Category: Screengrabs

USS Richmond Punch was a big hit when I made it for Thanksgiving a few years ago. It’s on the menu again this year, so I definitely wanted feature it in this month’s Drink & a Movie post. When thinking about what film to pair it with, the name immediately made me think of one of cinema’s great antiheroes, unapologetic former Confederate soldier Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) from The Searchers. Interestingly, David Wondrich identifies the recipe as originating during the Civil War era, which means it theoretically could be the concoction in this punch bowl:

The way we make it combines elements from the article linked to above and the recipe in Wondrich’s book Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl:

6 lemons
1 1/2 cups caster sugar
2 cups black tea
2 cups Jamaican rum (Smith & Cross)
2 cups cognac (Pierre Ferrand 1840)
2 cups ruby port (Graham’s Six Grapes)
4 ozs. Grand Marnier
2 750 ml bottles sparkling wine (Roederer Estate Brut)

Prepare an oleo-saccharum by removing the peels from the lemon, trying to get as little of the pith as possible, and muddling them with the sugar. Set aside for at least an hour. Meanwhile, juice the lemons and make the tea by pouring 16 ounces of hot (but not boiling) water over two tea bags and steeping for exactly five minutes. Add the lemon juice and tea to the oleo-saccharum and strain into a gallon container. Add the spirits and refrigerate overnight. When ready to serve, add to a punch bowl with a block of ice and the sparkling wine. Garnish with lemon slices and grated nutmeg.

As a special occasion beverage, this is definitely a time to break out your favorite spirits, which is why we go with Smith & Cross, Pierre Ferrand 1840 Original Formula, and Roederer Estate Brut. We are a family of tea drinkers and that flavor is prominent here, which is one of the main reasons we love this punch, which is sweet and tart and just a bit effervescent. It does pack a wallop, though, and the tannins on the finish will make you want to take another sip and then another, so handle with care! Or, you know, just be sure to snack liberally while you imbibe.

The screengrabs in this post are from my Warner Home Video DVD copy of the film, which is still going strong after 25 years:

It can also be rented from a number of streaming video platforms. The Searchers is hardly immune from the sins of representation which plague many classic westerns: see, for instance, Tom Grayson Colonnese’s observation in the collection of essays on the film edited by Arthur Eckstein and Peter Lehman that allowing the Navajo extras who play Comanches to speak their own language is as discordant “as if when we meet the Jorgensens, they have Italian accents, or as if the Hispanic Comanchero who finally leads the searchers to Scar speaks with a heavy Swedish accent.” Unlike most of them, though, racism is one of its explicit themes. It begins, famously, in “Texas 1868” (as an introductory title card reads) with Dorothy Jordan’s Martha Edwards opening a door:

As the camera tracks forward, following her outside, a tiny figure on horseback emerges out of the striking desert landscape:

As it draws closer, Martha is joined first by her husband Aaron (Walter Coy):

Then their three children. “That’s your Uncle Ethan!” says Pippa Scott’s Lucy to Robert Lyden’s Ben.

Inside, Ethan lifts his youngest niece Debbie (Lana Wood) to the rafters:

And although he declines to answer Aaron’s question about where he’s been for the past three years, he does specify that it wasn’t California, gazing at Martha the whole while:

The final member of the family, Jeffrey Hunter’s Martin Pawley, is introduced in the next scene in a variation on Ethan’s entrance:

“Fella could mistake you for a half-breed,” Ethan tells him over dinner.

“Not quite: I’m one-eighth Cherokee, and the rest is Welsh and English,” he replies. “At least that’s what they tell me.” You see, “it was Ethan who found you, squalling under a sage clump after your folks had been massacred,” Aaron explains. “It just happened to be me,” Ethan says, “no need to make more of it.” That night before the children to go bed, he makes Debbie a present of what Frank Nugent’s screenplay describes as “something appropriate to Maximilian of Mexico”:

Moments later, he tosses Aaron two bags of double eagles by way of clarifying that he expects to pay his way.

“That’s fresh minted–there ain’t a mark on it!” Aaron observes, to which Ethan simply says, “so?” The next morning breakfast is interrupted by a visit from Ward Bond’s Reverend Captain Samuel Johnson Clayton and his company of Texas Rangers, who are looking for cattle rustlers who they think have run off the herd belonging to Lars Jorgensen (John Qualen), whose son Brad (Harry Carey Jr.) has been “sittin’ up with” Lucy. Their intention is to deputize Aaron and Marty, but Ethan tells his brother to stay close in case the real culprits were Comanche. As they prepare to depart, Clayton chivalrously declines to observe a goodbye which makes it clear that Ethan and Martha are in love with each other:

The posse is 40 miles away when Marty rides up to Ethan to comment that “there’s something mighty fishy about this trail.”

Sure enough, Brad finds his father’s prize bull with a Comanche lance in it.

Ethan is the first to realize what it means: “stealing the cattle was just to pull us out. This is a murder raid.” The most likely targets are either the Jorgensen or Edwards places, and the majority of the Rangers ride for the former because it’s closer. Marty immediate heads for home against the advice of Ethan, who observes that their horses need rest and grain. The younger man obviously thinks he’s being callous, but the anguished look on Ethan’s face as he rubs down his horse is anything but:

The attack itself isn’t shown, only the brilliantly tense lead-up to it which features outstanding crepuscular lighting:

A devastating camera movement toward Lucy when she realizes what’s about to happen:

And a terrifying shadow falling over a tombstone that informs us that Ethan and Aaron’s mother was also killed by Comanches:

It ends on a close-up of the Comanche chief Scar, who unfortunately is played by a white man (Henry Brandon), blowing a horn to signal the start of the attack:

Fade to black. Ethan is proven right about the horses when he and Mose Harper (Hank Worden), who stayed behind with him, overtake Marty and ride past him:

But they arrive too late to help. Ethan discovers Martha’s body in another reprise of the film’s opening shot:

Aaron and Ben are also dead, while Debbie and Lucy have been captured. And thus begins the titular search. The same number of men ride out after the girls as went looking for Jorgensen’s cattle earlier, and soon enough they’re following a trail of corpses as warriors Aaron wounded die on the trail. Ethan shoots out the eyes of one, prompting Clayton to ask him, “what good did that do you?”

Mose pantomimes Ethan’s cold reply: “by what you preach, none, but what that Comanche believes, ain’t got no eyes, can’t enter the spirit land and has to wander forever between the winds. You get it, Reverend.”

Sam Girgus writes in his book Hollywood Renaissance: The Cinema of Democracy in the Era of Ford, Capra, and Kazan, “of course, Ethan doesn’t ‘get’ that he really has just described his own life and destiny of wandering over a nightmare landscape that denies ‘the spirit’ and the value and meaning of life,” but I find it significant that his action is prompted by Brad desecrating the body first with a rock:

In fact, not even Ethan’s most extreme racist actions or sentiments expresses are unique to him, which seems to support the statement Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington make in their monograph on director John Ford that “it is chillingly clear that Ethan’s craziness is only quantitatively different from that of civilization in general.” Anyway, he soon locates the raiders they’re looking for and proposes that they wait until nightfall and then jump them. Clayton decides they’ll try to run off their horses instead. Ethan disagrees, but Clayton says, “that’s an order.” Ethan replies by hurling a canteen at him with the words, “yes sir, but if you’re wrong, don’t ever give me another.”

This is followed by another one of the movie’s great set pieces, a frantic ride to a strong defensive position across a river that features lots of great parallel and intersecting lines after Clayton’s plan fails and the posse finds itself surrounded:

Ethan continues the search alone with Brad and Marty because, as Clayton acknowledges, “this is a job for a whole company of Rangers, or this is a job for one or two men.”

Three become two a few minutes of screentime later when Brad suicidally confronts the Comanches alone after Ethan finds and buries Lucy’s defiled body, which we hear but don’t see:

The final two searchers lose the trail soon after. “We’re beat and you know it,” Marty says. Ethan’s reply is my favorite line in this or any film (obsolete pejorative slang aside), because it’s basically the inverse of my philosophy of life: “Injun’ll chase a thing till he thinks he’s chased it enough, then he quits. Same way when he runs. Seems like he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter’ll just keep comin’ on.”

