It happens too often. I first learn about someone from an obituary.

Australian singer Slim Dusty died in late 2003. I was especially taken with the fact that he’d kicked the bucket after setting a worldwide record of having made 105 albums and CDs with a single label (EMI and it predecessors) over his career. That’s worth a listen, isn’t it?

So I ordered a “best of” CD, cranked it up and … didn’t like it much. The singing seemed middle of the road semi-country, uninspired. My wife, by contrast, latched on immediately – not big time, but she found if bouncy, authentic (tell me you don’t you cringe at that word), homey, all of that. So I listened again, liked it a bit more.

With every replay, the songs became … more familiar of course, but somehow right. I came to realize that what Dusty was putting across wasn’t a goofy version of laidback American country, but the face of the Aussie outback, which isn’t quite like anything we have here: We see the Great Plains and the expanses of the West as the ultimate reach in desolation. But in Australia, cattle stations (their equivalent of our ranches) are as big as Rhode Island. It doesn’t just take hours to cross them in a beatup Land Rover, it can take days. It makes you understand the value of your “mate” – human faces are so few and far between you don’t know when you’ll see another human being, so you value every encounter.

At the age of 79, looking back at his distinguished acting career, Clarence Muse wrote a letter to fellow board member of the Actor’s Guild Eugene Francis. What follows are excerpts from that letter.

…”You spoke of stereotype in our conversation, and I have always questioned this epithet. A shoe shine boy who has made use of his talent in his spare time to create a great patent, paint a magnificent portrait, or has risen to great national and international heights should not be called a stereotype. He is only a stereotype if he remains forever a shoe shine boy and is portrayed only shining shoes with no other contribution to humanity.

James Cagney's star has yet to rise. Sound engineers at Warner Bros. are busily perfecting the Vitaphone.

In perhaps 1931's most infamous Hollywood film, The Public Enemy, Beryl Mercer as "Ma Powers" is a silent-era harmonium among her fellow character actors. Out of step by more than chronological age, remaining forever asynchronous to her surroundings, she is elsewhere in her house when son Tom (Cagney) is fatefully shot, staggering en point, like a ballerina in the rain. We can hear the downpour and see a gigantic curbstone leaping upward as if to meet it.

Later, Tom’s lifeless corpse arrives special delivery—a rare case of an ending tacked onto a climax that actually makes things more traumatic, miserable, cruel, and violent. Some inscrutable force keeps Ma upstairs, humming goofily to herself. Depression Lesson #16 has got your morning paper: Beryl Mercer moons on infinite repeat, the model of mute endurance where criminal activity is concerned.

The Public Enemy’s iconic curbstone may as well be Cagney himself, lending the frame a rocketing sense of perspective. Mercer, on the other hand, embodies such extreme passivity that her symbol is that skipping record at film’s end.

Not one syllable will she utter against sociopathic mummies at her door.

by Daniel Riccuito

“When men get around me, they get allergic to wedding rings,” says Eve Arden’s Ida in Mildred Pierce (1945), a film that won Arden her only Academy Award nomination. Ida is a good egg, a steady, loyal friend to Joan Crawford’s Mildred. “You know, big sister type,” she says, in that inimitably sardonic, wised-up, swooping voice of hers, as she pours herself a stiff drink. “Good old Ida, you can talk it over with her man to man,” she says, of those men who treat her as if she isn’t a woman. Ida says that men are “stinkers” and “heels,” but she doesn’t sound all that mad about it. There isn’t a trace of self-pity in her tone, either. Arden never asks for sympathy. In fact, she never asks for anything. Some things seem to confuse, or bemuse, her on screen, but she was usually just playing that for laughs.

“See, one side of my face is gentle and kind, incapable of anything but love of my fellow man.

“The other profile is cruel and predatory and evil, incapable of anything but lusts and dark passions. It all depends which side of my face is turned towards you — or the camera.”

In the nineties, cult theater genius Ken Campbell would dub this the enantiodromic school of acting, but the speaker here is Lionel Atwill, horror star of the thirties and forties. “Pinky,” as he was known, was convinced he possessed a ind of physiognomic dexterity based around the very slight asymmetries we all have in our faces. Few observers could actually see the kindly side – though Atwill plays a sympathetic, well-meaning scientist in Dr. X, one of his most famous movies, he was clearly chosen because the piece is a whodunnit and he had to at least seem capable of nocturnal surgical atrocities. If you want an actor who seems capable of strangling and cannibalism, Atwill is your man. Though he possessed a kind of versatility, even his best-known comedy role, in Lubitsch’s To Be or Not To Be, involves playing a Nazi.

I just watched a little bauble with George Raft and Joan Bennett which could only have been made during the Great Depression. If there's a how-to or a lesson embedded in this potso, cattywompus mixture of comedy and horror, it's beyond my limited powers of description. Wallace Ford gets brutally murdered; an old man dies of a broken heart in prison. We feel these deaths, the excruciating physical pain of them. In comes Joan Bennett and, surprise, we get a romantic comedy that never stops, that can't stop moving—She Couldn't Take It (1935) is the snake's hips. Raft gives this amazing speech to Joan that should be dripping with self-pity but instead soars because it's so quick and slangy—so maybe the lesson is speed, speed speed! The speech is a cliché about growing up poor and how it robbed him of the chance to be with a decent woman. And it makes you cry! Until a moment later when the conversation pulls up short with a gag in pig-latin.

by Daniel Riccuito

“Phil I loved dearly, but he was too beautiful to be in love with. You’d really get hurt. I knew that.“

— Mae Clarke, Featured Player

“I know that quite sincerely/ Houseman really/ Wrote The Shropshire Lad about the boy.”

