Our Lady Of The Mountain-With Hazel Dickens In Mind    

By Zack James

Jack Callahan caught the folk minute bug when he was in high school in his hometown of Carver back in maybe 1961, 1962 he was not sure now exactly which with the elapse of almost sixty years and his memory not what it once had been. Knew it could not be before that since Jack Kennedy, of his own clan and brethren was President then so 1961 would be the earliest. Caught that bug after having heard some songs that held him in thrall over a fugitive radio station from Rhode Island, a college station, that every Sunday night would have a two hour show called Bill Marlowe’s Hootenanny where he, Bill Marlowe, would play all kinds of songs. Songs from the latest protest songs of the likes of then somewhat unknown but soon to explode onto scene as the media-ordained king of folk Bob Dylan and sullen severe Phil Ochs to old country blues, you know, Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and above all Mississippi John Hurt who were “discovered” and feted by adoring mostly white urban college students who had a famous “king of the blues’ shoot-out one year down at the Newport Folk Festival to Bob   Wills and Milton Brown Western Swing and everything in between. A fast paced glance at a very different part of the American songbook from which he knew either from his parent’s dreary (his term) 1940s Frank Sinatra-Andrews Sisters-Inkspots material to budding rock and roll. What got to Jack, what caused him to pay attention though was the mountain music that he heard, things like East Virginia, Pretty Polly and his favorite the mournful Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies sung by Linda Lane, a now forgotten treasure of a singer from deep in the Tennessee hills somewhere whose voice can still haunt his dreams.     

Now this adhesion to folk minute was quite by accident since most Sunday nights if Jack was listening to anything it was Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour out of WNAC in Chicago where the fix was on for the electric blues and rhythm and blues that were the precursors of that rock which would be the staple of his early musical tastes (and reaction to that parent’s dreary 1940s music but that story has been told elsewhere and this is about mountain music so forward). Usually in those days something had gone awry or some ghost was in the air in radio wave land, classmate Irwin Silver the science wiz of his school tried to explain it one day but he never really caught the drift of the science behind it,   and he had caught that station and then the Rhode Island Station, WAFJ. Although he was becoming something of an aficionado of blues just then and would become something of a folk one as well his real love then was the be-bop classic rock and roll music that was the signature genre for his generation (and again for those who missed the point the bane of his parents). He never lost the love of rock or the blues but he never went all out to discover material he had never heard before like he did with mountain music. 

One summer, this was 1964 he thought, while he was in college in Boston, he had decided rather than a summer job he would head south down to mountain country, you know West Virginia, Kentucky maybe rural Virginia and see if he could find some tunes that he had not heard before. (That “no job” decision did not set well with his parents, his poor parents who both worked in the local industry, the cranberry bogs, when that staple was the town’s claim to fame so he could go to college but that is a story for another day). Now it was not strange in those days for all kinds of people, mostly college students with time on their hands, archivists, or musicians to travel down to the southern mountains and elsewhere in search of authentic American music by the “folk.” Not professional archivists like Pete Seeger’s father, Charles, or the Lomaxes, father and son, or inspired amateurs like Harry Smith from earlier times but young people looking for roots which was a great occupation of the generation that came of age in the 1960s in reaction to their parents’ generation trying might and main to favor vanilla Americanization, golden age modernization and forget the hunky, dusty, dirty immigrant pasts. (A sad admission in an immigrant country except for those indigenous peoples who ground we stand on today making no discrimination between sacred or profane land, or mocking those distinctions. Sadder today when vast tracts of people are being denied access to their sacred and profane lands down along the gringo-imposed southern American border and working the northern ones now too. But that story too is for another day.)      

A lot of the young, and that included Jack who read the book in high school, had first been tuned into Appalachia through Michael Harrington’s The Other America which prompted them to volunteer to help their poor brethren. Jack was somewhat animated by that desire to help but his real purpose was to be a gadfly who found some hidden trove of music that others had not found. In this he was following the trail started by the Lally Brothers, a local Boston folk group who were dedicated to the preservation of mountain music and having headed south had “discovered” Buell Hobart, the lonesome fiddler and had brought him north to do shows and be acclaimed as the “max daddy” of the mountain world.    

Jack had spent a couple of weeks down in Kentucky after having spent a couple of weeks striking out in West Virginia where, for a fact, most of the rural folk were either rude or suspicious of his motives when he inquired about the whereabouts of some old-time red barn musicians he had read about from outside Wheeling. Then one night, one Saturday night he found himself in Prestonsburg, down in southeast Kentucky, down in coal country where the hills and hollows extent for miles around. He had been brought to that town by a girl, a cousin of his high school friend Jimmy Jenkins who was later killed in hellhole Vietnam on his father’s side from back home in Carver. Jimmy had told Jack to look her up if he ever got to Hazard where his father had hailed from and had lived before World War II had driven him to the Marines and later to love of his mother from Carver.  

This girl, a pretty girl to boot, Nadine, had told Jack that mountain music had been played out in Hazard, that whatever legends about the coal wars and about the music had long gone from that town. She suggested that he accompany her to an old-fashioned red barn dance that was being held weekly at Fred Brown’s place on Saturday nights on the outskirts of Prestonsburg if he wanted to hear the “real deal” (Jack’s term). That night when they arrived and paid their dollar apiece jack saw a motley crew of fiddlers, guitar player, and a few of what Nadine called mountain harps.

The first half of the dance went uneventfully enough but the second half, after he had been fortified with what the locals called “white lightning,” illegal whiskey, this woman came up to the stage after being introduced although he did not for some reason remember her name at first, maybe the sting of the booze and began to play the mountain harp and sing a song, The Hills of Home, that had everybody mesmerized. She sang a few other songs that night and Jack marveled at her style. When Jack asked Nadine who that woman singer was she told him a gal from “around those parts” (her expression) Hazel Dickens and wasn’t she good. 

When Jack got back to Boston a few weeks later (after spending more time with friendly Nadine in that searching for mountain music) he contacted the Lally Brothers to see if they could coax her north for college audiences to hear. They did so although Hazel initially was fearful of coming north to what she thought was a crime-ridden black plague city but which turned out since she was to play at Harvard’s Memorial Hall an ivy-covered sanctuary which she would visit several times later in her career and recognize as the start of her break-out from the hills and hollows of home to a candid world.  That was Jack Callahan’s small proudly boasted contribution to keeping the mountain music tradition alive. For her part Hazel Dickens did before she dies several years ago much, much more to keep the flame burning.            

