I’m going to venture across enemy lines here (not really…), and refer you to Jim Walsh’s post about the First Avenue HayDay documentary that’s screening tonight as the kickoff for Sound Unseen. I mean, Walsh was there, man… Me, during the First Avenue heyday, well, I was a fourth grade nothing kicking about on my Huffy bicycle. So, tonight then: there’s the concert footage-crammed screening at the Riverview, for one. Two: there’s an apres-party at the Hex, starring “Capes N’ Tates” (wink-wink) as well as that Wednesday night stalwart, DJ Jake Rudh.
Category: Blog Post
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The Hate That Love Produced
Clash By Night, 1952. Directed by Fritz Lang, written by Alfred Hayes (from the play by Clifford Odets). Starring Barbara Stanwyck, Paul Douglas, Robert Ryan, Marilyn Monroe, J. Carrol Naish, Keith Andes, and Silvio Minciotti.
Available on DVD locally at Cinema Revolution.
San Xavier, location unknown. Probably it’s California, but it could be Washington, Oregon. A fishing town where the guys get up too early to snag fish and the girls stay on shore gutting the same and stuffing its rancid meat into cans. Afterwards they fight and drink and make love and maybe, just maybe, a drop of kindness squeaks out somewhere. Usually not.
Clash By Night is a simple story, a love triangle, as blue-collar as it gets. At once a naturalistic film about first-generation American fishermen (ideally Italian and Irish, though none of them appear as such), it is really about what happens to people when they’re down and out and when love–or a lack of the stuff–warps them. And it warps them good.
The facts: Enter Mae (Barbara Stanwyck). Back after ten years of chasing wealthy men around, with only a suitcase and a headache to show for it. She walks into the town of San Xavier and back to her brother’s home. This brother, Joe Doyle (played by TV stalwart and forgettable actor Keith Andres) isn’t happy. He’s a tough who just wants to fish and smack his girlfriend, Peggy (Monroe), around. Of course, Peggy’s often the one belting him across the chops, and can understand Mae’s urge to get out of this dump.
Now enter Jerry, a big lunk with a heart of gold. He owns a fishing boat, lives with his father and his uncle, the latter of the two being probably the biggest asshole I’ve seen in a movie in a long time. Perhaps Fritz Lang thought it’d be beneficial if one of the audience had an urge to throttle someone themselves. Anyway, Jerry’s a nice guy who falls hard for Mae.
Enter Earl (the great Robert Ryan). He’s something else. His wife is a burlesque dancer, on the road and spending his dough, ignoring him while she struts and sleeps her way across the country. In typical Odets fashion, Earl says he wants to “stick pins in her and see if she bleeds.” He likes Mae, and from the start it’s obvious that Mae likes him. After some awkward courtship, Jerry finally marries Mae, but not before the slimy Earl tries to get his meathooks into her.
The film is truly about men and women clashing in the night, fighting and screwing, barking at one another and cornering each other in the cramped bars and kitchens of this backwater fishing town. And it’s beautiful. Beautiful because Fritz Lang knew enough to invest in his people, to cast wonderful actors who make every moment come alive. Paul Douglas is simply riveting as the shmuck who can’t grasp that his wife is wrong for him, and when he turns into a beast it’s as real the blasts of hot air bellowing from his nostrils. There are touching moments–the father, played by Silvio Minciotti (where the hell did this actor come from?), going from irritable and lonely to quiet and pensive as he plays his accordion in the shadows to his new granddaughter.
And then there’s Stanwyck and Ryan. Two of the most pathetic creatures you’ll ever see mess up a good thing. When they’re together the lines just sizzle, exchanges like:
“You’re the type of guy who needs a new suit of clothes or a new love affair. But he doesn’t know which…”
or this one,
“You can’t make me any smaller. I’m preshrunk.”
All this under a full moon, drunk, cigarettes poking out of their mouths. But every actor resonates, they exist even when they’re not in the scene, so when we see Stanwyck and Ryan, we know that Paul Douglas is lurking in town, hurt, angry. And when he’s alone, we know his wife and her lover are out amusing themselves, and we want them to succeed, and hating ourselves for thinking such a thing.
Clash By Night has its dull spots, most notably in the scenes with Marilyn Monroe and Keith Andes. It’s a bit long in the tooth. But it’s also a film they don’t make anymore–searing melodrama, shot through with noir-style camera angles, and filled with actors who seem to have shot up with hate and bile before the director yelled “action!” There are love stories today, weak, spineless things that don’t understand that everyone who loves also hates… at times with equal passion. This one doesn’t forget.
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IFP Party
IFP (Independent Feature Project, d’uh) is throwing itself a lil’ soiree this evening. It’s a fundraiser for the organization–which is dedicated to promoting the work, locally, of independent screenwriters, filmmakers, and photographers. But it’ll only set you back about fifteen bucks, so it’s cheap as benefit events go. Expect to be fed, watered, and entertained by 1) IFP’s currently running Ken Olson photography exhibition and 2) a screening of several short flicks, including the best picks from this year’s 48 Hour Film Festival.
