Train Keep a Rolling

I knew I needed a break from thinking about this election when I went onto one of my favorite left-leaning blog sites this afternoon and found myself reading a furious discussion of the fact that the MSM (that's "mainstream media," the bane of political bloggers) has been reporting Clinton's Pennsylvania victory margin as 10% when in mathematical fact it was only 9.2%! The argument centered mainly on whether this was more evidence of an anti-Obama media conspiracy or just of the criminal sloppiness of modern reporting, followed by many suggestions on how to get the word out to the public that Clinton didn't really win by "double digits" after all.

     Personally, I'm going to get the word out that I'd rather watch old movies for a week or two. Barack Obama's train ride to victory is clearly going to be a local, not an express, stopping everywhere from Kokomo to Raleigh to San Juan...or maybe the problem is that Hillary keeps tying herself to the tracks whenever it starts to pick up speed...pick your own metaphor...and we have plenty of time to think about other things.

      (But no, I'm not just going to "sit there and let Clinton steal Barack's momentum," to quote another blog thread. I'll be making calls to Indiana. I refuse to read any op-eds telling me that Indiana is now a must-win state for Obama, but I'll be making calls.)

      First of all, anyone who is or can soon be anywhere near the San Francisco Bay Area should check out a couple of local film festivals. The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto—a graceful, perfectly restored, Moorish Deco movie house from 1925, complete with live organ music between shows (with Richard Rodgers's heartrending Isn't It Romantic? for a theme song)—is running an unprecedented tribute to Bette Davis on her 100th birthday, showing every one of her first 36 movies, from her first supporting appearance in The Bad Sister in 1931 (in which she was cast as the good sister—talk about not knowing what they had!) to Jezebel from 1938. Unfortunately, now that I look at the schedule, I see that Jezebel is already past, as is the gloriously twisted Of Human Bondage, but there's some fascinating stuff still to come, many views of Davis as a skinny blonde playing a wide range of good girls and bad. So Big, tonight and tomorrow, is a Wild Bill Wellman movie from 1934 that has her backing up Barbara Stanwyck. Bette is out-acted—no one could touch Stanwyck in the crackling, rackety days of early-'30s shoestring soundies—which is a fascinating thing to watch by itself.

      Coming up are The Rich Are Always with Us (with Ruth Chatterton, always fun to watch do her self-conscious theatrical razzle-dazzle), Jimmy the Gent (Cagney being Cagney), Three on a Match (much of the great Warners' stock company—Joan Blondell, Warren William, Bogart, Lyle Talbot, Ann Dvorak—playing off each other), Fashions of 1934 (a Busby Berkeley musical starring William Powell, with Bette appearing weirdly where you'd expect Ruby Keeler), Dangerous (Davis's truly unsettling embodiment of an alcoholic), Satan Met a Lady (a pre-Bogart, pre-Huston adaptation of The Maltese Falcon), and a bunch more. Then in June, running through the summer, the Stanford is going to show "many but not all" of her movies from 1939 on.

      Oh, and I just looked it up: Jezebel and Of Human Bondage are both on DVD. I'll watch them both soon (and try not to think about the Kentucky primary as I listen to Bette's Southern accent in Jezebel).

      Meanwhile, at the Castro Theatre, right over the hill from my house, the San Francisco International Film Festival is opening tonight with Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress. The program describes the star as "the alluringly vulpine Asia Argento," which is probably exactly how Vin Diesel thought of her in XXX. A lot of very intriguing sounding new movies will follow, but there'll also be some great old stuff mixed in during the two weeks of the festival: tomorrow The Golem from 1920, with funky new music by a guy from the Pixies; later The Sweet Smell of Success, Some Like It Hot, and others; and this Saturday a new 35-millimeter print of Leave Her to Heaven, a most idiosyncratic psychological suspense movie scripted by Jo Swerling (one of my heroes) and also one of the most gorgeous movies you'll ever see, partly because of the throbbing Technicolor and Southwestern locations but mostly because of Gene Tierney.

      Tierney is not an actress I've taken very seriously until quite recently. I knew she was ethereally, almost mystically beautiful, at least when 20th Century Fox wanted her to be. I've loved Laura for decades and couldn't imagine any other actress bringing to life that ghost of everything men imagine women to be. But in Night and the City I thought she was just fine, and in The Shanghai Gesture almost dorky. I lumped her in with Linda Darnell and Hedy Lamarr as just one of those faces that clever cinematographers and erotically complicated directors could play wonderful tricks with. Then a friend of mine told me she was his favorite "screen goddess of yore," and coincidentally I had a chance to catch one of her early comedies, Rings on her Fingers (and she was pretty funny, too), and that got me to rent Leave Her to Heaven, and all of a sudden I saw something opening up behind her otherworldly gaze: she plays a cruel, dissociated bitch posing as a sweet girl next door, and she brings up something truly spooky from her depths in doing so. (And is she ever fascinating to look at.)

