Category: Drink & a Movie

I started this series four years ago as a way to get back into the habit of regular writing. It proved to be so effective that by July I had made up my mind to keep it going through 2025 and supplement it with enough “bonus” posts to give me the equivalent of a year-long weekly film series. Eventually it occurred to me that if I added one more, I could edit everything into a self-published book complete with an introduction, and when I created a two-column landing page a 54th became inevitable. But now after 95,940 words and 1,746 screengrabs, we have finally reached the finish line! We end as we must with the most canonical drink I haven’t yet written about, the Martini. I’m pairing it with The Thin Man and the screen couple who may well be responsible for James Bond’s outdated impression that it’s supposed to be shaken instead of stirred, Nick (William Powell) and Nora (Myrna Loy) Charles. After all, that’s how Nick is preparing one when we first meet him at the end of a 50-second-long tracking shot that makes its way through a crowded dance floor before coming to rest on our hero:

“You should always have rhythm in your shaking,” he tells the bartenders who watch him, rapt. “Now, a Manhattan you shake to foxtrot time.” He begins to strain the concoction into a glass:

“A Bronx to two-step time,” he continues, placing the drink on a tray:

“The dry Martini you always shake to waltz time,” he concludes. Which: this *would* guarantee that the shaking is done gently, limiting aeration and dilution to acceptable levels, and I don’t think a barspoon is capable of anywhere near the same degree of bespoke sophistication, so maybe the technique is overdue for a revival! The Martini proportions in The PDT Cocktail Book are perfect as far as I’m concerned, but in a nod to the Christmas season (which is when The Thin Man takes place) we’ve been making ours with a dash of an extra ingredient and a festive garnish. Here’s how:

3 ozs. Plymouth gin
1 oz. Dolin dry vermouth
2 tsp. Élixir Végétal de la Grande-Chartreuse

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled Nick & Nora (of course!) glass. Garnish with three fermented Christmas cranberries on a cocktail pick.

Élixir Végétal de la Grande-Chartreuse is the original product that its more famous descendants green and yellow Chartreuse are based on and a little goes a very long way. Here it contributes distinctive herbal notes to the nose and sip and, just as important for our purposes, a pale but pronounced green color that contrasts beautifully with the brick red garnish. The cranberries, in turn, provide just the slightest bit of effervescence, which accentuate the citrus notes of the Plymouth, but fear not: everyone we’ve served this to agrees that the little surprises we’ve added know their place and that our version has the classic finish of the one Nick proceeds to serve himself:

And savor:

The images in this post all come from my TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection box set which includes the first three Thin Man sequels, too:

The original can also be streamed on Tubi for free if you don’t mind commercial breaks or rented and purchased from a variety of platforms if you do.

Martha Nochimson argues in her book Screen Couple Chemistry: The Power of 2 that The Thin Man “is not structured by Hollywood’s familiar gender formula: woman/body–man/mind.” She submits as evidence the fact that both Nick and Nora first appear from behind, him in the mixing ritual depicted above which “requires an atypical male absorption in his body,” while her entrance behind their dog Asta “uses the cliche of female closeness to animality and body to make a joke of Hollywood’s traditional images of female glamour”:

As Rob Kozlowski describes it in his book Becoming Nick and Nora, their first conversation “takes place over the course of a single, forty-seven-second shot” that has nothing to do with the murder mystery that the film is ostensibly about “but everything to do with showing us this marvelous relationship.” It is preceded by Nick, who is visibly but amiably tipsy throughout this scene and much of the movie, forgetting the word “cocktail” but still managing to make himself understood to a waiter as he invites Nora to sit down and join him in one:

The long take which follows is, per Kozlowski, “very economical,” but also “absolutely the correct approach from a narrative standpoint”:

Because:

By holding both Nick and Nora in the frame, we’re able to see them both speaking, and both listening, at the same time. Nora, adorned in a fur coat with her chin resting in her hand, perpetually amused by the sight of her besotted and blotto husband, has her focus entirely on him. Nick, with his arms resting on the table, his hands inches away from hers, has his focus entirely on her.”

The scene ends with Nora asking Nick how many he has had. “Six martinis,” he replies. Her response is to immediately order five more to catch up, which to Kozlowski captures the essence of what makes theirs “the friendliest, most fun marriage ever captured on screen.”

“They’re almost always playing,” he explains, “and they’re equals on top of it all.” Nochimson agrees with him about this sequence, which she calls paradoxically “both archly witty and genuinely earthy,” but also notes that while “time has veiled Nick and Nora in sentimental nostalgia,” upon closer inspection “their abrasive qualities burst off the screen.” In a not-quite-but-almost-acknowledgement of the darker side of drinking, the latter wakes up the following morning with a hangover (instead of alcohol poisoning, which might be more realistic), but rather than make her more relatable, the ice bag she wears like an elegant hat only serves to reinforce Nochimson’s description of her as “tall, slim, condescending, and always appareled in stunning, regal, intricately designed and infuriating (for those in the audience who will never be able to afford such things) ‘outfits'” who “stands with that ramrod carriage that summons images of young girls schooled relentlessly in balancing books on their heads”:

Meanwhile Nick, whose speech is already beginning to slur from what appears to be a breakfast of Scotch and soda, does indeed have “the loose-jointed bearing of a man just about to fall into a heap” as he first flicks her nose:

Then pantomimes smacking her in retribution for a well-deserved slap on the back of the head:

The man on the phone in the foreground is Herbert MacCaulay (Porter Hall), lawyer to inventor Clyde Wynant (Edward Ellis), who we see here working in his laboratory:

And the mixology lesson we started this post with was interrupted by Wynant’s daughter Dorothy (Maureen O’Sullivan), who remembers Nick, a former private detective, from a case he worked on for her father in her youth:

You see, Clyde has disappeared. Or maybe he hasn’t: the phone call MacCaulay takes informs him that Wynant is back in town and wants to meet. Except that Wynant doesn’t show, and in the meantime his secretary-cum-mistress Julia Wolf (Natalie Moorhead) turns up dead. Coincidentally, she had just agreed to meet Wynant’s ex-wife Mimi Jorgenson (Minna Gombell), Dorothy’s mother, who upon discovering the body first screams:

But then makes a face and leans forward to remove something from the crime scene:

After she later reveals to Dorothy, who suspects her mother of robbing Wolf, that what she took was a metal chain known to belong to Wynant:

They and Dorothy’s brother Gilbert (William Henry) all descend on a Christmas party that Nick and Nora are hosting in their apartment for an eclectic collection of colorful figures from Nick’s former life. During the festivities a shady figure named Nunheim (Harold Huber) calls in with information related to the case:

As described by Fran Mason in his book Hollywood’s Detectives, the result of all of this is to “disorder Nick’s world, most obviously when Mimi slaps Dorothy in front of Nick and Nora because she believes that Dorothy has revealed information that thwarts her plan to blackmail Wynant on his expected reappearance”:

And although it isn’t until after they leave that the party “degenerates into an anarchy of tuneless singing, drunken disagreements and maudlin sentimentality,” Mason argues that “it is implied that they cause the disorder by bringing their world of crime, venal desire and pathologies to the hotel room to disturb the small world of Nick and Nora.” Thus when Nora sighs, “oh Nicky, I love you because you know such lovely people” at the end of the evening:

The line “applies as much to the Jorgensens and people like them as it does to the working class and underworld figures from among Nick’s acquaintances who are still present.” This sequence also again showcases the strong bond between the central couple when Nora walks in on Dorothy embracing Nick, which Kozlowski notes director W.S. Van Dyke “stages as if it would become one of those dramatic incident in which a wife sees her husband with another woman in her arms”:

He follows it with two quick pans, though, one to Nick making a face at his wife:

And then one of her crinkling her nose at him in return:

“By panning between the embrace and Nora’s reaction rather than cutting between them,” Kozlowski observes, “again we have Nick and Nora as one unit rather than being edited apart from each other, and we establish again that this married couple trusts each other completely.” That night Nick saves Nora’s life by knocking her out before the man who has broken into their apartment (Edward Brophy) can shoot her:

Now well and truly implicated in the case, Nick proves his mettle by solving it in relatively short order with an assist from Asta, who locates a body in Wynant’s factory when Nick decides to visit it on a hunch:

The police fall for the false clues buried with it and conclude that they’ve found someone else who was killed by Wynant, who at this point is their number one suspect, but Nick recognizes a piece of shrapnel visible in fluoroscopy:

And in classic murder mystery style organizes an elaborate dinner party to reveal who *did* do it, but not before he asks if Nora has a “nice evening gown” to wear to it, which per Nochimson confirms that he shares her “forthright understanding of glamour as armor and costume that the two of them manipulate.”

She does, and it is indeed “a lulu”:

After sadistically torturing nearly every guest by suggesting that they are the guilty party, Nick provokes the real killer into incriminating themself before the main course is even served:

And the movie’s penultimate scene finds Nick and Nora in the sleeping car of a cross-country train toasting their success with Dorothy and her new husband Tommy (Henry Wadsworth) in an off-center composition by cinematographer James Wong Howe that makes it clear the Charles’s have overstayed their welcome by including the door:

Hopefully the honeymooners have been paying attention, because their elders have been giving them and us a master class on the art of a happy marriage. As summarized by Elizabeth Kraft in her book Restoration Stage Comedies and Hollywood Remarriage Films, the central theme is that “it is a supremely adult activity and requires both maturity and common sense, along with the opposite ability, that is, the childlike ability to play and invent and enjoy.” Which come to think of it reminds me of my description of Drink & a Movie #1 The Tamarind Seed as “a thoroughly grown-up film to enjoy with your adult beverage! I’m not sure whether or not there’s an overarching theme there, but it strikes me as a fine place to leave off regardless. As mentioned above I’m planning to turn these posts into a book, which I think will involve a lot of cutting. A graphic designer friend has offered to help me, and I’m optimistic that the end result will make for an attractive and useful Christmas present for family and friends, so with any luck I’ll be done before next New Year’s Eve. I’ll order a few extra and sell them at cost from this site, so stay tuned if you’re interested! In the meantime, my liver has earned a good, long rest for services rendered, and I’m planning to abstain from alcohol for the duration of 2026–after all, even Nick Charles himself eventually confined himself to cider for the entire runtime of The Thin Man Goes Home! This means no cocktail commentary for awhile, but I do intend to keep up my pace of one illustrated longform post about movies per month on average. It isn’t midnight yet, though, so I have time for one last Martini before then. Here’s to you for reading!

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.

Fear not: this is not yet another polemic weirdly way too invested in convincing you that Die Hard is a Christmas movie! It *is* part of our household’s regular holiday rotation, though, so I’ve been saving a December slot for it and the Chain Smoker from Sother Teague’s I’m Just Here for the Drinks. The pairing is, of course, inspired by Bruce Willis’s John McClane, who quaintly lights a cigarette immediately after disembarking at Los Angeles International Airport approximately two minutes into the film:

Then proceeds to consume at least a full pack before the end credits roll. Here’s how you make it:

2 ozs. Mezcal (Del Maguey Vida de Muertos)
3/4 oz. Dry vermouth (Dolin)
1/4 oz. Zucca Rabarbaro
2 dashes Cocktail Punk smoked orange bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice and chain into a chilled rocks glass. Garnish with a flamed orange twist.

Teague describes the Chain Smoker as “basically a smoky mezcal Manhattan augmented with Zucca, an Italian aperitif, which has a natural smoky flavor from the dried Chinese rhubarb that serves as its base ingredient.” He notes that “the bitters add a subtle citrus note as well as another layer of smoke,” which is what dominates the nose. Flamed twists have always struck me as being more about theater than flavor or aroma, but both Teague and Frederic Yarm swear the burnt oils are a factor here as well. Regardless, agave and grape on the sip give way to a dry finish with roaring fireplace vibes, suggesting that Hart Bochner’s Harry Ellis could serve it with the “nice aged brie” he mentions while clumsily hitting on McClane’s wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia):

The image above and those which follow all come from my Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Die Hard Collection DVD set:

It’s also available on Hulu and Prime Video with a subscription.

