My Albums – the 1980s

Michael Jackson

Thriller (1982)

• Still the best-selling album of all time (with world-wide sales of maybe 100 million), Thriller was significant musically, visually, culturally, and in terms of racial equality. Thirty years later, with the fragmentation of contemporary culture, mass media, and methods of musical delivery, there can never be another Thriller. Yet Michael Jackson’s achievement remains secure. This album was released the year before we came to the USA. For a single track, how can one not choose the title track “Thriller?” A great cut, indelibly linked with an innovative video and Michael Jackson’s dancing.

Dire Straits

Love Over Gold (1982)

•  In 1985, my nephew Mike O’Brien recommended Dire Straits to me, while we were watching Live Aid from Wembley Stadium in London. Brothers in Arms (1985) was my first album, but later I bought this album, less well-known except to Dire Straits fans. I return to Love Over Gold often. It could be described as Dire Straits’ version of progressive rock. My favorites would be the 14′ long track “Telegraph Road” and “Private Investigation,” with its hypnotic blend of a sardonic Philip Marlow voice and a disillusioned lover.

The Police

Synchronicity (1983)

•  Sting brought all kinds of literary influences into this Police album, including Carl Jung (synchonicity), W. B. Yeats (Spiritus Mundi), and Paul Bowles’ 1949 post-colonial novel The Sheltering Sky (“Tea in the Sahara”). This could be called intelligent Rock. Yet, apparently members of The Police came to actual blows in the studio: certainly, the psychic tension & musical energy is very evident in this album. The track “Synchonicity I” has one of the most exciting Rock sounds out there, as does “Every Breath You Take.”  For all its rough edges, Synchronicity remains a great example of 1980s Rock.

Bruce Springsteen

Born in the USA (1984)

• The first CD physically pressed in the USA, this blockbuster album was Springsteen’s magnum opus. Perhaps it still is. Personally, Born in the USA reminds me of our 1983 move to the USA, and our time living in Baton Rouge, LA (1983-87). For me, along with CSN and the Eagles, Bruce Springsteen represents the America of the 1970s & 1980s, the promise of the American Dream, and the later realities of the Reagan presidency (1981-89). Many of the tracks on Born in the USA are superb and memorable, but my favorite track is his “Dancing in the Dark.”

Dire Straits

Brothers in Arms (1985)

•  The first of several Dire Straits albums that I purchased, this one is indelibly linked in my memory with our son Will. After witnessing his birth on 1st August 1986, I remember driving home late that night along LA Highway 1 and across the Mississippi River Bridge in my T-Bird Turbo, roof open windows down, humidity thick enough to see, with Dire Straits blasting out across the swamp. An suitable anthem for fatherhood!  Brothers in Arms is an album full of great music, but for me the standout track is “Your Latest Trick,” with its famous, instantly-recognizable sax introduction, Mark Knofler’s laconic voice, and his beautiful guitar tone.

Sting

The Dream of the Blue Turtles (1985)

• Sting’s first album after The Police brought powerful metaphors, intelligent lyrics, and seductive music. The level of Sting’s writing in “Russians” (“there’s no such thing as a winnable war / It’s a lie we don’t believe anymore”), “Children’s Crusade” (linking the poppies memorializing “the lads” of the Great War with the heroin / poppy addiction of today’s lads in London’s Soho), and “We Work the Black Seam” (about the 1984-85 UK Miners Strike) has not been equaled, it seems to me, even by Lennon & McCartney. But my favorite track on The Dream of the Blue Turtles is probably the fascinating “Moon Over Bourbon Street,” inspired evidently by an Ann Rice vampire novel. The fact that we lived only seventy miles from New Orleans at the time may have added some spice.

Paul Simon

Negotiations and Love Songs, 1971-1986 (1988)

• In my book, this is the best work of Paul Simon. But I also valued his Graceland (1986), an enormously influential album, marking the birth of World Music. There is not a bad song on the album, and many are masterpieces: “Kodachrome” using music to portray our visual images of the world, “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” on the games we play, “Still Crazy After All These Years” on nostalgia, meeting old lovers, and the craziness of life. It is hard to choose one cut, but let me mention the lesser-known “Train in the Distance,” from which the album title comes. The song ends with these words, “What is the point of this story / What information pertains? / The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly / Into our hearts / And our brains.” Paul Simon, wordsmith extraordinary, never wrote more poignantly than on his Negotiations and Love Songs, 1971-1986.
  

The Shadows

At Their Very Best (1989)

• This is a compilation of re-recorded tracks, and I have to admit that purchasing this album was an exercise in nostalgia.  Thirty years before, The Shadows had been my introduction to Rock, and in many ways my first inspiration for my own playing. As I have aged, I realize the simplicity in the work of The Shadows. I say this, not as criticism of Hank Marvin’s playing, but with a pang of appreciation & recognition. I think that my own guitar playing, despite a love of subtle jazz chords like Dm7-5 or Am7-11, increasingly values simplicity. Less really can be more. One track that exhibits that motif is “Theme for Young Lovers,” which speaks of a simpler, less complicated time that the 1960s represented – in our myths if not always in reality. For all of us, music, albeit briefly, may evoke such simpler times.

Raymond M. Vince
My Albums – the 1980s
rayvince.wordpress.com/
© 19th September 2012

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Notes on these Albums

• This an annotated list of the thirty (30) Rock albums that have meant the most to me over the years. The albums are arranged by decade from the 1960s to the present millennium. In the 1960s & 70s, this music was bought as vinyl LPs (although I also used reel-to-reel tape for some music back then), the middle period were bought as cassettes, the late period were CDs. Virtually all my top music from earlier eras, I now have on CD. I never did get into the strange US format of eight-track tapes, nor into Internet downloads.

• I have used the genre Rock liberally. But this is a very personal list. Many classic albums are not here: no Stones, no Bob Dylan (I knew Dylan via PPM), no Elvis, and so on. I listened to such greats: I often bought them as singles. But, for various reasons, I did not buy their albums. There are no singles here, either, only my top albums are listed. These are mainly Rock Albums, but I have included what some would call outliers – such as The Dixie Chicks, Peter Paul, & Mary, and others. But, whatever the genre, for good or ill, these are the thirty albums that are woven into my timeline, that have interpreted my life.

• Obviously, I have not included classical music or jazz in these selection of albums, though such music has been and still is an important part of my life – both as recorded music & live. I hope that my classical and jazz choices may be for another occasion. But for now, these are my thirty Rock Albums.

Raymond M. Vince
September 2012

My Albums – the 1970s

Simon & Garfunkel

Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970)

• In 1970, I was twenty-five, reading Kierkegaard & D. H. Lawrence, and working on my first graduate degree, an MA in Theology and English Literature. For many of us, the optimism of the 1960s was being replaced by an “inward turn.” Reflection was replacing revolution. A perfect example of this “inward turn” is Simon and Garfunkel’s gorgeous album, Bridge over Troubled Water (1970).

• For me, the standout cut on this album is “So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright,” an ode to the great American architect, but also (though I did not realize it then) a foreshadowing of the impending break-up of Simon & Garfunkel. Words and music have rarely been so perfectly matched. A musical note: this song was where I first encountered a favorite chord, the m7-5. It was in a delicious sequence:  Bb maj7 > Bm7-5 > A7. This is a song that I still love, and sing regularly.

Carole King

Tapestry (1971)

•  Tapestry sold 25 million copies, and for forty years held the record for the most weeks at #1 for a female artist (until Adele’s 21 in 2012). We forget how significant it was culturally: here was a strong woman, a “natural woman,” writing her own songs, and creating her own singer-songwriter genre. We are used to those characteristics now: in 1971 this was very much a new development. In that sense, Carole King was a musical & cultural pioneer.

• Like the preceding album, Tapestry revealed something of the “inward turn” of the early 1970s. For this album, with so many artistic greats, I have to choose two favorites here, “It’s Too Late” and “Will You Love me Tomorrow?” Yes, I sing these songs also.

The Eagles

Hotel California (1976)

•  With this album, The Eagles defined a particular place & time. They also gave us a language to evoke that era, using phrases like “life in the fast lane,” “brutally handsome” and “terminally pretty.” For a Brit who had married an American in 1972, and who in 1983 came to live in the USA, this album has come to define America and Americana. Don Henley once said that it was “a song about the dark underbelly of the American dream.”

• This “emblematic” album (Phil Booth) has evoked much interpretation. It seems set in the mid-1970s, yet is able to evoke the American culture of other times also. The album is full of good stuff, but the crucial track is still probably the title track, “Hotel California.”

Genesis

A Trick of the Tail (1976)

• From 1975 onwards, we were living in London. Genesis represented British art rock or progressive rock, a genre of Rock that may have seemed somewhat self-indulgent, but which could also be complex & interesting musically. The album still recalls for me our time in London – living in a city that was exciting, loud, innovative, and always interesting.

