The Prodigal Cinephile

The subject of my first Drink & a Movie post of 2023 is brought to you by a character in Vincente Minnelli’s The Clock identified simply as The Drunk:

Played by Keenan Wynn, he appears in a single long take positioned halfway through the film. Our heroes Corporal Joe Allen (Robert Walker) and Alice Maybery (Judy Garland) and their milkman friend Al (James Gleason) encounter him in a lunch room that they’ve ducked into to call for help with a flat tire. “Would you care to join me in a vermouth, cassis, or champagne cocktail?” he asks despite the fact that alcoholic beverages aren’t actually served in this establishment. This makes his suggestion inappropriate for their setting, but the latter two ingredients go together perfectly in one of my favorite cocktails for January, a very slightly original drink made entirely with local spirits that I call a Finger Lakes Kir Royale. Here’s how you make it:

1/2 oz. Finger Lakes Distilling Cassis Liqueur
4 oz. Dr. Konstantin Frank Winery Célèbre Rosé

Add the cassis to a chilled champagne coupe and top with the sparkling rosé. Garnish with a lemon twist cut (we use linzer cookie cutters) in the shape of a fireworks burst.

Célèbre Rosé was part of a case of local wines handpicked for us by David Sparrow shortly after we moved to Ithaca and has been a staple in our house ever since. It’s quite delicious, and together with the cassis it gives this drink a lovely pink color, but any good dry sparkling wine you have left over from the holidays will do just fine. This drink doesn’t necessarily improve upon a glass of plain bubbly, but it does take it in a bit of a different direction, which can be nice in the days and weeks after New Year’s Eve. Anyway, my screengrabs from The Clock are taken from my copy of the Warner Archives Collection DVD release of the film:

It can also be streamed via Amazon Prime and Apple TV for a rental or purchase fee.

Joe is a soldier from Indiana spending a two-day leave in New York City before he ships out to Europe who reacts to the Empire State Building a bit differently from Buddy the Elf:

Specific references and impressively accurate studio sets aside, the New York of The Clock is more of a generic Big City than a specific place and unlike Buddy, Joe doesn’t know what he’s looking for when he arrives there. He soon discovers that it’s Alice after she trips over his foot and loses the heel of her shoe:

He convinces a cobbler to keep his shop open late to fix it:

And she agrees to show him the sights in a sequence that features some pretty impressive back projection work:

Joe spends the first third of the film’s ninety-minute run time being just charming enough to convince Alice to make and keep (over the warnings of her roommate about the dangers of being “picked up”) a date with him “under the clock at the Astor at seven.” They spend the next fifteen minutes falling in love, culminating in a kiss that Sheila O’Malley describes as having World War II in it:

Frightened by what she is feeling, Alice hesitates. “I don’t know whether we ought to see each other again at all,” she tells Joe. Enter The Drunk. Alice and Joe realized that they’ve inadvertently stayed out past midnight and that the buses have stopped running. Luckily, Al appears and offers to give Alice a ride home in his milk truck. Alas, no good deed goes unpunished, and he winds up getting smacked in the face:

As described by Emmanuel Burdeau (via a translation by Bill Krohn) in Joe McElhaney’s book Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment, Keenan Wynn’s main function in the film is to provide Joe and Alice with an opportunity to “act as a team to save Al”: with him grappling with the effects of what in 2023 is obviously a concussion, they decide to work together to complete his shift. What makes The Drunk and to a large extent The Clock itself memorable, though, is Vincente Minnelli and company’s decision to give him three whole minutes of screen time to build up to this moment. Just for good measure, much of his rambling discourse is delivered around or to this lady (played by Moyna Macgill) who could care less because she is utterly lost in her own thoughts and rapturous enjoyment of her plate of food:

The scenes which follow the one in the lunch counter are some of my favorites in the entire film. As the city’s working class bemusedly look on, Alice and Joe deliver milk:

Per Burdeau, by the time the sun rises they will have shown “what they could be as a man-and-wife team performing a job together, making money, being economically grounded.” With their hearts and heads now in alignment, they decide to spend Joe’s final day of leave together, which is when the city that has brought them together conspires to show them what life apart would now feel like. Over breakfast with Al and his wife, both Joe and Alice express skepticism about servicemen getting married immediately prior to a tour of duty:

This all changes after they get separated on the subway a little while later:

Joe tries to meet Alice at her next stop, but mistakenly boards an express instead of a local train. She is trying to find him as well and has left by the time he gets there. Joe’s face records his horror at what has befallen them:

A window display proudly announcing the population of New York as 7,454,995 underscores the odds against them ever finding each other again:

Especially when, as Alice humiliatingly admits to the USO official she seeks help from, they don’t even know each other’s last names:

They finally do rediscover each other at the spot where they first met and realize that they already have all the information they need to decide to spend the rest of their lives together. The next six minutes of the film are another reason it reminds me of New Year’s Eve, featuring as it does shots of at least five different clocks, with one appearing in a shot every 30 seconds or so on average. Alice and Joe race all over town to successfully navigate a thicket of red tape and secure all the paperwork they need to officially wed at literally the last possible moment–the city clerk who performs their ceremony is getting into the elevator to leave for the day when they arrive.