The late, great David Bordwell suggested in 2019 that Die Hard “changed ideas of just how well-wrought an action picture could be.” One way it did this was through the “ingenious ways” it finds to “let the audience’s eye go with you” in its widescreen format, which begins with the scene that immediately follows the image that begins this blog post: Holly’s boss Joseph Yoshinobu Takagi (James Shigeta), president of Nakatomi Trading, addresses the company holiday party, but with his back to the camera because we’re meant to follow Holly as she wends her way through the crowd from the elevator (in its first of many appearances) at the right side of the frame at the start of the shot:

To the hallway at the left, which is where Ellis ambushes her with his offer of old cheese and flames:

Bordwell also lauds Die Hard as “one of the great rack-focus movies,” and that technique makes an early appearance as well during a telephone call when Holly’s daughter Lucy (Taylor Fry) asks, “is Daddy coming home with you?”

“We’ll see what Santa and Mommy can do,” Holly replies. The maneuver is reversed after she hangs up:

And followed by a cut to a close-up of a family portrait upon which Holly takes out her frustration with her husband, who hasn’t communicated his travel plans to her, by slamming it down:

The photo will reappear nearly exactly one hour later, making it perhaps the most prominent example of what Bordwell calls “felicities” which mark Die Hard as a “hyperclassical film” that “spills out all these links and echoes in a fever of virtuosity.” But I’m getting ahead of myself! First McClane rides in a limo for the first time and is introduced to the holiday classic “Christmas in Hollis” by his driver Argyle (De’voreaux White), who being new to the job also doesn’t realize that it’s customary for passengers to sit in the back:

Upon arrival at Nakatomi Plaza he discovers that Holly has started going by her maiden name again when he looks her up on a computer system that may be so advanced that “if you have to take a leak, it will help you find your zipper,” but isn’t much of a consistent speller:

McClane joins a storied cinematic lineage with this reaction to a sip of “watered-down champagne”:

And is in Holly’s office “making fists with his toes” with his shoes off to dispel his jetlag per the advice of the “Babbit [sic] clone” (per the screenplay) he’s sitting next to in the film’s opening scenes when suddenly gunshots ring out. Grabbing his sidearm and rushing to the door, McClane ascertains that a hostage situation is underway:

Then takes advantage of the distraction afforded by a topless partygoer to escape into what according to James Mottram and David S. Cohen’s Die Hard: The Ultimate Visual History production designer Jackson De Govia saw as the “steel jungle” of the not-yet-complete Nakatomi building’s stairwells, thus setting in motion what he calls “a survival drama in the context of architecture that’s under construction.” As criminal mastermind Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) carefully lays his plans, which include wiring the roof with plastic explosives so that he and the members of his team (all of whom, as Nick Guzan details in a terrific blog post ranking their wardrobes, “have distinctive roles, attitudes, and aesthetics”) can eventually fake their own deaths:

And convincing the FBI that he’s a terrorist by way of manipulating them into cutting the power to the building and automatically releasing the last, otherwise unbreakable, lock guarding the company’s vault:

McClane adapts to his new environment. He uses an elevator as a duck blind to scout his foes without being seen:

Hides in the cave-like vents that inspired this month’s drink photo:

Sets traps:

And successfully navigates a shootout through a conference table that De Govia chose for the way it “moves like a river”:

That altercation ends with McClane taking a bag of explosives off the body of one of his fallen adversaries while he identifies himself to Gruber over a walkie-talkie as “just the fly in the ointment, Hans, the monkey in the wrench.”

From this point forward they oppose each other more directly. First McClane retaliates against Gruber for firing a second anti-tank at an already disabled police vehicle just to make a point by strapping a bomb to a chair and dropping it down an elevator shaft, taking out two of Gruber’s men:

Then Gruber shoots Ellis, who not understanding what he’s up against, foolishly tries to convince McClane to turn himself in:

McClane meets Gruber face to face in a scene replete with unsettling canted angles when the latter goes to check on the explosives on the roof, but initially fails to recognize him when Gruber cleverly clocks a floor directory and pretends to be a hostage named Bill Clay:

Gruber also notices that McClane is shoeless and is able to hobble him by summoning his henchman Karl (Alexander Godunov) and ordering him to “shoot the glass”:

While McClane tends to some of the most painful-looking wounds in cinema history:

Gruber takes advantage of his absence to achieve his goal of gaining access to the $640 million worth of bearer bonds in Nakatomi Trading’s vault in a scene that Robynn J. Stilwell argues in a 1997 Music & Letters article “clearly constructs [him] as a sympathetic, heroic figure as aural and visual cinematic cues and narrative drive come together,” including the “rhythmic speech” of hacker Theo (Clarence Gilyard Jr.) building with the music toward a full-throated statement of Gruber’s Beethoven-based theme, a shot from a “low, powerful angle” of him rising “slowly, awestruck, to his feet, a little breeze ruffling his hair in the halo of the brilliant emergency light”:

Theo whispering “Merry Christmas” in another striking low-angle composition which dramatically sets him and his white sweater off against the pitch black of the rest of the frame:

And a euphoric tour of the vault’s contents that follows a shot of FBI agents Johnson (Robert Davi) and Johnson (Grand L. Bush) foolishly gloating that “those bastards are probably pissing their pants right now”:

Which makes sense when you remember that, as screenwriter Steven E. De Souza told Dan Frazier in an interview, “if you’re doing genre, the protagonist is the villain.” But while we may be “given every possible opportunity to read Hans as the hero of a caper film,” as Stilwell puts it, “classic Hollywood closure […] demands two things: that Hans die, and that Holly and John McClane are reconciled.” And so Die Hard doesn’t end here. Instead, McClane puts all the pieces together and heads back upstairs, where he battles Karl to the death, saves the hostages from being blown to smithereens, and leaps off the roof of Nakatomi Plaza:

Meanwhile, Gruber solves a puzzle himself when he discovers the picture we talked about earlier and finally figures out how a New York City cop came to be in position to interfere with his California heist:

“Mrs. McClane, how nice to make your acquaintance,” he says, setting the stage for a final showdown.

In his introduction to Mottram and Cohen’s book, director John McTiernan reveals that the inspiration for Die Hard came from a surprising source:

In this case, it was easy. It was right in Shakespeare. He wrote a bunch of plays he called comedies. They weren’t funny ha-ha the way we mean it. They were fun. Basically, fun adventures. And I was pretty sure that one of them fit.

It was about a festival night on which something crazy happens–and for everybody involved, the world is turned upside down. The princes become asses, and the asses become princes, and in the morning the world is put back right and the lovers are reunited.

Now the plot of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is way more complicated than that, but don’t look at that. Look at the totality. It was right there: Tell the story not of the cop and the terrorists but of the people who are part of the event. Let the audience sit back and watch the craziness as a whole. Let them enjoy it.

To Matt Zoller Seitz, writing on the occasion of the film’s 25th anniversary, this sense of fun is what makes the Die Hard great. Citing this shot of a S.W.A.T. team member pricking himself on a thorn as a particularly memorable example:

Zoller Seitz notes that “there’s a strain of satire coursing through the picture” and that “more often than not, what’s being made fun of is machismo itself.” He observes that “McClane is mostly spared this sort of scrutiny, but not always,” which to me is crucial to understanding its ending. First, there’s the specific manner of Gruber’s demise: he plumets to his death only after McClane unclasps a Rolex watch that Holly was given by her employer, which Roderick Heath describes as “a symbolic wedding ring to the new age of rootless money-worship” in a turn of phrase that reminds me of last month’s Drink & a Movie selection.

Afterward McClane spots the beat cop Sergeant Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson) who supported him throughout his ordeal across a crowded courtyard:

He introduces Holly as “my wife Holly . . . Holly Gennaro,” but she corrects him with a line that understandably rubs a lot of people the wrong way: “Holly McClane“:

In this moment they both clearly think they’ve changed, sure, but why should *we* believe it? After all, as Stilwell points out, “despite the ‘happy ending’ in this film, Holly is still not back ‘in her place’ in the sequels,” evidence perhaps that McClane has more John Wayne in him than Roy Rogers after all. Maybe, to paraphrase Puck’s final speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we should instead think but this, so all is mended, that we have but slumber’d here while these last few visions did appear. Certainly that would make Karl’s subsequent improbable reappearance easier to stomach!

So light ’em if you got ’em, or pour yourself another Chain Smoker if you don’t, and let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

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.

If you’ve been following this series from the start, it is no doubt obvious to you by now that when it comes to both drinks and movies, there’s nothing I prize more than thoughtful twists on familiar templates. I’ve been keeping one of my very favorites in reserve, but with fall in full swing it’s finally time to raise a glass to the Normandy Cocktail invented by novelist and famous tippler Kingsley Amis as a cheaper apple-based alternative to the classic Champagne Cocktail. As he says in his book Everyday Drinking, “Calvados is a few bob dearer than a three-star cognac, but the classiest cider is a fraction of the cost of the commonest champagne.” Amis originally penned those words in England in the early 1980s, and while they may not still be true today, his description of his creation as “a delicious concoction, deceptively mild in the mouth” absolutely is. Here’s how we make it using ingredients from closer to home:

2 ozs. Laird’s 10th Generation Apple Brandy
3 ozs. South Hill Cider’s Baldwin
1 dash Angostura bitters
1 tsp Demerara syrup

Stir the brandy, bitters, and syrup with ice and strain into a chilled champagne coupe. Add the sparkling cider and garnish with an apple slice.

The Normandy has an apple candy nose, but champagne flavors from the cider, which South Hill’s website accurately describes as “bone dry,” dominate on the way down. This includes toasty notes that I like a lot. The finish is all tart apple (“like a MacIntosh,” said my loving wife), though, reminding you what you’re drinking and of the season. The Cornelius Applejack I featured in my September, 2022 Drink & a Movie post is an even more local option for upstate New Yorkers, but I like the extra oomph you get from the higher ABV of the Laird’s; it does, however, result in a quite boozy cocktail that as Amis writes “tends to go down rather faster than its strength calls for,” so be careful lest you too end up with “heads in the soup when offering it as an apéritif”!

The movie I’m pairing it with also has an English provenance and is positively drenched in bubbly. Here’s a picture of my “Alfred Hitchcock: 3-Disc Collector’s Edition” DVD box set by Lions Gate which includes The Ring:

It is also streaming on Tubi and a variety of other free platforms, albeit not as many as I would have expected considering that it entered the public domain in the United States a few years ago.

Director Alfred Hitchcock famously referred to The Ring in François Truffaut’s book-length interview with him Hitchock/Truffaut as “the next Hitchcock picture” after The Lodger; as nearly everyone who writes about it inevitably notes, it’s also the only one in his long career that he ever directed from his own original screenplay (although most sources agree that his wife Alma Reville contributed to it as well). It begins with a series of images from a carnival that Christopher D. Morris characterizes as “a vertiginous multiplication of circles, of frantic and enforced gaity” in his book The Hanging Figure: On Suspense and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock that includes an opening close-up of a drum followed by a shot of children on a swing ride:

A point-of-view shot from the perspective of a woman on a gondola ride:

A grotesque extreme close-up of a barker’s mouth:

And two sadistic little boys throwing rotten eggs at a Black man in a dunk tank under the eye of a police officer that only becomes watchful when a higher, disapproving authority figure appears:

It becomes obvious in the very next scene that the fellow standing behind the two hooligans in the first image above, who we will eventually learn is named Bob Corby (Ian Hunter), is one of our main characters. He spots a woman through the crowd whom a title card identifies only as The Girl (Lillian Hall-Davis), but who a telegram will later reveal is named Mabel:

Alas for him, she’s romantically attached to her co-worker “One-Round” Jack Sander (Carl Brisson), who takes on all comers with the promise that if they can last just a single round in the ring with him, they’ll win a pound:

In a scene that Raymond Durgnat praises in his book The Strange Case of Alfred Hitchcock for the way it “picks out the variety of types who make a crowd; none, in themselves, highly original or individual; but the whole is more than the sum of its parts,” a number of men either confidently step forward to fight Jack like this burly sailor:

Or reluctantly allow themselves be cajoled into do like this henpecked husband:

Corby appears to be a variation on that theme, given that he seemingly only throws his hat in the ring after Sander goads him into it when he spots him flirting with Mabel:

But we soon realize that he’s a different animal entirely from his fellow challengers through a device that Hitchcock (“winningly,” per Durgnat) sounds quite proud of when describing it to Truffaut: “at the end of the first round the barker took out the card indicating the round number, which was old and shabby, and they put up number two. It was brand-new! One-Round Jack was so good that they’d never got around to using it before!”

