Sherry Chandler

Exhausted with serious literary pursuits, last night I indulged in a generous glass of merlot and episode 5 of The Outer Limits. “The Sixth Finger” aired October 1963. It “starred” David McCallum. I had such a crush on him, and he starts out pretty cute here as the Welsh miner whose encounter with the requisite mad scientist turns him into this egghead of the future. Script by Ellis St. Joseph (a pseudonym if ever I saw one) was good for laughs and, while I understand the domed forehead, what is the evolutionary need for Spock ears and a bulbous nose?

Enter Bogart with his tight-lipped lisping sneer, his piercing eyes under the snap brim of his hat, and this movie comes alive.

Three on a Match is a pre-code (Warner Brothers, 1932) soap opera that re-unites three schoolmates: the bad girl, the good girl, and the rich girl. Wikipedia has a nice plot summary.

Mary Keaton, the bad girl, is a good egg, a free spirit who shows her black bloomers on the swings and skips classes to smoke in the barn with the boys. Portentously, she steals the rich girl’s boyfriend.

Vivian Rivere, the rich girl, is given a special diploma as the most popular girl in class and Ruth Westcott, the good girl, gets honors for making the highest grades. Mary is only allowed to attend graduation after a scolding by the principal.

Graduation is from grammar school. This opening school-days scene takes place in 1919. In those days, as for my parents, high school was not part of public education, so these girls are now on their own. Times have changed in more ways than one. In fact, the movie introduces its time-changes with bits of newspaper articles and newsreel footage that are almost like archeological artifacts to the modern viewer. The scene in which Mary is getting a permanent wave is an eye-opener, too. And I always always love to look at the clothes from the 1930s.

In saying farewell to Ruth, Vivian announces that she will go off to a prestigious boarding school. Ruth says she will have to go to business school so she can work. “What will Mary do?” Ruth asks. “Oh, she’ll wind up in reform school,” Vivian replies with some satisfaction.

This movie is actually about the rise of the working-class girl, poor, wild, but essentially honest, and the fall of the spoiled rich girl.
Bette Davis is beautiful, competent, but wasted as the third point in this triangle, the hardworking good girl. Ruth seems excess to the plot, needed only to fulfill the title trope of three on a match. Davis had signed with Universal in 1931 and moved to Warner Brothers in 1932. In those two years she made a dozen movies. I’m not sure she had a dozen lines in this one, though she is billed as one of the stars. She is mostly paired with a curly-haired moppet who looks like a male Shirley Temple and of course steals every scene. He’s uncredited, but I think it must be Frankie Darro.

Joan Blondell mostly plays type as the wisecracking showgirl with the heart of gold. She is charming but not inspired. In one scene on the beach, Davis frolics around in a bathing suit while Blondell is costumed in a full-length pantsuit. It’s a gorgeous outfit but all eyes are drawn to Bette Davis.

Ann Dvorak is an actress I never heard of until I saw this film. As the brunette who is third on the match at the reunion lunch, the bored, doomed, rich girl, she isn’t really interesting until the final third of the movie when she’s become a coked-out ruin who makes one final grand gesture to save the life of her child.

But then that’s when Bogart bursts into the tenement flat and the drama becomes intense.

Here’s the setup. Vivian Revere has tired of her successful lawyer husband, Robert Kirkwood (portrayed by the urbane Warren William), and her pampered life. She decides to take a curative cruise with her son, the aforesaid moppet. But onboard ship, she meets Mary Keaton who’s come to attend a bon voyage party. Accepting Mary’s invitation to join the party, Vivian meets the gambler Michael Loftus (Lyle Talbot) and is persuaded to elope with him, Junior in tow, by lines like this one:

I can tell you’re a real woman, not one of those stuffed brassieres you see on Park Avenue. You’ve got all the works that make a woman want to go, and live, and love.

