IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour even, over-rated 4.0 by 971 masochists.
Genre: Sy Fy and Snooze
Verdict: No brains were eaten in the making of this movie. Nor were any used.
In Illinois farmland a silo appears. Well, a cone. There were already plenty of silos but no one notices them.
The cone sits there. Cone sitting.
Anticipating a plague of Cone Heads, a loud mouth Senator in Washington is granted executive authority by the President, who did neither constitutional law nor political science, to deal with the cone.
Big Mouth goes to Illinois and orders everyone around. Yawn, went the fraternity brothers. Ed crawls into the cone and finds nothing. The mystery deepens.
Meanwhile there have been three or more murders in the nearby small town. Huh? We see one in the opening sequence. A few people run around with a glowing basketball tucked under their coats. Hoosierland is indeed hoop country.
See.
There is one excellent scene early in the mayor’s office where he behaves oddly. Very. It is very well shot, a la Orson Wells, askew. Mayor goes ballistic. Literally. With a gun. Something is wrong! Got it. This scene is very well acted by the distraught mayor and nicely filmed. Much better than anything else in the picture. So much so, the fraternity brothers wondered if it was excerpted from another movie. The more so, since we never see or hear of the mayor again. Perhaps he was desperate to escape the rest of this movie. A wise man he proved to be.
More milling around and yelling occurs. Big Mouth makes many telephone calls, sends telegrams, tells a…. Ooops. No one replies to his missives. That cannot be right, he yells. I am too important to be ignored! Really? Think so?
Meanwhile the clock is ticking. Ever so slowly.
They realise the cone, which has been the focus of such attention as there has been, is a decoy. The real threat is elsewhere. Quick on the uptake, not. The attackers are moles from underground, not aliens from the stars. Huh! So that flash of light at the start was…a blown bulb, or what.
Meanwhile more and more people adopt the Quasimodo look. Finally there is a confrontation with Mr Spock, a noble suicide, a crashing bore, and the end.
Mr Spock is credited as Leonard Nemoy. Ah huh. He got the last laugh.
The inference is that the glowing basketballs were eggs and when they hatch the tribbles that emerge fasten onto the nearest human spinal column and munch away. The infected human becomes a soulless automaton perfect for attending McKinsey management training seminars ad nauseam.
There is intrusive narration. When our heroes go to the telegraph office, the voice over tells us that they are at the telegraph office in case we missed the big sign that said ‘Telegraph Office.’ And so on. Perhaps that was a service for blind members of the audience. The use of such voice overs rather than dialogue indicates the lack of sound technician. One of the many lacks in this case.
Without a doubt it is derived from Robert Heinlein’s Sy Fy novel ‘The Puppet Masters’ (1951). Heinlein sued and settled out of court. Executive Producer Roger Corman agreed, says the web gossip, to buy the screen rights to two Heinlein books and not to put Heinlein’s name anywhere near this one. Corman did not use the rights he bought. That is very unlike Mr Tightwad. It took another forty years for ‘The Puppet Masters’ to be filmed, as reviewed elsewhere on this blog.
‘The Puppet Masters’ (1994)
IMDb runtime is 1 hour and 49 minutes, rated 5.9 by 7552 cinemitizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Des Moines never looked better
In a small town in Iowa, but not blue-eyed Riceville, a spaceship lands and thereafter everyone is as dead-eyed as a born again Republican. They lose interest in sex and, believe it or not, in football!
The Masters proliferate at an alarming rate endangering the future of the Iowa caucus. To avert that catastrophe the resources of the distant and oppressive Federal government are mobilised in the person of a Canadian. Huh! Go with it.
The Masters attach themselves to the backs of victims, who seem to enjoy the experience, without leaving a wrinkle in a shirt or a hump under a blouse. Amazing.
The first fifteen minutes are whiz bang. The ship lands. Teenage boys find it. A baseball bat figures. Next thing you know everyone in town has a Master. The Feds come to check and shoot ‘em erupts in the local television station’s office.
After that rattling start the pace slows, and slows, and slows, punctuated by gratuitous fisticuffs, shoot ‘em ups, and chases that go around in circles. Regrettably it does not feature the (infamous) Des Moines Sky Walk, about which more below.
The Masters turn hosts into automatons who hate immigrants, blacks, homosexuals, success, table manners, Democrats, and good sense. Hmmm.
