The Casablanca Critique I Did Not See Coming

Amazon.com: Nazi Dreams: Films About Fascism eBook: Noah Berlatsky: Kindle Store

Excerpt from Nazi Dreams: Films About Fascism by Noah Berlatsky

I went to an anniversary screening of Casablanca a couple years back and was stirred, moreso for being in crowd that was also keen for it, by the "La Marseillaise" scene. Utterly, I confess, blind to its hypocrisy. It was anti-Nazi, so the subtext Berlatsky highlights remained below my threshold of recognition. Likewise, Rick's contempt for Ugarte and his paternalistic attitude towards Sam seemed like relatively tame bits of period racism. The obvious fact Laszlo was the proper hero, and the Rick-Ilsa romance is a slap in the face to not only the character, but what the character (ought to have) stood for, was obscured by Henreid's dutifully dull characterization of Laszlo and Bergman's luminescent screen presence. Yes, Laszlo gets the girl in the end and so is rewarded for his heroics, but the film does not recognize Laszlo is a better man than Rick. Rick's sacrifice is the real act of heroism in the cinematic world where the problems of three (but especially two) white people clearly amount to more than a hill of ethnic types.

Berlatsky's critique is much-needed eyewash. Compare the excerpt I screencapped above with this passage from Ebert's five star review:

What is intriguing is that none of the major characters is bad. Some are cynical, some lie, some kill, but all are redeemed. If you think it was easy for Rick to renounce his love for Ilsa--to place a higher value on Laszlo's fight against Nazism--remember Forster's famous comment, “If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.”

His analysis is literate, thoughtful, and insightful in its way but Ebert is blind to the film's moral failings.

I'll never look at Casablanca the same way again, and there's a feeling of loss that comes with that, because I, like most (I suspect), love to be stirred by anti-Nazi resistance; I get the appeal of sympathizing with the noble sacrifice of the martyr for love. But even at this late date, I recognize that I need to keep growing up and not holding on to my old favorites simply because they are my old favorites. We'll all be better off if we appreciate Casablanca for what it is, not for what the kid who first watched it wanted it to say about him.

"Why are you promoting a trashing of Casablanca? Why read so much into a love story set amidst the battle against Nazism? The Nazis are bad guys, the French Resistance are good guys: this is enough to know or care about ... nobody watches a romantic drama for insights into the North African colonial experience," is a reaction I sort of expect I'd get if anyone were to actually read this post. It's a reaction I sympathize with to an extent. But, if that's your gut reaction, my simple ask is that you interrogate it just a little. Why are you invested in defending Casablanca against leftist criticisms? Why not imagine what kind of movie it might have been had it treated Sam like a complex, authentically human character? If you knew a Capt. Renault in real life, would you befriend him, or would you think his corruption and exploitation of vulnerable women was just a rakish fun? If you wouldn't, what does that say about Rick? If you would, um, what does it say about you? Maybe also consider how French patriotism in light of its opposition to Nazism is a backdoor  whitewashing of French colonialism -- erasing the history, and humanity, of the people who lived in Casablanca before the imperialists rolled in and set up shop. It's great that the film's sentiments anti-Nazi, I'm not suggesting we lose sight of that, only that we deal honestly with what the French ideal of freedom actually looked like? You might not know much, or care much, about French imperialism, but what you think about it in this movie might inform how you watch later movies like The Quiet American, or maybe even the whole genre of Vietnam War movies.

I'm not saying it's time to hate Casablanca, only that it's well past time to temper the reverence we have for it with a consideration for what anti-racist, feminist, and other leftist perspectives bring to bear. Like it or not, praising Casablanca is a political act, in addition to being commentary on the art of filmmaking. How we praise it, what we identify as its virtues and its flaws, matters because we don't appreciate it in a vacuum.

Suddenly, I Have Hot Takes

Suddenly (1954) - Flickchart

Suddenly (1954) via flickchart

Eddie Muller played Suddenly for the most recent installment of Noir Alley on TCM. I'd never seen it before, don't think I'd ever even heard of it, but I won't let that stop me posting my hot takes.

First. it's not a film noir. You could make the case Sinatra's playing a noir character, his would-be assassin John Baron is perhaps not too dissimilar to (the literary source of) Bogart's Dix Steele from In A Lonely Place, so there's at least one element there. But, there's only one woman in the cast and, whatever her virtues, she's no femme fatale, Sheriff Shaw (Sterling Hayden) is not at all an anti-hero, and it's filmed as pretty much a straight crime drama, none of the shadow work or creative framing you'd expect in a noir.

