Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-Forget That Stuff You Learned In Art Class About The Sublime-Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock Unchained- In The Midnight Hour Gliding Through “Number 31” (1950) Without Wings

By Laura Perkins

Mercifully Sam Lowell has my back. The merciful part first. Recently I, with Sam as my sparring partner then, made my first big group of enemies at this publication when I had the audacity to suggest that late 19^th painter John Singer Sargent’s Madame X’s birdlike nose was maybe a sign of profession beauty in her day but was strictly Bride of Frankenstein these days (with no disrespect to Mary Shelley and her divine fictional creation Frankenstein which we paid homage to on the 200^th anniversary of its publication in 2018). I added a few off-hand remarks that professional beauties, and Madame X was no exception, in French high society then, maybe now too, slept their way to the top. That in turn was Sam’s central thesis which I thought was a little rough on the much- maligned woman. 

Then Sam, who has spent his career as a film review editor and writer and thus keen to find the back story, told me about the memoir of Madame X’s personal maid who gave details about her role as the one who let the “guests” up the back stairway, sometimes when her husband was down below. The maid had originally no ax to grind, would probably not have “told all” except Monsieur LeBlanc, Sargent’s paint supplier in Paris (and who would sent the paints over to London when  Sargent fled there since the finicky artist could find nobody else who could mix blacks, browns and greys like him) had been much maligned when he let on that he had shared Madame’s bed when she was “slumming” among the plebeians and Parisian high society bared their daggers at such impertinence and she wanted to set the record straight. So Sam at least was not far off in his understanding of this, his term modern day Whore of Babylon although I would have held back on her personal life since she took enough of a beating from that same self-satisfied Parisian crowd.                 

I, we, on that occasion went hammer and tong on the substance of John White Alexander’s (another three- name guy which I have noted elsewhere is so bourgeois, started out of some need to distinguish themselves from the two-name Joe Jones common man or to show their descent from some Mayflower stowaways or more likely to cover up their tracks around questions about their births) Isabella and the Pot of Basil (so-called) which was merely a cover for a kinky drug-induced (opium) erotic severed head cult which goes back to antiquity. As it turned out we were right, or I should say Sam a 1960s Summer of Love veteran and an Army veteran as well so very well-versed in the drug milieu while I choke the first time I even whiffed marijuana was right, that the pot contained the crucial poppies needed for the opium dreams. Sam the minute we entered the Museum of Fine Arts room in Boston where the painting hung sensed even before he went close to the painting that the basil, so-called symbol of love or something was the normal Victorian hogwash covering up not only Isabella’s, or rather the model who posed for Alexander, junkie drug addiction but the artist’s as well. Again, back story Sam pointed out that you never saw Alexander in short sleeves even on the hottest days the better to cover up the tell-tale tracks on his arms. Moreover along the way we found out that there had been an international modern-day crack-down on the devotees of this bizarre cult and even the Italian authorities back in the Renaissance were on Isabella trail once they got suspicious of all the well-bred young women who were hanging around when the well-paid executioners were doing their work.

I won’t even go into the hell broth we suffered from yahoos and high-brows alike when we exposed Whistler’s The White Girl as essentially an ad for a modern day Whore of Babylon (which I agree with Sam is what is true here although I still differ on that characterization for Madame X), the key being the symbolic wolf’s head and fur the model is standing on. This woman was allegedly four-name Whistler’s girlfriend, mistress, paramour so it makes sense, high Victorian hypocritical sense that he would not just put a big “A” or something on her head but something more symbolic but also making it clear she was “available.” Nice guy “pimping” his girlfriend just ti prove he could do art for art’s sake. Yes, Whistler was hard, very hard on his women. The high brows defending their own, in this case a three-named guy Doyle who was in deep denial about the real stuff going on among his forebears. Worse though and even Sam who always says he is beyond surprises at his age is that strangely, or maybe not given the times we live in we got most of our deep-freeze blasts from troll evangelicals worried about their kids maybe reading about sex and eroticism in art. Yes, I know, weird. We have already kicked that around and the good folk seem to have backed off once we got to 20^th century art which to them must have seemed a cesspool of filth and vulgar sex but no self-respecting kid would be caught dead reading some old fogey take on the meaning of modern art. Yes, weird indeed.

Those storms passed by and Sam and I took the whole experience as the overhead of doing something a little on the tangent side, a little off-beat but well with the parameters of art work analysis even if we are not as Doyle thought was his biggest contention professional art critics. What solidified us though was our firm contention that all serious 20^th century art all the way up to Pop and Op Art are centrally about sex, eroticism and sensuality. (We both agree the jury is still out on 21^st art especially Minimalism although I have noted that Matty Gove’s works reek of pure sex, rough sex to boot and that Dan Blake’s later works are nothing but almost pornographic depictions of various sexual acts. Matty when he read the piece sent me a message mentioning how perceptive I was to see that his signature paint, Three Intertwined Shapes, was his homage to S&M culture.)

As with many of our joint projects we are solid on the central point and disagree over particulars. (Sam has been an advisor to me since the first Singer piece although in the background where he remains since he refused to take the on-going self-selected art works assignment when first offered by site manager Greg Green.) That was the case when we put our first painting, the famous one by Edward Hopper from 1942 Nighthawks under the microscope. I basically took that narrative as a busted romance which tottered on the woman being ticked off at her guy for being drunk (note the glassy unfocused distracted eyes of the classic midnight drunk) and not bed-ready. See my take was that Hopper was pissed off at his wife Jo who was the female model for not letting him use a younger woman he had contacted (and was sexually interested in and very interested in painting in the nude except JO nixed that idea, a non-starter as long as she still breathed). Sam I thought was crasser in his narrative that this scene was a classic late-night diner prostitute pick-up spot and the guy was a John deciding whether to go for paradise or not. Sam finally agreed with my contention that Hopper was pissed off at his wife for being a prude but as usual had a little back story to lay on me that the young thing he was interested in painting he was seeing her and painting her nude. She would be the young model in the roadside whorehouse painting where she was sunning herself while the old madame was counting the nightly take. So you see we have different takes on occasion within the context of the broader thesis.

I hope nobody laughs but I almost wish those troll evangelicals were still yapping at my heels. Reason: one Clarence Dewar, art critic for Art Today who somehow saw that Hopper piece and flipped out. Naturally Mr. Dewar had to sharpen his knife with the fact that I am not an art critic (and neither by extension is Sam Lowell). I have repeatedly mentioned that hard fact which is a great deal of the reason that Greg Green gave me the project and has supported my work all along against all-comers. A fresh quirky look is what he has called it and has said so to his various fellow editor drinking buddies when they question the wisdom of letting a quirky dame run amuck with the crazies and the paid professionals hugging their respective turfs.