The Clock concludes with Joe and Alice enjoying their first morning together as man and wife. The scene is nearly two and half minutes old before either of them speaks a word, which is not to say they aren’t communicating the entire time:

This sequence, too, is another reason The Clock strikes me as a perfect movie with which to ring in the new year. It’s a time both for making bold, potentially life-changing resolutions, and for coming up with a plan to keep them; for marrying the man of your dreams, and for figuring out how he likes his coffee. Or, if I may, both for stocking up on champagne, and for finding creative uses for the bottles you don’t drink.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

As anyone who knows me would presumably tell you, I am not a sentimental person. It may therefore surprise some readers of this blog to learn that I am absolutely nuts about Christmas music! My family maintains a holiday playlist on our home computer which has grown to include nearly a thousand songs that we add to every year, and I turn it on every time I go downstairs in the morning and come home from work in the evening from the day after Thanksgiving clear through the end of the year. We’re also big on Christmas movies in our house. There are about 20 that we watch every single year, which doesn’t leave a lot of time for other films during the month of December.

I actually think this is part of the appeal for me–I try to keep up my one theatrical screening per week regimen, but otherwise am happy to take a bit of a breather from new movies. The very fact that I’m *not* super emotional is also a factor: cinema provides a safe space where people like me can experience feelings like hope and and sadness and goodwill for our fellow human beings without fear that letting our guard down in such a way will immediately lead to our inevitable demise. Christmas movies are particularly well-suited to this sort of thing–the fact that they often reference one another and are chock full of holiday music creates a sort of “force multiplier” effect.

There are plenty of drinks that I make this time every year as well, and in keeping with last month’s resolution to continue highlighting local spirits, my December pairing features my favorite way to use Finger Lakes Distilling’s Riesling Grappa, a concoction by Boston-based bartender Misty Kalkofen (creator of the In Vida Veritas cocktail I wrote about in March) called The Grinch. As fellow Cornellian Frederic Yarm notes in his Cocktail Virgin Slut post about it, Kalkofen actually renamed it Mistaken for Strangers in order to prevent it from being confined just to holiday menus, but I prefer the original appellation, not least because it really is the same color as the Dr. Seuss character! Here’s how to make it:

1 oz. Grappa (Finger Lakes Distilling Riesling Grappa)
1 oz. Green Chartreuse
1/2 oz. Lime juice
1/2 oz. Simple syrup

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a chilled rocks glass. No garnish.

Finger Lakes Distilling’s grappa is flavorful, but pretty mellow compared to some I’ve known (such as the one responsible for me and My Loving Wife flipping a canoe in the middle of the night the evening we got engaged–but that’s a story for another day!) and it shines in mixed drinks like this one because it’s substantial enough to stand up to other potent ingredients, but doesn’t take over. The first thing to hit you here are actually herbs and sweetness from the Chartreuse and syrup, and I believe it might make The Grinch a perfect introduction to grappa for people who think they don’t like it. The movie I’m pairing it with is one of my two or three Christmas movies of all time, Jon Favreau’s Elf. Here’s a picture of my copy of New Line Home Entertainment’s “Infinifilm” (the less said about that terrible idea, the better) DVD release of the film:

Elf can also be streamed via HBO Max with a subscription and can be rented or purchased from most major consumer platforms, including Amazon Prime and Apple TV.

My love affair with this film goes all the way back to the first time I saw it in either 2006 or 2007. My roommates and I got to the end and immediately watched it again! There are five main things that make this a legitimately good movie. First, there are the gorgeous North Pole costumes, sets, and old school special effects. The film opens with a dissolve from a children’s book-style rendition of Bob Newhart playing Papa Elf to the man himself:

He is, of course, wearing an exact replica of the clothes the Head Elf wears in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and like all the elf costumes it looks outstanding against the monochrome gray stone and wood that the elves apparently use for all their non-toy construction projects. This is followed by an opening credits sequence that features these delightful stop-motion animated arctic creatures, including one (the polar bear cub) voiced by legendary special effects artist Ray Harryhausen:

The film proper begins with the story of how Will Ferrell’s Buddy the Elf, who is actually a human, climbed out of his crib at an orphanage and into Santa’s sack of presents, in which he was transported to the North Pole and ultimately adopted by Papa Elf. Forced perspective is used effectively throughout this whole opening sequence, and although it occasionally looks obvious in freeze frame:

Elsewhere the joins between the human- and elf-sized sets are nearly impossible to spot even upon close inspection:

The next great thing about Elf is Will Ferrell’s acting. You could write an entire blog post just on his reaction shots. Here he is devastated to find out that his biological father is on the naughty list:

And here entranced by the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree:

Here he is utterly disgusted by an imposter Santa:

And here smiling is his favorite:

The rest of the casting is brilliant, too. If Ferrell is the grappa in The Grinch, James Caan’s Walter Hobbs is definitely the lime, adding an essential astringent element to the proceedings:

That’s as far as I’m going to take this analogy, but Ed Asner’s down-to-earth Santa also deserves a shout out:

As does Zooey Deschanel’s portrayal of Buddy’s love interest Jovie:

And Mary Steenburgen in the role of Walter’s wife Emily:

Deschanel and Steenburgen play their roles more or less straight, which in the latter case makes Walter’s eventual redemption believable, since we presume she never would have married him if he was really a bad person. But both help us see the practical value of Buddy’s irrepressible enthusiasm.

Memorable performances are also contributed by Peter Dinkledge as children’s book author Miles Finch, Amy Sedaris as Walter’s secretary Deb, Peter Billingsley (of A Christmas Story fame) as Ming Ming the elf, and my personal favorite Faizon Love as a department store manager named Wanda:

Oh! And who could forget this guy?

Praiseworthy element number four is the music, both the soundtrack and John Debney’s underrated score. I’m particularly fond of “Buddy’s Theme,” which I consider to be one of our best contemporary Christmas melodies alongside John Williams’s “Somewhere in My Memory” from Home Alone. Last but not least, when Papa Elf hands Buddy an Empire State Building snow globe and says his biological lives in “a magical land called New York City,” it isn’t just a joke!

Jon Favreau has spoken in interviews about how Elf was filmed not long after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center as being part of a deliberate effort to “reclaim” Manhattan, and a huge part of the movie’s charm for me is its obvious affection for the city. There’s both an appreciation for its grandeur:

And even more importantly a successful effort to look at its more quotidian wonders through fresh eyes that see the buttons in an elevator as beautiful:

Escalators as a challenge:

and classify taxi cabs as “yellow ones” that “don’t stop”:

I would in fact submit that the montage sequence set to Louis Prima’s “Pennies From Heaven” is one of the best cinematic representations of New York ever, without any additional qualifications. Which, this is a excellent example of what makes Elf stand out from some of the other movies I only watch in December: like The Grinch/Mistaken for Strangers, it deserves to be appreciated year round!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

I enjoyed highlighting local (upstate New York) spirits in each of my last two “Drink & a Movie” posts, and have therefore resolved to keep the streak going through January! I talked about Harvest Spirits’ Cornelius Applejack in September and Myer Farm Distillers‘ Cayuga Gold Barrel Gin in October; this month’s drink features Glen Thunder corn whiskey, which the Finger Lakes Distilling website describes as having an aroma “reminiscent of pulling back the husk from an ear of sweet summer corn.” My mind goes more toward popcorn, but whatevs: the distinction doesn’t really matter in my favorite concoction to use it in, cereal milk punch. The recipe for it appears in this New York magazine article, which attributes it to mixologist Jeff Bell of one of this blog’s favorite bars, PDT in New York City. Here’s how to make it:

2 oz. Momofuku Milk Bar cereal milk
1 1/4 oz. Bernheim wheat whiskey
3/4 oz. Glen Thunder corn whiskey
1/2 oz. Bärenjäger

Shake with ice and strain into a chilled rocks glass containing one large ice cube. Garnish with grated nutmeg. 

You might be able to buy genuine Momofuku Milk Bar cereal milk wherever you live, but we prefer to make our own using this recipe published on Serious Eats. If you have a dog, don’t neglect the parenthetical note about what to do with your cornflake remains–they’re one of the four-legged member of our family’s favorite treats!

I love how this drink combines cereal milk with spirits that taste distinctly like different grains to remind the imbiber what the stuff that comes out of the box was originally. It’s also so good that you may be tempted to say you want to bathe in it, which brings us to this month’s movie, Souleymane Cissé’s masterpiece Yeelen. Here’s a picture of my copy of Kino Lorber’s DVD release of the film:

Although Yeelen doesn’t appear to currently be widely available to stream, some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library.

