Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance

Saturday: I spent the afternoon baking a birthday cake for rushthatspeaks with three layers of chocolate meringue and chocolate mousse. Gladly accepted a ride from my mother because that was not a cake that would have survived public transit. Delivered cake to Rush-That-Speaks and gaudior's refrigerator, where it would spend the next five and a half hours as we drove to Providence—making sure to pick up jinian first—and celebrated Rush's birthday dinner at Julian's. Fun fact: scallop rangoons are exactly what they sound like, only really good; less cream cheese, more scallop mousse. The avocado-wasabi purée that came underneath the smoked duck was so good, I think I just need to make it as a regular condiment. I had a drink called the Bruce Banner. Cachaça, chartreuse, basil and bitters and one other ingredient I cannot remember; in the low light it glowed a pale radioactive green and tasted, as Rush correctly diagnosed, as though it could Hulk out on you at any moment. I liked it when it was angry. For dessert we all split the gummy bear sorbet, because we were curious; the weird thing was not that it tasted exactly as advertised, the weird thing was that it was delicious while tasting exactly as advertised. Afterward we drove back across the highway, parked I have no idea where because I find Providence both non-contiguous and non-Euclidean, and walked around WaterFire for maybe forty-five minutes. The bonfires burning on the river were beautiful, the music a pleasant and unexpected combination of folk-pop in multiple languages and opera, and the grove of memorial lanterns was really amazing. We saw a person in a Pierrot costume poling a boat on the river; later we saw them listening to a body-positive punk brass band that was covering "Killing Me Softly" with more trombone than that song usually sees. After that my tolerance for breathing woodsmoke ran out right around the same time Rush maxed out on crowds and we retraced our steps to the car thanks to Jinian's navigation skills and Gaudior drove us home. Cake was eaten. We ended up watching old Sesame Street songs off YouTube, mostly the ones scored by Philip Glass. I got home and looked at too many apartment listings and melted down, which was not the fault of anyone I spent the evening with, including the smoked duck.

Today: I was so exhausted that I got nothing done in the afternoon unless you think making a sandwich is serious business, but I still managed to leave the house with derspatchel in time to catch the closing night of Maiden Phoenix's inaugural all-female production of The Winter's Tale. Staged outdoor at Powderhouse Park, using the powder house itself as the backdrop for Act I and the natural stage of the climbing rocks on the other side of the park for Act II. The sun set during the intermission. I keep forgetting the play is basically a Greek romance instead of a Ruritanian one, but there's the Delphic oracle just in case you weren't sure. All of the cast were good: most vivid to me were April Singley doubling as a frightened, steadfast Antigonus and an outrageously Mummerset Shepherd, Cassandra Meyer's grave Hermione with eyes like an inlaid statue giving way in the second act to a shepherd's son just clever enough to be a fool, Sarah Mass' ribbon-bedizened Autolycus alt-rocking out "Two Maids Wooing a Man" to the admiration of rustic groupies, and Juliet Bowler as a chilling and chastened Leontes. I have drunk and seen the spider. The exit-pursued-by-a-bear was done so ferally, it made me want to want to see this company take on the Bacchae. And they reconstructed the ending in two ways I agreed with, first by undoing the neatly tied loose ends of Leontes' last speech to more emotionally nuanced effect (I know it's a comedy if it ends with a wedding, Will, but not everyone needs to pair off like place settings) and by redistributing the messenger speech of the climax among the characters each set of lines pertained to, so that Leilani Ricardo's Perdita named the recognition tokens by which she was identified as her father's daughter and the ghost of Antigonus appeared for a moment to relay the long-lost story of his death and kiss his wife, Gail Shalan's staunch Paulina, once more before vanishing, like a shade from the Greek underworld. There was a dance to see all the characters out, some in the floating jackets of their costumes, some not. It was pretty great. I am looking forward to whatever this company does next.

(But I do think the Bacchae would be fun. I've never seen a female Pentheus before.)

Tonight: I am looking at this Colchian woman's diadem. That's Medea's jewelry. Or would be, if my visual template for Medea's jewelry was not the archaic golden coronets and chains worn by Maria Callas in Pasolini's amazing Medea (1969), but it's still an evocative object. This black-figure kantharos just mostly makes me think of the next door neighbors' obnoxious party two weeks ago.

