weirdquark

The silver lining of having to think about the 17th Academy Awards has been the discovery of I Won't Play (1944), the year's winner in the since deprecated category of Best Short Subject, Two-Reeler. It had minor competition. Its vignette of down time in the Pacific theater is a cut above ephemera. It has nothing important to say about the war effort or American values except in the back-handed, Runyonesque fashion of popular music and tall tales. Frankly, good for it.

Directed by old-school all-rounder Crane Wilbur, the screenplay by James Bloodworth sticks close to its source short story by Laurence Schwab in setting up and knocking down the riddle of Fingers (Dane Clark), the dog-tagged Baron Munchausen-in-residence of an unidentified island in the South Pacific so currently overrun with very bored Marines that it's a wonder no one's busted out with the Rodgers and Hammerstein, whom the ever-modest Fingers would no doubt take the credit for introducing. If you believe what the gum-cracking, Variety-paging little bluffer gives out, he had a hand in every success of stage and screen from Gershwin to Sinatra, not to mention some sideman action on his own account with the likes of Goodman and Dorsey. He gave a hot tip to Bogart. Even the luscious pin-up of Kim Karol, lately classing up the sandbag-and-stenciled-crate decor of their dugout, he claims to have discovered at the nightspot on 52nd Street where he taught her the schmaltz that took her to Hollywood. He'd be insufferable except for his nonchalantly chutzpadik air of not seeming to care whether he's doubted, always with a wisecrack in the face of a direct challenge—put on the spot about his anonymity compared to the stardom of his alleged protégé, Fingers who couldn't look more Brooklyn Jewish if he were my grandfather tosses carelessly back, "'Cause I ain't got her big blue eyes." The scornfully spellbound audience of Chicago (William Haade), Rusty (Warren Douglas), and Florida (William Benedict) can't figure it any other way: "Fingers is either the biggest liar in the world or the most important guy in show business." The favorite is not Option B. On the other hand, on this tropical swamp of an island with nothing to do but sit around and read months-late mail and listen to Tokyo Rose, even an A-1 line of bull is better than a total cultural blackout, the closest any of his buddies is getting for the duration to the movie-palace, big-band comforts of home. It is a truth reluctantly acknowledged that for all his backstage bantam swagger and the nickname none of them has even seen him play a piano to justify, Fingers can be "kind of nice . . . to listen to, I mean."

Obviously, a spiel of this caliber cannot run indefinitely without either putting or shutting up and the wave function seems to collapse catastrophically when the cargo off the latest LST includes a beat-up traveling piano and in front of a rec hall's worth of eager witnesses, Fingers approaches the ivories with amazement and then ingloriously balks. He can't come through for an audience who'd thrill if he played "Chopsticks." He gets threatened with a personalized anvil chorus and digs in his heels on the title drop. Even for the chaplain (Robert Shayne) who's just as sternly worded as the next disappointed Marine, he can't muster more than the weak sauce of "Look, I don't mean to be a crab, Padre, but, well, I—I kind of made a vow, see?" which goes over even less well than his theatrical bluster about military pay not covering the rates he used to pull down nightly in New York. By the time the chaplain's finished with him for cheating the camp of the treat he as good as promised every time he sounded off about his hot combo nights on Swing Street, even his most traditionally skeptical critics are actually a little stunned. "I knew he was lying about all those people he was talking about, but imagine not even being able to play!" Lucky Fingers, if, after that exhibition, he can even get launched on one of his former anecdotes without being drowned out by the worse than silent treatment of Jolson in sarcastically three-part harmony. His glum demotion to persona insta-non grata, however, is nothing compared to the pasting his erstwhile buddies are prepared for him to receive when an unplanned refueling at the airfield gives the entertainment-starved Marines the windfall of a USO show by none other than Kim Karol (Janis Paige) her curvaceous, vivacious, flame-haired self, all set to knock what Fingers would have called the cash customers dead, especially if an accompanist can be found for the little box of a piano which is missing a couple of keys and still a better prospect than a torch song accordion. In agreement, the trio head off to collar their musical phony for a never-better chance to show him off to his own invention: "I wouldn't miss this for Tojo's funeral!"

