A Jet-lagged Hayride with Dracula: LOST IN TRANSLATION, THIS GUN FOR HIRE

"As for fidelity, should one not be faithful to all those whom one loves?" - Robin Wood  

Watching the weird nocturne noir chemistry cohere like a ghost from the black and white celluloid mist of This Gun for Hire (1942) for the zillionth time, I'm still trying to nail down the lovesick ache I get from Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake's mystical lost ghost frequency. Blonde, small (ten feet between them) and only flickeringly emotional, they're like a separated-from-birth version of Sharon Tate and David Hemmings in Eye of the Devil, or two alien-human hybrids who recognize each other from a past off-world life.

Neither fraternal nor sexual (as critic David Shipman notes, Ladd "never flirted nor even seemed interested, which is one of the reasons he and Lake were so effective together." [2]), their muted chemistry is so elusive, so void of frills and posturing, it resonates today as strongly as it resonated with wartime audiences. It's the "speak-softly-because-you-don't-know-who's-listening" wartime caution ("loose [or loud] lips sink ships"), the same shadowy skull reflection death drive cool low-key whispery savvy we find in Val Lewton's horror films and Sinatra's ghostly radio crooning from the same period (1941-45). There's a stealthy 'shhhhh don't wake the parents or the baby or the sleeping regiment' emotional intimacy that reaches out to include the listener/viewer like a warm blanket.

This was the era when every healthy able-bodied man was overseas facing death, and the women were expected to go into a kind of sexual deep freeze, working in munitions plants or driving cabs, and waiting for letters from the front, terrified of the arrival of an officer with an ominous telegram in the middle of the night. In the B movies from Monogram, Bela Lugosi abducted and froze the virgin brides and while men died powerless in their foxholes and idiot heroes missed obvious clues. John Carradine brushed their baby's zombie hair while they moaned powerless from their seats in the canteen.

But for all that, their woman's chastity was intact, somehow. We knew it would be all right as long as we kept our voices low. Sinatra's crooning soft from the radio protected them all like the giant wing of a feathery evening. Ladd and Lake's chemistry was perfect for this deep freeze moment. They pulled themselves from the gravity of their respective slumbering arcs and fully noticed each other, falling, with us, into a new kind of subtle dream.

That kind of subtlety is never popular for long however. Sleazy studio heads--perhaps used to a steady supply of eager would-be starlets ("Mr. Smearcase!" as per Lake's ingenue in Sturges' Sullivan's Travels) parading their wares-- were like John Travolta's snickering entourage in Grease, they want to know 'did they or didn't they?' Sympathetic wavelength entrainment and platonic pair bonding were to these slavering troglodytes just synonyms for cowardice in the face of zong zong zip zowie awooga!

Such men are a blight on Hollywood and human genomes. They're stuck there. But you! Oy, you can-a-dance-in-a-Manhattan, Vinny. All fornication will get you is VD or a kid, Vinnie. One broken condom at the drive-in ("feelin' like a fool / wonderin' what the kids will say / next day at school") and your career is over: child support, and diapers. Diapers, Vinnie! Or just whispers, shadows, cigarettes, and insouciant gazes. 4-ever.

Note: subliminal similarity to a multi-armed Hindu deity

That's the trick to staying cool in wartime: honoring the homefront sexual deep-freeze, the core of platonic alien jet-lagged love. To relish the anguish of sexual longing and sublimate it into art and friendship rather than materialize its carnal shadow and therefore obliterate it, this is the highest form of fraternal love. As I've written before on this site, in Visconti's The Leopard, Burt says "marriage is six months of fire, forty years of ashes," but with platonic love / friendship it's ten-to-twenty of slow-burning coal. Isn't that better, and way harder to find? Whether he's dead Fred from Night of the Iguana, an old wise film critic whose Cialis prescription ran out, a savvy Lacanian, or a sixty foot tall gorilla, the adroit, awakened lover is transported by beauty past the breakwaters of horniness and into accidental chivalry, into honor, the Hawksian code.

After all, she's got a boyfriend... over there... somewhere... it would be a kind of like Nazi sabotage to take advantage of his absence.

The first scene of This Gun For Hire tells it all: Raven (Ladd) rips the sultry boarding house maid's dress, not to ravish her but because she was mean to his kitten. Raven makes only two 'moves' on Ellen (Lake), the first to steal five dollars from her purse and next to march her into an abandoned building, not for vile molesting, but to shoot her dead as a witness, as someone he thinks is in cahoots with Laird Cregar. She gets away only by the timely return of two construction workers back from their lunch break. Her friend later tells her she looks like she's been on a "hayride with Dracula," an analogy which works well, as Drac's motives aren't carnally impure either. He's just in it for the blood.

The few times Ladd and Lake did hook up in a movie, their kiss happened only at the end, or after fade-out. We seldom saw the actual kiss. The Blue Dahlia (1946) for example, fades out on William Bendix and Hugh Beaumont looking over at Ladd and Lake, offscreen, who are by then presumably kissing. We've been longing for them to get together all through the film but now that there's nothing standing between them... well, who likes seeing their parents kiss, even if they're little blonde aliens? 

Aliens... I don't only mean extraterrestrial but also alienated. Foreigners in a strange land, unable to shake their dreamy disconnected jet lag ennui. When they finally meet a fellow traveler as alienated as themselves, like Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob Harris (Bill Murray) in Lost in Translation (2003) after so many lonely alienated hours, well, it's a special magic. Both unable to sleep in their ritzy Tokyo hotel, not speaking Japanese at all, or any other language, their initial reason for being there not taking up much of their time, their gaijin height and features contrasting them from the rest of the city as distinctly as giant Nephilim Nordic Vikings, they can either hang out together or with no one. They connect, but it's more about their sharing loneliness, as opposed to merging into couplehood --with all the associative baggage that implies.

