Only Angels Have Wings Entertaining, Though Dated

 

 

 

Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Directed by Howard Hawks

Columbia Pictures, 121 minutes, Not-rated

★★★ ½

 

The Wright Brothers took off in 1903, an above-the ground journey that lasted 56 seconds. There is a very American quirk of assuming that once something is proved possible, progress occurs at the snap of the fingers. When Howard Hawks directed Only Angels Have Wings three decades later, air flight was still in a state of infancy. Many airplanes were still built of fabric stretched across a light frame, all were propeller- driven, and crashes were so prevalent they ceased being newsworthy. This is the era of flight under analysis in Only Angels Have Wings, a good film though decidedly dated.

 

Another thing to bear in mind is that the film starred Cary Grant and Jean Arthur as its principals. Rita Hayworth was included, but this was her first major role and Arthur was then much more famous. The best way to watch Only Angels Have Wings is to keep these things in mind. The other is not to burst out laughing when you first see Geoff Carter (Grant) looking like a cowboy in drag in his oversized hat, flight jacket, and gun holster.

 

This film is set in an unnamed South American country, probably Chile as a port city and the Andes figure into the plot. A cargo boat enters a harbor to unload and refuel. Among those going ashore is Bonnie Lee (Arthur), who is totally comfortable with the wolf whistles, cat-calls, and swarming young men offering to buy her a drink. She heads off with two flyers vying to take her to dinner; one, Joe, loses out when he is called to fly cargo and mail for Barranca Airways, which only flies when their spotter in the Andes wires that the mountain pass is safe. Bonnie is in the bar with others, including airline manager Geoff and bar owner/Barranca backer “Dutchy” Van Ruyster (Sig Ruman*), when Joe returns in a gale, crashes, and dies. Geoff is practically the only person not in mourning for Joe, which outrages Bonnie Lee. She soon learns that sudden death isn’t unusual in the air freight business and that Geoff isn’t impressed by her histrionics or the shape of her legs. He and Dutchy are running a seat-of-the-pants operation and Geoff is more interested in being a flyer short.

 

What are these Americans even doing in such a remote place? In keeping with numerous films of the 1930s/40s–think cowboy movies or (later) Casablanca–most of them are running from something: the Depression, alcoholism, restlessness, broken hearts…. Quite a few simply love the thrill and danger of flying. Geoff falls into the bad romance category and has sworn off of (sorry!) “dames.” He’s a man of habits so particular you suspect OCD, though nobody then knew that term. His family are the boys in the airline and at the bar. Bonnie Lee thinks he’s a heartless creep, but she’s  definitely physically attracted  to him and wants to know his story. He finds her a noisy pain in the old runway, but Dutchy spills the beans on his past.

 

Five years earlier, the screwball comedy It Happened One Night won so many Oscars they almost had to order an emergency run of little golden castrati. It set the standard for plots involving two people who can’t stand each other as a prelude to romance, but let’s add few other things. One is the trope of the old guy, beloved by all, who has been hiding his failing eyesight, before Geoff grounds him.

 

The only serious applicant for the new flyer is “Bat” Mac Pherson (Richard Barthelmess),  a former bombastic hotshot involved in an incident in which he bailed out of a plane and left his partner to die. The circumstances didn’t matter; to Geoff and the rest of the boys, Bat is a rat and no one wants him. He arrives to shoulders colder than the Antarctica swim team. He also shows up with his new wife, Judy (Hayworth), who just happens to be the gal that done Geoff wrong. Judy begs Geoff to give Bat a chance. How? One of the cleverest uses of a Chekov’s gun places Geoff and Bat in the same plane during a howling snowstorm in the Alps. And with that, I’ll leave you hanging in midair!

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Alice Adams Has Lost its Charm

 

 

 

 

Alice Adams (1935)

Directed by George Stevens

RKO Pictures, 99 minutes, Not-rated

★★

 

In her lifetime (1919-2001) critic Pauline Kael had the power to make or break a film. She hailed Katharine Hepburn’s lead in Alice Adams as one of her two or three greatest performances. Just goes to show you that even a known hardboiled cynic like Kael could be hopelessly sentimental and champion a film and role that were antiques even by the standards of their day.

