The Prodigal Cinephile

Between Valentine’s Day in February and Easter in March/April, I think it’s fair to say we’re in the “chocolate quarter” of the calendar year! In honor of such, this is the first of three Drink & a Movie posts in a row that will feature a drink made with one of my favorite underrated heroes of the back bar: crème de cacao. As Paul Clarke notes in The Cocktail Chronicles, its bad reputation is likely attributable “the substandard quality of many chocolate liqueurs” prevalent on the market until Tempus Fugit Spirits’ version became widely available about ten years ago. It and the Giffard white crème de cacao that I prefer in the 20th Century cocktail I wrote about in 2022 for reasons of color are both excellent, though, and there’s no longer any use to shy away from this ingredient. As described in a post on his blog, Clarke created this month’s drink, the Theobroma, as his version of a chocolate martini. Here’s how to make it:

2 ozs. Reposado tequila (Mi Campo)
1/2 oz. Punt e Mes
1/4 oz. Bigallet China-China
1 tsp. Crème de cacao (Tempus Fugit)
2 dashes Bittermens Xocolatl Mole Bitters

Stir all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange twist.

The Theobroma begins with orange on the nose and an impression of sweet and bitter on the sip which quickly comes into focus as agave and chocolate. “Definitely a tequila drink,” said My Loving Wife, and I wouldn’t want to use something much more assertive than Mi Campos, which in my opinion is currently the best value in the reposado category available here in Ithaca, NY. It is rested in wine barrels, which contributes vanilla flavors also prominent in Tempus Fugit’s crème de cacao that come through on the swallow along with spice and more orange. Clarke’s description of his concoction as “a bold, elbow-throwing mixture that’s unafraid to let its chocolate flag fly” is spot-on, and I’m not going to try to improve on it!

Believe it or not, the chocolate martini was created by actors Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of the movie Giant. The book Rock Hudson: His Story contains the tale:

Rock and Elizabeth stayed in rented houses across from each other, and it was in one of those houses on a Saturday night in 1955 that they invented the chocolate martini. They both loved chocolate and drank martinis. Why not put chocolate liqueur and chocolate syrup in a vodka martini? They thought it tasted terrific and made a great contribution to society until they began to suffer from indigestion. “We were really just kids, we could eat and drink anything and never needed sleep,” Rock said.

Given these origins, what better film to pair with the Theobroma than a riff on the Rock Hudson vehicle All That Heaven Allows that hails from Germany, “the land of chocolate,” and involves stomach problems as a plot point? I am, of course, referring to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. Here’s a picture of my Criterion Collection DVD:

It is also streaming on the Criterion Channel and Max with a subscription, can be rented from a variety of other platforms, 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.

As Klaus Ulrich Militz writes in his book Personal Experience and the Media, the relationship between Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and All That Heaven Allows “is not as clear as it may seem at first.” For starters, although both films revolve around a May-December romance, director Rainer Werner Fassbinder must have conceived of his movie before he encountered its supposed inspiration for the first time in autumn 1970 because “a rough outline of the film’s story-line is told by the chambermaid in the film The American Soldier,” which he shot two months earlier. The fact that his protagonists Emmi (Brigitte Mira) and Ali (El Hedi ben Salem) enter into a relationship with each other at the beginning of it also represents a major structural break with the earlier movie directed by Douglas Sirk, which “largely follows the emancipatory logic of the melodramatic genre because his heroine only gradually manages to overcome her passivity before she eventually commits herself to her lover.” Nonetheless, per Militz, “the fact remains that when Fassbinder eventually made Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in 1973 this was done under the impression of Sirk’s films.”

One place many people feel the influence of All That Heaven Allows is in Fassbinder’s use of color. For instance, in her chapter for the book Fassbinder Now: Film and Video Art, Brigitte Peucker observes that the “formal, conformist grey clothing” that Emmi and Ali get married in marks them as “constrained by the social order,” but that it’s offset “by the Sirkian red carnations that emblematize emotion”:

This seems to echo what Brian Price describes in his chapter for the book A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder as the typical reading of the vibrant red dress Jane Wyman’s Cary Scott wears in Heaven to show “what remains inside and–owing to social constraints–invisible.”

