And there is such a thing as too much trouble.
- Elaine May
A lot of the problems endemic to Late Capitalism are surely endemic to mercantile commerce well in advance of there even being Standard Operating Procedure Capitalism. People try to make deals. Other guy comes along and he slaps you with a glove, which may or may not mean pistols at dawn, you understand?
When seaports arrive, the inlanders modify their practices. Swedish King Charles the First has a hell of a time in Russia. Strategy and salted earth. Napoleon lost Russia without once suffering a decisive loss on the battlefield. Of the Emperor’s foray into the wastes of the Caucasus, Count de Ségur has the following to report: “Napoleon’s genius, seeking to transcend time, climate, and distance, had as it were got lost in space” [although this is a translation]. Once known euphemistically as the "breadbasket of Europe [or the Soviet Bloc]," the Eastern part of the Ukraine—the Donbas region, including its Dontesk and Luhansk territories—was called in February of this year by the Washington Post, "an industrial powerhouse."
Horses poison the wellwater.
Artillery strafes the tesselations.
In the film AU HASARD BALTHAZAR, Wiazemsky pensively declaims: “It’s not money
I need, but a friend who can help me learn to run away” [although that’s as the subtitling has it, and Wiazemsky is playing a character named Marie who has not ever once had a single properly good day.]
Simone Simon. My God, what is there to say? In HELIOGABALUS OR, THE CROWNED ANARCHIST, the Prototype Roman Emperor adopts, as Antonin Artaud has it, "the costume of another country" and "in wearing women's clothing, adorning oneself with jewels, pearls, feathers, coral, and talismans: what was anarchic from the Roman viewpoint was [...] fidelity to an order [...,] decorum fallen from the heaven thither reascended by all available means" [I've diced it up, and it's already passaged through the translation of Alexis Lykiard]. Simone Simon does not want to go to heaven. She is, we argue, one of these who thither reascend. Jewish, she becomes full-on resident of The Hollywood about three years before the Second World War starts, effectively an exile, no? According to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis at the Jewish Women's Archive, Simon spent parts of her childhood in Marseilles and Madagascar, later living in any number of notable localités du continent, enjoying her moveable feast. Simone Simon retires from the cinema in the late 50s, but returns to the screen for a curtain call, you could say, appearing in Michel Deville's LA FEMME EN BLEU in '72. In his booklet essay accompanying the Criterion DVD release of Jean Renoir's La bête humaine [spine# 324], Geoffrey O'Brien, calling the film one "in which the natural world and the power of technology are wedded through the closely coordinated labor [sic]—effected through glances and sign-language—of two men," argues that the historical contingencies relevant to the production of Renoir's film, both consciously and unconsciously determine its trajectory, thus mobilizing a "consoling bit of theatricality—even if its just a silly performer performing a silly song—into the heart of an annihilating melodrama." Almost parenthetically (!), O'Brien asserts of Simone Simon that she plays "a femme fatale as fragile as she is irresistible." A man with a furnace of a brain who believed that women have mysterious powers he only faintly understood or could ever understand, pioneering horror producer Val Lewton hired Simon for Cat People because he was phobic of her in some sense, both excited and repelled. Kent Jones's feature-length Martin Scorsese-narrated doc accompanying the Criterion Blu-ray for Cat People [spine# 833] contains a bit of overtalk in which Matry says Cat People is about "the mood that stays with you...the sounds; the images." Somewhere Lewton's widow Ruth says her man believed Simone was an actual cat! “Val hated cats! Oh gosh, I remember once, I was in bed and he was writing—he used to like to write late in the night. There was a catfight outside, and the next thing I knew, he was up at the foot of my bed, nervous and frightened. He was very unhappy about cats. I think it stemmed from an old folk tale he remembered in Russia—that cats were peculiar creatures that you couldn’t trust.” Director Jacques Tourneur is quoted in the doc designating Cat People "an A picture made in B time."
BLACK LEOPARD
TORTUGA
It probably seemed natural to ace bemonocl'd Teuton Fritz Lang to adapt Jean Renoir's adaptation of Émile Zola's La Bête humaine for American producer Lewis J. Rachmil. It surely isn't the lone factor here that the screenplay comes care of the extremely fine writer Alfred Hayes [we cannot recommend strongly enough his novel The End of Me, available from New York Review books!]. Lang had already adapted Renoir's La chienne, about the murder of a prostitute, as Scarlet Street in '45. In a discussion of Human Desire accompanying the Eureka: Masters of Cinema Blu-ray release of Human Desire [spine# 197], scholar Tony Rayns argues that Lang's version of a small component part of the Zola novel Renoir focused on in order to make use of the "sophisticated European" movie star Jean Gabin, a luggisgh hunk not afraid of representing "enormous psychopathic mental difficulties," is the path-correcting moral version of the story, hoped palatable for the American fly-over people. If 19th century readers of Zola might have been inclined to imagine women, ethnic minorities, or sexual freaks "the human beasts" mayhaps indicted in the novel's title, Zola might not have been terribly disposed to disabuse them of the idea. It wasn't the case with respect to how Renoir saw thing nor as pertains to Lang, though the German also has his own typeset. The beast is machine-that-eats-people industriality. Murder is hypocrisy and covetousness, unless it is also a means of disabuse. All the workers are basically good individual souls, but they's caught in the wringer, alas...or betimes...or both. Lang doesn't believe in "conventional morality," as Rayns sees it, and this is largely why Gloria Grahame replaces Simone Simon [as she must!]. Grahame was a free spirit and exemplary scandal-rag fodder from the get-go. Married to director Nicholas Ray, she married the man's son subsequently, having begun consorting with him amorously before he was of legal age. She was on more than one occasion accused of assaulting other actresses. I continue to believe it a credit to the goodwill of society at large that Gloria was able to go on making her enticing mistakes until she died in 1981 at the age of fifty-five.
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