Once Again On The - 75^th Anniversary Of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s “Casablanca” -

By Bart Webber (October 2017)

I have spent much ink this year starting almost at the beginning of the year writing about the classic black and white film Casablanca a staple at every retro-film locale including the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I first saw it with a “hot date” back in the late 1960s. “Hot date” in those days for those not around then or who have forgotten (shame on you) in the female department being a gal who wore short dresses (mini-skirts being a heavy fashion sea-change brought over I think by the English rock invasion which in any case replaced the severe stiff collared shirt and long flouncy, I guess that is the right word, skirt of earlier high school times) and long hair. Long hair also something of a sea-change brought not from over the ocean deeps but locally by imitation of folk-singing icon Joan Baez among the folk set which I was hung up on. (Many a young woman with less than candid straight hair had told me that she spent not a few hours “ironing” her hair to perdition to get that cool “look”)      

More important than the skirt-hair combo attached to the folk scene aficionado-hood a date who did not mind going on a cheap date (hell the theater admission was about a dollar maybe two so there was something left over for the obligatory popcorn) when I told her what film we would be seeing. (That cheap movie date acceptance usually having already having been charted by a first or second date Harvard Square coffeehouse date where for the price of two long sipped cups of coffee and a shared pastry you could sit and talk to while away the night, sometimes depending on the night accompanied by some rising folk singer working out his or her performance kinks playing for the “basket” passed through the audience.)    

Now I am talking about Casablanca but when the Brattle did a retro usually there were twelve to twenty films in the repertoire almost all of which I would have either seen in my youth with my old friend Sam Lowell, who later became a film critic for a bunch of alternative newspapers like back in the day like The Rolling Stone, or by myself on Saturday afternoon double feature days at the Strand Theater in North Adamsville where we grew up. The young woman in this Casablanca scenarios and maybe others as well somehow had asked her mother who had been there on the first run about the film and so was intrigued about this hot on-screen romance during wartime between Rick and Ilsa. I am sure the mother young and in love with some departed soldier boy ready to go to Europe or the Pacific to do battle against that age’s night-takers filled her head with all the classic expressions and all the intimate moments when the two wartime star-crossed lovers had to go their separate ways reflecting just a bit her own concerns. Maybe she couldn’t explain the twenty some years after tear in her eye when reciting the plotline to that young daughter but she must have reflected on that line “We’ll always have Paris” dovetailing with her own broody thoughts back then.    

Here’s what was really nice about that particular date and I may have owed it all to the film (and a mother’s reflections too not recognized at the time.  That movie coupled with a quick after film stop at equally cheap Harvard Square Hayes Bickford for coffee (always an iffy proposition depending on when the stuff was brewed also iffy) and some kind of pastry that had been sitting on the stainless steel dessert shelves for who knows how long got me away without having to call “Dutch treat.” (Of course going to a local coffeehouse for coffee and pastry was out of the question once the gold bars had been spent on the movie and that mandatory popcorn.) The Hayes in those days not only a waystation for winos, the homeless and friendless and con artists but a place where rising folk-singers and their hangers-on hung out on the cheap.

Got me as well another six months of very nice dates so my memories of that gorgeous film with the six million quotable and unforgettable lines from “play it again, Sam” (Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa request to Humphrey Bogart  Rick’s main entertainment provider Dooley Wilson to play the sentimental As Time Goes By) to that “We will always have Paris” (when Rick responds to Ilsa’s bewilderment that he is letting her take that last plane to Lisbon with those wicked blood-stained letters of transit provided by him to her husband Czech liberation leader Victor Laszlo so he  can continue to do his work against the night-takers running the world in those days) are still pristine.              

As we commemorate the 75^th anniversary of that premier of that film I am not the only one who is crazy for this movie since I am enclosing a link to an interview done by Terry Gross on her Fresh Air show on NPR with film historian Noah Isenberg on  the making of the classic Hollywood film in his new book, We'll Always Have Casablanca. "  Needless to say when I get my greedy little hands on that item I will be reviewing it in this space. This guy has me and even know it all Sam Lowell who knows a lot about all the characters particularly the fate of Paul Henreid l beaten six ways to Sunday with what he knows about that film. Kudos.  

http://www.npr.org/2017/10/11/557101633/75-years-later-a-look-at-the-life-legend-and-afterlife-of-casablanca

All The Liquor In Costa Ricah-With The Max Daddy Blues Guitarist Taj Majal In Mind

By Zack James 

Seth Garth the old time music critic for the now long gone alternative newspaper The Eye who had followed all the trends in the folk world in the old days once his friend from high school, Jack Callahan, had turned him on to the genre after having heard some mountain music coming on high via the airwaves from a fugitive radio station one summer Sunday night still was interested in what was left of that world. More importantly who was still left still standing from that rough-hewn folk minute of the early 1960s. An important part of that interest centered on who still “had it” from among those who were still standing.

That was no mere academic question but had risen quite sharply in the early part of 2002 when Seth, Jack and their then respective wives had attended a Bob Dylan concert up in Augusta Maine and had come away disappointed, no, more than disappointed, shocked that Dylan had lost whatever voice he had had and depended increasingly on his backup singers and musicians. Dylan no longer “had it.” Both agreed that they would have to be satisfied with listening to the old records, tapes, CDs, and YouTube on sullen nights when they wanted to hear what it was like when men and women played folk music, protest and meaningful existence folk music, for keeps.

That single shocking event led subsequently to an earnest attempt to attend concerts and performances of as many of the old-time folkies as they could find helter-skelter before they passed on. The pair have documented elsewhere some of those others some who have like Utah Phillips and Dave Van Ronk have subsequently passed on. But one night recently, a few months ago now, they were discussing one Taj Majal (stage name not the famous wonder of the world mansion, building, shrine, mausoleum whatever it is in India) and how they had first heard him back in the day in anticipation of seeing him in person up at the great concert hall overlooking the harbor at Rockport.     

Naturally enough if you knew Seth and Jack they disagreed on exactly where they had first seen him after Jack had hear him do a cover of the old country blues classic Corrina, Corrina on that fugitive folk program out of Rhode Island, WAFJ. Seth said it was the Club 47 over in Harvard Square in Cambridge and Jack said they had gone underground to the Unicorn over on Boylston Street in Boston. Of course those disputes never got resolved, never got final resolution. What was not disputed was that they had both been blown away by the performance of Taj and his small backup band that night. His blues mastery proved to them that someone from the younger generation was ready to keep the old time blues tradition alive, including playing the old National Steel guitar that the likes of Son House and Bukka White created such great blues classics on. The highlight that night had been The Sky Is Crying which has been covered by many others since but not equaled.     

The track record of old time folkies had been mixed as one would expect as the shocking Dylan experiences pointed out. Utah Phillips by the time they got to see him at the Club Passim in Cambridge had lost it, David Bromberg still had it for two examples. The night they were discussing and disputing the merit of Taj’s case both agreed that he probably had lost it since that rough-hewn gravelly voice of his had like Dylan’s and Willie Nelson’s taken a beating with time and many performances. Needless to say they should not have worried (although they did when old be-hatted Taj came out and immediately sat down not a good sign for prior experiences with other old time performers) since Taj was smokin’ that night. Played the old Elmore James Television Blues on the National Steel like he was about twenty years old. Did his old version of Corrina proud and his version of CC Rider as well. Yeah, Taj still had it. But if you don’t believe a couple of old folkies and don’t get a chance to see him in person out your way then grab this album Shoutin’ In Key from the old days and see what they meant. Got it.