• For me, the quaint title track, “A Trick of the Tail,” is the highlight of the album, based, it would seem, on The Inheritors by William Golding, author of the better-known dystopia, The Lord of the Flies (1954). This Genesis album, A Trick of the Tail,  is firmly embedded in its time of the 1970s, yet still manages, at times, to transcend it.

Raymond M. Vince
My Albums – the 1970s
rayvince.wordpress.com/
© 18th September 2012

________________________________________________________________________________________

Notes on these Albums

• This an annotated list of the thirty (30) Rock albums that have meant the most to me over the years. The albums are arranged by decade from the 1960s to the present millennium. In the 1960s & 70s, this music was bought as vinyl LPs (although I also used reel-to-reel tape for some music back then), the middle period were bought as cassettes, the late period were CDs. Virtually all my top music from earlier eras, I now have on CD. I never did get into the strange US format of eight-track tapes, nor into Internet downloads.

• I have used the genre Rock liberally. But this is a very personal list. Many classic albums are not here: no Stones, no Bob Dylan (I knew Dylan via PPM), no Elvis, and so on. I listened to such greats: I often bought them as singles. But, for various reasons, I did not buy their albums. There are no singles here, either, only my top albums are listed. These are mainly Rock Albums, but I have included what some would call outliers – such as The Dixie Chicks, Peter Paul, & Mary, and others. But, whatever the genre, for good or ill, these are the thirty albums that are woven into my timeline, that have interpreted my life.

• Obviously, I have not included classical music or jazz in these selection of albums, though such music has been and still is an important part of my life – both as recorded music & live. I hope that my classical and jazz choices may be for another occasion. But for now, these are my thirty Rock Albums.

Raymond M. Vince
September 2012

My Albums – the 1960s

The Shadows

The Shadows (1961)

• I bought my first guitar, a Rossetti Lucky Seven, in January 1962, and the guitar playing of Hank Marvin, lead guitar of the Shadows, was my first influence, along with my good friend Nick Whitley. Back in 1959, Hank had the very first Fender Strat (Fiesta Red) imported into England, playing it through a Vox AC15, and later an AC30. In 1964, I had a little Tripletone 12W all-tube amp, playing through a gutsy 12″ Goodman speaker.

• I had to wait four decades, till Christmas 1998, to get my Fender Strat (American Standard blonde), along with a big 100W Marshall amp. But it was worth the wait! The Shadows have accompanied me on my five-decade guitar journey. For me, the classic track on this album is “Apache,” which was also the first 45 rpm vinyl single I bought.

Peter, Paul, & Mary

In the Wind (1963)

• If I learned guitar tone from Hank Marvin, then I learned claw-hammer finger picking from P&P of PPM, wearing out the vinyl of this album. I loved their songs, their harmony, and their powerful interpretations. I still do. Fifty years later, I am still playing many PPM songs at Yeoman’s Road pub in Tampa, FL on Tuesday nights.  Of course, Bob Dylan’s classic “Blowin’ in the Wind” is here, but my standout track is probably “Polly Von,” a sad and salutary tale about girlfriends and the perils of swan hunting.

• PPM were as formative influence on my teenage consciousness, my love of music, my guitar-playing, and my social conscience, as any artist. I knew and loved Dylan’s music & poetry, but through PPM’s sound rather than via Dylan’s voice. Along with the Beatles, Paul Simon, and (later) Queen, they form my early Rock pantheon. Others would come later: these were the foundation.

The Beatles

Rubber Soul (1965)

• For me, the Beatles’ album with the most personal memories is undoubtedly Rubber Soul. I was twenty when it was released: the world was my oyster, or so I naively believed. Every track was memorable, with its own connotations & meanings, as it was for many of my generation in the 1960s. My favorite cut would have to be “In My Life,” a perfect song when I was twenty, but no less so in my sixties.

• The Beatles’ cut of “In My Life” is a masterpiece, but also not to be missed is the wonderful spoken version by Sean Connery, on George Martin’s “farewell” album, In My Life (1998). Listen to that soft Scottish brogue interpreting Lennon & McCartney’s words: there will not be a dry eye in the house. Nostalgia defined.

The Beatles

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band (1967)

•  What can one say? This was the album that for ever changed Rock music. At the time, I admit that I did not recognize all its art & innovations, but over the years it has certainly grown on me. There is no doubt that its reputation is well-deserved. Plenty of gems, but for me, the standout track is “She’s Leaving Home” – the fusion of youthful angst and the bewilderment of an older generation. Nobody has told that story more poignantly than Lennon & McCartney.

• The Beatles have generated a vast literature – in print and online. Much has been written about this one album.  Here are two sources that I have enjoyed. One is a book/magazine, The Beatles: the Ultimate Album-by-Album Guide (Rolling Stone 2011), which is a fund of information about each album & track. Another source, recently discovered, is Alan W. Pollack’s Notes on all the Beatles songs, available online at http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/AWP/awp-alphabet.shtml.  It is a real labor of love, put together over many years.  Although technical, if you are a musician this may prove to be an invaluable resource.

Crosby, Stills & Nash

Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969)

•  Although I listened to PPM earlier, it was CSN that to me portrayed America – the land & the myth. This was the late sixties: the dream was beginning to fragment, to turn inward. This album seemed to perfectly mark that transitional time. Yes, Deja Vu (1970), CSN with the addition of Neil Young, was also a great LP.  But this album, for me at least, marked the end of the 60s.
  

• But it was also this album especially, with its subtle guitars and gorgeous harmonies, that took me into the magical place. Only one track to choose? It would have to be “Guinnevere” – a blending of Arthurian myth and Folk-Rock.

The Beatles

Abbey Road (1969)

• Another favourite Beatles album. Indeed, for many of us, this may be the best of all. It is certainly a worthy swansong for the four lads from Liverpool. This is an album that has grown on me over the years.

• Abbey Road is full of masterpieces. Indeed, this album is far more the Beatles’ legacy album than Let It Be, which never moved me.  And, like the previous Crosby, Stills, & Nash album, Abbey Road too marks the bitter-sweet end of the 1960s. My favorite cut from Abbey Road is the brilliant final medley, particularly “Golden Slumbers” / “Carry That Weight.”

Raymond M. Vince
My Albums – the 1960s
rayvince.wordpress.com/
© 17th September 2012

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Notes on these Albums

• This an annotated list of the thirty (30) Rock albums that have meant the most to me over the years. The albums are arranged by decade from the 1960s to the present millennium. In the 1960s & 70s, this music was bought as vinyl LPs (although I also used reel-to-reel tape for some music back then), the middle period were bought as cassettes, the late period were CDs. Virtually all my top music from earlier eras, I now have on CD. I never did get into the strange US format of eight-track tapes, nor into Internet downloads.

• I have used the genre Rock liberally. But this is a very personal list. Many classic albums are not here: no Stones, no Bob Dylan (I knew Dylan via PPM), no Elvis, and so on. I listened to such greats: I often bought them as singles. But, for various reasons, I did not buy their albums. There are no singles here, either, only my top albums are listed. These are mainly Rock Albums, but I have included what some would call outliers – such as The Dixie Chicks, Peter Paul, & Mary, and others. But, whatever the genre, for good or ill, these are the thirty albums that are woven into my timeline, that have interpreted my life.

• Obviously, I have not included classical music or jazz in these selection of albums, though such music has been and still is an important part of my life – both as recorded music & live. I hope that my classical and jazz choices may be for another occasion. But for now, these are my thirty Rock Albums.

Raymond M. Vince
September 2012

My Films – the 1960s

David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia

Columbia 1962

216′  /   RT: 98%   /   Oscars 7/10

• Lawrence of Arabia defines the genre of epic. Based of the life of Englishman T. E. Lawrence, it shows his extraordinary mobilizing of the Arab tribes on behalf of the British against the Turks in the 1914-18 Great War.  Roger Ebert says, “It is about spectacle and experience…. about things you can see or feel, not things you can say. Much of its appeal is based on the fact that it does not contain a complex story with lots of dialogue; we remember the quiet, empty passages, the sun rising across the desert, the intricate lines traced by the wind in the sand” (Chicago Sun-Times, 2001).

• Lawrence of Arabia  won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director – but not Best Actor for O’Toole. In the history of film, and in world cinema, it remains an enormously influential film.

• I was seventeen when I first saw Lawrence of Arabia.  The film made a deep impression on me, as did David Lean’s earlier film, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and his later Doctor Zhivago (1965). Any of the three could make my list, but I chose Lawrence of Arabia because of its vast scope as a film, the superb acting of Peter O’Toole (Lawrence), Alec Guinness (Prince Faisal), Jack Hawkins (General Allenby), & Omar Sharif (Sherif Ali), but above all for the complex, mysterious character that was T. E. Lawrence.