While there are two scenes where communication occurs between a Master and a man, these aliens seem to have no program. They are there to destroy, not to do anything more. Many have concluded that they were Republicans. I couldn’t possibly say. They make no plea that they have to do this to survive, that their home world has or is going to perish, that they bought Earth in good faith at a Milky Way real estate auction, that God told them to do it, that their KPIs require it, or any of the other standard tropes of the genre. In this respect the Masters fall short of ‘Teenagers from Outer Space’ (1959) who came to farm lobsters, a film reviewed elsewhere on this blog, hidden in a collective comment on several films. Search away. Or for that matter, ‘The Lobster Man from Mars’ (1989) who came to steal oxygen, also reviewed on this blog. Get to clicking to find it.
I cannot remember the book, which I read as a teenager, well enough to add anything sensible. ‘Guffaw,’ went the fraternity brothers. Right on cue. [Subsequent note, I did try to re-read after drafting these words of wisdom but found its 1950s machismo hard going. It reminded me vaguely of the stories in men’s magazines of the era in barbershops.]
The film is repetitive and violent and the FBI warning contains the following note. The film has ‘violence, gore, and BRIEF LANGUAGE.’ Yep. That put the fraternity brothers on high alert. Violence? Check. Gore? Check. But, whoa, brief language? Nope. There is a lot of yapping.
There is much running around in Des Moines car parks and the city hall environs. The energy is high; the meaning is low; the character development is zero. Muscle is supposed to be Canadian’s alienated son. ‘So what,’ asked the fraternity brothers. Good question, since we never do find out what to make of that except that Canadian wears Armani suits. There is sex interest in an exo-biologist but there is neither spark nor sparkle there. Linda Fiorentino would have burned a hole in the screen in that role, but this player is bland on bland. By the way, Keith David nearly steals the show in a supporting role. Don’t blame him for the final turn which came from the writer and the director, not the player.
Likewise, Will Patton, as the nerd boy who figures a lot of it out, is a pleasure to watch.
But we don’t get a lot of thinking in this slam-blam adaptation. Yaphet Kotto is entirely wasted as an empty uniform.
Sometimes killing the host kills the parasite and other times it does not. Mostly it does not, but when the parasite ridden bodyguards of the President are mowed down, the parasites go quietly. That puzzled the fraternity brothers, briefly. Nothing stays with them long.
The stunt work is fabulous with nary a CGI in sight. The night para-glide into the heart of darkest, alien infested downtown Des Moines was great fun. But once there it is the same old, same old. The running, jumping, falling, fighting, shooting was masterful if one wants it. But after the fourth or fifth time with no forward progress in the story or the people, well, who cares.
While the critics linked to the IMDb comment on the small budget, it seems to be large and talented cast with plenty of money for stunt work. The list of stunt men and women acknowledged in the credits rolls on and on.
The story comes from Robert Heinlein’s 1951 novel, in which it is clear that the parasites are Commies sapping the vital red, white, and blue juices from Americans who are too dumb to know that they are being drained. Heinlein has a claim to be the Dean of Sy Fy in the 1950s. He was an Arctic Cold Warrior – seeing reds as slugs, bugs, and cruds. Slugs in this outing. Bugs in ‘Starship Troopers.’ And cruds in ‘Red Planet.’ And under every bed, disguised as dust bunnies.
The patience of readers to this point is rewarded with a comment on the Des Moines SkyWalk.
It was built in the 1970s to allow downtown office workers to traverse its four miles of elevated walk ways in comfort, out of the weather of the Great Plains. It connects to several large car parking garages, a bus exchange, office blocks, city hall, retail malls, a sports complex, hotels, and is dotted with cafés, fast food franchise, laundries, and the like. It served two purposes, one, to keep jobs in the downtown area rather than in outlying business and industrial parks, and, two, to attract companies to locate in Des Moines.
We used the SkyWalk in Des Moines and learned a sad lesson. Everywhere else in the known world North is always at the top of a map. Not so in Des Moines. When we paced the SkyWalk we saw helpful, illuminated maps at every junction and read these to navigate. BIG MISTAKE. Soon we were going around in circles and off course. Why? How could this be? We looked more closely at the maps, one after another. On some North was at the top, where it should be. But on others it was to the right, or left, or a diagonal, or at the bottom. No two consecutive junction maps had the same orientation. Believe it or not, Ripley!
The maps were useless to outsiders. And no doubt were never consulted by locals. While there is some information on the SkyWalk to be found on the internet none of it addresses this fundamental point. Is it any wonder that no famous explorer ever came from Iowa? Couldn’t find north.
There is an app. Wonder where north is on it? No plan to find out.
While the RÉSO in Montréal has far fewer maps, they are consistent and put the true North, strong, brave, and free where it should be.
It seems the SkyWalk has kept jobs in the downtown, about 75,000 of them according to the Chamber of Commerce, and in so doing has brought new opportunities to Des Moines. It has also obeyed the law of unintended consequences and nearly destroyed street level commerce. Everyone uses the SkyWalk in preference to the street. There are virtually no walk-ins to businesses on the streets. The space for businesses on the SkyWalk is much less than on the street, so the net effect is to squeeze out small businesses from downtown.
