Myth Happens

To Kill a King (1980) is a compact riddle of half-hour television, a psychomachia of writer's block that plays like autobiographical ciphertext. Its muse is as elusive as radio astronomy and its spell breaks with a stone face thrown through a television set. Let it come as a surprise to no one that it was written by Alan Garner.

It's concentrated for Garner, actually, adhering to at least two out of three Aristotelian unities as it charts just about twenty-four hours in the stumped and haunted life of Harry (Anthony Bate), rattling so listlessly around the Tudor timbers of the Old Medicine House that he seems a less substantial presence within its pale-washed walls than the golden-tressed apparition first glimpsed like a candle at its window. The invitations to interviews and lectures which pile up in his mail and the glum recurring glance he gives his medal—Carnegie, Garner won it for The Owl Service in 1968—establish him as a writer of sufficient note to receive inquiries even from the States, but he hasn't written anything to feed their interest in years. He lights a fire as if he doesn't believe it'll warm him, clutches a composition book without daring to look inside. It's not hard to read a fisher king's desolation into this drouth of words. The wood into which he trudges to walk off one of his day-splintering "heads" looks sere as a green winter and so does self-neglected Harry, a dead-fall figure in his thistly slept-in cardigan and his barley-mow hair, unshaven as if smeared with ash. His vision is occluded with migraine and something worse: a trouble tuning in. The sky-meshed cradle of the Lovell Telescope tilts behind the prickle of trees to trawl for masers and pulsars and the vast cold spirals of the hydrogen line and Harry flounders awake in the night to transcribe the sudden clear whisper of a woman's voice. "I was asleep and it was already coming. I had to get it down. It came clean, fast as I could write . . . Years of nothing!" As dictated, it's a spellbinding incantation of stone and time and magic, but by the time it's read out over breakfast it's deteriorated into a scatological babble of joke rhymes. "But I didn't!" he protests, disbelieved: a shamed bear of a man bent over his treacherous words like a schoolboy called to account. "I didn't. It was something else." Only the drift-scan witness of the radio dish seems to believe him, cupped like the shell of the moon to his obstinate appeal: "You know. I did not." To his solicitous secretary David (Jonathan Elsom) and his skeptical sister Clare (Pauline Yates), it's just one more episode of lost marbles or silly buggers, to be accommodated with proprietary forbearance or dismissed with indulgent scorn over a lunch which descends from the bitchy to the bizarre as his sister's bland barbs clash as audibly as cutlery with his secretary's waspish deflections and Harry sits mute as a football between them, stirring only to answer his sister's matronly prod of "How's the head?" with the politely blank "Which one?" It is a real question, since we saw the other in the wet wood where Harry paced out the troubled paternity of his words against a ballad of Cheshire and Lancashire, a fist of black stone fished up from the water's iron glass. And if the child be mine . . . The pitted smile it showed him was older than churches. He threw it back with a shout as if it scalded him. A woman's voice sang him the rest of "Child Waters," a woman's shape eluded him across the water, the fields, the pierced mouth of the railway embankment, as if she were that Roland's tower of red gold shining on the other side of the Clyde. It's the question he doesn't want to meet as his afternoon makes a break for the nightmarish, the brittle malevolence of his visitors pursuing him through the uncannily autonomous involvements of telephone and manically swiveling typeball, coming around like a catch in the mind or a cry in the Selectric's chatter: "What are you going to do about it, Harry? What are you going to do about your heads?"

( But I am. )

To Kill a King was the last episode transmitted of the BBC's Leap in the Dark (1973–80) and I would love to hear how biographically legible it was to viewers at the time, since I came to it aware of Toad Hall and Jodrell Bank and the bipolar disorder which Garner has discussed freely, to the point where as soon as I saw the broadcast date I knew that by the time it hit the airwaves, its author was in the grip of a two-year depression as bad as anything he gave his "shaggy, draggy, dirty Harry." Its efficacy as exorcism remains; I used it to break my own dry spell of critical writing, which has felt for months like missing a part of my head. I thought that close to the bone was the best place to start. Even without the personal element, the play would feel like unfiltered Garner just from its opening rush of a train past a telescope, an old song heard in an older house, the slippage and compression of all that sandstone time. The version on YouTube has suffered the normal erosion of unrestored TV, but I can't knock the irony of the VT clock at the beginning. "No, no barriers." This night brought to you by my four-cornered backers at Patreon.

Yesterday in honor of the date, I watched Larry Yust's The Lottery (1969).

I can't remember when I first read Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948). It wasn't for school; that was "After You, My Dear Alphonse" (1943). It might have been in one of the classroom anthologies I always read cover to cover no matter what we were actually assigned out of them—Hawthorne, Bradbury. The house being full of almost every genre of fiction but the realistic, I could equally have found it in The Lottery and Other Stories (1949), the same acid-browned paperback that furnished me with the dustily stomach-sinking despair of "The Daemon Lover" (1949), a story which upset me for reasons I would not be able to articulate for decades. Since the inhabitants of the unnamed village in which Jackson set her parable of the homey barbarities we take for granted so long as they don't come too close to home can no longer remember the origins of their annual rite nor even the particulars of its observance which have worn down over the centuries to a black box filled with slips of paper and the corner of a square piled with stones, it makes sense for the story to feel like something I have always known, as it feels I always knew about year-kings, scapegoats. I imagined it in New England even though the text only commits itself to the close-knit markers of rural America, thus occasioning that subset of the onslaught of letters following its publication which concerned themselves with identifying the location of the practice she had apparently, ethnographically described. I wasn't connecting it with witch trials or the Gothic literature of the region or even some vibe of Jackson's North Bennington, the white-spired college town where she would eventually spend the rest of her rather haunted life. The story merely felt as it was meant to: wherever you read it, like something that could happen here.

So much does the same seem true of the version commissioned by Encyclopædia Britannica as part of their Short-Story Showcase (1969–77) that perhaps in an effort to head off a similar outcry of letters from the parents of its student audience, it subtitles its opening wide shot of a well-trodden strip of ground between census-designated houses and the long awning of a shopping center through which a kid in a ketchup-red windbreaker is wandering, The following is fiction. Despite the occasional dramatically high or low angle on the assembled ring of the crowd and the hands and faces singled out within it, the 16 mm cinematography by Isidore Mankofsky looks most—hand-jostled, post-synched, slightly blown out in the blue haze of sun between summer showers—like a home movie, the amateur record of the year's lottery in eighteen minutes of real time. It tumbles among the boys scrapping for the best stones in the rain-drying field, eavesdrops on the girls who watch them as if from the other side of a school dance, the adults who close up shop for the morning, pull up in their trucks, drift over from household chores. "Steve hates to eat those TV dinners. I don't blame him." "I like Miss Spangler better than I did that second-grade teacher." "You ever hear of taxes going down?" "Then I'm going to finish it off with some lace around the sleeves." Once two men emerge across the parking lot, one carrying a black box and the other a wooden stool, the screenplay adapted by Yust will follow Jackson's dialogue almost word for word, but the writer-director's real fidelity to his source material is the plain ordinariness with which the events of June 27, 1969, since the cars and clothes of the film are distinctly contemporary, play out before the camera's unshocked eye. To the citizens of this tiny, blue-collar community gathering without coercion or secrecy, the routine of the lottery with its methodical double-checking of participants and narration of the rules and finally the finish in time to get back to the day's work is as familiar as the civic business of voting, as normal as May Day on Summerisle. The lots are folded slips of college-ruled paper, the fateful black spots rounded casually in with pencil. If the black-painted wooden box in which the lots are stirred and drawn is as old as its chips and scratches suggest, its padlock could and might well have been bought from the nearest hardware store last week. No one even dresses up for the ceremony—Olive Dunbar's Tessie Hutchinson runs up at the last minute explaining with a self-conscious laugh that she "clean forgot what day it was," while William Benedict's Joe Summers is sworn in as master of the lottery in the white shirt and khaki slacks in which the viewer can imagine him at a cookout or a lodge meeting. His white-haired boyish face and scratchy tenor give him both authority and informality as he assumes his office and begins the roll call: "Do you solemnly swear that you will perform without prejudice or favoritism those duties prescribed by custom and dictated by law?" The film does not ignore the tensions underlying the day; it catches solemn faces and nervous fingers, how tightly the little slips of paper are held or turned over and over like dice still falling. "Seems like only last week we got through with the last one," Blanche Bronte's Jean Delacroix murmurs to Irene Tedrow's Mrs. Graves, who answers with the voice of experience, "Time sure does go fast." Drawing for the first time for himself and his mother, Jack Watson—a still-teenaged Ed Begley Jr., barley-blond gawky in his worn-edged denim jacket—stumbles in his nervousness against the box and is not unsympathetically admonished, "Take your time, son!" He hurries back into place without looking at anyone, as if he's bobbled the job of being a man. But no one weeps, no one hides, children hang off their parents' arms with boredom and even adults mutter around the halfway mark of the alphabet, "I wish they'd hurry." Neither the performances nor the photography ever flip into more conventionally signaled horror than the measured and sudden denouement of Jackson's prose. The sky is clouding over as the boys' rough cairn of stones is reached for, but the ritual goes on rain or shine. Joe Summers has already tucked his pencil and the year's list of names back into his shirt pocket, professionally. "All right, folks. Let's finish quickly."

( Attagirl, Tessie. )

It is not inconceivable that I could have encountered this film in its intended environment of middle or high school. I can remember different English classes screening To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Shane (1953), Of Mice and Men (1992), Romeo and Juliet (1968), even a scene from what it took me almost a quarter of a century to determine had been A Tale of Two Cities (1958), since at the time I registered mostly that it did not contain Ronald Colman and was therefore inauthentic. I had no idea of its educational existence until this spring, when it handily turned up on the Internet Archive. It seemed appropriate to wait to watch it in season, which I can only hope does not contagiously throw the viewer's hat into the ring. Perhaps it doesn't need to. We don't live in a different country from Shirley Jackson, setting her ritual tacitly in her own home town. "It ain't the way it used to be. People ain't the way they used to be." I don't know, Old Man Warner. Stones, blood, corn, who's in and who's out, sometimes it feels like the cars and the clothes are the only things that change. Attagirl, Tessie, indeed. This duty brought to you by my prescribed backers at Patreon.