• As Roger Ebert explains, “Using O’Toole’s peculiar speech and manner as their instrument, [Lean & writer Robert Bolt] created a character who combined charisma and craziness, who was so different from conventional military heroes that he could inspire the Arabs to follow him in a mad march across the desert…. What Lean, Bolt and O’Toole create is a sexually and socially unconventional man who is simply presented as what he is, without labels or comment” (Chicago Sun-Times, 2001). 

  An epic between war film & biography, this is a superb film. In 2012, Sony Pictures did a major 4k digital restoration, ready for the 50th Anniversary showing in cinemas, which will be on October 4th, 2o12. I already have my ticket. This is a masterpiece of world cinema.

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John Schlesinger

Far From the Madding Crowd

Warner-Pathe 1967

168′  /  RT: None  /  Oscars: 0/1

•  This film was popular in England, but far less so in the United States. Based on the 1874 novel by Thomas Hardy and set in the County of Dorset, it tells the story of headstrong Bathsheba (Julie Christie), who inherits her uncle’s farm, and her three suitors – her shepherd Gabriel (Alan Bates), lonely famer William Boldwood (Peter Finch), and handsome soldier Francis Troy (Terrence Stamp).

• I saw this film at age twenty-two, loving Bathsheba’s stubborness (reminiscent of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, which I read in 1960), and also, no doubt, Julie Christie’s beauty. But the novel, not for the first time, is more complex and satisfying than the film.  As Roger Ebert explains, “Thomas Hardy’s novel told of a 19th Century rural England in which class distinctions and unyielding social codes surrounded his characters. They were far from the madding crowd … because there was nowhere else to turn…. Schlesinger seems to shy away from this kind of social approach, preferring to supply a picturesque and charming (but aimless) movie about life down on the farm” (Chicago Sun-Times, 1968). This is a fair evaluation by Ebert. But, at the time, the film made an impression upon me.

 

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Stanley Kubrick

2001: A Space Odyssey

MGM 1968

 142′ / RT: 96%  /  Oscars: 1/4

• Another film that deserves the term epic, and not only because of allusions to Homer’s Odyssey. Originally a cult movie, over the years it has grown in stature. Michael Wimington called it “an extraordinary, obsessive, beautiful work of art” (Chicago Tribune). The 2002 Sight & Sound poll ranked 2001: A Space Odyssey among the top ten films of all time. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, the film was co-written by Kubrick & Arthur C. Clarke, based in part on Clarke’s short story, “The Sentinel” (1951).

• This remains a strange, paradoxical film. We forget the actors (can you remember who played the two astronauts?), yet we remember the slow dance of the spaceships, the Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II, and Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss. We remember the sinister, controlling voice of the HAL 9000 computer. By the way, the two astronauts were played by Keith Dullea (Dave) & Gary Lockwood (Frank), but is it not HAL who is more memorable? As many know, HAL is one digit from IBM, although Clarke claimed this was coincidence. Yet, it is not the cold perfection of HAL that we are left with, but his “nervous breakdown,” and his very human fear of memory removal & computer death.

• Early in the process, Stanley Kubrick knew the film would be largely a non-verbal experience. Both image & music would be crucial to that aim. Thus, the film breaks away from normal narrative development, “About half the music in the film appears either before the first line of dialogue or after the final line. Almost no music is heard during any scenes with dialogue” (Wikipedia). This is a film to think deeply about. We reflect upon man’s place in a vast universe. Not all current audiences may not be prepared for that. Yet, the literature on the ambiguity & interpretation of 2001:A Space Odyssey is vast and continues to grow.

• It is, perhaps, in the conclusion that this film make its greatest impact. As Roger Ebert writes, “all the machines and computers are forgotten in this astonishing last half-hour of this film, and man somehow comes back into his own….. a universe where time and space are twisted. What Kubrick is saying, in the final sequence, apparently, is that man will eventually outgrow his machines, or be drawn beyond them by some cosmic awareness. He will then become a child again, but a child of an infinitely more advanced, more ancient race, just as apes once became, to their own dismay, the infant stage of man” (1968 Review). An amazing film.

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Ken Russell

Women in Love 

United Artists 1969

131′ / RT: 90%  /  Oscars: 1/4

• This Ken Russell film, based on the D. H. Lawrence novel, Women in Love (1920), tells of the complex relationship between two sisters, Gudrun Brangwen (Glenda Jackson, who received a Best Actress Oscar) and Ursula (Jennie Linden), and their men, Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed) and Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates). Gudrun & Gerald’s relationship was negative & doomed, whereas Ursula & Rupert’s relationship was more positive.

• In England, Women in Love was regarded as a very good adaptation of Lawrence’s “controversial novel about love, sex and the upper class in England” (Wikipeda). I remember seeing it while studying D. H. Lawrence for my MA degree. I found the film an emotionally powerful realization of the novel. For me, having read the book, I experienced a delicious shock of recognition.

• Vincent Canby’s 1970 review is good: “Although the novel’s ideas are necessarily simplified onscreen, the movie does capture a feeling of nature and of physical contact between people, and between people and nature, that is about as sensuous as anything you’ve probably ever seen in a film. Also faithful to Lawrence is the feeling that the relationship between the two men, though unfulfilled, is somehow cleaner, less messy, than the relationships of the men with their women. When Birkin first makes love to Ursula, a frantic assignation in the woods, it’s a sort of mad scramble of garters, buttons, and lust. When, however, he and Gerald strip to the buff to wrestle—in the movie’s loveliest sequence—there is a sense of positive grace in the eroticism” (New York Times).  Among film adaptations of literary works, Women in Love is an excellent example.

My Films – the 1960s
Raymond M. Vince
© 10th September 2012
http://rayvince.wordpress.com/

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Notes

• These are my personal lists by decade, not necessarily the greatest films of all time. They are the movies that have meant the most to me. Some are recognized as great movies: some may seem more marginal. But, to some degree, all have illuminated and interpreted my life. Most of my chosen films are American or British, but some are from other cultures. However, I have yet to see some of the greatest foreign films.

• The films are not ranked in order of merit. I have arranged them in chronological order, by decade, beginning with the 1940s. But if we were to rank them, critics have usually put Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) first, describing it as the greatest of all American films. Number two are three are usually The Godfather (1972) and Casablanca (1942), in either order. Recently, in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was, to the surprise of many, voted number one. As time goes by, our way of viewing films, our expectations of a great film, and our evaluations of excellence, change. These are simply my choices as I see them in 2012.

• For each film, along with an image or photograph of the film, I give

Director &  Title
Distributor & Year of Release
Running time in minutes / Rotten Tomatoes Rating (RT) / Oscars Won / Nominated. 

• Then, I have annotated each film with comments, quotations, & evaluations. Of the film critics, I find Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times) generally the most perceptive & helpful, but other critics are also cited. Quotations and information is taken from various sources, including IMDB, Filmsite.org,  Rotten Tomatoes, and Wikipedia.

Raymond M. Vince
September 2012

My Films – the 1950s

Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard

Paramount 1950

110′  /  RT: 98%  /  Oscars: 3/11

• Perhaps the film about Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard is many things: a black comedy, a film noir with Gothic overtones, and a penetrating study of character, youth, & age. As a film about film, Sunset Boulevard is also inevitably about the nature of celebrity: both the dreams & the madness.

• Gloria Swanson plays the aging Norma Desmond who had once been a star in silent films, while William Holden is Joe Gillis, the struggling young writer who becomes dependent on Norma’s money. Gillis becomes Norma’s kept man, with tragic results, while Erich von Stroheim in a superb performance plays the butler, ex-husband, and protector of Norma’s illusions. Both Swanson & von Stroheim had been stars in the era of silent films, and other silent stars like Buster Keaton appear.

• In his 1999 review, Roger Ebert wrote, “Sunset Boulevard’ remains the best drama ever made about the movies because it sees through the illusions, even if Norma doesn’t. When the silent star first greets the penniless writer inside her mansion, they have a classic exchange. “You used to be big,” he says. Norma responds with the great line, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Hardly anyone remembers Joe’s next line: “I knew there was something wrong with them.” Paramount digitally restored this film for DVD in 2002. I first saw this poignant film about ten years ago, and I loved it. There is no better film about Hollywood.

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Michael Anderson

The Dam Busters

Pathe 1955

124′  /  RT: 100%  / Oscars: 0/1  

• This World War Two film is the first film that I remember seeing when first released: I would have been 10 or 11. It made an impression on me. Based on two books, it tells the story of the famous May 1943 mission of 617 Squadron, when “an elite RAF squadron flew deep into Germany’s Ruhr valley carrying five-ton experimental spinning bombs that needed to be dropped from a height of exactly 60 feet at precisely 240 mph in order to destroy three key dams in the Nazi industrial heartland” (2006 DVD).