If I have to spell out the denouement of this mishegos, I Won't Play has made such a bad job of its telegraphy that it might as well have used the Pony Express, but the sweetest twist is not what happens when Fingers gets shoved down in front of the piano or even at the airfield where he sees off Kim, but the fact that the camp braggart turns out to be surprisingly sensitive to the kind of dreams that soldiers half a globe from home sustain themselves on, whether it's a picture of a redheaded starlet or a lot of glitzy tall talk. "Everybody kisses everybody in show business." Showing off the brash and vulnerable persona that would serve him so well in his post-war noirs, Clark drops into conversations like an all-time kibitzer and sees himself out of a roomful of cut dead air with an elaborately unconvincing effort of not giving a damn. Paige was already a Hollywood singer as well as an authentic pin-up and could have wowed her audience accompanied by nothing at all, but she does such a knockout rendition of "Body and Soul" that I get mad all over again about The Pajama Game (1957). Audiences who liked their brief chemistry would get to see him strike out with her a month later in Hollywood Canteen (1944). Except that it provides the necessary distance between its antihero's claims and any means of proving them, the war remains mostly a matter of palm trees and G.I. shirts and the occasional patriotic detail like a game of darts played on a photo of Hirohito, but it's still a little jarring to hear the scene-setting narrator sound so blasé about suggesting a location of "maybe Tarawa," considering the winner of that year's Best Documentary Short Subject. Is this short fiction comparable cinema? Like hell, it's Saturday Evening Post-cute and it answers its outstanding question with a wink through the fourth wall; it looks terrible on taped-off-TCM YouTube, but I am delighted to have proof that the channel's chronically prestige 31 Days of Oscar does periodically dip into the discontinued categories instead of just the warhorses. After all, "Even a good liar is not to be lightly dismissed." This vow brought to you by my big backers at Patreon.

I seem to be continuing to sleep more than has been my steady norm for months into years, albeit at peculiar and inconvenient hours that leave me feeling like some sort of crepuscular mammal. I have never been able to nap in my life without it making me feel worse than when I conked out and now it just seems to be an irregularly scheduled part of my day. I am operating on the theory that I will eventually evolve a circadian rhythm. I had one in college, I think.

It would never have occurred to me that the house style of 20th Century Fox was historical megaflops, but Wilson (1944) is the third to cross my radar after Cleopatra (1963) and The Big Trail (1930): it lost its $5.2 million shirt at the box office and Darryl F. Zanuck died mad that it didn't win Best Picture. In the first edition of John Gassner and Dudley Nichols' Best Film Plays of 1943–44 (1945) which spatch picked up from the carrel outside the Brattle Book Shop the week before Christmas in 2017, Zanuck is the only producer to have a preface devoted to his published screenplay and it's all on the defensive, primarily against charges of unnecessary expense and boosterism for FDR. It is not majorly concerned with the historical accuracy of the script by Lamar Trotti, which is fine because regardless of whether it has its names and dates in order, it reads like a political fairy tale. How appealing it is to imagine the twenty-eighth President of the United States as a shy dry stick of a boffin animated by an almost supernal honesty and a self-deprecating sense of humor as underestimated as his perseverance, untarnished by failures of civil rights and never so impaired by his stroke that he can't share the joke with his wife of her letting him out of his presidential responsibilities. A kind of sacrificial king of American idealism, broken across a vision that the world is too fallen and fragmented to match him in, classed by the opening titles with the national saints of Washington and Lincoln. Probably it could only have been trounced by the Catholic super-treacle of Going My Way. Hollywood gonif!

Pursuing some details about Wilson with the fervor of a person who really does not want to have to watch the damn movie, I found a profile of Alexander Knox by James Hilton in the February 1945 Photoplay and blew a gasket that I hope registered with Harry Cohn's ass:

Knox belongs to the new generation of Hollywood stars who shape so oddly into the category that they are already on their way to changing both Hollywood and the star system [. . .] Indeed, the only possible thing to say is that he's an actor, and that the fame he has secured in "Wilson" neither enforces nor precludes any particular kind of thing he will do next.

