Think about what you're doing when you pull those Hitler salutes

Then my health decided to fall apart this week and so did my ability to write about anything interesting. Have a bunch of link-type things.

1. rachelmanija is compiling a list of Jewish characters in genre novels whose plotlines cannot in any way be summarized as "it sucks to be Jewish!" (i.e., no Holocaust stories, no pogroms, no character growth defined by dealing with anti-Semitism). Please do not leave suggestions here! I've already spammed the daylights out of her comments, so you should go and do the same. coffeeandink has related discussion of Jewish erasure here.

2. I intended to link this article over the weekend, but Twelfth Night and a Readercon meeting and then staying up all night with a poem took it out of my head: Kate Adie on the women of World War I, whose roles were so much more than spies or nursing sisters. I plan to look for her book. One of the quietly strongest moments in Leslie Howard's The Gentle Sex (1943) is the revelation that a love interest's sweet old mother, seen heretofore only in relation to her dashing young flying officer of a son and the memory of his first-generation pilot father, was herself an ambulance driver in the last war: her husband brought her flowers while she recovered from her shrapnel injuries, a piece of which remains in her shoulder still.

3. This is one of the greatest covers it has ever been my fortune to discover on the internet at two in the morning and promptly share with derspatchel, which is why I'm still listening to it this morning: Dead Kennedys, "Back in the U.S.S.R." The entire album is wonderful; Biafra is a Dada emcee for his own songs, singing out non sequiturs like "We have to stay in tune for the tape! This is our big chance with Robert Stigwood, don't let us down!" and "Aha! The song for the blind Hitler saluters—'Ill in the Head'!" A fan shouts right into the mike, "We want to see some biceps, Biafra!" and without breaking stride he calls the next song's title like a station stop, "Gas-light!" It's noisy and caustic and fun and through an only slightly over-complicated daisy-chain of internet led to listening to Bonerama's "Helter Skelter," which Rob recognized at once from the trombones.

So far this afternoon has involved way too much arguing with pharmacies.

You can't talk Latin much. It's not like French

Having finished arguing with pharmacies, and generally feeling like hell, I decided to watch Waterfront (1950), which I'd discovered on International Talk Like a Pirate Day and then not seen because the internet promptly went down for the rest of the day.

It's a quick little twist of a movie, with a melodrama plot and lots of location shooting. Robert Newton's name is first after the title, but he's not the protagonist; that's probably Avis Scott as Nora McCabe, daughter of a merchant sailor who abandoned his family in 1919 and fourteen years later blows back into their lives without remorse or warning, dragging in his wake a messy snarl of drunkenness and trouble with the law. Grown up to fend for herself, Nora's a sharp-tongued, self-reliant young woman who runs more of the household than her wistful mother, her younger sister hoping to marry her way out of the tenements, or their bright youngest brother learning Latin on a scholarship. She knew her father was snowing her all those years ago when he kissed her through the school gates and promised to return; now that he's back, she stares at him like something out of a horror movie, this aging man with his peppery grey hair and the same warm, unreliable grin. Newton's very good in the part, a less sympathetic take on some of the wayward types he's played (cf. The Desert Rats' Tom Bartlett). Confronted by his daughter, Peter McCabe is full of airy reassurances and confiding winks, but his temper scratches nastily to the surface when he doesn't get the loving reunion he wanted and in a fit of spite he goes very nearly from his wife's bedroom to a neighbor's bed. His long-separated spouse can speak kindly of him—"He never really had a chance, poor Peter. Taken away from school and sent to sea before he was George Alexander's age"—but the film doesn't make it an excuse for the monumental callousness with which he really seems to think he can just resume his former presence in their lives. For this reason I suppose Waterfront might be classifiable as a women's picture: the men are the catalysts, but the women are not the scenery. There's a poignant late moment between Peter and the son he never knew about, as he very gently and diffidently offers the boy a tobacco tin that came from his own father, plainly feeling it a very common return for two lines' declamation from the Aeneid. The film still closes on Nora and her new husband, the next generation that matters. Richard Burton is so young I didn't recognize him until his second or third scene, slender, smile-lined and lanky, with lofting dark hair; he can demonstrate to Nora that not all sailors go out with the tide and never come back, but after two years on the dole he can't convince himself he's still a fit match for her. It frustrates her that he insists on waiting to marry until she's no longer supporting them both, but when calamity strikes and he wants to offer his name as a statement of solidarity, she sets him straight as to her priorities: "It's knowing I've got you, Ben." And the very last shot isn't of any human thing at all, but the shipyards of Liverpool, the ships on the Mersey coming in, going out; it amazes me how many stories understand that the sea is under everything, it's what always and doesn't change. I think the film fails the kitchen sink test on the voices alone (almost no one makes any attempt at a regional accent, Lancashire native Kathleen Harrison mystifyingly included), but the cinematography is beautifully documentary of Liverpool's docks and bridges and knows how to turn as expressive as film noir at the right moments. Whatever this genre is, I think its defining entry is still It Always Rains on Sunday (1947), but I'm not sorry I saw this one. Seriously, worth it for the docklands.

I would be a lot more enthusiastic about the new BFI Player premiering on my birthday if I thought it would work in my country. I spent considerable time this afternoon determining that half the things I want to watch starring Robert Donat can't be found on the internet, let alone DVD. Even TCM doesn't seem to have heard of The Cure for Love (1949).