No fame is more fleeting than the showbiz kind. Some entertainers are just too much in and of a particular time. In the 1920s Harry Richman was a big star, billed as the Greatest Entertainer In America. He could sing and play piano, dance and act a little; he ran a hugely successful nightclub, was the toast of Broadway and, very briefly, a star in Hollywood; he wrote or introduced several songs that are still sung. But most of all he just personified the Roaring Twenties. He was the sleek, rakish, vaguely smarmy bon vivant in top hat and tails who was enjoying the decade’s non-stop party as much as you were. It’s been said that he was to the 1920s what the Rat Pack were to their era. Harry’s career peaked just as the party crashed to a halt at the end of the decade, and he faded out in the 1930s. If his name comes up at all today, it’s probably less often as an entertainer than as a footnote in aviation history.

He was born Harry Reichman in Cincinnati in 1895. His dad, a Russian Jewish immigrant, started out peddling eyeglasses door to door, carrying all his equipment on his back. He worked his way up to a prosperous wholesale business and real estate empire, and developed a taste for the high life. It killed him by the time Harry was an adolescent. In his thoroughly entertaining (sometimes suspiciously so) 1966 autobiography A Hell of a Life, Harry paints himself as a fecklessly scheming kid who grew up quick. At nine, he writes, he was a weekend ticket taker at an amusement park, shortchanging every customer he could because he was saving up to marry his childhood sweetheart. One night he showed off his ill-gotten riches by taking the girl out on the town. They stayed out too late to go home, so Harry got them a hotel room. When the cops burst through the door in the wee hours they found the kids sleeping fully clothed on separate beds. A doctor confirmed that the girl’s honor was intact. Her dad put the kibosh to their romance anyway.

Harry’s mother bought him piano lessons, dreaming he’d be a concert pianist, but like most kids at the time he was more interested in ragtime and jazz. He left home at around fourteen and headed to Indianapolis. There he and a kid who played fiddle went door to door in the kind of neighborhoods where an upright in the parlor wasn’t uncommon. They’d bang out a few popular tunes for spare change. As Remington & Reichman they were soon touring the very small-time Webster circuit of vaudeville theaters in the Dakotas and Canada, known to vaudevillians as the Death Trail. Harry kept working his way around the west, singing at the piano in saloons and whorehouses, working as a singing waiter in restaurants, as part of a “Hawaiian” hula act in a circus sideshow. At the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco he was in a musical act that opened for Harry Houdini, fifteen shows a day. Playing in Los Angeles clubs favored by the movie crowd he got to be pals with Charlie Chaplin and Al Jolson, whom he idolized. Jolson got him a shot at Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic, the late-night club revue that gave Eddie Cantor his big break. Harry raced to New York, but flopped and was canned after only one night. He was so despondent he ran off and joined the Navy.

He arrived back in New York in 1920, just when Prohibition did too. Now he and the city were ready for each other. On vaudeville stages he found work as an accompanist for headliners like the singer Nora Bayes and the beautiful twin Dolly Sisters, and for a while was Mae West’s on-stage pianist and straight man. He was reluctant to speak lines at first because he had a lisp that he could hide more easily when singing. West convinced him it was a distinguishing feature. He soon got top billing on his own on the Keith-Albee circuit. He also played at ritzy speakeasies like the Beaux Arts, where, he claims, Prohibition’s hostess with the mostest Texas Guinan stole her signature line “Give the little girls a big hand” from him.

Nils T. Granlund, known as NTG, was both a radio pioneer and the publicist for Marcus Loew’s movie theater empire. He hired Harry to headline live radio shows from Loew’s State Theatre, the movie palace in Times Square. Harry plugged new songs on air, like Billy Rose’s “Does the Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight?” With NTG’s help he opened his own Club Richman just behind Carnegie Hall. Harry made it one of the most opulent and exclusive nightclub/speakeasies in town. A lot of Broadway and movie stars became regulars, as of course did Mayor Jimmy Walker, and the Vanderbilts and Whitneys, and foreign royalty – you saw everybody who was anybody there.