So it is said. I would say Iowans are going around and around on the SkyWalk because they cannot find north.
Michael Shayne’s Seven embodiments by Lloyd Nolan (1940-1943)
Lloyd Nolan made seven B movies as Michael Shayne in the early 1940s. Within the limits of the genres, Noir and Comedy, they vary. Only one of them includes any reference to World War II. The details of the seven follow my comments.
‘Sleepers West’ is the most interesting.
Shayne escorts a secret witness on a train ride from Denver to San Francisco while villains on board plot to terminate that witness. The touch is light, and there is marvellous subplot involving two journeyman actors, Mary Beth Hughes and Louis Jean Heydt, a rarity to see these two with a chance to act, and they take it.
The result is pathos amid the action. In another sidebar the train engineer has his moments, too, as does the fireman shovelling the coal. Further enriching the film, Lynn Bari crackles with intelligence as a newshound.
There is a deadly serious take on this story in ‘The Narrow Margin’ (1952).
‘The Man Who Wouldn’t Die’ is excellent in its noir mood. There is a separate review of it elsewhere on this blog. Seeing it stimulated me to watch the whole set.
Dressed to Kill’ is theatrical in its setting and has a convoluted plot.
It is formulaic but done with vigour. Henry Daniell adds the caustic tone in which he specialised. It seems all too typical of the times that the two actors playing the black stereotypes are mismatched in the credits. Most of the action takes place on the ocean liner. Superman is there, Steven Geray adds his Hungarian accent, but the real surprise comes at the end. No spoiler. There is a pip of a scene early in the piece in a convenience store run by Frank Oth and Mae Marsh, two veterans who shine in their small parts.
‘Time to Kill’ puts Shayne into Phillip Marlowe’s shoes with a variation on Raymond Chandler’s ‘The High Window’ aka ‘The Brasher Doubloon’ (1947).
It gets the highest rating from the cinemitizens.
‘Just off Broadway’ starts and ends in a court room where Shayne takes over proceedings. Sergeant Bilko enlivens the show. The knife-throwing act is better done in this instance than in most other films. Was it for real? Marjorie Weaver, a veteran of other titles in this series, is pitch perfect as his gal pal. No idea how the title applies to the story. There are two oblique references to the war in this one.
1.’Michael Shayne, Private Detective’ (1940), 1 hour and 17 minutes rated 6.7 by 317, released 10 January 1941.
2.’Sleepers West’ (1941), 1 hour and 14 minutes, rated 6.8 by 303, released 14 March 1941.
3.’Dressed to Kill’ (1941), 1 hour and 14 minutes, rated 6.5 by 862, released 16 October 1941.
4.’Blue, White and Perfect’ (1942), 1 hour and 14 minutes, rated 6.8 by 264, released 6 January 1942.
5.’The Man Who Wouldn’t Die’ (1942), 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 6.7 by 340, released 1 May 1942.
6.’Just off Broadway’ (1942), 1 hour and 5 minutes, rated 6.1 by 122, rated 24 September 1942.
7.’Time to Kill’ (1942), 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 7.0 by 124, released 22 January 1943.
Thereafter Nolan like much of Hollywood concentrated on war movies. He compiled 160 credits on the IMDb, but given how ubiquitous he is, that seems too few.
‘Murder Chez Proust’ aka ‘Meurte chez Tante Lèonie’ (1994) by Estelle Monbrun
GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages rated 3.0 by 27 litizens.
Verdict: Best for Proustians
A small conference of Proustians gathers at Illiers in Aunt Lèonie’s house now a museum dedicated to the sickly Marcel. The organisers include the unscrupulous Adeline whose speciality is blackmailing others with her own remembrances of things past. She brow beats her timid secretary who is also at the mercy of her PhD dissertation supervisor, a man combining all the worst features of a god-professor, one who smokes. To add to the spice, Adeline has both a lover, who really does love her, and a fiancee. Neither of whom see her faults, so readily apparent to others. In the case of these two men, love is not only blind, but deaf and dumb.
In addition to the locals, a party of American stereotypes has descended on the conference. Well, the French did invent the concept of ‘chauvinism.’
The plot thickens when Adeline is found dead in the house museum. Inspector Jean-Pierre Foucheroux is there to investigate along with his sergeant Leila Djemani. These two soon establish a long list of people with motives to harm Adeline, including all those mentioned above and more. In fact, just about anyone who ever met her.
There are some apposite Proust references, but never enough to satisfy a Proustian and too many for others. There is the usual bluster from witnesses, and the secretary is so timid it is hard to believe she is a Parisienne of thirty.