Mix and Mingle Among The Mayfair Swells-Jane Austen’s “Love and Friendship” (2016)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Senior Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Love And Friendship, starring Kate Beckindale, Xavier Samuel, based on the novella Lady Susan by Jane Austen, 2016

Damn my old friend and former colleague at American Film Gazette Sam Lowell whom I replaced as film critic at this site although occasionally writes some “think” pieces now that he is no longer under any deadline. His damnation centers on the tendency that he had when he got interested in a type of film or an author/writer and do a “run” based on that interest (still does so when writing about film noir which he been doing a slow moving “run” B-grade noirs on recently). Over the many years I have known him I also seemed to have picked up the habit. The habit in the present case being taking a “run” at various films based on Jane Austen’s novels and other works after having viewed the film The Jane Austen Book Club. Well we are going down that trail once again with the film adaptation of her early work Lady Susan using the title of another Austen work Love and Friendship.     

The scheme in Book Club was to take a modern book club membership and develop the plot of the film around the similarity of relationships among them to those in Austen’s six major novels. No question that one Jane Austen was an astute observer of the social mores and ethos of the later 18^th century, early 19^th century English country gentry, a strata of society which if it didn’t have the prestige of the upper nobility nevertheless owned the vast tracts of land and controlled the doings of the Parliament in those days that made the kingdom work. Here dear Jane looks at the mating rituals of that country gentry whose members were always in the end driven by the need to avoid dropping down the social ladder. That is most definitely the concern of the lead character Lady Susan, played by Kate Beckindale, whose aim is just that desire to avoid dropping down in her circumstances-and because inheritance is everything just look at the obtuse Common Law provisions that of her daughter.      

    

Let the games begin. Bring a scorecard. Lady Susan is on the rebound having been tossed out of one manor for going toe to toe with the lord of said manor. So off she goes to the country estate of her brother-in law and wife with her lady companion to see what she can dig up to restore her diminished sources. Before long she has that brother-in-law’s wife’s brother, Reginald played by Xavier Samuel, eating out of her hand despite himself (despite knowing that she is in modern language a “tramp”). But his/their father said no way, forget it. Still that brother is not so easy to convince of milady’s sullen sooty character and things look like he will be snagged.

Then all hell breaks loose Lady Susan as it turned out was still going toe to toe with that randy lord and his wife found out about it through a letter delivered by Reginald. The long and short of it is that Lady Susan was forced to call off her relationship with promising Reginald although that is not the last we will see of him. Enter Lady Susan’s daughter Frederica along with a goof companion Sir James Martin. Once Reginald sees Frederica they quickly become an item and goof Sir James is left empty-handed. Well not quite since on the rebound and fiercely committed to her own cozy future she picks up Sir James. All’s well that ends well. With this scenario it is a wonder that Britain was able to rule the world for as long as it did. Hey, what do you think maybe it was because of it.           

The Golden Age Of The B-Film Noir- Paul Henreid And Lizabeth Scott’s “Stolen Face” (1952)

DVD Review

By Film Editor Emeritus Sam Lowell

Stolen Face, starring Paul Henreid, Lizabeth Scott, Hammer Productions, 1952

I am now deep into my retro-reviews of the classic Hammer Productions film noir in which an American producer contracted with that organization to do a series of such efforts using known, although maybe fading, film stars backed by English character actors to do the whole thing on the cheap. My whole operation started with a review of the film Terror Street (distributed in Britain as 36 Hours) and subsequently another entry The Black Glove (distributed in Britain as Face The Music probably a better title since the plot involved a well-known trumpet player turning from searching for that high white note everybody in his profession is looking for to amateur private detective once a lady friend is murdered and he looked for all the world like the natural fall guy to take the big step-off for it) I noted that long time readers of this space know, or should be presumed to know, of my long-standing love affair with film noir. Since any attentive reader will note this is my fifth such review of B-film noirs and hence proof positive that I am now in deep and that I still have the bug.

I mentioned in that review some of the details of my introduction to the classic age of film noir in this country in the age of black and white film in the 1940s and 1950s when I would sneak over to the now long gone and replaced by condos Strand Theater in growing up town North Adamsville and spent a long double feature Saturday afternoon watching complete with a stretched out bag of popcorn (or I think it is safe to say it now since the statute of limitation on the “crime” must surely have passed snuck in candy bars bought at Harold’s Variety Store on the way to the theater). I would watch some then current production from Hollywood or some throwback from the 1940s which Mister Cadger, the affable owner who readily saw that I was an aficionado who would pepper him with questions about when such and such a noir was to be featured would let me sneak in for kid’s ticket prices long after I reached the adult price stage at twelve I think it was, would show in retrospective to cut down on expenses in tough times by avoiding having to pay for first –run movies all the time. (And once told me to my embarrassment that he made more money on the re-runs than first runs and even more money on the captive audience buying popcorn and candy bars-I wonder if he knew my candy bar scam.)

That is where the bulk of my noir experiences were formed but I should mention in passing as well that on infrequent occasions I would attend a nighttime showing (paying full price after age twelve since parents were presumed to have the money to spring  for full prices) with my parents if my strict Irish Catholic mother (strict on the mortal sin punishment for what turned out to have been minor or venial sins after letting my older brothers, four, count them four, get away with murder and assorted acts of mayhem) thought the film passed the Legion of Decency standard that we had to stand up and take a yearly vow to uphold in church led by the priest exhorting to sin no more and I could under the plotline without fainting (or getting “aroused” by the fetching femmes).

Readers should be aware from prior series that when I found some run of films that had a similar background I would “run the table” on the efforts. Say a run of Raymond Chandler film adaptations of his Phillip Marlowe crime novels or Dashiell Hammett’s seemingly endless The Thin Man series. That “run the table” idea is the case with a recently obtained cache of British-centered 1950s film noirs put out by the Hammer Production Company as they tried to cash in on the popularity of the genre for the British market  That Terror Street mentioned at the beginning had been the first review in this series (each DVD by the way contains two films the second film Danger On The Wings in that DVD not worthy of review) and now the film under review under review the overblown if ominously titled Stolen Face  (distributed in England, Britain, Great Britain, United Kingdom or whatever that isle calls itself these Brexit days as unlike others in the series by the same title) is the fifth such effort. On the basis of these six viewings (remember one didn’t make the film noir aficionado cut so that tells you something right away) I will have to admit they are clearly B-productions none of them would make anything but a second or third tier rating.        