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The Judy Holliday Experience
Adam’s Rib, showing tonight at the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies in Loring Park.
Tonight, when you go see Adam’s Rib, pay close attention to Judy Holliday, would you? Judy Holliday, the not-so-bright blonde, butt of jokes, with the fluttery voice and look of kindness and near-despair. She’s a fool, no doubt about it. The dopey girl who has to quickly thumb through a manual to fire a gun at her no-good husband. Who talks like a Brooklynite in the worst way. Judy Holliday, playing the poor gal who seems lost on the witness stand, but firm in her love of her family. Judy Holliday, who picks up this fantastic film and hoists it on her narrow shoulders. Make no mistake about it: while Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracy have never been better, while they’re the brains of this marvel, Judy Holliday is its beating heart, is its pained soul.
Rumor has it that Kate and Rib director George Cukor and writer Garson Kanin conspired to cast Holliday in the role of the dopey blonde to show Columbia mogul Harry Cohn that she was just right to play the lead in the movie version of the play Born Yesterday. She won an Oscar for that role, which put her on the map. Unfortunately, the map was Ditzville, a role she couldn’t escape… for a time.
But Holliday was smart. Compare her to Jean Hagen, the gal Holliday’s husband is running around on. Now I like Jean Hagen–she’s screechy and wicked and perfect in Singin’ in the Rain–but she’s one note, very simple. Holliday is simply brilliant. Watch her in the first interview with Kate Hepburn in Adam’s Rib, the way she is confused and yet confident within herself, correcting Hepburn on a number of occasions.
When Hollywood, in its brilliance, thought to keep her pigeonholed as the ditz, Holliday went back to Broadway and started again, taking on more ambitious roles, flexing her muscles.
Then breast cancer took her at age 43. So instead of a career that might have taken off in a variety of strange angles (who knows what the following decades and directors would have done for her?), Judy Holliday was gone. Too soon.
So tonight, if you decide to visit Loring Park to watch this sweet little picture, pay attention to Judy Holliday. She is still staring at us, imploring us to pay attention to her character’s plight, still drawing our attention away from the circus in the courtroom, to the woman who has to go home to her kids each night.
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Motivation
I was on eGullet the other day and I found this site where you could make motivational posters, like the kind with cheesy moonscapes and sailboat pics above “inspirational” and “pithy” sayings.
I’ve created these for you:
Check out the others from eGullet food crew.
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Lady of the Rib
Only worthwhile happening tonight: the music and movies in the park event, this time with Vicious Vicious and a certain flick called Adam’s Rib. The new film playing over at the Bell is interesting–a documentary called Beauty Academy of Kabul, about women studying cosmetology in post-Taliban Afghanistan.
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Living Through
Those days were an iron wagon loaded with rocks that we dragged through muddy fields with our teeth.
You were a magnificent burning boat that would not sink.
We were as prepared as anyone could be who was facing a long night like that. We had, at any rate, been preparing for it for decades. There had been tests –test after test, many of them grueling and sprung on us almost completely unawares– and drills and close calls and false alarms.
We were all familiar –achingly familiar– with that urgent walk through the darkness and humidity of nights just like this one, from which we’d finally emerge, perpetually stunned and blinking, into those long hallways of brutal light and blinding white walls, into the maze of that place, a maze that seemed constantly to be shifting and expanding and spiraling ever higher.
On nights like that, that building, that complex, would feel as vast and silent as a library in the worst and most inscrutable sort of nightmare, yet there were reminders everywhere of what the place was up to and how crowded it was with battered pilgrims in all manner of distress.
It was always astonishing to me how a place so full of suffering could be so hushed. The rising and falling of helicopters was a dull thrumming that you felt mostly in your feet. The hallways were zealously lacquered to such a sheen that you’d find yourself almost tip-toeing like a cat burglar to avoid the squeak of rubber or the clatter of heels.
Sometimes, like that night, that morning, it felt like a holy place. There were saints everywhere, plaster mostly, with disturbingly abject or imploring looks on their faces. The image of Jesus strung up on the cross repeated itself again and again; again and again you encountered the grief of Mary.
Most of the sufferers, hidden away behind white doors with whispering pneumatic releases, were in the hands of the most reprehensibly competent sort of unbelievers.
That night, that morning, you were somewhere in that maze, wired and plumbed like a man who was going to be electrocuted and saved in the same instant.
We knew when we once again retraced our steps that morning that this time we would not be coming back for you. We knew that you were ready, even if we were not, for a long journey for which you would require no shoes, no wallet or driver’s license, no comb, razor, or shaving cream, none of the things, in fact, that we would carry away with us in plastic bags.
You and I had driven across the country together, east and west, and across Canada. We’d sat in the bleachers at spring training ballparks. You were always so happy, so eager, so utterly prepared to be amazed.
Now that’s a pretty swing.
That is one beautiful bird.
Isn’t that something?
We stood together one night on a dark beach in Florida, where astronauts had recently been blown from the sky. We saw the lights of boats in the distance, trolling still for wreckage. You shook your head and said, “It’s hard to even imagine,” but you were already a marked man, and the way you said it I could tell that it wasn’t, in fact, so hard for you to imagine at all.
