Lizabeth Scott, of the smoky voice, the tough hard eyes, the lean body with beautiful dangerous curves, has died at the age of 92.
Hers was not a lengthy career and it petered out a bit after the heyday of noir, although she kept working up until 1972.
She gave memorable performances in great noirs, such as Dead Reckoning with Bogart, Pitfall, I Walk Alone, and Dark City. Her final film was the wonderful Pulp in 1972, starring Michael Caine and Mickey Rooney. If you saw her once, you never forgot her.
I love the quote from Scott in The Hollywood Reporter about film noir:
The films that I had seen growing up were always, ‘Boy meets girl, boy ends up marrying girl, and they go off into the sunset.’ And suddenly [in the 1940s], psychology was taking a grasp on society in America. That’s when they got into these psychological, emotional things that people feel. That was the feeling of film noir. … It was a new realm, something very exiting, because you were coming closer and closer to reality.
Scott was another one of producer Hal Wallis’ contracts, and he put her in Loving You, Elvis’ second film, about a simple country delivery boy who takes the music world by storm. A rags-to-riches. Unlike Love Me Tender, Presley’s debut, which was a period piece, placing Elvis in an established ensemble, Loving You was an Elvis vehicle, created specifically for him, commenting on his impact in the culture. Lizabeth Scott, smooth and silky as well as hard-bitten and relentless, plays the press agent who discovers him singing at a country fair. Dollar bills spin in her eyes. Lust also spins. So they begin a partnership, with her taking him to the top, and … subtly … with the expectation that he will re-pay her in return. It’s subversive and strange, and Elvis plays the scenes with her beautifully, treating her with old-school Southern manners, filled with gratitude for all she has done for him, but not sure if he wants to … you know … sleep with her.
Additionally, she tries to turn him into something he’s not, forcing him to wear skin-tight faux cowboy outfits, basically turning him into a gimmick. A gimmick that is a slam-dunk with audiences. Elvis gives one of the great camp (and I mean that as a compliment) performances in his career, and in any career, in the “cowboy” number.
Conflict ensues. Will he be able to be a star on his own terms? Will she let him do his own thing? Lizabeth Scott basically plays the female Colonel Tom Parker in Loving You.
It’s a really good movie, and she’s terrific in it. I had only seen her in black-and-white movies when I saw Loving You, and she seemed to have a face and eyes born for black-and-white. My friend Kent observed that to see her in color here, the silvery hair, the white shirts, the pale skin, all in contrast with Elvis’ pitch-black hair (dyed for this film, and he kept it that way), and bright red shirts, bright green shirts, her sleek candy-colored sports car … She’s to die for. They make a great couple onscreen.
And see her other films, if you haven’t already. Definitely see Dead Reckoning and Pulp.
A Memory Lane Re-Post, Put Up Again In Honor of My Friend Phil’s Birthday. I Love You, Phil!
Me, Kenny, Phil, and Ann Marie, in the photo booth at Lounge Ax in Chicago. On a “Pat night”.
There are people in our lives associated with a very specific time and place. And that’s okay. But I feel lucky that some of those relationships have moved forward into the present day. Continuity. I’m a big fan.
One of the most specific times in my life, so much so that it is practically an anomaly, was living in Chicago and participating in the ritual of going to the regular Monday night Pat McCurdy shows at Lounge Ax and also then singing with Pat McCurdy and becoming a tiny bit famous, at least in that small world, and that whole crazy Ann-Margret time of my life. It’s like something drowned and captured in amber, an Atlantis, but … it did actually happen. I have the photographs to prove it.
The “Pat McCurdy crowd” are all friends on Facebook, and we’ve all moved on from those wild sleepless nights in Chicago so long ago, when Monday night at Lounge Ax was THE place to be, and we were all there, come hell or highwater, year after year after year.
Once I stopped going to Pat shows, I lost contact with a lot of people. This was before the days of Facebook, or even cell phones. I moved to New York. That was that. But slowly, some of us have found one another again. Phil and I have found one another.
The “Pat McCurdy crowd” was a gaggle of people who convened at Lounge Ax every Monday. Lounge Ax was right across from the Biograph Theatre, and so often, after emerging from a Pat show, we would go into the alley beside the Biograph, at 1 o’clock in the morning, and re-enact John Dillinger’s death. Taking turns being Dillinger or the Lady in Red. We would whoop it up “at Pat” and then go out to a bar afterwards and play the jukebox, play some pinball, yell and scream and laugh, and then stumble home at 3 a.m. with our respective significant others. Only to do it all again the following Monday. We had no Internet. No cell phones. We just knew where to find each other. We always knew where we would be on any given Monday.
One summer, Pat McCurdy hired four of us – me, Phil, Kenny, and Ann Marie, see above photos – to perform with him at the Milwaukee Summer Fest. It was an enormous undertaking, hilarious in the extreme, it involved a very complicated process of giving names and checking in and it was personally a very important time in my life, but I will try to be discreet for a change. Everything changed for me that weekend. I made some decisions that weekend that ended up having vast repercussions, fallout that I couldn’t foresee at the time.
On the flipside, it was, hands down, the most fun I have ever had in my life. Pat and I holed ourselves up in a little Milwaukee recording studio one sunny afternoon and recorded our duet (which appears on his CD Showtunes). And at night we performed for 3,000 drunken people at Summer Fest. I had a solo, the song I always sang with Pat, and I wore a black bustier, biker shorts, combat boots, and a black derby. Where I got the cajones, you’ll have to ask the entertainment gods. At one point during the show, after I sang the song, I had the unreal experience of having 3,000 drunk Wisconsin residents chant my name over and over, like I was a dictator or a Pharaoh. That’s as famous as I have ever felt.
Imitating Madonna in Truth or Dare, Pat gathered us all for a prayer circle before each show. The four of us were so excited it was EPIC for us. Pat was more quietly amused about it all. He had played such crowds many times before. Our prayers were a mixture of manic joking and intense sincerity. One moment I remember: we were all holding hands in a circle, a la Madonna and her dancers. I was holding hands with Pat. I started my prayer, in my bustier and derby hat, and it was an earnest moment of thankfulness for me, and Pat was looking down at me as I prayed, and here is what happened.