After all as mentioned before in that first review look what they were up against. For example who could forget up on that big screen for all the candid world to see a sadder but wiser seen it all, heard it all Humphrey Bogart at the end of The Maltese Falcon telling all who would listen that he, he Sam Spade, no stranger to the seamy side and cutting corners life, had had to send femme fatale Mary Astor his snow white flame over, sent her to the big step-off once she spilled too much blood, left too long a trail of corpses, for the stuff of dreams over some damn bird. Or cleft-chinned barrel-chested Robert Mitchum keeping himself out of trouble in some dink town as a respectable citizen including snagging a girl next door sweetie but knowing he was doomed, out of luck, and had had to cash his check for his seedy past taking a few odd bullets from his former femme fatale trigger-happy girlfriend Jane Greer once she knew he had double-crossed her to the coppers in Out Of The Past.

Ditto watching the horror on smart guy gangster Eddie Mars face after being outsmarted because he had sent a small time grafter to his doom when prime private detective Phillip Marlowe, spending the whole film trying to do the right thing for an old man with a couple of wild daughters, ordered him out the door to face the rooty-toot-toot of his own gunsels who expected Marlowe to be coming out in The Big Sleep. How about song and dance man Dick Powell turning Raymond Chandler private eye helping big galoot Moose Malone trying to find his Velma and getting nothing but grief and a few stray conks on the head chasing Claire Trevor down when she didn’t want to be found having moved uptown with the swells in Murder, My Sweet. Or finally, tall lanky and deceptive private eye Dane Jones chasing an elusive black box ready to explode the world being transported across Europe by evil incarnate if gorgeous Marla Sands in European Express. Those were some of the beautiful and still beautiful classics whose lines you can almost hear anytime you mention the words film noir. The entries in this series are definitively not ones with memorable lines or plots.  

In the old days before I retired I always liked to sketch out a film’s plotline to give the reader the “skinny” on what the action was so that he or she could see where I was leading them. I will continue that old tradition here to make my point about the lesser production values of the Hammer products. Doctor Ritter, played by Paul Henreid last seen in this space leaving on the last plane to Lisbon as the Czech liberation fighter Victor Lazlo with wife Ilsa on his arm to fight the night-takers another day after going mano a mano for her affections with Rick of Rick’s Café Amercian in the classic Casablanca, is a highly-skilled high end if worn out plastic surgeon who meets Alice, played by Lizabeth Scott last seen in this space as the mysterious girlfriend of an AWOL that Humphrey Bogart is looking for in Dead Reckoning, is a worn out concert pianist on holiday as they say in Merry Olde England. The pair had a short tempestuous affair and made big future plans until Alice blew out of town leaving no forwarding address.          

That abandonment by sweet smoky-voiced Alice kind of made the good doctor lose his moorings, go off the deep end once she informed him by phone that she was engaged to be married and had been when they had that tempestuous affair. Heartbroken the good doctor carried on but anyone could see he was off his game. No question. In a crazy minute he decided that we would “help” a young woman criminal, Lily, whose face had been disfigured during the war by giving her a make-over (and assuming against all reason that such a change would change this tramp’s whoring, thieving, conning ways). And guess what the change-over turned that dead-beat criminal into the spitting image of, ah, Alice, dear sweet Alice. Not only did he do that but the lonely doctor married the wench.            

Wrong, way wrong since no sooner had she gotten her new sexy 1940s glamour face ala Lizabeth Scott but that tramp went back to her whoring, thieving, conning ways. The doctor tried to bail out but after confessing to Alice his dirty deed, no soap, our little crook knew the gravy train she had grabbed onto and was not letting go. But you know since time immemorial, at least cinema time immemorial- crime does not pay- that the bad must take that big step-off. Here’s how it played out and you had better bring a scorecard. The good doctor tired of the craziness with Lilly/Lizabeth Scott blew town, London town, okay. This Lilly/Lizabeth Scott followed him on said train getting drunk and crazy along the way. Meanwhile Alice/Lizabeth Scott fearing the worse heads for that same show-down train. Doc and Lilly/ Lizabeth Scott have a falling out in which dear sweet Lilly accidently falls off the train. Leaving Doc and Alice/Lizabeth Scott to walk off together and a happy future.        

This one almost got that Wings of Danger treatment mentioned above, a non-review, but with actors like Paul Henreid and two, count them, two Lizabeth Scotts and a scorecard I figured what the hell.      

When The World Imitated Elvis, Circa 1956

From The Pen Of Joshua Lawrence Breslin

Nobody in the whole wide 1956 Western world wanted to be the be-bop max daddy king hell king of rock and roll more than Billie Bradley (not Billy, not regular old ordinary vanilla Billy, or some goat Billy. Not if you didn’t want a fight about it after your first passed-by indiscretion , and believe me you didn’t, no unless you wanted about ten generations of fury and of unhealed hurts compacted in one twelve year old boy with a set of brass knuckles in your face). Well, nobody wanted it more except maybe the king himself, Elvis, a guy who had had his own share of stored furies and unhealed hurts of an indeterminate number of generations that needed to get out of the bottle and was as fame-hungry beneath the volcano surface as any person alive, but Billie was a close second. And maybe, forget about talent and opportunity for a minute, for pure hunger, for pure get out from under the rock hunger, a lot closer to first than second.

What Billie was first at, definitely, and maybe more first than Elvis, who after all had the swivel hips, had the trainable voice, had the genetically-encoded rock rhythm, had the smoldering snarl, had the deep alienation look, and had that that fugitive sex appeal that made the women wet and the guys let their sideburns grow long, was the desire to use whatever musical talents he had (and they were promising) to be the king hell king of the projects where he grew up, the Olde Saco projects (up in Maine, a place they locally called the Acre) to name it but it could have been any such place in the go-go golden age American 1950s. And so whenever Billie (don’t spell it the other way even now, even now when he is long gone from king hell king strivings. Remember what I said about the furies and that set of “nucks”) was not in school, was not humoring his corner boys (including me) with some song or skit down in hang-out back of the elementary school, or was not robbing (“clipping” we called it but robbing was what it was, petty larceny anyway) some uptown Olde Saco merchant of his earthy goods or planning to, he was before the mirror (vanity thy name is Billie or one of thy names is Billie) singing some song but more importantly developing that certain look that was meant to drive the girls wild.

