Hitchcockian Kink

Title: Basic Instinct

Rating: 3 Stars

Lately, I’ve been dipping my toe into neo-noir. In the last week or so, I’ve watched Body Heat and House of Games. I even went old school noir with the John Garfield / Lana Turner The Postman Always Rings Twice. I may or may not be sufficiently inspired to watch the Jack Nicholson / Jessica Lange version.

Basic Instinct was directed by Paul Verhoeven. When this film was made, Verhoeven was in the midst of a series of intense films (Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls (?!), Starship Troopers, and Hollow Man). Starring Michael Douglas as an out of control detective obsessed with his suspect, he was in the midst of roles of men behaving badly (Fatal Attraction, Wall Street, Basic Instinct, Falling Down, Disclosure, A Perfect Murder).

The story is classic noir. The film opens with a couple (the man a former rock star) having sex. In  the midst of the action, the woman (blonde but you never see her face), reaches back, grabs an ice pick, and brutally stabs him to death. Suspicion is immediately focused upon his girlfriend Catherine (Sharon Stone). This suspicion is intensified when the detectives learn that Catherine, a writer, wrote a novel years ago that included an exact description of the crime. Nick (Douglas), the detective, begins a cat and mouse game with Catherine. Nick is trying to determine if she’s truly the killer. Catherine, writing another novel, this time about an out of control detective that once shot some innocent tourists (as Nick once did), is using Nick to gain material.

The tension builds. People die. Nick and Catherine have passionate, almost violent sex. As Nick gets deeper into the case, he becomes even more erratic, to the point where he is suspected of murdering an Internal Affairs detective that is after him.

He is suspended from the force but can’t stop investigating the murder until the fatal denouement.

In terms of the film, just as I did with Body Heat, I first have to give a shout out to the casting agents. Douglas and Stone are perfectly cast. It doesn’t just stop there though. The film is stacked with the best character actors working at this time. George Dzundza is Nick’s world weary partner. Stephen Tobolowsky is a psychiatrist. Wayne Knight is a district attorney. Daniel von Bargen is the Internal Affairs detective. Jeanne Tripplehorn is a psychiatrist / Nick’s ex-girlfriend. Chelcie Ross is the police captain. Some of these names might not be familiar, but they are all omnipresent character actors doing strong work here.

Clearly Verhoeven is aiming for a Hitchcockian vibe here. Arguably, you can picture the Vertigo Jimmy Stewart in the role of Nick and the Rear Window Grace Kelly as Catherine. Verhoeven imitates the camera work of Hitchcock. He even includes a shot pointing down a winding staircase reminiscent of Vertigo. The slasher scenes certainly bring back memories of Psycho. With the whole will they / won’t they and is she guilty / innocent themes running through the film, he’s trying to build up Hitchcockian psychological suspense.

It might have been much more successful if it wasn’t for the screenwriter. This would be Joe Eszterhaus. At the time, he was an incredibly in demand screenwriter. He was paid three million dollars for the screen play. For three million dollars, you apparently do not get subtlety. The violence is gory. The sex is graphic. There is bondage. There is bisexuality. There is what can only be described as barely consensual rape. It’s kind of hard to really have serious psychological suspense when much of your film audience is trying to sneak a peek at Stone’s intimate parts. Sure, Hitchcock had the Hays code to deal with, but even without it, I’m sure that he probably would have thought it best to hold back just a little bit. Here, it’s all on the screen.

I know that this makes me sound old, but I do kind of long for that time when films like this were made with the idea that they could become blockbusters. Even though it had a pretty hard R rating (it initially had an NC-17), it was one of the top grossing films of the year. In today’s world of sequels, comic book films, and comic book sequels, I miss the days when a truly adult film with an original script could be released with the expectation of high grosses.

Perfect Work Life Balance

Title: Severance

Rating: 5 Stars

One of the results of living through the pandemic is that work life balance has shifted for many people. Many have shifted to either purely virtual or part time virtual. Working virtual has many advantages. Avoiding the commute time alone saves people many hours a week. Not having to wear professional attire saves both time and money. It’s much easier to integrate those personal tasks (getting that plumber to come when your shower breaks) that inevitably bleed into your work day.

There are costs though. The idea of a 9 to 5 shift is kind of disappearing. I know people that get caught up in a work task and when they look up at a clock it’s eight in the evening. Microsoft just recently posted a study identifying a third work peak for virtual workers from 6 PM to 8 PM. Not having that physical break between home life and work life means that, inevitably, work stress will bleed even more into your personal time.

What is the perfect work life balance? It appears that that’s the question that the series Severance starts off trying to answer. By the end of the season, it became much more than that.

Although there are several major characters, the one that we spend the most time with is Mark (Adam Scott). Some time ago, his wife perished. Inconsolable and looking for at least a partial escape from his grief, Mark signs up for severance with the Lumon corporation.

