Souter and Pasties

Yesterday I went to a talk by Martha Nussbaum about religious intolerance in France and the United States. It was a nice talk, but mostly preaching to the converted about the logics and rationales for religious intolerance and how stupid they are – her particular target was the banning of the burqa in France.

And then at one point she was talking (quite hilariously) about a case in which a strip club was decided by the Supreme Court of the U.S. to contribute to violence in some area of the country because of nude women or some such business. As it happens, Justice David Souter was the only one to have made this connection in a concurring opinion for the Court.

And Nussbaum said something like "I am not sure what the difference between pasties and a g-string and full nudity really is in terms of incitement to violence. And I am not sure if Justice Souter really is the most qualified person to make that judgment."

I thought it was funny. A gay in-joke. But, actually, the whole room laughed. Are there really that many people in on the joke? Is Souter's possible homosexuality enough of a talking point that everyone in the room knew what she meant? Or did I read something into the comment that I wasn't supposed to read?

The whole thing, frankly, confused me. Especially because I was apparently laughing a little too loudly – a young woman turned around to see who was laughing behind her.

Killer Joe

I just have to tell you how bad this is!

Killer Joe has been sitting on my shelf for months. a couple months ago I had 35 films that I still wanted to see from 2012 and Killer Joe has always been one of them. My friend Justin told me this movie was terrible, but I insisted on seeing it. This is the great Matthew McConaughey season, we are told (with KJ, Magic Mike, and The Paperboy this year and The Lincoln Lawyer last year). I am inclined to agree. McConaughey's doing different and better projects than his standard rom-com fare. His performances are getting better, and he's getting more interesting to watch. But either Killer Joe is a hiccup in a winning streak, or we're only seeing something we want to see... that really isn't there.

The other pro, on the face of it, for Killer Joe is that it was written by Tracy Letts. I loved the original play of Killer Joe when it came out. It was part of the earliest strand of the 1990s New Brutalist movement in Britain. They loved KJ in the UK, though it didn't gain many fans in the US. Letts would have to wait until Bug came out to really take off. But I always thought it was good; I have always been a fan of the New Brutalists – Kane, Ravenhill, Butterworth: that's my stuff.

And that's fine and all. As a play. But William Friedkin's Killer Joe purports to be a movie. I'm here to tell you it isn't one, and the main trouble with this is Letts's screenplay. He hasn't cut down his dialogue even a bit, and the film is just one, long, talky scene after another. And another. The film starts with Emile Hirsch convincing his father (Thomas Haden Church) to hire someone to murder their mother, and the conversation between them goes on for about 7 or 8 minutes. This is fine for a play, really, especially if someone is going to be naked in the next minute or shoot someone in the stomach or fellate a chicken leg right in front of us. But these things are only shocking or strange in a play. In a movie... one has the feeling one has seen all of this before. I was bored out of my mind.

Killer Joe was strange and cool on stage in the early 90s before YouTube. Nowadays, we begin our days looking at video footage of hick Texans doing stupid things.

Friedkin's film has all sorts of other problems – does it like its characters? are we supposed to identify with their moral quandaries? are these people still talking? – but central to these problems is also the fact that McConaughey is just too likable and good-looking to play Joe in the first place. He's never really the scary, unpredictable force that he needed to be to make the play work. (Scott Glenn played Joe in the original New York production.) The film already doesn't work, but the unbridled, insensitive chaos at the center of what worked about the play, is completely lost in the film adaptation.

And let me predict for a moment before we all get too crazy: everyone should probably calm down about Letts's upcoming August: Osage County. If Friedkin couldn't get Bug or Killer Joe to work onscreen, why is it that everyone is thinking John Wells (who? he's directed one film) will get the Sam Shepard/Eugene O'Neill-inspired behemoth of August to work. With Letts once again penning the screenplay, this seems to me more and more unlikely.

The Warm Embrace of the Spanish Main

I love watching movies and noticing strange homoerotic activity. Last night I watched the Frank Borzage Technicolor pirate drama The Spanish Main. It's a beautifully shot film – the "glorious Technicolor" is sort of amazing – but the only print available is via the Warner Archive and the colors fluctuate and are not quite at the level they might be were it to be restored.