Or wanted to be somebody, like the chorus girl Lucille Le Seur. Accounts vary as to how Lucille got into the swank club. In one version, she convinced NTG, her sugar daddy at the time, to get her a spot in the club dancing the Charleston. NTG introduced her to Loew, who arranged a screen test at MGM, where she’d get her first tiny roles in 1925. Studio chief Louis B. Mayer decided her name sounded like Le Sewer, so the studio ran a publicity campaign in which the fans got to give her a new name: Joan Crawford. She never liked it.

For his part, Harry claimed that he discovered Crawford. He did have an eye for the beauties. He was one of the first to spot Jean Harlow, Sally Rand and Maureen O'Sullivan. Harry was an infamous ladies’ man, bedding a long line of beauties from chorus girls to socialites to Harlow, maybe Rand, and Clara Bow. According to Harry, his office at the club had a secret door for sneaking them in and out while their husbands or dates drummed their fingers at their tables thinking they were just taking a long time powdering their noses. He says that the Hollywood Bowl couldn’t hold all the women he had, and classes himself “a specialist in man’s favorite sport.”

Between the club and his other gigs Harry minted money and became the playboy nonpareil. He wore the finest bespoke suits and carried a gold cigarette case with his initials on it in diamonds. He commuted in a Rolls from Manhattan to his big house out on the water in Beechhurst, Queens, where he had a yacht and threw Gatsby-like parties for celebrities, beauties and millionaires. He learned to fly and kept a growing fleet of planes at nearby Flushing Airport. Harry worked hard, played hard, drank oceans of booze and smoked whole fields of tobacco. Everyone marveled at his stamina and joie de vivre even in that over-the-top decade.

In 1926, while still playing the host at his club, Harry got a featured role on Broadway in George White’s Scandals, one of several knockoffs of the Ziegfeld Follies. After a boffo year it toured other cities, including Cincinnati, where, he notes ruefully, it tanked. In 1930 he headlined Lew Leslie’s International Revue, where he introduced “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” And in 1931 he made it, finally, into the Follies as well. He got his choice of songs to perform, including “Lullaby of Broadway.” He was at the top of his career in those shows, the king of Broadway; his friend Eddie Cantor memorably said he wore Broadway like a boutonniere.

He didn’t do so well in Hollywood. He starred, playing himself as “Harry Raymond,” in the 1930 musical Puttin’ on the Ritz, in which he introduced the song by his pal Irving Berlin. The movie did mediocre business then and is barely watchable now except for that number, Harry gliding around in front of an army of dancers with his top hat tilted over one eye. His recording of the song, which some consider the best, was a hit. (Among his other records are Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” his own “Muddy Waters” and a pretty wonderful Jolson-ish rendition of “Ain’t She Sweet.”) While in Hollywood to make the film he met Clara Bow. Teamed up at first for publicity purposes only, they became a hot item and got engaged. Then she suddenly married someone else. Hearing the news, he says, was the only time in his life that he fainted.

He’d make only two more feature films and one short. He sums them up this way: “All were forgettable. It became clear to me that whatever I had was best projected in person, either on the stage or in a night club.” By the time he made the last film, released in 1938, he was well past his prime. When the Depression hit and then Prohibition ended, guys like Harry, icons of the Roaring Twenties, just didn’t fit the new reality. To his credit, he didn’t hang around like some other ghosts of the 1920s did. He left New York and settled in Miami, which was booming and lousy with new nightclubs where he could coast for a few years on his dazzling past. He went fishing with Hemingway and played with his airplanes.

