1943. Starring Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Choosing a favorite Hitchcock movie is a hopeless challenge. Rear Window has Grace Kelly and Jimmy Stewart, and the unbearably suspenseful scene when Raymond Burr comes home early. North By Northwest has Cary Grant dealing with a worst-ever case of mistaken identity. Strangers on a Train has that amazing plot, plus the carnival scene. Psycho has Norman Bates, the shower scene and its overall weirdness. Vertigo, its own weirdness and Jimmy Stewart. Finally, the scene in The Birds in which the birds attack the townsfolk caused me, as a child, to piss my pants. Literally.
Shadow of a Doubt, despite its lack of any diuretic shocks, has all its own charms and, according to Hitchcock’s daughter, was the great director’s favorite movie of his own.
Teresa Wright, looking as pretty and wholesome as a Rockwell painting, stars as Charlie, daughter of the wholesome Joseph and Emma Newton (Henry Travers and Patricia Collinge) and the pride of bucolic Santa Rosa, CA. Her mother named her after her uncle Charlie who, when we meet him, is in Massachusetts, lying next to a pile of money and about to evade a pair of trailing detectives. Meanwhile, on the West Coast, his namesake is lying on her bed, thinking of telegraphing him when a telegraph arrives. The announcement that he’s coming to visit proves to her that they are connected — “like twins,” she reminds her family.
Uncle Charlie (the great Joseph Cotten) arrives at the train station and immediately settles in. In time, he surprises his niece by tearing up the evening paper, roughly grabbing her arm and giving a truly disturbing speech at the dinner table. She stills wants to believe in Uncle Charlie, in part because of how much he means to her mother. But when two reporters show up to write about the family in a magazine feature but only seem interested in learning about the recent visitor, the beans get spilled. And young Charlie, filled with doubt, begins her own investigation.
The image of twirling dancers is being telegraphed between the two Charlies, as well as the melody of a waltz. When the young Charlie learns that police are searching for the “Merry Widow Murderer,” clues begin to fall into place. The relationship between niece and uncle change, and not for the better.
A highlight of the film for me is the peculiar friendship of father Joseph and Herbie Hawkins (Hume Cronyn) who are as hooked on true-crime stories and their own theories on how to perform the perfect murder, they are unaware of how much they creep out those around them. And the precocious, glasses-wearing young daughter — a standard role in films during these years — adds to the quiet screwball nature of the Newton household.
Shadow of a Doubt is much more serene than Psycho, much more bucolic than Vertigo, much, much less incontinence-invoking than The Birds. But its conflict — that young Charlie will destroy her family by telling them what she suspects about Uncle Charlie — is a clever-enough hook to make it memorable among all the other Hitchcockian classics.
The lesson a music fan can take away from the career of Kelly Willis may be this: If you resist the manipulation of major-label tools, you might not be invited to walk the red carpet at the CMAs. But at least there’s a chance you will earn respect through the virtue of solid songwriting and performing skills, and still get to be the same real you.
Recording three albums for MCA, beginning in 1990, Kelly was a promising, attractive — if not a little bland — act that the label had a hard time marketing. After being released from her contract, she recorded an EP, Fading Fast, for A&M. Although that was also not a happy relationship, it was a glimpse at what she was capable of. The highlight of the record, for me at least, was “He Don’t Care About Me,” written by her husband, Bruce Robison, and backed by members of Son Volt and 16 Horsepower. Friends and family would replace the support a label was supposed to provide, and Willis’ career has blossomed as a result.
The records that have followed, 1999’s What I Deserve, 2002’s Easy and 2007’s Translated From Love, are filled with songs the records that country music radio should be championing, if there was still country music radio. Willis has written some of her own best songs, but has also benefited by writing with hubby Robison, Chuck Prophet, and the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris, and has turned in great covers of the Replacements, Iggy Pop and Nick Drake — not the easiest choices for a waify ingenue.
The song that I keep returning to, and my iTunes counter would prove it, is Willis’ cover of Little Feat’s “Truck Stop Girl” on the 1996 compilation Rig Rock Deluxe. Again backed by members of Son Volt, Willis purrs the tale of heartbreak at the truck stop, the lovesick trucker so devastated by the rejection of his waitressing love that he drives off “without tightening down,” leading to his doom. I love the image of her with “her hair piled up high, the look in her eye that would turn any good man’s blood to wine.” It’s what country music really needs — a sea shanty set in the dusty bays of a giant truck stop, complete with tragedy, bloody wrecks and beehived sirens slinging hash.
And on top, as thick and sweet as melting cheddar on a slice of apple pie, is that voice. Thank God Kelly Willis’ Nashville career was cut short by MCA.
1933. Starring Richard Barthelmess, Loretta Young. Directed by William Wellman.
It wasn’t my intention to watch a movie about an economic depression, labor troubles and soup lines. I was actually hoping to find some escape from those topics. But the TCM Archives “Forbidden Hollywood” DVD series has been on my Netflix list for quite a while and I thought it might be a welcome alternative to the almost-always-pessimistic nightly news. There weren’t any financial troubles in the 1930s, right?