 

It was based on a novel by Booth Tarkington that had a downbeat ending far more realistic than the sugary ending RKO forced director George Stevens to substitute. Alice (Hepburn) is a working-class daughter who dreams above her station. Her father, Virgil, (Fred Stone) is a near invalid who has long been on medical leave from Mr. Lamb’s drugstore, though he magnanimously keeps Virgil on payroll. Alice’s mother (Ann Shoemaker) is a scoldwife who thinks Virgil is lazy and that Lamb cheated her family out of a fortune for a glue formula. She encourages Alice’s magazine-induced fantasies, though Alice finds herself humiliated every time she tries to fit in with a crowd whose money and lifestyle the Adams’s can’t begin to duplicate. To make matters worse, her brother Walter (Frank Albertson) is a classic n’er-do-well who tries to rise via gambling. At a fancy ball hosted by the Palmers, local elites, Alice motor mouths her way into the affections of dashing Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray). He’s loaded, but he’s also rather bored with society and Mildred Palmer’s relentless efforts to ensnare him as a love match for one of her daughters.

 

The more Arthur sits with Alice on her front porch, the more he finds her refreshing and the more Alice ups the charade that her family also has wealth. She makes certain that Arthur never enters the home to see its modest furnishings. In essence, Alice is a Cinderella wannabe who heaps lie upon lie, though Arthur shows little interest in speaking of money. The crisis arrives when it’s time to invite Arthur and his family to dine Chez Adams. Welcome to the screwball comedy portion of the film, if you can keep it down. Alice frets over everything and tries to cover worn parts of the sofa with strategic swaths of fabric. (Walter humorously spoils that dodge.)

 

Alice also attempts to put forth an “elegant” dinner after claiming that her family eats caviar every night. Naturally, it’s one the menu, though no one in her family has the slightest idea how to eat it. She hires a fake maid (Hatie McDaniel), who has even less idea how to prepare the food. The dinner is held on the hottest day of the year, but Alice insists on a soup course, a fish course, a meat course, and bananas Foster for dessert with hot coffee. In particularly painful bits of minstrelsy, McDaniel sweats her way through the evening looking like a soggy Aunt Jemima with the manners of a barn owl. Can it get worse? Yes. Arthur quit his job and “told off” old man Lamb as his wife insisted, just in time for the revelation that the Adams family are social outcasts because Arthur stole money from Lamb to cover gambling debts.

The hopes of becoming a glue baron fail to stick because good-natured Virgil intends to sell everything to make things right. Yet, as noted, the producers forced Stevens to jettison Tarkington’s ending in which  Alice gave up her big shot dreams to go to secretarial school and become a typist. In the movie, Arthur laughs off Alice’s follies and Cinderella is back in the prince’s good graces. 

 

If all of this sounds painful and labored, that’s because it is. Hepburn often played a ditz, but I’ve never bought her as a hopeless and stupid one. Some have called Alice Adams a screwball comedy, but it’s too broad even to fit within that expansive genre. Put another way, it’s more akin to an out-of-control I Love Lucy sketch than anything resembling Bringing Up Baby or Adam’s Rib.

 

Hepburn and the film actually garnered Oscar nominations, but sometimes so-called “classic films” are rusted and irreparable Model T’s best left to molder.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Dropkick Murphys Meet Woody Guthrie Documentary

 

 

This Machine Rising (2024)

Directed by Dave Stauble and Shawn Howard

https://dropkickmurphys.com , 56 minutes

★★★★

 

What first pops into your mind when someone says, “punk rock?” The Sex Pistols and the nihilism of John Lyndon (aka/ Johnny Rotten)? I hope not; they were a manufactured band, the invention of producer Malcolm McLaren seeking to cash in on a moment in musical history when mainstream rock had gone soft, disco was the rage, corporate music became dominant, protest music was marginalized, and hip-hop hadn’t quite arrived. In the late 70’s, I listened to a lot of punk and sub rosa protest folk because disco made me want to vomit mirror balls. I liked The Ramones, Talking Heads, Velvet Underground, and some edgy UK and German stuff a friend in London routinely challenged me to sample. I never cared for punk culture; guess I was raised to be polite! Not to mention that I’m a pacifist whose idea of a good fight is one at least ten miles from me.