I remember when I saw Translation at a Chelsea theater during its initial run on Thanksgiving in 2003 at with a cadre of AA people. I was in the throes of something so similar to the doomed bonding of Bob and Charlotte, I felt like the film was a continuation of my own life, with Manhattan doubling for Tokyo and Brooklyn for the States. I recognized too the dangers of this intense bond leading anywhere other than disaster, largely from the cautionary example of Steve Buscemi and Thora Birch in Ghost World (left), in which Johansson also co-starred just two years earlier.  We all in that AA posse recognized the same lost soul magnetism between Murray and Johansson in our own love for each other, the gorgeous ephemeral lost soul union known only to we who have heard the chimes at midnight fade into sirens and muffled EMT voices muffled across hurricanes of silence far over our heads as we leaned back against the flat bumpy pillow of the numb sidewalk and felt with our eyes half-open like we were standing, sitting up and lying down all at the same time: "Sir? Sir? Can you hear my voice? Have you had anything to drink or taken anything tonight?"

"Taken anything".. what a dumb expression, you think. No ossifer, everything's right where I found it.


Isolated in our space, cut off and adrift, our precious alcohol on the other side of a dangerous highway, when someone else comes along who gets that, someone also on that level--a sympathetic cute chick EMT rather than a suspicious cop eyeing your bulging gym bag--well, she's too precious to throw away by busting even some advanced playa move. You might rear back and think that's being scaredy-cat, but I know the follow-through too well. If it works, you have to make out for hours and blah blah, and if it doesn't and she leave, you die on the street, the average folks stepping over you like you're just another vagrant, and aren't you?

People say men and women don't know how to be friends but what they mean is they don't know how. Love can flourish more profoundly in a platonic friendship, irregardless of genders, or numbers. You needn't be monogamous or cockblock or judge or restrict or allow those things to be done to you. But first you need to have achieved a few of your life's most cherished desires, like crawling through the parched sand for days, finally making it to the far off mirage of a water fountain and seeing at last it's just a rock. Or in love's case, a goddamned diaper. Is anything more revolting than when love leads to a family? What's the use of being a hit man at all if they're just going to keep coming?

There needs to be some peace, a population evening-out, otherwise no one even has a chance to experience the grand crushing emptiness of making it to the water fountain and finding out it's just a fountain-shaped rock. To paraphrase Jim Morrison--no earth-shattering orgasm or greaser high-five will forgive you for the dawn you just wasted.


Breeder San Francisco homicide detective Michael Crane (Robert Preston - above) for example, wants to waste the dawn that is Lake's shimmering hair in This Gun for Hire by turning her into "a cop's wife," "I don't understand it," notes one of her fellow showgirls to him, "that girl is nuts about you," We don't understand it either.

Robert Preston? Whaaaat? Whyy? We can feel all the disembodied souls swarming around Lake like masked figures at a sold-out Sleep No More consider, at this news, breaking off to haunt some other gorgeous blonde. No point jostling with those other souls in the dark if you have to grow up with half the gene pool of this dunderheaded straight-edge who expects your gorgeous mom to cease chanteuse-ing, to perform instead for an audience of one, "darning his socks and cooking his (and eventually your) corned beef and cabbage." I love This Gun for Hire but when I hear that line I wince and want to shout, "all that horrid smelling steam will ruin her heavenly hair!"

No offense meant to Preston, he's great as the uber-gay promoter in Victor/Victoria, his winning performance did wonders for easing America's collective homophobia, but his detective is a safety-first putz fit to warm the Catholic Legion of Decency's heart, but annoy everyone else. When he sees lovely Lake slink onto the stage and do her number, this future fey Music Man can only imagine getting her out of that shimmery gown and into an apron; he sees her gorgeous hair and imagines how much better it will look wilted from the steam, leaning over a pot of fucking boiled cabbage all day. As Bugs Bunny would say, what a maroon. And is she any better?

I can only presume we're supposed to feel that way. In the shadowy option of the other side, Lacan's primal (or anal) father, is Laird Cregar, nimbly seeming both gayer and straighter than Preston, referring to his main vice as "backing leg shows" and by acknowledging the job's essential tawdriness, he brings it some counterintuitive class and legitimacy. He might be a lech, but at least he wants Ellen looking glamorous for everyone rather than Crane's super-menial "cabbage-cooker for one" alternative.

Oh well, even if she didn't wind up as a blue collar cop's wife role in her subsequent films and even if Gun would be the last time we have to have a square boyfriend for her (just noble dimwits or blustery gangsters from now on), we know her real love is always that lost cause with a broken wrist who claws at everyone but her. She looks at sweaty little crumb bums like Ladd's Raven or amateur mendicant-disguised Sullivan with compassion of the same sort Raven has for the stray boarding house kitten, not with disgust or judgment the way the rest of the world does, just one right guy to another, take it or leave it. The compassion in her eyes when she looks at Raven, especially on the train and when they're hiding out at the train yard, provides one of the great transcendental healing gifts of the movies. Hers is a look beyond sentiment, sympathy or some covertly judgmental altruism. It's a real feeling of empathy--it's lifted me out of many a post-bender shame spiral and made me, like Raven, her loyal champion. She's the dream girl for all us broken mugs who need a friend--her beauty acts like a healing opiated salve on our souls, and she's glad to radiate as long as we don't get Smearcase touchy-feely, which we're too shaky to try, anyway. 

"You know, the nice thing about buying food for a man is that you don't have to listen to his jokes. Just think, if you were some big shot like a casting director or something, I'd be staring into your bridgework saying 'Yes, Mr. Smearcase. No, Mr. Smearcase. Not really, Mr. Smearcase! Oh, Mr. Smearcase, that's my knee!' - Veronica Lake's character, a struggling actress who spends her last dime on who she thinks is a bum but is a slumming director who knows Lubitsch - Sullivan's Travels 1941

The same beauty Ladd and Lake capture in Gun is here in this diner between Lake and McCrea, the Hawksian self-awareness that keeps one so aloof from the shallow world finally being rewarded in a union of equals, and she's free from Mr. Smearcase and his grabby hands (in 1951's The Thing, Margaret tells Pat how much she likes him only when his hands are safely tied - Hawks knew, too, the two are connected).