• Like skipping stones across a pond, the bombs were a brilliant strategy for attacking impregnable dams. Not well-known in America, in Britain The Dam Busters is  a highly-regarded and much-loved film. It is reported that director Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings trilogy) is working on a remake of The Dam Busters.

• Among war films, The Dam Busters is unusual for its emphasis on scientists. Their work on radar, code-breaking, & the A-Bomb was critical to the war effort, but is rarely featured in war films. Michael Redgrave plays Dr. Barnes Wallis, the scientist or “boffin” who designed the “bouncing bomb,” while Richard Todd plays Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the CO of 617 Squadron. Musically, the “Dam Busters March” by Eric Coates contributed to the film’s popularity at the time, and subsequently. To this day, RAF 617 Squadron is still operational, and is one of the best-known military units in Britain. This is an intelligent & poignant war film.

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David Lean

The Bridge On the River Kwai

Columbia 1957

161′  /  RT  96%  /  Oscars  7/8

• I was twelve when this World War II film was released: at the time it impressed me greatly.  David Lean’s film is set in Thailand, after the British defeat by the Japanese at the Fall of Singapore in February 1942. That defeat was the largest surrender of British-led military personnel in history. The story is a work of fiction, based on a 1952 French novel. But there is no doubt that the historical setting, the forced construction of the Burma Railway in 1942-43 by British soldiers from a Japanese prison camp, was very real.

• According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission: “The notorious Burma-Siam railway, built by Commonwealth, Dutch and American prisoners of war, was a Japanese project driven by the need for improved communications to support the large Japanese army in Burma. During its construction, approximately 13,000 prisoners of war died and were buried along the railway. An estimated 80,000 to 100,000 civilians also died in the course of the project, chiefly forced labour brought from Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, or conscripted in Siam (Thailand) and Burma.”

• The film was well received critically, earning seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director (Lean), and Best Actor (Alec Guinness).  Since it was released in 1957, just 12 years after the ending of World War II, many survivors of that war were still alive. The wounds and traumas of war were still fresh, but the re-imagining of the war had begun.  In a similar way, after the 1914-1918 Great War, it was 11-12 later when Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms (1929) and the film All Quiet on the West Front (1930) appeared. The cast was excellent,William Holden (USN Comm. Shears), Alec Guinness (Lt. Col. Nicholson), Jack Hawkins (Maj. Warden), and Sessue Hayakawa (Col. Saito).

• The “Colonel Bogey” march, whistled by the British POWs at the start of the film, was justly famous, but more for vulgar than musical reasons. “Besides serving as an example of British fortitude and dignity in the face of privation, the “Colonel Bogey March” suggested a specific symbol of defiance to British film-goers, as its melody was used for the song “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball.” Lean wanted to introduce Nicholson and his soldiers into the camp singing this song, but Sam Spiegel thought it too vulgar, and so whistling was substituted. However, the lyrics were, and continue to be, so well known to the British public that they didn’t need to be laboured” (Wikipedia). Certainly, the vulgar version of “Colonel Bogey” was well-known to me as an English schoolboy in the 1950s.

• The film was restored by Sony in 1985, and again in 2010 by Columbia, when it was released on Blu-ray. A great film, influential culturally as part of the British post-war reflection and reevaluation, and a great example of the work of director David Lean and actor Alex Guinness.

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Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo

Paramount 1958

128′  /  RT  98%  /  Oscars  0/2

• The revaluation of Vertigo in the last half-century is unparalleled. Its initial release brought mixed reviews: it received two minor Oscar nominations but no awards. But, gradually, its reputation, and that of English director Alfred Hitchcock, has grown. I saw it in 1958 or 1959: only more recently have I recognized its amazing innovation.

• Now, Vertigo is generally regarded as Hitchcock’s magnum opus. In 1996, the film was given a major restoration and re-released to theatres, creating a new generation of Hitchcock fans. Finally, in 2012, the Sight & Sound critics’ poll named Vertigo “the best film of all time,” above Citizen Kane, Casablanca, & The Godfather. Whether we agree or not, there is little doubt that Hitchcock’s Vertigo is an artistic masterpiece.

•  James Stewart is Scottie Ferguson, a retired policeman who suffers from vertigo, Kim Novak plays the mysterious Judy/Madeleine, while Barbara Bel Geddes is Midge, Scottie’s friend. The plot is complex, and the film techniques (especially the famous vertigo shot) remarkable. But what is Vertigo about? Always, the film was about deception & mystery. Now, we see that it also about male erotic obsession, sexual objectification, and voyeurism. In 1996, Peter Stack wrote, “In its dark heart, the film is a sorrowful contemplation of love and the veils that manipulate sexual passions. It is a taste of romantic obsession, of flirtation and deceit. And it is a cold rumination on voyeurism, the heart-racing but somehow twisted excitement people feel when they spy on others. Aren’t moviegoers voyeurs?” (San Francisco Chronicle).

• Also in 1996, Roger Ebert described a crucial scene in Vertigo, “As Scottie embraces “Madeleine,” even the background changes to reflect his subjective memories instead of the real room he’s in. Bernard Herrmann’s score creates a haunting, unsettled yearning. And the camera circles them hopelessly, like the pinwheel images in Scottie’s nightmares, until the shot is about the dizzying futility of our human desires, the impossibility of forcing life to make us happy. This shot, in its psychological, artistic and technical complexity, may be the one time in his entire career that Alfred Hitchcock completely revealed himself, in all of his passion and sadness” (Chicago Sun-Times).  Vertigo is a remarkable but disturbing work of genius.

My Films – the 1950s
Raymond M. Vince
© 10th September 2012
http://rayvince.wordpress.com/

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Notes

• These are my personal lists by decade, not necessarily the greatest films of all time. They are the movies that have meant the most to me. Some are recognized as great movies: some may seem more marginal. But, to some degree, all have illuminated and interpreted my life. Most of my chosen films are American or British, but some are from other cultures. However, I have yet to see some of the greatest foreign films.

• The films are not ranked in order of merit. I have arranged them in chronological order, by decade, beginning with the 1940s. But if we were to rank them, critics have usually put Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) first, describing it as the greatest of all American films. Number two are three are usually The Godfather (1972) and Casablanca (1942), in either order. Recently, in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was, to the surprise of many, voted number one. As time goes by, our way of viewing films, our expectations of a great film, and our evaluations of excellence, change. These are simply my choices as I see them in 2012.

• For each film, along with an image or photograph of the film, I give

Director &  Title
Distributor & Year of Release
Running time in minutes / Rotten Tomatoes Rating (RT) / Oscars Won / Nominated. 

• Then, I have annotated each film with comments, quotations, & evaluations. Of the film critics, I find Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times) generally the most perceptive & helpful, but other critics are also cited. Quotations and information is taken from various sources, including IMDB, Filmsite.org,  Rotten Tomatoes, and Wikipedia.

Raymond M. Vince
September 2012

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My Films – the 1940s

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Orson Welles, Citizen Kane 

RKO Radio 1941

119’  /  RT 100%  / Oscars,  1/9

The masterpiece of Orson Welles, who was both director & leading actor. He was only 26 at the time. Attacked by the Hearst Newspaper empire, the film often was not exhibited by cinema owners because of intimidation and legal threats. In its initial run, therefore, the film lost money. In the 1941 Oscars, while it received nine nominations (but booed each time), it won only one Oscar (Best Writing). Gradually its reputation as a film grew. Now most critics regard Citizen Kane as the greatest American film of all time. The story is loosely based on the life of William Randolph Hearst (though Welles denied this), and on other people, including Welles. The film is astonishingly innovative – particularly in cinematography, music, & narrative style.

In his 1941 review, Jorge Luis Borge called Citizen Kane a “metaphysical detective story.” He also wrote, “Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and reconstruct him” Of the mysterious rosebud motif in the film, Roger Ebert has said, “Rosebud is the emblem of the security, hope and innocence of childhood, which a man can spend his life seeking to regain. It is the green light at the end of Gatsby’s pier; the leopard atop Kilimanjaro, seeking nobody knows what; the bone tossed into the air in 2001.” This is a film to buy and to watch often.

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Michael Curtiz, Casablanca

Warner Bros 1942

103’  /  RT 97% / Oscars 3/8

Almost certainly the best-loved film, at least in the English-speaking world. Critically, Casablanca is usually found in the top three American films. It is a classic story of love & war, with a brilliant and witty script, and characters that we care about. Almost all the film is set within Rick’s Cafe, yet somehow we are very aware of World War II, just outside the door. For that reason, I have shown it in my course War in Literature & Film at the University of Tampa. Like Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Curtiz brought together a war film & a love story. In so doing, he created an enduring cultural masterpiece.