There is work at Lumon that is considered so secret that extreme measures must be taken. Such workers voluntarily agree to be severed. A chip is implanted in their head. Once they take the elevator down to their work area, all knowledge of the outer world is erased. Similarly, when they take the elevator up at the end of their shift, all knowledge of their work (their inner world) is erased. Their personal selves and their professional selves have no knowledge of each other. Theoretically, the chip implant is irreversible.

When we pick up, Mark has been working at Lumon for some time. Someone has just left his small team and Mark has been promoted to manager. Since they’re down a person, they bring on a fresh severed named Helly (Britt Lower). There is also the grizzled veteran Irving (John Turturro) and the competitive go-getter Dylan (Zach Cherry).

It is an interesting question. On the surface, it doesn’t seem to be an absolutely horrible idea. There have definitely been some times in my life where my work took over my life, much to my own detriment. I’ve lost sleep. It’s affected my eating. It’s affected my personality. It’s affected personal relationships. An argument can be made that, during such periods, I’d have been happier not having all of that work stress.

However, think about the life of the ‘innie’. The only thing they know is work. They know nothing of what happens when the elevator door closes and then reopens the next morning. They’re not even aware of sleeping (at one point Mark tells Helly that, if he feels relaxed in the morning, that he infers that his ‘outie’ must have gotten a good nights sleep). They have no idea if they’re married and have children. They have no idea what their ‘outie’ likes to do. All they know is work.

And they really don’t even know their work. Mark’s group is called Macrodata Refinement. Their job consists of gazing at screens of numbers and identifying the ‘scary’ ones. That’s it. Those of us who have worked for very large corporations can relate to their futility of trying to find some purpose in such a seemingly inconsequential job.

Lumon tries with all of its might to infuse some sense of purpose to their employees. Their founder is lionized and idolized. They have compliance documents that read like nothing more than theological doctrine. Having suffered through numerous vision, mission, goals, and objectives documents, I can relate to the vacuous grandiose statements in the Lumon compliance documents.

Since the ‘innies’ have no concept of the outside, they have to be motivated internally within the workplace. They are awarded with coasters, dance parties, and waffle parties. In the early episodes, due to his competitive nature, Dylan is especially motivated by such trifles. I can’t even count the number of t-shirts, mugs, certificates, and tchotchkes that I received over my thirty plus year career. Most amusingly, when I was working on an Army program, they handed out pull-string vibrating grenades.

Lumon intentionally keeps the various departments segregated. Even worse, they propagate absurd rumors about the various departments. In particular, there’s a rumor that members of the Optics & Design team once violently massacred the Macrodata Refinement team. This naturally leads to profound distrust and no communication between the various departments. My own experience backs this up. Even though we all worked for the same company, there were many times when organizations that should have been cooperating were actively sabotaging each other. Especially since I spent my career in IT (considered an overhead organization), other organizations looked upon us as useless, conniving, or worse.

The head of O&D, Burt (Christopher Walken), retires in an episode. This is especially significant for an ‘innie’ because it is equivalent to their death. Once Burt goes up the elevator, he will never descend again. Inner Burt will never exist again. His farewell speech is a hilarious combination of retirement and eulogy. Having attended many retirement parties, I could relate.

Eventually, Mark’s team begins to rebel against the system. They explore the labyrinth of the Lumon campus. Many mysterious rooms with murky purposes are unearthed. They even discover a way they can exist, at least for a while, in the body of their ‘outie’. What will they discover when they are above ground? Who are they really? What do they want to achieve?

Since it’s so new, I won’t spoil it. Let’s just say that Season 2, when it eventually arrives, is poised to address larger questions such as Lumon’s true purpose. It appears that there’s much more to Lumon than a small group of people sitting in a large, sterile room looking for scary numbers.

Although it started off pretty slow, by the end of the series it had caught fire. It was entertaining, exciting, innovative, and addressing large important questions. I’m definitely looking forward to Season 2.

Democrats Don’t Know Bidness

During President Biden’s first year in office, 6.6 million jobs were created. That is by far the largest number of jobs created in any president’s first year of office. The current unemployment rate is 3.6%. I remember a time when 5% unemployment was considered full employment. The economy grew by 5.6% during that same period.

And yet I saw a survey where a significant percentage of Americans believe that the economy (specifically the unemployment rate) is substantially worse than it was during the Great Recession. That claim is simply nonsense. It does point to a larger belief that I find interesting. Large percentages of people believe that Republicans are simply just better at the economy than Democrats. This isn’t just the Trumpists that simply repeat whatever their great leader tells them to. I’ve known professional fund manager type people that parrot that line as well. As I do occasionally here, let’s look at the data.

Seems like the easiest way to compare Democrat to Republican Presidents is to look at GDP growth. After all, a growing economy would seem to be a pretty good indicator of how well it’s doing.

Let’s take a look at each President, starting with Reagan (the culmination of the modern Conservative Republican movement). I’ll list the total GDP growth and then, based off that, grossly calculate the average annual growth.

