Monday, March 28, 2016

POTUS possibilities: Starting to adjust to a possible queasy-making scenario

Whether you like Donald Trump or not, it seems not a bad idea, given how far along he is in getting delegates to be the Republican nominee at the summer party convention, to start envisioning, and somewhat coming to terms with, what a White House with him in it might be like.

We need not feel this is inevitable (and I certainly don’t plan on voting for him), but trying to anticipate what might, to some, seem an appalling prospect is a little like preparing emotionally for surgery. You know, imagine what the painful, risk-spotted journey will be like. Anticipating the evils can help us absorb them a little better if/when they come. And if Trump doesn’t become president, we’re OK; and maybe we will have “geared up for a rough ride” for how bumpy the White House will be if someone else gets elected we’re not sanguine about.

First, think of the broad conception that some have lately held: an outsider is running for president. He will shake things up policy-wise, and talks about getting tough with our overseas enemies, in a way he presupposes our current pres is not doing well enough. He has been employed as an entertainer, while having held other positions (and in some respects, in some of his career, he may have proven to be little more substantial than a vacuous figurehead), leading some to have asked stoutly, “How is he qualified to be president?” His defenders will quickly rejoin: “Aside from the debate of his own standing, it depends if he gets a really good Cabinet around him.” A popular comical TV show has made jokes about the idea of him becoming president.

Who am I talking about? Trump?

How about Ronald Reagan. Yes, that one who’s considered such a saint today.

(And yes, a joke was made—as if the joke couldn’t be more obvious—about a possible Reagan presidency on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.)

I remember from the 1980 campaign: so much, seemingly to my young mind anyway, of Reagan’s platform was to “get tough with the Russians.” (This was unsettling, if not merely reflective of an unrealistic cast of mind we saw in him, for those of us of an age to possibly be drafted, if the draft were reinstated. I remember when Reagan won in November 1980, a fellow college student could be heard uttering on the street, “Get ready to fight”—i.e., as a foot soldier. At the time, I didn’t think the prospect of our going to war was that strong.)

Never mind that the big military buildup that Reagan was, for years, given credit for actually started in Carter’s last term, in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

“Yes,” you say, “but whether Trump gets good people around him is really up in the air. Reagan had solid people.”

Really? Let’s recall:

* David Stockman, his budget director, who famously in about 1982 was (per the journalists’ metaphor) “taken to the woodshed” for a spanking by Reagan, so to speak, after Stockman had commented in some forum that Reagan’s economic trickle-down budget work was “basically smoke and mirrors” (quotes in this whole entry are sometimes from memory; some may not be exact). If Stockman was out of step here at all, it was in being truthful, and I recall him as holding up honorably over many years; but it showed some of the rot (policy-wise, at least) in the Reagan revolution.

* Ed Meese, Reagan’s blah blob of an attorney general. I think Meese proved to be weakest when he did a soft-peddling initial investigation of the Iran-contra scandal shortly after it broke in November 1986. It then took extensive congressional hearings, which made for TV theater in the warm-season months of 1987, to get more of the truth out.

* Off-color comedy, you want? How about James Watt, the Secretary of the Interior, who made headlines when (I had to read his Wikipedia article to get clear on this), in responding to the issue of whether he had diversity in a certain panel, he said, “I’ve got a Black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” (I remembered the “woman” component, erroneously, as “Oriental.”) Also, as I’d forgotten till I read the Wiki article, there was a kerfuffle where he forbade the Beach Boys to play at a holiday summer event on the National Mall, thinking they would attract the wrong element. (I mean, even for 1984, Watt was well “out of it.”)

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These were among Reagan’s Cabinet, but perhaps some of the worst problems with his presidency, leaving aside the Iran-contra scandal, were his shows of a high-handed dismissiveness (in almost an amateurish way) that he had toward the Soviets, which made him seem like a bumpkin scarily too close to the “nuclear football.” Remember his joking remark, when sound-testing was done for a radio show, and which upset the Soviets when it was picked up and broadcast, about how “The Soviet Union has been outlawed; we begin bombing in five minutes”?

