Keep Your Money In A Sock

Title: Wizard of Lies

Rating: 4 Stars

I read Emily St John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel a couple of weeks ago (I wrote about it here). Among other things, one of the characters is a thinly fictionalized version of Bernie Madoff. I certainly remember the Madoff scandal. Other than newspaper accounts at the time, I realized that I didn’t know that much about the story, so I poked around and found The Wizard of Lies. It’s a deep dive into the whole Bernie Madoff saga.

Indeed the saga really is quite amazing. First of all, there’s the sheer size of it. There were paper losses of something like 65 billion dollars. In terms of actual cash lost (eg not phantom investment gains that were never real), it’s closer to 20 billion dollars. Amazingly enough, with dogged persistence, the lawyer assigned to the clean up mission ended up recovering / clawing back something close to 16 billion dollars.

Then there’s how long Madoff was able to sustain the con. He confessed to starting in the early 90s. It lasted until the financial panic of 2008. At that point, there was so much chaos going on in the investment community that he could no longer accommodate the redemption claims that were cascading down upon his fund. However, that is just what he confessed to. One of his co-conspirators, in court, admitted to starting sometime in the late 80s. Madoff started his investment career in 1962. Shortly thereafter, he found himself in a bad spot and needed an under the table infusion of cash from his father-in-law to survive. It can be argued that Madoff, in one form or another, engaged in fraud for a period of over 40 years.

Then there’s how simple it was. Starting in the early 90s (if not earlier), Madoff, widely acknowledged as a smart investor, simply stopped investing. Money flowed into his firm’s account and it just stayed there. Making money off brokerage fees (for trades that he did not make), he did do some high living. He was recognized for his charitable causes. He was generous with his family and employees. Essentially though, the large bulk of his money just sat in the account. During good times, when cash coming in dwarfed requested disbursements, the account grew in value to multiple billions of dollar. It just sat there.

A key figure is Frank DiPascali. Madoff hired DiPascali right out of high school. Over time, DiPascali became the man who covered Madoff’s tracks. He generated the statements showing fake trades. He generated false reports that were used to placate the early lackadaisical SEC investigations. He even figured out a way to simulate trades using multiple devices under his control.

It’s interesting to me how few people were involved in the scam. There was DiPascali. He worked with two software developers that, under DiPascali’s direction, wrote the programs that produced the false reports. There were three other back office staff that were arrested and convicted. All told, less than ten people were able to perpetuate a 65 billion dollar fraud.

The scandal showed the ugly sides of hedge fund management. Hedge funds are designed ostensibly for sophisticated investors. The joke on Wall Street is that the Madoff scandal proved that there are no sophisticated investors. Several hedge funds were created that advertised specific sophisticated trading strategies. Unbelievably, these hedge funds were nothing more than feeder funds to the Madoff investment fund (itself, just as a reminder, was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme). These hedge fund managers were quite literally doing nothing more than passing on their investors’ funds directly to Madoff. Keep in mind that, once in Madoff’s hands, they just sat in a banking account. These hedge fund managers would then charge their investors very high management fees for this service. They literally did nothing other than transfer funds from their account to Madoff’s account. Sadly, the people who invested in these funds, since they weren’t direct Madoff investors, were not part of the pool of people eligible for the Madoff fund recovery. They had to fight their hedge fund managers for any recovery of their investments. There were people that thought that they were diversifying by investing in different hedge funds and then found out, to their horror, that all of these funds were actually feeder funds to Madoff.

The wreckage from this debacle was huge. Thousands, if not tens of thousands of people, had taken their retirement funds that were built up from a lifetime of work (anywhere from $500,000 to $2,500,000 or so) and invested it all with Madoff, either knowingly or unknowingly (ie via one of the feeder funds). Madoff’s funds, for many years, was never a top performer but had the advantage of being incredibly consistent. For those in retirement, this consistency was its biggest selling point. One day, in early December of 2008, all of that money simply disappeared in a flash. People who had worked their entire lives for a comfortable retirement now only had social security. People lost houses. People had to move in with their children.

Many charities had their endowments with Madoff. Madoff’s extended family had all of their investments with him. Madoff’s friends and their friends invested everything as well. All was lost.

Fund managers committed suicide. One of Madoff’s sons (neither of whom were privy to their father’s scam) committed suicide. The other, a cancer survivor, succumbed a few short years after the scandal broke with a reoccurrence of the cancer, probably due to stress and shock.

In hind site, it seems so obvious. Madoff, in his discussions with clients and with the SEC, claimed to use a variety of sophisticated investment techniques. The problem is that none of the techniques that he allegedly used would bring about the metronome consistency of his returns, year after year.

