Ketchup

Sometimes the rate of my consumption of culture outpaces my capacity to reflect upon it. Here's what's passed through my head of late:

The Wire, David Simon et. al. (2002-2008). I believe this displaces The Sopranos as the best television I've ever seen. If you've seen it you already know what I'm talking about; if you haven't seen it, you should. There were of course some passages that were more successful than others--I for one found the invented serial killer idea too clever by half--but on the whole this is a masterpiece. I was very sorry when I ran out of episodes, but then I realized that this story is of course far from over; all you need to do is read the Sun paper now and then and imagine the episode Simon would have wrought from the day's news. Here, this one took me about forty seconds to start scripting in my head.

Just Before Dark, Jim Harrison (1999). What a pleasure to read Harrison's collected nonfiction about Leelanau by a lake just northeast of Muskegon on a July afternoon.

We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Joan Didion (2006). What a pleasure to read Didion's collected nonfiction in the air over California's central valley. Old and new favorites. Too bad this edition's pages are so thin.

The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil (1930-1942). Oh my stars. I'm only on page 500 or so of the some 1200, and I'm going to have to put this away now that school's started, but I feel like it's OK not to read this straight through, and I also, frankly, feel like I've mostly gotten what's on offer here, namely deliciously incisive diagnoses of a grand society striding confidently toward the edge of a cliff. I can't think of any other novel that so decisively nails the 20th century's disastrous obsession with progress. "With a little attention, one can probably always detect in the latest Future signs of the coming Old Times. The new ideas will then be a mere thirty years older but contented and with a little extra fat on their bones, or past their prime, much as one glimpses alongside a girl's shining features the extinguished face of the mother; or they have had no success, and are down to skin and bones, shrunken to a reform proposed by some old fool who is called the Great So-and-so by his fifty admirers." Paging Ross Perot.

The Ghost Writer, Roman Polankski (2010). Whew, Polanski's just oozing decadence these days. This is supposedly a thriller about a CIA plot to, you know, take control of everything, but Roman can barely be bothered to flesh out any of the absurd plot points; he's too busy setting up beautifully lit shots of fog and sad adulterers. Beautiful photography, but not really a movie. The amazing house on the beach at Sylt receives more attention from the director than do any of his stars.

The Green Zone, Paul Greengrass (2010). Essentially a continuation of Greengrass's Bourne movies, in that Matt Damon takes on the entire corrupt U.S. military-industrial complex and wins. This one is purportedly set in the "real world," though, namely Baghdad's green zone. The movie is absolutely absurd, but the takeaway for the action movie crowd at the mall is that their government lied to them about Iraq, and that's a truth I'm delighted to see promulgated as widely and effectively as possible.

Who Killed the Electric Car?, Chris Paine (2006). Muddily structured but useful. I really had no idea this was going on when it was going on.

The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke (2009) does for 20c European history what Bergman's so-called "trilogy of faith" (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence) did for God. Namely, shows it to be incomprehensible and cruel, but absolutely beautiful to look at in luminous black and white. Go back and look at those Bergman films, though, and then look at this again, and see if you don't feel, as I did, how creepily clean Haneke's images are. Maybe I've been spending too much time in Lightroom, but The White Ribbon feels like a masterpiece of post-production as much as anything.

Colorado Territory, Raoul Walsh (1949). Walsh remakes High Sierra as a western, with Joel McCrea in the Bogart role. Nice enough for a Sunday afternoon, particularly if you like Virginia Mayo, which I do, but a minor Walsh by any measure. I like the hideout in the ruined village of Todos Santos.

Bad Day at Black Rock, John Sturges (1955). Sturges also directed The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and The Eagle Has Landed, among many others. Notice a theme? Manly men in conflict with other manly men. This one fits. A strange and small picture, in which Integrity (played by Spencer Tracy) squares off with Deceit (Robert Ryan) and comes out ahead. Atmospheric and nice to look at for a while, but finally the claustrophobia that Sturges is trying to engender just turns into tedium.

