Archives for September 5, 2003

To those of you joining us for the very first time after having run across the www.terryteachout.com URL in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, welcome to “About Last Night,” the 24/5 arts blog. You can read all about “About Last Night” in the right-hand column, which contains a diverse assortment of goodies, informative and otherwise (including a mostly new set of Teachout’s Top Fives, for those oldsters who didn’t notice the change of items earlier in the week).

As you may have gathered, I spent way the hell too much time chasing print-media deadlines this week. Nevertheless, I pulled up my socks and contrived to send you lurching into the weekend with a reasonably full bag of stuff. Today’s topics, from transgressive to subversive: (1) New from Christopher Trumbo, “Commie Dearest, or, A Boy’s Best Friend Is His Father.” (2) Why isn’t the greatest movie ever made available on DVD? (3) A singer you shouldn’t be living without. (4) Where to read about Hitler. (5) The latest almanac entry.

Hey, everybody, I was not happy with this week’s ratings! They weren’t bad, but they weren’t stupendous, either. I’m doing my job–what about you? Be so kind as to beat the bushes and tell all your art-loving friends about www.terryteachout.com. You’ll be glad you did. They’ll be glad you did. I’ll be glad you did.

I reviewed Trumbo, a new play about the life of Dalton Trumbo, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the lead:

So you’ve been waiting all summer for yet another play about the Hollywood blacklist? Well, breathe easier. “Trumbo,” which opened last night at the Westside Theatre, is a left-wing version of “Love Letters” in which Nathan Lane reads from the correspondence of Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter best remembered as one of the “Unfriendly Ten” witnesses who refused to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee’s 1947 probe of Communist activities in Hollywood and were later jailed for contempt of Congress. Gordon MacDonald plays Christopher Trumbo, Dalton’s son and the author of “Trumbo,” who in the play doubles as his father’s straight man. Both actors use scripts, and Peter Askin’s direction consists of having Mr. MacDonald walk from one side of the stage to the other and back again. (Mr. Lane sits at a desk.)

To read the rest of the review–which is considerably less enthusiastic than this paragraph, to put it as mildly as possible–pick up a copy of the Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section. Even if you don’t like my review, you’ll get your dollar’s worth.

My favorite movie of all time, and I don’t mean maybe, is Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, a painfully poignant look at the moral disintegration of France’s upper middle class (what Whit Stillman calls the “urban haute bourgeoisie”) on the eve of World War II. It’s on absolutely every serious movie critic’s list of the most important films as yet unavailable on DVD, so I was highly interested in the following item from the Criterion Collection Web site, which I heard about by way of DVD Journal:

Jean Renoir’s classic The Rules of the Game had been slated for release at the end of 2003, but that will change thanks to the discovery this week of a film element previously thought to be lost. Criterion’s staff had already spent months on the new high-definition master that was to be at the heart of a two-disc special edition when a French lab finally unearthed the fine-grain master of the reconstructed version, one generation closer to the original than anything previously available. A similar discovery delayed the release of another Renoir classic, Grand Illusion, intended to be Criterion’s first release. Expect The Rules of the Game in early 2004.

For those of you who aren’t cinephiles, this is a BFD (i.e., very big deal). Released in 1939, The Rules of the Game was suppressed after the Nazis moved into France, and had to be reconstructed piecemeal after the war. All existing prints (including the one that made it onto the videocassette linked above) are variously crappy-looking, and the Criterion Collection, whose DVD of Grand Illusion looks almost too good to be true, is famously fussy about picture quality. Hence the delay.

I can’t wait, but I don’t mind waiting, if you know what I mean. Nor should you.

My friend Nancy LaMott, who died of cancer in 1995, was the best cabaret singer I ever heard–period–as well as one of the dearest people I ever knew. She recorded five CDs during her lifetime, and a sixth was released after her death. They’ve been out of print for several years, but are now available again from her old label, Midder Music. To order them, go here.

I wrote a reminiscence of Nancy a few months after she died (it will be included in A Terry Teachout Reader) in which I described her singing as follows:

What I heard…was a warm, husky mezzo-soprano voice that seemed twice as big as the woman in whom it was housed; a vivid yet unaffected way with lyrics; and a quality at once sensuous and achingly idealistic. Later, after I had met Nancy, I would write that her singing sounded “as if the girl next door had snuck out at two a.m. to make a little whoopee with her steady boyfriend,” a description that delighted her no end.

All of Nancy’s records were good, but if you want to try just one, make it Come Rain or Come Shine: The Songs of Johnny Mercer. I have a sentimental attachment to that particular album–it was my own introduction to Nancy’s singing–but I also think it’s the best of her six CDs, if not by much. I can’t see how anyone could possibly hear her performance of “Moon River,” the first track on the album, without falling in love with her singing. I did, and I was also fortunate enough to spend quite a bit of time with her in the year and a half before she died. It’s nice to know that people who never heard her live will now be able to buy her records. If you didn’t, do.

“The Murder Artist,” my latest essay for Commentary, is now posted on the magazine’s Web site. It’s a review-essay about Frederic Spotts’ book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics.

If you didn’t read it in the magazine, click on the link in the “Teachout in Commentary” module of the right-hand column. You can’t miss it.

“The terrible thing about this world is that everybody has his reason.”

Jean Renoir, screenplay for The Rules of the Game