Here is the dagger through the heart though-the so-called fatal blow. The one that will send me back to the cheap seats. Mr. Dewar is of the theory that since the Impressionists, and that grouping is an important divide in modern art all art has been a search for the, get this, sublime. His argument is that with the invention of the camera artists have moved away from representational art, away from the line, color combo that drove most previous art. Apparently the further away from line-color coordination the purer the art form and hence the closer to the, get this, sublime. So where Sam and I saw a classic 20^th century sex scene one way or another Mr. Dewar sees Hopper say as making a big splash statement about the isolation of modern society and the decline of the individual. Individuals being afloat in a lost world which I guess can be cured by looking at some painting not with lust in their hearts but seeing a “terrible beauty is born” as the poet Yeats would have. To place that search in some midnight Joe and Nemo’s diner with a bunch of besotted drunks and a rum-dum short order cook who overcooked the hamburgers and recycled the coffee beans for the fifth time that evening is the epitome of, get this, sublime.         

   

Sam and I had a good laugh about that one although Sam says we have not heard the last of Mr. Dewar since he carries some weight, no what did Sam call it, some water, in art circles in New York and in the old days he was a student of Clement Greenberg who practically invented that silly sublime theory that has kept more lame art curators, art collectors, art directors, and so-called high-toned gallery owners looking in the wrong places than you can shake a stick at, maybe a brush too. One night Sam and I did get into a discussion about the place of the sublime in art history and how it has choked off more serious discussion than it has provoked. After a couple of hours, we were worn out by the place where the discussion was heading and reaffirmed our commitment to our own thesis about sex and sensuality (read eroticism, okay) as the driving force in modern art (and don’t forget maybe post-modern art too).

A couple of days later we saw Jackson Pollock’s Number 31 done in the late 1940s when he was the max daddy of what Greenberg called action painters and more generally the key figure to boost Abstract Expressionism, the so-called Greenberg search for the perfect break from line to pure form. Almost at the same time we both blurred out (to the annoyance of a couple of matronly art devotees at the next painting) “the thing reeks of sex” and I think I said primordial sex, trying to be polite with those old biddies present. Originally Sam and I were going to play off each other insights about Pollock’s place in the great sex and sensuality search presented by his drip paintings (although a serious argument can be made that during the early 1940s Jackson went amuck with the brush and in an earlier age would have been stoned to death by the sex police or at a minimum has his works burned at the stake).

Since then through internal meetings with Greg Green we have decided to give Sam an upcoming “unchained” space to run off his mouth about the genesis of his various takes on art before we put him back in the bottle. Basically I agree with Sam that Pollock was doing some very weird sexual things out there in Long Island in that shed, with or without Lee Krasner around. That recent testing has found some foreign materials which are not paint, which are some kind of human fluids, mixed into the brew. I will leave it there for now and let Sam give his, own take which will only confirm what those old biddies didn’t want to hear- Sublime terrible beauty sublime not old Dewar’s silly sublime but earthy tones down in the human grind and mud sublime.      

Once Again- Everybody Loves A Con Artist-Except That One Being Conned-Kurt Russell And Matt Dillon’s “The Art of the Steal” (2013)-A Short Film Review

By Si Lannon

The Art Of The Steal, starring Kurt Russell, Matt Dillon, Terence Stamp, 2013

Two axioms. Con artists are born not made. Everybody loves a con-except the victim. I knew Eddie Daley, the legendary con artist who swindled then multimillionaire J. B. Thompson out of half a million back in the 1960s on a non-existent stock deal when that sum meant something unlike today when it is just walking around money (the scheme something out of the famous buddy film with Robert Redford and the late Paul Newman in The Sting although way before but with fewer moving parts and thus less likely to fail-another axiom but only applicable to those in the con trade and so not listed along with the two generic axioms.)  Eddie even in elementary school was on “the con” grabbling kids’ milk money on some golden goose scheme which all it did was let him grab some cool clothes with his ill-gotten proceeds, maybe sent his long list of girlfriends flowers and rings. I was one of his victims, his greedy hungry victim the only kind you want, so I know the validity of those axioms first hand.

I know too that Eddie never stopped the perpetual con until he stopped a bullet about twenty years ago long after I stopped knowing about what he was doing and his whereabouts in some kind of fucked-up mess involving one of the drug cartels down in Central America. He must have been playing with fire and must have been tasting product to even think about a scam on those guys. The thing is that what one of the guys, Captain Crunch but everybody nodded and bought into the idea in the film under review The Art of the Steal said is true-you basically have to keep going until you wind up in the history books, the con hall of fame where guys reverently write about your exploits. Or go back to selling life insurance or vacuum cleaners door to door, something like that.  Maybe that is where Eddie’s head was at when the deal went south on him.   

To the next candidate for the Hall. Captain Crunch who did some serious time for a failed caper in Poland, courtesy of his snitching thieving little brother Nick. At that point from what we learned in the course of the film Nick was the brains of the operation (was the Eddie Daley figure on the endless con) and the Captain was strictly day labor, the wheelman, essential but still day labor. Rode a fast bike, car, trolley train whatever was necessary but fast. The MO there (and later you would be surprised how most cons will basically do a variation of whatever worked back when they were figuring stuff out) was to sell some connected Eastern European mobster a stolen Gauguin, or what he thought was stolen but which was a poor forgery. (Another rule to keep in mind if you are working the art forgery racket is at least let the paint on the forgery dry before moving the damn thing.) Mobster man got angry and Captain Crunch’s weasel brother to save his own crummy ass sent Captain over for a nickel, at least that is what the Captain wound up doing. In any case enough time to plot a serious revenge, work out many kinks in those sleepless nights when you worried about what the guy in the next bunk was up to. And hope it was not you and that pretty boy face of yours.   

A con can’t help being a con, born remember and the key is that anything that smacks of success is liable to seem foolproof-that and pure greed for openers is enough to get Nick, you remember Nick  Captain Crunch’s sleaze-ball brother who rolled him over to keep himself out of that hell-hole Polish prison where his own pretty boy looks would have him down as somebody’s hands-off “girlfriend” in about two seconds flat. When I first heard the scheme Captain figured to pull I thought it had too many moving parts, and it probably did. Mainly I was worried that Captain, never having been anything but a wheelman and cheap carny daredevil was out of his league, should have pulled things back a bit but Captain knew his scumbag brother only too well. The more he added the wetter Nicky’s lips got.

Captain first set up a fake manuscript ploy, a rare book with the idea once it was known to be stolen the inevitable “have to have” collectors would be lined up down the hall. Maybe this is no axiom but important nevertheless in high-end cultural cons as greedy as the con is there are a million collectors ready to pounce the minute they heard the item had been purloined just to have in in their inner sanctum private stash. Why, except the ever painful feeling every time I go to the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum seeing those still empty frames, do you think I knew that the art thieves on that caper would have no problem on the black market getting rid of the merchandise, the stuff has probably changed hands a few times by now.