As he notes, though, Emmi’s flowers are different in that “Fassbinder’s colors, unlike Sirk’s, tend toward disharmony and away from the kind of color coordination that makes analogy possible.” Pointing out that the man Cary is with in the image above, Conrad Nagel’s Harvey, is wearing clothing that matches the furniture they are sitting on, Price argues that this provokes a simile: “Harvey, we might say, is like a couch, something to rest on, something solid but soft, immovable–and worst of all for Harvey, something inanimate, or merely functional.” Contrast this with the dresses Emmi favors elsewhere in Ali, such as the one she has on as she sits “in front of an amateur painting of horses running executed in pale yellow gold tones decidedly less bold than the ones Emmi wears” and curtains “which are no less busy than her dress but are nevertheless discordantly situated with respect to it–baby blue instead of navy blue, a dull grayish green instead of the saturated green to which it stands, in the overall composition, in odd contrast”:

To Price “the contrast eludes metaphor” and because “this green is not like that green, then Emmi cannot be defined by the objects and spaces that constitute her on a contingent–and thus reversible–basis.”

My Loving Wife explained to me that this is also a wrap dress like the one designed by Diane von Furstenberg, which per this Time Magazine article she created “for the kind of woman she aspired to be: independent, ambitious, and above all, liberated.” Fascinatingly, it also states that “von Furstenberg was told from a young age that ‘fear is not an option.'” The similarity of that quote to the title of this month’s movie may be just a coincidence, but Emmi’s fashion sense surely isn’t, especially when you consider how many of these garments she has in her wardrobe:

Fassbinder similarly uses the television and frames within frames that appear in Heaven, represented here by a single powerful camera movement:

As a launchpad to do his own thing. He transforms the TV from a would-be prison cell into an symbol for the respectable German family that Emmi’s son Bruno (Peter Gauhe) believes she has disgraced with her choice of husband:

Meanwhile, almost every other aspect of the film’s mise-en-scène is a cage. This includes the wedding where Ali and Emmi celebrate their wedding:

The apartment and bedroom where Ali seeks solace (and couscous!) after his relationship with Emmi calcifies into yet another instrument of exploitation:

The stairwell where Emmi eats lunch alone after being shunned by her charwomen:

Then, once back in their good graces, joins them in giving the cold shoulder to their new co-worker Yolanda (Helga Ballhaus), a Herzegovinian immigrant:

And a shot-reverse shot of a nosy neighbor (Elma Karlowa) watching Ali and Emmi mount the stairs of her building that, Manny Farber writes in an essay collected in the book Negative Space, “suggests all three, like all Fassbinder’s denizens, are caught in a shifting but nevertheless painful power game of top dogs and underdogs”:

But my favorite aspect of Ali is reminiscent less of Sirk than something Richard Jameson once said about the movie Once Upon a Time in the West. He described it as “an opera in which arias are not sung but stared,” and that’s a perfect fit for this film as well! You can practically hear the thoughts of Asphalt Bar proprietress Barbara (Barbara Valentin) as she sizes up Emmi, who has appeared in her establishment for a second time hoping to find Ali:

And those of the waiter (Hannes Gromball) at the restaurant “where Hitler used to eat from 1929 to ’33” (!) as he contemplates his unusual customers:

“Sometimes, long silences seem to be an expression of the social hostility encountered by Emmi and Ali, as in the climactic scene in an outdoor cafe immediately before their regenerative vacation,” notes James C. Franklin in a Literature/Film Quarterly article called “Method and Message: Forms of Communication in Fassbinder’s Angst Essen Seele Auf“ (the movie’s German title) where “the interaction of the visual image and the silence creates an atmosphere of utter coldness and hostility”:

However, my favorite examples of where (as Franklin eloquently puts it) “there is much to be heard in the silence of the soundtrack” are the looks Ali and Emmi give each other the morning after he first comes back from a night out blackout drunk:

And then doesn’t arrive home at all:

The latter occur in the film’s final ten minutes. In a response to a chapter in Robert Pippin’s book Douglas Sirk: Filmmaker and Philosopher for the national meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics that he posted on Letterboxd, Matt Strohl comments on a phenomenon that he calls the “double ending” of subversive melodramas whereby “an ostensible happy ending is subverted by some unsettling element, which might then prompt us to reflect on whether it was really such a happy ending after all and to reinterpret the film in this light.” Although All That Heaven Allows concludes with Cary resolving to “come home” to her lover Ron (Hudson), both scholars argue that we should feel uneasy about this, Pippin (as paraphrased by Strohl) because Cary “did not make the decision to enter into this relationship” but rather “fell into it because of Ron’s newfound need for a caretaker” and Strohl because “Cary has not gotten over her fears and become a full-fledged agent, but rather has slid into a different socially-defined gendered role that she has not actively chosen.”