His real fame in the 1930s came in fact as a flyer. In the mid-1930s he’d set altitude and speed records. Then in 1935 he and the pilot Dick Merrill made the world’s first round-trip transatlantic flight in a single-engine plane. They filled the plane with tens of thousands of ping-pong balls as flotation devices should they land in the soup. Harry being Harry, after reaching Wales on the outward leg of the trip, they flew on to Paris to party all night with Maurice Chevalier before making the return flight. They landed upside-down in a Newfoundland bog, but they made it. It wasn’t as big a deal as Lindbergh’s one-way crossing in 1927, but Harry calls it the high point of his life.

Made in 1972 in the wake of Vietnam, Chantal Akerman’s Hotel Monterey prowls the warm sickly halls of an old New York flophouse á la search-and-destroy. The place must have looked like cold storage at the time, but today it appears almost luxurious – a relic from an era when the poor could still afford a room from the small-time slum operator. By the 1980s, hotels such as the Monterey fell to the liberalization clearances fueling the NYC bankruptcy fire sale, like the old diners that gave your Ma a job for life and the palaces of the Deuce. Who’d have thought that that hoary nemesis of American industry, the mustachioed Evil Landlord, would have won out in the end? In 1971 the gold standard was abandoned, courtesy of Ho Chi Minh and de Gaulle.

Crime of Passion (1957) shows the late-period  noir film curdling, warping, tarnishing, the process that would climax the following year with the gothic grotesque of Touch of Evil and the pop-art, pulp neo-brutalism of Kiss Me Deadly. Here, narrative already runs a poor second to madness, delirium, an oppressive restlessness and an accusatory anger that points one big finger everywhere at once.

Barbara Stanwyck, near the end of the shelf life Hollywood allotted her as leading lady, but still magnificent, plays a smart journalist pushed around by her editor, a man whose face seems to be literally melting off his skull in great globby folds, his dialogue emerging barely coherent from between liquifying rubber lips. He must smell of burning tires and grain alcohol. 

Stanwyck stands her ground, though. And she jokingly suggests using her Miss Lonelihearts column to tell a teenager to run away, not with her married lover, but with his wife. Brackets exclamation point brackets.

She also gets pushed around by detective Royal Dano, that scarecrow-skeleton figure, dowling limbs dangled from cheekbones like axe-blades, but falls for the stiff’s partner, big old Sterling Hayden. On their first date she tells him she never plans to marry, but on their second date, so it seems (the movie moves FAST) she marries him.

Now she’s in hell, deprived of the job that gave her purpose, unable to spend time with her husband alone due to the demands of his work, and surrounded by awful cop wives, whose dialogue is presented as a whirligig of echoed banalities, cut into blipvert frenzy close shots by director Gerd Oswald, a gifted hack from TV (lots of sharp expressive work on The Outer Limits). Oswald pushes everything to a hallucinatory extreme, but Stanwyck pushes back and claws out some credibility for an unbelievable character.

Screenwriter Jo Eisinger worked on Gilda and Night and the City: he was no stranger to ambiguity and shadow. Bored to insanity, Stanwyck starts plotting like a femme fatale Lady Macbeth for her husband’s advancement. Manipulating the detectives, their wives and the chief, she orchestrates fights, humiliations, and an affair with the boss (Raymond Burr: what heights of passion those two must scale!). And then suddenly it’s murder too.

It makes little sense that this competent woman would even find herself in this situation, let alone disintegrate so rapidly if she did, but reason and plausibility are not the film’s central concerns. We accept that being the smartest person in the room would be intolerable for Stanwyck, whose big-but-nuanced performance (she never chews the scenery without smelling and licking it first), and the film uses a touch of expressionist hyperbole to make us feel her intolerable situation. But her devious, yet inconsistent and reckless machinations come out of left field, prefigured only by a couple fo corny lines about how women are disproportionately liable to go nuts and kill somebody out of an excess of emotion. The film tries to sympathise with Stanwyck and side with her patriarchal oppressors at the same time.

