Category Archives: Movies

Thursday Detritus

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The rains have cleared away, leaving cold air in their wake. This pattern will keep repeating in the coming months, getting successively colder until snow replaces rain and mere cold air is a polar vortex or some such. Bah. At least the trees are coloring up nicely.

An open question for YouTube: how, in the age of digital spying on consumers — so I hear — can YouTube offer me such wildly off-the-mark ads? Lately I’ve been getting a lot of anti-vapping ads, for instance. Aimed at teenagers. Not, I have to add, ahead of much content that that demographic might watch on YouTube. The chances of me taking up vapping are pretty close to zero, YouTube.

Some time ago I picked up a copy of The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (1993) for $1 at Half Price Books. Now I’m reading it. It’s a good read and there are some good lines in it. Here’s one that helps introduce a character:

For the devil had long ago taken a shine to Tert Card, filled him like a cream horn with itch and irritation.

One of the author’s idiosyncrasies is constructions like that, with “filled” instead of “filling.” But you get used to it, and it works. That’s a wonderful sentence that pretty much sets the tone for Tert Card. We’ve all met people like that.

From a press release over the transom the other day, a subject I have no professional interest in. I’m more interested in how the thing was written. I suspect the writer is a fairly fluent but nevertheless non-native speaker of English (all sic):

Businessmen hailing from UAE have an interest in making some investments in Armenia. The trade turnover in between the two countries has risen 10-folks from twenty-five million to about 250 million USD in the last five years as told by Zaki Nusseibeh, the Minister of the State after the sidelines of the ministerial conference of 17th Francophonie summit…

After Ruddigore on Saturday, Ann wanted ice cream. At about 10 in the evening in Evanston, Andy’s Frozen Custard seemed the only place still open serving something close to ice cream. She agreed that was close enough, so we went.
That image doesn’t have many people in it, but not long after we got there, the place was packed. Seems that selling frozen custard late on Saturday evenings near a major university is a pretty good business.

I’d never been to Andy’s before. Turns out there are about 60 of them, mostly scattered around the central U.S., though as far north as metro Chicago and as far south as central Florida. Andy’s makes a good frozen treat. Too good, in fact. I should have gotten a small triple chocolate instead of a medium.

Who did the score for Doctor Zhivago? I found myself wondering that yesterday. Maybe that’s something I should know, but I looked it up: Maurice Jarre.

That came to mind because I’d turned on the TV and DZ was playing. In fact, the very scene in which Yuri and Lara reunited. The Lara’s theme leitmotif was part of the action. I watched about 15 minutes of it.

“What’s this movie about?” Ann asked. I had to think. It’s been how long since I’ve seen it? In the summer of ’81 at the Texas Union Theatre, or in Japan in the early ’90s, when I saw so many movies on VHS? Either way, over 25 years ago.

“Well, let’s see. Doctor Zhivago, that’s him there, Omar Sharif. He’s a doctor of course, and he has a wife. He likes her well enough, but he really loves this other woman, who’s on screen now. I don’t remember who played her. Anyway, there’s a love triangle and they all get caught up in the Russian Revolution and are often in danger. Bolsheviks show up. Zhivago’s also a poet and sensitive fellow. He spends a lot of time looking off in the distance. And there’s a lot of scenery. Wide shots of the steppes of Russia. It’s an epic of a movie. Did I mention that it’s over three hours long? It’s an epic of epic proportions.”

Despite my flip description, I remember liking the movie whenever I saw it. Odd how details of most movies you see or books you read or music you hear or places you go tend to evaporate over the years, leaving a residue like the one I told to Ann.

Never have read Pasternak, so I don’t even have a residue of the book. Maybe I should, but life is short and Russian novels are long. The most recent one I read, a few years ago, was August 1914. Pretty soon into it, I gave up trying to keep track of all of the many characters.

Maurice Jarre, I learned, is the father of Jean-Michel Jarre, known to me for Oxygène. Back when people had record collections, there was always one kid on each floor of each dorm at your college who had unusual records, things no one else had ever heard of. I can’t remember the lad’s name, but he was on my hall freshman year, and that was one of the records he had.

