Myth Happens

No Publicity (1927) is a stupendous trifle of two-reeler silent comedy starring Edward Everett Horton, which was all the information I required to try it out and regret nothing.

Silent Horton would be even more of a novelty if I had gotten to know him first as the earnestly doubtful narrator of Rocky and Bullwinkle's "Fractured Fairy Tales" (1959–64), but thanks to my temporally ambivalent relationship with pop culture, it is a much surer bet that he introduced himself with Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), where his elastically flustered double-takes paid off the fretful set-ups of his lines. Kicked back a decade and change into a ganglier, go-gettinger, youthfully middle-aged incarnation, he's at once instantly recognizable and revelatory as Eddie Howard, the gamely gauche press photographer whom the intertitles inform us "would have gladly gone into the whale's stomach to get a flashlight of Jonah," which is about what it takes when his paper assigns him to steal a snap of an heiress well-guarded by a regiment of society dragons. Pertly modern with her bobbed hair and the asymmetrical dash of a single earring, Ruth Dwyer's Sally Lawrence wouldn't mind the publicity at all, but her conservative guardian is played by Josephine Crowell like all the aunts in Wodehouse rolled into one redoubtable bosom and Eddie immediately finds his polite, straightforward efforts complicating into such time-honored shenanigans as hiding in the drapes, impersonating an iceman, and imitating the action of a folding screen, inevitably culminating in a full drag escape attempt just as inexorably thwarted by the success of his imposture. "This is Sister Blue, who has come all the way from Kansas to lecture for us." Patently unable to think of anything "Wrong With Our Girls," but equally unable to sneak out under the expectantly clutched pearls of the guests of Mrs. Van Pelt, Eddie swathed in the dowdiest of bombazines and a feather-plated hat screws his pince-nez to the sticking place and launches into the bluest-nosed lot of nonsense until the enforcement of the Production Code.

Because so much of his screen persona as it solidified into the '30's exploited his knack for an old-maidish dither—of the stars of the lavender screen, Horton was one of the most enduringly implausible-undeniable—it is frankly charming that while Eddie can pass himself off as a temperance matron with little more than a roll of grey hair and one of his own demure simpers, his shotgun lecture owes more of its credibility to the attentional inertia of his audience which applauds the mere subject of the younger generation's turpitude even when improvised desperately from the wrong end of the stick. "I despise lip rouge, it has given painter's colic to more men and boys." His listeners are more suspicious when he relents on the rouge question than when he literally hangs on to his hat in the face of an electric fan or successfully passes off a madcap careen tangled in his own hems as a demonstration of the latest craze in "vulgar dance—the Ford-fender shimmy." I had known the actor could throw a wild take, but I had not properly understood it was part of a full-body repertoire of physical comedy which saw much less action even in the musicals of his sound career and here can't be missed from the moment he's so cheerfully focused on his latest experiment in photography that he almost ignites his editor with the flash. Shown the door for the first time by Mrs. Van Pelt under disdainful full sail, he packs his Brownie back into its cigar box with an insultingly diligent finicking of his fingers and saunters off with such ostentatious nonchalance that he seems to have thrown out one of his hips. He can't retrieve his hat from its currently occupied chair without being mistaken for a particularly brazen masher, but the topper of the offended dignity with which he dons its crushed platter is the slight philosophical shrug with which he almost immediately takes it off again. He may have been less of a stuntman than legends like Keaton or Lloyd, but no sooner has he emerged in his decorous drag than he pitches himself falsies over fundament down the curve of the stairs in a katamari attempt to recover a portrait which previously slipped his waistcoat; he spins out in a whirl of rucked skirts and garroting shawl and comes up with a breathless, incredulous wince at himself and his bright ideas, almost breaking the fourth wall in his side-eyed momentum. Sally rushes over solicitously, but we will shortly be signaled that she's more than the obligatorily pretty face when, bored out of her mind with the moral droning of the supposed Miss Delilah Blue, defiantly redoing her lipstick and slinging her shapely gams everywhere like the dapper flapper she is, she twigs to the game before any of the straitlaced company and flashes at once into co-conspirator mode, the proto-screwball assurance of a true match. They flee the house together, leaving respectively the red herring of a well-dressed hatstand and a maid covering for her mistress with a standee joke. They clinch in the flash powder fallout of his lovestruck distraction. It's a fast wrap-up with one last gag at the expense of the older, stuffier generation, but a surprisingly satisfying one. If you can't love a man for his drag act and his absentminded tendency to explode things, what's Cupid coming to anyway?

No Publicity was the first in a series of eight two-reelers produced for Paramount by Hollywood Productions, which is to say Harold Lloyd, thus explaining their survival when so much of Horton's silent career has gone the way of all nitrate. I am inexpressibly grateful for it: the actor truly has been one of my particular idols since childbirth and I had never seen him as such an uninhibited silent clown. I should have expected nothing less from a man who was thrown out of his first college for pranking his own suicide. The presence behind the camera of so many of Lloyd's regular crew makes it all the neater that the film doesn't feel mad-libbed from his own oeuvre, following its star's lead instead to its own distinctive, impish and beleaguered identity. For all its silent virtues, it's irresistible to hear Horton enunciating in his inimitably rattled fashion the triple-take subtitle of "W-e-l-l, I-er-I mean, well, no-I-yes about bad habits." I discovered this short on Dailymotion, but the whole series comes in a box set from Undercrank Productions and I hope to watch them all, especially since I am assured of a reteaming with the vivacious Dwyer, who looks practically new wave and utterly misplaced in a house accurately described as "one of the most magnificent cold-storage plants in Snob-haven." When she still thinks our cornered hero is the afternoon's tedious lecturer, she gives him a cross-eyed literal kiss-off, and as soon as she has him pegged as a picture snatcher en travesti, she glows. I was rather delighted myself. This shimmy brought to you by my glad backers at Patreon.

A handful of shorts and a feature does not a marathon make, but it does give a person a solid evening of science fiction.

Mark Slutsky's Final Offer (2018) is a clever, generous two-hander with a premise worthy of Fredric Brown, namely that the fate of humanity in the face of interstellar expropriation rests with a scruffily hungover lawyer who scrapes himself off the floor of an elegantly appointed, eerily wall-less office to discover that he has five minutes to negotiate for the retention of his planet's oceans and spends most of them panicking. Since he's played with an infinite wince of flop sweat by Aaron Abrams, it would be unnecessarily rude to call him an ambulance chaser, but he freely admits that he wins most of his cases on no-show technicalities: "I do traffic tickets!" Anna Hopkins gives a practiced polish to the human veneer of his opposite number, the sfnal reality shock of her true form looming all iridescent streamers and eyes like mother-of-pearl out of Cthulhu: "I'm confident we'll get to a yes on this." The comedy of their corporate first contact comes from its earth-draining banality, but its charm shines when it exceeds its tongue-in-cheek brief and goes out not on the fine print of the punch line, but the much better twist of unexpected rapport, sincerely extended by a man so accustomed to losing, he doesn't need to be magnanimous to commiserate. It runs an adroit twelve minutes and had it been a short-short of the Golden Age, I could look forward to locating the fix-up novel. Wormholes and time scales may be a dime a pulp dozen, but the quick shot of the negotiator's business card with a fax number for the Virgo Supercluster is adorable.

As a complementary lesson in the pitfalls of science fiction comedy, the pilots of Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft's Come Back Mrs. Noah (1977–78) and Nigel Kneale's Kinvig (1981) make an instructive contrast, which is unfortunately not the same thing as a great double feature. The one appears to have been written by a team who didn't know very much about science fiction, meaning its already thin jokes are further slowed by infodumps and technobabble. Its funniest scene of a presenter chirping on about technological miracles while behind him three people grimly fail to open a tin of condensed milk doesn't need to be set aboard an unlaunched orbital vehicle in 2050. In a rare line that isn't cued to wackiness with retro-futuristic props, Michael Knowles helpfully kills a conversation: "It's just that if this blows up, there'll be Pontefract cakes all over Cairo." The other appears to have been written by someone who didn't know very much about comedy, meaning the satirical ambiguity of its extraterrestrial visitations washes out in the sitcom clichés of its marital boredom. Colin Jeavons salvages all of his scenes as a flat-capped anorak with a near-eidetic memory for every close encounter claimed in the UK and a dump stat of life skills, which may have insulted the fans who did not consider themselves interchangeable with ufologists and endeared him instantly to me. He jumps characteristically into a conversation with head-scratchers like "Well, what about the Great Pyramid, then? You given it any more thought?" The intrusion of a laugh track benefited neither show.

Mohamad El Masri's Other Other (2024) is one of the more ambitious and delicate short films of my recent acquaintance, a many-worlds interpretation of online dating which reveals its parallel conceit without once using the language of science fiction, relying instead on silhouettes and logistics and the eventual double-casting of Sosie Bacon and Scoot McNairy to draw out its meditation on the gulfs between our screen-bounded selves and the glitches of fitting together in three-dimensional space. It doesn't fuzz out into metaphor or enmesh itself in explanations of the elusive interpenetrations that allow a book or a key or a signal to cross where a door has someone and no one on its other daemon lover's side; it has the heft of a feature in half an hour, handheld as cinema vérité of a dream. Her spiky melancholy and his uncertain romanticism could bind or break them in the ordinary course of a relationship. The sleight-of-hand cinematography by Joshua Knoller cuts its lovers simultaneously together and apart, an eloquent incoherence: "I don't want to like solve all the like mythic mysteries that the universe dumps in my lap. I just am a person who's trying to be on this earth and just be." A more schematic, ironic screenplay could have been made of this material, but it feels true to its championing of messiness that the film as it stands in our reality is sweeter and more loose-ended, the hopeful blaze of its ending as vulnerable as the intimate digital distance of its original connection. It feels only a little as though the filmmaker is telling his characters literally to touch grass. "If we're going to do this, it has to be real."