Also, when the Soviets shot down a South Korean airliner in about late 1983 (out of their over-abundance of caution about their borders), though this wasn’t Reagan’s fault, it was part of a larger picture, composed of many notable un-encouraging moments from 1981 through ’83, where by no means did it seem we were making glorious headway with winding down the Cold War.

On Reagan’s part, it would take some moderation, vision-oriented practical-mindedness, helpful political developments on the other side of the Iron Curtain, and probably no small amount of subtle influence from his wife Nancy to get him to be the adept statesman with the Soviets he has gotten credit for in more recent years, starting (stumblingly) in about October 1986 when he first met with Mikhail Gorbachev (a particular meeting that did not go well for Reagan). In 1987, Reagan got into more of a stride of winding down the arms-race insanity with the Soviets, such as a significant arms-reduction treaty later in the year. This would not have cohered with how he rhetorically and diplomatically dealt with the Soviets in his first term.

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So, not being conclusive about the whole-Cabinet idea, if Trump was elected, and Chris Christie joined his cabinet, what type of role would Christie take? A James Watt type? (If CC was Secretary of the Interior, aside from the “promise” of controversial remarks, maybe he would be pressed by an HR type on needing qualifications like knowing what to do about forest fires. Brushfires like “Bridgegate”—a different matter, and one with mixed reviews.)

Or maybe some have thought CC would make a good Spiro Agnew, with that older-era man’s enemies-strafing rhetoric such as referring to journalists as “nattering nabobs of negativity.” But Agnew was from a different administration—one that, regarding its more-colorful members, nobody is holding up as exemplary lately.

Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Movie break: A subdued study-like film good for students, of Hitchcock or otherwise: The Wrong Man (1956), Part 1 of 2

This came amid his great train of works from Rear Window to Marnie, and would almost be forgotten, yet shares some trademark qualities with the others

[Note: This blog entry was in process for weeks before today’s sad news emanated out of Belgium. Suffice it to say that, while you (I) don’t know whether it is worse to hear the content of this news or to endure the tedium and upset of the “haranguing,” drawn-out way it seems to be covered (at least on the radio), the fun aspects of this blog entry aren’t meant to make light of the bad news, while on the other hand, my points about legal process in the U.S. unexpectedly but neatly serve to show how we get along, or try to, in this country, unlike the more authoritarian and violent style of the likes of ISIS.]


First, a passing note on Morley Safer (he’s back on TV, showing the spirit is willing…): [Update 5/12/16: On May 11, CBS announced that Morley Safer is retiring from work at CBS and 60 Minutes.] No, this is not an obituary. Relative old coot that I am, I enjoy watching 60 Minutes on TV on Sunday nights. But I realize that, like so much else in American pop and slightly-more-high-class culture in the past 15 or so years, people have disappeared (either retired to Florida or elsewhere; been quietly removed from their positions; or gone to the next world—with attendant or coincidental broad changes in what passes for market-wise stuff in the media, increasingly oriented to the likes of rabid fans of Jennifer Lawrence). Well, Morley Safer was the last of the old-time 60 Minutes crew, the bunch that started in the late 1960s and ’70s, like Mike Wallace (now deceased), Andy Rooney (ditto; he started in the late ’70s, but still seeming an original member), and even producer Don Hewitt (deceased). I made a loving joke about Morley in this fall 2012 blog entry: Movie break: An “adult picture” on an issue that concerns everyone—corporate malfeasance affecting nationally distributed products and health: The Insider (1999), Part 2 of 2; URL here. My point there wasn’t to scorn Morley; it was to speak with humor such as I try to make typical of my blogs, but trying to bridge my own long familiarity with Morley with likely audiences’ younger-eye aesthetics: I could say, “You know Morley Safer, right?” and they could say, “But he looks so old—like he’s 600.” So, how joke by way of sharing my enthusiasm for someone who seems “so old”?