A Single Man, Tom Ford (2009) has its affecting moments, but is mostly, probably predictably, an exercise in style. Not that there's anything wrong with that, if the style brings pleasure. Some here does--lots of beautiful California summer light, lots of fantastic bric a brac to ogle--but someone really should have steadied Ford's hand on the post-production dials; the gimmick where he keeps making people pale when they're sad and rosy when their faith in humanity (and/or libido) is restored is tacky and emberrassing.

Band of Brothers, various authors (2001). The Pacific is way better, and do you know why? Because this is pre-9/11 triumphalism, and that is post 9/11 realism. That's oversimplifying, but really, the difference is amazing. In Band of Brothers, PTSD is represented as tough luck that befalls the weak. In The Pacific, it's clearly shown that those who appear not to have PTSD are the truly weird ones. Like I said, The Pacific's a great example of how our understanding of historical realities is shaped by our present historical circumstances. So is Band of Brothers, unfortunately.

Music in rotation: Tosca, Up Bustle & Out, Jazzanova, Cal Tjader

Road House, Jean Negulesco (1948)

If I were a programmer at Film Forum or something, I might put together a group of noirs that take place in the sticks, as opposed to the city. Out of the Past, for sure, and also this one. I know there are others; I just can't think of them right now.

This is a pretty straightforward story of two guys after the same girl. It's distinguished by its unusual setting, as mentioned, and by Lupino's gorgeously ravaged voice.

All the King's Men, Robert Rossen (1949)

It must be a lot of fun to do the programming at Turner Classic Movies. Someone, clearly, thought that the week of the apotheosis of the Obama health care reform journey called for a showing of this powerful accounting of the costs incurred by the practice of retail politics. Had you forgotten, as I had, that the central plank of Willie Stark's platform is universal health care? And do you recall how he meets his end? I won't spoil it for you; let's just say the medical profession doesn't exactly rush to his aid in his moment of need.

It's a politics story, but it's also a Southern story, in ways which I probably wouldn't have understood ten years ago, before moving to Alabama. Issues of dilapidated family pride and post-Reconstruction sullenness, which of course also animated Faulkner, Walker Percy, Welty, and Tennessee Williams are central here, too.

It's a big book, and even a movie more than two hours long can't begin to get its arms around all the novel's moving parts, so some passages here feel stunted and lacking context. Still, it's a lively piece and worth watching. After you call your representative and tell him or her to vote yes on the Senate bill this week.

Scarlet Street, Fritz Lang (1945)

Jeepers, Johnny. Probably, perversely, my favorite Lang movie of them all. Edward G. Robinson perfects his macho/emasculated persona, and Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea click arhythmically as Vronsky atop Frou-Frou as they ride poor Chris Cross down to his doom. Add in the jacked-up pathos of the artist struggling to maintain two faces--one facing the real, the other the truer truth of the imaginary--and this sucker's sold. I would like to have seen this movie with Wallace Stevens. I would have held his hand.

Paging my digital petit voleur: Any chance you could locate Renoir's La chienne (1931)? I haven't seen it in more than a decade. It's not as hard-boiled as this, but it contains the full germ of evil which herein blossoms.

Stray Dog, Akira Kurosawa (1949)

Ostensibly a procedural about a rookie cop (Mifune, so young I didn't recognize him at first!) whose gun is stolen, the movie's as much or more about Japan's effort to regain its self-respect. Terrific, near-genius cinematography; the camera itself behaves like an investigator. Featuring many wonderful sequences, including one at a baseball game and another at a cabaret on an unbearably hot summer night. The chorus girls run off stage and into their dressing room, where they all collapse on the floor, fanning themselves. Really top notch Kurosawa; I'm surprised I've never seen this before.

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American Gangster, Ridley Scott (2007). Better than everyone said it was. Narratively a mess but mythologically deeply astute.

The Interrogators, Chris Mackey and Greg Miller (2005). As with all the memoirs of interrogators I've read, this is useful both with regard to what it thinks it's saying and what it's saying without realizing it.

Need for the Bike, Paul Fournel (2001). Oulipian on cycling. Charming/irritating in that utterly French way.

The Third Man, Carol Reed (1949). Genius. A perfect pairing with Civilization and Its Discontents. I'd forgotten how wonderful it is to look at, and how perfect the music.

Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1929). CANDY. The intelligence is stupendous, the style is wholly beguiling.

The Man Outside, Wolfgang Borchert (1949). Wanted to like this but it's a bit too manic for my purposes. That's saying something, considering how useful I find Buchner.

Travels with Herodotus, Ryzard Kapuscinski (2007). Almost makes me cry. The final, supremely elegant work by one of my favorite writers ever, who died in 2007. A perfect conclusion to his oeuvre.

Monstering, Tara McKelvey (2007). McKelvey makes a bit too much effort to make a narrative of her journalism, and is a bit too proud of her scoops, which are not in fact that deep. Not without merit, but not necessary if you've read Mayer and Gourevitch.

Manpower, Raoul Walsh (1941)

A year after They Drive By Night, Walsh reassembles much of the team from that picture to make Manpower. It's a terrific movie. The script is maybe a little hokey, and Alan Hale's maybe given a bit too much comic leash, but for crying out loud: George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, and Marlene Dietrich in a Raoul Walsh movie? What more could you want?

The movie would probably have a much higher profile if its setup wasn't so weird. Raft and Robinson are electrical linemen. It's hard to imagine what went on in that pitch meeting; maybe a lot of Martinis were involved. The picture works very hard to make the profession seem dangerous (which it is), heroic (which it may well be), and glamorous (which it isn't).

But you don't watch this one for the plot. You watch it to see Raft as the heavy-lidded charmer half-angel half-snake, Robinson as -- as always -- the tough-as-nails sap, and Dietrich. Dietrich. Dietrich who probably doesn't have to work too hard at her acting to convey her exquisite Weltschmerz here in the summer of 1941. It's probably coming quite naturally.

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Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman (2008). Former IDF soldier sets about unrepressing his repressed memories of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Waking Life plus Johnny Got His Gun, in Lebanon. Interesting to look at. I don't get why making it a cartoon is a good idea.

Miller's Crossing, Joel Coen (1990). I didn't like this bitter little movie the first time or the second.

Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey through Iraq, Tony Lagouranis (2007). Useful. Complicated. Many of the ways in which this book is interesting are likely not ones of which the author himself is aware. Lagouranis believes he's written the story of his coming to consciousness and conscience during his time as an interrogator in Iraq. The book is that, but it's also -- I don't want to overstate this, because I suspect Lagouranis is an ethical and well-intentioned person, but it's true nonetheless -- an example of the very self-exculpatory style which Lagouranis deplores in his commanding officers. More accurate and more precise to say: Lagouranis's oscillations between "there's no excuse for what I've done" and "here's my excuse for what I've done" are themselves an important part of the story of the systemic failures of the Bush administration's strategy and tactics in the GWAT.

The Last Days of Haute Cuisine, Patric Kuh (2001). Poorly written but fascinating account of the rises and falls of the French ethos, California cuisine, and corporatism in the American restaurant business.

Life of Galileo, Bertolt Brecht (1947), directed by Joseph Losey for the American Film Theatre, (1974). Brilliant production starring the great Topol of Fiddler on the Roof fame. Really enjoyable and provocative.

I haven't yet seen In the Loop, or The Thick of It, upon which In the Loop is based, but I'm having a hard time either of them will surpass Harold Pinter's Party Time. I just watched a 1992 production of the play as filmed by Pinter himself. (The DVD is from 2004, and was produced by "Films for the Humanities & Sciences.) What an absolutely brilliant piece of writing. The lurches and swerves from naked aggression to high society chitchat to lyric flights of symbolic imagination to stammered disconnections of sign and signifier literally make me gasp. Just a short play -- 35 minutes -- but I'd set it next to any of Pinter's best, or anyone else's.

Septem8er Tapes, Christian Johnston (2004). Weird, irresponsible, self-satisfied, atrociously written mockumentary "about" a filmmaker who goes to Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 to "get to the bottom" of the GWAT. Deeply strange. I not only don't get the point of it, I don't even get what the filmmakers might imagine the point might be.

