Reviews

Old movie review: ‘Portrait of Jennie’

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YouTube, which grows more annoying as time passes, is now featuring old movies provided (for some reason) with the wrong titles. When one came up called “The Painted Memory,” featuring Joseph Cotton, I had an idea it was probably the 1948 film “Portrait of Jennie.” As is so often the case, I was right.

I watched it with great interest. I haven’t seen it since I was a kid, but it was one of those movies that stuck in my mind. When I first saw it, I was still aspiring to be a visual artist, so I identified with the main character. I little expected that the story would be formative for me in a way I never anticipated.

What do I think of it, after 60 years? Read on, if (for some reason) you care to know.

The film is based on a 1940 novella by Robert Nathan, an author who ought to be better remembered. He was a pioneer of what we call urban fantasy today, and his stuff is quite good. I found several of his books in a public library when I lived in Florida, and enjoyed them.

The plot: Joseph Cotten plays Eben Adams, a starving artist in Manhattan during the Great Depression. Dealers find his work competent but uninspired, and he doesn’t sell much. Then one day in Central Park he meets a little girl named Jennie Appleton (Jennifer Jones), who dresses strangely in old-fashioned clothes. They make friends, and he is charmed. When he looks for her the next day, however, she does not appear. He draws a sketch of her, and a gallery owner buys it immediately, saying it’s the first inspired thing he’s ever done. Throughout the year, Jennie shows up periodically, and each time she seems years older. Eben does research and discovers that she was the child of trapeze artists in old vaudeville, decades before, and was orphaned when they died in an accident. Then she went to a convent school and college. Finally she appears to him again as a young woman, and he paints her portrait.

He goes to the convent to talk to an old nun who knew her. She informs him that Jennie used to go out to a place on the coast called Land’s End, where she died in a freak tidal wave. As a present-day tidal wave builds out at sea, Eben rushes to Land’s End to meet her and – he hopes – to rescue her this time. He fails, but an epilogue tells us that Eben Adams achieved greatness as an artist after his “Portrait of Jennie.”

What did I think of it? The movie flopped on release, in spite of the popularity of the original novella. In the years since, critics have revised their opinions upward, and now it’s considered a minor classic.

For my own part, I was a little disappointed. (This is the way of things remembered from childhood. They never live up to your memories, do they?)

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Fiction, Reviews

‘Paradise Royale,’ by Alan Lee

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“You are enjoying this. Unbelievable.”

“Beck, look around. We’re in Jamaica. Our enemy is crafty and clever. She’s a beautiful former MI6 agent and chasing her has led us around the globe. This isn’t boring. This isn’t dull. We could be chasing some drug addict who skipped bail. We could be transferring prisoners, but we’re not. Ay, what else do you want out of your career?”

I can’t believe I delayed reading Alan Lee’s “Sinatra” books. Manny Martinez, code name Sinatra, US Marshal and part-time secret agent, is an over-the-top character who perfectly fits into the over-the-top world of movie-inspired thrillers. He’s unbelievable, but he’s got the ego to carry off implausibility. James Bond is never far from the reader’s mind here, and the author leans into the similarities, with tongue in cheek.

In Paradise Royale, Manny and his female partner, Beck, are assigned to intercept a defense department computer genius who’s absconding with secrets to sell to our enemies. The interception isn’t all that difficult, but a complication arises – a stunningly beautiful, rogue British Intelligence agent and her pleasant but deadly male associate. They neatly intercept the defector and carry him off. Manny, never dismayed, immediately commandeers a private jet to chase the fugitives to Jamaica, where the prisoner gets snatched back and forth like a basketball as the two rival teams grow increasingly impressed with one another. Especially Manny and Bronwen, the Englishwoman. She is Manny’s equal, just as good-looking and just as resourceful as he is. Even as they deceive and entrap one another, they fall into increasing mutual infatuation. (This is a very sexy novel, though nothing explicit happens.)

Generally, as you know, I don’t care for kick-butt female action heroines, but I liked Bronwen a lot. I hope she comes back, even though Manny (in a later book) proposes to Beck.

I can’t think of anything bad to say about Paradise Royale, except to caution you about occasional bad language. Hollywood hasn’t told an action story this much fun in many, many years.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Wild Card,’ by Alan Lee

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Since I’ve become a fan of author Alan Lee, I’ve decided to read his “Sinatra” books as well as his delightful Mac August novels. “Sinatra” is the code name of Mac’s best friend, Manny Martinez, a US Marshal who is also on call as a super-secret government agent (because why not?). Manny is an off-the-wall character, a genuine original – though, oddly, he’s kind of based on James Bond. Only in this case Bond is a Puerto Rican American (and super-patriot). He’s implausibly handsome and has impeccable fashion style. Basically, he does all the things Bond does, but in a very American and semi-parodical manner.