Anthony Kimmins' Once in a New Moon (1934) is never going to be mistaken for a classic of British science fiction cinema. It has so many doubts about the genre literacy of its audience that it summarizes its thought experiment in the title crawl and gets such cold feet about its political implications that it reverses its sense of wonder for the finale. Bookended by these cop-outs, however, it is for the majority of its 63 minutes a herky-jerkily spirited quota quickie on the model of a cozy catastrophe: the fortunes of a seaside village after it is wrenched off the face of England and into an involuntarily independent planetoid by the fly-by-night gravity of a "dead star." More Verne than Godwin, the first half of the picture furnishes its hardest sf as Shrimpton-on-Sea orbits uneasily between the influences of the earth, the moon, and the close-veering comet and the resultant phenomena of slack tides, off-kilter constellations, time-lapse dawns, and finally earthrise are collated by the unlikely authority of Eliot Makeham's Harold Drake, the mild-mannered star-gazer of a postmaster whose one-day circumnavigation of the globe confirms its new designation of "Shrimpton-in-Space." Less Chesterton than Mackendrick, its second half satirically observes the celerity with which this island England crumbles into civil war, sparked by the complacent autocracy of Morton Selten and Mary Hinton's Lord and Lady Bravington and fanned by the agitation of sullen socialist Edward Teale—John Clements in his screen debut, thanklessly humorless at the fuzzy end of the love triangle. A free and fair election does not lead to a more equitable distribution of rations. A prim refusal of timber to the communal kitchens inspires a sortie to torch the manor instead. Freder-like, Derrick De Marney's Hon. Bryan Grant tries to talk some égalité and fraternité into his Blimpish parents: "Just because it doesn't work in England doesn't mean it can't work here!" Just in time to forestall the all-out class war, the deus ex runtime of the dead star splats Shrimpton back to the status quo of earth where all ideological differences can be overcome through the fellowship of the Royal Geographical Society. "What did I always tell you, Mr. Drake? Just a bad flood." I can't speak to the fidelity of any of the above to its credited source material of Owen Rutter's Lucky Star (1929), but it performs the B-prestidigitation of all seeming to belong to the same movie while it's rattling out, even if it separates into two or three different stories the minute the viewer takes a step back. It is a nice touch that before she is packed off into the romance which is a no-brainer between the well-mannered ex-aristocrat and the revolutionary wannabe, Rène Ray's Stella Drake sails around the unknown world with her father. The transit of Shrimpton is finessed with some stock storm footage and educational animation. The final gesture of lighting the beacon suggests more topical symbolism than the film was built to take, but then I am not sure it was built to take the democratically identified Bryan seriously advocating the adoption of socialism in space. I regret nothing about the time I gave it. I hope the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 felt the same.

I had no particular shape in mind for this collection of speculations—a Black Kitten Micro-Thon 2025? It is more than I managed last year. I found some of these items, spatch came up with others. It is a meaningful tradition to keep. There were no donuts, but Hestia was present on my lap for both watching and writing. This universe brought to you by my mythic backers at Patreon.

I admire the caliber of the performance given by Mel Ferrer in Lost Boundaries (1949) almost as much as his assessment that he shouldn't have done it.

It's not an insult, or a riddle. As originally documented by William L. White for Reader's Digest in 1947 and more fully in a short best-seller the following year, the source material for Lost Boundaries was the real lives of a light-skinned mixed-race family who had passed so successfully for white in legally integrated, not aboundingly multicultural northern New England that their children had reached adolescence without knowing it for themselves. Dramatizing this potentially exploitative material with a shoestring sincerity that simultaneously grounded and amped its challenge to the color line, the low-budget, independent production was in the vanguard of the cycle of race-relations pictures that flourished in mid-century Hollywood, the first announced and second released of four in its year alone. Such was its commercial as well as critical appeal that while it ran into high-profile censorship in Atlanta and Memphis, it did solid box office elsewhere in the American South as well as the more expected Northern receipts. It was screened in competition for the Grand Prix at Cannes and won for Best Screenplay. It is left as an exercise for the viewer whether the film would have enjoyed the same success of its moment had it more scrupulously avoided some of the period-typical compromises of its fictionalization of the Johnstons of Keene, New Hampshire, most absurdly and inevitably that none of the actors portraying the family was Black. Lest the modern audience imagine it passed without comment in the days of Jim Crow, the casting raised more than a flash of controversy, defended in some quarters as a tricky concession and called out as retrograde whitewash in others, a transparently cautious artifice which regardless of the reasons behind it risked reassuring the very anxieties it was intended to unsettle with the implicit claim that only whiteness could be credible as itself. Either way, it packed much more than the intended irony into its hero's optimistically innocent estimate of his future: "For one year of my life, I'm going to be a white man."

The casting of Ferrer feels itself like a testament to the national brain freeze in the face of multivalent identities. At the time when he was approached for the leading role of Dr. Scott Mason Carter, the restlessly extracurricular actor was an unknown screen quantity, chiefly employed within the studio system as an assistant director available for loan-outs, dialogue direction, and screen tests. His Broadway successes had been modest, his most prestigious work on the production sides of NBC and the La Jolla Playhouse. His own familial mix was Cuban-Irish and the deep-eyed, long-boned, lightly olive results got him effectively cast from a headshot. Even for the mix-and-match ethnicities of classical Hollywood, it feels a little outrageously on the nose to circumvent the vexed representation of passing with the non-Black non-whiteness of a Latino actor, but the unequivocal anti-racism of the part attracted him and he could communicate its ambiguities without recourse to panstick—as if to prove his third-alternative bona fides, he had last featured prominently as the white half of an interracial affair in the stage version of Lillian Smith's Strange Fruit (1945). It was not predictable, but it isn't a joke that his commitment to Lost Boundaries produced more than a tactful curiosity. Whatever melodrama adheres to the film around him, Scott himself never plays like a white image of mixed-race tragedy, sociologically problematized or sentimentally excused, as opposed to a specifically humorous, ambitious, stubborn and sometimes startlingly naive man who as we meet him on his graduation from the Chase Medical School of Chicago in 1922 has never let his good hair or his grade on the paper bag test affect his sense of self as culturally, ideologically Black. His affirmations of racial pride can sound a little pompous to colleagues who never had a choice about identifying as "Negro," but they stand in refreshing contrast to the repression of his in-laws whose assimilation into suburban whiteness—a house in Brookline before it was historically Jewish—allows them to treat their daughter's marriage to a fractionally darker-skinned man with almost as much disapproval as actual miscegenation. Collecting rejections from hospitals under no legal obligation to grant residencies to Black interns, he jokes with the cynical resilience of his fraternity brothers in Kappa Alpha Psi, "There are five railroad stations in Boston. It's a good place for a redcap. And if a passenger faints, my medical training will be invaluable." The accessibility of whiteness makes it a last-ditch reluctant fallback rather than an aspiration, a safety net that could strangle even as it teases the expediency of simply not saying anything, of letting the white gaze which imagines that it can tell Blackness at sight do the heavy lifting of lying for a man who has adamantly preferred to be recognized in his own skin. The accidentally sunk cost of the next two decades in fact becomes believable in part because Scott so clearly never thinks of himself as even conditionally white, crossing without code-switching between his country white practice in Keenham and the comfortable diversity of the Charles Howard Clinic in Boston. It is a plausible-deniable existence, possible because it's not supposed to be: "They don't have Negro doctors in New Hampshire." And yet the strength of his self-identification doubles as its own form of self-deception, an insulation from the realities of just how white his life has become, borne in on him in the film's nastiest, cleverest shock of his teenaged daughter unselfconsciously hollering through the house a racial slur that shudders the western union gentility of the script like a sonic boom. Not thinking of himself as the parent of white children, he has failed to ward them against the casual, radioactive absorption of normal American racism, especially in the super-Caucasian Granite State where their family may represent the total Black population of their white-steepled, tradition-proud community. It shames him as his non-disclosure conduct toward the town explicitly never does: he owes the white world no apologies, but his children deserved the truth. "I guess you might call it a twenty-year binge," he sighs to the old classmate on whose office couch he has fetched up as if coming off a bender instead of an interrogation, officially outed by his refusal to deny his race point-blank—"and what a hangover."