Much of the fight is shown from Mabel’s perspective, which means we don’t actually see much since she’s watching from her post at the ticket booth:

But we do cut to an interior medium long shot for its final moments:

Mabel is initially pretty displeased at the result. “We were hoping to get married, and now you’ve probably lost him his job!” she tells the victorious Corby and his companion (Forrester Harvey):

But is all soft-focus smiles when they reveal who they are:

When they return that evening to offer Sander a job as Corby’s sparring partner, the latter presents Mabel with an armlet, which Hitchcock cleverly portrays as being part of a single devil’s bargain:

A fortune teller (Clare Greet) sees the whole thing and tries to warn Mabel (to paraphrase Don Henley and Glenn Frey) not to draw the king of diamonds, girl, because the king of hearts is always her best bet, but Sander blunders in and declares, “that’s me. Diamonds–I’m going to make real money now.”

He remains oblivious through the armlet falling into a pond right in front of him when Mabel explains that because Corby purchased it with money he won from fighting Sander, “it was really you who gave it to me”:

And the boorish toast Corby makes after Sander and Mabel finally wed: “I think the prize at the booth should have been this charming bride; anyway, now he’s my sparring partner I shall take my revenge”:

But it isn’t until the film’s near-exact halfway point that he finally gets wise and acknowledges that, “it seems as though I shall have to fight for my wife, after all”:

This is followed by another montage technique that Hitchcock claims credit for inventing in his interview with Truffaut: “to show the progress of a prize fighter’s career, we showed large posters on the street, with his name on the bottom. We show different seasons–summer, autumn, winter–and the name is printed in bigger and bigger letters on each of the posters. I took great care to illustrate the changing seasons: blossoming trees for the spring, snow for the winter, and so on.”

Sander is by now plagued by surrealistic nightmare visions of adultery:

But nonetheless manages to win his next fight, securing him a title bout with Corby. Mabel isn’t there when he arrives home to celebrate, though. He pours champagne for his friends, who stare at it as intently as starving men ogling the first food they’ve seen in weeks:

But expecting her arrival any minute, he insists that they wait. “And so,” as Hitchcock tells Truffaut, “the champagne goes flat”:

Not content with merely wasting their contents, an enraged Sander finishes off the glasses themselves when Mabel finally gets home by throwing a framed photo of Corby at them:

She uses the photo as a shield after he rips her dress a few seconds later and flees:

Sander goes looking for Corby and upon finding him continues his vendetta against sparkling wine by way of rejecting a peace offering:

They basically decide to settle things in the ring, and that’s where most of rest of the film takes place. In his monograph on Hitchcock, Patrick McGilligan calls this sequence, which is set in Albert Hall, “a triumph of illusion, indebted to the recently invented Schüfftan process, first exploited by Fritz Lang in Metropolis, and which Hitchcock had brought home from Germany as his most valuable souvenir.” Per McGilligan, this technique allowed the director “to stage scenes in public places, without the expense (or permission) of actually filming there, by blending live action in the foreground against miniatures, photographs, or painted scenery.”

The fight is also noteworthy for Hitchcock’s documentarian eye for things like canvas preparation:

And a film crew getting ready to record it:

The judicious use of first-person shots to heighten the drama of big hits like this one:

And another bubbly being opened and dumped on Sander’s head to revive him ahead of the penultimate round:

At this point it looks like our hero is on his way to another loss, but the tide turns when Mabel discards the fur coat Corby gave her and goes to Sander before the final bell:

“I’m with you . . . in your corner,” she tells him. What’s interesting is how he becomes aware of her presence. Here’s how Michael Walker describes it in his book Hitchcock’s Motifs:

By now, Jack is too dazed to realise she is beside him, reassuring him that she’s back, but as he looks down at his pail of water, he sees her reflection. In fact, Hitchcock films this subjective image ambiguously: since Mabel’s image in the water dissolves into a reflection of Jack looking at himself, it is not certain that her reflection really is there or whether Jack has conjured it up from hearing her voice.

This is, perhaps, why the tender look Mabel and Sander exchange after he knocks Corby out doesn’t seem to presage a happily ever after.

As Walker says, “the connection between Mabel and water suggests her elusiveness: she becomes as difficult to hold on to as her reflection.” Of course, although we fade to black, this isn’t the movie’s final shot! Hitchcock instead chooses to end with Corby in his changing room. “Look what I found at the ring-side, Guv’nor,” says a member of his team, holding up the armlet he gave Mabel:

Corby contemplates it for a single beat:

Then flips it back to the person who found it and resumes adjusting his collar:

“It’s this lazy, sharp, sensible, apathetic gesture which, retrospectively, gives the film its asperity,” Durgnat says. “Since the affair didn’t matter much to him, it shouldn’t have mattered much to anybody.” Jack E. Cox’s fight cinematography is decades ahead of its time; ending a sports movie with an athlete utterly unconcerned about his defeat either literally in the ring or symbolically in the game of love would be a remarkable decision even today. Which also describes Kingsley Amis’s inspired substitution of apple spirits for grape ones in The Normandy and is the very definition of “timeless,” is it not?

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.

Starship Troopers was released on November 7, 1997. Three days later I turned 16. I don’t remember exactly how long after that it took me to earn my driver’s license, but there couldn’t have been much of a pause, because my friends and I saw it four times during its initial theatrical run. And so it was that this special effects extravaganza about an interstellar war against “the Bugs” became forever linked in my mind to both autumn and my childhood home of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This month’s drink, the Witch’s Kiss cocktail from [Jim] Meehan’s Bartender Manual, honors that connection to the past through the saffron in Liquore Strega–it’s grown in southeastern PA, believe it or not–and updates it to the present via apple butter that I make with fruit from the tree in our backyard prepared à la Simply Recipes. Here’s what else is in the cocktail:

2 ozs. Cinnamon-infused reposado tequila (Espolòn)
3/4 oz. Lemon juice
1/2 oz. Strega
1/2 tsp. Agave syrup
1/2 tsp. Apple butter

To infuse the tequila, add a four-inch cinnamon stick to a one liter bottle and let stand for twenty-four hours, then remove. Shake all ingredients with ice, then fine-strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Per Meehan, “while tequila shines brightest in a summer Margarita, the aged bottlings mix beautifully with fall fruits and vegetables.” The Witch’s Kiss is case in point. The first impression is all apple-cinnamon with a touch of minerality from the Strega, but the Margarita vibes come through loud and clear on the finish: it’s autumn in a glass, but *early* autumn specifically. I’m not going to pretend that the drink has anything more than a purely associational connection to Starship Troopers, so here’s a picture of my Columbia Tristar DVD copy of the movie, which is still going strong after more than 25 years:

It’s also currently streaming on Netflix with a subscription and is available via a number of other platforms for a rental fee.

Starship Troopers begins with its most iconic recurring motif, a series of “Federal Network” newsreel-style vignettes which first implore the viewer to “do their part” and enlist:

Then celebrate new planetary defenses against “Bug meteors,” which are described in slightly greater depth when “we” use our cursor to answer the question “do you want to know more?” in the affirmative:

Before finally “breaking Net” to take us live to our adversary’s home planet of Klendathu, where an invasion is underway:

We cut to a reporter (Greg Travis) on the surface who soon gets ripped in half by a Bug warrior:

After which a human soldier named Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) addresses the camera and tells the person holding it to “get out of here now”:

Then himself appears to die in combat:

Static gives way to a title card reading “one year earlier,” which yields in turn to a shot of Johnny in school in Buenos Aires, where a teacher named Rasczak (Michael Ironside) redirects his attention from amorous doodles:

To a lecture summarizing the main points of the History and Moral Philosophy class which is about to conclude in a scene that Todd Berliner argues in his book Hollywood Aesthetic: Pleasure in American Cinema “contains perverse elements that complicate its genre identity and garble its ideological position.” As he explicates further:

The ideological perversity of the scene results from the fact that Rasczak is lecturing his students about the failure of democracy. He says that the present governing state, which separates people into “civilians” and “citizens,” has restored peace after years of strife caused by “social scientists of the 21st century.” He is describing, in short, a fascist utopia, a military state that affords citizenship only to those who serve in the armed forces.

No straightforward ideological proposition can make sense of the classroom scene because genre cues point in two opposing directions–making Rasczak look alternately like a liberal educator or a fascist ideologue.

After the final bell rings, Johnny participates in a federally-funded research study testing for psychic abilities conducted by his best friend Carl (Neil Patrick Harris):

Wins the big game with this teammate Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer), who has a crush on him:

And goes to the prom with his girlfriend Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards), an aspiring pilot who responds to him telling her that he, too, has decided to enlist even though it means his wealthy family will disown him by whispering “my father’s not home tonight” in his ear:

A long shot of them kissing during the last dance dissolves into a close-up of the flag of the Terran Federation, then the camera tilts down to show Johnny, Carl, and Carmen taking an oath:

When a recruiting sergeant (Robert David Hall) with a robotic arm asks for their orders, we learn that Carmen has been assigned to Fleet like she hoped. Carl says he has been selected for Games & Theory aka military intelligence, to which the officer says, “next time we meet, I’ll probably have to salute you!”

However, he reserves his strongest reaction for Johnny. “Good for you!” he exclaims when he finds out what branch Johnny will be going into, gripping his hand. “Mobile Infantry made me the man I am today.” Then he pushes his chair back to reveal that he’s also missing both of his legs.

Dizzy winds up at the same boot camp as Johnny and helps him earn the coveted title of squad leader by suggesting that they run one of their old football plays in a scene screenwriter Ed Neumeier identifies as an homage to The Dirty Dozen (which also featured war games between a blue team and a red team) on his DVD commentary track with director Paul Verhoeven:

But Carmen dumps him in a video Dear Johnny (!) letter in the very next scene because she has decided to “go career”:

Then he is relieved of command of his squad following the death of a team member in a training accident and sentenced to “administrative punishment”:

After which he resolves to quit despite Dizzy telling him that it only proves he doesn’t “have what it takes to be a citizen.” His phone call home to deliver the good (from their perspective) news to his parents (Lenore Kasdorf & Christopher Curry) gets disconnected, though:

Moments later he learns why: Buenos Aires has been destroyed by one of those meteors we heard about earlier and the Federation is going to war.

Johnny’s commanding officer (Dean Norris) looks the other way as his drill instructor Sergeant Zim (Clancy Brown) tears up his letter of resignation:

And following a FedNet sequence featuring a woman giddily clapping her hands and cheering as a group of children “do their part” by stomping on a bunch of presumably innocent insects:

We find ourselves on “Fleet Battle Station Ticonderoga, deep inside the Arachnid Quarantine Zone,” where the men and women of the Federal Armed Services prepare to attack.” This is where we came in, as the fella says. Johnny survives, of course, even though official records list him as killed in action:

And the second half of the film chronicles the completion of his and his former classmates’ transformation from teen magazine idols into something harder and, especially in the case of Carl, who we last see decked out in garb that would clearly identify him as one of the bad guys if this was a World War II movie, verging on sinister.

In a chapter in the book The Literature/Film Reader: Issues of Adaptation, J. P. Telotte contends that a key difference between Starship Troopers the movie and the novel by Robert Heinlein it’s based on is that while the latter “is a first-person narrative told from Johnny Rico’s vantage point, Verhoeven’s film unfolds, not from the perspective of any individual, but rather from the point of view offered by the audiovisual culture itself,” which enables it to “establish a rather different authoritarian voice, and indeed a subtly tyrannical power, one that is the real heart of its satiric vision.” Andrew O’Hehir said something very similar in his remarkably astute contemporaneous review for Sight & Sound, noting that while Heinlein’s “fascist-flavored Utopia” was “a deadly earnest prescription,” in Verhoeven’s hands “it becomes an aesthetic and ideological field of play.” They’re thinking not just about the FedNet sidebars which explicitly reference historical propaganda pieces:

And are also, as Neumeier explains in his DVD commentary, “meant to evoke CNN coverage of the Gulf War,” but the rest of the film as well. I think it only really works if you sincerely enjoy it on its own merits for the amazingly undated special effects in scenes like the wreck of Carmen’s ship the Rodger Young:

And the attack on Planet P which surely must have been inspired by the movie Zulu:

Action sequences like Johnny single-handedly taking out a giant “Tanker” Bug with a grenade:

And endlessly-quotable lines like a panelist on a Crossfire-like program (Timothy McNeil) declaring, “frankly I find the idea of a bug that thinks offensive”:

And Sergeant Zim answering a question from Johnny’s skeptical fellow trooper Ace Levy (Jake Busey), about the utility of hand-to-hand combat in an age of nuclear weapons by pinning his hand to a wall with an expertly-thrown knife and declaring, “if you disable the enemy’s hand, he cannot push a button!”