Foucheroux and Djemani (nicknamed Gimpy and Chipmunk by colleagues) make a good pair of sleuths, and I liked the context. But the pace is slowed by Foucheroux’s backstory, a matter of indifference and irritation to me. While the characterisations are largely cardboard, I did love the displays of scholarly pretension in several of them. That part rang true. God-professors, indeed.
Estelle Monbrun
The author is a teacher who has no doubt seen all of these characteristics on display more than once. She has several other titles of the same ilk.
As I was finishing this book, I thought it so-so. Then I read the author’s afterward, which I found charming, informative, and engaging. Maybe I will read another one. She being a serious literary scholar had no ambition to write a novel, until moving to St Louis and discovering the necessity raking leaves.
Huh?
She went at leaf raking with such conviction that it led to a herniated disk, and while lying abed contemplating her errors, lacking the concentration to bandy lit crit, she wrote this krimi. By placing it is chez Proust, by dotting it with Proust bons mots, by populating it with Proust enthusiasts, she hoped it might entice some readers to turn to the man himself. The pleasure in forming that ambition led her on to other writers, e.g., Collete, Montaigne, and more.
Moi, I never went at leaf raking with conviction, though I have certainly gone at it, marvelling at how many leaves a couple of trees drop. The last time I did this I had to stuff them into large orange bags because these were collected to later be opened and the leaves shredded and the bags re-used. Well that was the story. However the low bid contractor had taken the money and run, and the bags were all going — unopened — into land fill. But we rakers, until the story was blown, had the comfort of supposing the work of bag stuffing had an environmental benefit. Ha, ha, ha. OK but you try stuffing endless leaves into orange bags to see how much fun it is.
‘I Walked with a Zombie’ (1943)
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 9 minutes, rated at paltry 7.2 by 9211 cinemitizens. Released on 30 April 1943.
Genres: Horror, Drama
Verdict: Jane Eyre in the West Indies.
On a blustery day of snow and wind in frozen Ottawa a pert young nurse is offered a post on a tropical island at a good rate of pay, expressed in dollars.* Off Nurse goes to San Sebastien where she meets the half-brothers Smooth and Touchy. Her assignment is to look after Mrs Smooth. ‘An invalid?’ she asked. No….. She meets Mrs later that night as a hot wind stirs the palm trees and rustles the cane fields. Disturbed by the sound of crying, Nurse finds the sleepwalking Mrs in a spooky tower.
There is tension between the brothers and it seems to relate to Mrs. James Bell gives an Oscar-worthy performance as the local doctor who mediates between medical science and the voodoo gods. The ambiguity remains throughout.
Smooth says that his family is cursed by its history as slavers. He is as morose on this island paradise as a doomed, grey man in the Nordic ice fields written by Henrik Ibsen, bearing the sins of his fathers. While Touchy defers to Smooth as the elder brother and as manager of the cane plantation, he assiduously undermines him. (Reminds me of so many people I have worked with in that passive-aggressive mien.)
The slave past remains in the local culture. When a baby is born the blacks cry for the pain and grief of slavery it will endure. Death is a time to celebrate release from those pains.
There is one creepy segment in a sugar cane field at night.
This episode might be the most memorable in the film, especially the line, ‘She does not bleed.’
A number of blacks populate the scenes, mostly in the background. But the crooner has some very pointed lyrics, delivered twice. He is credited as Sir Lancelot, born Lancelot Victor Edward Pinard and raised in New York City. Theresa Harris lights up the screen as Alma, who knows far more than she says. She has more than a hundred films on the IMDb, often uncredited and inevitably as a maid. Darby Jones
was cast for his bug eyes yet he remains dignified. He made a career out of jungle movies. The dancer who compels Mrs is the dynamic Jieno Moxzer. This is one of only two credits on the IMDb. Our loss.
None of the blacks is reduced to the comic stereotype so tiresomely common at the time in movies. That in itself is noteworthy. Added to that is the guilt of slavery articulated by Smooth, and it is a surprise package. Though there are some disparaging remarks in the script that irritated the fraternity brothers.
The screenplay is by Curt Siodmak, he of a long list of Sy Fy and Horror credits, and Ardel Wray. Some of the internet opinionators argue, well, assert, that the story is unusual for Siodmak. Not so sure myself. The air of menace, showing rather than telling, the concentric circle of stories are all motifs Siodmak used. But there is no doubt this one has emotional depth that may have come from Ardel Wray.
She, by the way, for refusing to rat people out was grey-listed during the Witch Hunts a few years later. Ergo her film credits are few. Grey-listing led her to work as a reader and editor in the back office at Warner Brothers. No longer getting screen credits kept her profile low.
