Two-Lane Blacktop is a great movie
but great in the way that, say, an Edward Hopper
painting is great.
Does it have a story or a plot? Not really.
Does it have meaning? Certainly not. Not unless you're
going to impose a meaning on it, because you feel you must. What could it possibly mean, after all? What could
any Edward Hopper painting be said to mean? Nothing, if you ask me. It's beautiful or it's not. Most movies are also similarly devoid of meaning
but, we hope, not beauty. A "meaning" is not a story. Take any famous movie. It probably has a clear and
compelling story but it would be wrong to say that
the movie means something. North by Northwest doesn't mean something.
There's no "meaning" to Jaws. But once you remove story and plot, or strip them
down to the minimum requirements for a movie to
have characters with names who do things, and
then people will start exerting themselves to tell
you what the movie "means" because it's not enough,
apparently, simply to enjoy it for its aesthetic qualities. And so you end up with silly statements such
as that Two-Lane Blacktop is "a sophisticated
look at American male obsession". Well, that particular statement could be made
about 99.99% of American movies if you take
away the word "sophisticated". You could make the case much more persuasively
about Jaws or North by Northwest,
that they're a look at American male obsession,
than you could about Two-Lane Blacktop. But I sympathize. I don't think that Two-Lane
Blacktop is about anything in particular, any more
than Edward Hopper's "New York Movie, 1939" is
about anything in particular. Certainly Hopper might have had something in mind
and there's the right combination of blankness and
detail for you to project any number of possible
meanings or stories onto it. But the actual thing itself is just beautiful art. And so with Two-Lane Blacktop. The title itself, two white lines on black, shows the
title of the movie as well as telling it. The film follows four characters without real
names that we ever learn: The Driver, The Mechanic,
The Girl and GTO. It's pretty clear how The Driver (James Taylor)
and The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson) get their names.
Equally clear for The Girl (Laurie Bird). Warren
Oates is GTO because that's the car he's driving. The Driver and The Mechanic drive around the country
in an astonishingly blank-looking 1955 Chevy
racing people for money. They pick up The Girl hitchhiking
and then start racing GTO cross country, with the
prize being their cars instead of cash. But this idea is soon dropped without explanation
and we're left to wonder more about who these people
might be than what they do. One of the attractions of movies is that every single
thing in a movie could be a metaphor but doesn't have to
be. And so they're are some shots that might mean something
but of course might not.
Is it significant in this shot that the GTO faces one way,
the Chevy faces the opposite way and a third car of a different
color is lifted off the ground and perpendicular to both other cars?
How about this one? Does it suggest that The Driver and The Mechanic
are imprisoned by their compulsion to live only for racing and
driving and speed, and that GTO and The Girl are viewing them from the outside,
wanting an intimate human connection but not at the cost of becoming
trapped in some similar cage? Does the reverse shot suggest that The Driver and The Mechanic perceive
GTO to be just as trapped in his way?
Definitely maybe! GTO famously tells a different story about himself to everyone
he meets. He has music to play for any occasion and a well stocked
wet bar in his trunk. Part chameleon but probably not a pathological liar, he
seems lonely to the point of desperation, though terrified
of getting too close to people. Harry Dean Stanton shows up as hitchhiker who makes a
sexual advance toward GTO. GTO rejects him but it's not
exactly clear why he rejects him. It seems not to be
gay sex in particular but sex in general and the presumed
vulnerability that are too much for him.
Warren Oates gives one of his best performances as GTO.
As part of his ever-shifting nature, he changes his colors,
very chameleon-like, in almost every scene.
Do the different colors mean anything more than that? Does the actual
color correspond somehow to the person or persons he's with? Are they
meant to match the colors on their map?
Does the following shot suggest that The Driver and The Girl are literally
"on the fence" about what they're doing and where they should go from here?
Definitely maybe! But mostly it's just mysteriously beautiful.
2020 July 13 • Monday
The great maestro Ennio Morricone, one of the titans
of music in general and soundtrack music in
particular, left us last week. But we still have
hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours of his music
to listen to.
for our 630th Soundtrack of the Week,
we sat down with Morricone's Dedicato Al Mare Egeo.
The main title theme is a delicious fusion or pop, jazz, classical and exotica with one of the meastro’s most beautiful and stirring melodies—from a career with dozenss of devastatingly brilliant melodies and lyricism. The theme is first presented by violin and then given a wordless vocal rendition by the incomparable Edda dell’Orso.
