Category: Drink & a Movie

I like spring peas, ramps, and fiddlehead ferns as much as the next fellow, but the seasonal ingredient I get most excited about during this time of year is rhubarb because it’s typically the first edible plant we’re able to harvest from our own yard. My favorite thing to use it in is pie, but it also makes an excellent shrub, and a couple of years ago I discovered that it can be transformed into a delicious syrup as well courtesy this drink recipe by Charlotte Voisey. Throw in the facts that, a) this cocktail is a great showcase for an excellent local spirit, 1911 Honeycrisp Vodka, and, b) it lends itself to garnishing with apple blossoms during the one week each year when they’re in flower, and you have an absolutely perfect beverage for upstate New York during the month of May! Here’s how we make it:

1 1/2 ozs. Apple vodka (1911)
3/4 oz. Rhubarb syrup
3/4 oz. Lemon juice
1 Tbsp Rosemary leaves

Lightly muddle the rosemary with the other ingredients. Add ice and shake, then double strain into a chilled glass and garnish with an apple blossom if you have one, an apple fan if you don’t and you’re feeling ambitious, or just serve as-is.

We don’t currently have a juicer, so we use this rhubarb simple syrup recipe from The Kitchn. The one place where we deliberately part from Voisey is by lightly muddling the rosemary before shaking. This could just be an issue with my technique, but we don’t get enough of that flavor otherwise, and its complexity is absolutely essential. An apple fan is a fun garnish, but the blossom takes this to a whole new aromatic level–it’s spring in a glass!

Between the rhubarb and the vodka, there was only one movie I was ever going to pair with this drink: Stalker. Here’s a picture of my Kino DVD release:

It has subsequently received a Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD release and can also be streamed on both The Criterion Channel and Max with a subscription or rented from a variety of other platforms.

Stalker is adapted from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic, but only loosely despite the fact that both authors are credited as screenwriters alongside director Andrei Tarkovsky. Both the movie and book begin with excerpts from interviews with a Nobel Prize winner. The latter one is substantially longer, identifies the speaker’s discipline as physics, and confirms that the Zone where the titular stalker (whose name in the book is Red Schuhart) plies his trade is indeed the site of an extraterrestrial visit. From there the differences multiply: the action of the book spans years as opposed to the single day or so of the movie; Red’s/Stalker’s daughter Monkey’s affliction is not an inability to walk, but rather non-human features which become more pronounced over time; there’s a major storyline about reanimated corpses; etc.

Perhaps the most relevant deviation is that in Roadside Picnic the Zone is littered with powerful (and in many cases dangerous) alien artifacts, which is how Red and his fellow stalkers make their living: they lead others on expeditions to recover them and sell some on the black market themselves. The movie, on the other hand, contains no corresponding futuristic props whatsoever. As Tarkovsky notes in Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, “only the basic situation could be strictly called fantastic.” Instead, the profoundly otherworldly atmosphere of the Zone is created by what Maya Turovskaya calls “an infinitesimal dislocation of the everyday” in her book Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry. The example she cites is the phone which suddenly rings in a house which is completely cut off from the grid:

Another obvious one is these embers that Professor (the gentleman pictured above, played by Nikolay Grinko), Writer (Anatoliy Solonitsyn), and Stalker (Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy) encounter in a territory long deserted by people:

The effect is also achieved through subtler means like the strategic mismatches between sound and image that Andrea Truppin documents in a chapter in Rick Altman’s book Sound Theory, Sound Practice. As Stalker and his companions approach the remains of a military vehicle, for instance, the way the camera tracks forward, sound of footsteps, and additional touches like “the movement of successive tufts of grass at the bottom of the frame as if the feet of the character were crushing them” all imply a point-of-view shot:

However, as the camera continues its progress the three characters whose perspective we presumed it embodied appear on screen, negating that possibility:

In their book The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie note that “in a good print, the arrival at the Zone becomes genuinely magical, the grass a pulsating green that contrasts with the shabbiness and dinginess (yet, in a good print, intensely tactile detail) of the preceding sepia images”:

And to finish with the writer who got us started, Maya Turovskaya poetically describes the surprise appearance of a black dog as having “a hint of warning, like a distant echo of some half-forgotten legend” about it:

Stalker shares its technique of creating a science fiction universe out of images culled from the present with the 1965 film Alphaville, which also has a similar thesis. In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky says that in the former he makes “some sort of complete statement: namely that human love alone is–miraculously–proof against the blunt assertion that there is no hope for the world. This is our common, and incontrovertibly positive possession. Although we no longer know how to love. . . . ” Compare this to the final lines between Natacha von Braun (Anna Karina) and Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) in the latter:

NATACHA: You’re looking at me oddly. It’s as if you’re waiting for me to say something. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know the words. I was never taught them. Help me.

LEMMY: I can’t, princess. You have to get there by yourself to be saved. If you can’t, then you’re as lost as the dead souls of Alphaville.

NATACHA: I . . . love . . . you. I love you.

But where that film’s director Jean-Luc Godard seems to be making the (unusually for him) simple argument that the seeds of a dystopian future have not only already been planted, but are in fact beginning to bear fruit, Tarkovsky is up to something different when he parades objects like this across the screen:

Or when he employs classical music in Stalker‘s incredible ending, which follows an ersatz miracle–a medium shot appears to show Monkey (Natalya Abramova) walking!

Until the camera pulls back to reveal that her father is carrying her on his shoulders across a landscape overlooked by cooling towers:

A few scenes later Monkey sits at a table reading a book:

As the camera slowly and unsteadily retreats from her, revealing a trio of glasses at the bottom right corner of the frame, we hear a lone train whistle and an isolated synthesizer from electronic music pioneer Eduard Artemyev’s score. Seeds from dandelions or some other plant float across the screen and a voice begins to read a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev which Björk later turned into the song “The Dull Flame of Desire”:

The train whistle sounds again and Monkey tilts her head to one side. Suddenly, the dog which accompanied Stalker back from the Zone whines and one of the glasses begins to move:

As it comes to rest at the corner of the table, a second glass, or rather a jar containing an egg shell, begins to inch forward in the same halting manner:

It stops a few moment later and the third glass begins to slide. Monkey rests her head on the table as it continues its journey all the way to the edge of the table, then over it:

As the glass lands with a thunk, the table starts to shake and the camera begins tracking toward Monkey:

We hear the sound of a train and fragments of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Fade to black. Tobias Pontara argues in Tarkovsky’s Sounding Cinema: Music and Meaning from Solaris to The Sacrifice that this is “a massive critique of modern history and civilization”:

In the sound of passing trains and in Beethoven’s music, we can hear a faint and fading echo of the restless striving of humanity as it tries to make sense of, conquer and colonize the universe, without as well as within. The scene makes it clear, however, that this grand project is a failure, and that what is ultimately of importance is something very different, something that will forever elude and outlast the signifying practices represented in the soundtrack.

His jumping-off point is a comment by Truppin that, “[i]f the train’s roar and its distorted music represent the destructive forces of Western civilization, the power of spirituality is represented by the small child, who calmly and gently moves the world, an embodiment of the Christian concept that ‘the meek shall inherit the earth.'”

The work of these scholars is some of my favorite writing on Stalker and they both provide ample support for their claims, but I don’t find their readings of this scene entirely convincing because Monkey’s telepathic powers have a different meaning for me than they do for them. I do agree with Pontara that “[t]he transfiguration in the last scene places the Stalker’s daughter firmly outside of civilization” and that “her relation to the sonic icons of modern civilization expresses in a radical way the possibility of overcoming and transcending the illusory ideals of that civilization.” What this reminds me of, though, is another classic of science fiction that the Strugatsky brothers surely must have been familiar with: Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which also involves children who develop in an unexpected directions as a result of interference by visitors from the stars. That book ends with the offspring of our species literally destroying the earth as part of their merger with a cosmic intelligence called the Overmind. Tarkovsky asserts in Sculpting in Time that “[i]n the end everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love.” The Monkey of Roadside Picnic appears to be evolving beyond that capacity; Stalker ends with that same character displaying the same sort of telekinetic powers that Jennifer Anne Greggson has in Childhood’s End. These associations are too tenuous for me to insist upon them, but they prevent me from embracing the ending of the film as unambiguously optimistic.

Noel Vera makes an interesting observation in his Critic After Dark blog post about Stalker: the room in the Zone that the main characters seek out which supposedly grants anyone who enters it their heart’s secret desire has catfish swimming about in it:

“What might they wish for, and have any of their wishes been granted?” he muses. Perhaps we should be like Kent Brockman and welcome these fish as our new overlords. If the very best aspects of humanity are inextricable from the absolute worst, it might be time to give someone else a crack at running the planet–why not them?

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

I don’t think I’ve ever made it to *February* 15 without filing my taxes, let alone Tax Day, but April is nonetheless a fine time to celebrate one of my all-time favorite movie props, the notebook in which J.D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee) aka “Snoodles” from The Palm Beach Story writes down all of his expenses:

In honor of the Ale and Quail Club that he and Gerry Jeffers (Claudette Colbert) encounter on their way to Florida, this month’s drink is my favorite beer cocktail, the Campari & IPA Spritzer. I know about this elegantly simple concoction thanks to Anjali Prasertong from The Kitchn. She, in turn, spotted it in a 2011 New York Times article called “Summer Cocktails Made Simpler” in which author Robert Willey attributes it to Tucson bartender Cieran Wiese. Meanwhile, my brother-in-law Simon pointed out on Instagram that the cult favorite summer sipper the NASCAR Spritz follows the same formula. I suppose one of the lessons here is that the provenance of a highball is always going to be murky! Another is that the specific ingredients you choose count for a lot when there are only two (or three of you include the garnish) total, and to me this is the perfect showcase for my original favorite beer, Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA, which emerged as a star of the American craft brewing scene right as I came of drinking age. Here’s how you make it:

1 1 /2 ozs. Campari
6 ozs. IPA (Dogfish Head 90 Minute)

Add Campari to a chilled glass containing two or three ice cubs. Slowly pour in the beer and gently stir a few times to combine. Garnish with a lemon slice.

You don’t want just any IPA here–you need something with a lot of character to stand up to the Campari. You’re also looking for citrus, but not too much. Enter 90 Minute IPA, which is malty and piney and delicious on its own, but even better with a boost of sweetness and texture. While this definitely is a refreshing beverage, the high ABV and strong flavors will keep you warm when a cool breeze blows, which makes it perfect as a way to unwind after work on a spring evening or for a rainy night like the one Hackensacker and Gerry travel south on. But first, here’s a picture of my Preston Sturges: The Filmmaker Collection DVD box set by Universal:

The Palm Beach Story is also available for rental on a variety of streaming video platforms.

