ILLUSTRATIONS: ATLAS SHRUGGED

Recently it has been my habit to do rapid  illustrations of some of the images that stick in my mind from my reading.  Here are two illustrations for Atlas Shrugged. Sharpie marker, grey shader marker and white prismacolor on sketch paper, approx. 6" x 8"

THE VULTURE IS MOLTING

"The penetrating study of a businessman's greed. A fearless revelation of man's depravity."  Imaginary novel mentioned in Atlas Shrugged to illustrate the decadence of modern society.

Lady Detective Holiday - WHILE THE PATIENT SLEPT

While the Patient Slept (1935) - It's a dark and stormy night in the mansion and the family vultures are gathering to watch the old man die.  Everybody is half hysterical by nature, everybody has got some kind of angle, and they all have their claws into each other.  There is something to do with a missing twin brother and a green figurine of an elephant.  Nurse Sarah Keate, played by Aline MacMahon, has been called in to supervise the coma.  Aline MacMahon and her eyebrows.  Her archingly elevated eyebrows.  She is a fine figure of a woman, but those eyebrows are her best feature.  Just look at them.

When the most hated relative is gunned down in the middle of the night on the main stairway, it's time to call in the law, in the form of blustering Detective Lance O'Leary (Guy Kibbee) and his ridiculous sidekick (Allen Jenkins).

From then on it's a lot of nocturnal rambling, shouted questions, the whole mob gathered in the living room, lightning flashing, a mysterious silhouette, a groping hand.  Look out, Nurse Sarah, look out for that groping hand!

This is the first of five movies based on the Nurse Sarah Keate novels of Mignon G. Eberhart.  It is based on the second of those novels and the first of them wasn't made into a movie until later.  The weird thing is that as soon as Keate and O'Leary meet, they act like they have worked on many a crime before, and the sidekick blurts out, "Every time there's a murder SHE pops up," which makes you think, what the hell, did I miss some other Nurse Sarah Keate movie that came before this?  But no you did not.  It's a ploy.  Five different movies made by two different studios, played by four different actresses and given three different names, that is the score for the literary Nurse Keate.  You can look it up if you want to know the whole deal.  This one is a well-produced B movie, good as these things go.  Naturally she is the one who finds the most clues and gets into the most peril from the mysterious figure with the groping hand, but you have to ignore the usual number of inexplicable instances of people covering for each other and not telling what they know and saying something happened when it didn't or didn't happen when it did, and finding out the butler has a criminal record but what does that have to do with anything.  Don't they always have a criminal record just to throw things off?  It's a mild way to fill the bill - did they put these before the main feature so you would have to sit through them, or after so you could bail out?  I don't know. 

Lady Detective Holiday - ADVENTURES OF KITTY O'DAY

Adventures of Kitty O'Day (1944) stars the mildly attractive, yet strangely forgettable, Jean Parker as the hotel switchboard operator who reads detective magazines and listens in on people's calls, so she naturally overhears a murder.  She is not so much a detective as a nosy meddler, and this is not so much a mystery as it is a farce of the vanishing corpse variety.  The story is so unimportant to the film that it is left to a brief unintelligible explanatory monologue at the end, but nobody in it or watching it gives a damn who did what to who and why.  Directed by world champion hack William Beaudine, this is a formulaic stand-in for a detective story, just as the characters are formulaic stand-ins for real people.  They are types - the nosy meddler, her frustrated boyfriend, the vamp, the overdressed older woman, the angry police detective and his absurd sidekick.  The types are played by actors who fit the role and who can get the job done as quickly as possible.  I knew when I saw Parker that I had seen her before a bunch of times but couldn't remember where or when.  I am still having trouble remembering her name.  Here she is with ever-present Byron Foulger, doing his bit as desk clerk.

Parker had a career of over 30 years with numerous starring roles, almost entirely in B movies.  She was in a few notable films, such as Little Women (1933) and Laurel and Hardy's Flying Deuces (1939), but mostly appeared in anything that needed someone to be The Girl opposite a handsome action man; adequately entertaining minor productions like No Hands on the Clock (1941) and Wrecking Crew (1942) with Chester Morris and Alaska Highway (1943) with Richard Arlen.

The only contact this movie has with the outside world is a couple of references to the "manpower shortage," which pops up a lot in movies from this period of the war.  Even its brief "outdoor" scenes consist of one tiny set with two park benches and some shrubbery. A cultural note of minor interest is one of the few film appearances of  Shelton Brooks, seen here as Jeff the Custodian along with what's his name who did something or other in the movie.  Brooks was an old time minstrel and vaudevillean, who composed the standard Dark Town Strutters' Ball, and Sophie Tucker's signature tune Some of These Days.