2020 July 10 • Friday
As of this writing, the Wikipedia entry for Men Into Space does not
mention the Men Into Space comic book!
It checks Murray Leinster's novelization and a toy space
helmet, but no comic book! How do these things happen? If we can't count on Wikipedia, then…. I could add it to the Wikipedia entry myself, That's the point, I guess. Okay, I started to do it and then my son told me I was doing it wrong, so forget
it. Somebody else can do it. We have exactly one (1) issue of the Dell Men Into Space
comic book here.
It calls itself No. 1083, March–May, 1960, which is a little bit odd.
Was it a quarterly? And no way were there over a thousand numbers of
these, so what does 1083 mean? Oh, it seems that it's actually No. 1083 of Dell Four Color
comics, a series that started in 1942 and ran for twenty years.
According to this neat site,
they stopped putting "Four Color Comics" on the cover after
No. 101. And so it also seems that this is the only Men Into Space
comic that ever was! It's pretty good. I had seen a bit of the show a long time ago but
don't remember it. The comic strives for a believable and accurate
scientific approach to, in this example, the problems of humans
going to the moon, landing, exploring and returning. Since it's an action and drama vehicle as well as science fiction,
there are several things that go wrong for our astronauts. While no writers or artists are credited, the people responsible
for this particular comic book were quite talented. The stories are perfectly paced and compelling, the characters
distinct and consistent, though perhaps somewhat unrealistically noble
and honorable as viewed from today's perspective. It's probably more
like how we wish we'd all behave than how we most often do. But comics live or die by the artwork and visually,
this was really interesting and impressive. The first thing to catch my eye was the use of color,
particularly lots of bright solid colors that enliven
various panels.
And then these three panels in a row, each one with a different
and powerfully vivid perspective and composition.
This next panel was like nothing I could remember seeing in a
comic book before and had me wondering if the artist had been
admiring Australian Aboriginal art.
And then finally, this dramatic image of Colonel McCauley
approaching the emergency "lifeboat".
I've seen that shot in episodes of Star Trek, which is
still several years off in the future. And the rocket he's in isn't pointing
nose up, it's mostly on its side and slightly angled away from the
surface, so this is a perspective the artist really wanted you to
have. It isn't just a direct result of what's happening in the story. So this was a really cool find! From my favorite bookstore,
Oceans of Books by the Sea in Wellfleet, MA. Picked it up
last summer, I believe. I hope I can get back there soon!
2020 July 08 • Wednesday
Donald E. Westlake's Parker series, launched in 1962
under the pen name of Richard Stark, remains a high point
of tough and fast-paced crime action fiction.
Parker is
a professional thief, big score such as armored cars
and banks and things like that. Westlake had several
interesting things to say about the character, such
as that he was "Dillinger mythologized into a machine".
The really good Parker novels, of which there are
quite a few, leave you hungry for more like them.
And there are a few of those as well. One of the absolute best, which was first published a couple
of years before the first Parker novel, is Jay Flynn's
The Action Man.
It was this article
by Bill Pronzini
that alerted me to the existence of this book. The article itself is
well worth reading. Denton Farr is rich, successful, strong, confident, experienceds,
basically has everything. But, you know, he's something of a character.
Once a year he pulls a job. Never the same kind of job twice, never
near where he lives. But there's something about the planning and
execution of a caper that turns him on like nothing else does. Neat meaning don't get caught. He had not been caught. Ever. There was plenty of money now. But the only thing
with any beat to it was the action of going after more. In The Action Man he breaks one of his own rules when
he gets wind of a massive army payroll just waiting to be taken
from a bank that's literally across the street from one of the
two bars that he owns. (The book takes place in "Peninsula City" which is not
far from San Francisco and presumably one of the cities
on the Peninsula Bay Area.) Flynn establishes the character, a type who could walk
over most Men's Adventure Magazine heroes without sweating
it, and reveals him to the reader layer by layer. Farr doesn't take chances.