Well, much more recently, I’d wondered where Morley has been for some time. When Bob Simon died in early 2015, Morley was quoted (on TV camera) in a news item; he looked older and seemed to speak with a bit of a slur. Was he, over the longer term, not well enough to appear on TV anymore? Then, this past March 13, he had a segment on 60 Minutes, interviewing a newly arrived, successful Danish architect. As a longtime connoisseur of 60 Minutes pieces, I was struck by how many different “edits” of Morley’s narrated comments there were—I mean, no surprise such piecemeal editing can go on, but his voice sounded quite different in different bits. Sometimes he seemed a bit slur-apt and mannered; other times, like his old self.

But let’s be charitable, along my with speculating (and of course, how he’s doing in his health is in large part his own “bee’s wax”): he sometimes speaks not entirely well (effect of medication? Did he have a minor stroke? Is some other ailment responsible?); his face seems to show a light as if he’s emerged transcendently from the shadows of less-than-full health, but I thought on March 13 that his eyes looked a bit unusual: had he had an operation on them? For cataracts? And I noticed in one or two shots that he was standing with a cane, which he’d never been shown using before.

So, at age 84, he’s no longer in JV-football-player health. But it was good to see him back on TV, doing a segment with, intellectually, the allusive richness and elegant phrasing we’ve come to expect from him. You know the poem, “Death, be not proud…”; well, allowing old veterans in the media to do their thing in advanced age is a way of saying, “Old age (and possible need for Geritol and adult undergarments), be not proud….


Subsections below (Part 1):
The film takes a civics-lesson approach that was not uncommon in the later 1950s
Hitch opted for an exercise in “neorealism,” but ended up with another well-crafted team effort
Basic facts about the case, and Manny’s stigmatization
Typical Hitchcock touches


Subsections to come in Part 2:
Herrmann’s restrained score both helps define this 1956 film and is one shared trait among several between this film and 1976’s Taxi Driver
The casting, and the question of Hitchcock’s Catholicism
Vera Miles is excellent as the acutely depressed Rose; and elements of psychological understanding and of joking

[Edit 3/24/16. Part 2 of this review is here.]

I’m glad I finally got to see The Wrong Man, after having heard about it in various contexts for a good number of years. For today’s young audiences, even if they are eager to make the acquaintance of Hitchcock, this could well be kept for their later viewing, when they’re older. I think that, for the average caffeine-charged, body-pierced, smartphone-addicted avid young filmlover, it’s about as “happening” as chewing on a feather duster. But to me in my older years, already well familiarized with Hitch, I found this film quite pleasant to check out, though, at least at first, my pleasure was often in how technically it was made. Vera Miles in her performance as Rose, the wife of the wrongly-accused hero (“Manny” Balestrero, played by Henry Fonda), is quite good, and a big step up from the relatively small part she plays as the pinched, impatient sister of Marion Crane in Hitch’s Psycho (1960).

The interesting thing about this film is that, while it was famously based on a real-life case of mistaken identity/arrest/trial that was featured in a magazine in 1953 and was even portrayed in a 1950s TV movie of some kind, it was the first time Hitchcock portrayed a real-life situation in a feature-length film. He even appears in a direct-to-the-camera introduction, explaining the basic situation—that this work, as a nonfictional suspense story, features more odd twists than did the fictional stories he’d earlier presented.