Me: “Dear God, thank you so much for this great experience, with these great friends. We are so happy to all be here–”
Pat: (interrupting, he couldn’t help it) “Sheila, you are stacked.”
So much for my prayer.
There is a photograph of me backstage after one of the performances that captures in all its blurry chaos, the high of those nights. (It is a strange photo that I cannot sufficiently explain, and I am also sort of in my underwear. Actually, I am totally in my underwear. In public.) The “PAT” spelled out behind me was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Before the weekend in Milwaukee, Phil and I traveled with a big group of people to spend a weekend at Kenny’s family farm out in the wilds of Wisconsin. We were at the farm for three days or so, before we trekked into Milwaukee to join up with Pat at the Summer Fest.
About 15 of us convened at Kenny’s farm. Tents were erected in the yard, we crashed all over the house. It was an unforgettable weekend. I only knew three of the guys there – everyone else was new to me, but the 15 of us clicked as a group. Many of us were actors, of course, but there were plenty who were not, and everyone shared a sense of whimsy and fun that made the entire weekend a nonstop laugh-riot. We were gay and straight, men and women, and we somehow mind-melded into one continuous organism. You know how it happens that way sometimes? Magic. We cooked mounds of food. There was too much pasta salad to feed an entire army, let alone 15 people, and so periodically one of us would get on the microphone and blast our voice out over the grounds saying, “Yes, there is a Pasta Salad Blue Plate Special going on right now … Please … I beg you … come eat more of this shit … we need to finish it …”
I took long runs through the countryside, returning to the house drenched in sweat. We played volleyball. We did nothing. We took naps. It was so awesome. We were kids, really, but we knew how to organize a weekend.
There was one notorious incident when the house ran out of food (including pasta salad) and so we all decided to travel, via caravan of cars, into the town about 10 minutes away. Many people had been drinking all day, so there was much drunkenness exacerbated by panicked hunger. A couple of us (including myself: I wasn’t drinking at all at that time in my life since it would interfere with my fitness regimen which I was devoted to with the heat of 1000 suns) were designated drivers. So I got behind the wheel with a bunch of drunken yahoos (ie: my dear friends) in the back seat and headed into town.
I was pulled over by a cop for going 55 in a 25 mile-an-hour zone, which wouldn’t have been that big a deal except for the fact that I had five wasted men, all of whom HAD BEERS IN THEIR HANDS, crowded in the car with me. One of them had been taking a huge swig of the beer just as I careened by the cop car. The cop gave us a hard time (naturally), but it was all softened since Kenny grew up in the town, and knew the cop, and the cop knew his Aunt Sally, or whatever. But still, they made me drive to the station where I had to take a breathalizer test. We had been DESPERATE for food, having eaten all the food in the house, and the cops in the station treated our predicament with some bemusement, giving us suggestions on good places to eat (as I blew into the breathalizer machine). “Have you tried the bowling alley? They have great burgers.” (I kept blowing into the machine.) “There’s a fireman’s picnic down the road aways … might find some food there.” My friends Phil and Kenny stood on either side of me, rubbing my back soothingly as I nervously blew into the breathalyzer. I hadn’t had alcohol in weeks, but I do have a guilty conscience so I was sure that SOME of that would show up in the results.
There Phil and Kenny were, actually wasted, rubbing my back, saying, “You’re doing so good, Sheila …”
I got a speeding ticket, that’s all, and then we went to meet up with the rest of our friends, who were at the bowling alley, eating. And freaking out because they had seen us over at the side of the road with the cop car. More hilarity. Ah, youth.
Kenny’s family had a yearly farm ritual, which he introduced to us as a group activity. Here is how it worked:
–Buy a rocket, one that you can launch.
–Go to the dollar store and buy paints and brushes.
–Spend a leisurely day painting the rocket together. Make it flashy, make it fabulous.
–At sunset, put on funny hats (there was a box of them in the closet) and walk down the dirt road to the nearest field to launch the rocket off.
–Wander through the field looking for all the pieces.
There we were, strangers to one another, strangers to Kenny’s family, but we all fully embraced the ritual. We were kids in our mid-20s, but we spent hours huddled over that rocket, detailing it, painting slogans on it … and then, at happy hour time, someone made a vat of cocktails, we all got drinks (mine was virgin!), we all put on funny hats and we trooped down the road to launch the rocket off.
I don’t know why that night stays so vivid in my memory.
I wonder if it is because I took so many pictures of it. Memory is a funny thing that way. But the night was beautiful, a real country night, with crickets chirping and the air filled with the scent of hay and cut grass. The company was good, the mood rather hilarious and ribald. I had a huge girl-crush on one of the girls there (take a wild guess which one in the photos below), and I have to say I still really like the pictures I took. They capture the feel of the weekend.
If you see anyone wearing a white T-shirt with a strange cartoony face on it (and there are many), that is a Pat McCurdy Tshirt, cartoons by Pat McCurdy. Everyone at that house was a serious Pat-head.
Maybe I also remember that weekend so vividly because everything was about to fall apart. I would stop going to Pat shows. I would lose track of that crowd. I would throw myself into a relationship with Michael in 2 month’s time (I didn’t even know Michael existed during the Milwaukee Summer Fest weekend, which seems incredible to me now: there was a time when Michael didn’t exist for me?). I would move from Chicago in less than a year’s time, to New York City, much of my decision to move having to do with what went down during this particular Milwaukee Summer Fest weekend. Or at least: what it revealed to me and how it all played out. It was a potent time, full of import – none of which I interpreted correctly. I guess that’s life.
Ultimately, what really remains, though, is the memory of that group of people at the farm, a respite, an idyll, the warm sun on our backs, the leisurely energy on the porch, the rock-solid comforting knowledge that you had nowhere else on earth you would rather be, and none of us had to be anywhere else anyway, our obligations were minimal. What remains is the cool twilight air, the shadows lengthening as we wandered through the big empty fields, looking for the pieces of our rocket that had launched up into the empty air, blazing with color.