President	Total Growth %	Annual Growth %
Joe Biden	5.6	5.6
Bill Clinton	34	4.3
Ronald Reagan	31	3.9
Barack Obama	19	2.4
George H W Bush	8	2.0
George W Bush	15	1.9
Donald Trump	6	1.5

Not a great start for Team R. Of the last seven Presidents, the bottom three are all Republicans. Reagan is the only one that barely gets on the podium with a bronze medal finish.

That’s only one measure. Jobs are also important. After all, we’re a nation of hard workers that to a great extent identify ourselves through our careers. Therefore, whichever Presidents generate the most jobs must be the better economic President. Let’s take a look.

President	Total Jobs Created (000s)	Avg Annual Growth %
Joe Biden	6,600	4.5
Bill Clinton	23,620	2.6
Ronald Reagan	16,131	2.1
Barack Obama	11,572	1.0
George H W Bush	1,917	0.5
George W Bush	1,350	0.1
Donald Trump	-3,003	-0.5

Hmmmm. Nothing changed here. The Rankings are still the same. Reagan is in 3rd place and the remaining Republicans bring up the rear. Special kudos to President Trump for actually losing jobs while in office.

Oh, I know! I bet that the Republicans will win when it comes to legalized gambling. Let’s look at stock market returns. I bet that’ll be the category where the Democrats socialist agenda will be exposed!

President	Total Gain %	Avg Annual Gain %
Bill Clinton	229	28.6
Barack Obama	148	18.5
Ronald Reagan	147	18.4
Joe Biden	15	15
Donald Trump	51	12.8
George H W Bush	41	10.3
George W Bush	-26.5	-3.3

This time there is a change in the standings. Unfortunately, not a lot of great progress for the Republicans. Reagan is still holding onto the third spot, being just nosed out of second by Obama. The other three Republicans are still bringing up the rear, albeit in a different order. I’d known but forgotten that somehow the stock market ended up in a worse shape after eight years of W’s reign. The 90s was a great time to be in the stock market!

OK, things still aren’t going well for the Republicans. Let’s see if we can shake this up. The Republicans are always going on about how irresponsible the Democrats are when it comes to spending while they are the small government stewards of fiscal responsibility. So, let’s take a look at debt. Remember, low numbers are good here.

President	Total Debt % Increase	Avg Annual Debt Increase %
Bill Clinton	32	4.0
Joe Biden	5.6	5.6
George H W Bush	54	6.8
Donald Trump	33.1	8.3
Barack Obama	74	9.25
George W Bush	101	12.6
Ronald Reagan	186	23.3

This does bring about a change in the rankings. H W Bush is on the podium with a 3rd place showing. For once, the Republicans don’t occupy all of the bottom three rungs. Obama is beaten by Trump and H W Bush but beats W Bush and Reagan. For a supposedly small government conservative, Reagan really crushed that last place finish. No one else was even close.

Maybe I’m still not being fair. Perhaps we should measure greater macro trends. Perhaps it’d be better to measure recessions. If our country’s entire economy goes negative for at least two quarters, that should be a pretty good indicator of which party is better at not steering our national economy into a ditch, right? Let’s see who was our President when any one of our recessions over the last forty years was started.

February / 2020 – Donald Trump

December / 2007 – George W Bush

March / 2001 – George W Bush

July / 1990 – George H W Bush

July / 1981 – Ronald Reagan

Isn’t that interesting? Over the last forty years, every single recession started on a Republican’s watch. Every single Republican had a recession and not a single Democrat did. If you pull the lens a bit further back, you’ll discover that, of the last twelve recessions, going back to 1948, ten of them have been during Republican presidencies. Presidents Carter and Truman each had one. So, Presidents Biden (so far!), Obama, Clinton, Johnson, and Kennedy did not experience a recession. On the other hand, every Republican President going all of the way back to President Benjamin Harrison (back in the 1890s) experienced at least one.

So, what does all of this mean? Shockingly enough, I’m not saying that Republican Presidents are bad at managing the economy. I am saying that we need to stop the narrative that somehow Democrats are bad at it. The data just doesn’t reflect that. There are much larger global trends going on that are beyond a President’s ability to control (eg global pandemic, dot com market crash).

Having said that, it is interesting, and probably not shocking, that the party that professes to hold government in contempt, that supposedly wants to shrink it so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub, and that seems to be manifestly suspicious of intellectual competence and expertise would prove to be possibly not up to the task of managing an immense and complex 21 trillion dollar economy.

Just sayin’

Giving Voice To Black Women

Title: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Rating: 5 Stars

This is one of those novels that isn’t just an amazing read but is also amazing in their historical context.

This is the story of Janie Crawford. Her grandmother was a former enslaved person. She gave birth to a daughter after being raped by her white enslaver. Her daughter was later raped by a school teacher. Janie’s mom eventually ran away and it was left to her grandmother to raise her.

Janie dreams of falling in love. One day, her grandmother sees Janie kissing a boy. Terrified that she’s going to end up like her mom, she immediately marries her off to the much older farmer Logan Killicks. Not an evil man, Logan is looking for a help mate, not a soul mate. He wants her to stay on his farm and work all day with him. It’s a life of drudgery with no joy for Janie. Such a life would have been adequate for someone like her grandmother, but Janie wants more.