Early in the film, the hero’s mother (Soumba Traore) wades into a marsh and pours a bowl of milk over her head as part of a ritual prayer for her son’s protection:

“Do you hear this forlorn creature?” she cries. “Goddess of the waters! Hear me, mother of mothers! Hear this helpless mother. Save my son! Keep him from harm! Save this land from ruin! Don’t let the weeds overgrow the house of the Diarra.” Then she lets the contents of another bowl rain down over her:

Milk appears in the very next scene as well. Our hero, whose name is Nianankoro (Issiaka Kane), has been captured as a suspected cattle thief:

The leader of the men taking him to their king lifts a gourd canteen to his lips and takes a swig:

He turns to a comrade and says, “here is milk. Drink it.” This guard hands it to another member of the band:

And so on until only Nianankoro is left to go thirsty:

Contrast this with the third appearance of milk a little while later, when the same king (Balla Moussa Keita) Nianankoro was being taken to as a prisoner personally offers him a drink:

What has changed in the intervening scenes is that Nianankoro has revealed himself to be a powerful sorcerer and, using the right leg-bone of a horse:

That he buried in a termite mound:

Has conjured bees and fire to defeat an invading army:

This is another reason for this month’s drink and a movie pairing: cereal milk is the Proust madeleine of my generation, with power to transport people back to the breakfast tables of their childhoods. In other words, it’s magic! The passage of time factors into Yeelen‘s narrative strategy as well, as represented by the image of a boy (Youssouf Tenin Cissé) who we eventually realize is Nianankoro’s son and a goat that appears at both the beginning and end of the film:

The best part of Yeelen has got to be the epic wizard duel between Nianankoro and his father Soma (Niamanto Sanogo), who has spent the entire movie trying to track him down and kill him. It contains some stare songs (to bastardize a lovely turn of phrase by Richard T. Jameson) straight out of the oeuvre of Sergio Leone:

And two killer dissolves:

Before concluding with both characters being subsumed into the “brightness” (the English translation of the Bambara word “yeelen”) of the film’s title:

Another one of my favorite moments in Yeelen is this closeup of Nianankoro’s future wife Attu (Aoua Sangare):

They meet when the king mentioned above asked Nianankoro to cure her of infertility. Which he certainly does do, but then he and Attu give into their lust for one another, ultimately leading to their exile. This single beautiful load-bearing image tells an impressively large portion of that story. And then, finally, there is the movie’s ending. Years (I assume) later, Attu returns to the scene of Nianankoro’s battle with Soma to retrieve the Kore wing (the scepter of the 7th and final Bambara initiation society per the titles which precede the film) which was her husband’s weapon during it:

Meanwhile her son finds two ostrich eggs buried in the sand nearby:

He retrieves one and presents it to his mother:

She re-buries it at the spot where the Kore wing stands, then gives it to her son along with Nianankoro’s clock. They walk away together bearing both objects:

There is a closeup of the remaining ostrich egg alone in the sand:

And then a shot of Nianankoro’s son striding confidently into the future with the Kore wing and his father’s cloak:

For a breakdown of exactly what’s happening here, see Suzanne H. MacRae’s Research in African Literatures article “Yeelen: A Political Fable of the Komo Blacksmith/Sorcerers.” It doesn’t take extensive knowledge of Malian history to understand that this represents Nianankoro’s triumph over Soma, though. Or, to translate this into cocktail terms: like cereal milk punch, it’s good on both the sip and the swallow!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

Two Father’s Days ago, My Loving Wife gave me a copy of David Lebovitz’s Drinking French as a present. It’s a terrific book filled with wonderful recipes, but far and away our favorite thing in it is the Yellow Cocktail created by Franck Audoux of the Paris bar Cravan. Here’s the recipe

3/4 oz. London dry gin (Cayuga Gold Barrel Gin)
3/4 oz. Suze
3/4 oz. Yellow Chartreuse
3/4 oz. Freshly squeezed Lemon juice

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker and shake with ice until well chilled. Strain into a chilled coupe glass and garnish with the oils from a lemon twist.

Lebovitz calls for London dry gin, but we prefer to use one of our favorite local spirits, Myer Farm Distillers‘ Cayuga Gold Barrel Gin, which has a similar golden hue to the other ingredients. “Autumnal,” the person at Red Feet Wine Market who sold us our last bottle said, which really is the perfect way to describe it. With that connection made, it was pretty much inevitable that I would end up choosing a movie directed by master of the giallo (Italian for “yellow”) film Dario Argento to go with it, although I decided not to select something from that genre. Instead I’m keying in on the drink’s vibrant yellow color and pairing it with Suspiria. Here’s a picture of my copy of Synapse Film’s DVD release of the film:

Suspiria doesn’t appear to be streaming many places, but some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library.

I mention color above, and that is what I like most about this film. Maitland McDonagh describes it as a “big, bright, nightmare fairy tale” set in “a psychedelic world of swirling red, yellow, and blue jewel-tones” in her book Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento, and I wouldn’t dare try to say it better myself. When I was an undergraduate film studies student, I remember numerous occasions when I fell in love with the idea of a movie based on the pictures in my text books, only to be disappointed by the reality of it, usually because it was either disappointingly conventional outside of the extraordinary moments captured by the stills that inspired me to see it, or because the film didn’t really work. Suspiria avoids these traps by using a simple narrative structure as a stable scaffold for pervasive formal audacity.