Happy birthday, Phil. I love you. I’m so glad our friendship was not just a “time and place” kind of thing. Go check out Phil’s blog, Love, a Lawn and a Labrador to see what he’s all about. Wonderful writer, wonderful man.
On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
My father gave me this beautiful volume in hard-cover. I refer to it all the time, one of the most important books in my library. It is a collection of prose writing from Seamus Heaney from 1971 to 2001. There are memoir-type pieces, as well as lengthy analysis of different poets and authors. Some of his wonderful book reviews are also included (I always kept my eyes peeled when he was alive for his byline. You knew it would be something good.) A lot of the people he writes about I am familiar with, but then there are those gaps in my reading, gaps for no reason other than life is short and I can’t get to everything. But he makes you want to pick up whatever book it is he discusses and experience it for yourself. There is some overlap in content with The Redress of Poetry.
There are personal essays, about his youth, the many aspects of it: the birth of the language issue in his head, at first buried but then more and more clear, the political, the explosion in the North of Ireland and how he experienced it, the trauma of it (all aspects of it) – but also his discovery of literature, his early encounters with the poets and authors who showed him the way.
While Heaney will always be remembered mainly for his poems, the amount of prose he put out there is overwhelming. The scope of his reference points. His ability to see connections, to unearth similarities, to draw from his vast store of knowledge in the process of writing in order to find the perfect analogy, a connection that will crack his topic open. He does it repeatedly. It makes one feel like a dumbass. I treasure that, because it reminds me of how much there still is to learn, how wonderful growth of this kind is.
The book opens with a series of essays about Heaney’s childhood. I love how he talks about the associations he made, as children do – this object/landscape/smell reminded him of time/place/era, and this object/landscape/smell somehow opened up the world for him … so when he sees THIS object/landscape/smell again he always thinks of such-and-such. His essays are full of those sorts of memories, things that we all experience as children but that he is able to make explicit and beautiful. This is the material poets work with. His memories of Belfast in the early 1970s are harrowing (he went into that a lot in his Nobel lecture), and Finders Keepers is a very political book. Things like language is political in Northern Ireland. The accepted literary canon is political. Book publishing is political. Heaney grew up in a British state, but he knew, somewhere, that he was different. Catholics were shut out of job opportunities, economic growth, and, on another level that was very pertinent to him, there was no sense of official Irish-ness in Northern Ireland. Poets who were born there, who identified as Irish, were still looped in with British-ness. He, and his group (called, casually, “The Group”), poets who started publishing the 60s and 70s, were devoted to carving out a little space for themselves, an Irish space, some breathing room. They all went at it in different ways. And then 1968 came. And the horrible 70s. And the position of poets from Northern Ireland became political. Everyone was meant to “weigh in.” You couldn’t write a poem without it being connected to politics. Heaney writes a lot about that too. As we move along, I’ll excerpt some of that.
This is an essay on T.S. Eliot. Eliot was in the canon, beneath only Yeats and Joyce. He was so entrenched in the establishment that his poems were like monuments in an open field, commemorating something mysterious, something school-children had to learn about. So there was THAT barrier to “getting into” Eliot. He was just so massively respected that people treated him with awe and reverence, and that doesn’t leave a lot of room for a school kid having to read “The Waste Land.” Heaney is very honest about all of that. He writes about it in the essay, and he writes about how the way Eliot’s poems were taught were in a strictly historical/social context, i.e. With the cataclysm of WWII, certainties shattered, and Eliot’s poems are about that. Yes. Of course. I learned that in high school about T.S. Eliot, too.
But the surrounding context of Eliot’s world doesn’t help all that much with understanding the poems. Heaney struggled with it. There seemed to be a barrier between him and Eliot. Eliot’s stuff was not accessible to him. Some of it seemed purposefully obscure. He couldn’t crack into the poems. They remained closed, out of reach, glorious accomplishments everyone agreed … but WHY, Heaney wanted to know. He was intimidated by Eliot. He was such a massive figure. What is there to be “learned” from Eliot? And HOW to learn it, when the way he is discussed seems to act automatically as a barrier to any kind of deeper understanding?
Eliot requires patience and submission. That’s true. He can be bafflingly private with his associations. That’s part of it.
Heaney had the sense as a young lad, and then older, when he had to teach Eliot in his classes, that he was in the presence of something so genius that it was way way BEYOND him. I’ve had such experiences, as I am sure we all have. There’s a chapter in Ulysses that, honestly, I realize I am not educated enough to understand. Doesn’t mean I didn’t read every word, but there is a definite feeling of inferiority in the attempt. An almost helpless I will never catch up feeling. This type of thing is what annoys those who sneer about “elitism”, and is something I used to experience in the old days on my site when I dared to write about Joyce with enthusiasm and familiarity. “Tom Clancy’s good enough for me,” quipped one douchebag. As though it’s “either/or,” as though me writing about Joyce was somehow an indictment of him. So silly. I was embarrassed for that guy for his comment. Choose limitations! Have at it!
Anyway, my Eliot thing had to do with Cats, as well as his use of adjectives in “Love Song of Alfred J. Profrock,” something I couldn’t quite understand or verbalize, but I knew that the imagery in that poem completely transported me. I had ZERO idea what he was talking about and it didn’t seem to matter.
And that seems to be part of Heaney’s part, in terms of Eliot’s actual language.
I’ll let him have at it now. In the preceding paragraph, Heaney quotes this excerpt from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
All this is extremely interesting to remember now, for it persuades me that what is to be learned from Eliot is the double-edged nature of poetic reality: first encountered as a strange fact of culture, poetry is internalized over the years until it becomes, as they say, second nature. Poetry that was originally beyond you, generating the need to understand and overcome its strangeness, becomes in the end a familiar path within you, a grain along which your imagination opens pleasurably backwards towards an origin and a seclusion. Your last state is therefore a thousand times better than your first, for the experience of poetry is one which truly deepens and fortifies itself with reenactment. I now know, for example, that I love the lines quoted above because of the pitch of their music, their nerve-end tremulousness, their treble in the helix of the ear. Even so, I cannot with my voice make the physical sound that would be the equivalent of what I hear on my inner ear; and the ability to acknowledge that very knowledge, the confidence to affirm that there is a reality to poetry which is unspeakable and for that very reason all the more piercing, that ability and that confidence are largely based upon a reading of Eliot.