That all said, I'm glad it played in Noir Alley, else I probably wouldn't have watched it. Muller's intro gave some intriguing insight into Sinatra's relationship with JFK and his having played in not only this movie, but later in The Manchurian Candidate. It's as perhaps the first of the assassination conspiracy thrillers that Suddenly is ahead of its time and worth a look beyond Sinatra's performance. Unfortunately, it's all the ways it's solidly of its time that ultimately sink it.

The damage is done early when Sheriff Shaw meets up with the widowed Nancy Gates after having bought her son a realistic looking (Chekov's) gun -- I didn't realize it was only a cap gun until it was explained later -- and basically mansplains how she ought to be raising her boy while berating her for not loving him back as she should. (That their virtuousness and the inevitability of their pairing up is signified by the fact they'll attend church together on Sunday also raised my hackles.)

Worse still, the movie promotes the idea that it is the citizen's duty to serve their President, even to the point of laying down their lives for his; an idea as ass-backwards as they come. The Secret Service agents who guard the President, sure, that's what they signed up for, but the idea law enforcement (it's really Shaw that expresses this) can sacrifice civilian lives in order to protect the President is repulsive, yet considered just and right by this movie. Shaw tells Nancy in no uncertain terms the he, her, and even her son don't matter, their lives must be sacrificed if there's a chance to prevent the assassination.

Fuck that. Now, you might think Trump being if office is coloring my judgment here, but even if we had a President Sanders, or Warren -- there is no way I'd choose saving them over a random person on the street, never mind a family member. The President's job is to serve us, the people, not the other way around. There's a VP, and a line of succession after that, to ensure our government can still function if the chief executive is taken out. The risk of assassination is accepted when seeking out the job and mitigated by the security provided by the Secret Service. It's not my job, or any other civilian's, to sacrifice our lives for the President's. That's not to say on a simple human level, the President is less of a human being than anyone else and there aren't scenarios in which it would be reasonable or virtuous for a civilian to risk personal harm or death if they could save the President's life, but the situation laid out in Suddenly is not, I'd argue, such a case.

Shaw, frankly, is a fascist. A McCarthy era, flag-draped all-American fascist. That he's presented as an upstanding, heroic figure reduces the film to a propagandistic screed. (The more I think about, the more I hate it.) Baron is a sociopath, probably a war criminal, and yet it'd have been a better movie had he killed Shaw -- and Shaw's passing gone as unlamented as the poor TV repairman who took a bullet for his part in foiling the plot, or of the Secret Service agent whose corpse spent a good chunk of the film rolled in a rug at the bottom of the basement stairs to nobody's particular distress.

One last irksome element: the script goes out of its way to obscure the President's party, or identify the authors of the conspiracy as either reactionaries or radical leftists. Baron doesn't know who hired him and he doesn't care about the Who or the Why of his enlistment. But, in the spirit of having their McCarthy Cake and eating it too, we're given a bit of offhand dialogue about filthy commies to make it clear the filmmakers aren't down with *that* sort of un-Americanism.

Re-reading Jack Graham on Villainy After Black Panther

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 74: Merlin | Eruditorum Press:

If Black Panther had ended with Killmonger taking the throne
and the weapons going out, I'd have been OK with that.

Instead, in Merlin, as in so many other products of the capitalist culture industries, the oppressed in revolt become evil and more powerful than the oppressors. The oppressors become the victims of the oppressed. The oppressed become the aggressors. They become machiavellian schemers. They become simultaneously cynical demagogues, fanatical zealots and amoral nihilists. The various villains that Arthur and Merlin face are all representatives of the groups that Uther has ruthlessly persecuted. They are engaged in antagonism because Uther has persecuted them, but they are depicted as the evil victimisers of the poor tyrant who just wants to live in peace. Their behaviour – disproportionately ruthless and destructive - justifies the structural violence of Uther’s regime. It’s perhaps unfair to hold Merlin up as a whipping boy. This is a very common and old strategy. On screen, it’s as old as Stagecoach and Birth of a Nation. And it goes back much further than moving pictures.  