So it’s, um, not a great film, but it’s absolutely fascinating: the old way of making movies is in slow collapse, stars and studios crumbling, the thriller genre caught straddling drifting tectonic plates of tabloid realism and pulp lunacy (then colour would come in and thrillers would leap headfirst into glamor, exoticism and romance). Nobody involved knows how to make this film, but they all handle bits of it with bravura skill. Watching it, you feel like you have narcolepy and have missed about an hour of intersticial character and plot detail that might make sense of it all.

by David Cairns

The cult director of Two-Lane Blacktop talks film theory, painting, politics, and, last but not least, actor Warren Oates.

Despite transparent light and searing heat, all seems frozen. Something clings to the landscape. Amidst Joshua trees and sagebrush, an ineffable presence surrounding even the stinkbugs.This is where George Stevens—who once said that Utah’s western desert ranges “look more like the Holy Land than the Holy Land”—filmed The Greatest Story Ever Told. Soon thereafter, a younger man breathing that same numinous air made a very different kind of movie. In fact, Monte Hellman made two: The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, displaced and gritty, eternally unblessed, a diptych belonging to the Western, yet standing at a slight angle to it in the same breath. 

Monte Hellman entertains a few questions on this perennial state of unblessedness, and the peculiar tone of what are, in my opinion, misnomered movies—his “Existential Westerns.” And here, I’m after the concrete processes that actually drive Hellman’s characters, his post-modern wraiths. So we touch on film theory, painting, politics, and, last but not least, that revenant of 1960s/70s cinema, actor Warren Oates. Always the smallest glint of insanity in his face, no matter how benign the expression—to me, Oates is the dark side of amiability, with those burlap features and that corpse laugh of his.  

In the 1941 Frank Borzage Technicolor version of Smilin’ Through, Gene Raymond is called upon to jealously shoot Jeanette MacDonald at her wedding to Brian Aherne. In real life, MacDonald and Raymond were married, and not happily. According to Sweethearts, a 2001 biography of MacDonald by Sharon Rich, their marriage was arranged by MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who sought to protect the moneymaking team of MacDonald and Nelson Eddy by preventing their marriage to each other, even though they were very much in love. They were both temperamental, and Mayer feared that if they quickly divorced that their ultra-lucrative star pairing in MGM films would be spoiled. So MacDonald did as she was told and married Raymond, who looked enough like Eddy that he was always being mistaken for him in public. And Raymond was predominantly gay. Rich produces a photo of a 1938 arrest and booking number for Raymond when he was caught with another man, and she interviews two witnesses to his two subsequent arrests, the last when he was serving as a military pilot during World War II.

A moral crusader from his early years, Anthony Comstock was born in New Canaan, Connecticut in 1844. His father, Thomas, was a prosperous farmer who also owned two sawmills. While the family had plenty of money, it was through the influence of Comstock’s fervent Congregationalist mother Polly, who like her husband had descended from Puritan stock, that the seven Comstock children led very austere lives marked by hard work, religious instruction, and precious little fun. Among his siblings, Anthony was the only one who clung fiercely to his mother’s fire and brimstone sensibilities. Polly died when Anthony was ten, but by then he knew full well Satan was a very real force in the world, and the only way to stay right with God was to remain pure in thought and deed, resisting the ever-present temptations presented by the Prince of Lies. Alcohol, tobacco, gambling and especially sex were all tickets straight to Hell, a belief he inflicted on everyone around him. This made him, no doubt, a very annoying child.

As a student in the local public school, Comstock never got a firm grasp on reading or spelling, which he considered useless anyway. He also found his growing sense of moral outrage enflamed by his fellow students, those godless little miscreants, who among other things would surreptitiously pass around ads for packs of those French playing cards with the pictures of the girls on them. No, the only education he needed he learned through the Old Testament stories his mother had read him, those tales of a vengeful God and the awful fate awaiting sinful, wicked men who ally themselves with the forces of evil.