There was a quant (a quantitative analyst) named Harry Markopolis that understood this. His specialty was exactly the types of investments that Madoff was allegedly making. He knew that it was mathematically impossible to generate the returns that Madoff claimed using these techniques. Years before the collapse, Markopolis talked to the SEC several different times and even tried to get the Wall Street Journal interested. It was all to no avail.

Markopolis suffered from I like to call the Asshole Cassandra complex. Cassandra, for those of you not up on your Greek mythology, had both a gift and a curse. Her gift was prophecy. Her curse was that no one would ever believe her prophecies. Her most famous one was when she tried to tell the Trojans that bringing in the Trojan Horse into their city walls was a really bad idea. Markopolis was a difficult man. He was insulting, abrasive, arrogant, and sexist. Also, being a quant (ie math geek), he would leap into deep technical arcana without trying to summarize in simpler terms. For all of this, his complaints were effectively ignored.

What kept this from being a five star review is something that eluded the author herself. Why? For a time, Madoff was a legitimate investor. His brokerage firm was ahead of its time in moving to computer trading. He was a chairman of NASDAQ.

Sure, in a panic, there’s a tendency to cheat, especially if you got away with it once before. However, very quickly Madoff’s failure became inevitable. He knew it yet he made no attempts to escape his fate. At any time he could have cashed out that account (he was essentially the sole proprietor), gathered up his family, and escaped to a country with no extradition treaty. Year after year, he continued to live the lie until it came crashing down like a tsunami upon him and everyone that he cared for.

It really is a compelling story. As someone who has worked his entire life and has built up a nest egg that I hope will take me through retirement, it’s a horrifying one as well. It really does make me question the entire investment house of cards that we all rely on so much and how fragile it seems to be.

Altman Channels Chandler

Title: The Long Goodbye

Rating: 4 Stars

I have a confession to make. I don’t really like the films of either Robert Altman or Elliott Gould. Because they were both on the AFI top 100, I’ve watched Nashville and MASH. I found Nashville to be long, boring, and self indulgent. In the year 2022, the sexism and racism makes MASH well nigh unwatchable.  I could kind of understand if the sexism and racism was somehow transgressive in service to a larger point, but when I watched it (admittedly a couple of years ago), it sure seemed to me that its purpose was more adolescent in nature. It struck me as a weirdly mean spirited film.

The Long Goodbye has been on my radar for a while as a well recognized example of neo-noir. Due to my previous experiences with Altman / Gould, I was not particularly looking forward to watching it.

Now having done so, I have to say that I’m pleasantly surprised.

Having previously watched several classic neo-noir films (eg Body Heat, Basic Instinct, The Postman Always Rings Twice (Nicholson / Lange version)), I have slightly mixed feelings about the genre. Since I’m a fan of noir, I do enjoy watching neo-noir films. My concern is around exactly how ‘neo’ the neo-noir actually is. Sure, the violence is much more graphic. The sex and nudity is much more explicit. With increased time and budget, the films look much better. With modern trained actors, the acting is much better.

All of that is true. However, at the end of the day, these films seem to have been somewhat constrained by the genre that was defined in the 1940s and 1950s.

This is the strength of Altman’s The Long Goodbye. It takes the noir genre and, while still keeping it recognizable, reinvents it.

For instance, he transplants the 1953 setting into the 1970s. 1970s Southern California is quite distinct from the 1950s. Chandler’s next door neighbors are a group of young usually topless women doing yoga and other new age practices. Everyone is dressed in pastel leisure suits. At parties, people pass around dried apricots as snacks. The houses are classic 1970s LA design.

In all of this, Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is a throwback. He always wears a suit and tie. Alone among the health freaks, he smokes incessantly. He drives a big old car from the 1940s. He seems to be a throwback to an earlier time.

But wait. This is not Chandler’s Marlowe. The film opens with an extended scene where Marlowe lovingly tends to a stray cat. His nubile next door neighbors treat him as a nonsexual friend (at one point he goes to the store to get brownie mix for them). He does not have a tough guy persona. When he’s arrested by the police, he doesn’t make wise cracks at them out of the side of his mouth like Chandler’s Marlowe would. Instead, he takes the fingerprint ink that they’ve refused to allow him to clean off and wipes his face with the ink, playing the part of the clown.

It’s not just Marlowe. The gangster that’s pushing Marlowe to recover his money is always dressed in pastel leisure suits. He affects a Southern California cool, not the rough guy swagger that you’d normally see. Even so, it quickly becomes apparent that he’s actually a dangerous psychopath in a top position enabled by obsequious minions (including a very young Arnold Schwarzenegger).

In other acting, Sterling Hayden is brilliant as the always drunk Hemingwayesque, self destructive writer crippled by writer’s block. Apparently Hayden, himself drunk and / or stoned for the entire shooting, improvised all of his lines.