They briefly return home to the Jorgensens in a sequence that features framing which ought to look familiar by now:

But are off again the next morning in pursuit of a lead that came to the Jorgensens in the form of a letter, much to the chagrin of daughter Laurie (Vera Miles), who reveals to Marty that “you and me have been goin’ steady since we was three years old.”

A big chunk of what happens next is shown in flashback as Laurie reads a letter that Marty writes to her, including his accidental (he thought he was trading for a blanket, not a bride) marriage to a woman named Wild Goose Flying in the Night Sky (Beulah Archuletta) that many people find distasteful in the way it’s played for comedy, but which M. Elise Marubbio defends as essential to understanding how “Ford’s direction throughout the film suggest an understanding of racism as a neurosis that permeates a community, including the viewer” in a chapter in the book Native Apparitions: Critical Perspectives on Hollywood’s Indians:

And an encounter with a cavalry troupe that has just massacred an entire Comanche village, including Marty’s wife, who ran off (possibly to look for Debbie) after she heard the two men talking about Scar.

Ethan and Marty finally catch up with him in New Mexico Territory, where the medal Ethan gave Debbie at the beginning of the film reappears during a conversation in which the chief reveals that two of his sons were killed by white settlers:

Debbie (now played by Natalie Wood) is there, too, and runs after Ethan and Marty when they leave to warn them they’re in danger:

When she tells them, “these are my people,” Ethan pulls his gun.

But Marty is having none of it:

They’re interrupted by a poison arrow which wounds Ethan in the shoulder and escape (without Debbie) to a nearby cave where they fend off another attack:

And where Ethan attempts to write a will that leaves all of his possessions to Marty on the grounds that he has “no blood kin,” to which Marty says, “I hope you die.”

Which finally brings us to the wedding in the screengrab at the beginning of this post, where Laurie, who McBride and Wilmington describe as “resplendent in the virginal white of her wedding dress,” harshly echoes the sentiments Marty almost just stabbed Ethan for when he tells her he has to leave one last time to retrieve Debbie, who they’ve just been notified is camped nearby with Scar and the rest of his band. “Fetch what home?” she cries. “The leavings of Comanche bucks sold time and again to the highest bidder with savage brats of her own? Do you know what Ethan will do if he has a chance? He’ll put a bullet in her brain. I tell you, Martha would want him to.”

This leads pretty directly to the film’s key moments. Marty daringly sneaks into the camp alone and convinces Debbie to leave with him, but has to kill Scar in self defense, raising the alarm.

The Rangers ride in after them, and Ethan claims Scar’s scalp, which judging from his face doesn’t bring the closure he expected:

Just then he spots Debbie:

Marty tries and fails to prevent him from riding after her:

And Ethan catches up with Debbie in front of another cave:

Robert Pippin writes in Hollywood Westerns and the American Myth that The Searchers revolves around the mystery of what happens next:

To Glenn Kenny it’s “an unabashed and matter of fact depiction of the mysterious workings of grace” which can’t be parsed in any rational way, while to Pippin “what we and [Ethan] discover is that he did not know his own mind, that he avowed principles that were partly confabulations and fantasy.” Whatever the case may be, and while I find Ethan every bit as compelling a character as I did in my youth when I first discovered this film, what I find myself pondering the most these days is what this scene and the final one that follows it say about America. After all, as Jeffrey Church points out in an article published in the journal Perspectives on Political Science, “the film is not called ‘The Searcher.'” Much ink has been spilled about the way Ethan stands alone in the final scene after Mr. and Mrs. Jorgensen (Olivia Carey) take Debbie inside, then Laurie and Marty push past him:

I think it’s absolutely essential to note that after John Wayne, the actor, clutches his arm in a moving homage to silent film star Harry Carey (father of the actor who plays Brad and husband to the actress who plays Mrs. Jorgensen), Ethan, the character he plays, chooses to turn and walk away:

Girgus reads Marty’s presence as “dramatically [subverting] Ethan’s wish to form a nation of one without any responsibility to anyone outside of himself” by turning their search for Debbie into a social experience that mirrors “the situation of America as a democracy of continued relevance to its own people and for the world during a period of increasing activism by minorities and people of color,” which seems just as true today as it did in 1956 when The Searchers was released or 1998 when Girgus’s book was published. But where he argues that Ethan “cannot (my italics) enter the interior spaces of the house” despite the fact that he “represents steadfast masculine strength, power, and aggression that constitute essentials for the survival of any society, including a democracy,” Pippin emphasizes the absence of a reconciliation scene with Ethan and suggests that he may instead be recusing himself from participating in the one taking place within because it is “while not a complete fantasy, much more fragile than those ‘inside’ are prepared to admit.”

My point with all this is that Ethan is, to borrow some phrases from the film, “a human man.” As are, of course, the Comanches he spends its runtime opposing. And the country built on their bones is indeed “a fine, good place to be.” But it can be even better. So let’s spare a thought for all of them as we gather around the communal punch bowl this Thanksgiving, because those who forget the past are doomed to repeat 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.

I had so much fun creating a double feature for last year’s October Drink & a Movie post that it was an easy decision to do it again. This time I’m celebrating the film I’ve long thought of as my favorite B movie, The Leopard Man, and the one which recently stole that crown, House of Usher. Here’s a picture of my Warner Archive Collection DVD copy of the former:

And here’s a picture of my MGM “Midnite Movies” DVD edition of the latter:

The Leopard Man is also currently streaming on Watch TCM until November 19 and is available for rental and purchase on a variety of platforms, while House of Usher can be rented and purchase on Apple TV+.

This month’s beverage pairing was admittedly inspired primarily by The Leopard Man‘s title, but although the Lion’s Tale would almost certainly be too spicy for the delicate palate of Vincent Price’s Roderick Usher (as Paul Clarke notes in The Cocktail Chronicles, where the recipe we use comes from, a little bit of St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram goes a long way), its bold pumpkin pie spice flavors make it a perfect match for the film he appears in and other scary season fare. Here’s how you make it:

2 ozs. Bourbon (Evan Williams Single Barrel)
1/2 oz. Lime juice
1/2 oz. Allspice liqueur (St. Elizabeth)
1 tsp. Simple syrup
1 dash Angostura bitters

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

Clarke garnishes this drink with a lime wheel, which is probably what I would do if I was making it during the summer, but in the fall we typically serve it unadorned as pictured above. In addition to its name, I was drawn to the Lion’s Tale right now because I’ve been itching to make a bourbon drink before my bottle of Evan Williams Single Barrel, far and away the best you can get at its price point, runs out. Without too many other ingredients to compete with, this is a great showcase for it. If you’re using a less full-bodied whiskey, consider employing a 2:1 simple syrup to counter the pungency of the lime juice and allspice liqueur.

Both films featured in this post are about contagion, but neither involves a literal disease. In the case of The Leopard Man, it’s bad luck which is passed from character to character. The film begins with P.R. man Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe) introducing his star client Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks) to his latest idea for drumming up publicity, a tame leopard:

At first Kiki isn’t impressed:

But then Manning explains that he envisioned Kiki making a grand entrance with the cat during the act of a rival performer named Clo-Clo (Margo):

Kiki and the leopard do cut a striking figure together:

And initially the stunt achieves its desired affect of getting everyone’s attention; however, Clo-Clo takes exception to having the spotlight stolen from her, and deliberately frightens the leopard with her castanets in what interestingly appears to be a point-of-view shot from the perspective of the cat:

It recoils, then lunges away into the night, but not before scratching the hand of a waiter:

Later that evening everyone is looking for the escaped leopard. A boy shines a flashlight on Clo-Clo’s legs:

She stamps and the light goes out, but the camera stays with her as she walks through the streets. A fortune teller friend Maria (Isabel Jewell) calls out, “take a card, Clo-Clo, see what the night holds for you.”