Also... the movie stars Paul Henreid as a powerful swashbuckler and he doesn't quite do it for me in this role. Truth be told, he would do a couple other pirate movies after The Spanish Main, including one in which he played Jean Lafitte, the American pirate/hero. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Paul Henreid as an actor, I just don't really buy him as a dangerous pirate. He spends most of the movie grinning broadly, so I guess that isn't so bad.

And Maureen O'Hara is fine, too, (and gorgeous, obviously) but she's playing the daughter of the viceroy of México, and she doesn't look a bit Spanish and speaks in a proper mid-Atlantic accent. Walter Slezak plays some kind of petty Spanish despot and is delightful and funny (and I even sort of bought him as a Spaniard). There is also a lesbian pirate played by British actress Binnie Barnes who is sort of in love with Paul Henreid (but whom we are clearly supposed to read as queer-identified).

The thing that struck me the most about The Spanish Main, though, were two parallel scenes in the film's first hour. In the first one, Walter Slezak is being fitted for an outfit for his wedding (he is supposed to marry Maureen O'Hara) and so he is talking to one of his ministers while the effeminate haberdasher (played by Bobby Barber) measures the portly man for his suit of clothes. This happens:
 

Immediately after this, Slezak looks down and says to the little man: You are to fit me, not fondle me.

It's a very strange no-homo moment in this movie.

But then a couple of scenes later, after Paul Henreid has been whipped aboard a ship (we don't see any of this whipping, obviously, since it is 1945), two of his friends go to rescue him and this happens:

Aside from the fact that Paul Henreid is shirtless and so the scene is even weirder, no one thinks to comment on the odd position that Henreid's friend (Curt Bois) is in as he unties him. Henreid doesn't have no-homo moment. He just goes with it.

And then...

...the cinematographer just zooms right in. Look at Curt Bois's face! This whole situation is hilarious to me.

And it shouldn't surprise us that movies like this from the 1940s and '50s alternately embrace and disavow homoeroticism in various ways. The Spanish Main's relationship with homoeroticism (including the conversations between the two women) is incredibly complex.

As you know, I am always on the lookout for such things, and somehow it turns out that I usually find something.

Viewing Habits of Late

The movies I've been watching lately have been a little nuts, I freely admit. One of the reasons I've slowed down my rate of posting on the blog is because for the most part I am watching older movies, films I assume none of the people who read my blog really wants to know about.

The reason for this weird new set of viewing habits is the Dartmouth library. I'm leaving Hanover in less than a month, so while I have access to the extraordinary library at Dartmouth, I thought I would watch as many of the rare films that they have as I can. I have chosen alternatively classic Hollywood fare and foreign pictures from the second half of the twentieth century. Many of these have been very interesting movies, at least to me, and so I thought I'd share some of them in a miniature report.

Nils Gaup's Ofelaš (which was released in the U.S. in 1989) is a bit of a Norwegian anthropological study. Evil villains hunting down peaceful families who are just trying to make their way in the wild snows of Norway. There were a series of these sorts of movies around this time if I recall correctly: movies that aren't documentaries but aim to record more primitive or traditional ways of life through narrative cinema rather than historical information. The filmmaking for Ofelaš is rather awful – so many closeups! – but the impulse is a sweet one, and this same impulse would give us Nikita Mikhalkov's superb Close to Eden in 1991, so I can't fault the impulse too much. If you want to watch something like this: the way of life of a people far removed from your own urban or suburban existence, rent Close to Eden.

And I finally got to see Kinugasa Teinosuke's Gate of Hell, which I've wanted to see for ages. I watched it on an old VHS copy from the library, and then the next day I got an email from the Criterion Collection saying they've released it on Blu-ray. Watch it on Blu-ray if you can. Gate of Hell is all about color. It is a superb film about stubbornness and foolishness that is recorded in blazing technicolor from the early 1950s: an intriguing antidote to all of the samurai movies from this period. Not that I dislike samurai movies; I love them, actually, but this is a samurai movie about honor and affection that moves in a slightly different circle – by turns comic and tragic. Just excellent.