Farr has has a local enemy, a television personality
who was able to put the screws on him pretty badly one time. In revenge, Farr married the woman that this other man
had been in love with and, with an unbreakable hold on
her, sleeps around and does whatever he can to make her unhappy,
thus hurting his erstwhile antagonist. In most books, that storyline would end there but The
Action Man is on a higher level. This particular subplot
isn't just a subplot and takes a few unexpected turns
and leads to developments that are crucial both to the main
character and the plot itself. Another wrinkle: you don't do something this major
on your own. Farr gets in touch early on with a crime
syndicate liaison that he always uses for connections
and materials. This man, known as The Commissioner, would dismiss
the job as impossible if anybody but Farr were pitching
it. But it is Farr, so it is possible, even likely,
but the organized crime families are issuing a very firm
"No". The political fall-out from the operation, they feel,
will cost them much more money than any cut of the
proceeds can bring them. So Farr gets it straight. Stay away from it—or else. This is just another item on his list of things to watch out for. The writing style throughout is perfect. Denton Farr
has more bases covered than a reader is likely to think of.
He's not just wealthy, he's a well known and extremely well
liked and respected member of his community. Nothing he ever does is rushed or sloppy or poorly thought out. At one point Farr is visited by a police officer, a Captain of
Inspectors named Gene Nicholls. Consider how well Farr has laid
his ground work here, and that it's not just laying groundwork
but also sincerely part of who he is. Denton Farr asked no favors. He even paid his parking tags. The cops of Peninsula City would fight each other
to protect him. The Parker of the Richard Stark could never be this sort
of person. Parker isn't personable. By necessity he
makes a virtue of distance, blankness, neither expecting
or helping beyond a brutally simple binary logic
of how to do what must be done. Denton Farr, already set for life, is a man with
many intimacies, pleasures, desires and at least this
one seemingly pathological drive for a certain kind of
"action" It's an excellent book, without question one of the greatest
of these crime heist tough-guy novels. An additional note: at the bank, "The assistant
cashier's name was Charles Rouse". Charles Rouse
as in Charlie Rouse, the alto player for Thelonious Monk's quartet?
Coincidence? We are unlikely ever to know. Also, while it would probably wouldn't be useful to
classify this novel—and the Parker books and other
members of the club—as "existential" fiction and
therefore more serious and, I don't know, artistic
than what we'd call them otherwise,
these books do often fit
that description, and the very last line of
The Action Man rather pleasantly reminded me of the very
last line of L'Etranger. The first line is "The dawn seeped, thin and gray, through the
restless morning fog, lightening the hardly-moving surface
of the bay, alerting the birds in the live oaks and pine forests
of the hillsides".
He had come home knowing an easy way to get money. Find
out who's got some, then find a neat way to get it.
He sat at the counter and had
steak and fried eggs and hash-browned potatoes and four cups
of coffee, and he thought about the possibilities of taking
that payroll. It couldn't be easy or it would have been done
before. He would have to do a lot of looking—first for the
way to do it, then for the right men for the job—and if there
wasn't one absolutely certain method of operation to use, and
at least one alternate that would give a ninety per cent chance
of success and getting away clean, he would have to forget it.
Gene Nicholls liked Denton Farr. Hell, every man in the
department did. He was good for five hundred tickets to the
Policeman's Ball every year, and the tab for the stuff they
fed the kids at the Christmas party. He would toss a cop
who tried using his badge to cadge a free drink out on the
street, and then send him a check for a hundred bucks when
he got married. At least a dozen men in the department,
turned down by every bank in town and even the loan companies,
were buying houses of their own because Dent Farr let them
have the down payment on a no-interest note they could take
ten years to pay back, if they had to. For guys who were
having a tough time bringing up four kids on a take-home
of two eighty-five a month, Dent Farr had picked up the cost of
babies and funerals. In most cases he did this anonymously.
Where it wasn't anonymous it was a confidential matter between
Farr and the other party involved.
2020 July 06 • Monday
R.I.P., Maestro Ennio Morricone.
It starts out with a forceful but slinky
theme song in which a female vocalist sings
in fairly heavily accented English. I can't
make out all the words. "I can not stay longer /
But my dream is stronger / Than —". I can't tell
what it is that her dream is stronger than.
But it's a cool song, kind of like a spaghetti
western version of "Thunderball". Next, while "Oriental Mood" hits the usual notes
of a gong here and what sounds like maybe a harpsichord
trying to imitate shamisen and koto there, it's
a rich sonic landscape, deep and complex, and
an excellent cue. It quotes the main title theme. The main title theme then returns as "Instrumental
Shake". I love these types of cues and this one is
especially good. Not much to it and it barely passes the
one-minute mark but it's great. Then there's "Crazy (Instrumental Version).