Here is the beauty of Captain’s idea he “sells” the idea to Nicky of not only grabbing one copy but making a bunch of copies and “satisfying” the laundry list of collectors with their own fake manuscript copies. Who are the collectors going to tell if they discover the damn thing is bogus, a fake? The thing is that it costs plenty of upfront dough to do good fake jobs and Nick is the only one with ready cash to front most of the deal. Reel him in. Reel him in good Captain. And he does with an added kicker. Nicky had stolen a Seurat art work, you know the French pointillist, and was trying to move it after stiffing his partner in crime who needless to say was pissed and ready to stiff him as part of Captain’s scheme. After Nicky fronts his share of the start-up costs of the manuscript he is ready to take delivery and sell to whoever wants the things at a nice mark-up. Problem: the whole con from start to finish was nothing but thin air. Meanwhile governmental agents who had been watching Nicky for a while pounced on him for the art theft. Meanwhile Captain has had a bunch of copies of the Seurat made and easy street beckons. Nice, except for poor Nicky who now has to watch his bunkmate’s every move.

You know Eddie Daley should have branched out into art cons not some crazy gabacho idea of ripping off the drug cartel boys. Maybe he would have wound up in the Hall of Fame rather than down in some lonesome grave who knows where.      

The Boy With Two Left Feet-With Fred Astaire And Ginger Roger’s 1935 Film Roberta In Mind

By Sam Lowell  

Remember the expression made famous, or infamous depending on your perspective, about old soldiers never dying but just fading away. Well it appears that yours truly, Sam Lowell, now supposedly placed out to pasture is still taking every opportunity to sneak a comment or quasi-film review as he fades into the sunset. Today’s comment concerns a film review that new film critic Sandy Salmon did a few days ago on the 1935 film Roberta starring the prolific dance team of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire with Paris and high fashion as the backdrop. Whatever the backdrop, whatever, as Sandy pointed out, the scriptwriter put down for plot the whole exercise was strictly as a vehicle for Rogers and Astaire bursting into song and/or dancing to the high heavens. Take that for what it is worth but what interests me is a comment Sandy made about his own youthful, well, two left feet, which made his social life, meaning his high school date life rather tenuous. Today I join the club, the club of two left feet dreamers that they were sweeping some damsel off her feet, or at least keeping off her feet, Fred Astaires.        

Naturally a story goes with it. See in high school I was sweet, okay, okay I had a “crush” on this girl from my sophomore English class, Theresa Wallace, based on the great conversations we had about literature mostly I think then on the work of Thomas Hardy and various other English authors that I, and she, were crazy for. I think she liked me too although I was a little shy and backward about picking up any feminine hints and furthermore had heard nothing on the high speed grapevine which would convey that information with such candor that it would be the envy of any professional intelligence organization. The big thing that I was interested in was whether she was taken, “going steady” in the terms of the day. That question got answered in the negative fortunately for in our neighborhood, among the corner boys in the know, if a girl was taken then that signaled “hands-off” as a question of honor although I later, too late, found out that tradition was honored more in the breech than the observance. The big thing here was that Theresa was “single.”          

We were having a conversation during lunch break one day, don’t ask me what the gist of the conversation was, when out of the blue Theresa mentioned that he parents were really strict, were hard-shell 12^th Street Baptists which I guess then was pretty serious stuff although I had my own problems with my Roman Catholic religion so I wasn’t in a position to evaluate the seriousness of her family’s religious bent. What she then said which gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach was that they would not allow her to go out on dates, not with boys, not double dates, nothing. The next thing she said though sent me to heaven or something like that, happy anyway. She, after something like a civil war when she described the situation to me, had persuaded them to let her go to the Spring Frolic, the big sophomore class dance. She had to go alone or with her girlfriends but no boys were coming to the door and no boys were to take her home. I guess from the restrictions it was a close thing whether they would let her dance with boys at the dance. The important thing was that she was wondering whether I was going or not. Now usually I avoided school dances (church ones too) like the plague after what happened in seventh grade at the Christmas dance which I will describe a little shortly. My idea for her before she told me about her parents strictures was maybe ask her to the movies or to go to Doc’s Drugstore to listen to the jukebox but not to a dance, no way. But Theresa gave me such a smile while she was asking if I was going or not it put me in a quandary. Then she said although I couldn’t pick her up she would meet me at the dance and we could have a few dances together if I liked. If I liked. You know I was going to the dance after that invitation come hell or high water.                

      

That brings up the why of my serious avoidance of dances. Back in seventh grade I was something of a good guy for girls to talk too without being fresh, showing some respect. For that I caught the eye of Betsy Binstock, the prettiest girl in seventh grade, who came up to me one day around Thanksgiving and asked me if I would take her to the Christmas dance. You know what I said so we don’t even have to go into that. I was thrilled but I also knew that I knew nothing about dancing except some silly stuff I had seen on American Bandstand where the kids were really cool in their dance steps. So I, after my first full-press getting ready for a date (mouthwash, deodorant, hair oil, etc.) picked up Betsy and we walked the half mile or so to the junior high school we attended. The dance, as always, was held in the gym festooned to try to hide the fact that it was a gym and not a dance hall. Unsuccessfully. I was excited just to be seen with Betsy and I noticed guys, guys I hung around with too, checking me out on my good luck. Once the dance began there were several songs played on the cranky record player which because we are talking about the pristine age of roll and roll which did not require dancing close together I was able to get through.

Then the other shoe fell, fell on Betsy. The junior DJ who was working the record player played a slow one, played Save The Last Dance For Me (of course I would remember the name of the song that would do me in). So we started to dance which Betsy was very good at. Needless to say I was not and accidently tripped over her feet causing her to fall. That fall was the bitter end. For the rest of the evening-the very long evening- Betsy made a point of limping every chance she got. Worse, worse in the seventh grade social universe, she let Lenny Balfour take home. Done for.

With that sad ass story in mind I decided that in the few weeks remaining until the Spring Frolic I would take some dance lessons from a friend of mine’s older sister. I swore him to secrecy and he held up his end of the bargain. His sister did the best she could and although I had improved somewhat every step I took was cause for a nervous breakdown on my part, maybe hers too. So the big night came. I was dressed to look good (what the hell you do learn some social graces by being around girls, women) and Theresa came in a little later with a girlfriend looking like a delicate bud. We both blushed a bit when she spotted me. Once again, pretty much the norm in rock and roll times at dances, the first few were fast ones where you could just gyrate on your own and cause no pain. Just before intermission the paid DJ played a slow one to end the first half of the dance. Played Moon River I think. Things did not go well so I will confess to a little forgetfulness on the song played. But here is why things did not go well. Theresa stepped all over my feet. At intermission both of us flustered Theresa said maybe we should go down to the nearby beach instead of staying at the dance since she said she had something to explain to me.             