Imre Gyöngyössy and Barna Kabay's Revolt of Job is a Hungarian film from 1983 about a Jewish man and wife who know that they are going to be sent off to camps by the Germans during the genocide of European Jews in the late 1930s. They live in this little village in Hungary and are childless and so they adopt a little Gentile boy so that they will have someone to whom they can leave a legacy. This movie is very funny for most of its running time – the boy is unruly and violent and very, very silly, and the parents are patient and loving but blustery and gruff in their own way. But running through the entirety of Revolt of Job is the knowledge that the parents and their child will soon be separated and in a violent and horrible way and so tragedy looms over the movie and its inevitability colors all of the comedy of the first three quarters of its running time. I found this film deeply moving.

And this last week I rented two Soviet films from the early 1980s. War-time Romance, from director Pyotr Todorovsky is the story of a man who begins to have an affair with a woman whom he loved during the second World War. They are both much older now, but neither of them is very smart about what he or she is doing, and they even spend a good deal of time with the man's wife, who understands everything that is happening from the very beginning. War-time Romance is on DVD from a Russian company, and the film is subtitled in English. I don't speak Russian, and even though the English translation is so bad that it is almost unreadable, War-time Romance shines. It is a beautiful film about loss and loyalty and love. Todorovsky's affection for his characters is coupled with a cold view of their situations. You watch the lives of these characters unravel toward awkwardness and comedy but Todorovsky manages to keep a respectful tone to the movie so that one can't help but feel sorry for them even if they've made their own troubles. Lovely.

My other Soviet movie was even better: Yuli Raizman's Private Life, which Wikipedia calls a "little-seen" film. If this is true, it is the fault of distributors and not of filmmaking. Private Life is an excellent film. An older businessman gets fired from his (apparently very important) job as a higher-up in some government ministry. What he does for work is unimportant, because the film is about what happens when he doesn't have a job to go to. He wanders around his home, speaking to fully grown children he doesn't understand at all and a wife who neither loves him any longer nor is interested in anything he might have to say. He has dedicated his life to work, but has not spent any time investing in his private life. Now without work, he is totally at sea trying to navigate his life at home. This is not a comedy, though it has a couple of charmingly funny sequences. Instead, Raizman treats his characters with the utmost respect. Private Life is a kind of serious drama of the banal, where small decisions have large consequences and one is reminded to pay attention to life as it passes by. Raizman does not include any of our standard USAmerican platitudes about "living in the moment" or "carpe-ing the diem" or "finding the beauty in plastic bags" and such. Rather, this is a character study of a man whom we might think silly or whom we might dismiss as a blowhard, and Private Life watches this man deal with the loneliness and terror of life without work. It's excellent. And the film's ending is absolutely perfect.

I have another three weeks in Hanover, so we'll see what other strange little gems I can collect...

Way to Make a Guy Feel Special

The time-honored traditions of ancient Roman comedy make their way back to the present.

What better way to make a theatre-history teacher feel good about himself?

This Is Forty

Is this really forty? Because I don't actually believe it.

If this is forty, no thanks.

Judd Apatow's latest movie has some really funny bits in it, but – and I mean this sincerely – why aren't there more of them? Instead of more bits, Apatow has included more sentiment: an extraordinary amount of sentiment, in fact.

This film is filled with deadbeat fathers who wheedle their sons out of money, with whining, awful children who just really, really need to see the last episode of Lost and hate all of their outfits.

And all of this would be fine, really, if there were just. more. funny. bits.

In truth, there are bits, they just aren't funny. The most baffling, I think, was a long-ish sequence about a painting by John Lennon and selling it on E-bay; it produces not one laugh and is completely extraneous to the plot. I thought it was headed somewhere, you know, like toward a joke later in the film, but no.

As it is, This Is 40 is funnier than Funny People, but, well, that isn't saying much, and This Is 40 is stuffed full of so much so-called morality that by the time the movie was over I was actually angry with it.