Of course, the rare music of ‘The Hollow Men’ was never mentioned in school. Disillusion was what we heard about. Loss of faith. The lukewarm spirit. The modern world. Nor do I remember much attention being given to the cadence, or much attempt being made to encourage us to hear rather than abstract a meaning. What we heard, in fact, was what gave us then a kind of herd laughter: the eccentric, emphatic enunciations of our teacher, who came down heavily on certain syllables and gave an undue weight to the HOLlow men, the STUFFED men. And needless to say, in a class of thirty boys, in an atmosphere of socks and sex and sniggers, stuffed men and prickly pears and bangs and whimpers did not elevate the mood or induce the condition of stillness which is the ideally desirable one if we are to be receptive to this poet’s bat-frequency.
I was never caught up by Eliot, never taken over and shown to myself by his work, my ear never pulled outside in by what it heard in him. Numerous readers have testified to this sudden kind of conversion, when the whole being is flushed by a great stroke of poetry, and this did indeed happen to me when I read Gerard Manley Hopkins. From the start something in my make-up was always ready to follow the antique flute of sensuous writing, yet when this kind of writing made its appearance in Eliot – in Ash Wednesday, for instance – its very plenitude was meant to render its beauty questionable. It signaled a distraction from the way of purgation:
At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs’s fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.
The fact that within the finer tone and stricter disciplines of Eliot’s poetry, these lines represented what he would later call ‘the deception of the thrust,’ did not prevent me from being deceived into relishing them. And in that relish two things were combined. First of all, a single unbewildering image was presented. To read the passage was to look across a deep lucidity towards a shaggy solidity, as if in a Renaissance painting of the Annunciation the window of the Virgin’s chamber opened upon a scene of vegetal and carnal riot. Second, the language of the lines called in a direct way, in a way that indeed skirted the parodic, upon the traditional language of poetry. Antique figure. Maytime. Hawthorn. Flute. Blue and green. The pleasures of recollection were all there. The consolations of the familiar. So that combination of composed dramatic scene and consciously deployed poetic diction appealed to the neophyte reader in me. To express the appeal by its negatives, the poetry was not obscure, neither in what it was describing nor in the language that did the describing. It fitted happily my expectations of what poetry might be: what unfitted it was all that other stuff in Ash Wednesday about leopards and bones and violet and violet. That scared me off, made me feel small and embarrassed. I wanted to call on the Mother of Readers to have mercy on me, to come quick, make sense of it, give me the pacifier of a paraphrasable meaning and a recognizable, firmed-up setting:
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live?
My panic in the face of these lovely lines was not just schoolboy panic. It descended again in my late twenties when I had to lecture on Ash Wednesday as part of a course for undergraduates at Queen’s University, Belfast. I had no access to the only reliable source for such teaching, namely, the experience of having felt the poem come home, memorably and irrefutably, so the lecture was one of the most unnerving forty-five minutes of my life.
— I got my haircut yesterday. I love my stylist. She’s awesome. A commercial for the 50 Shades of Gray movie came on the radio and she said, “I can’t wait to see this.” I asked her if she read the book. (I haven’t. But I stick up for it because I am super-annoyed at all the worried think-pieces about what it all MEANS. Newsflash, what it means is that women like sex, too, and like to fantasize about exciting – to them – sex. I know. Groundbreaking. There aren’t 500 worried think-pieces about why every GI put up a picture of Betty Grable while he was at basic training or why the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition is so looked forward to. It’s because men enjoy boobs and curves and like to fantasize about sex. I know. Revelatory. For what it’s worth, I know that things like the swimsuit issue have generated some worried think-pieces, although nothing to the level of what 50 Shades has brought about. It’s the volume of commentary that is so illuminating. So. No. I have not read the book, nor will I, but I think it’s great that so many women like it, let your fantasies flow, sisters, and I think people snickering at it and making fun of the women who love it are in the same category as people who were contemptuous of Elvis because his main fan base were screaming girls. You’re just pissed off they’re not screaming about you, you’re just pissed off that women are expressing dissatisfaction with boring lazy sex and maybe want a bit more. SO. I am a 50 Shades apologist, and I haven’t even read the damn thing.) My stylist was listening to the Audiobook during her commutes to the salon.
She said, “I am intrigued by the characters. But I think the author uses the same words too much.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, like the word ‘murmur.’ Everyone ‘murmurs’ when they speak. Every other word is ‘murmur.’ I’m at the point where I want to scream if I ever hear the word ‘murmur’ again.”
(Now THAT is my kind of literary analysis.)
I was guffawing as she went off on ‘murmur’. She was on a roll. She continued:
“The other word she uses too much is ‘intently.’ Everything is done ‘intently.’ I think the word ‘intently’ is on almost every page. And then of course, people ‘murmur intently’ and I’m thinking, Lady, there are so many words in the dictionary, try using some of those.”
My stylist has HAD it.
— More snow coming. Hopefully it won’t impact my flight outta here, but at this point … My brother flew home for my grandmother’s funeral, and was stuck in Boston for two more days. So I am prepared for such an eventuality.
— Speaking of snow, it was freezing the last two days, and my car was basically enclosed in a car-sized icicle. Had errands to do yesterday and so I bundled up, got my shovel, and went on down to hack my car out of the glacier. It was arduous and it sucked, and I found myself saying to myself, “This is arduous and it sucks,” but then suddenly I thought of Touching the Void and literally felt ashamed of my complaining. That guy descended INTO the crevasse of ice in order to maybe possibly who knows come out the other side. I think I can hack away at the ice for half an hour without whinging.
— Will be starting out my stay in L.A. staying with good friends Alex and Chrisanne. I can’t wait. It’s been two (maybe?) years since I’ve seen them, although I feel like I see Alex all the time due to Facebook. But we all know that’s not the same thing.