• The AFI list of 100 Movie Quotes has the most quotes from Casablanca, with Rick’s toast to Ilsa, “Here’s looking at you, kid” coming in at #5. Roger Ebert has written,  “Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it” (Chicago Sun-Times). Sam, playing piano & singing “As Time Goes By,” casts a spell. His song becomes not simply a musical motif  in the film: it forms the soundtrack for our lives.

Many minor roles and extras in the film were actual exiles & refugees from Hitler’s Europe, bringing an emotional intensity to Casablanca, especially in scenes such as the “duel of the songs.” The main roles were as international as the War itself: Humphrey Bogart as Rick (American), Ingrid Bergman as Ilsa (Swedish), Paul Henreid as Victor (Austrian), Claud Rains as Capt. Renault (English), Conrad Veidt as Maj. Strasser (German), Sydney Greenstreet as Ferrari (English), Peter Lorre as Ugarte (Austrian-Hungarian/German), and Dooley Wilson as Sam the pianist (American).

• There are deeper historical dimensions in Casablanca. Initially, Rick Blaine will not “stick his neck out for anyone.”  Others may be heroic, but not he. Rick’s Café Américain seems an oasis in a world of chaos and violence. Rick personifies an America that – before Pearl Harbor – was very reluctant to be drawn into this “European” war. Yet, in the end, Rick – like the USA – does commit. He joins the struggle: he finds his own heroism. In so doing, he, Ilsa, and Victor (and Capt. Renault) lead Casablanca to an ending unequaled in emotional & dramatic power. One never gets tired of this masterpiece.

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Howard Hawks, The Big Sleep

Warner Bros 1946

 114′  /  RT:  96%  /  Oscars: 0/0

My earliest memory of the culture of the United States was actually an audio experience, listening to a BBC Radio play in the 1950s or 60s, probably of some Raymond Chandler novel. That wry & laconic Marlow tone helped me to first imagine America. But it was much later, probably not until 2000, that I remember watching The Big Sleep. The film stars Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall, who first lit up the screen in Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1944). The plot of The Big Sleep is endlessly confusing & complex, with many loose ends, producing this iconic modernist thriller – and a great example of film noir.

• The Big Sleep received no Oscar nominations. While the film is based on the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep, the film was heavily censored by Hays Code requirements. The novel clearly shows that Carmen is a killer, and that Geiger sells pornography and is gay, but none of this could be portrayed in the film, except by subtle allusions. However, the suggestive racehorse scene did slip by the Hays Office – Roger Ebert calls it “one of the most daring examples of double entendre in any movie up until that time.”

The dialogue is always sharp & smart, a testimony to Chandler’s novel but also to screenwriters who included William Faulkner. As Roger Ebert says, this is “one of the great film noirs, a black-and-white symphony that exactly reproduces Chandler’s ability, on the page, to find a tone of voice that keeps its distance, and yet is wry and humorous and cares.” In the genre of film noir, some may prefer John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) or Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947), both great films. But for me, The Big Sleep not only taps into some personal memories of Philip Marlow’s skeptical and wry tone, it is also a classic film noir. A confusing plot, indeed, but does not that well portray modern life?  Like much of film noir, this is a film that presents far more questions than answers.

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Carol Reed, The Third Man

British Lion 1949

 104′  /  RT: 100%  /  Oscars 1/3

A masterpiece of British cinema, with the screenplay written by Graham Greene. The notorious Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, may be based on the famous British spy & traitor, Kim Philby. Joseph Cotton is pulp writer Holly Martins, Trevor Howard plays Major Calloway, and Alida Valli is Anna Schmidt, Lime’s girlfriend.

“Of all the movies I have seen, this one most completely embodies the romance of going to the movies” (Roger Ebert). The film, evoking Vienna after World War Two, is a superbly enigmatic story, “… superficial mysteries wrapped around deeper mysteries of the human heart, all immersed in a desperate universe suspended by the silent witnessing of a thousand eyes” (Tom Keogh).

• This British film noir thriller has been remastered and is available as a DVD with a useful booklet in in the Criterion Collection (2007). There, critic Luc Santes says that The Third Man is one of a handful of films “that have become archetypes… a construct that would lodge itself deep in the unconscious of an enormous number of people…. Vienna after the war represents the ruins of Europe” (6). Among those same ruins, through distorted camera angles, brilliant close-ups, and melancholy zither music, Reed & Greene tell their story. They give us a haunting image of the early Cold War.

In The Third Man, with his excellent cast, crew, and setting director Carol Reed “created a portrait of postwar corruption and the death of idealism that has lodged ever since in our collective consciousness. Together, they made a rich, moody masterpiece of guilt, love, and ambivalent redemption” (Michael Wilmington). This is one of my favorite films of all time. You should see it.

My Films – the 1940s
Raymond M. Vince
© 9th September 2012
http://rayvince.wordpress.com/

_______________________________________________________________________________________________

Notes

• These are my personal lists by decade, not necessarily the greatest films of all time. They are the movies that have meant the most to me. Some are recognized as great movies: some may seem more marginal. But, to some degree, all have illuminated and interpreted my life. Most of my chosen films are American or British, but some are from other cultures. However, I have yet to see some of the greatest foreign films.

• The films are not ranked in order of merit. I have arranged them in chronological order, by decade, beginning with the 1940s. But if we were to rank them, critics have usually put Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) first, describing it as the greatest of all American films. Number two are three are usually The Godfather (1972) and Casablanca (1942), in either order. Recently, in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was, to the surprise of many, voted number one. As time goes by, our way of viewing films, our expectations of a great film, and our evaluations of excellence, change. These are simply my choices as I see them in 2012.

• For each film, along with an image or photograph of the film, I give

Director &  Title
Distributor & Year of Release
Running time in minutes / Rotten Tomatoes Rating (RT) / Oscars Won / Nominated. 

• Then, I have annotated each film with comments, quotations, & evaluations. Of the film critics, I find Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times) generally the most perceptive & helpful, but other critics are also cited. Quotations and information is taken from various sources, including IMDB, Filmsite.org,  Rotten Tomatoes, and Wikipedia.

Raymond M. Vince
September 2012

Nabokovs: Father and Son

Death of Dmitri Nabokov at 77

Last Wednesday, 22 February 2012, Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov (1934-2012), the only child of his famous father, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977), and his mother, Vera Nabokov, nee Slonim (1902-1991), died in Vevey, Switzerland.

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Most of us who love the work of Vladimir Nabokov probably know of his son Dmitri only as his father’s literary collaborator and translator. In any universe, that would be no mean place. Yet, Dmitri was more, a fascinating and passionate man.  But first, his famous father.

Exile marked the life of Vladimir Nabokov.  In 1919, with his family Vladimir had fled Russia and the Bolsheviks. From 1919-1922, Vladimir studied at Cambridge University, England. In 1922 in Berlin, Vladimir’s father, Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (1870-1922), was assassinated. In 1925, Vladimir Nabokov married Vera  Slonim, the same year my parents Percy and Ena married in England.

On 10 May 1934, Dimitri was born in Berlin, Germany, during the Nazi era.  In 1937 the family fled Germany for France;  then in 1940 for the USA. Like many in 20th century Europe, another experience of loss and exile.  First, Dmitri attended Harvard, and then studied opera  at Longy, MA, and La Scala, Milan.

Mr. Nabokov concentrated on history and literature at Harvard and graduated in 1955. He also began training for the opera at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass. In the late 1950s, Mr. Nabokov helped his father translate his novel “Invitation to a Beheading.” In 1959 he traveled to Italy and began training with a singing coach at La Scala in Milan. He later made his operatic debut in “La Bohème” alongside Luciano Pavarotti, then a novice tenor. An imposing presence onstage at well over six feet tall, he continued to sing professionally until 1982. He also raced cars competitively until 1965 (Daniel E. Slotnik, New York Times).

To say that Dimitri covered the bases in his 77 years is an understatement.

“Professional opera singer, mountain climber, race car driver, and Vladimir Nabokov’s best translator and collaborator, Dmitri Nabokov has led an impassioned life” (Matt Evans, The Morning News)

Six Obituaries & One Article

• NRC  Rotterdam, Netherlands,  23 Feb 2012
• RIA Novosti, Moscow, Russia,  24 Feb 2012
• Miami Herald, Miami FL, 24 Feb 2012
• New York Times,  Daniel E. Slotnik, New York, 25 Feb 2012
• Washington Post, Washington, 25 Feb 2012
• Los Angeles Times,  Los Angeles, 26 Feb 2012

The article is by Matt Evans, “I Will Sing When You’re All Dead,” published online a few years ago in The Morning News. 