 

The more important point, though, is that punk (and some heavy metal) was/is working-class music. Originally punk espoused a DYI ethos. In an odd way that resonated with folk music, the sort that Pete Seeger used to exhort audiences to “just sing out!” In the 1990s I began to hear Celtic punk rock (Pogues, Flogging Molly, Oi Polloi, early Wolfstone….) A move to Massachusetts made me a Dropkick Murphys fan. If you have negative preconceptions about  punk, the DKMs will destroy many of them. Put simply, the Dropkick Murphys are thoughtful people. You may have seen the name Ken Casey in the news. He’s the booming lead vocalist of Dropkick Murphys who recently visited Ukraine as a part of an aid convoy, has actively heaped opprobrium on Donald Trump, called out a fan wearing a MAGA shirt (and gave him a DKM shirt to wear instead!), raised money for former GOP governor Charlie Baker rather than endorse a Democratic machine candidate, and won a Mass Humanities storyteller award. He and his Dropkick pals (Matt Kelly, Al Barr, James Lynch, Jeff DaRosa, Tim Brennan, and Kevin Rheault, plus producer Ted Hut and manager Jeff Castelaz raise money for the Claddagh Fund to help organizations supporting kids, veterans, and families in crisis. And, if you don’t already know it, the band is Boston-born and bred.

 

You can learn about some of this stuff from their recent documentary that’s free on Dropkick’s YouTube Channel. It’s titled This Machine Rising and its very title confirms a punk/folk connection; it’s a play on the slogan Woody Guthrie had on his guitar: This Machine Kills Fascists. Guthrie wrote so many songs in his lifetime (1912-67) that new ones turn up all the time. Earlier, Dropkick Murphys had its first monster hit, “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” a 7-line scribbling from Guthrie. Another popular BKM song, “Gonna Be a Blackout Tonight” also used Woody Guthrie’s lyrics. Nora’s son heard it and approached his mother about collaborating with BKM. Billy Bragg, Wilco, Dylan, Springsteen, and others have written music for some of the estimated thousands of unpublished Guthrie lyrics. In 2022, Woody’s sister Nora asked Dropkick Murphys to take a swing at them. What was supposed to be one album–This Machine Still Kills Fascists–organically spawned a second, Okemah Rising.  A national tour began in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in September, and ended in Boston on St. Patrick’s Day 2024.

 

This short document shows Casey’s meticulous approach to going through the Guthrie archives. At times it feels as if the DKMs are more like Ph.D. students than punk rockers. The other thing that will strike viewers is the reverence the band paid to the material; Casey spoke of literally trembling while holding one of Woody’s original songs. Likewise, band members easily discourse on the careful approach they took to developing appropriate tunes to unscored lyrics. In other words, the Murphys interjected serious musicianship into the project, something that alerts us that if punk began as DYI music, it has evolved beyond that ethos. I’ll confess that it thrills me to hear punk raucousness filtered through bagpipes, squeeze boxes, and penny whistle. It’s equally a thrill to hear DKM unplugged as it were. Sometimes they do Guthrie acoustically; at others, Woody’s ghost plugs in with the band.

 

Hardcore DKM fans probably saw this documentary when it debuted last year. If you’ve not seen it, do so to see what good dude punk looks and sounds like.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

A Room of Her Own at the Clark

  

 

 

A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists In Britain, 1875-1945
Clark Museum of Art lower level

Williamstown, Ma

Through September 14, 2025.

 

It’s no secret that women have historically gotten short shrift in art galleries. This is especially the case for women married to a renowned artist. Revisionist art historians now believe that numerous masterpieces attributed to men were actually done by wives and daughters. There is no doubt whatsoever that many female artists were limited in subjects to domestic scenes that struck many critics of the day as treacle. That’s because social norms restricted women to sentimental subjects (flowers, children, domestic duties) lest their “delicate natures” be ruined.

