Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate! As children of the 80s and 90s, mixtapes played a prominent role in my courtship of my loving wife Marion. Or rather, mix CDs did. One of the first ones I gave her included the song “Under the Milky Way Tonight” by the Church as track nine. We later chose it for our first dance at our wedding, which took place on August 9. I’ve made it the ninth track on every mix I’ve given her since then, which I try to do at least once a year, usually on Mother’s Day or her birthday. With her permission I’m posting the track listing for the one she received this weekend, since it’s more indebted to the movies than usual. Although: films are often are the way I discover new old music these days and the mix I made her last year was heavily influenced by movies as well, so maybe this is the continuation of a trend? Anyway, the other convention I honor is limiting the mix to just 80 minutes worth of music, since that was the length of the CD-Rs that got this tradition started. Without further ado, here’s what is included on Marion’s 2024 Mother’s Day mix along with notes about the films that inspired each selection:
Ian Tracey, Garfield Wilson, and Pirate Chorus – “Ode to the Falling.” This is from the soundtrack for Peter Pan & Wendy, which was directed by David Lowery, the François Truffaut of the “film blogosphere” (am I the first person to use that term in a decade?), and one of our “Friday Movie Night” selections last year.
Janis Martin – “Cry Guitar.” Film critic Sheila O’Malley of The Sheila Variations mentioned Martin somewhere last year, maybe on Instagram? Anyway, this prompted me to give her a listen.
Giorgio Moroder – “Ivory Tower.” This is of course from the soundtrack for The NeverEnding Story, a favorite of Marion’s.
The Church – “Under the Milky Way Tonight.” For the reasons described above!
Grandaddy – “Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake.” No movie connection here, just a good song by a band Marion likes.
Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris – “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” No movie connection here, either, just a new to me cover of one of my favorite songs from Back to Mono.
David Bowie – “Chilly Down.” This is Marion’s favorite song from the soundtrack for Labyrinth, a recent Friday Movie Night selection.
New Order – “Hellbent.” I regularly do this annoying thing where I listen to every album from a band or solo artist in chronological order, which would be fine except that everyone else in my family doesn’t necessarily want to come downstairs to New Order every morning for two weeks. Anyway, Marion noted that she liked this song.
Sandy Lam – “Ji Qing.” This is from the soundtrack for As Tears Go By and I think the MUBI Podcast must have mentioned it in their show about Chungking Express last April?
Brian Eno – “Fat Lady of Limbourg.” No movie connection: they played “Back In Judy’s Jungle” at the Cherry Circle Room in Chicago when I went there last year during ALA Annual and it reminded me that it had been a minute since the last time I listened to Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), which is an awesome album.
The Waterboys – “The Whole of the Moon.” No direct movie connection, but the Waterboys’ song “Fisherman’s Blues” was on the soundtrack for Waking Ned Devine, which I saw at the Point of View Cinema (RIP) in Millersville, PA in high school. I dug it enough to buy it on CD, and that’s what was playing when I lost my virginity. So now you know that about me!
Little Anthony & The Imperials – “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” No movie connection: Little Anthony & The Imperials was another group I gave the “listen to every song in order” treatment to last year.
Kacey Musgraves – “Cardinal.” No movie connection: just a good song that Marion likes from an album that came out this year!
Manon Hollander – “Marie Douceur, Marie Colère.” From the soundtrack for John Wick: Chapter 4. Who doesn’t love foreign language versions of classic rock songs?
Enjoy!
Links to previous mixes I’ve posted about can be found here.
I like spring peas, ramps, and fiddlehead ferns as much as the next fellow, but the seasonal ingredient I get most excited about during this time of year is rhubarb because it’s typically the first edible plant we’re able to harvest from our own yard. My favorite thing to use it in is pie, but it also makes an excellent shrub, and a couple of years ago I discovered that it can be transformed into a delicious syrup as well courtesy this drink recipe by Charlotte Voisey. Throw in the facts that, a) this cocktail is a great showcase for an excellent local spirit, 1911 Honeycrisp Vodka, and, b) it lends itself to garnishing with apple blossoms during the one week each year when they’re in flower, and you have an absolutely perfect beverage for upstate New York during the month of May! Here’s how we make it:
1 1/2 ozs. Apple vodka (1911) 3/4 oz. Rhubarb syrup 3/4 oz. Lemon juice 1 Tbsp Rosemary leaves
Lightly muddle the rosemary with the other ingredients. Add ice and shake, then double strain into a chilled glass and garnish with an apple blossom if you have one, an apple fan if you don’t and you’re feeling ambitious, or just serve as-is.