When the Civil War broke out, Comstock, then 19, volunteered for the union army and was packed off to Florida. Much to his horror, he quickly discovered that certain Northern businesses, hoping to ease the burden of those proud soldiers willing to sacrifice everything in defense of, well, whatever it was, were in the habit of delivering shipments of not only whiskey and tobacco to the camps, but pornography as well. Although he saw precious little action, he immediately became an enormous pain in the ass to the fellow soldiers in his regiment. Forget about the Confederate army—it was the smoking, drinking, cursing and gambling among those in camp with him that would prove their downfall, and he let them know it on a daily basis. He would claim in his diary to have converted two or three of his fellow soldiers to the ways of righteousness, promising Comstock they would neither drink nor chew tobacco for the duration of the war. But given the evidence of his diary entries, it seems Comstock’s own wartime vice was porn.

In a 1863 diary entry he wrote: “Again tempted and found wanting…Sin, sin. Oh how much peace and happiness is sacrificed on thy altar.” Other entries make it clear the early morning temptations he failed to resist took the form of self abuse.

(In psychological terms, as history has shown time and again, Comstock’s weakness for porn is hardly a shock considering his coming crusade.)

Comstock was not exactly a wholly freelance operator when it came to his wartime proselytizing. He allied himself with The Christian Commission, a project spearheaded by the YMCA which sent missionaries to the front in order to try and save the souls of both Confederate and Union soldiers. His association with the Christian Commission would prove very profitable in the years following the war.

After leaving the army, Comstock moved to New York and took a job at a dry goods store in Manhattan. While most commentators seem baffled by Comstock’s decision to move to the very heart of American vice, a growing dirty metropolis where taverns, gambling join’s, contraceptive devices, prostitutes and erotic literature were all plentiful and accessible, his motivation as a crusader made the move an obvious one. If your self-appointed mission is to stamp out vice, then you go where the vice is.

And sure enough, the bookseller next door to the dry goods store where Comstock worked, a Mr. Conroy, did a brisk business selling pornographic pictures and erotica to those heathens deaf to the word of the Lord. Understandably outraged by this, Comstock entered the store, purchased an obscene book, brought it straight to the police and then led them to the man who sold it to him.

Although the police took Conroy into custody, the bookseller was soon free again and back to his godless business. Every time Comstock demanded the smut merchant be arrested, he was freed again in a matter of hours, convincing Comstock (and correctly) the cops were in cahoots with the city’s purveyors of vice, though this epiphany in no way tempered his holy mission.  

Entrapment not being a major legal roadblock in the late 19th century, Comstock would use the same technique—making an illicit purchase, then fingering the seller—to wage his one-man war om smut peddlers throughout the city.

His tireless crusade soon not only earned Comstock coverage in the local papers, in 1872 it also brought him to the attention of the founders of the YMCA. It was the YMCA’s Christian Commission, after all, which had pushed for an amendment to the 1865 postal bill making it a misdemeanor to send obscene material through the mail. Impressed by Comstock’s efforts to eradicate vice, the YMCA’s brass began introducing the young zealot to a number of wealthy and powerful men around the city who who likewise felt something needed to be done about New York’s shocking moral degradation. Comstock seemed to be just the reformist warrior they were looking for. With their financial backing and political connections supporting him, Comstock founded The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.

Under the guise of the NYSSV, and with the enthusiastic encouragement of local and federal politicians, wealthy conservatives, and evangelicals, Comstock expanded his efforts, demanding the confiscation of not only blatantly pornigraphic materials and the arrest of those who sold them, but the banning of books, artwork and plays he deemed obscene, though his definition of “obscene” was so broad and so vague it essentially boiled down to “anything Comstock didn’t like.” Over the years this would include medical textbooks, classic literature and newspaper editorials condemning his campaign. The efforts to ban works of art and literature willy-nully came to be known, in a term generally if inaccurately attributed to George Bernard Shaw, as “Comstockery.”