Richard Barthelmess stars as Tom Holmes, a WWI grunt who takes a German machine-gun nest and captures an officer before being shot and left for dead by his commanding officer (Gordon Westcott). That officer takes credit for the capture, while Holmes recovers in a German POW hospital, becoming addicted to the morphine that silences the pain of metal in his spine. When the war ends, he meets up with his former commanding officer, a rich kid headed to a hero’s welcome. Instead of honors and medals, Holmes settles for a job with the rich kid’s family bank, but his need for morphine gets him fired by the appearance-conscious bank president.
Holmes is committed to a narcotics hospital (which kills his doting mother) and, upon his release, he hits the road to Chicago. It’s amazing how quickly things move along in films from this era — within the first half-hour, he’s experienced war, the home front, the bank job, commitment, a change of scenery, a new home, and a new love. Soon, he’s working for a laundry, where his resourcefulness and drive have him climbing the company ladder. All for nothing, warns his neighbor Brinker (Robert Barrat), an eccentric Communist inventor, who calls him a fool for trusting the evil capitalist system that will chew him up and spit him out. Brinker is the highlight of the film for me, a cartoonish Bolshevik who tinkers on machines in his apartment, and scolds his neighbors with a weird clucking that nearly wears out its novelty.
After marrying neighbor Ruth (Loretta Young), Holmes is enlisted by Brinker in patenting his latest invention, a laundry machine that speeds up productivity. Holmes sells it to the laundry under the agreement that no one will lose their job, but when a large corporation takes over, there is a massive layoff, and Holmes becomes the scapegoat for an unsympathetic mob. Holmes goes to prison for leading the riot that targeted him, while Brinker becomes an extremely wealthy man. (”You used to hate the capitalists!” yells Holmes. Brinker explains, “Naturally, but that was before I had money!”)
Richard Barthelmess wasn’t the first actor to play the tormented hero and not the last. (I cheered for him just as I did for Russell Crowe in Gladiator, that he’d not only crush the evil people but, more importantly, he get back the modest life he wanted and deserved in the first place.) He can certainly portray the everyman, however. Brinker is the more entertaining character, but Holmes the most believable. His scene at the bank, needing to buy morphine to think straight, but unwilling to steal what he needs, is heartbreaking. The fact that he is fired, committed and scorned makes it even worse.
The ending of the movie reunites Holmes with an old acquaintance among the soup lines and transient camps, at the mercy of more mobs and heartless authorities. And it makes the point, 75 years later, that playing by the rules and working hard doesn’t guarantee you won’t be homeless and jobless. Just like the depression that spawned this movie, it’s a lesson you wouldn’t think we’d have to endure again.
If you live in Minneapolis, you’ve probably read the recent news item about a couple of teenage burglars who beat an 85-year-old man nearly to death in the process of stealing a few bucks from his modest home. The man has survived, but the photos they show of him on the news are sickening — red bruises all over his face, and stitches around and over the top of his scalp, the result of attempts to relieve swelling in his brain.
This is the kind of thing that makes me sick and angry, and I don’t have any sympathy for what will happen to the two young men who will hopefully be tried as adults and receive serious punishment. I doubt that their lives are redeemable to us — the prison system is nowadays more about keeping them away from us than turning prisoners back into fully functional human beings again. Maybe at one time there was hope that the man walking out of prison has soberly considered his actions and wants a new life, but now our hope is that he feels as much discomfort as possible and, for a given period of time, he can’t hurt anyone else.
But what may be the most disturbing aspect of this story is a quick soundbite that a reporter got from the mother of one of the suspects within a few days of the crime. Why the mother would show her face to the camera is a mystery, given the shame she ought to be feeling regarding her son — who, with his partner, were caught at the scene. After a quick, flat apology to the victim’s family, she said that the assailants were just kids who had “made a mistake.” I hope those photos of the elderly man on the receiving end of her son’s mistake are as haunting to her. But there’s no doubt how those kids learned to excuse their own behavior.
Mama Tried (performed by Merle Haggard)
Written by Merle Haggard
The first thing I remember knowing
Was a lonesome whistle blowing
And a young’un’s dream of growing up to ride
On a freight train leaving town
Not knowing where I’m bound
And no one could steer me right but mama tried
A one and only rebel child
From a family meek and mild
My mama seemed to know what lay in store
Despite all my Sunday learning
Towards the bad I kept on turning
Til mama couldn’t hold me anymore
And I turned 21 in prison
Doing life without parole
No one could steer me right but mama tried, mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better but her pleading I denied
That leaves only me to blame ’cause mama tried
Dear old daddy rest his soul
Left my mom a heavy load
She tried so very hard to fill his shoes
Working hours without rest
Wanted me to have the best
She tried to raise me right but I refused
And I turned 21 in prison
Doing life without parole
No one could steer me right but mama tried, mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better but her pleading I denied
That leaves only me to blame ’cause mama tried
Merle doesn’t say what crime landed his character in jail, but “life without parole” suggests that it was serious. (Merle himself focused on armed robbery, which is why he got to have a recording career and a few great songs about being an ex-con.) The key line in the song is, of course, “That leaves only me to blame ’cause mama tried.”
It’s an old-fashioned notion, captured in a 1970s country-western song, that you are responsible for your own actions, especially the awful ones. Maybe the problem was that these children weren’t raised on Merle Haggard. Or maybe it was, in their case, mama’s lack of trying.