Political theory and practice – Page 53

White Tiger (Belyy Tigr) (2012)

White Tiger (Belyy Tigr) (2012)

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 44 minutes, rated 6.5 by 3213 cinematizens.

Genre: War, Fantasy.

Verdict: Ahab, tank whisperer.

Context. In the July and August of 1943, near Kursk in South West Russia, an enormous tank battle occurred as the Nazis launched their last major Eastern offensive, putting into the maw a million men (Germans, Austrians, Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, Bulgarians, Slovenians, Croatian, and more) with 3000+ tanks. Big, huh? But the Soviets saw that bid and raised it, offering to Ares more than two and half million men with 7000 tanks. The air fleets were likewise enormous. Events far away determined the eventual outcome when the Western Allies invaded Sicily leading the Nazis in Russia to fall back because reserves of men and material intended to sustain a counter-attack in Russia were diverted to Italy.

Set-up. After one tank engagement in the weeks this battle dragged on, a badly burned Ahab is pulled from a T-34 and miraculously recovers from his near fatal wounds in ten minutes. This is Comrade Found who becomes the tank whisperer. He communes with the steel hulls of burned-out hulks and confirms that his tank was destroyed by the titular White Tiger tank.

This is a long way from the Soviet propaganda films about the Great Patriotic War like Two Soldiers (1943), It Happened at the Donbass (1945), The Star (1953), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), ….. where bare and barrel-chested hero workers rip German tanks apart with one hand while hold Lenin’s testament aloft in the other. In this film there is blood and grit, and no one turns to Lenin for solace. Moreover, the tank whisperer is a non-entity, pigeon chested, cross-eyed, monosyllabic, and stooped. This is no Hollywood hunk taking time off from the steroids and the gym.

But once Found recovers in record time from burns — he is reborn, he is back in a tank seeking out the White Whale of a Tiger in some mixed up zoology. White proves so destructive and elusive that the Soviet Army dedicates a small unit led by the Tank Whisper to seek and destroy it. Shoot ‘em ups occur. Tank whisperings save Ahab but the great White gets away again and again. There is talk that it has a ghost crew as well as magical powers to cloud men’s mind. It is the S-H-A-D-O-W tank! Talkative German prisoners tell everything they know which is not much without even getting a cigarette in return.

That occupied the first hour plus, then — inexplicably — we cut away to a ceremony led by Russians with a German Field Marshall surrendering in the presence of American and British flags and at least one American general officer uniform. The Nazi delegation includes all arms: Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe. Huh? From 1943 to 1945 in a flash. The White Tiger made no further appearance in the last two years of the war.

There follows another half hour with several pointless scenes in a ruined city, perhaps Berlin, which I watched with one eye. It ends with an incomprehensible monologue from guess who? Only one ear was required for that: Found says the White is still out there waiting. Ah huh…, and…. Nothing.

By the way, there are no women in the film after Tank Whisperer leaves the hospital, apart from a few passing in street scenes at a distance.

Leaving aside the last half hour it had some mystery, which was never resolved, and so just became an excuse for blown ‘em up and shoot ‘em up. Tant pis. The early musings of a couple of the characters were a good start but they became repetitive rather than informative, not a patch on similar musings in The Thin Red Line (1998) or Castle Keep (1969). Still when I compare it to the trailers I have seen of recent Anglo-American war films White Tiger has a verisimilitude completely lacking in them. There is not a bareheaded, bare chested Brad Pitt in sight reminding us his food-fad diet, the hours a day he spends in the gym and at the make-up chair.

I cannot forbear, and why should I, from mentioning that one reviewer on the IMDb refers to the setting as the winter. Winter in July, well maybe, in Boston but not in west central Russia.

Not my usual far but I found some references to it that made it sound more thoughtful than the usual shoot ’em up. Not so, I found.

The Shadow Returns 1946

The Shadow Returns 1946

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 1 minute run time, rated 5.7 by 128 cinematizens

Genre: Howdunnit (not Whodunnit).

Verdict: All hat, no oil.

‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!’

Unlike The Whistler, The Shadow did not need to spy on people to find out their secrets: he got up in the morning knowing them. Moreover, The Shadow had ‘the power to cloud men’s minds so that they cannot see him,’ completely unnecessary where the fraternity brothers are concerned, but handy nonetheless. Still it left the brothers wondering about women’s minds. Nor did The Shadow need a gimmicky off-key whistle like you-know-whom. Finally, he was voiced once by Orson “I am a Genius” Welles. It ran to 677 episodes from 1937 to 1954. Most of which have been lost to ravages of indifference. But some can be had from Audible.

What a pedigree to take to the movies! What a flop the movies were and are!

In the movies he knows from nothing and back again. His mind is the only thing clouded. His gimmick is a black cat suit for a costume party. He is surrounded by people who know his secret.