Loftus seems to appeal to the heretofore well-hidden risk-taker in Vivian. Soon enough, she becomes debauched. The couple is in hiding from her husband but Mary knows where they are. She becomes concerned about Junior and her own role in facilitating this liaison. After talking things over with Ruth, she first confronts Vivian and offers to take the child to live with Ruth’s family. When that doesn’t work, she goes to Kirkwood and rats Vivian out.

Kirkwood reclaims his son, divorces Vivian, marries Mary (fulfilling the foreshadowing of the schoolyard), and sets Ruth up as nanny to Junior.

Vivian and Loftus continue on the fast track to perdition until, having run through all of Vivian’s money and desperate to pay back a gambling debt, Loftus abducts the child. Junior goes willingly with “Uncle Mike” to see his mother but the gangsters, led by Bogart’s Harve, see a chance to turn this into a real kidnapping.

Three on a Match was Bogart’s second film for Warner Brothers and his first tough guy role. It’s a joy to watch him turn this potboiler into a real drama.

Along with frank attitudes toward women’s sexuality, racy dialogue, and the shocker of an ending, Vivian’s coke addiction is one of the things that marks this as a pre-code film. It’s fairly subtly handled. We never see her snorting, only early on, drinking cocktails and feeding her child on bon-bons. By the time of the kidnapping, though, Vivian is obviously in trouble. She is unkempt with dark rings under her eyes. Confronting Harve, she sniffles and runs her fingers under her nose. Harve does a take, turns to his henchmen with a knowing look, and runs his own finger under his nose. If you aren’t watching closely, you’ll miss it. Later, when Harve has been out on an aborted mission to collect the ransom, he’s asked if he “got something” for Vivian but he says the streets are crawling with cops and he couldn’t. Of course, this is Prohibition time, so we could be referring to alcohol. But I think not.

My son pointed out that this movie lets not one but two blonds triumph over the brunette. But I think the real loser was Bette Davis. Always the sidekick, whether to Vivian as schoolgirls or Mary as adults, her big reward is the post of nanny to the rich brat. Not only is there not the least hint of romance for her, though I suppose as nanny she’s set up to meet some one well-heeled, but while the other two get to have their fun, Ruth doesn’t even get to misbehave a little bit. And she was never more beautiful

Ah well, Bette makes up for lost time later.

Nicholson Baker has written a pacifist history of World War II called Human Smoke. The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster). Here is an excerpt of his interview with Charles McGrath in the NYTimes:

“I came to the Second World War with a typically inadequate American education.” Mr. Baker said, “and I was surprised to discover that Churchill had this crazy, late-night side. He was obviously thrilled to be in the midst of this escalating war. This is a man who wanted Europe to starve — he wanted to starve it into a state of revolt.”

He added: “I’ve always had pacifist leanings, and so one of the things I wanted to learn was how do you react to the Second World War if you’re a pacifist. That war is always held up as the great counterexample, the one that was justified. And I got hungrier and hungrier to answer the question: Did the Allies’ response to Hitler really help anyone who needed help? One of the things I discovered, for example, was that the most impressive opponents of the war were also the people most actively arguing that we had to help the refugees. There was a complete overlap.”

Talking about starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto during the British blockade, Mr. Baker became so worked up that he had to pause, take off his rimless glasses and rub his eyes, and then he went on: “What are you going to do when Europe is threatened by Hitler, this paranoid, dangerous person? My feelings about the war change every day. But I also feel that there is a way of looking at the war and the Holocaust that is truer and sadder and stranger than the received version.”

Here are the opening two paragraphs:

Alfred Nobel, the manufacturer of explosives, was talking to his friend the Baroness Bertha von Suttner, author of Lay Down Your Arms. Von Suttner, a founder of the European antiwar movement, had just attended the fourth World’s Peace Conference in Bern. It was August 1892.

“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses,” Alfred Nobel said. “On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

William Grimes wants none of it.

But I look at the troubled aftermath of WWII and wonder if there might have been another way.

We have been watching Terry Jones’ Barbarians, which though it may be couched in commercial bombast nevertheless leaves me feeling a bit less than sanguine about the glories of western civilization.