Did you know? You should never yell in front of your kids. And you should always tell your husband or wife the truth. And once you're married, you really should be married for life, because the institution of marriage is really special. Also, if you get pregnant, that means you're having a baby. No one ever thinks about ending a pregnancy, in case you're wondering. And, man, isn't music just great. Yeah, it's so great. Especially with that special someone. We should all have more of it in our lives. And wouldn't the world be so much better if we just hung out with our grandparents more? Totally. I love those guys. In fact, we would all just be so much happier, guys, if we didn't fight as much, and I know this logic is sort of circular, man, but just go with it.

There are other things to say. Paul Rudd is still really, really attractive. And Melissa McCarthy has two scenes, both of which she knocks out of the park. Her second scene is so good, that Apatow includes a 3-minute gag reel during the closing credits of McCarthy doing the same exact bit a second time while Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd laugh hysterically. It really is hilarious.

But these scenes are few and far between, and this is a 125-minute comedy that feels really long.

Mostly, I think I'm just sick of Judd Apatow's insistent moralizing. And his characters' moral points of view (none of which I think is any good) doesn't make any of them one bit happier. No thanks.

Seniors on Gay Sex

What a lovely little video.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

It's Dangerous Liaisons set in 1930s Shanghai!

What this means first of all is beautiful, expensive costumes (by Miggy Cheng). The production design, the dresses, the suits, a sumptuous scene at the Chinese opera: these are all exquisitely rendered.

The acting, too, is uniformly excellent, with a fun and humane lead performance by the Korean actor Jang Dong-gun (The Promise, The Coast Guard, Tae Guk Gi) and really superb performance by Zhang Ziyi (Crouching Tiger, Hero, 2046, House of Flying Daggers). I have not always loved her work (Memoirs of a Geisha is a particular stain on my memory), but here she is just so good! She plays the Michelle Pfeiffer role – the respectable woman who is seduced by the lothario and ends up falling for him. The director, Hur Jin-ho, makes this role much bigger than it is in the Stephen Frears version, and one can understand why with this beautiful performance at the film's center.

Zhang Ziyi is fascinating in this.

The camerawork and direction in this Dangerous Liaisions are much less impressive, and the CGI which recreates the 1930s city, skyline, and port is nowhere near as successful as the beautiful costumes and production design are. Hur Jin-ho, too, focuses on the morality of the Dangerous Liaisons tale, aligning the moral positions he dislikes with conspicuous wealth and the moral positions with which he identifies as either impoverished or showing great sympathy to the poor. I find this kind of easy moralizing Manichaeistic and therefore unimaginative (i.e. boring).

But, then, the truth is that I wind up disappointed at every version of Dangerous Liaisons I've ever seen. Because I want the story to end differently, but no one ever rewrites the thing the way I want to see it. This is my fault, of course, and not the fault of the original novel's author (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos). He was writing in the 18th century and all. I get that. But I detest the novel's moral point of view. I find it facile and (actually) a little idiotic, and it surprises me that no one has thought to revise the novel's ending completely when adapting it for the screen.

The story (if you haven't seen Cruel Intentions) is that two experienced cynics make a bet that involves ruining a respectable lady as well as thwarting the love-plans of two young people (who are basically pawns in the game, though they have no idea). At the end, the male protagonist is killed by the female protagonist, and then she (usually) weeps or is in some way shown to be sad about what she has done. In some versions (Cruel Intentions and the 1988 Liaisons), the female protagonist also gets some kind of comeuppance.

Jang Dong-gun wears a suit like this in every scene. And wears it well.

Why must the protagonist die? I don't mind so much that he falls in love, that he abandons his principles, that he loses the bet. But when he decides at the end that he will destroy his rival, he isn't even given a chance to do that. She is so much more powerful than he and always was, and he was always just her tool. But why hasn't anyone any pity for him?

We're supposed to have pity for the two young people (who are both outrageously stupid in every version I've ever seen); we're supposed to want them to be together even though they both do things just as "bad" as the protagonists. Why should we pity them and not the protagonists? The answer, I think, is because the young people are stupid. Because they don't know any better, because they are immature, because they act out of love and hurt instead of out of cynicism and calculation.