Lamont Cranston interferes in police investigations to the amusement of his uncle, the Police Commissioner. His faithful driver is an oaf. He ridicules his girlfriend, Margo Lane whose single contribution to proceedings is to wear silly hats. Yet this is the Shadow. Hardly! A mere silhouette of his radio self.

This Shadow is so pathetic he has to hold a gat on the cops while he explains things to them. Not a cloud in sight. However in this outing the police do figure it out and there is a nice scene toward the end when the Irish Inspector No-First-Name Cardona and Lamont piece it together based on nothing but the clock and the script.

But to back up: Four sneaky types fall off balconies to break their necks and die, apparent suicides. Each was alone when taking the concrete dive. No one pushed them. Were they drunk or drugged? No. Were they following a Des Moines Sky Mall map? No. Were they by some scriptwriting coincidence suicides? No. Were they raptured by the Kool Aid? No. What then?

That is intriguing but the weary and dreary direction undercuts the suspense. Later the explanation involves either Indiana (Jones) or Australia, sort of.

There is also a neat idea about a secret lab in a warehouse that is not integrated. The only critic linked to the IMDb entry who bothered to comment on it said the plot was ‘not wholly coherent,’ exemplifying understatement.

Kane Richmond as Lamont Shadow has the profile of a superman double, chiseled features, powerful jaw, a brow untroubled by thought, a masterful baritone voice, broad shoulders, an effortless glide of step, a toothy grin, and the confidence of a schoolyard bully. Yet, strangely, he has no presence on the screen.

Margo gets some compensation for the twenty-four carat sexism throughout. Her best line is a reply to Lamont is: ‘Don’t yell at me until after we’re married and then don’t you dare!’ Even better when Lamont is trying to open a safe with much manly posturing as he prepares to pick the lock, she reaches past him and opens the door which she had noticed was not closed but which Lamont had not, so busy was he preparing for his display of masculine genius. Hssss [sound of ego deflating].

On the radio The Shadow and The Margo were a team and all business but on film they seem to be auditioning for a comedy show on the way to a masked ball, and failing. There is much, too much, slapstick with the black costume that he always has handy. The comic relief is annoying as usual.

It is little wonder that translating this successful radio serial to film failed. The radio audience would have found it to be a failure as above. The scriptwriter used bait and switch, and the audience switched back to radio.

The Empty Mirror (2008) by J. Sydney Jones.

The Empty Mirror (2008) by J. Sydney Jones.

GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages rated 3.4/5.0 by 351 by litizens.

Genre: krimi, period.

Verdict: serious and intense.

Vienna: In 1888 Gustav Klimt is arrested on suspicion of murder when one of his models is found dead! Klimt is an uncouth giant from whose hand comes those ethereal paintings. That was a striking contrast.

His friend and commercial lawyer Karl Werthen promises to help him. To Klimt it is all some kind of joke and he treats his incarceration as a research trip. But the murder was the fourth in a series and the Pox News clamour to scapegoat Hillary is loud, though an advisor to the police minister tells Werthen that Klimt is not the guilty one but public opinion demands a scapegoat, and well…..Hillary is not available so it might just have to be the big guy.

Werthen is ill equipped to investigate a murder but his old friend from Graz (been there) Dr. Hans Gross is an accomplished criminologist, as he says repeatedly. Gross is passing through the capital of the Empire en route to the University in Bukovina to take up the Chair of Pompous Pontificating in that remote corner of the Austrian Empire. To extend his stay in Vienna Gross is ready to lend a hand.

While Werthen is strait-laced, upright, and uptight, Gross is ready to get down and dirty, crawling around the crime scene with a magnifying glass or probing a corpse in the mortuary. Werthen finds all that distressing, disturbing, and distasteful, but Gross’s effort does turn up clues missed by the plodders.

Gross concludes that the murders have been calculated to implicate Jews. About halfway through (per the Kindle measure) someone observes Gross and Werthen. Ominous. Is this the perpetrator watching those who seek him. His perspective recurs now and again thereafter.

The conceit is that Gross has written several textbooks on criminal investigation which have been read by Arthur Conan Doyle who then used the techniques therein revealed to create Sherlock Holmes. Gross assumes everything stems from sex and cites Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing to that effect. To avoid censure Krafft-Ebing wrote his book in Latin – Psychopathia Sexualis. (We passed Krafft-Ebing’s mansion a few week ago when traversing Vienna.) They seek out a young Sigmund Freud for advice but he is out of town for the moment.

The malevolent observer arranges for a red herring, and muses on his duties. Gulp!

Then the story seems to end half way through and there is a romantic interlude in which Werthen gets married to live happily ever after. As if!

Then the krimi resumes. Odd construction. What would Aristotle make of this disunity? Same as me. Annoying is what I made of it. One character mentioned the sewers (shades of The Third Man) in passing and leaves it at that. The mention alerted this reader but nothing came of it. False alarm.