And then there's that hair. Gun for Hire is considered her big hair breakout, but if she owes her career to anyone it's not her hairdresser or Ladd or Raymond Chandler but Preston Sturges, for throwing her into a pool in Sullivan's Travels (1941), leading to the scene where she brushes her long hair out by the pool in her sexy white robe. A complex post-modern masterpiece on the bourgeois need to tell the story of 'the little guy' to the little guy who'd rather not hear about it. (3)  

There's only one problem: there are only a few Lake-Ladd noirs, and only a few other films that know how to situate Lake's rare gifts --and once you watch 'em all, where are you? A shivering alcoholic in the cold again, sifting through your stacks of DVDs like they're a bunch of empty bottles, wondering if there's anything left, anywhere, for that sense of Hawksian bonding or Lake-Ladd alien frequency, that golden healing opiated salve. Can Ramrod fit the bill? No. Her hair never leaves those western coiffs.

"It's really the repression of sex (think of old stories like Brief Encounter and Love Affair) and the acceptance of a carnal boundary that can't be crossed that becomes, in their eloquent silence-filled rapport, a form of love more life-altering than the sexual contortions now monotonously de rigu eur." - Molly Haskell (4) 

The tragedy with the couple in platonic love orbit in Lost in Translation, is that each party has already 'settled' for an approximation of what they considered 'normal' - the cop boyfriend or the star-chasing photographer, some banal 'normie.' Luckily, it's not a tragedy, as that obligation to be faithful to an undeserving other frees them from needing to drag the carnal along into their love affair. Courtly love was never about breaking up the marriage, which was usually arranged at the time. Sex was what triggered your disillusionment, not the other way around. It's the hesitant but undeniable attraction of doomed lovers in the lost moment, sharing the pain of remembering that loving bond, that matters. Anyone who's fallen in love from a distance--something all too common in the internet age where the lack of earthly parameters frees one to write acres of poetry and longing prose letters--vast forests of stanzas--that never need to be printed or even saved, anymore than their yearning urgency needs to be concretized in the carnal sack. The lover in your mind isn't usually even close to the actual person anyway. When you finally meet up, there's that awkward first few hours as you adjust your expectations.

In AA we say 'think the drink through.' Instead of just thinking of the drink and the sweet sudden feeling of completeness, of joy and fearless brio, the surge of coherence, confidence, inspiration, and jubilant love it brings, think it through to the need for the next one, twice as strong as the need for the first, but with only half the joy and completeness, and then the sodden depression when we're too drunk to do anything but drink more, and gradually we're too fucked up to do anything else but pour. And then... it's all gone, and we're too fucked up to get any more. We can't even find our goddamned pants, or even the phone to order delivery, let alone drive or stagger to the liquor store.

But it's the same for Bob as he's being drawn to Charlotte in Translation, that rapturous connection too delicate to risk with clumsy fumbling. In AA we also say "drink all you want, just don't drink the first one," i.e. if you don't have the first drink, you're free, and that's not a lot to ask, considering all the other drinks waiting. It's a trick, but it works. Same thing in the Bob-Charlotte or Lake-Ladd connections: if you don't make a first move you'll never lose her. Maybe she'll sleep with every single one of your friends while making eyes at you, but in 20 years you will be the only guy she remembers without anger and remorse when she's making her qualification in Sex Addicts Anonymous. And if you doubt your love is stronger without it, just check how peevish Scarlett is at Bill for hooking up with that lounge singer. Here they're both married, but the real devotion is to each other, and sex with other people is an affront, almost too close to the real thing.

It's a Catch-22. It's like death, in fact, and like death you are officially permitted to laugh it off, to stand pat, sound in your Lacanian ideal and self knowledge, using her loveliness to fuel your art. Forever. There's no greater bond. If Death chooses you, if Death makes the first move, then okay. But you don't have to make it easy for her. Death loves a good challenge! Pedro, did you put the girl on the stage or not??

No! she did not go!

It's that death drive as a platonic ideal that is why Johansson was so well cast in Lost and later in Her and the underrated Lucy and why it was so important she wanted to fool around with Captain America in Winter Soldier and later Bruce Banner/Hulk in Age of Ultron, but they were the ones who held back. Natasha Romanov, sexy seductress super spy: it's great that she wants to fool around with you, it's bad if you allow it, because this is a girl so used to having men she wants, of using sex as a weapon, of being constantly ogled, seducing and destroying, that the only way to win her respect is to not be one of her countless conquests. You can't risk the Hulk coming out when she dumps you, or sleeps with some KGB shithead as part of her job. In this way art thou noble, chivalrous, and tortured enough that your soul is forge-hot, ready to be hammered by God or the Devil into brave new shapes.

And if you love her, you want her respect more than the crushing pain of thwarted desire; if she doesn't call you back some rainy Sunday night, it won't be for anything you did wrong. Brits have this shit down with the relationship between Dr. Who and his companions, for them--with tons of platonic pair bonds--it's no big deal. Only America, where sex is such an obsession it's stifled in its cradle, does such steamy self-sabotage keep everyone lonely in that susceptible-to-advertising way so intrinsic to first world domination.

Take it from me, the pain's the same, either way. Things are only valuable once they're lost. So lose yourself and watch your price shoot up until you're smack center of the comic store window. So what if you're not in Near Mint condition? You're still Very Fine.