So, Marlowe is kind of inept. He doesn’t get the girl. He’s not really a fighter. However (spoiler alert for a 50 year old film), when he discovers that his good friend used Marlowe to escape to Mexico after killing his wife, Marlowe, without compunction, shoots him dead in cold blood. The last scene shows Marlowe, after the killing, skipping down the road.

This is not your father’s noir. I found it to be an interesting take on a pretty well trod genre.

As such, I think it was a great example of neo-noir.

A Long Con To Freedom

Title: The Confidence Men

Rating: 3 Stars

Although I only gave it three stars, the story is a good example of narrative history. It well tells a small story set within a large event. The story beggars belief. It’s full of drama and comedy.

Given that it is such a great story, the reason why I gave it three stars is that the author pretty clearly only had a relatively few number of sources to collect from. Checking the notes at the end, it would appear that the bulk of the narrative comes from three sources. Given the relative scarcity of reference material, the author augments the basic story with vaguely related background information. With this augmentation, the book still only clocks in at around 240 pages. The story could have been told in a long form article. Even so, it’s an enjoyable read.

The story takes place in Turkey during World War I. Henry Jones, a Welch Scottish officer in the English army, was taken prisoner by the Turkish army. Cedric Hill, an Australian, was a pilot in the English fledgling air force. He was captured when his plane was shot down. They both ultimately ended up at the same Prisoner of War camp located in a remote part of Turkey. The town was so remote from anything else that the Turks did not even bother with walls or barbed wire.

The main problem that the POWs experienced was boredom. They played games. Weekly lectures were scheduled on subjects in which a prisoner had some expertise. They created musical instruments.

Eventually, the passage of time exhausted all of these possibilities. One day, Jones had the idea of building a hand made Ouija board and trying to communicate with spirits.

This isn’t as weird as it might seem. In the preceding decades, there were scientific advances that seemed magical. Voices and music could be invisibly transmitted using radio waves. The inside of a body could be seen using x-rays. People separated by great distances could talk to each other in real time via a telephone. The average person didn’t understand any of this. Remember that, during this time, most people believed in religions that taught life after death. Given all of that, does it really seem all that strange to think that there might be a way to talk to dead spirits?

Considering the fact that millions of soldiers were dying in World War I (not to mention the normal everyday death by disease that was will still quite common), people claiming to be able to talk to the dead were a popular trend. Even seemingly rational people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, fell under the spell of mediums claiming to be able to talk to his dead son. The magician Harry Houdini, infuriated at charlatans using basic magic tricks to swindle those in grief, spent much of his time exposing them.

Given all of that, Jones’ Ouija board proved to be popular. However, despite everyone’s best efforts, the board only produced nonsense. Interest was beginning to wane. Just for fun, Jones invented a spirit (Sally) and began to channel her. Expecting his fellow prisoners to immediately see through his ruse, he was shocked that they were completely taken in. Within a short time, all of the prisoners were crowding into the room listening to his now myriad spirits communicate through the board.

One day, one of the Turkish officers, a man the prisoners called Pimple, attended one of these sessions. Pimple completely fell for it.

Jones now had an idea. None of the prisoners have tried to escape because they know that, first of all, they’re in the middle of nowhere, and, even if they do succeed, that the remaining prisoners will suffer mightily for it. What if he could make use of the Ouija board to trick the Turkish officers into facilitating his escape while at the same time doing so in such a way that no harm could come to the remaining prisoners?

He knew that he couldn’t do it alone. He recruited Hill. Hill’s value was that he’s a master of sleight of hand.  While Jones could spin a story through his spirits, Hill could manifest acts that reinforced Jones’ tales.

The two of them embarked on an elaborate long con. Unknowingly, they incorporated all of the major components of a long con (roping the mark, telling the tail, giving the convincer, taking off the touch, and giving the blow). Unfolding over a period of many months, they spun a fantastical tale to the Pimple and to the head of the camp (a man named Kiazim) of a secret buried treasure located somewhere in Turkey. It involved spirits that were helping them, other spirits that were impeding them, and buried clues that need to be found and unearthed.

Kiazim and the Pimple were completely taken in. In the final stages of the con, following the lead of their supposed spirits, the two aided Jones and Hill as they both feigned madness. Convinced that the treasure is in Constantinople, the Pimple led Jones and Hill on the long journey. Once in Constantinople, the two ended up incarcerated in a mental institution. They spent months there as the Turkish doctors try to exposed them as frauds. Eventually, the doctors certified them as insane. By this time, having feigned madness for many months, both Jones and Hill were not in great shape, mentally or physically.

Eventually, they were paroled to a medical ship heading to England. Most amusing, after all of their months of cons and deprivation, they only arrived in England a couple of weeks before their fellow prisoners. In the interim, the armistice ending World War I had been signed.

