Category: Travel

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Mark Twain, Six Feet Under

“I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it,” Mark Twain remarked on the “subject of graveyards.” Yet, he concluded, there was “no genuinely sentimental part” to the spectacle we make of the act of decomposing. “It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.”

Perhaps it takes a higher degree of sentimentality to find the romance in the morbid; but I am capable of just that. Whenever I travel, I enjoy visiting places of interment, particularly those large necropolises with their temples and statues erected in memory of mortals who, while above ground, played a vital role in the workings of our large metropolises.

Bankers and bigwigs seem to insist on occupying the largest dwellings in the cities of the dead. There must be some consolation in knowing that, even when six feet below, one can still get folks to look up in admiration. Writers, by comparison, often have modest graves. They, after all, leave their impressions by filling volumes that, however small by comparison to a mausoleum, are apt and ample monuments to their craft. Tombs are largely reserved for those who managed no tomes.

Mark Twain’s own grave is an encasement in point. Last summer, returning to New York City from a trip to Niagara Falls, we had a stopover in the town of Elmira. Since I was in charge of both the map and the guide book, I made sure it was on our way. After all, the humorist from Missouri is buried there. The first thing we did, after securing a room for the night, was to go in search of his final resting place, which we found, eventually, along with that of filmmaker Hal Roach (shown here). However impaired our sense of dimensions after beholding the Falls, the stone (pictured) is less than majestic.

Close to it, though, is a larger monument, about twice as high as the number of feet I presume him to be under, which is precisely the length denoted by the cry of “mark twain” from which Samuel Clemens took his name. The cleverness of the tribute notwithstanding, I wonder whether the writer so honored would have welcomed such a column. Resting assured that monuments are being perpetually erected in the minds of those who read, relish, and recite his words, Mark Twain may well have been better pleased with a more modest disposal, given his attitude toward burials as expressed in Life on the Mississippi:

Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages, when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground, to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air with disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must die before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse.  It is a grim sort of a thought.  The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have now, after nineteen hundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen.  But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics, within a generation after St. Anne’s death and burial, made several thousand people sick.  Therefore these miracle-performances are simply compensation, nothing more.

Besides, he pointed out (quoting a member of Chicago Medical Society, who was an advocate of cremation), “[f]unerals cost annually more money than the value of the combined gold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880! These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-grounds and expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation of property in the vicinity of cemeteries.”

Mark Twain was born on this day, 30 November, in 1835; he died nearly a century ago and, whatever his views on the matter of tombstones, has well earned his keep at Woodlawn. Here he immaterializes for us in “The Adventures of Mark Twain” (Cavalcade of America, 1 May 1944), the voice being that of Fredric March. In light of Mark Twain’s remarks, I believe he would have approved of the memorial services a cost-effective medium like radio can provide. Radio gets rid of the body but keeps the spirit alive.

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Seeing Jungle Red; or, Arthur Godfrey’s Sneeze

The Latvian National Opera had not yet reopened for the fall season. Little more could be said in our defense. Having enjoyed another organ concert in the Dome, followed by a Russian meal at Arbat, we once again made our way through the old town to pay a visit to the city’s Forum Cinemas, a multiplex boasting the largest screen in Northern Europe. By the end of our stay, we had pretty much exhausted its late-night offerings (the overrated Dark Knight, the enjoyably featherweight Mamma Mia, the horrific Midnight Meat Train featuring Lipstick Jungle’s Brooke Shields, the enchanting art house fantasy The Fall, and the daft but tolerable Get Smart).

Not ready to head back to our hotel, situated none too conveniently in a remote spot of the run-down Russian quarter (seen above, beyond the cinema and the market, an area towered over by a block of bricks known as Stalin’s birthday cake), we decided to spend a few more Lats, the local currency, on . . . Disaster Movie.