One day she meets Joe Starks. He’s full of energy and possibilities. He wants to make something of himself. Convinced that life with Joe will be much richer, Janie runs off with him. Indeed, Joe does become prosperous and successful. He even becomes the mayor of the little town they settle in. However, Joe is not at all interested in what Janie wants. He figures that as long as he keeps her in nice clothes and a nice house, she should be satisfied. All of her dreams of love and living life seem to disappear. She feels herself becoming a husk of herself. After some twenty years of marriage, Joe sickens and dies.

Now close to forty, Janie is at loose ends. Other men come around to woo her. She doesn’t see any of them offering her anything new. One day she meets a much younger man named Tea Cake. Tea Cake doesn’t seem to want anything from her except her love. The two of them run off and get married. Although their relationship is occasionally tempestuous, at last Janie discovers love. Not only love, but Tea Cake encourages her to experience and live life as his partner, not just as his possession. Although she’s living a much simpler life than she did with Joe, she’s much happier.

All good things must come to an end. A hurricane comes through and devastates their land. During the hurricane, Tea Cake risks his life to save her from a rabid dog. In doing so, he is bit himself. Driven mad by rabies, Janie must shoot and kill Tea Cake before he kills her. She’s acquitted at trial and heads back to her original home. There she will live and luxuriate in the memories of the love that she had with Tea Cake.

It’s a wonderful story. Published in 1937, it’s considered a classic of the Harlem Renaissance.

The fact that it was written and published seems kind of amazing to me. Zora Neale Hurston was born in 1891. All four of her grandparents were born in slavery. She was born the fifth of eight children. Despite experiencing poverty, she graduated from Howard University. She studied anthropology at Barnard and at Columbia. She studied under Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology. She wrote this novel in a seven week period while staying in Haiti.

Not even two generations removed from slavery and living in a world where white people dominated all Black people and Black men dominated Black women, Hurston managed to write this amazing novel describing a Black woman’s journey from living a life of subjugation to realizing her full self as a Black woman. You can draw a pretty straight line from this novel to later works by such authors as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.

I found it interesting that fellow Harlem Renaissance authors did not all positively review her novel. Authors such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison criticized it. They thought it presented a caricature of Black life. They also did not like the colloquial dialect in which it was written.

From her anthropological work, she studied African American folklore and cultural traditions in Georgia and Florida. It would seem that this extensive research influenced the novel and informed the creation of her characters’ dialect.

Although racism isn’t explicitly called out in the novel, the fact that there are very few white characters in the novel and they are all much removed speaks to the segregationist world in which the Black characters live. It does discuss the discrimination that takes place within the Black race in the form of Mrs Turner. With Janie’s lighter skin and European features, Mrs Turner idolizes her and despises her other Black neighbors. Even when Janie insults her, Mrs Turner takes it as her due because of Janie’s supposed superiority.

This important novel is a forerunner to Black feminist writing.  Even better, it is also is a vibrant, funny, moving novel that sparkles with life.

Living The Ellroy Life

Title: Handsome Johnny

Rating: 4 Stars

In one of my first posts, way back in 2016, I made the case that the spy Kim Philby was the Person of the 20th Century (read here). At one time in WWII he simultaneously had the ear of Stalin, Churchill, and Hitler. His defection to the Soviet Union led to American counterespionage efforts that nearly destroyed the CIA. Graham Greene’s literature was influenced by him. There were rumors that he played a role, albeit minor, in the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

That’s a pretty hard record to beat. I have to say, though, that Johnny Rosselli gives him a run for his money. His story is truly amazing in its scope and breadth.

Also, as I was reading this, I found myself tripping back to James Ellroy’s novels. I’m speaking specifically of the LA Quartet and the Underworld USA Trilogy. One series is all about the dark underside of law and order in Los Angeles. The other is about the mafia’s hidden impact upon important events in American history. They were all written in Ellroy’s propulsive, staccato, hypercaffeinated style that has to be read to be believed (after all Ellroy is the demon dog of American crime fiction). Johnny Roselli was a significant crime figure in Los Angeles for decades, which puts him in the middle of Ellroy’s milieu. He’s featured as a character in at least one of Ellroy’s novels.

If you leave out the whole gangster backstory, his life really is the classic successful American immigrant story. He was born Filippo Sacco on July 4th (of all days!) in 1905 in an impoverished part of Italy. His father immigrated first, bringing with him the rest of his family in 1911. Living in poverty in Boston, his family’s life takes a really dark turn when his father died in 1918 of the Spanish Flu.

Left virtually on his own, he basically lived on the streets and took to a life in crime. Fairly early on, due to legal issues, he took on the name Johnny Rosselli. Later, in the 1930s, he went to the trouble of forging legal documents in his new identity. In the 1920s, Rosselli made the move to Los Angeles. It became his home for decades.

From the 1920s to his death in 1976, Rosselli always seemed to find himself in the middle of the action. In doing so, he ended up meeting many significant figures of the 20th century. Below is a list of just a few of his exploits.