See Lance Mannion: It’s not serious foreign policy if it doesn’t kill people.

Watch at YouTube.

In spite of Yankee Doodle Dandy, I find it hard to think of James Cagney as a song and dance man. Yet Wikipedia tells me he started out as a chorus boy in vaudeville and on Broadway and was once a street dancer known as Cellar Door Cagney.

This longish number here is from Footlight Parade, one of three musical extravaganzas Warner Brothers produced in 1933 with huge Buzby Berkeley production numbers. The other two were Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd Street.
These were not actually pre-code films — Footlight Parade even makes reference to the code by having a censor in place but he, like the code, was abused and ignored as they proceed to put on numbers like “Honeymoon Hotel,” which seems to have more in common with a notell motel than the bridal suite at the Ritz and “Shanghai Lil” with it’s professional women in opium dens.

Kicking the gong around.

Footlight Parade gets good reviews and some even think it is the best of the three Warner Brother musicals. I didn’t like it much.

Even the huge synchronized swimming number, “By A Waterfall,” was remarkable without being particularly interesting. It consumed an entire reel, as did “Shanghai Lil.”

I’d heap rather watch Ginger Rogers doing “We’re in the Money.” In Pig Latin or not, I wish the long-lost dollar would make another comeback. And come to think of it, that might be part of my problem with Footlight Parade. Too many love songs.

To my somewhat modern eye, the frame story was sexist, racist, and clichéd. I mean, Ruby Keeler as a Chinese courtesan speak/singing pidgen?

What was worse, James Cagney seems to inhabit an entirely different universe from that of Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, and Guy Kibbee. Joan Blondel could match him for edge but the others belonged in a gentler world.

But the movie has one delightful minute, in the middle of the long number above, when Cagney and Keeler break into a tap routine on the Shanghai bar. Keeler even mimics Cagney’s distinctive marionette-on-a-string tap style for just an instant.

(That style also showed up in about ten seconds worth of “direction” for a sort of pre-Cats number called “Sitting on a Backyard Fence,” but it was only a tease. All was to be saved for the finale, “Shanghai Lil.”)

Alas, the whole number breaks down in the end to a sort of patriotic drill team routine, and how we got from AWOL sailors in Shanghai to FDR’s image on the American flag is a little puzzling. The Warner Brothers did love FDR, but this routine doesn’t have either the emotional power of The Gold Diggers‘ “Remember my Forgotten Man” or the Wow! of 42nd Street’s skyscrapers.

Some things I’ve happened on in the last several days that seem in some way connected.

This broadcast of Fresh Air in which Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz talk about their book The Three Trillion Dollar War. Bilmes and Stiglitz talk about all the human and dollar costs of the war in Iraq, some obvious, some hidden. They talk about the way our veterans have to fight the system in order to get the care they need. They talk about the way the powers that be consider care for veterans a diversion of funds that could otherwise be used to beef up our war machine.

This statement from Atrios:

Whatever one thinks about Obama generally, this notion that opposing the Iraq war back when it was the most awesome war ever wasn’t a big deal really pisses me off. It was a big deal, and I’m tired of the few courageous people such as Bob Graham who did oppose it getting written out of the script. Those were crazy days, and the “crazies” who stepped way out on that limb to yell “stop” deserve our praise and admiration for it.

The entire anti-war movement hasn’t just been marginalized, it’s been largely erased from our political narrative. It existed. It marched. It gave speeches. And some even cast their votes in Congress.

In the Valley of Elah, a film in which a father (Hank Deerfield) tries to find out who killed his G.I. son (Mike), recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. What he discovers about his son’s brutal murder is no more disturbing than what he sees in the e-mailed photos and the murky, corrupted cell phone videos in which his son recorded his in-country experiences. A. O Scott, in the NYTimes, describes the film like this:

Much as Hank wants to know what happened to Mike the night he died, his real quest is to find out who his son was, and what happened to him in Iraq.