Little did I know that what we were about to behold is now deemed the worst film ever made. Disaster Movie makes the average Saturday Night Live burlesque look like a penetrating commentary on the human condition. It is Airplane! operated by Alitalia. Bankrupt and ramshackle, it doesn’t just run on empty, it never gets off the ground into which it runs the genre. Without much hesitation, I added my lone star to the IMDb jury’s near unanimous verdict.

Having paid to watch, I can hardly lay claim to standards. And yet, I am determined not to throw money at The Women, the long-in-the-works remake of the Cukor classic, a so-called update starring (if you can call it that) a line of Hollywood A-list dropouts including Annette Bening and Meg Ryan. Who, I ask, is content to substitute the nail-polished treat of a lifetime for what looks like a Lifetime treatment of same?

On this day, 21 September, in 1939, radio personality Arthur Godfrey was called upon to promote the original on the Sun Dial, a morning program originating from the studios of WJSV in Washington, DC. The at that time not so “Old Redhead” alerted listeners to a midnight screening of The Women. And “how about the women treating the men to this show?” Godfrey dutifully added. Glancing at the advertising copy before him, the antemeridian plate spinner continued in a drone suggesting somnolence and stupefaction:

It says, talking about style: wait till you see that gorgeous $250 nightgown that is part of the Technicolor fashion show in that new picture The Women. Fancy that, paying $250 for a nightie [. . .]. Mine costs a dollar and a half, and I bet I sleep better than she does, I bet you. [Chuckle]. Well, anyway, MGM has screened Clare Boothe’s malicious, delicious play that’s a riot of revelations about our own sex. You know, men is what I’m talking, men. Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell head a 100 percent female cast.

That historic lineup was hardly anything to sneeze at. Yet Godfrey did just that—letting out what is a rare enough sound in radio. Perhaps he was allergic to women’s pictures or rebelling at the thought of touting what did not match his persona; perhaps it was merely the effect of sleeping in that five-and-dime nightgown, a garment out of which many of those tuning in on that Thursday morning were jumping at what was the most surprising and lively sound in Godfrey’s lazy chatter. Coincidence or commentary, what a time for a sneeze!

After all, Godfrey told listeners that he had a “hunch” he was being recorded. Indeed, he was. The 21 September 1939 broadcast emanating from or transmitted by CBS affiliate WJSV has been preserved in its entirety, providing today’s listener with the opportunity to experience the pastime of a past generation, from serial dramas like the Angelus Lipstick-sponsored Romance of Helen Trent (aforementioned) to news presented by the recently departed George Putnam.

No matter how nonchalant, Godfrey was aware that his words were being captured for posterity. As pop-cultural waste like Disaster Movie drives home, such knowledge does not translate into an effort to deliver memorable performances. Fast cash is more practical than lasting fame. Meanwhile, if another take on The Women is your fancy, stay put for Jack Benny’s 5 November 1939 send-up or listen to Tallulah Bankhead’s 7 December 1950 portrayal of Sylvia Fowler on The Big Show. Instead of settling for a bromide, you might as well “put some gin in it.” It’s a little trick I learned from the Countess De Lave.

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Return to Radio Street

Writing this journal, I often think of myself as being on the verge of extinction. A sense of pastness pervades my present, delayed responses to the supposedly bygone, with modern technology determining (and potentially terminating) my virtual presence. In my largely inconsequential musings on popular culture, I am perched on the edge of both nostalgia and history, dreading the irresponsibility and the impossible responsibilities of such territories foreign to me. At best, I can represent myself—and that but feebly, squeezed in as I am by the marginalia, the marginality of my interests, intellect, and imagination.

A quest of self between the nowhere of nostalgia and the distinct there—and therefores—of history? Somehow, that is not unlike riding the retro tram that takes visitors to Latvia through the nation’s capital, Riga. No wonder. I recently returned from there.