As we walked down to the beach Theresa, half in tears, told me because of her family’s religious views she had never really learned how to do so. She had asked her girlfriend, and had sworn her to secrecy, to teach her some steps, but she just could not get the hang of it and had been worried that I might find fault with her since I was such a good dancer. (She didn’t know only because of her being all over my feet I didn’t get a chance at hers.) She was sorry that she had two-left feet. I mentioned, no, I confessed to her, my own fragile efforts. We laughed. Then I suggested maybe we should start a club for people with two-left feet. She replied, “with only two members.” Oh, yes, yes indeed. That remark got us through high school together-even through the senior prom.            

Grease Monkey’s Sonata-Mickey Rooney’s “Quicksand” (1950)-A Film Review

DVD Review 

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

[This is a DVD that I found of all places in a “for sale” bin of discontinued material at the Cambridge Public Library several weeks ago. This while my transition to emeritus and the ending of the grind of film reviewing under deadlines and Sandy Salmon my replacement on the day to day work was in progress. I had offered the film for Sandy to review knowing (and hoping) from long friendship and competition (mostly friendly as among most film reviewers outside of New York City) that he didn’t give what we called in the old neighborhood where I grew up a “rat’s ass” about reviewing a 1950s film noir. So here I am again in the saddle for a minute.] 

Quicksand, starring Mickey Rooney, Jeanne Cagney, Peter Lorre, Barbara Bates, directed by Irving Pichel yet another Hollywood figure blacklisted in the red scare Cold War night when the powers- to-be in Tinsel-town and their cowardly hangers-on took a dive on funny little things like constitutional rights-and people’s livelihoods, 1950  

Forgot the film noir aspect of the film under review, Mickey Rooney’s Quicksand, although only now is this minor classic noir and probably Mickey’s best performance against type (he spent his early career as the “ah, shucks” cinematic version of Andy Hardy of that classic series of young adult books) being recognized as such. This plotline is strictly from Sister Cecelia’s, maybe Sister Mary Rose’s, or maybe Sister Delores’, hell, maybe all of them, lessons from Sunday school at old Saint Stephen’s Roman Catholic Church in my old home town. The lesson: once you go down the slippery slope of sin (and probably crime as here was the same thing in their imaginations) then there is a serious rollover effect, serious consequences. Yeah, and obviously Mickey’s character Danny, the lowly grease monkey, you know, auto mechanic either didn’t pay attention or was absent those Sundays when whoever was running the Sunday school operation where he worshipped was holding forth about that very prospect. No question, he uncorked every possible evil as he went down the road to perdition.        

Funny from a first look at Danny he didn’t look like a guy who would wind up doing from one to ten in some California penal colony once the dust settled. But then you didn’t know then what steered him down the garden path. Of course then we didn’t know that he would run smack daub into a low rent femme fatale, Vera, played by Jeanne Cagney, who was serving them off the arm at a hash house where the local grease monkeys filled their lunch buckets and he made the fatal mistake of dating her up (a mistake as well since she was too tall for him, maybe too blond as well). Once you know all he was doing was trying to move might and main to get her down among the downy billows then all his fevered actions made a kind of off-hand sense as every guy, including this reviewer, has had first-hand experience with if he goes for the femmes. (Frankly this Vera didn’t have the look of steam-infested career waitress, looked more like a bar girl or a roper on a scam but you never know what has a gal serving them off the arm).

Okay here is what the slippery slope looked like if you follow along (and suspend disbelief as well). It seemed after making that hot date for that very night Danny was cash-shy, needed some dough to carry some weight with Vera. Everybody was tapped out so, and remember, this is where he falls down, gets ready to take the big step-off if he doesn’t catch a break, he grabbed a measly twenty buck from the skinflint larcenous auto boss’s till. Just an overnight loan. No problem because some guy who owned him more than twenty would cover him the next day and that hot date would be worth it he could tell. Problem: the boss’s accountant showed up early the next day for some other reason so he would need to cover the twenty bucks fast. He can’t get the dough to cover so naturally he gets the fever-driven bright idea that if he goes and buys an expensive watch on credit for a hundred bucks (remember this is before cash-back credit cards could have saved his butt even if they were charging usurious rates) and then hocked it for thirty bucks.

That idea worked well enough for Danny in the short term, got him a reprieve from the boss’s accountant although just barely and with a very jaundiced eye but then the next hurdle showed up at the garage-the dreaded “repo” man. Seems that in California in those days you didn’t actually own, couldn’t own, an item on credit until it was fully paid for, now too if I am not mistaken. The repo man gave him twenty four hours to ante up the C-note or he was going to stir for grand larceny. What to do, desperately what to do since a hundred bucks was way out of his league on such short notice. Simple, our Danny boy bops a drunk carrying plenty of dough on the head in darkened parking lot (let’s call that one assault and battery in the night time and armed robbery, okay and you get an idea that Danny’s wheels have gotten well off the track). He is in the clear now, his miseries are over as he handed the repo man his piece. Of course Danny is just a misbegotten grease monkey and not some kind of career criminal so when he flashes fifty dollar bills Vera’s way she knows he is the guy who bopped the well-known drunk. Worse, the guy she used to work for at the local penny arcade who seemingly still has a thing for her, Nick, a seedy guy no question, played by the lovely Peter Lorre, knows he grabbed the dough. Has the handkerchief he used as a mask doing the robbery. Nick’s price for keeping quiet-a new car from the auto shop. Or else.                

  

There’s more, believe there is more in this Dante-like descend into hell. Danny grabs the car alright and thinks he is back on easy street and can now enjoy his new honey in quiet, maybe get under the sheets with her finally. Nope, that larcenous auto shop boss has his own scam. He accused Danny of stealing the car (he also accused others in the shop of the same crime in order to blackmail them). His price for keeping quiet three thou for a two thousand blue book car. Jesus. That is where the quick-thinking hustling Vera comes in to save his bacon, maybe. Seems that Nick besides running that seaside arcade does some business in cashing checks for guys-a low rent operation that is still with us unfortunately. She knows where Nick keeps the dough and it is not in a bank. So Danny goes and grabs the dough, hey who would have thought, thirty-six hundred. Now he is on easy street and can get back to the serious business of running around with that femme Vera.

Forget it. Vera, who was a drifter from hunger just like Danny, had her big eyes on a mink coat and while Danny was off doing something she bought the coat for the cash she was holding for him. Eighteen hundred bucks, her half of the heist according to her thinking, and not a bad price when you think about in the days when women craved mink and it wasn’t politically incorrect, very politically correct to wear fur. Danny went crazy and finally saw she was little more than a bent whore. But that left Danny short with his boss. He went to the boss with his eighteen hundred-take it or leave it. The boss took it naturally since he was a larcenous character. Except that was a stall-he was holding out for three thou and was calling the coppers when Danny freaked out and strangled him. Murder, one, the big step off at the Q no doubt. Grabbed his gun too on the way out knowing he was nothing but a desperado now, an outlaw. All for a twenty buck deal to go around with a floozy.            

