Suddenly Last Summer: Does It Resonate?

 

 

 

Suddenly Last Summer (1959)

Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz

Columbia Pictures, 114 minutes, Not-rated.

★★★

 

More than a dozen Tennessee Williams plays have been made into movies, including Suddenly Last Summer in 1959. It had the advantages of being directed by the talented Joseph Mankiewicz, a screenplay penned by Gore Vidal, and the incomparable Katherine Hepburn in its cast. She was more than up to task of a Williams drama but by then, her star was eclipsing and that of Elizabeth Taylor was ascendant. She would win a Golden Globe for Suddenly Last Summer, not Hepburn.

 

The film also stars Mercedes McCambridge and Montgomery Clift, which made it well-acted and well-crafted all around. The open question is how well it holds up and on that score the answer is decidedly mixed. It largely depends on how you feel about the now-outmoded psychiatric precepts upon which it rests.

 

It is something of a pas de deux between Vi(olet) Venable (Hepburn) and her niece Cathy Holly (Taylor). Cathy is a troubled but reluctant patient in a private Catholic hospital. She suffers from trauma resulting from the death of her cousin Sebastian while they were traveling together. Call it a European vacation gone horribly wrong. Cathy adored Sebastian, but her aunt Vi blames her for failing to protect her son Sebastian. From what? Ahh, there’s the rub.

 

Cathy exhibits severe behavioral issues. She is cynical, babbles, and is prone to angry outbursts. Her mother Grace (McCambridge) insists that Cathy is just a sensitive poet type, but for 1937 New Orleans–the post-vacation setting for Williams’ play–that’s partially code for meaning she’s unorthodox, obscene, seductive, and oversexed. But does this make her dangerous? Vi thinks so and encourages Dr. John Cukrowicz (Clift) to lobotomize Cathy for her own good. He can tell that she has sublimized a deep shock, but insists that Cathy first be treated by talk therapy. The wild card is that Vi promises hospital director Dr. Lawrence Hockstader (Albert Dekker) she will fund a new wing, but only if Dr. Cukrowicz removes the “hideous story” from Cathy’s brain.

 

Hideous story? Holy Sigmund Freud, Batman! Without revealing too much, sex plays a role in the “hideous story,” but are we still talking about Cathy? Vi insists her son “saw the face of God” before he died and the more Dr. Cukrowicz talks with Vi, the more we wonder whose sanity is most in question. So too does Cukrowicz, who thinks that buried pain has made both women reality-challenged. Two stories will surface and, in my opinion, reviewers missed the possibility that they might be the same story remembered in radically different ways.

 

Suddenly Last Summer was billed as a mystery thriller by some, and Gothic noir by others. My vote goes to the latter. In a particularly creepy moment bathed in shadows, d desperation, then resignation, Cathy is certain that a lobotomy is imminent. Imagine her caged anguish. Tennessee Williams often placed characters in trapped mental spaces. Some observers claim these paralleled Williams’ conflicted Catholic worldview and his mystical and moral qualms. This won’t make any sense unless you watch the film, but there’s a side story involving cannibalism could be symbolic and imaginary, not literal. And, yes, there is indeed quite a lot that’s cloaked in Freudian garb, raiment that often unsettles contemporary views of sexuality.

 

It's almost guaranteed that certain ethnic aspects of Suddenly Last Summer will seem past their sell-by date. Sebastian’s fate takes place on the fictional island of  Cabeza de Lobo. It looks like a Caribbean location, but it was filmed in the Balearic islands of Spain. They do not come off well. Ethnocentrism? Exoticism? Projected primitivism? A commentary on repressed colonialism?

 

Strangely, the film was criticized in its day for stretching Williams’ one-act play with needless filler to bring it to movie length. Today it feels like there’s too much going on! Alas, it ends rather meekly and abruptly, as if there was no convincing way to complete it. Yet, Hepburn and Taylor? Is that worth a peek? Of course.

 

Rob Weir

June 2024 Music: Ruth Moody Lynne Hanson Beth Bombra JM Clifford Moonsville Collective

 

How about a five-way tie for best artist of the month? I lucked upon some amazing music and can honestly say that any of all of these would make a wonderful addition to your playlist. 

