Porcelain promises

Apparently our particulate pollution levels are officially unhealthy for sensitive groups, which explains not only the light brass tint to the afternoon but the rather massive asthma attack I had instead of sleeping for the entire morning. The day before, I couldn't enjoy the rain because it came with a headache so skull-crunching, I actually sort of passed out from it at a terrible hour to the rest of my schedule. I was under non-joking doctor's orders to rest up this weekend and it has not vaguely happened. I keep being light-headed, ear-ringing, unfocusable. My brain feels like a flickering commodity and I don't like worrying about false flags.

As it turns out, what goes on with my hand is that it's going to have arthritis, but with any luck on the same glacial timeline as the kind that runs in my family, and in the meantime I have been referred back to OT. Maybe there will be more paraffin.

My parents as an unnecessary gift for taking care of the plants while they were out of town—mostly watering a lot of things in pots and digging the black swallow-wort out of the irises—gave me Eddie Muller's Dark City Dames: The Women Who Defined Film Noir (2001/2025), which not only fits the theme of this year's Noir City: Boston, but contains such useful gems as:

One of the most common, if wrong-headed, criticisms of film noir is that it relegates women to simplistic archetypes, making them Pollyannas or femmes fatales, drippy good girls or sinister sexpots. People who believe this nonsense have never seen a noir starring Ella Raines.

Ella Raines is indeed all that and a drum solo on top, but she is not a unique occurrence and I can only hope that people who have not been paying attention to Karen Burroughs Hannsberry or Imogen Sara Smith will listen to the Czar of Noir when he writes about its complicated women, because I am never going to have the platform to get this fact through people's heads and I am never going to let up on it, either.

Anyway, I learned a new vocabulary word.

Thanks to the Canadian wildfires, our sunset light is Pompeiian red, by which I mean mostly the cinnabar and heat-treated smolder of the pigment, but also the implication of volcano.

Because my day was scrambled by a canceled appointment, after I had made a lot of phone calls spatch took me for soft-serve ice cream in the late afternoon, and once home I walked out to photograph some poppies I had seen from the car.

( Did you love mimesis? )

I can't help feeling that last night's primary dream emerged from a fender-bender in the art-horror 1970's because once the photographer who had done his aggressive and insistently off-base best to involve me in a blackmail scandal had killed himself, all of a sudden the hotel where I had been attending a convention with my husbands had a supernatural problem. Waking in the twenty-first century, I appreciate it could be solved eventually with post-mortem mediation rather than exorcistic violence, but it feels like yet another subgenre intruding that the psychopomp for the job was a WWI German POW.

It improves my mood considerably that I can listen to the Drive's "Jerkin'" (1977) because not only is the song itself a brilliant example of stupid rock, the band existed for a grand total of seven months during which it managed to release one un-radio-playable single, manufacture a scandal, blow an important gig, and implode in a puff of 20/20 hindsight, which sounds like a none more punk biography to me. Any myriad of such one-not-exactly-hit wonders would have bubbled through any scene with a critical exposure to Patti Smith or the Sex Pistols—in this case it was Dundee's—but this one left enough traces that I can, thanks to one of the better functions of the internet, experience all six and a half minutes of their total musical record and read for myself their history according to their lead singer, who really should feel proud that so much pleasure can be transferred through a song about masturbation. It has a two-guitar solo! DIY that slide! The persistence of thrown-at-the-wall weirdness makes me feel better about the world. On that note, because I had recent occasion to, as it were, drag it out, Lou Rand Hogan's The Gay Cookbook (1965).

City of Fear (1959) has no frills and no funds and it doesn't need either when it has the cold sweat of its premise whose science fiction had not yet become lead-lined science fact. It's late noir of an orphan source incident. Its ending is not a place of honor.

Unique among atomic noirs of my experience, City of Fear couldn't care less about the international anxieties of nuclear espionage or even apocalypse, at least not in the conventionally pictured sense of flash-boiling annihilation. More akin to a plague noir, it concerns itself with the intimately transmissible deteriorations of acute radiation syndrome as it tracks its inadvertent vector through the bus stops and back alleys and motor courts of the city he can irradiate with nothing more than a nauseated cough, the drag of a dizzied foot, the clutch of a sweat-soaked palm. As Vince Ryker lately of San Quentin, Vince Edwards has all the hardbodied machismo of a muscle magazine and the cocky calculation of an ambitious hood, but he's a dead man since he shoved that stainless steel canister inside his shirt, mistaking its contents for a cool million's worth of uncut heroin. It's a hot sixteen ounces of granulated cobalt-60 and it has considerably more of a half-life than he does. Well ahead of the real-life incidents of Mexico City, Goiânia, Samut Prakan, Lia, this 75-minute B-picture knows the real scare of our fallout age is not the misuse of nuclear capabilities by bad actors, but simply whether our species which had the intelligence to split the atom has the sense to survive the consequences. "I doubt if anyone can explain that calmly to three million people without touching off the worst panic in history."