Connoisseurs of anti-epic should not overlook Leslie Norman's Dunkirk (1958). Especially in a decade supposed to be setting comfortably into the aftermyth of war, it's notable how matter-of-factly near to a cynical tragedy its docu-realist treatment leans with the naïveté of the Phoney War and the disorientation of the British Expeditionary Force—if Operation Dynamo was a miracle, it was also a seat-of-the-pants shitshow in which no one ever knew what to expect next, whether an attack from the Luftwaffe or orders from the Admiralty. The action of the film never approaches the triumphalism of the credits' crisp fanfare. The critical eye it casts on the state of Britain in the spring of 1940 wouldn't stand for it.

In service of its scope of chaos, the screenplay combined by David Divine and W. P. Lipscomb from Elleston Trevor's The Big Pick-Up (1955) and Lieutenant Colonel Ewan Butler and Major J. Selby Bradford's Dunkirk (Keep the Memory Green, 1950) distributes its confusion, disillusion, determination, and dithering among three narratives which cascade inevitably into one another as national attention and effort converge on the event horizon of Dunkirk. Fed up with the waffling and pettifogging of the Ministry of Information, Bernard Lee's Charles Foreman is starting to feel like a Fleet Street Cassandra as every attempt to confirm the reports of German forces massing on the borders of the Low Countries blandly receives the official brush-off: "I have nothing to add to the communiqué . . . That's a matter for the censor." Despite his side hustle of small-scale military subcontracting which exempts his garage from the petrol ration, Richard Attenborough's John Holden doesn't yet feel the war as much more than an embarrassment, especially when it obliges him to justify his reserved occupation: "Anyway, would I have done any more by sitting on my backside in France for the last six months? Well, would I?" Even John Mills' Corporal Tubby Binns of the 2nd Wiltshires spends most of his time in country catcalling the newsreels with his mates until all of a sudden the German advance has overtaken the Pathé Gazette and left him holding the closest thing to an officer's bag of shepherding the survivors of his unit through refugee columns and sitting-duck fields, making up the numbers of the lost with the odds and sods of other companies and even branches of the service until they should reach the sea-breeze nightmare of the beaches where waiting around to hit the sand as Stukas whine down on the middle of church parade is even more nerve-racking than laying up in half-abandoned farmhouses and hedgerows as deceptive with birdsong as their own English countryside, a sightline of ocean and a sea-change of war away. A shocked private could be speaking for the nation as he stares at the smoke-cratered coppice that seconds ago housed a battery of Royal Artillery: "I hope somebody knows what they're doing."

It's an open question down to the last of the film's two and a quarter hours, which decently epic runtime does require a little set-up before it can use its deliberate pace for as much horror show as history lesson: all quiet until it isn't on the western front. Cartoons of Allied confidence look impossibly innocent in hindsight—Chamberlain of all people chasing off the Führer with an umbrella—but when Holden finds his machinists listening to Lord Haw-Haw, he has to switch off the programme himself after one of them objects, "How do you know it's twaddle?" In a London pub, the phoniness of the war isn't a rhetorical question to the merchant seaman who lost two fingers and ten days drifting off the Faroes to the Kriegsmarine. Flanagan and Allen hang out their washing on the Siegfried Line while the Maginot Line is circumvented by the animated arrows of Fall Gelb and the British positions crumble back to the Channel coast far more neatly on the map than in scrambling, fractious life, where even before the situation assumes its full pear shape the soldiers on the ground have only the haziest and most blackly joking idea of their deployment up to the Dyle: "We sit up on the end of a line held by the French to connect up with the Belgians. You know, like closing a door." – "And we're the door, eh?" – "Well, supposing someone puts their foot in the bloody door?" Even with our intermittent advantage of the bigger picture, the audience is encouraged less toward admiration at the audacity of the operation than amazement that any of its moving parts actually meshed: the pair of staff colonels contemplating their commander-in-chief's call to pull out the BEF at the expense of the French First Army, the vice-admiral who has to prove that it's mathematically worth risking further destroyers on Dunkirk instead of reserving them against the likelihood of invasion; the French journalist bitterly observing the English failure to recognize the scale of the disaster for France. The score by Malcolm Arnold saves its most inspirational motifs for the assembling of the little ships including the real-life Medway Queen and Massey Shaw and one of the same RN officers who has just been requisitioning all the shallow-draft small craft the Admiralty can get its articles on sighs from the tall bridge of his destroyer, "I suppose they're going to try to bring the army away. There's not a chance, you know." It is standard practice for war movies to sneak their suspense into the uncertainties of the historical record, but Dunkirk rather breathtakingly makes the record itself feel like a long shot. "Fools at the top. Fools at the bottom. There are times when I don't think we ought to win this war."

Fools or not, Dunkirk cares too much for its people at the bottom to let its skepticism write them off; they may be pieces of the vast, struggling mosaic of the evacuation, but they have more than archetypal lives, fragile, unpredictable, and governed by irony as often as not. "It's a funny thing about those flowers, Mike," Meredith Edwards' Private Dave Bellman notes over their improvised, oil-lit dinner in a farmhouse as ghostly deserted as if its former occupants knew something its current ones don't. They have been trying to estimate the days since Belgium, the season their only real clock: "I used to like the smell of lilac. I hate it now." The same fair weather that shone impartially on the strafing of refugees and the dive-bombing of the battery will last catch him lying under the leaf-light of an orchard, calling faintly in Welsh for his mates and God—Binns with the weight of his unwanted stripes on his shoulders has had to leave the wounded man for the Germans, swearing he'll be safe as a prisoner of war and hoping to believe it himself. He lingers in absentia and not just because Binns has a flare of near-mutiny on his hands over the decision, a loose end the film can never go back for. We are left guessing similarly when a naval rating disappears in the explosion of the civilian boat from which he stared with its owner in horror at the smoldering horizon of the town and the straggling piers of men reaching into the sea. "I've had two tries—ain't got away yet," one old hand of the beaches warns the newcomers who are still processing the fact of a full-on run-out rather than a line to hold when another cuts into their hopes of an orderly embarkation, "Be ruddy lucky if you did. It's my fourth try." Destroyers are sunk before our eyes, thrashing with men, barely clear of the overcrowded mole. Men under bombardment grip themselves to the sand, their mutter and babble of counting, praying, one voice crying over and over that he doesn't want to die until his neighbor can't take it another dirt-showered second and shouts back, "You might bloody well have to, chum!" Thanks to the distance of the dogfights from the beaches, the grounded airman played by Michael Bates spends most of his time being cursed out for the fuck-all efforts of the RAF and stubbornly refuses to take camouflage in khaki. Wringing out his wrong uniform as their little company shockily reconvenes from the incendiary sinking of the paddle steamer they optimistically wangled themselves aboard, he flashes a bedraggled grin at Binns: "We had to get back to you, Corp. We knew you couldn't do without your glamour boys." It feels like more than the ticked boxes of propaganda, this attention beyond some universally assumed experience of Dunkirk. When the medical officers at the café turned casualty clearing station draw lots to determine who'll remain with the wounded, a short straw is understood to mean something particular for Stepney-bred Harry Landis' Lieutenant Levy turning quietly back to his patient as the rattle of German machine guns closes in. Even the protagonists have less plot armor than might be expected from their telephoto functions as their paths collide in ways only the audience can see the twists in. Of the crowd of weekend sailors tapped to deliver their boats to Sheerness at the tight-lipped behest of the Navy, Foreman was the first to volunteer to take his on to Dunkirk as soon as he'd seen the day's catch of blanket-wrapped soldiers stumbling wearily ashore and almost at once an air attack on the Vanity leaves the journalist as subject to the vagaries of fate and tracer fire as anyone else stranded on the sands. Holden couldn't look more of a civilian with his rimless glasses and his hesitant stammer and his indignant failure to register his boat because it's "not thirty foot—not since I ran slap into Teddington Lock it isn't," but when the Heron is swamped by a squabbling rush of soldiers and Robert Urquhart's Private Mike Russell steps in to lend his grease monkey's expertise to the jammed engine, the windblown little man at the tiller responds in a kind of reminiscent surprise, as if in one crashing, oil-soaked night it slipped his mind, "I own a garage." If Binns is another of his actor's national everymen, the camera is always catching him at helpless, hurting moments, his tenacious face creased with more second guesses than pluck and the conviction of an inglorious welcome home: "I suppose they think we've made a muck of it." The wry comfort offered in so many words by Dunkirk is the knowledge that the muck was well and duly made before Binns and his people got anywhere near it.

It is a truth chronologically acknowledged that any current appraisal of this picture has to squint back through the blockbuster acclaim of Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), but I am not convinced that the earlier film suffers by comparison. Certainly it's as much survival horror as the later version and perhaps more effectively, being so much less stylized. Its political edge, however carefully negotiated with the War Office, strikes me as more subversive when it really doesn't leave the impression that a muddle through is as good as a mile; its caution against complacency feels like a corrective not only to the received myths of Dunkirk but the back-patting war films which preceded it. So successfully stark and pragmatic is this telling that it almost loses the ending when a narrator cuts suddenly over model shots of the wrecked mole, half-sunken ships, windswept beaches strewn with abandoned vehicles and artillery to claim that this "great defeat and . . . great miracle" was the crucible that unified Britain for the rest of the Second World War, but fortunately it catches itself in time with the Kiplingesque punch line of Binns and Russell back to the Army again, sergeant, who dresses them down for drilling as sloppily as if they'd just won a war instead of damn near—and don't they know it—lost one. It suits one of the final productions of Michael Balcon and original flavor Ealing Studios, whose propaganda in actual time of war ranked with the weirdest of Leslie Howard and Powell and Pressburger. Its heroism is as real as it's back-handed, beautifully shot by DP Paul Beeson as if filling in the lacunae of the historical footage that mainly supplies the aircraft and armies to which the otherwise ambitious effects budget did not extend. Its reconstruction of Dunkirk is no sleight-of-hand of glass mattes but a cast of honest-to-goodness thousands shivering in the water or sloping around the dunes of Camber Sands like some surrealistically live-action Paul Nash. Their Beckettian efforts to get off the beach approach black comedy except for the body count. Sean Barrett ended up on the original record cover of the Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" (1985). I caught this Dunkirk with spatch on Tubi, but it can be viewed clearly on the Internet Archive and even on Blu-Ray if you live in the right country and can ignore the really appalling error in the advertising copy. As he watches the motley flotilla of the little ships accruing water boats and passenger launches and pre-war tugs, an incredulous seaman begins to sing in time with his mooring, "Oh, roll on the Rodney, the Nelson, Renown, that one-funnelled dinghy is bound to go down." This shambles brought to you by my miraculous backers at Patreon.