We don’t currently have a juicer, so we use this rhubarb simple syrup recipe from The Kitchn. The one place where we deliberately part from Voisey is by lightly muddling the rosemary before shaking. This could just be an issue with my technique, but we don’t get enough of that flavor otherwise, and its complexity is absolutely essential. An apple fan is a fun garnish, but the blossom takes this to a whole new aromatic level–it’s spring in a glass!
Between the rhubarb and the vodka, there was only one movie I was ever going to pair with this drink: Stalker. Here’s a picture of my Kino DVD release:
Stalker is adapted from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic, but only loosely despite the fact that both authors are credited as screenwriters alongside director Andrei Tarkovsky. Both the movie and book begin with excerpts from interviews with a Nobel Prize winner. The latter one is substantially longer, identifies the speaker’s discipline as physics, and confirms that the Zone where the titular stalker (whose name in the book is Red Schuhart) plies his trade is indeed the site of an extraterrestrial visit. From there the differences multiply: the action of the book spans years as opposed to the single day or so of the movie; Red’s/Stalker’s daughter Monkey’s affliction is not an inability to walk, but rather non-human features which become more pronounced over time; there’s a major storyline about reanimated corpses; etc.
Perhaps the most relevant deviation is that in Roadside Picnic the Zone is littered with powerful (and in many cases dangerous) alien artifacts, which is how Red and his fellow stalkers make their living: they lead others on expeditions to recover them and sell some on the black market themselves. The movie, on the other hand, contains no corresponding futuristic props whatsoever. As Tarkovsky notes in Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, “only the basic situation could be strictly called fantastic.” Instead, the profoundly otherworldly atmosphere of the Zone is created by what Maya Turovskaya calls “an infinitesimal dislocation of the everyday” in her book Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry. The example she cites is the phone which suddenly rings in a house which is completely cut off from the grid:
Another obvious one is these embers that Professor (the gentleman pictured above, played by Nikolay Grinko), Writer (Anatoliy Solonitsyn), and Stalker (Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy) encounter in a territory long deserted by people:
The effect is also achieved through subtler means like the strategic mismatches between sound and image that Andrea Truppin documents in a chapter in Rick Altman’s book Sound Theory, Sound Practice. As Stalker and his companions approach the remains of a military vehicle, for instance, the way the camera tracks forward, sound of footsteps, and additional touches like “the movement of successive tufts of grass at the bottom of the frame as if the feet of the character were crushing them” all imply a point-of-view shot:
However, as the camera continues its progress the three characters whose perspective we presumed it embodied appear on screen, negating that possibility:
In their book The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie note that “in a good print, the arrival at the Zone becomes genuinely magical, the grass a pulsating green that contrasts with the shabbiness and dinginess (yet, in a good print, intensely tactile detail) of the preceding sepia images”:
And to finish with the writer who got us started, Maya Turovskaya poetically describes the surprise appearance of a black dog as having “a hint of warning, like a distant echo of some half-forgotten legend” about it:
Stalker shares its technique of creating a science fiction universe out of images culled from the present with the 1965 film Alphaville, which also has a similar thesis. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky says that in the former he makes “some sort of complete statement: namely that human love alone is–miraculously–proof against the blunt assertion that there is no hope for the world. This is our common, and incontrovertibly positive possession. Although we no longer know how to love. . . . ” Compare this to the final lines between Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina) and Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) in the latter:
NATACHA: You’re looking at me oddly. It’s as if you’re waiting for me to say something. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know the words. I was never taught them. Help me.
LEMMY: I can’t, princess. You have to get there by yourself to be saved. If you can’t, then you’re as lost as the dead souls of Alphaville.
NATACHA: I . . . love . . . you. I love you.
But where that film’s director Jean-Luc Godard seems to be making the (unusually for him) simple argument that the seeds of a dystopian future have not only already been planted, but are in fact beginning to bear fruit, Tarkovsky is up to something different when he parades objects like this across the screen:
Or when he employs classical music in Stalker‘s incredible ending, which follows an ersatz miracle–a medium shot appears to show Monkey (Natalya Abramova) walking!