The Situation, Philip Haas (2006). Well intentioned ham-fisted Americans-are-bad message movie about an improbably beautiful and beatific female journalist in Iraq.

I could, but won't, and probably shouldn't, write a book about representations of the GWAT in film.

Humana Festival 2008: The Complete Plays. Why am I always so surprised that so much contemporary drama is so trite and boring? After all, so much contemporary everything else is trite and boring, why shouldn't that be true of drama, too? One good play here: Becky Shaw, by Gina Gionfriddo. A queer claustrophobic family drama. Title character is an outsider who comes into the family's orbit to simultaneously air the dirty laundry and soil a bunch more. Not really my cup of tea -- too much psychology, too much talking -- but very good at being what it is.

Lars and the Real Girl, Craig Gillespie (2007). Surprisingly sweet and affecting movie about a town that teaches a guy how to love. That sounds horrible, but it's true! I don't know how it doesn't lapse into sentimentality or broad comedy, but it doesn't.

The Forever War, Dexter Filkins (2008). Dispatches it is not, but the comparison will be made and not for no reason. Filkins was the Times' guy in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, and these are the stories that aren't right for a newspaper but need to be told nonetheless, the ironic ones, personal ones, the ones that unfold over years and the ones that are contained in a single instant. You don't read this one for policy analysis, political history, or any of that big picture stuff; this is about people trying to stay alive in war zones.

Thief, Michael Mann (1981).
Manhunter, Michael Mann (1986).
I've always enjoyed Mann's glacial style -- that's a reference to both time and attitude -- but it sure doesn't hold up well over time. The interminable Tangerine Dream riffs in Thief and the interminable brooding of William Petersen in Manhunter don't feel slick and cool, they feel like you just ate a quart of quaaludes. Also, James Caan's entire torso is covered with hair and Mann makes sure you know it, often. Also, Caan blows up The Green Mill, which is inexcusable.

Elizabeth, Shekhar Kapur (1998). Stylish pseudo-historical romp, great cast.

Network, Sidney Lumet (1976). The M*A*S*H of television. Did anyone make any movies in the 70's that weren't completely depressing in both form and content?

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All blogging energy still going to Harriet at the Poetry Foundation, but here's what's up on the home front.

Drunken Angel, Akira Kurosowa (1948). Beautifully shot but plodding story of an alcoholic doctor (not unlike Graham Greene's whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory) determined to treat a self-destructive mobster with TB in postwar Tokyo. A kind of allegory of Japan trying to muck out its stalls. There's a bubbling miasma right in the middle of the neighborhood just to remind us of where and when we are.

I Live in Fear, Akira Kurosowa (1955). Patriarch of a large family in the smelting business becomes so obsessed with his fear of nuclear weapons he insists on selling everything and moving to Brazil. The family doesn't want to go, also doesn't want to disrespect papa. A lot of long anguished silences ensue. Still, it got to me; Mifune's absolutely terrific as the terrified and terrifying protagonist.

The Making of a Chef, Mark Ruhlman (1999). Ruhlman goes to the CIA and writes about what it takes to make it. Lively and engaged journalism, great fun if you're the kind of person who enjoys debates over how dark a roux should be used in the making of brown sauce, which I am.

House of Games, David Mamet (1987). I've probably seen this ten times and it's still really. really. good. It seemed kind of antique when it first came out, and has aged beautifully. The big red convertible seemed Twin Peaksish before there even was a Twin Peaks.

The Spies of Warsaw, Alan Furst (2008). One of my many guilty pleasures. Read more than half of this on a day of LGA delays while listening to Radian on the iPod. Was almost happy!

The Dark Side, Jane Mayer (2008). Probably the most significant and comprehensive account of Richard Cheney's efforts to secure unlimited and incontrovertible power for the executive branch, and the inevitable results. The accounts of Jack Goldsmith, Dexter Filkins, Seymour Hersh, Phillipe Sands, and others are certainly also worth reading, but this one is the one to read if you're only going to read one, in my opinion.

Beacons of Ancestorship, Tortoise (2009). Yuck! Way too noisy. Sounds like high school students covering Can songs. Had to listen to Millions Now Living ten times before I was able to forgive the lads for this betrayal of my love.