Even without its wall-to-wall spectacle of manifest destiny, Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930) is an invitation to alternate history. I had no idea a Depression-era 70 mm widescreen format had ever existed. It had never occurred to me that among the wishful stock of the hell of a good video store next door, I would want the pre-Code star career of John Wayne.

In the spring of 1930, Marion Morrison, who preferred to be called Duke, was twenty-two years old. For the last four years, he had been employed by the Fox Film Corporation as an assistant prop man and bit-part player; he had about twenty roles to his name and only one of them credited. Casting around for a leading man to anchor the studio's million-dollar gamble of American migration, the veteran director is supposed to have spotted the former college tackle shlepping furniture on the lot and promoted him for a part originally envisioned with Tom Mix or Gary Cooper. One Hollywood rebranding and a boot camp in frontiersman's skills later, the freshly monikered—after Mad Anthony—Wayne was front and center of a five-month shoot across seven states, a Fitzcarraldo-class exercise in rugged documentarianism. "No great trail was ever blazed without hardship." Despite the primally Western setting, the effect is much less a screen persona in embryo than a non-actor carrying a film. Still coltish at six foot four, Wayne in The Big Trail has a raw, aw-shucks voice and a long-limbed lope as well as a charming habit of slinging one leg over his horse's neck to perch sideways in the saddle; he moves sometimes with self-conscious stiffness, sometimes as easily as if he's forgotten the camera he does not yet know how to play to. Once on his way out of a crowd scene he seems to check his heading against the fourth wall. He's beautiful. Except that the picture is an ambitiously open-air talkie, he wouldn't need line readings with his long-lashed cat-eyes and his thick-tousled hair, his face pointed around its big bones that would look more conventionally handsome and less ferally attractive once he finished growing into them; it's incredible that no one put him up for a screen test before Walsh. Even his inexperience fits right into the cinema vérité ethos of a film that devotes more attention to the quotidian details of life on a wagon train from Missouri to Oregon than the beats of melodrama which propel the rudimentary plot. He doesn't sound like a stage-trained actor, he sounds like the production scooped some kid out of the backwoods around 1840 and there he is in his sweat-worn buckskins, throwing his Bowie knife with the dead-eye accuracy of long winters trapping on the Snake River all in one shot so that we can see it was done without doubling or trick photography.

For those lucky audiences who managed to catch The Big Trail on the eye-filling high-definition silver nitrate of the Fox Grandeur process, it must have been possible to enjoy the film as a kind of panorama, unscrolling westward through the dust of plains and the drag of rivers, snow-flocked mountains and salt-cracked deserts from the banks of the Mississippi to the Willamette Valley. It is not impossible to enjoy it as such even digitally. The scale of filming is legitimately, epically stunning. Just the depth of field allows Walsh to stage a world always packed and bustling with action, meticulously ceaseless tableaux before which the principals may be conversing or flirting or facing off while around them any number of other lives are going on. Men check the iron-hooped wheels of a Conestoga, women chop wood and scrub clothes while behind them a fleet of prairie schooners fades nearly to the horizon without mattes or models and between the two distances other pioneers are loading provisions or cleaning tack or just leaning over the back of the nearest ox to watch the scene. Dogs trot and children run wherever the wagon train halts for the night; mules balk and horses jink; the oxen are whacked onward and the swaying surge of cattle herded through the veils of dust that fog the sunset so spectrally, the settlers could be their own ghosts imprinted like wheel-ruts on the land, speckling into daguerreotype. Downstream of the current-tugged mass of canvas and horses jostling across a deep-swirling river, the team and contents of a capsizing wagon are borne as swiftly as escaping breath; as the trail trudges on through dunes weathered with sagebrush and the broken-down evidence of prior travelers, a pale hollow of stones comes visible from human attention to it as a grave. It's like Pieter Bruegel painted a Western. It never feels overly busy, all the planes of motion through which the eye can wander as if selecting its own narrative. It doesn't slacken when the cast pares down, either: Wayne riding after buffalo with a pair of Pawnee scouts is part of the same charged immensity of space as the grasslands and the light-limned clouds. One lovely, unexpected interlude shows a human mother nursing her child matched by succeeding shots of a mare with her foal, a bitch with her puppies, a cat with her kittens, a sow with her piglets. The domestic work of cooking and mending is photographed no less squarely than Herzogian efforts like the felling of great trees to construct the blocks and tackle by which precariously upended wagons and livestock bawling in slings may be safely winched down the precipitous rimrock while the settlers themselves work hand over hand down the slope and occasionally watch all their worldly goods crash bouncing to the white water below. As often as it holds the long shot of the sparrow's fall, the camera—the DP behind it was Arthur Edeson, who worked wonders on this production and never worked with 70 mm again—can cut in close to the slippage of hooves and feet in sand or mud; it is trampled directly over by a Cheyenne charge. Nothing in this film, no matter how familiar from generations of the Western mythos, looks like anything else for decades through the sheer demands of the format, the huge deep-focus of every shot. The tensest moment of action does not belong to the corral of wagons under attack, but to winter light scudding across the snow-crusted trunk of a long-fallen sequoia, the wind whistling louder than even a well-projected voice in the forest's cold cathedral. The Grand Canyon plays itself.

Perhaps inevitably, the screenplay officially credited to Hal G. Evarts and unofficially attributed to eight divers hands including Walsh does not share the invention of the visuals it scaffolds. Beyond the vignettes of the trek, it offers a sturdily old-fashioned blend of romance and revenge in which Wayne's Breck Coleman figures as both panther-sure tracker of the low-down coyotes who murdered his mentor down by Santa Fe and sweetly gauche suitor to the Southern belle whom he met under such innocently disastrous circumstances that audience members with a low tolerance for misunderstanding may not make it through the first act. None of it would have been new to the silents; some of it might have worked better in one. As played by Tyrone Power Sr. in his first and only foray into talking pictures, the bearish bullwhacker Red Flack suggests a blood-and-thunder Shakespearean take on Bluto; Ian Keith really twirls his mustache as the slick riverboat gambler Bill Thorpe who makes a calculated bid for the heroine's hand; Charles Stevens' Lopez provides as weaselly a sidekick for the treacherous wagon boss as Tully Marshall's Zeke represents the wily old coot in the hero's corner. Covering the immigrant angle, El Brendel does his trademark Swedish dialect routine with bonus mother-in-law shtick and one extremely well-deployed rendition of a joke older than vaudeville—sunk to his waist in a mudhole, the straw-haired little shlimazl politely objects, "What are you kicking about? I am sitting on my mule." By contrast, Marguerite Churchill as Ruth Coleman looks straight out of a revisionist Western of the '70's with her high-boned cameo of a face; she shares a slow chemistry with Wayne when the dialogue isn't crowding them to the point that some of her most expressive contributions to their relationship are reaction shots. "You know, you can get sort of used to having somebody not like you," he observes after a moonlit dance in which the figures called have brought them awkwardly into one another's arms. Instead of wooing her like the gambler with his promises of a silken life, the rangily down-to-earth trapper draws her in for the first time with his love for the open country in which she could imagine only danger instead of "big tall pines just a-reaching and a-reaching as if they wanted to climb right through the gates of heaven . . . that old moon smiling down on you and every time you look up, there she is, sort of guarding over you, like a mother minding her young." Breck has already been established as one of these both-ways figures of the frontier in the tradition of James Fenimore Cooper, fluent in hand talk and respectful of indigenous ways and so surprised to be asked by the children of the wagon train if he's ever killed an Indian that he explains at length everything he learned from growing up with them instead; it makes his paean to the natural world that only his earnestness keeps from sounding like cracked corn far more persuasive than when he's called on to encourage the blizzard-daunted pioneers in the name of settler-colonialism, "We can't turn back! We're blazing a trail that started in England!" It does feel notable to me that The Big Trail does not treat its Native Americans as an undifferentiated natural hazard as opposed to an overlapping polity of nations with their own relations to one another and European invasion. With one band, Breck is able to broker safe passage for the wagon train by promising that it will not settle on Cheyenne land; later on his personal diplomacy cannot hold off being caught in an alliance with the Crow. The circling of the wagons may be archetypal, the jokes made in the Cheyenne language feel not. I may just need to see more silent and pre-Code Westerns. I can't tell if it is unusual to depict the women of a wagon train so readily swinging axes and shouldering rifles beside their men, if the dead are so often made to feel irretrievable instead of inevitably whittled down. Intertitles regularly trumpet the historical indomitability of the pioneer spirit, but the dialogue itself does almost no incluing for the viewer as far as geography or even the year except for a mention of twenty-six stars on the American flag. It's harder for me to evaluate the historicity of the clothing than the fact that all of it looks as though the cast has been wearing it for months on the road. Lines like "Somewhere our trails will cross again" could probably not have been put over even with title cards.

Needless to say, The Big Trail was a flop. By staking so much—technologically, artistically, commercially—on the success of a big-budget experiment in a brand-new film format, Fox bet and bought the farm even more badly than its shortly impending successor would fare with Cleopatra (1963). Both the studio and its founder William Fox were in parlous financial shape following the Crash of 1929 and the rollout of Fox Grandeur had been complicated by the understandable reluctance of movie theaters in the first shock of the Depression to shell out for another projection system so soon on the heels of conversion for sound. The budget by the end of the shoot had exceeded $2 million and it should surprise no one who interacted with an Apple II in the 1980's that the travails of the location shooting included a run-in with dysentery. At the time of its release, only Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles and the Roxy in New York were equipped to run The Big Trail on its intended 70 mm—everyone else had to settle for the shorter and much less radically visualized 35 mm version which had been filmed simultaneously by Lucien Andriot. It made back effectively nothing at the box office of what had been spent on actors and wagons and extras and animals and reflectors and catering and trucks and film and the four additional foreign-language versions for international release. The new-minted John Wayne was busted down to B-movies on Poverty Row, where he employed the skills he had mastered for The Big Trail in low-budget Westerns until his reintroduction by John Ford with Stagecoach (1939). Widescreen formats would not reemerge in American cinema until the post-war period as part of the competition with television. I would like to know what access to 70 mm could have done for classical Hollywood cinematography, but what seems to be left really haunting me is Wayne. Was he ever so vulnerable again onscreen, so romantically attainable and alluring? His early failures to straighten out the situation with Ruth are sympathetically undignified, his climactic reunion with her among the vast sun-dapples of the heaven-reaching redwoods is breathtakingly mythic and hungrily human at once. I spent so much time ragging on him for The High and the Mighty (1954), but the radiantly awkward youngster saying without conceit or deceit, "It wouldn't be true if I told him I didn't want you. It happens I do," could have become that painfully transparent man. He lost the knack, or was trained out of it, and it was a loss to American masculinity. He looks incidentally even better grimed up from travel, which I appreciate wardrobe and makeup understanding. I caught the film on TCM, but the 70 mm version has been transferred to Blu-Ray/DVD and a decently ripped copy appears to exist in the right aspect ratio on YouTube. It should be seen in a theater, even if no original prints survive. This hardship brought to you by my great backers at Patreon.

