The Wrong Box (1966, directed by Michael Hodges; script by Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove, inspired by a story by Robert Louis Stevenson)

Despite its misfires, it has some marvelous performances.

Today’s movie in the Museum of Modern Art’s Michael Caine retrospective was The Wrong Box. It isn’t bad—at best it’s a shaky ⭐️⭐️⭐️ movie—but given the creative team it should have been better.

While The Wrong Box isn’t quite as funny a farce as it thinks it is, there are some truly comic scenes that stand out from the stodgy bits: Ralph Richardson (Joseph Finsbury) dodging the missiles hurled by John Mills (his brother, Masterman Finsbury) as he tries to mortally wound him, thereby collecting the money in the tontine that was set up when they were boys; Peter Sellers as Dr. Pratt, surrounded by kittens and cats in his dire flat, with so many good lines that you’d have to take notes to remember them all; and the last scene when everybody’s chasing everybody, the coffin ends up in the wrong carriage, and clergyman Norman Bird, who’s trying desperately to conduct a funeral, is so flustered that he starts to read the marriage service. There’s also a dead body that has to be dealt with, the oldest butler in London (Peacock, played by Wilfrid Lawson) who always seems on the verge of expiring, and a Salvation Army delegation that rescued Masterman after he was dumped in the Thames and brought him home when everyone thought him dead. Overall, though, it doesn’t entirely rise to the level of a classic farce. It’s more of a British fruit tart than the dessert soufflé it should be.

As for the other stars, Michael Caine plays Masterman’s son, Michael, as a dim bulb, which is tiresome; Peter Cook (Morris Finsbury) and Dudley Moore (John Finsbury) are his conniving cousins, doing a double act in which Cook is the smarter one and Moore is always being distracted by whichever lady is in the vicinity; and Nanette Newman (Julia Finsbury) is a beautiful but not very bright ingenue who screams at the least provocation.

If the writer of the Museum of Modern Art’s note saw the movie they wouldn’t have described Michael Caine’s role as “brief but memorable.” He has as much screen time as any of the other stars.

The Wrong Box will be screened at the Museum on Sunday, August 31 at 2 p.m. It was available from Sony in the U.S. and Indicator in the U.K., and though it seems to be out of print, it can be found on eBay. There are no streaming options.

Deal With It

I'm not napping, jerk.

Our Betters (George Cukor, 1933): When irony was in flower

 

Our Betters, based on a play by Somerset Maugham, is set in post-WWI London. That the title is meant ironically is made evident in the first 10 minutes when newlywed Pearl Saunders (Joan Bennett), an American hardware heiress, inadvertently discovers her husband of but a few hours, Lord George Grayston (Alan Mowbray), consoling his mistress and assuring her that everything between them will continue just as before. (Did you ever hear of such a thing? I didn’t think so.)

Her innocence destroyed in record time, Pearl, now Lady Grayston, calls on her native moxie and makes the best of the bad situation. Soon, she is London’s hostess with the mostest, with newspaper articles to prove it. Her dinners and parties are the talk of the town and an invitation to a weekend at the Grayston estate is much sought after.

Five years pass, as Pearl does her best to smile through her tears. Enter sister Bessie (Anita Louise) and Bessie’s American beau Fleming (Alan Starrett), well-meaning naïfs who are thrust into a decadent milieu unlike anything they saw back home. The tensions between Joan’s glittering life and her aching heart become painfully evident, and over the course of a weekend in the country, everyone’s life changes forever, as movie loglines love to say. Actually, everybody gets shaken up for a while and by lunchtime the next day it’s clear that things will go on much as before.

Maugham must have been inspired by Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to write a play with an upper-class setting in which wealthy characters spout witty, epigrammatic dialogue. In an obvious homage to Wilde, the last character to appear is named Ernest, and he is astonishingly effeminate even for the height of the Pansy Craze. He seems to be wearing lipstick and eye shadow, and is a tango instructor. Played by Tyrell Davis, he gets the last line and puts his gay seal on the proceedings.

The nonstop wit gets a bit tiresome, and if the film of Our Betters doesn’t overcome its stage origins, the pre-Code frankness of the script is worthy of at least one star.

