Alan Jacobs

If you want to have a good time, watch The Crimson Pirate (1952). It’s absolutely delightful. Years ago a critic — can’t remember who — described that masterpiece of cinema Nacho Libre as “endearingly ridiculous,” and that description applies to The Crimson Pirate as well.

(Among other things, you get this fellow in a small and uncredited role: 

Yep, it’s Christopher Lee!) 

That bearded fellow next to Burt Lancaster in the picture at the head of this post? That’s Nick Cravat, who was Lancaster’s old friend and one-time partner in the circus. Burt kept him on his payroll — as his personal trainer, which for all I know was true — for decades, and got him into movies, but typically (and here) in non-speaking parts, because his Brooklyn accent was both thick and utterly ineradicable. Many moviegoers over the years assumed that Nick was actually mute. He’s very funny in this movie, like a muscular Italian Harpo Marx. 

But here’s my favorite little fact: The exteriors were mostly filmed on and around the island of Ischia, in the Bay of Naples — which is where Auden lived in the summer months from 1948 through 1957. I love to imagine Auden sitting in a favorite taverna — in those years he developed a love for Negronis, and made a point of having one or two every night before dinner — and looking across the tables to see … 

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“1324”] James R. Roberts, Ivan Illich Leading Seminar at the Centro Intercultural De Documentación, Cuernavaca, Mexico, 1971. Courtesy of the Northwestern University Archives.[/caption]

I am huge fan of the wines made by Steve and Jill Matthiasson, and one of their most remarkable products is their sweet vermouth, which is not like anything else I’ve tasted. In a recent newsletter they tell us, graphically, how they make it: 

Allow me to tell you about a memorable scene from Salka Viertel’s compelling memoir The Kindness of Strangers. In their native Austria and later in Germany, she and her husband had worked in films, she as an actress and he as a director. They came to California in the 1920s, planning to stay just a few years, but with the rise of Hitler they decided that — especially since they were Jewish — they could not return. In the Thirties their home would serve as a kind of salon for their fellow refugees, and Salka became an energetic social activist. But her day job was as a screenwriter for MGM. That’s the context for this tale:

Having listened to the Sunday afternoon Philharmonic concert from New York, at which Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night (Verklärte Nacht) was performed, Thalberg decided that Schoenberg was the man to write the score for The Good Earth. Next day the producer Albert Lewin came to my office and asked if I could talk to Schoenberg. I explained that long ago Schoenberg had given up the style of Transfigured Night and had been composing twelvetone music, which I doubted Irving would like. However, I promised to do my best to arrange a meeting. I knew that Schoenberg was having a hard time; he was giving lessons, which took many hours from his own work. I asked him if he would be interested in doing the scoring of Good Earth.

“How much would they pay?”

“Around twenty-five thousand dollars, I suppose.”

Or, in today’s money, half a million clams. So Viertel arranges a meeting, and Schoenberg and his wife duly come to Thalberg’s office at MGM. Viertel, who was there to translate, resumes the narration:

I still see him before me, leaning forward in his chair, both hands clasped over the handle of the umbrella, his burning, genius’s eyes on Thalberg, who, standing behind his desk, was explaining why he wanted a great composer for the scoring of The Good Earth. When he came to: “Last Sunday when I heard the lovely music you have written....” Schoenberg interrupted sharply: “I don’t write ‘lovely’ music.”

Thalberg looked baffled, then smiled and explained what he meant by “lovely music.” It had to have Chinese themes, and, as the people in the film were peasants, there was not much dialogue but a lot of action. For example, there were scenes like that where the locusts eat all the grain in the fields which needed special scoring, and so on. I translated what Thalberg said into German, but Schoenberg interrupted me. He understood everything, and in a surprisingly literary though faulty English, he conveyed what he thought in general of music in films: that it was simply terrible. The whole handling of sound was incredibly bad, meaningless, numbing all expression; the leveling monotony of the dialogue was unbearable. He had read The Good Earth and he would not undertake the assignment unless he was given complete control over the sound, including the spoken words.

“What do you mean by complete control?” asked Thalberg, incredulously.

“I mean that I would have to work with the actors,” answered Schoenberg. “They would have to speak in the same pitch and key as I compose it in. It would be similar to ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ but, of course, less difficult.”

Schoenberg departs, with, unsurprisingly, no firm agreement having been reached. Then:

After a pause Thalberg said: “This is a remarkable man. And once he learns about film scoring and starts working in the studio he’ll realize that this is not like writing an opera.”

“You are mistaken, Irving,” I said. “He’ll invent a revolutionary kind of scoring.”

“He’ll write the music on my terms, you’ll see.”

Next morning Trude Schoenberg telephoned me that the price of prostitution had doubled. For his complete control of the film, including the dialogue, Schoenberg was asking fifty thousand, otherwise it was not worth his time and effort.