In support of this argument one has only to glance at his previous motion picture roles to gather some notion of the man's range. His first Hollywood film was "The Sea Wolf" with Edward G. Robinson, in which he played the shipwrecked author, a man of physical fear but mental courage. After that there were the memorable moments in "This Above All" as the gentle clergyman and in "None Shall Escape" as the fanatical Nazi leader which in Knox's hands had the sharpness of a steel engraving.

So Knox is a star, but like many of the newer stars, he doesn't fit into the star system; and when enough people don't fit a system it is the system that has to be changed.

I don't disagree with Hilton—about either the actor or the system—but if the latter had changed to accommodate the former in the mid-'40's, I wouldn't have spent these last ten years of my semi-professional life banging my head against the exact intractability of classical Hollywood to know what to do with its actors of whatever gender who couldn't be easily typed or ticky-tackied into marketable components of the dream machine, which are naturally the kind it seems reasonable to me to like best and inclined to be frustrating to follow. In the same way that it fascinates me to encounter criticism of the Production Code at the time of its enforcement, it's useful for me to know that my feelings about the limitations of the traditional star system were shared by its contemporaries, but then it's even more maddening that its operations would not shift meaningfully until the '60's. Justice for Jean Hagen, basically. In other news, I am charmed that Knox was into motorcycles. So was William Wyler around that time; I am glad they never collided.

I forgot to mention when the three robin nestlings fledged and launched, but the current monarch count stands at one chrysalis and four caterpillars. The moon is still wildfire-stained.

Apparently if permitted to sleep, my body thinks it should be allowed to do it again. I napped this afternoon and am contemplating further adventures in napping this evening. It's inconvenient in terms of a day, but on the other hand my sleep debt was old enough to vote in the last election. Have some links.

1. Courtesy of moon_custafer: Keith Moon fills in for John Peel in 1973. The musical choices are clever and more surf-inflected than I would have guessed and the interstitial sketches are deranged. Eleven out of ten, no notes. "Here it is once again, for those of you listening, in color."

2. Courtesy of selkie: clips from this weekend's semi-concert performance of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl starring Cynthia Erivo as Jesus. The effect is not unlike Nina Simone's "Pirate Jenny" (1964). Also queer af.

3. With incredible timing, the Harvard Film Archive has just announced this winter's series of Columbia 101: The Rarities, meaning that anyone in the Boston area who actually wants to hit themselves with None Shall Escape (1944) will have two chances on 35 mm including the first night of Hanukkah. I plan to be there. Several other titles of interest I have never seen, or never seen in a theater. Especially since this spring took my plans for Noir City Boston out at the knees, wish me luck.

4. Of the minimal amount of television I watched as a child, nearly all of it was brought to me by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and viewers like you. My mother has begun to refer to the incumbent of the White House with epithets as out of Homeric epic, of which "starver of children" is currently the strongest: bodies, minds, future. The earthquake swarm around Akrotiri subsided earlier this year, but everyone I know feels like Thera and counting.

5. A whole lot of people sent me the newly published Sumerian myth and it does make me very happy.

It doesn't sound like much to call a movie the most important film about the Holocaust to come out of wartime Hollywood. Once you get past the handful of outliers headed by Lubitsch, the bar is in hell, baking bagels. The Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations did not pull in the crowds in Peoria. Thanks to the combined filtration of the Production Code Administration and the Office of War Information, even films that engage with the ideologies rather than the aesthetics of Nazism can start to feel as thin on Tinseltown ground as a minyan in Sodom. I don't know what else to call None Shall Escape (1944), a Columbia B-effort that does not play like any other American propaganda of my experience. It plays like a pre-Code at the height of World War II, a crash-in from some parallel dream factory with far less need to cushion the reality shock of genocide or the humanity that commits it. It's harsh, cheap, uncannily unstuck in time. Nothing in the literature has knocked me for such a loop since Emeric Pressburger's The Glass Pearls (1966).