The only clues he has are some JPEGs his son e-mailed to him, the memory of a desperate late-night phone call from the war zone and some smeary, scrambled video recovered from Mike’s cellphone. These hectic, unfocused clips stand in jarring, pointed contrast to the neatly composed frames and carefully paced shots that make up most of Mr. Haggis’s film, and they pose an agonizing challenge: How do you extract meaning from such chaos?

I have no desire to critique this film, other than to say that in the long line of craggy, flawed, ineluctable lawmen that Tommy Lee Jones has made me love in spite of myself, Hank Deerfield is the one who touches my heart deepest. Scott’s review can speak for me. “Almost no violence takes place on screen,” he says, “but there are times when ‘In the Valley of Elah’ feels almost like a horror film.”

I would delete the “almost.” It is a horror film, and one our soldiers live daily.

“Don’t send a hero to Iraq,” exclaims one young soldier from Mike’s squad.

For so many reasons.

Watching The Last King of Scotland was as painful as I’d feared it would be. It’s taken me months to screw my courage to sticking. After all, we’re living through terror(ism) enough, without my having to invite it to my living room.

But oh! the horrible power of Forest Whitaker’s performance as Idi Amin.

It was this performance I wanted to see. I’ve admired Whitaker’s work since The Crying Game and even Smoke.

He did not disappoint.

And there was a gem of a role for Gillian Anderson as a woman who, tempted, refuses to fall.

What was the take-home message of this searing confrontation with the Other?

Hubby says don’t get sucked in by charm and grand charisma.

Son says don’t go to Africa to play the White Man.

Me? I don’t regret having seen it, though it’s left a small scar on my psyche, but I don’t know the moral of the story.

I felt maybe a little set up by the movie. Our protagonist, Dr. Nicholas Carrigan, is maybe unbelievably stupid and naïve, though he does possibly have an ego big enough to match Amin’s. (A blindly stupid white man with a huge ego and a love for the trappings of power. Nah. Not realistic at all.)

Carrigan’s character is so ugly, selfish, using, and one-dimensional that it begs to be reduced to allegory. Perhaps James McAvoy had spent too much time playing fauns in C. S. Lewis country?

So maybe the take-home message is simply don’t f*ck Idi Amin’s wife, ya stupid, arrogant goit.

Which, if you think about it, is a moral that encapsulates both the others.

As Whitaker’s Amin said, Amin/Uganda/Africa is not a joke. Unless Amin is making the joke.

Maybe it’s enough that Whitaker gives us a look at the complexity, the charm, the frightening human face of evil.

The performance begs to be called a look into the heart of darkness, because, in the Conradian sense, the term is appropriate. But it’s also a phrase become hackneyed and stale that has been used by any number of reviewers about this film, so I won’t say it.

For some reason, I had not seen the 1961 release of A Raisin in the Sun. I’m not sure why but I’d guess it was because I was sixteen years old when it was released, living in deep country a two-hour drive from any walk-in theater, and focussed on the burning issues that preoccupy most sixteen-year-olds.

And somehow, over the years, I did not go back and pick it up.

My loss.

The film has not dated. For good or ill, the issues it raises are still relevant. Some of them are timeless and applicable to those of any race who live in poverty.

The performances are gripping. Sidney Poitier’s is surprisingly athletic. For some reason I hadn’t thought of him as an athletic performer. In part, I think that’s because he belongs to an older generation of actors for whom physicality was more subtle.

For the most part, the film keeps to the single room set that the play uses but it really doesn’t seem like a filmed play. In part, I think this comes from the vitality of the performers and in part from smart camera work. But also, as my son observes, it is necessary that the play stay in the single room of the Chicago tenement apartment so that we can get the feel of just how cramped and hemmed in the Younger family is.

A plot synopsis here.

I have to tell you that I cried like a baby watching it, and I think there were some male eyes in the room that weren’t quite dry.