This is a romantic lounge slow dance number featuring
the violin and it's lovely. Naturally there's a vocal version
of it as well a few tracks later on, with breathy and
ethereal post-Astrud singing. "Crazy / I am crazy / When I
see charming eyes / Oh dear, oh me, oh my." It's a cool song
that made me consider what a Henry Mancini/Astrud Gilberto
team-up might have sounded like. There's also "Crazy (Instrumental Version 2)", not
much different but no violin and more prominence given
to guitar, vibes and saxophone. "Funny Shake" is goofy clown music with some jazz combo lounge
elements in the foundation. Whatever scene needed this music
probably should have been cut from the film. Fast Man with the Golden Arm high-hat playing
starts out "Action" and sets the scene pretty quickly.
This tough and tense mood is diverted by the addition
of scatting vocal chorus and use of harpsichord. The vocal
part of it isn't a favorite flavor of mine but this
track is quite good. "Action 2" is nothing like it, being more pounding
ostinato and cool keyboard lines floating on top while
somebody keeps hitting a gong really hard. The next track is "Suspence" [sic], an atmopsheric
piece with lots of space and a use of organ that might
remind you of old radio shows. "Suspence 2" is similar
but quite a bit longer. Then the main title theme gets an "Instrumental Reprise"
with some great electric guitar sounds. Strangely there then appears to be a second "Action 2"
cue. It's like the first "Action" cue but with instruments
taking the place of the singers. A later "Action 3" is similar
but has a slightly different ending. These movies often have night club scenes and here's
"Night Club", a surprisingly cheery and buoyant number
almost insipid in its happy simplicity. It's hard not
to love the use of the harpsichord in this combo, though,
and the sounds of all the instruments. "Lounge Mood" starts out with a simiarly buoyant and perky
energy but downshifts to brushes on the drums and romantic piano
with more beautiful electric guitar sounds. Finally there's "Finale", which starts out in "Suspence"
mode before returning to the vocal version of the main theme.
2020 July 03 • Friday
The photo of Eva Lynd from Bowler's Handbook (1958, noted
by us in Eva: Men's Adventure Supermodel) compelled us to
get that actual Bowler's Handbook.
It turned out to be pretty interesting.
Of course we went looking for Ms. Lynd right away and found her.
Strangely, the photograph in Eva: Men's Adventure Supermodel
has this caption, which appears to have been clipped and pasted
on top of the photo: "Dazzling Eva Lynd is a little dazzled herself
at the ingenious operation of Amercan Machine & Foundry Company's
Automatic Pinspotter. It has revolutionized the bowling industry". As you can see, the actual copy of Bowler's Handbook
that has joined the Gutbrain archives has a slightly more
staid text: "Eva Lynd is intrigued by the ingenious operation of
American Machine & Foundry Company pinspotter, revolutionary development". What gives? We might never know. We might not even be able to recall this
discrepancy at some point down the road. Speaking of the use of machines in the bowling industry,
Bowling Handbook shows how bowling balls get
the holes put in them, a process about which it had never
before occurred to me to wonder.
We bought this for Eva Lynd but got a surprise Groucho Marx bonus.
And of course there's a lot about bowling, including
a substantial amount of content about women who bowl or,
if you prefer, "Ladies of the Lanes".
After noting that there are about six million women bowlers active
in the US, the article presents numerous positive comments
about men and women both bowling and competing, though there
seems to be some agreement among the men and women quoted
that men will always have the competitive edge. The reasons cited are fairly vague, when reasons are given at all.
It comes down to unsubstantiated assertions of differences in
strength and stamina.
Bowling champions Hank Marino and Buzz Fazio had nothing but unqualified
praise for Marion Ladewig, nine-time "Female Bowler
of the Year" and first female bowler to be inducted
into the Women's Sports Foundation Hall of Fame,
according to Wikipedia. "The results she gets speak for themselves
and show that a big hook is not necessary for
making high scores. She bowls with amazing accuracy,
because her coordination is perfect and her approach
smooth. There's nothing in her style to throw her
accuracy off." Another big leaguer who feels that anyone can profit
by watching Marion Ladewig in person, on film, or TV
is Buzz Fazio— "Marion is outstanding. Her style is simple. Simplicity
is the secret. She walsk—Just four steps—and sets the
ball down straight. Her direction is amazing.