Recognition from Cannes notwithstanding, Lost Boundaries generally does not live up to its protagonist. Some of it is the rough edges of the homebrew production—the bare-bones budget was partly financed by the home mortgage of producer Louis de Rochemont and costumes and props are supposed to have been sourced from an appeal to the Seacoast public on WHEB—but more of it is script-level hackiness, notably whenever the treatment of race wanders from Scott and his complicated integrity. It is perceptive of the narrative to touch on colorism as well as racism, Beatrice Pearson's Marcia Mitchell Carter leafing through pictures of variously complected relatives in the last stages of her pregnancy, her anxieties about the cocktail of the next generation allayed by her husband's teasing of their pinkly crumpled firstborn, "He's all right, but he kind of looks like anybody's baby, though, doesn't he?" It is critical that it not confine its sympathies to its light-skinned actors, foregrounding in turn the dark, dignified contributions of Emory Richardson as Dr. Charles Frederick Howard, Rai Sanders as Dr. Jesse Pridham, and future acclaimed documentarian William Greaves with soul and charisma to burn as supporting MVP Arthur Cooper, in which context it does not feel like routine marginalization that the janitor at the clinic is played by Leigh Whipper. Particularly since the production consulted with both Ralph Ellison and Walter White, it is inexcusable for it to stick the Carter children with all the tragic mulattohood their father dodged. Like his real-life model, Richard Hylton's Charles Howard Carter hits the road to sort out his suddenly mixed self, but where Albert Johnston Jr. hitch-hiked cross-country through a kaleidoscope of personally rooted Black America, Howie bombs into a sensationalized, racialized lost weekend in Harlem whose sole silver lining is the disbelief with which the legendary Canada Lee's Lieutenant Thompson takes in the goal of his panicked slumming: "And you think that you can find that out in five days?" Susan Douglas as Shelly Carter gets one good line disenchanting her sweet gawk of a steady when he brings her "an awful rumor going around town about you folks," but even though it should be realistically ambivalent that she walks out of the reconciliatory finale of the Sunday service wherein the liberal authority of the Episcopal minister catechizes the rest of white Keenham into reopening their hearts to the Carters, especially since she has just dumped her white boyfriend it more reinscribes her as the latest imitation of life. Under the present world-historical conditions, it may carry an extra sting that Scott is stripped of his lieutenant commander's commission for no more disgrace than membership in a historically Black fraternity, but the notion that he could have been refused a placement at a segregated hospital because he too easily read as white smacks unconvincingly of bothsidesism. Even more so in a production committed to the documentary realism of location shooting and non-professional acting than in a slice of studio gloss, the casting of the Carters scratches like a wink to the censors, a fourth-wall warrant of boundaries that have not been so much as mislaid. One of the first-act walk-ons is Maurice Ellis of the 1936 Federal Theatre Project Macbeth. "You know what they used to say down South. If you white, you all right. If you brown, you can hang around. If you black, stand back," indeed.

In 1951, Ferrer gave an interview for the October issue of Negro Digest in which he discussed his role in Lost Boundaries: the responsibility that came with the part, the degree to which he had been identified with it, the importance of its reception among Black audiences, the caveat of his pride in the production. "I have always been self-conscious about having played this part . . . I have always felt that, ideally, a Negro should have had it, and not an actor playing a role." That he considered and could articulate as meaningful the distinction between representation and a role fascinates me as much as his willingness to state it on the record of a year in which it was manifestly not a Hollywood concern, discussing a production which had stalled on the casting of a textually Black part until a suitable hedge came across its director's desk; it doesn't sound like a humblebrag, either. Whatever Ferrer could channel through his own analogous sense of difference and the acknowledged assistance of what we would now call the sensitivity reading of his castmates, he understood it did not give him access to the Black lived experience. He played his role sincerely, not as a parody or a travelogue, and his trolling of white viewers who assumed from it that they had caught him out in an imposture of his own makes a supportive postscript. It is impossible not to wonder what Lost Boundaries would have looked like as a race film, or at least an independent production with more Black talent behind as well as before the camera. It exists in the hell of a good video store next door, the ghost-reflection of the Johnstons in a universe of different choices. Ferrer could have said nothing about the controversy either way and gone unremarked by the mores of his industry, but it feels frankly in character that he couldn't stay under the radar. I would love to know and have been able to find no information on how his performance was read by Latine viewers of the time.

The director who cast Ferrer was Alfred L. Werker, whose rather impressively racist comments during the casting imbroglio suggest a source for some of the Harlem hell-ride, although the divers hands of the screenwriters led by Virginia Shaler and Eugene Ling must take their share of anti-credit. The photography by William Miller, on the other hand, is a spindrift-and-picket-fences document of the Seacoast from the Nubble to the White Island Light, Keenham itself—compositely named after Gorham and Keene, where Dr. Albert Johnston Sr. practiced from 1929 to 1966—played by locations in Kennebunkport, Kittery, and the producer's home town of Portsmouth, all bound together by the march-of-time narrator pointing out "our old rambling mansions . . . our first citizens . . . our doctor." If it's true that Boston partly subbed for Harlem, it would be instructive to know which parts. The extras from the University of New Hampshire, from which Albert Johnston Jr. graduated in the same year as the film's release, were an apposite touch. Carleton Carpenter wrote and performed the jauntier of the film's two original songs, but the torchy number put over by Greaves was one of Johnston's own compositions, sneaking back into his own story. Somewhere in history a film is still waiting about him and his real-life road trip of self-discovery, which gave him no easy answers and got a Hollywood movie made. As for Lost Boundaries as it exists with all its heartfelt and uneven intentions, I caught it when it came around last month on TCM, but it plays with an endurable degree of blur on YouTube and the Internet Archive. It is not in several ways quite as much of an artifact of its time as it might be. This role brought to you by my invaluable backers at Patreon.

I come not to bury Jack Bernhard's Decoy (1946) because it would just dig itself up again. This Z-budget artifact of block booking does not suffer from good taste. It is barely impaired by morals. A generation before the ascendance of sick humor, its plot is a pile-up of macabre and preposterous kicks in the head, culminating in a stinger so feel-bad, it actually is funny, the mic drop of nihilism attributed to so many noirs and accomplished by so few. It has a real feeling of doom, a phosphorescent unwholesomeness, and it opens in the scuzziest truck-stop restroom committed by Golden Age Hollywood. I am extraordinarily fond of it.

I can't even slate it for its femme fatale when Margot Shelby (Jean Gillie) is a figure of such irresistibly surreal avarice, it seems only respectful that the film should not escape her insatiable event horizon any more than the men she adds to her string and cuts lethally loose when she's through. Behind door number one, we have career robber Frankie Olins (Robert Armstrong), who turned himself into a three-time loser just to keep her in style and now awaits his turn in the gas chamber in the aging faith that she'll spring him in time to reap the luxuries of his secretly stashed $400,000. Behind door number two, right-hand double-dipper Jim Vincent (Edward Norris), signing on to her scheme to locate said lettuce in the chauvinistically misplaced confidence that he's calling the shots as opposed to so far behind the eight-ball, the audience can already hear it rolling up on him. Door number three opens onto the disadvantaged street where Dr. Lloyd Craig (Herbert Rudley) maintains a charity practice on his days off from prison doctoring, but his noble-minded naïveté peels off him like paint at a whiff of Margot's $75 perfume, the sum of his honest week's pay. Even Sergeant Joseph Portugal (Sheldon Leonard), the kind of sturdily streetwise flatfoot who rescues jailbait from mashers, pays for his bar snacks along with his beer, and drops his ubiquitous nickels in the tin for Yugoslav Relief, hovers on the edge of her harem in reluctant admiration of her total freeze-out of the law. Stripper-like as he watches over his half-eaten hard-boiled egg, she provocatively adjusts the cuff of diamonds on her wrist to glitter the gulf between his plainclothes scruples and her shameless glamour: "Do they have this kind of trash on your level, Jojo?" In a contractual sort of fashion, the film offers a motivation for her money-hunger, a childhood of industrial poverty which she sees distastefully reproduced in the doctor's street with its slum panorama of laundries and liquor stores, its gutter-playing urchins she strides brusquely past as if their ragged baseball shouldn't even bounce through the same air as her mink. "That street runs all over all the world. I know because that's the street I came from, six thousand miles from here in a little English mill town. But it's the same rotten street, the same factories, the same people, and the same dirty little grey-faced children." It's like trying to impose psychological realism on fire. What Margot wants is unremarkable, the ticket-taker and the cigarette girl and the audience who shelled out for the double feature all want it and so do we, eight decades on and it feels even less like a joke that a working stiff is just a corpse that can't afford to get off the clock. How she wants it cannot be explained by social factors. She wants like a Schwarzschild radius, like K-capture, like Kelvin zero. She wants like a contagious haunting, so that even men she's never met are scythed collaterally down by it, the driver of an armored car, the driver of a hearse—Liebestod is for chumps, it's cash on the death's-head that makes this world go round. What a vanitas, though. Between soft waves of red hair, her fine-boned face has a hard translucent pallor, as if faintly fever-sheened with its own cupidity, the crisp caress of her voice draws out a phrase like methylene blue until it sounds like an aphrodisiac and not the key to an audaciously lurid plan, not after all to rescue her lover from the death house before the whereabouts of his loot snuff it with him, but to reanimate him after execution and get it out of him then. "It'll cost plenty," she warns her co-conspirator, "and it's a long shot," as briskly as if she had just proposed a spot of bribery instead of jaw-dropping Grand Guignol. Margot, the original girl with the hungry eyes. That undiscovered country had better cough up and fast.