 

At first glance, there’s not much radical or shocking material in the Clark exhibit. The real radical act was the very act of painting, drawing, or sculpting. In the period between 1875-1945 British women weren’t supposes to do that. The exhibition title A Room of Her Own takes its cue from a 1929 essay from Virginia Woolf that argued that women needed personal physical space in which to unleash their creativity. Of course, female writers had long known about discrimination. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was originally released with her husband’s name on the cover, Mary Ann Evans published as George Eliot, the Bronte sisters as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, Elizabeth Gaskell was Cotton Mather Mills, Louise May Alcott was A M Barnard, and Amandine Lucie Aurore Dupin became George Sand. Even today that practice endures. Or did you think Joanne Rowling wanted to be known as J.K. or Robert Galbraith?

 

One of the painters shown is Vanessa Bell,  sister of Virginia Woolf. Here’s Bell’s modernist  painting of her sister. Here also is Anna’s self-portrait, gripping her brushes.Another quietly subversive painting is Nina Hammnett’s, Portrait of a Woman (1917) showing a woman deep in study. Vanessa Bell also worked in ceramics and did a series on admirable women. There are ten plates on display (of 48 ) that once belonged to Kenneth Clark. Duncan Grant and Clark’s wife, Lady Jane Clark, helped  paint them. 

 

Vanessa Bell of Virginia Woolf

 

Nina Hammnett Portrait of a Woman

Anna Alma-Tadema

One of the more striking works on display is Wilfred Knight’s The Deluge. It’s a depiction of the Biblical flood with six figures leaning forward to imbue the canvass with drama. In the late 19^th century the Pre-Raphaelites were in vogue. Although Lawrence Alma-Tadema was considered a realist, he influenced them, as did his wife Alma with The Garden Studio, which became her room of her own. Mary Lowndes did a take on Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt in The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. Evelyn De Morgan took a more gloomy look on her 1915 painting The Field of the Slain, her protest against the bloodshed of World War One. Marie Spartali Stillman’s Love’s Messenger (1885), though, is a classic Pre-Raphaelite work. 

Knight The Deluge

De Morgan Field of the Slain

Stillman, Love's Messenger

We get more war images when Britain entered the Second World War. Dame Laura Knight did Take Off in 1943 showing a crew preparing for a bombing mission in Germany. This Stirling Mk III bomber was shortly after decommissioned.  She also did Balloon Site, Coventry in which women are in charge and using their muscles on an equal basis with men. 

 

Knight, Take-Off

 

Balloon Site, Coventry

My three favorites, though, are Annie Louisa Swynnerton’s The Sense of Sight (1895) , an angel’s stunned look at the visible world, Swynnerton’s Mater Triumphalis (1892), a very rare nude done by a female artist, and Elizabeth Adela Armstrong’s Will o’ the Wisp (1900). Okay, so I like the Pre-Raphaelites, so sue me!

A Sense of Sight

Mater Triumphalis 

 

 

 

 

Will of the Wisp

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

Great Black Hope: Elegant Writing, but Weak Narrative

 

 

 

Great Black Hope (2025)

By Rob Franklin

Simon and Schuster, 320 pages

★★★

 

 

Have recently read several novels dealing with African-American high achievers who have done stupid things. Most of them wrestle with the age-old question of what matters most, race or social class? Rob Franklin is one of them and in Great Black Hope suggests that race obliterates class.

 

I will admit up front that the self-inflicted travails of elites bores me. (My take is that in individual cases race matters most, but collectively social class is more important.) David Smith–usually called just “Smith”– comes from a family of high flyers and is, himself, a graduate of Stanford. Many people say that Stanford is harder to get into than Harvard. At Stanford, Smith had numerous white friends, was active socially, partied, and was openly gay.