Mass Entertainment

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Here’s a list I spent some time with recently: Wiki’s List of highest-grossing media franchises. Being Wiki, there’s no telling how accurate it is, but I will note that there are an enormous number of notes and references. So I’ll take it as accurate enough.

The list is interesting for a number of reasons, but mainly for information on the high-grossing franchises I’ve never heard of, which are quite a few.

Most of them are Japanese: anime, manga, even franchises whose most profitable expression is pachinko machines. As far as I could tell from my years in Japan, pachinko parlors were insanely bright, intensely noisy places to throw away money. But I was just a barbarian outsider. Apparently the machines are branded, and the branding is big business.

Take Fist of the North Star which, originating way back in 1983, would have been around when I was in Japan. I’d never heard of it until today. Though starting as manga, the franchise has enjoyed nearly $16.8 billion in pachinko machine sales, plus a few billion more in manga and other games.

Pachinko, incidentally, comes up 13 times on the list. Most of those are Japanese franchises, but not all. There have been $2.85 billion in Disney Aladdin pachinko (and arcade) machines sold. Spider-Man pachinko machines are popular to the tune of $308 million in sales, and Tomb Raider has sold $300 million.

I was curious how many of the franchises I’ve supported, either for myself or my children, so I counted: more than I would have thought, about 50. That includes mostly through ticket sales, as well as small-screen viewing (at least occasionally), but also the quarters I spent on Pac-Man and Space Invaders, and things my daughters watched that I never would, such as Sailor Moon and Dora the Explorer.

Mass-market entertainment’s pervasive. Even when your tastes tend to run to less successful shows.

Thursday Plattero-filleto-mulleto-turboto-cranio-morselo-pickleo-acido-silphio-honeyo-pouredonthetopo-theouzelo-throstleo-cushato-culvero-cutleto-roastingo-marowo-dippero-leveret-syrupu-gibleto-wings.

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Just having fun with the head. As I did a few years ago. It’s one of the English translations of the Greek, which is transliterated lopado­temacho­selacho­galeo­kranio­leipsano­drim­hypo­trimmato­silphio­parao­melito­katakechy­meno­kichl­epi­kossypho­phatto­perister­alektryon­opte­kephallio­kigklo­peleio­lagoio­siraio­baphe­tragano­pterygon.

I didn’t even have to find my copy of the Book of Lists to find it. All I did was Google “long Greek word leftovers,” and I found it right away.

Considering that it’s the “first day of summer,” it’s pretty cool and rainy around here. That’s nonsense anyway. It’s the Summer Solstice. That’s all.

Saw a few fireflies early in the week, but not since. They’re just the early ones. Around here most of them show up in July.

Not sure whether the rain pleases the toads or not, but I’ve seen some lately.

Something I didn’t know until recently that I found out in my work: the Seminole Tribe of Florida owns Hard Rock Cafe Inc. Since 2007. I probably should have known that, but I didn’t.

Not long ago I sat down with Ann and watched the 2011 Captain America movie on DVD. I’m rarely in the mood for comic book movies, but I thought I’d give it a go.

Not bad. I thought the best idea — which might be true to the comic, I have no clue — was that Captain America, after his conversion by Science from a 98-lb. weakling into a super-soldier, spent much of WWII on bond tours.

Then, of course, through an insane convergence of circumstances, Captain America got to defeat the badies in pitched CGI battles, be sad about his buddy’s death, and fall in love with a tough-but-tenderhearted British bombshell. Right, whatever. That’s what the 15-year-old boys (and some girls) paid to see.

I would have preferred a movie about a fellow who spends the war doing over-the-top patriotic shows, in a ridiculous costume, to sell bonds. He wouldn’t even have to be sad about his situation. Just before V-E Day, he could accidentally take a few hundred Germans prisoner, something like Don Knotts might have. It could be a comedy. That kind of thinking is what I get for not being a 15-year-old boy for a good many decades now.

