Juke Swamp

JUKE GIRL is a pretty good Warner melo from the pen of A.I. Bezzerides — like all his films it manages a prominent role for a Greek-American character, and carries a bit of a political punch. Odd to see such a left-leaning film, siding with farmers against crooked wholesalers, yet starring Ronald Reagan. He’s actually kind of winning in it.

The title character is lovely Ann Sheridan, who dances with customers in Muckeye’s bar. The movie is in no way hers. The plan must have been to imply that it’s the story of a racy dance hall hostess to cover the fact that the movie is really about organized labour. It would have been great if Reagan had gotten in trouble with HUAC for being in it, but alas even their idiocy had limits.

My favourite line is Ann seducing her way onto the premises of the wholesalers’ so Ron can steal a truck to help out the embattled Greek farmer who must get his produce to market before it spoils. “Gee, a packing house must be a wonderful place at night,” she coos through the fence.

With almost precode energy, the movie does a lot of packing itself, cramming in a murder and framing along with the dirty business dealings and hints of political corruption. It’s oppressively crammed with ugly mugs, bulbous, walking Drew Friedman cartoons — if you have Richard Whorf AND Howard Da Silva in a movie, you are possibly subjecting your audience’s nerves to what the automobile industry calls destructive testing. How much nasal sneering can we take?

Curtis Bernhardt directs, without his interesting expressionistic flourishes, but with a lot of GUSTO.

At the end, the murderer is revealed as wholesaler Gene Lockhart, so Ron and Ann are saved from the lynch mob. We think that’s going to be the situation defused, since Lockhart, an unintentional killer, is clearly in the throes of complete nervous collapse and can be turned over to the sheriff, but NO — the ugly (ugly!) mob he has whipped up now turns on him, and Bernhardt, who can’t help himself, chucks in one METROPOLIS style high angle of hands reaching for the miscreant, ringing around him, seemingly about to tear him apart like Charles Laughton’s Dr. Moreau…

And we fade out. A coda rounds off the fate of the other characters, but this moment of bloody, Reign of Terror revolution is never referred to again, and we are left to assume that Lockhart was (a) torn limb from limb (b) hanged from a lamppost or (c) eaten.

This is why Warner pictures are the coolest.

The title attracted me in the same way that SO YOUNG SO BAD and PROBLEM GIRLS seem like really appealing movies based on titles alone. Watch for them here soon!

The Sleeping Images of Things

In a charity shop I picked up, slightly randomly, The Poetic Image by Cecil Day-Lewis (Daniel’s dad; also a crime writer whose book The Beast Must Die was adapted by Chabrol). It’s a very interesting treatise on the forms and uses of imagery in poetry ancient and modern (or modern-ish — the book dates from 1947. A stamp on the inside front cover says it was presented to Lynn Watson os Shrewsbury High School as Modern Languages Prize in 1970.)

Among the food for thought is a very fine description of the creative process, which applies whatever kind of writing one is involved in, I should say. Perhaps a work of fiction may be more likely to be sparked not by a poetic image (a kind of engram, compressing together object, idea or emotion) but by some more abstract narrative notion. Rarely does it begin with a theme, I think. Here’s what Cec says ~

The poet, then, starts with an impression, a drop in the river of experience, crystallized perhaps into an image. Or, let us rather say, that is how the poet is apt to start nowadays; for there have been times, as we have noticed, when he at any rate seems to have begun with an abstract idea and set out to put it into verse. The modern method, insofar as it differs from the classical, is indicated in Goethe’s words,

It wasn’t on the whole my way, as a poet, to stride after the embodiment of something abstract. I received within myself impressions — impressions of a hundred sorts, sensuous, lively, lovely, many-hued — as an alert imaginative energy presented them.

This is the first stage. W.B. Yeats witnessed the second when, quoting Goethe’s ‘One must allow the images to form with all their associations before one criticizes,’ he went on to speak of the trance-like state in which ‘images pass rapidly before you,’ and said that it is necessary to ‘suspend will and intellect, to bring up from the subconscious anything you already possess a fragment of.’ That concentrated attention which watches over the birth of a poem from the moment when the first birth-pang is felt — a concentration will-less indeed, yet intense, and by its very passivity aiding the process which brings the whole poem out into the light — may fairly be called a suspension of the intellect. But it overlaps with the third stage, then the poet’s attention becomes more active (Malebranche called this attention ‘the prayer of the intellect’), and the work of criticism begins, the selection or rejection of associated images in conformity with the now emerging pattern of the poem. The creative process up to the emergence of formed images from the unconscious, is described by Dryden in his introduction to The Rival Ladies, where he speaks of the time when the play was only ‘a confused mass of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark: when the Fancy was yet in its first work, moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be distinguished, and then either chosen or rejected by the Judgement.’

That Lucretian phrase, ‘moving the sleeping images of things towards the light,’ may be set beside this passage from E.S. Dallas —

Trains of thought are continually passing to and fro from the light into the dark, and back from the dark into the light. When the current of thought flows from within our ken to beyond our ken, it is gone, we forget it … After a time it comes back to us changed and grown, as if it were a new thought.

I do not know that out modern psychology, which he and Dryden so far anticipated, could have put the whole thing any better.

***

The best account of creativity I’ve ever read. Polanski has said that he mainly works on instinct, but applies his critical faculties to what his instincts suggest. Dali spoke of his paranoiac-critical method. It’s all about catching images thrown up more or less irrationally from parts of our brains we don’t control. and then attempting to fit them into a pattern which makes its own kind of sense.

Picture is by William Blake. Chosen for irrational reasons.

Gene Giannini Lives on his Back

Spoiler alert! Rod Steiger as Gene Giannini lives (and dies) on his back in the late Francesco Rosi’s LUCKY LUCIANO.

Over at The Forgotten.