Lorraine Hansberry wrote this play out of some very bitter experiences in her own childhood:

“25 years ago, [my father] spent a small personal fortune, his considerable talents, and many years of his life fighting, in association with NAACP attorneys, Chicago’s ‘restrictive covenants’ in one of this nation’s ugliest ghettos. That fight also required our family to occupy disputed property in a hellishly hostile ‘white neighborhood’ in which literally howling mobs surrounded our house… My memories of this ‘correct’ way of fighting white supremacy in America include being spat at, cursed and pummeled in the daily trek to and from school. And I also remember my desperate and courageous mother, patrolling our household all night with a loaded German [L]uger [pistol], doggedly guarding her four children, while my father fought the respectable part of the battle in the Washington court.”

All of this is in the future for the play’s Younger family. The play ends with their decision to move into the all-white neighborhood in spite of the offer to buy them out and in the full knowledge that they won’t be welcomes. I am impressed by Hansberry’s ability to work out of this personal bitterness to produce a play that is at base positive and expansive.

In a comment to Rebecca about the Betty Boop Minnie the Moocher cartoon with Cab Calloway, I quoted this aricle

When the animation begins, Betty and her father, a Jew from Austria, perhaps based upon the Fleischers’ own father, are arguing. He insists that she must follow the family tradition and eat a traditional dish. Betty tearfully refuses. The scene is a thinly disguised parody of “The Jazz Singer.” Like Jakie Rabinowitz, Betty decides to run away. Like Jakie, she too runs toward jazz music. But, unlike Jakie, Betty runs toward the real thing. No “Toot, Toot, Tootsie” for her. With her boyfriend, the dog Bimbo, she runs off to the strains of “Minnie, the Moocher.”

…

These cartoons were the first opportunity many viewers had of seeing Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway perform. For some in the audience it was the first time they heard real jazz rather than the “jazzy” songs of Jolson.

“The Broadway Melody,” released by Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer in February 1929, is another example of a movie with “jazzy” songs, though without the blackface. Advertised with the tagline “all singing, all dancing, all talking,” it was the first talkie to win the Oscar for Best Motion Picture. Although it retained certain features of the silent pictures, like flash cards to explain the scene, it included a very early technicolor sequence (now lost). It was the top grosser of its year, according to Wikipedia.

An impressive list. But beyond that, I see nothing to make me disagree with the consensus review at Rotten Tomatoes:

…interesting as an example of an early Hollywood musical, but otherwise, it’s essentially bereft of appeal for modern audiences.

It’s almost as though sound made these guys forget everything they knew about making a movie, or even putting on a show. See this review I found at Not Coming to a Theater Near You

The Broadway Melody won the Academy Award for the best picture of 1929, but I am at a total loss to explain how or why. Looking at some of the other nominees—Alibi, The Hollywood Revue of 1929, and In Old Arizona—all films otherwise forgotten, I am tempted to imagine that 1929 must have been a shitty, shitty year for motion pictures. I suppose I should make concessions to the fact that the coming of sound changed, from top to bottom, back to front, the way films were made, but this cannot possibly be an excuse for all of the flaws in this film. I will allow that it explains why, when actors move out of frame, the camera seems unable or unwilling to follow them, and I will allow that it explains why, even in scenes taking place in hotel rooms or backstage dressing rooms, the camera sits at an aloof remove from the action, threatening to reveal a theatrical proscenium arch at any moment. It does not explain, however, why the screenplay requires the actors to repeat the same conversations over and over or why the musical numbers feel so flat and forced. Surely centuries of theatrical tradition would have alerted the filmmakers to what would be acceptable in what is, in essence, a filmed version of a Broadway revue.

That last’s the thing. I mean, you don’t really expect a musical to have much of a plot, but this one doesn’t have much of a show either. There are some really impressive stage sets, but the chorus line is out of sync and the camera doesn’t ever seem to be in the right place. Sometimes it seems to be in the orchestra, where it cuts the dancers off at the ankle. Particularly egregious for the woman who did the tap dance en pointe. The novelty of that wore off well before her sequence ended. Even tapping en pointe should be interesting. IMDb reviewer lugonian describes her “constantly waving her arms as if she were prepared to fly away after getting the go-ahead for takeoff.” Would have been more fun if she had.

