Category Archives: Metaphorical Noodles

Babbling Books And Motion Pictures

I thought it might be of interest to myself, perhaps to you, to give the classic bibliographic list of books and films that are very much current in my mind, and for that matter, in my literary and cinematic genetic database. Here, first, is a list of books, stories or authors that have impacted upon my thinking and feeling. When I was a history major I used to enjoy reading the bibliographic essays at the end of a book in which the author let his hair down and made comments about what he had read; I enjoyed the good-natured criticism or pleasure that the author had in excavating his pearls from the select oysters he chose. So it will be here.

As to plays, Sartre’s The Flies, was for me the best introduction I ever had to Existentialism and a goddam delight to read. Miller’s Death of a Salesman moved me but Miller pulled his punch; it was a play about a Jewish salesman, for I feel Miller sanitized it for the public as he also kept the fact he had a retarded child away from the public as if some slur on his self (my personal crankiness about him). If you get a good translation, Moliere’s The Misanthrope is a soaring and scathing commentary on what each of us has to do to defeat the grind. It is also called the French Hamlet, although it is often performed as high comedy. I may return to this but I am trying only to list those artistic works that bring a sweet or sharp taste to my mind after all these years.

As to short stories, I am always charmed and swept into the arms of Conrad, remembering his “The Lagoon.” Crane’s The Open Boat is a seamless story in which not one word is out of place, pure as a crystal marble. The Martian Chronicles for its remarkable creation of a world; I Have No Mouth and I Want to Scream, absolutely brilliant science fiction psalm, title story in the collection; I am only, again, citing books that have moved me in one way or another and sometimes I remember only snippets or the tone and sometimes forgetting who wrote the story. What I consider perhaps as the geatest collection I’ve read for sheer humanity is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. If you want epiphanies and glorious and practical insights about human beings, read and study him, in fact, Hemingway did just that and never gave Anderson his due.

I move on. As to novels, Mary Renault’s volumes, The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea are magnificent recreations of ancient Crete in all its glory. I remember reading her description of a gem -encrusted saddle and I could almost touch the facets of the jewels; you want to learn how to write description — seek out that one paragraph (epic). The Nigger of the Narcissus by Conrad is profoundly psychological and it is like reading one of Freud’s works but it had magic for me and I was thrown off by its depth and brilliance, insights dripping off it like a steak. The great novels I’ve read must include very high on the list The Last Temptation of Christ by Kazantzakis, a genius. He had the audacity to write a sequel — in verse — to the Odyssey (in two volumes) and by all literary accounts equaled Homer before he began writing novels in his seventies. Wrenching, powerful, all powerful, mystical, earthy, when Kazantzakis wrote about a bowl of grapes in a bowl you not only could see them, you could taste them. I loved his willingness to be ornate if need be, to be a Gaudi — in his time he was a diplomat, a Communist, broke out in stigmata, a mystic and god knows what else he was. Krishnamurti was a friend — one can only imagine what they spoke of over a cup of Turkish coffee. Kazantzakis was a Cretan, not Greek — a significant difference to my mind. Report to Greco, his confessional, is ranked up there with St. Augustine, but Kazantzakis is so very much more real as a human being. His St.Francis gave one the suffering in the man without Bambi and flitting birds; intensely  and agonizingly is the prose so that you feel what this man felt for life. I remember asking people to read him and offering to girlfriends, etc a copy of the book just to have someone talk to me about that.

I enjoyed reading John Hersey’s The Wall, a terrific recreation by a non-Jew about the Warsaw Ghetto; his identification with the Jewish mentality was spectacular, his ability to identify really remarkable. Gulliver’s Travels is far from a children’s book but a very dark and scathing depiction of human beings, its misanthropy is a delight and right on target. At the end Gulliver is so sickened by human nature that he at first refuses to be rescued at sea — now that is darkness to be relished.

