“Irving Lerner was an artist -” I can remember that sentence fragment in an introduction Martin Scorsese wrote for a season of films which influenced his work. He said that Murder by Contract, Lerner’s pulpy assassination thriller, had inspired the “minimalism” he aimed for in Taxi Driver, although both films manage to make simplicity seem baroque at times. Location shooting, long-held set-ups, intense close-ups and  an unblinking view of criminal activity connect the films, but it’s a sort of tribute to Scorsese’s imagination at the time that he transmuted all his sources so thoroughly.

Lerner worked in documentaries (the famous Muscle Beach, 1948, in collaboration with Joseph Strick) and television, and his career climaxed with the theatrical adaptation The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1969), which details the Spanish conquistadors’ first encounter with the Incas. Where a David Lean sensibility might have been expected, Lerner provides sumple, graphic lay-outs which flatten and compress the action into a series of comic book panels. Cramped, rather than expansive, the film looks both great and cheap.

The aesthetic of poverty was Lerner’s friend. City of Fear (1959) is a nuclear anxiety thriller in which a San Quentin fugitive (Vince Edwards) somehow acquires a canister of deadly Cobalt 60, believing in contains heroin. As the authorities prepare to evacuate LA, and Jerry Goldsmith’s score rattles and blares on the soundtrack, Edwards tries to monetize his ill-gotten gains.

From the start, Lerner makes a virtue of necessity, the chief necessity being to make a film out of spit. A wide lens frames Edwards close as he drives, sneering at the radio as it recounts his criminal exploits. Lerner holds the shot ruthlessly, relentlessly: he could easily cut to a POV, but I think he wants us to know, early on, that this is a film of limited means, in which every resource will be stretched to breaking point. Chief among these is the electrifying Edwards, a very different figure from his Ben Casey role on TV, as a prison-hardened psycho slowly eaten away by radiation poisoning. The plot is structured not by any true deadline regarding the threat to the city, but by the amount of time it takes it’s hero-villain to die.

I first heard Slim Gaillard in a cramped little new and used punk rock record store just off South Street in Philadelphia in the mid-‘80s. You wouldn’t normally be expecting the spiked and leathered clerk in a place like that to be playing ’postwar jazz, but Gaillard was a different kind of finger-popping jazzbo, as singular a groovy beatnik punk rock wildman as they come.

Bulee “Slim” Gaillard’s early life, as he describes it, was as storied, fantastical, even mythical as Salvador Dali’s or an early 20th century boy’s adventure novel. Given official records are sparse, it’s just better and somehow more fitting to simply take him at his word. It only makes sense, really, and helps explain as well as anything how he became what he did.

When it is said that someone lives in their own world, it is often not meant kindly or admiringly, but Beatrice Lillie lived and worked very much in her own world like a child does at play, seemingly impervious to outside reaction or convention. If you “got” her no one was funnier, and in her heyday she was actually billed as “The Funniest Woman in the World,” all by herself. Why is someone funny, especially if you are not an easy laugher? Because of an element of surprise, or the swift introduction of something unexpected, and Lillie’s comic style was nothing but unexpected, aberrant, capricious.

She was born in Canada in 1894, and she started performing early with her mother and her sister Muriel. Lillie’s mother would sometimes sing an “art” song called “There Are Fairies at the Bottom of Our Garden,” and later on Lillie was persuaded to try the “Fairies” song for laughs, as can be seen in an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1952. When she sings, “And the queen, well can you guess who that may be?” the word “queen” comes out as “kuh-ween,” and Lillie is the ultimate in pansy flair here, using a feather fan as a self-delighted child would.

“Mirrors are the doorways through which Death enters the world,” observes a character in Cocteau’s Orphee. “Gaze long enough into a mirror, and you will see Death at work.”

I feel the same way about screens, almost. You don’t see it at work, though. It creeps up on you.

There is a moment in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return that on its incandescent surface could have been lifted, weightless, from the great post-war dream of materialist deliverance: The top on the convertible is down, the radio on; The Paris Sisters are singing I Love How You Love Me as a reincarnated Laura Palmer lifts her face to a cloudless sky. Within the tapestry of this early Phil Spector production — his trademark reverb eternally associated with Romance and Death (two conditions Spector knew all too well) — the voice of Priscilla Paris is a siren sound from the American Beyond. We could be hearing a dream goddess lullaby from the whispering gallery, or sweet nothings from the crypt. We don’t know. We’ll never know. Just as Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood keeps us guessing with the elusive murmur that “Sharon Tate will never die,” granting her a gaudy, wondrous L.A. to cavort in where it’s 1969 forever and movie stars still matter, so we find ourselves in Tarantino’s version of paradise (complete with flame throwers to the face). In this oneiric echo chamber, momentarily shared by Lynch and Tarantino, Surrealism smiles down upon a vision of American blondness; muscle cars soaked in sunlight; the terrible ecstasy of unending motion; candy for the eye and ear.

During an appearance on Firing Line in December of 1967, radical activist, community organizer and author Saul D. Alinsky told host William F. Buckley Jr., “Controversy is a matrix of everything creative that comes out of life.“ He further quipped, “All progress comes in response to a threat.”  The core of his argument that evening, however, was that the only way people can get power is when they take it for themselves. As undeniably intelligent as he  was, Mr. Buckley seemed to have a difficult time comprehending any of these notions. Or at least he pretended to have a difficult time for the sake of his audience.

Out of simple contrariness, when I was about twelve or thirteen I began working my way through the entire political spectrum, from the extreme Right to the extreme Left and beyond. I became an outspoken True Believer at each stop along the way—I was a fascist, a conservative, a revolutionary Marxist—sometimes for a few days, sometimes a few weeks. By the time I was in high school, I considered myself a Bakuninist with strong Nihilist leanings. It was around that time I first read Alinsky’s last book, Rules for Radicals, originally published in 1971, less than a year before his death.

