Twelve movies

[One to four stars. Four sentences each. No spoilers. Sources: Criterion Channel, Netflix, TCM, YouTube.]

Behind Green Lights (dir. Otto Brower, 1946). A car rolls up to a police station, corpse at the wheel, and Lieutenant Sam Carson (William Gargan) gets an investigation going. One likely suspect comes into view (the daughter of a mayoral candidate), two more likely suspects come into view (the dead man’s estranged wife and her fiancé), and then, of course, the real killer is exposed. Some worthwhile atmospherics here in what looks like a genuinely shabby police station where Lt. Carson works through to the morning. But there’s also considerable dumbness when the cops overlook the ridiculously obvious. ★★ (YT)

*

Lucky (dir. John Carroll Lynch, 2017). Harry Dean Stanton, in his last movie, as Lucky, a WWII vet, never married, living on coffee, cigarettes, and Bloody Marias in a tiny southwestern town. The movie tracks his everyday doings — washing up, doing yoga, going to a café, a convenience store, a bar — and, late in the movie, there’s an extraordinary departure from the everyday at a fiesta: Lucky is full of surprises. Hanging over the movie is the question of how to live in the face of mortality, nothingness, ungatz, and there’s an answer offered. With Ed Begley Jr., James Darren (his last movie too), Beth Grant, and David Lynch. ★★★★ (N)

*

From the Criterion Channel feature Nordic Noir

Death Is a Caress (dir. Edith Carlmar, 1949). Criterion says it’s the first Norwegian noir and the first Norwegian film directed by a woman. The story, told in flashbacks, eerily prefigures that of Sunset Boulevard, released a year later: here, an older, affluent married woman, Sonja (Bjørg Riiser-Larsen), spots a young auto mechanic, Erik (Claus Wiese), and an affair begins. As in Sunset Boulevard, there’s another, younger, well-adjusted woman in the picture, Erik’s fiancée Marit (Eva Bergh). Conversations about free will and determinism add a Detour-like flavor to the narrative. ★★★★

Girl with Hyacinths (dir. Hasse Ekman, 1950). The girl is Dagmar Brink (Eva Henning), and her story unfolds in flashbacks as a writer-neighbor (Ulf Palme) follows clues to work out the reason for her suicide. Moody and mysterious, beginning with the opening shots of feet and legs as their owners speak. Anyone who’s read Heart of Darkness will understand the lie with which the movie ends. Criterion points out that Ingmar Bergman considered this Swedish movie a masterpiece. ★★★★

Two Minutes Too Late (dir. Torben Anton Svendsen, 1952). Grete (Grethe Thordahl) is a wife of three months, insecure, possessive, married to Max (Paul Reichardt), a man everyone thinks is God’s gift. Grete sits home alone; the telephone rings; there’s no one on the line. Suspicions multiply in this Danish noir, as Grete suspects her sister of an affair with Max, but when a woman is found dead in a bookshop, Max is just one of the suspects. The who of this Danish whodunit is easy to guess, but the twist at the movie’s end is not. ★★★★

Hidden in the Fog (dir. Lars-Eric Kjellgren, 1953). Meta noir, with Eva Henning playing a woman named Lora in a movie in which a smitten police inspector references Otto Preminger’s Laura. As the movie begins, Lora shoots her philandering husband and watches as a book falls from his hands. She runs from the house and wanders through Stockholm; the work of solving a murder begins; and Lora is not the only suspect. One final trope: a climactic scene with all parties gathered in a drawing room as the inspector reveals the killer. ★★★★

*

Leaves of Grass (dir. Tim Blake Nelson, 2009). Remarkable performances from Edward Norton as identical twins Bill and Brady Kincaid, the one a classics professor at Brown, the other a high-tech pot grower in Tulsa. Bill’s return to Tulsa after twelve years is fraught: he’s estranged from his druggie mother (Susan Sarandon), at odds with his brother, smitten with a poetry-writing high-school teacher (Keri Russell), and pressured to abet his brother’s criminal schemes. Lots of comedy, but the story moves toward increasingly unfathomable violence, along with a tangential subtext about anti-Semitism (Nelson, who wrote the screenplay, was born in Tulsa to Jewish parents). I’m adding a star because this only movie I know of that references the hortatory subjunctive (Nelson majored in classics at Brown). ★★★ (CC)