After the debacle of Citizen Orson Wells at RKO, the studio was in dire financial straits. It was imperative to get revenue and there was little or no money. Val Lewton was appointed head of the B-Movie unit at RKO and he was handed a backlog of properties with deadlines for completing them. The KPI was $.
Val Lewton
Most of these properties were short stories, which had been purchased to get the titles, not the narrative, in the way that one today might purchase an internet domain to get the name, not the content. He then assigned titles to writers to produce screenplays quick-smart. Likewise he had to work with directors, technicians, and actors already on contract.
This film is one result. It was made on a micro-budget but with clever lighting, accomplished camera work, skilled editing, and brisk direction, it looks like an A-movie. Much of the credit for all the preceding qualities has to go to the director, Jacques Tourneur. His other credits include ‘Cat People’ (1942), ‘Leopard Man’ (1943), and ‘Out of the Past’ (1947). Winners all. He specialised in film noir. He, too, suffered from the Witch Hunts of the time, finding it opportune to return to his native France for extended vacations at times.
Though barely more than an hour long it is chocked full of characters and incidents, each carefully defined. Yet it does not seem rushed or crowded. It is another exhibit for a masterclass on film-making.
*One quibble though, it was only in 1949, per the fount of Wikipedia, that Canada introduced its dollar to replace the British pound.
Careful viewers will note that as the opening titles roll there is a disclaimer that ‘any similarity to any persons living, dead, or POSSESSED, is entirely coincidental.’ I put the capitals in for emphasis.
‘William Morris: A Life for Our Time’ (1995) by Fiona MacCarthy
GoodReads meta-data is 780 pages, rated 4.17 by 115 litizens
Genre: Biography, Leadership
Verdict: a good book but so much detail that the man is obscured.
William Morris (1834-1896) was a poet, essayist, novelist, and more who was and is best known as a decorative artist. (He is not the William Morris [1877-1963] of the Morris automobile.)
Morris was born into comfortable circumstances in Essex. One of six children, his father was a broker who invested in mining (copper and coal). As a boy young Morris played at knights and lords, and that made the man. Most of us grow out of children fantasies, whereas Morris grew into them.
Medieval Europe was Eden before the fall of industrialism in his mind. He found the remnants of this past in cathedrals in England and France, and also in other ancient, rude buildings. That they were rough hewn showed they were made by human hands, and this he always preferred. He found continuity with this time of yore in the rough and barren landscape of Iceland, where every rock, tree, and crag has a name, and a role in an edda.
Two overarching themes dominated his creative life. One was to bring the past into the present, and the other was to bring nature into the home. The past and nature are unsullied and so they refresh the soul. To drink their elixirs we must drill back through industrialism, through the Enlightenment, and through the Renaissance to El Dorado.
At Oxford he came into the company of friends who stayed with them for the rest of his life, like the English poet with an Italian name Dante Rossetti, painter Edward Burne-Jones, and architect Philip Webb. This the germ of the so-called Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, reaching back past Raphael to an earlier tradition, and it was a brotherhood. Male companions were an essential in his life though there is not hint of an erotic element.
Influenced by John Ruskin, as later was the singular Marcel Proust, Morris began to look closely at buildings. Thereafter he treated them as repositories of human creativity, imagination, ingenuity, and history. Well, some of them. Those made by hand with tools made by hand, and so on. He founded a society with some of his inherited wealth to preserve historic buildings, which was one of the precursors of the National Trust.
Morris began as painter of murals, and gouache works, migrating into interior design. Today to refer to Morris evokes a response about wallpaper with flowers and vines. Leaving aside many details, Morris was a cantankerous genius who made decoration into a fine art.
He threw himself into one thing after another, and mastered each from the ground up. To make wallpaper, first Morris made the paper. To make the paper he first made the presses and vats to make the paper. Only then did he devise the means to transfer his designs to the paper.
A Morris wallpaper.
Tapestry is the same story. First he made the loom, then he made the tapestry. Later in life when he took up bookbinding. He once again made his own ink, paper, and presses so that the results looked medieval, free from the corrupting influences of modernity.
He was sure that the product that results from such wholistic labour was more authentic and superior, i.e., closer to nature and to the past, but he could never articulate that. Indeed, one theme in the book is that Morris, despite the endless flow of words from him in essays, novels, poems running to twenty-four hefty volumes in the University library, was unable to communicate. He could talk, he could write, but he seldom got across his essential meanings. The weight of his verbiage drowned himself out. This was especially true in his private life.