Her face tells us everything we need to know about the significance of the ace of spades she draws:

But she quickly recovers and flicks it away, calling “faker!” back over her shoulder:

Clo-Clo greets people as she passes them and the camera stays with her until suddenly it doesn’t. “Hello, chiquita,” she says to a girl in a window, and with that the narrative torch has been passed:

This is Teresa Delgado (Margaret Landry) and she is about to be sent on a nighttime errand to get cornmeal for the tortillas for her father’s dinner in a scene which lasts five full, harrowing minutes of screentime and ends with the unforgettable image of her blood seeping through the crack beneath her front door:

The film spends some time investing in exposition after Teresa’s funeral. A posse is formed to track down the animal that killed her. Maria reads Clo-Clo’s fortune again, but no matter how hard she tries to avoid it, the ace of spade keeps appearing. “What did they say before the bad card came up?” she asks. “You will meet a rich man and he will give you money,” Maria replies. Finally, Jerry introduces Kiki to a local museum curator named Galbraith (James Bell) who was on the posse with him. At dinner that night Galbraith gestures at a fountain with his pipe and says, “I’ve learned one thing about life. We’re a good deal like that ball dancing on the fountain. We know as little about the forces that move us and move the world around us as that empty ball does about the water that pushes it into the air, let’s it fall, and catches it again.”

The next scene picks Clo-Clo up again as she tries to sweet talk a flower seller into giving her a free rose. “My mistress, Señora Consuelo Contreras, does not have to beg for flowers. She won’t miss one,” says another customer (Fely Franquelli).

As was the case with Teresa Delgado, the camera stays with her, but this time only for awhile. Consuelo (Tula Parma), the girl she works for, actually turns out to be both our new subject and the next murder victim, and the moments just before her death feature another POV shot, we think showing a branch bending under the weight of the leopard that’s about to kill her:

Except that at the crime scene the next morning, Jerry offers a different theory: “it might not be a cat this time,” he suggests to a skeptical police chief (Ben Bard) and Galbraith.

The second half of the film chronicles his efforts to prove his hunch correct. Clo-Clo receives $100 from the wealthy benefactor Maria saw in her future, but the death card is still after her and the scene after it appears one final time is her last.

Everyone thinks she’s the leopard’s third victim except Jerry, who correctly interprets signs that Clo-Clo put lipstick on right before she was killed as evidence that her murderer was a man. When the skinned, week-old carcass of the cat is found shortly afterward in a canyon that Galbraith searched by himself earlier, he finally has a suspect. Kiki and Consuelo’s boyfriend Raoul (Richard Martin) help him successfully set a trap. Galbraith escapes, though, and flees into a procession that commemorates the slaughter of a peaceful village of Native Americans by Spanish conquistadores, which per J.P. Telotte links his crimes to that tragedy “to suggest a continuum of such inexplicable human horrors”:

Jerry and Raoul quickly apprehend him and extract an explanation of sorts as they drag him away: “I didn’t want to kill, but I had to.”

Speaking specifically about Consuelo he continues, “I looked down. In the darkness I saw her white face. The eyes full of fear. Fear! That was it. The little frail body, the soft skin. And then, she screamed.” Suddenly a shot rings out and Galbraith falls dead, shot by Raoul. As Telotte notes, this is a superficially classic resolution: “The publicity agent-detective has played his hunch and unraveled a murder mystery; the killer has confessed and is killed in retribution.” Except that this isn’t how the movie ends. The final images are instead of Jerry and Kiki walking away as Robles informs Raoul that he will have to stand trial for Galbraith’s death in the background:

The parting reminder that Raoul must be punished because “he too bears that murderous potential, a dark and unpredictable possibility that society, for its own preservation, has to repress” leaves us “with a sense that there is no real ending yet in sight, certainly no true consolation here for the victims’ families, and no satisfying feeling that things have at least been ‘made right,’ just a disturbing residue from these terrible events.” Chris Fujiwara, writing in his monograph about director Jacques Tourneur, suggests that The Leopard Man‘s disturbing effect derives from the fact that the doom which circulates from character to character represents “a debt that no one owes and that is owed to no one but that nonetheless insists on being paid.” There is no such doubt about who must pay the bills in House of Usher, at least not in the mind of the last male heir of the titular family. He lives in a mansion which we encounter at the beginning of the film as Mark Damon’s Philip Winthrop rides up to it through a desolate landscape that director Roger Corman explains in his autobiography How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime he opportunistically shot following a forest fire:

He is admitted inside by a servant named Bristol (Harry Ellerbe), who cryptically asks him to remove his boots in a high-angle shot which almost seems like it’s from the house’s perspective:

We learn why in the next scene. Roderick, who is none too pleased by Philip’s presence, is afflicted with hypersensitive hearing: “sounds of any exaggerated degree cut into my brain like knives,” he explains.

Roderick orders Philip to leave, but Philip informs him that he isn’t going anywhere without his fiancée Madeline (Myrna Fahey). She is supposedly bedridden, but appears in the room moments later:

And that’s basically the film’s entire plot! Roderick reluctantly agrees to let Philip stay and leads Madeline back to bed. While they’re gone coals jump out of the fireplace and singe Philip’s pants:

That evening the house trembles, and looking out the window Philip spies a crack running its entire length:

One his way down to dinner a few minutes later, a chandelier falls from the ceiling and misses him by mere inches:

The next morning Philip visits the kitchen and says he wants to take Madeline’s breakfast to her. A cauldron of gruel, which per Bristol “is the most she’s ever eaten in the morning,” edges ever closer to Philip while they talk, but luckily Bristol notices before it burns him:

Up in Madeline’s room Philip tries to persuade her to leave with him. “Perhaps you’ll feel differently after you’ve seen,” she says, and takes him downstairs to the family crypt. She shows him the coffins of her great-grandparents, grandparents, parents . . . and an empty one labeled “Madeline Usher.”

Suddenly, as they talk a coffin tumbles down nearly on top of them:

“I think you still do not understand,” Roderick tells Philip in the aftermath of this incident, “and I think it’s time that you did.” They repair to the balcony, where Roderick explains that the land around the house once was fertile, which is depicted through an effectively haunting camera effect:

Then they go back inside for my favorite scene, a history of the Usher line accompanied by close-ups of each family member’s anachronistically modern portraits and a list of their crimes. Anthony Usher was a “thief, usurer, merchant of flesh” and Bernard Usher was a “swindler, forger, jewel thief, drug addict.”

Francis Usher was a “professional assassin,” while Vivian Usher was a “blackmailer, harlot, murderess. She died in a madhouse.” Finally, Captain David Usher is identified as a “smuggler, slave trader, mass murderer.”

At the conclusion of the tour, Roderick shares the thesis which governs his life:

This house is centuries old. It was brought here from England. And with it every evil rooted in its stones. Evil is not just a word. It is reality. Like any living thing it can be created and was created by these people. The history of the Ushers is a history of savage degradations. First in England, and then in New England. And always in this house. Always in this house. Born of evil which feels, it is no illusion. For hundreds of years, foul thoughts and foul deeds have been committed within its walls. The house itself is evil now.

In an interview with Lawrence French, Corman suggests that the fictional painters of these portraits (which in real life were created by artist Burt Schoenberg) “may have been picking up the distortion from the evil in the minds of the people he was painting.” This would be another example of transmissibility, but I like my loving wife’s explanation that they are a creation of the house better, especially since it reinforces the claim Corman makes in How I Made a Hundred Movies that in this film “the house is the monster.” Consider this exchange between Roderick and an incredulous Philip from the same scene:

RODERICK: Mr. Winthrop, do you think those coals jumping from the fire onto you were an accident? Do you think that chandelier falling was an accident? Do you think that falling casket was an accident?

PHILIP: Are you trying to tell me that the house made those things happen?

RODERICK: Yes.