Things looked grim, very grim as he was going on the lam to Mexico, or someplace very far away from California. This is where we get a little sneak redemption. See Danny had thrown over a nice girl, Helen, played by Barbara Bates, who would have been right up his alley if he was Andy Hardy but he had been in throes to that damn femme. The thing was this Helen was still carrying the torch for him, carrying that flame despite knowing that he was in a heck of a lot of trouble. Yeah, true love which he finally realizes he could have held onto for dear life. She would share his fate whatever happened. Some people are like that, thankfully, thankfully for Danny. He tries to talk her out of going with him but no use. As they try to blow town his damn automobile blows a gasket. So he is back in the bright idea business. He, they will, at gunpoint stop a car on the highway and force the driver to take them away to Mexico. So add on hijacking, kidnapping and who knows what else to the total. And who knows what Helen will get for being his sidekick on this part of the descent.

Then Danny, Helen draw a convenient little break. The guy they kidnapped was a non-plussed lawyer who asked for the whole story. Asked as well whether that auto shop boss was really dead which would have been a tough dollar to get around for what started out as a twenty dollar petty larceny case. As it turned out that auto shop boss was not dead but had just been unconscious. Free, free at last. Well not quite. There was too much of a mess to get him off scot free  so he would be doing that one to ten. Guess who will be waiting for him coming out stir? But wouldn’t Danny have been better off having listened to Sister Cecelia, Sister Mary Rose, Sister Delores, hell, maybe all three of them, about the slippery slope of sin. If you are a noir fan and can find this one take a look.           

Traipsing Through The Arts-All 20^th Century Art Is About Sex-The “King Of The Mopes” Edward Hopper Unchained- In The Midnight Hour Gliding Through “Nighthawks” (1942) Without Wings

By Laura Perkins

Sometimes you just can’t talk to Sam Lowell about art. Sam is my longtime companion meaning for those who feel they need to know that as one wag put the situation in the case of Whistler and one of his mistresses we are living together “without benefit of clergy.”  Meaning as well that after five, three him, two her, collective failed marriages we decided to cut out the middleman. Result: we have been together longer than any of the five, three he, two she failed marriages and a lot longer than a couple of them combined. That does not mean that Sam cannot get ornery, can’t be a pain in the ass especially about art. See he never really got over the idea that he should have followed his youthful instincts and gone to art school which his high school art teacher had paved the way for him as an alumnus of Massachusetts School of Art with a scholarship. Sam’s mother, an old Irish Catholic cross to bear whom I never met, wanted him to move up in the world by being the first in the family to go to college and to get a nice white-collar civil servant job that would have satisfied her own youthful busted dreams. Sam finally bought into her argument that life in a cold-water garret as a struggling artist would actually be a step down from the utter poverty they had already lived in the Acre section of North Adamsville.

But Sam never as long as I have known him fully accepted his path, his fate and as he has reached retirement age it has only galled him more. That said, as is well known, or should be, Sam didn’t do that civil servant bit but became over the years starting at the now defunct East Bay Other (California) and going through American Film Gazette and now American Left History and associated publications become an award-winning film critic. What is less well known is that along the way he would write, sometimes under his own name, sometimes under the name Charles Skyler, for Art Today and Art News especially if a film had an art theme like say The Thomas Crowne Affair or more famously The Girl With The Pearl Earring. Which sets up why Sam is sometimes hard to talk to about art and can get ornery about his takes on various pieces of art like the one to be discussed today Edward Hopper’s iconic if somewhat overblown Nighthawks from 1942.

By rights this assignment to traipse through the arts, art museums to select some works for commentary should be Sam’s providence. Unfortunately when site manager Greg Green originally approached him he turned down the assignment since Sam wanted to play out his hand, his term, and track down the reasons a famous California private investigator Lew Archer whom he had known, had interviewed a couple of times before he passed away had never made the P.I. Hall of Fame. Sam had chalked it up to sexual impotence which left Lew less than eager to bed whatever femme was around at a time when guys like Phil Larkin, Sam Spade, and Phil Marlowe were setting the standard for hard-boiled detectives taking a walk on the wild side while solving some bang-bang case. Sometimes Sam can stubbornly go after every possible lead and he did in the Archer case so with some decent results but to my mind not enough to not have taken his natural choice reviewing art works, especially American art works.

Sam’s pass on the assignment was my good fortune although it was Leslie Dumont not Sam who suggested to Greg when he was looking in-house for somebody to take the on-going art work assignment who clued him in that I had taken some art classes and at least had gone to an art museum once in the last fifty years. The bar thus was pretty low, and I almost did not take the assignment either except I got assurances from Greg that he would have my back if I decided to go off on a few tangents. Which I have and he has backed me up despite the hellfire and damnation from a bunch of troll evangelicals who have objected to my talking about sex and sensuality in regard to some pretty hot 19^th century art like Sargent’s Madame X and Whistler’s The White Girl. As it turned out, although they are still claiming me as Keil the devil’s servant and bound for the lake of fires, they don’t really give a damn about art one way or another but about talking about sex and art together just in case their young folk decide they want to look at some on the Internet. Yeah, as Sam, and half the guys here would be quick to say, WTF.

Sam Lowell does care about art and that is where this whole thing is heading now. Two things have come together, have collided really. Sam has basically exhausted the Lew Archer impotency bit thus having some time to think about art and when I took on the assignment I knew that I would be consulting him as I went through my paces. He would not be so foolish as to try to usurp the assignment (nor would Greg let him since he is happy to have a quirky look at the arts by me where Sam would go chapter and verse). But he has definite opinions which he thinks I should incorporate int my pieces (what he forever had called “sketches” even that 10, 000-word Archer medical report, or what amounted to a medical report). That came up a bit in Sargent, Alexander and Whistler pieces but hit hard when we discussed Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks where we have two very different takes on what was going on in that midnight hour at that funky New York diner. (By the way Sam insists on calling him Eddie this, Eddie that but I have never seen even the most democratic reference ever call him anything but Edward and so Edward it is.)     

       

Here’s the general framework Sam and I have total agreement on-all serious 20^th century art (and now reaching into the 21^st century) is about sex, erotism, sensuality. Period. The jury may still be out on the Minimalists although there are some pieces by Matty Gove that reek to high heaven of sex, rough sex too. You can’t think of a school post-Impressionist, Ashcan, Realist, Regionalist, Abstract Expressionist without being overwhelmed by the Freudian deluge. Don’t even mentioned about Action painting, Pop and Op-Art schools which are drenched with primal sexual urges and dreams. (Only some silly school boy or girl would for example fail to see the mix of sperm and womanly fluids in the drippings of Max Daddy Jackson Pollack.) Where Sam and I differed or have a difference now with Hopper’s masterpiece is interpreting the narrative. I will get to that in a minute but let me tell of a couple of controversies we had on the earlier works I have presented to set up the battle lines.