In the 1920s, he met and impressed Al Capone. He became the Chicago’s syndicate representative in Los Angeles.

He helped set up one of the largest delivery systems of alcohol during Prohibition.

Until he was imprisoned for the first time, he was interested in making films. He helped produce two films. In one of them, one of the actors featured was Jack Webb. The strict no nonsense narration of that film inspired Jack Webb to create the TV series Dragnet (just the facts, ma’am).

He lived in the same bungalow apartments as, of all people, Edgar Rice Burroughs (of Tarzan fame).

Known gangster Rosselli had an office near Joseph Breen, who was the prudish head censor that applied the Hayes Code to film production. One of his partners in film was Breen’s son.

He was close friends with Harry Cohn, co-founder of Columbia pictures.

Showing great flexibility, he helped break up the unions that were driving up costs for film making and then later, when the mafia realized that there was money to be made in unions, he helped to build them up again.

In 1931, he went to Nevada and spread around bribes to open up the state’s gambling laws. Hilariously, he was the instigator that introduced the first topless showgirls to Las Vegas (at the Tropicana). He became the mob’s chief strategist in Las Vegas. No major deals were done without him. An argument can be made that he was a primary influence in the development of Las Vegas.

He met and had an affair with 1930s famed platinum blonde actress, Jean Harlow. A generation later, he met and had an affair with another famed blonde actress, Marilyn Monroe.

As can probably be imagined, Capone was not the only mobster that he rubbed shoulders with. He had relationships with Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen, Meyer Lansky, San Giancana, and Santo Trafficante.

He was the go to guy in Las Vegas when Howard Hughes tried to make it his own. He met Robert Maheu, a somewhat obscure person now, but a former FBI and CIA officer that ended up as Howard Hughes personal lawyer. Rosselli was a facilitator in Hughes’ attempts to buy up nearly all of the Las Vegas casinos. Rosselli played golf with Hughes in the 1930s when Hughes was still in playboy mode. Later, when he went all hermit, Rosselli met him (while Hughes was trussed up on a stretcher) when Hughes first came to Las Vegas on a train. They even had a brief conversation.

Since Castro had closed all of the mafia’s casinos in Havana, the federal government knew that the mafia felt no love for Castro. Maheu (again!) met Rosselli to determine if the mafia would be willing to assassinate Castro. Rosselli, despite his life of crime, felt gratitude to America for giving a poor immigrant like himself a chance at success and considered himself a patriot (he even volunteered during WWII despite a lifetime problem with tuberculosis). He agreed to do it only if he was not paid.

Thus ensured an entire comedy of errors where the federal government tried to work with mobsters to get poison to Cuba so that someone close to Castro could administer it to him. The attempts were pathetic and laughable. While in the process, Rosselli met and befriended Bill Harvey, another somewhat obscure but at the time legendary figure as the drunken wild man of the CIA. When he first met Harvey, Rosselli thought that Harvey reminded him of a hung over Oliver Hardy.

He was seemingly sex obsessed. One of the many women that he had a relationship with was Judith Butler. Again, not many people remember her, but her claim to fame was simultaneously having an affair with the Chicago crime boss Giancana and with President John F Kennedy (yes, while he was President). Somehow, Rosselli found a way into that already too complicated triangle.

For murky reasons, Rosselli hired a Washington DC inside lawyer and, among other things, spun him a fabulous tale. It involved the mafia sending hit teams to Cuba. Castro intercepted the teams and brainwashed them. He then (the story goes) sent them back to the US to assassinate Kennedy. This story ultimately landed on the desk of DC insider columnist/reporter, Jack Anderson. He published it. As a result, there is now a whole active set of conspiracy theories around Castro’s responsibility for JFK’s assassination. Apparently, even Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, believed it.

Eventually, all of his activities came to light. He testified at the famous 1950s Kefauver commission that was focused on exposing the mafia. Due to his governmental activities, he testified during both the Watergate hearings and the Church hearings (which exposed CIA’s long history of dirty tricks).

His time was running out. He was convicted in a gambling scam at the LA Friars Club. His forged birth papers came to light and his true birth place in Italy was discovered. He was going to serve his sentence and then be deported back to Italy. Know that this was in 1976 and he left Italy as a 6 year old child in 1911.

However, it was not to be. One theory was that some gangsters thought he was talking too much. Another theory was that the then current head of the Chicago syndicate did not approve of his slick, smooth talking ways and wanted him out of the way. Regardless, one day he disappeared. His body was found later, in a Florida bay, floating in an oil drum. His legs had been chopped off and shoved into the drum. His body was badly decomposed, but the coroner was able to determine that he had been strangled. He was 71.

Although an ignoble end that was undoubtedly terrifying, Rosselli squeezed as much out of life as anyone.

Is It Hot In Here Or Just Me?