Until the camera pulls back to reveal that her father is carrying her on his shoulders across a landscape overlooked by cooling towers:
A few scenes later Monkey sits at a table reading a book:
As the camera slowly and unsteadily retreats from her, revealing a trio of glasses at the bottom right corner of the frame, we hear a lone train whistle and an isolated synthesizer from electronic music pioneer Eduard Artemyev’s score. Seeds from dandelions or some other plant float across the screen and a voice begins to read a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev which Björk later turned into the song “The Dull Flame of Desire”:
The train whistle sounds again and Monkey tilts her head to one side. Suddenly, the dog which accompanied Stalker back from the Zone whines and one of the glasses begins to move:
As it comes to rest at the corner of the table, a second glass, or rather a jar containing an egg shell, begins to inch forward in the same halting manner:
It stops a few moment later and the third glass begins to slide. Monkey rests her head on the table as it continues its journey all the way to the edge of the table, then over it:
As the glass lands with a thunk, the table starts to shake and the camera begins tracking toward Monkey:
In the sound of passing trains and in Beethoven’s music, we can hear a faint and fading echo of the restless striving of humanity as it tries to make sense of, conquer and colonize the universe, without as well as within. The scene makes it clear, however, that this grand project is a failure, and that what is ultimately of importance is something very different, something that will forever elude and outlast the signifying practices represented in the soundtrack.
His jumping-off point is a comment by Truppin that, “[i]f the train’s roar and its distorted music represent the destructive forces of Western civilization, the power of spirituality is represented by the small child, who calmly and gently moves the world, an embodiment of the Christian concept that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth.'”
The work of these scholars is some of my favorite writing on Stalker and they both provide ample support for their claims, but I don’t find their readings of this scene entirely convincing because Monkey’s telepathic powers have a different meaning for me than they do for them. I do agree with Pontara that “[t]he transfiguration in the last scene places the Stalker’s daughter firmly outside of civilization” and that “her relation to the sonic icons of modern civilization expresses in a radical way the possibility of overcoming and transcending the illusory ideals of that civilization.” What this reminds me of, though, is another classic of science fiction that the Strugatsky brothers surely must have been familiar with: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which also involves children who develop in an unexpected directions as a result of interference by visitors from the stars. That book ends with the offspring of our species literally destroying the earth as part of their merger with a cosmic intelligence called the Overmind. Tarkovsky asserts in Sculpting in Time that “[i]n the end everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love.” The Monkey of Roadside Picnic appears to be evolving beyond that capacity; Stalker ends with that same character displaying the same sort of telekinetic powers that Jennifer Anne Greggson has in Childhood’s End. These associations are too tenuous for me to insist upon them, but they prevent me from embracing the ending of the film as unambiguously optimistic.
Noel Vera makes an interesting observation in his Critic After Dark blog post about Stalker: the room in the Zone that the main characters seek out which supposedly grants anyone who enters it their heart’s secret desire has catfish swimming about in it:
“What might they wish for, and have any of their wishes been granted?” he muses. Perhaps we should be like Kent Brockman and welcome these fish as our new overlords. If the very best aspects of humanity are inextricable from the absolute worst, it might be time to give someone else a crack at running the planet–why not them?
Cheers!
All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife.Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.
Also in Theaters: For at least one more week, the best new movie now playing locally remains Dune: Part Two, which continues its run at the Regal. Civil War, which is there and at Cinemapolis, is also definitely worth seeing. The Beast has a few more showtimes at Cinemapolis today before it closes; if you like it, you may be interested to know that you can see the Met Opera’s production of Madama Butterfly at the Regal on Saturday and Wednesday. I hear that The Fall Guy, which is at the Regal, is a fun time at the movies and hope to see it there before it closes. It’s once again slim pickings for repertory fare, but you can see Amélie at Cinemapolis all week.
Home Video: I’m absolutely thrilled to report that Turner Classic Movies has devoted the first three Thursdays of May to films directed by Frank Borzage, who up until now perhaps my most glaring cinephile blind spot! Here’s tonight’s lineup (all times in Eastern):
Each film they showed last week showed up on WatchTCM shortly after it aired, and hopefully that will be true of these titles, too–if so, I’m determined to watch all of them! Of the movies there now, the highlight is definitely Man’s Castle, which is the closest thing I’ve ever seen to the cinematic equivalent of a Bruce Springsteen song–just change the setting to New Jersey in your mind, listen to that long whistle whine, and tell me I’m wrong! I’m also a big fan of the two Gary Cooper vehicles, A Farewell to Arms and Desire, which I believe is the first movie I’ve ever seen set in San Sebastián, Spain, one of my favorite cities in the world. The Circle, No Greater Glory, and Secrets are excellent as well. Also are available are two I haven’t watched yet, Mannequin and Stranded. Meanwhile, History Is Made at Night, the one Borzage film I’ve seen more than once and the subject of a future “Drink & a Movie” post, is also available on The Criterion Channel.