So moon_custafer asked me who should in my opinion have played Dan Roman in William Wellman's The High and the Mighty (1954) instead of the one conspicuously weak link in the otherwise solid ensemble of this parent and original of the star-studded disaster flick, the reluctantly cast co-producer John Wayne.

As written by Ernest K. Gann in the 1953 best-seller which he adapted for the screen himself, Dan Roman is a man with a haunting. He names it to himself as such; he still wakes up screaming from its nightmares; it is not made a mystery for the reader. By the end of the first chapter, we along with the ground crew have been acquainted with the stupid, wrecking story:

"We used to call him Sad Dan, or the Whistler. I'd thought he'd blown his brains out by now, but he's got too much nerve for that. He was flying for Aero Columbia same time I was line chief down there after the war. One day he takes off from Cali with a full load and one of them South American line squalls decides to hit the field at the same time. The wind shifts too late for him to stop and he don't make it over the little hump of ground about half a mile from the field. He hits flat, but the ship breaks in half and there's nothing but fire in ten seconds. Dan gets tossed through the cockpit window and only gets a few scratches which leaves him alive to blame himself. The copilot is killed . . . everybody but Dan [. . .] I knew two of the passengers. They were going down to the Coast for a holiday . . . a blond girl named Alice, and a boy named Tony. I thought they were wonderful people and so did everybody else, including Dan Roman . . ." Ben stopped looking at his cigar and carefully replaced it between his teeth. "Alice was Dan's wife and Tony his only kid."

Fifty-three years old, a flyer since adolescence and a veteran not just of wars in the air but races, endurance flights, every kind of commercial aviation from bush mail to passenger airlines, he thinks now of a plane as a lethal collection of failure points and flies because he doesn't know anything else to do with himself. He's so old for a co-pilot that he embarrasses the much younger captain of Trans-Orient Pacific Flight 420 who has never heard the story of the Aero Columbia crash and imagines the one-time legend must be over the hill. The reader who benefits from the head-hopping of the third-person narrative knows it's because Dan never again wants to find himself in a position of command, more than survivor's guilt-ridden with the responsibility that killed too many people because they trusted him. He doesn't talk much beyond exchanges of technical information and social necessity, not because he's naturally taciturn but because he can hear the hesitation marked permanently in his voice, as if always apologizing a little for being alive. He couldn't stay grounded and sane and staffing a flight crew really is the safest place for him, but at the same time it would not be incorrect to describe him as a lean drink of PTSD with reading glasses and a slight limp.

I can't be too hard on Wayne because he hadn't planned to take the part and did so only because Warner Bros. was about to pull their funding without a name headlining the production, but he was right despite his previously successful collaboration with Wellman and Gann that he was miscast. He brings none of the crucial fragility to Dan Roman, none of the self-doubt, none of the extra-diegetic uncertainty. When the novel's DC-4 en route from Honolulu to San Francisco loses its number-one propeller in a fire just past the point of no return over the Pacific, Dan's part in the action isn't as simple as the old warhorse rising to the occasion. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, as he reassures the passengers about the procedures and prospects of ditching in rough seas, he can't stop himself from silently supplying a running rebuttal of each technically true, contextually specious claim; he's grateful when the passengers themselves begin to form the kind of community that can calm their collective fear because he can't provide the confidence to pull them through himself. He doesn't have the overocean experience of the captain whose decisions he is coming to suspect are the product of fatalism rather than facts and he can't trust that his own instinct to nurse the fuel-bleeding plane through the slow wind-dragged miles to the coast even if it means an instrument landing on the proverbial wing and a prayer is in compliance with the cold equations of their situation rather than a personal need for atonement. It's a smart twist to slip into the high stakes. His presence in the cockpit—an aviation pioneer on a routine passenger flight—should tilt everyone's chances more toward United Airlines Flight 232 than Pan Am Flight 526A, but the audience of the film, like the reader of the book, should never lose sight of the possibility that Dan for all his decades flying by luck and second nature could be wrong. John Wayne would make pictures that questioned his heroism, but he does not let it happen in The High and the Mighty. He's too much the Duke, the hard right icon of American masculinity. Of course his old hand's judgment is superior to these scientifically trained pups. Slapping his younger colleague to snap him out of the freeze that has been creeping up on him all flight, Wayne just looks patriarchal and shaming, whereas the same gesture in the novel works because its open acknowledgement of the captain's fear allows him to stop wasting his energies trying to hide it and devote them instead to trying to save people's lives under circumstances where only a fool wouldn't be afraid—it's an exorcism more than a rebuke, a distinction we can't imagine Wayne's Dan being sensitive to any more than we can picture him second-guessing himself. No apologies are imprinted in the flat rock of his voice. Sometimes he looks at a photo of his wife and child, but the audience never feels their ghosts.

Both Wayne and Wellman had wanted for Dan Roman—and originally gotten—Spencer Tracy, who backed out at the last minute for reasons speculated to range from health to politics. He wouldn't have occurred to me from reading the novel, but since he was capable of including human softness among his expressions of emotion, he should have been fine as Dan. The actor who would have knocked the role out of the park, though, if you ask me, was James Stewart.

In hindsight he's a shoo-in, but even at the time he should have been on the production's radar. By 1953, Stewart was proving through his Westerns with Anthony Mann that he could do weatherbeaten raw nerves better than any other male star on Hollywood's A-list, men whose demons and frailties counted just as much if not more than their grit and marksmanship. His romantic actor's knack for vulnerability was being pushed into weird, weak, reckless places, matters of honor and business curdling into compulsions of vengeance and shame in Winchester '73 (1950) and The Naked Spur (1953), decency a self-dogged bid for redemption in Bend of the River (1952). The Far Country (1955), which actually wrapped production the month before The High and the Mighty started up, would stretch self-sufficiency to the point of maladaptation before snapping back with a recoil too sharp for sentiment. Dan Roman with his nightmares and his expertise and his ambivalent relationship to the only thing he has left to keep him alive would have fallen well within the palette of these struggling men, less centrally perhaps in such a stacked ensemble but no less believably. Stewart could look simultaneously rugged and breakable, anxious and stubborn. His capacity for freakout had been spectacular as far back as George Bailey. He could live under a character's skin, telegraphing emotions as if unconscious or helpless of their escape; he could lock down just as eloquently, superficially undemonstrative as Dan has to be internally cursing himself for not reporting the early, mysterious jolt in the beat of the engines that he persuaded himself was nothing more than his own twangy nerves and now it's more than a thousand miles too late over a heavy night sea with a blown-out engine hanging like a sea anchor from one extinguished wing and a skipper already operating in a state which Dan recognizes from personal experience as controlled fear. Imagine how easily through the flinching pane of Stewart's face we could have understood this awareness for ourselves, the pulled wires of his body that always seemed to have unfurled an extra angle somewhere, the tension nagging like that so often stammer in his factual drawl, the cost of everything he can't let out into his hands or his calculations in a slow-motion crisis with no time for navel-gazing and yet the haunting as always is along for the ride:

Standing firmly on the ground and talking with comrade airmen, it was all very well to fall back on the old pilot's saying—I'm in the front of the ship and if my ass gets there, they'll get there, so why give the passengers a second thought—but the pilots who relied on that phrase to mitigate their responsibility were not those who had ever lost an Alice or a Tony, nor had they ever looked into faces like those waiting hopefully in the cabin.

Like Wellman who famously flew with the Lafayette Flying Corps in World War I and Gann who had piloted commercially on either side of flying the Hump with the ATC, Stewart was even a pilot offscreen, a decorated combat veteran of WWII who didn't retire from active stints in the reserves of the USAF until the mandatory retirement age of the 1960's took him out. In his own lineage of aviation pictures, the part would have followed beautifully on his high-strung boffin convinced of imminent de Havilland Comet-like catastrophe in Henry Koster's No Highway in the Sky (1951) and set the stage for the even more defensive traditionalism of his seat-of-the-pants dinosaur in Robert Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix (1965). I can see no way it could realistically have happened. At more or less the exact dates of production of The High and the Mighty—November 1953 into January 1954—Stewart was filming Rear Window (1954) for Hitchcock, after which it looks a little ironically as though he went straight on to Mann's Strategic Air Command (1955), one of the hardest sells for the post-WWII American military-industrial complex I have ever let into my eyes along with its spectacularly VistaVision Technicolor aerial photography of the Convair B-36 and the Boeing B-47 Stratojet. If he was ever under consideration for the part of Dan Roman, I have no evidence of it and in fact according to William Wellman Jr.'s Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel (2015) no one was except Spencer Tracy, hence the absence of any second-stringers to reach out to when it came time to recast the part stat or shut down the film. The meta-irony of the production depending on Wayne in the crunch as Flight 420 after all needed Dan Roman would be easier to relish if it had not knocked a whole chunk of heart and suspense out of the film.