The “Retro Tram” takes you to the Jugendstil district, where you will find the largest accumulation of art nouveau architecture in the world (a designated World Heritage site); it also takes you to Riga’s garden city, Mezapark and its nouveau riche . . . past the Latvian National Opera, the Riga Latvian Society, the National Library of Latvia, past and through a series of cemeteries, all the way to the Riga National Zoological Garden. National! That elusive, loathsome, longing-inspiring notion.

Even though it numbers among the world’s less-than-happy countries, if a recent survey is to be believed, Latvia strikes one—or struck me—as a young nation eager to find and define itself. Wars, occupations, repressions of native culture and language, and now the surge (or scourge) of Western commercialism have made this a difficult and perhaps impossible project. One such commercial enterprise, the Retro Tram, takes you—the tourist—past sites revealing German influences and bygone splendor, while much of the old town seems like a theme park—or the construction site for one—featuring new buildings meant to reflect one past while obscuring a more recent, the horrors of which are reenacted or displayed in some of the city’s museums (the Occupation Museum, for instance). Are these places representative of the nation or placeholders for a national identity lost in (or to) the spirit of European unity?

It seemed appropriate that the tram is departing from and returning to a street whose name bespeaks or proclaims the quest for such solidarity, for union and the voicing of uniting ideas in a language that unites: Radio, McLuhan’s “tribal drum.” As I am returning now to Radio Street, to the subject that is right up mine, I struggle once more to make the past my present while steering clear of both the headlongevity of nostalgia and the impossible burden—the hubris—of history. All I can offer is a splash in the shallow puddles of my own reflections as I make my way down what, to me, is anything but Memory Lane . . .

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A Slice of Bacon . . . to Go

It seems I am going back to school.  If I take Francis Bacon literally, that is. Considering that his stained-glass likeness greets me whenever I turn on the boiler or am induced by allergies to reach for the vacuum cleaner, it is high time I start quoting him now. According to the aforementioned essayist, “He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.” A timely reminder, as we are off tomorrow on a last-minute trip to Riga, Latvia.

Stained-glass likeness of Francis Bacon in our home

Es nerunāju latviski.  That is to say, I am a stranger to the native tongue (which is related to Sanskrit); and, having just gotten my hands on a couple of guidebooks, I realise that I am a stranger as well to much of the culture and history of the Baltic nation, even though German influences are pronounced—being that Riga was founded by Albrecht von Buxthoeven, a German bishop, and rarely enjoyed independence for long—and English, as is the case in most larger Western cities nowadays, is widely understood.

Francis Rudolf’s diary with self-portrait

Much could be gleaned, no doubt, from the journal of a local, that is, a Latvian Francis, meaning the expatriate Renaissance man Francis Rudolf or Rudolph (1921-2005), some of whose paintings, drawings and diaries (shown here) were gifted a few years ago to a university here in Aberystwyth, the town where I currently reside.

“Expatriate” is too clinical a term: Rudolf was forced to migrate during his youth, when Latvia was being invaded by the Nazis and the Red Army.  There he is, sticking out his tongue at us who are still largely ignorant of his world; yet it was he who put Latvia on the map for us and got me intrigued about Riga.

Francis Rudolf, undated self-portrait

Richard Wagner and Sergei Eisenstein aside, there are few names in the Riga travel guides to which a journal devoted to US radio dramatics can readily relate.  Determined not to stoop to the sharing of random snapshots, I shan’t continue broadcastellan until the conclusion of my “scholarly” outing, which is preceded and followed by sojourns in familiar destinations in Wales (Cardiff), England (Manchester), and the Netherlands (Amsterdam). Technology permitting, I might file the occasional report.

It rather irks me to be silenced by the marginal nature of my chosen subject.  What a failure of self-expression, what a missed opportunity a journal like this is if it cannot accommodate whatever its keeper happens upon, sees and undergoes; yet such is the curse of the concept blog.