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is a different kind of beast. The scene after the second staredown depicted above opens with Ali “gambling away a week’s wages” (as Barbara points out to him) at the Asphalt Bar:

He busts out and sends a friend to his place for 100 more marks. While he waits for the money, Ali goes to the restroom and proceeds to slap himself in the face multiple times in a weird twist on Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats freshening-up routine in The Hustler:

As he sits back down at the table and immediately proceeds to lose a hand, Emmi enters the bar in the background:

Barbara brings her a Coke, the drink she ordered the night she met Ali, and Emmi asks her to play the tune they later danced to. Ali and his companions stare at Emmi as Barbara selects the song on the jukebox in the foreground of a three-layer composition:

As soon as the music begins playing, Ali stands up and asks Emmi to dance. As the sway back and forth he confesses that he has slept with other women, but she assures him the it isn’t important and that he’s a free man who can do as he likes. “But when we’re together, we must be nice to each other,” she says. “Otherwise, life’s not worth living.”

“I don’t want other women,” he responds. “I love only you.” Suddenly, he collapses to the ground, moaning in pain:

The final scene takes place in a hospital. “He has a perforated stomach ulcer,” a doctor (Hark Bohm) tells Emmi. “It happens a lot with foreign workers. It’s the stress. And there’s not much we can do. We’re not allowed to send them to convalesce. We can only operate. And six months later they have another ulcer.”

“No he won’t,” Emmi insists. “I’ll do everything in my power. . . . ” The clearly skeptical doctor interrupts her: “Well, the best of luck anyway.” Emmi walks over to Ali and the camera tracks in on their reflection in the mirror:

The doctor closes the door:

And the film ends with a shot of Emmi crying as she holds an unconscious Ali’s hand:

The utility of the “double ending” for Strohl is that it can explicate an otherwise inchoate sense that “there’s something off” about a Hollywood ending. There’s obviously no need for that here, but if broaden this concept and reinterpret it through the lens of the drink writing idea of a “finish,” it can also give voice to whatever lingers in your mind after the final credits have rolled. Ali‘s finish is the same as the Theobroma’s: they’re both bittersweet, which, if you don’t think that’s appropriate to the Valentine Season, you’ve never really been in love.

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.

The San Francisco Nog created at Waltham, Massachusetts bar Deep Ellum has been a favorite in our house ever since Frederic Yarm wrote about it on his Cocktail Virgin Slut blog a few years ago. With Fernet Branca on my mind, it was natural that my thoughts would also turn to San Francisco, since for reasons Grant Marek chronicled for SFGate that spirit is linked to the city “in the same way that Malort is to Chicago and Guinness is to Dublin, Ireland.” This led me to a movie filmed there that I’ve been entranced with ever since I encountered stills from it in David Cook’s A History of Narrative Film as an undergraduate film studies major: The Lady from Shanghai. A dairy-based beverage would be a terrible fit for its hot and sweaty first half, so instead I’m taking a cue from the yacht the Circe which belongs to the titular lady Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) and her husband Arthur (Everett Sloane) and pairing it with the Don’t Give Up the Ship cocktail that most drinks historians agree first appeared by that name (there’s also a concoction called a Napoleon in The Savoy Cocktail Book with the exact same ingredients) in Crosby Gaige’s 1941 Cocktail Guide and Ladies Companion, but which, like the Last Word I wrote about in 2023, owes its present-day popularity to Seattle’s Zig Zag Cafe.

As Jason O’Bryan noted in The Robb Report, there are now two versions of the drink. He favors the rendition made with Cointreau and sweet vermouth, but My Loving Wife and I enjoy the one that features Grand Marnier and Dubonnet Rouge more. He’s actually a fan of both and describes the original as “a lower-toned winter drink,” which is obviously appropriate to the season, and we think it’s a better platform for the fernet as well. Using a movie comparison that I appreciate as a child of the 90s, O’Bryan speculates on his Drinks and Drinking blog that this “may be a Happy Gilmore/Billy Madison situation.” Anyway, the recipe by Zig Zag’s Ben Dougherty which O’Bryan and others link to is no longer on Food & Wine magazine’s website, but you can still find it in their 2007 Annual Cookbook. Here’s how to make it:

1 1/2 ozs. Gin (Junipero)
1/2 oz. Dubonnet Rouge
1/4 oz. Grand Marnier
1/4 oz. Fernet Branca

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

Junipero is ideal here because it’s made in San Francisco and also matches O’Bryan’s call for a “big, robust, juniper-forward” selection. In addition to being delicious, Grand Mariner is also made with a brandy base, which as Eddie Mueller says in his description of the Sailor Beware cocktail he created to pair with The Lady from Shanghai for his Noir Bar book seems “a likely libation for sinister shyster Arthur Bannister.” Both the gin and fernet are very prominent, so steer clear if you aren’t a fan of those ingredients. But if, like us, you love them: full speed ahead! On to the film. Here’s a picture of my TCM Vault Collection Blu-ray/DVD:

It can also be rented from a wide range of streaming video platforms.