Dying City, Christopher Shinn (2008). This rather lightweight play, which uses the device of identical twins to investigate certain dualities to be found in human nature, was, amazingly, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Weak.

A lot of drama in current rotation. Bert Brecht (esp. Galileo). Georg Büchner (I hesitate to mention this name, since I am loving this book so much I don't even want anyone else to know about it. Do you ever get that way about a book? It's a weird feeling.) Mark Ravenhill (wildly overrated). Suzan-Lori Parks (fantastic, esp. Venus, but all of it is terrific). Genet, Lorca, Peter Weiss. On deck: Edna Walsh, von Kleist, Wolfgang Borchert.

TV worth watching: Smith. You can only watch this if you have DirecTV, and there are only seven episodes. CBS produced and then killed it in 2006-2007. It's very good; Ray Liotta's character has a lot in common with DeNiro's in Mann's Heat.

TV which might be worth watching; I can't really tell: Weeds. I find this show very disconcerting, but completely addictive. It's so weird. What does it even mean? Cheech & Chong + Three's Company + Good Fellas. Or something like that. I suspect if I lived in California, it would just seem like a reality show. As it is, I'm bewildered but fascinated.

The Woman in the Window, Fritz Lang (1944)

You'd call it perfect, but then what are you going to call Scarlet Street? Perfecter? I always forget to watch these two in reverse chronological order, with Scarlet Street for dinner and The Woman in the Window for dessert. That's OK; it'll serve as an appetizer, too, albeit a sweet one. Actually, no, it should be La Chienne for your soup, Scarlet Street for your bloody meat, and The Woman in the Window something whippy for dessert. Not just delicious, not just nutritious, you could dissertate on that set of courses!

Man Hunt, Fritz Lang (1941)

An odd movie, but a pivotal one. Perhaps not one of Lang's masterpieces, but certainly one that's crucial to grapple with if you intend to understand his trajectory.

In 1939, Geoffrey Household publishes Rogue Male, a novel about an apolitical big game hunter who, weary of mere elephants and rhinoceroses, goes on a "sporting stalk" (i.e., hunting minus the killing) of the most dangerous animal of all: MAN. Sounds cheesy, yes. But the man Household's protagonist chooses to dry fire on is Hitler. Not named as such, but it's pretty obvious.

At the time of the novel's publication, the USA was still bound by the Neutrality Acts, but Hollywood was (rightly, obviously) anxious about Hitler's rise, and the novel was rushed into screenplay form. John Ford passed. Lang got the nod. Shooting started in early 1941, and the film was released three months later. (There's German efficiency for you.) Keep in mind that at this point, Lang was not yet a Hollywood power, he was an obsessive and difficult immigrant. Far from being given a free hand, he was expected to adhere to certain conventions.

Unsurprisingly, given the complex historical and personal contexts, this film is a dizzying collection of disparate impulses. There is a thick strand of anti-Nazi propaganda, around which we find wrapped additional ribbons of romantic comedy, film noir, and, not least, psychological melodrama. It's a message movie, a war movie, a spy movie, a film noir, a comedy, a romance. It's preoccupied with plot and atmosphere by turns. There's stuff about class and nationalism. There are sequences that ask you to consider whether the wilderness is more civilized than the city, and the city more savage than the wilderness. There are, as always in Lang, claustrophobic spaces. (Compare and contrast, for example, Spencer Tracy locked in a cell in a burning jail in Fury with Walter Pidgeon trapped in a cave in Man Hunt.) Long story short I could write a book on this one, but no one but me would want to read it, so instead:

The thing that will stick with me from this is its frame. The first sequence throws us, without context, into a scenario where we assume the protagonist is up to something very serious, but which turns out to be the height of frivolity. By the final sequence, the same man is moving into the same position, but this time with conviction and purpose. (Note that in the first minutes he crawls on his belly like an animal, and in the last he drops from he sky like a god.) This movie's a lot of things, but for me, above all, it's a historiographical bildungsroman. It's about a character's coming into historical consciousness. Think about that, and then think about the Viennese patrician buried in the Hollywood hills. That was one weird fucking century we had back there.