“Let him keep [. . . ] a diary,” Bacon rightly advises.  I often regret my own strictures in this respect, as I imagine that my experiences may be rather more relatable to some than the dramatics of radio are to most.  Besides, an online diary is ideally suited to the recording of everyday observations.  

As has been demonstrated rather conclusively by the dead air I left behind on past travels, I seem incapable of reconciling the peripatetic with the armchair reflective.  Still, I hope my experiences are going to enter into this journal somehow.  As Bacon recommends,

[w]hen a traveller returneth home, let him not leave the countries, where he hath travelled, altogether behind him […].  And let his travel appear rather in his discourse, than his apparel or gesture; and in his discourse, let him be rather advised in his answers, than forward to tell stories; and let it appear that he doth not change his country manners, for those of foreign parts; but only prick in [that is, plant] some flowers, of that he hath learned abroad, into the customs of his own country.

Now, I have long been confused as to what “his own country” might mean, being that I have not lived in what is presumably and legally “home” to me for nearly two decades; but, in lieu of on-the-spot reports, I shall endeavor to gather and display such “flowers” as may withstand the airwaves or can be securely propped against a microphone . . .

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A Fine Kettle of Fish

My visit to Canajoharie

These past few days, I’ve been trying to keep my eyes shut—as if the medication had not already made it well-nigh impossible to keep them open. The more they are watering, the more inflamed they get. And what with all this gasping for air, I hardly feel in my element. Allergies. My mother used tell me they are just a state of mind as she insisted that I mow the lawn—which is one reason I have not laid eyes on her in about two decades. State of mind, my bloodshot eye! Anyway. If I am not reaching for tissues or fishing for the inhaler, I am digging into my library of radio recordings, which I am spending an inordinate amount of time cataloguing. Otherwise, I would simply lose sight of what I have yet to hear.

Our Freedom’s Blessings was one of the titles to which I never gave a thought, let alone lend an ear. Lending a hand in its return to the air—or its turning up on the internet—turned out to be somewhat of a headache. So be it. After all, there is little use and less joy in going on about something without giving anyone else at least half a chance to follow.

My visit to Canajoharie

Little is known about Our Freedom’s Blessings, other than that it was produced by the New York State Department of Commerce. No recordings of it are currently available online. So, I set up a new site for the sharing of programs [now defunct].

Since the crash of my last Mac back in November 2007, I have been unable to edit my old pages; and, itchy eyes notwithstanding, it is only now that I can face the prospect of starting from scratch. You might well argue that an episode of Our Freedom’s Blessings titled “The Little Jars of Canajoharie” was not worth all this effort. Ah, but have you been to Canajoharie?

As Uncle York, the narrator of Our Freedom’s Blessings tells us, Canajoharie is an Indian name meaning “the kettle that washes itself.” The “little town with the funny name,” we learn,

lies smack in the middle of the Mohawk valley.  In 1890, Canajoharie was hardly more than a crossroads, still half country.  Well, it was a leisurely kind of life, quiet days of wagon wheels on dirt streets, the tingling smell of hickory smoke in a cow crossing in the main part of the town.  But Canajoharie folks wasn’t asleep.  Far from it.  Couple of fellas that smoked their own hams and bacon started to sell them to other folk.  And before you knew it, there was a full-fledged little company operating, one that took for itself a homespun kind of name: Beechnut.

Well, we did not listen to Uncle York on our travels through upstate New York when we happened upon Canajoharie—after an unwelcome detour—and that despite the fact that the Mac on which the recording is stored went along for the ride. Had we done so, we might have learned a little something about the fortunes of the town. We did insist on seeing the “kettle,” not heeding the warnings of a local that it was little more than a hole in the ground.

Equipped though we were with hand-drawn map handed to us at a tourist information booth that suggested we were not the only ones eager to seize the opportunity to gawk at a pothole, we did not encounter anyone else on along the way on that warm June morning. We got lost, passing derelict factory buildings and warehouses that bespeak the town’s heyday, the days of which Uncle York speaks.