On the other hand, if she moves in, goes for that first kiss, you may as well go along because it's even better if you help. And it's rude to refuse a beautiful woman. And then that's probably going to be it, onscreen, so make it count. Censors, man. What you do after the fade out, or whether or not we pan to your buddies walking down the street, passing below the window, wondering if they'll ever get to be sheriff or mind their own business, or pull away from your conversation on the Tokyo street so we can't hear it ---that has to be your affair, private, for this all to work. There's only one solution to the bind Charlotte and Bob find themselves in at the end of Lost in Translation, for their final words together --Bob's whispering in the Tokyo throng while his car service sits in traffic--to be unheard by our corrupting microphone ears.

Anyway, we'll always have Facebook.

Here's looking at you/r kid/s.

NOTES
1. Robin Wood, Sexual Politics in Narrative Cinema, (p. 82)

2. Shipman, David. The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years. New York: Hill & Wang, 1979.
3. I wish had a making-of documentary extra, so we could see all these rich characters with expensive filmmaking machinery filming a bunch of extras as hobos hopping a freight train in a movie about how dumb it is for rich guys to film hobos running onto a train instead of Ants in Your Plants.
4. Molly Haskell "Melancholy Males or Movies about Men Turning 50" (The Guardian, Oct. 10 2003)

10 Great Movies for a New Years Day Hangover

Damn but you made a mess of things last night --I mean you must've since you don't remember and your girlfriend's on the couch instead of in bed with you and you're fully dressed, under the covers, waking up now in late afternoon, bleary and a mess, to reach with shaking hand for that warm foam-crusted highball on your nightstand, swilling it down before the gag reflexes can kick in, before you can get sick from the pain of hangover. You choke it down, which gives you strength to pop up and make a gin and juice 50/50 juice glass full. Bliss. And then... floating through another blackout day.

Then... waking up again, a messier mess of things, blearier, shakier hand, for that warm... wait where the fuck is it?

When did I start to lose you in that last paragraph? The crusty highball hand-reach? Well, we can't all be 'blessed' with alcoholic genes. For the rest, a hangover on New Years Day is as close as you're gonna get. Let's say you wake up, you'll give me that at least? And it's January first, and it's getting dark all ready or so it feels- you're not used to getting up in late afternoon... And it's cold, and you don't have to work tomorrow, so there you are.

It's time to watch TV and recuperate. That's where I can help.

Here are some important DON'Ts  for hangover or detox recovery movies (Because you are very sensitive to noise and unpleasantry):

NO: gross-outs: eating, bodily humors, bathroom incidents (you'll literally gag)
NO: bugs, jungles, tropics (you'll sweat in sympathy)
NO: Cruelty and ugliness (all your sense are amplified)
NO: Loud sudden shocks, screaming, banging on pots, or playing harmonica
NO: Shouting, yelling, blue collar misery (you have enough of that just in your dry mouth)
NO: factories (ugh!)
NO: TV commercials (so watch TCM or DVDs)
-----------
Here are some recommended DOs:

YES: Sexual heat, with good rhythmic second chakra breathing (realigns the dilated nerves)
YES: cold climates, snow, ice (shrinks inflammation)
YES: Youthful love and tragic romance (you're very emotional)
YES: people talking in low, conversational voices (shhh)
YES: the sweet freedom of cheerfully facing immanent death for a noble cause (allays your guilt over trashing today through yesterday's revelry).

SO.....

1. ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE (1969) Dir. Peter Hunt

The main thing here that's good for the alcohol-poisoned penitent is the length of the film and the cold atmosphere: the frozen, snowy on-location Alps raced around in by hard-to-shake bad guys in pursuit of our boy Bond--Lazenby, who's just dull but not obnoxious, so it's quite all right. The trip to Blofeldt's mountaintop lair is itself an amazingly cohesive journey, from car to helicopter to cable car, up, up, up. And then some girls girls girls who aren't afraid to write their room numbers in lipstick on Bond's naked thigh, and the amazing Telly Savalas laying out his big plan, cigarette in hand, or saying "you love chickens...." with that great nasal smoker delight in his voice, through a light-sound hypnosis machine. And then down down down, via cable car, skis, one ski, ice skates, car, and on and on, chased by actual professionals who can't easily be brushed off, for a change. By then your pulse will be slowing and the relative leisurely composition of the first half of the film will ease you into the hair-raising second half. Bond is always comfort when detoxing, but nowhere near as comforting for the alcoholic in recovery than when sheathed in snow and supported by Mrs. Peele herself, Diana Rigg. She's so forgiving of his momentary fear, and his gratitude for her managing to be in the right place at the right time is so touching, and her fearless ability drive aggressively when he's just too worn out, is so palpable it's like she's our own AA sponsor.

2. TITANIC (1997)

Dir. James Cameron

See above for importance of cold and length. You need long cold movies, because being without a movie to watch, or pick next or figure out something else to do after an hour and a half is terrifying. Loneliness or the terror of being dragged out to another overpriced club are always beckoning. Also, your heart is like those icebergs, melting now with remorse, and other things. I saw this in the theater the day after New Years Day, which I spent getting royally sick as my girl tried to get me to stop booze cold turkey. She wouldn't even give me no weed! It would have helped with the nausea. That bitch. But the next day we went to see TITANIC and leaving the theater I could barely walk, my dilated nerves and heightened volatile emotions were so carried aloft in the grandeur and sweep and blue light ice farewell, I was a sobbing mess. My cold turkey girlfriend sneered at me for crying but that didn't bother me. The film's got everything a good hangover movie needs: ice, love, and in-the-moment live for today-no tomorrow philosophy. I could have done without the framing device. but hey, I guarantee that if you're in that dilated nerve ending brutal hangover state, the movie will work for you too, and now you can FF-right past Bill "I never let it in" Paxton, if you want, though you won't have the wherewithal to do so so just SUCK IT UP!