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts canbe found here.
What I’m Seeing: I’m going with The Beast at Cinemapolis for this week’s theatrical screening.
Also in Theaters:Challengers, which is at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall, is penciled in as my theatrical selection for next week. The Fall Guy, which opens at the Regal today, will likely work its way up to the top of my list later in May. The best new movie now playing in Ithaca that I’ve seen is Dune: Part Two, which remains at the Regal. Civil War, which is there and at Cinemapolis, is neither as good nor as bad as you’ve heard, but it’s definitely worth seeing so that you can form your own opinion. Finally, repertory pickings are slim with Cornell Cinema done until fall following a “mystery screening” tonight, but options worth considering include Amélie, which opens at Cinemapolis tomorrow and runs all week, and Alien, which closes at the Regal tonight, but definitely not Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace, which: why is this back in theaters?
Home Video: I typically make it a point to only recommend movies in this space that I have watched recently, but decided to make an exception after reading in the New York Times yesterday that Uncut Gems is leaving Netflix on May 8. It would have been a shoo-in for my Top Ten Movies of 2019 list had I made one that year and I remember it fondly every time one of my sports books runs a promo that suckers me into a silly NBA parley, which happens more often than I’d like to admit. I haven’t seen it since right before the pandemic, though, and my loving wife hasn’t seen it all, so this definitely what we’ll be watching this weekend!
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts canbe found here.
What I’m Seeing: Local theaters are full of intriguing options right now! I’m going with the movie of the moment Civil War at Cinemapolis because I enjoyed the first three films that Alex Garland directed and because national treasure Stephen McKinley Henderson is in it.
Also in Theaters: I hope to catch both Challengers, which is at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall, and The Beast, which is at Cinemapolis, before they leave Ithaca. Had I but world enough, and time, I’d see Monkey Man (the Regal) and Sasquatch Sunset in theaters as well, but it probably isn’t going to work out. Oh well. Following a lot of turnover on local screens, the best new movie in Ithaca that I’ve already seen is once again Dune: Part Two, which is at the Regal. Cornell Cinema is winding down their spring programming with Cléo from 5 to 7 on Monday, a free screening of Borders on Tuesday, and a Science on Screen event which includes a screening of Back to the Future and a lecture by Professor Eilyan Bitar on Wednesday. Your other best bets for repertory fare are Spirited Away, which is at the Regal in dubbed or subbed versions Saturday through Wednesday, and Alien, which opens at the Regal tomorrow and runs all week.
Home Video: The name of this blog refers to the fact that I took a roughly decade off from intensive movie watching between finishing graduate school in 2009 and the birth of my second child in 2018 to concentrate on my family and career. I’m sure I still saw more films than an average person during this time, but there were also a lot of prominent new releases that I completely missed. I finally caught up with one of them the other day after Jason Bailey noted in the New York Times that Whiplash is leaving Netflix on April 30. As you probably already know, it’s terrific! J.K. Simmons is a Best Supporting Actor of the Decade candidate for his performance as Terence Fletcher, I’ve been listening to the soundtrack nonstop on Spotify all week, and the final sequence is absolutely stunning. I think I like it best, though, for its treatment of art and sport as two sides of the same coin. Sport is the art of the body, and artists are competitors just as surely as athletes are–they just have different ways of keeping score. Whiplash is about how much we’re missing when we focus only on concerts and games and ignore the countless hour of practice and decision-making that preceded them: if we applaud the final performance without understanding what led up to it, who knows what kind of awful behavior we’re condoning? At the same time the only way to convincingly rebut Fletcher’s claim that his methods are necessary if we value greatness is with a thoughtful definition of what that word does and should mean.
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts canbe found here.