The film takes a civics-lesson approach that was not uncommon in the later 1950s

But this film isn’t just an entertaining technical stunt from Hitchcock (or one of “biographical import,” in relation to the oft-told story of how his father had had five-year-old Alfred put in a jail cell to teach him a lesson, which supposedly haunted Alfred ever after). It comes among several films of the 1950s by various directors that dealt, in ways different in content or angle, with issues of miscarriage of justice, abuse of legal process, mistaken identity in a legal context, and/or the like. On the 2008 DVD for Touch of Evil, commenter and professor James Naremore mentions how there were more films that addressed social justice in the 1950s, which is otherwise thought of as a drily conformist decade, than there tend to be today (on average; he spoke in ~2008), while Touch of Evil was also radical (in his approving view) in its esthetic approach.

But it’s true that social and legal issues were embraced in what now seems a surprisingly concentrated way in that later-Eisenhower era, not just with Welles’ 1958 film, which deals with corruption of personality impacting detective work (centered on falsified evidence), but with Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men (1957), which today helps teach us how a jury should function regarding the issue of reasonable doubt; and even Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), particularly in its trial scene, where the theme of a railroading “show trial,” where men are wrongly tried and convicted for symbolic reasons or in order to intimidate a broader populace, is especially well depicted. (Whatever public consciousness there was throughout the 1950s of the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s in the Soviet Union and the associated novelistic derivative by Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, along with considered review of the McCarthyist abuses of the early 1950s—à la anti-Communist witch hunts—all would have provided important cultural background to the 1950s films’ intellectual agendas.)   

Hitch’s film may seem the most subdued and buttoned-down, in a sense, of all these films, but together they show that on some level, intelligent members of society were concerned with the questions of what to do when, even in an enlightened society like the U.S.’s, the justice system malfunctions? And this was a few years before the Miranda decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, instituting guarantees of the rights of arrested citizens to their being shielded from improper treatment by investigating officers. While Hitchcock’s film also deals, as do these other films, with matters falling under criminal (or military) law (and even if Hitch was concerned, somewhat like Franz Kafka, with the dark, going-haywire potential of these situations, especially in their psychological impact on the innocent victims), still, whether in a civil-law context or not, the theme of a justice system going screwy, whether due to bad-faith motivations or simple mistakenness, is something that never gets old, and never loses its relevance if Americans want to be good citizens and act in line with consciousness of how their justice system is never foolproof and perfect, and needs vigilant citizens “looking in” to “keep it honest,” just as any other institution of our society needs this vigilance.

(This point can be bolstered in two ways: First, when it comes to the likes of recently deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the legal philosophy that the U.S. Constitution should only be said to contain, and extend to modern citizens as legal guarantees, what it was “originally” meant to contain [which many could very well consider the views of a rightist crank], should cohere with the fact that we citizens do not want to be in a position to demonstrate, when the occasion warrants, that the Constitution also does not contain language of an especially colorful and coarse nature that we are all too willing to produce volcanically when we protest about being egregiously and self-evidently mishandled by agents of the state. Second, in work situations, ethical complexities or conundrums between peer, low-level workers who have run into conflict within ingenuous frames of mind can be assessed differently years later; but bad management whose egregiousness is clear at the outset never loses its status as bad management.)


Hitch opted for an exercise in “neorealism,” but ended up with another well-crafted team effort

The Wrong Man also was Hitch’s way of imitating a film genre that was newly coming to the States—“kitchen-sink realism,” as it was informally dubbed, or a kind of neorealism that was first being propagated by new Italian filmmakers. I think that, today, one need not be familiar with this genre, or even ask how well (or how much) Hitchcock captures its style in this film. What I think stands the test of time is that, in this kind of story, how the camera follows the proceedings in an almost plodding, hug-the-droll-details way actually helps convey what an alienating experience being wrongly accused and arrested (or otherwise subjected to a high-stakes legal proceeding) can be. Though little moments in this story may seem rather trite or tedious on second or third viewing, the film overall rewards multiple viewings, not just for how technically adept it is, but for how the simple fear and almost soul-crushing sense of damaged name and (family) prospects can explode in a normal, quiet life when the machinery of the state suddenly enters and marches you through its procedures without any real justification in fact.