Featuring adolescent Roddy McDoyle as a plucky cabin boy.

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Getting ready to teach course on terrorism and torture in June. Cheery summer reading/viewing:

Hany Abu-Hassad, Paradise Now
Albert Camus, The Just Assassins
J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale
Don DeLillo, Falling Man
Ariel Dorfman, Death and the Maiden
Paul Haggis, In the Valley of Elah
Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony
Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Here's hoping my students have strong stomachs.

Hangmen Also Die!, Fritz Lang (1943)

You could think of this film as the epitome of German exile influence in Hollywood during World War II; the story was written by Lang and Brecht (it was Brecht's only American screenplay credit), and the score was written by the great Hanss Eisler, of whom many Billy Bragg and Wilco fans have sung, many probably unwittingly. The setting is occupied Czechoslovakia. The (very) bad guy is Reinhard Heydrich, who is soon executed by the underground. (Note that this takes place off-camera; we're firmly in the hands of the Lang of M's bouncing ball and the Brecht of Verfremdungseffekt.) The remainder of the film is a veritable tutorial on the agonizing conditions of resistance and the manipulations of occupation. Are you a traitor if you betray one to save many? What about betraying many to save just one -- your own father, or lover, or even simply the grocer across the street you've known all your life? Ostensibly a drama, and just dramatic enough to "sell" as a thriller, this is actually very much an epic in the Brechtian sense: we're required at every turn to evaluate, consider, and critique. The movie feels somewhat mechanical in this respect -- it's Important, and knows it -- but a half-century on, its questions about how to tell the difference between a traitor and a hero remain relevant.

The Return of Frank James, Fritz Lang (1940)

What a disaster! I chalk it up to this being Lang's first western, and his first film in color. A genius of Lang's intensity was probably obsessed with the nuances and possibilities of each of these new toys; as such it may not be a complete surprise that he was too overly preoccupied to take much interest in actually making a watchable movie. It doesn't help that Henry Fonda is about as exciting as a piece of whole wheat toast, Gene Tierney seems to think sitting stock still and being beautiful qualifies as acting, and Ernest Whitman's character is a racist stereotype so banal it's hard to even to get angry about it. The only bright -- well, actually, brightly dark -- spot is John Carradine as Bob Ford; you may remember him as the Confederate swashbuckler aboard John Ford's Stagecoach.

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L.A. Confidential, Curtis Hanson (1997). This has held up well. It's no Chinatown, but nothing is. I had forgotten about the prostitutes who get plastic surgery to look like stars.

The Bad and the Beautiful, Vincente Minnelli (1952). Kirk Douglas is the epitome of Hollywood's necessary evil: the producer. He makes it possible for three ambitious but flawed people -- a director, an actress, a writer -- to achieve greatness, but requires them to sell their souls along the way. They each begin by hating him, but then love him, then hate themselves, then hate him all over again. I remembered this as a bit more wicked and fun; on a second viewing it's a little too mawkish. But it remains one of the great movies about movies, and a nice double-bill with L.A. Confidential. Especially good to watch them back to back in your hotel room at the A.W.P. convention.

Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov (1957). VN's fourth written in English, based on his experiences as a visiting professor at Cornell and Wellesley. The depictions of departmental politics remain, I assure you, brilliant. But this is as much or more a novel about exile than it is about campus follies. The structural and narrative games here are nowhere near as complex or resonant as in Pale Fire or Ada, perhaps in part because VN was working closer to lived experience here. A brilliant read for a rainy afternoon in a college town. Don't make the mistake I did and start underlining your favorite sentences; it's easier to underline the handful that aren't perfect.

What Goes On, Stephen Dunn (2009).
Mercury Dressing, J.D. McClatchy (2009).
One Secret Thing, Sharon Olds (2008).
Sestets, Charles Wright (2009).
Thousands of books of poetry published each year, and this is what the Old Gray Lady wants reviewed. If I hadn't had to insulate the basement this winter . . . .

City Dog, W.S. Di Piero (2009).
The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, Fanny Howe (2009).
Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue, William Logan (2009).
These ones I've been living, eating, and sleeping with for months. Review forthcoming in Poetry.

