I am going to make it through this year if it kills me

Today did not start out well. I have been dealing with constant nightmares lately: when I fell asleep for an hour this evening, I dreamed of being trapped in a live version of one of those puzzle-houses where the floor has to be crossed in a certain pattern to be safe and the people who came out of the rooms to speak to me were neither human nor really sentient, but neither were they animatronics or anything normally unresponsive. I was afraid they were corpses. Last night I dreamed that my parents had split up and sold their house to friends of the family and I only found out when I came over to babysit my niece and all the bookshelves were bare and all my father's lab equipment was gone from the basement; before that, I dreamed of shooting someone in defense of others, but it was messy and battering and went on forever and did not save me from being badly hurt first. Earlier this week I dreamed that someone put a food court in Auschwitz. (I think I blame that on Herman Wouk, but I was really upset.) So I overslept and all I got out of it was nightmares; I got out of the house as soon as I had done enough work not to feel like slacking. After that, several good things happened which I need to record, especially the last.

I spent most of the afternoon and evening with my cats. We are taking them to the vet tomorrow because Autolycus has been sneezing for a week and Hestia needs her claws clipped by professionals, but they were active and affectionate and debunked my anxiety that they have been forgetting me just because I don't live with them right now. Autolycus curled up on my feet as I worked and turned on the monster purr when I tried to move, kneading his way up to my chest and burrowing under my arm in order to keep me in place. derspatchel has started referring to Hestia as the Generalissima, because of her winter coat and the imperious way she presents herself for adoration—expressed, of course, by petting whenever she demands it—and she leapt to the top of her box as soon as I came through the door. While I was sleeping this evening, Autolycus nestled himself behind my knees and slept with me. I must remember that I will not suddenly lose them. My cats are very important to me. I feel better when I am with them.

I met Rob for dinner at Tenoch Mexican outside of Davis Square. They are an inexpensive and delicious source of huitlacoche, which I had previously encountered only at a much pricier restaurant; we split a quesadilla of it, because corn smut is stupidly tasty, and assorted small tacos of beef cecina, choriqueso, campechano, and barbacoa de borrego, all totaling an incredible amount of food for completely reasonable prices. Walking back to his house afterward, we passed Comicazi. They had the usual assortment of used comics and DVDs on their outside table, but there was also a box of magazine advertisements from the 1930's and '40's. Most of them were for cigarettes—Camels, Lucky Strikes, Chesterfields, with the occasional beer for variety, all being endorsed by various celebrities, mostly film stars. Ginger Rogers, Spencer Tracy, Rita Hayworth, Herbert Marshall, etc. Neat stuff, but neither of us really wanted a cigarette ad. Then we found this. Fibber McGee and Molly with a miniature radio script? Yes, please. And not even selling Chesterfields—60-watt bulbs for 11¢ plus tax. "Back on the air for Johnson's Wax the first Tuesday in October."

Most importantly—

My mother found my opal leaf. It was just at the edge of the driveway, not far from where I had found the chain; she thinks the briefly warmer weather this week melted just enough of the slush to let it become visible. I had not expected to see it until spring, if ever. It was covered in some kind of driveway humus, so I soaked it in cold water until it was mostly clean; the stone itself looks slightly chipped along one of the leaf-edges, but the setting is intact and it hasn't done anything exciting like shatter so far. I will need to get it a stronger chain with a better clasp. Thank you so much to everyone who wrote with sympathy and hoped it would return to me. I am astonished that it did, but overjoyed. I have already written to my brother to let him know. Sometimes Persephone shows up early.