Although Comstock did have any number of outspoken enemies around town, especially among early civil libertarians and women’s rights groups, no one seemed capable of stopping, or even curtailing, his efforts. Because of this, his sense of personal invincibility grew, as did his political clout. People were scared to death of him, even if they hated him and everything he stood for. Cross Comstock, and you could find yourself in prison for sending a Mother’s Day card.

It’s been argued that Comstock’s war on obscene material was, at it’s core, really a war against contraception and abortion, given he argued that the reading of obscene materials inevitably led to the sort of behavior that would bring contraception and abortion into play. Inspired by the 1865 postal law, with the help of his political backers, in 1873 what came to be known as The Comstock Act was passed. The law not only forbade sending obscene material through the mail, but any product or information related to contraception or abortion. Three years later, the Comstock Act (aka The Comstock Law) was amended, its powers greatly expanded. The amended version read:

“Every obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, writing, print or other publication of an indecent character, and every article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion, and every article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or immoral use, and every written or printed card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or of whom, or by what means, any of the hereinbefore mentioned matters, articles, or things may be obtained or made, and every letter upon the envelope of which, or postal card upon which, indecent, lewd, obscene, or lascivious delineations, epithets, terms, or language may be written or printed, are hereby declared to be non-mailable matter, and shall not be conveyed in the mails, nor delivered from any post-office, nor by any letter-carrier.”

Muselmann is a term from the Holocaust. It was used by prisoners of the camps to describe their fellow inmates, those who were utterly emaciated and resigned to impending death. The word is Yiddish for Muslim, deriving from the old Turkish word, müslüman. In the camps, its use was varied and there are many opinions on its origin and application, most notably from Victor Frankel, Eugen Kogon, and Primo Levi (all of whom were Holocaust survivors). Here is Levi’s powerful description: “Their life is short, but their number is endless: they, the Muselmanner, the drowned form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand ...” 

The term also appears in works by Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Godard, Stanislaw Klodzinski (who wrote a whole study on the word), Germaine Tillion (inmate of Ravensbrück), to name a few. ‘Muselmann’ is a remarkable word and concept, able to call up profound images and associations.

Instead of canonizing war criminals, we should be watching films like Dead of Night (1974) that chronicle their murderous legacy. So just what does a low-budget ‘zombie’ flick from more than forty years ago have to do with the fresh dirt-covered, flag draped coffin encasing a former President? Or even a long-serving Senator who defied death in Vietnam and returned home to haunt the corridors of power as a lifeless, bloodthirsty politician? We can compare the legacy of those two particular corpses with Bob Clark’s far superior film that documented their handiwork. A young soldier dies in Vietnam and returns home, seemingly and miraculously alive to his elated parents just hours after they receive the news of his death. His besotted, overbearing mother’s prayers for his return become an incantation that reanimates the corpse and returns him into the family fold. Never mind that Andy, (Richard Backus) the prodigal son, is a dead eyed, monosyllabic automaton who needs daily infusions of blood. Never mind that he sits for hours in a rocking chair, staring straight ahead, refusing food and all attempts to coax him back into normalcy. Never mind that his alcoholic father is grieving over Andy’s murder of the family dog who recognizes the ghoul from the moment he darkens the doorstep. Never mind the local doctor, who fatally places Andy at the scene of another murder, or Andy’s sister who unwittingly offers up a human sacrifice for her un-dead sibling as she arranges a surprise 'blind date’ with Andy and his former girlfriend. What matters is that Andy is home, regardless of the circumstances that turned him into a pulse-less, literally heartless killer. Even more ghoulish than the dead eyed Ken doll standing in for the sensitive and reluctant soldier is the mother who will follow him into hell, prepared to sacrifice the rest of her family along the way. Sound familiar? Most actors are required to “breathe life” into their characters, but Richard Backus is tasked with depriving his of oxygen in order to function wholly as an un-living, non-breathing apparition devoid of anything 'human’. He somehow manages to instill terror into the viewer before his zombie/vampire persona is fully revealed.