Space Odyssey

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I’m much of my way through reading Space Odyssey by Michael Benson, which was released this year in time for the 50th anniversary of 2001. The book is subtitled “Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece.”

The book doesn’t pretend to be a biography of either Kubrick or Clarke, but a tale of creating the movie, beginning with the extended deliberations by Kubrick about what to do after Dr. Strangelove and the critical ideas Clarke contributed to the genesis and eventual shape of the movie, and taking the story through production, post-production and release, all of which were behind schedule and over budget.

Both Kubrick and Clarke come across as towering intellects, which no doubt they were, but with certain flaws. If he thought it was good for the end product, Kubrick was perfectly willing to take advantage of Clarke or put his actors in danger on the set. For his part, Clarke couldn’t stand up to Kubrick, or say no to a money-sucking leech of a lover, though eventually his association with the project made him wealthy indeed (indirectly, because he had no points in the movie itself).

Since movie-making is such a collaborative effort, a lot of other contributors to the ultimate outcome make appearances in the book. Each is fascinating in his own way, such as the very young man who shot highly kinetic scenes from a helicopter over Scotland, for part of the Star Gate sequence; the mime who choreographed the movements for — and played — the lead ape-man in the Dawn of Man sequence; the designer who built the astonishing centrifuge set; or the stuntman who did the incredibly risky shots of astronaut Poole floating in space.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the movie that the book makes clear is how much of 2001 — a multimillion-dollar project with a large staff — was essentially made up on the fly by Kubrick. A fair number of bad ideas were winnowed out along the way, and good ideas came from various and unexpected sources, all of which the director wasn’t shy about using.

I’ve gotten to the chapter that describes the filming of the Dawn of Man. Reading about that process in detail reminds me of the reaction to the movie by someone I recommended it to years ago (in college in fact). He wasn’t impressed by 2001 or its mystique. Afterward, one of the things he asked me was, “What were those damned monkeys doing?”

The Producers

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Remarkably, Ann wanted to see The Producers, so we went this afternoon. Another movie released in 1968, but about as different as can be from 2001. She seemed amused by it.

I had given her the gist of the story — the producers schemed to pick a play that would certainly fail, so they could keep the over-subscribed investment, and then it doesn’t fail. I think she had wanted some context for “Springtime for Hitler,” which she must have seen on YouTube (probably the 2005 version, though).

I don’t think I spoiled anything by telling her that. The joy of The Producers is in the execution. In the good many years since I saw it last, I’d forgotten how much fun the movie is. And how much is slapstick. It in the hands of lesser actors and a lesser director, it would have just been low comedy. With Mel Brooks and Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder and Kenneth Mars, what you have is inspired low comedy. For his part, Mars’ loopy German might be the best ever put on film.

As funny as the leads were, I have to say I laughed the hardest at Lorenzo St. DuBois (L.S.D.)’s audition song, as performed by Dick Shawn. Known, according to Wiki, for “small but iconic roles in madcap comedies, usually portraying caricatures of counter culture personalities.” He certainly nailed the dimwitted hippie in The Producers.

Somehow I’d forgotten that he was wearing a can of Campbell’s Soup around his neck during the audition. Nice detail. Ann didn’t ask me about it, and maybe she just considered it a passing oddity. But it was pretty clear to me that Mel Brooks, already entering middle age in 1968, didn’t think much of hippies, Pop Art, Timothy Leary, etc. The rest of the audience — mostly my age or older — got the joke, and laughed a lot at L.S.D’s antics, too.

Something I didn’t know until I did a little reading: Estelle Winwood, who played one of the old women Zero Mostel dallies with to get money for his plays — the one with the most lines — had a long career, acting well into her 90s, and living to be 101. She also was associated with the Algonquin Round Table.

Speaking of longevity, since it was a TCM showing, the movie was proceeded by a recent short interview with Mel Brooks. He’s a hale fellow for 91.