There is one extravagant production number (the one that was done in technicolor), “The Wedding of a Painted Doll,” in which some amazing stuff is going on, but the stage is chaos, more like a three-ring circus than the precision choreography of Busby Berkeley that will hit it big in just four years.

The sister act at the center of the film is pathetic (no dubbed vocals and Anita Page apparently couldn’t dance at all), and speaking of jazzy music, “Truthful Parson Brown” as performed by the guitar quartet Earl Burnett and his Baltimore Orchestra is twelve-bar blues as Presbyterian hymn.

Add to that, the leading man’s a jerk who leaves the older brunette sister for the younger taller blonde on the basis of one decidedly unsexy kiss, the sisters’ agent stutters, a schtick that seems to relieve him of the need for any funny lines, the costume designer is campier than Dom DeLuis doing “The French Mistake” (without the irony), and the sisters, whose love for each other is the real emotional center of the pic, are so busy sacrificing themselves for one another that they forget to put any tension into the plot. One evil, self-centered thought would have been welcome.

But then I never think the Oscar winner for any year is the best film. I’m seldom all that enthusiastic about any of the nominated ones.

P.S. The blackface may come in with The Duncan Sisters, famous for their performance of “Topsy and Eva in the 1920s. “The Broadway Melody” is said to be loosely based on their lives and they were originally slated to play the lead roles. “Topsy and Eva,” a musical play based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was made into a film in 1927, just missing its opportunity to be a talkie. D. W. Griffith was involved and

It has been said that Griffith’s reputation as a racist is actually based on this film and not The Birth of a Nation

Spoiler warning.

The first part of this Netflix adventure lay in actually getting the right movie. When we pulled the sleeve out of our pretty red Netflix envelope last week, the DVD sleeve said 3:10 to Yuma (1957) and mentioned Glenn Ford and Van Heflin but when we popped it into the player what we got was Russell Crow and Christian Bale. It seemed almost as though the small gods of Netflix couldn’t believe anybody would really want to see a 30-year-old western shot in black & white when they could have a no-doubt faster paced, grittier, more colorful modern remake.

But that was precisely the version we did want to see. So we bunged the DVD back in the envelope unwatched and sent a message to Netflix that we wanted the movie we wanted. To their credit, they got the right one back out to us almost the next day (it was the weekend).

It was worth the wait. The worst part of the movie was the song, “3:10 to Yuma,” sung by Frankie Laine (of course). It was derivative in both words and music and a perfect example why Laine didn’t realize he was parodying himself when he sang the Blazing Saddles theme.

Once the bombast of the theme is done, however, 3:10 to Yuma is a fairly slow and quiet film that gives the tension time to build and Glenn Ford, with his slow crooked smile, time to charm the pants off stolid Van Heflin. Well, let me rephrase that. Time to charm the sawed-off shotgun out of Heflin’s hands.

He does charm the pants off Felicia Farr’s saloon girl, though all we have of that scene are the two of them coming out of the back room through a beaded curtain, putting their clothes in order just ever so subtly. That’s enough. I know how all the parts go together.

Heflin reprises his long-suffering sodbuster role from Shane (1953), with even echoes of the gunfighter’s seduction of the rancher’s wife and son(s). In this case, he’s Dan Evans, a small-time rancher and American everyman who made the mistake of setting up business on land without a water supply sufficient to stand up to drought. He takes the job of guarding Ford’s Ben Wade for the $200 he needs to buy water rights from a neighboring rancher. You can see how this part of the plot echoes.

In this film, however, Heflin isn’t castrated by a gun butt to the head, which allows for overtones of High Noon (1952) as we watch that big hand moving along, nearing 3:10. (Tex Ritter much more believable in the music department here.) And just like they did Gary Cooper, the townspeople desert Heflin, leaving him to make a lone stand for truth, justice, and the American way.