*

Song of My City (dir. David C. Roberts, 2025). A short film (too short) made of brief scenes (identified only in the closing credits) from films depicting 1970s New York City. It’s not Woody Allen’s Manhattan: it’s a city of cops and crime and bags of garbage lining the streets. You can almost smell the eau de New York, which I think of as a blend of urine, exhaust, garbage, and cigarette smoke. With music by Philip Glass, Gene Krupa, and The Velvet Underground. ★★★ (TCM)

*

Two Criterion Channel shorts
My Back Pages (dir. Nick Canfield and Paul Lovelace, 2024 ). A short movie that should be longer, it’s a glimpse into the (Manhattan?) apartment of Mitch Blank, a collector of all things Bob Dylan (even newspaper articles whose headlines reference Dylan songs), as Blank prepares to donate some portion of his collections to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I wrote “apartment,“ not “life,” because the man and his motivations are left unexplored: when he began collecting, how collecting has affected his life and relationships, how he affords it (he even has an assistant), whether he plays an instrument or sings, whether he’s ever met Bob Dylan. Such basic questions! About all we learn is that Dylan’s music takes Blank to a place he likes to be (he calls the music “healing”) and that he feels a need to divest himself of some of his stuff: “Sometimes you have to take a shower.” ★★

Windy Day (dir. Faith Hubley and John Hubley, 1968). An Oscar-nominated short, and an abiding gift from the filmmakers to their children, with beautiful mid-century animation by Barrie Nelson. The voices of Emily Hubley and Georgia Hubley, the filmmakers’ young daughters, speak of big things — marriage, babies, death — as their animated selves romp through a semi-abstract world. For anyone who’s been a parent or a child, this movie should be a tonic. “I was a boy in my father and my mommy planted the seed.” ★★★★

[Also at YouTube.]

*

Blue Moon (dir. Richard Linklater, 2025). Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart on the most miserable night of his life, at the bar in Sardi’s, having ducked out of the boffo opening night of Oklahoma!, the musical written by his soon-to-be-former partner Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and now awaiting their post-show arrival. Hart drinks and smokes, engages in fast repartee with the barman (Bobby Cannavale), gives the inexplicably present E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) the beginnings of Stuart Little (utter fiction), awaits a beautiful college student he’s purportedly planning to seduce (Margaret Qualley), and speaks with Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and Hammerstein (Simon Delaney) at length, shamelessly flattering them even as he reveals his contempt for their new work and his desperate need to be back in the game. Hawke gives a brilliant (yes, Oscar) performance, and the complaints about the camera angles needed to make him look short are, to my mind, pointless. One of the saddest movies I’ve seen. ★★★★ (N)

*

Cover-Up (dir. Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, 2025). The life and work of Seymour Hersh, reluctant to talk about himself, zealous about protecting his sources, past and present, and relentless in his pursuit of dark truths. Poitras: “So why do you keep doing the work?” Hersh: “You can’t have a country that does that.” This documentary is something of a grand tour of state atrocities and criminality, from My Lai to Watergate to Abu Ghraib, and I started shaking when I realized that an anecdote I once heard a Vietnam vet tell (with crazed laughter) mirrors a detail from My Lai — a massacre that, as Hersh points out, was not unique. ★★★★ (N)

Related reading
All OCA “twelve movies” posts (Pinboard)

Banjo Man

“In recognition of Black History Month, the Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive (IULMIA) is proud to highlight films from our collections that center Black communities, voices, and lived experiences”: From Blues to Banjo: Black Music in the IU Libraries Moving Image Archive.