Dave Kehr famously called The Lady from Shanghai “the weirdest great movie ever made,” but as James Naremore writes in his book The Magic World of Orson Welles, “its strangeness did not result from an early, deliberate plan.” Instead, he argues that as a result of some combination of interference by Columbia Pictures and the “weariness, contempt, or sheer practical jokery” of its director, “the movie seems to have been made by two different hands.” Naremore points to the fact that it was “reduced by almost an hour from its prerelease form” and “substantially revised” at the behest of studio chief Harry Cohn (who allegedly offered $1,000 to anyone who could explain its plot to him after viewing the rough cut) as his primary evidence for this, but I haven’t read anywhere that Welles ever intended to edit the film himself and it’s hard to know for sure what exactly a finished version that he had more say in might have looked like. Based on the interviews with him that Peter Bogdanovich compiled into the book This Is Orson Welles and reads from on the commentary track on my DVD, for instance, the single-take version of the opening Central Park sequence (which American Cinematographer reported set a record for the longest dolly shot ever filmed) was always destined to be cut apart and down. It’s also not as if every shot overseen by Welles that made the final cut is beyond reproach. As Naremore says about one that I’m unfortunately no longer able to not see, the decision to use a panning movement which causes the jagged edges of glass at the corners of the frame below to move “is clearly a director’s error”:

Welles’s biggest objection seems to have been to the music by Heinz Roemheld, exemplified for him by the “Disney”-esque glissando added to this dive:

And although I don’t actually have a problem with the way the climactic Magic Mirror Maze shootout sounds today, it’s hard not to be intrigued when Welles tells Bogdanovich that it “should have been absolutely silent except for the crashing glass and ricocheting bullets–like that, it was terrifying.” Even more obviously tragic are the cuts from the final shooting script for the Acapulco sequence which Naremore describes in Biblical terms as depicting Glenn Anders’s George Grisby “tempting” Welles’s Michael O’Hara atop a mountain:

As Grisby and O’Hara stroll up the hillside from the beach, Grisby’s remarks are systematically played off against American tourists in the background, whose conversations about money become obsessive and nightmarish. We see a little girl attempting to get her mother to buy her a fancy drink. “But mommy,” she says, “it ain’t even one dollar!” Then a honeymoon couple walks past. “Sure it’s our honeymoon,” the young man says, “but that’s a two-million dollar account.” An older lady and her husband cross in front of the camera, arguing about taxi fare. “I practically had to pay him by the mile,” the lady complains. A gigolo speaks to a girl seated on a rock. “Fulco made it for her,” he announces. “Diamonds and emeralds–must’ve cost a couple of oil wells. And she only wears it on her bathing suit.” Another young couple walks up the steps from the beach, the man rubbing his nose with zinc oxide as he mutters, “but listen, Edna, you’ve got to realize pesos is real money.” Two girls enter the scene, one of them saying “Heneral–that means General–in the army like. Only this one’s rich.” Meanwhile, through all of this, Grisby babbles about the atomic bomb and the end of the world, ultimately turning and asking O’Hara, “How would you like to make five thousand dollars, fella?”

All that remains of this dialogue are the line from the gentleman afraid of sunburn and the Spanish lesson (although you can also see a couple of the other characters) and as a result all of this meaning is pretty much entirely lost.