It's no wonder your wife kicked you out. But it's no wonder she fell for you in the first place

Because I have not yet seen the finale of Hannibal, my Tumblr interactions are currently self-limited to sites where it should not be possible to encounter even a stray crossover Richard Armitage, like Archaic Wonder, Dark Beauty (tentacles, nice), and Leslie Howard Forever. The latter has just reminded me that I never wrote about The Petrified Forest (1936), even though it formed a critical part of my adult discovery of Leslie Howard in 2008. Let's fix that.

When I say that I have acquired my knowledge of film all out of order, I mean it. The Petrified Forest also marked my introduction to Bette Davis. She was my age at the time and has no difficulty playing about fifteen years younger as the story's heroine, Gabrielle Maple. Gabby is the only child of a man who runs the most neglected roadside café in Arizona and an absent Frenchwoman who stuck out a year or two in the tumbleweed wastes with the father of her war baby before fleeing prudently back to Bourges, from which she sends her daughter yearly care packages of French literature; she's smarter than her father who still plays at soldiers with the Black Horse Vigilantes, smarter than her grandfather endlessly retelling the time Billy the Kid didn't actually shoot at him, and orders of magnitude smarter than the college football never-was with whom she is going through the motions of courtship because there's nothing better to do. The desert is beautiful and she despises it: "They say it's full of mystery, and it's haunted, and all that. Well, maybe it is. But there's something in me that makes me want something different." True to the double-edged nature of wishes, two strangers from the outside world arrive on her doorstep in the same day, a down-at-heels drifter with a fatalist's way with words and a gangster with a nationally broadcast manhunt close behind him. The results are very clearly a well-filmed stage play, with only minimal effort made to open the action out for the screen, but unless you have a problem with tightly focused character dramas, it doesn't suffer thereby.

Famously, The Petrified Forest is the movie that made Humphrey Bogart a star—he had originated the role of Duke Mantee in the original Broadway play, but Warner Bros. planned to replace him with Edward G. Robinson on film. Leslie Howard refused to reprise his part onscreen unless his co-star was given the same consideration. The rest is film history and Casablanca (1942) playing at the Brattle every Valentine's Day until the end of time.¹ Saying that Bogart's subsequent career rewarded his friend's trust, however, skips over the fact that he's also just really good in the part. Playwright Robert E. Sherwood based Mantee's character on John Dillinger, who was dramatically gunned down by federal agents in 1934; Bogart reportedly studied footage of Dillinger and his gang for his portrayal. I can't evaluate the likeness for myself, but it's notable that while some of his crew have the slangy theatricality of movie hoods, Mantee himself looks mostly like a man who's much too young to be as hard-bitten as he is. Even in his shirtsleeves, unshaven, run to earth, he has an edgy magnetism, hands curiously suspended like a gunslinger ready to draw; his eyes are constantly taking in the room, combat-focus. He doesn't have a romantic streak so much as an odd, deliberate loyalty, so that he will wait as promised for his lover long past the point where any other self-respecting gangster would have chucked the moll and run for the border, and he'll agree in all seriousness to honor a quixotic deathwish from a stranger he met only a few hours before. The violence in him is nothing so obvious as simmering. Onstage, where the audience's attention cannot be directed as meticulously as on film, you'd have needed co-stars of Howard's caliber to keep him from simply walking off with the show.²

[Two-hour delay goes here, in the course of which I obtain my father's assistance in figuring out how to uninstall a particularly sticky application that installed itself without bothering to ask me first. That was . . . not fun.]

Although the Brooklyn Daily Eagle's description of the delicacy and melancholy of Howard's performance is quite accurate, they are not primarily the reason I love him in the film. His character is a curious twist against type: his poetry³ and his whimsical fatalism make him look like the disillusioned dreamer looking to do one last good deed, but the facts of Alan Squier's life describe a rather sketchy failure—a novelist manqué who was more content to be kept by his publisher's wife than to write the great American anything, a self-declared intellectual who proclaims himself an outmoded species and neurosis the work of a vengeful Nature, his air of melancholy romanticism undermined by his volatile sense of humor. He's as likely to snicker after a philosophical pronouncement as cap it with another aphorism. Even his accent is not quite the cachet of class it first appears: when eagerly asked if he's English, Squier replies with the half-apologetic admission of a commonly disabused illusion, "No. You might call me an American once removed." He attempts to pay Gabby for his meal with the romantic gesture of a first and last kiss, only to be made to confess shamefacedly that he hasn't a penny in his pockets. He doesn't intend to entangle himself in her life any more than the play-acting of chivalry demands. It seems to surprise him more than anyone that he changes his mind. If he's really in search of anything, it's a grand exit: he claims to be hitchhiking across America to drown himself in the Pacific Ocean, which he later modifies to a burial in the Petrified Forest. "It'll inspire people to say of me, 'There was an artist who died before his time.'" Sydney Carton, he's not. He's no Quixote, either, a gentle anachronism hurt into gallant madness; he seems to find tilting at windmills too much of a commitment, choosing instead to fade elegantly out of the picture, trading on a kind of wistful self-destruction. And it is exactly that confusing blend of genuinely attractive qualities with the danger signals of a complete fuckup that interests me, much as it does Gabby. It all goes a bit Liebestod in the end.