— Very excited to hang with my brother, my wonderful nephews, Melody, my sister-in-law … I will be quite busy while I am out there but there’s lots of wiggle-room in my schedule.
— Excited, too, to FINALLY meet Kim Morgan. I mean, come on, it’s ridiculous we haven’t met in person yet.
— In general, I like the winter, although the short days wreak havoc on my illness and my sleep-pattern and I have to blast my head with this light-therapy stuff just to combat it. That sounds rather violent. But it really helps with Mood. That being said, I love the cold weather, and snow, and ice, and wearing parkas and sweaters and wool hats. However, the last month or so has been pretty non-stop grey skies, with a lot of storms. It will be wonderful to be in Los Angeles. I love the light there. I love the feel of the air. It will be a good break.
— Along with the sudden coming-together of this short film (although it had been talked about for about a month, it felt like within a 24-hour period it all got real), another thing I have been working on, pestering, obsessing over, manipulating, conniving, etc. – for months – literally since last August – suddenly reached a new phase, in the same 24-hour period when the film turned from a “maybe” to a “Go.” Same day. Why does everything happen at the same time? I’m not ready to talk about the second thing yet, because I don’t want to jinx that one either, I’ll only talk about it when it’s DONE, but it’s been a ridiculous and lengthy process requiring cold-calling people I don’t know, asking favors of people I don’t know, and trying to get around a wall in order to get what I want, and the whole process has taught me how to be persistent, and how to give up worries that I might seem like a pest. If you want it, then you have to take that risk. Be a freakin’ pest. In general, people want to be helpful, and sometimes they need a nudge, or a reminder. “Hey, member you said you’d do that thing for me three months ago? Could we re-visit it?” Always nice, always accepting that people are busy, bees with honey, etc. etc. I mean, there’s being a pest, and then there’s being Rupert Pupkin, and I know the difference. I had to just keep emailing different people, even though I had already emailed, and keep asking, and keep saying, “Can we re-visit this? I know you’re busy… thank you so much …” This type of behavior is REALLY hard for me, but dammit, I want this. After months of nothing-ness, suddenly – a breakthrough. Still not where it’s an actuality, but WORLDS closer. And of course there would be a breakthrough on the same day when I got a text from the film producer telling me to book my flight ASAP. The two projects are not connected at all. They have nothing to do with each other, except for the fact that they were both generated by me, and after months of wishing/hoping/waiting, of course BOTH things started moving, like some gigantic interconnected engine, in a single 24-hour period. I had a moment where I thought, “Can’t we just spread the good news out? Why can’t we parcel it out a little bit more evenly?” Then I got over myself. Only jagoffs bitch about too much good news.
— Finally finished The Red and the Black. I had never read it before. Good GOD. What a brutal and hilarious novel. Hilarious and awful. Made me laugh out loud repeatedly. Thinking: “These people are OUT … of their MINDS.”
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance, any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
– Charles Dickens, “Hunted Down”
“There’s no writing against such power as this – one has no chance! Read that chapter describing young Paul’s death: It is unsurpassed – it is stupendous!”
— William Thackeray, after finishing the fifth installment of “Dombey and Son”
I was so obsessed with the musical Oliver! when I was 10 years old that I had to read the book it was based on. Although I knew of Christmas Carol, and had seen movie versions of it, as well as attending the yearly production at Trinity Rep in Providence, reading Oliver Twist at age 10 was my real introduction to Charles Dickens. It was tough going. It was tough going because I kept wondering why it was different from the movie. I was 10. But I was so obsessed that I struggled through it. We were on our yearly family summer vacation (to the lake where we all still go every summer), and I had my big copy of the book and my older cousin Nancy, who was a teenager, had also read it, so she encouraged me to keep going with it. It was the biggest book I had ever read in my young life. I had never read a book so long, a book that clearly was a little bit beyond me. I loved it. I was proud of myself when I finished it.
It would be some years before Dickens came into my life again, when Tale of Two Cities was part of the curriculum in my 10th grade English class.
I have written often about the books I was forced to read in high school, the ones I loved, the ones I hated, the ones I couldn’t even remember. As an adult, I went back and re-read them all. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, The Red Badge of Courage, Billy Budd … Many of these had been chores to finish. How wonderful to go back and rediscover them.
My Real “Way In” to Dickens: Tale of Two Cities
However, there were a couple of books on the high school curriculum that excited me, where I couldn’t wait to come to class to hear what our awesome teacher (Mr. Crothers) would have to say about the chapter we had had to read, where I loved thinking about the books. The Great Gatsby was one, Catcher in the Rye was another, and, strangely, A Tale of Two Cities was the most exciting of all.
Tale of Two Cities is unique in the Dickens pantheon. Most people fall in love with Dickens through David Copperfield or Great Expectations, but my “way in” was Tale of Two Cities. I was a teenager when I first read Tale of Two Cities. I FLIPPED over that book.
I grew up in a family devoted to the stories of the American Revolution. I actually thought that I might be related to John and Abigail Adams, because their names were thrown around so casually. I knew about Bunker Hill. I had walked with my dad on that hill. I knew about capturing the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga and transporting them over frozen rivers and mountains back to Boston. I knew about the Minute Men. I could sing the score to 1776 by heart. By age 10, 11, I already knew about France’s key role in the American Revolution, which, seen in retrospect, was kind of a crazy thing for them to get behind. France was a monarchy. Financing our revolution emptied their coffers, creating the financial crisis that was the spark that lit the flame. They hated England so much that they helped the fledgling colonies overthrow a King. But in so doing, they put their own monarchy in peril.
France’s revolution set the tone for the “revolution eating their young” phenomenon, and many in the United States watched with horror as the events unfolded. (Thomas Jefferson watched with glee and excitement, the “blood of patriots watering the tree of liberty” and all that.) Edmund Burke, in his masterpiece Reflections on the Revolution in France lays it down for all time: what went wrong? There was no guillotine in the American Revolution. The loyalists either went back to England, or sucked it up and stayed put. France was the opposite. As each round of the revolution progressed, the enemies would stack up, and those who were the judges in the first round, became casualties in the second round. And on and on, until it burned itself out in mayhem and outright terror, with heads rolling in the gutters. With each phase, the rhetoric about the Revolution got more and more pure. Purity in politics is bad news. It means tyranny and anyone who tells you different either doesn’t know their history or is lying to themselves and to you, so RUN.