Philip is unconvinced, though, and shouts at Roderick, “I’ll tell you what’s evil in this house, sir: you!” He finally persuades Madeline to leave with him, but she dies before they can depart. Or so Philip thinks. We catch on before he does that all is not as it seems thanks to the twitch of a finger as she lies in her casket:

Philip doesn’t notice, but Roderick sure does, and he reacts exactly like you’d expect someone who just realized their beloved sister is actually alive to:

The next morning over coffee, Bristol accidentally lets it slip that Madeline was prone to catalepsies. Philip now suspects that they buried her alive, but when he breaks open her casket, it’s empty:

Things escalate quickly from here. Roderick won’t tell Philip where he has hidden Madeline’s body and Bristol doesn’t know. After a day of fruitless searching, Philip collapses into a tormented surrealist nightmare sequence featuring multiple generations of evil Ushers that ends with Madeline screaming:

Upon awakening, he confronts Roderick again, who in the course of their conversation reveals that he is tortured by the sounds of Madeline moving even now. As he describes her “scratching at the lid with bloody fingernails, staring, screaming, wild with fury, the strength in her,” we cut to her bloody fingers emerging from beneath the lid of her coffin:

The climax includes a close-up of Madeline’s red eyes reminiscent of the murderous eyes of Sister Ruth which I talked about in my August Drink & a Movie post about Black Narcissus:

And lots and lots of fire:

With a presidential election looming, the political dimensions of these two films fairly leap off the screen, and viewed as a double feature, I think they do have a cogent message. It’s not enough to just remember our nation’s twin original sins of genocide and slavery like the participants in the ceremony which concludes The Leopard Man, but as demonstrated by House of Usher, guilt absolutely can be taken to nihilistic and pathological extremes. What unites them even more directly is their compactness: with runtimes of 66 and 79 minutes respectively, these are two of the most brilliantly concise films you’re ever going to see. Which, come to think of it, is another thing they have in common with a Lion’s Tale–after all, it’s basically just a whiskey sour with extra zip. So here’s to good ingredients and technique and letting them speak for themselves!

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.

Although the majority of it technically falls within summer, it’s hardly any wonder that in the United States the month of September is more closely associated with fall when it marks the beginning of the school year, return of football, and appearance of pumpkin beer on grocery store endcaps. This makes the Autumn Winds created by St. Louis bartender Matt Seiter and collected in Gary Regan’s The Joy of Mixology a perfect cocktail to highlight right now because it uses sage, which I’ll always associate with Thanksgiving stuffing no matter how many times I combine it with ingredients like peaches and tomatoes, to whisper of the season to come while still offering up enough lemony brightness to make it a great porch sipper. Here’s how you make it:

2 ozs. Gin (Citadelle)
1/2 oz. Bénédictine
1/2 oz. Brown Butter Sage liqueur (recipe follows)
1 dash Angostura bitters

Make the Brown Butter Sage liqueur by browning 10 tablespoons of butter, stirring constantly, over medium heat. Remove from heat, add 3/4 oz. lemon juice and a chiffonade of 12-15 sage leaves, and rest for 10 minutes. Add 1 cup simple syrup and 12 ozs. vodka (Tito’s) and allow to stand at room temperature for 4-6 hours. Refrigerate overnight, skim solids from the top of the mixture, and strain into a bottle. Make the cocktail by shaking all ingredients with ice, straining into a chilled champagne coupe, and garnishing with a spanked fresh sage leaf.

If you’ve never spanked a sage leaf, it’s exactly what it sounds like, and you don’t want to skip this step as it releases odors that are essential to the way the drink works. Regan mentions that a small amount of butter solids will remain in the liqueur even after straining, which is true, and that it’s best to shake the bottle before mixing to make sure you get all of that flavor. Seiter calls for Ransom Old Tom, the first gin I ever fell in love with, in this Feast Magazine article, and I’m sure it works great, especially in late September when it actually starts to get cold! But I like Citadelle because it resonates not just with baking spices in the liqueur, but also the lemon, plus it’s an additional (along with the Bénédictine) French connection to this month’s movie. Speaking of which:

History Is Made at Night contains one of the most deliriously happy endings in cinema history, but even more than most movies made in the 1930s, its atmosphere is redolent with signs of World War II. Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD release:

It can also be streamed via The Criterion Channel with a subscription, and some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Andrew Sarris famously argued in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 that “History Is Made at Night is not only the most romantic title in the history of cinema but also a profound expression of [director Frank] Borzage’s commitment to love over probability.” The specific paramours in this case are Charles Boyer’s Paul Dumond and Jean Arthur’s Irene Vail, who as the film begins is attempting to leave her husband, Colin Clive’s sadistic and irrationally jealous shipping magnate Bruce Vail. Unwilling to accept the possibility that she hasn’t been cheating on him, but unable to prove that she has, he devises a scheme to “catch” her in his chauffeur Michael’s (Ivan Lebedeff) arms in order to prevent the divorce from becoming final (because she will no longer be “blameless” in the eyes of the law). Unfortunately for Vail, Paul just happens to be putting a drunken companion to bed (“you can’t drink all of the wine in Paris in one night–it’s practically impossible!”) next door from the apartment where the tawdry scene will play out and hears something:

He creeps out onto the balcony and peers through the neighboring window:

When Michael begins to force himself on Irene, Paul makes a split-second decision to pose as a robber. He pulls his hat down over his eyes:

Climbs inside:

And lays Michael out with what Nick Pinkerton amusingly characterizes as “one of those right-on-the-chin one-punch knockout swings so prevalent in Golden Age Hollywood filmmaking”:

Just then Vail and his lawyer Norton (George Meeker) come rushing in. Paul holds them with a pretend gun (the old finger in the coat pocket trick):

“Steals” Irene’s pearl necklace and other jewelry as they look on and then orders her to get her coat:

Finally, Paul locks Vail and his lawyer in the closet and he and Irene make their escape:

Cue the film’s first of many major tonal shifts. As described by Hervé Dumont in his book Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic, “after this busy, Dashiell Hammett-like aperitif, regulated like a ballet and photographed in the style of film noir (Gregg Toland), we go into an English waltz.” Once they are alone together in a cab, Paul first offers a puzzled Irene a cigarette, then returns her necklace and jewels:

He explains that he is not, in fact, a thief and merely wanted to help her out of a sticky situation, to which she says, “all I can seem to say is ‘oh!'”

Paul proposes dinner and instructs the driver to head to an establishment called the Château Bleu when she accepts. Unfortunately, the neon sign out front goes out right as they arrive. This doesn’t deter Paul, who addresses the gentleman locking up (Leo Carrillo): “Cesare, you are not closing!” He replies, “no, we are not closing–we are closed!”

But Paul appears to know more about this man than just his name, and by playing to his vanity (“everyone here knows that you are the greatest chef in Paris, that is no news, but would you believe that you were that famous in America?”) convinces him to reopen the kitchen for a private engagement:

The musicians and their leader (George Davis) who preceded Cesare out the door are brought back even more easily by the mere mention of a champagne party:

And with that what Dumont calls “the paradigm of sequence of seduction” is off and running. Paul orders lobster cardinale (which according to Saveur was invented in Baltimore, where I spent most of the 2010s, by the way) à la Cesare and salad chiffonnade. Then he draws a face on his hand, as one does, and introduces Irene to “the woman he lives with,” Coco:

I admit to feeling perplexed by this particular decision the first few times I watched History, but part of the shtick is that Coco doesn’t have a filter, which gives Paul a way to let Irene know that he is single and ask her what the hell precipitated the scene in her apartment earlier without technically violating societal norms. Dan Callahan further observes that when she reappears toward the end of the film, “Borzage uses this comic explosion to keep us off balance, unguarded, making us laugh so that when the lovers are reminded of their problems, we feel their pain much more deeply.”

Anyway, Paul and Irene tell Cesare to keep their food warm, much to his chagrin, and commence to dance until dawn, with Irene discarding clothing all the while. To again quote Dumont:

The camera frames Irene’s shoes, pans to her mink stole lying on the floor, and finally insistently follows the languorous steps of the dancers. The polysemy of images makes this erotic striptease–Irene is only wearing a long silk negligee–the outward expression of confidence and progressive abandonment (without saying a word, she says more to aul than she has ever said to her husband), but also one of detachment, of breaking off: jewels, shoes, and mink are signs of Bruce Vail’s property.

But although to them the night they have passed together qualifies as the year that Paul must wait as a gentleman before its in good taste for him to utter the one the “only thing important enough to say to [Irene] tonight,” they soon discover that they are not yet free to be together. Irene returns home, she thinks just to pack up her belongings, to find Vail waiting for her. He leads her and the police to believe that Paul’s blow killed Michael, when in reality he finished the poor guy off himself:

Then tells her that unless she joins him on a trans-Atlantic steamer that very afternoon, he’ll commit all of his resources to “finding the murderer.” Cut to Paul at the Château Bleu, where–surprise!–he is the head waiter. He recommends a French 75 to the man he put to bed the previous evening as a hangover cure, then writes the special du jour on a blackboard:

He’s expecting Irene to join him at five o’clock, and when his shift is over buys a newspaper to read while he waits. That’s when he sees this headline:

He resolves to follow Irene to New York, but locating her proves to be more challenging than he expected, because duh. Luckily Cesare decided to join him, and the two hatch a scheme to convince the owner of a restaurant called Victor’s to hire them to turn it into the hottest place in the city, which they do. Finally, one night Irene shows up in a dress that I’d *love* to see sparkle on a good nitrate print and claims the table he has ordered the staff to keep empty for her every night.