I do, obviously, and that’s why, like Jamelle Bouie, I’m able to read it as an artifact “made by the human government of the film to rally the populace in a losing war against the Bugs” (which a footnote in this 2001 journal article by Lene Hansen indicates was supported by the film’s no-longer-extant late-90s website) or, as O’Hehir suggests, a fable from an alternate universe in which Hitler won. I am genuinely moved by Johnny and Dizzy’s surprise when they discover that their new Lieutenant is their old teacher:

Johnny’s eulogy for Dizzy after she dies in his arms:

And his reaction to hearing his unit described as “Rico’s Roughnecks” for the first time after he assumes command when Rasczak also dies in combat:

Because I am moved, I am also disturbed; because I am disturbed, I am on my guard against being manipulated by these same techniques in other contexts.

Telotte notes that for all its deviations from the book it’s adapted from, “the film still follows the Heinlein pattern of youthful education, in large part because, the movie implies, we have all become very much like juveniles in the process of being molded by today’s media culture.” This strikes me as similar to Neumeier’s commentary track observation that “Carl has become like an insect here” when the image above of him placing his hand on the “Brain Bug” Sergeant Zim has captured to read its mind appears on the screen. Early in the film, Carmen pushes back against a teacher’s (Rue McClanahan) statement that insects are superior to us in many ways on the grounds that “humans have created art, mathematics, and interstellar travel.”

The rebuttal focuses just on the third item on this list, but as O’Hehir points out, “for all the movie’s humans know, there are arachnid poets greater than Milton.” This is where Starship Troopers *really* starts to get interesting for me. While also still in school, Carl refers to his psychic abilities as “a new stage in human evolution,” which reminds me of two of my previous Drink & a Movie selections: Crimes of the Future, which regards such a possibility in a positive light, and Stalker, which is more circumspect. Neumeier means to criticize Carl by comparing him to an insect, but as Ed Howard observes in a 2009 blog post, his director “focuses equally on the casualties of humans and aliens alike” and “keeps subtly reminding his audience that the aliens are not simply expendable cannon fodder,” for instance in this scene where “Verhoeven’s composition deliberately recalls popular representations of the Pearl Harbor attack and of American napalm bombing raids in Vietnam”:

Similarly, although O’Hehir is right that “of course, we’ll root for the human race against a teeming hive of insects,” scenes like this:

And this:

Nonetheless inarguably constitute torturing prisoners of war, and our species’ reaction to Carl’s triumphant announcement that the captured Brain Bug is afraid is also shameful:

Heinlein obviously intends insect society as a metaphor for America’s Cold War Communist enemies; Neumeier and Verhoeven flip this around and equate the Bugs with fascism. More important than specific ideologies, though, is the universal truth that the harder you try to vilify a supposed enemy, the likelier it is that you will come to embody their “worst” tendencies yourself. Or to quote another movie I saw in high school, 8MM, “if you dance with the devil, the devil don’t change–the devil changes 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.

A thought popped into my head awhile back when fresh sweet corn from regions to the south started to appear in local grocery stores: I should make a drink reminiscent of elotes! As J. Kenji López-Alt has written, it is after all “the best way to serve corn, period,” and by enshrining its flavors in a cocktail, I’d be able to enjoy it year-round even when its main ingredient is out of season. So I grabbed a bottle of Finger Lakes Distilling’s Glen Thunder Corn Whiskey out of the pantry, fat-washed it with cotija cheese, mixed it up with some lemon juice to make a sour . . . and went straight back to the drawing board, because the resulting concoction was absolutely terrible. In fact, my first BUNCH of attempts were failures. Among the things I learned from these experiences were that:

• Finger Lakes Distilling isn’t even making Glen Thunder any more, as I found out when I drove all the way out to one of their tasting rooms to try in vain to refresh the bottle I had just kicked
• Unless handled with an extremely deft hand, cheese-infused spirits risk making the drink you’re using them in taste, to quote my loving wife, “vomitous”
• You can take corn out of a can, but you can’t take the canned flavor out of that corn pretty much no matter what you do with it

The turning point came when I remembered this Food & Wine article and special ordered a bottle of Nixta Licor de Elote from Ithaca’s Red Feet Wine Market. My pivot to Mellow Corn as a replacement for the Glen Thunder also turned out to be a blessing in disguise when it proved to play much nicer with others, and a few tweaks later I had something that not only tasted the way I wanted to, but also remained distinctive enough from the popular Elote Old-Fashioned I discovered around the same time that I remain comfortable claiming my drink as an original creation. Here’s how you make it:

1 1/2 ozs. Mellow Corn
3/4 oz. Nixta Licor de Elote
1/2 oz. Lime juice
1/2 oz. Ancho Reyes
1 teaspoon 2:1 simple syrup
1 Egg white

Start by rimming a chilled cocktail glass with this mixture (I recommend using a mortal and pestle if you have one) inspired by Trader Joe’s Everything But The Elote seasoning, which you could obviously use as an alternative, but it won’t be nearly as good:

• 1 Tbsp Grated Parmesan cheese
• 1/2 tsp Lime zest
• 1/2 tsp Kosher salt
• 1/2 tsp Granulated sugar
• 1/2 tsp Chipotle powder
• 1/4 tsp Dried cilantro
• 1/8 tsp Citric acid

Combine all of the cocktail ingredients in a shaker and mix with a immersion blender until frothy. Add ice and shake, then strain into your prepared glass over a large ice cube:

The egg white is essential for achieving the creamy texture I’m going for, so don’t leave it out! If this ingredient makes you squeamish, please note that we usually err on the side of extreme caution by pasteurizing the eggs using an immersion circulator to hold them at 130 degrees in a water bath for 45 minutes to an hour before separating them, which neutralizes the food safety threat without noticeably impacting them otherwise. Cheese, smoke, and heat are the first things you’ll notice, but corn is definitely present on the swallow and even more so on the finish. The drink starts out on the sour side thanks to the citric acid in the spice mixture on the rim, but once your lips stop tingling the balance of the beverage itself is, if I may say so myself, perfect, ensuring that no ingredient overpowers the other and making this more than a novelty cocktail that’s enjoyable for the first few sips but inevitably overstays its welcome. Which is, of course, a reference to the film I’m pairing it with, The Exterminating Angel. Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD copy:

It’s also currently streaming on the Criterion Channel with a subscription and is available via a number of other platforms for a rental fee.

One of my high school English teachers used to say that the hallmark of great literature was a work possessed of both individuality and universality. I can’t think of many movies that better embody this dual standard than The Exterminating Angel, which is to say that I agree with both Seth Colter Walls, who hailed it as “2009’s most indispensable film” in a Newsweek article published shortly after the release of the DVD pictured above, and Mark Harris, who described it in Film Comment eight years later as a “bleak, caustic vision of rich people presiding over the end of civilization” that “does not seem like a movie behind the times so much as a movie of no particular time.” Noting that an opera adaptation by Thomas Adès was set to debut in just a few months and that a musical version by Stephen Sondheim and David Ives was also in the works, the latter went on to suggest that “it can’t be good news that its time may finally have come,” and I believe that’s right, too, for reasons I hope to make clear anon! The Exterminating Angel opens on a household in a flurry of activity. Mexican aristocrats, Edmundo (Enrique Rambal) and Lucía Nobile (Lucy Gallardo) are hosting a dinner for their wealthy friends after a night at the opera, but something is amiss, as we discover when the doorman Lucas (Pancho Córdova. I think–IMDb says Ángel Merino, but the screenplay published by Onion Press in 1969 credits him as “Waiter,” so I’m ruling in favor of Wikipedia) decides to go for a walk even though it means the loss of his job. “Well, if he didn’t like it here, good riddance,” says the majordomo Julio (Claudio Brook)–“there are many Lucases in the world.”

Be that as it may, he isn’t the last to leave and other strange things are afoot at the Casa Nobile, as these two maids discover when their attempt to flee is temporarily thwarted by the untimely arrival of their employers and their guests not just once:

But, inexplicably, twice:

As they sit down to dinner, the repetitions (which director Luis Buñuel suggests he was the first to use this way in a movie in an interview with José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent collected in their book Objects of Desire) continue as Edmundo gives the same toast a second time:

And the remaining staff follow the maids out the door:

Lucía also decides to abandon a jest involving a bear and some sheep after her guest Mr. Russell (Lucy Gallardo) responds negatively to one whereby a waiter (Merino) deliberately “trips” while serving the first course:

Finally, matters really take a turn toward the surreal after dinner when the guests would normally leave, but find instead that none of them are able to cross the threshold of the drawing room:

So against every rule of etiquette they settle in for the night:

When Julio arrives with leftovers for breakfast the following morning, he discovers that he is now trapped as well:

Which brings us to just about exactly 1/3 of the way through the film’s 95-minute runtime. In an interview included with the Criterion DVD as an extra, Silvia Pinal (who plays a guest named Leticia aka “The Valkyrie) quotes a friend of hers as saying that “Buñuel invented reality shows with The Exterminating Angel.” Most of the remaining hour does indeed prove that no one is there to make friends and as the days stretch into weeks the increasingly uncivilized assembly take turns throwing each other under the bus by surreptitiously tossing life-saving medicine where it can’t be reached:

Engaging in sexual abuse under the cover of darkness:

And threatening to resort to human sacrifice despite the total lack of evidence that it would accomplish anything. They break open a pipe in the wall to find water:

But are reduced to eating paper when the leftovers from dinner run out:

Until the bear from earlier miraculously chases the sheep which were to be part of the same entertainment into the drawing room:

Where they are blindfolded:

Slaughtered, and cooked over a fire made with wood from a smashed cello:

Bodies nonetheless begin to pile up after Russell expires of natural causes:

And two of the trapped guests who are having an affair choose a lovers’ suicide over attempting to go on. Haunted by nightmare images like this disembodied hand:

And let down by rituals such as these kabbalistic “keys”:

The Masonic cry for help:

And “the unpronounceable word”:

A contingent of the remaining guests indicate that they are determined to go through with their plan to kill Edmundo under the reasoning that “when the spider’s dead, the web unravels.” Dr. Carlos Conde (Augusto Benedico) opposes them saying, “but you’re crazy! It’s ridiculous, completely irrational.”

To which they reply, “we’re not interested in reason: we want to get out of here.” Suddenly, Edmundo appears standing next to Leticia and nobly tells them that “there’s no use fighting something so easily achieved”:

He retrieves a revolver from a cabinet but before he is able to turn it on himself Leticia cries out, “wait!” She announces that she has realized that “like pieces on a chessboard, moved thousands of times” they’ve somehow all returned to the very spots they were standing in the night they got trapped.

They fumblingly repeat the things they said then and follow her out the door, freed just as mysteriously as they were imprisoned:

To Skrikanth Srinivasan, The Exterminating Angel is “the greatest of detective films, since its object is not the discovery of the culprit […] but the discovery of the nature of our human and social condition and its motivations.” He finds the answer in the movie’s two-part structure. The first, which concludes with the scene above, “tells us that man has no escape if he locks himself up in society’s rules, opposed to the imperative rules of nature, which can manifest themselves within society’s rules only in a barbaric and secret form in direct contradiction with the spirit of these social rules.” Where Pinal’s friend sees reality television here, scholar James Ramey finds “a cinematic articulation of what in recent years has been described as a posthumanist attitude towards the human” in his article “Buñuel’s social close-up: An entomological gaze on El ángel exterminador/The Exterminating Angel (1962),” noting that it’s “not unlike an ant colony transferred to a glass casement for entomological observation.”