It is a fascinating story. When you hear of a long con, usually it’s for a nefarious purpose. Here, two men used the techniques of the long con to achieve their freedom. Reading about it now, it strains credulity that they could have pulled it off. Their absolute commitment to the con was impressive.

Even though their efforts only yielded a couple of extra weeks of freedom, it seems clear that the ennui that they were suffering at the camp was enervating. Going through with the con gave them the will to survive that carried them to freedom.

A Tale Of Two Nickys

For some time now, various Nicholas Cage films have been in my queue to watch. With him being in the news with his latest film, which looks pretty awesome (Nicholas Cage starring as Nicholas Cage!), I decided to check a couple out.

Looking back, it’s kind of mind blowing that Con Air and Face/Off, two action film classics from the 90s, were released in the same year. In fact, from what I read, they were released with weeks of each other. At times, they were filming simultaneously and they had to work around Cage’s schedule to accommodate them both.

Cage was having a pretty good time of it right then. Around that same time, The Rock and National Treasure were also released. He was king of the action stars there for a bit.

How do the films stack up? First of all, do I even have to tell anyone the plot of either? The films are about as high concept as a film can be. In Con Air, Nicholas Cage plays a recently paroled prisoner that has the unfortunate luck of boarding a flight that has been taken over by convicts. In Face/Off, an FBI agent, desperate to foil a terrorist attack, receives the terrorist’s face in a transplant (?!) to go deep undercover to foil it. Meanwhile, the aforementioned terrorist manages to get hold of the FBI agent’s face and has it transplanted on him (??!!). The two then, um, face off.

Welcome to 90s action films!

Well, the critical consensus is that Face/Off is the better work. Directed by John Woo, it’s full of his directorial flourishes. The action shots are beautifully, stylistically shot. The settings, including a prison where the prisoners traipse around in magnetized boots, are elaborate. Explosions and gun fights are choreographed into something approaching ballet.

The two major stars, Cage and John Travolta, engage in a scenery chewing contest of epic proportions. Just imagine the possibilities of Travolta imitating Cage mannerisms and vice versa. If anything, Cage has the tougher role to play. Previously the flamboyant terrorist, with the face swap, he now has to be the angst ridden family man FBI agent. He has to seriously dampen down his performance. On the other hand, Travolta, in the second half of the film, gets to open up and play the mad man.

For an action film, it brings up interesting questions about identity. An interesting case can be made that both the FBI agent and the terrorist become better men after the face swap. The FBI agent loosens up a bit and becomes a more interesting husband / father. The terrorist becomes more responsible and closer to his own girl friend. Is there a message here that men need to have both good and bad in them?

The FBI agent’s (Travolta) young son was earlier shot and killed by the terrorist (Cage), so there is a deep thread of vengeance running through the film as well. If anything, this, IMO, brings the film down a notch. This a 90s action film after all. Do we really want child murder to be a central plot point driving the film? It seems a bit heavy for the genre.

It goes without saying that plot holes are gigantic here. The transplanted FBI agent has apparently satisfying sex with his previously repressed wife. Did the scientists also do a penis transplant?  The wife really couldn’t tell that she was with a different man? A big plot point is that all people that know about the FBI agent’s face transplant have been killed, so the FBI agent has no way of proving who he is. Did they also transplant fingerprints? The film was released in 1997. This is after the OJ trial, so DNA was definitely a thing then. It just seems like this could have been easily discovered.

I found it interesting that the face transplant scene is pretty much a direct homage to the 1960 French film, Eyes Without a Face (which I wrote about here). Granted the budget for Face/Off is much higher, so it appears much more high tech, but effectively, it’s the exact same process.

So, the verdict is that, although I found the film enjoyable, if for no reason other than watching Travolta and Cage, both at their primes, together in a insane action film, it wasn’t quite as awesome as it could have been.

Con Air, on the other hand, is all of that and more. Dare I say it, but I think Con Air might just be the quintessential 90s action film (please note, Die Hard was released in 1988).

Don’t believe me? Check out the cast. Nicholas Cage as Cameron Po, the paroled convict with a heart of gold. John Malkovich as Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom, the sociopathic mastermind of the plan. Ving Rhames, as Nathan “Diamond Dog” Jones, the black militant. Steve Buscemi as Garland “The Marietta Mangler (?!)” Greene, the flight’s serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Danny Trejo as John “Johnny 23” Baca, a sadistic serial rapist. John Cusack as the hard-charging US Marshal Vince Larkin. Last but certainly not least, we have an early appearance for Dave Chappelle as Joe “Pinball” Parker, a low level criminal kept around for primarily comedic effect.

That is quite the cast! And they all get their moments to reach out, grab hold, and start chewing any scenery that comes their way. None of these moments are wasted.