And it worked for a while, a while around the Olde Saco projects for a while, with the local girls (junior division about age twelve or under) who wanted their Elvis moment even if it was once removed. Not that Billie’s look was anything like Elvis’ (in tense moments, Billie fury moments, moments when Elvis got another boost of stardust, maybe the Ed Sullivan Show, to add to his fame Billie would call Elvis’ style pure punk, nothing , nada. All we said was okay Billie, okay). Billie, kind of wiry tough, kind of with a long thin face, and more importantly, with blondish brown hair would had perhaps done better to work off a Bill Haley imitation but the one time I mentioned that to him he exploded (no nucks though) that Bill Haley was yesterday, a has been, a never was, nobody and, maybe with that big sax sound something our parents would listen to. [Billy Haley and his Comets were the jump street in 1955 with their Rock Around The Clock youth anthem.-JLB]

Every time Olde Saco South Elementary School put on a charity talent show, or Saint Sebastian’s ran a church dance with its included talent show between sets during the period from, say, 1956 to 1958 Billie was there. And for several shows running he was the be-bop king hands downs. Beating everybody with his faux renditions ofJailhouse Rock, Hound Dog, Heartbreak Hotel and the like. One time at Saint Sebastian’s when Billie performed, all in black suit (borrowed from a cousin), black shirt, black tie, and white shoes (yah, he did look good that night, looked like the next heavyweight contender that night) the place went wild when he did his rendition of One Night With You. The girls, and not just the twelve year old junior division girls either, hell, maybe not even the twelve years old girls, started storming the stage throwing themselves and whatever they had in their hands at Billie. It was all that he could do for Father Lally, the priest assigned to monitor the church dances, to get order restored and close the hall up for the night after that scene. That Sunday the Monsignor himself, a fierce old fire and brimstone orator from the old school, read from the pulpit that anyone who had been present at the melee had better show up at confession within the week, and be quick about it. At last count about two people showed, and they were not Billie or me. 

Needless to say all through this period the girls would flock around Billie, more so after the San Sebastian episode (the girls from over at the San Sebastian Elementary School and Saint Brigitte’s too started mysteriously showing up at our hang-out) and his “rejects” would wind up with his corner boys (including me). So for all the Olde Saco days and nights of that period, especially those summer nights when for a change of pace Billie would lead us in some doo wop harmony and the girls would, like lemmings to the sea, come gathering around as dusk turned to night we were his biggest promoters. All hail King Billie.

Then one night, one 1958 night, at a church benefit held in the basement of Sainte Brigitte’s Billie’s world came unglued. See he had become something of a “local kid makes good” celebrity by then after winning those local contests. More importantly he had established himself as a girl magnet, girls with dough to buy dreamy guy records, and therefore a prospect in a music world looking for next big thing after Elvis( who had just signed up to do some military service), or maybe by then Jerry Lee. Every record label had scouts out in every nook and cranny to find the next Tupelo honey magic. So Alabaster Records, the big label for new untried and unattached talent, had sent an agent to see Billie do his stuff.

Naturally Billie wanted to impress the agent so he tore into his best current cover, Carl Perkin’s Bopping The Blues. What nobody knew, at least nobody in the audience (except said corner boys), was that his suit, his sweet Billie blue suit, had been quickly made by his mother on the fly from material purchased at some bargain discount joint over on Second Avenue. On the fly in this case meaning that there had been a dispute in the Bradley family about buying Billie a new suit (he already had acquired that San Sebastian black suit as a hand-me-down from his cousin which his father said was good enough) when dough for the rent money was scarce just then A compromise was reached and Mrs. Bradley had purchased the material to make the suit herself. All of this just a couple of days before Billie’s showcase show time. About half way through the performance though first one arm of his suit jacket came flying off and then the other. Needless to say the Alabaster agent wrote Billie off without a murmur.

Here is the funny part. The girls in the audience, those giggling teeny-bopper girls, thought that the arm gag was part of Billie’s act. So for many, many months Billie was followed by an even larger bevy (nice, word, huh) of adoring girls from school and the neighborhood. And we, his loyal corner boys gladly took his “rejects.”

Here is the not funny part though. After than night, after that rejection (the agent had left without a word said to Billie, maybe the unkindest cut of all) something kind of snapped in Billie. I don’t know what it was exactly, call it loss of innocence, project style, although we were already wise to the not having enough dough when others had plenty part. And the breaks in the world breaking to those with some spoon-fed clout part too.

I was the closest of his corner boys to Billie then. The others, sensing some impending disaster or Billie fury busting out, started to move away from his orbit. We would talk for hours about stuff but there was an edge to his dream talk, an edge that hadn’t been there before when we talked about his great big break-through and how he was going to take care of all of us corner boys, and the girls too. Something about the world being fixed a certain way, a certain not Billie way, and it ate at him. He dropped away from his music, from the talent shows and school dances. From that point on the wanna-be gangster began to take over. I stayed with him through part it, through being his look-out man when he was on the “chip,” being his “hold” man when he started doing minor breaking and entering over in plush Ocean City, and, for a minute, when he moved on to more serious stuff. Then I too moved on. The last I heard, and this was a while back, he was doing ten to twenty for armed robbery up at Shawshank. But when William James Bradley, Billie, was in his Elvis moment, yes, when he was in his Elvis moment, he made this whole wide world move.

Won’t You Come See Me Plain Jane-William Hurt’s “Jane Eyre” (1996)-A Film Review    

DVD Review

By Film Critic Sandy Salmon

Jane Eyre, starring William Hurt, Charlotte Gainsbourg, based on the novel by Charlotte Bronte, 1996   

I have already gone through the genesis of how I came to review a now growing bunch of films based on that early 19^th century English author Jane Austen’s works having viewed a film titled The Jane Austen Book Club whose theme was based on the plots of her six major novels. I don’t have to now go into the details of the Jane Austen experience except to cite the obligatory mention that in my young adulthood back down in New Jersey reading Ms. Austen’s books or watching a film adaptation was strictly “girls” stuff. (Except of course an also mandatory mention if you were interested in a girl and she either wanted to rattle on and on about some old time romantic theme from those books or wanted you to take her to a movie which if you expected to get anywhere, and usually it was not anywhere with Austen devotees so don’t lie guys, you were obliged to sit through.) That same youthful standard (including exceptions to the “girls” book aversion) applies to the other big 19^th century English romantic novelist Charlotte Bronte of the infamous Bronte sisters.        

This is where for once the aging process actually produces a positive result. Sitting through this film adaptation of Ms. Bronte’s Jane Eyre starring William Hurt as the brisk Edward Rochester and Charlotte Gainsbourg as why don’t you come see me plain Jane (Rochester’s continued plaintive plea toward her throughout the film) showed me why the Austen/Bronte combination was so strong not only as great literature but as something that would appeal to the hearts of all but the most hardened of young women. That I sat through it with my wife who was in suspense about the fate of her poor Jane added to the pleasure when despite every possible obstacle she gets her man, gets the slippery slope Rochester.        

This is the point where my old friend and fellow film critic here, Sam Lowell, before his recent retirement from the day to day film review work would begin to outline the plot and I have increasingly attempted to follow in his footsteps when reviewing older films. With this important caveat from him since he unlike myself (yet) has actually read the book (and Austen’s as well) so knew that the director here Franco Zeffirelli had eliminated much of the last part of the book when attempting to be true to the author’s plotline the thing became too long for the screen. Still the film adaptation is faithful to the key element of what drove the young girls to distraction and my wife recently plain Jane gets her man. 