The story starts again, and includes a stay to the Lower Belvedere which we visited in September 2019. The plot goes around and around and includes the much exploited events at Mayerling and even Sissi with a head of hair to make Farrah Fawcett cringe. In the end our heroes prevail, but only just.

There are many nice touches. Foremost is the study in corruption of the prince who masterminded the whole thing in the name of saving the Austrian Empire, chiefly from those Magyars. Franz Ferdinand is also a nice portrait of nobody’s fool. Then there is the Emperor whose sole concession to modernity is to make himself available to receive petitions from citizens twice a week for an hour. Otherwise, Austria in 1898-1899 as portrayed in this novel clings to the past. Motor cars are discouraged. Electricity, despite the role of one of its citizens — Nicoli Tesla — in it development, is not used by the government for illumination. All the sixty Austrian generals based in Vienna are seventy or more years old. The body politic was a gerontocracy with sclerosis, lacking a mirror of self-knowledge.

Jones has a compère in fin de siecle Wien and that is Frank Tallis whose books include Vienna Blood, Death in Vienna, Vienna Woods, and Fatal Lies discussed elsewhere on this blog.

Having just spent a week in Vienna I recalled many of the streets and byways that figure in this book.

An Author Bites the Dust (1948) by Arthur Upfield

An Author Bites the Dust (1948) by Arthur Upfield

Genre: krimi

GoodReads meta-data is 224 pages, rated 3.93/5.00 by 228 litizens.

Verdict: Parody plus

In the Yarra River valley the self-appointed, self-satisfied gatekeepers of Australian literature gather at the home of Mervyn and Janet Blake, having removed themselves from Melbourne to concentrate on their labours refined and many. He has published several novels but recently has concentrated on devastating critiques of the works of others, while she publishes short stories. They are much celebrated in the tiny world of the antipodean literati, almost as much as they celebrate themselves – legends in their own minds.

There are frequent gatherings of their acolytes at this quaint country retreat. Among the number are Martinus Lubers, Arvin Wilcannia-Smythe, Twyford Arundal, and others. As fine a pencil-necked crew of four-eyed paper-shufflers as Upfield could imagine. Of course these aristos do not mix with local hoi polli, but are much observed by the locals, including Mr Pickwick, a neighbouring cat.

This smug world shatters when Mervyn is found dead one morning in his study. There is no discernible cause of death. Inspector Cardboard from Melbourne Criminal Investigation Bureau arrives to muddy the waters and does so energetically, concluding there is no crime to investigate. He congratulates himself on his perspicacity and returns to Melbourne.

Still suspicions remain because there is no discernible cause of death and Bony is summoned from far Queensland, being the only sensible detective in the wide brown land, and he is seconded to the case. He sets about learning the ways and wherefores of the village and its villagers.

It has all the Upfield features:

A careful and respectful description of the locale and locals.

A stalwart local plod stymied by the aforementioned Inspector Cardboard.

Grizzling about government while relying on it.

Bony reading footprints on cement sidewalks, well, almost.

His many annoying habits, rolling his own cigarettes and drinking many cups of tea with exaggerated courtesy.

A school of red herrings among the cast.

A crime within a crime to roil the depths.

An off-stage persona who was there all the time.

A beautiful woman to admire Bony.

Published in 1948 and set immediately after World War II there are may references to shortages of goods except for tea, which occasions the ritualistic grizzles about the GOVERNMENT, but nary a mention of the war itself, still less of its toll on the village – yet local men must have been in the army in Singapore, New Guinea, or Egypt.

Most of all it offers a window on haute literature versus commercial fiction as the acolytes circle each other. Bony finds a cicerone to this new world in a commercial author, one Clarence Bagshott (aka Arthur Upfield) who explains to him that writers may be either storytellers or wordsmiths or both. (It takes pages and pages to make this simple point, I am afraid.) The best writers are both. A story teller may be a good writer but not always, though a wordsmith with nothing to say does not make the cut.

Commercial fiction places a premium on storytelling because that is what buyers want to read.* (Amen, to that Brother Arthur!) Litterateurs write only words. [Snort!] They turn inward and haughtily disdain commercial fiction as beneath their rarefied vocabulary. Does this explain Dan Brown’s success?

Upfield must have had a lot of fun characterising these wordsmiths from their frilly clothes, poncy hairstyles, sneering lips, pinched features, skimpy moustaches, watery eyes, reedy voices, skinny arms, and ridiculous names. There is not a manly man among them, to be sure, and the ladies fair little better but he spends fewer words deprecating them.