If you could see me now –and I like to think that you can– you’d know that I’ve already lost so much of what you gave me.
(Four short years.)
(Four long years.)
And you’d know –I know you know– that I’m going to get it all back.
I hope that your voyage, wherever it has taken you and whatever it has entailed, has been as eventful and full of wonder as the life you lived, and that the muffled clanging of that battered bell you lugged around, rattling behind your ribcage all those years, is now just a receding memory. I like to imagine you’ve seen some astonishing things, and that you are living now in some version of one of the old comfortable stories that you believed in so passionately.
It gives me pleasure to think that you are at peace, and even greater pleasure to know that you lived, so fiercely, so gently, and that you were mine and ours, and that I belong to you still, and always.
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Edible Weekend
Corn With The Wind by Mark HessI feel a tasty weekend coming on….
Do you know what’s great about Irish Fair? It’s the names of the food vendors. FatHead Brennan’s Pie Shop will stuff you with cheese and onion pie. Tussie’s Tea & Sweets will settle you with a dense scone. The Ancient Order of Hiberians are not as frightening as they sound, and they sell lemonade for gosh and bi’garn. Don’t forget to tip back some Finnegan’s Irish Amber and contribute to society while you’re doing it.
Pizza Luce is seriously a pizza pioneer in the Twin Cities, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that. I still remember my first post-Danceteria slice from the Luce on Fourth St., it might have been the first time I realized that artichoke hearts had a place in this world. This weekend, celebrate the good life at the Pizza Luce Block Party in Uptown. Live bands, frosty beer, beautiful ‘za.
August and September are the best times to go to weekend markets, people. It’s the harvest remember? This Saturday, the Mill City market is hosting a spectacular, spectacular Trout Fest. Local giants Tim McKee (La Belle Vie), Lenny Russo (Heartland/Cue), Jack Riebel (Dakota) and Jim Kyndberg (Bayport Cookery) will whip Star Prairie Farms trout into all sorts of crazy dishes. And you can pick up some freshly harvested veg to round out your plate.
On Sunday, my little hometown burg will throw it’s umpteenth Corn Days festival. When I was a kid, I used to bike up to the church and help shuck barrels and barrels of corn the night before the shindig. My sister was a Corn Princess in the 80’s and nothing will top the year I won $50 at bingo, and spent it all on snow cones and mini-donuts. Sunday I’ll drag my kids to my old neighbor’s yard to watch the parade, be pelted by candy, and giggle when the horses poop on the road. Then it’s an afternoon of beer and fresh sweet corn, $1.50 for all you can eat.
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Kiss This, Connecticut Voters
W, you’re a much better lover than Hadassah“If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England,” Mr. Lieberman said at a campaign event in Waterbury, Conn.
This via the NY Times this morning, from a stump speech made yesterday by Joe “Swift Boat” Lieberman yesterday.
Just remember: those of you who think that the Iraq war was wrong may as well carry those bottles of explosive shampoo on the plane yourselves, because you are helping the terrorists. All you majority of Americans who hate America, don’t forget to vote for Democrats, because, well, isn’t it clear by now? They hate America, too.
Does anyone else find it strange that those who claim the terrorists hate us because of our freedom get so upset when we exercise some of that freedom to turn out one of the idiots who got us into this mess?
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Find me inspiration, Friday…
I really wish I could say I liked The Man Show. In fact, I expected to like it, and even spent some energy, before ever having seen the thing, imaging what flattering things I might say about it. I expected it to be one of those things that jolted me out of my south Minneapolis comfort bubble. Because, first of all, the show plays in an outlying suburb for heaven’s sake! (And I grew up in an outlying suburb…) And second, the audience is completely different than what it is at, say, The Jungle–it’s more middle American, less likely to go out afterwards so that they can smoke cigarettes, drink wine, and argue with their friends about what they’ve just seen.
It’s no fault of Stevie Ray (the one-man performer in The Male Intellect), but this show just isn’t very funny. The script is based on predictable Men-Are-From-Mars-Women-Venus jokes that mostly fell flat last night. And that’s all the nastiness she wrote, because the experience was otherwise swell. The Chan serves up a damn fine margarita and walleye! And the company’s good, too–and by that I mean the folks who were sitting next to me last night (my party of two was seated family-style).
Onward to the weekend before us…
Here are the Fringe shows I plan to see:
Dancing Rats and Vampire Moms
How To Cheat (As previously noted)
The Depth of the Ocean, a show staged in the pool at the downtown YWCA. How neat!I’ll be spending the better part of my weekend fringing… But if you’re not into that sort of thing, there’s also the Coral Lambert: Iron Pours show opening at Gallery 13 and the This Side Up cardboard exhibition at Creative Electric Studios. There’s some cool happenings associated with Tekween, a festival dedicated to exploring visual art by local Arab artists. There’s the Bike-in At The Bell. And, down in Rochester, there’s the Headphone Festival–which sounds worthy of a road trip, if I do say so m’self.