But I say that that is ridiculous. I have pity on the cynics, too. And even more, I admire the bet itself and the skill with which it is accomplished. I envision a version of Les Liaisons where the protagonists get what they want. Where they form a union (tenuous, perhaps, but isn't that interesting too?) or have a brief affair and then grow bored of one another. Or even where they agree to go their separate ways. I'd be equally happy with, say, a version where the male protagonist actually gets to live with his respectable girlfriend and make some kind of life without being killed. Something. Anything. I've been watching versions of this story for years and they always end the same.

Have pity, I say, on the villains.

Trance

Trance really is not that great.

But honestly that does not matter one bit.

Because the awesome thing about Trance is that it is so drunk on itself, so in love with its three hopelessly fascinating and attractive (and I mean that word in every sense possible) leads, so giddy with its own excesses and narrative folds, that it convinced me that it was excellent for almost every single minute of its running time.

The first twenty minutes of Trance are a heist movie – a complicated theft of a very expensive (£26,000,000) Goya. The perpetrators of the heist are James McAvoy (I love that guy) and the always-brilliant Vincent Cassel.

But, then, the painting is gone. And only James McAvoy knows where it is, except that he's forgotten and so what he needs to do is remember. Various tortures don't help McAvoy remember, so Cassel forces him to undergo hypnotherapy, which will tell us all where the painting is.

Not so fast. The hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson, looking as gorgeous as ever) gets herself involved in the problem. She figures out instantly that this guy is lying to her and she immediately proceeds to insinuate herself into the gang, demanding an equal share of the profits and wrapping everyone around her finger.

Things get complicated from here. He can't remember. She needs to hypnotize everyone in the gang. She starts to manipulate their minds. She's implanting post-hypnotic suggestions. She starts having an affair with one of them. And where the hell is this painting? Did he even steal the damn thing?

For me the movie goes off the rails around the 40-minute mark. But only if I spend any time thinking about it – which I did not do until the movie ended. Instead I just reveled in the intriguing shots set up by Boyle and by Anthony Dod Mantle (his usual DP). All of the usual Boyle touches are there: the beautiful colors, a slight horror-film sensibility, a constant flirtation with genre specificity, a love affair with his stars.

As I say, the whole thing is enjoyable from start to finish. It doesn't really end up making a lot of sense, but I mostly left the theatre grateful that Danny Boyle still makes films like this. The director of Slumdog Millionaire (as he is billed on the poster) has already won the Best Director Academy Award, and he could easily have stopped spending time on genre pictures in order to make higher-paying, more "important" studio pictures, but here he is making a movie about hypnosis and mind-control. For this I am grateful.

My advice: don't think about it too much and just go see it anyway.

Out?

The last time someone came out to me was Friday morning.

People come out to me more often than you might think, actually. These are students, mostly: young people who are working through a lot of things. For many of them, I am the first person over thirty that they've told, and they are seeking advice or support or sympathy.

The so-called closet (I am not fond of the term) is obviously a complicated device and I am careful whenever anyone decides to tell me that he or she is coming out of it.

I have a number of contradictory thoughts on this topic, however. I don't believe that people ought to be compelled to tell me they are queer in some way, but then, last term I was teaching a course called Sex & Drama, and I had two gay – or somewhat gay – students who never told the (apparently entirely heterosexual) class that they were gay. These students never publicly identified, even for the purpose of the course and its subject material, with the gay characters in the performances we examined. I thought it all so strange!

But, of course, from what I know about social pressures at this College – they are fairly intense and rather socially conservative – I can assume these students had a good reason for their silence. And they are entitled to that silence.

In regard to celebrities announcing their queerness, I deplore the pressure put on these figures to "come out". Most of these people are out. They are carrying on relationships, have kids, their families all know, and (to put even more fine a point on it) we know. We know they are gay or queer and we don't even know them. So to whom are they "coming out"? It seems to me fairly clear that the answer to that question is "straight people". And why ought that to be important to any of us?

More to my purposes for writing this today, you will have noticed that I am hedging my bets on calling celebrities or my students "gay". I worry about a term like this because I am not entirely sure of what gay means, and I think it is important to recognize that we don't all experience identifications in the same way.