I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE (1944)

Dir. Jacques Tourneur / Prod. Val Lewton

You wouldn't think a movie set in the Caribbean would fit this list but this isn't the 'real' Caribbean. No one sweats on the isle of San Sebastian; it's a Caribbean of the mind, cool and dry as a thigh bone rattle, and full of windy mystery as experienced through the eyes of a smitten nurse (the always soothing Frances Drake). I love the spiderweb latticework shadows of potted ferns and porch struts and harp strings, and through it all blows a gentle insistent leaf-rustling wind which builds to a thrilling, satisfying chill in the midnight through-the-cane field walk, the wind calling them through skull sign posts and dry cane stalks and a skeletal Darby Jones guarding the way. When we were young, brother and I watched this and Cat People nearly every night on a back-to-back tape every late night for an entire summer, the fan roaring in front of the TV, amazed how well such apparently slight 'everything to the imagination' films like these could hold up under such heavy repeat viewing. I watched it again recently and was floored about how so little happens, and so quickly. I love the beautiful opening with the Canadian snow outside the window and a Frances Dee voiceover, through to the end with a local black wise man's voiceover on St. Sebastian, offering a prayer for the dead. Where did that guy come from? We don't see anyone with that voice, but it works - he's St. Sebastian himself, perhaps... either way it's as soothing and lovely as a 50/50 gin and grapefruit juice for breakfast.

NADJA (1994)
Directed by Michael Almereyda

This was made by someone with a clear love of the genre, as it's structured like a loose remake of the 1935 Universal horror classic, DRACULA'S DAUGHTER with shades of THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, and BLOOD AND ROSES (i.e. CARMILLA). It's full of beautiful black and white film compositions, with occasional lapses into pixelated imagery culled from a then-the-rage Fisher Price Pixelvision movie camera. With a bad hangover you wont mind the blurriness of these stretches, which add a dreamy surrealist patina, and the rest of the film is de-gorgeous (a phrase we used back then, as Deee-Lite was pop queen of NYC night life). I couldn't get more than 45 minutes into the over-baked unoriginal pomp of Jarmusch's overpraised ONLY LOVER'S LEFT ALIVE but this film really knows its classic horror movies and has some interesting things to say, with great Gothic shots that wondrously fuse the downtown grit of NYC and the lighthouse expressionism of the old world. Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) is weary of her jet set life and longs to love her latest victim, a girl with a great East Village apartment. The cast is gorgeous, and soothing to the eye. Unlike, say, so many Duplassy mumblecore types, these actors are both gorgeous yet intelligent, witty yet not snarky. And hangovers can be soothed by the beauty of Galaxy Craze as Lucy--a kind of Molly Ringwald divided by Deborah Kara Unger. There's also the beautiful Martin Donovan as Harker, a once-beautiful Peter Fonda as a hippie Van Helsing, and a surprisingly sexy Jared Harris as a punk rock ill brother Nadja harbors weird incestuous desire for, and Suzy Amis as his nurse whom Nadja wants out of the way. It's clear in every frame and spoken word that the Gothic expressionistic blood of Karl Freund, the philosophy of Nietzsche, and the downtown cool of Abel Ferrara cohere and flow through Almeyerda's venis. I even like his 1998 film THE ETERNAL (Aka TRANCES), a weird Irish bog mummy tale that plays out like a hybrid SHINING-SZAMANKA coupled to that old Bram Stoker chestnut "Jewel of the Seven Stars," filmed once by Hammer in the 60s as BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB. Like NADJA, also good for a hangover.

5. SPRING BREAKERS (2013)

Dir. Harmony Korine

A homage to film noirs like GUN CRAZY or THE BIG SLEEP, molded halfway into a Lite Brite money chute that's intoxicatingly dangerous, its measured sexual breath energy is perfect for second chakra-alignment. I haven't had drugs on my person in years but suddenly I felt the cops coming in through the window, or through my skin, watching Korine's movie with my headphones on. The cold feeling in the blood it created made me realize, for the first time, I never knew that blood 'running cold' is a literal thing. It reminds me why I never liked cocaine -- I'll gladly sacrifice the sexual gyrating moment by moment heavy breathing tactile intensity to not feel the blood run cold pit of the stomach disappearing empathy response. But BREAKERS glows like the secret chamber in a TWIN PEAKS bordello. Once the Jesus freak girl goes home, this shit really gets good, turning into a badass bizarro world version of CHARLIE'S ANGELS with James Franco inhabiting the role of a southern fried gangsta rapper Charlie--singing Britney songs on his outdoor piano, fellating a gun and squabblin' with his childhood buddy, the reigning (black) king of St. Pete. Hear it with 'phones for maximum ASMR drugginess; it will contextualize and heal and soothe your hungover brain... and ease your woeful remorse.

6. THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1957)

Dir. Douglas Sirk

Like Harper is a grim sequel to The Thin Man, which itself was a sequel to The Big Sleep (i.e. Nick and Nora are what happened after Marlowe married heiress Vivian Rutledge), so The Tarnished Angels can be imagined as a sequel to those 30s MGM barnstormers, with Robert Stack as the Clark Gable daredevil pilot, and Jack Carson as the Spencer Tracy dog fox gone-to-ground mechanic. Then there's Dorothy Malone in the Harlow role, so smoking hot and well-lit you join the crew of leering sleazebags that pay to watch her parachute down in a fluttering skirt. It's based on a Faulkner story and you will finally believe Rock Hudson can act as he plays a tipsy reporter smitten by Malone and in quiet awe of Stack's daring, but Stack needs flight "like an alcoholic needs his drink," and when his plane crashes out from under him he pimps out his wife to get a new one.