In Wild Card, Manny and his partner Noelle Beck (a sweet, wholesome Mormon girl) are given the case of Benjamin Curtis, governor of Maryland and brother to the vice president. Curtis has a gambling habit, and is deeply in debt to sinister people. So their job is to go to the casino, take him in hand, and get him out. Only, when they get hold of him, he explains that the situation is worse than anyone knows. The people he owes money to are more dangerous than organized crime, and killing the governor will be the least of their retaliations if they don’t get paid the millions they’re owed. Implausibly (but plausibility matters little in these stories), Manny finds himself taking the governor’s place at the poker table, first at the casino, and later on an offshore yacht. The fact that Manny has never played poker before is only a minor road bump compared to other challenges Manny and Beck will face, from international assassins to frenzied sharks.

It’s over the top, but great fun – more like a Bond movie than a Bond novel. It’s impossible (I think) to resist Manny as he strolls into the jaws of death with perfect confidence, knowing he’s the smartest, the best looking, the deadliest, and the Most American person around, and Americans always win.

I loved Wild Card. Recommended. Cautions for language and violence.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Cocktail Time,’ by P.G. Wodehouse

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P.G. Wodehouse wrote five novels (as well as a timeless short story) about the Earl of Ickenham, better known as Uncle Fred. Cocktail Time is the third in the series, placing the sequence somewhat later in time than I expected. One always envisions Wodehouse stories taking place in the 1920s or ’30s, but references here to television and World War II being in the past alert us to the fact that this one was actually published in 1958.

Instead of a précis of the plot, I think it will be more efficient to describe the story geographically. Imagine Dovetail Hammer, Berkshire, the stately home of Johnny Pearce, one of Uncle Fred’s godsons. Johnny wants very much to get married, but he doesn’t feel he can afford it. He’s not very wealthy, and upkeep on the manor is high. On top of that, he feels obligaed to pension off his imperious childhood nurse, who’s gotten accustomed to thinking of herself as major domo of the estate. He can’t expect his new bride to deal with that.

One measure he’s taken to increase his income is to turn Hammer Lodge, a smaller dwelling on the estate, into a rental house. It is now being occupied by Sir Raymond “Beefy” Bastable, the eminent London barrister. Beefy’s great secret, known to few, is that he is the author of Cocktail Time, a scandalous bestselling novel about today’s dissipated young men. (He wrote the novel after having his hat knocked off by a Brazil nut shot from a catapult (slingshot) out of a window of the Drones Club, unaware that the actual shooter was not a dissipated young man, but Uncle Fred himself). Beefy has persuaded his worthless nephew, Cosmo Wisdom, to take public credit for authorship, in order to preserve his own reputation. However, he has taken the precaution of writing a letter establishing his own authorship, in case it should be necessary. And now that his agent has started talking about film rights, Beefy is reconsidering his claim – only the letter has been stolen.

This covers only the high points. There are several cases of sundered hearts in this tale, and Uncle Fred is always keen on uniting sundered hearts, as part of his general life project of “spreading sweetness and light.” His usual method of spreading s. and l. is by telling bald-faced, shameless lies, gently shepherding the unhappy couples into proximity, and arranging for them to acquire sufficient resources to set up housekeeping. A novelty in this story is that several of the sundered couples consist of middle-aged people.

Lots of fun. Cocktail Time is about mid-level on the Wodehouse scale, which exists on an infinitely higher plane than any other humorist’s work. Recommended.

Fiction, Reviews

Saga reading report: ‘The Saga of the People of Floi’

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It occurred to me just today that I owe you a saga reading report. I read one from The Complete Sagas of Icelanders, as is my custom, during the Elk Horn Iowa event, and I forgot to tell you about it. This one was ‘The Saga of the People of Floi’ (Flóamanna saga). It’s not an example of high saga art, but it does not lack for interesting moments.

Although (like so many sagas) it starts with an overview of several generations of genealogy, its unquestioned hero is a man with the complex name of Thorgil Scar-leg’s-stepson (Ørrabeinsstjúps). (Among his ancestors is Aslaug, wife of Ragnar Lodbrok, whom fans of the Vikings TV series will recall). Thorgils satisfies the requirements for young saga heroes by going abroad to have adventures which are suspiciously similar to the adventures of other saga heroes (though at one point a man named Olmod the Old Karrason shows up, whom you may recall as a character in my novel The Year of the Warrior. This is the only non-Heimskringla reference to Olmod I’ve ever seen).