 

 

Ruth Moody is the songwriting anchor of the Wailin’ Jennys, but this Winnipeg-based artist is a solo treat all on her own. Any musician would assert that Wanderer is a good title for a record, but Moody means it on more cylinders than one–coming of age, relationships, motherhood, musing on the meaning of home, and life’s ups and downs.  Her music is often filed under bluegrass, but Wanderer is more folky in its emphasis on lyrics, polished but understated arrangements, and a voice as calming as a breeze through the sweetgrass. Moody sings of her journey to contentment on the Wanderer. Nor is she afraid to be vulnerable or admit to bouts of self-doubt. “Already Free” is an example: I’m running from the future or the past/Or somebody I can never be… Maybe I’m already free. She even revisits adolescent regrets in "Seventeen,” and if it’s not putting yourself out there to back to that age, you were raised in a sealed bunker! “Twilight” is another small gem. Add it up and you have a musical treasure chest. 

 

 

Lynne Hanson has been lionized on this blog before and Just a Poet is the latest reason to celebrate. She’s also Canadian, but she shatters images of northern niceness by exploring the skeptical side of life. “Spray Paint” has meaty hooks, but is the relationship about which she’s singing ending or finding its way to new beginnings? Number two is doubtful!  Hanson’s alto voice gives everything she does a slightly dark edge of mystery, including herself. “Outlaw Lover” poses as a confessional in which she’s bad news in many ways, including being the blue tattoo that your mama fears. This one draws comparisons to Bonnie Raitt’s blues-influenced country/folk approach. Hanson calls such songs “raw Truth” and that’s pretty good tag. “Just a Little Bit” is heartbreak country and this time it’s someone else who might deliver pain Great line: Heartbreak hurts but it never killed anyone. Detect a theme? In the doomed affair of “Rubik’s Cube” she describes herself as being as jumbled as that puzzle. Hanson is on the money about singing raw truth. One suspects that “Weeds” might be the most autobiographical selection on the record. It has a strong walking beat and delivers the message that she is putting all of me in every single song I ever wrote/Ain’t work ‘cause I do it for me.

 

 Beth Bombara sometimes sings with the birdlike delicacy of Patty Griffin, even when she’s been a rock n’ roller. It All Goes Up is a departure.  She picks up an acoustic guitar on “Curious and Free” and sings Don’t have to know where we’re going/As long as the tide keeps pulling in. The overall treatment is mysterious–from the catch in her voice to its melancholy feel and a “fiddle” that’s probably a mellotron, an early electronic keyboard/computer hybrid. “Electricity” is a mix of old and new. It has passages with the frangibility of love songs, but with electric breakouts that pulse with… well… electricity. Bombara is a Tom Petty fan and “Lonely Walls” has the vibe of one of Petty’s more introspective songs. “Everything I Wanted” is almost classic Bombara in that it’s bop rock served with blue-collar attitude and irony. I’ve been following Bombara for a few years and, though I like her hard surfaces more than the shiny ones, I applaud the fact that she keeps testing her limits.

 

 

If I told you I had an album titled Trains, Thinkin’ and Drinkin’ from a guy who uses his initials as his first name, and dropped a single called “Damn Shame,” you’d probably start thinking Alabama, Tennessee, or maybe Kentucky. Nope. J. M. Clifford is a Brooklyn native and an elementary school teacher.  He underlined the conjunction on the cover of his new album and, from where I sit, he’s heavier on the thinkin’ than the drinkin’. Like many of us, he had time to think during Covid lockdown, plus he was dealing with the aftermath of a divorce. “Damn Shame” is a good song, but “Complicated Man” gets to the heart of the matter even better. He takes the wind out of his own sails on the self-effacing first song, its upbeat bluegrass tempo a veil over his broken relationship. He cowrote “Complicated Man” with Ron Pope. It’s an infectious  bluegrass song featuring mighty fine picking and a mountain music gospel feel. No wonder he draws Norman Blake comparisons. It’s worth plenty to hear Clifford pick. When it’s available, check out “Billy Goose.” By the way, the title track is bathed in irony. 