It’s worth remembering the origin of the word ‘villain’. It comes from villein. The villeins were pretty much the lowest of the low in feudal Europe. The scum of the earth. The serfs. Peasants, tied to the land. Effectively, the property of the landowner. And they were in the majority. Our word for ‘evil person’ or ‘antagonist’ comes from the word that described the great masses of oppressed, bullied, exploited working people in feudal Europe, the people who created all the wealth that the kings ate and wore and traded and stored and administered and fought wars with and sat their fat arses on. 

Jack's essay is fantastic, each time I re-read it I want to go back and immediately read it again. Re-reading it today because it helps to clarify why #TeamKillmonger is so appealing.

When did noir transition to neo-noir?

What is the film where noir gives way to neo-noir? I'm pretty sure it happened sometime in the 50s but I can't settle on a title.

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) September 28, 2017

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Some interesting discussion in the replies to this tweet. Noir is slippery enough that Eddie Muller is able to run a series on twitter called "Noir or Not?" with no end of movies that trigger debate, so we may never be able to settle on answer to the transition question either.

Sunday Morning Noir Conversation Fragment

@cdogzilla And Effie's gentle but heartbreaking condemnation of Spade. A real gut-punch to end on.

— The Nitrate Diva (@NitrateDiva) March 5, 2017

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Serenity Now!

On the next Movies on the Radio, we're talking gunslingers & saloons. Tweet us your pick for best Western! #sotmovie https://t.co/N4cIKgXFWt

— The State of Things (@state_of_things) February 17, 2017

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I got pretty nervous as soon as the producer said she was turning on her microphone, so I failed pretty hard at trying to make my point. What I wanted to say was I still love Serenity because it's energizing, hopeful escapism -- the kind we (I, at least) need more than ever these days. (By, "these days," I mean we got Trump making Nazis like Reavers set loose upon the 'verse and it's going to take all the little bands of principled folk working together to fix the broken pieces of society.)

All entertainment is political, whether we like it or not, even the escapist kind. The best westerns are about figuring out how to live together in a way that celebrates and protects people's freedoms. They show us people riding horses in the great wide open, sleeping under the stars, etc. but they also show how those cowboys and outlaws get bound together with the teachers, bartenders, sheriffs, and shopkeepers in a community that stands together against the cruel injustices of nature and greedy men. Serenity isn't merely sci-fi with Western trappings; it explores the themes that go along with the dusty long coats and holstered weapons as effectively as any John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, or Kevin Costner sun-drenched epic. Better than most, I'd argue. Certainly with less white supremacist baggage than the typical Western.

What actually came out of my mouth though was more, "OMG if only it were really possible to get the hell out from under our current government and bring it down with the righteous truth and blasters instead of having to carry around protest signs in marches and constantly getting my elected officials' voicemail to leave pleading messages for sanity -- messages that are ignored."

Coming soon to a theater near me ...

Why The Power of the Daleks is the holy grail of lost Doctor Who episodes

Image via the Telegraph / BBC

... the story is talked about with hushed reverence by fans today [not to mention critical analysts like Dr. Sandifer, whose take on the story sparked my intrigue -- cm] with a particular frisson emerging from the fact that the Daleks are pretending to be meek servants in a human colony on the Planet Vulcan. Their creepy chant of “I am your servant” is one of the great coups de theatre from the early days.

The "I am your servant" line is featured in a weaker installment of the new series, am genuinely eager to see the story that inspired it.

It Don't Mean a Thing

Hell Is Hot: How Squirrel Nut Zippers Accidentally Sold a Million Records | Music Feature | Indy Week

Twenty years later, the swing music revival of the late nineties remains a perplexing hallmark of the decade. For a few years, bands that swung made a forceful showing on mainstream radio. Leading the pack was Carrboro's Squirrel Nut Zippers, who cloaked raucous rock in fast-and-loose hot jazz arrangements. Its ebullient songs were as inspired by the Pixies as they were by Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong.

~Remembering when Swingers felt so profoundly relevant, cool, and deep. So ... money.~

Blogger's Digest

Need to clean out the to-be-blogged-about items I've got building up in feedly. Prefer the one-post-per-link-or-subject approach, but the backlog is too daunting. So, it's a digest post. Possibly the first of several?

