End-of-the-Month Update

Writing

My usual end-of-the-month writing slump from April didn't go away this time but stretched out most of the way through May, instead. I had enough good days here and there to keep the month from being a disaster where the writing was concerned, but mostly it was slow going and began to pick up only during the past few days. I think I was just so busy in April, what with the traveling and lots of writing, that I got a little worn out and it's taking me some time to recover. Whatever the reason, I fell short of my page goal for May and so my surplus is gone. I'm back to running a deficit, 56 pages to be exact. But I'll make it up. And if I don't . . . well, it's not a killin' matter, as my dad used to say. The quality of the work is still pretty good, even if the quantity isn't quite where I want it to be.

Reading

I read the following books in May:

THE EIGHT OF SWORDS, John Dickson Carr
WANTON BAIT, "John Dexter"
MILTON CANIFF: CONVERSATIONS, Robert C. Harvey, editor
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, Sara Gruen
THE BUTCHER #2: COME WATCH HIM DIE, Stuart Jason (James Dockery)
THE COMPLETE COLOR TERRY AND THE PIRATES, VOL. I, Milton Caniff
SECRET AGENT X, JUNE 1934: CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, Brant House (Paul Chadwick)
DIE A LITTLE, Megan Abbott
BLOOD SON, Erica Orloff
SCARLET GODDESS, Ennis Willie (I'll post about this one in a day or two)

I also read a facsimile reprint of the August 1937 issue of the pulp DETECTIVE SHORT STORIES, published by Adventure House, and YOURS FOR FASTER HIPPOS, a chapbook collection of several articles and essays by Don Herron about Robert E. Howard, including his classic "Conan vs. Conantics".

Movies

For a while it looked like I wasn't going to watch very many movies this month, but I saw several here towards the end. We watched THE HOLIDAY, ACCEPTED, FATHER GOOSE, SEA CHANGE, THE MALTESE FALCON, NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM, TREMORS, and TREMORS 4: THE LEGEND BEGINS. We started and gave up on several others.

Just Your Basic Giant Worm Movies

We watched a mini-marathon of TREMORS 4: THE LEGEND BEGINS (chronologically the first in the series, as the title makes clear), which I hadn’t seen, and the original TREMORS with Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon, which I saw when it first came out but not since then. TREMORS is one of the great popcorn movies of all time as far as I’m concerned. Sure it’s silly. And there’s no explanation for where the giant worms come from. But I don’t care, it’s still a lot of fun. TREMORS 4 is actually a Western, telling the story of how the worms first showed up in the 1880s. There are a lot of connections to the original, including actor Michael Gross, who’s in all four films, I think. (I haven’t seen #2 and #3, and I’m too lazy to look them up.) Gross is the only recognizable name in TREMORS 4, which clearly has a lower budget. It’s entertaining, too, but not on the same level as the original. And the plots really are almost exactly the same. So I don’t know if I’d recommend TREMORS 4 if you’ve seen the original. But there are worse ways to waste time.

Night at the Museum

I’m sure most of you know the drill on this movie: Lovable loser played by Ben Stiller gets a job as the night watchman in the Museum of Natural History. At night all the exhibits in the museum come to life. Chaos and mildly amusing, special-effects-laden whimsey ensues. Everything wraps up in a predictably touching, satisfying manner.

Although NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM never did fully engage my interest, I laughed a few times, had no trouble staying awake, and found it reasonably entertaining. Robin Williams makes a pretty good Teddy Roosevelt, Stiller’s buddy Owen Wilson plays a tiny cowboy from one of the museum’s dioramas and has a good time with it, and it’s always good to see Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney, who, along with Bill Cobbs (one of my favorite character actors), play the former night guards in the museum. I seem to remember that this movie got fairly bad reviews when it came out, but I give it an okay rating.

The Maltese Falcon

We watched THE MALTESE FALCON last night, since Joanna is sort of a Humphrey Bogart fan and hadn’t seen it. What’s left to say about THE MALTESE FALCON that hasn’t already been said thousands of times by hundreds of better commentators than me?