But the center of the film focusses on the drama between the two men as they sit in a hotel room waiting for the train that will take Ben Wade to prison in Yuma. And/or the arrival of Wade’s gang to rescue him. Ford charms, Heflin resists and the two men develop a tense camaraderie, sharing cigarettes, parrying with words. (Though most of Heflin’s parrying consists of telling the irrepressible Ford to shut up.) Also a familiar American movie trope, but it’s hard for me to imagine anyone topping Ford’s performance here. To quote Dave Kehr in the NYTimes, Glenn Ford could be a bland hero but never an uninteresting villain. Much of the joy in this film is in watching Glenn Ford with his perfect equanimity and his tip-tilted stetson.

The film is unrealistically free of brutality, blood and guts. I’m sure the modern remake corrects those errors, which is precisely why I don’t really care to see it. I know how all those parts fit together, too.

And to be honest, I don’t really believe Van Heflin made it out of town alive. Ben Wade was boss to an amazingly inept gang of brigands. Or that a Ben Wade ruthless enough to shoot one of his own men rather than be caught would not have taken advantage of Dan Evans any number of times.

But it wasn’t part of the world created here for either of these men to be brutally shot down. Evans is not a murderer and Wade is not without some twisted sense of fair play. It was, I suppose, a more innocent time.

3:10 to Yuma is based on an Elmore Leonard short story of the same name.

Watch at YouTube.

P.S. I didn’t say anything about the black & white cinematography because I’m really not very smart about that stuff. But it’s beautifully filmed, as most black and white film is, to use light and shadow to enhance the tension.

Some beautiful horses and horsemanship, too.

Let’s see. Used to say there was four women in every man’s heart. The Maid in the Meadow, the Demon Lover, the Stouthearted Woman, the Tall and Quiet Woman. It was just a thing he said. I don’t know what it means.

I was born politically incorrect: white, southern, female, daughter of Southern Baptist tobacco farmers. On top of that, my forefathers fought for the Confederacy. As far as I know, no one in my family ever owned a slave but that’s a technicality. It’s still a demographic that puts me way out on the fringe of my social peers of choice.

What is more, I am somewhat unrepentant, unwilling to repudiate my family. Though I would not do now what they did then, I have no wish, through the wisdom of my hindsight, to call them evil, to shake the dust of their sins from my righteous sandals. To do so would seem like apologizing for who I am and that’s not an easy thing to do.

Which may explain why I identify so strongly with Quoyle, the protagonist of Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (Scribner, 1993). He found redemption not by denying his past, because he didn’t know he had one, but by discovering and immersing himself in it.

When the novel opens, Quoyle, a fat and shambling man with a huge chin and no-color eyes, lives in Mockingburg, New York. He’s spent a lifetime being bullied by his father and his hateful older brother. He’s underemployed as a newswriter for The Mockingburg Record and miserably married. A man almost completely ineffectual, he is compared in the chapter head note to the Flemish Flake (see photo), described in the Ashley Book of Knots as

a spiral coil of one layer only. It is made on deck, so that it may be walked on if necessary.

Quoyle is not just passive, he’s also self-deluded. A sort of shadow Walter Mitty, he creates fantasies in which his demon lover of a whoring wife, Petal, loves him and he has some sort of family life with her and his two daughters, Bunny and Sunshine.

All of this misery comes crashing to a cataclysmic halt with, in quick succession, the joint suicide of Quoyle’s parents and his wife’s accidental death in a car crash. Oh yes, and he gets fired. Again. Quoyle is flattened completely.

Enter deus ex machina in the form of his long-lost and stout-hearted aunt Agnis. Having dropped by to pick up her brother’s ashes, she invites him to come along with her to the family homeplace in Killick-Claw, Newfoundland.