Hitchcock interviewed various participants in the real case and tried to get his story as close to the facts as possible (Patrick McGilligan, Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light [ReganBooks, 2003] pp. 534, 536). He also had the services of playwright Maxwell Anderson, a famed name of the time, who had both written a book on the case [added 3/24/16: Actually, as I look into this, while the Wikipedia article on the film suggests he wrote a book on the case, a brief Google search does not show me solid support for this, and McGilligan does not indicate it, either] and co-wrote the script for Hitchcock; the script has a conscientious, level-headed way of walking us through all the details most key to a digestible story. Angus MacPhail also helped with the screenplay (and both Anderson and MacPhail would be tapped by Hitch to work on the succeeding film Vertigo, though neither ended up in the final credits, though some of their ideas [or, in MacPhail’s case, his ethnic background] did contribute to that film).

Then, Hitch used his trusty production team of Robert Burks for cinematography (here, atypically for Burks, working in black-and-white, which comes out fine, giving the film a noir flavor without being stagy); George Tomasini for editing (the film is quite crisply edited, even with some scenes fading out almost too quickly); and Bernard Herrmann for music, along with Herbert Coleman for associate producing (check all Hitch’s major films of 1954-64 for the presence of members of this production team).

The production director for this film was Paul Sylbert (born 1928), brother of the equally illustrious production designer Richard, and Paul speaks on the 2004 DVD.

With Hitch’s standard way of storyboarding an entire film (shot by shot), which is one thing that makes his films still so watchable today, The Wrong Man is quite well put together, even if the story might not grip or affect everybody, equally, today. This story is helped in accessibility by being made by a crack production team at the top of their game within a succession of films that is possibly one of the most artistically successful trains of consecutive films by one director in all of cinema (I’ve seen all of Hitch’s films from 1954 to 1964 except for all of To Catch a Thief [1955], which to me has always seemed like fluff I could just as well skip). (It’s like the phenomenon of how even a relative clunker within the series of films done by Steven Spielberg within his decade-plus of mostly adult films, from 1993, the year of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List, to about 2005, the year of Munich, still seems well done, because a prime director in his fifties is steadily working, and fully effectively, with trusted associates.)


Basic facts about the case, and Manny’s stigmatization

How much the specific facts of this story reflect, bit for bit, the facts of the real case isn’t entirely clear, but it seems the general method Hitchcock used was to follow all the relevant facts, no matter how mundane. Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, a player of an acoustic stand-up bass in a dance band at the Stork Club in NYC, stopped by a life insurance company office to see about taking out a loan on his wife’s policy (this sort of thing is still possible to do, as I did it back in the 1990s) to cover expenses. In this case, the emergent expense was $300 for extraction of impacted wisdom teeth his wife had. Early on, when the family seems in hunky-dory spirits, the couple acknowledges they have to struggle a bit with money at times, but his wife doesn’t yet give the sense of guilt and doom she does later (though a passing remark she makes foreshadows it); the later development is her contracting an acute case of major depression (eventually requiring her to go to inpatient treatment), apparently precipitated by her husband’s arrest. In this later case, her depression not only builds on her feeling that she has brought the misfortune on them because (as she blames herself unfairly) she isn’t a good wife in handling money well, but eventually she starts talking paranoid, as if “they” will break the family down through willy-nilly prosecution of the case so that Manny is imprisoned no matter what they do.

When Manny stops by the insurance company, some women working there suddenly get the notion he was the man who had robbed them some weeks ago (the time of the film is mid-January 1953, and some of the robberies the film refers to happened the previous fall and Christmas season). The film is good at the camera’s coming in close and showing the insurance workers engaging in a kind of acutely worried hugger-mugger, discussing the man at the window (Manny) whom they think is the crook, back for more, even though he is ostensibly asking about his wife’s policy. Shortly after, a level-headed male supervisor will talk to someone at the home office, and eventually—when Manny has left the insurance company office—the police arrange to pick Manny up on his way home and start having him visually inspected by witnesses, and test his handwriting, to see if he is the suspect. From then on, Manny is locked into a mistaken-identity situation, which Hitchcock did in a number of his films. Ironically, in this film, Manny’s name is “mishandled” several times, with some people assuming he goes by “Chris” (short for Christopher), not the “Manny” his close associates know him by; the implication seems to be not only does he become mistakenly in the custody of the city police, but his name gets mangled, adding further to the indignities and rather Kafkaesque oblivion he is sunken into.

