Archives for January 21, 2004

Bookslut links to this fine piece by the novelist Claire Messud, but seemingly misreads it. Messud returned to Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady twenty years after first reading it. Less prone to idealization than her younger self, she recognizes complexities (“ragged truths”) in the characters that she missed the first time around, finds some of her sympathies relocated, and deems the novel even greater than she thought:

[Isabel] reveals her essential self, and it is less clear-sighted, less natural, less shining a vision than she, or the youthful reader I was, would have wished. But she is all the more human for her failings, just as The Portrait of a Lady is all the more magnificent for its novelistic imperfections. What is true is beautiful, more surely than the inverse; and therein lay my joy in rereading this masterpiece.

The nice thing about this essay is how, aside from offering a clear-eyed appreciation of the novel, it tracks Messud’s changing values as a reader. And though she’s glad to have moved on to this fuller appreciation, she’s not at all dismissive of the easier novel she used to love.

I was channel-surfing the other day and stumbled across Woody Allen’s Play It Again, Sam, which opens with the last scene from Casablanca. The camera pulls back to reveal Allen watching the film in a small art house–the kind of theater of which Manhattan once had many, but now has only a few.

As I watched, I thought, I wonder how many people under the age of 45 saw Casablanca for the first time in a theater? I’m 47, and I first saw it in a Kansas City revival house a quarter-century ago, just prior to the introduction of home video recorders. Back then, seeing Casablanca anywhere was still a big deal: it didn’t get shown all that often on local TV stations, and there weren’t yet any cable networks devoted exclusively to old movies. Come to think of it, there weren’t any cable networks, period.

All of which led me to ask myself yet another unnerving question: how many people under the age of 45 have seen Casablanca at all?

When I was in college, Casablanca was one of the few pre-1960 movies of which everyone I knew was at least aware, whether they’d actually seen it or not. Old movies had yet to be made ubiquitous by the invention of the videocassette, making it a lot harder for any film to attain “iconic” status. I worshipped Bogart–everybody did–but I hadn’t seen many of his films, and while I still like Casablanca very much, it’s no longer the one I’d choose in order to introduce him to a young filmgoer. (Nowadays, I’d opt for In a Lonely Place or To Have and Have Not.) Nor would I be entirely surprised to learn that it no longer holds a privileged place in the hearts of Gen-X film buffs up to their ears in DVDs.

Still, I’d hate to think that my younger friends wouldn’t smile in recognition were I to drop a line from Casablanca into a casual conversation. No, it’s not a great film, not by a long shot, but it’s one of the most purely entertaining movies ever made, and its heart is in the right place. I know, I know, times change and tastes with them, but I’d like to think all my friends had seen Casablanca at least once. It’s the romantic in me.

DOC HOLLIDAY: What do you want, Wyatt?

WYATT EARP: Just to live a normal life.

DOC: There is no normal life, there’s just life.

Kevin Jarre, screenplay for Tombstone

Courtesy of a kind and generous reader, I’ve been alerted to the existence of Comet Video, a firm in North Carolina that sells good-quality VHS copies of hard-to-find B westerns–including, to my amazement, all of the Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott
films. In lieu of reprinting my essay in the forthcoming Terry Teachout Reader, here’s what David Thomson said about them in his indispensable New Biographical Dictionary of Film:

They have a consistent and bleak preoccupation with life and death, sun and shade, and encompass treachery, cruelty, courage, and bluff with barely a trace of sentimentality or portentousness. The series added the austere image of a veteran Randolph Scott to the essential iconography of the Western and provbed that Boetticher was a masterly observer of primitive man. His style remained without any flourish or easy touch and the series brought him some critical attention. Two films at least–The Tall T and Ride Lonesome–must be in contention for the most impressive and least handicapped B films ever made….Throughout this series, one feels that Scott’s middle-aged Westerner is as unsentimental and self-sufficient as the cinema has achieved. The man’s integrity never looks less than hard-earned and desperately sustained.

I agree with every word.

The print of Seven Men From Now released by Comet Video is faded and blurry, but it’s still a must. Lee Marvin is the villain, and he never played a more flamboyantly vicious one, not even in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat or John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, Comanche Station, Decision at Sundown, and Buchanan Rides Alone, on the other hand, are all clean and clear–my guess is that they derive from digital cable telecasts.