Title: Body Heat

Rating: 4 Stars

In the pilot episode of Cheers, the bar denizens are sitting around debating the sweatiest films ever made. Rocky II was nominated. Or Ben Hur. Or Alien. The crew ended up coalescing around Cool Hand Luke. Body Heat was also suggested, and based upon my recent viewing of it, I would definitely place it as a top contender. Everyone sweats extensively. Everyone has sweat stains. After sex, the participants are absolutely dripping with sweat. On top of that, Ted Danson, most famous as the bartender in Cheers, played the soft shoe dancing prosecutor in Body Heat.

Body Heat, from 1981, is a fantastic re-imagining of noir. Technically it was called neo-noir to differentiate it from the moody black and white classic films from the 1940s and 1950s. It follows the basic formula of a dumb guy thinking he’s a smart guy meeting a woman way smarter than him and then paying the price for his stupidity.

Before I even start to talk about the plot, let’s talk about the casting. We have William Hurt as Ned Racine, our hapless stumblebum. There’s Kathleen Turner as Matty Walker, the femme fatale. As I’ve mentioned, Ted Danson is Peter Lowenstein, the deputy prosecutor. Lastly, there’s Mickey Rourke, as Teddy Lewis, the arsonist who owes Racine a favor. Their respective roles in this film are one of the first roles in any film for all four. Finding them and bringing them together was a wonderful act of casting.

There’s also an elephant in the room that probably needs to be addressed. Racine plays an oversexed lawyer having a torrid affair with Walker. Alas, now that Hurt’s, shall we say, troublesome relationships with women have come to life, it makes his appearance in this role problematic from the lens of the current day.

Racine is a borderline competent lawyer. He is unprepared and negligent in his work. Racine meets and pursues the wealthy Walker. She fends him off but ultimately can’t deny their irresistible chemistry and they commence a torrid affair. The only problem is her husband. Walker wants to divorce her husband and be with Racine but her prenup prevents her from getting a large settlement. In desperation, Racine agrees that they need to kill her husband. Having developed a careful plan, he manages to kill her husband, take his body to an abandoned building, and start a fire that consumes the building. Thinking that no one else knows about their affair, they agree to keep their distance from each other until it seems safe.

Of course, being noir, the plan falls apart. The corpse is missing a pair of glasses. Who has the glasses? Are Racine’s fingerprints on the glasses? Later, it seems that Walker uses Racine’s known incompetence as a lawyer to avoid having to share her husband’s estate with his sister. Later, mysterious things keep popping up that puts holes into Racine’s carefully thought out plan. Now it appears that maybe Walker is actually planning on killing him and putting all of the blame on him.

Will he figure it out what’s happening to save his skin? Well, if this is your first time in the world of noir, understand that the male protagonists are really not very smart. They act all self confident and self assured but they simply don’t have the candlepower to back it up. On the other hand, the women, all ‘whatever you want, you’re the strong man’, are running through the finish tape of the race while the men are still lacing up their shoes.

This is simply well executed. Both Hurt and Turner perfectly play their roles. Playing Lowenstein, Danson is Racine’s easy going friend that at first appears to be bemused by Racine’s ongoing misfortune but becomes increasingly concerned as it goes ever so more wrong for him. Rourke is great as the seedy arsonist that knows that Racine is in over his head and implores him to stop. You see the plot unfold, and as the dominoes fall, there’s an inevitability to Racine’s doom that he ever so slowly begins to understand.

Also, in retrospect, there’s an early 1980s hilarious vibe to it. Racine is a jogger (and I do mean jogger as opposed to a runner). He wears oh so short shorts and baggy (and, obviously, very sweaty) t-shirts. When he takes a break from running, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of smokes.

In fact, there’s a bit of an homage to the smoking that is omnipresent in all of the classic noir films. During one scene, a character asks if it’s OK to smoke. In response, everyone else in the room reaches into their pocket or purse to fire up their own cigarettes/cigars. The only one not smoking is Lowenstein. When one of them offers him a cigarette, he just smiles bemusedly and says that he’ll just breathe in all of the smoky air in the room.

When a character is self aware enough to know that smoking is dangerous and can still make a lighthearted joke about second hand smoke, you know that you’re watching a quality film from the 1980s.

English Restoration Rashomon

Title: An Instance of the Fingerpost

Rating: 5 Stars

On the surface, it’s a simple story. The year is 1663. The setting is Oxford. A man dies. It’s determined that he’s been murdered. A woman is accused. She confesses. She is hung. Justice has been done.

Since the novel is over 700 pages, it’s safe to assume that it’s a bit more complicated than that. And indeed it is.

First of all, the same story is told from four different points of view. In one way or another, all of the narrators are unreliable (hence the Rashomon in the blog title). One version is told by Marco Da Cola, a foppish younger son of an Venetian trading family stopping over in Oxford on his way to London to help settle his family’s business. A second version is told by Jack Prestcott, the madly impulsive son of a disgraced nobleman trying to prove his father’s innocence and restore his family lands. The third is John Wallis (a historical figure), a coldly calculating man that was the greatest English mathematician before Newton that was a master of code breaking. The fourth is Anthony Wood (another historical figure), an archivist / historian seemingly more interested in pouring over dusty books than social intercourse.