On the first front, voice-over dialogue informs us during the opening credits that once upon a time a dancer named Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) “decided to perfect her ballet studies in the most famous school of dance in Europe.” Alas, the “celebrated academy of Freiburg” turns out to be a front for a coven of witches. Through pluck and courage she triumphs over their leader and brings the whole place down House of Usher style. That’s about it for the story. But my Godard (RIP), the images! We can begin as the film (almost) does, with shots drenched in primary colors. This one comes first:

But this one is even more red:

Beautiful right? But not terribly innovative. That’s true of this shot as well, which reminds me of the oft-mentioned-on-this-blog Chicago bar The Violet Hour:

What really makes the film interesting are all the moments that it isn’t quite possible to capture. Take this one:

This is a murderer stalking his prey shot from behind, and it doesn’t last long enough to get a screengrab that shows him clearly enough to figure this out without a prompt. Or how about this shot?

I’m sure you’ll agree that it is very green. But there’s something else funny about it as well, yeah? It’s not an unusual lens–rather, the camera is set up behind a light bulb:

Far from being a film comprised of beautiful tableaus loosely connected by a plot, Suspiria is much greater than the sum of its (occasionally breathtaking, to be sure!) parts. Sometimes this is accomplished via gimmicks, as in the case of this unmotivated reaper-shaped shadow:

I thought something similar was going on in the opening scene at the airport. It features two extreme close-ups of the inner workings of an automatic door, and I assumed that in at least one of them the machinery was switched out for a knife. But no:

Why go to the trouble if just the metal and the motion achieve the same effect? In any event, it’s everything else going on around these shots that really count. To deal with the latter scene first, the juxtaposition of ambient noise when Suzy is inside the airport:

with Italian band Goblin’s eerie prog rock score whenever we catch a glimpse of the world outside kicks everything off on an extremely unsettling note. See also this awesome use of a wind machine:

In the case of the forest where the above shadow appears, what I really remember is the haunting image of Eva Axén’s Pat Hingle running through it as seen by Suzy through the window of a cab:

My single favorite part of Suspiria is probably the ridiculous statement Barbara Magnolfi’s Olga (right) makes to Suzy (middle) and Stefania Casini’s Sara (left) which I think I heard sampled in Atmosphere’s “Bird Sings Why The Caged I Know” before I ever saw the movie: “I once read that names which begin with the letter ‘S’ are the names of snakes!” Look at these faces!

Suzy’s palpable relief during her happily ever after moment at the end of the film is pretty great, too:

I’m no connoisseur of horror films, but the opening murder surely has to be one of the most aesthetically striking ones in movie history:

And I love the way Helena Markos’s invisibility is rendered near the end of the film:

But I think the very best SCENE of all is the one which ends in poor Sara’s demise. She’s the figure in the shot bathed in green light above, and the man in yellow in the screengrab above it is the person who will eventually killer her. She attempts to take shelter in a locked room:

But the straight razor worrying the latch on the door suggests that this isn’t a viable long-term solution:

Suddenly she looks up:

The camera follows her gaze to salvation in the form of cheery yellow light streaming through a window:

She climbs up to and out of it:

And into this room:

The decor maybe should have cued Sara into the fact that all is not well, but she is understandably focused on the doorway in front of her which appears to lead to freedom and safety:

She leaps! But it, uh, doesn’t end well:

Many of the colors in Suspiria seem to exist only for us, the audience: I doubt that the idea at the beginning of this sequence is that Sara sees herself as being surrounded by green light, for instance. But this yellow window lures her to her doom! In that respect it is not at all like the Yellow Cocktail, which rewards one with bracing minerality, a pleasing sweet-tart balance, and warm spices. Unless you drink too many of them, I suppose, which might make your head feel like this:

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

Ten years ago (wow that makes me feel old!) I emailed myself a link to a recipe by Rachel Tepper for a cocktail called the Sweet New Year. Serious Eats appears to have removed it (and many others, including most tragically this one for pasta with Meyer lemon and basil that we make for dinner at least once or twice a month) from their website at some point for unknown reasons, but thankfully the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine captured it for posterity in 2012. Here’s how you make this drink:

1 1/2 oz. Applejack (Cornelius)
1/2 oz. Bärenjäger
1/4 teaspoon Demerara sugar
Handful of mint

Muddle mint and sugar in a cocktail shaker. Add spirits and stir to combine. Strain into a chilled rocks glass and garnish with one nice-looking sprig of mint.

As described by Tepper, the Sweet New Year is a simple but elegant play on the traditional Rosh Hashanah dish of apples dipped in honey, which is the main reason I chose it for this month’s drink. It’s also a beautiful showcase for one of my favorite New York spirits, Harvest Spirits’ Cornelius Applejack, my current go-to host/hostess gift. I like the addition of mint, too, both for the complexity it contributes and because I can harvest it out of my own herb garden throughout late summer and early fall.