 

Like many college grads, Smith is adrift for a time after graduation. He goes back to his hometown of Atlanta, where his family is filled with high achievers. They resemble what W.E.B. DuBois called the talented 10th; that is, they are lawyers, designers, and business people. This is remarkable as the Smith family is just several generations removed from being sharecroppers. Smith would love to be a literary heavyweight, but is working as a tech writer. He feels like a fish out of water in Atlanta, though his gayness is not an issue.

 

Thus far the novel has the stamp of upward mobility analogous to those of white social climbers  with all of the intendant First World problems. Smith heads off to New York City, continues his tech writing, and shares a nice apartment with Elle England, whose mother is a famous soul singer. Smith hits New York’s gay club scene and has mostly white boyfriends. At a party in the Hamptons, Smith is arrested for possession of cocaine. Was he targeted for being the “black guy? Probably, but all he can think of is how to avoid embarrassing his family or going to prison. His lawyer sister recommends a good New York lawyer who advises Smith to attend AA before appearing before a judge, even though Smith insists that he's not addicted. Another inner reason is that he thinks that he's better than the other saps who end up in such programs. As if he doesn't have enough problems, Elle is murdered. Smith is soon hounded by an ambitious reporter who wants to pump him for information on the “real” Elle England. Moreover, Elle was seen leaving a club with a black man. Is Smith a suspect?

 

Franklin resolves some of Smith’s dilemmas, but overall he fudges what we are supposed to observe. I came away feeling that Elle’s murder was superfluous to the plot. Franklin makes us see that Smith suffers from confused identities. It is true enough that human beings wear many hats at once but they usually have a primary identity. It appears that Franklin wants us to see that doesn't insulate rich black people the way it does rich whites. That's not exactly breaking news, but why does Franklin make Smith seem like a stalker in seeking white sexual partners?

 

In my view Franklin wants to enhance Smith's obliviousness. To that end, Smith has a flat affect and his actions suggest that he's a bonehead. Who would risk a stiff jail sentence and continue to party just to run with the pack? I found my attention wandering because David Smith began to seem like any other story about a person with great advantages who throws them away. Call me a classist if you must, but I don't really care about the thoughtless rich, the whirl of fancy overpriced restaurants, and lives of surfaces lacking depth. I’m tired of novels about privileged and pretentious New Yorkers.

 

This is Rob Franklin's debut novel. It is by turn funny and tragic. Alas, Franklin's narrative gets away from him to the degree that Smith is relegated to a piece of background scenery rather than the center of the story. One could only hope his next book will be more down to earth and narratively tighter. It's a shame to waste such elegant prose on a cliched story.

 

# Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for an opportunity to review this book.

 

Rob Weir

 

Who's Your MoMA Part Two

 

Klint

I've been in Canada for the past week, hence the radio silence on this blog. It was an amazing experience just to get a break from the news cycle, talk to nice folks, and let them know that yours truly is as baffled as they by American politics. More anon on that subject. 

Here's part two of things from the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. First up is Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. She died in 1944, but is having a moment these days. MoMA is currently featuring her works of vegetation. If that sounds dull, let me assure you, it's not. Klint loved flowers, ferns, etc. The above image is like a clay photographic negative of Queen Anne's Lace. Note my comments on the ones below.

 

This work reminded me of Aboriginal waterhole "dreamings"

 

 

 

 

Klint moved into abstraction. This is her impression of an orange marigold.

 

 

 

She is best known as a precursor to pop art.

Numerous artists commented upon the human condition and its foibles.

This Kazuo Shiraga tackles First World gluttony

This 1968 sculpture by Dorothy Dehner is social distancing before it was a thing

And, of course, war is the ultimate human frailty. 

Kathe Kollwitz, "Tower of Women "

This David Alfaro Siquero work from early WW II says it all

Of course, abstraction and deconstruction have long been staples of art. 

Francis Picabia 1914 during WW I 

 

 

Arshile Gorky 1941

Nkanga tribute to Ralph Ellison

 

 

Nkanda tribute to Art Blakey

Jack Whitten tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.

 Finally, one of my all-time favorites. Henri Rousseau was considered a primitivist, a style of art that came after impressionism. He was not interested in real situations or color, so he was also a bit of a fauvist. This work is huge and I took a detail shot of "Dreaming."