I think I have made it pretty clear that there is not much to this - the second half devolves into a lot of chasing around and everyone eventually goes down the laundry chute, but in the part that relies on dialogue between a few people standing in an unnatural arc roughly facing the camera, it has some laughs.  It is mostly inoffensive, and that is sometimes enough.

Lady Detective Holiday - MURDER ON A HONEYMOON

Murder on a Honeymoon (1935) is the third and last of Edna May Oliver's appearances as spinster detective Hildegarde Withers and it couldn't be more different from the feeble effort which followed it.  Capably directed by Lloyd Corrigan (a unique instance of a director who dropped the megaphone and went into screenwriting and an extended career as a character actor) and co-written by Robert Benchley so you know at least there are going to be some good lines in it, it looks like they tried.  All pretense at the schoolteacher setting is dropped as Hildegarde is on vacation in California.  On a short seaplane hop to Catalina Island, in itself a great way to start a picture, the most irritating passenger sickens and dies.  It appears that he was a witness against the mob, and that it was murder, and that Inspector Oscar Piper must hop out from New York to take charge of the investigation.  That business out of the way, we may settle down to a fairly pleasant entertainment that keeps one's interest and even has a few mild surprises before it satisfactorily ends. 

While the story is adequate it is the sharp dialogue and interaction of Oliver and Gleason that provides the interest here.  The RKO studio had a good thing going with these two and it was only because she signed with MGM, probably for more money and less work in classier pictures, that this series didn't peter out at the usual pace for such things.  Since I have just viewed the dismal production which followed this, comparisons are inevitable, but the main thing is that in Murder on a Bridle Path it seems like they didn't even bother to try.  Here they spent some money on it, with much of the action filmed on location on Catalina Island.  Oliver maintains the frumpy sardonic schoolmarm nature of the character as compared to the aging socialite portrayed by Helen Broderick.  You can imagine having cocktails in Broderick's apartment but with Oliver a handshake at the door and sincere thanks for a pleasant evening will suffice.

A secondary character in the plot is played by Lola Lane who has a lot of charisma, which makes up to some degree for her lack of subtlety as an actress.  It seems as if there were more to her part than appears now, as it's a bit disjointed and meaningless - it never really contributes anything of value to the story. I enjoyed her in Port of Lost Dreams (1934), Death from a Distance (1935) and the serial Burn 'em up Barnes (1935).  I bring her up because here is something that maybe you didn't know.  In 1938 she appeared as the girl reporter Torchy Blane (usually played by Glenda Farrell) in Torchy Blane in Panama, inspiring the name and character of girl reporter Lois Lane in Superman comics the following year.  So that is where that came from.

It's not the greatest thing you have ever seen by any means, but it is well made, doesn't put you to sleep, and gets a little bit exciting before it ends, and that's all anyone can reasonably expect from this sort of thing.  You come away from it saying that wasn't bad at all.  Except maybe for the fact that Willie Best was still being billed as Sleep 'n' Eat. That's bad.

A Lady Detective Holiday: MURDER ON A BRIDLE PATH

Lady Detectives seem to be standard fare in these enlightened times, but they were few and amateur back in olden days.  Single girls or spinsters, schoolmarms or nurses, they found themselves fortuitously on the scene of a murder presided over by their old acquaintance, the blustering boob of a cop.  Spotting with their female eye for detail the vital clue, they consistently save the ass of their grudgingly grateful foil and step back into obscurity when the flashbulbs start popping, as a lady ought to do.

Murder on a Bridle Path (1936) is the middle "gem" in the diadem of films featuring Stuart Palmer's accidental sleuth Miss Hildegarde Withers. Played here by acerbic Helen Broderick, it bodes ill from the start with two directors named in the credits.  With a ten day cheapie like this, that probably means somebody quit or got bumped to another project and the other guy finished up.  Neither of them, and they shall be nameless here, had much to show for themselves as directors and they spent most of their time as assistant directors and editors.  It shows.  I have seen the first two Withers movies in which she is well-represented by the immaculately spinsterish Edna May Oliver, and while they are never more than standard fare, the chemistry between Oliver and her foil, Police Inspector Oscar Piper played by irascible James Gleason, provides most of the viewing value.  Here, not so much.

When an unpleasant young socialite is struck down in Central Park, clearly an accident,  up pops Hildegarde to complicate matters by pointing out the evidence that is right in front of them all.  Then a bunch of stuff happens and they go places and talk to people, Willie Best does his chagrin-inducing schtick, Dewey Robinson pops in with his giant eyebrows for one scene, and suddenly you find out who did it and it is over.  I don't often say this, but this movie stinks.  I like Helen Broderick, but all she does is pop off shots at Gleason and pick up scraps of paper that turn out to be valuable clues.  Most of these cheapies try to build mystery by having everybody talk about everything, but in this one nobody talks about anything and it is all suddenly pulled out of a hat and the killer suddenly goes through a railing at the top of the stairwell and you're done.  I lured the wife into watching this and she nodded off after ten minutes, finally bailing out one minute before the killer was revealed and she didn't even care who it was.  I didn't even care who it was.