Last night, for the first time in decades, I watched The Magnificent Ambersons, and three points struck me with great force.

First: If Welles’s vision for the film had been realized, it would have been the single greatest work of art to elaborate and dramatize and even extend the argument of Leo Marx’s great 1964 book The Machine in the Garden — it would have offered the best available portrayal of the benefits and the costs, in equal measure, of the transformation of America from a pastoral world ruled over by a land-owning aristocracy to an industrial powerhouse. The scenes in the movie’s early minutes introducing Eugene Morgan’s horseless carriage could have been designed to illustrate Marx’s thesis: “Within the lifetime of a single generation, a rustic and in large part wild landscape was transformed into the site of the world’s most productive industrial machine. It would be difficult to imagine more profound contradictions of value or meaning than those made manifest by this circumstance. Its influence upon our literature is suggested by the recurrent image of the machine’s sudden entrance onto the landscape.” (Leo Marx, by the way, just last week died at the age of 102.)

Second: The film as it exists has a protagonist, but it’s not Joseph Cotten’s Eugene Morgan or Tim Holt’s George Minafer, but rather Agnes Moorhead’s Fanny Minafer — an “unnecessary woman,” a frustrated and embittered spinster who has no place in either of the book’s social worlds, being equally unvalued by the old aristocracy of land and the new industrial meritocracy. Fanny’s character arc culminates in a terrifying breakdown: this woman who has always been fighting off panic comes to the very end of her powers of self-control. Moorehead’s performance is staggering, and her fascinating and revelatory description of how Orson Welles directed her in that culminating scene, told to Dick Cavett in 1973, may be seen here. You really shouldn’t watch that scene out of the context of the whole movie, but if you absolutely must — or, better, if you have seen the movie but just need to be reminded — here it is. Gives me chills every time.

Which brings me — this is my third thought — to the infamous final scene of the movie, shot by the assistant director Fred Fleck while Welles was in Brazil. It’s just as terrible as everyone says it is, but there’s one way to make sense of it, even, strangely, to make it work. Bear with me for a moment.

Welles had shot what he wanted to be the penultimate scene of the movie, a meeting between Eugene Morgan and Fanny Minafer at the boarding house where she now must live. Stills from this scene remain:

It’s important to understand that Eugene has no idea that Fanny loves him, indeed has loved him for decades, and that the great bitterness of her life is her displacement, by the glamorous Isabel Amberson, from what she thinks of as her proper place in Eugene’s affections. As you can see from the shot above, she has recovered her composure — but at the cost of destroying her inner life. She is a shell of a person, and their meeting is both cold and fruitless.

In the concluding scene shot by Fleck, Eugene visits George Minafer in the hospital, and as he leaves George’s room is met by Fanny, to whom he speaks of the reconciliation between him and George, inspired, he says, by the spirit of his “one true love” — meaning Isabel, of course. Throughout this scene Fanny has a weirdly beatific look on her face, one that, I suspect, Moorehead was instructed by Fleck to wear: after all, doesn’t she now know that the immensely wealthy Eugene will take care of her beloved nephew, and probably of her also? That consoling knowledge, we are asked to presume, is sufficient to overcome her decades of pining for Eugene and her consequent resentment of Isabel.

Not bloody likely, I say.

So I prefer to understand the end this way: Fanny lies in her narrow bed in the crowded, dingy boarding-house in a bad neighborhood of what is now an industrial city, and she indulges in a fantasy. She imagines another life, the other fork of the road, one in which Eugene is reconciled to George, of course, but also, and more important, in which he finally sees that all along, Fanny was his own true love. She lies in her narrow bed, and dreams, and smiles. And her dream is what we see at the end of The Magnificent Ambersons.

Like Lincoln Michel, I have a soft spot in my heart for little literary magazines, and worry about their future. (For what it’s worth, I think the biggest problems afflicting little magazines stem from their having been co-opted into providing one particular service: publication credits for creative writing teachers.) I sometimes imagine an alternative career for myself in which I wrote only, or almost only, for such journals. I’m pleased to say that I have an essay called “Looking Westward” appearing in a forthcoming issue of Raritan.

Cormac McCarthy gives an interview to some high school students.

I love — love — uniform editions of authors’ books.

Ted Gioia’s case for super-vinyl … I dunno. I’d prefer to have an improvement in viny records that does not require me to buy expensive new equipment. Might that be possible?

Rowan Williams: “One thing that might be said in response to Patriarch Kirill is that neighbours have to be loved, not terrorised into resentful silence – a matter on which the God first acknowledged in Kyiv in 988 had a good deal to say.”

In a recent post I wrote about my suspicion of the metaphors people use to describe the sound of vinyl records; turns out that there’s a (sadly long-silent) Tumblr devoted to the absolute balderdash audiophile magazines spout.