By convulsions many, the plot involves a commercial writer, I. R. Watts, whom Bony tracks down. Watts is pseudonym and neither the publisher nor Australia Post is very cooperative in penetrating the disguise. However, Bony has his ways, he asked the Tax Office which happily reveals all. Yep. Damn GOVERNMENT!

Spoiler ahead.

Here is where it gets complicated and interesting. Yes, of course, this storyteller of commercial fiction is the pseudonym of one of the very same literary snobs, but which one and why?

Turns out Janet Blake is I. R. Watts, whose commercial success might rival that of Upfield himself. She is a story teller par excellence. Having read one of the Watts books while on the trail, Bony attests to that with the assurance and confidence of a man who has read little. Here is where the flour is stirred in to thicken the plot, for she has long kept this secret pseudonym from her husband Mervyn Blake who is so self-centred he did not notice either her industry nor the income that resulted from it. I can believe that when I reflect on some of the cases of Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) with whom I have worked. This disorder is a pattern of self-centred, arrogant behaviour, a lack of empathy and consideration for other people, and an excessive need for admiration. [Fill in the blank for the names of those near by. Continue on a separate page.]

Her earnings as I. R. Watts maintained their lives while he scorned all others in his literary criticism. The commercially successful novels of Watts would have been beneath his contempt. His own career as a novelist has ended and in truth it never quite started it seems, since his early novels were rejected by British and even, shock, Australian publishers until Janet Blake made suggestions, changes, and so on, and when they were then emended and published she allowed him full credit. Rather than embracing that productive partnership, Mervyn (because of his narcissism) rejected her further contributions, and though he wrote many other novels, none were published. Into that lacunae grew his bile and his criticism of others. Sounds like a good case for tenure.

In short, she did him in, though quite why I never did get, apart from the fact that he was an insufferable dolt, but then look around, no shortage of those, and few of them are murdered. The how is made of hardened air inside pingpong balls.

Thanks to the scavenging of Mr Pickwick, Bony works it all out and arrives at the herring de jour.

You say ‘Boney’ and I say ‘Bony,’ because Upfield wrote it as ‘Bony.’ When some of the stories were filmed for television it the 1970s the name was changed to ‘Boney’ for reasons only known to those who made the change. That in turn has influenced some of the re-issues of the books. The stupid lead the blind as usual. That television series is discussed in connection with comments on another Upfield title to be found elsewhere on this blog.

Upfield published at least thirty-seven Bony titles; he addition he published two dozen short stories, and a great deal of non-fiction in newspaper articles about the outback, aboriginals, and life in the scrub. He served in the Australian Army in World War I and upon return to Australia lived as a jackaroo for years. He was an active member of the Australian Geographical Society and participated in many of its expeditions.

* To Bagshott’s literary dichotomy I would add a third category today: Prize fiction. The books that are entered for literary prizes today are not written for readers of either stories or words. They are written to arrest the attention of the overwhelmed and jaded hacks who serve as jurors on selection panels for literary prizes who must pick winners out of the hundreds of titles submitted. The weird, the strange, the incomprehensible, the attenuated, the dead boring, the unreliable narrators, the omission of punctuation, these are all devices to make a book standout of a pile of ninety volumes on the desk. I have spoken! Did I say ninety, one such hack has since told me that he had one hundred-and-fifty the last time he did one of these duties.

Civilisation is in a race between education and catastrophe.

In his Outline of History (1920) H. G Wells wrote that ‘Civilisation is in a race between education and catastrophe.’*

Catastrophe is winning.

After one hundred and fifty years of free public education, the Enlightenment project seems to be spent. Instead of reason and evidence, even ostensibly educated people celebrate, parade, and worship passion. Emotions are regarded as superior to reason. Thus I have oft heard that it is praise to say a scientist is passionate, whereas I would prefer a scientist to be cool and detached, letting the facts and evidence lead to the conclusions, not the emotions. Ditto for journalists, doctors, teachers, and ambulance drivers and more. But no, they are congratulated for passion not competence, discipline, restraint, diligence, tenacity, skepticism, preparation, endurance, and the like.

To say someone is competent, knowledgeable, effective, precise, industrious, or professional is faint praise compared to attributing passion.

Indeed the self-advertising of universities follows the crowd, touting passion not perfection, belief not doubt in proclaiming their virtues.

Emotional reactions are simple, binary, as when cheering on a sporting team. These days even the self-appointed newspapers of record, having forsaken the historic mission of public edification, put sports figures and celebrities on the front page in the vein attempt to hook buyers and readers by passions, not by information, insight, knowledge, or long and slowly accumulated intelligence that came from sitting still and reading or patiently listening. Favoured instead is the direct intuition of passion.

Press that button!

The White School House at Corning Iowa last time I saw it.