• The Sherlock Holmes class I wish UConn offered when I was a student
• Rolling Stone's Top 100 TV shows list is not terrible. Deadwood too low. Doctor Who too low. 
• Dangerous Minds resurfaces Theory.org Trading Cards
• Maybe police chiefs could focus more on not killing people, less on their stupid religious biases
• Maybe sheriffs could worry more about other police murdering people than where trans kids go to the bathroom
• Super abusive but cute greeting cards. I can think of a Wake County sheriff deserving a card ...
• Round up of free, classic audiobooks
• Know your cognitive biases
• Know your deplorables
• One of this blog's chief laments, as expressed by Samantha Bee
• Giving Justin Trudeau the side eye -- we're on to you, Canada.
• As an atheist, I guess I should see Sausage Party then? Hmm.
• The Pixies!
• Been working on the swimming and running. Once I get a new bike, will start the last training leg before attempting a sprint triathlon. Speeding safely downhill seems like a good thing to bone up on.
• Know your Derrida.
• My go-to means of viewing movies by ... emm ... occult means appears to have been put down by The Man so I've fallen way behind seeing hard-to-find movies that I really want to see, like High Rise.

New Blog Side Project: DigiCards

Front image of the Moriah Jefferson motion digicard

Me and card collecting go way back. Back to my elementary school days collecting baseball cards. Mostly Topps, but also Fleer cards, and Donruss, even collected a few "3D" mini-cards from a maker I don't remember -- but I want to say was a collectible issued through some Hostess cupcake promotion, or something like that. 

Even today, I've put the digital card apps on my phone and have some Star Wars and MLB cards I'm hoarding, ostensibly for when my son or daughter are interested enough to take over the accounts. 

But, I always wanted to make my own cards. (A solipsist by nature, I wanted to make cards of me playing Little League, as Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back; and, I wanted to make cards for my favorite authors. ["I'll trade you two Piers Anthonys for that Heinlein Grandmasters card," I imagined was how the schoolyard swapping might go ...])

So, to scratch that childhood itch, I've launched a new sideproject for the ol' blog. There's a link to the index page for the cards I've created on the right-hand side, or you can jump in and view the first motion card of Moriah Jefferson in action against Syracuse. Cards for Stewie and Tuck are up already as well.

If you're not a fan of UConn Women's hoops, the first series of cards are probably not going to be of much interest to you. Stick around though, I've got the beginnings of a film noir series in mind. Yo La Tengo cards won't be far behind those.

The Guys That Thought Rey Was Too Heroic Are Going To Blow Their Gaskets

BTW the #RogueOne trailer passes the Bechdel test. THE. TRAILER. http://pic.twitter.com/U95yzEJzBN

— Rebecca Keegan (@ThatRebecca) April 7, 2016

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The Circle of the Walk of Life

Every movie ending is better when it's soundtracked by Dire Straits

Salomone contends that "Walk of Life" is "the perfect song to end any movie," and he tests that hypothesis by laying it over 50-plus classic endings. Bill Murray whispers in Scarlett Johansson's ear and leaves Tokyo behind, riding off into the sunset on Mark Knopfler's wistful synth-organ melody; the titular Friends decide to grab one last coffee at Central Perk while Knopfler sings about some dude busking in the subway. "Walk of Life" closes out comedies and dramas, sci-fi odysseys and character studies, happy moments and sad ones. It works with Inception just as well as it works with The Lion King.

I've take some grief for my enduring fondness for Dire Straits, and Mark Knopfler's solo albums and soundtrack work, in some cases perhaps deservedly. While I resist the notion that a "guilty pleasure" is a thing, I find myself willing to excuse some excessive synth & keyboard noodling in his compositions (the Local Hero soundtrack) that I scowl at in others. The songs still work for me, even when I recognize they shouldn't.

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 6

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

Image via VF: Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark; Left, by Paul Schraub/The Collection of Hank Risan; Right, from the Everett Collection.

That a gambling mogul has paid millions of dollars for prop Maltese Falcon of dubious provenance just feels ... perfect. [Vanity Fair]

The fake falcon is made of lead, Gutman tells us. Kemidov must have figured out what he had and crafted a replica to fool Gutman's agents. The question is, was there a real lead prop? Or, were they all plaster? If there was a lead prop, is that what Wynn has, or did he get Kemidoved? 
We may never know for sure.

(Have to admit, I've poked around looking for replica to put on my bookshelf. They're a little pricey though. On the cheap end, you can pick one up on etsy for about $85. But at that price point, what you can get is ... *coughs discreetly* ... rubbish. Go up $100 from there and the replicas start looking better, but $85 was already more than I was looking to spend, never mind the $200 ballpark.) 