The American experiment, from the get-go, incorporated mess, uncertainty, and compromise. It was built that way. The Declaration of Independence declared that all citizens would have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. Transcendent words. But mess is right there in the words: My pursuit of happiness may make YOU unhappy. And vice versa. Therefore, we have to fight it out. In the courts, hopefully, although sometimes it happens elsewhere. It’s not perfect or pure, it’s not meant to be. The end result is not promised in the Declaration. We are not guaranteed to “be happy”, remember. We are guaranteed to be free to “pursue” our happiness.
On the flip side, the slogan for the French revolution was “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”. By declaring that “equality” was the yearned-for end result, a great leveling took place in French society, a leveling that, once it started, could not be stopped. Things that had been held in high esteem needed to be brought down so that everyone was on the same level, were “equal”. This was Edmund Burke’s main criticism. “Brotherhood” is also a dangerous thing to require of a revolution. It sets up sides: you are with the Brotherhood, or you are against. And we all know how that played out in France, as everyone became an enemy of the State, and the cobblestones ran with blood. France had so decimated itself that it opened the doors for a Napoleon to stroll in and crown himself Emperor.
None of this was “news” to me when I was 15 and first picked up Tale of Two Cities. Maybe that was why I latched on to Tale of Two Cities so viscerally. I remember reading it late into the night, far surpassing the amount I had been assigned to read for the next day. There is, of course, a great subplot in the book, with the love affair, and the father, and Sidney Carton, but that’s not my memory of what hooked me about the book when I first read it. I loved it for the politics. I loved it for the Defarges. I loved the intrigue and violence, the very real sense you got of those “two cities” across the Channel from one another, warily keeping an eye on each other, important messages galloping across the distance in the dead of night. I have never forgotten my first experience of reading Tale of Two Cities.
As I have grown older, so many different aspects of Tale of Two Cities come to the foreground, elements I flat out could not have clicked into when I was a teenager. Sidney Carton, for example. That sourpuss of a man, cynical and distant, who eventually makes the ultimate sacrifice: he is one of Dickens’ most indelible and heartbreaking creations. I couldn’t see past the surface when I was a kid, and I had no experience of what Love does when it is not allowed to express itself, how it can twist you, mark you forever. Now I understand that in my DNA, so a paragraph like the following brings me to tears:
When his host followed him out on the staircase with a candle, to light him down the stairs, the day was coldly looking in through its grimy windows. When he got out of the house, the air was cold and sad, the dull sky overcast, the river dark and dim, the whole scene like a lifeless desert. And wreaths of dust were spinning round and round before the morning blast, as if the desert-sand had risen far away, and the first spray of it in its advance had begun to overwhelm the city.
Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears.
Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.
It reminds me of the great exchange in Men in Black:
Jay: You know what they say. It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Kay: Try it.
Madame Defarge represents everything that is despicable about the human race. She is what makes a revolution. She still lives. She is among us. We’ll never get rid of Madame Defarges. She’s not an “aberration”, or a mistake. I got that about her in high school. I don’t think I got all of it but I got most of it. Stalin would have loved Madame Defarge. And then he would have killed her. Because that’s what happens to fanatics like her in a revolution. That fanaticism you helped create, that rigid unforgiving unhuman pure atmosphere you helped promote, will turn around and get YOU. And you have no one to blame but yourself.
I have so many favorite scenes from Tale of Two Cities:
— when the wine bottle breaks and goes into the cobblestones outside the Defarge shop
— the whole section about the increasing sound of footsteps outside the London house (Dickens at his very best)
— the famous opening
— the whole chapter called “the Jackal”
— the two chapters about “knitting”
Here is an excerpt that is one of my favorite bits of writing in the book: the sun coming up over the Monsieur the Marquis’ stone home. Not to put too obvious a point on it, but here goes: Obviously, there were no motion pictures in Dickens’ day, but there is something very cinematic and downright modern about his writing that, on occasion, predicts the swooping subjective eye of the movie camera. (I feel that in Stendhal too.) Dickens writes cinematically, and his books usually translate very easily into movies because he has already done half the work for the adaptation. This section about the sun coming up over the stone house is a perfect example.
You can see the slow camera pan over the objects Dickens describes. You can see him start in a wide shot and pan over the landscape into closeup.
The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night for three heavy hours; for three heavy hours the horses in the stables rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is set down for them.
For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and human, stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the landscape, dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads. The burial-place had got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass were undistinguishable from one another; the figure on the Cross might have come down, for anything that could be seen of it. In the village, taxers and taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets, as the starved usually do, and of ease and rest, as the driven slave and the yoked ox may, its lean inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and freed.
The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the fountain at the chateau dropped unseen and unheard – both melting away, like the minutes that were falling from the spring of Time – through three dark hours. Then, the grey water of both began to be ghostly in the light, and the eyes of the stone faces of the chateau were opened.
Lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the still trees, and poured its radiance over the hill. In the glow, the water of the chateau fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces crimsoned. The carol of the birds was loud and high, and, on the weather-beaten sill of the great window of the bedchamber of Monsieur the Marquis, one little bird sang its sweetest song with all its might. At this, the nearest stone face seemed to stare amazed, and, with opened mouth and dropped under-jaw, looked awe-stricken.
Now, the sun was full up and movement began in the village. Casement windows opened, crazy doors were unbarred, and people came forth shivering – chilled, as yet, by the new sweet air. Then began the rarely lightened toil of the day among the village population. Some, to the fountain; some, to the fields; men and women here, to dig and delve; men and women there, to see to the poor live stove, and lead the bony cows out, to such pasture as could be found by the roadside. In the church and at the Cross, a kneeling figure or two, attendant on the latter prayers, the led cow, trying for a breakfast among the weeds at its foot.