When I came across the name of “Canajoharie” in my recordings library, I just had to tune in. Never mind that “Little Jars” turned out to be little more than a juvenile infomercial about the makers of baby food. Somehow, whatever flotsam drifts toward me on the airwaves seems to belong in my life. It is never an altogether different kettle of fish.

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Abiding Faith; or, Where’s the Caterer?

There was a sheet of paper pinned to each seat at the aforementioned Walter Kerr Theatre, asking patrons whether or not they had liked the current production and whether they would recommend the show. Now, I did not hand in my questionnaire. Who am I to caution theatergoers about a musical with such a wonderfully gifted group of players: Harvey Fierstein, who also wrote the libretto, Tom Wopat, whom I had previously seen, defenses way down, in Annie Get Your Gun, and the glorious Faith Prince (last featured here on the cover of the playbill for Bells Are Ringing)? Obviously, enough people had come to the Walter Kerr on that Tuesday evening in early June to relegate me, chancing it by getting a last-minute ticket at TKTS, to a seat way in the back.

Now, this might be all right when the stage is filled with a line of chorus girls making their way down a giant staircase, a set boasting an enormous showboat or an oil painting coming to life (as in the revival of Sunday in the Park with George I would see a few weeks later); but A Catered Affair is not that kind of a razzle-dazzler. It is a modest, earnest musical play; it examines characters rather than providing an opportunity for a series of show tunes. Modesty is its quiet strength, but, sitting in the back row, it still feels an awful lot like weakness.

I regret to report, however belatedly, that I did not warm to A Catered Affair, and not because its thin story felt somewhat warmed up. Sure, it is based on a 1955 television play by Paddy Chayefsky, himself not exactly a hot property these days; but then, most of today’s Broadway offerings are recycled.

A promotional close-up supplied by the theater to passers-by with a view no audience member would enjoy

No, it wasn’t that. I was simply too far removed from the hearth—even further than Uncle Winston, the sidekick Fierstein insisted on turning what, back in the 1950s, could only be an outsider. I appreciated him being there, as a reminder that homosexuals where always in the picture, even when they were kept well outside the frame of the camera. Unfortunately, Winston’s moment in the limelight is “Coney Island,” a dreadfully cliché-laden number in which he advises us to keep our eyes open as we ride the rollercoaster of life.

I had been told about the old stove, and that Ms. Prince actually prepared scrambled eggs during the scene. And that is a recommendation? Well, hand me a frying pan and start selling tickets! It rather reminded me of Gertrude Berg, who insisted on realism, and real eggs, even though The Goldbergs was a radio program. Yes, eggs were being prepared on the stage of the Walter Kerr that night, but, unable to smell the, that did nothing to whet my appetite. An intimate play deserves an intimate theater, especially a play that depends on character far more than on plot, of which there is little, and that anticlimactic.

Indeed, A Catered Affair would have made a fine radio musical, if something like that were ever to be reintroduced into American culture. This is not to say that it is cheap or second-rate. It just means that it does not require visuals for its staging of a family in crisis, a particular brand of problem play you might call Miller Light, even though Rheingold or Schlitz were more likely to be found in the family icebox.

The Walter Kerr was once a radio studio; back in the late 1930s, the playbill informed me, Alexander Woollcott broadcast from here. I would have enjoyed closing my eyes and listening to Ms. Prince, who wowed me many years ago as Adelaide and who keeps delighting me whenever I play selections from the Guys and Dolls cast album. Having kept my eyes peeled on a faraway stage with little to see (not even the event promised in the title), I did not recall a single tune upon exiting the theater shortly before 9 PM, after 90 minutes of intermission-free drabness.

Broadway does Family Tuesdays now, for the discerning “family,” however defined, that can afford to spend money on the less-than-spectacular.