The other chief flaw of The High and the Mighty has nothing to do with John Wayne. Like the novel, the film follows the Vicki Baum model of the interconnected ensemble each with their own story and since there are twenty-two credited roles between the flight crew and passenger manifest alone, the cumulative effect of tracking them all over 147 minutes can make a viewer start to feel as though the flight is passing in real time. Equally out of reach in the forking paths of the multiverse is the version of The High and the Mighty which has less human interest and more aviation detail—not immiscible elements even in Wellman's own filmography, but here the division of plot between cabin and cockpit makes the narrative feel less communally bound than switching on a schedule and I remain constitutionally more inclined toward three-star fixes and gambles with fuel and altitude than marital problems. Claire Trevor, Jan Sterling, Doe Avedon, and Paul Fix nonetheless turn in some characterizations as lovely as kissing a mink coat before flinging it out to the cloud-roaring night of lightening ship and Robert Newton as Gustave Pardee is translated with such fidelity from the page that I am almost tempted to wonder if Gann actually had him in mind for the shambolic, sad-eyed theatrical producer possessed of an enormous incongruous charm which he has always used to get away with being something of a dramallama and now finds himself using to calm his fellow passengers despite being scared stiff of flying himself: "I was guilty of the cheapest theatrics a while ago . . . and now it seems, I'm stuck with it." Please put me through to the shade of Wild Bill Wellman and if he can't find a way to get Jimmy Stewart as Dan Roman without losing me L. B. Jeffries, see if he'll at least give directions to the hell of a good video store next door. The last thing I expected this movie to do was explain what Robert Stack is doing in Airplane! (1980). This kidding brought to you by my stuck backers at Patreon.

It would dignify The Forty-Niners (1954) unnecessarily to call it a noir Western. Despite the hard-rock narration of its federal marshal gone incognito among claim-jumping cutthroats to flush out a couple of killers for hire, it is at best a Western procedural whose moral deserts far more closely resemble a frontier case of Crime Does Not Pay (1935–47) than anything helmed by Andre de Toth or Fritz Lang. Like so many such narratives of relentless virtue, it only perks to life once vice enters the picture. A noir might have known to start with him.

The Forty-Niners was the Western swan song of Wild Bill Elliott, one of the premiere B-heroes of horse opera since its silent days; he would close out his career with a cycle of detective pictures for which this film makes an improbably semi-documentary gateway, the scene-setting of its title crawl chased immediately by an interior monologue which punctuates the action like clippings from a police gazette. "On the afternoon of February 11, 1849, United States Marshal John Sanford was traveling from Sacramento to the town of Placerville . . . Walker paid for his crime on the scaffold on July 2, 1849." Dustily denim-jacketed, Elliott's Sam Nelson belongs to the roll-your-own school of laconically rugged lawmen, his bona fide toughness signaled by all the bait he doesn't rise to until inevitably some wannabe shootist pushes too far and finds himself facing the business ends of Sam's reverse-holstered stag-handled six-guns faster than he can wipe his nose. This dead shot can nevertheless hold off a thickening mob without dropping a man; he stowed his tin star the better to pass as a gold-fevered pistoleer, but admits after months of scraping the boomtowns of northern California for the slim lead of a free-range bunco-steerer alleged to have cut himself in as middleman on the hit, "Looking mean was no problem because that was the way I felt." He drinks as a matter of hospitality, not machismo. When he pins on his emblem of office again, it is the calm force behind his statement that in the matter of killers, "I can be one, too, if I have to." It is not in the film's favor that we never doubted it. The bread and butter of undercover stories is the tension between the face and the mask and at no point in his impersonation of a gunman of negotiable morals is Sam ever really challenged to break his code—he talks a cold game, but when actually faced with the commission of conscienceless murder to discharge his end of a deal, the plot bails him out by blowing his cover before a confrontation would be anything but clear-cut self-defense. Even his possession of a sense of humor confirms rather than tempers his white-hat status when it's as straight as his face. There may be shades of grey among the three-card twists of the screenplay, but none of them belong to Sam Nelson.

What Alf Billings looks like at first, then, is a dash of the grit and irreverence the film cannot afford to vector through its stand-up protagonist, displaced as is the tradition onto the less exemplary persons of the supporting cast. Rescued by Sam from the consequences of being caught with more than the usual number of queens in a deck, he establishes himself instantly as the kind of grandiloquent tinhorn whose diction operates independently of his fortunes, brushing off his near-lynching—safely behind him as he drinks another man's coffee and stretches his feet out at his fire with the signature complacency of tricksters and cats—with the expansive assurance, "My good sir, you are looking at a man who has been shot at and missed by experts." The trail he's left of small-time larcenies west of the Mississippi doesn't fit him for an involvement with violent crime, but he doesn't demur at associating with professional killers and cracks himself up answering, "Sam, I think I can truthfully say that no one alive likes gold any better than I do." As he matter-of-factly engages the services of the savior he doesn't realize plans to field him as a Judas goat before arresting him as an accessory, his charm and his calculation so neatly balance that he seems capable of anything from expedient double-cross to quixotic alliance, one of those disarming no-goods so often found in Westerns made by Randolph Scott with Budd Boetticher or James Stewart with Anthony Mann, but not usually played by Harry Morgan anywhere. The results are tantamount to handing the film to its character man on a platter with fries on the side. Even as Sam works to suss out the reasons for their contradictorily accommodating and hostile welcome in Cold Water, Alf is spinning them off like a dynamo as he makes for the main chance: recognizing the proprietor of the town's flourishing saloon and its sheriff as the couple of skunks he once hooked up with a none too choosy mine owner in need of anonymous guns, he wastes no time blackmailing them for what he airily estimates as "half—of everything." The ultimatum is all the more audacious coming from a sawed-off drifter without a carpet bag to his name, standing his ground as coolly as a high-roller. True to form, he has an ace up his sleeve: a letter in incriminating detail prudently secreted as insurance against reprisal. But he's also got his cardsharp's face, as undistinguished and misleading as the Iliad's Odysseus who never looks like much until he starts to talk: "You still think I'm bluffing? Pull the trigger and find out." Sam side-eyes the brains and the scruples of any man who would take Alf on as a partner in good faith, but especially when set against the venal nerves of John Doucette's Ernie Walker or the hair-trigger swagger of Lane Bradford's Bill Norris, the high-flown little cellar-dealer doesn't look so bad. At least he pays his debts and laughs without malice when his honesty is insulted to his face. He has one other quality, too, which is sprung on the viewer just as The Forty-Niners seems to be shaping up to a kind of shell game of Sam and Alf at unsuspecting cross-purposes in the matter of the murder investigation. I had never seen it from his actor before, which just feels like further evidence of the oversights of old Hollywood. He makes an honest-to-God romantic lead.

Of course it is a coincidence even beyond the convergence of all relevant parties in the same whistle-stop that the neglected wife of Ernie Walker should turn out to be the old flame of Alf Billings, but it pays off for the film in such spades that I accept it in the same spirit as the dramatically convenient reunion of Krogstad and Kristine in A Doll's House and with similar feelings about it. The action of The Forty-Niners may bend around the duties of the manhunt, but its heart belongs to a road-worn, uncertain couple who look at each another like the second chance they never imagined deserving. For the love of irony, what was Ernie expecting from bribing and browbeating his wife into sweet-talking that silly letter out of her one-time beau? Fifteen years of slow-drinking loneliness have left Virginia Grey's Stella Walker sharply fragile, not stupid—as her evening with Alf winds down to its "real clever" close, she levels suddenly with him and as if her directness has touched off his own scratched decency, he returns the courtesy until they are sorting the botch of their past in St. Louis as much as the chance of their future beyond Cold Water. It never feels like sentimental regeneration. No amount of reminiscence can change the fact that if Alf had left any word when he lit out ahead of the law all those years ago, Stella would never have vanished in turn with a protector she didn't love. "Has it been that bad?" he can't stop himself from asking, knowing the answer like his apology. His own life hasn't been exactly charmed. Telling Stella what's really in the letter means admitting he hasn't returned as the successful man of business of his magnanimous cigars and his smart suit of clothes. Proposing to take her away on her own husband's money as good as warns her of the lean times to come in between schemes. But she's had security from a man who tired of her and what Alf is offering is far more substantial in everything it doesn't promise, just the important thing: "I haven't stopped thinking about you in all these years. We're both older now—certainly I'm not much more of a man than I ever was—but I think we could be happy." His voice is so soft without its medicine show edge, it's almost unrecognizable; his kiss of her cheek as gentle and a little gauche. With the same incongruous dignity, absently cutting a deck of cards without dealing until he sets them down like a decision reached, he'll offer Sam the first reason to trust him since the marshal saved his skin in Red Bluff: "I'm tired, for one thing. For another, I'm in love." Even the seen-it-all lawman blinks at that one. It's a tremendous performance by Morgan, building effortlessly from swindler and skedaddler to lover and even fighter, though he admits with a mordant trace of his normal insouciance that he isn't sure if the derringer he's carried for years even works. It pulls the film all off balance with itself. Despite his star billing, Elliott ends up feeling more like the frame of the story than its hero, the lens through which we can observe Alf who struggles and changes and cares after all for something more than gold. Even in a noir, it might not have been enough to save him from the unforgiving compliance of the Production Code, but a more shadow-sided movie might have been willing to acknowledge him as its protagonist first. He's such an unexpected figure in a Western so otherwise and lethally by the book. Nothing in its quick-draw climax or the legal proceedings thereafter is as captivating as Alf in his literal black hat holding a gunbelt out to Sam meaningfully, scrawling a paper for Stella with dust in his soft fairish hair, straight as a die in his own crooked way to the end. "Well, I'll take that chance."

The Forty-Niners was written by Dan Ullman and directed by Thomas Carr for Allied Artists, making a pleasant surprise of how nice its non-budget looks in the widescreen cinematography of Ernest Miller; the same truly cannot be said of the sound of its narration. I am generally minded to remove the average voiceover from its print with pliers, but this one talks over such solid blocks of its action, it suggests the production kept running out of daylight or money and deciding to shoot mitout sound until rehearsals could be afforded again. It has the runtime of a respectable second feature and can feel much slower whenever its hour and ten minutes are spent away from Stella or Alf. Viewers in hopes of the California gold rush will feel misled by the title; the repercussions of its contract killing could as easily have snaked out in the naked city of the director's choice. The problem is that the character is absolutely right when he claims, "Good Sam, you can bless the day you befriended Alfred Billings, believe me." He should never have bothered to try to go straight if he was going to steal an entire movie. This half brought to you by my older backers at Patreon.

I don't know that I would call Stephen Fisher my favorite Hitchcock villain, but he has lingered with and troubled me for years, which makes him worth the contemplation.