Admittedly education itself has changed in that century and a half. In the last two generations in a comfort born of the sacrifices of others, the denizens of higher education have largely devoted themselves to undermining the Enlightenment project, while enjoying its benefits, and they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and passed that on to their students who have gone on to become school teachers, parents, journalists, and community leaders. Witness the world they have made today in Whitehall and the White House where volume and repetition have replaced facts and evidence. Passionately saying it is so now makes it so.

Intellectuals were the first to find facts irrelevant and spread the word in seminars, lectures, and books. The word has spread and now grows of itself. Truth is no longer privileged. This I have been told for years in seminars, conferences, and theses. All knowledge is tainted. Everything is opinion. (See Plato’s Republic Book Ten.)

*If some smartypants out there could supply the volume and page numbers I will thank them personally.

Café Europa (2015) by Ed Ifkovic.

Café Europa (2015) by Ed Ifkovic.

GoodReads meta-data is 278 pages, rated 3.68/5.00 by 28 litizens.

Genre: period krimi

Verdict: Nifty.

Edna Ferber (1885-1958) and firebrand, fictional suffragette Winifred Moss are travelling in Budapest in 1914. The trip is R and R for Suffragette after a gruelling period of arrest and torture in London, while Edna is escaping her cloying mother, ensconced in Berlin. From Kalamazoo, Ferber’s parents were Jewish, one Hungarian and one German, thus she travels with the languages for Mitteleuropa.

With its hotel upstairs featuring English plumbing the threadbare but comfortable Café Europa is favoured by English-speaking travellers. It is likewise convenient to the sights and sites of Buda (though few figure in this story apart from the Chain Bridge and the Castle).

In act one The Travellers observe the betrothal of a young American heiress to a sclerotic Austrian count. She previously had been courted by a dashing Hungarian, a scion of a porcelain fortune, but her parents arranged a marriage to the count, who is supremely indifferent to the whole matter, but his mother is the match-maker on that side. The American parents want the marriage to get the lustre of aristocracy, while the mother wants the gelt. The girl does not seem to mind but acts like the spoiled child she is. It is all very Edith Wharton [without her subtlety], until…..

The bratty heiress is murdered in the garden at midnight! Who dun it?

Act two opens with the local plod Hovarth investigating only to be pushed aside by a bumptious, idiot from Vienna who must arrest someone to satisfy aristocratic pressure. Neither the parents nor the match-making mother seem to care about the dead girl, but both parties are embarrassed by her murder. Talk about blame the victim.

Act three sees the murder of another American tourist: Buzzing around from the beginning is an annoying Hearst journalist named Harold. He goes here and there stirring and sewing sensationalism, malice, and half-truths. Think Pox News with energy and there it is. Harold differs from Pox journalism in having a certain puppy charm. Then Harold is shot dead in the street.

Act four: Meanwhile, Edna and Suffragette fall in with some local artists, reluctantly.

After much to’ing and fro’ing the cast gathers, ostensibly, in a wake, but we know the denouement is coming at 90% on the Kindle. We know this because, deus ex machina, while falling sleep the night before Edna and says to herself and the inevitable portrait of Emperor Franz Jozef on the wall in her hotel room: ‘That’s it!’

Act five offers an explanation of sorts: It turns out the murder….. Whoops, Spoiler ahead, take warning! Everything is political. Brat’s father is not only rich, stupid, and vain, he is also the owner of Colt Firearms and a matrimonial union with the Austrian Empire would feed the weapons to its army. Yes, it is a long bow, but there you have it. The best way to scuttle the union is to murder her. Sure makes sense. But then, maybe that sort of thing does to some tiny minds.

Harold of Hearst had begun to figure it out, and so he also had to go. Bang!

Spoiler. In keeping with the great tradition of krimis the murderer is the least likely, the seemingly gawky busboy, who is in fact a thespian terrorist. Another long bow.

The hindsight is thick throughout, everyone knows war is coming, quite how they could be so sure is left to one’s imagination when so many others, including many of the decision-makers, were taken by surprise. It was made fact by repetition. There had many conflicts in the Balkans already and another was perhaps inevitable, but the prescience in these pages anticipates the Great War not another armed border dispute.

The multiple-sclerosis of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is well done. Everywhere is the picture of Franz Jozef, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and monarch of many other constituent polities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and once President of the German Confederation, yet the regime is comatose. He leads his peoples in clinging to the past. He will not promote to general a soldier less than seventy years old, only if all eight grandparents were themselves nobility may one enter the court circle at the Hofburg, telephones are forbidden in imperial buildings, he has never ridden in an automobile, though aged he ascends six flights of stairs each night to his army cot rather than have a new-fangled elevator installed. Electricity is banned from official buildings. He favours only those who do the same.

Yet in Paris, in London, in Berlin modernity is bursting out in all forms, electricity, automobiles, telephones, jazz, dance, short skirts, women smoking – none of these practices are permitted in the K and K (for King and Emperor) lands. French, English, and German armies are promoting young officers with technical educations and embracing new weapons and tactics, while in K and K the cavalry sabre remains the ultimate weapon.