The seeds for that fateful train journey are planted years earlier. The Palm Beach Story begins with one of cinema’s great opening credits sequences, a silent retelling of the frantic hours leading up to Gerry’s marriage to Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea), who may or may not be the man she intended to wed. You see, although it concludes with the two of them about to exchange vows:

They both had to beat a doppelgänger to the church. Gerry accomplishes this by locking hers in a closet:

While Tom (dark tie) and his best man (no mustache) may just have had better luck with cabs than their counterparts (light tie, no mustache):

As Lisa Sternlieb writes in her American Shakespeare article “He Isn’t Exactly My Brother”: Shakespearean Illogic in The Palm Beach Story,” when these identical twins reappear at the end of the film following Tom’s comment “that was another plot entirely,” we are meant to suspect that he’s referring to the idea that “the Claudette Colbert who is gagged and locked in a closet has wanted to marry the Joel McCrea who marries her sister while the Joel McCrea who doesn’t make it to the church on time has wanted to marry the Claudette Colbert who marries his brother.” So who knows if Tom and Gerry (yes, like the cartoon cat and mouse) intended to marry each other at all? Given these uncertain beginnings, it’s hardly a surprise that the shot of the two of them is followed by title cards that say “and they lived happily ever after . . . or did they?”

These are followed additional titles in the same font which establish the year of the main action as 1942, five years after the wedding we just witnessed, and two dissolves to first a sign advertising an apartment for rent, and then a group of people getting off an elevator:

One of them is an old man played by Robert Dudley who, seemingly detecting that the apartment isn’t empty, uses what Stuart Klawans calls “his dog’s senses” in Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges “to track the female presence he picks up”:

When she finally confronts him, he reveals that he’s the inventor of the Texas wienie (“lay off ’em, you’ll live longer”) and thus in possession of a bankroll that Preston Sturges’s screenplay (as published in Four More Screenplays by Preston Sturges) describes as big enough “to choke a crocodile”:

He gives her enough money to take care of all her debts because it makes him feel young again “to do a little favor for such a beautiful lady.” She can’t wait to tell Tom the good news, but he fails to appreciate it as such: “I mean, sex didn’t even enter into it,” he says sarcastically, to which Gerry replies, “but of course it did, darling!” And then, “sex always has something to do with it. From about the time you’re about so big . . . “

” . . . and wondering why your girl friends’ fathers are getting so arch all of a sudden.” She is, of course, talking about The Look: “you know, ‘how’s about this evening, babe?'”

Their night eventually ends as all nights should with a boozy dinner and lovemaking, but she wakes up the next morning determined to capitalize on her youth and good lucks while they still last to secure a more comfortable future her herself and her husband. After a bit of business with a round pivot window that Chevy Chase and National Lampoons’s Christmas Vacation (the subject of my December, 2023 Drink & a Movie post) director Jeremiah S. Chechik were presumably familiar with:

Gerry’s off to Palm Beach to secure a divorce courtesy the wealthy members of the Ale and Quail club, who, given enough “subtle” hints, would never leave a lady stranded. One of them is even chivalrous enough to loan her the pajamas that inspired this month’s drink photo:

Here they are serenading her with “Sweet Adelaide” later that evening:

Then engaging in some harmless indoor trap shooting:

And finally, their sexual hopes frustrated, turning into what Klawans calls “a parody of a lynch mob”:

This sequence, which Alessandro Pirolini aptly describes in The Cinema of Preston Sturges: A Critical Study as being “as narratively useless as it is visually exhilarating,” ends with the conductor of the train cutting the Club’s private car (and all of Gerry’s clothes) loose:

Luckily, by this time Gerry has already met cute Hackensacker, a thinly-veiled caricature of John D. Rockefeller III, by crushing his pince-nez glasses while attempting to climb into the sleeping car bunk above his:

“Just pick off any little pieces you see, will you?” he says, ever the good sport. It’s at breakfast the following morning when we meet his notebook. Having turned her borrowed pajamas and a Pullman blanket into an almost presentable ensemble, she finds him in the dining car pouring over the menu.

“The thirty-five cent breakfast seems the best at first glance, but if you analyze it for solid value, the fifty-five center is the one.” They eventually settle on one seventy-five cent breakfast each with a la cart prairie oysters to start–“make mine on the half-shell,” he instructs the waiter.

While they wait for their food, he proposes that they get off the train in Jacksonville to buy her “the few little things” she needs, then proceed the rest of the way to Palm Beach (where he is going as well) by boat. Hackensacker dutifully records each purchase in his book:

Including a piece of jewelry that the screenplay describes as “a ruby bracelet and then some”:

The dissonance between Hackensacker’s profligacy and scrupulousness understandably makes Gerry nervous. “I keep feeling that two men with butterfly nets are going to creep up behind you and lead you away,” she worries. The revelation that he’s actually the richest man in the world is followed by a punchline which hits close to home for someone like me who can’t ever quite manage to stick to a budget: “I write things down, but I never add them up.”

Meanwhile, following his own encounter with the old man who Manny Farber described (in a New Republic essay included in Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber) as possessing “the quality of a disembodied spirit, believably a pixie–or ‘The Wienie King,'” Tom is en route to Palm Beach himself via plane to intercept Gerry. The “enchanted figures who continually grant Tom and Gerry’s spoken and unspoken wishes” are just one of the ways that, per Sternlieb, “The Palm Beach Story intricately engages with the mechanics and actively opposes the logic of Shakespearean comedy, particularly its obsession with transformation and metamorphosis.” Gerry and Hackensacker meet Hackensacker’s sister, Mary Astor’s Princess Centimillia (an underrated Sturges name!) aka Maud and her hanger-on Toto (Sig Arno), and Tom is waiting on shore as all of them disembark. Gerry introduces Tom as her brother, prompting more than one person to comment on their supposed familial resemblance. To again quote Sternlieb:

In order to love Shakespeare’s comedies, we must continually suspend our disbelief so that we can fully appreciate boys dressed as girls dressed as boys or love at first sight or soliloquies that can’t be overheard on stage, but Sturges asks the opposite of us. He asks us to notice that people are always willing to believe anything, always eager to create their own reality, always ready to form opinions of us based on nothing at all. He asks us to notice that most of us are living in Cloud Cuckoo Land, and in Cloud Cuckoo Land people will always see what isn’t there. When Gerry introduces the Hackensackers to her ‘brother’, first Maud then Snoodles exclaims, ‘You look exactly alike’. We are constantly performing or being asked to perform to meet others’ uninformed expectations, but what a relief when we can finally be ourselves.

From here it’s not long before we’re basically right back where we started. The Princess wants to make Tom her eighth husband (“I’m thinking of an American–at the moment, it seems more patriotic”), but he has eyes only for Gerry, who Hackensacker attempts to seduce by singing to her outside her window:

Unfortunately for him, it just drives Gerry back into Tom’s arms:

They come clean about their true relationship the next morning. “I don’t suppose you have a twin sister. . . . ” Hackensacker says mournfully to Gerry, but of course she does! And Tom has a twin brother. Cut to all of them (and Toto, in a nice touch) at the alter:

The shot which follows is deceptively advanced for its era, as discussed by VFX artists The Corridor Crew starting at the 10:26 mark of this video–there’s a fairly straightforward duplicated shot (you can see the seem easily here because part of Rudy Vallee’s shadow is missing), but the camera is moving in a way that would have been difficult to coordinate with 1940s technology. Anyway, neither Gerry’s sibling nor Tom’s looks particularly happy to be here:

And as the camera tracks back, The Palm Beach Story ends with the same two title cards that set its plot in motion:

‘Round and ’round and ’round we go! Sturges originally wanted to call the film Is Marriage Necessary? That title didn’t survive the Hayes Office, but the sentiment did surely did. His cynicism, like the bitterness in a Campari & IPA Spritzer, goes down easy, though. So hit play again, why don’t you, and pour yourself another! It’s good for what ails you.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka my loving wife. Links to all of the entries in this series can be found here.

My loving wife is a proud graduate of Duke University, so the Tobacco Road recipe by Joe Bolam of Char Steak and Lounge in nearby Rochester, New York in the booklet which came with my new bottle of Fee Brothers Turkish Tobacco Bitters immediately caught my eye. When it turned out to taste like something these guys would love:

I knew I had my drink and a movie pairing for March! They are all panelists on the television program The Sports Writers on TV, and the person they are talking about is William Gates, who along with Arthur Agee is one of the two main subjects of the documentary Hoop Dreams. The sport they both play is basketball, which our household becomes fairly obsessed with each year at this time as the Atlantic Coast Conference (I’m a Pitt grad) regular season wraps up and we head into the postseason. Here’s how to make this month’s cocktail:

1 1/2 ozs. Basil Hayden Red Wine Cask Finish
1/2 oz. Cherry Heering
1/2 oz. Averna
1/2 oz. Carpano Antica
2 dashes Fee Brothers Black Walnut Bitters
2 dashes Fee Brothers Turkish Tobacco Bitters

Stir all of the ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled glass.

The Tobacco Road is a rich drink thanks to the Carpano Antica and Heering, so we left it ungarnished, but as a Black Manhattan variation, a Maraschino cherry would not be out of place. It has a lot of fruit on the nose, chocolate and coffee on the sip, and an almost sherry-like finish which suggests that it would go great with a cigar like the one Bill Gleason is smoking above in the image on the right.

On to Hoop Dreams! Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD release:

It can also be streamed on a wide range of platforms, including both The Criterion Channel and Max with a subscription, and some people may have access to it via Kanopy through a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Hoop Dreams is a longitudinal documentary which follows Agee and Gates over a five-year period which begins with them being discovered on the streetball courts of inner city Chicago and recruited by St. Joseph, an elite prep school in the suburbs, and ends shortly after the conclusion of their respective high school basketball careers. At the start of the film, Gates is ascendant: the excerpts from The Sports Writers on TV that I began this post with are from the “Freshman Year” section of Hoop Dreams and in them Bill Gleason compares him to Hall of Fame point guard Isiah Thomas. Agee, on the other hand, is kicked out of St. Joseph his sophomore year after his family falls behind on their tuition payments. Gates suffers two major knee injuries during his junior year, though, and is therefore never able to lead St. Joseph to the promised land of the Illinois state championship tournament while Agee blossoms as an upperclassman and leads Marshall Metro High School on a Cinderella run to the semi-finals of the same event. The movie concludes with end titles indicating that both players are now seniors in college playing for Marquette and Arkansas State respectively, but noting that Gates has grown disillusioned with basketball.