As with Face/Off, the plot is nonsense. There’s a drug cartel leader that is apparently financing the operation but has plans to betray the convicts. It does not end well with him. Po has many opportunities to leave the plane and actually get back with his wife and kid, but, valuing his friendship with a diabetic convict over his family, he continues to still stay on the plane. At one point Po writes a message to Larkin on the chest of a dead body, throws the body off the plane, and sure enough, the message gets right to Larkin.

In the climatic scene, although having many opportunities to shoot down the plane in the greater interest of safety, instead they let the plane crash land in the middle of the Las Vegas strip, causing untold deaths and damage, not least of which is the fact that The Marietta Mangler, who we find out, even if he is a mad dog murderer, is kind of OK because he has a dry sense of humor, gets away clean to continue his murder spree.

In short, it is glorious madness and chaos. It’s a violent, comic graphic novel come to life. This is peak Jerry Bruckheimer. You can’t get any better than that.

Living In The New Gilded Age

Title: Fulfillment

Rating: 4 Stars

Although the book was focused on Amazon, it really told the tale of two Americas. There is the tale of those enjoying a technical career in successful cities like New York, Washington DC, Austen, San Francisco, and Seattle. Lavishly paid and working in fancy offices with nice benefits, they live a life of relative splendor.

For those not living in these mega cities, life is much more grim. Globalization, among other factors, has hollowed out the manufacturing that smaller cities and towns had relied upon. Now working minimal wage jobs with no benefits, for many it is a struggle to survive. For those that have essentially given up hope or have been injured working on the dangerous jobs that are allotted them, many succumb to opioid addiction.

Amazon didn’t invent these two Americas. However, its business practices are solidifying these states.

Amazon doesn’t really have an interest in creating high tech centers anywhere that there isn’t the infrastructure already supporting it. This was best seen when it was looking for its second headquarters. Of the many government entities that submitted bids, several of them were cities (such as Baltimore or Columbus) that had fallen on hard manufacturing times and were grasping at this lifeline to reinvigorate themselves. Unsurprisingly, the first down select eliminated nearly all of them. The final two candidates were New York and Washington DC. Both are already huge high tech areas. The rich just kept getting richer.

Amazon doesn’t ignore these smaller locales. Instead of giving them opportunities for high tech wage growth, Amazon offered to build fulfillment warehouses or data centers. Data centers consume huge amounts of energy and employ relatively few workers.

The warehouses employ more workers, but at minimum wage with little benefits. The work is physically demanding and dangerous. Accidents at Amazon occur at much higher rates than other warehouses. Work is driven by automated quotas. If an employee does not meet their quota, they will be warned, and if performance does not improve, they will be terminated automatically. An employee is given a maximum amount of time for bathroom breaks. Exceeding that limit can lead to termination. If a supervisor gets even a whiff of an employee’s interest in unions, they will be immediately terminated. Wages are so low that a significant percentage of Amazon workers receive government assistance like food stamps (ie SNAP).

For these low paying, low quality jobs, Amazon expects significant governmental concessions. For instance, they expect to pay no property taxes for many years. They force governments to negotiate in absolute secrecy with no public notice. These governments, desperate for any revenue or job growth, feel that they have no choice but to acquiesce. This turns out to be a losing proposition for the governments when the warehouses end up consuming governmental services (eg emergency services) without paying for them via taxes.

Amazon’s chicanery does not stop there. There are many small businesses that have, over time, found their niche market. Amazon comes to them and basically say, come join our market place if you want any chance to survive. Small businesses, when faced with the giant monolith of Amazon, feel compelled to join. Amazon takes a fifteen percent commission off every sale. With profit margins often less than that, these businesses cannot survive. Even those businesses that clear that gate, Amazon, in their role of running the market place, collects sales data. For those products that are successful, Amazon will create their own Amazon branded version of the product and price it much cheaper, effectively destroying the small business. Even if that is not enough, unethical companies will start offering cheaper, counterfeit products. Amazon makes limited efforts to remove counterfeit products.

The fix is in.

Even in the successful cities, Amazon throws its weight around. Seattle, Amazon’s first corporate headquarters and even now home to some 50,000 highly paid employees, finds itself stymied by Amazon. The surge of high wage employees (a problem so many other cities would love to have) has resulted in a severe shortage of housing of all kinds. Median home prices in Seattle near a million dollars. Lower income housing has been razed so that new high rise apartments and condos can be built for the affluent. As a result, Seattle is experiencing one of the worst homeless crises in the country.

Amazon, since its birth, has been resistant to pay any kind of tax at all. For many years, as the scrappy underdog upstart, it avoided paying sales taxes. Now a trillion dollar Goliath, it can no longer make that argument, but its allergy to taxes continues. A head count tax passed by Seattle to directly address Seattle’s homeless problems was passed and then almost immediately repealed when Amazon threatened to stop expanding in Seattle. Amazon has such an out sized presence in Seattle that local leaders quake at even token threats. Meanwhile, ever more homeless are living in the streets outside million dollar condos.