2001 at the Music Box

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Just before the screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago at noon on Saturday, one of the theater’s managers spent a few minutes telling us what to expect. Not in terms of content — it was a safe assumption that most (but not all) of the audience had seen the movie sometime in the last 50 years — but that there would be a few minutes of introductory music to a dark screen, and an intermission.

She also mentioned that the Music Box was one of a relatively small number of movie theaters nationwide equipped to screen the new 70 mm print of 2001. Interesting that a neighborhood jewel box of a theater from the 1920s has the latest movie screening tech.

I’d read about the new print. It was made recently from the original negatives, the goal of which wasn’t to clean up the images or digitally goose the movie, but to re-create as closely as possible what an audience would have seen in 1968. When I read about that, I knew I wanted to see it, even though I’ve seen the movie n times over the years.

For one thing, it had been a long time since I’d seen 2001 in a movie theater. I know I did at some point in the early ’70s, when I was old enough to be dropped off at a movie theater, the Broadway Theater in Alamo Heights, but not old enough to drive there myself. I saw it again at some mall theater during high school, after which I read Arthur C. Clarke’s book. In college, I saw it a few more times, at the Vanderbilt student cinema, and I think at an early multiplex in San Antonio during an early ’80s summertime revival.

Since then, I’ve seen it on VHS, DVD and on demand, but not in a theater. I was miffed that TCM didn’t pick it for its big screen series this year for the 50th anniversary, while choosing to show entertaining but lesser moves like Big and Grease. But maybe that’s because the 70 mm version was in the offing elsewhere (including Cannes, where it was first shown not long ago).

More than wanting to see 2001 in a theater, I was intrigued by the idea that it would look like it did 50 years ago. I wasn’t old enough to see it then. I’ll never have the experience of seeing it when it was just a strange new movie — no one ever will again — before it worked its way into the common culture, inspiring volumes of interpretation and giving us an unshakable image of a killer sentient computer with an unctuous voice. Still, this would be as close as I’d get to an original showing.

Ann went with me. Yuriko did not want to go and Lilly had a conflict. The Music Box wasn’t full for the showing, but there was a fair crowd, and not everyone was my age or older. The 70 mm “unrestored” print didn’t disappoint. It also showed, if there was ever any doubt, that 2001‘s special effects were special indeed, from the closest foreground to the furthest background.

Odd how those model spaceships, on actual celluloid, look more real than any GCI spaceships I’ve seen in a digital medium. That observation might be conditioning left over from my youth, or valid for most people, or meaningless all together. I don’t care. That’s what I see.

I noticed a few imperfections in the print: a scratch or two, minor pops of light, that kind of thing. That took me back. Do I remember right that probably as late as the 1980s, movies displayed those kinds of visual ticks?

Speaking of visuals, one new thing that occurred to me during this viewing, and there’s always something new each time, was the visual debt that some of the backgrounds owed to Chesley Bonestell and Luděk Pešek. For instance, a long shot showing the vertical landing of the ship that took Dr. Floyd to the Moon, with unrelated astronauts in spacesuits in the foreground, instantly brought Bonestell to mind — this time. You’d think I’d have noticed that before.

The soundtrack was loud. Except when it wasn’t. At first I thought that was a function of the more advanced sound systems of our time compared with 1968, and so not quite like an original audience would have experienced it. Now I’m not so sure.

“The team also went back to the original six-track soundtrack and faithfully transferred it to the new prints,” the Variety article notes. “ ‘The film is mixed in a very extreme way,’ [director Christopher] Nolan says with awe. ‘There are incredible sonic peaks that are beyond anything anyone would do today.’ ”

Sonic peaks from the get-go, I’d say, as the heavens align to the “Also sprach Zarathustra” fanfare. But for me the most startling sonic peak comes when HAL decides to murder the hibernating astronauts. The cut is from the quiet of the spaceship while Bowman is out retrieving Poole’s body to a sudden, full-screen, flashing COMPUTER MALFUNCTION accompanied by a loud beeping. Louder, I believe, than in other versions of the film. I heard at least one audience member gasp when the scene started.