Agee and Gates represent the millions of youth athletes in the United States fighting for a shot to become one of the roughly 500 professionals who appear in an NBA game each season. Competition is part of the film’s DNA, so it’s understandable that for many critics it’s of paramount importance to determine who its “winner” is. To bell hooks, writing in Sight & Sound in 1995, “the triumphant individual in the film is (the young) Arthur Agee, who remains obsessed with the game” while Gates “is portrayed as a victim” despite the fact that (or because) he “learns to critique the ethic of competition that he has been socialised to accept passively within white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” Kimberly Chabot Davis argues against this interpretation in a South Atlantic Review article called “White Filmmakers and Minority Subjects: Cinema Vérité and the Politics of Irony in Hoop Dreams and Paris Is Burning“:

Hooks sees William Gates as the loser of the film because he eventually decides to reject the basketball dream, and she is upset that “his longing to be a good parent, to not be obsessed with basketball, is not represented [by the filmmakers] as a positive shift in his thinking,” whereas Arthur Agee, who never questions the dream, is represented as ‘the triumphant individual.’ In direct opposition to hooks’s reading, I came out of the film thinking that the filmmakers indirectly criticize Arthur Agee’s blind pursuit of the NBA dream and attempt to portray William Gates as the real winner because he learns that education and family responsibility are “truer” measures of success.

Comments made by filmmakers Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert in the short documentary Life After Hoop Dreams included on the Criterion Collection DVD as an extra suggest that the latter may track more closely to their actual feelings, but the genius of the film is that it supports both readings. As John Edgar Wiseman notes in his essay “Serious Game,” its final cut “seems not based on assumptions the filmmakers formed before they encountered the actual lives of their subjects but a story that evolved naturally as footage accumulated.” While Hoop Dreams doesn’t insist on a moral, it definitely does have a point of view. Take, for instance, the transition between its first two sections. “Freshman Year” ends after St. Joseph’s varsity team is eliminated from the playoffs with voiceover narration by James that says, “despite the loss, William’s gutty performance bodes well for next year.”

“Sophomore Year” then begins with him in class:

James notes that he and Agee are both on partial scholarships which aren’t big enough to cover a recent tuition increase. Cut to Patricia Wier, President of Encyclopedia Britannica explaining how in response to a solicitation by St. Joseph she and her husband decided to sponsor a student, who turned out to be Gates. There’s a shot of Wier and husband in the stands watching a game:

Followed by one of them introducing Gates to their friends:

James’s narration explains that “with continuing support from Patricia Wier, William is assured that his entire education at St. Joe’s will be free.” This is immediately succeeded by a series of interviews with Agee, his mother, and St. Joseph basketball coach Gene Pingatore describing the chain of events that led to Agee being dismissed from the school. “I thought Pingatore and them would help me out, but. . . . ” Agee says, shaking his head:

Pingatore, Agee, and Agee’s mother then all speak in turn: Pingatore defends the school’s decision on the grounds that St. Joseph is dependent on tuition dollars to function, Agee speculates that Pingatore was concerned about his height, and Agee’s mother states that she never would have enrolled her son at St. Joseph in the first place if she had known he might experience the anguish of being forced to change schools in the middle of the year. The scene ends with a four-shot montage sequence: it begins with empty desks and a row of padlocks:

Followed by a statue of Saint Joseph himself:

And then a shot of a sort of shrine to Isiah Thomas, who attended St. Joseph, in the school’s lobby which is shown multiple times throughout the movie:

Whatever the filmmakers think of Agee’s and Gate’s choices and values, they clearly don’t believe that St. Joseph has treated the two boys equally and have a theory why not. Another thing I like about Hoop Dreams is the way it utilizes repetition effectively. Robert Greene discusses one great example in his essay “The Real Thing.” A one-on-one game between Agee and his father which takes place at the beginning of the film:

Is echoed by second near the end which, because of everything that has happened in between, “has the cadence and expressive power of an epic showdown.”

Another is the way the filmmakers leverage a recurring establishing shot of the Agee’s apartment at night with its lights on to efficiently communicate that their power has been turned off:

Speaking of efficient, James’s narration does a marvelous job of concisely telling the story of important basketball games, such as this one in which Agee and his teammates force a taller but slower opponent out of its comfort zone by holding the ball late into the shot clock:

And I love the way the film lets us into spaces we may never otherwise get to see such as a D1 recruiting visit:

And a nurse’s assistant graduation:

I was surprised to find that what I appreciated most after recently spending time with Criterion Collection edition of this film, though, were the commentary tracks. The one featuring Agee and Gates comes closer to being “essential” than any other I’ve ever listened to: anyone willing to spend nearly three hours of your life watching Hoop Dreams absolutely will want to hear what its subjects have to say! The commentary track with James, Marx, and Gilbert is full of insights as well and the two sometimes work in tandem to show parts of the movie in a new light. To go back to St. Joseph’s treatment of Agee, both groups believe that school didn’t just treat him unfairly, but in fact acted contrary to its own best interests. The former players observe that it was a bad basketball decision:

ARTHUR: But they was just, like, “I guess we got room for one guy. And this one guy is gonna take us down state, like, we’re gonna put everything in him. We don’t need another guy that HE needs.” And they didn’t know that William needed me to take that pressure off of him.

WILLIAM: I mean, if there was somebody that understood me at St. Joe’s, it was Arthur. Because at that particular point I really felt like the only person who could have understood me out there was him. And I felt like not only did I lose a best friend at the time, I felt like a part of me was gone.

While the filmmakers express bewilderment that St. Joseph could be so un-PR-conscious to kick Arthur out of school knowing that he was the subject of a movie. At other times, illumination comes from the distance between the commenters’ different experiences of the same event such as when James and company lament not being told earlier that Gates had a daughter with his girlfriend, while he says this can’t possibly be true because the St. Joseph school newspaper ran a story about it. They also both note that Pingatore changed after the film but have different explanations for why: Agee and Gates think it’s because he learned from watching himself on screen and began yelling less and giving his players more freedom, whereas the filmmakers ascribe his more relaxed demeanor to finally winning a state championship in 1999, not anything to do with Hoop Dreams.

Mostly, though, it’s amazing to just listen to Agee and Gates relive pivotal moments in their lives like the two free throws that Gates misses at the end of his junior year which lead directly to a St. Joseph loss in the playoffs.

He explains that he heard his cartilage tear earlier and therefore didn’t want the ball at the end of the game. As Gates watches himself go to the line, he observes that he shot 100% from the line in the games leading up to this one and that “all of these games are high-pressure games. None of them are more high-pressure than the others.” To him, the reason he missed those two shots was simple: he couldn’t bend his knees and never should have let himself be inserted back into the game. “People think I’m disappointed because I missed the free throws,” had adds. “No, I’m disappointed because I wasn’t honest with myself or my teammates. I let my team down that year.”

If you do watch the film, both commentary tracks, and Life After Hoop Dreams, you will have spent more than 12 hours with Agee and Gates by the time you finish. The cumulative effect is that of revisiting your own sports memories, the way we Horbals like to break out our video recording of my little brother’s 4×800 relay team winning a Pennsylvania state track title in 2005. And that, I think, is the real achievement of the Criterion Collection’s presentation of Hoop Dreams: it makes these two young men and everyone in their lives seem like family.

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.

One of the most fun parts of my “Drink & a Movie” series has been the twin experiences of, 1) seeing a movie for the first time and thinking of a cocktail that would pair great with it, and 2) trying a new drink and connecting it with a film. Pyaasa was an example of the former: as I tweeted shortly after I watched it, I knew right away that it was destined to accompany a Last Word. The Light and Day, which I discovered in the Death & Co. Modern Classic Cocktails book, is an example of the latter. Here’s how you make it:

2 ozs. Plymouth gin
1/2 oz. Yellow Chartreuse
1/4 oz. Maraschino Liqueur (Luxardo)
1/4 oz. Orange juice
4 dashes Peychaud’s bitters

Stir all of the ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled coupe glass.

Creator Alex Day described it in Vice as “somewhat of a martini but also sort of a sour drink” inspired by an Aviation. Per Day “it follows no convention of a cocktail,” but is absolutely delicious nonetheless. One of its distinctive features is that many of its ingredients are relatively gentle: Plymouth is one of the less assertive representatives of the London Dry style of gin, Yellow Chartreuse is Green’s more approachable sibling, and orange juice is far more easygoing than lemon or lime. This matches its pastel hue, but don’t be fooled: with two-and-a-half ounces of booze in it, the Light and Day packs a punch! It’s a sweet drink to be sure, but the maraschino and Chartreuse contribute a ton of complexity and harmonize beautifully to create something bright and sunny which is just the ticket in the middle of winter, especially since that’s when oranges are at their best.

When I saw and tasted this soft but serious concoction, The Young Girls of Rochefort immediately popped into my head. Here’s a picture of my Miramax DVD release:

It can also be streamed on The Criterion Channel and Max with a subscription or on Apple TV+ or Prime Video for a rental fee.

To begin, as you would with a cocktail, with the film’s appearance, critic Stephanie Zacharek noted in 1998 that director Jacques Demy “understood color as sheer entertainment.” The best exemplar of this for both of us is the attire of Gene Kelly’s Andy Miller. For her he is “one of the few performers of our era who could not only carry off a lilac sport coat, but also turn it into a symbol of enlightened masculinity.”