When we discussed Sargent’s Madame X Sam wanted to go knee-deep into Madame reputation as a professional beauty and as an up and coming new age courtesan where I wanted to deal with the ideal of beauty then with that hideous birdlike nose of hers which by today’s standards would place her in the wallflower category, except maybe among nerdy guys. (On the side I wanted to discuss Sargent’s devious homosexual urges to make Madame X out as a tramp, a whore I think I called her but we decided to tamp that down since while there is plenty of anecdotal material that he and his dear friend Henry James were bedmates the hard evidence through biographers is not there yet.) We took a stab at both themes since this was my first piece, but unlike Sam I was a little uneasy about casting Madame out of high society once those denizens saw how she was advertising her “wares” via the Sargent portrait.                  

Alexander’s Isabella provided a mutual agreement when two things happened- Sam “sniffed out,” his term, that the jar in which an aroused Isabella kept the severed head of her lover done in by her jealous and grabbing brothers was filled with poppies, with the stuff of opium not silly basil and she was high as a kite when she did her ceremonial caress of her doomed lover. Once Sam showed me the photograph of a poppy crop I was won over. More importantly Sam dragged me, not literally he is not like that at all even when ornery, to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see not the Isabella although we did view that fine work of art but the plethora of paintings throughout history going back at least to John the Baptist, maybe before with Mendon the wanderer where some woman is swooning over the severed head in a fit of ecstatic reverie. Very enlightening and also the cause of more random troll activity responses than even poor Madame X faced.  

Whistler’s The White Girl (we both agree that the later Symphony in White designation is malarkey, nothing but show and the work of some two-bit prissy art curator ) put us at some odds since I believed, still believe that Whistler was attempting to show some age of innocence idea so he could sell the damn thing and pay his back rent and have some dough left over for wine and partying. I refused to believe that a friend of the virginal Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood would be surreptitiously advertising his then girlfriend, mistress, whatever arrangement she had while they lived together “without benefit of clergy” was a latter-day Whore of Babylon. Then Sam showed me the scholarship on what that strangely out of place wolf’s head and fur meant going back to ancient times- the age old “open for business.” Damn. I didn’t like it, was furious at Whistler who by all accounts was hard on his mistresses and models but I had to concede the point.

On the Hopper Nighthawks narrative on those denizens of the deep night I think I am right. I’ll give Sam’s take first and then my own. Sam sees Hopper as strictly a voyeur, frankly a dirty old man, literally and this will not be the last time Hopper lets his sexual fantasies and dreams spill out on canvas. The key question for Sam is why he is so interested all of a sudden in the “night people,” deep night when nothing but stuff that had better not see the light of day goes on when most of his stuff is strictly daytime mopery, my expression. Sam has claimed here a certain amount of “nighttime” expertise having ended an evening more than once winding up at Joe and Nemo’s which is really Hopper’s template here. Sam is thinking of the one on Stuart Street in Boston adjacent to the Combat Zone, no further description necessary, but they were all over many Eastern urban cities including New York and he remembers one somewhere Seventh Avenues. Come a certain hour after the bars close and remember they close later in New York City and the night people come up, among them what used to be called “ladies of the evening” according to Sam. What is going on here is nothing but a “hotel, motel, no tell” between the man and the woman we can see. The distance between them tells that they are not lovers and her looking at her fingernails while he decides whether to take a chance with such a brazen hussy. (If not him then the guy with his back to the viewer is the next in line.) The pair are negotiating the fare and the location, that Hotel Deluxe just beyond the shadows on the left to be their resting place after the evening’s exertions. I at least got Sam to back off on the short order cook who is just some rum-dum who couldn’t get a day job as the “pimp” here. He might have been getting a rake-off from her  to use the diner as a business address but that is all. Christ Sam can get weird, would any woman have that jamoka do anything but serve dish-water coffee and grease-laden burgers-at an hour.         

Yes, sure sex is involved in this muted scene although frankly itdoes not depend on Hopper’s being a dirty old man although Sam pointed to a couple of later paintings that might make that argument. My take is that these two are lovers, disenchanted lovers. But lovers, nevertheless. They had been at Club Nana up the street, a hot spot of sorts before the war but now filled with guys either too old for military service or 4-F laggards. The Nana in those days had Earl “Fatha” Hines holding forth (this before he headed to Boston and the High Hat Café) and the evening had started out pretty well before our grumpy Gus laid up too much liquor, too many whiskeys. Got ticked off that some sailor made a pass or two at his woman and now after they closed the joint down they were doing their inevitable stop at the diner to have him sober up a bit before he heads back to his rooming house up the street and she grabs a cab to her place further downtown. Not happy campers, a not usual scene in a Hopper but not the sullen creepiness that a dirty old man like Sam suspects.            

On The 50^th Anniversary Of The Passing Of The “King Of The Beats” -Ti Jean Kerouac-A Series Of Appreciations-Introduction 

By Contributing Editor Allan Jackson

[Back in 2007 and then in 2017 when we commemorated the 50^th and 60^th anniversaries respectively of the publication of Jack Kerouac’s landmark travel book of a different kind On The Road which ignited a generation, maybe two. to “hit the road” I was the site manager, then called general editor, a throw-back from the times when American Left History was a hard copy publication. At those times I had been re-reading a series of Ti Jean’s books after senior writer Sam Lowell had pointed out to me that the previous years had been the 50^th and 60^th anniversaries respectively of fellow Jack “beat” brother Allan Ginsberg’s landmark poem (really screed) Howl which for a while took poetry into a different direction which we had neglected to commemorate (and which we did belatedly). Now Sam has again reminded that we have come to a certain commemoration date, the 50^th anniversary of the death of Jack Kerouac and we are again in need of evaluation, no, re-evaluating the place of his work, his place as “king of the beats” whether than title fits or not and his place in the sun.   

Of course on those prior occasions I could assign whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted since I was the person who was handing out the assignments. Now after a prolonged internal fight in which I was deposed and sent into “exile” I am back but solely as a contributing editor, not as the person handing out assignments. That task is now in the capable hands of one Greg Green whom I knew over at American Film Gazette many years ago and had brought over a couple of years ago to run the day to day operation here. Greg and I have had our ups and downs especially after I was in desperate straits when I was sent into exile and had no current source of income and had to depend “on the kindnesses of strangers.” But that is past and since I was instrumental in the previous commemorations Greg decided that I should as with a couple of other major projects that I have done since my return oversee the Kerouac death watch anniversary this year.   