As well she should have. In my earliest viewings of the movie, that scene disturbed me the most. Sure, you can say HAL went just a little funny in the head because of contradictory programming. Or maybe he was just an evil bastard willing to murder people in their sleep. You know, like some people are. I’m hardly alone in noting that HAL was pretty much the most human member of the crew, for better and definitely worse.

Then again, the sound wasn’t always loud, or even quite intelligible. The more-or-less idle chitchat on the space station at the very beginning of the spoken dialog was a little hard to hear. Everything is intentional in a Kubrick movie, so I suppose that fits with the movie’s well-known lack of exposition.

That was one of the few things I told Ann before the movie. I didn’t want to over-prepare her, but I did say that obtrusive exposition wasn’t one of the movie’s characteristics. Had there been voice-over narration — the original script apparently called for that — I believe that would count as obtrusive, and the movie wouldn’t be regarded as highly. I never did quite like the brief narration at the beginning of Dr. Strangelove, though I can see why it’s there.

Here’s something I never noticed in the soundtrack. Again, during the idle chitchat at the beginning, there’s a background PA voice announcing the following. Twice.

A blue lady’s cashmere sweater has been found in the restaurant. It can be claimed at the manager’s desk.

How did I never hear that before? It popped out at me this time. Maybe that’s a function of the new print. Or maybe it’s just one of those things tucked inside a densely layered work of art that isn’t noticeable early on.

Later, the PA says: Will Mr. Travers please contact the met office.

Whatever that is. Interesting detail, those PA announcements. As if to show that by the end of the 20th century, space travel will have some of the ordinariness of air travel in 1968. Many of the space station details — the customs screening, the restaurant, the phone call — point to that.

Guess that counts as 1968 optimism about the future of space travel. It’s easy to deride that in hindsight, but it wouldn’t have been completely unreasonable at the time. We were well on the way to the Moon, for one thing.

After that would come large space stations, Moon bases, voyages to Mars and rocket engines and spaceships large enough to mount an expedition to Jupiter in 18 months. The idea that extensive space travel would be part of the near future had jumped out of speculative fiction into the realm of serious expectation. Turned out no one wanted to pay for those things, but that was still in the future.

The movie is not, on the other hand, optimistic about future of politics, as you’d expect from Kubrick. That’s another thing that occurred to me for the first time. It’s only hinted at, but the hints are pretty clear. Mainly, the movie assumes that political bureaucracies will be the same prevaricating, susicious entities they’ve long been.

Dr. Floyd is either an important official of the U.S. government, or in a quasi-governmental body, but in any case the lid is slammed down on the discovery of the monolith on the Moon. He offers the official, and secret, reason.

Floyd: I accept the need for absolute secrecy in this and I hope you will too. Now, I’m sure you’re all aware of the extremely grave potential for cultural shock and social disorientation contained in this present situation if the facts were prematurely and suddenly made public without adequate preparation and conditioning. Anyway, this is the view of the council.

Eighteen months later, the monolith is still a secret, even from the astronauts going to investigate where the radio beam pointed. Talk about paranoid secrecy. It’s almost Soviet in its reach.

Floyd expresses the idea, which isn’t unusual in science fiction, that the discovery of extraterrestrials would somehow cause “cultural shock and social disorientation.” Not just science fiction. I seem to remember discussion along those lines — a “fundamental change” in our thinking or some such, if not shock or disorientation — as far back as when the Vikings were digging unsuccessfully for microbes on Mars.

I’m skeptical that any such thing would happen. Say we discovered an alien artifact tomorrow. Something indisputable, except that there would be a group of fools that disputes it anyway. But let’s say most people accepted it for good reasons.

Then what? Assuming the artifact isn’t attacking us or producing pathogens, nothing too dramatic. The reaction would be, how about that. Someone is out there. How interesting. Maybe over the course of decades or centuries, the discovery would change the way we think, but for most people in the here and now, it would be a curiosity. Our lives would go on. Besides, we’ve already been conditioning ourselves, in books and movies and TV and more, to the possibility of aliens for years.