      A lot of awful things happened to Gene in her life, including a first child born severely retarded and a decades-long journey through major depression, probably bipolar disorder. She came of age when the mental health establishment was determined to "conquer" depression, but the drugs that might have helped hadn't been found yet. So she spent years in and out of institutions, getting her brains scrambled by electroshock. But she did her best to get through, and to take care of the people in her life as well as she could. Late in her life she wrote a book about it all, Self-Portrait, that I've seen praised for its candor and humanity. I'll be at the Castro on Saturday the 26th to see her on the big screen.

      Meanwhile, Turner Classic Movies, my favorite place to hide when I just can't handle the real world, is showing some fun stuff as usual. Some Hedy Lamarr movies tonight—and after the wonderful essay about Hedy and John Garfield on Self-Styled Siren's blog, I realize I've been probably been too quick to dismiss her, too. And Saturday morning Detour, one of the great, weird, punch-drunk, low-budget noir quickies, starring yet another inconsistent but fascinating actress of the '40s, Ann Savage (whom my pal Will Jacobs and I find so compelling that we're going to be using her in our new novel, Million Dollar Ideas.)

      So there you go. Lots of ways not only to avoid worrying about the election, but to avoid engaging with the present altogether.

Jules Dassin

No politics this time, except a retelling of a political life. Jules Dassin, the director, died last week, and I keep thinking about him. Although it's only been recently that I've really begun to notice or understand him, he's been a presence in my imaginative life since I was a kid.

      My parents loved his movies. My dad especially liked Rififi—nothing gratified him more than a finely wrought heist movie—and explained to me what was great about Topkapi when he took me to see it when I was seven or so. For my mother, the great Dassin movie was Never on Sunday. I had no idea then, but now I understand how that sentimental comedy about a scholar in love with a whore gave voice and image to everything she wanted to believe about her own sexuality and passion for life and hunger for self-acceptance. She would speak Dassin's name with something between a sob and a sigh; although that was partly, I think, because she (like most of the art-house audience) assumed he was French, and so invested his name with wet flourish: Zhool Dah-SANH. She didn't know he was really just Julie Dassin from Morris High in the Bronx—"DASS'n"—son of a Jewish immigrant barber.

      Dassin's journey to the movies was a fairly standard one for a New York Jew of his generation: Yiddish Theater, Group Theater, radio, Broadway, then the invitation from RKO to learn directing by assisting a master (Hitchcock in this case). And like most of the creative kids who came up through that world he got involved in left-wing politics, joining the Communist Party during the "Popular Front" days and leaving it when Stalin signed his pact with Hitler in 1939. If you were a son of Yiddish immigrants in the Depression, that was how you expressed your humanity, your civic responsibility, your essential patriotism. It showed in his movies, too. They were never overtly political, but his inclinations and talents led him to stories of exploitation, alienation, and crime—Brute Force, Naked City, Thieves' Highway—and his brutal focus on the agony of individuals struggling against an indifferent environment turned those stories into indictments of the culture of money and what it did to people.
      He was just becoming an important American artist when America turned on him, as it turned on so many of the idealists who had held up the progressive pillar of our national coalition through the Depression and the War. In the late 1940s the House of Representatives and the mavens of the movie industry teamed up to destroy the careers of left-leaning filmmakers, and the great mass of those filmmakers' coworkers and fellow citizens, even their own labor unions, sat by nervously and let it happen. Never mind that Americans of all political stripes had eaten up the dark images of corruption and conflict that left-wing moviemakers had perfected. Never mind that stories of the little guy battling plutocracy were a staple of the American imagination on the right wing as well as the left. We were in one of our fits of ideological madness when any call to change is heard as a threat to our identity, and the word went out to sacrifice the "Communists" to our terror.

      When Dassin took on Night and the City, he knew he was about to be blacklisted, that it would be his last movie for an American studio, and it showed in the nausea and hysteria, the mad persistence of dreams in the face of hopelessness that shaped every scene. With a good crew, a strong script and one brilliant actor—Richard Widmark, who also just died—he crafted a whole vision of a fear-driven world with its soul out of joint. There was not an explicitly political line in the entire thing, no angry laborers or cruel bosses, only touts and conmen and B-girls and cabbies and wrestlers, and yet without a moment of posturing or cant he made it one of the cinema's most relentless critiques of capitalism, its psychological, spiritual, and social costs, like Brecht without the speeches or surrealism. And then his American career and life were over.