Well, I don’t delude myself into thinking that any of these observations are original to me, but since I’ve seen the movie so many times, I decided to watch for things that I hadn’t really noticed before. One of them is the fact that the sets have ceilings. Orson Welles and his cinematographer on CITIZEN KANE, Gregg Toland, get a lot of credit for being innovators because so much of the photography in KANE is from a low enough angle to show that the sets have ceilings. The same thing is true in THE MALTESE FALCON, which came out the same year (albeit a few months later) as CITIZEN KANE. I’m thinking that John Huston and his director of photography, Arthur Edeson, deserve to be considered innovators, too.

Another angle I considered is the legend that Huston gave a copy of Hammett’s novel to his secretary, told her to put the dialogue into script format, and then used that as his shooting script. I’m inclined to doubt that, because there are some fairly important changes from the book, including the deletion of the Flitcraft story and a slightly different ending. Huston had to have done some work on the script.

I was also somewhat surprised at how little screen time Sydney Greenstreet actually has. Gutman is such a dominant character that it seems like he’s there more than he really is. But Greenstreet doesn’t make his first appearance until the movie is halfway over and is in only three or four scenes after that. But it’s a great performance, no doubt about that.

Finally, this isn’t something new I thought about on this viewing, but rather a long-time complaint about the movie. Mary Astor really is a weak link in what’s otherwise a great cast. I don’t think she was a very good actress, her hairstyle is distractingly goofy, and I don’t find her attractive at all. It’s a tribute to Bogart’s skill that I can believe Spade really cares about Brigid. One of the actresses considered for the part before Astor got it was Rita Hayworth. Now that’s a Brigid O’Shaughnessy I would have liked to have seen.

Despite that quibble -- and Gladys George really isn’t very good as Iva, either, come to think of it -- THE MALTESE FALCON is still a great, great film, one of my all-time favorites, and thank God they haven’t remade it as an Adam Sandler movie . . . at least not yet.

Die a Little -- Megan Abbott

I really think that you have to be in the right mood for a book, that sometimes no matter what the author does, a story or a style isn’t going to resonate with this particular reader at this particular moment. Which brings me to Megan Abbott’s debut novel, DIE A LITTLE. Having heard a lot of good things about this book, I gave it a try months ago, read about twenty pages, didn’t care for it, and put it back on the shelf. But something kept telling me that this is the sort of book I usually like, so I gave it another try, and I’m glad I did. This time I raced right through it and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Set in Los Angeles in the mid-Fifties, it’s the story of schoolteacher Lora King and her brother Bill, who’s a detective for the district attorney’s office. Lora and Bill are very close -- too close for siblings, some reviewers said, but I’m not sure I agree with that. I think Abbott is just capturing a different era, a time when adult siblings could live together with no hint of sexual suspicion and, indeed, nothing improper going on. But either way, the ties between Lora and Bill are strong enough so that when Bill falls in love with and marries a woman named Alice Steele, you know that change in the status quo is going cause some serious repercussions. And by the end of the book, boy, does it, as Lora starts investigating Alice’s background and discovers a lot of dark and dangerous secrets that lead to people doing things they thought they never could, resulting in a fusion of domestic drama and noir crime novel that works really well.

Lora narrates this book in the present tense, a style I usually don’t care for, but between this book and Sara Gruen’s WATER FOR ELEPHANTS I’m starting to like it a little better. I still think the story is awfully slow to develop and the first half of the book is too laden with period details, but once Abbott has everything established the second half goes by at a much faster pace, galloping along to an ending that’s not really surprising but still quite effective.

After starting this book and not liking it, I also picked up Abbott’s second novel, THE SONG IS YOU (couldn’t resist the cover), but didn’t get very far in it, either. After reading DIE A LITTLE, though, I’ll definitely be giving THE SONG IS YOU a second chance, too.

Sea Change

I still read and enjoy Robert B. Parker’s novels, but most of the time the plot details go in one side of my brain and right out the other. So I can’t tell you if SEA CHANGE, the latest TV-movie adaptation of one of Parker’s Jesse Stone novels, is faithful to the book or not. But that doesn’t really matter, I suppose. I watch these movies for Tom Selleck’s portrayal of Jesse and his interaction with the other characters. Selleck is just about perfectly cast in this role. The movies, with their melancholy musical score always playing in the background, seem a little more dour to me than the books do, but I enjoy them anyway and will keep watching as long as the producers keep making them.