The chateau awoke later, as became its quality, but awoke gradually and surely. First, the lonely boar-spears and knves of the chase had been reddened as of old; then, had gleamed trenchant in the morning sunshine; now, doors and windows were thrown open, horses in their stables looked round over their shoulders at the light and freshness pouring in at doorways, leaves sparkled and rustled at iron-grated windows, dogs pulled hard at their chains, and reared impatient to be loosed.
All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the return of morning. Surely, not so the ringing of the great bell of the chateau, nor the running up and down the stairs; nor the hurried figures on the terrace; nor the booting and tramping here and there and everywhere, nor the quick saddling of horses and riding away?
What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads, already at work on the hill-top beyond the village, with his day’s dinner (not much to carry) lying in a bundle that it was worth no crow’s while to peck at, on a heap of stones? Had the birds, carrying some grains of it to a distance, dropped one over him as they sow chance seeds? Whether or no, the mender of roads ran, on the sultry morning, as if for his life, down the hill, knee-high in dust, and never stopped till he got to the fountain.
All the people of the village were at the fountain, standing about in their depressed manner, and whispering low, but showing no other emotions than grim curiosity and surprise. The led cows, hastily brought in and tethered to anything that would hold them, were looking stupidly on, or lying down chewing the cud of nothing particularly repaying their trouble, which they had picked up in their interrupted saunter. Some of the people of the chateau, and some of those of the posting-house, and all of the taxing authorities, were armed more or less, and were crowded on the other side of the little street in a purposeless way, that was highly fraught with nothing. Already, the mender of roads had penetrated into the midst of a group of fifty particular friends, and was smiting himself in the breast with his blue cap. What did all this portend, and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind a servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle (double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of the German ballad of Leonora?
It portended that there was one stone face too many, up at the chateau.
The Gorgon had surveyed the building again in the night, and had added the one stone face wanting; the stone face for which it had waited through about two hundred years.
It lay back on the pillow on Monsieur the Marquis. It was like a fine mask, suddenly startled, made angry, and petrified. Driven home into the heart of the stone figure attached to it, was a knife. Round its hilt was a frill of paper, on which was scrawled:
“DRIVE HIM FAST TO HIS TOMB. THIS, FROM JACQUES.”
DICKENS MISCELLANIA: QUOTES AND APPRECIATIONS
Letterhead for Charles Dickens’ literary magazine, ‘All the Year Round’, founded in 1859
Queen Victoria wrote in her journal two days after Charles Dickens died in 1870:
It is a very great loss. He had a large loving mind and the strongest sympathy with the poorer classes.
Michael Schmidt writes in Lives of the Poets:
[William Cullen] Bryant became a big noise in American journalism, a champion of liberal causes, and a catalyst. When [Charles] Dickens arrived in New York, he is reported to have asked on coming down the gangplank, “Where’s Bryant?”
Charles Dickens kept up a voluminous correspondence. He responded to fan mail, to reader questions, to any letter that came across his desk. In 1866, a woman wrote him about her desire to be a writer and if Dickens had any advice. Here is Dickens’ reply, dated December 27, 1866:
Dear Madame, you make an absurd, though common mistake in supposing that any human creature can help you to be an authoress, if you cannot become one in virtue of your own powers.
I love to hear about the influences on writers, who the writers I love read for inspiration. And so this quote from Dickens very much satisfies:
I don’t go upstairs to bed 2 nights out of 7 without taking Washington Irving under my arm.
Along those same lines, after reading the manuscript of Robert Browning’s “A Blot in the ‘Scutcheon’ in 1842, Dickens wrote:
“I swear it is a tragedy that MUST be played; and must be played, moreover, by Macready. There are some things I would have changed if I could (they are very slight, mostly broken lines); and I assuredly would have the old servant [Gerard] begin his tale upon the scene [II, i]; and be taken by the throat, or drawn upon, by his master, in its commencement. But the tragedy I never shall forget, or less vividly remember than I do now. And if you tell Browning that I have seen it [ms.], tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work.”
L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables, wrote in her journal:
I first read [Pickwick Papers] when a child — there was an old coverless copy lying around the house and I reveled in it. I remember that it was a book that always made me hungry.”
George Orwell wrote an essay on Dickens that is a must-read for any Dickens fan, as well as anyone interested in literary criticism. It’s a fascinating vigorous analysis of Charles Dickens, although it does take a scolding tone. Orwell was not noted for his sense of humor, and Dickens, above all else, is FUN. He should be FUN. Still, it’s a must-read. Here are two excerpts:
The fact that Dickens is always thought of as a caricaturist, although he was constantly trying to be something else, is perhaps the surest mark of his genius. The monstrosities that he created are still remembered as monstrosities, in spite of getting mixed up in would-be probable melodramas. Their first impact is so vivid that nothing that comes afterwards effaces it. As with the people one knew in childhood, one seems always to remember them in one particular attitude, doing one particular thing. Mrs. Squeers is always ladling out brimstone and treacle, Mrs. Gummidge is always weeping, Mrs. Gargery is always banging her husband’s head against the wall, Mrs. Jellyby is always scribbling tracta while her children fall into the area — and there they all are, fixed for ever like little twinkling miniatures painted on snuffbox lids, completely fantastic and incredible, and yet somehow more solid and infinitely more memorable than the efforts of serious novelists. Even by the standards of his time Dickens was an exceptionally artificial writer. As Ruskin said, he “chose to work in a circle of stage fire”. His characters are even more distorted and simplified than Smolett’s. But there are no rules in novel-writing, and for any work of art there is only one test worth bothering about — survival. By this test Dickens’s characters have succeeded, even if the people who remember them hardly think of them as human beings. They are monsters, but at any rate they exist.
And here Orwell writes about Dickens’ gift for writing about childhood:
No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child’s point of view. I must have been about nine years old when I first read David Copperfield. The mental atmosphere of the opening chapters was so immediately intelligible to me that I vaguely imagined they had been written by a child. And yet when one re-reads the book as an adult and sees the Murdstones, for instance, dwindle from gigantic figures of doom into semi-comic monsters, these passages lose nothing. Dickens has been able to stand both inside and outside the child’s mind, in such a way that the same scene can be wild burlesque or sinister reality, according to the age at which one reads it.