( How do you think I should use my face? )

I cannot make this film sound any better, weirder, or worse than it is. It's bleak and bonkers and looks like it was shot with a flashlight and a piece of cardboard where most B-movies at least tried to spring for two. At 76 minutes, it could be double-featured with a Senecan tragedy or a whoopee cushion. Eddie Muller paired it with the Corpse Reviver #2. It was the one collaboration produced by the brief marriage of Bernhard and Gillie and as the lankier morgue attendant whistles in admiration of his own mispronunciation of dichotomy, "Ain't that a lulu?" I saw it for the first time shortly after moving to our current apartment, when I was in no condition to try to convey its effect of an entire bookcase of pulp falling on the viewer, but it was most recently disinterred by TCM and is otherwise impressively difficult to find on the internet in legal fashion, which means that if you would like a ludicrously morbid pick-me-up, you should find it however you need to, only please leave the tire jack in the car. "Just this once, come down to my level." This trash brought to you by my singing backers at Patreon.

I can't believe this year is over. I can't believe this year. I maintained my website and my presence on AO3 and wrote new work and was kept too much from sleep and it does not feel like twelve months either way.

I published two new pieces of fiction this year, both of importance to me:

"Twice Every Day Returning" in Uncanny Magazine #61, November 2024.
"Hyperboloids of Wondrous Light" in Not One of Us #81, December 2024.

Some new poetry, the same:

"Hagstone" in Not One of Us #78, March 2024.
"Penis Secrets of the Anunnaki" in Nightmare Magazine #141, June 2024.
"The Same Fur Coat" in Strange Horizons 8/5/24 , August 2024.
"Fair Exchange" in Not One of Us #80, September 2024.
"A Long Time Afterward" in Nightmare Magazine #144, September 2024.
"Amitruq Nekyia" in Strange Horizons 10/7/24, October 2024.
"Sheela-na-Gig" in Weird Fiction Quarterly Fall 2024: Masquerade, November 2024.

A couple of meaningful reprints:

"The Choices of Foxes" in All in Among the Briars: An Anthology of Mythic Wonder (ed. Julia Rios), June 2024.
"Sheela-na-Gig" in Weird Fiction Quarterly: Holiday 2024, December 2024.

I wrote one piece of fanfiction that made it as far as AO3 and left the rest of the fills in place:

"One More Game of Chivalry" (The File on Thelma Jordon), January 2024.

I wrote painfully so much less than I wanted for Patreon:

Easy to Get (1947), January 2024.
"Man on a Mountaintop" (The United States Steel Hour, 1961), February 2024.
Channel Incident (1940), March 2024.
Foreign Correspondent (1940), March 2024.
Rear Window (1954), March 2024.
The Forty-Niners (1954), March 2024.
Why Girls Leave Home (1945), April 2024.
The High and the Mighty (1954), April 2024.
T-Men (1947), May 2024.
The Big Trail (1930), May 2024.
We Who Are Young (1940), May 2024.
Dunkirk (1958), June 2024.
The Kiss (1929), June 2024.
The Lottery (1969), June 2024.
The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943), July 2024.
To Kill a King (1980), September 2024.
The Phantom Light (1935), September 2024.
The Girl Who Couldn't Quite (1950), September 2024.
The Keeper (1983), October 2024.
Watcher (2022), October 2024.
Tank Patrol (1941), November 2024.
"Hung High" (Gunsmoke, 1964), November 2024.
Lake George (2024), December 2024.
Exit (2012), December 2024.

I cannot say at the end of this year that we are all still here: we lost Autolycus. But you must say that Alexander lives and reigns or his siren-sister will wreck your sailing and Hestia was sharing slices of lox with me earlier this evening and I want the rest of us to stay that way. Happy New Year. A healthy, a safe one. Mir zaynen af tselokhes.

Lake George (2024) is a neat, wry, bittersweet neo-noir that earns its prefix more for its production dates than for any presto-chango twists on its source genre, which was after all the most skeptical, disillusioned, and sometimes subversively sympathetic of classical Hollywood. With a few allowances for the Production Code, it could easily be a first-generation noir as it criss-crosses a modern, sun-twinged California in which none of the essential building blocks of low-level crime have changed since the days of Dolores Hitchens and Ross Macdonald, however drastically telecommunications have globalized from candlesticks to iPhones and the Red Cars given way to the Glendale Beeline. It comes alive in its own right in the commitment and surprises of its leads, the character actors it showcases in the best traditions of the B-film, where losers, liars, and weirdos could command just as much notice as the heroes of the A-list. It may have been written as a love letter to those lives on the margins, but it never feels like a pastiche of them.

Nor does it feel like a deconstruction even as it taps and tweaks at its apparent archetypes, since even noirs of the 1940's were capable of toying with their fast-forming conventions and exploded as much as they reified as the canon freewheeled on into the 1950's. When a reluctant ex-con finds himself unable to pull the trigger on the resourceful ex-moll he was strong-armed to dispatch and subscribes instead to her counter-proposal to clean out the crook who's been pulling both their strings, the audience may be counting down to the drop of the fatale-sap penny, but for goofy, rueful, luxurious stretches, Lake George genuinely doesn't seem to care what twists may be on its horizon so long as it can inveigle its audience into a road trip where panic attacks, donuts, and the sun-setting salt gold of the Pacific count for as much as cracked safes, coitus cringeworthily interruptus, and bullets. The two-hander is worth the ride. Despite the Dietrichson blonde of her hair, Carrie Coon's Phyllis more mercurially recalls one of the dizzily round-the-block dames of Jean Hagen, freely admitting that she met her ex-partner in organized crime in rehab. "I thought I was a coke fiend! Nose like a Dyson." No sugar baby in her mid-forties and a denim boiler suit, she turns a loose-limbed cartwheel among the dune scrub and stages the photoshoot of her own burial with the critically judged splatter of an exploitation director and after point-blank capping a dude, briskly talks his girlfriend out of the mutually assured destruction of dropping a dime with one arm comfortingly around the younger woman's shoulders as if she were actually solving a problem instead of compounding it. If she doesn't suggest the sustained attention of a long con, her compulsively scattergun tactics get r-selection results. With such all-embracing cynicism that it amounts to positive thinking, she asserts cheerfully, "Everybody's playable." From the other end of the double act, Shea Whigham's Don regards her with one of his brilliantly microsurgical deadpans, a Wallace Ford-esque fireplug of regrets kept so close to the vest, the explanations for them may no longer matter as much as their desaturating effect. "I got in over my head and did something stupid." He's almost a pained joke of a goon, this chunkily middle-aged, white-collar stiff with his lame arm and paralyzing surges of panic, retro-kitted out for his unwanted job with a .45 and a champagne-colored 1983 Mercedes-Benz 300TD that coughs a conspicuous plume of black smoke when revved up, its windshield perpetually wiper-smeared in rather the same way that its driver, his more-salt-than-pepper hair wind-flopped, in a brown suit that did him no favors even before he started sleeping nights in it, looks simultaneously disreputable and square. His erstwhile target squints at him as if she can't quite believe in his obstinate reality: "Jesus Christ, you're like some nervous insurance salesman." Just throwing them together generates the friction of an odd couple that is all the more appealing for sidestepping any temptation of romance, but turning them loose on a heist which proceeds less in stages than improvised hiccups gives them the time to bond over more than their debts to Glenn Fleshler's Armen in his athleisurewear and million-dollar-view McMansion, their evasion of Max Casella's Harout with his red tassel loafers and triggerman's ready M9—mutual life-saving, whatever, disposing of bodies, a classic, days on the road and nights in motels, it's either talk or fall out, but the burger that Phyllis makes Don eat, because it is understood that he often forgets to, his blood sugar crashed, and she tipped him into full-bore freakout when she was just trying to throw him a normal scare, is better than a soulbond. $200,000 goes nowhere near as far in this recession-ridden century as it did in the post-war boom, but the fact that Don offers half to cash-strapped Phyllis when she had built it up as his bribe leaves her sincerely lost for words, no defenses against no-strings fairness. The mysteries of their tarnished pasts and present reliabilities hum through the film like tires down the asphalt sinewaves of Route 101, but the engine is the fragile, adult rapport through which his dry sense of humor emerges in tandem with her impulsive kindness. "Feel good about it?" she psychs him up as they cruise their first stash house. His comically honest answer is "I rarely feel good about anything."