You know, it's always them pretty guys who can get away with that stuff

I don't know what kind of voice John Gilbert's silent fans expected him to have. If it's true that his sound played any part in the demise of his career, then I have to assume they imagined something clean and classical, like an American Ronald Colman, the kind of voice that could make Shakespeare out of introducing itself on the subway. Hearing Gilbert speak for the first time in Tod Browning's Fast Workers (1933), it's true that Shakespeare was one of the last things on my mind, unless we're talking the skeevier bits of Much Ado About Nothing. But it works just fine. As construction-site rake "Gunner" Smith, Gilbert has a slightly flat-voweled, slightly abrasive baritone—bad for a romantic hero, perhaps, but great for a charming heel. And that's the dictionary definition of the Gunner, with his raffish mustache and his lean body, equally agile shinning around steel girders or quick-changing out of his evening clothes because he's come straight to work from yet another shack-up. He can banter with the speediest of the screwballs; he can sneer without changing his smile, delivering with Cagney-grade contempt the fantastic brush-off "Ah, go stuff a duck." He's even almost a good enough bullshit artist to convince himself that he's sleeping with his best friend's girlfriends out of the kindness of his heart—after all, if he can pick them up like nickels in the street, they're hardly the kinds of girl a best buddy should marry, are they? The viewer should not need much experience with double entendres to recognize that the title refers not only to efficient construction work, but to Gunner's track record with the opposite sex. His buddy "Bucker" Reilly (Robert Armstrong), the slow, silent type given to marriage proposals after a woman says two words to him, can only stare in admiration. He hasn't met a girl yet that Gunner hasn't been able to prove a floozy. That doesn't even count the flings this Don Juan of the I-beams has on his own time. To the rest of the construction crew, the whole thing's as good as a long-running soap.

I wish I could say the same about the film itself. It has the gritty, scrappy energy of many a pre-Code programmer, outspoken sexuality and economics included, but it can't decide whether it wants to be a hard-boiled love story or a cautionary tale of bros before hos, Depression-style, and when it tries to land both at once in the third act, it just falls over sideways into poorly explained melodrama with a bewildering comedy whiplash that leaves the audience wondering if the director just scribbled "PUNCH LINE GOES HERE" on the shooting script and walked off the set.¹ I'm left feeling most positive about the performances. Armstrong's Bucker is a genial dope, but he can turn as stonily dangerous as any man who thinks he's been made a fool of. The construction workers are a lightly sketched cast of colorful blue-collar types of whom the scene-stealer is Sterling Holloway's Pinky, a whifty-voiced riveter who isn't quite the fool he looks.² More importantly, Mae Clarke gets some great scenes as no-last-name Mary, Bucker's latest crush and Gunner's long-time girl; she's a fast worker, too, a practiced lightener of hearts and wallets who boasts of herself as "a girl [who] can trim every guy she meets from Frisco to New York." Her specialty is looking like an innocent astray; when Bucker tries to call her on it, sarcastically proffering a raft of sob-story clichés, she bamboozles him magnificently by demanding to know who told him about her ailing grandmother and her overdue rent and the job she lost for resisting her boss' advances and the family locket she was forced to pawn, all with such authentic, tearful fright that all he can do is stammer that he "ain't a detective." Her only soft spot is for Gunner, but he claims "that forever and ever stuff . . . makes me want to reach for my hat." They don't pretend fidelity to one another, which means they don't treat each other like marks; however amorally, they are probably each the other's healthiest relationship. The trouble comes when Mary finds herself touched by Bucker's dumb but honest devotion and Gunner recognizes too late that great sex and emotional candor might actually be what most people mean when they talk about love and I've mentioned before that I can't stand love triangles, right? At least there are some trickily vertiginous shots atop a half-built skyscraper and the whole thing lasts only 66 minutes, so it didn't take much out of my night.

But it proved to me that Gilbert should have had a sound career, even if he moved into character acting rather than top-billed romances. He's good in Fast Workers, regardless of the coherence of the film around him; he could carry a picture even in an antiheroic role. According to IMDb, it was his third-to-last. In a reasonable universe, it would only have been mid-career. This evidence brought to you by my true-hearted backers at Patreon.

1. Browning's name is in the credits, but not as director: he was so unhappy with the studio assignment of Fast Workers after the notorious failure of Freaks (1932) that he tried to take his name off the picture. I suppose it would not console him that I think it was a better directing job than Dracula (1931).

2. He moons over a nest of pigeons like they were his own babies ("I think they're going to have blue eyes") and most of his lines fall a half-step to the side of actual human dialogue ("Well, you know, boys will be plumbers"), but he's a sly kibitzer and a poker shark. He has no real effect on the plot, but I was glad to see him all the same.