On one level, he may be nothing more than a side effect of the shifting conditions of Foreign Correspondent (1940). Produced just as the phony war was turning into the real thing, the film undergoes a corresponding transformation over the course of its runtime from a pre-war light thriller in its director's own tradition to an urgent piece of up-to-the-minute propaganda as blunt as a broken fourth wall—thirty-nine steps to London after dark in two genre-jolting hours. The farther the eve of war ticks down to midnight, the more clearly the reality of Germany emerges from the Ruritanian static of Borovia, the MacGuffin of Clause 27 falls by the wayside of the headlines of September 1, 1939. As the seat-of-the-pants screwball of jungled umbrellas and prevailing windmills levels out into the cat-and-mouse of classically amateur espionage, the dialogue begins to admit the existence of blackouts and bomb shelters in London. So perhaps does Fisher clarify from an urbanely professional traitor to a deep-cover patriot, one more mask peeled off the depths to which we must recognize the enemy will keep sinking. His Universal Peace Party isn't merely a well-veneered campaign for appeasement, it's a front for strong-arm tactics as brutal as they are surreal, blasting a drugged and kidnapped man with photoflood lighting and big-band jazz. The crudity of personally arranging a murder dismays him as much as the necessity of participating in an interrogation and he sets to it as smoothly as he addresses the audiences who really believe in his conscientious objections. The warning he imparts to the American reporter unwittingly on his trail would give him away to anyone with an ear for double-speaking when he characterizes the hijackers of a prominent anti-fascist statesman as "cunning, unscrupulous—and inspired," but even his daughter who finally comes to suspect him of treason doesn't go so far as to imagine that he might never have owed his allegiance to the country they have lived in all her life. "I've just been worried," she confesses aboard the America-bound clipper they boarded narrowly ahead of the official declaration of war, "but I believed in you." Quick as if it hurts him, her father shakes his head: "You shouldn't."

A Hitchcock veteran if not a regular, Herbert Marshall had starred for the director as a conscience-stricken juror turned amateur detective in Murder! (1930) and lost none of his gentlemanly attraction over the intervening decade even as he eased out of the romance of a leading man; it puts his Fisher at first in a class with Professor Jordan of The 39 Steps (1935) or Phillip Vandamm of North by Northwest (1959), well-mannered, well-respected, well-connected men for whom the business of treason may require certain sacrifices at second hand but never compromise itself with such interference as personal feeling. Well after we've seen his duplicity in action, he remains courteous, humorous, never so controlled that he looks untouchable. His distaste for the harsher aspects of his work may be nothing more than squeamishness when he's willing to let other men bloody their hands with them. His reluctance to involve his daughter in his subversive activities does suggest more conscience than self-preservation when his right-hand man notes the additional difficulties of working around her, but even as he realizes she loves the man he's just sent off to meet with an unfortunate accident, he restrains himself from calling off the hit. Beyond the dramatic shock value and the careless-talk paranoia of wartime, it never made any sense to me that he should turn out to be ethnically German. Nothing about the mechanics of the plot would alter if Fisher were exactly what he seemed from the revelation of his perfidy, a well-bred Englishman whose Nazi sympathies have made it worth his while to promote a disingenuous pacifism while working with foreign agents to help them obtain "a piece of information that would be very valuable to the enemy in the war that breaks out tomorrow, weather permitting." All the twist adds is a dash of xenophobia and a strange complexity which there is barely time left to explore before the flying boat hits the water and the film its entreating epilogue. What I had missed was the previous war's phenomenon of spy fever as recently discussed by philomytha—the specter of German sleeper agents seeded throughout Britain in the most innocuous and naturalized guises which consumed not only popular literature but civilian imagination and official decisions as the country hurtled into World War I. It had not occurred to me that Foreign Correspondent could have been produced so near the outbreak of hostilities proper that it would draw more on the tropes of the older war because the newer ones had not yet been established. If it were still gearing up to the latest in propaganda, however, it would account for the otherwise curious sympathy the film extends to its not even honorable enemy with a generosity reminiscent of erstwhile war pictures as recent as Powell and Pressburger's The Spy in Black (1939) and unthinkable by the time Hitchcock returned to World War II with Saboteur (1942), whose Nazi agents really are the home-grown fifth columnists that Fisher only resembles. There's no percentage in it, nationalistically speaking. But there is a remarkable pain in the speech he makes to the daughter he loves more than anything else in his double life, the last illusions of which he is forced to disabuse her before they leave the charmed space of the air and the justice of the war-fired earth catches up to him:

"Carol, I've got to talk to you. I don't want to, but I've got to. It's the hardest part of the whole thing, talking to you now. I don't mind about the rest, really . . . I'm to be arrested when we land. As a spy. Shipped back to London. That's quite all right, except just the one phase of it—you. That's why I've got to talk to you. I should like you to think of me a little from my own point of view. It might help you, afterwards. First about yourself, my deceiving you. I had to, you know, I didn't want you involved in any part of it because you're English—half English, anyway—I'm not, I'm just coated with an English accent. It's a very thin coat. I've fought for my country in my heart in a very difficult way because sometimes it's harder to fight dishonorably than nobly in the open. And I've used my country's methods because I was born with them. I don't intend making this sort of plea to the court-martial. I'm making it only to my daughter whom I've loved dearly and before whom I feel a little ashamed."

It is not an absolution. Even allowing for how much the divers hands of the screenplay would not have known about Nazism in 1940, Fisher remains off north of the moral compass by the sheer fact that whatever he may have done to his discredit, what he's sorriest about is the hurt he's caused his daughter by getting caught. Even so, just the way his sure-footed public speaker's voice suddenly stutters, stumbles as if in spite of itself into lines like a very thin coat suggests some more troubled history of assimilation and alienation than mere loyalty of blood and soil, neither the dispassionate mastermind nor the fanatical dupe; it takes him out of archetype and into his own unanswerable and problematic self without which he could not be let out of the film heroically, for his daughter to find strength in his memory even as she agrees to the publication of his crimes. "My father fought for his country his way. It wasn't a straight way, but it was a hard way. And I've got to fight for my country—the hard way." On the other side of the war, this figure of the Nazi's daughter will become the much more compromised heroine of Notorious (1946), shape-shifting herself to make up for her father's shame. Here at its beginning, he can still be saluted as much as watched out for, the enemy who is so very like ourselves.

Because the film changed so often in production as world-historical events around it did the same, I cannot tell without research if Fisher was always intended to take the shape he did, but the net result is that for all the vivid, often dream-logical images with which Foreign Correspondent supplies its viewer, from a lethal camera-flash to a rice-paper shatter of sea, the only character who holds up comparably in my memory is George Sanders' Scott ffolliott, the amiably ambiguous co-lead who can explicate the niceties of Tudor decapitalization during a car chase, essay an improvisation in counterterrorism as if he's filing copy, and launch himself out of a hotel window into an awning full of rain with the same aplomb with which he leaves instructions to cancel his rhumba lesson, none of which protects him from fear or embarrassment or danger of his life. It fits him into the chiaroscuro, off-kilter and no joke. The weird little not so lesser light that is Foreign Correspondent would be even stronger if the same could be said of Joel McCrea's Johnny Jones or Laraine Day's Carol Fisher. Their blatantly allegorical endgame is a mutual awakening from the sidelines of their innocence in order to exchange it for a common responsibility—fighting Nazis—but however sincerely they speedrun a romance or broadcast while the bombs fall, they never really pick up the ambivalence in which their shared ally thrives as much as their poignant antagonist, the signature of their split, startling world. If it was an accident of history, so much the better. It ends up feeling like the most real thing. Perhaps I return to Fisher simply because I can't explain him, as in life he never tried to explain himself. "Thanks," he dryly acknowledges a refusal to condemn him totally, seconds from the irony of enemy action that will overturn the state of play once again. "It's a minority report, but very welcome." This coat brought to you by my hard backers at Patreon.

On the one hand, I have read too much science fiction to be the ideal audience for "Man on a Mountaintop" (1961). Even before I get around to picking at the entanglement of gifted children and anti-intellectualism and human loneliness and abusive parenting that comprises this ambitious, unwieldy teleplay written by Robert Alan Aurthur and directed by Tom Donovan for The United States Steel Hour (1953–63), I want to fight it on its own ground of the literature that supplies the allusion of its title. Once a nationally famous child prodigy tenure-tracked before he could buy his own drinks, Horace Mann Borden (Cliff Robertson) at the age of thirty-one busses tables at an all-night cafeteria in Greenwich Village and doesn't crack a wince when baited to perform his savant's calculations for a fifty-cent contemptuous tip; he gets away as often as he can to the movies, returning to sleep in his rented room furnished with secondhand stills of old movie stars and the three books of his total library. He is obsessed with Philip Wylie's Gladiator (1930), seeing in the tragically misfit end of its artificially created superman his own doom since childhood. He meets no one who can challenge him to see himself instead in the super-intelligent community of Wilmar Shiras' Children of the Atom (1953). He calls himself a freak and a monster for graduating summa cum laude at twelve with an honor thesis in theoretical physics which he defended before the combined faculties of Harvard and MIT and despite reading voraciously enough to imprint on Wylie, never seems to have run across A. E. van Vogt's Slan (1946). Of course no one within the walls of the script will have handed him a stack of Zenna Henderson because the entire premise rests on how nihilistically isolated Borden has become from himself in the course of fleeing other people, but how could he not have known a single person in his formerly high-flying intellectual life who could have accurately informed him that he may be damaged, but he's not—for God's sake, especially in his field—that weird? His flat affect and avoidance of eye contact and jerkily uninflected voice may conventionally indicate the alienation of his intelligence or realistically reflect a childhood spent as a prop for his father's theories of pedagogy, an adulthood salt-smarting conscious of every discomfort his differences provoke. As much for his own reinforcement as to warn off the sympathy he can feel coming from his newest neighbor, he repeats, "A freak and a monster cannot live in this world of normal people." Corn-fresh from Iowa by way of an aborted summer in Europe, Gerta Blake (Salome Jens) is not equipped to argue with Borden's self-presentation of irredeemable strangeness; her ability to make her way into a friendship with him is founded on the determination of naïveté, her unconditionally offered support which she eventually names as love. She is a normal person, she wasn't reading by the age of four; her solution to the bitterness with which he describes himself as a machine because he understands the formula for mass–energy equivalence but not the meaning of the words I love you is to let him, like a fairy tale, kiss her. It is so far from a solution for a man directed by nature and nurture to look for the one correct answer to a problem that it winds him right up into a meltdown. It couldn't have to hurt to try him on Theodore Sturgeon first.