Part two chronicles the tragedy of said colony’s liberation. As Gilles Deleuze observes in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, “the [Exterminating] Angel’s guests want to commemorate, that is, to repeat the repetition that has saved them; but in this way they fall back into a repetition which ruins them.” And so we find them congregating together once more, this time for a Te Deum at their local cathedral:

As the service ends, the priests stop at the door. “Why don’t we wait until after the faithful have left?” one of them says.

The film ends with a plague flag over the cathedral:

Violence on the adjacent town square:

And another group of sheep offering themselves up as food for the incarcerated:

Per Srinivasan, “the elliptical brutality of the last section and the speed with which we arrive at the renewal of the phenomenon of avolition gives us the impression that it’s going to return with ten or twenty times the force,” which echoes something Buñuel himself says in Objects of Desire and reminds me of the ending to The Happening: “the church will be worse because this time it’s not just twenty people, but two hundred. It’s like an epidemic that extends outwards to infinity.” For Srinivasan the cause of all this is clearly religion, but Wael Khairy found that it echoed something even more immediate in a piece for RogerEbert.com published on April 6, 2020:

Much like COVID-19, an invisible force prevents the visitors from stepping outside the confines of the house. The title suggests that this is the work of an exterminating angel. I would never liken an infectious disease to an angel, but one can’t help but dwell on the eerie similarities of how this invisible force is affecting society as a whole. Like “The Exterminating Angel,” this outbreak feels like a wake-up call. Mother Nature is stepping in and exposing fragility of society and how easily the facade we’ve built around us can collapse. 

He concludes by wondering, “What will happen after this global nightmare comes to an end, and millions of families exit their homes? Will we emerge from our homes as changed people with a new awareness of the world, or will we fall back into the same trap?” Sadly, five years later, I think we all know what the answer to this question is. But, hey, when the end comes, at least now you have a new drink to toast it with, right?

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.

We planted red shiso in our herb garden a couple of years ago as a novelty. It unexpectedly came back the following spring and basically took over, which we soon discovered poses a bit of a challenge because it has such a distinctive color and flavor that most recipes you find it in use only a small quantity, so it’s hard to dispatch in bulk. Luckily, although it still pops up all over our yard, the amount competing for space with other edible plants is now more or less under control and it has returned to being a valued occasional guest on our summer meal plans in dishes like Marc Matsumoto’s twist on capellini pomodoro and as one of the “fresh tender herbs” in our house salad dressing, Food & Wine magazine’s whole lemon vinaigrette.

Like the mint we also grow, though, the place it really shines is a drink component and garnish. Our favorite such beverage is the Shady Lane from Brad Thomas Parsons’ Bitters book, which has long been part of our home mixology library but somehow hasn’t yet made an appearance on this blog. Here’s how to make it:

1 1/2 ozs. Gin (Roku)
3/4 oz. Lillet Rouge
1/2 oz. Blackberry-lime syrup
1/2 oz. Lime juice
2 dashes Scrappy’s Lime bitters
3 Blackberries, plus more for a garnish
3 Shiso leaves, plus more for a garnish
Club soda

Make the blackberry-lime syrup by combining one cup of blackberries with one cup each of sugar and water and the zest of two limes and bring to a simmer, stirring occasionally and mashing the berries with a wooden spoon. Remove from heat, cool completely, and strain, reserving the solids. To make the cocktail, muddle the blackberries and shiso leaves in the bottom of a shaker with the syrup. Add ice and all of the other ingredients except the club soda and shake, then strain into a chilled rocks glass. Top with club soda and garnish with additional blackberries and a shiso leaf.

First off, despite what Parsons says, DO NOT DISCARD THE SOLIDS AFTER MAKING THE SYRUP: hey are absolutely delicious with yogurt and granola! Shiso is a difficult flavor to describe to people not already familiar with it. Writing for the New York Times in 1995, Mark Bittman went with “it has a mysterious, bright taste that reminds people of mint, basil, tarragon, cilantro, cinnamon, anise or the smell of a mountain meadow after a rainstorm,” which, sure, I guess, but the quote by Jean-Georges Vongerichten four paragraphs later also gets the job done: “I like it a lot.” Whichever way you want it, that’s what dominates the first sip of a Shady Lane, but this immediately slides gracefully into dark fruit, lime zest, and juniper. The drink’s balance is absolutely perfect–it doesn’t register as particularly sweet or tart–and the effervescence from the club soda and spiciness of the Japanese gin make it a great summer sipper. Parsons explains that he named this concoction after the classic Pavement song, so it would be a great choice to pair with the film about them that recently debuted on Mubi, but its brilliant purple hue reminded me of the garish colors of Tokyo Drifter, so that’s what we’re going with. Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD copy:

It’s also currently streaming on the Criterion Channel with a subscription and available via a number of other platforms for a rental fee.

As Tom Vick writes in his book Time and Place are Nonsense: The Films of Seijun Suzuki, “Tokyo Drifter begins with a gesture more at home in experimental than commercial cinema: grainy, high-contrast, black-and-white opening scenes that were shot on expired film stock.” A man wearing a light-colored suit with white shoes and gloves walks toward the camera along a railroad track:

He is “Phoenix” Tetsu (Tetsuya Watari) and until recently none dared mess with him or his yakuza boss Kurata (Ryûji Kita). They’ve gone straight, though, and Kurata’s rival Otsuka (Eimei Esumi) has decided to test Tetsu’s resolve by ambushing him:

Otsuka watches from a nearby car:

And predicts that Tetsu will “get knocked down three times, then rise up like a hurricane” in a voiceover that accompanies the brief color fantasy sequence that Criterion chose as the basis for their cover art:

But when Tetsu stubbornly refuses to fight back he says, “I see. So we can do anything we want.” The sequence ends with another splash of color when Tetsu, having staggered to his feet after his beating, looks down and spies a broken gun which is obviously a prop and glows red against a monochrome background:

Which Peter Yacavone contends “promotes a consciousness of cliché” in his book Negative, Nonsensical, and Non-Conformist: The Films of Suzuki Seijun. Whatever Otsuka wants turns out to be stealing a building from Kurata by forcing his business partner Yoshii (Michio Hino) to sign a sizeable debt over to him at gunpoint:

Then shooting him:

Tetsu arrives moments too late to help:

And is knocked out in the skirmish that follows:

He revives in time to save Kurata from signing over the building to Otsuka:

But not before Kurata accidentally kills Yoshii’s secretary Mutsuko (Tomoko Hamakawa) while trying to shoot Otsuka:

Tetsu confronts Otsuka’s henchman Tatsu “the Viper” (Tamio Kawachi) in a junkyard sequence that includes a largely gratuitous depiction of a car being demolished:

As well as Tetsu singing the movie’s insanely catchy titular theme song:

Tetsu informs Tatsu that he intends to take the rap for Mutsuko’s murder should Otsuka attempt to finger his boss, and that if he is arrested he’ll let the police know who killed Yoshii. Otsuka responds by sending an emissary to Kurata to propose a trade: if he hands over Tetsu, they’ll return the deed to his building. He refuses:

And moved by his gesture, Tetsu, who overheard the conversation, decides to leave town:

Tony Rayns, writing in the book Branded to Thrill: The Delirious Cinema of Suzuki Seijun, argues that “the ultimate fascination of Tokyo Drifter is that despite the apparently wilful ‘deconstruction’ of the genre, it none the less works as a thriller.” One great example of both parts of this proposition is a duel fought in front of a train speeding down on the combatants shortly after Tetsu arrives in Shonai, home of one of Kurata’s allies, with Otsuka’s men hot on his heels. When they attack he signals his presence by again singing the film’s theme song as he walks through the snow:

Then joins the fray. As he takes cover behind some bales of hay, voiceover narration signals his thoughts: “my range is under ten yards.”

Suddenly, he spots a pair of geta in a shaky cam POV shot:

The idea, of course, is that they are ten yards away from Tetsu’s enemies, which explains why he leaps toward them moments later:

Fast forward to the next scene. It begins with Tetsu trudging through a field covered in snow, which cinematographer Shigeyoshi Mine and production designer Takeo Kimura identify as the movie’s true protagonist in a delightful anecdote about an alcohol-fueled creative session by director Seijun Suzuki that I’m grateful to Vick for including in Time and Place are Nonsense:

Kimura has confidence in Mine’s talent, with whom he is able to create an image like a sumi-e [a traditional ink-wash painting]. But the characters of the two men do not harmonize well. Mine is impulsive, Kimura is complex. One trait they have in common is that they are both egotists. … When they are drinking sake, their ego emerges with greater force. …They discuss the photography of [Tokyo Drifter], in which the snow is the protagonist of the story. I’m being canny. I wait until they stop arguing. Sometimes they turn to me, but I don’t respond, because for me it is enough to decide at the time when the camera has to be set up. The snow already has provoked something in these men, whichever image of the snow will eventually transpire.

Anyway, as Tetsu walks he realizes he’s being followed:

No explanation is offered for either the way he vanishes from his pursuer Tatsu’s sight in between shots or the apparently nondiegetic triangular shadow that appears at the same time:

But the next thing we know Tetsu has gone from prey to predator and awaits Tatsu under a bridge:

There’s a close-up of Tatsu standing in front of a railway signal:

Followed by one of a train:

And suddenly the Viper is aiming his gun at the Phoenix:

In quick succession there’s a close-up of Tatsu, followed by one of Tetsu, followed by a shot of a steam engine’s boiler:

Still Tatsu waits:

As the train continues to draw closer to Tetsu, Suzuki switches to wonderfully artificial-looking back projection:

Cut to a POV shot from Tetsu’s perspective as he counts railway ties: “15 yards, 14, 13, 12 . . . 10.” The end of the list is marked by a red line in the snow defining what we learned earlier is the limit of his range:

As Tetsu makes his move, Tatsu finally starts to fire:

Tetsu runs toward him and dives to the ground, shooting back:

Cut first to close-up of the train, then to a long shot of Tetsu walking away, apparently having won:

Yacavone writes that this all “plays like deliberately orchestrated nonsense,” but also concedes that it’s “exciting on its own terms,” which I think is basically the same thing Rayns is saying and goes double for Tokyo Drifter‘s highly-stylized climactic shootout. It follows Kurata betraying Tetsu in the scene that most directly inspired this month’s drink photo:

And features the latter first taking cover behind a slim column:

Then throwing his gun into the air, catching it, and shooting the man who sold him out in one smooth motion:

I appreciate Yacavone’s writing on this film because he draws attention to details I suspect I might have missed otherwise, such as the absence of any “visual trace of prewar central Tokyo” from the title sequence featuring a montage of tourist attractions built in preparation for the 1964 Summer Olympics:

The way it “exploits the recessed paneling of Tokugawa architecture to suggest an infinite depth that is equated with tradition” and “suggest that in its own way Yamagata, reminiscent of an age of duty, aristocracy, and self-sacrifice, is just as deathly and alienating as Tokyo”:

Or even just the simple fact that Hideaki Nitani’s character Shooting Star has the same initials as Suzuki.

But the overall contours of Tetsu’s journey are easily discernible even to the uninitiated through universal devices like a low-angle shot of a tree in front of a darkening sky that charts his withering loyalty to Kurata:

And when the final showdown ends with Tetsu rejecting the woman who loves him (Chieko Matsubara) on the grounds that he “can’t walk with a woman at [his] side” and exiting through a vaginal hallway, we understand that he has been reborn into the world as a truly independent Tokyo drifter:

Which strikes me as representing a level of meta complexity worthy of Pavement’s immortal lyrics “you’ve been chosen as an extra in the movie adaptation of the sequel to your life.”

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.