In part it is a study of a kind I had not thought popularly available until the publication of Adorno et al.'s The Authoritarian Personality (1950), a case history of terminal Nazification. The film isn't subtle, but neither is it stupid. The age of onset is World War I. To the small and oft-annexed town of Lidzbark, it made no difference for years that their schoolteacher was ethnically German, especially since the culturally Polish community around him was territorially Prussian at the time, but in the demobbed spring of 1919, as the restoration of Poland and the breaking of Germany rest on the same table at Versailles, it matters fiercely to Alexander Knox's Wilhelm Grimm. He greets his homecoming ironically, cautiously: "You're very generous to an enemy." It would go over better without his newfangled Aryan hauteur. It marks him out more than his soldier's greatcoat or his self-conscious limp, this damage he's taken beyond shell-shock, into conspiracy theory that horrifies his long-faithful fiancée of Marsha Hunt's Marja Pacierkowski all the more for the earnestness with which he expects her to share it. Disability and defeat have all twisted up for him into the same embittered conviction of betrayal, all the riper for the consolation of the Dolchstoßlegende, the romantic nationalism of Lebensraum, the illusion of Völkisch identity as an unalterable fact to cling to in a world of broken bodies and promises where even the home front is no longer where he left it. "You don't understand. Nothing's the same anymore . . . The future lies in victory, not in freedom." Like an illness that protects itself, even as his nascent fascism kills his romance deader than any disfigurement, it feeds his hurt back into the seamless cycle of grievance and justification until his frustration finds itself a suitably inappropriate outlet—raping a smitten student to revenge the slur of his jilting on his Teutonic manhood. More than proto-Nazisploitation, the assault seals his willingness to take out his insecurities on the innocent. By the time the action rolls around to Munich in 1923, it suspends no disbelief to find him serving a comfortable six months for his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch. By 1934, he's a decorated Alter Kämpfer, a veteran of the Reichstag fire and the Night of the Long Knives, a full oak-leaved SS-Gruppenführer who can turn his own brother over to the Gestapo without a blush and effectively abduct his nephew into the Hitler Youth; in short, exactly the sort of proper party man whom the seizure of Poland in 1939 should return to Lidzbark in the sick-joke-made-good plum role of Reichskommissar. Technically quartered in Poznań, he can't miss the chance to grind the supremacy of the Reich personally into the faces of the "village clowns" who last saw their schoolmaster fleeing in disgrace. "The best," he remarks pleasantly over his plenitude of coffee and brandy, the likes of which his silent, captive hosts have not seen in war-straitened weeks, "and not enough of it." He has already presided over a book-burning and the filming of a newsreel of propaganda, a casually cruel calling card. All the rest of the Generalplan Ost can wait until the morning.

None Shall Escape would be historically impressive enough if it merely, seriously traced the process by which an unexceptional person could accumulate a catalogue of atrocities that would sound like anti-German propaganda if they had not already been documented as standard operating procedures of the Third Reich. Concentration camps in their less crematory aspects were old news since 1933. The 1970's did not invent the Wehrmachtsbordelle. Knox ghosts on his German accent after a few lines, but it doesn't mar his performance that could once again come off like a national metonym and instead makes a mesmeric awful object of a man accelerating through moral event horizons like a railgun, never once given the easy out of psychopathology—in a screen niche dominated by brutes, fools, and sadists, the demonstrably intelligent, emotionally layered Wilhelm who has outsourced his conscience to his Führer stands out like a memo from Arendt. The political detailing of his descent is equally noteworthy and particularly acute in its insistence on a ladder of dreadful choices rather than irresistible free-fall, but I can get nuanced Nazis elsewhere in Hollywood if I need them. I can't get the eleven o'clock shocker of this picture which feels like a correction of the record, not a first-generation entry in that record itself. It goes farther than uncensored acknowledgement of what no wartime production would call the Shoah, remarkable already in light of official directives not to dramatize even the known extent of Nazi antisemitism unduly. Shot in the late summer into fall of 1943, it is the earliest film I have seen in my life to show that the Jews fought.