And yet! This scene is nonetheless burned into my memory because it ends with one of my favorite shots in the whole history of cinema. Grisby explains that all Michael needs to do to earn the money he’s offering is to kill someone. “Who, Mr. Grisby?” O’Hara asks. “I’m particular who I murder.” Cut to a sharp-focus close-up of Grisby’s face that contrasts strikingly with a softer one of Michael’s, which Naremore argues is an example of how “glamorous studio portrait photography contributes to the film’s aura of surrealism:

“It’s me,” Grisby says. What follows is brilliantly disorienting because when combined with an earlier establishing shot that places the two men on a sort of parapet:

The high angle perspective makes it look like Grisby is falling off the edge of the frame to his death when he says “so long, fella!” and suddenly steps away:

This impression is compounded by the fact that the next scene includes an image of Elsa looking ghostlike as she runs in front of a nighttime cityscape in a white dress:

To the point that it’s strange to hear her and Michael talk about Grisby in the present tense. Equally unforgettable is their later meeting in the Steinhart Aquarium, which Brian Darr called “its most striking location shoot” in an article for SFGate, that features them talking in silhouette as sea creatures of symbolic import swim by:

And a moray eel enlarged to monstrous proportions which reminds me of the one at the National Aquarium in Baltimore we visited every snow day when we lived there:

I also love the shots of Elsa stabbing at buttons on an intercom which appear to cause a man who has been shot to burst through a door in another room:

And a car carrying Michael and Grisby to accelerate and collide with the truck in front of it:

Finally, as American Cinematographer amusingly noted, “the climax of the picture, during which the antagonists shoot it out in this mirrored room, is one of those unforgettable cinematic moments that seem to occur all too rarely these days.”

The joke is that those words were written in 1948, not tweeted out yesterday! Sure, the Crazy House sequence that precedes this one, which Welles told Bogdanovich would have been even more acclaimed had it remained intact, is reduced to just 90 seconds of shadows, signs, and slides:

But a little bit of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (which according to Simon Callow’s biography Welles screened for his cast and crew) goes a long way.

And in the end Naremore concludes that “there is a sense in which all of Columbia’s tampering with the film has not been as disruptive as, say, RKO’s revisions of The Magnificent Ambersons.” To him this is primarily because it is “characterized by a sort of inspired silliness, a grotesquely comic stylization that has moved beyond expressionism toward absurdity.” This certainly is true of Glenn Anders’s performance, which Bogdanovich describes as “free in its eccentricity and eccentric in its freedom.”

I think it’s also because as Robert B. Pippin observes in his book Fatalism in American Film Noir, “Michael plans to be a novelist” and “what we are hearing as the voiceover appears to be the novel he has written after all these events are over,” so the inconsistencies can all be chalked up as bad writing or the sins of an unreliable narrator.

Last but not least Barbara Leaming notes in her biography of Welles that he “read and assimilated [Bertolt] Brecht” shortly before The Lady from Shanghai in preparation for a collaboration that never came to fruition, which to her “explains the peculiar presence of the otherwise incongruous (and hitherto mysterious) Chinese theater sequence toward the end.” Although the translations of the film’s unsubtitled Cantonese dialogue that Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo provide in their book Noir Anxiety demonstrate that these scenes are thematically consonant (the opera “performs the trial of a woman accused of being a sinner”) with the rest of the work, her observations that this is also the reason no one in the audience seems bothered by Michael and Elsa talking since “the alienated acting of the Chinese theater is perfectly tolerant of interruptions and disturbances” and that “Brecht writes that the Chinese actor occasionally looks directly at the audience, even as he continues his performance–and so it is in this sequence when the police arrive” remain valid:

As does her suggestion that “the Chinese theater sequence illuminates the distinctly odd–almost chilly–acting style that permeates the film as a whole.” So, yeah, The Lady from Shanghai is an odd duck of a film! But here’s something even crazier: it also appears to be an inspiration for my December, 2022 Drink & a Movie selection Elf! Compare this shot of two people blatantly flaunting smoking regulations:

With this one:

Which, okay, you’re not convinced. I get it. But consider as well this description of Michael from Joseph McBride’s Welles biography:

Part of what makes Welles’s film so unsettling is the ironic tension between the moral issues and the characters’ apparent lack of interest in them. K.’s whole life in The Trial is changed by his investigation into the principles behind his case, and Quinlan in Touch of Evil spends most of his time rectifying the moral inadequacy of the law; but in The Lady from Shanghai O’Hara treats his legal predicament as only an unpleasant adventure he must get through so he can move on to a more important concern–Elsa Bannister, the lawyer’s wife. Unfortunately, as he discovers, she is the instigator of the whole complex murder plot, and the issues encroach heavily on his fate despite his avoidance of them. At the end he has been forced to formulate a philosophical position similar to the tragic understanding Welles’s other heroes achieve, but of a less definitive nature.

Doesn’t that sound a lot like the exact inverse of the way the contagious goodness of a certain “deranged elf-man” we all know and love teaches a cynical world how to believe again? Something to ponder while you enjoy your drink!

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.