The flight races are spectacular, some truly amazing barnstormer flying going on. It's in black and white Cinemascope, a rarity in itself, but you eventually get sucked in, especially with a decent DVD transfer, which you can get via the TCM Archive and maybe nowhere else. Expensive, then, but worth it... Even if you come away from it all feeling a bit down on life as a whole, you're sure one thing: these three leads show so much power they all but crack the film apart. The best scene occurs with Stack and Malone crashing on Hudson's floor and couch. He comes home a bit drunk, Carson is asleep, and there she is, awake and whispering to him. Sirk's decadent black and white lighting shining through her white nightgown as she spreads herself along the couch, and it's so hot you almost pass the fuck out. Looks like we're... closed for the evening. I'd give Stack a plane too, and so would Rock, if we could have for ourselves even for a night the Malone in this film --and we hate ourselves for being so vile, and so does she. But that just makes her all the sexier. That and the whispering and the live-for-the-moment all make it an ideal hangover movie.

7. ANIMAL CRACKERS (1930)

Dir. Victor Heerman

Few consider ANIMAL CRACKERS to be the Marx Brothers best film (most go for either NIGHT AT THE OPERA or DUCK SOUP), but much as I love all their Paramount work and their first two movies at MGM, for my acid viewing, nothing beats 1930's ANIMAL CRACKERS. It's their most psychedelic and unforced. When Groucho does his STRANGE INTERLUDE impression and steps out of the action to directly address the camera in a dreamy poetic rhythm, trippers freak out thinking he's talking directly to them across time and space. It's also the second and last Marx effort based on an actual a priori stage play (so all jokes are time-tested), and it has a great George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart script. It takes its time and spreads out and was filmed out on Long Island and the Brothers radiate a zany ease only proximity to their hometown NYC can provide. Make sure to see it from the beginning, when it starts it looks like it's going to be the most boring musical ever made: Seems 'yawn' Mrs. Rittenhouse (Margaret Dumont) is giving a party on her Long Island estate. Oh great, you think with inner sarcasm, this is gonna be super boring and can ease my pain by offering no suspense or guilt whatever; then... Captain Spaulding arrives --and we get a rare chance to see Groucho wow the crowds with some truly original leg dancing. All worries vanish into a haze of giddy laughs and bourgeois tolerance, even when they occasionally drown you in puns. And your dilated nerves will be glad to hear Harpo's absolving harp interlude and will gently trill at the bare Norma Shear shoulders of the younger ladies, and will be assured by the imperious gullibility of Margaret Dumont no permanent harm can happen here; and there's also future alcoholism survivor Lillian Roth, rolling her eyes like she's too good for it all--and we certainly agree she's too good for Hal Thompson as the earnest wooer whose rank imitation has the "the soul of the Bogard." Truly, that battered MacGuffin canvas heals the broken misery of life.

8. NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)

Dir. Alfred Hitchcock

It's regal, it's lovely, its gray flannel and blue train color schemes soothe the spirit, and of course Cary "No mother, they didn't give me a chaser" Grant forgives us all trespasses. He soothes a scene just by being in it. Wily agent Eva Marie Saint is soothing, too, never speaking above a purr. Even the bad guys (James Mason and Martin Landau as his fey henchman) never shout but rather use their words in silken eloquence. The only loud behavior comes from Bernard Herrmann's aggro score. It's a Bollinger mimosa of a movie, and long enough that it counts as three refills-- enough to uncoil your misery.

9. MACBETH (1948)

Dir. Orson Welles

I'm partial to this film from days of watching my streaky VHS dupe over and over during my last alcoholic relapse, drawing pangs of solace from Macbeth's inconsolable guilt, his sense of letting ambition and his wife's venomous viper words (she's the equivalent of the demoness in the bourbon bottle) draw him farther and farther into the morass. This is the movie for when you're trying not to think about the horrible mess you made of your night, and nervous system. And now thanks to Olive's Blu-ray you can see the dirt on the stage sky - the vast cavernous set--with jagged mountainsides fresh from Republic westerns, like a spirit world, neither indoors no out, neither onstage, no off, with the thick atmosphere seeming to breathe and thrive, even when the Scottish brogues are so thick you can barely understand a word... but who cares? You can savvy enough to be moved and to have your emotional state of remorse and guilt reflected in great Elizabethan poetry, the feeling of eternal night and fog and Welles' voice as absolving and dissolving in its mellifluent baritone as an Epsom salts bath.

10. THIS GUN FOR HIRE (1942)

Dir. Frank Tuttle

With her soft dream-like voice like she's trying to not wake up your angry girlfriend, Veronica Lake is a great salve for any hangover. Her chemistry with the equally soft-voiced Ladd is palpable, and sublime enough to forgive the endless contrived coincidences the plot hinges on. There's a weird thick layer of quiet in this film, perfect for hangovers or guilty consciences. Topping it off, the great Laird Cregar as the most silken of villainous stooges, his whole elegantly large form trembling at the thought of the violence he must inflict on his captive, he brings it all into perspective; it's just another night after all... you'll live. No matter what you did last night, Veronica Lake forgives you. Have a peppermint. (See: Veronica Lake Effect).


Erich Sez: When in doubt pick quiet, dark movies w/ devouring hotties

Now if you decide, wisely, to drink more the morning after, i.e. the hair of the dog, to cure your hangover, may I suggest the films mentioned below? A highball glass filled halfway up with gin and topped off with grapefruit juice, no ice, will dissolve the pain and you'll feel the glorious flush of rapture that only the true benders know, and these films will let you know you made the right choice. Just remember to leave a half-full glass of the same concoction by your bedside, because the hangover is going to be substantially worse the next time you wake up, though chances are you won't have time to even make it to bed. You'll just wake up on the couch, the DVD menu on eternal repeat and hopefully that half-full drink will be there. Down it quick, hit play again, and now you'll really be on a bender.



W.C. Fields says go for it!