This week: Banjo Man (dir. Joe Vinikow and Reuben Chodooh, 1977), “a rare portrait of John ‘Uncle Homer’ Walker, an 80-year-old Black Appalachian banjo player whose life and music challenge commonly held assumptions about the roots of old-time mountain music.” But it’s not yet available. I’ll add a link when the film comes online.

*

And here it is. Narrated by Taj Mahal.

[In 2026 it’s much better known that the banjo is an instrument with African roots and was long a major instrument in Black American music.]

Joseph Cornell’s house

[37-08 Utopia Parkway, Flushing, Queens, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I’ve read somewhere that Joseph Cornell was grateful to have met someone who had met Claude Debussy. I suppose I can say that I’m grateful to have met someone who had met Joseph Cornell. That would be John Ashbery, who corresponded with Cornell, spoke with him by telephone any number of times, and visited him once at home (no date given) in the company of another (unnamed) poet. From Ashbery’s foreword to Joseph Cornell’s Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993):

We sat for a long time in the kitchen, which was devoid of any of the treasures we had imagined the house to be full of, drinking Lipton’s tea and trying to do justice to the plate of leaden pastries on the table (Cornell explained that he preferred these “heavy-duty pastries,” as he called them, the old-style cafeteria kind, to the newer, fancier ones).

Cornell’s penchant for sweets and his habit (Depression-inspired?) of using a single teabag for multiple guests (and more than one round of tea) is attested by other visitors to Utopia Parkway.

Cornell, his brother Robert, and their mother Helen moved to the house on Utopia Parkway in 1929. Cornell spent the rest of his life there. The basement was his workspace. The garage housed additional materials for his art. (But look for the sign next to the front door: the garage was for rent when this photograph was taken.) The house stands.

More about no. 37-08 and its best-known occupant:

~ The art historian Phyllis Tuchman’s account of a visit to no. 37-08: “Enchanted Wanderer: A Writer Returns to a Lost Afternoon with Joseph Cornell” (Hauser & Wirth).

~ Eliza Barry Callahan’s account of trying to make it into no. 37-08, many years after Cornell’s death (The Paris Review).

~ Sarah Lea and Jasper Sharp’s account of “The House on Utopia Parkway” (Gagosian Quarterly ).

~ A Gagosian installation: The House on Utopia Parkway, Wes Anderson’s re-creation of Cornell’s basement workspace.

Related reading
A handful of Joseph Cornell posts : More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[I’m also grateful to have met John Ashbery.]

Sock It to ’Em, JB

[Click for a larger view.]

More like this, please.

Post title (once again) with thanks to Rex Garvin and the Mighty Cravers and the Specials.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

I started today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper by Rafael Musa in the upper left with 2-D, four letters, “Notation after ‘A new broom sweeps clean’” and 19-A, three letters, “Stain source.” Easy! And then the puzzle grew much more difficult. One “Hairy situation” (8-D, four letters) after another (61-A, five letters). And still more “Hairy situations” (48-D, four letters). Two longer answers that I filled in with no crosses helped hugely to open up the puzzle: 17-A, nine letters, “Infomercial order” and 28-D, ten letters, “Didn’t try very hard.”

Some other clue-and-answer pairs of note:

11-D, ten letters, “Out of it.” ELIMINATED? UNEMPLOYED? No, a more delightful answer.

15-D, eight letters, “Performers with horses.” Also delightful.

16-A, five letters, “Frost and Eliot contemporary.” Well, maybe. One might say that Samuel Beckett and Joan Blondell were contemporaries (both born in 1906), but to my mind, contemporary suggests someone who shares a particular cultural space. My first thought was POUND, who had a connection to both Frost and Eliot. Interesting: Google AI names Eliot and Frost as contemporaries of 16-A. But I’m not buying this answer.

30-A, eight letters, “Word from the French for ‘cure in brine.’” I did not know that.

33-D, eight letters, “More than one soft touch.” Nice.

42-A, five letters, “Battle of Hastings participant.” Obvious, right? Wrong.

My favorite in this puzzle: 46-A, six letters, “Spot-checked?”