The movie I’m pairing this drink with is Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street. Here’s a picture of my copy of the Cohen Film Collection DVD release of the film:

Hester Street can also be streamed via Amazon Prime and Apple TV for a rental fee, and some people may have access to it through Kanopy via a license paid for by their local academic or public library as well.

Based on a novella by Abraham Cahan called Yekl (my library’s copy of which is available for free via the Internet Archive), the film tells the story of a family of Jewish immigrants living in New York’s Lower East Side in 1896. Steven Keats’s Jake (nee Yekl) is already living there when the story begins, enjoying the life of an apparent bachelor. This all changes when he sends for his wife Gitl (Carol Kane) and son Jossele (Paul Freedman) following the death of his father. Dismayed by their failure to embrace their new country as enthusiastically as he has, he begins neglecting them in favor of the people he had been keeping company with before they arrived, most notably a woman named Mamie (Dorrie Kavanaugh).

What I admire most about the film is the ingenuity on display in it. When people talk about “movie magic,” they’re often referring to things like huge sets, original costumes, intricate models, and armies of extras that Hollywood studios use to create whole worlds from scratch. Micklin Silver and company are wizards of a different sort: despite having access to few such resources, they nonetheless spin a convincing depiction of the nineteenth century out of locations, objects, and people readily available on the streets of 1970s New York. Call them alchemists. They understand that whether you are shooting an interior scene:

Or an exterior one:

The number of extras you have to work with is less important for creating a feeling of crowdedness than how well you fill the frame with them. You can also get a lot of mileage out of a well-placed reaction shot:

The only reason this sleepy fella is even in the picture is because Mamie and Jake need to ascend to the roof of Mamie’s building among the wash hanging out to dry for even a bit of privacy.

If you can so effectively establish the idea of a crowded tenement, are you really losing anything by not actually being able to show one? This scene is also a good example of another kind of economy–Silver and her editor Katherine Wenning cut away the INSTANT Jake’s lips touch Mamie’s.

What do they cut to? This close up of a sewing machine:

When you only have a limited number of period-authentic props to work with, you’ve got to make every second with them count! Similarly, when you don’t have the budget to recreate Ellis Island, you’ve got to use things like lighting and sound to create a sense of chaos and grandeur. I submit that the film does a fine job of this:

Hester Street isn’t perfect: most notably, I don’t think Keats and Silver succeed in showing us what’s going on inside Jake’s mind, which makes their version of the character much less interesting than Cahan’s. Whereas the novella describes him as being “in a flurry of joyous anticipation” on his way to meet Gitl and Jossele at Ellis Island, but then goes on to say that “his heart had sunk at the sight of his wife’s uncouth and un-American appearance,” the Jake of the film just seems put out by how much they’re crimping his style from the word go. It’s the difference between a man who wants to do the right thing but is so intoxicated by his ideal of America that he can’t and one who is just kind of a jerk. It also renders some scenes unintelligible, which Micklin Silver herself seems acknowledge in one case on the commentary track on my DVD copy of the film. She notes that this scene showing Jake awkwardly praying for his deceased father was meant to convey the idea that he’d never even gotten around to unpacking his tallit:

I think I see now how they’re trying to accomplish this by having Jake use the stylish bowler hat we saw him buy a few scenes earlier as a head covering and ending the scene with him expressing frustration:

I’m not sure I ever would have gotten there on my own, though, since you could also interpret this whole scene as just showing Jake grieving. Of course, Hester Street isn’t *about* Jake the same way Yekl is. The single best thing about Micklin Silver’s film is without doubt Carol Kane’s Oscar-nominated performance as Gitl. Whether she’s trying to make sense of her husband’s baffling decision to go out the night she arrives in America after more than three years apart from him:

Gleaning from a small, absent-minded gesture that her lodger Bernstein (Mel Howard, a non-professional actor who is also quite good here) is in love with her:

Realizing while watching him teach her son how to read that she returns his affection:

Or extracting a king’s ransom from the lawyer sent by Jake and Mamie to secure a divorce without ever saying a word:

She communicates deep wells of emotion with little more than subtle changes in expression. Especially when contrasted with the hammy antics of Steven Keats’s Jake, it’s a masterclass in minimalist acting.

Speaking of performances, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Doris Roberts’ entertaining turn as Jake and Gitl’s landlady Mrs. Kavarsky.

“You can’t pee up my back and make me thinks it’s rain!” she says at one point, and she spends the entire film embodying the essence of a person for whom this represents a philosophy of life.