After writing about the Tour de France, blackcap bush in my backyard, and 2024 Paris Olympics in my first three July Drink & a Movie posts, I had two obvious places to look for inspiration for my last one. Rather than choose between the birthday celebrations of the two countries members of our household have citizenship in, though, I decided to leverage my penultimate “bonus” post (my goal is 54 in four years, so just one per month won’t quite cut it) to do both. It’s arriving a bit later than intended, but my follow-up to my Canada Day commemoration featuring Crimes of the Future therefore highlights what I think surely must be the greatest “3rd of July” film ever made, Lonesome. Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD copy:

As a film in the public domain, you can also easily find it streaming for free on platforms like Tubi. The beverage I’m pairing with it is the Sherry Tale Ending that Toronto-based bartender Colie Ehrenworth created for the fourth Canadian season of the Speed Rack bartending competition, which is included in the book A Quick Drink by its founders Lynnette Marrero and Ivy Mix. Here’s how to make it:

1 1/2 ozs. Reposado tequila (Espolòn)
3/4 oz. Amontillado sherry (Lustau)
1/2 oz. Lillet Blanc
1/4 oz. Maple-sugar syrup
3 dashes Angostura bitters

Make the maple-sugar syrup by combining equal parts by volume of maple syrup, turbinado sugar, and water in a small saucepan and stir over low heat until the sugar has fully dissolved. Remove from heat and cool completely. To make the cocktail, stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

Normally I try to avoid repeating base spirits in consecutive months, but that actually doesn’t seem so inappropriate in an extra post arriving hot on the heels of its predecessor–think of it as a sort of “two for one” deal! I like the Canada connection for the same reason, which: Ehrenworth advises using maple syrup from Ontario and that definitely is the way to go, especially if like us you’re lucky enough to have family who make their own and are willing to share. This drink was specifically engineered to be a lower ABV nightcap by combining elements of the Adonis, a sherry-based classic cocktail, and a 50/50 Manhattan and yet another affinity between this month’s concoction and its predecessor is that the tequila is once again a supporting player. The dominant flavors here are instead dried fruit notes from the amontillado on the sip which gracefully give way to the candied citrus from the Lillet on the swallow. So it’s a sweet drink, yes, but an agave and dark molasses finish prevents it from ever coming across as cloying, making the Sherry Tale Ending a light but satisfyingly complex way to finish your night.

At just 69 minutes, Lonesome would also be a great way to unwind after an evening out. The plot is simple: lonely hearts Jim (Glenn Tryon) and Mary (Barbara Kent) arrive home to their respective empty apartments after a half-day at work feeling listless:

Suddenly, each hears this bandwagon as it passes by on the street below:

Lured by its siren song, both decide to head to Coney Island beach. Jim spies her on the bus ride there fending off a would-be Romeo with the implicit threat of brooch pin violence

Impressed, he pursues her through the crowd upon arrival:

Undeterred by either a young hooligan who trips him:

Or her apparent disinterest in watching him perform feats of strength:

And with a bit of extra prompting from an auspicious fortune that reads “you’re about to meet your heart’s desire”:

He finally succeeds in catching her eye in a very nice rack-focus shot:

And before long they’re talking to each other on the beach:

Literally: while its first 29 minutes are silent (although they do feature a sophisticated sound mix timed to the action), Lonesome contains three dialogue sequences which most critics revile, but that Aaron Cutler argued in a blog post for Moving Image Source “add to the rest of the film largely because they are inconsistent with it.” Referring also to the final one, he continues:

For the first time in their lives onscreen, Jim and Mary speak, and they do it because of each other. When Jim promises Mary that “We’ll never be lonesome anymore,” he says it in his own voice, out loud; when he later argues with a judge and police, he does so with the voice that Mary helped him find. Even after the lovers fall back into silence, we retain the sounds of their voices in our heads, distinguishing them as individuals.

To Cutler the “brightly smeared” colors that suddenly make an appearance in the film’s 37th minute perform a similar function.

“Within a long-shot world,” he says, “Jim and Mary see each other in medium and close-up; within a black-and-white, silent world, they can see and hear each other in color and in sound.” Anyway, Jim and Mary have lots of fun together on the boardwalk after the sun goes down:

And he wins her a doll:

But the party ends during a ride on the dual-track Jackrabbit Racer roller coaster when a wheel on Mary’s car catches fire:

She faints:

And when Jim tries to come to her aid, he is arrested by a bizarrely aggressive cop, leading to the scene described by Cutler above in which his obvious passion earns him a reprieve:

Alas, he and Mary are unable to locate each other again in the throng:

A squall suddenly blows up while they’re searching and, not having exchanged contact information, they return home despondent and alone. But wait! Jim puts on a record of the song he and Mary danced to earlier; in the next shot, she hears it coming through the walls and pounds on them, yelling for her neighbor to turn it off:

Jim recognizes Mary’s voice and rushes down the hall:

They’ve been living next to each other all along! As they embrace, the lovers contemplate Mary’s doll, which as Glenn Erickson noted in a Blu-ray review has had “its face half washed away in ‘tears'” by the storm, thus becoming a “physical ‘locator'” for the heartbreak they have just triumphed over:

The end. Lonesome is brilliantly, restless inventive from start to finish and probably contains twice its running time’s worth of visual information if you count the many superimpositions, such as the clock face which accompanies shots of Jim and Mary at work and portraits of the people she is connecting to one another in her job as a switchboard operator:

As Richard Koszarski observes in his excellent DVD commentary track, even director Pál Fejös’s most ostentatious images are far more innovative than they appear:

When a shot of Mary at work seems to elbow a shot of Jim right out of the frame, we are seeing this new optical printing technology at work. The effect is not, as some historians have said, a panning shot in which the camera moves to the left or right, but a much more complicated technical exercise introduced to Hollywood only a few months before Fejös shot this film in which the optical printer and a new Kodak duplicating film stock could allow filmmakers the sort of flexibility in shaping the image that prefigures the development of digital cinema decades later.

Meanwhile, for the ostensibly more straightforward scenes that begin the film, cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton “developed a small mobile camera system that allowed him to follow the actors very closely as they moved within the cramped confines of their cold water flats”:

Fejös and company also make great use of a technique which was falling out of style with the advent of sound in the applied color sequences, which as Joshua Yumibe explains in his chapter for the book Color and the Moving Image were “proving difficult to apply in ways that did not interfere with soundtracks on prints.” Universal nonetheless approved their use here both to facilitate marketing the film in the company’s publicity journal Universal Weekly as “the first talking picture with color sequences” and because they “greatly enhance an already beautiful story.” Specifically, per Yumibe, color formally reinforces the narrative ambivalence he (riffing on Siegfried Kracauer) reads into Lonesome‘s insistence on tearing Jim and Mary apart before it allows them to be together by using “the same hues that previously colored their romance” for the flames that result in their separation.

A sequence in which Jim and Mary search for a lost ring on the beach serves a similar function. Sure, they are ultimately successful:

But what were the chances? As Jonathan Rosenbaum said about my February, 2024 Drink & a Movie selection The Young Girls of Rochefort, despite the fact that all eventually ends well, “the missed connections preceding this resolution are relentless, and one may still wind up with a feeling of hopeless despair despite the overdetermined happy ending.” No wonder, then, that he numbers both that film and Lonesome among his hundred favorite films!

One of the best things about Koszarski’s commentary are when he points out places where, with his assistance, things obviously seem to be missing like a “gag title” to explain Jim’s exchange with the man who serves him coffee and doughnuts on his way to work:

Flaws like this are on of the reasons that David Cairns, another champion of Lonesome‘s dialogue scenes, provides for calling it “a magnificent one-off” in a 2016 blog post: “I wish the part-soundie era had lasted another five years. When the two leads abruptly start speaking to each other in live sound on the beach at Coney Island, the jarring transition from one medium to another is beautiful. You can’t get that in a perfect film, only in a makeshift masterpiece like this one, a superproduction assembled on shifting sands.” Talking about this moment:

He concludes by saying, “When the film reaches its tearful conclusion, sudden nitrate decomposition afflicts the footage, with PERFECT artistic timing — it drives home the fragility of what we’ve been watching.” It may be a bit of a stretch, but this strikes me as a possible callback to the delicate balance of the Sherry Tale Ending and even the holiday that occasioned this post. It’s great that the United States has made it to 249, but if we’re not careful it won’t still be around next year to mark its Semiquincentennial, let alone make it all the way to the year 2074.

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.

Happy Canada Day! This month’s post honors that country’s first citizen of cinema, David Cronenberg, and its de facto national cocktail, the Caesar. To begin with the former, here’s a picture of my Neon DVD copy of Crimes of the Future, one of *my* best movies of the 21st century so far:

It’s also currently available on Hulu with a subscription and via a number of other platforms for a rental fee, and some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Everyone in my household except me is a Canadian citizen and we spend a lot of time north of the border, so Caesars are a staple of our holiday and other gatherings. I knew that I eventually wanted to write about a drink from the excellent book Caesar Country: Cocktails, Clams & Canada by Aaron Harowitz & Zack Silverman, which was published the same year this series began, and when I settled on Crimes of the Future as the movie I’d be pairing it with the choice became obvious. Here’s how to make our very slightly modified version of their ingenious Waltermelon:

1 1/2 ozs. Reposado tequila (Espolòn)
2 ozs. Watermelon juice
2 ozs. Caesar mix
1/4 oz. Simple syrup
1/4 oz. Lemon juice

Make the Caesar mix by roasting 4 1/2 lbs. halved Roma tomatoes cut-side down on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a Silpat mat with a seeded, stemmed, and halved jalapeño chili (skin-side up) and four whole cloves of garlic with their skins left on about 30 minutes until nicely browned. Let cool completely, then remove the skins from the garlic, add everything to a blender with two tablespoons fresh oregano (or two teaspoons dried), and blend until smooth. Add one cup of water, 1/2 cup clam juice, 1/4 cup lemon juice, 1/4 cup simple syrup, and two teaspoons sea salt and blend again to homogenize. Add 1/4 teaspoon cayenne powder, 1/4 teaspoon celery seed, 1/4 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper, 1/4 teaspoon onion powder, and 1/4 teaspoon paprika and quickly blend again. Strain the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer and cheesecloth (you’ll need to squeeze, which can be messy if you’re not careful) and adjust the consistency with additional water as needed and/or seasoning with more salt. To make the cocktail, stir all of the ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled Collins or highball glass rimmed with kosher salt. Serve on the rocks garnished with cubes of feta cheese and watermelon on a skewer.

This beverage is certain to surprise and delight Caesar fans for sure, but even more so anyone who only knows its cousin the Bloody Mary. Thanks to the addition of watermelon juice, which per Harowitz & Silverman was inspired by an observation by chef José Andrés that “tomatoes with watermelon is a simple, refreshing, and perfectly balanced combination,” it’s sweeter and much lighter in body than the brunch staple you’re familiar with, which I personally find unpleasantly sludgy. Watermelon is also probably the flavor that will dominate your initial impression, but only because it’s unexpected: starting with the second sip, it feels like the world’s most natural companion to the umami-rich Caesar base. Finally, there’s a nice bit of heat on the finish, which is also where you finally pick up agave notes from the tequila and the oregano (one of the ingredients in the original Caesar created by Calgary bartender Walter Chell, as the book notes) we added as a second connection to Greece, where Crimes of the Future was shot. The first is of course the cubed feta garnish, which reminds me a bit of these trapezoidal purple “candy bars”:

They aren’t actually candy, hence the scare quotes: this is, rather, what you eat after you get the elective surgery that leaves these scars:

And replaces your digestive system with one capable of converting reprocessed industrial waste into energy. But we’re getting just a bit ahead of ourselves. Following the opening credits sequence that inspired this month’s drink photo:

Crimes of the Future begins with a shot of a structure that looks simultaneously futuristic and decrepit viewed from the shoreline of a rocky beach:

The camera pulls back to reveal a boy (Sotiris Siozos) sitting next to a rusty can and digging in the water with a spoon:

Then circles around to the right before tracking in, almost as if were studying him. A woman’s voice says “Brecken” and he looks up:

Cut to a long shot of the speaker, his mother Djuna (Lihi Kornowski): “I don’t want you eating anything you find in there, you understand me? I don’t care what it is.”

Cut back to Brecken, who rises, then back to a medium shot of Djuna as she mutters “I don’t care what it is” to herself a second time, her voice quavering.

It’s an odd exchange and on a first viewing the logical assumption is that she’s concerned about him consuming marine animals or fish, possibly because the water is polluted? But the real cause of her duress is revealed about 30 seconds later when Brecken finishes brushing his teeth and begins to munch on a plastic wastebasket as Djuna looks on:

What happens next is even more shocking. As Brecken sleeps, Djuna smothers him with a pillow:

She confesses her crime over the phone in the scene that follows, and although her words are unrepentant (“yes, yes, I mean the Brecken thing”), there are tears in her eyes when she hangs up:

The person at the other end of the line is an associate of Djuna’s ex-husband Lang (Scott Speedman), who is understandably also reduced to sobs when he shows up to claim his son’s body:

And with one murder in the books, we’re off. The next shot introduces us to Crimes of the Future‘s protagonists, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux). She awakens him from a restless night in his LifeFormWare OrchidBed with good news: there’s a new hormone in his body!