( Horses are more important than Jews, that's all. )

It was not clairvoyance, even if None Shall Escape often gives the impression of working just ahead of the rim of history. Its Oscar nomination for Best Original Motion Picture Story was shared between the German and Austrian Jewish refugees of Alfred Neumann and Joseph Than, who had brought their respective border-crossing experiences to Hollywood—Neumann had even been born in Lidzbark when it was still German Lautenburg. Director Andre de Toth was Hungarian and, for a change, not Jewish, but his very late exit from occupied Europe had gifted him with a disturbing, exceptional qualification to treat the subject of Nazi atrocities on screen: caught in Warsaw when the balloon went up, he had been pressed into service in Nazi propaganda. One of the sickest, most pungent details in the movie is the Theresienstadt-like newsreel of a queue of desperately smiling townsfolk to whom the Nazis dispense a largesse of bread and soup which is snatched from their mouths the second the cameras stop rolling, the rabbi himself unceremoniously jerked from the line he was originally forced into so as not to spoil the picture of placid, grateful Poles with a Jew. It was de Toth's recreation of an incident it had haunted him so much to participate in that he spoke of it only toward the end of his life, its ghost hidden until then in the plain sight of the silver screen. Did he lend his piratical eyepatch to the wounded Wilhelm for the same reason, like Pressburger's stolen memories to Karl Braun? Who among this émigré crew had seen the loading of a night train bound to the east? The closeness to reality of this film is a double edge. Wrapped in its near-future frame of a post-war, Nuremberg-style trial in whose hindsight all these horrors are supposed to be safely past and in the process of redress, None Shall Escape locks itself into uncertainty because it knows, as its more sanitized age-mates do not have to, that when the lights come up the trains are still running on time. It can't close the loop of its own title. When all the testimonies have concluded in the case of Wilhelm Grimm, Reich Commissioner of Western Poland, charged in the absence of a definition of genocide with the "unspeakable miseries" of "the wanton extermination of human life," the notably international tribunal does not pronounce sentence: it turns the future over to the audience. The verdict is left to the fourth wall to render as a line of Allied flags flutters expectantly as if over the as yet unimagined headquarters of the UN. Like a lost soul stripped of everything but the doctrine that cost him it all, Wilhelm screamed out his die-hard Reich-dream straight to us: "You've just won another battle in a fight which has not ended . . . You cannot crush us! We will rise again and again!" In a more recognizable war movie, his cry would be the impotence of defeat, but in this one? Is he right? Is there such a thing as justice for crimes against humanity? Is it enough to keep us from churning out more conspiratorial ideologies, more genocidal wars? It isn't spellmaking, it's a thought experiment so suddenly, darkly reflective that if Technician Fourth Grade Rod Serling hadn't been in boot camp with the rest of the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment at the time of production, I'd blame him for a hand in its black mirror. If I shake it under the present world-historical conditions, the magic eight-ball seems to be coming up SOL. Do I need to state that this picture commercially flopped?

Fortunately for historical memory, None Shall Escape was never entirely lost. I found it in the Criterion Channel's Noir and the Blacklist and while I could argue with the first categorization, the second was an indisputable hat trick: Marsha Hunt, Alexander Knox, and screenwriter Lester Cole, the card-carrying Communist of the Hollywood Ten. Sucks to McCarthy, it can be readily watched on YouTube and the Internet Archive and even to my surprise obtained on Sony Pictures Blu-Ray. DP Lee Garmes does his low-key considerable best to compensate for a budget like Samuel Bischoff turned the couch upside down and shook it for change and a moth flew out. The resourceful art direction of Lionel Banks does the same for a Western set that needs to be in Poland. I am afraid that after catching the back-to-back breadth of his shape-changing in The Sea Wolf (1941) and this film, I am unlikely ever to be sensible on the subject of Alexander Knox again, especially when his performance is one of those high-wire acts that can't once glance down at the actor's vanity for reassurance or out to the audience for sympathy, but Hunt matches him so intensely and effortlessly over their quarter-century entwined like a marriage on the wrong side of the mirror, somewhere off in the forking paths of alternate film history they should have been less inimically reteamed. "There's your Weimar Republic for you." Of course I don't need to reach back into 1919 or even 1944 to find a Wilhelm, but it matters to have the reminder of a Rabbi Levin. We will outlive them. This choice brought to you by my free backers at Patreon.