We truly are living in a new gilded age. If anything, this age is even more gilded than the last. The wealth gap has never been this wide. Is there any wonder that tens of millions of Americans, living in a world in which the game appears to be rigged and in which is no hope to escape, let themselves be seduced by a bombastic grifter, who if nothing else, allowed them to vent their rage at the elites that seemingly look down upon them? The Democrats’ obsequious courting of the tech elite has caused them to lose all credibility with those that used to be the bedrock of their party.

This book, if nothing else, really called out to me the dangerous times in which we live.

Don’t Answer That Door

Title: The Postman Always Rings Twice

Recently, I’ve read The Postman Always Rings Twice, I’ve watched the John Garfield / Lana Turner 1946 film, and the Jack Nicholson / Jessica Lange 1981 film.

The first thing to note is how closely both of the films adhere to the novel. The novel itself, weighing in at around 120 pages, should be classified as a novella (about the length of a screenplay). All of the significant plot points in the novel are hit on in both films.

Frank Chambers, feet always itching for the road, ends up in front of a gas station / restaurant. There, the Greek owner Nick Papadakis, tries to cajole Frank to stay and work. Frank isn’t interested until he sees Nick’s wife, the stunning Cora. Smitten, Frank takes the job. During one of Nick’s absences, Frank and Cora begin a passionate affair.

Although Nick is a pretty inoffensive guy that treats Frank well, Frank and Cora decide that they have to kill Nick so that they can be together forever. Their first attempt is foiled and spooks them. Even so, they are determined to try again. They strike Nick over the head and then stage a car accident. While staging it, Frank gets caught in the car and is seriously injured.

The police and DA are immediately suspicious. While recovering from his injuries, Frank is coerced by the DA into signing a complaint against Cora. Feeling betrayed, Cora makes a full confession implicating both of them. Knowing that she’d confess, their lawyer rigged it so that Cora actually confessed, not to the police, but to one of his employees. Using other shenanigans, the lawyer is able to get Frank off and Cora on probation.

Now that they’ve both turned on each other, they’ve lost all trust in the other. Cora’s mom becomes sick and she must visit her. While gone, Frank has an affair. When they finally get back together, Cora announces that she’s pregnant. Now newly recommitted, they look to have a life of happiness together. Driving home, looking forward to their future, Frank gets into an accident and Cora dies.

In the novel and in the 1946 film, Frank, already under suspicion for the murder of Nick, is falsely convicted of the murder of Cora and is condemned to die. For some reason, the 1981 film just ends with Frank holding Cora’s lifeless body.

The novel is one of the all time great classics of hard-boiled fiction. It’s one of the giants along with novels such as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. For that reason alone, I have to give the nod to the novel over the films. In addition, for its time, it really is transgressive. Although not explicit by today’s standards, when it was written in 1934 its depiction of violence and sado-masochistic sex was shocking. It was quite literally one of the works that was ‘banned in Boston’. Finally, I give a lot of credit to a work of fiction that can tell a story in such a tight, concise manner. It is hard-boiled fiction at its best.

Between the two films, it’s a tougher call. On the one hand, the 1946 film featured classic performances by John Garfield and Lana Turner. It consistently makes best of film lists. Although there were earlier cinematic versions of the novel, this is the first English one. It’s definitely the most famous version.

One problem that the 1981 version has is why? If the film makers are going to follow the plot so slavishly, what’s the point of doing another version?

Well, first of all, and this bums me out to say this, it is better acted. It bums me out because John Garfield was essentially the first Method actor to make it in Hollywood. He gives a good performance, but frankly, Jack Nicholson gives a much stronger performance. You can draw a pretty straight line from Garfield to Brando to Nicholson. A couple of more decades of maturation of the discipline of Method acting has led to better actors. Even though Lana Turner is a legend, Jessica Lange delivers a much better performance as Cora. In a similar manner, I can (and have in a previous post) made the argument that the acting in Van Sant’s version of Psycho is stronger than Hitchcock’s (with the notable exception of Anthony Perkins).

The 1981 version also gains because it did not have to abide by the Hays Code. This allowed the violence and sex in the novel to be more explicitly shown. It’s interesting that Lana Turner refused to watch the 1981 version, calling it pornography. It makes me wonder if she read the novel, because it just puts on the screen what Cain describes in words.

Finally, the 1981 version gains just because it wasn’t made under the studio system. In the 1940s, films were created under something like an assembly line process. There was limited time and budget. In the 1981 version, there was clearly a higher budget that allowed for more realistic sets and richer cinematography. It just looks like more effort and care was put into it.