Let us casually move on to other tomes. Elias Canetti’s, Crowds and Power, is probably one of the best books of the 20th Century dealing with the psychological and sociological and emotional  analyses of human beings in groups — he was a novelist and it reads beautifully. His chapter on the Xhosas, a tribe, will make your shudder in its retelling of an actual event; his prose is impeccable. Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and DaVinci are examples of a master at play whose data later on proved unsound but whose prose is wonderful. St. Exupery’s small series of essays, Wind, Sand and Stars, is a mystical reflection on flight and simply sweet existential wonderings. In one essay he is forced to land on a sand dune in the desert. It takes off from there (no pun intended). Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey combines the thinking of a scientist who writes like the poet he was; the prose is entrancing. Again, all of the above left reminiscences within my mind, traces of having read something that touched me and that returns not necessarily to haunt or nag at me, but to wash across my soul in pleasure and fond remembrance.

As to the movies of my mind before they became art works to be studied. I was deeply affected by movies. In the late 40s and all of the 50s my childhood was not glued (I actually played in the streets) to the TV set but to the actual seeing movies on the screen where they had much more impact. For its emotional impact, The Thief of Bagdad grabbed my heart. Starring June Duprez, John Justin, Conrad Veidt, and Sabu, the adolescent mischief maker, the film is now seen as one of the great epic fantasies ever put up on the screen — I can still hum a few notes of the magical score, revel in the glorious technicolor and find Veidt’s performance as the evil vizier and magician lithographed in fear and acid — a remarkable performance. I first saw Welles’ Citizen Kane at the Lakeland, an old movie house affectionately called the “dumps,” in the 40s and I knew on some level I was watching something very special. How special? The burning of Rosebud burned in me for decades until I finally put it to partial rest by writing a few articles about it as well as other articles about early movies that moved me deeply. In fact the publisher of an old movie magazine that published some of my essays in the 80s just retired and published a book about his film magazine. Sure enough I’m listed in the table of contents. Goddam! The circle is complete. Got to buy that book! One other movie, The Search, starring Monty Clift, about a soldier tying up with a waif in postwar Germany who is searching for his mother, eviscerated my gut. The loss of a parent is mind-boggling and Zinneman caught that in his direction. Remember when you are 8 or 9 you are in many cases just an empty vessel for what is put into you. It takes centuries of psychic time to turn all of that into feelings, observations and sympathies. I end here; perhaps more some other time.

Peter Lorre, Emigre, Star of M, Face-Maker, Mis-Used, Actor’s Actor

Several months back I saw Fritz Lang’s M in which Peter Lorre introduced himself to cinema. In the film he is a child molester and murderer;  for the greater part of the movie we see Lorre at angles, in shadows and then we catch that face with eyes as big as “soft-boiled eggs” Kirk douglas labeled them in a much later Disney movie. Lorre’s head was round and often he gave the appearance of a goiterous frog. At the end of the movie he has about three to four minutes in which he pleads and cajoles his criminal captors to grasp his compulsions as molester. (Lorre had attended the lectures of Freud as a young man which goes a long way to explain how he worked at his roles; he was actor as intellectual.) It is an astounding performance; Daniel Day-Lewis would enjoy this as did so many actors for decades to come. Lorre does not act; he inhabits his role, he turns himself inside out and reveals what there is to behold. Absolutely remarkable! Yet this role was to haunt him to the end of his life — imitated, mimicked, stereotyped and mired in Hollywood typecasting so that he rarely escaped. Lorre’s first and greatest performance (perhaps) crippled him.

What is important here is some context. He was Hungarian, his real name Lowenstein. He was a close friend to Berthold Brecht and performed in his plays during the Weimar period in Germany (his apprenticeship as a performer, entertainer and actor was profound). By the time he fled the Nazis he was quite the professional. He starred in two Hitchcock movies, Secret Agent and The Man Who Knew Too Much, and terrific in both; he was a character actor of the first order and in the heyday of character actors in the 30s and 40s, he was marvelous — I give you Joe Cairo in The Maltese Falcon, the gardenia wearing closet homosexual and in Casablanca as Ugarte, the chain-smoking conniver who is nabbed by the Nazis in the early scenes at Rick’s. Bogart loved him dearly as a friend.