 

 

Speaking of drinking, how about a song called “I Like Drinking Beer?” It’s performed like a Texas two-step and is a litany of all the things the band loves with the punchline and I like drinking beer. Welcome to the Moonsville Collective, a California quintet that plays old-time music and not-so-old songs that sound timeless. They also like having fun and don’t always take themselves seriously. They have a song titled “Ain’t Got No Home,” but it’s not the one penned by Woody Guthrie, and give a string band treatment to “Red Rocking Chair.” They also do one called “Long Gone” because, why not add still another song of that name to the annals of music. A Hundred Highways, their first new record in half a dozen years. Ya’ gotta love any band with the cheek to do a song titled “Helen Highway.” You want drinking songs? They’ve got a million of them!

Rob Weir

Promise and Failure of the Arts and Crafts Movement

 

Sometimes the very best and very worst ideas are one and the same. Industrialization began to catch on in the early 19^th century and by mid-century was on its way to becoming dominant in how goods were manufactured in Western society. You didn’t have to be a Luddite to be critical of the factory system. It was dirty, unhealthy, wasteful of natural resources, and exploited wage-earners. It did make goods make goods cheaply, but that was a mixed blessing. Even when they cost less, they were also “cheap” in quality, generic, and reduced consumer choices. In clothing and footwear, for example, “bespoke” goods tailored to fit the wearer were replaced by predetermined sizes. Thus was born the old joke “one size fits none.”

 

In Britain various visionaries–some driven by artistic motives, others by social and political ideals–asked a simple question: Should manufactured goods be rejected in favor of all things artisan-made? Proponents of the arts and crafts movement thought that reviving handcraft work would yield well-made and beautiful objects that could be sold at prices the masses could afford. They were right about the aesthetics of their endeavors, but dead wrong on how affordable they would be, as anyone who has ever attended a high-quality craft studio or show can attest.

 

The arts and craft movement fought the good fight. You name it and it was made: wallpaper, metal work, lamps, pottery, furniture, textiles, painting, houses…. You’ve probably heard of some of the key movers and shakers: Charles Robert Ashbee, William Arthur Smith Benson, Walter Crane, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, William Morris, and John Ruskin. The latter two could be considered movement lynchpins. Much of it was a based upon romanticized notions of medievalism. The paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rosetti went a step further and evinced Greek and Roman tales that were reworked in the Middle Ages! In many respects those Victorians seeking to rediscover the “folk” in everything ending up producing things no laborer or ploughman could dream of affording. Google some of the “cottages” Philip Speakman Webb built in the name of “art of the common building.

 

 

The Arts and Crafts movement made its way to the United States, where it was just as naïve as its European influencers. Frank Lloyd Wright drew inspiration from Webb. Do you live in a Wright home? Many American designers are also acclaimed figures: William Wallace Denslow (illustrator of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), Elbert and Bertha Hubbard, William “Dard” Hunter (handmade paper), architect William Lightfoot Price,  Gustav Stickley. The U.S. movement stumbled over the same contradictions as the Europeans in that most acolytes were designers whose work was made by others–often via the same industrial methods they sought to dethrone.

Nonetheless, those designs and finished products are gorgeous. You can see them in many places, including: Ashcroft in North Carolina, the Arden Community in Delaware, Craftsman Farms in New Jersey, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC. To whet your appetite here are a few gems from the Museum of American Arts and Crafts in St. Petersburg, Florida. No need to concentrate of the design firms; just enjoy the beauty of these objects. It’s the difference between the artistic and the prosaic.

 

 

Why the Yankees Beard Ban is a Good Idea!

 

In 1973, George Steinbrenner (1930-2010) bought the New York Yankees. Three years later, he instituted a no-beards policy Yankees players. Steinbrenner was not a nice man, but he did restore the team to its past glories–11 American League championships and seven World Series.

 

Whatever you might think of Steinbrenner, he put his money where his (big) mouth was rather than pocketing profits like so many MLB owners these days do. He was never the richest MLB owner, but no one ever heard him cry poverty. (How unlike the Pohlad family that owns the Twins and insists they are a “small market” risk, though they are baseball’s  8^th richest ownership group!!)

 

George Steinbrenner was a conservative Republican whose no-beard rule was initially a reaction to the long hair/hippie look of the 1960s and 1970s. The policy has never been reversed. If you want to collect big New York bucks, ya’ gotta shave.