On the other, out of eviscerating nowhere at the midpoint of the episode comes the monologue in which Borden reveals the reason that six years ago he quit academia to haunt the local movie houses and duck his neighbors in the hall and make no use of the formidable intelligence for which he was so strictly valued:

"Yes, I was a teacher. At nineteen, I was an associate professor. And all that time, I had the feeling that everybody was looking and waiting, waiting, waiting. All right, prodigy, produce. All right, genius, produce. Produce the evidence that will prove Einstein is wrong. Produce the theory that will change the world. They were like children at my feet, waiting for me to hand them down the ABCs that would rock their very existence, but I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I could never do it, because I don't know enough and I'll never know enough. There's so much, so very much to know and I could never know enough . . . I used to walk the halls of that university, afraid to face people to whom I was becoming a failure. I hid behind the door in my office, hating the thought of seeing my students and the other members of the faculty to whom each day was another day of disappointment, another day in which I did not produce. And one day, I said, enough! I will live where are no mirrors, where I—where I won't even have to face myself. I will live alone, where I will disappoint no one. It's simple, satisfying, and I'm happy this way."

Oh, Borden. Wittgenstein at that age ran as far as the Russian front trying to drop out of his own head. It didn't work for him, either.

What right has this speech to ring true as pain when so much of the rest of the episode is full of stock sentiments about smart people in a stupid world? None of them are straw men, but most of its characters are fleshed out only as far as their arguments, their hostile or possessive or amiable misconstructions of Borden who holds the gravity of the play like a dark star in his separateness from them which may not be anything as mythical as he's built it up to be. His estranged father (Paul McGrath) is a sort of snake-oil cartoon of B. F. Skinner, an obscure psychologist who made his name exploiting his brilliant child as if its achievements were his own invention and still maintains with proprietary frustration that his new Einstein owes the world his gifts no matter the cost to himself. Bohemian Charlie Blake (Chris Wiggins) inclines toward a protective animosity when his little sister starts bringing their "real flip" of a reclusive neighbor home like a stray cat and only an insightful, unexpected comment on his avant-garde paintings checks him into a second look at this blunt dark-haired man in busboy's shirtsleeves, for once feeling safe enough to venture an opinion that might make him visible. Gerta is steadfast throughout, but the most telling show of support may actually come from Willie Bliss (Gene Saks), the brash off-Broadway actor who surprises everyone within earshot by apologizing to Borden for bullying him like the class clown with the bookworm, even if he has to broach the subject with typical theatricality: "Why, do I have to say why? Isn't it enough I want to apologize? I'm stupid . . . Sometimes when you're stupid, you're afraid of people who aren't." It does not please Gerta that they team up to entertain her party with a quiz kid act: she runs from the room in tears, leaving Borden mystified. The speech rings true because he does, even in ways I can't tell if his author intended. Even granting his definition of happiness as the avoidance of pain, the most encouraging thing that can be said for Borden when we meet him is that he has a stable routine. His reputation in the building is half creep, half punch line; the combination should make him disappointment-proof, but he shies off at the first threat of contact as if a civil word might unacceptably raise hopes. It isn't funny that he drops his newest armful of old Hollywood in his haste to get out of sight. His social overloads are brief and distressing, glitchier than his usual conversations with his throat working against the lockjaw of listener's expectations, the staccato key-clack of his sentences so invariable that hearing it lighten with uncertain pleasure at the end of a quiet evening strikes like a revelation. He can hold down a job on the night shift and lose himself in the silver screen. His diffident offer to Gerta of some pictures from his collection of William Holden is the bravest move he's made in years. It's a crystalline performance by Robertson, coming so soon after his first run at flowers and Algernon in The United States Steel Hour's "The Two Worlds of Charlie Gordon" (1961) that it is impossible for me not to wonder if he was typed slightly as an exponent of neuroatypicality, but Borden himself doesn't feel like a type. Genius is a tough act to put over and he does it without fanfare or equations, the seal on his intelligence not that it comes bundled with weirdness and trauma, but that devastating articulation of the flipside of Dunning–Kruger: the knowledge of how much he doesn't know. "Somewhere the cogs didn't mesh." It should not be lost on viewers sensitive to depictions of giftedness that the play, like Borden, ultimately blows off the big question of whether he will accept or decline the new offer of a teaching position at Columbia; it's irrelevant. It's not his route back to himself, or on to the self he was never allowed to be. "I'm a machine built without love," he tries to make real to the parent still bent on seeing him in terms of his potential, unwilling or unable to acknowledge that for all his eidetic memory and precocious mathematics the prodigy was a person instead of a paradigm shift in waiting. "Didn't you know that, Father? Didn't you know if you failed that I would be a freak? Didn't you know that? When you build a machine and it fails, you throw it away. What do you do with a man? What do you do with a man?"

I have less in common with Borden than makes a neat sign-off. I was reading by the age of four and designed my own octal system after reading about Maya numerals around the age of nine and was regularly challenged to recite verbatim passages from books that classmates refused to believe I was reading at my usual speed and would jerk out of my hands just to make sure, but I also had a talking doctor and the luck of a pair of parents who cared more about my resilience than my potential, which doesn't mean I can't understand a character who finds it easier to imagine their own death by lightning than a life that isn't seen as a disappointment. It gets me over the jostling rather than melding of themes in "Man on a Mountaintop" and helps a little with the construction of its female lead as a normalizing force of love. Borden is drawn with sufficient reality that even a healthier version of him would be hard to picture as particularly normal, except in the ways that it is completely normal to make only so much eye contact and watch a heck of a lot of movies and look in science fiction for ways to understand your life. When it gets into print, I'd give him Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1968): Will he be different from me? Yes, that he will. There's the terrible thing: the strangeness of the stranger. However familiar some of the strangeness may be. Enjoy the preview of the Space Needle during the commercial breaks. This flip brought to you by my real backers at Patreon.

This year. I can't even summarize it: sickness, stress, poverty, my short-term disability leave consumed by further illness instead of recuperation, crisis of beloved cat. I maintained my website and my presence on AO3 and wrote some new things including my first original fiction since 2020 and was very, very tired.

I published no new fiction this year. I had one very important reprint:

"As the Tide Came Flowing In" in Adventures in Bodily Autonomy: Exploring Reproductive Rights in Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Horror (ed. Raven Belasco), Aqueduct Press, October 2023.

There were some new poems:

"The Credo of Loplop" in Uncanny Magazine #50, January 2023.
"Exposure" in Not One of Us #73, January 2023.
"Drained" in Not One of Us #74, March 2023.
"I Have a Sister Beyond the Sea" in Not One of Us #75, June 2023.
"The Green Room" in Not One of Us #76, September 2023.
"Scarcity Economics" in Not One of Us #77, December 2023.

No fanfiction that made it as far as AO3, since I decided in April that discretion was the better part of sadfic, but I will count the ghost poem I wrote for Johnny Ryan at such time as it sees print.

In past years, I never included my editing work for Strange Horizons or The Deadlands because they were other people's publications, but my name is on the cover of this volume:

The Deadlands: Year One (eds. E. Catherine Tobler, Sonya Taaffe, David Gilmore), Psychopomp Books, December 2023.

I wrote so much less than I had wanted for Patreon, but at least about some films it mattered for me to do so:

Night into Morning (1951), January 2023.
The Flying Scotsman (1929), January 2023.
Learn and Live (1943), January 2023.
Ministry of Fear (1944), January 2023.
The Wild North (1952), February 2023.
Black Kitten 'Thon 2023 [Mad Love (1935), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), Time Out for Trouble (1961), "The Last Day" (1989), Time Piece (1965), The Hidden (1987), The Sounds of Science (2002), Neptune Frost (2021)], February 2023.
Hunt the Man Down (1951), March 2023.
Any Number Can Play (1949), March 2023.
Julius Caesar (1953), March 2023.
The Unfaithful (1947), March 2023.
Nude on the Moon (1961), March 2023.
The Accused (1949), April 2023.
"Sign of the Zodiac" (The Barbara Stanwyck Show, 1961), April 2023.
Something Always Happens (1934) and Crown v. Stevens (1936) , April 2023.
I Walk Alone (1947), April 2023.
The Capture (1950), May 2023.
The Fastest Gun Alive (1956), May 2023.
The File on Thelma Jordon (1950), May 2023.
1917 (2019), June 2023.
Holiday Affair (1949), June 2023.
Dial 1119 (1950), June 2023.
The Furies (1950), June 2023.
revisiting Too Late for Tears (1949), July 2023.
The Hitch-Hiker (1953), July 2023.
The Woman on Pier 13 (1949), August 2023.
The Well (1951), August 2023.
Inferno (1953), August 2023.
Lightning Strikes Twice (1934), September 2023.
The Lighthouse (2019), September 2023.
Doctor Who: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988), October 2023.
Dark City (1950), October 2023.
Harriet Craig (1950), October 2023.
The Killer Is Loose (1956), November 2023.
Desert Fury (1947), November 2023.
on film editing and Elisha Cook Jr.'s hands [Born to Kill (1947)], November 2023.
They All Come Out (1939), November 2023.
Men (2022), December 2023.
Suicide by Sunlight (2019), December 2023.

For once, could the coming year actually be better? It will have to be enough that at the end of this one, we are all still here. Happy New Year. A healthy new year. Af tselokhes.

Alex Garland's Men (2022) does not fail for me because I disagree with its folk horror, but it does require something like a suspension of mythological belief. Of all the folkways from which to draw an avatar of toxic masculinity, it would never have occurred to me to choose the Green Man, especially as such bluntly primal proof that #yesallmen. For two out of three acts nonetheless, the conceit throws out fruitful runners into the film's fractally off-kilter contemplations of guilt, grief, and gender. Beyond that point, I want the mythopoetic drum circle to get off my lawn.