When I had the big sexuality conversation with a former student to whom I am very close, he assumed that I already knew what he was about to tell me, and so he said something like "well, I figure you know what I am gonna say, so...". And the truth is: I did and I didn't. My experience of being gay is one thing – I experienced it as a deeply ingrained piece of me that I wanted to hide from my Christian parents, and now I experience it as a way that I live my life: a public choice I make on a daily basis to celebrate my own queerness, to seek out other queer people, to consume as much queer culture as possible. But what did being gay or queer or bisexual mean to my former student? I didn't know the answer to that and knew I didn't.

I'm seventeen in this photograph. Lifetimes ago.

One of the troubles with the narrative of "coming out" is that it assumes that we all come out the same, and that once "out" we are all the same - that we've all come out of something nebulous and dark and repressive and now we're all out and proud and happy. But "coming out" is just a story. (The standard version goes more or less like this: I was born gay, I struggled with my gayness all through my adolescence and I felt very conflicted, silenced, and filled with self-hatred through most of my teenage years, but it gets better, and now I am somewhat of an adult and I can tell you that "this is who I am" and I am happy.)

When we fit our lives to the "the story", the story itself takes over. For myself: I don't believe that I was born gay, I didn't struggle with my gayness all through my adolescence, and I was very in love with a young woman when I was in high school. Oh but who can remember? The truth is that the story takes over. We can't escape it. I started high school twenty years ago, and "the story" is so much a part of our collective consciousness of what it means to be a gay person in the 21st century United States that I can no longer remember what I was thinking back then. I can only remember the story.

So now when someone tells me that she is gay, I want to hear what that is like for her, what it means to her, how she has bent her life around that concept.... Or not! There are so many of us. I know so many different queer people – and they live such different lives. The next time someone tells me he or she is gay, I want to begin to respond with something like Welcome to the family, but tell me more. I want to know how you think about queerness and how you experience that queerness.

Blogging Elsewhere

I have done / am doing a set of interviews of my colleagues over at Endstation Theatre for their website. So far the interviews of Aaron Farr and Krista Franco have been posted and many more are to come.

The interviews are not really about art as such or theatre, either, but more about how we work together and why we are all spending so much time working for this company. They are pretty great, though, and I am proud of them.

At the Faculty Meeting

Jamie: Now, I know you who are visiting faculty are not required to serve on sub-committees, but would either of you be willing to meet to talk about the acting track? I can offer... lunch.
Dan: Oh... lunch! Wow. Are you sure?
Chris: I can do that.
Rice: Me too.
Jamie: Great, well I'll schedule a meeting for Wednesday.
...
Dan: Is there any place where you guys can get lunch for all of you for around three dollars?
Maggie: Yeah, I don't think the department can afford...
Rice: There is a nice new diner down on main street.
Chris: CVS has chips.

At the Library...

Librarian: You're a faculty member?
Me: ...
Librarian: I must be getting old.
Me: Are you saying I look twenty-one years old?
Librarian: I guess I better not say.
Me:  ... (What does that even mean?)

The Champions

For some reason, Champion, Mark Robson's excellent picture from 1949, hasn't been released through normal DVD channels and Netflix doesn't carry it. (Well, it is on Netflix Instant but in a colorized version, which, I hope we all recognize, is an unwatchable format.)

Anyway, this is the only explanation I have for only having seen Champion a couple of days ago.

A couple of important things about this movie. It stars the great Kirk Douglas – '49 was his breakout year, with both A Letter to Three Wives and Champion. And let me say that if you aren't familiar with this actor's excellent work, or if you only know Kirk Douglas from Spartacus, it is time for you to rent Detective Story or The Bad and the Beautiful or Ace in the Hole. All of them are superb and Douglas is fantastic. In Champion he is perfect, he plays the tragedy of his part to the hilt. It is a beautiful performance.

And okay, okay, I hear you say: It's a boxing movie. Aren't they all the same? Well, Champion is a boxing movie, true enough, but it's also a gangster picture. This movie is a story about a boxer who is also deeply involved in the racket that makes the fight-game happen and pays the bills of the pugilists who basically work as slaves. All of the fights are fixed in this racket. There is no way to get ahead except to do as you are told. There are few guns in Champion (it was 1949, and the PCA still had teeth), but the sense of danger is palpable in every scene once Midge, the main character, gets anywhere close to the bigtime.