Like I said not without a ton of work and a fistful of trials and tribulations along the way starting when Jane’s bitch aunt pawned her off on a hellish orphanage to break her willfulness. Somehow she survived that institutional experience (having actually taught there a couple of years as well as eight years as an inmate) and since she needed to poor and plain fend for herself in this wicked old world sought gainful employment in her chosen profession. That necessity led her to Thornhill Castle and the mysterious and secretive Rochester when she was hired as a governess for his charge/illegitimate daughter. From the beginning when they met by chance on the estate there was no question that the thoughtful and intelligent Jane whatever her plain looks (as opposed to the one Mayfair swell upper-class gold-digger on his trail) and the troubled but ultimately good-hearted and able Rochester were if not a match made in heaven (or “society” earth since as the household administrator said a landlord and governess don’t mesh in that world) then drawn together by some passion not related to looks, class, money or previous experiences.                

Still the road was tough since whatever attraction there was between them there was that little quirky secretive side of Rochester who was vague about his daughter’s mother and the way she was brought to him and more importantly as her world came crashing down on her on her wedding day that he had a mad hatter of a wife living up the penthouse (okay, okay not penthouse but maybe attic). There would be as Sam Lowell suggested more trials and tribulations after that fiasco but a romance novel as great literature or as a Harlequin dime store novel needs to in the end proclaim victory for love-and it does here as well.  

Once More Into The Time Capsule, Part One-The New York Folk Revival Scene in the Early 1960’s-Malvina Reynolds

CD Review

Washington Square Memoirs: The Great Urban Folk Revival Boom, 1950-1970, various artists, 3CD set, Rhino Records, 2001

"Except for the reference to the origins of the talent brought to the city the same comments apply for this CD. Rather than repeat information that is readily available in the booklet and on the discs I’ll finish up here with some recommendations of songs that I believe that you should be sure to listen to:

Disc One; Woody Guthrie on “Hard Travelin’”, Big Bill Broonzy on “Black , Brown And White”, Jean Ritchie on “Nottamun Town”, Josh White on “One Meat Ball” Malvina Reynolds on “Little Boxes”, Cisco Houston on “Midnight Special”, The Weavers on “Wasn’t That A Time”, Glenn Yarborough on “Spanish Is A Loving Tongue”, Odetta on “I’ve Been Driving On Bald Mountain”, The New Lost City Ramblers on “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down”, Bob Gibson and Bob Camp on “Betty And Dupree”, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott on “San Francisco Bay Blues”, Peggy Seeger on “First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, Hoyt Axton on “Greenback Dollar” and Carolyn Hester on “Turn And Swing Jubilee”."


Malvina Reynolds on “Little Boxes”. Like everyone else from the “Generation of ‘68” who paid attention to folk music on their way to greater social and political consciousness I know this song from Pete Seeger’s rendition. I only knew the name Malvina Reynolds much later. I only ‘knew’ the musical work of Ms. Reynold much later through the efforts of Rosalie Sorrels who did a whole CD compilation of Malvina's work (reviewed in this space). The lyrics to “Little Boxes”, by the way, are a very concise and condensed expression of the way many of us were feeling about the future bourgeois society had set up for us back in the early 1960s. As the song details-it was not pretty. I submit that it still is not pretty.

Malvina Reynolds: Song Lyrics and Poems

Little Boxes

Notes: words and music by Malvina Reynolds; copyright 1962 Schroder Music Company, renewed 1990. Malvina and her husband were on their way from where they lived in Berkeley, through San Francisco and down the peninsula to La Honda where she was to sing at a meeting of the Friends’ Committee on Legislation (not the PTA, as Pete Seeger says in the documentary about Malvina, “Love It Like a Fool”). As she drove through Daly City, she said “Bud, take the wheel. I feel a song coming on.”


Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,1
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same,
And there's doctors and lawyers,
And business executives,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry,
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university,
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

When Women And Men Made Horror Movies For Keeps-Vincent Price’s “House On Haunted Hill” (1959)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

House On Haunted Hill, starring Vincent Price, Elisha Cook directed by wild man horror film icon Billy Castle, 1959       

Sometimes Sandy Salmon the recently hired day to day film critic in this space throws me a “no-brainer” like the film under review mad monk Vincent Price’s Billy Castle-directed horror film House on Haunted Hill. Reason: when I was a kid I spent many, my mother might say too many, Saturday afternoons in the darks of the Strand Theater in downtown North Adamsville watching black and white double feature films to die for in the late 1950s, early 1960s. Mostly I was interested in film noir from the 1940s which Mr. Cadger the affable owner would play to cut down on overhead on first-run expenses and ran what today would be called retrospectives or even film festivals. But whenever a new horror movie was up he was on top of that knowing that kids “liked” to get scared out of their wits and would fill the seats to capacity (and buy gads of popcorn and candy which he told me one time was really how he made money on that now long gone but not forgotten theater turned to condos). So something like the film under review legitimate scary guy Vincent Price’s House on Haunted Hill would be like catnip to kids, including me.

Now everybody knows today, especially the kids who still make up the key demographic for horror films, that these films are driven by max daddy technological thrills and spills, a mile a minute, the more the better. And maybe today’s kids like them. But back in what was the golden age of horror films, the black and white film age where the shadows mean as much as what was shown the thing was driven by plot and not as much by gismos. And this film is a classic example which when I checked with a few guys from the old neighborhood recently scared the “Bejesus” out of them to quote one old friend. So what seems kind of hokey today was the cat’s meow back in the day.         

Here’s the play. This rich decadent playboy type guy Loren, Price’s role, and his youngish fourth wife are ready to party down in a house rented by Loren. (That house according to the blurb a Frank Lloyd Wright creation which now looked fairly modern compared to the usual Victorian house filled with odd spaces and menacing from the outside no question. The poster for the film shows such a Victorian-style house which is a little disingenuous. Worse though were the posters back then showing seemingly half-naked girls being exploited and yet no such thing happened in the film to the chagrin of teenage boyhood.) The game to be played was simple-five unrelated guests who needed dough badly for various reasons including just having that amount would each receive ten K if they made it through the night in the locked house. Fair enough.         

What the collective guest list did not know, would not find out until the end when it too late is that one of the five was a “ringer” had some other additional motive. Once everybody was “in” and locked down the games began. First Loren’s good-looking if diabolical blonde wife was killed which set the place in an uproar. Then one young woman was harassed enough that she would wind up killing the nefarious and weird Loren. Again fair enough. If you play with fire you are sure to get burned at some point. The thing of it was though this whole scene was a house of mirrors despite all the screams and odd occurrences. The wife had not been killed for she was part of a plot to kill her husband for his fortune along with her boyfriend, that Trojan horse on the guest list. And Loren was not killed either because he was on to the plot to kill him by his wife and her lover. In the end that wife and lover took the fall, went down the bloody road. In the end too between the screams and shadows (and even the hokey lover’s skeleton controlled by Loren to scare his wife to perdition) I, and my friends, were scared like crazy. Enough said.          