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Going Ithaca; or, A Hardy Welcome

Traveling through Upstate New York on a weekend in summer without having called ahead for reservations is like entering a lottery with money you owe to a loan shark with particularly keen nostrils. It is a heck of a gamble. While not the Vegas type and averse to mixed metaphors, I prefer vacationing without a safety net; but to the one driving and hoping for a bedpost instead of yet another signpost pointing to some rural spot barely traceable on the map it can be rather a pain in the hard-pressed posterior.

“There’s no room to be had in Ithaca,” we were warned one stormy evening by the proprietor of a second-hand bookstore in Dryden, a little town in the Finger Lakes District. That was Saturday, 21 June, which happened to fall on the second day of this year’s Ithaca Festival, the weekend Ithacans set aside to celebrate themselves and, by so doing, apparently draw considerable crowds to augment their population so as to justify every overpriced motel bed in town.

We had experienced difficulties with accommodations (make that impossibilities) on the previous night up in Saratoga Springs, where even the bedbugs were lining up for the tiniest of places to flop due to some rock concert of which we, who would much rather listen to a piano being tuned by Florence Foster Jenkins, were altogether, though not, as it turned out, altogether blissfully unaware.

Well, there was a room to be had in Ithaca. And not just a room, but a view, as well. That view, at some remove from the rather fancifully named Meadow Court Inn, was up in the balcony of the old State Theatre. We were being treated, free of charge, to a screening of a silent movie shot on location in Ithaca, which, as Aaron Pichel informed us in his extensive notes on the film we were about to see, was a center of motion picture production during the early days of narrative filmmaking.

Directed by the brothers Leopold and Theodore Wharton, The Lottery Man (1916) features a young Oliver Hardy (shown above) in the role of Maggie Murphy, a cheerful maid who ditches a chance at riches for the fellow servant she loves.

The audience at the old State Theatre was largely local. We could tell by their cheers. They recognized buildings and streets (pointed out to us in the program) and expressed themselves appreciative of this off-Hollywood production in the mounting of which several long since departed townspeople had been actively involved both behind and in front of the camera.

Based on a Broadway stage success of the same title and starring two of the original cast members of the 1909-10 production, The Lottery Man is a clever little farce that tells the story of an impecunious but resourceful college student who offers himself as prize to any woman daring or desperate enough to purchase a dollar ticket, only to realize that he has fallen in love and is jeopardizing a chance at matrimonial happiness by attempting such a money-raising stunt.

Among the luckless and disgruntled ticket holders shown in a climactic crowd scene were quite a few poorly disguised males, which brought to mind the recent policy changes in the State of New York owing to which the state of matrimony no longer demands that an Oliver in search of a husband either pose as Olivia or propose to one instead.

The little known and seldom shown Lottery Man, which, as of this writing, has yet to receive five votes on the Internet Movie Database, was ably accompanied that night by the jovial Philip Carli (pictured), one of a rare but according to him far from threatened breed of entertainers. The fact that we number among our friends a silent movie composer/accompanist who wrote a radio play-turned-television drama about Laurel and Hardy added further significance to this unexpected outing at the end of a long drive along the Mohawk and down Cayuga Lake.

Sure, the moviegoing experience might have been enhanced by the presence of a projector (the film was screened digitally); but I, for one, was glad to have been part of this special event at a night on which we could have hoped for nothing more than a roof over our chowderheads.

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The House of [Broken] Glass

Fleischmanns is a small town. There’s a sign on the road just before you get to it that says POPULATED AREA. Fleischmanns is populated with five hundred people, no more, no less. To a stranger it looks like any other little village in the Catskill Mountains. To a native it’s a special place and every town he doesn’t live in is a nice place to visit but he wouldn’t want to live there—he wants to live in Fleischmanns.