Also in Theaters: The best new film playing Ithaca this week that I’ve already seen is Aurora’s Sunrise, which screens for free at Cornell Cinema on Monday. I had the pleasure of catching this ingenious blend of original (partially rotoscoped) animation; interviews with Armenian genocide survivor Arshaluys Mardigian; and footage from Auction of Souls, a 1919 American silent film about her life in which she played herself, at last year’s Maine International Film Festival. I also recommend Dune: Part Two, which continues its run at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall. New movies I hope to get to before they close include Sasquatch Sunset, which is at Cinemapolis, and Civil War, which is there and at the Regal. Best International Feature Film Oscar nominee Io Capitano, which opens at Cinemapolis today, is supposed to be good as well, as are De Humani Corporis Fabrica and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, both of which play Cornell Cinema tonight. Your best bets for repertory fare are once again two films directed by Christopher Nolan: Interstellar, which is playing the Regal this afternoon, and Inception, which is there on Wednesday. Finally, there are free screenings at Cornell Cinema on Tuesday and Wednesday, of the movies Bad Press and In Search of My Sister respectively, and a showcase of short films presented by Bike Walk Tompkins is playing Cinemapolis on Sunday with tickets available on a sliding scale from $2-$10.
Home Video: I recently finished watching everything in the “Directed by Kinuyo Tanaka” collection on The Criterion Channel. The highlight for me is Forever a Woman, which I *thought* I saw nearly 25 years ago as a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh under the title The Eternal Breasts, but I must just have remembered that it was playing as part of a local film series because its best scenes are unforgettable. It stars Yumeji Tsukioka as a long-suffering wife and daughter based on Fumiko Nakajō who is trying to finally live for herself a little as a poet before she dies of cancer and is probably the most explicit treatment of what seems to me to be Tanaka’s main theme: contrasting feminine-coded artistic pursuits like poetry and flower arrangement as a way of finding meaning in life with masculine-coded vocations like politics and journalism that are obsessed with controlling people’s destinies.
This is complicated somewhat in her next-best film as a director, Girls of the Night, in that the reformatory that former prostitute Kuniko Sugimoto (Chisako Hara) graduates from is run by women. I strongly recommend watching this film back-to-back (maybe even as a double feature) with Tanaka’s impressively assured debut effort Love Letter because it feels like an explicit attempt by a now more established director to correct the latter’s distractingly censorious attitude toward women with the audacity to seek economic security and sexual pleasure in the arms of foreign soldiers. Love Letter also includes what may be Tanaka’s single best scene, an arresting finale which cuts back and forth between the two main characters (Yoshiko Kuga’s Michika and Masayuki Mori Reikichi) but ends before the two of them ever share the frame together again.
Tanaka’s first color film, the historical epic The Wandering Princess, has really started to grow on me. The middle portion is an inversion of Forever a Woman: instead of using poetry to make meaning out of an unhappy marriage, Machiko Kyô’s Hiro Saga channels her thwarted aspirations to become a painter into building a blissfully happy home even as the world goes up in flames around her. There are also a number of nice scenes involving flowers and trees. The remaining two entries in the series, The Moon Has Risen (which is based on a script by Yasujirô Ozu and Ryôsuke Saitô) and Love Under the Crucifix, have their moments as well. All of these movies deserve to be better known, so check them out!
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts canbe found here.
I don’t think I’ve ever made it to *February* 15 without filing my taxes, let alone Tax Day, but April is nonetheless a fine time to celebrate one of my all-time favorite movie props, the notebook in which J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee) aka “Snoodles” from The Palm Beach Story writes down all of his expenses:
In honor of the Ale and Quail Club that he and Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) encounter on their way to Florida, this month’s drink is my favorite beer cocktail, the Campari & IPA Spritzer. I know about this elegantly simple concoction thanks to Anjali Prasertong from The Kitchn. She, in turn, spotted it in a 2011 New York Times article called “Summer Cocktails Made Simpler” in which author Robert Willey attributes it to Tucson bartender Cieran Wiese. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law Simon pointed out on Instagram that the cult favorite summer sipper the NASCAR Spritz follows the same formula. I suppose one of the lessons here is that the provenance of a highball is always going to be murky! Another is that the specific ingredients you choose count for a lot when there are only two (or three of you include the garnish) total, and to me this is the perfect showcase for my original favorite beer, Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, which emerged as a star of the American craft brewing scene right as I came of drinking age. Here’s how you make it:
Add Campari to a chilled glass containing two or three ice cubs. Slowly pour in the beer and gently stir a few times to combine. Garnish with a lemon slice.