"Put Out The Fire In Your Head"-With The Line From Patti Griffin’s “You Are Not Alone” In Mind

By Special Guest Writer Greg Gordon

Normally I don’t write for blog and on-line publications preferring still the hard copy route to have my work appreciated by any who would appreciate my efforts. The reason that I am writing this little comment is the editor here, my old friend Pete Markin, has asked me to comment on a line from Patti Griffin’s song You Are Not Alone where she asks her lover to “put on the fire in your head”-calm down, take it easy, be with her. I am not personally much into music so that I did not know the song, or the line from the song, nor did I know who Patti Griffin was. But the line intrigued me. Intrigued me more when Pete told me the reason that he wanted me to comment rather than take a stab at it himself since he loves the song is that he wanted my take on who among our still standing old-time from the neighborhood friends could rightfully be asked to do what the phrase asks. And he included himself in the mix so for all practical purposes he is recusing himself.

Now Pete Markin, Seth Garth, Frankie Riley, Fritz Taylor, Bart Webber, Si Lannon, Jack Callahan, Josh Breslin and about fifty other guys, from what Pete calls the Generation of ’68, whom Pete and I have come to know over the years whatever neighborhood they grew up in, mostly poor white guys like me and him, whatever achievements they have accumulated over a lifetime, whatever heartaches they have suffered as well they, we all have one thing in common. We all have since youth, maybe since, hell, maybe from the womb, had outsized wanting habits, have had the hunger. So each and every one of us one way or another could fall under the sign of “put out the fire in your head.”       

For me it has always been an outsized and maybe overblown sense that I have been under-appreciated as a writer now that Gothic detective novels, the niche I had made for myself started way back in maybe middle school when my English teacher Miss Winot encouraged me to flush out my private detective Galen Fiske, are a dime a dozen, maybe cheaper. So maybe I should chill out about it, throw water on that last dream and not to worry. That said I do not intend to go chapter and verse over every guy whom I have mentioned above but give a few words and here and there. I might as well start with Pete who has always had this thing about this woman, let’s call her Josie to give her a name whom he treated like dirt when he was young and was crazy to go to bed with every dame who gave him a second look. Leaving Josie holding the bag.

He had not seen her in about forty years, didn’t know what had become of her (although he belatedly wished her well) but nevertheless on whiskey-sodden barstool nights in some dank barroom he will inevitably bring up her name, his sins against her, and that wistful what might have been had he had the sense God gave geese. I know I have been on the stool beside him. This despite the intervening three marriages and assorted well-behaved kids who came with them. So that fire in his head has been smoldering for a long time, caused him some sweaty, dreamless nights. At this point I don’t think it will ever go out. Some things are like that.

Fritz Taylor’s fire is maybe really fire, really fire that he brought down on the heads of people in Vietnam with whom he had no quarrel, never had except his friends and neighbors at his local draft board in the days when that was the way non-enlistees got called up to military service called his ticket, gave him the ride. He spent years hiding from the “real” world with a bunch of brothers under the bridge out in Southern California trying to drink/drug/cut himself to some place of peace but that vagabond stuff never did the trick. Nor did his three marriages with a mixed bag of good and bad kids. Will still drink himself to a coma, or maybe sleep is better and yell out of nowhere An Loc (a small town/ village/hamlet which he and his men burned to the ground one awful August 1968 night). That fire too seems like an endless sleep.

Now that the reader is getting my drift, getting that maybe that Patty Griffin song, those lyrics might not be susceptible to dousing I will like I said not go through the whole litany of the fire nights among the guys. But one last case should sum things up a bit. Josh Breslin is a guy we met, those of us from the old North Adamsville neighborhood, out in the San Francisco Summer of Love, 1967 night. Josh, a little younger than us but a kindred working class guy from up in Olde Saco, Maine, was a real good-looking guy whose moniker was the Prince of Love in those moniker-filled days. Had half the girls around Golden Gate Park in something like his harem. For a while anyway. Then he got caught into the grasp of a woman we called (and will still call her here) Mustang Sally and can draw your own conclusions about why she took that name. The long and short of it was that before too long she got pregnant. Josh was set to marry her or something like that. One night she split we think with a guy named Pirate Johnny and we/he never heard from her again. So Josh, the love them and leave them Prince of Love, too would on moonless ill-begotten nights wonder out loud what had happened to his child. That after two marriages and a parcel of I am not sure what kind of kids. So maybe Patti and her song are wrong. Maybe you can’t put out the fire in your head.            

“One Johnny Rocco More Or Less Is Not Worth Dying For ” –With Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart’s “Key Largo” In Mind     

By Special Guest Commentator Lance Lawrence

Here is the genesis for this commentary. I don’t normally as much as I love the old time 1940s and 1950s black and white movies do film reviews here or in other hard copy and on-line publications I write for. That was usually handled by my old friend, old neighborhood North Adamsville growing up friend, and colleague at this site Sam Lowell. The “was” part is because Sam has recently retired from the day to day fuss of film editor handing it over to our common colleague Sandy Salmon. He has taken the outlandish and over-the-top title of film editor emeritus. That has allowed him to do occasional commentary without the hassle of every impending deadline and having to watch film he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about (his, our, old-time neighborhood expression which I think is self-explanatory.)              

Sam recently had a problem having to do with the film Key Largo I am keeping in mind as I do this piece. Sandy who does not like doing old-time black and white movie reviews as a rule had asked Sam to review this film. He agreed figuring this would be an easy punt since he had always been crazy for Humphrey Bogart films and had always been half in love with foxy Lauren Bacall ever since she and Bogart steamed up the theater in the very loose film adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have And Have Not. Also many years ago he had already reviewed the film and could use that as a basis for a current review. (Sam never throws anything out and of course now the  computer doesn’t have to so he probably has his first grade papers stored somewhere.) Once he had watched, no, re-watched the film though he had another idea. His angle was looking at the Humphrey Bogart character, ex-World War II soldier Frank McCloud, from the perspective of a guy who had had a hard time coming back the “real” world after the war like many guys probably did (and do so now in Iraq-Afghanistan time as well).    