After three decades of working tirelessly to mobilize the nation’s urban poor to empower themselves one neighborhood at a time, the book was Alinsky’s attempt to distill the lessons he’d learned from personal experience, adapting them for the new generation of young student radicals emerging from the Sixties.

Between 1905 and 1928 tenor Harry Haley McClaskey topped the pop charts under the stage name Alfred Alexander. In that same period, he also topped the charts as Carl Ely, Irving Gillette, Harry Barr, Lou Forbes, Harry Haley, Robert Rice, Al King, Henry Gillette,  Frank Knapp,  and Shamus McClaskey, among many others. But his greatest fame came under his original stage name, and the one he’s best remembered for today, Henry Burr.

The singer behind early twentieth century hits like “The Song That Stole My Heart Away,” “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” “Till We Meet Again,” “Beautiful Ohio,”  “There’s a Little Spark of Love Still Burning” and “A Baby’s Prayer at Twilight” had such a unique and, at the time, ubiquitous voice—what you might call a strident trill—it’s hard to believe that array of pseudonyms ever fooled anyone. But from Burrs perspective it’s likely the only people he was out to fool were record company executives.

If you hear a cylinder recording of an early twentieth century ballad today, regardless of the name attached to it, there’s a roughly one in four chance you’re hearing Burr, who in later years claimed, by his own reckoning, to have produced some 12,000 records, though the actual number seems to be a bit closer to 5,000.

Thirties films had a unique sympathy with the older woman. Films today barely represent the menopausal or post-menopausal at all, and if they do, it’s in the form of a few stars who are usually holding the aging process back by any means possible.

But the forty-something woman was invaluable in old movies, as the voice of skeptical experience. Older men were frequently buffoonish goats of the Guy Kibbee persuasion, probably because that was obviously more amusing than towing the patriarchal line. But older women could snipe from the sidelines, seeing through the lies of leading men and the folly of women who love them.

Like Jean Dixon, perennial romantic-cynic with her putty face alive with eyes that have seen it all and a smile that forgives without forgetting. It’s startling that she made so few films (13 in a career of just 9 years), her presence is so indelible, whether as Joan Crawford’s prostitute pal in Sadie McKee, maid to William Powell’s butler in My Man Godfrey, or best pal in most of the rest (which include Cukor’s matchless Holiday and the criminally underrated Swing High, Swing Low).

My father, Ed Leo. One of his legs is made out of wood, because he left the real one in an army field hospital in 1944. He had been a professional boxer, but the war put the kibosh on that career, and so he became a tool grinder. He was a pretty regular guy, and the only book I ever remember him reading was No Time for Sergeants, but he yelled with laughter reading that book. I was amazed, but then not so amazed, at the hundreds of people that came out for his funeral, lining down the block on Fifth Street…

by Dan Leo

“The beauty of that man. He’s so still. He’s moving. And yet he’s not moving.” –Lee Marvin on Robert Mitchum

All cloudy skies and discouraging words, the range in Robert Wise’s Blood on the Moon (1949) is a place where no one can feel safely at home. The film opens on a dismal panorama of rain pounding a formless landscape, blotting out the horizon. Robert Mitchum comes riding alone, head down, rain dripping off his hat, stopping to gaze dejectedly over a dark valley.

If any one actor embodies the very notion of the “noir western,” it is Mitchum. Before he distilled the noir ethos with his world-weary pessimism and cool insolence, Mitchum started his career as a heavy in the amiable, low-budget Hopalong Cassidy series, earning “$100 a week and all the horse manure I could carry home,” he later recalled. After seven films with Cassidy—parts he described as “a lot of beard, very little dialogue”—Mitchum signed a contract with RKO, and the studio tried him out as a clean-cut cowboy hero in two Zane Gray westerns, Nevada (1944)and West of the Pecos (1945). He was wasted on these cardboard good guys and boy’s-adventure stories, which had no use for his undercurrents of melancholy, disaffection and skepticism. The first film to fully express his persona as the eternal outsider was Raoul Walsh’s seminal noir western, Pursued (1947), which cast him as a displaced foundling followed through life by the black cloud of his mysterious past.

The very notion of a capitalist democracy is suspect at best. This system will always provide a modicum of democracy for some, generally the wealthiest among us, as long as it’s supported by a species of enslavement reserved for the multitude. But even by its own lights, this late-phase example of Democracy, American-Style is in shambles. The collaboration of both major political parties in accelerating the fall of organized labor as a broad, galvanizing social force represented the unmistakeable beginning of the end. When that moment came after the war, more decades ago than most Americans can remember now, that our institutions elected finally to put the screws to unionization, collective bargaining, and everything else that the ideal of human solidarity had historically accomplished, to bolster our shining capitalist democracy – keeping labor and capital in a marginal, always uneasy alignment so that a propaganda construct known popularly as the American Dream appeared attainable to all – it all withered to a dry husk. 

The 1949 Japanese Invisible Man movie, The Invisible Man Appears (ha!) is probably the best Japanese invisible man movie of the lot. It beats out the simply-titled The Invisible Man (Tomei Ningen, 1954) and easily trounces the complicated, fussy Invisible Man Vs. Human Fly (Tomei Ningen to Hae Otoko, 1957). Nevertheless, it has certain commonalities with them.

All three movies insert a fair amount of gangsterism into their narratives, though the title character is never a gangster himself. The gangster stuff allows for frequent trips to swank nightclubs, in every film, where the narrative can be suspended while some kind of sexy floor-show is enacted (Human Fly’s best scene has the miniature antagonist clambering over the curves of his normal-sized showgirlfriend). And all the films situate the source of the trouble in wartime.