I stopped drinking before the advent of DVDs, so I woke up to a rewound videotape, but either way the effect is the same. Hit play before you have a chance to second guess your decision. Movies can be watched over and over and over when you're on a bender! I saw SPECIES (1995) a hundred times that way. It's got everything you need: a soothing blonde beauty -- Henstridge is so achingly hot (and unaugmented) she actually seems alien. There are explosions, an escape onto a train, and any sexually frustrated male in the throes of delirium tremens can appreciate her need to mate fast, before the blue devils hot on her trail come a-cockblockin'. These devils are a bunch of sweaty losers played by Oscar luminaries like Forest Whitaker, Alfred Molina and Ben Kingsley, led by Michael Madsen as a tough guy. He can barely keep a straight face as the tough guy but his late inning tryst with Marg Helgenberger is a stealth bolt of proof grace. Two confident mature people coming together with nothing but carnivorous respect? I'll drink to that. (See: Natasha Henstridge Vs. the Coordinated Cockblock Quintet).



But in the meantime, you're an outlaw now, so enjoy that giddy flush of freedom that comes with the pall of death hanging over it, the rare Marx Brothers-ish joy when you know the ship has sailed and you're not getting back to land until you jump in the ice cold water and try to swim to shore. And the longer you wait, the farther the boat sails out to sea, and the longer and colder the swim. So why not stay aboard for another day?

See also the good folks at Modern Drunkard, who originally published my Guide to the Bender article (later reprinted in Daedalus Press's Decadent Handbook), and who have lots of great film reviews. Of course anything by W.C. Fields is golden, particularly INTERNATIONAL HOUSE and NEVER GIVE A SUCKER AN EVEN BREAK. There's also THE THIN MAN, APOCALYPSE NOW, and of course, I would imagine since again I got sober before it came out, but GHOSTS OF MARS. One look at this great, terrible, magnificent film - and I knew... I knew. Mars, in the company of Natasha Henstridge and her stash of 'clear.' A matriarchy and Joanna Cassidy from BRADE RUNNA? What better way to drink through the dawn?


In the words of Desolation Williams, "Come on, you Martian motherfuckers!"



PS - In honor of hangovers and seeing double we've answered sporadic requests to change the white on black print we've used since the beginning of the site. The result is you can read longer without feeling dizzy, we hope. It's still being tinkered with and we welcome feedback. (--erichk9@aol.com)

PPS - By 'we' I mean me, of course. But it sounds like there's a whole staff that way. See? Honesty, that's the resolution.... Happy New Years!

Somnolente Noir: THE GLASS KEY (1942)

Alan Ladd is "tired of hick town stuff" in a weird tale of brotherly love and deceit called THE GLASS KEY (1942). The "hick town" is run by racketeer Brian Donlevy as a kind of less comedic version of THE GREAT MCGINTY (1940). In fact, KEY and MCGINTY go well together, recalling a time in film when shady local politicians could still climb city hall ladders and backstab and make friends with slap-happy gangsters like Akim Tamiroff and William Bendix. Male friendship is what it's all about, as in the loosely post modern remake of KEY, the Coen Brothers' MILLER'S CROSSING (1990), but it's no-good scheming women that set the world tumbling in motion, to its knees and beyond.

There were enough rich femme fatale poor detective romances going on in the 1940s that there was even a word for it, "slumming." The detective could let go of his hardscrabble life and live like Nick Charles, presuming he didn't get double-crossed, or even worse- she loses interest in him now that he's not poor, and gets contemptuous of his sponging. Part of the appeal of THE GLASS KEY lies in Alan Ladd's stoic rejection of this destiny, via the much richer Veronica Lake. Like many film lovers, I've long been fascinated by the weird chemistry the pair exhibit, and how other similar pairs, such as Claire Trevor with Laurence Tierney (BORN TO KILL) or Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews (LAURA), lack that same chemistry, much as they may have chemistry on their own. Ladd and Lake seem to be born in a different time than those around them, a different projection speed, both blonde-haired, alcoholic and short (him 5'5" she 4'11"), isolated as a separate alien race, a pair of lost Nordic hybrids (which I've written of here) trapped in the sticky webs of human desire, villainy, and wretchedness... but never complaining or tolerating wrongness when they see it.

THE GLASS KEY is the perfect Lake-Ladd film second only to THIS GUN FOR HIRE (the same year as KEY, 1942) In GUN, they're just pals who come to trust each other in a world full of duplicitous poisonous snakes (which in a way makes it even sexier and sadder). But in KEY they have such a great sleepy chemistry, it's like they're dreaming while awake and whenever they're together they're packing or leaving or otherwise hanging out in empty rooms. You just get used to seeing one or the other's leaving trunks dead center in the room whenever they're together.  You don't have to read Wikipedia to know that both of them had hard childhoods. You can feel it in their shy delivery and wary glares. Ladd and Lake are two damaged souls recognizing each themselves in one another, and the aloof posturing, verbal attacks and avoidance strategies they used to keep the world at bay couldn't fool each other for a minute.

The normal 'sex appeal' of screen sirens is kind of transcended by Lake, a very heavy drinker who once noted "I wasn't a sex symbol, I was a sex zombie." Ladd seems a bit of a zombie himself, and together they stand as undead outsiders in a noir world never quite asleep enough to suit them.

Perhaps that's why Lake-Ladd films are, for me anyway, ideally seen when at home, sick with a cold, as I was all this past week. THE GLASS KEY goes down smooth and easy, with William Bendix's fists standing in for the effects of influenza, and Veronica Lake's smooth alcoholic tones as gentle as a shot of Tussinex Suspension.