We taped this movie last week and watched it a few days later. As a postscript, we also started watching two other movies on DVD but gave up on both, so I’m not going to count them. For the record, they were THE GOOD SHEPHERD, the CIA movie with Matt Damon, and SHOPGIRL, with Steve Martin and Claire Danes. We all agreed that they were both utter snoozefests, and THE GOOD SHEPHERD was incomprehensible to boot. Is it just too difficult to light a scene so the viewer can tell what’s going on and tell your actors to speak their dialogue so that it can be understood? Or am I just a reactionary curmudgeon?

The Duke

I can’t let the hundredth anniversary of John Wayne’s birth go by without a few comments. I know some people don’t care for Wayne or his movies, but he’s my favorite actor by far and has been for more than forty years. Here’s my list of my favorite John Wayne movies, not necessarily the ones I think are the best films he made, but the ones that I’ve gotten the most enjoyment from over the years.

THE COMANCHEROS (This one never shows up on people’s lists, but I love it. That may have something to do with the fact that it’s the first John Wayne movie I ever saw. My dad took me to see it at the Eagle Drive-In Theater in 1961. You can’t get much better than that. But I think it’s a fine film, too, with great music, good photography, a top-notch script, and entertaining performances all around . . . Wayne and Stuart Whitman as the leads, Lee Marvin as Tully Crow, Nehemiah Persoff as the leader of the Comancheros, Edgar Buchanan as the judge, Bruce Cabot as a Texas Ranger, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams as a gunrunner, Bob Steele as the rancher Schofield, George Lewis as Iron Shirt . . . I even like Patrick Wayne as Tobe.)

THE MAN SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (Lee Marvin in support again, along with Jimmy Stewart, Vera Miles, John Qualen, Woody Strode, Andy Devine . . . that stark black-and-white photography, the story that loops back on itself time and again, Wayne’s line about the steak -- “I said you pick it up, Liberty” -- the looks on the faces of Stewart and Miles at the final fade-out . . this is close to the perfect film as far as I’m concerned.)

RIO BRAVO (One of Wayne’s best and most subtle performances, Dean Martin and Walter Brennan, Angie Dickinson in tights, Wayne’s mocking “Took ya two!” when he and Dude are shooting at the dynamite, the way Howard Hawks takes the stunt casting of Ricky Nelson and makes it actually work in the story, even the song sequences . . . there’s nothing not to like in this one.)

STAGECOACH (Great cast, great script, and the shot that introduces Wayne is an all-time classic. Plus some wonderful stunt work by Yakima Canutt. I still don’t like the fact that we don’t see the big shoot-out at the end, but that’s okay.)

BIG JAKE (The first shot of Wayne in this one is a classic, too. Richard Boone is a great villain, Maureen O’Hara is still beautiful, and I like the elegaic Old West vs. New West feel. I’m also inclined to like this one because I first saw it at the Worth Theater, an ornate, old-fashioned, Thirties-era movie showplace in downtown Fort Worth, which was torn down years ago, unfortunately.)

THE SEARCHERS (Another example of great casting from top to bottom, with some of my favorite moments coming from character actors like Hank Worden and Ken Curtis. I still love the bit where Curtis, as Charlie McCorry, stops his big fight with Jeffery Hunter’s Marty to pick up “somebody’s fiddle”. It’s a beautifully-made film, too, probably John Ford’s best use of Monument Valley -- which doesn’t look anything like West Texas, but who cares?)

THE QUIET MAN (You can’t find a much more spectacular sight than Maureen O’Hara in the Irish countryside. And that epic brawl between Wayne and Victor McLaglen is still great fun.)

TRUE GRIT (“Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!” Enough said.)

HATARI! (Another one I saw at the drive-in with my dad. Not much story, but a nice fusion of two of director Howard Hawks’ staples, the knockabout, screwball comedy and the grace-under-pressure drama.)