While I would argue that the pink polo shirt he wears under it looks even more glorious on its own:

Of course, the most important parts of his wardrobe are (to again quote Zacharek) the “confident grace and ease” on display in the dance scenes which (per Darren Waldron in his monograph on Demy) he choreographed himself:

And most especially in the radiant smile he wears when he first lays eyes on his soul mate Solange Garnier (Françoise Dorléac):

Speaking of whom, the complementary outfits she and real-life sister Catherine Deneuve’s Delphine Garnier don in their scenes together are also wonderful:

As are the brilliant blue and orange (go Knicks and Mets!) button-up shirt and tie ensembles worn by George Chakiris’s Etienne and Grover Dale’s Bill which inspired this month’s drink photo:

Their dancing is terrific, too, by the way, especially their speed skater-like footwork in the musical number “Nous voyageons de ville en ville”:

Unfortunately, to many critics, the professional moves of Kelly, Chakiris, and Grove only serve to underscore a perceived “amateurish” lack of perfect timing elsewhere. For me this is mostly an unimportant byproduct of on-location shooting and Demy’s ambitious camerawork. Consider, for instance, the 84-second-long crane shot near the beginning of the film that starts with pole dancing on Rochefort’s Place Colbert:

Follows Bill and Etienne and company past the café where many subsequent scenes will take place:

And then ascends up to and through a second story window where Solange and Delphine are teaching a dance class:

Perhaps even more impressive is the 56-second-long tracking shot which follows Delphine as she walks from her half-brother Boubou’s (Patrick Jeantet) school to her soon to be ex-boyfriend Guillaume Lancien’s (Jacques Riberolles) art gallery, which critic Jonathan Rosenbaum celebrated for the sense of “exuberance combined with a sublime sense of absurdity” created by her slipping in and out of the choreography of the pedestrians dancing all around her. It begins in long shot:

Includes a medium shot of her being lifted by a sailor as she crosses the street:

And then resumes following her in long shot the rest of the way to her destination:

By my count 44 dancers, two moving cars, and three bike riders appear on screen, which is quite a feat of coordination even if everyone’s movements aren’t totally synchronized. Scholar Carlos Valladares (who is now a PhD student at Yale) goes a step further in a 2016 paper published in the Stanford Undergraduate Research Journal called “Dance and the Postmodern Sublime in Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967).” He analyzes the “simple” (distinguishing it from the two sequences I cite above) dance on a transporter bridge which accompanies the opening credits, among other scenes, and contends that the movie’s “deliberately ‘sloppy’ steps are a realistic look at (and criticism of) traditional movie musicals” which challenges “the perception of the musical as an elitist art that only a few select masters (Minnelli, Donen, Kelly) have mastered.”

Whatever reading you prefer, this strikes me as a perfect example of the same kind of polite disregard for the rules that led to the creation of the Light and Day.

Tasting notes usually conclude with a discussion of the drink’s finish, and that’s where The Young Girls of Rochefort really shines. Rosenbaum’s most perceptive comments about the movie are related to what he calls “perhaps the most beautiful dovetailing of failed and achieved connections apart from Shakespeare and Jacques Tati’s Playtime.” Pointing as well to the lyrics of the song “La femme coupée en morceaux,” which is about an axe murder, and the threat of war omnipresent in newspaper headlines and Rochefort’s status as a garrison town:

He argues that even though the film “is on all counts Demy’s most optimistic film–the one in which every character eventually finds the person she or he is looking for–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.” Michel Legrand’s addictive (my family is glad that I finally finished this post because I’ve been listening to it on repeat for weeks!) score, which might be my favorite movie music ever, deserves a huge amount of credit for this. The tragic death of Françoise Dorléac mere months after The Young Girls of Rochefort‘s premiere also casts a shadow over it for those who know that she and Deneuve would never again appear on screen together. But for me a lot of the welcome bitter counterpoint to its more apparent saccharine elements comes from the characters themselves. As Waldron observes:

We hear evidence of the selfishness that frames the construction of each character, preoccupied with their own narcissistic pursuit of happiness and lacking responsibility and compassion for others. Yvonne allows strangers Bill and Etienne to pickup Boubou up from school, and Solange dismisses Delphine when she claims she is sad after rupturing her relationship with Guillaume. Such egotism is extended in the Garnier women’s vanity; when flattered by Bill and Etienne, Yvonne and Delphine retort, separately, ‘on me l’a déjà dit’ (‘I’ve already been told that’).

And then, of course, there’s the whole matter of Yvonne (who is played by (Danielle Darrieux) leaving her fiancé Simon Dame (Michel Piccoli) because of his name! I recently mentioned to my friend Scott that one of my hopes for this series is that when I look back on it my choices will tell a story. My vague idea was that it might have something to do with seasonality, but he replied with the much more interesting suggestion that my theme is “the human experience of trying to become a better person,” with emphasis on the process employed by characters who are successful and the price for not doing “the right thing” paid by those who are not. The Young Girls of Rochefort may be the exception that proves the rule. Yvonne and Simon end up together in the end, but it is this the result of growth or just regret?

After all, sometimes the difference between leaving town in the company of carnies by yourself after your twin sister inexplicably no-shows without explanation:

And having your masculine ideal (aka Jacques Perrin’s Maxence) as your travelling companion is simply a matter of bad or good timing:

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.

Most days I’m lucky if 5-10 people visit this blog, but not on February 2 when every year hundreds of people Google “sweet vermouth on the rocks with a twist” and find their way to this 2019 post with the same name. Welcome, folks! Despite the fact that Groundhog Day is one of my all-time favorite movies, I wasn’t necessarily ever planning to include it in my Drink & a Movie series since I’ve already written so much about it and because I featured it in a shot-lived Twitter series called “Pairings” in 2018. Here’s the thing, though: while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with drinking good sweet vermouth on its own with a bit of ice, that’s probably the last time I did so myself! I’ve also been hoarding an observation for years thinking it would make good fodder for a video essay, but I haven’t made one of those since 2008 when Kevin B. Lee kindly did all the hard work. So in honor of the day and without further ado:

Bill Murray’s Phil Connors, Groundhog Day‘s protagonist, unconvincingly claims that sweet vermouth makes him “think of Rome, the way the sun hits the buildings in the afternoon.” This reminds me of the explanation James Bond (who you might also know from the movies) gives for ordering an Americano in Ian Fleming’s short story “From a View to Kill,” which is part of the 2008 anthology Quantum of Solace:

One cannot drink seriously in French cafés. Out of doors on a pavement in the sun is no place for vodka or whiskey or gin. A fine à l’eau is fairly serious, but it intoxicates without tasting very good. A quart de champagne or a champagne à l’orange is all right before luncheon, but in the evening one quart leads to another quart and a bottle of indifferent champagne is a bad foundation for the night. Pernod is possible, but it should be drunk in company, and anyway Bond had never liked the stuff because its liquorice taste reminded him of his childhood. No, in cafés you have to drink the least offensive of the musical comedy drinks that go with them, and Bond always had the same thing–an Americano–Bitter Campari, Cinzano, a large slice of lemon peel and soda.

Although this isn’t actually the strongest endorsement, I far prefer an Americano to plain vermouth. Here’s how you make this “fine speci-mine” of a drink:

1 1/2 ozs. Campari
1 1/2 ozs. Sweet vermouth (Method Spirits)
3 ozs. Club soda

Stir the Campari and sweet vermouth with ice in a chilled glass. Add the club soda and a garnish with an oversized lemon twist.

Carpano Antica, the vermouth I tweeted about in 2018, is still my favorite, but it’s way expensive these days compared to other quality options like Method, which is made a mere 30 miles away from where I live. The Campari adds bitterness and the soda effervescence and resulting cocktail is far more interesting than any of its three ingredients is on their own–no disrespect, Rita. On to the movie! Here’s a picture of the Columbia Pictures DVD release which I think I’ve owned since college:

You can also rent the film from Apple TV+ or Prime Video. Groundhog Day is the rare movie that has entered the vernacular: even if you haven’t seen it, you probably know that Phil Connors finds himself living the same day, the titular holiday celebrated on February 2, again and again. We see pieces of about 40 repetitions onscreen, but there are references to many more (e.g. “I’ve killed myself so many times, I don’t even exist anymore”) and in his BFI Modern Classics monograph on the film, Ryan Gilbey claims that director Harold Ramis maintains that the original script specified that this goes on for 10,000 years. The scene I want to write about takes place on the last such day. It begins with Connors, a TV weatherman, giving far and away the best version of a report on Punxsutawney Phil we’ve already seen him deliver a number of times, complete with a Chekhov reference:

A reaction shot shows that his producer Rita (Andie MacDowell) is delighted with his work:

“That was . . . surprising!” she says to him afterward. “I didn’t know you were so versatile.” To which he replies, “I surprise myself sometimes.”

She invites him out for a cup of coffee, but he declines on the grounds that he has errands to run. “Errands? What errands? I thought we were going back,” she says. Which: of course she does! After all, this is their first interaction since cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott) dropped her off at her hotel the previous day after a car ride Phil spent peevishly complaining about their assignment. But by now he’s off. Although Rita doesn’t see where to, we do. First he catches a child who he knows is about to fall out of a tree:

Then he shows up with a tire and a jack to help these ladies with a flat tire:

He appears in the nick of time to administer the Heimlich maneuver to Punxsutawney’s Mayor Buster Green (Brian Doyle-Murray):

And stops on the way out to light a cigarette for a woman at the neighboring table:

Cut to the Pennsylvanian Hotel that evening where Larry’s attempts to hit on Nancy (Marita Geraghty), who Phil spent a portion of eternity seducing, elicit a priceless look from the bartender played by John Watson Sr., who contrary to Jude Davies’s belief is not the only non-white character in the entire film:

On their way to the party next door they run into Rita, who suggests that they call Phil. “Phil Connors?” I think he’s already in there,” Nancy replies, leaving Rita puzzled:

Inside she is astonished to find Phil playing the piano, and when he sees her he launches into a jazz riff on Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Variation No. 18:

After he finishes, the woman standing next to Rita identifies herself as Phil’s teacher:

Her pride in him used to feel like a borderline plot hole to me (remember: from her perspective they met each other for the first time earlier that day) until I realized she must be looking ahead to instructing him in the future, not backwards to anything she’s already shown him. Anyway, Phil and Rita begin to slow dance:

But keep getting interrupted by people wanting to thank Phil for things he did for them that day, including an incredibly young (he was seventeen during filming) Michael Shannon in his first film role as Fred Kleiser:

“There is something going on with you,” Rita says.

“Would you like the long version or the short version?” Phil asks. “Let’s start with the short and go from there,” Rita replies. The shots I want to write about are the ones that come next. Everyone applauds as the song that’s playing ends and there’s a cut to a long shot in which we can see Phil telling Rita something, although we can’t hear him:

There’s another cut to a long shot of Buster telling everyone that a bachelor auction is about to begin:

But then we’re back to Phil and Rita, still talking.

At one point you can see her nod, but once more we aren’t privy to what they’re saying. Amusingly, the next shot after this is one of Buster holding his hands in front of his ears and saying, “I don’t want to know about it!”