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 5

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

What, we wonder (quite reasonably) does have Hammett have against gays? And Middle Easterners, for that matter.

Joel Cairo is, even more so than the women of The Maltese Falcon, less a character than a collection of stereotypes. He doesn't go anywhere without mincing steps. His voice is effeminate.  He's expected to take being slapped, and like it.

He's also the only character in novel defined by his ethnicity. Gutman is probably German. O'Shaughnessy must be Irish. But neither of them are identified as the Irish, or the German, the way Cairo is consistently identified in the text as "the Levantine."  He even gets a chapter named for him that way.

Cairo carries a Greek passport, among others, and Gutman, if I recall, refers to him as a Greek at some point in either the movie or the novel, but his wallet contains a note written in Arabic, and I don't think we'd imagine Cairo is a Greek name. He's probably Palestinian then, or Syrian, and that fact he's an effeminate queer earns him nothing but barely concealed contempt from the author.

Is it crazy to wonder if Hammett isn't perhaps showing signs of some repression by setting his story in San Francisco and treating his most prominent gay character so shabbily?  (I say "most prominent" because I think we are supposed to infer by his stroking of Wilmer's head after Gutman agrees to let him be Spade's fall guy that Wilmer is a ... kept boy?)  Hammett was actively left-wing throughout his life and, while progressive activism isn't a guarantee of open-mindedness to all ways of life and freedom from prejudice, it's a little surprising he seems so contemptuous of a character he crafted to be an underdog twice over. Hammett had children, was married, and had relationships with women throughout his adult life, there's no evidence I can see that he was gay or bi.

The times, I guess. We chalk this less-than-gallant portrayal of a homosexual Levantine up to mere parochialism and prejudice of the era.

Unless we're supposed to see how unfair he's being, and in recognizing the unfairness, hold him, ourselves, and a society that tolerates that unfairness accountable for their shortcomings. I'd prefer to think Hammett was doing undercover work here, and not merely taking cheap shots at an exotic Other to pander.

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 4

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

In the film, it's not clear what book Spade has at his bedside under the alarm clock and which Gutman enjoys later while they await Effie's delivery of the bundle. We know from the novel it's Duke's Celebrated Criminal Cases of America. 

We know from the Flitcraft tale that Spade worked for a detective agency in Seattle before coming to San Francisco, and that he's been partners with Archer for less than a year when he tells Effie he would sought to dissolve their partnership once their year contract was up. So, it tells us something that he's not just getting his information about the SFPD from experience, but that he's studying their history. Spade isn't only hard-boiled, he's well-read.

As an aside, he references Arnold Rothstein when discussing the case in the DA's office. I had always assumed that was a case from the book, but that's because my Tammany Hall and Black Sox scandal knowledge is somewhat and shamefully deficient. Also, because I haven't been watching Boardwalk Empire. Rothstein was  prominent New Jersey underworld figure who was shot to death during a poker game over failing to pay a debt. So Spade's observation that the DA has Rothstein on the brain while investigating Thursby is an astute one. (Rothstein was murdered in 1928, a year before Hammett started publishing The Maltese Falcon in Black Mask magazine. Timely for the story, but a reference that probably would have been stale by 1941.)

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 3

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

What's in a name? It's possible I've read too much into "La Paloma" as the name of Jacobi's ship already, so might as well speculate on the name Jacobi itself.

It strikes me as an apt name to use for a minor character in a detective novel. I can only speculate as to how Hammett landed on it, but I'd like to think it's a nod to the German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi: 

"It was in algebraic development that Jacobi’s peculiar power mainly lay, and he made important contributions of this kind to many areas of mathematics, as shown by his long list of papers in Crelle’s Journal and elsewhere from 1826 onwards. One of his maxims was: 'Invert, always invert' ('man muss immer umkehren'), expressing his belief that the solution of many hard problems can be clarified by re-expressing them in inverse form."

Detectives, after all, face hard problems, so how to think about solving problems would be a matter of some importance to them. The clues don't add up? Try reasoning by subtraction. Invert the problem and see if expressing it in different terms leads to insight.

