Tragedies, luxuries, statues, parks, galleries

Seicho Matsumoto's Points and Lines (1958) has been called a drawing room mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie but the novel's lineage runs deeper than that. Specifically, to trains which were intrinsic to Sherlock Holmes stories: think how many of those hinge on the catching of, the scheduling of travel, the back-and-forth. This is not the single-track journey of Jonathan Harker's passage into darkness in Dracula, but the criss-cross confusion of the modern world only clever investigators can navigate. In Matusmoto's novel it is the killer who masters the schedule and the detective who unpicks it. The clinical exposition – the commuter denouement – runs for many pages. 

It's no coincidence that one of Agatha Christie's best novels is set on a train. How Poirot gets on the carriage is the most thrilling half of Murder on the Orient Express. He urgently requires travel; the train is fully booked – unusual, for the season; Bouc, a friend and the director of the railway wrangles the detective a second-class berth; a threat is made to one of the passengers; and that night, out of further courtesy, Bouc moves Poirot into the last first-class cabin on the carriage, inadvertently putting him at the center of the action. 

Big bang theory

Among movies that will be difficult to explain to future generations Crimes of Passion is lying around like an unexploded bomb in Twitter's basement. Anything by Ken Russell would do it, really. Kids reference The Devils because they think it's naughty horror but the scary part is it's not: it's just Ken. The literal explosions in his work are ludicrous and funny until you remember that as a child the director witnessed his cousin Marion blown to pieces when they were playing in a British field and she stood on a landmine.

Released in 1984, Crimes of Passion predates the body horrors of Se7en and trails De Palma's gaudiness (the soundtrack by Rick Wakeman does not help). Kathleen Turner remembers making the movie:

I have always thought Crimes of Passion was a very powerful film - some of my best work I think. Not an easy job though. Antony Perkins I can say because it was common knowledge on set was doing god knows what drugs and Ken at that time was still drinking heavily. So that created difficulties that didn't need to have been there. I walked into Ken's trailer at 6 o'clock in the morning and was asked if I wanted a glass of wine. No thank you, Ken.

The movie was written by Barry Sandler whose screen credits include dramatisations of Agatha Christie's The Mirror Crack'd (1980) and Evil Under the Sun (1982). Says Sandler:

I tend to deal with certain themes in all my work and I’ve always been fascinated by masks and facades and the disguises we wear. But in terms of Crimes it’s certainly the most transgressive approach I’ve taken. In a way I was tapping into what was going on around me during the eighties, it was just at the beginning of the advent of the AIDS crisis... people had difficulties with their relationships, there was a lot of sex going on and it was very easily accessible and a lot of people were using it as kind of an excuse or a defence or a rationale or some way to avoid intimacy, to avoid relationships.

... [Ken Russell] was most intrigued by the China Blue/Shayne scenes. The scenes with Kathleen and Tony. And that kind of high-pitched almost surreal interplay fascinated him, dealing with themes of masks and facades, illusions and deceptions, with these two outrageous characters going at each other. He was less intrigued with the other aspect of the film which was the Grady home life. He wasn’t really connected into that world, into the American suburban idiom, so I think those scenes were less interesting to him than the scenes which were more outrageous, which were more Ken Russell kinds of scenes. He was interested in the themes inherent in the conflict between China Blue and Shayne.

Sandler's 2016 interview with Ian White in 2016 is here.

Death warmed up

It's been some years since I watched it last but A Perfect Murder is still good. Better, in fact. As I noted in my earlier not a review because no one is paying me for this and why am I doing it, the story is based on Frederick Knott's Dial M For Murder which Knott adapted for Alfred Hitchcock's film in 1954. I think that makes it noir. Barry Gifford had words to say about the noir label to Zach Vasquez:

I think the term noir has really been overused and abused. You know, it's great when Eddie Muller, who's a friend of mine, does a Noir Alley series for TCM, he really understands the concept and knows what he's doing with it. But, you know, at the time, I really think that they—publishers and filmmakers—tried to slap this noir label on things that had nothing to do with noir. All of a sudden, noir turned into a two-syllable word in the United States. It's only one syllable in French, right? So, the thing is, it just got abused, and it's still being abused. But that's none of my business.

The rest of that excellent interview is here. Like most people, I picked up Barry Gifford's books after Wild At Heart but I didn't start reading them until my then-publisher gave me The Sinaloa Story, which blew my mind. That book made me a devotee. My favourite Barry Gifford novel is Port Tropique. It's short: every line is a banquet.