The ball goes just where it's supposed to go.
Her style is something for all women and men
to study," concludes Buzz. But apparently, even in 1958, there was this
old problem: "In some areas of the nation, it is considered
improper for women to wear slacks," he explains. "Yet dresses
often interfere with a woman's freedom to swing the
ball pendulum-style. Wearing of slacks by women bowlers
would give them a definite rise in scores." All in all, the Bowler's Handbook was an interesting
window to look through. We'll leave you with this "Come Hell or High Water" photo
of a bowler wading through two feet of water to get to
his league.
Hank Marino felt that watching Brunswick's Marion Ladewig
in motion was about as fine a course of bowling as any
man or woman could get.
Far from gloomy about prospects of women, Hank says
there is one definite way for ladies to boost their
scores. That is to wear slacks wherever local custom
permits.
2020 July 01 • Wednesday
Men's Adventure Magazines, a staple of a certain kind of
mid-century page-turning entertainment, has its own cottage
industry of research and reference books.
There are several places to start, of course, but the only
book that I've read on the subject so far is this memoir
of the female model for a huge number of
illustrations, paintings and photographs for these magazines
as well as numerous book covers, photographs, miscellaneous
modeling gigs, appearances as an actress or extra in films
and television programs, etc. She even had her own band,
The Models, for a while! The woman in question is, of course, Eva Lynd, who tells her story in
Eva: Men's Adventure Supermodel, edited by Robert
Deis & Wyatt Doyle.
That's the hardcover edition. There's also a paperback
with a different cover and, for some reason, a lot
fewer pages. (Who would want that?)
The harcover's cover image comes from here:
Don't confuse New Man's cover story, "The Passion
Decoys Who Blasted the Nazis" with Bluebook's cover story,
"The French Dynamite Dolls Who Blasted the Nazis".
It's Eva Lynd both times and artist Norm Eastman both times as well. Lynd recounts her career with warmth and fondness and a light touch. She was in Cuba months before Castro took over, had a charming
interaction with Cary Grant while working as an extra on North by
Northwest, won a hundred books from Peter Lawford at a party
by throwing a bottle cap into a waste basket and has only glowing
things to say about the artists and photographers she worked with,
as well as the model who was her male counterpart, Steve Holland. In the following image, Lynd is the model for four of the five
women and Holland the model for both men. Al Rossi is the artist.
This style of painting and illustration… does it still exist?
I'm sure people can do it but there probably isn't any demand
for it outside of reproducing originals for a secondary collectors'
market. You might gain some new respect for the skill involved after
seeing how they use photographic references to create these scenes.
This book has several examples.
Eva Lynd was quite busy in the 1950s and 1960s. You never knew where
you might see her. She even showed up in the 1958 Bowler's Handbook.
One of her more interesting gigs was certainly as a hair model
for Salvador Dali, who was doing some thing where he created his
own hair styles. Because I'm sure there was a huge demand for that.
The Dali hair style that Lynd modeled was called "French Bread".
The other two pictured here are "Miss Sea Urchin" (center) and "Bullet" (right).
On a side note, I was watching Vertigo recently and my
eye was caught by an issue of Swank magazine on Jimmy
Stewart's coffeetable.
Film theorists have noticed this and incorporated it into a
strategy of interpreting every single thing in every frame of
the movie as an obvious Freudian sexual signifier. Me, I just wanted to know what issue it was. Vertigo was filmed in the autumn of 1957, so I presumed
it could be from then or perhaps the summer before. (The November
1957 Swank had an article on Hitchcock so that would
have been an amusing touchm but that's not what the cover looks like.) I haven't been able to find any Swank magazine with that cover.
(There are only a few that have the masthead in yellow, so that makes
it easier to look for.) But in my search, one that kept coming up and whose date would
have made it perfect for the Vertigo coffeetable
was the August 1957 Swank with none other than Ms. Eva
Lynd on the cover!
She was everywhere! And she's still with us, healthy and happy
in her California home though not, alas, appearing at Pulpfest 2020. Maybe she can reschedule for next year. Let's hope!