Robin Duke’s Doris, who we met earlier at the town’s diner, then interrupts Phil (who appear to still be talking) and drags him to the front of the room:

These shots account for just 30 seconds of screentime, but I consider them to be some of the film’s most important. I don’t think it’s strange that Rita would spend the entire $339.88 in her pocketbook to abruptly end the bidding war for Phil that subsequently erupts between Doris and (to Larry’s chagrin) Nancy:

It’s for charity, after all, and she’s obviously very curious about how Phil came to be so popular. But although she doesn’t remember, this isn’t the first time they have spent part or all of this day together and on every previous occasion she recoiled when he expressed too much interest in her. Consider, for instance, the first time he made the mistake of saying “I love you” to her. “You don’t even know me,” she replied:

And then, presumably in a rush of recognition that it’s awfully coincidental that they like ALL of the same things, “oh no, I can’t believe I fell for this, this whole day has been one long setup.” To be sure, that’s a much different situation than suddenly being confronted with evidence that the coworker you thought was a jerk is actually the hero of an entire small town, but it’s still pretty crazy when that person presents you with this:

And says, “I know your face so well, I could have done it with my eyes closed.” Followed by: “no matter what happens tomorrow or for the rest of my life, I’m happy now because I love you.” But what does Rita say in reply? “I think I’m happy too.” And then they kiss:

By this point in the film, Phil has long since stopped trying to escape February 2. He is, instead, constructing a day that he would be content to inhabit for the rest of time. There is absolutely no reason to believe he hasn’t already lived minor variants on this chain of events over and over and over. In fact, I contend that the long shots above provide concrete evidence that he has. Rita asks him for the short version of his story. Just as he apparently spent six months spending four to five hours a day perfecting the art of throwing playing cards into a hat:

What we see here is the culmination of Phil’s efforts to perfect the art of explaining to Rita what has happened to him in only a few seconds!

Groundhog Day is not about a bad guy who learns to be a saint. One of the best things about it is that Phil retains (or, more accurately, loses but recovers) his wry sense of humor. He calls the boy he saves from the tree a “little brat” and shouts “I’ll see you tomorrow–maybe” after him as he runs away because he never says thank you, and the movie’s final line isn’t “let’s live here,” but rather, a beat later, “we’ll rent to start.” Much earlier on, Phil sits at a bar with two local drunks and asks, “what would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?”

“That about sums it up for me,” Rick Overton’s Ralph replies as Rick Ducommun’s Gus takes a shot. Groundhog Day is the story of a man who discovers through the hard work of introspection how he really wants to live his life and does it without expecting any other kind of reward. We may not be stuck in a time loop, but there’s nothing stopping Ralph or us from doing the same. So: to the groundhog! Or world peace, if you must.

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 tend to have a lot of egg whites on hand during the months of December and January as a result of nog making and my absolute favorite way to use them up is in Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s amaretto sour, which Imbibe notes has effectively become the standard way of making it. And for good reason! He boasts that it’s “the best Amaretto Sour you’ve ever had in your life,” and although I can’t claim to have verified this claim through extensive testing, that’s mostly because I haven’t felt the need to try another recipe since discovering this one. Here’s how you make it:

1 1/2 ozs. Amaretto (Disaronno)
3/4 oz. Cask-proof bourbon (1792)
1 oz. Lemon juice
1 tsp. 2:1 Simple syrup
1/2 oz. Egg white, lightly beaten

Dry shake all ingredients, then add ice and shake again. Strain into a chilled rocks glass with one big ice cube, making sure to get as much froth out of the shaker as you can, and garish with a cherry and a lemon twist.

My go-to bourbon for this drink is Maker’s Mark Cask Strength, but they make the spirit I featured in last month’s aged eggnog and I wanted to mix things up a bit. I’m glad I did: 1792 is just about as good of a value and contributes an even higher ABV, which is essential for cutting the sweetness of the amaretto and creating the “warm glowing warming glow” I’m looking for in the dead of winter. It results in a richer texture as well, and you definitely want to use 2:1 simple syrup for the same reason. Disaronno is delicious and easy to find and also has a great origin story: according to the company’s website, the woman the artist Bernardino Luini (a pupil of Leonardo di Vinci) chose as a model for the Madonna in one of his frescoes created it as a thank you gift. And so it was that this month’s pairing suggested itself, because when I think about painting and the winter holidays, one movie immediately springs to mind: Scarlet Street, which ends with perhaps the most cynical use of Christmas music in the history of cinema. Here’s a picture of my Kino Video DVD release:

It can also be streamed on Prime Video with a subscription or on Apple TV+ for a rental fee, and some people may have access to it via Kanopy through a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Scarlet Street begins with a flurry of symbolism. An expensive-looking car pulls up to a building. As an organ grinder entertains its glamorous passenger:

The chauffeur ascends a set of stairs, walks past a woman knitting, and knocks on a door marked “private”:

Inside the men of J.J. Hogarth & Company celebrate Christopher Cross’s (Edward G. Robinson) 25 years with the firm as (hat tip: Joseph Gibson) cigar smoke rises unmotivated from the bottom of the frame:

The boss (Russell Hicks) quiets them and stands to make a speech:

Well boys, I hate to break up a good party, but you can’t keep a woman waiting, can you? You know how it is, boys. I can see you all understand, alright! Well, believe you me boys, I’ve had the time of my life tonight. And speaking of time, I have here a 14-karat, 17-jewel timepiece. And that’s only right because the man I’m giving it to is a 14-karat, 17-jewel cashier.

Cross reads the engraving and stammers out a brief speech of gratitude. Everyone belts the refrain of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” then J.J. treats Chris and his co-worker Charlie (Samuel S. Hinds) to fancy (“it’s made special for me, a dollar apiece”) cigar before excusing himself. As the others rush to the window to ogle the “dame” he can’t keep waiting:

Chris and Charlie quietly make their own exit. Charlie doesn’t have an umbrella, so Chris sees him to his bus. As they stand waiting for it, Chris tells Charlie that he wonders what it’s like to be loved by a young girl like the one their boss is seeing and that he dreamt of being an artist and still paints every Sunday. “Well, that’s one way to kill time,” Charlie replies. Chris invites Charlie to come see him the next day when the bus arrives, then goes looking for the East Side subway. Lost among the “mixed up” streets of Greenwich Village, he witnesses what he believes to be a mugging:

Emboldened by drink, Chris charges forward to defend the damsel in distress, then braces for an answering blow that never comes:

The woman (Joan Bennett) he has “saved,” who is wrapped in a cellophane raincoat, first tests her jaw:

Then checks on her assailant. Chris runs off to find a policeman. When they return, the man is gone. The woman, whose name we will soon learn is Kitty March, tells the cop he went thataway, then says to Chris, “let’s get out of here.” He consents to take her home, and with that his fate is sealed. We are barely ten minutes into a film with a runtime of 102.

A major topic of debate among film scholars and critics is whether or not Chris is too pathetic to be someone audiences can identify with. And to be sure, if you’re going to put an apron like this on, it really should be to make a statement, not just to prevent your clothes from getting dirty!

But I agree with Kino’s DVD commentator David Kalat that Edward G. Robinson’s performance is “extraordinarily warm and humane” and recognize a great many things in the character he brings to life, especially his struggle to find a sustainable balance between the hobby that brings him happiness and the career that pays his bills. In a book-length interview with Peter Bogdanovich, director Fritz Lang claims that “Robinson’s fate in the picture is the fate of an artist who cares much more for his paintings than for gaining money.” He then specifically references the scene in which Chris discovers that Kitty has been signing her name to his paintings so that she can sell them and instead of getting mad at her, acquiesces to the scheme: “it’s just like we were married, only I take your name,” he says.

In a chapter for Joe McElhaney’s A Companion to Fritz Lang, Vinzenz Hediger argues that for Chris, “the realization of his dream to be recognized as an artist, even though it only happens through the intermediary of the woman he loves, in combination with that woman’s attention, appears to be the only moment of genuine happiness he has experienced in life.” This is consonant with Jeanne Hall’s observation in a Film Criticism article called “‘A Little Trouble With Perspective’: Art and Authorship in Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street“ that far from painting being his escape from a loveless marriage like many scholars claim, Chris’s hobby was what brought him to his wife Adele (Rosalind Ivan) in the first place when he rented a room from her in order to save money for paint. Chris describes what happened next to Charlie thusly: “oh she was sweet–butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. And, uh, well, you know how these things go.” To translate this into (somewhat) contemporary terms, yada yada yada, now he has to paint in the bathroom:

In Kitty he thinks he has found not just a young girl who loves him, but a young girl who loves him and his work. Per Hediger, “[t]he recognition may be false but it can be lived vicariously so long as it is grounded in true devotion,” and for the length of time Chris believes it to be true, he blossoms. Dan Duryea’s Johnny Prince (more on him in a second) notes that Damon Janeway (Jess Barker), the art critic who has “discovered” Kitty, thinks that the work he produces during this time are the “best things [he’s] done,” and I agree with scholar Tom Gunning when he argues in The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity that “Chris’s identification with the image of a woman could also be seen as an essential step in his development as an artist, keeping him alive to his polymorphic childlike perversity, but gaining authority rather than regressing through it.” After all, as Gunning goes on to point out, “Chris’s lack of interest in signing his own name to his works and his feminine alter-ego, both recall the fundamental avant-gardist gestures of Marcel Duchamp: signing several works with the name of his feminine alter-ego (whom he had himself photographed as, in drag) Rose Selavy (glossed as Eros, c’est la vie).”

Chris loves to paint, but he’s also lonely. His marriage to Adele is a bitter disappointment because it not only failed to solve the latter problem, but jeopardizes his freedom to engage in the former activity when she threatens to give all his paintings and supplies to the junkman in retaliation for him not buying her a radio. Kitty gives him sustenance until, abruptly, she doesn’t. Although Mark Osteen is technically correct when in his Journal of Film and Video article “Framed: Forging Identities in Film Noir” he pinpoints Chris’s disavowal of his identity as an artist as the moment “Chris’s painter self dies along with the lover and the cashier,” but that self likely would have starved to death anyway even if Chris had responded to Kitty laughing in his face and saying “you’re old and ugly and I’m sick of you” by calmly placing the fateful ice pick back on the table he knocked it off of and walking away instead of, well, you know:

One of my favorite things about Scarlet Street is its treatment of Chris’s paintings, which were modeled after the work of Henri Rousseau and created by a friend of Fritz Lang named John Decker (who I assume was also responsible for the illustrations by “Tony Rivera” which adorn the walls of the apartment Chris rents for Kitty). Hall is right that the movie is unusual in the way it “encourages viewers to reflect on the socially-constructed and class-based nature of art and aesthetics by insistently raising questions about the quality of Chris’s work and persistently refusing to answer them.” Like Kitty, I personally think this one is pretty excellent:

And although “Self-Portrait” is a title he will later bestow upon a painting of Kitty, one of the film’s many dissolves suggests that maybe it would have been better applied here:

Meanwhile, the other painting which inspired this month’s photograph certainly is interesting:

Some of the other dissolves are absolutely brilliant, including these two involving of Johnny which Gunning discusses at length:

In the process of doing so, Gunning describes Johnny as being “[a]s nasty, slimy, sadistic, cowardly, lazy, ignorant and venial a character as one could find in a Hollywood film,” which is accurate. Dan Duryea is so effective in this role that I wonder if it was detrimental to his career–I recently saw Thunder Bay for the first time, and although his Johnny Gambi turns out to be a perfectly decent person, I kept waiting for him to do something horrible, which was incredibly distracting! The distinctively out-of-style hat he dons in Scarlet Street is practically a character in its own right, as evinced by these two different close-ups:

And as documented by Mike Grost, the rest of Johnny’s wardrobe is interesting, too. Other things to love or hate include the masterful use of practical effects to make studio lot exterior scenes look like they were shot on location:

And the dirty dishes in Kitty’s kitchen sink, aka my worst nightmare:

What makes this one of the most unforgettable movies ever made, though, is the way it ends. In a shocking plot twist, Johnny is sent to the electric chair for the murder committed by Chris.