Interestingly, near the end of the film, though two of the insurance company women are again enlisted to help identify the real crook, and they spot Manny with his steadfast lawyer at the police station, they hesitate regarding Manny as if feeling awkward but opt not to apologize to him. And the only person Manny confronts in any sense is the crook when the man is ushered past him, and Manny asks him, “Do you know what you did to my wife?” The fact that the insurance woman-workers are never held to account in the story probably reflects Hitchcock’s assessment of these particular women as rather blameworthy in the whole case; it’s more debatable whether this also conforms with his complex and “characteristic” way of regarding women, which of course some have summed up as misogynistic, and which in any event can be at times on the peculiar side, but let’s not go there right now.

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Some details of the police work are interesting. Of the two cops who do the initial investigating, one, an Italian-looking fellow who does most of the procedural talking and managing, seems trying to be judicious toward Manny, only really starting to seem biased against him after the rather dubious handwriting test is done. The other man, a blond, rather cool-looking sort, seems to regard Manny as guilty from the outset, having a steady, skeptical smile at him when questioning him on something. This reminded me of nothing so much as the character played by Richard Anderson in the trial scene in Paths of Glory, where Anderson’s prosecuting attorney is so bemused and indifferent to the fact he is part of a process of a foreordained conviction of the three soldiers, that his smug manner almost seems wildly satirical, if not for how carefully Kubrick handles the Stalinist quality of the trial, overall.

(The blond policeman in The Wrong Man much later “does penance,” spontaneously becoming something of a hero, by suddenly being seized by some recognition of a possibility after he has passed the new robbery suspect being brought into the 110th precinct station, the one in charge of Manny’s case. He returns to the office after almost having left for home, presumably to get the ball rolling on having the new “collar’s” case being collated with Manny’s case, toward possibly getting Manny freed from his original case.)

Despite the overall premise that Hitchcock is showing a legal process that is wrong on a key premise (the identity of their suspect) and from then on seems a headlong Kafkaesque nightmare of sorts, the subtlety and tone of the overall proceedings are kept modest and sensible. No burlesque or pointed satire here.

Another thing that seems amusing today is that the attorney helping Manny, Frank O’Connor (Anthony Quayle, to be discussed more in Part 2), who seems all earnest about wanting to help once he’s heard Manny’s story, warns that he has never defended a criminal defendant in a trial before—which in real life would normally be a big red flag, not that the attorney isn’t sincere—and he says they shouldn’t worry about money now (Manny and Rose and already super-strapped); instead, he counsels, let’s just win the case. This is awfully noble of the attorney, and maybe it was something that could happen in the 1950s on behalf of the right, winning-seeming defendant. But this was before the Supreme Court case that established the right to a free public defender for criminal defendants who are indigent; and certainly in this country today, if you are in a civil (not criminal) case, if you have no money for an attorney, no likes of Frank O’Connor is likely to come gallantly your way.

But these quibbles aside, there is enough realistic about this film, or about which we could give the benefit of the doubt, that it is interesting to watch for me, and I would think for anyone old enough to have lost the “baby teeth” of innocent illusions about the U.S. legal system, especially if the person has been in the teeth of a frivolous or abusive proceeding in the past.