However, I just can’t get behind the 1981 ending. The whole point of the novel was the irony of Frank  getting away with murder and then being convicted of a murder that he didn’t commit. Not only that, but you can see that it even seems fair to him. Robbing the film of the power of that moment is inexplicable to me.

One word (or more) about the title. The novel does not explain it (as far as I know, the word postman doesn’t even appear in it). The 1981 film also does not explain it. In the 1946 film, at the end, Frank does explain what the title means. The idea is that the postman always rings twice to make sure that the recipient receives the package. If you replace postman with justice, the same thing applies. Frank receives his justice even though it took justice two attempts to get him.

The provenance of the title is actually more complicated than that. Cain originally named the novel B-B-Q. This title was rejected by the publisher. In turn, the publisher had a recommendation. I don’t remember what it was but Cain rejected it, saying that it sounded like a musical. Up until the publication date, they could not come to an agreement on the title. Cain was talking to his friend and playwright, Vincent Lawrence. Lawrence related an anecdote that involved waiting for a postman and noted that his postman always rang twice.

The phrase struck Cain as the perfect title for a novel and he managed to convince his publisher to use it. Later, he backed into the explanation of justice somehow standing in for the postman.

Now that we live in a world of mailboxes and UPS and FedEx and Amazon drivers, the title makes even less sense. Even so, there is no denying that it is a very cool title.

Way better than B-B-Q.

A Bernie Madoff Ghost Story

Title: The Glass Hotel

Rating: 4 Stars

On the surface, this is a fairly simple story. Broadly, it’s the story of Jonathon Alkaitis. He’s a fictional representation of Bernie Madoff, the fraudulent investor that ran a Ponzi scheme for years, sucking in both prominent and small investors into his scheme. He posted glowing returns until the 2008 downturn. Unable to service all of the requested fund withdrawals, his house of cards collapsed. People lost billions. Many died from shock or suicide. Sentenced to 150 years, Madoff just recently died in prison.

The Glass Hotel tells the story of the immediate years before the collapse, the collapse, and then the years after.

However, it’s so much more than that. In fact, Alkaitis is one of a slew of characters that feature prominently.

There’s Vincent (a woman, named after the poet Edna St Vincent Millay), a young bartender that catches the fairly recently widowed Alkaitis’ eye. Previously knowing only poverty, Alkaitis sweeps her away and, for a number of years,  Vincent lives the life of the very rich and glamorous. Vincent’s brother Paul, with a fledgling drug addiction, generally seems lost. Leon Prevant, a successful shipping executive, makes the critical mistake of befriending Alkaitis one night. He invests his entire life savings with Alkaitis, and when it fails, he must suffer the ignominy of spending his retirement years as a nomad in an RV with his wife. There are the Alkaitis co-workers, complicit all, dreading the day that they all secretly knew was going to come.

One central theme that I see in this novel is deceit. Obviously, Alkaitis’ fraud looms large. It does not stop there. All of the characters have secrets. Vincent’s mom disappeared canoeing one day. There’s no evidence of foul play, but she was a strong swimmer. Could it be that she committed suicide? Vincent must live with that uncertainty.

To deal with her grief in the aftermath of her mom’s disappearance, Vincent made a series of five minute long videos. Paul, a composer, finds those videos and proceeds to choreograph them to music without Vincent’s permission. Doing so launches his career. His success is based upon the appropriation of his sister’s grief.

Vincent herself seems to easily shed her outer skin. She flawlessly moves from low income bartender to high society maven. She is always conscious of the falseness of her act. Once Alkaitis is exposed, she immediately sheds that skin and begins a new life as a cook on ocean going freighters.

Even Prevant is not immune. Because of the Great Recession, he is fired from the career that he’s loved at the same time that he’s also lost his entire life savings. He does manage to pick himself up and, if not lead a fulfilling life, he and his wife do manage moments of tranquility in their travels. Asked to perform an investigation, the previously upright Prevant allows himself to be corrupted with the whisper of a promise to regain some small portion of his lost life.

Another theme is visitation by spirits. Alkaitis, while serving his 170 year sentence, is visited by the spirits of those people who are dead indirectly because of his actions (from suicide and shock). At first we are led to believe that this is a condition unique to Alkaitis. His creeping age and his habits of living in fantasy is causing him to blur the lines between dreaming and reality. As the novel progresses, at various times, other characters also have experiences with ghostly figures. There’s a sense that this tragic event has somehow caused those lives affected to become linked.

Perhaps this idea of linkage is the central theme here. After all, financial investments, good or bad, are available globally at the click of a button. Shipping, Prevant’s passion, creates a nearly unimaginably complex network of goods that traverses the world. Whether we know it or not, no one can live truly in isolation any longer.

The Glass Hotel is a beautifully told story with interesting and engaging characters.

