me after she read Octavio Paz’s poem for Cornell that I translated. (She doesn’t read Spanish.) She sent me a German-French grammar that apparently he meant to do something with and never did. A lot of the pages were folded over and they’re all made into star patterns with red ink around them … He lived in what was called Elysian Park. That’s an awfully strange address to have.”
— Elizabeth Bishop (Octavio Paz’s poem about Cornell at end of post)
Living in “Elysian Park” on a street called “Utopia Parkway”, as Joseph Cornell did for the entirety of his life, is definitely a “strange address to have”, and a fitting one for this dreamy dream-like obsessive artist, who spent his life constructing eerie beautiful little boxes(worlds) filled with everyday objects (marbles, clay pipes, glass jars) that became magical talismans when placed inside the boxes. Here’s one of his most famous boxes, the one Bishop mentions in the excerpt above:
Medici Slot Machine
Cornell was indeed a very “reserved” man (although his art was anything but), and the publication of his journals and art notebooks – Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files – is a fascinating insight into his mind (even more so than Deborah Solomon’s biography, the only biography of Cornell that we have – so it’s also worth the read, although her interpretation of his art leaves much to be desired.). The problem with Solomon’s biography is not Solomon. Or, it’s not only Solomon, who mused that Cornell loved to use clay pipes in his boxes because they “symbolized impotence”.
Much much more about one of my favorite artists, below the jump.
“My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might be fairly urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigor and abundance than Browning; yet, perhaps because I have more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn, as they have had theirs.” — Matthew Arnold, letter to his mother
If you have any inclination – as I do – of trying to educate yourself on the continuum of literature – like, who led to what, and who inspired who, and what outside forces created the literature of such-and-such an era – then in your reading you will encounter the words of Matthew Arnold. He was a poet, and his “Dover Beach” is anthologized, and his most famous poem, and the one we had to read in high school. But he was also a critic, an exacting and severe man, who dug into the works of his contemporaries, as well as the past masters, in order to understand and explain what it is they were doing. His comments are invaluable, even if you disagree with them.
Born on this day in 1822, Arnold came from an interesting background. He was not a member of the elite. His father was a headmaster at a school. (Arnold himself would go on to be Inspector of Schools, appointed in 1851). Like father, like son. A blessing and a curse. Arnold was very father-dominated, even more so after his father died. Arnold was ambitious. His dreams were huge. And, hell, with the space of time, one can say “Listen, you made it into the canon with ‘Dover Beach.’ Not too many people writing poetry today will still be read literally 150 years later.”
, on the first Elvis Sun tracks:
– is a fascinating insight into his mind (even more so than Deborah Solomon’s biography, the only biography of Cornell that we have – so it’s also worth the read, although her interpretation of his art leaves much to be desired.). The problem with Solomon’s biography is not Solomon. Or, it’s not only Solomon, who mused that Cornell loved to use clay pipes in his boxes because they “symbolized impotence”. 