The film knows its noir geography, too. Catching the 7 bus at the corner of Colorado and Verdugo grounds the action as documentarily as the digitally dotted towers that have thickened the skyline of Los Angeles, a meal in the parking lot of Grizzly Bear's Burger or the tables out front of Ossy's Bakery. "Two views for the price of one," Armen boasts of his red-tiled terrace beyond which the metropolitan grid runs out to the smog-veiled mountains, before blaming Don's fuck-up for keeping him out of the higher price bracket of Beverly Hills. The most unexpected violence occurs in the sunlit suburbs of Goleta and Thousand Oaks, in the kinds of houses which have little succulent gardens by the front door and relegate a stuffed swordfish to the wall of a garage cluttered with bungee cords and paint cans, but when the screen filled with the skull-pale boulders of the Alabama Hills, I golf-clapped to the slight disruption of the other three people in the theater. The shout-out to Lone Pine in the sign for the Trails Motel could be a nod to High Sierra (1941), but in this house the respite of Lake George itself, floating the same stratospheric blue in its ring of pines as the sky over the Sierra Nevada, is more likely to evoke the escapism of lakes and mountains in Johnny Eager (1941). Cinematographer Tod Campbell lets the day scenes flood with natural light, often striped through the dust-flecked windows and solar-tinted windshield of the station wagon which serves as more of a home for our antiheroes than any of the Eisenhower leftovers of their one-night motels, and shoots most of the night scenes with a rich sheen of sodium like the reflection off a safe's worth of gold bars. Without grotesquerie, it's the cheap, transient, lonely edges of Americana familiar from so much noir, which will never go out of style so long as characters in whom we can recognize our own losses and yearnings wash themselves out of their lives for one reason or another, drugs, disenchantment, a weakness for the ponies. "Sometimes you have to do shit you don't want to do." These chipped and weathered people, answering something in one another that isn't just greed or lust. Her obfuscating motormouth and the one full-throated fuck! he lets out in deeply humane frustration. His peculiar, battered dignity and her matter-of-fact confidence that has the desired effect even when it's flim-flam. The late-lit, wrinkled waves at the foot of Ellwood Mesa are shot as meditatively as their faces, washed side by side in cloud-skeined sea breeze. Whether a pile of skimmed, scammed cash is the best way to get it or not, who doesn't want to believe in Don saying for the first time without bitterness to Phyllis, "I guess we both can do better."

I saw Lake George at the Somerville Theatre, which I guess goes to show that I will leave the house in slithering rain for the right kind of noir even if it doesn't contain Van Heflin. It was the first new movie I had seen in theaters in just about five years and seems to stream on a variety of usual suspects for the convenience of the home viewer, though if someone asked me to program a series of neo-noirs that don't get hung up in the Venetian blinds, this one would most definitely get an airing at size. It was written and directed by Jeffrey Reiner, who seems to love film noir for its philosophy more than its tropes, and I don't even care that like some of its studio-system ancestors it jinks just a little on the way to its elegantly reflective ending. I must now fervently hope it is not the only time I see either of its leads carrying a feature. This insurance brought to you by my rare backers at Patreon.

Since I went to the trouble of tracking down Tank Patrol (1941) for Bill Owen, I appreciate it giving him a particularly pointed broadside of anti-fascism even for the Ministry of Information.

Except for its technical detail of a Crusader Mk I, Tank Patrol is not among the more innovative products of the MOI, framing its rousing vignette of a knocked-out tank crew resourcefully regrouping to break out from behind Italian lines as an instructional lecture from a sergeant in the Royal Armoured Corps on the importance of a well-manufactured intercom. Any backchat from his audience of overlooked turret welders is exchanged almost instantly for the gallows banter of the crew in the vast grit of the Western Desert, evaluating their scrapped-up situation with succinct disgust: "What a life, eh, Tiger? Lost, out of gas, stone motherless broke and far from home." They wedge the tank out of sight in a sand-drifted cave and soften a berth for their front gunner who took almost as hard a hit as the intercom and the wireless, feverishly mumbling as he's field-bandaged so that the driver has to lullabye him for lack of better drugs and then clap a hand over his mouth before he gives them away to the little rustle outside that's an issue of Corriere della Sera blowing in on the dry night breeze, an unwelcome sign of just how close the encamped enemy must be. Their hull gunner can see the perimeter of sentries when he reconnoiters over the nearest dunes, a loop of oasis ringed in crates and troop trucks. It looks to their commanding sergeant like the staging for an area attack, but with some luck and nerve—and the windfall of a prisoner of war in his invaluable grigio verde and bustina—like a plan for getting hold of the petrol without which even their loader's down-to-the-wire fix-its won't get them back in the fight, let alone to their unit. At least they have been established in the kind of propaganda that is more positive reinforcement for our girls in the machine shops than cautionary tale for our boys in khaki drill. "You get some tea ready and share out the bully. We'll save the chocolate for an emergency."

Nonetheless, because he was played by an actor of interest to me in his screen debut, I worried about George the front gunner for most of his 37-minute film, especially since he had so little to do in his introductory scenes beyond wince and twitch in delirium and look almost impossible to move without further injury, a stiff-blanketed little effigy gently supported by one of his mates for a mouthful of water from a tin mug, the sweat beaded like oil on his corrugated young face. Even when he starts talking in clear sentences, he's still flat on his back in the flicker of a makeshift paraffin lamp. His grudge could be personal with all that white gauze knotted under his shirt, but as the camera dollies in on his refusal to make nice with their prisoner, unyielding as if he's staring down more than a fellow soldier's scruples, he makes its politics crystalline:

"I've had some of these Fascist beauties before when I was working at sea. When you're on top, they'll come crawling like a dog. But blimey, when they're on top, God help you. I seen these blackshirt boys in Genoa, bashing their own people over the head. When I was on that East Africa run, I heard a little of what they did in Abyssinia when they got their flamethrowers busy. When I was running food into Valencia, these Caproni boys used to come over and bomb us night and day. They killed two of my mates. Don't talk to me about Fascists."

What makes this speech more than a recruiting catalogue of atrocities is the interaction that touches it off. Beyond the popular aria he was humming when picked up on patrol, the Italian prisoner is not presented with especial caricature—he's referred to as derogatorily as the rest of the Royal Italian Army, but as played by London-born variety artist Nino Rossini, the long-faced truck driver from the 26th Light Armoured Regiment "Porcospino" comes across mostly as an average squaddie out of his depth, uncertainly fluent in English and inclined to sit tight until he can see what his British captors want of him. He is not identified with any particular campaign such as could assure his participation in war crimes. Nor is he personally offensive, a stand-in for his castor-oil state: the set-to starts because he's sharing cigarettes and snapshots of home with the loader who duly admires the other man's children and says approvingly of their surroundings, "Seen country like that back home in South Africa." The humanitarian outreach just hits a bit of a blast mine when George glances at the picture he's proffered as encouragingly as a postcard and points out the "nice big picture of Mussolini on the wall, too." The prisoner defends Mussolini as a "great leader," draws himself up proudly in his shirtsleeves and knee-fort of blanket to answer the question of whether he's a Fascist, "Of course!" It's a totalitarianism too late to recover the conversation after that. Their prisoner may be an amiable fellow, a doting father, and almost certainly doesn't want to be motoring around the sand-fly rock-flats of Libya or Egypt any more than a British tank crew, but the moment he affirms himself as a Fascist, not merely by uniform but ideologically, George has no more time for him and transitively neither should we. The slightly shocked loader attempts to smooth things over, "Oh, well, gentleman only wants to be friendly," and George snaps back as sharp as he'd do it, considerately blanked for the tender sensibilities of a U certificate from the British Board of Film Censors, "The gentleman only wants a punch on top of the –– nose!" In fact, despite the decisiveness of his rebuff, the gentleman will exit the film without ill-treatment beyond a slight case of impersonation and a share in a daily brew-up that debatably counts as a breach of the Geneva Convention. His regiment is another story, its convoy of men and munitions more than fair game for the triumphant resurgence of the refueled Crusader with all its plugs and valves in talkative order and its guns thumping the two-pounder tune of "And give 'em this one with the best wishes from good old London town . . . right from Port of Spain . . . one from Jo'burg . . . and Coventry . . . and Birmingham . . . and Plymouth . . . from the whole British flaming Commonwealth of Nations!"

Tank Patrol was produced for the MOI by the Strand Film Company, one of the independent documentary units of the 1930's which propagandized prolifically throughout the Second World War; it was directed by John Eldridge and written by A. L. Lloyd, which I thought at first must have been a false cognate for the folk singer and then after I had read that he trained with the RAC as a tank gunner and wireless operator before being seconded to the MOI, reconsidered because of the sense it would make not just of the overall scenario, but specifically of ex-merchant seaman George, anti-fascist before it was patriotically popular—a blockade-runner for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, for the love of the left wing. It's a tantalizing K-hole. Dave Arthur in Bert: The Life and Times of A. L. Lloyd (2012) discusses his subject's pre- and post-war radio career, but makes no mention of any involvement in film until the 1950's. More problematically, Bert Lloyd didn't enlist until 1942 and wasn't tapped by the MOI to write for the Russian-language weekly The British Ally until 1943. I got this film from the Australian War Memorial where its four reels loosely strung together with flickery leader are dated 1941, which is also the production date given by its object record in the Imperial War Museums. American trade mentions treat it as a recent release in 1944 and Denis Gifford's The British Film Catalogue: Non-Fiction Film, 1888–1994 (2000) places its initial exhibition in October 1943. The IWM's British Official Films in the Second World War: A Descriptive Catalogue (1980) lists it as homefront propaganda of 1941. To clarify nothing, Bert Lloyd is credited as a contributor to the MOI's Life Line, a traveling exhibition about the Merchant Navy first mounted in 1941. It's appealing to imagine he had a hand in the film, especially with its scraps of Caribbean singing and Australian reminiscence, even if I suspect that the Italian rank and file stationed in the Western Desert would have had popular songs on their gramophone as well as classical stuff by Caruso, however ironically cultured a soundtrack it makes for the violence of the commander's one-man raid. The Commonwealth cross-section of the five-man tank crew compels less of my attention, partly because I've seen Leslie Howard put the same point over more numinously and inventively, but it is neat that the screenplay thinks to include, along with Bill Elliot's Australian hull gunner, John Martin's South African loader, Owen's Battersea-bred front gunner, and the generically officer-class British commander played by Norman Williams, a driver from Trinidad and Tobago, even if Jorge Juan Rodríguez is ethnically ambiguous enough not to risk the question of a mixed unit. He has apparently brought a machete to a 40 mm fight and it serves him well. Skeptical of the red-sauce accent employed by Rossini, I was delighted to find him a cut-glass straight man to Tommy Fields. As for Owen, his first essay in the archetypal working class is convincingly harrowed and then charmingly resilient when he finally sits up on his own with his grease-grimed face and his hair falling every which way to chime in on a homesick conversation. "Port of Spain, eh? When I worked on the tankers, we used to run in and out of Trinidad, carrying oil for Liverpool. I'm glad I ain't on tankers now," he concludes with cheerful self-deprecation for a man who almost got himself blown in half on maneuvers in North Africa, "I'm no hero." His willingness to turn a cold shoulder to even the mildest-mannered of fascists makes him look like one. It seems extraordinarily unfair of the credits to misspell not only the actor's name—having not yet changed it at the behest of the Rank Organization, he's supposed to be Bill Rowbotham—but the character's. With that kind of attention to detail, God knows if the screenwriter even was an A. L. Lloyd. At least they knew the right direction to throw a punch. This meeting brought to you by my political backers at Patreon.