He married Jane Burden. She was not his social equal in Victorian England, and to prepare her for marriage they had a year-long betrothal during which she was tutored to upper middle class ways. They had two children, girls. The tittle-tattle about Jane is endless, and MacCarthy shifts it all judiciously. What is obvious is that when Morris proposed, it was an offer too good (socially and financially) for her (and her parents) to refuse, so she took it. Rossetti circled her for years like a moth to a flame; MacCarthy concludes that is all it was. Later she did have a paramour, and Morris knew this in all but word. He hated it and accepted it.
Morris had a volcanic temper and he gave vent to it often. I first tried to read this biography years ago, after reading his ‘News from Nowhere’ (1890), about which more below. After a time, I quit because I found him an unpleasant companion, with his tirades, self-indulgent jags, and perpetual spoiled child approach to life. Having persevered this time I find that only in his sixties did he seem to grow up.
The author handles this well and leaves it to the reader to decide. I did. Many speculate that he suffered from this syndrome or that. As if giving the pattern of actions a name absolves him of responsibility. Hardly. That syndrome was Jerkism. Often encountered for which no treatment has ever been devised.
In the 1880s the priest found his vocation, and Morris became an evangelical vicar for socialism. What that word meant to him is elusive. Overtly it put him in the company of Frederich Engels, Edward Aveling (and his wife, Eleanor Marx), Henry Hyndman, and others. These early English socialists were so uncompromising that if five were in a room there were seven factions claiming the Truth. They were only united on two points. (1) The current order is corrupt and unjust. (2) It is so corrupt and unjust that it cannot be reformed but must be destroyed. Thus they shunned the Chartists, the Liberal reformers like John Stuart Mill, and later the Fabians and the early stirrings of the Labour Party with their sewer socialism that offered practical improvement to the lives of millions but did not promise a city on the hill.
Socialism meant everyone had sufficient wherewithal to live a dignified and meaningful life. That honest work was the highest value. These are the basics of Morris’s socialism. His commitment was, in any event, not intellectual but emotional and he went at it for ten years like a man possessed. He funded socialist publications. He traveled the length and breadth of Great Britain extolling it by preaching on street corners, and so on. He exhausted himself. He also outspent the firm, the running of which he left to others: alienated clients, exasperated his wife, mystified many longterm associates, and perplexed his employees.
The jockeying for position among the socialist factions came to a point where he was turfed from the socialist organisation he had founded and funded. The plotters assumed he would continue to fund it since the cause was righteous. Naiveté has many names. He did for a time just as he put up with Rossetti’s years of attendance on Jane, but even he had a stop button. Much of the Wikipedia entry charts the torturous evolutions and convolutions of these folks.
After a decade of public proselytizing Morris retired from the field and returned to his workshops. Age caught up with him quickly and by the later fifties he looked much older and frailer, partly the result of untreated diabetes, and the long term effect of gout. Daughter May became even more important in keeping a Morris involved in the business.
There is a matter not resolved in this copious volume. May did not inherit the business or any part of it, though she was instrumental in it. One wonders why. There was no estrangement, and she began compiling his collected works shortly after his death and edited twenty-four volumes.
He seldom practiced what he preached, it has to be said. The workmen he employed were paid just enough to attract and keep them. There was no profit sharing. They called him ‘Sir’ though he often worked side-by-side with him. Peter the Great did that, too, but his workmates often called him Pete. He made no effort to contribute to their social or home life, or to educate their children. Robert Owen, George Pullman, the Rowntrees, and many other entrepreneurs did those things, while engaging in the industrialism he detested, but Morris did not. When confronted by the gap between his words and deeds his response was that one man’s actions were insignificant in the bigger picture. Immediate, practical, incremental amelioration did not interest him. It would only prop up the dreaded system. Never mind that such palliatives might enrich and save lives in the here and now. Rapture not relief was his ambition.
It is well to remember that he is not the only man to have inherited wealth. Unlike so many others he did something constructive with it and in so doing he also led others to do constructive work, too. In 2004 we visited Cardiff Castle in Wales, a lavish home, one of eighteen owned by the the Bute family who furnished it. Eighteen. The family spent no more than a week there in a year. Such riches, and yet not a day’s work done by any member of the family. That might be the comparison to keep Morris in perspective.
The book abounds in details. Sometimes more than enough is piled on for this reader. It is subtle in its interpretations with insight and clarity. The prose is supple. The book is a better companion than the subject.
Fiona MacCarthy
We saw a superb exhibit on the Arts and Crafts Movement in Barcelona in April 2018 and that inspired us to do a William Morris tour of Adelaide in August 2018. This book was my assigned reading for the Adelaide sojourn. By coincidence I also heard an ‘In Our Time’ program on Morris, which is recommended.