RANDY RIDES ALONE (The best of the early, low-budget Lone Star Westerns Wayne made for Monogram, with Gabby Hayes playing a villain, a truly bizarre plot, and the usual fine stunt work by Wayne and Yakima Canutt.)

There are a lot of other Wayne films I could mention, like McCLINTOCK!, THE COWBOYS, THE TRAIN ROBBERS, IN HARM’S WAY, THE LONG VOYAGE HOME, RED RIVER, EL DORADO, RIO LOBO, any of the Three Mesquiteers movies where he played Stony Brooke, THE ALAMO, THE SONS OF KATIE ELDER, even the late-in-his-career cop movies McQ and BRANNIGAN . . . well, you get the idea. I like John Wayne movies. I like ’em a lot.

Happy birthday, Duke.

Longarm and the Bayou Treasure -- Tabor Evans

Those of you who enjoy swamp novels might like this one.

Father Goose

Since we're Cary Grant fans around here, this afternoon we watched this movie from 1964, pretty late in his career. I saw it back when it was new but hadn't watched it since then, so it was almost like I hadn't seen it before.

It's a minor entry in the list of Grant's films but still pretty enjoyable. Set in the Pacific during the early days of World War II, it's the story of a coastwatcher and all-around reprobate (Grant), who gets saddled with taking care of the daughter of a French diplomat and the seven schoolgirls who she's taken under her wing as they try to stay out of the hands of the Japanese. Leslie Caron (not a favorite of mine) plays the French woman; Trevor Howard is the Australian officer who coerces Grant's character into taking the job as a coastwatcher, who reports by radio about enemy ships and planes he observes from his hidden post.

There's a little action, and a slight sense of the fact that at this point during the war, everybody was afraid that the Japanese were going to invade Australia. Mostly, though, what you get is romantic comedy, and there were few better at that than Cary Grant. He's as smooth and likable here as ever. This is an amiable movie, far from a classic but a pleasant enough way to spend a couple of hours.

The Complete Color Terry and the Pirates, Volume 1 -- Milton Caniff

Continuing with my Milton Caniff binge . . . This volume collects the first nine months or so of the TERRY AND THE PIRATES comic strip, both the color Sunday pages and the black-and-white dailies, which follow two separate continuities at this point in the strip’s history. The dailies explain, sort of, why Terry Lee and Pat Ryan are in China to start with. Pat’s an adventure writer (although he’s too busy adventuring to ever write about it), and Terry is there to look for a lost mine left to him by his vagabond grandfather. Although Caniff doesn’t specify this, I get a sense that Terry may be an orphan, which is why Pat, a family friend, has taken the youngster under his wing. The search for the mine involves them with the first of the beautiful women who inhabit the strip throughout its run, riverboat captain Dale Scott. Later on our intrepid heroes run into a more well-known Caniff female, heiress Normandie Drake.

Meanwhile, over in the color Sundays, Caniff is in the process of introducing his most famous character of all, the female pirate Lai Choi San, better known as the Dragon Lady. Terry and Pat are captured by the Dragon Lady and taken to her stronghold, where they get mixed up in a mutiny led by the Dragon Lady’s second-in-command, who is also in love with her and jealous of the attention she pays to Pat. If you’re familiar with the Dragon Lady, though, you know she’s not going to let her heart overrule her mercenary nature. She’s always got some sinister scheme going on.

The hardboiled action and sexual tension of these yarns is what really sets them apart from other comic strips of their time and makes them the groundbreaking classics that they are. The art starts off rather crude but rapidly improves, although by the end of this volume it still had not reached the heights of excellence that it would over the next few years. You can already see the cinematic framing, the detail, the use of silent panels and darkness and light that really set Caniff’s work apart, though. This is wonderful stuff if you’re a comic strip fan, and I highly recommend it.

One word of warning: Connie, the Chinese sidekick of Terry and Pat, is about as politically incorrect a character as you’ll ever find, especially in his heavily-accented dialogue. At the same time, he’s right there to save the day on numerous occasions and despite being the comedy relief usually functions more as a third hero than a sidekick, so I’d advise modern readers to look past the surface stereotyping.