Chemistry

Ken Robinson (1940-2021) and Jon Hassell (1937-2021). Social media is for goodbyes. Ken taught me art and it changed how I looked at things. He said maybe you're further ahead with your writing than you are with this. He was right but I stuck it out for another few years, just in case. It is not an exaggeration to say I think about things he said every day. Jon Hassell I only heard about. I dug Fourth World I: Possible Musics out of a record bin in the store on Great South Road in Manurewa and thought hey, this seems pretty good. Nobody can not like track one.

All that we see or seem

The form within the form is tricky. Movies about movies run out of puff. Novels about novels disappear up themselves. Paintings about paintings could be the Droste effect. Music about music? Call the lawyers. But an art form referenced within a different art form triggers something in noir. In Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944) a 40-year-old and therefore almost dead assistant Professor Wanley (Edward G Robinson) is lured into a real-life dilemma by a painting of Alice Reed (Joan Bennett) – warning – overlaid by her reflection. Later something bad happens: both parties fall into the mirror. Dan Duryea is waiting. It's a mean trick.

Five Keigo Higashino novels

1. Journey Under the Midnight Sun (Byakuyakō). Translated by Alexander O. Smith
2. The Devotion of Suspect X (Yōgisha X no Kenshin). Translated by Alexander O. Smith
3. Salvation of a Saint (Seijo no Kyūsai). Translated by Alexander O. Smith
4. A Midsummer's Equation (Manatsu no Hōteishiki). Translated by Alexander O. Smith
5. The Name of the Game is Kidnapping (Gēmu no Na wa Yūkai). Translated by Jan Mitsuko Cash

Leave the sunshine out

 

The Night Porter, Cape Fear, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Kalifornia

Half-world

Masako Togawa's 1963 novel The Lady Killer is published in a new edition by Pushkin Vertigo. I first read it in Penguin paperback in 1994. The English translation is by Simon Grove. It's one of those novels where every word is in the right place. The reveals are especially good. The author drops visual clues with Hitchockian relish. The reader sees what's coming, and then something different comes along.

The Lady Killer was Togawa's second novel. Wikipedia describes the author as a "Chanson singer/songwriter, actress, feminist, novelist, LGBTQQIAP community icon, former night club owner, metropolitan city planning panelist, music educator." In 1967 she turned her sister’s coffee shop into a celebrity hangout and lesbian nightclub known as "Blue Room".

Yeah, I was out of touch

I skipped Side Effects (2013) when it came out. Maybe there was too much Soderbergh about. Maybe I still harboured resentment about the holographic Fabergé egg. Ocean's Twelve has gotten better with time. Ocean's Thirteen now feels like a breath of fresh air. That's just a shift in mood. But that Side Effects was poorly received seems inexplicable. The movie is focused and emotionally intricate with just the right amount of weirdness. The script by Scott Z Burns probably hits every mark in the Syd Mead storybook. But the direction is out of sight. It sits alongside Andrew Davis' A Perfect Murder (1998) and Bob Rafelson's Black Widow (1987). People dismissed those films as workmanlike but a workmanlike thriller leaves nowhere to hide.

Now playing: Better satori

1. Shygirl – 'Slime'
2. Megan Thee Stallion – 'Thot Shit'
3. Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, Zubin & Parv0 - 'I Don't Want To Fall In Love'
4. Lil Peep (feat. Craig Xen) - 'California World'
5. Nedarb - 'one'

Only now at the end do you truly understand

I think a lot about the talkie denouement. I like the device. My favourite structure is weird event / maze of weirdness / long explanation. In a good novel part three is self-evident. In another type of good novel the reader would never be able to see anything until it was explained. The Hotel of the Three Roses by Augusto De Angelis (Pushkin Vertigo) was published in 1936 and there is a lot of talk in it, almost all of which takes place in the same hotel room. Spaces are meticulously mapped out and the plot is peeled back from many angles but mostly people chat. (It doesn't hurt that they're Italian. European characters talk to the author: New Zealanders just nod.) The first of 20 Inspector De Vincenzi mysteries, it was published by Mondadori whose yellow-jacketed editions lent their name to the Giallo tradition of Italian movies and novels. At the end the crime is solved, or at least deconstructed in preparation for a second read. The resolution is gothic. You don't need hindsight to glimpse Mussolini in its shadows. 