Typical Hitchcock touches

It is a measure of how Hitchcock remains an influence and a sort of seminal director that this film is so watchable, and a treasure chest of things to point out as characteristic of his style and, subsequently, of film techniques that have long been adopted by others. By comparison with The Ladykillers (1955), which I reviewed in two parts spread over this blog and my other one, The Wrong Man is a ready delight to watch just for how well it is visually made, whereas The Ladykillers you have to work up some enthusiasm for.

Because The Wrong Man is in black-and-white, there are certain techniques that were already typical by 1956, and often seen in noir, such as “deep focus,” where all persons in a shot are equally in focus, no matter how close they are to the camera. But there is one Hitchcock visual touch—I mean in addition to his variety of interest-generating camera angles and interspersing medium shots with close-ups—that runs through a lot of his films, at least as late as Topaz (1969), which you usually see in his color films: having a table lamp appear conspicuously in a shot, which seems there to elicit some sense of space between us and one or more character(s) in the shot. Sometimes a scene can be split up into shots where they vary as to whether they feature a lamp. We can find this phenomenon in his great-period films Vertigo and North by Northwest (1959). We see it several times in this film, too.

Another touch is using a visual trick, involving no tiny amount of creative engineering, to evoke a sense of acute psychological distress or some other evanescent phenomenon. In Rear Window (1954), we see the pinkish after-image (in Raymond Burr’s character’s eyes) of the flashbulb going off. In Vertigo, we see (especially in the church tower shots) the famous “trombone shot” of a distance-covering image change in elemental texture to show Scottie’s sudden bout of dizziness. And in The Wrong Man, there is a relatively simple shot of Manny sitting, seeming exhausted, in a jail cell, with the shot starting to turn around as if done on a ferris wheel (in fact, it was, on a small custom-made “ferris wheel”), while the music, per Herrmann, evokes the spinning, increasing-chaos sense. This effect may seem a little hokey today, but the intent is appreciated.

Another shot a bit later has Manny in his new cell, with the camera peering at him through a narrow hole in the door (the special DVD extra, Guilt Trip: Hitchcock and The Wrong Man, explains something about how this was done), and he paces around a bit; and when he hears his name being called, Fonda gives him a confused, paranoid look, as if he can’t grasp what he’s hearing. As it turns out, he is going to be released from his cell, because his bail has been posted. By this point in the film, Hitchcock has gone a long way to show Manny’s emotional dislocation caused by an arrest we will find is firmly established as wrongly based.

Manny will further prove to be emotionally traumatized when, for instance, as he arrives home, he looks leerily at the place in the street across from his house where the police had been waiting for him two nights ago. Hitchcock was an early master at explicitly depicting psychological dislocation in an age when the popular audiences were hungry for it in films and literature.

To be continued.

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

R.I.P.: George Martin (1926-2016), first among “fifth Beatles”

There have been numerous people nicknamed (by fans, critics, etc.) “the fifth Beatle” over the 45+ years since The Beatles broke up, but the assessment can fairly apply to several people (as mathematically awkward as that may be), and they can be parsed, with their special distinctions, this way:

Fifth Beatle in terms of securing the business deals of the first five-or-so years of their career, including (as far as I understand) some kind of ~10-year arrangement with Capitol Records and/or EMI starting in 1967: Brian Epstein, their manager.

Fifth Beatle in terms of being a factotum in their early years, and an essential linchpin in keeping their business affairs as a group “together” and able to produce future profits (per their old group identity, not as individual post-breakup artists) after Epstein’s 1967 death and after their business dalliance with Allen Klein: Neil Aspinall (who died in 2008).

Fifth Beatle in terms of being a lovable roadie: Mal Evans (who died in 1976).

But….

Fifth Beatle in artistic terms, in being essential to their development on various levels on records and their control of their art, to the point where, in their latest albums (except for Abbey Road), he could let them manage their own recording sessions more: George Martin.

The obituaries will say as much authoritative stuff as I could on the fly, so check them out (especially, though I haven't read much of it yet, Allan Kozinn’s in The New York Times).