Sure, she’s with Vail, but yada yada yada the next thing you know she’s showing Paul how to make “eggs à la Kansas” the following morning:

And that, two-thirds of the way through History Is Made at Night, is when things *really* start to get interesting. Because, as noted by Brian Darr, screenwriters Gene Towne and Graham Baker appear to have intentionally capitalized on the 25th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic by ending the movie with a ship hitting an iceberg! There is, as yet, no hint of this in the breakfast scene depicted above, but on a postprandial stroll Irene lets it slip that the reason she and Vail were about to depart for Paris on the Hindenburg (seriously) was so that she could testify against the man arrested for the death of Michael. Paul barely hesitates: he and Irene will return to Paris on Vail’s boat the Princess Irene because he cannot allow an innocent man to go to the guillotine for a crime he believes he committed. And suddenly the stakes Borzage are gambling become clear. He is famous for placing obstacles between his romantic leads, but this one is a doozy even by his standards: the barrier is their own human decency. The film’s climax reenacts their star-crossed love affair, but on a bigger canvas to emphasize the universality of their plight. When Vail orders the captain of the Princess Irene to speed forward despite the hazardous conditions his vessel is sailing through, ostensibly to set a record but really to destroy Paul and Irene, he is no longer imperiling just their lives, but thousands of others.

Their union was already on death row, but once the ship starts sinking and its lifeboats fill up, the sentence is extended to hundreds of other couples.

The fundamental injustice of the two soulmates being separated from one another has been compounded, their sacrifice takes on even more heroic dimensions, and the only suitable reward is a miracle: although he and Irene don’t know it yet, Paul has already been acquitted, and a pardon comes through for their fellow passengers at the eleventh hour as well: “attention everyone, attention. The forward bulkheads are holding and the ship is in no danger of sinking,” comes the unexpected announcement. “Help is on the way. The lifeboats are standing by and you will soon be with your families.” Their reactions represent the full range of emotions that Paul and Irene, who for now still think they’ve only been granted a stay of execution, will presumably soon feel:

The final image of a kiss promises that our heroes truly will live happily ever after:

…at least until the Germans march into Paris about three years later. Of course, we could take things one step further and read the suicide of Bruce Vail as anticipating the end of that conflict. This, ultimately, is what connects this month’s movie and drink in my mind: the thing to remember about autumn is that it’s followed by winter, spring, and summer, just as war follows peace follows war. So be merry, pour yourself another glass of champagne, and have another helping of lobster cardinale:

Because the worst of times must by definition eventually get better, and nothing gold can stay.

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.

As I have mentioned previously, after I publish my last “Drink & a Movie” post in early 2026 I plan to edit all of them into a book. My chief model for this endeavor will be Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails by “Dr. Cocktail” Ted Haigh, which features a blend of images, drink lore, and practical advice in perfect proportions and which is spiral-bound for ease of use as all recipe books should be! Haigh’s version of the classic East India Cocktail has been in heavy rotation at our house since the end of raspberry season, so it seemed like a logical choice for this month’s drink. Here’s how we make it:

3 ozs. Brandy (Frapin VSOP)
1/2 oz. Raspberry syrup (we use the recipe below from Jeffrey Morgenthaler’s The Bar Book)
1 teaspoon Maraschino liqueur (Luxardo)
1 teaspoon Ferrand Yuzu Dry Curaçao
1 dash Angostura Bitters

Make the raspberry syrup by simmering two cups of fresh raspberries with eight ounces of water in a medium saucepan for five to ten minutes until everything is approximately the same color, then strain. Add one cup of sugar while the mixture is still hot, stir until dissolved, let cool, then bottle and refrigerate. Make the cocktail by stirring all ingredients with ice and straining into a chilled glass. Garnish with a cherry.

The East India Cocktail is an elegant beverage. Haigh explains that it “was named not for the eastern part of India but for all of it and more: India, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and the entirety of the British colonies.” This therefore struck me as a perfect opportunity to break out the bottle of yuzu Curaçao I picked up at The Wine Source in Baltimore last winter since I associate it with that corner of the world more than its West Indian cousin. The dominant flavor is of course cognac (there are three ounces of it, after all), but the other ingredients serve the same function as the atmosphere at the palace of Mopu, where most of this month’s movie Black Narcissus takes place: they exaggerate everything. So it’s fruitier, sweeter, more mysterious cognac. Speaking of which: considering how much of it you’re going to use, it’s definitely worth splurging on a good bottle! Frapin VSOP was a recommendation by someone at Ithaca’s always reliable Cellar d’Or and we like it here and to sip on its own quite a bit.

Black Narcissus is set in the part of the British Empire that the East India Cocktail is named after, and it has been on my mind ever since I was fortunate enough to see it at last year’s Nitrate Picture Show, so it was an obvious way to complete the pairing. Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD release:

It can also be streamed via The Criterion Channel and a number of other commercial platforms for free, with a subscription, or for a rental fee. Some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Thanks to brilliant Oscar-winning art direction by Alfred Junge and cinematography by Jack Cardiff, along with stunning matte paintings by W. Percy Day, Black Narcissus is one of the most transportative films ever shot entirely in a studio. It begins with a series of shots that establish the setting:

This is followed by an introduction to Mopu, which the Order of the Servants of Mary plans to convert into a convent, that Priya Jaikumar notes “is filtered through three people, all of whom are less than objective about the place and the nuns’ mission.” We see it first through the eyes of Reverend Mother Dorothea (Nancy Roberts), who ponders an illustration in a book:

Then Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr), who is being sent there as the order’s youngest Sister Superior, imagines it as she reads a letter from Mr. Dean (David Farrar), the British agent of The Old General Toda Raj (Esmond Knight) who has given it to them:

Mr. Dean’s letter reveals that the General’s father previously housed his concubines in Mopu:

And introduces us to the local holy man who sits motionless day in and day out with his face to the mountains:

Before seamlessly transitioning into a depiction of the General giving instructions to Mopu’s housekeeper Angu Ayah (May Hallatt) and Mr. Dean, who we see for the first time riding a pony that is absurdly small for a man of his height:

The rest of the nuns who will occupy Mopu, or Saint Faith as it is now to be called, are introduced in the next scene, which per Roderick Heath is reminiscent of “the kind of war movies where a team of talents is assembled for a dangerous mission in enemy territory.” There’s Sister Briony (Judith Furse), the strong one; Sister Philippa (Flora Robson) for the garden; and Sister Blanche or “Honey” (Jenny Laird), because Sister Clodagh will need to be popular:

As well as Sister Ruth (Kathleen Byron) because “she’s a problem,” but “with a smaller community, she may be better.” Sister Ruth is initially represented as an empty place at the convent’s dinner table:

But she appears very soon afterward in corporeal form at Mopu ringing a bell perched at the end of a dizzying abyss which Bertrand Tavernier calls “absolutely breathtaking” in the DVD extra The Audacious Adventurer and an example of special effects that are more impressive than those of the digital era because “these seem to have a soul: they are not just the product of technology but are infused with emotion.”