Rosh Hashanah is never mentioned in either Hester Street or Yekl, but the way the former ends calls to mind the traditional wishes for a “sweet year” that the drink featured in this blog post is named after. The rabbi who presides over their divorce cautions Gitl that she must wait ninety full days before she remarries, but says to Jake, “you, young man, may wed even today if you desire.” A subsequent crane shot of him walking down the street with a veiled Mamie suggests he might well have done so! Although their conversation is all about how spending Mamie’s life savings to buy off Gitl has altered their plans for the future, it does end with a kiss and an embrace:

The next scene is the film’s last, and it depicts a parallel conversation between Gitl and Bernstein in which they talk about how they’ve invested that same sum of money in a grocery store that she will work in while he studies the Torah in the back.

I personally choose to believe both couples will be happy. Which: mazel tov!

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.

It’s right around this time every summer that I start to really look forward to the start of football season. By now I’ve usually finished reading the Football Outsiders Almanac, I’m catching bits and pieces of CFL games on ESPN2, and I’m starting to prepare for my family/friends fantasy football league draft, which usually takes place over Labor Day weekend. This month’s drink selection is therefore a tribute to the pigs who so generously donate their skins to our true national pastime each year, the Benton’s Old-Fashioned from The PDT Cocktail Book, which was created by Don Lee in 2007:

2 oz. Benton’s Bacon Fat-Infused Four Roses Bourbon
1/4 oz. Maple Syrup
2 dashes Angostura Bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a chilled rocks glass filled with one large cube. Garnish with an orange twist.

To “fat-wash” the bourbon: combine 1.5 ozs. molten Benton’s bacon fat and one 750 ml bottle of Four Roses bourbon (the one folk used to refer to as “yellow label” before the bottle got a facelift in 2018) in a large nonreactive container and stir. Infuse for four hours, then place the container in the freezer for two hours. Remove solid fat, fine-strain the bourbon through a terry cloth or cheesecloth, and bottle.

I know what you’re thinking: didn’t the whole bacon cocktail thing run its course a decade ago? The bourbon in this drink isn’t just bacon fat-infused, though, it’s Benton’s bacon fat-infused. We are talking about a product that tastes so much like a campfire that my children, six and four years old as of this writing, refuse to eat it. The drink was originally made with Benton’s country ham, which is also delicious. The point is, not just any cured pork product will do. I’m sure there are plenty of others that would work here, but make sure you taste the original first so that you know exactly what you’re looking for. We buy ours at The Wine Source when we’re visiting family in Baltimore, but you can also order it online.

The spirit which results from the marriage of Benton’s bacon fat and bourbon is savory with a rich mouthfeel and a predominant flavor of smoke, which puts me more in the mind of pechuga mezcal than breakfast, even after you add maple syrup. Speaking of which: most recipes for this drink that you can find online call for “Grade B” syrup, but such a thing no longer exists as of 2015. The equivalent new rating is “Grade A Dark Robust,” but you should just use the best syrup you can get your hands on. We are fortunate to have relatives in Ontario who make their own! Add in Angostura bitters for complexity and essential oils from the orange twist for brightness, and what you have is a clever, endlessly quaffable concoction that I’m not at all surprised turned out to be one of PDT’s all-time best sellers.

The movie I’m pairing this drink with takes everything I love about football and turns it on its head: the Marx brothers film Horse Feathers, which exactly no one attributes to director Norman Z. McLeod. Here’s a picture of my copy of Universal’s “The Marx Brothers: Silver Screen Collection” DVD set:

The film begins with Groucho Marx’s Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff outlining his leadership philosophy (“whatever it is, I’m against it!”) for the assembled faculty and students of Huxley College.

We soon learn that his son Frank (Zeppo Marx) is a 12th-year senior at Huxley who somehow still has football eligibility. Frank informs his father that Huxley has had a new president every year since 1888, which might explain why someone as obviously unqualified as Wagstaff was able to get the job, although perhaps not why his predecessor made such a big deal about leaving. Huxley also hasn’t won a football game during this time, and Frank, who clearly hasn’t taken a statistics course yet, thinks this must surely be a causal relationship. He tells his father that two of the best football players in the country hang out at the local speakeasy, and Wagstaff sets out to recruit them to play in the upcoming rivalry game against Darwin College. Unfortunately, a gambler named Jennings (David Landau) who’s betting on the opposition has beat him to the punch:

About this guy: if Huxley hasn’t won a game in 40 years, surely there’s no way they’re the favorites in this contest, right? So if Jennings is going to go to the trouble of fixing the game, why wouldn’t he do so on behalf of the underdogs to maximize his profits? Worst gambler ever! Anyway, Wagstaff mistakes speakeasy employees Baravelli (Chico Marx) and Pinky (Harpo Marx) for the real football players Frank mentioned and recruits them instead. Many hijinks ensue over the course of the 45 minutes of screen time leading up to the climactic football sequence, including this shot of Baravelli filling an order for one quart of Scotch and one quart of rye from a common source, which hurts my soul as a lover of fine spirits:

And this one of Pinky, who by the way is also a dog catcher, gleefully shoveling books into a fire, which pains me as a librarian:

Finally, it’s game time. Baravelli and Pinky arrive late after their attempt to kidnap Darwin’s new best players goes awry and they end up locked in a bedroom instead. Despite the deck being stacked in their favor, Darwin is only up 12-0 heading into the fourth quarter, which: maybe Jennings was on to something after all! Suddenly, the tide begins to turn. First, Professor Wagstaff enters the game mid-play and makes a crucial tackle along the sideline:

Then one of Darwin’s ringers suffers a finger injury when Pinky decides it would make an excellent substitute for the hot dog he lost during the previous play and bites down:

Huxley soon turns the ball over, but this gives Pinky the chance to tie a string to it:

Which leads directly to a pick-six. Huxley converts the extra point to pull within five. Let us pretend (since it doesn’t really matter for plot purposes) that Huxley doesn’t then receive the subsequent kickoff despite being the team that scored, and that we instead see Darwin punt to give the ball back to Huxley, implying that the latter team’s defense did its job instead of that the folks who cut this film don’t know the rules of football. As Professor Wagstaff lights a cigar and Pinky munches on a banana, they snap the ball to begin the next play:

The call is a left end run by Frank, and it has all the appearances of being a game winner thanks to Pinky’s innovative use of banana peels to prevent Darwin’s players from making a tackle:

Alas, Frank makes the mistake of saying “nice work, Pinky!” while the play is still in progress, which of course prompts Pinky to trip him shy of the end zone. Luckily there’s still enough time on the clock for another play. This time the ball goes to Pinky and he’s running free up the middle when a dog bursts onto the field. Pinky reverses direction to try to catch it, but is convinced by the characters played by the other Marx Brothers to abandon his pursuit and instead jump with them into the horse-drawn garbage chariot he had arrived at the game in earlier and apparently parked in the field of play. They all race up the field for the game-winning score.

Just for good measure, Pinky’s teammates toss him three more balls which he also places on the ground in the end zone:

The scorekeeper diligently awards Huxley six points each time, making the final score 31-13.

I grew up rooting for the New York Mets and watching big events like the Olympics, Super Bowl, and World Cup, but didn’t become a general sports fan until college. Attending a Division I school (the University of Pittsburgh) with a proud football history during its basketball program’s Golden Age (RIP the Jamie Dixon era!) helped, as did living in a hockey- and football-mad city at a time when its teams in both sports lucked into a series of franchise-altering talents (Ben Roethlisberger, Evgeni Malkin, Sidney Crosby) who won them multiple championships. This is why I root for Pitt, the Penguins, and the Steelers. It doesn’t quite explain why I reliably watch three to five NFL games every week between the months of August and January no matter who’s playing. For that, we must turn to the Peyton Manning Colts. I can remember sitting in a crowded bar ignoring everyone I came there with in favor of a TV on silent showing Manning playing chess with the opposing team’s defensive coordinator, altering plays and lofting passes to spots where only his gifted wide receivers Marvin Harrison and Reggie Wayne could catch them. They’d then proceed to defy the laws of physics and contort their bodies in impossible ways to get both of their feet down in bounds with the ball.

This combination of strategy and graceful athleticism is what fascinates me about football: throw in analytics and the salary cap, and in the modern passing era it’s more like watching two ballet companies compete against each other in a full-contact version of something like the Eschaton game from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest than the battle of brute strength that I used to assume it was. I enjoy football movies like Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday and Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights enough to return to them from time to time, but I’ve never seen a film that gets *this* aspect of the sport right. Unless, that is, you count Horse Feathers. When I remember great NFL moments like Santonio Holmes’s game winning touchdown catch in Super Bowl XLIII, I don’t just think about the play itself, but also the drive that made it possible, the offseasons that brought the players involved in it to Pittsburgh, and the ruling on the field that yes, this really was a completion. But what counts as a catch and what doesn’t in the NFL is based on rules that at the end of the day are essentially arbitrary and subject to change, as indeed they have multiple times since that February night in 2009!

Horse Feathers understands this fundamental truth about football, even as it’s indifferent to it otherwise except as a platform for jokes. Baravelli announcing the play that Huxley is about to run (“Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Professor Wagstaff gets the ball!”) is basically the exact opposite of Peyton Manning calling out audibles at the line of scrimmage. Either way, you’ve got adults play[act]ing something that started out as a children’s game. I’d argue that in both cases the principles have elevated what they’re doing to the status of art, but if you aren’t having fun watching them, you’re doing it wrong.

Cheers!

All original photographs in this post are by Marion Penning, aka My Loving Wife. Other entries in this series can be found here.