• Morning News, 19 Nov 2008

Dmitri Cheated Death – Multiple Times.

Evans talks of how many times Dmitri seemed to cheat death.

Dmitri was born in Berlin on May 10, 1934, home to Hitler’s putsch and the Brownshirt Bureaucracy. Although Vladimir, his father, was famously Russian, Vera (Dmitri’s mother), was Jewish-Russian, which made her and her son potential Nazi targets. The Nabokovs fled Germany and its pack of jaundiced Nazi curs for Paris in late 1937; they fled France for America in May of 1940. The transatlantic liner they sailed on was sunk by German U-boats on its subsequent (and final) westward voyage. Incidentally, the Germans invaded Paris less than one month after the Nabokovs were safely in America. Nice try, Nazis, but no dice (Matt Evans).

In July 1952, Dimitri fell 30 feet climbing the Middle Teton.  He walked away unhurt.  Later the same year, the strange phenomenon of the meteor occurred:

In December of that same year, while asleep in Camp 2 (15,600 ft.), just below the snowline on Mount Orizaba, Mexico, Dmitri narrowly missed becoming the epicenter of a 10-foot crater made when a meteor, hurtled from God only knows which distant solar system, struck during the night…. The suspicious may seek to further cast doubt on Dmitri’s claim by citing the paucity of “killed by meteor” stories. True enough, but remember this: The meteor-flattened don’t tell tales (Matt Evans).

Then in 1980, in Switzerland, Evans tells of a fiery crash in his Ferrari 308. Dimitri was severely burned, “dying” briefly.  Receiving six skin grafts, he spent 42 weeks in intensive care and rehab, in the same hospital complex where his father had died three years earlier.

This Dmitri Nabokov, then 46, destroyed his “rare fiberglass Ferrari 308 GTB designed for competition” in a fiery crash near Chexbres, on the autoroute between Montreux and Lausanne, at 1045 hours, September 26, 1980, on the Chexbres Autoroute. He suffered third-degree burns over 40 percent of his body, and fractured his neck.  Medics brought Dmitri to a Lausanne burn unit, where he died 12 days later—albeit only briefly: “[I am] enticed by a bright light at the far end of the classic tunnel, but restrain myself at the last instant when I think of those who care for me and of important things I must still do” (Matt Evans)

Dmitri – Little Boy in Father’s Great(est) Work

Scholars will argue about which is Valadimir Nabokov’s greatest work.  Is it Lolita (1955) or is it his revised autobiography, Speak, Memory (1999)?  There is a good case for both, but it is in the 1999 work that we meet young Dmitri.  But first, Lolita, the most famous of Nabokov’s books:

Lolita (1955) is a disturbing, indeed shocking, but wonderfully complex novel about a strange man, Humbert Humbert, and his taboo love for his stepdaughter, Dolly, better known to the world as Lolita.  The novel Lolita begins with these words, showing Nabokov’s love of alliteration, puns, multiple allusions, and much more:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.  My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta. The tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four foot ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita (9)

Three hundred pages later, come the final, rich sentences of Lolita.  The first and last words of the book are Lolita—full circle. Only in the “refuge of art,” can we, like Vladimir Nabokov, share this immortality. Nabokov’s “comic vision” is able to overcome the “sadness or terror of everyday life” (Alfred Appel 457).  Such indeed is the gift of “the angels,” and the “durable pigments” of art.  Here are these two last sentences of Lolita:

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita (309).

Speak, Memory (1999) is an autobiography, but with a difference.  First, it covers only the European part of Vladimir’s life, from 1899 to 1940. Second, this is an amazing, poignant work, one of the greatest autobiographies of all time. Certainly, it has moved me more than anything I have read in years. Jonathan Yardley wrote this:

Precisely how many times I have read it I do not know, nor do I recall when I read it for the first time, but this can be said with certainty: It is a book that I absolutely, unconditionally love. Opening it entirely at random – to any page, any paragraph, any sentence – I feel at once in the presence of the miraculous, awakened once again to the power, the magic and the mystery of the word (“Nabokov’s Brightly Colored Wings of Memory.” Washington Post 26 May 2004)

Dimitri was only six at the end of the book, Speak, Memory, when his parents Vladimir and Vera were about to leave with him for America, escaping Nazi persecution.  In Chapter Fifteen, the final one, Dmitri’s father Vladimir writes this:

Whenever I start thinking about my love for a person, I am in the habit of immediately drawing radii from my love – from my heart, from the tender nucleus of a personal matter – to monstrously remote points of the universe….  I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion,in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence (232)

We have an amazing discussion of time and space, concepts of the finite and the infinite – and much more. Nabokov then writes about how he and Vera – like every parent in history – delight in the growing self-awareness of their beloved son (233).  The chapter ends with what, in lesser hands, would be mundane: namely, the Nabokovs and Dmitri are about to board the SS Champlain for New York – and freedom.  In Nabokov’s hands, however, there is an amazing evoking of “pure memory.”  Every time I read this, I am swept away.  What it will do for you, I know not.  But, as a tribute to Dmitri Nabokov and his remarkable father, let me share this with you.  The “you and I” refers to Vladimir and his wife Vera. As good stories often do, it begins in a garden. It ends with a ship.

Laid out on the last limit of the past and on the verge of the present, it remains in my memory merely as a geometrical design which no doubt I could easily fill in with the colors of plausible flowers, if I were careless enough to break the hush of pure memory that (except, perhaps, for some chance tinnitus doe to the pressure of my own tired blood) I have left undisturbed, and humbly listened to, from the beginning….  suddenly, as we came to the end of its path, you and I saw something that we did not immediately point out to our child, so as to enjoy in full the blissful shock, the enchantment and glee he would experience on discovering ahead the ungenuinely gigantic, the unrealistically real prototype of the various toy vessels he had doddled about in his bath. There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems…a splendid ship’s funnel… that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen (243).

This little boy, who in 1940 saw that “splendid ship’s funnel,” has passed on.  Dimitri was the son of one of the greatest authors of our age. We have his father’s work, which that little boy grew up to work on.  That is grace indeed.

But – we mourn the passing of Dimitri Nabokov.

© Raymond M. Vince / 26 Feb 2012

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Romantic Modernist

 

Brilliant Writer or Haunted Man?

We know F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) as the author of The Great Gatsby (1925), arguably the finest American novel of the 20th century.  But who else was he – intelligent chronicler of the Jazz Age, master of the short story, tragic hero, romantic modernist?  All those things – and more.  Today, we recognize him above all as a brilliant writer – indeed, one of the greatest authors that America has ever produced.  But it was not always so.

 Fitzgerald himself feared, towards the end of his life, that ultimately he was a failure. This judgment became popular in the 1950s and later; maybe, after the horrors of World War Two, it sounded reassuring to some.  In 1958, for instance, Brooks Atkinson called him a writer “haunted by the past, possessed by the demons of the present, weary, disillusioned, overwhelmed on every side…” (qtd. in Prigozy, 18). Reminiscent of our conflicted view of his contemporary, Ernest Hemingway, it now seems very hard to separate Fitzgerald the writer from the legend of Scott and Zelda – American celebrities.  So, we are left with excess followed by failure: an easy judgment.

Writing the American Dream

Yet, this is a judgment too superficial.  What he wrote of his greatest creation – Jay Gatsby – was true also of Fitzgerald, Jay’s creator, that he had “an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person” (The Great Gatsby 2). As both romantic and modernist, Fitzgerald understood America only too well, first as the Nation embraced wealth and modernity in the 1920s, and then as Dream collided with Depression in the 1930s. The hopes, tragedies, and ironies of the United States are encapsulated in Fitzgerald’s life and work, as he himself was able to recognize.  That evaluation is true of the 1920s: it remains valid today. To put it simply, Fitzgerald lived and wrote the American Dream – and he paid the price for so doing.

His coming-of-age novel, the work that launched his career, was This Side of Paradise (1920). Fitzgerald accepted, as an older generation could not, that America and Europe were experiencing a major shift in consciousness.  We can call this shift modernity.  It is exemplified in the impact of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein: it was birthed through the traumas of the Great War.  The young protagonist of Paradise, Amory Blaine, is part of a new generation, one that had grown up “to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (Scribner ed. 260).  The book asks, what is to become of Amory’s generation in this brave new world?  An older generation of conservatives still cannot accept Amory’s conclusion about “dead” Gods, nor appreciate the pathos of Fitzgerald’s question.  We may realize that the roots of contemporary culture wars lie less in present political demographics than in deep contradictions long found within the American psyche.