David O. Selznick, independent movie producer, was a huge fan of Charles Dickens. He said later on in life that he could point out punctuation errors in new editions of Dickens’ novels, so well did he know all of those books. Here are two memos from Selznick (who was famous for his memos):
To: Mrs Kate Corbaley
June 3, 1935
It is amazing that Dickens had so many brilliant characters in David Copperfield and practically none in A Tale of Two Cities, and herein lies the difficulty. The book is sheer melodrama and when the scenes are put on the screen, minus Dickens’s brilliant narrative passages, the mechanics of melodramtic construction are inclined to be more than apparent, and, in fact, to creak. Don’t think that I am for a minute trying to run down one of the greatest books in the English language. I am simply trying to point out to you the difficulties of getting the Dickens feeling, within our limitations of being able to put on the screen only action and dialogue scenes, without Dickens’s comments as narrator. I am still trying my hardest and think that when I get all through, the picture will be a job of which I will be proud – but it is and will be entirely different from David Copperfield.
My study of the book led me to what may seem strange choices for the writing and direction, but these strange choices were deliberate. Since the picture is melodrama, it must have pace and it must “pack a wallop”. These, I think, Conway can give us as well as almost anyone I knew – as witnessed by his work on Viva Villa! Furthermore, I think he has a knack of bringing people to life on the screen, while the dialogue is on the stilted side. (I fought for many months to get the actual phrases out of David Copperfield into the picture, and I have been fighting similarly on Two Cities, but the difference is that the dialogue of the latter, if you will read it aloud, is not filled with nearly the humanity, or nearly the naturalness.
As to Sam Behrman, I think he is one of the best of American dialogue writers. Futhermore, he is an extremely literate and cultured man, with an appreciation of fine things and a respect for the integrity of a classic – more than ninety per cent more than all the writers I know. He can be counted upon to give me literacy that wiol match. On top of this, he is especially equipped, in my opinion, to give us the rather sardonic note in [Sidney] Carton.
Here is another one of Selznick’s memos:
To: Mr. Nicholas M. Schenck
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.
October 3, 1935
I should like also to call to your attention the danger of treating this picture [Tale of Two Cities] as just another [Ronald] Colman starring vehicle. Granted that Colman is a big star; that any picture with him achieves a good gross; A Tale of Two Cities, even badly produced, would completely dwarf the importance of any star … The picture is beautifully produced. If I do not say this, no one else in the organization will. It has been splendidly directed by Jack Conway; and Colman is at his very top. Further, bear in mind that the book of A Tale of Two Cities would without Colman have a potential drawing power equaled only by David Copperfield, Little Women, and The Count of Monte Cristo among the films of recent years because only these books have an even comparable place in the affections of the reading public. This is no modern best seller of which one hundred thousand copies have been published, but a book that is revered by millions – yes, and tens of millions of people here and abroad.
For their Fall 2015 menswear collection, Rag and Bone launched a video featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Lil’ Buck. Directed by George Greville, it’s a mini-masterpiece of movement and images, completely hypnotic and gorgeous, sexy and strange.
My grandfather and grandmother. The photo is dated October 13, 1938, and is in an album that my grandmother called “Of Ourselves By Ourselves.” (Hm, there’s a certain Sinn Féin ring to that.) My aunt posted the photo to Facebook and we have all just stopped in our tracks to appreciate it. They both look so happy, so together. I love my grandparents.
The great Stephanie Zacharek wrote two pieces about John Wick in The Village Voice. Highly recommended reading (maybe after you’ve seen the film, which you definitely should):
Those two pieces, but especially the second, is the best of what film criticism can do. It can explain why something works for a certain critic, and if the critic is a good writer (and Zacharek is a great one), it will pulse with a feeling so compelling that you will have to go and see it for yourself. Or, it will put into words that ephemeral thing you could sense but didn’t know how to describe.
John Wick is a great piece of film-making. It is made up primarily of fight scenes, ferocious, with a body count equivalent to a small Romanian village. The film was made by two former stuntmen (it is their first feature, and I just have to tip my hat to that – this is incredibly bold, audacious, confident, GORGEOUS film-making) – and besides the story, which is a classic Revenge drama, it is a celebration of the old-school style of stuntmen, what stuntmen (and women) can provide. How AWESOME they are. But it’s how the film is shot that makes the difference. (Again, read that second piece by Zacharek. It’s all there. What she said, basically.) In my review for Taken 3, I talked about the problem of the current trend of quick-cut frenzied action scenes, how it ends up feeling lazy. Instead of creating an action scene that makes sense, visually, they just cut the film to shreds, hoping that the fast-paced edit will do all the work for them. Meanwhile, I’m watching a car chase and I completely lose my orientation in space. I don’t know where we’re going, who’s at the wheel, what’s happening. That’s not immersive film-making: that’s BAD film-making.
In John Wick, the highly choreographed fights are seen mostly in full, and all of the cuts make sense: they come when the fight takes a turn, when someone joins the action, when someone goes down. But until then, you get to see the phenomenal physical work of two actors PRETENDING to battle it out. The whole movie is one long fight, really, and so what ends up happening is you enter a world of relentless movement, bodies flying and lunging and crouching and falling, and it takes on a terrible and violent beauty. Zacharek referred to it as a barbaric ballet, and I couldn’t put it any better.
And the inciting event, as it were, the event that gets the ball rolling, that makes John Wick set out for revenge, is not a gimmick, or a lazily sketched-in plot point. It is specific, heartfelt, and thus totally understandable. All of that is dependent on Keanu Reeves’ mostly wordless performance in the first 15 minutes of the movie. It lands. It’s horrifying. Just as much thought has been given to that quiet sad prologue as to the multiple chaotic fight scenes that make up the rest of the film. Nothing is sketched-in. They have taken the care (the whole film shows great care) to set up their story strongly and emotionally.
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was the most exciting of all. 