 

The Steinbrenner ban has been called anachronistic, an assault against freedom of expression, and a whole bunch of other things. It has never been called a good idea–until now! It turns out that old George was a wise arbiter of taste. He has saved home team fans from some of the worst beards ever to disgrace a human face.

 

Warning: The beards below are not just ugly, they’re downright scary. If you have small children, you should keep the below images hidden until they go to bed. A mere peek could distress their sleep worse than the monsters living under their beds. You too should limit yourself to an image or two at a time. It’s embarrassing when full grown adults need stuffed support animals to ward off nightmares.

 

Mike Fiers apparently fancies a post-MLB career in mathematics. He’s wearing the beginnings of a Fibonacci spiral on his face.

 

 

Jake Fraley will make you scurry to high ground to keep watch for invading Norsemen. Stay alert so you can flee with your family before they land.

 

 

Sergio Romo is retired now. He is presumably in search of Pancho Villa to help reclaim Aztlán on behalf of Mexico. 

 

 

 

Brian Wilson scalped an Amish guy.

 

 

 

Justin Turner isn’t human. He’s actually a deranged, possibly rabid leprechaun. 

 

 

 

Have you ever seen the movie Deliverance? Kevin Quakenbush was in it. Cue the banjos and run! 

 

 

If President Chester Arthur had added a full beard to his bushy sideburns, he would have been Brian Schlitter’s doppelganger.

 

 

 

 

Josh Harrison is what ‘bots will look like after the AI revolution conquers humankind.

 

 

 

Will someone please tell ZZ Top that their missing brother is hiding in Colorado under the assumed name of Charlie Blackmon?

 

 

 

It doesn’t get any more disturbing that Brandon Marsh. He was voted Most Likely to Became a Psychotic Murderer by his peers at the asylum. 

 

 

 

 

 

Now do you see why the Yankees ban beards? 

Murder Your Employer is Wicked and Funny

 

 

Murder Your Employer: Book 1 MacMasters Guide to Homicide

By Rupert Holmes

Avid Readers Press, 2023, 388 pages.

★★★★

 

Who hasn’t thought, “I could just murder my boss?” Most people really mean they just want that boss to go away–preferably to a different solar system. But what if you actually meant it?

 

Murder Your Employer is a wickedly funny book filled with puns, ironic names, and ways to dispatch human targets. Some methods would make Rube Goldberg proud. The MacMasters Conservatory for the Applied Art is a Hogwarts for homicide. None of the students know where it’s located. If they are accepted, handlers meet them, blindfold them inside a windowless van, and drive, fly, and sail for several days in circuitous ways. Is the campus in North America, England, Eastern Europe, China, or just around the block? They will never know as they cannot leave the cloistered, sprawling campus and will exit the same way they entered. MacMasters has it all: a professional staff, a science center, laboratories, a market, a lake, athletic fields, a bamboo forest, hinged and unhinged fellow students, a castle, and gardens. Exercise care when visiting the gardens. Some plants are designed to “delete” (i.e. murder) an employer.

 

It's very expensive, but one of the four main characters, Cliff Iverson, has been sponsored by an unknown benefactor. Think Great Expectations with a nasty twist. He was rescued by watchful MacMasters staff after bungling an attempt to push his boss, into the path of a subway train. Cliff worked as an aeronautics engineer for Woltan Industries, but was fired by Merrill Fielder for pointing out a flaw in the design of a new aircraft that could kill hundreds. Fielder only cares about how profits would sink if the plane was taken off the market. He was also responsible for the suicide of one of Cliff’s close friends, hence Iverson believes Fielder worthy of deletion.

 

MacMasters holds sanguinary values, but it is not amoral, which is why some students are uniquely dismissed. Four “Enquiries” must be answered satisfactorily before a plan to delete an employer is approved: “Is the murder necessary? Have you given your target every last chance to redeem themselves? What innocent person might suffer from your actions? Will this deletion improve the life of others?” The narrative is told via Iverson’s journal and from the voices of two other students and that of Dean Harbinger Harrow. The time period is not specified, but internal clues suggest the early 1950s.  