The Landscape of Loss

Along with his first novel, Fitzgerald is writing the earliest of his short stories, some among his best.  What themes do we find in these stories?  Roxanna Robinson helpfully asks, “What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heart-breaking, more haunting, more romantic?” (Best Early Stories xi).  Certainly, Fitzgerald portrayed the excitement of the new Jazz Age – flappers, cocktails, and automobiles – after the horrific losses of the 1914-1918 War.  Yet in these stories, and throughout his career, Fitzgerald also wrote – so poignantly – of this “landscape of loss.” Indeed, this may be crucial to his abiding significance as a writer.  Loss is not merely generational or transitory: it is human and eternal.  That is a truth that in his heart Fitzgerald knew.

Two years after This Side of Paradise, his second novel, The Beautiful and the Damned (1922), appeared. With its autobiographical allusions to the excesses of Scott and Zelda, this seemed an obvious morality tale.  It contributed to the writer’s reputation, but more to the popular legend. In both This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and the Damned, James L. W. West III sees the question of vocation: “Without a calling, Fitzgerald tells us, we risk deterioration and ruin. Alcohol and idle pleasure cannot sustain us, nor can wealth. We must have purpose and vocation to give direction and consequence to what we do” (Prigozy, 56). But, what was true of Scott and Zelda was true also of America, if anyone was listening.

 The Great Gatsby (1925) – Quest or Elegy?

Three years after his previous novel Damned, Fitzgerald published his masterpiece The Great Gatsby (1925) – the flawless novel of his generation.  The Great Gatsby was a retelling of America’ story from the point of view of modernity, an ironic reinterpretation of the American Dream.  As is well known, the 17^th century Dream goes back John Smith in Jamestown (1607), William Bradford on Plymouth Rock (1620), and John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Company (1629).  Whatever our evaluation of those first settlers may be, their versions of the American Dream were clearly articulated – varieties of a quest for God, Gold, and Glory. But how do we work out that Dream in the 20th century?  That was the question posed by Fitzgerald.

 By 1900, the United States was the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.  Apart from the Fundamentalists, Americans could no longer identify easily with Puritans in Massachusetts or John Smith in Jamestown. What then becomes of the Dream?  Is it merely a selfish quest for wealth and power, or is there still vocation and vision?  In other words, is The Great Gatsby a quest for a living Dream, or an elegy for one that is no more?

 

The Wisdom of Irony

 The title of The Great Gatsby presents us immediately with irony.  How great is this fellow Jay Gatsby, self-made American hero?  How noble is his poignant, doomed quest for Daisy – his legend of the Holy Grail?  Matthew Bruccoli argues that Fitzgerald’s novel is “time-haunted,” dealing with time, loss, and memory (10-12).  Using a Shakespearean phrase, the time is “out of joint” (Hamlet I, 5, 188).  The Great Gatsby appeared just six years after the dramatic 1919 corroboration of Einstein’s new space-time paradigm.  Time and space indeed had changed – with a vengeance. Within this context, as I have argued elsewhere, small wonder if the novel be “time-haunted.” Today, we still argue about the American Dream: for those with ears to hear, Fitzgerald’s profound reinterpretation still speaks.  Here, for instance, is the justly famous ending to The Great Gatsby,

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder (180)

Amid the stridency of the 2012 U.S. Election, we may hear again Fitzgerald’s wise and wistful final words of the novel, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past (The Great Gatsby 180).

 Tender is the Night (1934) – the soul of Fitzgerald?

Fitzgerald was disappointed with the sales of The Great Gatsby. He continued to write short stories, while he and Zelda enjoyed the hospitality of Sara and Gerald Murphy on the French Riviera. But Zelda’s metal state was becoming dire: in 1930 she was hospitalized, first in France and then in a sanatorium on Lake Geneva, being diagnosed as schizophrenic. The Crash of October 1929 had precipitated the Great Depression – for America and also for the Fitzgeralds. Yet, since 1925, Scott Fitzgerald had been working on and off on his next novel.  In 1934, Tender is the Night finally appeared.  Less accessible than The Great Gatsby, it remains difficult and controversial.  Yet a case can be made that this novel reveals the soul of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The title, taken from John Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” evokes what Charles Scribner III has called the “transient, bittersweet, and ultimately tragic nature of Fitzgerald’s ‘Romance’” (Tender is the Night ix).  The central characters, Dick and Nicole Diver, portray both the magic of their friends the Murphys and also the tragic failure of Scott and Zelda’s marriage.  A product of the 1930s Depression, the novel may yet speak to us. Placed amid the idyllic warmth of the Riviera, the novel shows us the birth of modern psychiatry, the illusions of Hollywood, the anomie of the rich, the “landscape of loss” – and the traumas of shell-shock and the Great War.

War and the Lost Generation

In fact, Tender is the Night bears comparison with another tragic story of war and love – published just five years earlier – Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). Fitzgerald’s tale is as much a witness to the post-war “lost generation” as anything that Hemingway had written.  For example, here in an early scene from Tender is the Night, Dr. Dick Diver explains to the young Hollywood starlet Rosemary the significance of the 1916 Battle of the Somme. At over a million casualties, the Somme remains one of the bloodiest battles ever recorded.

“The land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer,” he said to Rosemary…. All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently” (56-57).

This passage from Fitzgerald might usefully be put alongside Hemingway’s bitter words from A Farewell to Arms about the wartime manipulation of language, “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene…” (185). If the Great War marks the birth-pangs of our modern age, then the literature of modernism is the chronicle of that painful birth.

The Crack-Up (1945)

In the 1930s, Fitzgerald was known also as a writer of perceptive essays, such as his “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1931) and “My Lost City” (1932).  His observations and epigrams still sound sharp and to-the-point, as in this gem,

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire…. We were the most powerful nation.  Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun? (“Echoes of the Jazz Age,” The Crack-Up 13-14).

However, in 1936, during a time of personal breakdown, Fitzgerald published three essays under the title of “The Crack-Up.”  At the time, they were not well-received: Hemingway, for instance, found them embarrassing whining.

On 21 December 1940 in Hollywood, CA, F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a massive heart attack.  In 1948, his widow Zelda died, in a fire at Highland Mental Hospital in Ashville, NC.  After Scott’s death, his friend Edmund Wilson began to edit the three 1936 essays, other essays, some letters, and Fitzgerald’s notebooks.  Later, he published them all under the title of The Crack-Up (1945). Today, many find this posthumous work a compelling psychological and intellectual picture of Fitzgerald.  Indeed, The Crack-Up may be the nearest we can get to an autobiography: it presents the back-story to his creative genius.  For example, in this quotation, he takes his own psychological breakdown and extrapolates it to a more general human experience,

Of course all life is a process of breaking down… the test of a first-class intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function…. I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle…. The contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future (“The Crack-Up,” The Crack-Up 69-70)

The Legacy of Fitzgerald

Has anybody given a better definition of modernism or modernity, and of the conflict between the conservative and progressive psyches?  Conservative skeptics may discount Fitzgerald’s words as the product of an unbalanced and dangerous mind: similar judgments have been made against the gloomy but perceptive Dane, Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Yet, in both men’s work, there is unfailing commitment to truth-telling – painful in honesty and yet timeless in significance.  As Fitzgerald famously wrote, “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy” (Notebooks, The Crack-Up 122). His reputation, revised upwards from the 1970s onwards, now rests securely on The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, and a brilliant collection of short stories.  However, to these undoubted masterpieces The Crack-Up adds a poignant account of the tensions of Fitzgerald’s thinking and feeling.  It shows us the inner life of a man. It reveals a Romantic Modernist.

© Raymond M. Vince / 25 February 2012

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What to Read?

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s two great works are The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is the Night (1934).  I wrote about Fitzgerald and Einstein in my “The Great Gatsby & Transformations of Space-Time: Fitzgerald’s Modernist Narrative & the New Physics of Einstein.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 5 (2006): 86-108.  Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920) is not his greatest writing, but I have found that students often enjoy it – perhaps because they find themselves in a similar Sitz im Leben to its protagonist, Amory Blaine. The tales of Fitzgerald have been edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli in a comprehensive collection, The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scriber 1989), and there is also an interesting collection edited by Bryant Mangum, The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Modern Library, 2005), from which the Roxana Robinson quotation above is taken.  Fitzgerald’s posthumous The Crack-Up (1945) is an illuminating portrait of creator and man.  A good introduction to the voluminous literature on Fitzgerald is The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Ruth Prigozy (Cambridge, 2002).  Indispensable for deeper research is The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review (Managing Editor, Kirk Curnutt).

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Ray’s LitChat #2 – An occasional series of articles on Literature

Ernest Hemingway: Ordinary Hero

“So Much to Write”

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is the quintessential American author.  Witnessing and writing about many of the traumatic events of the twentieth century, like his best character Nick Adams, Hemingway is an American Everyman, a pilgrim journeying through life. Through the first six decades of the century, Hemingway experienced the Great War (1914-18), the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), World War Two (1939-45), and the Cold War era of the 1950s and into the 1960s.  Sharing the stage with the New Woman of the 1920s, he wrestled in life and literature with what the New Man should be. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald – friend, rival, and contemporary – he wrote tragically and memorably about war and peace “in our time.”