Until the Criterion Collection gets around to releasing the Boetticher-Scott Westerns on DVD, these white-label videocassettes will do just fine. If you want to sample before springing for the whole series, start with Ride Lonesome. It’s the best, if only by a nose. The Tall T is almost as good, though, and features a wonderfully complex performance by Richard Boone as a not-quite-redeemable villain who has grown to loathe his thuggish companions.

To order, go here.

I had lunch with Maud today. We dined at Le Cirque, and over our second bottle of wine, we shook our heads in dismay at the blackout Mr. TMFTML claimed to have had after our last Cool Bloggers’ Orgy, held at the 15-room pied-a-terre of Old Hag. He says he Can’t Remember a Thing, but I have my doubts….

Actually, I really did have lunch with Maud today. We met for sandwiches at the Grange Hall. She drank coffee, I iced tea, and I regret to admit that we never got around to discussing our total coolness, nor did we make cruel fun of the proles seated at the inferior tables, gaping and pointing at the Harmonic Convergence of the Titans of the Blogosphere taking place before their astonished eyes. The embarrassing truth is that we talked, among other things, about how friendly and generous-spirited our fellow arts bloggers are. (Well, maybe not Mr. TMFTML, but somebody has to be the heavy, right?) As it happens, Maud is one of the nicest people I know–and not even slightly dull, either. She even used That Word in one of today’s postings!

Sorry, Jennifer. We’ll try to be snarkier next time.

Artsjournal.com blogger Greg Sandow has posted–brilliantly, in my opinion–about James Levine’s programs for his upcoming first season as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The composers represented include Dutilleux, Ligeti, Carter, Lutoslawski, Babbitt, Harbison, Wuorinen, Birtwistle…you get the idea, right? Late eat-your-spinach modernism, an idiom so over that it can’t even be said to be in extremis anymore.

I would have trampled all over this appalling announcement, but Greg did it for me:

I’m not saying I don’t like these pieces. Some of them might be to my taste (or yours), and some might not. It’s what they represent as a group that bothers me. They’re all examples of a modernist style of composition that hasn’t been current for decades. To suddenly jump in a time machine, and present them all as important, presumably cutting-edge contemporary programming — God, it’s so out of date, so retro, so 20th century! By announcing these programs, the BSO turns its back on the current state of new music….

And then there’s the problem of accessibility. I’m not — absolutely not — saying that orchestras should play only easy pieces. But this modernist style has absolutely no audience. It doesn’t appeal to mainstream classical concertgoers. They don’t have modernist taste….

And worst of all, this modernist stuff never even appealed to the one audience it conceivably might have had, which is artists in other fields, and intellectuals. If this audience for Carter et al existed, the BSO could proudly say it was doing something for music that, admittedly, few people appreciated — but those few people were some of the most important artists and thinkers alive. But this isn’t the case. In fact, as it happened, when the minimalists came along in the late ’60s and early ’70s, they had this audience, or anyway a part of it; so did John Cage, in the ’50s and ’60s. Stockhausen, a modernist who’s now out of fashion even among other modernists, and isn’t on the BSO’s programs, once inspired musicians out on the edges of rock and jazz. But the BSO’s modernists never, as far as I know, inspired anyone….

Read the whole thing here. Then scroll upward and read Greg’s further postings on this subject. Though I don’t share his high opinion of some of the composers he prefers, I endorse virtually everything else he has to say, and I couldn’t have put it better. His attack on Levine’s ostrichian programming seems to me devastating–and definitive.

As I was posting that last item, yet another question popped into my head: what snippet of old-movie dialogue would I most like to have written? While I adore the Bogart-Rains scene in Casablanca to which I made reference, there’s no doubt in my mind about the one I’d pick:

There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff, 45 miles an hour.

How fast was I going, Officer?

I’d say around 90.

Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.

Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.

Suppose it doesn’t take.

Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.

Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.

Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.

Excuse the hell out of me for being a philistine, but I’d rather have written that than anything by Shirley Hazzard. Or Martin Amis, for that matter. Or just about any novel written after approximately 1975, to be perfectly honest (there are exceptions). I guess I’ve got a film-noir soul, which is pretty funny considering how hopelessly bourgeois I am.

What about you, OGIC? What scene would you pick?

UPDATE: Futurballa didn’t recognize the scene. Yikes! Unhelpful hint: the complete script of this film can be found in a Library of America volume, believe it or not….