Unable to shake the vision of Johnny and Kitty happily together in the afterlife, Chris tries to commit suicide, but is unsuccessful.

Years pass in an instant and now he is a derelict shuffling down the street to the tune of the Christmas carol “O Come All Ye Faithful,” which as Robert B. Pippin notes in Fatalism in American Film Noir “is a hymn to the baby Jesus”:

The soundtrack then shifts to “Melancholy Baby,” which is utilized throughout the film in a variety of versions for a wide range of purposes. One way to look at this is as simply a logical accompaniment to the painting which two men are carrying out of the gallery he’s passing by, which is of course his/Kitty March’s aforementioned “Self-Portrait.”

But Pippin has another interpretation:

The Christian notion of eschatological time suggests both that there is this radical revolutionary possibility in historical time, such that everything is different, full of new possibilities, after the Incarnation, and that an individual can be born again, decisively become almost literally a different person, free of the burden of the past, forgiven, after having been saved. Lang’s irony about this assumption is absolutely withering. The ‘baby’ of real relevance is not the baby Jesus, but, the music reveals, our melancholy baby. The aspiration for such revolutionary change is paired musically with the reality of the stuck-in-time, repetitive melancholy baby. And that means not only ‘melancholy’ because this tempting Christian way of thinking about time is naïve, but because melancholy is melancholy, not mourning in Freud’s famous sense. It is the impossibility of ‘moving on’ from a traumatic event, a compulsive need to suffer it all again and again, a refusal of the liberating work of mourning (a fate, in other words).

Wow! The soundtrack then shifts back to a Christmas carol, this time “Jingle Bells.” There is, again, an obvious explanation: the gallery owner Dellarowe (Arthur Loft) is saying to his customer (Constance Purdy), “well, there goes her masterpiece. I really hate to part with it.” To which she replies, “for ten thousand dollars, I shouldn’t think you’d mind!” So the jingling bells are those of the cash register.

But Pippin’s reading does this one better: “[t]he fate that Christianity naïvely believes can be mastered is not cosmic or divine fate but a socioeconomic, drastic restriction of possibilities, and it appears here as all powerful.” Whichever view you subscribe to, Scarlet Street‘s final images are independently shattering. Chris beholds the painting, but his expression barely changes. He puts his head down and resumes his slow walk:

Suddenly, all the people disappear:

It is, as Gunning describes it, “[a]s if a neutron bomb had exploded.” We hear Kitty’s voice whisper “jeepers I love you Johnny” one final time, and with that it’s all over.

Brrr. Typically I recommend mixing up the drinks in these posts before the movie I’m pairing them with starts, but it in this case you might want to save it for the end because you’re going to need something to warm you up afterward!

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.

About a decade ago I started watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation more often each December than any other holiday movie. I’ve been meaning to explore why this is ever since I started this blog in 2018, which is right around the same time I discovered food writer Michael Ruhlman’s aged eggnog recipe. And this, dear reader, is how a Drink & a Movie pairing is born! To begin with the former, this is the specific eggnog that I make every year as one of our family’s holiday traditions. I don’t remember where I first came across it, but considering that planning ahead and preserved foods are two of my favorite things in the world, I imagine it was love at first sight! It also allows plenty of room for variation, so it never become boring, and someday if I come into a pile of money at just the right time I’m totally going to try it with a single malt from Oban as suggested in the notes section of Ruhlman’s blog post. The toasted sugar Tennessee whiskey meringue (which is a fantastic way to utilize the egg whites that don’t go into the nog) is a twist on the brown sugar bourbon meringue published on the blog Proportional Plate a few years ago, with toasted sugar a la Stella Parks (cooked for three hours to a light ivory color) replacing the brown and a little “help from Jack Daniels.” Here’s how we made the batch pictured below:

12 egg yolks
2 cups granulated sugar
1 liter bourbon (Maker’s Mark)
4 cups whole milk
1 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup Cognac or brandy (Pierre Ferrand 1840)
1/2 cup dark rum (Goslings Black Seal)

Whisk egg yolks and sugar together in a large bowl until well-blended and creamy using a stand mixer or by hand, then add remaining ingredients and stir or whisk to combine. Transfer mixture to a one-gallon glass jar or multiple smaller jars and place in the refrigerator for 30 days. Serve in a moose-shaped glass topped with a dollop of toasted sugar Tennessee whiskey meringue and garnished with freshly-ground nutmeg.

Ruhlman correctly observes that this is a boozy concoction and it’s also quite rich, so you’ll want to go easy, but this is a feature not a bug as far as I’m concerned: if something takes up space in my fridge for a month, I want it to last awhile! Dark rum adds the molasses notes that I’m looking for in a winter beverage, but you could substitute Smith & Cross if you want to highlight the funkiness which I otherwise find surprisingly mild: the real benefit of aging is that it allows all the flavors to marry. You could also, of course, use Jack as your primary base spirit if you wanted to forgo the meringue but maintain the Christmas Vacation connection.

Speaking of which, here’s a picture of the Warner Home Video Special Edition DVD release which hangs out in a box in a basement with all of our other Christmas movies for most of the year:

It can also be streamed via Max with a subscription or Apple TV and Prime Video for a rental fee.

On June 21, 1987 the New York Times published an interview with Stanley Kubrick by Francis X. Clines which began with the legendary auteur praising a series of recent Michelob beer commercials: “they’re just boy-girl, night-fun, leading up to pouring the beer, all in 30 seconds, beautifully edited and photographed.” The person who directed them was one Jeremiah S. Chechik, and according to a 2016 Slash Film oral history by Blake Harris, his phone started ringing off the hook the next day. Less than two years later he was directing his first feature film. “Economy of statement is not something that films are noted for,” Kubrick went on to tell Clines, and Christmas Vacation is no exception, but as Dave Kehr noted in a contemporary review for the Chicago Tribune, it definitely does exhibit a “fine sense of timing.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in my favorite scene. Hapless patriarch Clark Griswold (Chevy Chase) has found himself trapped in a cold attic while his family goes shopping:

While searching for warm clothing, he finds a box of home movies:

The scene which follows is a smidge under two minutes long and begins with a 37-second lateral tracking shot which brings Clark into the right third of the frame with a film projector in the foreground:

Then swings around to show us what he’s watching from over his shoulder:

There’s a cut to head-on shot of Clark occupying the left two-thirds of the screen and the light from the projector filling the rest which lasts about three seconds:

Then a cut to a title card followed by approximately twelve seconds of home movie footage starring people identifiable as younger versions of characters from Christmas Vacation:

This sequence repeats itself with very similar timing, but this time the camera also tracks in on Clark slightly:

Cut to an exterior shot of the rest of the Griswolds arriving home:

Then back to twelve more seconds of home movie footage followed by another ten seconds spent tracking in to an even tighter close-up of Clark’s face:

Cut to a shot of Clark’s wife Ellen (Beverly D’Angelo) coming up the stairs with an armful of presents which ends with a close-up of her gloved handing grasping for the chain one pulls to open the attic:

Followed by one last close-up of Clark which holds for just a second or two before the music abruptly ends and he falls through the floor:

Considered against the entire sweep of film history, Chechik and crew aren’t doing anything original in this scene, but it stands out within the realm of holiday movies because it finds a perfect balance between sentimentality and slapstick. The pratfall at the end of this scene is funny because it’s surprising: we know something is coming, but not what, since we have no way of knowing that Clark set his projector up right on top of the attic door. Meanwhile, the 2:1 (after the initial tracking shot) ratio of documentary evidence of what the “fun, old-fashioned family Christmas” that he’s trying to recreate looked like to his emotional responses to it helps us understand what he’s struggling to achieve elsewhere in the film and why. Last but not least, the marriage of these images to Ray Charles’s “That Spirit of Christmas” is absolutely perfect.

Music is a crucial aspect of a number of other scenes as well. Angelo Badalamenti’s use of a drum to accompany Clark’s reaction to his son Rusty’s (Johnny Galecki) question “did you bring a saw?”

And then a lone, melancholy (French?) horn playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful” over footage of the tree they picked out tied to the top of the Griswold’s “front-wheel drive sleigh” is why this gag works:

And the decision to let the rendition of “Silent Night” which plays over footage of the rest of the family asleep in their beds end before the shot of Clark on his ladder underneath a huge moon re-checking each of the thousands of bulbs which failed to light earlier in the evening makes him seem even more cold and lonely:

Which brings me back to the question I mentioned at the outset of this post: why did I all of a sudden become much more interested in Christmas Vacation about ten years ago? After all, although I wouldn’t say I “grew up” with this film, it is one I watched for the first time as a child, when family lore has it that I started bawling my eyes out after Aunt Bethany’s (Mae Questel) cat meets its demise:

In a contemporary review for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington observed that Chechik and screenwriter John Hughes “deliberately mix up horror movies and sentimental family comedies in their imagery.” He’s specifically talking about this scene near the end of the film when Clark “fixes the newel post”:

Which, per Wilmington, “fuses imagery from ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ in a single visual gag,” a connection we are prepared to make by an earlier scene in which Clark dons a hockey match before cutting his tree down to size:

Wilmington is dead-on when he notes that point is to underscore the “fiery obsessiveness behind [Clark’s] desire, constantly thwarted, to construct the ideal Christmas.” The key is that the childhood holidays immortalized in film strips Clark finds in his attic weren’t perfect–as he says to his father (John Randolph) a bit later on, “all our holidays were always such a mess.” His desire to improve upon them comes from a good place: he wants to give his family an experience that they’ll still remember fondly 30 years later, just as he was moved to tears by images of “Xmas 1955.” But it’s also at its core a selfish project and thus not one that he necessarily deserves to be celebrated for. The final line of Christmas Vacation is one I think of often when we host holiday get-togethers. As a chaotic Christmas Eve improbably ends with everyone happily singing and dancing:

Clark and Ellen share a kiss outside:

She joins the rest of the family inside, leaving him alone. “I did it,” he says with a smile:

One way to interpret this is as further evidence that Clark is delusional. But another, more charitable explanation is that he has finally realized that the work is the reward, which I think would be enough to make this a movie about hosting Christmas and hospitality in general. It hardly seems like a coincidence that I would really begin appreciating Christmas Vacation at the same time I acquired in-laws and planning seasonal gatherings became a prominent part of my life.