The best thing about Champion, though, is its style. This movie is one of the blackest films noirs I've ever seen. There is so much shadow in this movie that it is at times even distracting. I found myself straining to see, wondering if my television needed to be adjusted. It didn't. Take another look at that poster up to the left. It is nothing like any poster from the time period. Check out this poster from Battleground, for example. The style is totally different. Champion's poster focuses on darkness. That black is astounding, in fact. It swallows the hero and his girl. And if the text pretends that the movie might in any way be about loving, the sheer audacity of this all-encompassing black belies any of the tagline's pretensions to being a love story.

This darkness works to incredible effect. In the images below, Midge, his trainer, and his brother (Arthur Kennedy, also nominated for an Oscar for his work) discuss the possibility of getting a shot at the title. Midge is supposed to fight the guy in the #2 slot with the hope that he will win and then his next fight will be a shot at the title. Here are the men discussing the situation:

That's Kennedy in the background. Then the trainer tells Midge that he will have to take a fall in this fight. The #2 guy is due his turn. If #2 fights the champion and wins then everyone makes more money and Midge can fight the new champion in a year or two. But no matter what, right now, Midge takes the fall if he ever wants to fight in New York again. Midge is furious, but he agrees to take the fall. Then he knocks that lamp in the foreground straight off right with a powerful blow, and cinematographer Franz Planer (1894-1963) gives us this:

Kennedy has turned to look at his brother, but the light is now gone and there appears to be no one there. What an image! It conveys so much with light: so much of this man's inner turmoil. This is the kind of cinematography I am talking about. Planer's work is fantastic in Champion. It's worth it to watch this movie just for the lighting. Seriously.

And this noir style is not restricted only to scenes about gangsters and violence. We also get exquisite images like this:

Planer puts Douglas directly in the way of the light. He moves immediately after lighting her cigarette, but for just this moment, we get an image of a woman deep in thought, even if she looks as if she is only accepting a light.

I should add that Champion did not win the Oscar for cinematography. That went, and deservedly so, to Paul Vogel for Battleground, another film from 1949 for which I have nothing but love.

Because I Often Need This Reminder

Students don't often write little notes telling me they liked a course or found the work I assigned useful. So when they do, it is good to keep a record. More for my own sanity than anything else: a reminder that I am not a useless teacher and that students sometimes find a course I teach impactful.

Since I use this blog as a way to remember things as well as a public forum, I hope this doesn't come across as (too) self-serving or arrogant. In any case, at the end of Winter Term 2013, these are the notes I got from students.

Thanks for a great term and interesting discussions on the topics of sexuality as they are portrayed in the theater. Have a great break. WH

Thanks for such a great class this term and all your help! I had so much fun and recommended all my friends who will be on next term to take your Paris theater class since I won't be on campus :( Have a great spring break! NW

Thanks for the wonderful term. I'm really glad I decided to step out of my comfort zone and take a chance on your class. Please let me know what time the department decides to offer your theater class next term – I may not be able to fit it into my schedule, but I may try to audit it. CJP

I had a great time in your class and I'm glad I chose to take this course (rather than taking another econ/math/dry quant course). CF

Thank you for a wonderful class. This has been my favorite class at Dartmouth so far and I thoroughly enjoyed reading and discussing so many interesting plays! Have a good spring term. KO

Sex & Drama was truly wonderful experience. I enjoyed it very much. Thank you. Thank you for being one of my favorite professors here (I'm not sucking up; it's true). Dartmouth has been an unforgettable experience, and I am glad you were a part of it. I've learned a lot, and am much more aware now. I wish you the best, wherever you may teach. I am positive that the students there will enjoy your classes, no doubt. All the best, Professor Thomas. JT

Thanks for what was honestly one of the very best classes I've taken at Dartmouth. This is coming from a senior w/ the easiest major (psych) and thus a shit ton of free class slots to take whatever i want. Considering taking another one of your classes next term despite never being interested in theater before this winter. Thanks again for such a great semester, see you in class next term! JC-B

I like it here. These young people are certainly a polite bunch.