To figure out who killed Archer, he's got to look at the problem outside the narrative O'Shaughnessy has fed him. He's got to see how it doesn't add up. O'Shaughnessy must be lying when she says she couldn't trust Thursby. Spade learns that Thursby's loyalty to her was unshakable. Miles may have been a fool, but he was too experienced a detective to be gunned down by a man he was tailing without getting his hands out of his pockets. "The man who shot him stood here," Archer says when re-enacting the shooting with Tom Polhaus. That a man did it is an assumption based on facts not in evidence. Spade's got to recognize the lazy thinking and subtract anything that followed from the false premise. He figures out while he and O'Shaughnessy await the inevitable arrival of the police after Gutman's gang have left his apartment to skip town. Jacobi, the mathematician, would have been proud. (Jacobi, the bullet-ridden ship's captain, would have liked to have know the sort of woman O'Shaughnessy was before falling in with her.)

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 2

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

Huston's adaptation hews so close to the novel that even the changed scenes and omitted characters could barely be said to haunt the movie as ghosts. Among the changes: we don't see Gutman's daughter; Spade's lawyer gets relegated to a single phone call; Effie doesn't call Cairo "a queer," and his handkerchiefs are said to smell of gardenias rather than the less recognizable chypre; we meet one hotel detective, instead of two; Spade doesn't force O'Shaughnessy to prove she didn't steal the thousand dollar bill that Gutman palmed. The changes are competent; they don't leave holes in the story or gaps we tend to notice. We don't see Spade take a meal in the movie, but the movie wouldn't have been improved by us watching him make a liverwurst sandwich. 

The one scene in the novel that doesn't make it in Huston's film that I would include, if I were to produce a new adaptation, is Spade telling O'Shaugnessy Flitcraft's story. It's a decidedly odd story, in and of itself, and it's even odder for it to be in The Maltese Falcon. While easy to see why the decision was made not to include it in the film for the very reason we can easily imagine the novel without it, I think we need to bear down and ask why it's there. Hammett wrote Spade as a man who spoke judiciously, a man who liked to talk, but wasn't a prattler. There's certainly a reason the Flitcraft story makes the cut. Can we make sense of it?

Hammett scholars will have no doubt covered this ground, and I'll circle back check my hypothesis against what more accomplished critics will have already had to say on the matter, but it seems to me that the story of a man whose perception of his life is blown open by a near-miss falling beam while walking past a construction site has something to say about Spade's love of Brigid O'Shaughnessy. 

Flitcraft walks away from his life, his family, internalizes the randomness of our existence, then eventually drifts back into a life that mirrors the one he lead before his satori and period of wandering. Beams stopped falling near him and he stopped living as if they did.

Spade has, by meeting O'Shaughnessy, found himself similarly having his reality shattered. He's in love with a woman he knows is lying to him, using him the way she's used other men as protectors for as long as she's needed them, one he finally recognizes as a cold-blooded killer. She's a beam that's fallen directly in his path. And he is very nearly ready to throw away his life and the terms by which he's lived it, to live a new one with her. She's shown him a glimpse of himself he's never seen and he's shaken to the core by her. Brigid is merely puzzled by the story, and it never comes up again in the novel.

Yet, when Spade tries to explain himself to her, to explain why he's going to turn her over the police, the Flitcraft story underscores the scene. He could upend his life, he could shield her from the law and carry on in a new way. He wants to. But won't. He refuses to be a Flitcraft. She's a capricious force of nature he won't bend his will to. His anguish is that he's seen what Flitcraft saw, but he's not going to let it change him. 

Musings On "The Maltese Falcon" 1

Leading up to a 75th anniversary theatrical viewing of The Maltese Falcon, I've been re-watching Huston's classic adaption and re-reading Hammett's novel. It remains a favorite, though I see through different eyes now that I'm about the age of Spade's ill-fated partner, Miles Archer, than I did when I read and watched it repeatedly as a bookish pre-teen who had just discovered film noir and the novels of Hammett and Chandler.

Gutman relates the story of the Knights of the Order of St. John to Spade. How, in 1539, they hit upon the idea of sending a golden falcon, encrusted beak to claw with precious stones, to King Charles V of Spain as tribute. The story he tells places the San Francisco-set noir in a (fictionalized) historical context stretching back through the 16th century to the Crusades. Gutman describes the Crusades as essentially centuries of sustained looting. The Order of St. John can pay such lavish tribute thanks to the Order's legacy of plundering untold hordes of gold, silks, ivory, jewels, and the like from the East hundreds of years earlier. Not schoolbook history, but history nevertheless, he assures him.