 

The other two students are Gemma Lindley, who works in the health care industry. Her boss at St. Ann’s Hospital, Adele Underton, is a gorgon and blackmailer. Adele steals all of Gemma’s ideas and passes them off as her own, uses Gemma as her personal lackey, and does virtually no work of her own. About the only people who tolerate her are men she attempts to snare, though most don’t last long.

 

We also meet “Dulcie Mown,” who strikes everyone as familiar. She’s actually Doria Maye, a fading but attractive actress who dearly wishes to delete Leon Kosta, a movie producer who sleeps with every aspiring actress and makes Harvey Weinstein seem a candidate for the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. He has it out for Maye because she rebuffs his continuing carnal advances, refuses an order to have sex with an executive to seal a business deal, won’t give her a role from a script she discovered, tells her she’s a has-been, and wants to demean her by making her do cartoon voices. Kosta also employs a spy to watch Doria and tries to ban her from the studio lot.

 

Could the world do without such creatures? MacMasters enrollees had better hope so. It has the ultimate pass/fail system. Students undergo a rigorous curricula in everything from weapons training, handling reptiles, and deadly uses of erotica to concocting untraceable poisons, devising disguises, and feigned incompetence–the latter a useful skill if, for example, you wish to dispatch someone with a bow and arrow. They must produce a “thesis,” individual plans for executing their bosses. That thesis is only complete when they do so; if they are unsuccessful, a MacMasters staff member will delete the student with a painless injection!

 

Author Rupert Holmes has also worked in films and penned “The Piña Colada Song.” This novel is a bit like that novelty tune: clever, goofy, and sometimes cheap. I loved it!

 

Rob Weir

The Briar Club: Another Great Read from Kate Quinn

 

 

The Briar Club (2024)

By Kate Quinn

William Morrow, 432 pages

★★★★

 

The Briar Club is another affirmation that Kate Quinn is one heck of a writer. In her latest novel she takes us the Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, a time of both optimism and the Red Scare. The title derives from Briarwood House, ousHousea boarding home for women. Leave it to Quinn to personify the house without making it sound hokey. The house “speaks” to readers in interstitial chapters, an important mystery-building device.

 

Quinn excels at characterization. Briarwood House is run by Mrs. Nilsson, who is so grumpy and rulebound that boarders nickname her “Doilies.” To say that she cuts corners does an injustice to right angles. Her husband’s absence is somewhat enigmatic, but young Pete and his maligned, cross-eyed sister Lina also live at Briarwood and are as delightful as their mother is acerbic.

 

Quinn populates Briarwood with a cast that brings mayhem, sisterhood, and color that contrasts with the stodgy grayness of Doilies. Grace March is the first to add touches of lightness. She’s gregarious and the proverbial “pistol,” a rulebreaker who can charm with offers of sun tea. Choose your metaphor for Grace’s room-freshening project that evolves into painting vines that extend down the staircase from her fourth floor rental. When Mrs. Nilsson is absent for her weekly card game, Grace holds impromptu parties in her room that become ever-more-elaborate dinners in which each resident, Pete included, cook a specialty. You could add “by hook or crook,” as no one has a lot of money. One of the book’s more unusual features is the inclusion of recipes–from colcannon to strawberry fool–used by the Thursday night cooks.

The other core residents are Nora Walsh, Reka Muller, Felicity Orton, Beatrice Verrette, Claire Hallett, and Arlene Hupp. Quinn gives each her own chapter that provides deep background. Grace is the pivot around which most things occur, including men sneaking in and out, a no-no in Doilies’ book. Nora is there to escape from her family, including her crooked cop brother who steals from her. She works at the National Archives and finds herself pursued romantically by Xavier Bryne, who is either a gangster or a “businessman.” Reka, once Professor Muller, is a widowed Czech refugee struggling to make ends meet by shelving library books whilst grumbling over the constant bawling of Orton’s baby. (“Fliss” is English and her American doctor husband is stationed overseas.) Bea is a junior high phys. ed. teacher who pines for the days when she was a star in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. (Think A League of Their Own.) For their parts, Claire works for Senator Margaret Chase Smith, which irks Arlene, a diehard nationalist who works for the House Un-American Activities Committee and thinks Rep. Joseph McCarthy is a hero.