Broderick meanders through her undemanding role without contributing much to it, although in the right circumstances she can be a real asset to a film.  Not here.  After this tiresome thing, Withers was played in two more movies by ZaSu Pitts who I fear may be even less appropriate for the role than Broderick.  The character vanished from the screen, to appear once more in a 1970s TV movie played by Eve Arden whose years as Our Miss Brooks must have prepared her adequately for the spinster schoolmarm duties.  All I know right now is that of the three I have seen, this one is the worst.  If it ever comes on TV, get some cleaning done instead.

WORKS OF ETGAR KERET

One day I found upon the comics shelves of the otherwise pretty lousy Holgate Branch Library, a short walk from my home, a volume called How To Love, containing works by the Actus comics collective.  Seriously, the Holgate Branch Library is the lousiest library I have ever encountered.  It used to be pretty okay for a little neighborhood branch library but it seemed that once every few years they would undertake an assessment which concluded that they should reduce the number of  actual books, and see that the ones they kept were mostly thin illustrated books with shiny covers with the word dummy or idiot in the title.  If you just want to browse it is worse than useless - it is insulting.  A real tragedy considering how great almost every other library in the city is. 

I was pleased by the quality of the works in How To Love,  and surprised to find that there were people in Israel who just want to live normal daily lives.  I was ashamed to be surprised.  For you see, Actus is an Israeli comics collective.  Realizing one's ignorance is the first step toward removing it and I had soon read the few other available volumes of Israeli cartoonists - two by Rutu Modan (Jamilti and Exit Wounds) whose clear-line style and nostalgic/surreal stories are fascinating, and Jetlag, a collection of  works drawn by various artists, based on the stories of Etgar Keret.  I had never heard of Keret but instantly saw in him something I had never seen before and didn't even know what it was.

Keret's books are not the kind you want to read right through.  They would be good to have around where you could pick one up and spend a few minutes reading a story and go about your day digesting them.  His stories are very very short and each one is unique. Each one is strange in a new way, a boiled down Twilight Zone compressed into two or three pages and inserted into the real world.  However unimaginable the situations and events, they seem Normal with a capital N. 

Keret has also had his works transformed into movies, with varying results.  The most mainstream of them is Wristcutters, A Love Story (2006), based on a single story of the crummy half-assed afterlife to which suicides are doomed. Meduzot [Jellyfish] (2007) is written and directed by Keret and his wife, Shira Geffen, and is made up of a group of stories which intersect but don't overlap.  An inept and alienated young woman finds some of life's meaning in a beautiful child who appears from the sea, a Filipina works as companion to a harsh elderly woman who doesn't seem to appreciate her daughter's life as a stage actress, and a young couple are having a rather unhappy honeymoon when they encounter a mysterious writer staying in the same hotel. $9.99 (2008) is an Australian/Israeli stop motion animated film comprising a group of Keret's stories which, as in Meduzot, intersect without overlapping.  It suffers, in my opinion, from that type of physical ugliness unique to stop motion animated characters, and bears a touch of that unsettling Australian psychology which makes me apprehensive every time I have to decide whether or not to watch an Aussie movie.  There is a beggar who commits suicide and returns with wings - still the same mooching bum but with wings.  There is a woman who wants her men to be smooth and clean - really smooth and clean.  There is a young man who looks to a mail order book for his answers to life's problems and the book costs $9.99.  Of the three, Meduzot is the one that best conveys the spirit of Keret's work and I recommend it.  It has another value which I think is very important, in showing life in Israel without religion and politics.  It is not a commentary on anything other than living as a human being.

If you have a few moments to spare, and would like to try out an Etgar Keret story there are a few you can read on his website here.   You can also learn about some of his other activities, like the four foot wide house.

So why was I surprised to learn that there were regular people in Israel?  Try not to freak out when I tell you this.  That place has got more baggage than any other country on earth.  You never hear anything but politics, religion, conflict from that place.  Sometimes I want to smack that country and say just be Human first, then be religious or nationalist or whatever you want to be, because all that stuff isn't as fascinating to me as it seems to be to you.  We all brush our teeth the same way. Keret doesn't write Israeli stories, or Jewish stories, political or religious stories.  He writes stories that can fit into any brain without having to be an example of something or teach a lesson about something, and they make you see things a little bit differently.