The Keeper (1983) is pocket hauntology, a one-room two-hander that packs its half-hour with explicitly immensurable time. Its plot is that paranormal evergreen, the ghost-hunters who find their quarry and so much the worse for them, but as it plays out in the stone-time cosmology of Alan Garner, they should have been so lucky as to wake the dead.

From its start, the teleplay does not align us with the human disturbance of the tranquil decay of Beacon Lodge, the colorless slanting of a winter afternoon through ivy-scrawled panes across a floor of sticks and rubbish, every sign of dereliction from bare shelves to jutting beams except for the fire that danced in unswept ashes as if newly laid, the one unbroken chair drawn up to the hearth as if vacated just a moment before. It doesn't look like a place where anyone has been living, yet it does not look unoccupied. Rattling the door to come in, Peter (Tim Woodward) and Sally (Janet Maw) register as gate-crashers rather than guests, bundled like hikers with the paraphernalia of their psychical overnight which they unshoulder to take in the chill, littered, open-roofed emptiness: "What a shame, letting it get like this!" From restless coverts of the house, we regard them as doubtfully, a couple so obviously mismatched, they make a natural pair, him gangling and fairish, still cheerful to believe after six fruitless investigations, her dark and compact, skeptically prepared to enjoy a self-spooked night. They unfold their camp beds, share a thermos of coffee, make their first, mundane observations. By the time night has fallen without a glimpse of spirits beyond the contents of their glasses, Sally is teasing her earnest, embarrassed partner, "When I said I'd come with you on this jaunt, I expected a little more of a run for my money," as they sit up by the artificial campfire of a storm lantern. "You might find it here," he returns with a hint of storyteller's malice, before relating the ill-starred essentials of this nineteenth-century gamekeeper's lodge that make it sound like a miniature Hill House, a locus of inexplicable misfortunes long predating the suicide that emptied it of active tenancy in 1912, its peculiarly formal abandonment following the 1960 sale of the estate. "There's always something been here . . . That's what's creepy. There's no ghost. But my grandmother was never in doubt," Peter concludes, a mischievous, telltale admission, the origin story perhaps of his paranormal interest: "If ever any house was haunted, this one was. Or is." The riddle hangs on the air like the curious whiff of smoke, reminiscent of herbs, even incense, Sally caught for an instant as she moved around the cold-hearthed half-ruin, how can there be a haunting without a ghost? The audience with the advantage of a share in the darting, creeping camera that peers through the caged ribs of wainscoting and across both sides of a Scrabble board as if everywhere and nowhere at once may have their suspicions, but as Peter warns with apt and unconscious irony, "It's best to keep an open mind."

Considered as the mystery of a classic ghost story in which the cause of the haunting contains the conditions for its expiation, the short slow burn of The Keeper plays by Golden Age rules in providing its characters with the necessary clues, though their susceptible rationalism makes it anyone's guess whether they'll interpret them correctly in time. Certainly it feels unwise of Sally to chafe her arms and mutter, "Oh, come on, house, if you're going to," especially without checking whether it already has, but the night is wearing on in the click of tiles and the scratching of pencils and Peter's good-natured grousing about her triple scores and the most notable anomaly recorded so far at Beacon Lodge has been an incongruous rise in the ambient temperature, not so much that its mortal lodgers aren't still huddling into their coats and scarves over the last of the coffee, but definitely not the eerie heat-theft that presages the spark-gap transmission of the dead. Even as they compare their personal theories of haunting, neither of them gives much thought to the competitive acrostic of their game—cuckoo, love, west, window, nest, lodging, go—until it leaps out in exquisite corpse relief as the skeleton of the folk verse apparently written by Sally in lieu of her intended correspondence, an act of mutual, unwitting psychography that makes irreversibly clear how literally the strangeness of Beacon Lodge has gotten under their skins:

Go from my window, my love, my love,
Go from my window, my dear;
For the wind's in the west and the cuckoo's in his nest
And you can't have a lodging here.

Prior to this point, the house has been no more unwelcoming to its visitors than any historic structure half pulled down and left to rot the rest of the way, its bare walls offering the shelter its stripped roof denies, but now as if in vehement underscore of the song's instruction they are assailed by all the sense-wrenching phenomena a parapsychologist could dream of, a windless storm that beats them to the ground in one another's arms, an audible smash of glass intact in the bobble of a torch-flash, a terrible deep-sounding tread that clangs at the door and drags itself across the vanished floor of the upper storey and down the inaccessible gap of the stairs and in the finest tradition of stone tapes, on the cassette that Peter frantically plays back it's nowhere to be heard, only their own captured human confusion and fright. His pedantically point-missing deflection that "Cuckoos don't have nests, anyway" has as little effect as breaking the connectors of the tiles. Sally has already intuited that the plug can't be pulled on this haunting so easily. "We're being used. I'm being used," she breathes in dismay, the letter-writer dwarfed by the looming slats of the chair still turned toward the silent hearth, its perspective dissolving over her shoulder as her pen began to scrawl across the page. Her round face in its cup of bark-brown hair floats like a mask in the paraffin light, a pressure of darkness behind it: "I can feel it. Absorbing. What are we doing here?"

( Who are you? )

The Keeper was the third and last of Garner's original one-shots for television anthologies, in this case ITV's Spooky (1983), the precursor to Dramarama (1983–89) under whose banner it was released on now inevitably out-of-print DVD; I watched it despite an aggravating, glitchy muddiness on YouTube and the tight direction by John Woods, the restive cinematography by Albert Almond, and especially the skittery, antique score by Gordon Crosse, rattling the nerve harp of its hammered dulcimer, suggest that even younger viewers who had made it through Children of the Stones (1977) or the catalogue of Sapphire & Steel (1979–82) could have hit this programme and bailed on the entire concept of TV. I thought I had discovered it last month after To Kill a King (1980), but it turns out I was rediscovering an almost decade-old recommendation from Catherine Butler, which feels correct. It may be a minor item in Garner's catalogue, but minor Garner is still weirder than most alternatives. "Welcome to Beacon Lodge." This trespass brought to you by my absorbing backers at Patreon.

I mean it more in interest than in condemnation when I say that of the quota quickies directed by Michael Powell which have so far come my haphazard way, The Phantom Light (1935) is the first to feel like journeyman work. For coastwise thrills and chills, it gets a ten out of fog-blind ten. For everything else, I wish Emeric Pressburger could have been in on the script.

By his own admission in A Life In Movies: An Autobiography (1986), Powell did not fret unduly over the plot of his last assignment for Gaumont-British and if so, it shows. The set-up is sterling: called out on short notice from his native London to the remote coast of north Wales, veteran lightkeeper Sam Higgins (Gordon Harker) slings his kit bag off the train to discover his new post awash in rumors of suicides and false lights, wrecks led spectrally astray like the all-hands disaster that claimed the sister to the locally crewed Mary Fern. "It was the North Stack Light that drowned them all." Everyone from the chatty porter to the crabbed harbormaster has an ominous word to impart to him, replacing as he is the principal keeper vanished with one of his assistants à la Flannan Isles. Of the two locals tapped as relief, the craggy Claff Owen (Herbert Lomas) seems more superstitiously rattled with his somber brooding on the drowned, but even fresh-faced Bob Peters (Mickey Brantford) witnessed the wet marks of bare feet all through the lighthouse as if visited by a damp but duty-minded revenant. Just to ease the tension, all three men are sharing the close quarters of the rock station with Tom Evans (Reginald Tate), the stark-eyed survivor of the disappearance medically decreed unfit to be moved in his semi-sane state. The beyond last thing Sam needs as he settles in for a masterfully jittery night is the arrival of further complications from the mainland in the castaway persons of Alice Bright (Binnie Hale) who tried to wangle herself a berth in the lighthouse for purposes of psychical research and Jim Pearce (Ian Hunter) whom Sam clocked as a reporter the second the younger man flashed a wad of notes for more material reasons, but their slap-kiss bickering completes the full spook house of mysterious mischiefs, ulterior motives, and uncertain loyalties. Ashore, Sam fatefully waved off all warnings with the belligerent assurance of a man carefully not sounding the depth he may be out of: "It ain't going to spoil my sheet. I've been in the service now for twenty-five year come Michaelmas and I've never had me light go out yet." As the dirty weather thickens around the Mary Fern and the dirty tricks inside the North Stack Light, whether through the interference of wreckers, ghosts, or Bolsheviks, even the staunchest defender of Trinity House may have to admit that the odds of that record standing are off.