Overall, I’d say 2001 is optimistic, assuming a certain common interpretation of the movie. After much travail — it is an odyssey, after all — mankind does reach for the next level of development, just as the ape-men did.

One more thing I thought about for the first time this time around: Why no redundancy for HAL? The astronauts talk about shutting down HAL and resuming the mission using Earth-based computers, which would certainly be a clunky way to go about it at that distance. And mission control mentions “twin” 9000 series computers at its disposal. So why weren’t at least two HAL-class computers built into the Discovery? In case, you know, one fails in some way, such as trying to go all HAL on the crew.

A nit to pick. After it was over, Ann seemed impressed, and had some questions and observations. She did sleep through some of the movie, though. Especially those long scenes outside the spacecraft.

She may or may not grow to like 2001 as much as I do. It’s an acquired taste, and not for everyone. But I’m glad she went.

Quasi-Spring Break

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The vernal equinox might have just passed, but every time I go outside, winter reminds me that it’s decided to linger. Have one for the road. Take another turn around the block.

Then again, we’ve seen a few robins. The croci are emerging. In the evening, Onion is way off to the southwest. All the usual signs of spring are here. So time for a kind of spring break. Back to posting Easter Monday, which is April 2 this year.

Till then, a few items.

Without looking for it — the only way to find many things — I came across this picture the other day.

That’s Mike and Steve Johnson, in a picture I took at a wedding of a mutual friend of ours on July 6, 1996. Mike died in 2016. I’m sorry to report that his twin brother Steve died earlier this year.

Recently I finished Apollo 8, subtitled “The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon,” by Jeffrey Kluger (2017). Thrilling indeed. Covers much of the same ground — rather, space — as the Apollo 8 chapter of A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, though naturally in more detail.

The author characterizes the mission as the most “audacious” decision NASA ever made, and I’ll go along with that. Reading about any of the Apollo voyages, but especially this one, gives you (or should give you) a sense of just how dangerous it all was. Worth the risk, of course, but I’m surprised none of the Apollo astronauts bought it on the Moon, or in space, as opposed to the awful fate of the Apollo 1 crew.

A footnote: all of the Apollo 8 crew are still alive. Frank Borman just turned 90, James Lovell will turn 90 next Sunday, and Bill Anders is the youngest at 84. None of the other full Apollo crews are alive, though for now there’s at least one left from each mission except Apollo 14.

About 20 years ago, I saw Lovell speak at a real estate conference. I don’t remember much about what he said, other than to praise the movie Apollo 13, but it was a kick to see him anyway.

Recently we saw Vertigo at the theater. Been a long time since I last saw it, more than 30 years. These days, it gets high critical praise. Perhaps, I thought, I’d admire it more with a few more decades behind me, since I remember not being overly impressed by it as a young man.

It’s certainly a remarkable movie, interesting in a lot of ways. But it didn’t speak to me any more now than it did before. Maybe the story’s serious implausibilities got in the way. Not sure I can quite put my finger on it. A good movie, maybe a great one, but best? Naah.

The Philadelphia Story

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We all went to see The Philadelphia Story on Sunday at the movie theater of a nearby mall — a special showing, just like Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Casablanca recently. Oddly enough, Ann suggested we see it. And she wants to see next month’s showing, Vertigo.

That, I told her, is a very different movie from The Philadelphia Story. Truth is, I’ve forgotten most of the details of Vertigo. I’ve only seen it once, in the summer of ’81, and I wasn’t entirely taken with it. I might think differently now. Or not. Guess I’ll find out.

As for The Philadelphia Story, it was as charming as ever. Think this was my third viewing. After it was over — and after Ann discussed the structure of the movie, with some astuteness beyond her years — it occurred to me that “love triangle” isn’t an apt term for the story.

Better would be a love triskelion, with Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) as the focus, and the three men, Dexter Haven (Cary Grant), Mike Connor (Jimmy Stewart) and the stiff and put-upon George Kittredge (John Howard), all connected to her for different reasons.