You don’t want just any IPA here–you need something with a lot of character to stand up to the Campari. You’re also looking for citrus, but not too much. Enter 90 Minute IPA, which is malty and piney and delicious on its own, but even better with a boost of sweetness and texture. While this definitely is a refreshing beverage, the high ABV and strong flavors will keep you warm when a cool breeze blows, which makes it perfect as a way to unwind after work on a spring evening or for a rainy night like the one Hackensacker and Gerry travel south on. But first, here’s a picture of my Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker Collection DVD box set by Universal:
The Palm Beach Story is also available for rental on a variety of streaming video platforms.
The seeds for that fateful train journey are planted years earlier. The Palm Beach Story begins with one of cinema’s great opening credits sequences, a silent retelling of the frantic hours leading up to Gerry’s marriage to Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea), who may or may not be the man she intended to wed. You see, although it concludes with the two of them about to exchange vows:
They both had to beat a doppelgänger to the church. Gerry accomplishes this by locking hers in a closet:
While Tom (dark tie) and his best man (no mustache) may just have had better luck with cabs than their counterparts (light tie, no mustache):
As Lisa Sternlieb writes in her American Shakespeare article “He Isn’t Exactly My Brother”: Shakespearean Illogic in The Palm Beach Story,” when these identical twins reappear at the end of the film following Tom’s comment “that was another plot entirely,” we are meant to suspect that he’s referring to the idea that “the Claudette Colbert who is gagged and locked in a closet has wanted to marry the Joel McCrea who marries her sister while the Joel McCrea who doesn’t make it to the church on time has wanted to marry the Claudette Colbert who marries his brother.” So who knows if Tom and Gerry (yes, like the cartoon cat and mouse) intended to marry each other at all? Given these uncertain beginnings, it’s hardly a surprise that the shot of the two of them is followed by title cards that say “and they lived happily ever after . . . or did they?”
These are followed additional titles in the same font which establish the year of the main action as 1942, five years after the wedding we just witnessed, and two dissolves to first a sign advertising an apartment for rent, and then a group of people getting off an elevator:
One of them is an old man played by Robert Dudley who, seemingly detecting that the apartment isn’t empty, uses what Stuart Klawans calls “his dog’s senses” in Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges “to track the female presence he picks up”:
When she finally confronts him, he reveals that he’s the inventor of the Texas wienie (“lay off ’em, you’ll live longer”) and thus in possession of a bankroll that Preston Sturges’s screenplay (as published in Four More Screenplays by Preston Sturges) describes as big enough “to choke a crocodile”:
He gives her enough money to take care of all her debts because it makes him feel young again “to do a little favor for such a beautiful lady.” She can’t wait to tell Tom the good news, but he fails to appreciate it as such: “I mean, sex didn’t even enter into it,” he says sarcastically, to which Gerry replies, “but of course it did, darling!” And then, “sex always has something to do with it. From about the time you’re about so big . . . “
” . . . and wondering why your girl friends’ fathers are getting so arch all of a sudden.” She is, of course, talking about The Look: “you know, ‘how’s about this evening, babe?'”
Their night eventually ends as all nights should with a boozy dinner and lovemaking, but she wakes up the next morning determined to capitalize on her youth and good lucks while they still last to secure a more comfortable future her herself and her husband. After a bit of business with a round pivot window that Chevy Chase and National Lampoons’s Christmas Vacation (the subject of my December, 2023 Drink & a Movie post) director Jeremiah S. Chechik were presumably familiar with:
Gerry’s off to Palm Beach to secure a divorce courtesy the wealthy members of the Ale and Quail club, who, given enough “subtle” hints, would never leave a lady stranded. One of them is even chivalrous enough to loan her the pajamas that inspired this month’s drink photo:
Here they are serenading her with “Sweet Adelaide” later that evening:
Then engaging in some harmless indoor trap shooting:
And finally, their sexual hopes frustrated, turning into what Klawans calls “a parody of a lynch mob”:
This sequence, which Alessandro Pirolini aptly describes in The Cinema of Preston Sturges: A Critical Study as being “as narratively useless as it is visually exhilarating,” ends with the conductor of the train cutting the Club’s private car (and all of Gerry’s clothes) loose:
Luckily, by this time Gerry has already met cute Hackensacker, a thinly-veiled caricature of John D. Rockefeller III, by crushing his pince-nez glasses while attempting to climb into the sleeping car bunk above his:
“Just pick off any little pieces you see, will you?” he says, ever the good sport. It’s at breakfast the following morning when we meet his notebook. Having turned her borrowed pajamas and a Pullman blanket into an almost presentable ensemble, she finds him in the dining car pouring over the menu.