Post Script
His ‘News from Nowhere’ (1890 has a place in the canon of utopia theory. He was moved to write it in refutation of Edward Bellamy’s ode to industrialism in ‘Looking Backward’ (1888). The two books have been since forever wed.
Bellamy celebrated the creative capacity of industrialism in the United States. Labor is organised like the armies of the Civil War and production was so great that there came abundance for all in return for a minimum service in the Industrial Army, which waged and won the war on want. Several innovations dot the story, like music piped into the home, like the credit card. It is a Rip van Wrinkle story in which a sleeper awakes to find this new order in full swing.
Bellamy’s book had an enormous impact, and it was this influence that drove Morris once again to his pen. His socialism was millennial. The old order had to be destroyed and only then could we find our way to the New Jerusalem. Gradual improvements were illusory sops, not change. Abundance would be destructive rather than liberating. Of course, only someone who already has all the creature comforts can dismiss them so easily.
Morris recoiled from this materialism finding it without soul. His rejoinder is another Sleeper Awakes tale. This sleeper awakens to a post-industrial world which has reverted to cottage arts and crafts, and everyone is happier for it, including the anti-vaxxers.
While Bellamy pictured the future as a continuous development with the present, Morris posited a rupture that overthrew the factory system and industrialism, and their attendant corruptions. Much of the book is devoted to the pleasures of arts and crafts, with nothing about tiresome necessities like clean water, sanitation, medical science, and communication.
‘Below the Clock’ (1936) by J. V. Turner
Genre: Krimi
Goodreads meta-data is 282 pages, rated 3.64 by 11 litizens
Verdict: Lifeless is the kindest thing to be said.
When Amazon’s mechanical Turk suggested this title, I was tempted because of the context, namely Westminster. That a Chancellor of the Exchequer might die — murdered — at the dispatch box delivering a budget seemed a neat set-up. So I acquired and started to read it.
I did finish it but only by some quick thumb work on the Kindle to flick through the pages and pages in which nothing happens very slowly. It is consists nearly entirely of conversations, many belaboured to be clever, I guess, but succeed better at being irritating, annoying, and distracting. Nor were the characters either well defined nor distinguished one from another.
Finally, the protagonist is intended to be colourful, I guess, but succeeds in being petty and pompous. His ‘violently coloured’ and occasionally ‘virulently coloured’ handkerchief is much flourished. Aaargh. Note that this is the seventh in the series.
While there is much going back and forth, this reader never got any sense of the geography or ethnology of the House of Commons, its nooks and crannies or its denizens, though it must have them by the dozens.
Then there are the many typographical errors. It is hard to believe they were in the original edition when copy editors prepared books for publication. The mystery is how they crept in. Via OCR software is one possibility without the mediation of a copy editor.
J V Turner is a pseudonym for David Hume. Nor that David Hume.
I am sure that someone on GoodReads says it the best book ever published. Indeed among the eleven raters, there are two at 5.
‘Murder in the Blue Room’ (1944)
IMDb meta-data is run time a snappy 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 6.2 by 151 cinemitizens.
Released on 1 December 1944.
Genre: Noir, Comedy.
Verdict: All singing, all dancing gal pals do what has to be done.
To dispel superstitions about a mansion where a murder took place twenty years ago, the family puts on a party for family and friends. As the guests gather and cavort, the upstairs Blue Room, where the deed occurred is nonetheless kept locked.
Brash, a young suitor for Daughter, insists that he spend the night in the Blue Room to prove it is safe. This kNight errant hopes to win patronal favour for his matrimonial suit by this exploit. Sure, that is understood but safe from what?
Thereafter the plot thickens. The next morning, though the bell in the Blue Room rings for the butler, no one is there in the Blue Room when the ever typecast butler Edwards enters. Bernie OIds on loan from countless other cop shows, comes to investigate but makes no progress, apart from chewing on a toothpick. Brash has disappeared.
The sleuthing is taken over by the three Jazzy-belles on hand to entertain the guests. These wisecracking gal pals mix song with inference and dance with investigation. They are amusing. The music has zest. The dancing is Olympic standards. Very diverting. All so much better than say the Ritz Brothers, originally contracted for this film before they got a better offer.
Needless to say there is a villain, and it is a he, the one least suspicious. Of course.
For once Ian Wolfe as the eternal butler gets some good lines and moments on camera, and he makes the most of them.
The Jazzy-belles carry the picture, a scratch group assembled for this film, it seems: Grace McDonald, Betty Kean, and June Preisser. Two of them had short careers but McDonald continued in television into the 1980s.
A rarity then for the time with these three as the principal players.