When I got home, I looked up Virginia Weidler, who memorably played the bubbly younger sister, Dinah Lord. I figured she might be the only named member of the cast to still be alive. But no, she died in 1968 at only 41. Seems that Ruth Hussey survived the longest, dying in her 90s in 2005.

Of course there’s a lot of witty banter in the movie. My favorite line — which I didn’t remember from previous viewings, though I don’t know why not — was by Uncle Willie (Roland Young). Dexter had suggested going off for some of the hair of the dog that bit them. Uncle Willie thinks that’s a fine idea:

“C’malong, Dexter, I know a formula that’s said to pop the pennies off the eyelids of dead Irishmen.”

Stinkin’ Badges

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All of us went to a screening of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on Sunday, one of the old movies that TCM shows in movie theaters periodically, in this case for the 70th anniversary of its release. I can take or leave Ben Mankiewicz doing the introduction, as he might on television, but for someone who hasn’t seen the movie, I guess they’re informative.

No one else in the family had seen it. I had, on tape about 25 years ago. Good to see it again, and on the big screen. Like for Casablanca, the movie didn’t fill the house, but there was enough of an audience for an audible chuckle when the subject of badges came up, as most of us knew it would.

Remarkably, “Stinking Badges” has its own Wikipedia page.

This is the kind of thing I wonder about when I’m watching a movie again: just how far would a peso go at the time when the movie is set (1925, despite the appearance of some later-model cars)? Maybe that came to mind because I was handling pesos recently.

Early in the movie, Fred C. Dobbs (Bogart) panhandles three times from the same well-dressed American in Tampico — played by director John Huston — eventually claiming not to realize it was the same man, who tells him off. The well-dressed American clearly gives Dobbs a Mexican peso of immediate post-Revolution vintage: one of these, I could see.

A very common coin at the time: from 1920 to 1945, about 458.6 million of them were minted. It’s a nice coin, composed of .7199 silver and weighing 16.66 g (12 g silver) though not as weighty as a U.S. Peace dollar of the time, .9000 silver and weighing 26.73 g. So what was Dobbs receiving when he got one?

According to the movie at least, which I realize had no obligation to be accurate, enough to buy a meal or a few drinks or a haircut with change left over. The haircut scene was interesting for another reason: Bogart was bald by this time, but after the pretend haircut and oiling of his hair, he didn’t look like it. Probably the work of hair stylist Betty Delmont, if IMDb is accurate.

Also, McCormick (Barton MacLane) promised Dobbs and Curtin U.S. $8 a day for working on his oil rig. That’s about U.S. $114 in current money, but what did it mean in pesos in 1925, when the cost of living was surely a lot less in Mexico?

Curious about the exchange rate, I did some looking around and found this interesting table posted by the St. Louis Fed: average annual exchange rates to the U.S. dollar in the 1920s. That would be the Coolidge dollar that Cole Porter sang about being the top. To answer the question about pesos, it seems that ca. 1925, the rate was about two pesos to the dollar. So if Bogart could get 16 pesos a day, when he could feed himself for two or three, that’s not bad.

Of course, Dobbs and Curtin didn’t get any of that until they beat it out of McCormick. You’d think that if McCormick had made a habit of swindling oil-rig workers, and still walked around openly in Tampico, he’d at least have carried a pistol.

Another thing I noted while looking at the table. In 1922, a French franc was worth about 8.2 U.S. cents. By 1926, the rate was 3.2 U.S. cents to the franc. No wonder Hemingway could afford to drink himself silly in Paris, and Liebling could afford to eat himself fat. Further examination of the table traces the course of the great inflation not only in Germany, but also in Poland and Hungary.

One more thing: when looking into the value of the 1920s peso, I happened across an interesting essay about the economics of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by a Wake Forest economist named Robert Whaples.