*

One I overlooked: 14-A, nine letters, “Cross-sectional side piece.” Yow!

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Bye, tariffs

From The New York Times (gift link):

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that President Trump exceeded his authority when he imposed sweeping tariffs on imports from nearly every U.S. trading partner, a major setback for his administration’s second-term agenda.

The court’s 6-3 decision has significant implications for the U.S. economy, consumers and the president’s trade policy. The Trump administration had said that a loss at the Supreme Court could force the government to unwind trade deals with other countries and potentially pay hefty refunds to importers.

As my daughter would say, Holy moly!

There are other exclamations that come to mind as well.

Decoy Mongols

[From the Decoy episode “Around the World,” February 24, 1958. John Newton as Lieutenant Kendall, Frank Silvera (of Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss ) as Andrew Garcia.]

[From the Decoy episode “Reasonable Doubt,” March 10, 1958. Eugene Peterson as Lieutenant Franklin.]

[From the Decoy episode “Tin Pan Payoff,” June 9, 1958. Mike Kellin as songwriter Harry Keenan. Click any image for a larger view.]

Decoy was a short-lived television show, thirty-nine episodes, 1957–1958. We found it, or most of it, on YouTube. It is said to be the first television series about a policewoman — Patricia “Casey” Jones, played by Beverly Garland.

As the show’s title suggests, Jones did much though not all of her work undercover, posing as an art collector, a bar girl, a drug addict, a prison inmate, a model, a nurse, a secretary, a sideshow dancer. As with Naked City, exterior scenes were filmed on location, so we get to see New York City playgrounds, a housing project, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village streets, and Washington Square Park (along with low-budget studio interiors). Many recognizable names show up in individual episodes: Ed Asner, Martin Balsam, Peter Falk, Diane Ladd, Lois Nettleton, Suzanne Pleshette, and others.

What I most appreciate about the show is the chance to see Beverly Garland as something other than Mrs. Steve Douglas of My Three Sons. Here she’s an unmarried woman with a revolver in her purse and virtually no private life, “effortlessly cool,” my daughter says. Decoy is worth watching.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)

[From childhood’s hour, the Mongol has been my favorite pencil.]

A pretty penny?

“Installation is included? Heck, I paid a pretty penny for installation!”

When I see this commercial for Renewal by Andersen (which does not appear to be available online), I laugh. And heck, I wonder how long the expression “a pretty penny” might last now that the penny is defunct.

A related post
“Yap,” “skedaddle,” and “sheesh”

What a comment!

An anonymous reader left a comment tonight on a 2014 post titled Old Grote. What a comment! Read it and feel a little happier.

Also, you’ll then know what Old Grote means.

John Ashbery, John Yau, and the movies

John Yau, from “At the Movies with John Ashbery,” an excerpt from a work in progress (The Paris Review ). The subject is the first screening of Joseph Cornell’s film Rose Hobart :

According to John, halfway through the debut showing, with Cornell present, Salvador Dalí — in a fit of envy, and one of the few in the audience to grasp what Cornell had done — used his umbrella to knock over the projector, which Cornell was operating, as he stormed out, screaming: “My idea for a film is exactly that, and I was going to propose it to someone who would pay to have it made. I never wrote it down or told anyone, but it is as if you had stolen it!” Another source has Dalí yelling: “Joseph Cornell, you are a plagiarist of my unconscious mind!” Cornell, who was notoriously shy, was understandably distressed by this outlandish and inexcusable behavior, and stopped showing his films in public until the mid-sixties, when, with the encouragement of Jonas Mekas, he began showing them again.

If you have access to the Criterion Channel, you can see John Ashbery talk about movies in Michael Almereyda’s short film The Lonedale Operator . And anyone interested in Ashbery and the movies should seek out what he called the “muddled yet marvelous” Val Lewton production The Seventh Victim (dir. Mark Robson, 1943). Ashbery went so far as to write an essay about it. You can find it at archive.org. It’s so strange.

Related reading
All OCA Ashbery posts (Pinboard)

Thanks, Jim.