The plot in this sense is mostly a skin for the philosophy, a procedural on the eighty-four-hour clock of its antihero's endurance as the authorities scramble to trace their rogue source before it can ionize too much of an unprepared Los Angeles. In slat-blinded boxes of offices as blank as concrete coffers, Lyle Talbot and John Archer's Chief Jensen and Lieutenant Richards of the LAPD gravely absorb the crash course in containment delivered by co-writer Steven Ritch as Dr. Wallace, the radiological coordinator of the Los Angeles County Air Pollution Control District who bears the stamp of nuclear authority in his thin intense face and his wire-brush hair, a lecturer's gestures in his black-framed glasses and his quick-tilt brows. Pressed by the cops for a surefire safeguard against loose ⁶⁰Co, he responds with dry truthfulness, "Line up every man, woman and child and issue them a lead suit and a Geiger counter." The stark-bulbed shelves of a shoe store's stockroom provide a parallel shadow site for the convergence of local connections such as Joseph Mell's Eddie Crown and Sherwood Price's Pete Hallon, whose double act of disingenuous propriety and insinuating jitters finds a rather less receptive audience in an aching-boned, irritable Vince, groaning over his mysterious cold even as he clings territorially to the unjimmied, unshielded canister: "Look, this stays, I stay, and you get rid of it when I say so." Already a telltale crackle has started to build on the film's soundtrack as a fleet of Geiger-equipped prowl cars laces the boulevards of West Hollywood and the drives of Laurel Canyon, snagging their staticky snarl on the hot tip of a stiff just as the jingle of an ice cream truck and the clamor of eager kids double-underline the stakes of endangered innocence. While Washington has been notified, the public is still out of the loop for fear of mass unrest, the possibility of evacuating the children at least. A night panorama of the dot-to-dot canyon of lights that comprises downtown L.A. recurs like a reminder of the density of individuals to be snuffed and blighted if Vince should successfully crack the canister into an accidental dispersal of domestic terrorism: "He's one man, holding the lives of three million people in his hands." At the same time, he skulks through a world that for all its docu-vérité starkness of Texaco stations and all-night Thrifty Drug Stores seems eerily depopulated, a function perhaps of the starvation-rations production, but it suggests nonetheless the post-apocalyptic ghost this neon concentrate of a metropolis could turn into. It might be worse than a bomb, this carcinogenic, hemorrhagic film that Dr. Wallace forecasts settling over the city if the high gamma emitter of the cobalt gets into the smog, the food chain, the wildlife, the populace, Chornobyl on the San Andreas Fault. "Hoarse coughing, heavy sweat, horrible retching. Then the blood begins to break down. Then the cells." With half a dozen deaths on his conscience as the picture crunches remorselessly toward the bottom line of its hot equations, we can't be expected to root for Vince per se, but he isn't so sadistic or so stupid that he deserves this sick and disoriented, agonized unraveling. His relations with Patricia Blair's June Marlowe are believably tender as well as studly, sympathetically admitting in her arms that he just wanted something better for the two of them than an ex-con's "dead meat dishwashing for the rest of your life." A cool redhead, she's a worthy moll, unintimidated by police interrogation or the onset of hacking fever. A sly, dark anti-carceral intimation gets under the atomic cocktail of tech almost in passing—the fatal canister came originally from the infirmary at San Quentin, where it was used in what Lieutenant Richards describes as "controlled volunteer experiments" and Vince more colloquially identifies as "secret junkie tests." Perhaps we are meant to presume that the prison grapevine jumbled the science, allowing him to confuse the expanding field of cobalt therapy for drug trials and thus a lethal radionuclide for a lucrative opioid. The fact of human experimentation regarded fearfully by maximum-security inmates remains. Their radiation safety was evidently nothing to write home about either way.

( It's worth a million. )

Co-written by Ritch and Robert Dillon, this terse little one-way ticket was directed for Columbia by Irving Lerner, a past master of documentaries and microbudgets and an alleged Soviet asset while employed by the Bureau of Motion Pictures, or at least he was accused of unauthorized photography of the cyclotron at UC Berkeley in 1944. Wherever he got his feel for nuclear paranoia, it is intensely on display in City of Fear, its montages a push-pinned, slate-chalked, civil-defense-survey-metered feast of retro-future shock. Lucien Ballard once again shoots a grippingly unglamorous noir of anonymously sun-washed sidewalks and night-fogged intersections. The low-strings score by Jerry Goldsmith pulses and rattles with jazz combo edginess, all off-beat percussion and unease in the woodwinds and jabbing brass, closing out the film on a bleak sting of the uncertainly protected city. I discovered it on Tubi, but it can be watched just as chillingly on YouTube where its existentialism, like a committed dose, spreads from the individual to the national to the planetary. No one in it wears proper PPE, but it names its deadly element outright. For a study in whiplash, double-feature it with A Bomb Was Stolen (S-a furat o bombă, 1962). This contamination brought to you by my controlled backers at Patreon.