What’s fascinating about this story is that not only are the narrators unreliable, but actual historical events occurring at that point in time are unreliable as well. Considering the fact that in the last 200 years or so, Queen Victoria ruled for 63 years and Queen Elizabeth has ruled for 70 years (and counting!), we associate England with stability.

England in the 1660’s was in a state of chaos. First of all, this is the aftermath of the English Civil War. Charles I and parliamentary forces fought each other for most of the 1640’s. The parliamentarians triumphed and, shocking the world, executed Charles I in 1649. His son Charles II was exiled. Royalist forces were purged at all levels of the society, no more so than in Oxford. In the 1650’s, various Royalist factions attempted to overthrow the republican commonwealth and/or assassinate the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell. After Cromwell died of natural causes in 1659, his son ruled for a short period of time before Charles II, previously exiled, assumed the throne, albeit under parliamentary rule. The previously exiled Royalists fought to regain their lost positions while those that had flourished under the commonwealth pivoted to accommodate their changed political situation.

That wasn’t all of the chaos. A century previous, Henry VIII, angered that the Catholic church would not sanction his divorce, took over Catholic property in England and established himself at the head of English Protestantism. The Catholic church, Catholic nations such as France and Spain, not to mention devout Catholic Englishmen, understandably did not take too well to this and actively tried to reinstate Catholicism. A century later, this fight was still raging. Catholics were still being oppressed. English kings were suspected of being secret Catholics. Due to the very nature of the protestant movement, radical schisms were popping up that the now doctrine protestant religion had to stamp out.

One of the fun things about this novel is that all of this is incorporated into the plot. So, while the basic plot is unfolding, in the background are religious schisms, assassination plots, and political machinations. Iain Pears does excellent work painting the picture of life during the English Restoration. Pears also successfully integrates real historical figures with the story being told. The philosopher John Locke, Robert Boyle (the father of chemistry), the architect Christopher Wren, and famous political figures like the Earl of Clarendon all make appearances within the novel.

The eyewitness accounts of the four narrators are all colored by the narrators’ backgrounds, prejudices, and hidden motivations. Da Cola, the outsider from the continent, a haughty courtier, is generally bemused by the English barbarous actions and customs. Prestcott, absolutely consumed in his quest to prove his father’s innocence, is blinded by all else. Wallis, the cryptographer that has supported both the commonwealth and for the Royalists, is paranoid and sees conspiracies everywhere. Even Wood, seemingly the impartial observer, has his own blind spot that affects his writings. In this way as well it is reminiscent of Rashomon. The last narrator in that film seems to be impartial until he too is exposed as shading his truth to obscure his own motivations.

Da Cola is the most enigmatic figure in the book. Who is he? A fopish gallant completely at a loss in the backwater of Oxford? A murderous mercenary? A Catholic priest?

Who killed Robert Grove? Was it Sarah Blundy, who confessed to the crime? Or was it Thomas Ken, who was being kept from a promotion by Grove? Or was it an accident and the poison was meant for another?

At the center of the mystery is Sarah Blundy. Was she a desperately poor harlot that sought vengeance on Grove? Was she a strong, independent woman in a time when neither of those attributes were prized and was punished for it? Or was she something else nearly impossible to contemplate?

Pears successfully managed to write a novel that was a marriage of historical fiction and mystery with a dash of post modernism (ie unreliable narration). Since I enjoy all of these different types of fiction, this novel was pretty much designed for me and so, at least for me, it delivered.

Assassination By Medical Malpractice

Title: Destiny of the Republic

Rating: 5 Stars

This threads together three different story lines. One is the story of James Garfield, assassinated a scant three months after his inauguration and then dying in agony about three months after that. Another is that of Charles Guiteau, the man who assassinated him. The third thread is that of Alexander Graham Bell. Already famed as an inventor, he thought that he could possibly help save the injured President’s life by inventing a device that could locate the bullet lodged in his body.

I’m going to dispense with the Bell thread first. Although certainly interesting, Bell played at best a peripheral role in the Garfield assassination drama. Other than to pad the work a bit, his story didn’t really need to be included. Since it was interesting, I don’t regret that Millard included it, but it seemed unnecessary.

Although I gave it my highest rating, the fact that Millard felt inclined to include the Bell story does highlight a problem with the subject. Since Garfield only functioned as President for about three months, from the point of view of his presidency, there just isn’t much there. Most of those three months was centered around job seekers and fighting the Stalwart senator Roscoe Conkling.

This paucity of information is reflect in the book’s length. It tells three different life stories and it still comes in around 260 pages.

Even so, Millard makes very good use of those 260 pages.

After you read them, you realize what a missed opportunity a Garfield presidency was. Garfield was, quite simply, a good man. Born into abject poverty, he used an iron work ethic and a brilliant mind to rise up out of it. Toiling in manual labor on a river, a near drowning convinced him to make something of his life.