The screenplay confused the fraternity brothers. At one point, speaking of the death in the Blue Room, a member of the family says no one knows how the victim, her father, died. Later her brother says their father was shot. In both cases the attending physician is present along with several others. Throughout there is friendly ghost in attendance who is not integrated into the story but is there for comic irritation.
As this film made it way across the country, the newsreels that preceded it would have carried the news of the enormous and ominous reverses Allied Armies began to suffer in the Battle of Bulge.
The whipping boy Machiavelli
‘Early in the 16th century, Niccolo Machiavelli acted as chief political advisor to the ruling Medici family in Florence, Italy. The details of his counsel are well known because Machiavelli laid them out for posterity in his 1513 book, The Prince. The gist of his advice for maintaining political control is captured in the phrase “the end justifies the means.” According to Machiavelli, a ruler with a clear agenda should be open to any and all effective tactics, including manipulative interpersonal strategies such as flattery and lying.’
That it the opening paragraph of ‘Machiavellianism’ by Daniel Jones and Delroy Paulhus, in ‘Individual Differences in Social Behaviour’ (New York: Guildord, 2009), pp 93-108.
This is a standard reference work in social psychology. It is wrong on all counts.
1. Machiavelli never advised a Medici, and he certainly never drew a salary as an advisor to a Medici. Moreover, he never tried to do advise a Medici, despite the letter commonly printed at the front of student editions of ‘The Prince.’ That letter was intended as irony not as a fact, a subtlety lost on many. In fact, when the republican government Machiavelli served was overthrown, a Medici had him dismissed from office and had him imprisoned.
2. Machiavelli did not publish a book called ‘The Prince.’ He had no interest in posterity. That title was put on a manuscript he had blogged for years and which was then published long after his death. The publisher had a commercial motivation, nothing more.
3. In the manuscript that became the book ‘The Prince’ Machiavelli described but did not recommend the practices he had seen rulers use. In fact, he advises a prince against liars and flatterers.
4. He never said ‘the end justifies the means.’ Nor is this a distillate of his teaching. Read the passages about Agathocles to see why.
All these matters and more are dealt with at length in ‘Machiavelliana’ (Leiden: Brill, 2018) for those who must know more.
These kinds of mistakes, constantly recycled, have created a mythical Machiavelli. Bad as they are, they pale next to remark quoted in the ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ recently of a judge’s remark in sentencing a child abuser by saying his misdeeds were of ‘Machiavellian proportions.’ While the phrase is meaningless, it once again drags Machiavelli’s name through the dirt of others. Ah so much for a law school education.
‘The Amazing Mr X,’ aka as ‘The Spiritualist’ (1948)
IMDb meta-data is runtime a brisk 1 hour and 18 minutes, rated at 6.5 by 1155 cinemitizens.
Genre: Noir, Mystery
Verdict: Noir at its best.
Babe is a two-year widow who starts hearing his dead husband’s voice in the air without a BlueTooth headset. Oh Oh. This irritates Richard Carlson, her new suitor. She has an Ingenue sister who lives with her in a mansion on a cliff top. Where else?
Walking on the beach below one night, she encounters Mr X, who tells her about herself for he is a medium and sensitive to her vibrations. [There were snickers from the fraternity bothers at his point.] The Viennese Mr X oils his way into her life.
He is an utter cynic, having planted an accomplice as a maid in the mansion to glean information. His aim is to separate this widow from a lot of moolah. Ingenue falls in love with him and his oily ways. Widow is perplexed by it all.
A séance is arranged in Oily’s wired up studio. The party is crashed by Carlson and the private dick he has employed. The crashers insist that the show go on; Oily tries to grease his way out of it to no avail. His hand is forced and the lights go down. Then….
The dead husband appears to all. No one is more amazed than the amazing Mr X in a star turn.
Seems husband has had several widows pining for him and he has plans to reduce the number. The plot twists even more, and Oily discovers, to his own surprise, that there are some things he will not do for money. Ingenue figures it all out and ….
It is a master class in creating an atmosphere heavy with mystery and peopling it with rounded characters yet including all the clichés, to wit, a crystal ball, a turban, and a raven. All in just over one hour of runtime.
The dead husband is menacing and ruthless. The private dick has a sense of humour. Carlson is so earnest that he made the fraternity brothers feel guilty. Ingenue is so enthusiastic it is hard to take. Babe is so perplexed that she must have been reading some of Martin Heidegger hieroglyphs.
But the real star of the show is the camera, and the lighting that emphasises the air of mystery and confusion. Harvard graduate Bernard Vorhaus directed. He is another victim whose career was blighted by the HUAC, the monster that roamed Hollywood off camera for far too long. He gave David Lean his first job in movies. After being black listed Vorhaus went to England with his Welsh wife and changed careers, working on home renovations. Our loss.