Needless to say, since this dark cloud anniversary is upon us I have to do a new introduction, a setting of the tone. One thing that I was not able to do when I was overseeing the previous commemorations was to write about something that has haunted me for a long time-how different Jack’s experiences were from those of my parents, from any Acre neighborhood parents despite some very strong similarities between the way he grew up and the way they did. In short they were near contemporaries having all been born and raised in the 1920s and forward experiencing youthful Great Depression and slog-through World War II. The three could not have been more different in their lifestyles and life dreams. It would take my parent’s son, me, not my other siblings who went very different ways, would take their son, and their son’s generation to at least momentarily connect with the older man and what he brought to the table. Maybe the link between “beat” and “hippie” was tenuous, but it was there, and is there fifty years after his passing to his unsettled grave. That will be the thread that runs through this new series. Adieu, Ti Jean.     

*************

Jack fifty tears, fifty years gone in some bastard grave in holy, holy, holy Edson Merrimack River ground busted asunder by holy goofs looking for timely relics, looking for that one word which would spring them into some pantheon, some parity with the king (we will not even mention that other king that animated our dreams for we now speak of parent, parent of class of ’68 dream). Funny non-Catholic ground Lowell given his deep sea dive to right his ship around the beatitudes that the class of ’68 left in the shade if you wished to know. Mere, dear Mother Kerouac, turning in her old Quebec come down to the textile mills from desolate turn of the century farms which gave to the bloody English overlords, another common sticking point against heathen English overrunning the small patch farms with enclosures and encumbered debts devotion grave, with the times out of sorts the young passing before ancient hatreds mother. Not a stranger come the end on Hard Rock Mountain and no place but some stinking trailer benny and that fucking crucifix that never helped anybody that far gone into the haze.

Not strange for assuredly lapsed Catholic cum Buddha swings devotee coming out of Desolation Mountain, Dharma bum frills and assorted other spiritual trips, (won’t even think about that black boy, and he was just a boy, who against some grandmother dreads blew the high white note out to the China Seas, via, well, via Frisco Bay drove the writing, the what, the unvarnished truth  until it drove him into the ground. That and those endless whiskeys and cheap Thunderbird wines when dimes were scarce a few times down on his luck cadging wino bottles from buying for underaged kids, with his bottle the kicker and what the hell if he didn’t go it, didn’t get his some sterno junkie would dip into Salvation Army surplus and the thirst was great. Not “his” thirst but “the” thirst and don’t mix the two up buddy as he told that straggly bearded kid, some hippie bastard from Omaha clueless about the decadent night which lie ahead, the compromises too.

Strangely bisected, fuck finally my real point (another luxury of not having to be general editor with parsing and editing to make “nice” for the academic journals which thrive, which throttle on  Jack’s sputum and can get down in the mud with the real critics like Artie Shaw and Bugs Malone and not worry about half-ablaze in the head, half fire in the head Patti Griffin called it once),  through my own parents too who had no idea of hip, no idea of “beat,” except maybe mother in beatitude but that is a different story, a story about common roots high holy day Catholic stuff. Another common point, emerged in veiled tears, speaking of tears, to rear their ugly heads come feast days. (Wondering if her, their fairy sons would see the light, would submit to the calling that every grandmother hoped without saying leaving it to transient daughters to do their own parsing. Father no hipster born to the hills and hollows which hallowed by memory played no part in big boom beat-beat time coming out of World War II like houses on fire. No speedy cross-country by 1947 Hudson (hell no car a public transportation might as well say welfare crude bum and fuck that is all a guy like that deserved.) With big ideas of shaking things up, making merry with the always with us squares and other geometric forms. Jesus the worst part knowing that they knew not of square or any other geometric dreams. Too bad, too bad when they chance came around and the call went out looking for junkie hipsters, con men and queers hanging around public toilets on Seventh Avenue in New York City. 

No Dean Moriarty, hell call a thing by its right name, no Max Fame, no Allan Ginsberg, no Kenneth Rexforth, no Hank James, or his brother William speaking in tongues trying to figure what a guy named Freud meant when he wanted to go where his mother lived, after killing cosmic fathers and brothers, no Gregory Corso, no John three names somebody a throwback to ancient Boston Brahmin bouts with legitimacy speaking of bastards, trace the genealogy back to Mayfair swells days, nothing for the bastard who is bothering one Laura Perkins who I have been sweet on for an eternity but who only has eyes for Sam Lowell about her sexy takes on serious 19^th century artist who were as capable of going down into the mud, blowing some high white note out in the Japan seas for a change. Above all no Neal Cassidy, no fake Dean Moriarty to skirt the libel laws with wives and mistresses searching for vagrant unknown fathers in some dusty coal bins but a poor old good old boy and maybe in another time said Dean, Adonis Dean against Father Sheik, would have wandered out in the cowboy West night looking for drunken fathers with hip-ness but that was not the play, not at all. Father Sheik coming like a bat out of hell from those hazardous coal bins looking to break the eternal hills and hollows existence that plagued his fathers since the time the first clan were cast out of England for stealing pigs or consorting with them in any case with not unfamiliar family refrain of “leave, or the gallows,” such were the tempers of the times.

And Father Sheik, hell, Adonis Dean too, with no way out except that passport via some Nippon adventure over Pearl always Pearl nothing else needed and he off to Pacific battles and raiments. Jack to the North Seas and merchant marine bunks with odd-ball seasick sailors (and me wondering whether having looked of late at YouTube should attribute my borrowed words but the hell with it plenty of seasick sailors had nothing to do with YouTube or song lyrics). And forsaken Dean too young to know the face of battles hung up in reformatory secret vices which an earlier generation (and later ones too) would “dare not speak their names” (Catamite, Sodomite, homosexual, pug ugly, suck-head, your call.) How quaint.

Two years and two places do make a different no Bette Davis eyes in the hills and hollows but Jack-induced Merrimack adventures of boys seeking pleasures in riverside woods and hamming it up for all the world to see. If only the old man could have written out his dreams, if he could have written out anything. Jack to the library born to take his fill of whatever classics that river textile town had to offer and whiskey you’re the devil which should have given even a blinded son something to think about with dear Jack fifty years dead and the old man still trembling in his teeth. My God.