Disneyfication Of Museums

<oldManRant>

I can’t exactly remember but about twenty-five years ago or so I went to Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC. If you’re any kind of a history buff, then you’ll know that it’s most famous as the site of Lincoln’s assassination.

It was a pretty dingy place. There wasn’t a lot of external markings. I don’t even remember if it cost money to enter. If it did, I’m sure that it was a modest amount.

There wasn’t much to it. You were pretty much on your own. There was a small collection of artifacts in the basement. I seem to remember one of Lincoln’s stovepipe hats and, I don’t know, maybe Booth’s derringer. It was all presented simply. There’d be an artifact and an explanation on a 3×5 card.

You pretty much had free run of the theater. You could go down into the seating area and look up at the Presidential box. In the quiet, you could imagine John Wilkes Booth climb to the rail of the box and jump, catching his spurs on the American flag (still present) on the way down and breaking his leg. Although you couldn’t actually go into the Presidential box, you could walk right up to it. IIRC, there were a set of footprints drawn on the floor. You could literally stand where Booth stood when he fired the fatal shot.

Although, it was a relatively low key presentation, I found it quite moving, almost unnerving. I could almost feel the ghosts of that night still lingering. It was one of my favorite experiences during that trip to DC.

About five years ago, I made it back to Washington DC. Still harboring those fond memories, I decided to revisit Ford’s Theatre. Suffice to say that it was much changed.

It was apparent that it had undergone a multi-million dollar renovation. It’s front had been completely refurbished. You couldn’t just walk in. There were so many people that a reservation was required.

Once inside, the museum was completely redone. It was full of colorful placards full of information about Lincoln, Booth, and the assassination. Some of the exhibits were interactive.

The theater was open to the public as well. Unlike last time, most of it was cordoned off. I couldn’t get close to the stage. I couldn’t get close to the Presidential box.

Needless to say, I didn’t feel the presence of any ghosts. I understand that a museum’s first purpose is to educate. The Ford Theatre is now shooting for a more general breadth of tourists, so it had to make the presentations more accessible to people (ie children) that are not history geeks like me.

Still, when I left, I was kind of bummed and will probably never go back.

</oldManRant>

Why did I write this? Well, I recently went to the Museum of the American Revolution in downtown Philadelphia. I’ve never been before. This should have been right up my alley. I’ve been to Independence Hall several times and have enjoyed it each time.

Opened in 2017, it is clearly using the same modern museum presentation approach that Ford Theatre did. Once again, there are colorful placards telling a pretty simple story of the American Revolution. There are wax figures in various vignettes. There are a number of historically relevant items such as canteens, swords, and guns.

Since it is fairly new, it does do a good job of including diverse voices. You hear the point of view of women and the enslaved, for whom the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ clearly does not apply. I had never heard of the Phillipsburg Proclamation. Over eighty years before the Emancipation Proclamation, the British General Henry Clinton announced, as a wartime measure, the freeing of all slaves in the American colonies. Many of the enslaved made the rational decision to join the British to win their freedom, while at the same time American revolutionaries, supposedly fighting for their liberty and freedom from tyranny, fought in part so that they could continue to own slaves.

The centerpiece of the museum was Washington’s tent. Yes, this was the tent that Washington lived in during the Revolutionary War. That’s pretty cool. However, to see it, you had to endure a fifteen minute presentation on the American Revolution in a theater. At the conclusion, the curtains would raise and you could see the tent. You had to stay in your seat and it was on stage behind glass. I mean, at the end of the day, it’s just a tent, and you can’t even get within twenty feet of it. It was somewhat anti-climactic.

So, all in all, the museum was kind of a meh. With the exception of the Phillipsburg Proclamation, I don’t know if I learned anything new. Most of the artifacts just aren’t that unique enough to inspire some deeper communion with history. I probably wasn’t the target demographic.

Some of the problem might have been with the war itself. Technically the war took place roughly between 1775 through 1783. The fact is that not a lot actually happened during that time. It can be summed up pretty quickly as:

• April 1775: The first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.
• June 1775: At Bunker Hill, the British win but learn that the Americans can stand and fight.
• 1776: British take New York. Washington barely escapes with remnants of his army.
• Dec 1776: Washington sneaks up and attacks Hessians at Trenton. This gives the Americans a boost at their lowest moment.
• Oct 1777: British surrender an army at Saratoga.
• Oct 1781: British surrender an army at Yorktown.
• Sep 1783: Treaty of Paris is signed.

That’s not really a lot of action during an eight year war. Sure, there are things like the Battle of Cowpens and Nathan Hale’s execution after a very unsuccessful career as a spy, but that’s all pretty small potatoes.

What was most important to the revolutionary cause was that Washington and his army endured. They just needed to outlast the British and they did. Perhaps that just doesn’t make a very compelling museum exhibition.