— The Schoolgirl in Noel Coward’s “Mad about the Boy”

“Young Phillips Holmes, on the Paramount roster of juveniles, has had his hair bleached and curled for a forthcoming production. Now he is a perfect blond. Whenever Jack Oakie sees him on the lot he pauses, and a puzzled expression crosses his face. ’Oh,’ he always says with mock surprise, ‘I thought you were Carole Lombard.’”

— Motion Picture News, April 26, 1930

We don't need critics—We need cine-metaphysicians.

Is it enough to explore the verbal stylings of Depression-era character actor Warren Hymer? No. We demand to learn what Mr. Hymer’s screen presence means!

Today’s Depression Lesson is that mugs like him are living then, now and forever in the forces just without.

Hymer is gliding on a nimbus, minus mazoola. His ostensible nescience is in fact numinous horse sense. We could easily (and wrongly) claim this actor is generic, but therein lays the point: enormous personal magnetism goes into playing the dime-a-dozen patsy or knuckle-headed ghee.

We had a lurid fantasy life. And it was not pre-Code, it was prehistoric. Synchronized sound technology created Neanderthal Cinema, an aesthetic slouching and slack-jawed, a case of temporarily thwarted evolution.

In a brief era with no accepted form and before industrial standardization, experimentation raged, and some of sound cinema's experiments were dumb, inept, or too far ahead of their time to have a prayer of working. So the exceptional and the clunking are both responses to a general ignorance about what will work. Take the split screen of sleeping sweethearts in Love Me Tonight (1932), with dream voice-overs singing on top: All we see is snoring people.

Judy Roderick was an odd sort to be singing the blues in the mid ‘60s – white, female and young. I was surprised to realize from the photos included with the remastered CD release of her Woman Blue that she wasn’t just sort of pretty, as I’d remembered her, but strikingly beautiful.

Maybe it was the toughness and distance of that face in person. Onstage she didn’t relate much to her audience. She stood straight, four-square with her guitar, said almost nothing but sang magnificently.

A native of Michigan, Roderick spent much of her musical life in Denver. Despite a small but intense following (and early coffee house gigs with Janis Joplin in Berkeley), she never made it big. She turned out a couple of albums in the '70s and '80s and died in 1992, in Montana, of a heart attack, a complication of diabetes.

Roderick’s initial album, on Columbia, didn’t go far. But Woman Blue on Vanguard, in 1965, is as close to a perfect album as anyone’s ever put together: just her, her guitar and minimal, understated accompaniment. It’s mostly traditional blues, plus a couple of contemporary songs that fit the mold. Each piece is excellent, the mix of light and heavy balances like a seesaw, and both the opener and closer – “Someone to Talk My Troubles to” and “Woman Blue” – are songs you’ll never forget. The CD release tacks on four more session cuts, worth listening to in their own right, but nailed on to the end they seem almost an insult to a beautifully constructed work of art.

I think of artists as being divided into top down vs. bottom up; exterior vs. interior. Roderick is very much the interior, bottom up artist, the kind I usually like best. Her singing – the emotion – grows from inside, it’s never imposed. Strange for the blues, she has a ringingly clear, almost clipped articulation, each word placed like a flower in a Japanese arrangement, an individual statement within a clearly envisioned whole. Hearing her is like passing the window of a house filled with the aroma of fine cooking.

She uses lilting vocal glides for emphasis, as most blues singers do, but usually within a word or even a syllable, seldom over a whole phrase. Sometimes it approaches a medieval melisma. But when she decides it’s time, she slams it. On “Mistreated,” she belts out “you mistreater” as a blast of accusation, then slides the same phrase in as a whisper of misery. Emotional bookends.

Though his career as a film director spanned three decades of near-constant work, William Dieterle (his last name is pronounced “Dee-ter-lee”) has never garnered much of a reputation of any kind. Andrew Sarris places Dieterle in the “Miscellany” section at the end of his book The American Cinema and pats him on the head with this line: “Dieterle was around on the set when many interesting things happened over the years, and it is reasonable to assume that he had something to do with them.” Dieterle has 88 credits as a director, and perhaps there are more bad films on that list than good ones. But the good ones shyly ask for more attention than they have received.

If he is remembered at all, Dieterle is mainly noted as the prime architect of that award-seeking and unloved thing, the Hollywood biopic. He directed Dolores Del Rio as Madame Du Barry (1934), Kay Francis as Florence Nightingale in The White Angel (1935), and Paul Muni in The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), which won Muni an Oscar. The following year Dieterle’s The Life of Emile Zola, which also starred Muni, won an Oscar for best picture, and the Muni-Dieterle team stayed together for the lavish and intricate Juarez (1939). Dieterle did two decent biopics with Edward G. Robinson, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) and A Dispatch from Reuter’s (1940), and Van Heflin played Andrew Johnson for Dieterle in Tennessee Johnson (1942). And then Dieterle brought his Hollywood career to a close with a biopic of Richard Wagner called Magic Fire (1955), which he produced himself, and Omar Khayyam (1957), where Cornel Wilde played the Persian poet. While Dieterle’s biopics have some virtues, in the main they are heavy and solemn, seemingly bent on being educational, and marred by the self-important acting of Muni and the miscasting of some crucial roles. A Dieterle retrospective of these ten biopics would probably not be too robustly attended.

Almost nothing at all is known about writer/actor/producer Larry Tucker’s private life. At least not publicly. Although it’s said he was married twice, the identities of his wives remain murky at best, and it’s unclear if he had any children. What we do know for certain is that he was born in Philadelphia and, after suffering for years from an unpleasant combination of cancer and multiple sclerosis, died in Los Angeles in 2001 at age 67. All we have left to remember him by is the work, but even that it must be admitted has mostly been forgotten, in many cases for the best.