It would be facile to regard the war movies of Harry Morgan ironically in hindsight of M*A*S*H (1972–83). He was twenty-six years old when he was signed by Twentieth Century-Fox in the fall of 1941; the odds that he wouldn't play in war pictures right out of the newly non-neutral gate of 1942 were astronomically against. He made his screen debut in boot camp and could be found thereafter on submarines, aircraft carriers, small Pacific islands, and the heartstrings of the home front. He could even be found in the Allied invasion of Sicily, whence my no-contest favorite of these early, military roles, the officious little captain of MPs in A Bell for Adano (1945). He is an ornament of welcome grit to his humane yet sometimes sentimentalized story and you couldn't get me within range of his chat-up lines for all the chocolate and cigarettes in the American zone.

In fairness to Captain Purvis of the 123rd Military Police Company, he's not the nemesis of the film. As in the best military comedies and tragedies, that distinction is reserved for the brass, in this case the Patton stand-in whose high-handed prohibition of mule carts from the narrow streets of Adano—one recalcitrant beast held up a whole convoy—threatens to blockade the small and demoralized, war-battered town as disastrously as if it were still an American objective. Purvis is merely the rules and regulations rolling downhill, a sarcastically sidemouthed goldbrick who regards the sincere bridge-building of John Hodiak's Major Joppolo as wasted on "spaghetti pushers" and cares most about learning the Italian for "How's about it, toots?" His CO listens seriously to the concerns of the citizenry about fishing rights, collaborators, the seven-hundred-year-old bell melted for artillery by the Fascists, Purvis crashes around the local girls as if he's paid for them with his vino and cracks about not knowing the difference in the blackout. As much cynical off-color as he contributes to individual episodes, however, he ties the plot together when the major coolly countermands his superior's unjust order and the scandalized captain indignantly initiates the time-honored practice of CYA: "I am not going to burn for anybody!" The ensuing round-robin of red tape is Helleresque, ricocheting as far as the dead letter office of Algiers with the blameless misdirections of William Bendix and Stanley Prager's Sergeants Borth and Trapani and the mounting exasperation of the Provost Marshal at Vicinamare, snowed under every report coming out of Adano except for the one about the carts. "He must think we've got nothing to do but worry about that jerkwater town." Inevitably, ironically, by the time the other shoe drops, Purvis has completely forgotten chucking it in the first place, as loyally defensive as the next guy of the major's good works until the penny bounces and leaves him scrubbing awkwardly at his mousy hair, mumbling the deeply pissant takeback, "Gosh, I never figured anything like that would happen." Partly it's the nature of the Army, rewarding even compassionate insubordination less than adherence to the kinks of the chain of command; it's also his own damn fault. In a film which devotes a soapish amount of its screen time to picturesque sketches of Italian peasantry from such traditionally reliable character actors as Marcel Dalio, Monty Banks, Henry Armetta, and Eduardo Ciannelli, not to mention an unconsummated affair which not even Gene Tierney as the defiantly blonde-bleached Tina Tomasino can totally sell as a meeting of human lonelinesses as opposed to shoring romance, Purvis has an ignorantly realistic, graffiti feel, a Kilroy scrawl of a figure who could have done nothing to improve the international standing of the American G.I. He also gets the funniest scene in the picture, when he incautiously takes a call meant for the major and finds himself put so comprehensively on blast that he can't get a word in to identify himself and when he's further instructed to hand the phone off to his own person, panics a visible, receiver-juggling second before blurting up a half-octave as harassed as Shelley Berman: "Hello? This is Captain Purvis speaking?" Morgan could be a great tough actor, but he could also wind up terrifically, and I appreciate any role that gave him the chance for both. His desk is a jackstraws of untended reports in which it is more than possible to disappear a paper simply by flipping it under the stack.

Directed by Henry King from a screenplay by Lamar Trotti and Norman Reilly Raine, A Bell for Adano was the second dramatization of John Hersey's 1944 Pulitzer-winning novel of the same name, its theatrical run overlapping the Broadway adaptation which had preceded it; its author would become even more famous for the New Journalism of Hiroshima (1946), which I read decades ago in the plain-jacketed first edition inherited from my grandparents. A Bell for Adano began as nonfiction itself before branching out into something more creative, although the distance between Adano and Major Victor P. Joppolo and Licata and Major Frank E. Toscani remained so slim as to land the writer in an amicably settled libel suit over his inconsistent filing off of serial numbers. At their best, both versions resist the pull of flag-waving, their idealism about the American occupation continually complicated by a still-resonant skepticism of its ethics and effectiveness—Joppolo achieves a victory of humanitarianism on the justified level of local legend and for his pains gets relieved of command and the war, not yet won in the summer of 1943, rolls on. The film gets a documentary boost from the street-wide photography of Joseph LaShelle, but Richard Conte so neorealistically steals his one hard scene as a repatriated POW that it begs the question of what he could have done with the Bronx-born, Italian-American Joppolo. Maybe I just prefer John Hodiak when he's codependently entangled with Wendell Corey. "Listen, if that meatball already thinks the Navy's efficient, he's going to get the surprise of his life. I'll have that bell for him in a week." It came out between V-E and V-J Day and seemed a suitable candidate for Memorial Day, allowing for somewhat fuzzed-out YouTube. Not to recant my earlier point entirely, it is delightful to watch Harry Morgan playing exactly the kind of character Colonel Potter wouldn't have given two colorfully minced oaths for. This town brought to you by my can-do backers at Patreon.