by Jennifer Matsui

On November 20 1942, a Brooklyn jury returned guilty verdicts on a pair of Williamsburg teens, 16-year-old Neil Simonelli and 18-year-old Joseph Annunziata, for the murder of Irwin Goodman, their math teacher at William J. Gaynor High School. The two of them had never much liked Goodman, a 36-year-old father of two. When he reported them to the principal for smoking in the boys’ room, they walked eight blocks to Simonelli’s home, where they picked up a pistol, then back to the school. They confronted Goodman and got into a scuffle with him. The gun, which Annunziata was holding, went off, perhaps accidentally, fatally shooting Goodman through the back. Because the jury entertained a doubt that the shooting was premeditated, they convicted the boys of murder in the second degree. The pair went off to Sing Sing together to begin sentences of 20 years to life. Had the verdict been first-degree murder, they could have been the youngest New Yorkers ever executed. 

The city’s newspapers, from the New York Times to the Brooklyn Eagle, provided extensive coverage of the case, and there was commentary in national magazines like Time. What fascinated them all, beyond the crime itself, was the boys’ lifestyle and attire: uniformly, the press described Simonelli and Annunciate as “jitterbugs,” “Zoot Suit Youths” and “Zoot Suit Killers.”

In 1922, Baltimore-based journalist, essayist, literary critic and gadfly H. L. Mencken wrote, “I am, in brief, a libertarian of the most extreme variety, and know of no human right that is one-tenth as valuable as the simple right to utter what seems (at the moment) to be the truth.” Toward this end he used his American Mercury magazine and other publications as platforms from which to wage his ongoing war against the more ludicrous expressions of self-righteous morality, in particular fundamentalism, Prohibition and censorship. He once described the Puritan mindset that so dominated the American Northeast as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy,” and his post-mortem evisceration of Anthony Comstock (who had staged the most singularly effective and far-reaching censorship campaign the nation had ever seen) remains shockingly timely. But That’s another story.

Count Dracula (1977) is a British television adaptation of Bram Stoker’s canonical vampire tale. For Tim Lucas, who recommended I check out this awkward video/film hybrid, it does greater justice to the original Dracula than any other filmic version. “Judi Bowker,” claims Lucas, “is the only real Mina ever represented in film, and it makes her corruption all the more tragic.” Dracula isn’t the central focus. This gives Bowker’s Mina Harker — who might accurately be described as a doll-like, even pat incarnation of honey-haired innocence  — the chance to evince a modern paradigm, becoming, by immeasurably small degrees, a model of high-minded vampirism. Mina communes, unprotected, with madness AKA the fly-eating menace called Renfield. Surviving the encounter with her true opposite number (normally Dracula himself), she does so by moving him with frankness: “I was very interested in what you were saying about Eternal Life… I feel we understand each other”. It’s a finely turned performance echoed satisfyingly by the soundtrack’s Ondes Martenot, more human and throaty than any other electronic instrument, here centralizing a woman’s existential experience — drawn from, but not solely dependent on, Stoker’s original late-Victorian metaphysics. Even Count Dracula’s hybrid format, then-standard for English television, seems appropriate to Mina’s curiously doubled existence as she glides along an ethical Mobius strip like an enlightened somnambulist.

by Daniel Riccuito

Let’s open with a few passages of deathless prose from the classics.

EMORY’S SOFT-SHELLED TURTLE (18 in.; to 35 lb.) is the only Southwest member of an edible group with long necks and short tempers. Handle with care.

BELTED KINGFISHER Where there are fish there are Kingfishers, beating the air in irregular flight, diving into water with a splash and emerging with fish in their beaks.

THE EASTERN MOLEor common mole makes the mounds that dot your lawn. You are unlikely to see any moles, for they stay underground unless molested.