Fun Fact: George Cukor directed Our Betters, Dinner at Eight, and Little Women in 1933. That was some run of Hollywood Golden Age classics.

’In Dreams’ by Sierra Ferrell

This will clear the politics out of your head for a few minutes. There’s a link to this video in the New York Times article “In the Age of the Algorithm, Roots Music Is Rising,” which is one of the most overwritten pieces I’ve read in a long time. As mentioned in the article, “In Dreams” has racked up more than 11 million views.

Sierra Ferrell’s voice reminds me of 1920s recordings, though the lyrics are like nothing the Carter Family ever dreamed of.

Sierra Ferrell, “In Dreams” / Gems on VHS™ 

The Gulf of Mexico/Golphe de Mexique

From J.F. Letenneur: “Exceptional onboard document of this rare and fabulous maritime atlas, a masterpiece by the greatest French hydrographer of the 18th century, with maps of all the coastlines known at the time.”

Source: The David Rumsey Map Collection

 It’s Love I’m After (1937)

It’s Love I’m After sounds like it would be more interesting than it turns out to be. There's nothing wrong with the leads or the supporting actors—Eric Blore is almost the fourth lead—but it never achieves takeoff velocity. Whether because of the studio—Warner Bros. instead of Paramount, the director—Archie Mayo instead of Ernest Lubitsch, the year it was made—1937 instead of 1933, or the high society setting, it is a curiosity and not a classic.

     Basil Underwood (Leslie Howard) and Janet Arden (Bette Davis) are two stars of the The-a-tuh who are (we’re told) madly in love but can’t stand each other for longer than it takes to play a scene before the claws come out and they commence to fight like two cats in a sack. Marcia West (Olivia de Havilland) is a besotted fan of Underwood, engaged to Henry Grant Jr. (Patric Knowles), and Digges, no first name (Eric Blore), is Underwood’s dresser and Man Friday. To show Marcia that Underwood is unworthy of her infatuation, Grant inveigles him to turn up at the West family estate and play the cad. He agrees, despite having promised Arden that they will be married that very night. Naturally, nothing goes according to plan. 

     At the West estate, keyholes are peeped through, doors are slammed, signals get crossed, and people turn up when they are least expected by the characters if not the audience. It’s funny enough but it isn’t My Man Godfrey. Still, with Howard, Davis, Blore, and the impossibly young Olivia de Havilland doing their best, 90 minutes pass pleasantly enough. Also in the cast are Spring Byington as de Havilland’s aunt, George Barbier as her father, and Bonita Granville as an annoying girl who might be believable as a nine-year-old but looks like the 14-year old she was.

     You can watch It’s Love I’m After on a Warner Archive Collection DVD. TCM screens it from time to time and there are less legitimate sources for those who care to look for them.

As I was saying...

As Facebook becomes less inviting and Meta more obsequious, it’s a good time to start posting again.

To begin, here’s a short piece on The Brutalist. 

Wednesday’s movie at the Regal UA Kaufman 14-Plex was The Brutalist (2024, dir. Brady Corbet) starring Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a Hungarian architect who has reached the United States after World War II. He left his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) behind, thinking they had died at the hands of the Nazis.

Interlocutor: And how did you find The Brutalist, Addison?

Addison: It was brutal, and yes, I'll be here all week.

I stuck with the movie past the halfway mark/intermission, right up to the scene where it jumped the shark. No spoilers, but the action was so implausible and out of character that I walked out. After a few minutes and a chance to reconsider I went back, only to find that there was a new implausible scene, with Tóth berating Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé), his oldest friend in America, someone who’d stuck with him through good times and bad, for no good reason. There was about 15 minutes left, but I’d had enough. You can let me know what I missed in the comments.

There are some good things in The Brutalist, though I can’t remember what they were, but they were outweighed by the problems: slow, almost languorous, pace; multiple implausibilities and plot holes; headache-inducing editing, and peculiar music choices. One that bothered me was a scene in a Black nightclub where the musicians are playing something like free jazz, which as far as I know wasn’t widely heard until the late 1950s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_jazz).