The sadomasochistic pair bond between Alan Ladd and Bendix is also something very special, and an interesting echo of the rough and tough fight at the drop of a hat rapport between Donlevy and Tamiroff's mobster in the GREAT MCGINTY (directed by Preston Sturges who also directed Lake in the previous year's SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS). The willingness to fight and 'take' punishment is often decoded as being allusions to homosexuality, but I would disagree. I'd say it's more of a kind of code of masculine ethics ala FIGHT CLUB or A MAN CALLED HORSE. Taking a beating is what makes a man tough, fighting back until all that's left of you is fingernails. Bendix's sick excitement over 'bouncing' Alan Ladd around the room "like a ping pong ball" is contagious, and in one of the big climactic scenes it's hilarious and heartening to watch Ladd calmly, like a patient cobra, draw out the sadistic tough talk of Bendix in an upstairs barroom. Bendix hams it up, but is a delight, playing basically the same brute he'd ushered in with THE HAIRY APE (1944) and the later Lake-Ladd film, THE BLUE DAHLIA (1946). 

The Great McGinty (1940)

And Ladd's canny beating-taking for his dim-witted boss buddy is therefore a cool triumph. This, like Hammett's other novels mirrors later films like THE GODFATHER, where we're introduced to the machinations of power and feel lucky we're not involved: it's too dangerous grabbing at the big brass ring, and you have to presume your enemies have already planned six moves ahead, and you need to plan the seventh in advance or else take your face smashing-in stoic like a brave. It's not often either you see a movie where the good guys have the district attorney in their pocket, and people wage war via whole newspapers and elections the way we argue in chat rooms today.

Last interesting anecdote: I've always been upset there's really one or two films where Lake has her signature hair over the eye. According to Susan Kelly: By this time the peek-a-boo hairstyle had become a nationwide fad, so much so that government officials actually had to request that Ms. Lake stop wearing her signature style because women in war plants who were copying it were catching their hair in the machines!

Well, that explains a lot, but I still regret the abundance of skull-tightening headgear Lake wears, as it seems to all but castrate her for the bulk of KEY's running time. On the other hand, the film's really about the buddyhood of two men, and how one should never let a girl who doesn't even like you interfere with your 'bros before ho's' mentality, especially right before an election. Got that? On the other hand, I'm sick so don't listen to me, and Lake went on to drunken despair, getting kicked off pictures, and tending bar in women's hotels after the 1940s wore themselves out, but she still had her pilot's license, and I would like to know why I can't seem to find a good old-fashioned pulp-art covered paperback version of Hammett's original Glass Key anywhere and last I checked this 1944 version is not on R1 DVD. What gives... pally?

The Veronica Lake Effect

What is it about Veronica Lake that makes her so completely unlike all other 1940's blonde femme fatales? Something in her gaze reflects a sweet tender concern; something in her voice casts a gossamer warmth--the cinematic equivalent of a warm shoulder to weep yourself to sleep into-- even as her aura, face and beautiful blonde hair freeze you where you sit like a blast of Arctic air.

So many of her directors seemed determined to hide her beautiful hair in strict buns, or pulled under stupid hats and turbans. Perhaps her hairstyles reflected the tenseness and repression of the times. Veronica Lake's long blonde hair shone like a moon that could turn the tides, and so was kept locked up tight in buns of steel and bizarre hats. Repression hates changing tides. When Lake's hair was free it could wash all the sins of the depression and the war away, as in the amazing bathrobe scene of Sullivan's Travels (which is so aptly captured in Starlet Showcase). But when her hair was hidden, Alan Ladd sulked and Brian Donlevy and Joel MaCrea shot pained glances.

If my text is incoherent, forgive me. I've got a bad cold and am delirious... which I don't mind a bit with the cinematic ghost of Veronica Lake hovering above me on the TV screen. But what is it about her? Her voice always seems distant and far away, as if it was dubbed in later by the ghost of a flower. Rene Clair must have tried to access this supernatural power in I Married a Witch, because the film seems primed to take off into some alternate dimension. It never succeeds totally, but it spawned that TV show, Bewitched. Goddamn Dick York for his part in emasculating the male ego ideal of this great nation! Frederic March is at least a stronger force than Jimmy Stewart in Bell Book and Candle. Kim Novak has some of this weird Veronica Lake magic, but it's not the same brand.

Do you, dear reader, dare assume there are no such things as witches? Veronica Lake was a witch!!!! Maybe that's why she's such perfect company in the fires of a late November fever!

P.S. Here's a true fact about me: Some of my relatives (on my father's side) were tried and hung as witches in Salem, Mass, back in the day (Mary Easty was hung; Mary Edwards escaped). My great grandmother, who recently died at 107, and my grandmother, now 94, both have inherited some of this weird magical daemonic power that Veronica Lake had. Is this why we like some stars over others? Genetics? We feel emotions through cinema's stars as if they were vessels, proxies; stand-ins for our dream selves. Now let's presume that, on an unconscious level, you can connect yourself through the past to these moving images of people long dead... is that not itself a form of black magic? To connect your soul with that of Veronica Lake is to merge with the past, facilitating not just the common shallow depth unconscious drive of returning to the womb, but the deep end unconscious drive of merging with the womb behind your mom's womb, back further still, behind you great grandmother's womb, to all-seeing I am Womb, from which all beings come, and from which comes birth, thought, expression, action, life, death, retention, release, all just facets of the same ever-sparkling tinsel-toed diamond?

Imagine your own ancient ancestors who lived before telephones and electricity -- what would they think if they could see you now? They couldn't see you if they tried, and oh how they tried. They tried with crystal balls but they couldn't look that far ahead. But we can see them, all the way back when they were young and pretty. Just as I can connect to the gossamer image of Veronica Lake through my fevered viewing of This Gun for Hire, so we can see our own ancestors, and marvel at the pre-digital age. And if this is true, it is also and obviously true that future generations of ourselves are right now looking back at us, peering through the silvery veils of screening room time to marvel at the age of tools and celluloid and pixelated flesh; a time before all was pure thought; a time when man and machine were separate entities; a time before the cleansing hand of 2012 came and washed it all away until there was nothing, just the eternal blazing brilliance of her blond and wavy hair, the peaceful calm stillness of a Veronica Lake.