“The thirty-five cent breakfast seems the best at first glance, but if you analyze it for solid value, the fifty-five center is the one.” They eventually settle on one seventy-five cent breakfast each with a la cart prairie oysters to start–“make mine on the half-shell,” he instructs the waiter.
While they wait for their food, he proposes that they get off the train in Jacksonville to buy her “the few little things” she needs, then proceed the rest of the way to Palm Beach (where he is going as well) by boat. Hackensacker dutifully records each purchase in his book:
Including a piece of jewelry that the screenplay describes as “a ruby bracelet and then some”:
The dissonance between Hackensacker’s profligacy and scrupulousness understandably makes Gerry nervous. “I keep feeling that two men with butterfly nets are going to creep up behind you and lead you away,” she worries. The revelation that he’s actually the richest man in the world is followed by a punchline which hits close to home for someone like me who can’t ever quite manage to stick to a budget: “I write things down, but I never add them up.”
Meanwhile, following his own encounter with the old man who Manny Farber described (in a New Republic essay included in Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber) as possessing “the quality of a disembodied spirit, believably a pixie–or ‘The Wienie King,'” Tom is en route to Palm Beach himself via plane to intercept Gerry. The “enchanted figures who continually grant Tom and Gerry’s spoken and unspoken wishes” are just one of the ways that, per Sternlieb, “The Palm Beach Story intricately engages with the mechanics and actively opposes the logic of Shakespearean comedy, particularly its obsession with transformation and metamorphosis.” Gerry and Hackensacker meet Hackensacker’s sister, Mary Astor’s Princess Centimillia (an underrated Sturges name!) aka Maud and her hanger-on Toto (Sig Arno), and Tom is waiting on shore as all of them disembark. Gerry introduces Tom as her brother, prompting more than one person to comment on their supposed familial resemblance. To again quote Sternlieb:
In order to love Shakespeare’s comedies, we must continually suspend our disbelief so that we can fully appreciate boys dressed as girls dressed as boys or love at first sight or soliloquies that can’t be overheard on stage, but Sturges asks the opposite of us. He asks us to notice that people are always willing to believe anything, always eager to create their own reality, always ready to form opinions of us based on nothing at all. He asks us to notice that most of us are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land, and in Cloud Cuckoo Land people will always see what isn’t there. When Gerry introduces the Hackensackers to her ‘brother’, first Maud then Snoodles exclaims, ‘You look exactly alike’. We are constantly performing or being asked to perform to meet others’ uninformed expectations, but what a relief when we can finally be ourselves.
From here it’s not long before we’re basically right back where we started. The Princess wants to make Tom her eighth husband (“I’m thinking of an American–at the moment, it seems more patriotic”), but he has eyes only for Gerry, who Hackensacker attempts to seduce by singing to her outside her window:
Unfortunately for him, it just drives Gerry back into Tom’s arms:
They come clean about their true relationship the next morning. “I don’t suppose you have a twin sister. . . . ” Hackensacker says mournfully to Gerry, but of course she does! And Tom has a twin brother. Cut to all of them (and Toto, in a nice touch) at the alter:
The shot which follows is deceptively advanced for its era, as discussed by VFX artists The Corridor Crew starting at the 10:26 mark of this video–there’s a fairly straightforward duplicated shot (you can see the seem easily here because part of Rudy Vallee’s shadow is missing), but the camera is moving in a way that would have been difficult to coordinate with 1940s technology. Anyway, neither Gerry’s sibling nor Tom’s looks particularly happy to be here:
And as the camera tracks back, The Palm Beach Story ends with the same two title cards that set its plot in motion:
‘Round and ’round and ’round we go! Sturges originally wanted to call the film Is Marriage Necessary? That title didn’t survive the Hayes Office, but the sentiment did surely did. His cynicism, like the bitterness in a Campari & IPA Spritzer, goes down easy, though. So hit play again, why don’t you, and pour yourself another! It’s good for what ails you.
Cheers!
All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife.Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.
What I’m Seeing This Week: We’ll be out of town for the next five days, but my loving wife and I are going to take advantage of the fact that we’re staying with willing babysitters to see Stalker at The Screening Room in Kingston, Ontario tonight.