Key Largo, John Huston (1948). Wow. It had been years, and I'd forgotten. Here's a picture that takes place almost entirely in two rooms -- it started as a stage play, by Maxwell Anderson -- but never holds still for a second. Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, and Lauren Bacall are mesmerizing to watch, and Lionel Barrymore and Claire Trevor play their supporting parts perfectly. Anyone who fancies the ear cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs a triumph of violent suspense should watch the scene here where Robinson makes Trevor, a former showgirl turned alcoholic, sing for a drink. Saddest thing in the world.

It Happens Every Spring, Lloyd Bacon (1949)

Charming. A baseball-loving chemistry professor (the under-appreciated Ray Milland, who always looks to me like he's dying for a drink) accidentally discovers a compound which repels wood, and quickly realizes its potential: a little dab in the pitcher's mitt, and no hitter will be able to connect. Goes on to win 30-odd games and the championship for St. Louis, and his girlfriend's father's begrudging admiration to boot. Interestingly, at no point, ever, does the movie contemplate the fact that our hero is a cheat. Who cares! He's a winner! Barry Bonds would enjoy this.

Secret Command, A. Edward Sutherland (1944)

A west Coast shipyard trying to keep the Navy in ships at the height of the war in the Pacific is infiltrated by Nazi saboteurs, and G-man Pat O'Brien goes undercover as a laborer to thwart them. Which of course he does.

Will wars sixty years from now be as different from wars today as wars today are different from wars sixty years ago?

Ball of Fire, Howard Hawks (1941)

Sublime. Hawks directs, Wilder wrote, Cooper and Stanwyck star, plus -- icing on the cake! -- S.Z. Sakall! and, even better, Dan Duryea as the small-time hood Duke Pastrami! It's really just too good.

A group of seven old professors (think hi ho, hi ho) and one young one, Cooper, are holed up in a NYC townhouse are writing an encyclopedia. They've got two problems: their funding's running out, and their isolation from the outside world has left them fatally uninformed about the realities of contemporary life. In other words, they're professors.

Meanwhile, Stanwyck (as Katherine 'Sugarpuss' O'Shea), has problems of her own: the bulls are after her. The solutions are as elegant as they are absurd: the professors/dwarves give Sugarpuss/Snow White refuge, and she gives them a thrilling education in up-to-the-minute slang.

Hawks and Wilder get all that set up in about fifteen minutes, leaving them free to spend the next hour to revel in the possibilities, like Stanwyck looking around at the professors' library and saying, "Whee, that's a lot of books! All of them different?"

Needless to say, Stanwyck winds up wanting the square but sincere professor more than the flashy gangster. A movie to bring hope to every nerd who's ever lost out to a bad seed.

The Lost Weekend, Billy Wilder (1945)

On the one hand, a melodramatic catalog of every alcoholic cliche in the book, from the aspiring writer pawning his typewriter for a bottle of rye to pleading with the local publican for just one on the house. But on the other hand, flashes of terrifying accuracy. Ray Milland escapes by night from the drying out ward at Bellevue, waits outside a liquor store for the owner to arrive and open up, and when he does, looks him in the eye and just takes the bottle of rye he needs. You'd be hard pressed to find a scene of greater intensity. It's good to see a movie that shows the darkness in the bottle. Makes you realize how alcoholism is usually made to seem comic or cartoonish in the movies.

T-Men, Anthony Mann (1947)

Great noir procedural from the great Anthony Mann. Two Treasury agents infiltrate a counterfeiting ring in Los Angeles by posing as hoods. Lots of close scrapes and disasters narrowly avoided thanks to the bottomless ingenuity and, even more so, clenched-jaw stoicism of the good guys. And I'm talking stoicism; here, as in Border Incident, one of the Feds is put in a position where he literally stands by and watches while his comrade is murdered.

Lots of great hats, suits, nightclubs with cigarette girls, 10-cent hamburgers, big black boxy cars, cigarette holders, steam rooms, bottles of rye, tough-talking voice-overs, etc. Great fun.