Then, having won the daughter of a king of Ireland as a wife, Thorgils returns in triumph to his home in Iceland. (The author has him generously bestow this Irish wife on a friend, to clear the deck for another wife, probably more historical.) There’s also an intriguing incident involving a “tub-duel,” where two men get into a large tub and fight with clubs – though Thorgils himself brings a sword, which is decisive if not very sporting.

We are informed that Thorgils was an early convert to Christianity, and later followed Erik the Red to the new Greenland colony. The stories involving Thorgils’ faith smell a little off to me, especially one where, during his Greenland voyage, Thor appears to him and demands a sacrifice. Thorgils refuses. Then he realizes that he has an ox that belongs to Thor on board, and so he throws it overboard. (That strikes me as an account of an actual maritime sacrifice, revised in spin doctor mode to satisfy a Christian audience.)

His ship is wrecked in Greenland, and he and his party suffer greatly before they can get help from other settlers. When Thorgils’ wife dies leaving him with a baby boy, he performs an action that has endeared him to feminist saga scholars ever since (Jane Smiley references it in The Greenlanders): he cuts his nipple, squeezing out first blood, then serum, then milk. And so he nurses his own son, to whom (we are told) he was particularly devoted thereafter.

In the end he can’t get along with Erik the Red (understandably), and returns to Iceland, dying a bitter and poor old man.

The Saga of the People of Floi is comparable to the Saga of Egil Skalagrimsson in telling a lively story about an unpleasant man. But it lacks the artistry of that work (which was very likely written by Snorri Sturlusson himself). Nevertheless, it’s both intriguing and highly memorable.

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The Nowak test

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Photo credit: Frederick Wallace. Unsplash license.

One of the many personal characteristics that make me such a bore is that I get almost no pleasure whatever from a job well done. Today I crossed two items off my “to do” list, things I’d been working up to for about a week. In intervals. When I wasn’t coughing or having a lie-down to recoup my strength. (I’m getting better, thanks to antibiotics, but it’s a process.)

And not a morsel of satisfaction does my frontal cortex vouchsafe me. I’ve heard of people being gratified by a job well done, but I’ve almost never had the experience.

Enough about that.

Like most of us, I’ve been thinking about the murder of Henry Nowak in Southampton, England recently. Everybody has a lesson to draw from it. Here’s mine:

Lots of us have wondered, over the years, how we would have stood up – morally – in Nazi Germany. Would we have defied the Nazis? Kept our heads down and our mouths shut? Knuckled under and collaborated?

I think we can be sure of one thing.

If you’re okay with a system that treats race as a moral category, you would not have defied the Nazis. If you think you can judge a person by the color of their skin, and that the authorities should too, you would not have defied the Nazis.

Now the fact that you (or I) can’t accept such a system doesn’t prove that you (or I) would actually be a Bonhoeffer. Things get real quite fast when your life’s on the actual line.

But if you can’t even agree that justice ought to be colorblind, you’re on the Field Gray side of things.

Fiction, Reviews

‘High Country Nocturne,’ by Jon Talton

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I wrote last night that I’ve given up reading author Jon Talton, so this will be my final review of any of his David Mapstone books. I’m tempted to call it ironic that, the more Talton’s books “improve” (at least in the sense of marketability), the less I like them. But it’s not ironic at all. It’s entirely proportionate, since marketability doesn’t matter much to me. (As sales of my own novels demonstrate.)

David Mapstone, you’ll recall, is a former academic historian, later recruited as “sheriff’s department historian” (cold case detective) in Maricopa County, Arizona. In the last book his boss and mentor, Mike Peralta, lost his job as sheriff and became a private detective, and David came to work for him.

In High Country Nocturne, Mike is suddenly a fugitive. Working as a diamond courier, he has been recorded on surveillance video shooting another guard and absconding with the jewels. David doesn’t believe it’s true, and starts to investigate, but he’s coopted by the slimy new sheriff, who pressures him into researching an old unsolved death.

But soon he finds himself and his wife under attack by an assassin, and his wife ends up in the hospital, close to death.

If I were Jon Talton’s agent or editor, I’m pretty sure I’d be delighted with the trajectory this series is taking. David Mapstone started out as a competent but slightly nebbishy deputy, more scholar than fighter. As the books have gone on, he’s become more formidable, a genuine avenger. All the stakes have been raised. The suspense is greater, the violence fiercer, the explosions louder. As is the case with so many detective series, the thriller element is now emphasized.