Dave Kehr observes that “despite the great wit and character of [Emeric] Pressburger’s dialogue, Black Narcissus is a film that develops almost entirely through formal rather than dramatic means.” One of my favorite examples of this is the way the past elbows its way into the sisters’ present the longer they remain at Mopu. Early on, Sister Clodagh’s flashbacks are signaled by dissolves, like this one:

Which is followed by a medium shot of Clodagh fishing amidst a shimmering disco ball of sunlight glistening on the waves that Martin Scorsese accurately lauds in his DVD commentary track as “overwhelming” for those lucky enough to see the film on the big screen in a good print:

As the film progresses and her memories become as real as whatever she’s experiencing live, though, this is replaced by straight cuts, for instance from Sister Honey’s description of a jacket worn by the Old General’s heir (Sabu) as “just like my grandmother’s footstool” to this one from Sister Clodagh’s youth:

This sequence also ends with an astonishing moment which Ryland Walker Knight describes as transitioning “in one shot from technicolor beauty to the void, the loss of grounding becoming as powerful an edit as imaginable”:

Sister Philippa’s own struggles to combat the return of the repressed are similarly conveyed more by this image of her staring off into space:

And this close-up of her blistered and calloused hands:

Than anything in the screenplay. But Kehr is right that this tendency is best exemplified in the incredible final sequence, where it’s “enough to see the bright, red lipstick that Sister Ruth has put on to know that the apocalypse is near.” He’s referring to the scene which follows her sudden appearance in a red dress to announce to put an exclamation point on her decision to not renew her vows (the Servants of Mary are only bound to their order for one year at a time):

Which was foreshadowed much earlier by a shot of her watching Sister Clodagh speak to Mr. Dean while the convent’s young translator Joseph Anthony (Eddie Whaley Jr.) teaches students how to say the names of various weapons in English:

And set up by first a fatal act of attention and kindness by Mr. Dean, who thanks her for her misguided efforts to treat a woman bleeding to death in the convent’s hospital instead of immediately fetching the much more experienced Sister Briony:

And then a fatal decision by Sister Clodagh to ask Joseph Anthony to bring her a glass of milk:

Sister Ruth dumps it out, assuming that it’s poisoned:

And spots Sister Clodagh talking to Mr. Dean once again:

She rushes downstairs past a dramatic streak of sunlight on the floor that Kristin Thompson says in her video essay “Color Motifs in Black Narcissus“ Technicolor technicians lobbied Cardiff to remove from the film after they misidentified it as a lens flare:

And takes up position behind a window so that she can eavesdrop on them:

Hearing Mr. Dean console Sister Clodagh leads directly to Sister Ruth donning her red dress. Sister Clodagh implores her to at least wait until morning before departing Saint Faith. And so they settle in for a long night, Sister Ruth with her lipstick and compact and Sister Clodagh with her bible:

The camera tilts from Sister Ruth’s lips to her red eyes and a forehead dotted with beads of sweat:

She outlasts Sister Clodagh in a staring contest of sorts in which the passage of time is indicated by cutting back and forth between a shrinking candle and the wall art in Mopu:

And makes her escape when Sister Clodagh finally succumbs to fatigue:

Sister Ruth treks through the jungle in a sequence which contains a shot that reminds me of one in Suspiria that I wrote about in my October, 2022 Drink & a Movie post:

And finally arrives at Mr. Dean’s bungalow, where she tells him she loves him. He rejects her, and she literally sees red and passes out:

In his autobiography A Life in Movies, director Michael Powell describes the climax of Black Narcissus, which ensues after she comes to and returns to Mopu, as an experiment with “composed film” whereby the blocking and editing were timed to composer Brian Easdale’s music, as opposed to him creating this part of the score based on rushes. Reminiscent of a horror film, it begins with a two shot sequence of Sister Ruth watching Sister Clodagh intently in the predawn hours:

Sister Ruth stalks Sister Clodagh, her presence felt but never seen, as the latter woman attempts to go about a semblance of her morning routine:

Finally, checking her watch and realizing what time it is, Sister Clodagh steps outside to ring the convent’s bell. This is followed by perhaps the film’s single most famous image:

Sister Ruth attempts to push Sister Clodagh over Mopu’s cliffs:

But Sister Clodagh maintains her grip on the bell’s rope:

And in the ensuing struggle it is Sister Ruth who ultimately falls to her death:

Kehr notes that India achieved independence mere months after Black Narcissus‘s premiere on April 24, 1947 and suggests that the final images of a procession down from Mopu can be read as anticipating Britain’s departure.

“For Powell and Pressburger,” Kehr writes, “these are not images of defeat, but of a respectful, rational retreat from something that England never owned and never understood. It is the tribute paid by west to east, full of fear and gratitude.” This reading is complicated for me by the fact that the film doesn’t end with Sister Clodagh looking back at Mopu as it’s covered by mist:

But rather with Mr. Dean bidding a tender farewell to her:

The rains beginning to fall, proving his prediction that the sisters wouldn’t last this long correct:

And finally him looking on as they ride away:

So, yes, the last image is of a British retreat, but it’s a POV shot from the perspective of an Englishman who will remain behind and who promises to take care of Sister Ruth’s grave. It therefore doesn’t play as a farewell to Empire for me so much as an elegy for a certain idea of Britishness, one caught impossibly between the two ways of living in a colonized land previously articulated by Sister Philippa: “either you must live like Mr. Dean, or . . . or like the holy man. Either ignore it or give yourself up to it.” Sister Clodagh intuits that there must be a third way, but cannot articulate what it is, which is why she and the surviving sisters must leave. It’s also why, for all of Black Narcissus‘s gorgeous and inspired cinematography, my favorite moment of all might be the simple scene in which Sister Philippa places the flowers she planted instead of vegetables like she was supposed to on Sister Ruth’s grave:

Here, more than the film’s actual final images, is the respect, fear, and gratitude that Kehr speaks of, as well as, appropriately, sadness. Which is too somber of a note to end a post in this particular series on, so here’s a shot of a shirtless Mr. Dean:

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.

July is always the month of Bastille Day and the Tour de France and this year it also ushers in the Paris Summer Olympics, so I knew I was going to choose a French film to write about, but which one? I’ve long been meaning to highlight the Employees Only Martinez from Jason Kosmas and Dushan Zaric’s Speakeasy book, which has a dominant absinthe flavor that makes me think of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Moulin Rouge, so that seemed like a good starting point. From there it was a short hop, high kick, and cartwheel to my final destination, since with all due respect to John Huston, Baz Luhrmann, and the other filmmakers who have made it their subject, one film set in that famous establishment towers above the rest: French Cancan. But first, the drink! Here’s how you make it:

2 1/2 ozs. Gin (Drumshanbo Gunpowder Irish)
1/2 oz. Luxardo Maraschino
3/4 ozs. Dolin Blanc vermouth
1/4 oz. Absinthe bitters

Make the absinthe bitters by combining 3/4 cup absinthe (Kosmas and Zaric call for Pernod 68, but I used St. George Absinthe Verte because that’s what we currently have in our bar), 1/8 cup Green Chartreuse, 1 1/2 teaspoons Fee Brothers mint bitters, 1/4 teaspoon Peychaud’s bitters, and 1/4 teaspoon Angostura bitters in a small jar. Stir the amount of bitters that the recipe calls for and all of the rest of the ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Speakeasy calls for Beefeater 24 gin, but I wasn’t able to find it in Ithaca so I went with Drumshanbo (which I had not previously tried) because the website The Gin is In described it as having a similar flavor profile, including the green tea notes which Kosmas and Dushan Zaric made a point of listing as a key aspect of their cocktail’s finish. We agree with them that the “super velvetiness” of Dolin Blanc is essential to creating a texture that makes the Employees Only Martinez a pleasure to sip. It also contributes floral and vanilla notes that play well with the anise and matcha that come from the other ingredients. This is a bigger drink at four ounces and a potent one, so handle with care, but it was the perfect accompaniment to the Greek salad with feta-brined grilled chicken that we had for dinner the other night, and I look forward to trying it with briny oysters sometime soon per Speakeasy‘s recommendation that it goes great with “raw bar of any kind.”

On to the movie! Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD release:

It can also be streamed via The Criterion Channel with a subscription, and some people (including current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students) may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Although French Cancan begins with a notice that “this story and its characters are imaginary” and should therefore “not be seen to represent real people or events,” it’s transparently a fictionalized account of the Moulin Rouge’s founding. One night while slumming in Montmarte with rich patrons of his night club The Chinese Screen and his mistress/biggest star Lola de Castro de la Fuente de Extremadura aka “La Belle Abbesse” (María Félix), Jean Gabin’s Henri Danglard is struck by inspiration. As he explains later to his M.C. Casimir “le Serpentin” (Philippe Clay), “do you know what I’ll give them? A taste of the low life for millionaires. Adventure in comfort. Garden tables, the best champagne, great numbers by the finest artistes. The bourgeois will be thrilled to mix with our girls without fear of disease or getting knifed.”