He attended a small college, and by his second year (while still a student!) he was named an associate professor. He was president of a college at the age of 26. When the Civil War struck, he immediately enlisted and became an officer. In a crucial battle in Kentucky, he used ingenious tactics to overwhelm a much larger Confederate force and help keep Kentucky out of the Confederacy. Promoted to Brigadier General, instead Abraham Lincoln called him to serve in the House of Representatives, saying that he needed men like Garfield in the House.

Garfield was warm and gregarious, with a loud and hearty laugh. Incapable of holding a grudge, at the sight of enemies that he’d forsworn, he’d walk over, give them a big hug, and say that he can never stay mad.

After the Civil War, the Republican party split into two. There were the Stalwarts, who believed in political patronage, and the Half-Breeds, who believed in civil service reform. This political schism came to a head during the 1880 Presidential campaign. Roscoe Conkling, leader of the Stalwarts, put form US Grant for a third term. The Half-Breeds nominated James G Blaine. James Garfield gave a rousing nomination speech for a third candidate, John Sherman (William Tecumseh’s brother).

The convention was deadlocked for dozens of ballots with no end in sight. On a later ballot, one elector threw his support to Garfield. Horrified, Garfield tried to stop it. From that small beginning, eventually there was a groundswell of support and, on the 36th ballot, Garfield was the Republican nominee, having neither sought it nor desired it.

With his staunch support of civil rights, his natural brilliance, his willingness to compromise but also willingness to stand up for principle, Garfield had a bright presidential future ahead of him.

Alas, it was not to be.

Whatever natural gifts that Garfield made maximum use of, Guiteau had none of them. A failure at nearly everything, he landed at the Utopian community of Oneida. Despite its philosophy of promiscuity, even here Guiteau failed, where the women there nicknamed him ‘Gitout’. He tried and failed to be an evangelist. He wrote a mostly plagiarized religious book that did not sell. Perennially short of money, one of his favorite tricks was to pass as a gentlemen at a boarding house. He’d give various excuses for not paying and then skipping out in the dead of night. He’d move from city to city, one step ahead of bill collectors.

Mentally unstable, he survived a boat collision that convinced him that he was saved for a higher purpose. Somehow caught up in the Republican party, he decided to become a Garfield supporter. He wrote a mostly plagiarized speech in support of Garfield. When Garfield won, Guiteau was convinced that he was the reason for Garfield’s success. Guiteau then proceeded to lobby for a prominent post (eg consul of Paris). He wrote numerous letters and habitually hung around Garfield’s office seeking an interview.

The Presidency was much different in those days. There was a Secret Service, but it was concentrated on stopping counterfeiting. There was one young male secretary that would screen Garfield’s visitors. Anyone could and pretty much did walk around the White House. Garfield never had bodyguards. He regularly walked around Washington DC by himself.

Guiteau made himself enough of a pest that James G Blaine, now the Secretary of State, told him to his face that he will never get a post and to never bother the administration again.

Infuriated at the rebuff and convinced that Garfield was going to destroy the country, Guiteau resolved to assassinate Garfield, leaving the field open for his Stalwart Vice President, Chester Arthur. After following him for some weeks, Guiteau saw his chance at a train station and shot Garfield twice. He was immediately captured. Blaine was at the station with Garfield and recognized the disgruntled office seeker.

Garfield had a serious bullet wound in his back. However, he did not die immediately. In fact, he lived for an additional agonizing 80 days. During that time, his weight went from 210 down to 130 pounds.

Just a couple of years previously, Joseph Lister, famous for advocating antiseptic practices, had visited the US and promoted his techniques. Although accepted in Europe, in America doctors treated his ideas with scorn. Invisible germs in the air? That’s nonsense! Sterilize a wound? What a waste of time!

Dr Doctor Willard Bliss (yes, he’s a doctor and yes, Doctor was his first name!) assumed imperious control over Garfield’s recovery. No fan of Lister, he repeatedly dug his fingers into Garfield’s open wound in a futile search to find the bullet. Here Bell makes his entrance with a mechanical device to detect metal. Dr Bliss was so convinced that he knew where the bullet was that he didn’t even let Bell check one entire side of Garfield’s body. Yep, you guessed it. It was on that side. Since in those days, only the poor went to the hospital and then only to die, Garfield was treated at the White House. At the time, the White House was a pestilent house overrun with rats and sewage. Although Garfield was dehydrated, he was continually given alcohol to drink. It reached a point where he could no longer keep any food down. Dr Bliss’ brilliant response was to administer bouillon and whiskey rectally.

Ironically enough, the autopsy showed that the bullet, when finally found, was fully encased by protective cells. If the doctors had done nothing, in all likelihood Garfield would have survived. Many Civil War veterans carried bullets in their bodies. Garfield would have just been another.

In fact, at Guiteau’s trial, he tried to make that very point. The jury (and America for that matter) were not interested. After the prosecutors took two months to put on their case, it took the jury one hour to convict. In case there was any doubt regarding his sanity, on the scaffold, immediately before his hanging, Guiteau recited a poem in a childlike falsetto. The words included “I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad”.

From such a small, now long forgotten part of US history, Millard managed to tell a compelling story.