Also, the mild political conservatism of the early books has morphed into repeated expressions of contempt for the right.

A continuing, melancholy theme of the David Mapstone books has been his expressions of (certainly sincere) sadness about the changes in his community. As one of those few Phoenix residents who remembers how the place was before the real estate boom, he mourns all the things that have been lost – farms and ranches and floral gardens and open desert, now all subdivided and paved over.

On a much smaller scale, I mourn the decline (subjectively, for me) of this detective series, which started well, but seems to have sold out to sensationalism.

Fiction, Reviews

‘South Phoenix Rules,’ by Jon Talton

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I’ll begin this review by disclosing that I have decided to stop reading Jon Talton, whom I originally liked very much. I’ll explain my reasons below. Two more reviews are coming, however (this one and the next), because I like the author enough that it was hard to make the break. However, he ticks me off in a couple ways.

The first way is that he jerks his readers around by way of soap opera-style drama in his hero’s, David Maphouse’s, romantic life. As South Phoenix Rules begins, we find that his wife Lindsey, with whom he was blissfully happy the last time we looked, is now working out of town and pondering divorce. To complicate matters more, her long-lost, bad-girl sister Robin is now living in David’s house (at Lindsey’s insistence) and flirting heavily with him.

Then Robin receives a FedEx delivery that I won’t describe to you, which sets David – who has just resigned as a Maricopa County sheriff’s deputy – to investigating the drug business in and around Phoenix. This is the darkest, most violent story in the series to date, with David going full vigilante. There’s also a shocking murder that changes the shape of the whole series scenario.

The second reason I’ve grown annoyed with author Talton is his repeated assertion that the Tea Party, and anyone concerned about the border, must be motivated by pure racism. He seems to prefer a situation where white employers exploit underpaid foreign labor, undercutting wages for poor Americans of all races. I’m not saying it’s not a debatable and complex issue. I’m just tired of his simplistic, libelous assertions.

But I’m reading one more book, and I’ll probably review that tomorrow. No more after that.

Reading, Religion

How to Develop a Precocious Mind

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Young writer Bethel McGrew describes growing up with scholarly parents in a house of ten thousand books.

The ideological benefits of homeschooling are obvious, but besides these I’m moved to reflect on this simple freedom of time—time to train my attention on good and beautiful and difficult things, to furnish my mind with them at my own pace. I have sadly lost some of that gift of attention in the digital age. I flip through a decades-old memo pad logging all the books I read in a given year, in between the little to-do lists I would make for an afternoon of reading, chess study, or whatever else nine-year-old me was working on, and I’m filled with envy.

Bethel is a good columnist with strong opinions of her own, not simply all the correct ones. I recommending her Substack and whatever she releases into the wild, like this piece today on what the revival of Michael Jackson says about America.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Arizona Dreams’ and ‘Cactus Heart,’ by Jon Talton

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I’m still clawing my way out of my respiratory infection, and so have been reading in pretty long stretches, concentrating on Jon Talton’s interesting David Mapstone mysteries. I have to confess I don’t love the books as much as I did, but I haven’t ditched the author yet.

Arizona Dreams finds our hero, Arizona “sheriff’s historian” David Mapstone, getting a visit from a woman who claims to be a former student of his (though he doesn’t remember her) from his teaching days. She gives him a map that’s supposed to lead to the desert grave of a murder victim. But that’s not what he finds at all…

Meanwhile, David’s wife Lindsey, also a deputy, is investigating a series of ice pick murders. David will get involved with that investigation too.

Cactus Heart is prequel, set back before the turn of the millennium, before David and Lindsey got together. In hot pursuit of a couple of criminals, David and the sheriff stumble on an old crypt in an abandoned building. Inside the crypt are two small skeletons – the skeletons of children. David’s investigation will lead him to the old crimes of one of the county’s most powerful families.

The stories remain well-written and interesting. I am cooling to the author because, in spite of the anti-woke opinions David Mapstone expresses in regard to his academic career, some of his other views bother me. David describes himself as a Goldwater libertarian, but a Greenie in terms of land development (fair enough; the southwest is certainly overdeveloped). He’s also not interested in a strong border. In these books, anyone who believes in border enforcement is uniformly portrayed as a racist. These books, it should be noted, were written before the borders were completely opened during the Biden administration, and all the human suffering that caused. It looks kind of dumb in retrospect, to me at least.

Still, the books maintain my interest. Cautions for language and sex scenes, which sometimes seem to me a little more detailed than necessary.