      The blacklisters weren't just cowardly or conciliatory, they were petty and mean-spirited, too: American film distributors passed the word among their European counterparts that no movie in which Jules Dassin was involved would ever be exhibited in the United States. That kept him from landing a movie job even in France for five years, and when one came to him it was nothing special: a low-budget crime flick called Du rififi chez les hommes. But his loving attention to the mechanics of theft made it a nasty delight. It was a huge hit in Europe, and American distributors wanted a piece of that cash. So money became Dassin's savior and the blacklist began to crack. But Dassin never wanted to be an American again. He directed a movie with the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, fell in love with her, fell in love with her country, and became a "first-generation Greek."

      Even in Europe his work was rarely political on the surface. His best movies were sentimental comedies and ingenious crime capers. And yet, through his amused fascination with thieves, prostitutes, and fly-by-nighters he continued to make brisk points about the effect of cash on morality and law. He cast himself in his most personal movie, Never on Sunday, as an American intellectual named Homer who is disappointed when Greece will not reflect back to him his own fantasies of its cultural purity. He falls in love with a Greek prostitute but cannot accept her for what she is, trying to reform her through education until he finds himself sinking into the muck of the modern Greek underworld. In the end he arrives at the essential Dassin understanding: that we and the world are painfully flawed and money is stronger than any of us, that we can save ourselves only through honest acceptance of what we are. Dassin wasn't a very good actor, and that's part of the reason the movie doesn't hold up as well as his Hollywood work, but in his fragility and eagerness to please and sometimes too self-conscious effort we can see his journey out of pain and into love.

      (And it launched my mother on her own version of Homer's journey. For years after seeing that movie she was desperate to see Greece, but when she got there she found no sign of the singing, stomping, glass-tossing gaiety Dassin had promised. My father took her to a taberna to hear bouzouki music, but the music was overamplified and everyone smoked. She hated it.)

      Dassin's interest in movies—and his talent for them—faded as he grew older, and he gave more and more of his energies to helping Mercouri, his wife and moral compass, in her work as a socialist politician and eventual Culture Minister of Greece. After she died in 1994 he devoted himself to her last cause, the return of the British Museum's Elgin Marbles to their original home on the Parthenon. Not a quixotic battle, exactly, because it might yet succeed. But still a heartbreaking one somehow. For over two centuries those marbles have sat there, white and serene in their London tomb, far removed from the passage of time and the turmoil of Greece and the racket of New Oxford Street, and the British are in no hurry to let them go. The corrosive smog of Athens, they say, would damage them. Dassin outlived his wife by fourteen years, but in those years he came no closer to bringing the marbles home. So they stay frozen, those Centaurs and Lapiths and horsemen and basket-bearers, some headless, some handless, but all imperturbed, so far from the building they were meant to glorify.

      There's a trace of the pain of all those early 20th century left-wing patriots in that unrealized dream: the return of a pure, shattered beauty at long last to its rightful home.

(Listen to the) Paisley People

Nothing about America’s future today, only our distant past. Archaeologists from the University of Oregon have just announced the discovery of the oldest known human DNA in the Americas: coprolites—fossilized doo-doo—radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. The petrified dung was uncovered in the Paisley Caves, near the town of Paisley, Oregon (named by a settler after the mill town in Scotland where the famous Persian teardrop pattern was introduced to the West), and so we can hope that the original depositors will become known as the Paisley People.

      For seventy years the oldest known humans in America were the Clovis People, whose 13,000-year-old spear tips and cutting tools were unearthed in Clovis, New Mexico. (When I was a kid I learned about them as Clovis Man, because that’s how they did it then. Java Man, Peking Man, Piltdown Man. Sometime around 1970 archaeologists got reluctantly in touch with their feminine sides and started talking about the Clovis People, making our antecedents sound less noble but more homey.) Some archaeologists have disputed their place as “first known Americans” for years, but no one has been able to provide the hard data to strip them of the title—not until Dennis Jenkins and his UO team found, not stone tools that could be dated only roughly by the stone strata they were buried in, but the perfect, dateable organic relic.

      That in itself is a miracle. Picture it: some guy takes a dump in a cave, a minute later he's forgotten that particular dump forever, but the stuff somehow survives all the dung-eating bugs and molds until it gradually turns to stone so that 14,300 years later it’s thrilling the scientific community and getting written up in our family newspapers. It’s one of those times you really wish people could have a sudden glimpse of the future. “Who are these wondrous beings with their vast villages and miraculous devices? And what are they doing with my crap?!”

      What a symbol of eternity! What a reminder of the continuity of time and life. It’s like the Clock of the Long Now, except instead of a whirring masterwork of perfectly calibrated machinery it’s a pile of turds.

      But here’s the real revelation: the first known Americans were the Paisley People of Oregon. The Paisley People. Of Oregon. Forget your noble savages, man. Forget your bronze-skinned warriors and your blood-stained hunters of the plains. This has always been a hippie nation.