Unless you hate lighthouses, this picture should be foolproof. Especially since its treatment is more spookily adventurous light thriller than serious supernatural suspense, it should clip along with as much twinkle as shiver as the absurdity of its haul of red herrings ironizes the danger of a real conspiracy afoot at the light and after about half an hour it does, which would be less of an issue if the film ran more than 76 minutes tops. I like a slow burn as much as the next viewer and the dilatory opening almost sinks the story before it even gets to the harbor. The location shooting of the Ffestiniog Railway is fun as far as heritage trainspotting goes—especially if you don't mind that Tan-y-Bwlch is not a seaside stop—but the humor of the culture clash between Cockney cynicism and Welsh clannishness wears off faster than a Celtic twilight and while it may be fair to point to the preoccupation with outsiders and communities as a future Archers trademark, I feel I can guarantee that emigré Imre would have written a more nuanced take than jokes about everybody within earshot being named Owen. Sam does need to encounter enough local foreboding to justify the sympathetic greeting from Dr. Carey (Milton Rosmer), "I suppose they've been chilling your blood to begin with, eh?" along with the well-attested snafu of the phantom light, but the lighthouse itself is so atmospherically as well as structurally central to the film that until the cast is fully assembled inside its vertiginously stacked shadows and blaze, even the most charming visual anecdotes of witchy stationmistresses and musical fishermen can't help but feel like marking time. It feels a little, perhaps unfairly, as though the director got distracted by the documentary pleasure of hanging out in his own setting. Save it for Hirta or Chillingbourne, Micky. Fortunately, once the action stabilizes offshore, so does the tone of the film: its characters may crack wise about their scares, but they still jump. "Don't be silly. How could you vanish if you're invisible? If you're invisible, you vanish before you've started. Ridiculous." Or they don't seem fazed at all by the uncanny goings-on at the North Stack Light, which is part of what troubles Sam about Alice and Jim. She rattles off two or three explanations for her interest in the light, the rising melodrama levels finally prompting him to ask meaningfully if she last acted in East Lynne. It improves nothing when she turns a gam-flashing pair of short-shorts out of his Sunday trousers. "A ruddy girl in a respectable lighthouse!" For his part, the assumed reporter offers no explanations, only a coolly amused sense of biding his time that doesn't square with his unsettled situation or the nautical clumsiness that fetched him up to the stack, apologetically out of petrol, a straight man with a joke up his sleeve. "I'm going down to the storeroom to fetch my box of tricks." Stumbled on behind the curtain of his bunk, Tom Evans begs in apparent sound mind to be untied. Claff Owen, normally confined to the kind of poetic doomsaying on which folk horror thrives, serves an unexpected reality check with his quiet rebuke to his nervily bumptious superior: "You are always saying you are chief here, Sam Higgins. No one is disputing it." All throughout, a tetchy, sarky, worried little man with the tenaciously creased face of many a comic hero, Sam hangs on to his skepticism for his sanity and gradually edges out of archetype, ruefully shaking off a well-meant attempt at consolation with none of his usual bluster. "If a man's worth his salt, he ought to help it. And here's me with twenty-five years' service come Michaelmas, sitting here while a gang of wreckers plays tig in me own lamp room!"

Where the film shines, appropriately, is the lighthouse itself. Practically it may have been a composite of the Hartland Point Lighthouse, the Eddystone Light, and Islington Studios, but the salt-soaked art direction of Alex Vetchinsky, the dark lantern photography of Roy Kellino, and the dreamily logical editing of Derek Twist work it up into a world of its own, at once a kaleidoscopic maze of discontinuous stages as fragmented as the flash through a third-order Fresnel lens and a normally inhabited environment where oil lamps are still used to read by and sausages can be fried to a perfect split. We get our first sight of it not in establishing long shot, but from within the luminous glass hive of the lantern room, the camera revolving like an orrery within the tick of the mechanism that rotates its own brass-banded shadow across the words etched around the stone ring of the wall, Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. Only after we have seen Claff and Bob about their duties, Tom restlessly tossing in his bunk, the human and optic workings of the light, do we refer back to the lighthouse as it appears to the approaching boats, a stark tunnel of stone self-illuminated against the night sky and sea in their webs of cloud and foam. Once inside, the camera will maintain a depth of field realistically commensurate with the tight curved fit of the tower—it does not affect the elegantly low-key set-ups—as its characters move, some easily, some gingerly, through its partitioned spiral of spaces, but it will return time and again to these icons of the light, the slow morse of its flare at a distance, the gear-train heartbeat of the lantern, the white strings of waves pouring over the ship-tearing rocks. When the light is put out, it's as sudden as a murder, the phantom light springing up on the cliffs like fool's fire while the faceted eye of the lighthouse remains hollowly dark. "God! It's out! My light's out!" Restoring it really feels like an elemental act, not only because of the ship in shattering danger out in the coal-thick fog. It's the steady sum of all its flickering, stubborn, foolish inhabitants, whose overlapping efforts are in defiance not just of the wreckers, quite modern ones, by the way, in it for the insurance fraud rather than the salvage, but of their own misgivings and mistakes. "Here, don't worry about him, miss. He won't be found drowned." No wonder the stops-out pyrotechnics are kept in reserve for the breath-catching wresting of the Mary Fern from the North Stack Rocks, an adrenaline shock of a montage cut as fast as pistons and timed to the blaze of the light, the churn of the screw, the desperate ringing of the telegraph full astern. Claff Owen put it most vividly, back when the film was just starting to get under way:

"Sometimes I think of the ships passing to and fro in the storm, and I listen to the gulls beating against the glass and breaking their little wings. It's then I realize the lives that are in my hands. Suppose I let that light go out? I'd have all those drowned souls on my conscience, beating their wings against my window like the birds."

And we're off to Mother Carey! It promises a ghostlier narrative than the one which actually unfolds, but underneath the credits a ragged figure, storm-lit, blank-eyed, dripping, emerges into the doorway of the lighthouse and with a strange fixed unstoppability begins to climb the stairs, exactly like the supposed return of the last chief keeper from the sea that drowned him. "Poor Jack Davies, back from the dead with the water streaming from his hair!" If the film had only been set rather than partly shot in Cornwall, I'd blame the Wild Magic.

Since Pressburger wouldn't leave Paris for London until the fall of 1935 and even then wouldn't be introduced to Powell until a fateful story conference in 1938, The Phantom Light was adapted by Ralph Smart, Joseph Jefferson Farjeon, and Austin Melford from Evadne Price and Joan Roy Byford's 1928 stage play The Haunted Light and while it winds up to a gripping and humane finale, it does kind of faff around getting there. Its quirkiness comes out in welcome details like a handshake instead of a kiss underneath the lighthouse's beam, but its assemblage from stock components sets a limit on its overall peculiarity. Its most consistently three-dimensional character is the North Stack Light. Powell himself had a disappointment in the picture: he had wanted Roger Livesey for the part of Jim. On the one hand, knowing the actor's magnetism and the tidal quality of his voice as showcased in I Know Where I'm Going! (1945), I can agree that Michael Balcon missed the boat. On the other, since I have liked—and associated with the sea—Ian Hunter ever since The Long Voyage Home (1940), I wouldn't swap him even without the equal-opportunity scenes of him stripping to the waist to swim for shore. I can rent the Livesey version from the hell of a good video store next door and imagine for good measure that Pressburger did work on it, in which case it would have been as thoroughly turned inside out and reinvented as their first collaboration. Over in this universe, it's a curate's egg of a quota quickie with a visible descendant in Robert Eggers; I got it with a slight crunch in the runtime from the Internet Archive, but it might look better on BFI Player if your location permits. "They think there's something romantic about lighthouses. Romantic!" Sam sighs with professional disillusion, making ready for an unexciting stay. Alas that his film was directed by a self-confessed sucker for lighthouses. This conscience brought to you by my chief backers at Patreon.

In case it is not enough to praise the picture for its ambiguously supernatural, female-forward wit and shiver, I have not seen a better argument for the collective authorship of the Lewton unit than The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943).