Bogie had very good taste. In fact there is a charming and very tender picture of Lorre resting his head on Bogie’s chest in comradeship, affection and love in the book I am reading, The Lost One by Stephen D. Youngckin, more on that in a moment. Hitchcock, Langs, Houston all knew very well that Lorre was masterful, and a remarkable scene stealer as well, but also very generous with other actors all through his short life (he died at 59 from a cerebral hemorrage). Lorre would coach an actor about his lines or ease him into a performance by kibitzing or playing. In fact, Lorre was an imp and elf and often had actors chase him about a set because he pinched their fannies or told them the truth. I admire him for telling Robert Morley that he was a pompous ass, which he was. Yet within a moment he could become serious and give a good performance. He had the ability to move from one stance to another, the consummate professional. He wanted to make people happy but it came from his acting needs rather than some sorry emptiness within.

Although he was the “monster” on radio, then TV, he could rarely if ever escape the parameters set for him. He spent his later years with Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone in a series of Corman movies based very loosely on the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. (Ironically, during the war Lorre would narrate from memory Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and by all accounts audiences were enthralled by his skills.) They knew they were acting in trash, but Lorre and the other pros kidded themselves and tried to make the most of it; they had to eat. Professional to the end, Lorre was always quick to ad-lib a line or show through gesture (his genius) what pages of dialogue tried to communicate. Karloff was a kindly man, Price was quite literate, graduating from Yale or Princeton and had written books on art. As a young boy I saw Karloff in 1957 with Julie Harris in The Lark. Even then I vaguely recall the fuss kicked up by having Karloff in a serious role. It is the classic story of how this country run by entrepreneurs and its plutocracy of puppets assimilates creative artists and grinds them into a kind of soylent green cracker. All through his short life Lorre joined the resistance, fled from it, toyed with it, criticized it until he dropped dead. He could stand apart and wisecrack about what was being done to him. What is admirable about him is his scrappiness, his unwillingness to be shut down and he paid the price of his persona being turned into cartoons, Robin Williams as the genii in Aladdin and one sordid person who tried to change his name to Lorre’s and to pose as his son.

Lorre returned to German in the very early 50s to direct and write a screenplay with strong undercurrents about Germany’s role in the past war. In the rubble that was Germany this introspective film was not received well, for the Germans had, perhaps still do, a short memory and Lorre was very disappointed with the reception. The film is the title of the book,  Der Verlorene (The Lost One) made in 1951. For much different reasons Charles Laughton never directed another movie after The Night of the Hunter and Lorre never did direct again, but ended his life going back to the old stuff the audience knew and expected from him.

At the end of the book a eulogy is reprinted given by Vincent Price. Remarkable in its insight, in its love and respect for Lorre, one actor to another actor, with full admiration for his special genius, I was very, very moved. I suggest if you get the book read the eulogy first and then go back to the specifics of a life, almost well lived, almost respected. His fans cherished him; he had the remarkable capacity to extend his warmth to you over the airwaves, in his comedic stances. I believe that Price’s words reflect so well on him and the special gift Lorre had for making friends.  I give you Peter Lorre: Any man who is mistakenly thought not Jewish in a hotel and faces anti-Semitism, purposely spills ink on the register and then forwards a three month subscription of the Jewish Forward to the hotel manager is my kind of man — my kind of Jew.

Orson Welles in Heaven

This is a short story in progress. I am offering it here for you to comment or to dismiss, whatever the flavor of the day is.

Orson Welles is dead, and Steven Spielberg did him in. Always trying to finance another film, Welles is invited by Spielberg to dinner. Spielberg has purchased one of the extant three papier-mache Rosebud sleds from Citizen Kane. After larding Welles with kudos, so the story goes, of how much he has influenced the younger generation of filmmakers, Welles thinks he might have a shot at being financed by Spielberg. After all, Spielberg can help Welles make 10 films for the price of one of his, indeed, in his Othello Welles was so hard pressed for money that he used Turkish towels in a bath scene and the critics thought it brilliant. But all Spielberg does is talk about Kane and Rosebud.

“Orson, why a sled of all things”? If Steven has the answer to that his own films might grow immeasurably as art. (Hadn’t Welles screened John Ford’s Stagecoach countless times?)

“Why not a sled, Steven? Orson’s busy eyebrows that supported that high foreheard arch, flicker, for it is now no longer a generation of vipers but one of fools; kids raised on camcorders, a spume of non-readers.

“Well, the glass paperweight might have been used symbolically?” (It is, muses Welles.)

“Yes, it might have.” Orson finds this intolerable if not inane but he endures out of strength as an artist — he is not panhandling, never did. Movie-making is a world of “happy lunacy” as he termed it at a Hollywood fete in his honor.