He buys a dance hall called The White Queen with “drafts, promises, a lot of hot air,” and with the help of an investor named Baron Walter (Jean-Roger Caussimon) who knowingly shares Lola with him (“the precarious modern world judges by appearance only–respect them, and I’ll remain your supporter,” he tells Danglard) sets about transforming it. First, though, he returns to Montmarte, orders an absinthe, and waits for a young lady named Nini (Françoise Arnoul) who caught his eye on that fateful night out to wander by.

When she finally appears he follows her home and negotiates with her mother to secure her services in a scene which Janet Bergstrom has described as her “virtually sell[ing]” her daughter to Danglard:

He then recruits an old friend named Madame Guibole (Lydia Johnson) to teach Nini and a number of other girls a now-passé dance that she was famous for back in the day called the cancan, which he has the bright idea to revive as the “French Cancan” to tap into a fad for English names. The plan is almost torpedoed when a Russian prince (Giani Esposito) infatuated with Nini draws Lola’s attention to her presence at a government official’s visit to the Moulin Rouge construction site by conspicuously kissing her hand as the “Marseillaise” plays, making Lola jealous because she immediately realizes that Danglard has brought her there:

Lola kicks Nini in the shin, causing a brawl to break out. As Danglard attends to her, a troublemaker eggs Nini’s lover Paulo (Franco Pastorino) on by observing that “the boss is lifting your girl’s skirts,” which ultimately results in him pushing Danglard into a pit:

Baron Walter, enraged at the breach of Danglard’s verbal contract with him, withdraws his backing, but the prince steps in. Alas, he promptly tries to commit suicide when Lola makes him aware of the fact that Nini is love with Danglard following a remarkable scene in which he appears to sit motionless in a chair for many hours to confirm that they are indeed an item:

Luckily he bungles the attempt. He asks Nini for a “make-believe memory” that he can dazzle the younger generations with upon his return to Russia and they spend the evening touring all the Parisian hot spots in a sequence that features contemporary actors playing the biggest stars of the Belle Epoque, including Édith Piaf as Eugénie Buffet:

Afterward he presents Nini with the deeds to the Moulin Rouge in Danglard’s name (“it’s simplest”), but there’s one more rapids to navigate before the show can go on: Nini spies Danglard kissing his newest discovery Esther Georges (Anna Amendola) backstage on opening night and refuses to dance unless she can have him all to herself. A fiery speech by Danglard takes care of that, though:

And per David Cairns a contrite Nini wearing a “camouflaged dress” is finally “absorbed into the theatre”:

Bergstrom can’t forgive Renoir for what she calls French Cancan‘s “retrograde representation of male-female relationships,” a criticism which admittedly rings true when he and editor Borys Lewis place shots of Guibole leading Nini and her fellow dancers through a rehearsal next to one of pianist Oscar (Gaston Gabaroche) watering flowers:

But the film also contains multiple floods of women, which feels very much like an explicit acknowledgement that this is just a conceit–after all, dams break and, in the immortal words of Poison, “every rose has its thorns.” Here’s the first:

With the second being the nine-minute-long cancan that concludes the film which begins with dancers dropping from the ceiling, bursting through a poster on the wall, and leaping off a balcony:

And then explodes into a celebration of color and motion which is not merely the best thing about this film, but one of the most joyously spectacular sequences in all of cinema:

André Bazin writes beautifully about two other moments in his monograph on the director, which he offers in support of the statement that “Renoir’s is the only film I have ever seen which is as successful as the painting which inspired it in evoking the internal density of the visual universe and the necessity of appearances that are the foundation of any pictorial masterpiece.” First is the moment Danglard spots Esther from across an alleyway. “The decor, the colors, the subject, the actress, everything suggests a rather free evocation of Auguste Renoir, or perhaps even more of Degas. The woman bustles about in the half shadow of the room, then turning about, leans out the window to shake out her dustcloth. The cloth is bright yellow. It flutters an instant and disappears. Clearly this shot, which is essentially pictorial, was conceived and composed around the brief appearance of this splash of yellow.”

Next is this description of the young woman bathing in the background of the scene when Danglard takes Nini to Guibole’s for the first time. “She appears in the background through a half-open door, which she finally closes with a rather nonchalant modesty. This could well have been a subject dear to Auguste Renoir or to Degas. But the real affinity with the painters does not lie in this specific reference. It is a much more startling phenomenon: the fact that for the first time in the cinema the nude is not erotic but aesthetic.”

For Bazin moments like these combine to create the impression of “a painting which exists in time and has an interior development,” a sentiment echoed by his contemporary Pierre Leprohon, who says in his book Jean Renoir: An Investigation into His Films and Philosophy that “Renoir was not composing color canvases on the screen; he never forgot the essence of cinema, which is motion” and adds, “that is why French Cancan can be considered a major step in color films. It develops painting further without imitating it.”

Dave Kehr observes in his book When Movies Mattered: Reviews from a Transformative Decade that while Renoir frequently took actors as his subject, this is the first and only time he decided to make a film about a director, and that he shared more in common with his protagonist than just their common profession:

There is, obviously, a lot of Renoir in Danglard–Danglard’s work in creating his show exactly parallels Renoir’s work in creating his film, and Danglard’s revisionist cancan finds its aesthetic equivalent in the artificial Paris Renoir has fashioned to contain it. And we can assume that there is a lot of Danglard in Renoir, particularly his fashion of handling his performers, accepting their eccentricities along with their talents, and trying to bring out their most profoundly individual abilities. But direction is the most mysterious of creative processes, and Renoir knows to respect the mystery. What does Danglard do, exactly? Not much that we can really see. For the most part, he is simply there, observing intently and saying nothing. And yet the vision that emerges is Danglard’s vision, developed through an almost imperceptible series of choices and in flections. It is Danglard’s sublime passivity that makes French Cancan Renoir’s most direct and penetrating statement of the art of the movies. The director is the medium between the world and the image: he takes from people the reality that belongs to them and then sells it back in heightened form.

Cairns sees another statement about cinema in the parade of shots of people watching the climactic cancan which is positioned near the end of it.

“These are curtain calls for all the bit-players and leads in the film,” he argues, “and also a kind of farewell to an era, and also something else — a celebration of the audience’s role in the entertainment, and therefore a warm tip of the hat to us, watching on a TV or computer sixty years after Renoir made the film, a hundred and twenty seven years after the events depicted in the film failed to happen in as elegant and colourful a manner in reality.” This would, of course, make the stumbling drunk’s bow in French Cancan‘s final image ours:

Which as the author of a series called “Drink & a Movie” I very much appreciate. So here’s to you and here’s to me!

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 number one source of new cocktails to try is Frederic Yarm’s Cocktail Virgin Slut blog. One thing I like about it is that he tends to work with spirits he already has in his bar, to the point where you can get enough of a sense for what’s there to pick up a few of those bottles yourself and follow along at home. Because the recipes he posts show up in my RSS feed every day, it took me longer than it should have to buy his Drink & Tell: A Boston Cocktail Book and Boston Cocktails: Drunk & Told books, but I’m glad I finally did because they’re great volumes to flip through in search of inspiration. While doing so with the latter awhile back, the Triumph of Pompei cocktail created by Tyler Wang of No. 9 Park jumped out at me as a great drink to pair with Damsels in Distress, one of my favorite movies of the 2010s, first because it’s name evokes Seven Oaks University’s Roman letter fraternities, but also because it’s similarly light and effervescent on the surface with a deeper, more complex core. Here’s how you make it:

1 1/4 ozs. Cocchi Americano
3/4 oz. Fernet Branca
1 oz. Grapefruit juice
1/2 oz. Simple syrup

Shake with ice and strain into a glass containing 1 1/2 ozs. club soda. Fill glass with ice, add a pinch of salt to the cube on top, and garnish with a grapefruit twist.