Rob Weir

A Visit to the Museum of Modern Art Part I

Who’s Your MoMa? Part I

 

 Picasso: Girl Before a Mirror, 1932

 

 

In a recent trip to New York City all thoughts of spending time roaming Manhattan streets evaporated in the face of consecutive hundred degree days. The good news is that there’s an air-conditioned museum to cater to every taste.

 

On a whim we decided to go to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a place to which we hadn’t been in years. Perhaps you are as I used to be and think that you hate modern art. It might be better for MoMA to rename itself the Museum of 20^th Century Art. “Modern” is a term that’s as relative as time itself. As an art form it references Western works from the 1860s through the 1970s–basically from early Impressionism on and embracing various styles: post-impressionism, abstract expressionism, surrealism, installations, material culture, photography, video, performance art, etc. The concept of modernism is what links them. Though  some art, especially surrealism, can seem weird or bleak, embedded within it is a belief in progress. That’s why so many artists spotlighted factories and machines. Even critical attacks on warfare retain a fascination with the technology of war. If you will, sleek airplanes, silvery bombs, and powerful weapons pay oblique homage to factory production.

 

Embedded in modernism is a vague belief in utopianism, whether fashioned by fire, reason, rebellion, or innovation. Two world wars and economic collapse were among the challenges of the 20^th century. Much of modern art is a conscious attempt to dismantle older ideals and values. When we admire bright impressionist paintings today it’s easy to forget that that it once shocked people as a vulgar cartoonish assault on the “standards” of the day. Imagine what those who felt Western art standards were being eroded made of abstract art. Even I you don’t that far, some critics railed against Van Gogh. After all, human faces weren’t supposed to have streaks of blue, smudges of green, and blobs of red!

 

Confession: I used to hate “abstract” art. I asked a question you should not: What is it? Think of it this way; everything in an art museum is simulacrum. It is not the thing represented or for use, rather a representation of a person, place, or thing. When Marcel Duchamp displayed a urinal in a museum, he did not expect anyone to pee in it. His point was that context determines meaning. Look at the form, not its usual function. Pop art like Andy Warhol’s soup can silk screens did much the same thing, with quite a swing at commercialism to boot.

 

A painting is essentially akin to a photograph, a sort of lie that we agree has meaning. Why not abstract it? Take a city and represent it as disjointed cubes or scramble lines like Picasso. A painting consists of color (including black), line, texture, and form, but who says all of those elements need to be present or represent reality? When I first saw Mark Rothko’s all-black paintings I couldn’t distinguish them from a Goth rolling black paint over bedroom drywall. I’m still not very fond of those, but I have come to admire what he did with other colors, especially red.

 

Artists are often imagined as alienated and skeptical. True, but that is the path to that most vaunted on American myths: individualism. To go back to progress, it is the belief in the power of individuals to change society. (Or, at least, a critique of that belief.)

 

Enough with the lecture. A big reason to visit MoMA  is that it is filled with works now viewed as iconic. I found myself walking into a gallery and exclaiming, “I forgot this was here.” My guess is that what most people mean when they say they don’t like “modern” art is that don’t like “contemporary” or “postmodern” art. Second confession: I’m not fond of most of it either. Both strike me as sterile and soulless because of a lack of belief in progress. It becomes nihilist and narcistic, one person’s screed against everything or nothing. But don’t be surprised if a few decades from now they will seem tame and iconic.  

 

Here's batch one of images from MoMA.

 

Rob Weir  

Jackson Pollock, One Number 1, 1950

 

 

 

Toulouse Latrec, M de Lauradour, 1897

 

 

Mark Rothko, No, 5, 1948

Max Beekman, Departure, 1932-35

 

Rene Magritte, 1932

Magritte, The Lovers, 1928

 

 

Paul Gauguin, Washerwomen, 1888 

Gustav Klimt, Hope II, 1908

Giorgio de Chirico, Anxiety, 1913

Alice Neel, Kenneth Fearing, 1935