I thought about ending this post with a more in-depth discussion of the eggnog scenes, but although “it’s good, it’s good” is invariably what I say whenever I quaff this particular beverage:

It’s really nothing more than a prop for Chevy Chase and Randy Quaid (who plays Cousin Eddie) and a showcase for the glassware so delightfully cheesy that we just had to have it:

Another option would be to call out the incredible ensemble cast that plays the Griswold grandparents, which in addition to John Randolph as Clark, Sr. also includes Diane Ladd as Clark’s mother, E.G. Marshall as Ellen’s father, and Doris Roberts (who I mentioned in my September, 2022 Drink & a Movie post about Hester Street) as her mother:

Or these ridiculous tracksuits worn by the Griswold’s yuppie neighbors Todd (Nicholas Guest) and Margot (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss):

Or Brian Doyle-Murray’s bad boss for the ages Frank Shirley:

Or one of the other lines we quote over and over again each December like “lotta sap in here. It looks great! Little full, lotta sap.”

Instead, I’ll conclude with a question: what in the world are we supposed to make of the fact that the animated opening credit sequence appears to show that Santa’s hat has a skeleton?

Now *that’s* horrifying. 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 from the moment my Drink & a Movie series was born that I would eventually feature the Last Word, and by the time the credits rolled on my first viewing of Pyaasa last year there was no doubt which movie I would pair it with. I originally slotted this post for late fall with a vague thought that I could mention actor-director Guru Dutt’s facial hair in the context of Movember or because of National Novel Writing Month, even though the character he plays is a poet. Sadly, the recent passing of Seattle bartender Murray Stenson, who is credited with rescuing the Last Word from obscurity, made my timing even more appropriate.

The main things you need to know about this concoction in 2023 are that: 1) it’s not for everyone, as I learned the hard way about ten years ago when we ordered a round for our table at a conference and one by one they all got passed over to me as each of my colleagues decided they weren’t a fan, which eventually resulted in me singing karaoke in front of co-workers for the first and only time in my life; and 2) if you are a fan of Green Chartreuse, this is (along with drizzling it over the best chocolate ice cream you can find) one of the few uses for the bottle you hoarded away a few months ago that is superior to just drinking the stuff straight as a digestif. Here’s how to make it:

3/4 oz. Gin (Broker’s)
3/4 oz. Maraschino liqueur
3/4 oz. Green Chartreuse
3/4 oz. Lime juice

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled coupe glass.

Most Last Word recipes note that it was invented at the Detroit Athletic Club prior to Prohibition, included in Ted Saucier’s 1951 book Bottoms Up, then rediscovered and popularized by Stenson 50-odd years later. The origins of its name deserve to be more well known, too. As described in Gary Regan’s book The Joy of Mixology, it was introduced to New York by famous vaudevillian Frank Fogarty, who Regan quotes as saying “you can kill the whole point of a gag by merely [using one] unnecessary word.” The Last Word is rather tart, but although adding a bit of simple syrup might make it more accessible, I don’t recommend it: the assertiveness of this cocktail is its best quality! Acid, spice from the gin, and herbs from the Chartreuse explode on the palate. With the latter clocking in at 110 ABV, you definitely should consider making it your final drink of the evening, though.

The screengrabs in this post come from a copy of the Yash Raj Films DVD release which I borrowed via interlibrary loan:

I actually own a DVD copy of the film released by Ultra Media, but it has a persistent watermark in the top left corner (yuck!) and I was thrilled to get my hands on the edition that DVDBeaver identified as being the best one available. It can also be streamed on Prime Video for a rental fee.

Pyaasa begins with falling blossoms waking Dutt’s Vijay up from a night spent sleeping rough in a park:

The beauty of nature moves him to compose a poem: “These smiling flowers/These fragrant gardens/This world filled with glorious colours/The nectar intoxicates the bees/What little have I to add to this splendor save a few tears, a few sighs.”

But then, as he watches, a bee lights on the grass, where it is trampled by one of his fellow Kolkatans:

This may be for me the best example of what I think scholar Corey Creekmur is writing about in his chapter on the film for editor Lalitha Gopalan’s book The Cinema of India when he says it “may well be the Hindi Citizen Kane (1941), a work whose audacious style, autobiographical resonance and lasting impact on filmmakers have exceeded its initial success.” The scene is a subliminally effective stage-setter on the first viewing. It struck me as perhaps a bit heavy-handed on the second. Beginning with the third, though, all sorts of interpretations start to open up: the bee is Guru Dutt! It is a worker bee! One bee alone may be helpless to oppose a shoe, but consider the swarm!

The story is fairly straightforward. Vijay can barely afford to feed himself because no one will buy his poems, except when his half-brothers sell them as wastepaper. Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman) is a prostitute who chances upon them and recognizes their worth. They meet cute when, thinking he’s a potential customer, she tries to seduce him with his own work in a scene which uses columns and shadows well to hide and reveal her face:

Vijay is oblivious to her affection at first both because he’s consumed with his work, and because his first love Meena (Mala Sinha) reenters his life in the following scene, which includes a flashback to the two of them in college:

As scholar Carrie Messenger notes in a chapter on the film in editor Marlisa Santos’s book Verse, Voice, and Vision: Poetry and the Cinema, this is a reworking of the themes of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s novel Devdas with poetry taking the place of alcohol as an “addictive and destructive” force in the protagonist’s life. Messenger adds that the triangle of Meena/Vijay/Gulabo would have reminded many contemporary viewers of gossip that Dutt, Rehman, and playback singer Geeta Dutt constituted a real-life love triangle and that Pyaasa “features song sequences where the voice of Guru Dutt’s actual wife is channeled through the body of the lover, both through Gulabo and through Meena, a tension that disembodies the voice at the same time that it also creates the strange embodiment of an idealized creation, a Frankenstein, the best of both of these women as well as Geeta Dutt’s voice,” which is fascinating.

The songs are one of the best parts of the film. My favorite is probably “Sar Jo Tera Chakraye,” which is sung by Mohammed Rafi and set to a comic set piece featuring Johnny Walker, a member of my personal character actor hall of fame.

“Aaj Sajan Mohe Ang Laga Lo” features some first-rate unrequited longing, which I’m a total sucker for–Gulabo actually isn’t resting her head on Vijay’s shoulder here, but rather hovering just above it, and he has no idea she’s there:

And the extravagant production design in “Hum Aap Ki Ankhon Mein,” which obviously inspired our Last Word photograph, is exactly what a daydream sequence within a flashback (!) calls for:

Dutt saves the best for last, though. “Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye To” builds to a crescendo in some of the most incredible marriages of image and music ever captured on film. The scene takes place at a ceremony commemorating what is presumed to be the one-year anniversary of Vijay’s death. Mr. Ghosh (Rehman Khan), the publisher who organized it and the man who Meena married for money, breaking Vijay’s heart, knows that he is very much alive, as do Vijay’s half-brothers and his childhood friend Shyam (Shyam). Everyone else is shocked when the poet they only know through best-selling book that Gulabo paid Ghosh to publish “posthumously” appears at the back of the auditorium and begins reciting a verse railing against the corruption of the world:

As Ghosh’s henchmen try to drag Vijay away, he breaks free of them and rushes forward as the camera pulls away from him, singing “burn this world! Blow it asunder!”

This scene is, in fact, primarily constructed of tracking shots, and they appear all throughout this film and the next and final one Gutt directed, Kaagaz Ke Phool. I consider them to be some of the most expressive camera movements in all of cinema. Creekmur says that “when the camera moves in and out throughout Pyaasa, it seems to replicate the physical act of breathing, or the opening and closing of the heart’s valves.” This is just about perfect, but it misses an important element: the velocity of the camera often changes during the movement, creating a disorienting effect like being on an elevator or a roller coaster, which to me feels like my heart skipping a beat or getting caught in my throat.

One of the best places to study these shots is during the scene where Vijay recites a poem for a reunion that his classmate Pushpa (Tun Tun) has told him about. As he spots Meena in the crowd, the camera tracks in to a close-up of his face then cuts to one of her which continues the motion:

As he begins to speak (“I am weary of this troubled life . . . “) the camera tracks away from him:

Then toward Meena and Ghosh, who is watching her intently, in the kind of rhythmic back-and-forth described by Creekmur:

The same thing happens as Vijay says “today I break all belief with the illusion of hope,” but with the addition of a sudden acceleration:

These shots also figure prominently in a scene in which Vijay, who Ghosh has hired to work as a servant at a literary party he is throwing, is moved to recite one of his own works in response to poems by two honored guests. Here and elsewhere the movements sometimes parallel each other, as when the camera tracks in first on Meena, then Ghosh:

In both cases the effect is to link the emotional responses of characters to a common event, here Vijay’s manifestation as a savior who could rescue Meena from her unhappy life if only she could transcend her desire for wealth and high position in society. Any doubts that a first-time viewer might have about whether this should be considered a deliberately Christ-like pose:

Will be laid to rest in either the next scene, in which Meena denies her love for Vijay to Ghosh three times, or if not then, when this Life magazine cover makes an appearance a bit later on:

Vijay spreads his arms wide again in the final reel:

Which also contains a direct callback to Pyaasa‘s opening sequence when Gulabo falls and someone steps on her:

As was the case with the bee, I found the Christ imagery amusing at first, then precious, but ultimately embraced it as representing more than meets the eye. Jesus died so that the world’s sins could be forgiven; Vijay doesn’t die and as a result its hypocrisy is laid bare. This is at worst an intriguingly cynical inversion, but I agree with scholar Arun Khopkar’s (as translated by Shanta Gokhale) in-depth argument in Guru Dutt: A Tragedy in Three Acts that its use here is far more complex.