“So.” Steven says.

“So!” Orson says. He does not suffer fools, this mountainous man with the compassionate heart.

“Well, the sled does work.” Welles gives him that just to get on with it. He has lost again and he knows it.

“You mean because of the snow?” Steven replies.

“Yeah, the snow. Snow symbolizes death, Steven. Did you ever read Joyce’s ‘The Dead’?”

“No.”

If Orson had Lived

He’d direct himself in the definitive performance of Lear.

He’d restore or re-shoot the missing footage from The Magnificent Ambersons.

And he never would make a sequel to any of his films.

And he would have continued working out the labyrinth which was central to all his films.

He’d be slain by Steven Spielberg.

If financed, Welles would make three or more greater films than Kane.

He’d have chosen not to lose weight. He is so wounded, it is his buffer.

He’d co-direct with Clint eastwood — Welles admires his The Ballad of Josey Wales. In fact, it has John Ford written all over it and is composed as if Welles had shot a western which, come to think of it, he had — Macbeth.

Rosebud sleds enter the market, named after the in-joke that it is William Randolph Hearst’s name for Marion Davies’ genitalia. (And to have that on your lips when one comes to die.)

Steven Spielberg might be induced to retire and read more.

Orson is missed dearly and we don’t know we miss his civilizing presence.

Orson in Heaven

The most American of directors is an expatriate. Even in heaven.

Orson, there is no need for a film to be made here.

“I’ll do it any way you want but I have to have final cut.”

Dear Orson, I have the final cut.

“I give you that. But all film is death on celluloid; even poor Georgie Raft refused to see his films because he didn’t want to see himself grow old.”

I love you dearly, Orson. In you abides a noble spirit, and like your childhood hero, Shakespeare, you contain both desert and oasis and great expanses of largesse and much good will. Always free of racism, you gave many people work. You were misused and abused. Is it not so that you continued to write and create up to the very end regardless of how you were perceived, with all those Carson jokes about your weight, as if you did not have feelings?

“I have no response except that I be allowed to create and imagine; that I never be re-
incarnated as Steven Spielberg.”

Welles delivers that insouciantly with an arched eyebrow and they both have a grand laugh.

Welles is given a studio. He is now working on a great Lear. Opening with a magnificent crane shot that goes beyond the great one that begins Touch of Evil, this time the credits don’t spoil it; Universal’s gift to editing. While Welles is finishing his Lear, he has released The Other Side of the Wind to his heavenly confreres. Huston is fine and well, and Welles is pleased that he is doing so much better now free of emphysema. How Welles iis applauded in heaven and given honors by those of his generation who understand and admire a master at work. More good news. Welles is doing Hamlet, and he feels the young Errol Flynn, with sufficient coaching, might do very well in the role. And Flynn has accepted — recognition at last. The last we hear of Welles he is scouting locations above with the great cinemaphotographers, Griffith’s Billy Bitzer and his own Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez.

And Rita has returned, Alzheimer free, for she cherishes the boy genius. She and Everett Sloane are waiting for a recoupling; The Lady from Shanghai is one of Rita’s favorite roles. And no one can say “lover” better than Sloane — he will be forever “Bernstein.” Privately Welles has caringly, compassionately chided him for taking his own life.

The End

Imagine the finest Carrera marble of Italy, liquefied and cooling, imagine it flowing, like lava, into an artifice of great design and one might hear again the voice that was Welles. (Poor Joe Cotten, just had a laryngectomy; poor Leland.)

Imagine Cotten and Welles entwined and fused into one spoken language and one hears the harmonics by which the planets do their rounds.

And who now attends to the octogenarian, Joe Cotten, who now would play Leland masterfully — and at the right age — as he did as young man in Kane, gussied up in a wheelchair, cap, and cadging the shadow-shrouded reporter for stogies. And how Welles would fill up Charles Foster Kane with character whereas he was just a marionette, as Welles later confided to his biographer.

And who now will embrace Welles’ memory lovingly? Oh tragic and insupportable loss, his childhood friend might exclaim.

And when Spielberg comes to die, what will issue from his lips?

Originally written in August 1990 and last revised in July 1992, this story is still with me and the above rendition has been improved. What saith thou, reader?

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