And Davis is very good, though she's less complicated than her male foils: the nowhere girl whose innocence is curdling for want of experience. She was a studio substitution, but she holds her own.⁴ I just like the film, all right? It's not as dreamy as it first looks. This recollection sponsored by my wonderful backers at Patreon.

1. In thanks and memoriam, Bogart and Bacall's daughter—born in 1952—was named Leslie Howard Bogart.

2. I don't know if Slim Thompson originated his role onstage, too, but he's one of the supporting highlights of the film: a rare black character in the era of the Production Code who doesn't have to be subordinate. As one of Mantee's gang, he carries a shotgun and operates as independently as any of his fellow criminals; he has a striking, scathing interchange with a black chauffeur who won't accept a drink without asking his employers for permission: "'Is it all right, Mr. Chisholm?' Ain't you heard about the big liberation? Come on, take your drink, weasel!" He appears to have done very little else on film, which I was sorry to find out.

3. Gabby is reading her way through François Villon as the story starts. Once she and Alan meet, Swinburne's translation of the "Ballade for a Bridegroom" forms a recurring refrain.

4. I still haven't tracked down the 1934 Of Human Bondage in which she and Howard starred together for the first time, although I know it was her breakout role. Recommendations for? Against? I bounced off the novel in college.

And that's my parting gift to you—that doubt!

Realistically, I know I've delivered more than 4 x 500 words on film this month—my post on Max Ophüls' Caught (1949) would have handled the wordcount all on its own, if that were all I was keeping track of. Pedantically, I want to have written four actual posts for my Patreon, because it feels like the one intellectual endeavor I have left these days and because I guaranteed it. The problem is that this month has been a nightmare of interacting stressors and despite seeing any number of interesting films mostly in theaters, I've recorded very little about any of them. I've written no poems and no fiction. It just hasn't been a very contemplative August. I really did want to write about David Lean's Ryan's Daughter (1970), which derspatchel and I saw for the first time a few weeks ago: it has a reputation as a trainwreck and much to our surprise we didn't find it so. Consider these notes toward a review of Ryan's Daughter. I'll come back to the real thing when I have time.

It is not actually the film's fault that it's not an epic. In many ways, it doesn't present itself as one; it has the deliberately small scope of a character study, observing a few months in the life of a small community in which everything changes for the major players and nothing at all for the wider world. If Lean had filmed it with the monochrome intimacy of Brief Encounter (1945), I don't think it would have received half the opprobrium it did on release. He was coming off a streak of epics, however—The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965)—and so he gives a political love story the full 70 mm treatment, including a leitmotiv-heavy score to whose charms I was impervious. The cinematography, however, knows what it's doing. Because the film is set in a small village in the west of Ireland in 1916, because nothing about the plot makes sense without the tense current of nationalist politics and the claustrophobic isolation of fictional Kirrary, the Irish landscape needs to register on the audience as vividly as any of the human figures that populate it. The panoramic approach is immersive, tactile, and in the case of a spectacular storm scene, disorienting, overwhelming, and awe-inspiring. It's not unlike an Omni film of a novel. I'm willing to believe that critics expected the same kind of breathtaking sweep from the narrative and excoriated the film when instead they found something much more human-sized. It's on the writer, the director, and the editor, however, that the script feels like it could have used one more pass. It's not shapeless, and it pays off emotionally with startling intensity, but we found curious ellipses and late-mentioned details that felt like either casualties of editing or signs of a troubled production, information that could have shaped the story more effectively throughout. There's some question as to whether the copy we had access to was missing scenes, in which case I'd like to get hold of a recent DVD and rewatch before making any definitive statements; even if we got a truncated version by mistake, I can say in its favor that it never felt like a three-hour slog. Something is always happening onscreen, and it's always worth watching, whatever it is.