Past the high-rise window of a flat steeped in sunset to a tisane of blood, a man falls as slowly and unstoppably as the rain; before a row of decaying cottages half absorbed into the forest's edge, a field of dandelion clocks loosens to the wind. The countryside through which the M4 winds Jessie Buckley's Harper Marlowe in her trim teal Ford Fiesta is so burgeoning and virescent, it could be a green mouth opening to deliver her to the dry stone lanes and red phone boxes of her two-week retreat at a sixteenth-century manor house for which she confesses in awe and embarrassment that she "might have splashed out just a little bit too much." With the mod cons of electric kettle and flatscreen TV socketed into its flagstones and oak beams and a jumble sale of pastoral watercolors and blue-and-white china decorating the Pompeiian smolder of its walls, it's as uncanny a chocolate box as any place so long lived in and despite a few conversational bobbles with the heartily tactless owner, Harper as she makes herself tea and touches base with a London friend looks much more at home on semi-holiday in Herefordshire than in her red-eyed memories of St Katharine Docks. Striding out for an inaugural walk among the ferns and the bluebells and the rain that makes a luminous nave of leaves, she cuts a faun's figure with her dark slant of hair falling in her eyes, hands in the pockets of her soldierly watch coat. Framed by apples and wisteria through the small-leaded panes of the living room, she could pass for an Austen heroine as she practices classically at the piano she demurred to her host about playing. The verdant land seems so reverberant to her presence that when she finds her voice bouncing back from the inside of an abandoned rail tunnel far longer and clearer than the laws of acoustics should allow, we share her delight rather than dread as she duets with herself and the moss-flocked stones, the almost acidly reflecting pool of rain-ringed water at her feet. Only when a previously unseen figure—vaguely silhouetted, yet legibly male—rises from the far leaf-lit end of the tunnel as if it has been listening in secret all the while does she falter, the looping echoes fade. The tunnel takes up a harsh staccato cry like a piston of crows; the figure runs toward her with the distance-stretching slowness of a dream and she flees as if in real, ancient panic, the fear of wild places inflicted by the goat-god. She breaks cover among the rotting bricks of the railwaymen's houses, but when she pulls out her phone to memorialize her rural urbex, inexplicably under the thin lichened boughs is standing a mother-naked man, off-color as peeled bark, and unlike many a haunting he's still there in the shot hours later when she studies it suspiciously in the bath. He's there in the garden the next day, inspecting the branch from which she broke and ate a small, half-blushed apple on arrival, thrusting an earth-grimed hand as suddenly as a tongue through the mail slot; neither of the arresting officers seems to notice the violent emerald of his eyes, how his skin beneath its rough sleeper's scabbed grazes is scrofulous with lichen. "Stinks to high heaven, though," the sympathetic policewoman who takes Harper's statement confides. As if something has been woken in the green of Cotson, the film's weirdness will proliferate exponentially from this encounter and yet it has always been present, the shadow preceding what casts it. Or as Harper catalogues her day in exhausted disbelief, "I meet a boy in a churchyard who tells me I'm a stupid bitch, then I meet a vicar who tells me that I drove James to kill himself, then I meet a policeman who tells me that they just released the naked weirdo who tried to break into the house yesterday and . . . I'm done."

At times the film feels in dialogue with John Bowen's Robin Redbreast (1970), another collision of modern womanhood with the sexuality of the land. Harper in the church where she screams her pain like a sermon is transfixed by the foliate head on one side of the font, the sheela-na-gig on the other like obverse and reverse of the same wood's coin. Her marital status is a matter of local comment, as if even in the twenty-first century there is something unsettled about a Mrs. Marlowe who insists on Ms. Perhaps her singlehood is not entirely settled for her, covering her inadvertent booking of the rental under her married name with the implication of a divorce rather than the shocks of bereavement that slice through a late gilding of light or the full-body slam of a door, the guilt that gnaws from never knowing whether her husband fell four stories to his death in a hideous accident or a suicide set like a curse on her resolve to leave him for the same reason she had to call his coercive bluff: "Because I have a life, too! I have a fucking life!" The failed joke of a stern admonition about forbidden fruit lingers allusively—sin, shame, Summerisle—over a narrative in which women are time and again held culpable for the choices of men. It happens so casually at first, it doesn't even feel like an irony that the space she's tried to give herself from her trauma seems instead to be transforming into a prism for it, the echo-faced refractions she finds everywhere in the village pitched at just the right horror of plausible deniability, less of the uncanny than of heteronormative human behavior. Harper gets the tour of Cotson Manor from the brightly bluff Geoffrey, so obviously the endling of some dwindled gentry for whom Airbnb is the last, best hope of paying the bills that the audience can almost overlook in his Barbour-jacketed haplessness how obstructively as well as comically he fumbles the bags he insists on lugging out of the car for her when she could have done a neater job herself. "If you need me," he offers wistfully, "you've got my number." The schoolboy loitering on the moss-splotched steps of the church sports a caricature mask of Marilyn Monroe; his face behind the garish plastic is adult as a changeling's, his hostile eyes poison-green. "You can't hide?" he cajoles like double-speaking. "Go on. I bet you're good at it. And I'm good at seeking." The silver-combed vicar in his black cassock teases out her fears and just as solicitously rakes her with them, one hand pressing her skirted knee with an unchanged air of mild, pastoral inquiry: "Do you prefer things to be comfortable or true? Might it be true that if you'd given him the chance to apologize, he'd still be alive?" His fingers spread over the slats of the wooden bench as if feeling for her warmth when she's gone. Over his pint at the pub with the rest of the all-male regulars, the off-duty policeman who turned loose her nuisance alarm of a home intruder grimaces defensively at her distress: "You saw him twice. I don't know if he saw you once. It's not quite stalking, is it?" The whip-round of glances as she storms out without touching the vodka tonic she wasn't even permitted to pay for underscores what the facially perceptive viewer may have already picked up. Every male part in the village—the Green Man is no exception—is played by Rory Kinnear. It works because no one comments on it; it feels like a metaphor, not a stunt. Catching the likeness to her landlord in a sap-skinned vagrant, the not quite twinship of the broken-veined local lads who stare after her in the Cotson Sheaf, even we can't know if we're seeing possession or projection, a world full of hammers when you feel like a nail or a revelation of reality ley-line deep. The best of Men plays in this space of suggestion, the implication of a pattern neither clarified nor disproved. The tranquil, formal notes of Harper's piano seem to wind from the sunlit leaves of the apple tree over the cloud-banded fields into the deep, shadowy, moss-groined wood, just as the echoes of her singing will emerge from the earth to overdub themselves like residual tape loops onto the shadows of the church and the sunset-misted meadow, the dripping cavity of a dead stag's eye. Geoffrey cudgels his brain for the dying-rising crossword clue of a pomegranate like the red rinds we saw in the Marlowes' flat. A school jumper is stitched with a jagged globe of tree. The more we see of the terrible last fight between Harper and James, the less finished it feels, but none of her interactions with the Cotson men offer any direct line of challenge or closure so much as a free-floating fog of microaggressions and triggers like variations on an inexorable theme. What kind of countryside has she come to anyway, where she can find apples and bluebells in the same season and the fields curve the same luciferin green between the hedgerows as the lily-flecked slopes of the wood? The Green Man grows ever more thorn-barbed, leaf-pierced, twig-antlered, his ultimate face an epiphytic mask with blood at its roots. He never looks human and as he sits cross-legged in a lichen-stained bunker left over from the Second World War, his own fingers peel back his brow to plant the oak's green flag.

( Don't tell me there's more. )

It is never fair to fault a story for not being the one you want it to be, but the fact remains that I would feel much friendlier toward the ambitious faults of Men if it were more ambivalent in its otherwise formidable treatment of the Green Man. Bias disclosed in the form of at least three poems I have written in the mythos myself, but Garland's full-frontal equation with the monstrous masculine flattens a wild thicket of old weirdness into a sort of polemic topiary that does a disservice to the near-century of rich and prolific fakelore that has flourished ever since Julia Somerset, Lady Raglan declared the architectural motif of the foliate head evidence of pagan persistence into the modern, Christian day. The identification of the feminine with civilization may be as old as Šamḫat, but it sits oddly when Harper's early scenes place her so literally in tune with the land; even a later one seems to tease her resonance with the sheela-na-gig, the stone-carved woman holding the folds of herself brazenly or apotropaically apart, before the blame she receives for inspiring such fantasies nixes any chance that the film is inviting her to become a participant in its verdant myth rather than a victim of it. It may go without saying that Men is a very straight, very cis film, even though one of the problems of misogyny is that it is not practiced strictly by cishet men. I may just have wanted the version of this story written by M. John Harrison or Mattie Joiner or Sylvia Townsend Warner. I prefer room in the bracken for everything from the Pearl-Poet's Green Knight to Greer Gilman's Tom o Cloud. And still I seem to wind up feeling about this movie something the way I feel about Mollie Hunter's A Stranger Came Ashore (1975), a selkie novel I have loved since fifth grade even though its central figure means something so different and much darker to his author than to me that I cannot on some level accept it as canonical—Garland may be almost orthogonally interested in the Green Man as far as I am concerned, but he realizes his vision so intensely that even when it bottoms out on its own metaphor I am not sorry to have experienced it. The film looks stellar. The cinematography by Rob Hardy captures the pollen-glaze of gilt-filtered light as eerily as the radioactive smears of moss leaching like lime down long-derelict stone. Without resorting to two-strip Technicolor, the red-and-green color scheme is maintained as scrupulously as a novel by Tanith Lee right down to the costume design by Lisa Duncan which furls the olive drab of Harper's coat over mullein-red trousers or a peach-colored dress. The countertenor on the dense and tensile, medievally inflected score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow lends an ecclesiastical air to some of the most visually pagan scenes while also braiding with Harper's own voice in an appropriately recursive palette. The same song brackets the action, sung first by Lesley Duncan, then covered by Elton John. Buckley uses her own Irish accent throughout, a clever, natural note of outsiderness in the English countryside; her relatively light dialogue lets her vivid face carry the weight of keeping Harper herself on the right side of archetype, as thorny as the trouble she's facing. Kinnear can hang up his hat as the heir to Alec Guinness if he wants to, but what's more impressive is how little like a one-man show his ninefold casting feels. I watched their near double act on Kanopy, but it streams on a variety of usual suspects. I can always read Alan Garner or Geraldine McCaughrean to recover, or just climb a tree. This game brought to you by my specific backers at Patreon.