Toward the end of the essay, Whaples offers this observation: “In these scenes and others, the film examines altruism; bargaining and negotiation; barriers to entry; creation of capital; capital constraints; compensating wage differentials; contract enforcement; corruption; cost-benefit analysis; credence goods; debt payment; deferred compensation; economies of scale; efficiency wages; entrepreneurship; exchange rates; externalities; fairness; the nature and organization of the firm; framing effects; game theory; gift exchange; incentives; formal and informal institutions; investment strategies; job search; the value of knowledge; labor market signaling; selecting the optimal location; marginal benefits and costs; the marginal product of labor; natural resource extraction; opportunity costs; partnerships; price and wage determination; property rights and their enforcement; public goods; reputation; risk; scarcity; secrecy; sunk costs; supply and demand analysis; team work; technology and technological change; the theory of value; trade; trust; unemployment; and the creation and recognition of value and wealth.

Can any other movie offer more?”

Adios, November

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Three yawning months of meteorological winter ahead. That’s what counts for winter: December, January and February. Never mind what anyone says about the solstice. But at least no heavy snow or ice is forecast for now.

Back again to posting around December 10.

What did we do to deserve this sunset? A late November event, as seen from our deck.
On Thanksgiving, the girls and I watched Airplane! on demand. What is it about that movie and its rapid-fire, throw the jokes against the wall to see if they’re funny structure? I’ve watched it a number of times since I saw it when it was new, and it’s funny every time.

Unlike another movie I paid good money to see in 1980: The Hollywood Knights. That was a mistake. So much so that sometime afterward I invented my own personal scale of movie quality: The Hollywood Knights Scale, from zero to some unspecified large number, zero being the worst.

The Hollywood Knights comes in at exactly 0 on my idiosyncratic scale. I’ve seen some bad movies in my time, but that ranking is still valid as far as I’m concerned (though I’d have to put, say, Patch Adams at 0.1).

Not familiar with The Hollywood Knights? Wiki gives a pretty good summation: “The ensuing antics include, among other things, a sexual encounter involving premature ejaculation, a punch bowl being spiked with urine, an initiation ceremony involving four pledges who are left in Watts wearing nothing but the car tires they are left to carry, a cheerleader who forgets to put on her underwear before performing at a pep rally, several impromptu drag races, and the lead character of Newbaum Turk (Robert Wuhl) wearing a majordomo outfit and singing a version of ‘Volare’ accompanied by the sounds of flatulence. Mooning also plays a prominent role in the film…”

None of those things necessarily make the movie unfunny. After all, Airplane! includes jokes about drug abuse, pederasty, oral sex, a sick child, and African-American dialect. There are ridiculous visual gags, such as Ted Striker’s drinking problem or pouring lights on the runway. Punning is rampant (don’t call me Shirley). Yet it all works as a comedy. The writing, directing, acting, timing and entire conceit as a spoof of more serious movies are vastly better than anything The Hollywood Knights did.

Speaking of odd things in movies, this is a still from Animal Crackers.

That’s supposed to be part of an outdoor patio of a lavish home on Long Island. The characters, who are not really that important in the scheme of the comedy, are the wealthy homeowner’s daughter and her honest but poor boyfriend. What caught my eye was that structure behind them.

According to the imdb, the uncredited art director for the firm was the German-born Ernst Fegté, who was working in Hollywood by 1925, and who had a busy career. Now what, I can imagine him thinking, would a wealthy Long Island socialite want for her patio? Something — modern.

The movie was made in 1930. Here’s something else from exactly then, a cover of Radio Listener magazine that I saw at the early Soviet art exhibit at the Art Institute last weekend.

It’s a Peakaboo Stalin. Lenin figured in a fair number of the works, but Stalin was only an up-and-coming character during most of the period. A little like Fonzie, though — pretty soon he’s going to take over the show.

One more thing, and naught to do with movies or the Soviet Union. I took Lilly back to UIUC on Sunday, and en route arranged to take a picture of this roadside attraction in Kankakee. Almost literally roadside, since it’s best seen from I-57.
“28 feet tall, Abe stands in front of a heavy equipment rental lot, and holds signs that promote whatever its owner feels strongly about at the moment,” says Roadside America.

I’ve seen him with a sign, but for the moment he holds none. Just as well, I figure. A sign in Honest Abe’s hands is gilding the lily.