That is when he thought of me, although really it is the late Peter Paul Markin always and forever known as Scribe, another North Adamsville corner boy of ours that he was really thinking about when he had that grand idea (his expression). (The late Scribe not to be confused with the administrator of this site another North Adamsville guy speaking of nepotism who took the Scribe’s name as his on-line moniker in honor of our fallen comrade.) See the Scribe after he got back from Vietnam where he had been an infantryman and had seen some pretty horrible stuff which he seldom talked about had had serious problems coming back the “real” war after his war. Had been up and down emotionally for a while out in California where he lived after he got back from Vietnam. Had once he settled down a bit (for a while) taken up the journalist’s life which he had gone to college for before he made fateful decision to drop out his sophomore year to get tangled up in the Summer of Love experience out in San Francisco in 1967 (and since he had no student deferment was subject to draft and induction into the military and therefore “fateful” is the right word).         

While working for the now long gone but then influential alternative newspaper East Bay Other the Scribe was handed a plum assignment from the editor Sally Jacobs. Handed it because he was the only Vietnam veteran, the only one with enough street “cred” to do the assignment. It seems that a whole bunch of guys were in the Scribe’s boat, had had a tough time coming back to the “real” world and had formed a “community” or better communities down in Southern California along the riverbanks, railroad tracks and under the multifarious bridges. He was assigned to tell their stories, those that wanted to talk and some did and some didn’t. Those who did formed the basis for what was called the Brothers Under The Bridge series which ran for a while in the newspaper and won the Scribe some awards and stuff.    

So what does the Scribe’s work back then have to do with Sam Lowell asking me to give my take on a guy like ex-soldier Frank McCloud. The Scribe, the logical choice, is no longer with us having succumbed to those Vietnam demons, demons which led to his addiction to cocaine as relief and another fateful and fatal decision to do drug dealing which eventually got him two slugs in the head down in Mexico when a deal went bad. Most of us who knew him count him as an uncounted casualty of the war and maybe his name should be etched in that black granite down in Washington with the 58, 000 others. But we haven’t spoken about it much of late although maybe before we pass on we should make an effort even if we have to get a black granite slab and do it up ourselves in North Adamsville Square. Since the Scribe can’t do the job Sam asked me because I too unlike him, who felt it needed a soldier to soldier touch, was a Vietnam veteran as well. Although I didn’t have as many problems as the Scribe I had my fair share in the immediate aftermath of my military discharge. I have written about those experiences extensively elsewhere so I need not repeat them here after all this is Frank McCloud’s story not mine. More importantly I have taken up the Scribe’s cudgels and written plenty about my fellow Vietnam veterans who are still haunted by that fucking war. Still haven’t come back to the “real” world even though the hobo camps are long vanished and they have been left to their own inadequate devises.

I want to describe Frank McCloud, ex-Major in the European Theater of World War II under the sign of ‘one Johnny Rocco more or less in the world isn’t worth dying for ” a classic line uttered a few times throughout the film. That refers to the villain of the piece bastard gangster Johnny Rocco, played by gangster film fixture Edward G. Robinson, deported by the federal authorities as a no account blight alien residing in Cuba but late of Chicago and the gang wars that dominated that town back in the day and how good men let guys like Johnny breathe and breed.  

      

 As the background to why soldier Frank McCloud  had taken the Greyhound bus down to the Keys, down to Key Largo at the beginning one of America land’s end. Why he was to wind up at that very spot locking horns with one Johnny Rocco probably the last thing he had expected to deal with in sunny tropical Florida. Why he had been drifting along in the post-war period after that war had taken the starch out of him, made him cynical. Why he had, sound familiar, a tough time coming back to the “real” world after slogging through the Italian campaign. See he had gone back to the old job he held before the war but just couldn’t make it make sense. Became a drifter, day worker, low rung work, a man of no fixed abode. Not quite down in the under the bridge jungle like out in post-Vietnam California but still restless and moving aimlessly.

So one day Frank decided to take that fateful bus ride down to the Keys to make sense of the life, and death, of one of the guys under his command whose grieving father, played by Lionel Barrymore, and a young done on the run wife, played by Lauren Bacall running the Largo Hotel. Supposedly this was just a courtesy call at least that was what he told one of Johnny’s boys, guys like Johnny always travelled with a “don’t give a fuck” entourage when he was told by that guy there was no room for him in the inn. Then the damn hurricane winds started picking up and that tidy metaphor-filled event would blow the lid off Frank’s duel with the real world.      

Enter Johnny, no, enter a snoopy cop who was looking for a couple of wild-eyed Seminoles who fled the coop on him and sought safe harbor at the hotel. That copper after taking a beating took a couple to the heart by dear Johnny just to prove he had not lost the old touch.  Along the way Frank had chances to show some of the bravery he had shown in war but he was no longer the knight-errant going after bad guys for other guys who would not give him a fair shake. That when he said it all, made it clear the, his post-war world would be every man and woman for his or herself. That shocked that dead G.I.s people, that broken down old man and that fetching wife who had heard better things about Frank from that son-husband’s letters but that was that.

Now is the time to tell why undesirable alien Johnny Rocco was in some stinking off-season deadbeat hotel facing down hurricane winds and playing with fire-power. He was trying to pass paper, trying to unload counterfeit money for dimes on the dollar to a rival gangster and his confederates. This hole-in-the-wall hotel was the meeting place for the exchange which actually happened despite the hurricane coming to blow all the people all away. Problem (beside the sheriff showing up and finding his copper deputy washed up by hurricane) was the big yacht he arrived on had been taken to a safe harbor by the skipper. No boat. No boat to flee back that ninety or so miles to friendly Havana.    

      

Well almost no boat. See among his skills our man Frank had been an expert sailor, had been so since he was a kid. He made the mistake of telling one of Johnny’s boys that fact when he was helping to secure the hotel’s boat against the hurricane blow. So naturally Johnny latched onto the Frank-boat idea as the way to get him, his boys, and that ill-gotten dough back to Cuba. Johnny had taken the measure of the man, had seen that Frank had that beaten down look a lot of returning soldiers had after finding all the patriotic stuff,  all the making the world safe against the night-takers from guys like Hitler and Mussolini down to punk gangster Johnny Rocco was a lot of hooey. Johnny’s entreaty picking up on what Frank had said previously that after all what was it to small guy Frank McCloud whether a putting a guy like Johnny out of commission was worth breaking a sweat for played its part. After a couple of threats to put Frank on the rack and to the disappointment of that disillusioned old man and that comely daughter-in-law he consented.        

You never know what will push a man’s buttons, and what won’t. Given a handy pistol filched from Johnny by the gangster’s moll, Gaye, seemed to have put life back into Frank, got him thinking maybe another small fight against the night-takers was in order. In the end there would now be no brothers under the bridge fate for our boy. It was a thing of beauty to watch as Frank totally outmaneuvered Johnny and his four confederates, one overboard with a nice turning maneuver, another bang-bang, a third bang-bang, ditto the fourth. Then the inevitable mano a mano with evil Johnny. Johnny Too Bad. Johnny gone to push up the daisies. Yeah, you never know what will push a man’s buttons. Bring him back to the “real” world. I wished the Scribe could have figured that one out.