Also in Theaters: The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival kicks off in earnest tomorrow with two screenings at Cinemapolis, where all remaining events will take place. Highlights include three films which made a splash on the festival circuit last year: Green Border, winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Viennale, on Saturday; Last Things and Youth (Spring)on Monday; and Pictures of Ghosts, which is directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, whose last feature Bacurau was the topic of my May, 2023 Drink & a Movie blog post, on Tuesday. You can find reviews of all of them by searching my Film Blogs, Etc. 2.0 CSE by title. The best new film now playing locally that I’ve already seen remains Dune: Part Two, which is at both Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall. Wicked Little Letters, which my loving wife wants to see, opens at the same two theaters tonight. Anything with both Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in it is an easy sell for me, so we might have to make plans for another date night soon! I’m intrigued by two action movies at the Regal: Monkey Man, which is directed by one of my favorite actors, Dev Patel, and the Liam Neeson vehicle In the Land of Saints and Sinners. Critics seem to like both! Cornell Cinema returns from Spring Break with free screenings of the Burkinabé film Borders on Tuesday and A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings on Wednesday. The latter will be followed by a Q&A with director Aviva Kempner and Cornell professor Elliot Shapiro. Otherwise, your best bets for repertory fare are a trio of films playing the Regal: Gone with the Wind on Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday; The Matrix tonight; and The Dark Knight on Wednesday.
Home Video: As mentioned previously on this blog, I was troubled by this year’s Oscar winner for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound The Zone of Interest. While that remains the case, I feel like I have more appreciation for what it is *trying* to do after finally seeing The Act of Killing, which it references in a key moment that I now understand clarifies that Christian Friedel’s Rudolf Höss knows that he is a monster. This is important because I don’t think “living next to Auschwitz” is a terribly useful metaphor. The Act of Killing and its companion film The Look of Silence delve deep into the psychology of killers like Höss (in this case the leaders of gangs that murdered hundreds of thousands of so-called “communists” in Indonesia in the 60s) by way of depicting in harrowing detail not just the sky-high cost of resisting them in the moment, but also the Sisyphean task of holding them accountable afterward should they emerge victorious. This is, to me, a far more potent “there but for the grace of God” than the fear we might one day be judged by history and/or our maker to have been “good Nazis” because it doesn’t let us off the hook so easily—we can’t just say not me, I attended a protest/changed my profile picture to a flag/cast a protest vote against Joe Biden/whatever. Anyway, these movies would be a mortal lock for any Best Films of the Millennium list I might be moved to create, so: highest possible recommendation! The Act of Killing is now streaming on Peacock, The Look of Silence is available on Prime Video, and current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students have access to both via Academic Video Online.
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts canbe found here.
Last January I described eight reasons I read film criticism. I thought about this post the other day after I checked Letterboxd (which I am now finally using, obviously) to see if anyone I follow had logged The Seen and Unseen and was delighted to find a review by Michael Sincinski. But why did that make me so happy? And which of my categories did this fit into? The closest fit would seem to be #2 “to check my own impressions of a film I just watched against that of the critical community” because of my timing, but I wasn’t motivated by fear of missing something. I definitely do enjoy Sicinski’s writing, but #7 “for pleasure” didn’t seem quite right either. All of a sudden the movie The Eight Mountains popped into my head. It’s about climbing mountains in the Italian Alps, among other things, and documents a ritual whereby climbers leave messages for those who will follow in notebooks buried at the summit of each peak before beginning their descent:
In the film this facilitates intergenerational communication between the man pictured in the screengrabs above, Luca Marinelli’s Pietro Guasti, and his late father Giovanni (Filippo Timi), who he had ceased speaking to years before he died, as do the maps that the latter used to record where he had gone:
Movies, like food, are for me very consciously a substitute for travel. I can’t afford to pop off to Turin on a whim, but I can watch a movie shot there or pick up a bottle of Barolo pretty much any time I like and learn something about the region that way. I also think of cinema as a terrain to explore in its own right. Film criticism is like the lines on Giovanni’s map: it says, “this place is worth going to!” It’s also like the messages in the notebooks he and Pietro find on their climbs: “I passed this way, too, and here is what I saw.” Which is to say that that engaging with it doesn’t always have to have a deliberate purpose–sometimes you follow a trail just to see where it leads and then you read whatever you find at the end of the road because it’s there.
The Prodigal Cinephile 