It was not produced by Val Lewton, nor did it involve most of his usual collaborators behind the scenes. Their catalogue is sufficiently extensive that merely through the interchangeable manufacture of the studio system one might reasonably expect a chip-in from DeWitt Bodeen, Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, Nicholas Musuraca, Robert De Grasse, John Lockert, Robert Wise, J.R. Whittredge, or Lyle Boyer, but nope. Like the majority of the popular B-series devised by RKO to capitalize on the success of their Saint films without having to cut a check to Leslie Charteris, The Falcon and the Co-eds was overseen by Maurice Geraghty and directed by William Clemens; it did have a one-off Lewton veteran in its DP J. Roy Hunt, but not in its cutter Theron Warth. Three of its stars had featured prominently in the quartet of shadowy, literate, enigmatically haunting titles that then comprised the CV of the Lewton unit—Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), and The Seventh Victim (1943)—but as contract players on the efficient factory floor of B-reliant RKO, Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, and Isabel Jewell were just as likely to be found on the set of another installment of the Falcon, especially Conway who had taken over the title role from his real-life brother George Sanders the previous year and would run with it for another three. It doesn't matter. The somberly thrilling sensation that this sunlit Gothic could at any second plunge off the California cliffs where its gentleman detective is suavely investigating a rumor of murder in the seaside hothouse of an all-girls school comes straight from the woman who wrote four screenplays for the Lewton unit—more than any other writer except Lewton himself—before her phosphorescent career was derailed first by the unit's dissolution in 1946 and then by her own blacklisting in 1948, the indispensable and still too often overlooked Ardel Wray.

Because Wray left so few traces on film outside of Lewton's productions, it would be chauvinistically easy to conclude that The Falcon and the Co-eds represents his auteurial imprint on her creativity, as opposed to the greater likelihood that it showcases the reasons her own interests and sensibilities meshed so fruitfully with the coalescing house style of the Lewton unit. With Conway's Falcon practically wading through ladies on his rounds of the Bluecliff Seminary for Girls, deftly pirouetting around student crushes and the submerged reefs of more adult passions which he navigates with the self-deprecating aplomb of quips like "Happens I have a phobia about being shot at," the film does not exceed the series brief of urbane light thrillers, but underneath the effervescence of amateur theatricals and midnight snacks and the sailor-suited trio of close-harmony troublemakers who gaggle after Tom Lawrence like self-appointed Bluecliff Irregulars, the doomier, dreamier atmosphere of the story soaks out of the slow-curling waves that crash at the foot of a smuggler's cove, the swirling glissandi of a concerto played like a residual haunting by the recording of a famous suicide. Loneliness is part of it, the alienation diagnosed by Tom as he surveys the sadly self-sufficient, book-muddled quarters of Alex Jamison, the poet-professor whom none of the girls can believe died of the natural causes on his death certificate:

"A man puts a good deal of himself into poetry . . . A man who perhaps demanded too much from people and had to live in books to get it. A quiet man who spent most of his time alone. A shy man who didn't try to assert himself, never thought of impressing people. Instead he probably took refuge in a world of his own imagination. How easily a man like that could have been dominated by others."

Everyone at Bluecliff seems to live in their separate imaginations, even the fussily no-nonsense dean concerned more with the effects of the scandal on the school's finances than with the possibility that a murder not only occurred on her campus but was uncannily foretold. Jewell's Mary Phoebus looks like a sleepwalker constantly startled awake behind the shield-glints of her glasses, her namesake-blonde curls and her breathless voice lending a china-doll air to her timid music teacher who seems curiously innocent of the implications of being caught rifling a dead colleague's desk when she explains it was only the manuscript of his poems she was trying to preserve. As if sheltered by the solidity of his own opinions, George Givot's Dr. Anatole Graelich with the dueling scar of his Mitteleuropean education on his brow holds psychologically forth like the sole practitioner of rationality on staff and freely confesses to testing the student body for telepathy with his pack of Zener cards. The clearest head for miles actually seems to belong to Brooks' Vicky Gaines, the wryly introduced drama teacher who feints and wrong-foots the Falcon as neatly as if she were lessoning him in stage combat, but even this unsentimental character has a habit of niching herself into the sea-cliff to lose herself in the ceaseless wind and the sea-swell, a kind of self-searching cosmicism: "I can't explain the sense of freedom it gives me. I watch the waves beating to the shore—I wonder if Nature's putting on a show just for me. To let me know how powerful she can be." Most obviously in danger of detaching herself from consensus reality is Rita Corday's Marguerita Serena, the darkly sensitive, allegedly clairvoyant student tormented by the conviction of following in the path of her father's insanity. "Beautifully, at times," she bitterly recalls him playing his own avant-garde compositions. "Other times strangely, wildly—" The moments when The Falcon and the Co-eds slips into her fragile subjectivity are some of its eeriest and most powerful, as when the shadow-treed soughing of the wind shapes itself into a deathly enticement to follow or, far worse for a drowned man's daughter, she hears clearly at last the spume-hoarse voice rasping itself out of the combers that burst salt-white on the rocks far below, Insane . . . only one answer . . . the sea . . . At the climax wherein the killer seeks to transfer her own unstable guilt into Marguerita, framing the girl as if by sympathetic magic to take the fall of the death by water in which madness ends, the film admits without forcing the scene's sapphic frisson. Nor can the accuracy of her premonitions really be explained by the murderer taking advantage of her morbid fantasies when she is seen absentmindedly doodling in order the symbols of the Zener cards which have yet to be dealt. The jokey blare of the ending propels the action on to the next picture with the usual tag of a damsel in flirtatiously accepted distress, but the elusive unease raised by its elemental setting, its frank talk of despair and suicide, even the casually piratical legends of the Devil's Ladder is not so easily left behind.

The Falcon and the Co-eds does not always blend glitchlessly into its series, compliance with which seems to account for Wray sharing her screenplay credit with established Falcon scribe Gerald Geraghty, although the original story was hers alone. A phone call apparently placed by a dead man is spookier than a student who faints at the drop of a foil is funny. Ruth Álvarez, Juanita Álvarez, and Nancy McCollum never feel over-egged as the precocious "Ughs" who rattle off their dialogue with tripartite enthusiasm and can swing a nursery rhyme like the Andrews Sisters, but Cliff Clark's Inspector Timothy Donovan and Edward Gargan's Detective Bates feel so out of place despite their standing as recurring characters that their most believable scenes are engulfed in an impassable whirlpool of schoolgirls or chased down the stairs by a bevy of indignant housemothers as if maenads are happening any second—accused of hiding behind their badges, they protest, "Lady, if we knew any place to hide, we'd be there!" The dorm party lit like a séance would fit right into the Lewton oeuvre, but the mercifully brief battle-of-the-sexes spanking would not. It is nonetheless functionally impossible to watch this picture without phantom consciousness of its Lewton unit version, backing off the hijinks and fully embracing the destabilizing poetry that edges it out onto the soft-spoken brink of horror even so. Conway in particular handles himself just fine as the droll and gentlemanly Falcon, but isn't it enticing to imagine him rolling up to Bluecliff in yet another inexplicable reprise of his Lewton-signature role of trash psychiatrist Dr. Judd, Satanist manqué and deserved recipient of one of the silver screen's best big cat maulings for trying to screw crazy sane? The effect on his professional fencing with Dr. Graelich would be suitably saturnine, especially in their discussion of the paranormal: "After all, psychic phenomena is an outpost in my profession and I don't have to tell you that Bluecliff has always been ultra-conservative." His inquisitive triangulation between the two female teachers would be shaded with as much audacious sleaze as apologetic courtliness, double-edging his compliment to Vicky, "It takes a very unusual woman to be rude and charming at the same time." His kindness to Marguerita might remain unaltered, much as one of his incarnations once treated an innocent abroad in the wildwood of the city with unexpected care. Nothing would change about Hunt's shadow-laced photography in which splashes of light are as unnerving as blood and the ocean surges and coils like a live thing in a dream. It feels unfair to Roy Webb who scored all eleven of Lewton's films for RKO that The Falcon and the Co-eds should employ him only as a highly recognizable, uncredited library clip.

I have no idea how Wray got from the Lewton unit to the Falcon series and back. It may not have been as much of a departure as it looks from this distance, when her seeming inseparability from Lewton is partly the survivorship bias of films that were actually produced—per Clive Dawson, RKO did announce her for other projects outside the unit that just fell through. It happened within the unit all the time: as much as I can find to admire in the somewhat mutilated Isle of the Dead (1945), I would give even more for their never-realized Carmilla. Their partnership continued beyond RKO, but she looked set to reestablish herself independently when he moved on to MGM while she was still under contract to Paramount. The project whose co-writing was still in the preliminary stages when her refusal to name names instantaneously ended her film career was the crime picture about postal inspectors which would eventually reach the screen as the much reassigned and rewritten Appointment with Danger (1950). It is as maddening as all the wasteful rest of McCarthyism: while I have no grounds for speculation on the particulars of an Ardel Wray-penned Dead Letter, I have no doubt that she would have thrived in the dark-drenched, dream-slant, nationally haunted environment of film noir. That she did not get the chance is a loss to more than my fantasies. Of the graduates of the Lewton unit, she is very much the one that got away.

To sum up, The Falcon and the Co-eds plays a great deal like its series detective took a wrong turn at the end of The Falcon in Danger (1943) and stumbled somewhere between the sugar fields of Saint Sebastian and the footlights of El Pueblo and while he may solve the crime, he leaves unplumbed this women's world where the key to two murders is a marriage and the sea speaks louder than a man. I got it from TCM and God bless the Internet Archive. None of its students are by definition co-eds, but the uncredited one with the glasses is the screen debut of Dorothy Malone. When Tom Lawrence casts the line of describing her favorite sea-view as lost and searching, Vicky leaves the bait dangling like philosophy: "Who isn't?" This show brought to you by my powerful backers at Patreon.