However, the historical motifs in The Maltese Falcon run deeper even than the Crusades. Hammett subtly, elegantly weaves a lyrical legend from Herodotus's history of the Persian wars into his pulpy detective story. Or, since I can't prove it, I've imagined that he has. It's part of the charm of Hammett's novel, and Huston's 1941 adaptation, that such a reading is possible.

Ships under the command of Mardonius, serving the Persian King Darius the Great, were caught in a storm in 492 B.C. while on an expedition to Greece. The Greeks, unfamiliar with doves, were fascinated by the site of the white birds escaping the sinking ships. They imagined, the story goes, that the doves were the last messages of love from the drowning sailors. The romantic idea made it's way into seafaring lore, and into song. From 1861,versions of the "La Paloma" ("The Dove") gained popularity in Spain, Cuba, and Mexico. This image, of a dove escaping a shipwreck, flying with a message of love, is not directly found in The Maltese Falcon, of course, but we see its dark reflection in Hammett's tale.

Brigid O'Shaughnessy, on the run with the stolen black statuette of a falcon, meets Captain Jacobi in Hong Kong and entrusts him with the treasure. He transports it to San Francisco for her while she tries to find a way to get rid of her no longer convienent ally, Floyd Thursby. Jacobi's ship is burned in the harbor when Gutman's henchman, young Wilmer, is careless with matches while attempting to find it in the hold. The falcon, dove-like, escapes the ship with Jacobi, and later is delivered to Spade's office by the bullet-ridden (again, Wilmer at work) ship's captain. Spade receives his love's black bird; but its message is of betrayal, and it brings death and blood with it from its downed ship.

Jacobi's ship is named "La Paloma."

The Iron Man Analysis I Didn't Even Know I Needed To Read

My new post at Eruditorum Press: Solid Dick, or Why 'Iron Man' is Objectively One of the Most Evil Films Ever Made http://t.co/vFGTRT7ql4

— Shabogan Graffiti (@_Jack_Graham_) September 16, 2015

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A cinematic experiment I'd be curious to see, but we're probably better off if Hollywood doesn't attempt.

Saw White House Down yesterday on TV. Had never heard of it -- nor of its fraternal twin, Olympus Has Fallen -- and only watched out of lazy Sunday afternoon loss of will to channel surf. At the end, was surprised to find it had hooked me, despite being a typical dumb-and-loud actioner, trying to make some scratch off the corpse of Die Hard with maybe a dash of Air Force One thrown in.

Part of the reason I hung in with it was watching the noxious James Woods play the villain. At this stage of his career and celebrity, where his politics are well-known, it's the role he was born to age into. The old saw goes: to be a good villain, the bad guy should think he is the hero. This is what the movie gets exactly right in both the writing and casting of Woods' character -- retiring, terminally ill head of the Secret Service Presidential Detail with extreme right wing politics, forced to serve a black President who is trying to practice diplomacy in the Middle East -- they've given us a villain who could credibly be seen as believing he is right. He believes he, and his fellow conspirators, are going to save the world. It helps that the character's politics, while demented and malevolent, are not hard to find in the real world.

This movie cried out for an alternate version, one that could have been shot at the same time, but where all the cinematic conventions used to identify the hero in this sort of story were used to depict Wood's Martin Walker and Richard Jenkins' House Speaker Eli Raphelson as the heroes, and Channing Tatum's John Cale and Maggie Gyllenhaal's Agent Finnerty as the villains.

To be clear, I'm not saying we need movies with a crypto-fascist heroes. Rather, to have the version we got and my proposed alternate version, both produced with the same budget and rudimentary competence Roland Emmerich achieves with WHD, shown side-by-side would be the perfect object lesson to drive home the point of your Film Studies 101 classes and scores of youtube video essays. Add a few scenes where we get to see Walker's grief over his son's death, remove the scenes where we see Cale with his daughter being a good dad, and you'd be most of the way there. I can pretty much guarantee you the alternate version of this movie would find an adoring audience in the Republican base. They'd probably start forming Martin Walker Societies. (Which is why this should remain a thought experiment.)

You know John McCain (not to mention Lindsey Graham, Tom Cotton, and the rest of the #47traitors crowd) would help promote it.