Robert Mitchum, for example. Normally he looks like film noir or terrifying Americana and here he's both plausible and poignant, cast against type as widowed schoolmaster Charles Shaughnessy, whose marriage against his better judgment to the much younger Rosy Ryan (Sarah Miles, then married to scriptwriter Robert Bolt) is the beginning of both their troubles. His character is a kind, shy, erudite man with a melancholy look in his heavy-lidded eyes; he inspires passion in the restless Rosy, but he can't give it to her. Her wedding night is a painful contrast between bawdy shivaree in the street below and unsatisfying lovemaking in the bedroom above: she's a virgin, he's conventional, and the rapidity with which he falls asleep afterward is almost a punch line. She lies to him a little, telling him that he's all right; she lies awake afterward, staring at the rain cracks in the ceiling. She didn't know what she was expecting, but it wasn't that. He's aware almost as soon as she is of the indifference that has settled over their marriage where at first it looked like a fairy story—the retiring older man drawn out by the fierce love of a barefoot girl—but he keeps it to himself with a strange hopeless wistfulness, as though naming the problem will make it real and enduring it silently might make it imaginary enough to bear. By then she's met Major Doryan (Christopher Jones), however, and made a dangerous decision in Ireland of the Troubles: when the handsome British soldier crumples with shell-shock in her father's pub, she not only offers him a hand out of the darkness, she kisses him impulsively and does not resist him when the emotion of the moment converts itself instantly into physical desire, wanting her as blindly and passionately as her husband never did.¹ Their affair is so gobsmackingly stupid that it hardly needs a case of informing and mistaken identity to endanger them both. It goes wrong faster than they think it will; not so the audience, but we've had the advantage of screaming at the screen from the second act.

With one striking exception, the affair itself is always seen from Rosy's perspective.² It's a kind of tight third person and it fascinates me. Her first experience of sex and her first experience of fulfilling sex are each an astonishing combination of the explicit and the symbolic: unambiguously physical action surrounded by more customary implication. On their wedding night, we know exactly when Charles enters her for the first time: her face tightens with pain, she makes a noise that is almost protest and flinches away from his rhythm, and the rest of the act's unsuccessful nature is indicated by the traditional shorthand of the wife gazing listlessly over her husband's shoulder. When she trysts with Doryan in a glade of bluebells, we know exactly when she experiences sexual pleasure for the first time: her face opens with shocked delight, she grips his back to press him more deeply into herself, and the rest of the act's rapturous nature is indicated by evocative shots of the sun glimpsing through trees, the rubbing of boughs together, a spider's crystal web trembling in the breeze. Usually directors pick one mode or the other. I'm curious whether I can attribute the mix to the year of filming, as the need for suggestiveness gave way to the ability to show. If you can get past the bluebells, it actually works.

Here is where I stop for the night. Short version short: despite its reputation, the movie doesn't suck. It has gorgeous cinematography, complex doubling, and an impressive amount of female gaze on its sex scenes, considering its director was a dude born in 1908. John Mills as grotesque village idiot and local doppelgänger Michael deserves a post of his own. I have to sleep first. This sketch sponsored by my understanding backers at Patreon.

1. Doryan is one of the script's stumbles for me, unfortunately. The actor is undeniably beautiful, with a masklike symmetry reminiscent of Hurd Hatfield in the 1945 Picture of Dorian Gray; the trouble with his damaged imperturbability is that we get almost no sense of him as a person except during his shell-shock episodes, when the mask comes unglued and he looks desperately frightened and very young, recoiling in memory from earth-showering explosions, hiding his head from mortar fire that can't touch him, and none of that tells us what Rosy sees in him when he's in command of himself and only limping from the most visible of his war wounds. It's possible that he's intentionally one-dimensional. Rosy gets conversation, affection, stability from her husband; what she does not get is sexual satisfaction and that's all she cares about with Doryan. She doesn't need to know about his childhood or his war record. The intensity with which he wants her is attraction enough. But there's so much implied to the audience in those few destabilizing moments, it struck both me and Rob as weird never to follow up on any of it. Barry Foster is onscreen for maybe fifteen minutes total as an IRB leader and we know nothing about him beyond what he's willing to do to get weapons for his cause and he's arresting. You can have conversations about him afterward. Christopher Jones is pretty and shell-shocked. At least Rosy likes him.

2. The one exception is marvelous: Rosy and Doryan in each other's arms on a windswept hillside, the music swelling around them; cut sharply to Charles, watching them from inside the house, on the other side of a closed window from the hillside and the wind, and there is silence. He does not share the music or the romance. He is cut out, shut in, excluded. You don't get the offstage chorus when you're not the one who's loved.