If I had to offer an opinion on why Adrien Brody received a Golden Globe and is nominated for an Oscar [ETA: which he won], I’d guess it’s because he maintains a Hungarian accent for more than three hours, he has a scene where he loses his temper and throws things, because Tóth has a heroin habit, and it’s a Serious Movie about a creative person who’s misunderstood. The heroin is particularly confusing because it doesn’t affect his work or his appearance, it shows up and then disappears, and he keeps it a secret from everyone except Gordon for decades.

As always, your experience will vary and I’ll be interested to hear what you thought.

A friend wrote: Sorry, Addison, I liked it, though I don’t think it’s one of the greatest. I agree the scene you mention came out of left field but frankly events like that often do. Power dynamics and jealousy were apparent early on. I also liked the occasional noirish elements, e.g., the sudden frantic search for someone and the resulting ambiguity of outcome. I think if you take the Italian scene and look at how losing trust creates unexpected behaviors, it makes sense. As does the decision to confront by one brave actor and the resulting emotions and aggression. Finally with respect to Brody’s performance, it was sublime! The scene at the train when he receives family news: there’s a photograph at Dachau of prisoners welcoming their liberators with exactly that conflicting mix of over-the-top joy/anxiety/grief/despair. Brody totally pulled me into his story then. And what a tender gentle lovemaking was displayed at one point! 

 reacti

“It's important to have a look.” I

Her nametag is hard to read: Poodle.

It’s important to have a look. A signature. Be someone. So people will remember you. You all think you're so special. You’re a dime a dozen. There are hundreds, no, thousands of you out there, studying, auditioning, going here, there, hither and yon. You expect people to remember you if you don’t have a look?

From Master Class by Terence McNally

All Lit Up

Morning view, #7 line

This could turn into a blog of pictures of people sleeping on the subway. What I liked about this was contrast between how the tablet lit up the guy’s face while the people on either side were sleeping. The way his hair stands straight up is a bonus. I’m not sure if the “Discovering Columbus” poster is a distraction or a comment.

Chilling Out

NYPL Steps

This shot comes from a series I took while walking past the New York Public Library building. The late afternoon sun made it difficult to get a consistent exposure but editing software compensates for that. It's just a snapshot, but what the heck.

Tradition Meets the 21st Century

Waiting For A Train, 2012

I thought the contrast between the smartphone and the traditional headscarf and long dress was striking. And how about that bag. Could it be redder?

My new camera

I bought my first digital camera, a Nikon S3300 point-and-shoot, on eBay about two weeks ago and I'm learning how to use it. It's been almost 40 years since I spent any time taking pictures and to say that photography has changed is a stunning understatement. The instant gratification of a digital camera vs. film may be the biggest change. Here's a picture I took on the subway this morning, cropped a bit, but otherwise unmanipulated.

Lexington Avenue line, Wednesday morning

Some of the pictures don't look that sharp, but if they are good enough for a blog post, I'll be satisfied.

Everyday I Have the Blues #22

Year-end Roundup, Part I

I’ve neglected this blog for most of this year, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t collecting notable examples of everyday English usage. I was, and it’s time to clear out the cache in time for the end of the year.

First up is an interesting smartphone app, Everyday. You take a photo of your face once a day or so, and the app turns them into a movie. Hew to the schedule long enough and you can bring an entirely new dimension to your masochism. I think the name is a sort of joke, but I’m not sure.

Reuters covers so many fascinating subjects that their copy editors sometimes find themselves challenged, or so I imagine. Take this story about beach polo in Miami by Simon Evans. I called it “Keeping the P in WASP” because down in the fifth paragraph, Evans describes the typical polo tournament as having “a gentile tone.” Mr. Evans wins the 2011 Close But No Cigar Award for that interesting use of the word. Follow the link to read my snarky comment and learn more about the gentile tone of polo in America.

The New York Public Library’s Library Lions gala is noted as one of the high points of the season. For that reason, as well as the association of the library with good writing, you might think that someone would have given the announcement more than a cursory read, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Nor did the writer notice the red line under “playwrite.” 