The descriptions of the modern art as a revolution itself, destroying the old order, are very well done and quite arresting. Even the Hearst hack is conscious of something in the art he sees, though he cannot articulate it and it does not delay him long from the spoor of cheap sensationalism.

While thinking Edna and Suffragette drink Bulls Blood wine. During our recent visit to Budapest, I asked about this very wine, recalling its role in completing the PhD dissertation long ago. The vintner said it was an export label first applied to vast quantities of red wine Hungary traded to the Soviet Union in return for oil in the 1960s. It would seem that the Soviets then bottled it and traded it to Canada for wheat. In turn I traded it for words at the typewriter. Yes, I know, there are extensive entries for it on the web but if read closely, they do not contradict the essence of the intel above.

Edna Ferber had a long and distinguished career as a writer, novelist, playwright, and essayist. This is the sixth in a series featuring her.

———

William R King the Vice-President who wasn’t

Pay attention class!

William Rufus KING was a Vice President of the USA? True or False.

True. Briefly.

When? 1853. Yes only in that year, but not the whole year. Considerably less than twelve months.

From Alabama, he was New Hampshireman Franklin Pierce’s Democratic running mate in the 1852 election. Though the two did not meet during the nomination or campaign. Uh? Yep and there is more, or rather less.

In 1852 to give geographic balance to the New Englander heading the ticket, King was nominated in absentia, having travelled to the hot and humid climate of Cuba for his health. (Maybe he should have gotten a second opinion.) After the Democratic ticket won, a special act of Congress allowed King to take the Vice-President’s oath of office at the US consulate in Havana on 24 March 1853. A little later he returned to his home in Alabama and died there on 18 April 1853; he was Vice President for little more than three weeks, none of it spent in Washington D.C. He must have the title for the shortest VP term, though John Tyler is often credited with that. Tuberculosis was the killer, perhaps to make a comeback aided by anti-vaxxers near and far.

Pedants note. The Wikipedia entry credits him with forty-five days in office, longer than Tyler as above. How that number is arrived at given he took the oath on 24 March and died on 18 April is one of the mysteries of WikiWars. In the Wikipedia text he is credited with holding the office from 4 March (when President Pierce took the oath) though the text also clearly states King did not swear the oath until the 24th of March because he had not been in D.C. on 4 March. Members of Pedants United (PU) are sure that he was only VP after he took the oath, not when the office was vacated, or when Pierce was sworn in. Those who agree may tell anyone they please.

I first came across this spectral Vice President reading a biography of Franklin Pierce, discussed elsewhere on this blog for avid clickers.

The Old Dark House (1932)

The Old Dark House (1932)

Genre: Old dark house, Gothic

IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 12 minutes, rated 7.1/10.0 by 8062 cinematizens

Verdict: In the beginning.

The Set-up: Monsoon rains in Wales wash out roads and lead two separate travelling parties to pitch up at the Old Dark House of the Femm family. If only the travellers had been able to read the map where it said ‘Do Not Stop Here.’ But it was too wet, too dark, and the director was in too much of hurry for that warning.

There they find the hirsute, mute butler, Frankestein’s monster, moonlighting in a second job. Melvyn Douglas wise cracks; Raymond Massey looks serious; Lillian Bond just looks as does the very talented Gloria Stuart (of Titanic) in this pre-Code film; but Charles Laughton has the best part and plays it superbly. Then there are the cross-dressing Femms, Horace, Rebecca, Saul, and Roderick engaged in a race to the nut house.

Enthusiasts for creepy old dark houses, ahem, like me, are in for a disappointment. There are no secret passages (from which chain saw wielding cats leap), no sliding panels (to reveal a torture chamber), no peep holes (through which to see terrible sights, like a Republican), nor does anyone flounce around in a cape (the most common ensemble for villains in Old Dark Houses).

On the other hand, the Femms do provide compensations. Horace jumps every time someone scratches. Rebecca screeches denunciations of all as sinners. Roderick is the cross-dresser. Saul likes fire. Lots of it.

We never do find out anything about the travellers and they all survive the night to continue being unknown though in a slightly different configuration. In these days Douglas often played the wise-cracking wastrel, belying his later, memorable dramatic roles.

Gloria Stuart before taking passage on the Titanic

James Whale of Frankenstein directed, wasting Boris Karloff behind some hairy make-up, from the novel Benighted (1927) by J.B. Priestly; the screenplay closely follows the book. Among the nice touches are many visuals, nobody can open a door like Frankenstein’s monster, or the split mirrors before Gloria Stuart, the shadows on the dining room wall, and never did the phrase ‘Have a potato!’ seem so strange. By comparison the Hammer remake in 1963 is a toga party.