Pyaasa ends with Vijay and Gulabo literally holding hands and disappearing into the sunset together:

Guru Dutt’s younger brother Devi describes it brilliantly in a quote included in Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema by Nasreen Munni Kabir as “a sort of [my italics] happier ending” than the one originally planned for the film. Here’s screenwriter Abrar Alvi’s account of it from the same book:

I believed that Vijay should not leave and go away in the last scene of the film, but that he should stay and fight the system. I told Guru Dutt, ‘Wherever Vijay goes he will find the same society, the same values, the same system.’ We discussed the scene at length, but I was overruled by Guru Dutt. So I wrote the ending in which Vijay comes to Gulab and tells her to go away with him to a place from where he will not need to go any further. I asked Guru Dutt, ‘Where does such a place exist in this world?’ But Guru Dutt put his foot down.

The 5,327,708.80 rupee question is, I think: will Vijay find it satisfying to, in the immortal words of Eden Ahbez, simply “love and be loved in return?” If I could wave a magic wand and conjure up a lavish Criterion Collection release of any film, it would be a box set of Pyaasa and Kaagaz Ke Phool. Perhaps I’ll wish for an essay answering this question to include in the booklet while I’m at it!

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.

This month’s Drink & a Movie post is dedicated to Ithaca, New York legend Park Doing, who has one of the greatest Halloween rituals I’ve ever encountered. Each year he watches Harry Smith’s twelfth (I mention this because it’s sometimes referred to as No. 12) film Heaven and Earth Magic with whatever friends and neighbors find themselves at his house. It’s a non-intuitive, but inspired choice, which makes it absolutely perfect for this series. What I thought I’d do here is combine Park’s tradition with one my family borrowed from chef Grant Achatz a few years ago and a couple of new ones. Let us begin with a beverage. In Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, Ted Haigh observes that the Corpse Reviver originated at the turn of the twentieth century as “more a class of drink than a single recipe” which was sometimes referred to simply as a “reviver” or an “eye opener.” In other words, it was originally meant to be imbibed in the morning! Albeit cautiously: as Harry Craddock notes in The Savoy Cocktail Book, “four of these taken in quick succession will unrevive the corpse again.” My recommendation is therefore to consume just one to give you fortitude at the beginning of the evening. Here’s how we make it:

3/4 oz. Dry gin (Broker’s)
3/4 oz. Lillet Blanc
3/4 oz. Cointreau
3/4 oz. Lemon juice
1 tsp. Absinthe (St. George Absinthe Verte)

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a cherry impaled on a skull pick.

I shamelessly pilfered the skull and cherry presentation from local establishment Nowhere Special Libations Parlor, which uses it to striking effect. We prefer Craddock’s proportions for this drink, interpreting “one dash” to mean one teaspoon of absinthe following David Wondrich’s lead once again like we did in August because my loving wife and I are absinthe fans and this works great for us. Ted Haigh calls for just 1-3 drops, though, and Jim Meehan goes with a rinse in the PDT Cocktail Book, so YMMV. Broker’s has been our house London Dry gin for awhile, and we’re not the only ones–I’ve had at least three conversations recently about how it’s one of the best spirits values around right now!

Next, of course, we have a movie. Here’s a picture of the Harry Smith Archives DVD release of the Heaven and Earth Magic that I borrowed via interlibrary loan:

I actually do own a DVD-R copy of the film that I bought off eBay awhile back, but I didn’t want to use images from it because its provenance is uncertain. I’d love to add a Harry Smith Archives edition to my personal collection, but unfortunately it has been out of print for ages.

Most people’s primary source of information about Heaven and Earth Magic seems to be P. Adams Sitney’s Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 which includes notes that Harry Smith composed for the catalog of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative which describe his “semi-realistic animated collages” as being part of his “alchemical labors of 1957 to 1962” and indicate that the film was made under the influence of “almost anything, but mainly deprivation.” They also summarize the movie’s plot:

The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land in terms of Israel, Montreal and the second part depicts the return to earth from being eaten by Max Muller on the day Edward the Seventh dedicated the Great Sewer of London.

Sitney characterizes this synopsis as “ironic,” but notes that it is accurate in broad terms; he also provides his own interpretation. The main characters are a man and a woman:

Like many of the film’s elements, both started life as engravings from a late-nineteenth-century illustrated magazine. Per Sitney, the man is identifiable as a magus by “his continual manipulations in the alchemical context of No. 12, coupled with his almost absolute resistance to change when everything else, including the heroine, is under constant metamorphosis.” As she sits in a “diabolical” dentist’s chair, the magus injects her with a magical potion:

This causes her to rise to heaven, where she becomes fragmented:

He spends much of the rest of the movie attempting to put her back together again, but “does not succeed until after they are eaten by the giant head of a man (Max Muller), and they are descending to earth in an elevator”:

This narrative absolutely is discernable upon repeat viewings, and Heaven and Earth Magic easily lends itself to a variety of interpretations as well. Scholar Noël Carroll, for instance, reads it as a “mimesis of the drug experience” and a “metaphor of cinema as mind.” The viewer does need to put some effort into it, though, which lends credence to Sitney’s claim that Heaven and Earth Magic is Harry Smith’s “most ambitious and difficult work.” Whether or not you enjoy this film is utterly dependent on how interesting you find its images and musique concrète score. Apparently Smith preferred an original cut which was more than four times as long, but I think it’s just about perfect at 66 minutes. The use of what Carroll calls “literalization” is consistently surprising and hilarious, such as when the theft of the watermelon is accompanied by the sound of water:

As is the doggedness (pun very much intended) with which these Victorian ladies pursue the thief:

These dancing skeletons remind me of my oldest daughter’s equine phase, which included a brief but intense fascination with a Nature mini-series called “Equus: Story of the Horse”:

I love these wild phantasmic images which appear later in the elevator sequence referenced above:

And the symmetry of Heaven and Earth Magic‘s final and first images, which mirror each other, is quite satisfying:

My loving wife (who has a graduate degree in art history) observed that Smith is an obvious influence on the animated sequences Terry Gilliam created for Monty Python’s Flying Circus and flagged this scene as her favorite:

Because it reminded her of the Berlin Foundry Cup, which depicts a Athenian bronze workshop:

And this brings us to a second movie. You see, this is an example of red-figure vase painting, and that is precisely what the negative photography in Maya Deren’s The Very Eye of Night has always made me think of! Considering the facts that with its 15-minute runtime, this film plus Heaven and Earth Magic are roughly the same length as a short feature, and that both are frequently lumped together as examples of avant-garde/experimental/underground cinema, this struck me as a perfect opportunity for a double feature. So here’s a picture of my Kino Lorber/Re:Voir DVD release of The Maya Deren Collection:

Although The Very Eye of Night (like Heaven and Earth Magic) does not appear to be currently on commercial streaming video platforms, some people may have access to it via Kanopy through a license paid for by their local academic or public library.

In an article about the film, scholar Elinor Cleghorn refers to The Very Eye of Night as Maya Deren’s “most technically complex and medium-specific film” and clearly establishes that it was regarded as a major work during its initial screenings in 1959. The titles of recent appreciations by Ok Hee Jeong (“Reflections on Maya Deren’s Forgotten Film, The Very Eye of Night“) and Harmony Bench (“Cinematography, choreography and cultural influence: rethinking Maya Deren’s The Very Eye of Night“) demonstrate that it is not thought of as such today, which Cleghorn attributes to our friend P. Adams Sitney, who was otherwise a champion of Deren but dismissive of this film, which he felt represented an unwise divergence from “the powerful element of psycho-drama” that he prized in her earlier work.

The Very Eye of Night is similar to Heaven and Earth Magic in that it has an elaborate story that can probably only be followed by viewers who know what to look for. As described by scholar Sarah Keller in her book Maya Deren: Incomplete Control, it begins with an elaborate credit sequence which introduces the characters and “upholds the philosophical, mythical, and/or metaphysical principles espoused by the film as a whole,” as in the case of this image which references an eye with an iris, the yin-and-yang symbol, and Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”:

It is more than a minute after the final title card before the first dancers (Richard Englund as Uranus and Rosemary Williams as Urania) appear, arcing across a field of stars accompanied by music by Deren’s future husband Teiji Ito:

Doubling/mirroring proliferates throughout the film, not just in the way the dancers are paired with one another:

But also through costume elements such as the tights worn by the actors who portray Gemini (Don Freisinger and Richard Sandifer):

And this ribbon:

The most enchanting images for me are the ensemble shots:

But the entire film has a timeless quality which supports Deren’s statement of purpose which was originally published in Film Culture magazine and reprinted in the book Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film: “whether or not the viewer formulates it, I am convinced that he will know that I am proposing that day life and night life are as negatives of each other, and that he will feel the presence of Destiny in the imperturbable logics of the night sky and in the irrevocable, interdependent patterns of gravitational orbits.” In an essay called “‘The Eye for Magic’: Maya and Méliès” published in Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde, scholar Lucy Fischer argues that “for Deren the sky was a site of rapture” and that “just as outer space presents a field in which earthly laws are violated and superseded, so the domain of film dance liberates the body through the magic of cinematography and editing.” I think something of this mindset can be seen in the triumphant gesture which concludes the dancing:

It is fair to observe that The Very Eye of Night is not as rigorous as Heaven and Earth Magic, but to my eyes it’s also more beautiful, and I don’t consistently prefer one over the other. Meanwhile, both are perfect fits thematically and visually for a night associated with transformation, mystery, and experimentation. I’d actually suggest watching them in reverse order of how they’re discussed in this post, staring with The Very Eye of Night as an accompaniment to your Corpse Reviver #2 and saving Heaven and Earth Magic for after trick-or-treating is over. You’ll probably be hungry, which brings me to my final recommendation: this recipe for beef chili with beans. Author Grant Achatz notes that it’s a modified version of the one his mother made for him and his cousins every Halloween. We gave it a try a couple of years ago and have been making it annually ever since. Although Achatz says he ate it at the beginning of the evening “as a way to counteract the sugar buzz to come,” we prefer to save it for after we return home both as a way to warm up from a usually cold (and sometimes rainy) night outside and a strategy for breaking up our kids’ candy consumption. It’s hard to make chili look good, but here’s a picture of the pot which is now hanging out in our freezer awaiting its big night anyway:

Definitely don’t skimp on the ancho and pasilla powders, which you can easily make yourself as far in advance as you want by toasting seeded and stemmed dried chilies, letting them cool, and then grinding them. We usually grind our own beef as well, but that’s nowhere near as essential. The recipe itself doesn’t mention them, but serving them with sour cream and cilantro as shown in the picture in Food & Wine is a great move.

And there you have it, a ready-made itinerary for your upcoming All Hallow’s Eve festivities!

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.