Count on everyone having secrets they hold close to the vest even while bonding with each other (except the snitty Arlene). Among the things that makes Quinn an engaging writer is that she parcels out information in drips rather than rushing torrents. She also makes ancillary characters come alive, even those with mere cameos. In The Briar Club, most of those in supporting roles are male, with the notable exception of Sydney Sutherland, the wife of the social-climbing Barrett who hopes to be a communist-hunting U.S. Senator like his father. Other men who play roles in The Briar Club are Pete, Xavier, a hood named George, Nora’s male family members, jazz musician Joe and his Black friend Claude, Bob McDowell, and FBI agent Harland Adams who dates several of the Briarwood House women.

If this sounds complex, allow me to tantalize you with more: criminal gangs, Gustav Klimt, an overwhelmed mother, women trying to break the 1950s glass ceiling, stolen tomatoes, baseball, battering, forbidden love, a Betty Crocker bakeoff, Operation Longhorn, two in-house murders, spies, and a surprise ending that leads to an even more unexpected coda. All of this takes place against the Korean War and the rise and fall of McCarthyism. It is to Quinn’s credit that none of these seems labored or didactic, even when Quinn slips on occasion with a few details that seem too modern.  Add splashes of humor and The Briar Club is like The Thursday Murder Club meets a satire of the 1950s, murder, espionage, and proto-feminism.

Rob Weir 

 

  

Steampunk Quilts? You Betcha!

 

 

  

StitchPunk (through July 13)

Domestic Partners (through June 15)

New England Quilt Museum

18 Shattuck Street

Lowell, MA

 

On a recent trip home from Maine Emily wanted to stop at the New England Quilt Museum (NEQM). I was only mildly interested and planned to walk about and take photos instead. Into every life a little rain must fall and, in my case, threatening weather was a good thing. I went inside the NEQM and adored the two featured exhibits.

 

 

 

StitchPunk is, of course, wordplay on Steampunk, but it was also a marvel of imagination and creativity. First, though, let me say a few words about steampunk. It was all the rage in the late 1990s and into the first decade and a half of the 21^st century. The term is associated with dreamers and science fiction writers who use the trappings of the Victorian world, but replace modern technology with shiny brass gears and steam power rather than our current (pun intended) reliance on electricity and petroleum. Steampunk ardor has cooled a bit, but it still has allure. Its critics associate it with hipsters doing hipster things and those who dislike science fiction for its assumed lack of “science” and its alleged animus toward “progress.”  

 

 

Courtesy of a book by Simon Webb titled The Real World of Victorian Steampunk, I’m prepared to tell such people that they are nuts! Do you remember that Elon Musk design for a vacuum tube rail system? A steam-powered version was successfully demonstrated in 1867. In1903, the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane, right? Nope! Several steam-powered airplanes got off the ground in the 1880s and 1890s and traveled further than the flimsy gas-powered wood and canvas box of the Wrights. Solar power was proved a good idea in 1878, and in the same century steam-powered buses,  ocean-going boats, telephones, and fax machines were operational. So too were electric cars capable of reaching over 150 mph and the prototypes of Skye and computers. The very world of oil and gasoline to which fanatics so zealously cling came to dominate for the same reasons they remain: the discovery of oil led self-interested investors to promote machines using it and demote steam machines, some of which were superior. So there!

 

The show at the NEQM doesn’t seek to rekindle such battles, rather it focuses on stitchers and quilters who wanted to do create unique and unusual fabric art. Like steampunk writers, a lot of what they do upsets traditionalists. Is it a “quilt” if it contains wire, dryer vents, gears, hardware, jewelry, mannequin faces, and glass jars? Why not? As the below pictures show, it’s cool stuff no matter what labels you want to slap on it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I would suppose the wooden marionette fashioned by Bruce Rosenbaum, Isaac Singer: The Time Stitcher doesn’t fit rigid definitions either, though many of the pieces you see are decidedly sewing-related. (If you don’t know, this is the Singer associated with a famed line of sewing machines that still bear his name.)

 

 

 

 

 

You only have a few more weeks to catch Domestic Partners, which is more on the calm side–in both design and intent. Fiber artist Dawn Allen pays homage to the farm animals of her youth as well as domesticated companions, and woodland critters. Her show skirts the borders of “Ahh, cute!” but in a good way.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rob Weir