But he never made, he the old man never made New York ever as far as I could tell, knew none but obvious landmarks like tall Empire State Building or Lady Liberty. Mother Jacked on some Cape Cod Canal cutaway small steamer to the Big Apple (not Big Apple then but who knows) and Automats, evoking Laura’s Edward Hopper sad-assed dreams of a guy who couldn’t even draw smiling faces and hence the queen of 20^th century angst and alienation and five cent ferry rides to Staten Island. The Village, okay for me to call it Village as I was a denizen once for Jack too might as well have been on some planet’s moon for all she knew-him too, too rich for his blood but Jack’s meat, no problem. Even if strangely Times Square hipsters, grifters, drifters and Howard Johnson hot dog eaters were mixed into the new wave, then new wave against Big Band Duke, Artie, Lionel jazz boys coming up with their sullen lipped riffs to spring a new alienated be-bop on the square world. Jack knew square, knew father square, knew mother, Mere, square in large letters of unrequited love but shook it off long enough to cross the great desert America giving Lady Liberty the boot, the un-shod sole, or maybe taking a cue from Jack book lamming it out on Bear Mountain just for the hell of it. But this old mother, not Mere mother, never knew, never had an idea of even in her big Catholic, Irish Catholic dream of meeting the boy next door and finding steady white-collar civil servant heaven. Jesus is that what she was about when the deal went down and Jack split for Ohio with two bucks and six bologna sandwiches stale well before Toledo believe me I know.            

Life took a different tact though she never found that clever test-worthy boy next door (he was some greaser with a big hog of a bike which would have inflamed Dean, would have gotten his wanting habits on and maybe a run to the Coast). So she having had her fill of Coney Island dreams and Automat five cent pies took a chance on the Sheik (strange on looking at Jack photographs how sheik-like our boy was and father too like some lost tribe members) found guarding the country’s defense not far from her home but he of Pacific wars, many with manly Marines. Jack flopped the Navy but did dangerous merchant marine runs out in the North Atlantic, out to the Murmansk seas (that makes three China and Japan alongside) not honored even in Washington until much later down in front of Arlington National bravos resting places. And a not so funny twist of sagging fate brought her dish loads of kids and some undefined alienation from which she was excluded, and he too by association. They didn’t prosper far from it but they also didn’t have that run, no, those runs, to the West looking for lost fathers, looking for the Adonis of the West to shake up his love. Could two worlds be any more different and only about say forty miles apart. That not a question but maybe a quiet condemnation for some woe-begotten life of quiet desperation, her mantra for all the good it did her.

It would take a son, some son, some great girth of sons and daughters to jailbreak, to Jack their ways out of that parent, remember their parents’ contemporary, that snare set for those who didn’t get to Times Square, didn’t get to the Village but stuck it out in Hoboken, Elko, Oceanside. It would take some unsettled sense that all was not right with the world, that too many kids were stuck with Modesto hot-rod dreams, Hell’s Angels angers, Louisville thwarts, and many La Jolla searches for perfect waves to jumpstart what Jack, and not just Jack but he is fifty tears, fifty years gone. Oh, what might have been. 

California’s The Garden Of Eden-Except For The Odd American Sociopath- “The Gift” (2015)-A Short Film Review

DVD Review

By Brad Fox, Jr.

The Gift, starring Jason Bateman, Rebecca Hall, Joel Edgerton, directed by Edgerton, 2015

I am apparently becoming the resident “expert” on psychological thrillers since this is my third consecutive effort. Not that I mind, everybody in the film critic, film review business including amateurs, those who think anybody can give an opinion about a film and have it stick finds some niche. Finds some safe haven really in this tough racket where you are only as good as your last review. I remember my father the famous New York film reviewer who worked with Pauline Kael and helped turn the work from a pastime to a profession saying not even your last review but the one right in front of the reader. (Now the profession has spawned climatic studies courses where you can get a “major” in film review which has surprised my now retired father no end.) The draw this time, this The Gift is a quirky little number with its fair share of obvious thriller clichés but with enough twists and turns to make it an above average venture.  

Your average thriller usually sets up the demented psycho early, lets him (or less often her) go through his paces getting everybody he comes in contact with a little shaky, shaking their heads anyway. That is the case early on with one Gordo Mosley, Gordo the Wierdo as he was known in high school, played by Joel Edgerton who directed as well, who looks for all the world like a stone-cold killer and A-I psycho. He runs into an old classmate Simon Callem and his wife Robin who have just moved to LaLa land after suffering the colds of Chicago (and some undisclosed problems Robin had, a prescription pill junkie habit best left in the past). Of course, nobody explains as will be revealed why deadbeat, down at the heels Gordo winds up in a high-end interior design shop in LA and just happens to run into the lovely couple picking out pillows or something for their new digs but we will let that pass. Seems Gordo and Simon knew each other in high school and that is the wedge Gordo needs to become a nuisance and somebody that Simon really wants to avoid-at all costs. But like most weirdos, maybe this is a requirement for membership, Gordo has some kind of idea fixed in his head that he will become part of the Simon-Robin circle. And won’t take no for an answer. Simon for his own reasons which will unfold as the film moves along is adamantly against that and makes it plain to Gordo. Robin is a little more forgiving, sees Gordo as a sad sack just like herself.        

Once rebuffed odd things start happening at the Callem homestead and the prime suspect is one Gordo the Weirdo. Once that idea is set in stone, once we are led to believe that Gordo is the bad guy and capable of any kind of madness-even murder the twists start happening. The play then starts to revolve around what big man on campus Simple Simon and a friend did to Gordo back in high school. A classic case of macho man picking up the scent, picking up weaknesses, bullying mercilessly a weaker man. It gets worse-Simon set Gordo up with a lying sack of crap story that wound up getting him a reputation as a gay man. All bullshit, all made up out of thin air. But not without consequences for Gordo Mosely. That brush in turn led him to almost be killed by his father for being gay. He wound up being sent to military school and life went downhill from there for him. All because big man “could do it” according to his accomplice.

As the revelations keep coming out in dribs and drabs Robin gets a totally different look at her husband who turns out to be a bum of the month lying sack of crap. Moreover his savagery is not all in the past. Along the ways this ‘survival of the fittest guy” Simon has set up a co-worker with a false past so that he can move up the food chain to a cushy job. That guy, and not who you would suspect Gordo, went berserk and tried to destroy Simon’s house. While that little diversion was going on the pregnant Robin was ready to give birth which she does. A boy.

Here is where the chickens come home to roost and not in now exposed sociopath Simon’s favor. We know he lied his ass off about that co-worker just to get ahead but when under Robin’s pleadings he goes to apologize to Gordo for his high school craziness which ruined Gordo’s life Gordo refuses to accept the malarkey. Simon then does his patented bully act when things don’t go his way and trashes Gordo. Then things go to hell in handbasket for dear sociopath Simon. Robin after giving birth and realizing that Simon has a very dark side which she had not seen before wants no part of him. His destruction of a fellow worker’s chances gets him the boot from that promotion, gets him fired.  Here is the sweet part in a way Gordo who really was disturbed-how much bully Simon’s fault is pretty clear- Gordo via his stalking Robin and knowing her penchant for prescription drugs is in the home when Robin faints-gets all this on camera-and may or may not have taken advantage of her in that condition. He sends Simon a “gift” of the film of him hovering over Robin leaving the bastard to wonder whether the child Robin bore was his or the madman Gordo’s. Sweet revenge.