You see, he suffers from a condition called Accelerated Evolution Syndrome whereby his body produces new organs, which Caprice tattoos while they’re still in his body:

Then removes in front of a live audience using another LifeFormWare product, the Sark autopsy module, which has made them stars of the performance art world:

There’s no need for anesthesia or sterilization because human beings have ceased to feel pain except in their sleep and infections have disappeared for reasons unknown. People now get their thrills from a new fad called “desktop surgery,” which basically consists of cutting into each other:

And the entire situation is making the government nervous. As the two bureaucrats who staff the National Organ Registry it establishes in response explain, “human evolution is the concern. That it’s going wrong. That it’s . . . uncontrolled, it’s . . . insurrectional.”

Violet Lucca reads Crimes as being deeply autobiographical in her monograph on Cronenberg, but immediately goes on to note that there’s far more going on here than just taking stock and settling scores:

Saul is Cronenberg himself, performance art is cinema, “body art” is “body horror” (the questionable subgenre Cronenberg supposedly invented), the National Organ Registry stands in for TIFF and Telefilm Canada, and Timlin (Kristen Stewart) and Wippet (Don McKellar), the jittery geeks who work at the NOR, are a heady mix of film fans and people who work in film (critics, archivists, programmers, publicists, or whatever). However, the way in which these parallels are drawn–and Saul’s succinctly croaked objections to the various interpretations of his work, the state of performance art, and to the state of the world–are commentaries that are just as applicable to our reality as they are in the film’s. The government’s endeavors to control both art and body are meant to protect those who are already powerful, going so far as to deny nature and very clear biological warnings.

What takes the movie to the next level and makes it what Neil Bahadur calls on Letterboxd “one of the most visionary works of science fiction in the history of cinema” is how this is accomplished: “it deemphasizes technology for exploring changes in human habit, psychology, and physiology.” Deemphasizes is exactly the word–there’s plenty of tech in the movie, but like LifeFormWare’s Breakfaster Chair it’s shown to be unable to keep pace with the body’s endeavors to heal itself.

Enter Lang, who is not only Brecken’s father, but also the leader of the “plastic-eaters” mentioned above. He cannot explain how their body modifications came to manifest naturally in a new generation beyond referring to the boy as their “miracle child,” but approaches Saul and Caprice with the idea of performing a public autopsy on his son’s body “to show the world that the future of humanity existed and was good–was at peace and harmony with the techno world that we’ve created.”

Saul accepts under orders from his handler in the government’s New Vice Unit, which unbeknownst even to Caprice he works for as an undercover agent, ostensibly to earn Lang’s trust so that he can infiltrate his group, but really because they’ve already gotten to Brecken’s body:

Meanwhile, LifeFormWare is making plans of its own to ensure the continued viability of its products:

Crimes of the Future is also quite erotic, to the point where the album Pinkerton by Weezer could almost function as an alternative soundtrack to it, especially the tracks “Tired of Sex,” which matches well with this awkward encounter between Saul and Timlin:

“The Good Life,” which might as well be all about him, and “Butterfly,” our new accompaniment to the end titles that follow this brilliant final image:

Speaking of which, many critics identify it as a reference to my February, 2023 Drink & a Movie selection The Passion of Joan of Arc, but it also marks the conclusion of a motif that started with the 14th and 15th screengrabs in this post by putting a new twist on it. Djuna and Lang both weep for things lost, in her case the familiar world she knew in her youth, and in his the unexpected delay of long-anticipated future he thought had already arrived. Saul’s tear, on the other hand, is like Joan’s a sign of acceptance. Caprice gives him a bite of Lang’s “modern food”:

The Breakfaster Chair stops moving:

And to paraphrase a different set of alternative rockers active in the 90s, it’s the end of the world as we know it–but he feels fine. To Bahadur, “Cronenberg’s deep fear here – as it should be to all of us – is of reactionaryism: that those who are deemed different are then deemed subhuman, if not human at all. The title is in reference to this alone: is difference or the new the crime of the future? Is it already the crime of the now?” Noel Vera similarly suggests in a blog post about Crimes that by the end for Saul “the coming apocalypse isn’t so much a calamity as a fascinating new condition to explore and exploit, even embrace.” He also observes in passing that his name might be a reference to Alfred Bester’s classic sci fi novel The Demolished Man, something that occurred to me as well, specifically this nonsense rhyme that Ben Reich learns to prevent his thoughts from being read in a future where telepathy is common:

 Eight, sir; seven, sir;
 Six, sir; five, sir;
 Four, sir; three, sir;
 Two, sir; one!
 Tenser, said the Tensor.
 Tenser, said the Tensor.
 Tension, apprehension,
 And dissension have begun.

What’s interesting is the way that story ends. It revolves around Reich’s attempts to commit the perfect crime and escape his world’s worst punishment, something with the threatening name of “Demolition.” But it’s not what we think it is, as we finally discover in the final pages:

Reich squalled and twitched.

“How’s the treatment coming?”

“Wonderful. He’s got the stamina to take anything. We’re stepping him up. Ought to be ready for rebirth in a year.”

“I’m waiting for it. We need men like Reich. It would have been a shame to lose him.”

“Lose him? How’s that possible? You think a little fall like that could–“

“No, I mean something else. Three or four hundred years ago, cops used to catch people like Reich just to kill them. Capital punishment, they called it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Scout’s honor.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. If a man’s got the talent and guts to buck society, he’s obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you’ve got left are the sheep.”

“I don’t know. Maybe in those days they wanted sheep.”

Harowitz & Silverman argue that a big part of what makes the Caesar a great drink is that it’s infinitely customizable: they define it as “a cocktail (alcoholic or non-alcoholic) made with a base of vegetable juice and an element of the sea.” It thus can be adapted to almost any dietary preference or restriction, so mix yourself up a Watermelon like we recommend or try something different: whether you do or don’t drink, are an omnivore or vegetarian, or even (judging from Crimes‘ first line) eat plastic, Caesar Country is your roadmap to a satisfying Canada Day concoction.

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.

You’d never know it from this monthly series, but my loving wife and I aren’t drinking as much as we used to, and the most common way I discover new cocktails these days is by trying to find novel uses for old bottles which have been languishing in our liquor cabinet and refrigerator for far too long. And so it was that I found myself mixing up The Navigator which Frederic Yarm featured on his blog in 2018 earlier this year with some of the madeira I purchase each December to make bigos, a nod to both my upbringing in Pennsylvania Dutch country where we eat pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s day for good luck and the two years of Polish I took in college. When it proved to be a perfect platform for not just that spirit, but two other household favorites, Bacardí Reserva Ocho and Rothman & Winter’s Orchard Apricot Liqueur, I immediately decided to feature it in one of my last remaining Drink & a Movie posts. Here’s how to make it:

1 oz. Bacardí Reserva Ocho
1 oz. Rainwater Madeira (Leacock’s)
3/4 oz. Lemon juice
1/2 oz. Simple syrup
1/4 oz. Apricot liqueur (Rothman & Winter)

Combine all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an edible orchid and a lemon twist.

Punch provided a great overview of rainwater Madeira in 2017 for their “Bringing It Back Bar” series. Once considered the most prestigious style in the category in United States, it emerged from Prohibition with a debased reputation but has recently found favor with bartenders who find it “attractive not only for its relatively low price point, but for its subtlety.” It functions in The Navigator the same way as it does in the recipes linked to in that article–as a medium-dry counterpoint to the apricot liqueur and rum, resulting in an easy-drinking concoction which is sweet, but subtle instead of cloying. That’s actually not a terrible way to describe the movie I’m pairing it with, The Strange Case of Angelica, which like Madeira and The Navigator’s presumptive namesake Prince Henry hails from Portugal. Here’s a picture of my Cinema Guild DVD copy:

It’s also available for rental or purchase on Apple TV+, and some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Director Manoel de Oliveira was 101 years old and had 30 features under his belt when The Strange Case of Angelica debuted at Cannes in 2010, and it has a stately mien and pacing befitting such a remarkable resume. The film begins with an epigraph by Antero de Quental: “yonder, lily of celestial valleys, your end shall be their beginning, our loves ne’er more to perish.” This is followed by two languorous minutes of titles accompanied by Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires performing the third movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in Bi Minor which unspool over a nighttime cityscape of Régua from a vantage point across the Douro River:

The action begins with a 3:30 single take street scene also shot with a stationary camera and featuring a “strongly diagonal” (per James Quandt on the DVD commentary track) composition that will accrete significance as the movie progresses. A man inquires as to the whereabouts of the photographer who lives above the shop is car has stopped in front of:

And is told that he’s out of town, but a passerby helpfully offers directions to the home of a young “Sephardi emigrant” he knows who “takes photos all over the place.” This turns out to be Isaac (Oliveira’s grandson Ricardo Trêpa), who we meet bent over a malfunctioning wireless in what J. Hoberman identifies as a reference to Jean Cocteau’s Orphée in an essay collected in his book Film After Film:

Unable to make the “static-garbled radio transmissions” any clearer, Isaac shoves the device forward in frustration, knocking a pile of books onto the floor. When one volume falls open to this page:

He picks it up and begins to read. “Dance! O stars, that in constant dizzying heights you follow unchanging. Exalt, and escape for an instant the path that you are chained to.” Suddenly, there’s a knock at the door.

“It’s the angel!” Isaac exclaims and returns to the book. “Time, stand still, and you, former beings, who roam fantastical, celestial ways. Angels, open the gates of heaven, for in my night is day, and in me is God.” As he finishes the passage, there’s another knock, now accompanied by a voice calling his name. Shaken at last from his reverie, Isaac puts the book down and answers the door to find that it’s his landlady Madam Justina (Adelaide Teixeira), who Quandt describes as “like a kind of one-woman Greek chorus,” bearing a message that he has been summoned by a “very important lady” to take pictures of her daughter.

Upon arrival Isaac is greeted outside at the foot of a staircase by a nun (Sara Carinhas) who turns out to be the sister of the woman he is there to photograph (Pilar López de Ayala) and her maid (Isabel Ruth).

They inform him that his subject Angelica has just passed and that his commission is to create “one last souvenir, even if it is very sad” at the behest of her mother. Isaac asks for a stronger bulb for the room’s only light, which Hajnal Király characterizes as “a historical memento of the Oliveira family, owners, at the beginning of the twentieth century, of a factory manufacturing electric devices” in her book The Cinema of Manoel De Oliveira:

Then sets to work in a photo shoot depicted through a combination of long shots of Isaac:

And point-of-view shots complete with frame lines showing us exactly what he’s looking at as he focuses his camera:

He moves in for a close-up:

When suddenly Angelica appears to open her eyes and smile at him:

He is obviously shocked:

But upon realizing that no one else has noticed anything strange hastily finishes up and departs. The next day as he’s developing the pictures he took, an image of Angelica again comes to life, causing him to once more jump back in surprise:

Moments later he spies some laborers tilling the soil in a vineyard across the river:

And resolves the photograph them, much to the chagrin of Madam Justina, who laments the fact that “hardly anyone works like that these days”:

As Quandt notes, “Oliveira’s materialist appreciation of sound is wonderfully apparent” in the sequence that follows, which features more slanted lines:

And a charming call-and-response working song about a shabby suit of clothes. It ends with Isaac appearing to hear bells calling mourners to Angelica’s funeral, for he next appears in the church where one of the friends gathered around her coffin comments that “she looks like an angel from heaven”:

Which inspires him to recite the snippet of poetry he read earlier. That night in a scene which begins with what we soon realize is a shot of his reflection in a mirror, Isaac wakes up and walks over the photos hanging on a line in front of his balcony:

As he stands there an apparition materializes behind him:

He passes through the doorway and becomes translucent himself. The two of them embrace and rise into the sky:

Leading forthwith to my favorite image from this movie, the epically goofy grin plastered on Isaac’s face as he floats supine through the air:

Which he wears right up until the moment when a strikingly topographical overhead shot of the Douro abruptly gives way to one of him in freefall:

He awakens the next morning with a start and lights a cigarette:

“That strange reality . . . perhaps it was just a hallucination? But it was just as real as this. Could I have been to that place of absolute love I’ve heard about?” Then: “I must be out of my mind.” The second half of the film chronicles his self-deportation from the land of the living, which Daniel Kasman read as reminiscent of the director of my September, 2024 Drink & a Movie selection History is Made at Night in a dispatch filed from Cannes 2010: “as in Borzage, escape from the world’s ails to the bliss of an otherworldly love is at once the most cowardly and most heroic of actions.” As part of The Strange Case of Angelica‘s very first wave of viewers, Kasman understandably focuses specifically on the titular character’s role in precipitating Isaac’s withdrawal from his fellow lodgers:

Growing frustration when Angelica remains tantalizingly out of reach even in his dreams::

And increasingly public erratic behavior:

But as Rita Benis notes in a paper collected in the book Fearful Symmetries called “The Abysses of Passion in Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Angelica,” the film’s fantastical elements like Isaac’s visions of Angelica are strongly linked to its realist sequences like his efforts to document the “old-fashioned” ways of the vineyard workers visible from his apartment and “their contrast is what generates the real fear implicit in the film,” such as in “the distressing sequence where he desperately follows a tractor working the rocky soil, taking furious snapshots to the fading traces of an ancient world (the connection between man and earth)”:

These shots are, of course, immediately followed by one of him thrashing around in his bed, haunted by the sounds of hoes striking the earth over and over again, and they finally unlock the secret to all those diagonals: each of Isaac’s impossible loves are a step on what is ultimately one long stairway to heaven.