This is an oldie but goodie, and since it involves John Boehner it deserves the widest possible exposure. I think this goes back to 2009.

International Business Times may still be looking for copy editors, both fast and knowledgeable. Or maybe just fast. I’m beginning to think that people don’t know what it means when a red line appears under a word they’ve just typed.

Nokia is a Finnish company, but surely its ad agency has some native English speakers on staff. On second thought, maybe that was the problem.

I'm still trying to figure out what was in the writer’s mind when he or she wrote this. What rule decrees that “being ordered around by crew members” is incorrect?

I hope you enjoyed these examples of mangled English and come back next week for more from the archives.

Everyday I Have the Blues #21

I Can Has Smartphones?

This deck on the home page of the Wall Street Journal made me LOL this morning. Maybe I should cut the editor some slack — it’s hard to remember whether the subject of the sentence was singular or plural at 11 p.m. — but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t preserve it forever here.

Everyday I Have the Blues #20

Rather than pin the blame on one of the reporters, let’s award this one (second paragraph, second line) to the Reuters copyeditor. Way to go, CE!

Everyday I Have the Blues #19

Don’t blame the writer.

Headlines are seldom dreamed up by the reporter, so I won’t even mention the writer’s name on this piece from the Associated Press that was featured on Yahoo! tonight. For an explanation of the egregious mistake (because it’s in a headline and may be the only part of the story millions of people see), see Everyday I Have the Blues #17.

Everyday I Have the Blues #18

We have another copy editor free zone: AOL’s DailyFinance. In evidence, I submit the lede paragraph from Willow Duttge’s story today about the Kia:

Hamsters That Sell: Kia’s Soul Commercial Wins Auto Ad of the Year

By WILLOW DUTTGE Posted 3:00 PM 04/01/10 Media

Evidently, hamsters are good for sales, or at least for getting viewers to remember your product. The Kia Motors (KIMTF) ad for it's Soul wagon created by ad agency David&Goliath, features dozens of them. The streets of a generic city are littered with hamsters that are stuck spinning on their creaky hamster wheels while hip hamsters zoom past in their bright red Soul. The ad was so effective in grabbing viewer's attentions that it was awarded Automotive Ad of the Year from the Nielsen Automotive Advertising Awards on Wednesday.

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/9hOvbi

Willow is a seasoned journalist and a graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism (you can find out all about her here), but since she can’t rely on copy editor Matthew Schwartz or any of the other veterans listed with him on the DailyFinance site to correct her writing, she needs to learn the difference between “its” and “it’s” (one is a possessive—do you know which one it is?). She also should spend some time studying the concept of agreement: hip hamsters zoom past in their bright red Soul. Just the one? Without seeing the ad, I would guess that we see more than one Soul, no matter how many hamsters are in it. [NOTE: Skip the study. My assumption was wrong. There is only one hip hamster group (a family?) in one car in the ad. Still, it would have been clearer to say “while three hip hamsters zoom past in a bright red Soul.”]

Also, “grabbing viewer’s attentions” is completely confused. If there is more than one viewer, it’s “viewers’ ” but the convention is to refer to the viewer, which may be what she was thinking of at first but when she tried to bring in multiple viewers she couldn’t figure out how to construct the possessive, and then the whole thing just broke down.

And one last thing in this paragraph. The ad was awarded Automotive Ad of the Year at the Nielsen Automotive Advertising Awards, not from. Never from. Possibly by, but not from.

In the next paragraph we find “startting” for “starring.” It’s hard to understand how such a glaring mistake could have gotten past even a quick read through, but that’s a simple spelling goof. As I’ve said before, Spellcheck is your friend. There’s more, but I’ve had enough.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I applied for a job with AOL last year but was not hired. They thought they could get along without me and they may be right, though this story certainly indicates otherwise. I am not bitter. I am simply a disinterested copy editor, offering guidance to the many writers who struggle to write coherently, out there in the vast reaches of the Internet.