Robin Bailes, The Vengeance of the Invisible Man (2019)

Robin Bailes, The Vengeance of the Invisible Man (2019)

Good Reads meta-data is pages 236 rated 0.0 by 0 litizens. (Lazy sods!)

Genre: krimi, academic

Verdict: Whoa! I did not see that coming.

Recovering from her Mummy’s Quest (2018) adventures in Egypt, Amelia has been digging in Romania. Romania! Yes, Rumania in the Carpathian mountains. Seems there are pictographs there, too, for her to interpret. In anticipation of Christmas she has returned to Cambridge and her sister, the high powered Zit who talks a mile-a-minute while running hither and yon. She is loud, full tilt, and one-dimensional, contrast to the shintrovert Amelia.*

Zit’s publishing firm is bringing out a work of fiction – Memoirs of an Invisible Man. In short order, the question becomes ‘Is it non-fiction?’ because strange things start to happen. The author does not show up at the book launch, but the books go flying through the air. Sales follow. There are several other public displays of the invisibility – a pair of empty trousers dance through Christmas shoppers, and so on. Nothing that would be noticed on King Street in Newtown.

The sensation hungry media adds to the fire garnishing invisibility with hyperbole. Sales continue to soar. Zit loves the sales but cannot communicate with the author, still less set KPIs. All of this intrigues Amelia, who read the manuscript and found it poignant, even moving, whereas, compliant with her McKinsey training all Zit sees only £’s.

In a parallel track professors two in Cambridge fastness have been strangled in locked rooms. Were they victims of collegial animosity. Well, as a matter of fact….. [But that would be telling].

Plod Harrigan applies the acids of questions, shoe leather, and patience to crack the case much to the fury of his superior who wants RESULTS! NOW! Bullying subordinates is certainly a chapter in the McKinsey Management Manual these days. Nonetheless, as he nears retirement Harrigan keeps on keeping on, despite the badgering, er hmm, management of his superior. Loved Harrigan’s musings about his last words, and pleased he did not need them.

Meanwhile, Amelia connects the dots between the murders and the invisible man. Seems obvious, and yet there are surprises to come. Believe me: I was surprised. Of course, they are connected but not in the way I expected.

A victim of her own curiosity, Amelia gets in the way and has a brush with the invisible one that frightens her into contacting Universal (see The Mummy Quest, reviewed elsewhere on the blog, for an explanation). She expected [sigh] the suave, dashing, handsome Boris to come to her rescue. Instead, thanks to the duty roster, she gets the short, unsympathetic, and dowdy Elsa who saves her neck more than once with a willingness to believe the unbelievable and a resourcefulness honed from previous encounters with the unbelievable.

In the midst of all this Amelia meets a man who does take her seriously and she him, but fitting courtship into a schedule dominated by the unbelievable is difficult. This romance is charming, but it does slow the action.

There are references to the formidable Maggie at the start and finish, but I was disappointed she did not put in an appearance. She just about stole the show in Egypt. The crystal ball suggests that she will figure in the next title in the series that will take us to Nosferatu country.

There are many great lines in what is essentially a screenplay. Elsa says that in her experience the dividing line between the living and the dead is a grey area. There are more where that came from. Read on.

Razor-tongued Robin Bailes (host of My Dark Corner of this Sick World to be found on You Tube) cannot be stopped, and in this one he comprehensively outsmarted this jaded reader with the double-barrelled plot. It brings together many threads from the cinematic suite of invisible man films discussed elsewhere on this blog. This is the third book in Bailes’s series, and the best for my AUD $4.95 on Kindle. Very clever. Chapeux!

*Shintrovert is a shy introvert, a term coined by Jessica Pan in Sorry I am late, I didn’t want to come (2017) discussed elsewhere on this blog. Do try to keep up.

Maginot Line Murder (1939) by Bernard Newman

Maginot Line Murder (1939) by Bernard Newman

GoodReads meta-data is 219 pages, rated 0/5 by 0.

Genre: krimi

Verdict: Talky

Multi-lingual Brit secret service agent Bernhard Newman is rambling through the Vosges Mountains on his honeymoon, when….. Because of his experience in ferreting out German spies, Papa Pontivy, head of the French Deuxième Bureau, asks for his help. In the inner sanctum of a fort on the Maginot Line a dead body has been found. That is bad. Here is what is worse. The deadman is unidentified. Worse. Worst: he was shot dead but no one heard anything. Oh, and the corpse was naked and disfigured, to prevent identification it seems. How is it that no one noticed all of this in the claustrophobic confines of the underground fort?

How did a stranger penetrate the many defences of a Maginot Line redoubt? Sacré bleu! How did he do so in secret? How did someone else kill him without leaving a trace? All good questions.