With truth and insight, his work chronicles how, in the twentieth century, the world changed forever. In one of his greatest stories, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), Hemingway’s alter ego Harry reflects on his life, “There was so much to write.  He had seen the world change; not just the events … but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how the people were at different times.  He had been in it and he had watched it and it was his duty to write of it” (17).  That was Hemingway’s duty: he must write “of it.”  He had to tell the story.  And, until his last tragic years, he did.

An Ordinary Hero

As ambulance driver or war correspondent, Hemingway participated in the Spanish Civil War, and the two World Wars. As such, he saw the tragic suffering, the myriad betrayals, the appalling waste of life.  Like George Orwell, he protested the manipulation of language by those in power, particularly in wartime. That was why, in A Farewell to Arms (1929), with rhetoric often misunderstood, he wrote, “Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene…” (185). In that same book, he wrote that this world “kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially” (249).  Yet, despite his pessimistic view of Fate, Hemingway wrote with power about ordinary people, finding in them a kind of courage – an ordinary heroism.

 Hemingway’s observations on men and women, war and peace, heroism and cowardice, words and actions, are an abiding part of our Western cultural memory.  Embedded in a wonderful collection of novels, short stories, essays, and letters, his observations remain unique and indelible.  We live in a very different world, indeed a different millennium.  But still we need his sharp eye, his accurate ear, his truthful voice.  There is no doubt that Hemingway shaped the English language, more than any other modern writer, replacing outworn classical rhetoric with Anglo-Saxon understatement, irony, and concision.

 Themes, a Legend, and an Ending

In his writings, Hemingway illustrates so many important themes – including war and violence; Nature, Fate, and naturalism; the changing understanding of masculinity & femininity; the “poetics of loss” (William Adair); human existence in the face of death; and a call to courage defined as “grace under pressure” (Hemingway).  His stories have a surface simplicity; underneath, they are complex, profound of meaning, well illuminated by his own metaphor of the iceberg.  What is only suggested – even what is omitted – becomes of the utmost significance to the story.  Absence is a characteristic feature of Hemingway’s work, as it is for the “lost generation” and for Modernist literature as a whole.

 As the twentieth century developed, Hemingway became more famous as celebrity than as writer.  His face was on the cover of countless magazines: the legend became larger than the man.  In this contemporary culture, we are very used to that, but in this particular phenomenon Hemingway was a pioneer – ultimately a tragic pioneer.  In 1952, he received a Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea.  Then in 1954, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Yet, his father’s suicide back in 1928, and the death of many friends through the 1940s, haunted Hemingway. In the 1950s, with his writing skills apparently failing him, increasingly depression, illness, and alcohol took their toll on the man.  As Camelot opens with the presidency of John F. Kennedy, Hemingway’s story comes to an end.  On July 2^nd, 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway took his own life.

 Hemingway’s Legacy

What is the legacy of Hemingway?  What still can he give us?  Through his various protagonists – Nick Adams, Frederick Henry and Catherine Barkley, Harry, an old man and two waiters in a “clean, well-lighted” cafe, Francis Macomber, Robert Jordan and Maria, among many others – we see one of the great storytellers of our time dealing with very human hopes and fears amid the new world of modernity.  This is a tragic and fateful world, and Hemingway allows us few illusions. Some will not read him still for that reason.  Yet, Hemingway also may reveal to us a world of beauty and healing grace.  As an old man said, “Man is not made for defeat… A man can be destroyed but not defeated” (The Old Man and the Sea, 103).  Like ancient Beowulf facing his greatest enemy, the Fire Dragon, like “man at war with the hostile world” (J. R. R. Tolkien), Ernest Hemingway gives us the simple dignity of the hero facing the archetypal battle of life.

 © Raymond M. Vince, February 2012

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What to Read?

His early The Sun Also Rises (1926) is a favorite, and remains a good introduction to Hemingway.  A Farewell to Arms (1929) is the best American novel from the Great War, while many would see his Spanish Civil War tale, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) as his finest novel.  All his short stories repay study, but the collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (1961) is exceptional and moving.  I have often taught his In Our Time (1925), an unusual and to me underrated collection of short stories and vignettes, many about war. His novella, The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is deservedly famous.  The posthumous works of Hemingway are controversial, but The Garden of Eden (1986), Under Kilimanjaro (2005)  and A Moveable Feast (Restored Edition, 2009) should not be missed.  Hemingway’s Letters are now being published.  The scholarship on Hemingway is vast, but The Hemingway Review (Editor, Susan F. Beegel) is invaluable for research.

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Ray’s LitChat #1 – An occasional series of articles on Literature

Faster than Light? Maybe.

The Speed of Light

Can something go faster than light – or is this the ultimate velocity in the Universe, as Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity (1905) claims?  Of course, that velocity is pretty fast, so, you might say, who cares?  How fast is fast?  The way I learned it at school, back in England in the 1950s, as measured in imperial units the speed of light in a vacuum was very roughly 186,000 miles per second.  In the more modern MKS (meter/kilogram/second) units, or SI units, it is 299,792,458 metres per second.

The speed of light is usually described by the constant c, and it appears in the most recognizable scientific formula of all time,  Einstein’s famous E=Mc², which also dates from 1905. SI stands for Système international d’unités; sorry, French-haters, but that’s just the way it is. That figure of 299,792,458, incidentally, is accurate because now we actually define the length of the metre from this constant c and the definition of the second.  Here is a link to BIPM or the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures in Sèvres, France, which explains this.

Light … & American Exceptionalism

Some, whose belief in American exceptionalism seems to verge on paranoia, may refuse to accept the word of the French.  So, for such thinkers, here is a link to NIST or the National Institute of Standards and Technology, found in Gaithersburg, Maryland – which I understand is still in the good old USA.  However, the NIST is part of the United States Commerce Department, which some in the GOP – if they remember – want to abolish.  Therefore, you may want to click the NIST link above rather speedily, while you still can.  Presumably, the Far Right believe that abolishing the NIST will help our scientific standing in the world.  I have my doubts.

The Big Question

So, to return to my original question, can something go faster than light?  The  question is being asked now because of recent reports that neutrinos – those strange little subatomic entities, electrically neutral & very weakly interacting – have been observed by Italy’s OPERA detector traveling faster than light!  Yes, Italy is not only about Chianti, Debt Crisis, & Ferrari 458s: they also do Science over there. On these wonderful little neutrinos,  Wikipedia has a useful introductory article, with links to more credible sources.  This dramatic observation of super-fast neutrinos is sending, as they say, “shockwaves through the physics community.”  Stumble sent me a link this morning to a useful discussion of these Italian observations and their implications for Physics.  The link is below:

Faster-than-light neutrinos could be proof of extra dimensions

So what are the implications?  The Stumble posting – taken from material in New Scientist – stresses we are still very far from a  confirmed result.  There needs to be a great deal more scrutiny and testing before we can accept such a revolutionary observation and corroborated.  But as this posting goes on to say,

While it might seem that such a discovery would invalidate Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity – which takes it as a given that the speed of light is the absolute limit – there may be a way to reconcile the theory with the results.

So what is that way?  It has to do with String Theory, a powerful and “elegant” theory in Physics but which – so far – has yet to be corroborated by experiment.  Maybe, the thought goes, these darling little neutrinos (meaning small, neutral one in Italian) are taking a kind of short-cut through another dimension, a dimension beyond our three spatial dimensions and one of time.  Shades of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone (1959-64), maybe?  Cue the spooky music.  The article continues,

Anyway, the larger idea here is that the three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension we’re familiar with are what make up a four-dimensional membrane, known as the brane. However, this brane “floats” in a larger reality known as the bulk. While in the ordinary course of things it would be impossible to leave the universe – to leave the brane – at incredibly high energies it might be possible for particles to temporarily break free and zip through the bulk.

This may be all getting a bit metaphysical, but a lot of these ideas are crucial to string theory, which takes extra hidden dimensions as one of its central features. Until now, string theory has remained an elegant theory that is completely beyond the bounds of experimentation. If – and, again, this is one gargantuan if – the OPERA results hold up, that could represent the first tangible evidence for string theory.

So maybe we can keep Einstein’s foundational theory, with its absolute velocity for c, and also accept the strange results of these speedy, little neutrinos.  An interesting question, and one that I suspect the great Einstein would have loved.  Today, we often are surrounded by rather small questions, and even smaller minds.

But Albert Einstein loved the really big questions.