Now playing: 1966 Smith-Corona Sterling

1. MNDR – 'Hell to be you baby' 
2.  Kamaal Williams – 'Medina' 
3.  i:cube – 'Adore' 
4.  DJ Python – 'Descanse' 
5.  Tristan Clopet – 'Yield'

Splatterdammerung

Army of the Dead's McGuffins rack up the horror from a vault of millions to military supremacy to (spoiler/sequel alert) Mexico City – what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas. Chekhov's gun is a cement cutter and the zombie hordes are self-organising, in a nod to John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars. The feel is more Carpenter than anyone else, although there's plenty in there. 'Suspicious Minds' on the soundtrack is a lovely joke for a warm-brains-chomping zombie movie, when you think about it. The scope is biblical, but Old Testament. The cast is one of the better-looking this side of Black Panther. Can we talk about Zack Snyder the Director of Photography? The shallow depth of field is ravishing. Sure, movies are running out of stuff – everyone's being clever calling this zombie movie a zombie movie, geddit – but this dead flesh is a feast for the eyes.

A Benny Hill to die on

Artists are to free speech what NRA members are to weaponry: blind to living without it. And so sitting through Kiss Kiss Bang Bang once more I must defend Shane Black's puerile body humour and formalised misogyny as having a right to exist but 16 years later the film is no less cringemaking. All other elements of the Shane Black Script are present: a mismatched duo, Christmas, cars, money deals, scary paramilitary killers, an even scarier killer without a creed. In 2016 this will morph into The Nice Guys which is cleverer and nearly mature.

My theory is that Black is a director, not a writer. He's great with actors: in Kiss Kiss Michelle Monaghan and Robert Downey Jr pop. Screenwriter Black acknowledges Brett Halliday's Mike Shane mysteries as a source for both films. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is based on Bodies Are Where You Find Them and The Nice Guys takes inspiration from Blue Murder. Halliday is just one of the pen names of American writer Davis Dresser who wrote too many books to have written them all, a blurring which may have freed Black to mess with it.

Disappointment viewing

The second series of For All Mankind killed its two best characters. Ronald D. Moore says it was for the best but I am left with that Lane Pryce feeling, or worse, Adriana La Cerva. TV is not story: it's a continuum. There's a reason why we say people tune into it: it's a note. I'm not saying mood substitutes for plot. Pam and Ellen's fire died three episodes back. Karen slid into very Betty-Draper bad-housewifery. Ed blew up something. Molly ... never mind. Arcs and beats and the fucking hero's journey: why so much suffering? All I wanted was something to watch.

City of women

Cry of the City (1948) directed by Robert Siodmak, screenplay by Richard Murphy, Ben Hecht, based on a novel by Henry Edward Helseth. The men are the stars but the women are the night. We care for Richard Conte's Martin Rome and Victor Mature's Lt. Candella delivers justice but all the good and bad stuff – plot, motive, tone – is punched out by the female characters. Debra Paget's Teena Ricante is untouchable; Betty Garde's Miss Pruett has Hitchockian authority and gamesmanship. Mimi Aguglia as Mama Rome is the moral center – even Candella defers to her. Shelley Winters flashes her range as Brenda Martingale: she's detective and enabler. Hope Emerson as Rose Givens is the real tough: everyone's chasing Rome but Givens is the only one who gets her hands on him.

23 changing to 15

Ames

 "We were shooting the first season and we were coming up with the graphics for the opening, which showed a pulp novel called 'Bored to Death' opening up and showing the actual words of my story ... I said, 'Oh my God, this is so cool. I wish I was writing books with covers like that.' And one of the writers said to me, 'Jonathan, you have a TV show now.'"

– Jonathan Ames interviewed by Adam Sternbergh, 2021. 

The fast and the furious

"I like to work on a film like that where it’s continually opening up its secrets to me. I think that any work of art, not just a film, is a mystery. I think it was Cocteau who said that it should reveal its secrets slowly." 

– Two-Lane Blacktop director Monte Hellman interviewed by Nicholas Pasquariello in 1976.

Portland is burning

As chaos spreads in Portland I wonder how the Odditorium is going. Circa 2001 The Dandy Warhols' Courtney Taylor-Taylor spent his US$1.5 million in royalties from the Vodafone 'Bohemian Like You' TVC to create the quarter-city block that includes a recording studio and so on, and also a wine bar. This prompted Wine Enthusiast's Lauren Mowery to ask the not unreasonable yet also completely unnecessary question, 'Why did you decide to open a wine bar, especially in your studio?'