After a tour of the fortifications Newman goes about his honeymoon business….ahem. And Papa Pontivy takes over. He disregards evidence and relies on his numerous instincts. Gallic though he may be he does not practice the Cartesian method, which in general is to accept nothing as true until verified beyond doubt, to divide the problem into its smallest components, to take each component in turn, to start with the easiest and (re)solve it and then on to the next. To make enumeration complete and reviews general so that nothing is omitted. Pops does none of this.

Thereafter the novel violates most rules of fiction. It divides the action and the narrative voice. Newman leaves. Pontivy takes over insisting on his instinct, which by the way make no sense but reference to his instinct is constantly repeated to the point where I agree with one of the characters who says to him, ‘I am tired of hearing about your instinct!’ Amen, brother! He then goes to Brittany which his instincts tell him is the key to the Line. He does not bother to look at a map, but relies on the writer to prove him right.

This instinct that he cannot stop talking about when Newman says a Captain seems to have recognised him (Newman). That sets Pontivy off but it is not his perception at all but Newman’s. And even that makes no sense since the Captain certainly recognised him since he had earlier encountered him in the woods and marched Newman in to explain himself. One rule for writing fiction is, I know, write fast and do not read what is written. This author applied that rule to the hilt. I kept going because of the few details about the Maginot Line, but as a krimi it is tedious.

Bernard Newman (1897-1968) was a prolific author. He had been a liaison officer with French forces during World War I. After this war he travelled widely in Europe on a bicycle. He was in France in May 1940 and saw for himself the onset of the German invasion. He often made himself the protagonist in his novels as above.

His oeuvre includes travelogues, spy stories, science fiction, and journalism. His The Blue Ants (1952) described a nuclear war between Russia and China set in 1970. There are nearly a hundred titles in all listed in the Wikipedia entry. Some have been re-issued in a Kindle format. Probably not for me.

Confession. As a boy the encyclopaedia we had at home featured an extensive entry on the Maginot Line which fascinated me. Later I appreciated the political and social aspects of this engineering feat, and that added an informed layer of interest. André Maginot had served in the trenches at Verdun in World War I and he marched with veterans at the consecration of the tomb of the unknown solider in the Arc de Triomphe after the war. He entered politics to prevent another blood bath, and when he was invited to join a cabinet he wanted Defence so he could build that wall that later bore his name, though it was never officially named.

There were two major military reactions to the bloody stalemate of trench warfare in World War I. One was to turn to mobility in tanks, trucks, motorcycles, and air planes. Proponents of mobility included Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, both of whom had also been in the trenches, and also Erwin Rommel who had practiced mobility on the Italian front in World War I. But Churchill and de Gaulle were marginalised in the post-war politics.

The second response was to build impregnable trenches under nine feet of steel and concrete which itself was under tons of earth. Maginot was one who responded in that way, but more importantly so was Phillip Pétain, the defender of Verdun, and his word was law on military matters because of the sacrifices at Verdun, birthplace of Jean d’Arc. This was an effort to learn lessons taught in blood.

Most of the lore about the Maginot Line is mistaken, like most lore. It did not continue along the Belgian border because the Belgians vigorously objected to that, and claimed that their neutrality would be respected, and if not, then their own Albert Line would suffice. In either case no unnamed (German) invader would threaten France through Belgium. When came the test, the Albert Line was breached in a few hours – it had been built by the lowest bidder, a German firm that turned over all the plans to the Wehrmacht. That may sound dumb. So does contracting with Chinese-owned firms for defence computers but we do that right in the wide brown land. Nonetheless, Maginot was determined to continue the Line to the coast, but he ran out of money and because of the Depression he ran out of political support. One of the reasons the Germans attacked when they did, was to strike before the Line reached the coast. Where it was tested in the South, it proved impervious to Italian attacks.

The Maginot Line was built:

To prevent a German surprise attack.
To slow a cross-border assault.
To protect Alsace and Lorraine.
To save manpower. (Recall that Germany had twice the population of France.)
To allow time for the mobilisation of the French Army.^.
To be used as a basis for a counter-offensive.
To invite Germany to circumvent the Line by violating the neutrality of Switzerland or Belgium which would galvanise world opinion against it, and it would also make the field of combat those countries and not France itself.

In the polarised whirlwind of the Third Republic, the French general staff forgot its own strategy and spread men and material along the Line so that there was no concentration and in a crisis none would be possible. Consequently, the Line was fully manned, leaving no troops in reserve for such a counter-attack.

I read this novel years ago in the Fisher Library copy. It has not improved with age.

Not to be confused with Double crime sur la ligne Maginot (1937), a film that depicts a love triangle among officers in the Line and offers so many images of the formidable Line and hundreds of troops that it must have been made with the cooperation of the army, perhaps as propaganda to show how great the Line was. In the event, German agents were the villains. There is a version of it on You Tube, and it is dead boring.