J. Hoberman closes his essay on The Strange Case of Angelica with a quote:

The last living filmmaker born during the age of the nickelodeon, Oliveira told an interviewer that cinema today is “the same as it was for Lumiére, for Méliès and Max Linder. There you have realism, the fantastic, and the comic. There’s nothing more to add to that, absolutely nothing.” The great beauty of this love song to the medium is that Oliveira’s eschewal remains absolute. It’s a strange case–pictures move and time stands still.

The other night at dinner we went around the table at the request of my children and all said what we’d eat if we had to subsist on just one food for the rest of our lives. Neither Oliveira’s film nor The Navigator may be the most daringly innovative creation featured in this series, but they both contain everything I’m looking for in a drink and a movie respectively, and while it would be suboptimal (to say the least) to be confined to such a limited diet, I can think of far worse answers to the cinema and cocktail versions of my kids’ question!

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.

I knew right from the start that this series would eventually feature the Cinema Highball, an ingenious rum and Coke variation created by Don Lee and included in The PDT Cocktail Book, but what to pair it with? A name like that suggests primacy of place–should I save it for the final entry and write about it alongside my favorite movie, I wondered? But then I’d have to pick a single favorite, and as the days went by my options narrowed. The Flowers of St. Francis and Early Summer came off the board within six months of this project beginning and The Passion of Joan of Arc and Pyaasa followed in its second year of existence. Meanwhile, another question was beginning to vex me: which of the 100+ films directed by Jean-Luc Godard was I going to tackle? The solution to both my problems arrived simultaneously last May when I realized I wouldn’t finish my post about Stalker before the first of the month, eliminating a possible hook: what better way to commemorate May Day 2025 than with a post celebrating “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola”?

The source of these title cards is, of course, Masculine Feminine. Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD copy:

You can also stream it on the Criterion Channel and Max with subscriptions or via Prime Video for a rental fee, and some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

The drink, which lends itself beautifully to batching and bottling (Lee sold them out of a vending machine at his Greenwich Village bar Existing Conditions), requires advance preparation, but is otherwise dead simple. Here’s how you make it:

4 1/2 ozs. Coca-Cola Classic
2 ozs. Popcorn-infused Flor de Caña Silver Dry Rum

Infuse the rum by combining one ounce of freshly popped popcorn per 750 milliliters of rum in a nonreactive container and let sit at room temperature for one hour. Strain to remove the solids, then add one ounce of clarified butter per 750 milliliters of rum, cover, and let sit for 24 hours at room temperature. Freeze the liquid for four additional hours to solidify the butter, then fine-strain and bottle. To make the cocktail, combine both ingredients in a chilled cocktail glass filled with ice cubes.

The impression of taking a big swig of soda while your mouth is still full of movie theater popcorn is so pronounced that you may instinctively start trying to pick kernels out of your teeth! If you can’t get Flor de Caña, another smooth silver rum like Planteray 3 Stars would work just fine here as well. Finally, while I suppose you *could* use something other than Mexican Coke made with real cane sugar in this drink, I don’t know why you would.

Masculine Feminine‘s Paul (Jean-Pierre Léaud) is actually a highball drinker himself, although he prefers Vittel (a brand of mineral water) and cassis.

He is shown here with Madeleine (Chantal Goya), whose character’s name also comes from Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Paul’s Mistress,” and her roommate Elisabeth (Marlène Jobert). This is one of two by the author that inspired the movie; as Richard Brody notes in his book Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, the other manifests most directly in the form of the erotic Swedish film (which many people also interpret as a parody of The Silence) these characters go to see with their friend Catherine (Catherine-Isabelle Duport).

Despite apparently missing this connection completely, Roger Ebert surfaces another even more interesting one in his review of the 2005 American rerelease:

The movie was inspired by two short stories by Guy de Maupassant. I have just read one of them, “The Signal,” which is about a married woman who observes a prostitute attracting men with the most subtle of signs. The woman is fascinated, practices in the mirror, discovers she is better than the prostitute at attracting men, and then finds one at her door and doesn’t know what to do about him. If you search for this story in “Masculine-Feminine,” you will not find it, despite some talk of prostitution. Then you realize that the signal has been changed but the device is still there: Leaud’s character went to the movies, saw [Jean-Paul] Belmondo attracting women, and is trying to master the same art. Like the heroine of de Maupassant’s story, he seems caught off-guard when he makes a catch.

He is referring to a cigarette flip trick Paul attempts numerous times through the film (I stopped counting after five) but isn’t ever quite able to execute, making him look silly instead of cool:

“Paul’s Mistress” also shines light on how to interpret our hero’s failure to survive the film, which in her insightful contemporaneous review Pauline Kael describes as “like a form of syntax marking the end of the movie.” Or, as Godard himself says in an interview with Gene Youngblood collected in David Sterritt’s book Jean-Luc Godard: Interviews, “even though my adaptation is very different, the de Maupassant story ended with Paul’s death. But I think death is a very good answer in that kind of movie. There is no meaning in it.”

Quotations from other works abound as well, most conspicuously in the form of three members of the original French cast of Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman (Chantal Darget, Med Hondo, and Benjamin Jules-Rosette) performing dialogue from it in character, which introduces a racial component to film’s sociological analysis of male-female relationships:

And perhaps most famously in Paul’s monologue about his generation’s relationship to the movies, which per Brody is clipped “nearly verbatim from Georges Perec’s novel Les Choses,” with Godard’s main contribution being the specific reference to American cinema:

We went to the movies often. The screen would light up, and we’d feel a thrill. But Madeleine and I were usually disappointed. The images were dated and jumpy. Marilyn Monroe had aged badly. We felt sad. It wasn’t the movie of our dreams. It wasn’t that total film we carried inside ourselves. That film we would have liked to make, or, more secretly, no doubt, the film we wanted to live.

Scenes like these, each of which would require a blog post entirely its own to fully unpack, represent Masculine Feminine at its most intricate, as does the 39 second-long sequence Richard Roud analyzes in his monograph about Godard which flips back and forth between day and night five times in a way that “more or less” parallels what we hear on the soundtrack. The first shot accompanies a voiceover by Paul in which he says, “lonely and dreadful is the night after which the day doesn’t come”:

The second, third, and fourth go along with voiceovers by Catherine and Paul’s friend Robert Packard (Michel Debord) saying, “American scientists succeeded in transmitting ideas from one brain to another, by injection” and “man’s conscience doesn’t determine his existence–his social being determines his conscience” respectively:

And finally the fourth, fifth, and sixth are paired with voiceovers by Elizabeth and Madeleine saying “we can suppose that, 20 years from now, every citizen will wear a small electrical device that can arouse the body to pleasure and sexual satisfaction” and “give us a TV set and a car, but deliver us from liberty” in turn:

Roud postulates that “one could make out a case that Godard has treated this sequence dramatically.” According to the theoretical argument he outlines, “darkness corresponds to Paul’s loneliness, to Robert’s pessimistic view of life and to Madeleine’s plea for a television-set,” while “daytime would correspond to Catherine’s rosy optimism about what science will be able to do and to Elizabeth’s Utopian future in which sexual problems will be solved by a gadget.” He believes that such ideas are “meant to be only lightly suggested,” though, and to him the real interest of this sequence is that it “shows Godard reaching towards that almost total escape from the shot as filmed” that he will achieve later in his career” and “brings out even more strongly than before that dialectical tension between reality and abstraction which forms the basis of all Godard’s later films.”

Did you get all that? I certainly didn’t my first (or second) time around, and I still don’t agree with every part of it, but the genius of Masculine Feminine is that it’s apparent that *something* is going on, which keeps you coming back to take a closer look. The fact that this is invariably rewarding is what I think Dave Kehr is talking about when he calls Godard “very strict in his sloppiness” in his capsule review for the Chicago Reader. The movie also offers many more straightforward pleasures, including an extremely animated Paul telling a Robert a story in a laundromat sequence punctuated by a panoply of jump cuts:

A hilariously cheeky depiction of him “putting himself in someone else’s shoes” by copying the actions of man who asking for directions to the local stadium:

Paul telling the story of how his father “discovered” why the earth revolves around the sun, an experience I myself had in a third-grade science class when I figured out where rainbows come from seconds before the teacher explained it to me and my fellow students:

And Chantal Goya’s songs, which are crucially far more interesting than any statement Paul or Robert ever makes on screen.

Penelope Gilliatt called Masculine Feminine “the picture that best captures what it was like to be an undergraduate in the sixties” in an article for The New Yorker, but moments like these are remarkable because they also feel timeless to one like me who went to college in the early 2000s. As do, sadly, the random acts of political and tabloid violence that Gilliatt speaks of next: “five deaths recorded; total apathy expressed by the characters.” Only two are depicted, a woman shooting her husband outside a café:

And a man (Yves Afonso) who appears to be about to mug Paul before he suddenly turns his knife on himself:

Non-diegetic gunshots also appear throughout on the soundtrack, though, which Adrian Martin describes in his essay for the Criterion Collection as “harsh aural interruptions, firing at unpredictable points” that represent “the violence of everyday modern urban life” in concentrated form. Can you blame Paul if he’s so inured to it that he’s more worried about the draft coming in through an open door than the murder taking place outside of it, or about his matches than the man about to immolate himself with them in protest of the Vietnam War? Maybe so, but my point is that while Godard, who styled Masculine Feminine a “concerto on youth” in an interview with Pierre Daix collected in the Grove Press film book about it, may not approve of his protagonists playing at pop stardom and philosophy while the word burns, he (to paraphrase another great work of music) obviously understands that they didn’t start the fire.

One of the movie’s most talked-about shots is Paul’s single take interview with “Miss 19” (Elsa Leroy), which lasts nearly seven minutes and is introduced by a title card which reads “dialogue with a consumer product.”

His questions are seemingly designed to reveal her ignorance about current events, but as Stephanie Zacharek observes in her 2005 review, “the scene is fascinating because although on the surface it seems Godard is asking us to join in ridiculing this girl, in the end it’s Paul’s vulnerability and naiveté that are exposed.” He is also every bit as concerned with his image as Madeleine is, it’s just that where she’s specifically focused on hair and makeup:

He’s attuned to the power of mise-en-scène in all its dimensions (remember that cigarette prop?) and nearly scraps a marriage proposal entirely when he can’t make the location he has scouted work:

It really is too bad that Masculine Feminine‘s boys map so clearly and simplistically to Godard’s notion of the “children of Marx” and its girls to the progeny of Coca-Cola, but it strikes me as a major stretch to say that the former come away looking better than the latter, especially when, as Ed Gonzalez points out in his Slant Magazine review, the ladies get the final word: “the last shot of the film acts as a female-empowering solution to Godard’s philosophical algorithm of the sexual politic. FIN.”

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.