UPDATE: As of May 17th, all of the egregious errors cited above have been corrected, which proves that someone is reading this blog. No need to thank me, guys, it’s all in a day’s work. But DailyFinance could still use a copy editor. Reading the rest of the story, I see that in the next-to-last paragraph the second sentence is inexplicably uncapitalized:

But how did the commercial do in the category that really counts: selling cars? for 2009, Kia's sales were close to 10% higher, a bump the company partly attributed to sales of the Soul.

Since journalists don’t get to claim a dispensation under the poetic license, the quote above consists of two sentences, the second starting after the question mark and therefore requiring a capital F. So go fix it. We’ll discuss whether audiences can be “impacted” (fourth paragraph) another time.

A first response to Jeff Jarvis’ column in The Guardian

Jeff Jarvis got all up in Rupert Murdoch’s face over Murdoch’s plan to start charging for access to The Times (London). The column ran in The Guardian, which a commenter pointed out is losing millions of pounds each month. It is well worth reading, and before more time passes I want to post some of my thoughts on what Jarvis said about the future of newspapers, free versus paid content on the Internet, and low-cost news businesses.

• Why so emotional, Jeff? Rupert Murdoch instituting a paywall isn’t intended as a personal affront to you. It’s just business.
• If something can’t go on the way it has, it won’t. There is no reason why there won’t be a second bursting of an Internet bubble, though this won’t return the genie to the bottle or restore newspapers and magazines to financial health. But it’s unreasonable to expect publishers (or anyone) to go on losing money year after year if profitability isn’t imminent.
• Real journalism (sourced, fact checked) isn’t for amateurs. That doesn’t mean they can’t do it but that doing it consistently and well, and maintaining a site of some kind, is not going to be common. (See Dr. Johnson quote in the right column.) Some people keep on with their hobby, a very few make money at it, many give it up. Opinion is easy; news stories take time.
• If journalism can’t pay more than twice the minimum wage, why should anyone with intelligence and ability go into the field?
• What’s my personal bias in this? I don’t want to read a full newspaper or magazine on a computer monitor, e-book reader, or iPad. I don’t want to spend that much time tethered to the screen when I’m not at work. I would be willing to pay for an online subscription to The New York Times, but if I could afford it I’d prefer to buy it each day and read it on my way to and from work. I won’t subscribe to all the papers whose Web sites I look at now—very occasionally, to be sure. I almost never watch network TV news (PBS News Hour aside, usually on Friday for Shields and Brooks, and Washington Week—maybe I should have majored in poli sci) so I’m definitely in a minority here.

Everyday I Have the Blues #17

Before too much more time passes I would like to welcome Hilton Als and The New Yorker copyediting team to the Hall of Embarrassing Usage with this example from the February 15/22, 2010, issue.

When the camera hones in on Linney’s heart-shaped face...

I confess that I had to look up ‟home in on” and ‟hone” in the dictionary before I could be sure that I wasn’t the one who was confused. After all, I’m just a freelance copy editor. The New Yorker is — or used to be — one of the best edited magazines in the country. As this example shows, ‟used to be” is more like it.

Horton Foote and David Mamet in Conversation, part II

Here is another page of my notes on the program Horton Foote and David Mamet gave at the 92nd Street Y in 1986, the first part of which is here. I will post additional material if I find more pages.

Mamet: [In Hollywood] if someone gets shot in Act III, they don’t see why they can’t get shot in Acts I and II also.

Mamet: More and more, the kind of movie I like is a silent movie.

Mamet: Wait a second—you’re writing about human beings and I’m writing about Chicago?
Foote: I mean, human beings in Chicago.

Mamet: ...wishing they hadn’t sent the limo because you know you’re going to pay for it at the story conference.

Mamet: They always invite me to come on the set... they never mean it. Sure, I’d love to stand on the corner for three hours feeling like a damn fool while they massacre my screenplay.

Mamet: It’s like the mother of Moses—you just watch your baby go [when you sell the copyright].

Mamet: All you can put on the screen is the narrative line or what Aristotle called the ‟structure of the incidents.”

Foote: Couldn’t your work [About Last Night, based on Sexual Perversity in Chicago] have been done correctly?
Mamet: Yes, but it was done by venal and unpleasant people.

Foote: I wanted to be an actor in the worst way.
Mamet: I did too. I was an actor in the worst way.