This is how the aforementioned actress-playwright Gertrude Berg begins her reminiscences about the town in which her father opened a summer resort more than a century ago in a spot once known as Griffins Corners. That, incidentally, is also the name of the local pub where we had lunch on our stopover at that once thriving, affluent community. Fleischmanns. Who ever heard of a place that sounds like a time slot reserved for the sponsor of Rudy Vallee! When I read the name, I thought for a moment that Mrs. Berg, who knew all about commercial radio, had made it up; but when I discovered it on a map of the Hudson Valley shortly before our 1,300-mile trip through upstate New York a few weeks ago, I was determined to pay a visit.

Now, I am not prone to bouts of nostalgia, the state of pining for what never has been anything else but an intense longing to the indulgence in which entire industries are devoted. I much rather aspire to something that is, delve in what has been, or simply make up whatever suits me without getting all melancholy about it. Still, if there is any place in the Catskills that could make me melancholy, it would have to be the town of Fleischmanns.

I don’t quite know what I expected after I read the lengthy, detailed description in Berg’s charming Molly and Me; I only knew that I really wanted to go. After all, Berg’s serial The House of Glass owes much to the town and the hotel run by Berg’s father. The House of Glass (a single instalment of which, dating from 13 November 1935 and featuring famed contralto Madame Schumann-Heink, has been shared on the to me invaluable Internet Archives) was “Fleischmanns all over again—through a ribbon microphone” Berg remarks in her biography:

Barney Glass was my father. The hotel was full of guests, all of whom I had known. I used what I could remember of their stories, and where there were unhappy endings I added happy ones. The radio hotel always solved its problem with a laugh, and as far as reality was concerned all I had to do was change the names of the guests and I had my story line.

Fleischmanns has a museum devoted to memory. It was closed on the day we passed through. The library has a copy of Molly and Me. I took it from the shelf, flicked through it until I got to the chapter on the town, and left it on a little table, as if to remind anyone stopping by of those better days. I know that the Borscht Belt went bust some decades ago; but I sensed that we caught Fleischmanns with its pants down. Not the kind of clowning around that makes you laugh; more like a sad, half-forgotten soul stuck in a retirement home with a suitcase of ill-fitting clothes and a yellowed scrapbook filled with mementoes of a past few active minds could be stirred into recalling . . .

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Beyond Trickery: Houdini at Niagara Falls

While in New York City, I took in a few films I would have otherwise missed (the intoxicating My Winnipeg, featuring 1940s B-movie actress Ann Savage) or given a miss (the eerie Happening, which went nowhere, but worked well as a prolonged exercise in foreshadowing). Of these offerings, The Incredible Hulk was certainly the least, despite the compelling opening sequences shot on location in Brazil. Thereafter, Fantastic Four and X-Men: The Last Stand screenwriter’s Zack Penn’s adaptation of the Marvel strip exhausted itself, like so many of today’s nominal blockbusters, in CGI trickery that, after all these years, still fails to convince me.

Lou Ferrigno’s cameo sure made me long for the days in which monsters were made of materials that a more or less effectively resembled flesh and bone and stuntmen were at hand to bruise and break theirs for our amusement—the kind of hands-on work recalled for us in the unlikely medium of radio as a series of dramatic reenactments titled Daredevils of Hollywood.

I appreciate a solid stunt or expertly executed legerdemain, which is why I admire the work of the digits-deficient Harold Lloyd and the spectacles of the silent era in general.

During a visit to Niagara Falls, I wondered whether Harry Houdini, who also starred in a series of silent films, had ever gone over them in a barrel. He did not; but that is just the kind of stunt his public would have expected of the great escape artist, whose specter looms large in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I had devoured not long before my trip to Niagara.

