It goes tick-tick-tick-tick-stop

Who knew Leo Rosten wrote film noir? Lured (1947), by Douglas Sirk; I found it this evening on TCM. Starring Lucille Ball and George Sanders, yet. She's an American taxi dancer in London who takes undercover work with Scotland Yard after her closest friend disappears, all too likely the latest victim of the "Poet Killer" who sends the police a taunting bit of sub-Baudelairean verse as preface to each murder. He's the nightclub owner who takes an interest in her because she wouldn't throw a glass of water in his face if he were on fire. She mistakes him for his secretary, he impersonates the blind date who stands her up, it's all very meet-cute and good chemistry until he comes under suspicion of the murders, which is not as much of a problem as his consequent belief that she seduced him under orders of Scotland Yard. It all gets sorted out in the end. I'd call it more of a mystery-romance than a true noir, despite some intriguingly dark red herrings and a gonzo scene with Boris Karloff as a mad fashion designer, but not at all a bad thing to stare at while recovering from grading. This is the film in which Sanders delivers the line—with inimitable self-savor—"Of course I am. I am an unmitigated cad."

There's no good segue and it deserves its own post, but I don't want to wait another day to recommend it: Read Lila Garrott's "Telling Deaths." It's that good.

P.S. It was Eeyore's birthday today. It is entirely appropriate that I only find out now.

Don't you sign away your name again

Bad: I spent most of last night in too much pain to sleep, and I'm not exactly sleeping overtime as it is. I don't feel like I'm here at all.

Not bad: while unable to sleep, I discovered one of the roles George Sanders should be known for and isn't.

It's in This Land Is Mine (1943), Jean Renoir's drama-fable about life under the German occupation; script by Dudley Nichols, rest of the cast Charles Laughton, Maureen O'Hara, Walter Slezak, Una O'Connor. The names set it somewhere in France, but the film is deliberately scripted and staged as if taking place anywhere in occupied Europe that could also be England or the United States, those still-free powers that might be inclined to look down on German-held countries as cowards or collaborators. Which is precisely what the story is about: Laughton plays Albert Lory, a timid schoolteacher hopelessly in love with a beautiful colleague, too shy to tell her and too frightened of the world in general to know what to do next if he did; early in the film, he's shamed in front of his students by panicking badly during an air raid and thereafter he's assumed to have turned in Louise's brother, a signalman who helped sabotage a Berlin-bound train, because everyone knows now there's nothing Lory couldn't be scared into doing. As it happens, he's innocent. The real culprit is Sanders' George Lambert, who is not smooth or caddish or lazily epigrammatic; he's a basically decent, conventional man who discovers too late that he doesn't have either the self-knowledge or the self-deception required to be a traitor. He talks himself into betraying his best friend for the allegedly greater good, but he's having second thoughts even as he gives up the fatal information; his conflicted attempts to warn Paul, however, only guarantee his friend's death. The German commander who comes to visit afterward is cheerfully, contemptuously clear: having demonstrated that he can betray, George will be expected to go on doing it, as much and as often as the Germans need. He might start with the dead man's sister, his ex-fiancée. He shoots himself first.

I do not want to shortchange Charles Laughton, who makes the transformation from quaking nobody to momentary hero of the resistance with believable clumsiness and an odd, clownish grace, but I knew he had the range; I hadn't actually been sure about Sanders. But from about his third scene on, he's devastating: there's no way this ends well and he knows it. He's a dead man walking from the moment he lights Major von Keller's cigarette. I wish he'd been cast in more of these off-type roles.

The rest of today: I have no idea. Read the new John le Carré and do laundry, I think. I'm not sure about staring at TCM.

This is where the stories come from

I was answering an e-mail about family stories with rose_lemberg when my mother walked up and handed me a letter from one of her cousins, explaining how we're related to Bel Kaufman, who just turned a hundred today.

(My great-great-grandfather's older brother, Jacob Kaufman, was her grandfather. My relation to Sholem Aleichem is only by marriage.)

That was pleasingly random.