Yarm uses one “i” in the name of this drink in both the book and on his blog, but per Wikipedia that refers to the modern Italian city, whereas I’m interested in the ancient Roman one, so I’m going with two. However you spell it, the Triumph of Pompeii greets you with citrus on the nose and sweetness on the tongue. You get the Fernet right away along with the wine flavors of the Cocchi Americano, but the former stands out on the finish, which is where the grapefruit starts to assert itself as well. Diffords Guide recommends using grapefruit soda in place of club soda, but I think this disrupts the progression I just described: as is it’s a perfect accompaniment to grilling up dinner on an early June evening or settling in to enjoy the chaos of the Roman Holidays like these young ladies are doing:

Speaking of whom, Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), Violet (Greta Gerwig), and Heather (Carrie MacLemore) are three of the titular damsels in distress in director Whit Stillman’s first film of the 21st century after a thirteen year pause. Here’s a picture of my Sony Pictures Classic DVD release:

It can also be streamed via Apple TV+ and Prime Video for a rental fee, and current Cornell University faculty, staff, and students have access to it via Academic Video Online as well.

Damsels begins during registration for Seven Oaks’s fall semester with Rose saying “there” and Violet responding, “yes, I think so.”

The person they are talking about is Lio Tipton’s Lily, a transfer student who they offer to “help.”

Lily doesn’t actually seem wildly enthusiastic about this idea, which is understandable considering that their first conversation starts out with Violet pointedly observing that “clothes can be critical for
confidence — and an overall sense of well-being,” then pivots to an explanation of what “nasal shock syndrome” is after Rose violently reacts to the body odor of some passing male students:

Lily has lost her housing assignment, though, and when her three new friends offer to let her room with them, she gratefully accepts. We follow the new quartet to the suicide prevention center they run through which they meet the temporary fifth member of the their group pictured on the DVD case, Caitlin Fitzgerald’s Priss, along with Nick Blaemire and Aubrey Plaza in memorable cameo roles as Freak Astaire and Depressed Debbie respectively, all three of whom can be seen in the screengrab below rehearsing a show that the center is putting on for therapeutic reasons:

The five leads, who are shot more than once to look like they are literally glowing, next crash the first meeting of the Daily Complainer, the school newspaper.

There they meet editor Rick De Wolfe, who is played by another stalwart of American comedies of the era, Zach Woods, seen here condescendingly explaining that the publication’s name derives from the fact that it comes out every day even though the questioner was obviously referring to the “Complainer” part:

The group has a falling out with Priss after she steals Violet’s boyfriend Frank (Ryan Metcalf), who doesn’t realize that his eyes are blue. “I’m not going to go around checking what color my eyes are!” he says:

At least he knows what blue is–moments later we discover that his roommate Thor (Billy Magnussen) has not yet learned the colors. He’s not embarrassed, though: “What’s embarrassing is pretending to know what you don’t,” he explains, “or putting other people down just because you think they don’t know as much as you.”

The situation with Frank sends Violet into a “tailspin,” and her roommates are worried when she disappears, especially after Rose, who has known her since seventh grade, explains that Violet isn’t even her real name–she was born Emily Tweeter (“like a bird”), suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and lost both of her parents. Luckily, whatever Violet’s original intentions were, she is saved by a bar of soap:

As she explains to the waitresses (Carolyn Farina, who portrayed Audrey Roget in Stillman’s films Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, and Shinnerrie Jackson) and some fellow customers (Gerron Atkinson and Jonnie Brown, who per IMDb is a fellow Pitt alum) at a diner she breakfasts at afterward who express concern that she’s one of “those depressed students down from the university” intent on killing herself, she’s not as crazy as she was yesterday “due to the salutary effect of scent on the human psyche”:

Meanwhile Lily gets involved first with two young men, a cinephilic graduate student from France named Xavier (Hugo Becker) who practices Catharism:

And Adam Brody’s Charlie Walker, whose real name is Fred Packenstacker and who has my favorite line in entire movie during a later scene in which Violet challenges his belief that decadence has declined. “How?” she asks. “How?” he replies, “or in what ways?”

Anyway, Alia Shawkat makes an appearance:

Violet ends up with Charlie/Fred, Lily confesses that all she really wants is to be “normal,” and the whole thing ends with first a musical number set to the song “Things Are Looking Up” from the 1937 Fred Astaire film A Damsel in Distress, then Violet fulfilling her dream of starting an international dance craze, the Sambola!

As you likely gathered, Damsels in Distress isn’t set in the “real” world. It is, instead, a stylized distillation of the essence of the college experience. In an Indiewire article containing highlights from a Q&A which followed a sneak preview screening, Stillman (who also wrote the film’s screenplay) explained that Lio Tipton “subverted [his] intentions” with their performance as Lily:

Lily was clearly the nemesis character, this person you think is going to be a friend, and you think is going to be wonderful, but they let you down. And Analeigh, by being really natural and likeable in scene after scene, had created this problem where audiences like and identify so much with Lily, that they dislike [Greta Gerwig’s] Violet character. And it subverts our purposes. That’s a negative commercially, but it somehow enriches the film. My cliches were unintentionally subverted by a superior actress.

Lily’s essential goodness comes through most clearly for me in the way she sort of hops when she talks:

The key to understanding what’s going on here is the same thing I love most about the film: it celebrates college as a safe space for reinvention. Compare, for instance, the diner conversation referenced above about people who actually kill themselves by jumping in front of cars on the highway with the “suicidal Ed School” students who keep throwing themselves off the top of their two-story building, which I assume was inspired by Leonard’s Leap from A Damsel in Distress:

Going off to college is one of the best opportunities many of us ever get to actually become the individuals we aspire to be, which is much easier when you aren’t surrounded by people who have known you for your entire life and think they already know who you are, and for as long as you’re there you have access to a support system dedicated to helping you do so. Violet is the purest embodiment of this theme, which is why she’s the hero of the story, and which also explains why there’s nothing incidental about her dance craze aspiration. As Miriam Bale put it in her Damsels in Distress review for Slant, “‘Sambola!’ might be shorthand for a message that, if you follow certain steps, even sloppily, as long as you’re a pain-in-the neck about never compromising, as long as you keep at it, you too can be a better person.”

Rick DeWolfe is the closest thing the film actually has to a villain in large part because he clearly thinks he’s already his best self; Lily doesn’t really want to change, either, but because of the humanity that Tipton brings to the role, we don’t accept her rejection of Violet’s “doufi orientation” as the final word on who she is. After all she has learned a few things from her roommates, even if only in spite of herself, as shown by her reaction to the smell of Doar Dorm:

And so it is that she comes to represent a reminder that eccentrics like Violet aren’t ultimately defined just by the number of lost souls who they save, but also the regular people they transform in much subtler ways, which is much more interesting than just serving as a foil to her.

Along similar lines, Damsels is also one of the purest celebrations of the joy of learning you’ll ever find in the movies. Stillman notes on the commentary track included with the DVD that “color stands for all kinds of things you don’t know about,” and superficially ridiculous though it may be, it’s hard to imagine a better depiction of the thrill of finally getting to apply hard-earned knowledge in a practical setting than Thor, who has been “hitting the books,” shouting out the colors of the rainbow:

To be clear, though, the best thing about Damsels is Greta Gerwig, and I’m hard pressed to think of a role I enjoyed her in more. In a Q&A included on the DVD as an extra titled “An Evening with Damsels in Distress,” she explained what attracted her to the film: “I think my idea of what actors did at some point was: you’re in a musical, you have to be able to dance, and sing, and tap dance, specifically, so being able to be in this movie felt like the pinnacle of achievement of my acting career.”

The climactic musical number at the end of Damsels features steps, dresses, and a fountain that Peter Tonguette notes are reminiscent of my February Drink & a Movie selection The Young Girls of Rochefort:

And ends with another benediction from the sun that any actor from any era would be lucky to include in their highlight reel:

Looking at this and the hot pink Sony Pictures Classic logo that the movie begins with, I wonder if it’s too much to suggest that without Damsels, we might not have “I’m Just Ken”?

Probably yes, but this does bring us back to this month’s pairing, I think. The “triumph” of Pompeii is of course that we remember it to this day, and the message of Barbie is not that the eponymous doll was significant in any particular way, but rather that it’s meaningful in and of itself that she was part of the lives of millions of children. This sounds an awful lot like the answer Violet gives to Professor Black (Taylor Nichols, also of Metropolitan, in which he plays a character with the same last name) when he asks why she considers starting a dance craze so important. So here’s to the Sambola! Long may it “enhance and elevate the human experience” and continue “bringing together millions of people in a joyous celebration of our God-given faculties”!

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 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.