In this place of harsh weather and harsher history, Quoyle slowly discovers his roots, a family whose sins included shipwrecking (by placing false beacon lights), rape, incest, and child molestation. His family was so bad that their neighbors drove them out of their home on Gaze Island, so that they put their house on skids and pulled it across the bay on winter ice. They re-established it on Quoyle’s Point, a promontory so rocky and wind-blown that they had to anchor the house down with huge cables.

Quoyle tries to help the aunt reclaim this house that has been standing empty for 40 years and in doing so overcomes a lifetime of fears and develops a certain competence. He gets a job writing the shipping news for the Killick-Claw weekly The Gammy Bird and meets “the tall and quiet” woman, Wavey Prowse, whom he desires but with whom he can’t quite connect. He acts as the catalyst to heal the past of his aunt and the future of his daughters.

That Quoyle’s redemption comes as a result of embracing and taming his inner brigand is made clear in the film of The Shipping News. In it, Quoyle takes part in the bacchanalian destruction of his friend Nutbeem’s boat, an event that echoes the wrecking practiced by his ancestors.

Nutbeem is a fellow reporter who has built a Chinese junk himself and plans to sail it to South America and a warm and easy life. It is at his farewell stag party that the locals work themselves into a drunken frenzy and, claiming they want to make Nutbeem stay, take axes to his boat and sink it. Still crazy from this destruction, Quoyle staggers drunkenly to Wavey’s house and assaults her.

Wavey repulses Quoyle easily enough and he sleeps it off on her couch.

The next night Quoyle goes out through a great storm, a storm that washes him clean, and approaches Wavey in gentleness. She accepts him and, in the night, the storm breaks the heavy cables of the past and blows the unhappy Quoyle house away.

Things are not quite so neatly symbolic in the novel. In it, Quoyle doesn’t participate actively in the boat’s destruction and, wandering away from the melee, he only peers somewhat wistfully through Wavey’s window into her warm and lighted kitchen.

In the novel, what happens to Quoyle the next day is that he discovers his cousin Nolan, the last of the old-time Quoyles, living in squalor in a hut near the Quoyle house. Nolan turns out to be the ghost who has haunted Quoyle’s daughter Bunny, perhaps the maid in the meadow, and who has been leaving witch-knots on their doorstep to drive them away. Quoyle has traced Nolan to his lair to confront him, have it out. Instead

In the man before him, in the hut, crammed with the poverty of another century, Quoyle saw what he had sprung from. For the old man was mad, the gears of his mind stripped long ago to clashing discs edged with the stubs of broken cogs. Mad with loneliness or lovelessness, or from some genetic chemical jumble, or the flooding betrayal that all hermits suffer. …Quoyle could not shout at him, even for the witch-knots in his daughters’ footsteps, even for the white dog that had terrified Bunny. Said, “You don’t need to do this.” Which meant nothing. And he left.

Shortly thereafter, Quoyle sees that Nolan is taken care of in a clean and warm modern nursing home and the cousin supplies him with the last key to unlock his past.

I like this ending better because, when the cleansing storm comes and the cables of the past are broken, the old unhappy house is blown away by an act of compassion. It is not in turning away from his past that Quoyle is healed of its wounds, wounds he didn’t even know he had, but by discovering first that he needs a little bit of that wildness and then by looking at the sins of the past with unflinching but gentle and forgiving eyes.

Thus the knots of the past are unraveled but, as head note to the final chapter, taken from The Ashley Book on Knots, reminds us:

There are still old knots that are unrecorded, and so long as there are new purposes for rope, there will always be new knots to discover.

I’ve gone on long and totally failed to capture the charm and humor of this book. The old house may be tied down with cable but the prose is light, the characters quirky and funny. I haven’t mentioned the way the villagers reach out to their returned prodigal. Or how Quoyle sums up his life in headlines: Reporter Licks Editor’s Boot, Man Sounds Like Fatuous Fool.

Being a comedy, the novel ends with all snarls unsnarled and couples coupled with the mooring hitch, of which The Ashley Book of Knots says:

The merit of the hitch is that, when snugly applied, it will not slip…