Rich in pop cultural references to comic books and superheroes, the novel makes mention of Houdini, a “hero to little men, city boys, and Jews,” in the opening paragraph:

In later years, holding forth to an interviewer or to an audience of aging fans at a comic book convention, Sam Clay liked to declare, apropos of his and Joe Kavalier’s greatest creation, that back when he was a boy, sealed and hog-tied inside the airtight vessel known as Brooklyn, New York, he had been haunted by dreams of Harry Houdini. “To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same thing,” he would learnedly expound at WonderCon or Angoulême or to the editor of The Comics Journal.  “You weren’t the same person when you came out as when you went in.  Houdini’s first magic act, you know, back when he was just getting started.  It was called ‘Metamorphosis.’ It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.” The truth was that, as a kid, Sammy had only a casual interest, at best, in Harry Houdini and his legendary feats; his great heroes were Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, and Jack London.  Yet his account of his role—of the role of his own imagination—in the Escapist’s birth, like all of his best fabulations, rang true.  His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.

There was no escaping the illusionist and stunt performer. So, while browsing at one of New York City’s few remaining video stores, I was not surprised to come across Harry Houdini box set, which I promptly snatched up.

Earlier this week, I screened The Man from Beyond (1922). A convoluted and somewhat ramshackle thriller involving cryonics, the supernatural, and plenty of melodramatic villainy, Beyond features a Niagara Falls-set climax not unlike the one in Henry Hathaway’s previously mentioned technicolor spectacle Niagara (1953). The only trickery is achieved through editing, which, to be sure, makes film a dubious vehicle for the display of an illusionist’s real-time feats. That aside, however, and despite all its cardboard hooey, Beyond achieves a physicality—a corpo-reality—missing from today’s CGIdeated action-adventures. When it comes to movie magic, I take bodies over pixels any day.

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After the Falls

Having just returned from a trip to Niagara Falls, I was eager to revisit Henry Hathaway’s 1953 technicolor thriller starring Marilyn Monroe. Shrewd, sexy, and sensational, the expertly lensed Niagara is the most brilliantly devised star-making spectacle of Hollywood’s studio era. It has so much going for it that it can afford to be utterly predictable. The Falls are predictable, which does not make them any less exciting. And as much as I enjoy spotting old-time radio performers like the aforementioned Lurene Tuttle or Jack Benny’s jovial announcer Don Wilson, Niagara hardly requires any added attractions to make repeat viewings worth my while. More than the mere setting for a tale of adultery and revenge, the magnificent Falls are a dramatic extension of Monroe’s form and the character she portrays, as well as an obvious metaphor for the rush of desire and the flimsiness of the social fabric with which we attempt to stay it.

No one seems safe from the inexorable and devastating force of Niagara. Not even Jean Peters, the far better half of a couple of second honeymooners so clean as to be emotionally washed up and well past passion. Spending a honeymoon by the falls is something of an endurance test. Either your love proves as strong and permanent as the scenery or the flame is doused and consumed by it. Passion, to be sure, is no requisite for marriage, which is why the falls can be seen as a substitute for it, an ersatz externalization for the unsettling influences those settling in dare not permit themselves to experience.

No matter how many showers she takes, how many times she gets sprayed by the mist, no matter how many times she slips into a new dress, Monroe’s Rose is far from spotless. She is no Lorelei Lee, either, an infantilized siren whose predatory sexuality is rendered innocuous by her apparent simplicity and her chief interest in the monetary value of her prey. According to the Code under which Hollywood operated, a lapsarian anti-heroine like Rose must go down in her own scheme to rid herself of her brooding, volatile husband (Joseph Cotten, whose character is too unsure of himself or his position to control his wife, let alone the film’s point of view).

For the gender-confused and fatalistic teenager I once was, Niagara outlined adult life as an improbable proposition, a threatening, unconquerable front: the terror of “taking the plunge” in conformity and the peril of attempting to go against the stream while stuck in a barrel destined for the Horseshoe Falls. Wet behind the ears, I seemed unlikely to get altogether soaked. My downfall would be suffocation, not rapture. The only recourse that appeared open to me back then was to assume the likeness of a devastating and lamented corpse when the bells were rung on my behalf by the re-producers in charge of casting me aside. I never got entirely over this feeling, but have long since learned to keep afloat.