Liz Smith in the New York Post today discusses an upcoming biography of Doris Day, which is coming out in October. At last! To me Doris is one of the sexiest women ever in the movies or music, and it sounds as if this new book, entitled Considering Doris Day by Tom Santopietro, will give the lady her due...

I watched a double feature last night of an Italian erotic suspense film called The Devil's Honey (1987) and a Warner Bros. B-picture, Crime Wave (1954). The Italian flick was about a young woman deranged with grief when her boyfriend dies of an accidental head injury. She blames the neurosurgeon who failed to save the boyfriend, and kidnaps him. She keeps the medico tied up in her farmhouse and menaces him with her barking dog. She walks around nude to get the doc horny as well as terrified. The physician is a whoremonger whose wife has left him because of his taste for prostitutes, and even though he's tied by his neck to the wall, he tries to make love to his comely kidnapper. For some reason she kills her dog in preparation for killing the doctor. Then she has a flashback where she remembers that her boyfriend was bisexual and let a male friend give him a blowjob at the same time she was kissing him in a darkened movie house. This memory gives her a change of heart about her deceased lover. She gets over her grief, frees the doctor, and lets him screw her. No, not a profound movie! But it had an interestingly melancholy mood, was well-photographed, and Sir Cranky enjoyed seeing the girl walk around the farmhouse in the nude in a relaxed and natural manner that you rarely see in American films.

Crime Wave was something else entirely. This taut 74 minute film noir is about a ex-con (Gene Nelson) who is contacted by some prison pals who have escaped from San Quentin, killed a cop, and now want Gene to drive the getaway car in a bank heist. The head gangster is played by the great Ted de Corsia, a veteran of this type of role, who comes across memorably as an arrogant smalltime blowhard complete with cigarette holders and pipes. Gene is trying to live a straight life with his new wife (Phyllis Kirk) and a decent job, but he is forced into complying with the hoods. Sterling Hayden is at his best as the cop in pursuit of the thugs, one of whom is played by Charles Buchinsky who later changed his last name to Bronson.

I saw Crime Wave on a tape somebody made for me off the Mystery Channel some time ago. It does in 74 minutes what most movies today can't do in 150 minutes--give you memorable characters, a solid story, fast pacing, and a real feeling for its milieu (in this case, 1954 Los Angeles). It also features ultra-realistic cinematography which evokes the feeling of ordinary light, giving the film a real time-capsule quality--it's as if you're going back to 1954 to witness the story as it actually happened in normal locations, not studio stages with moody and bizarre lighting. It's amazing how director Andre de Toth was able to frame his shots in a way that made familiar crime-movie situations seem fresh.

More and more, I admire shorter movies that can tell a complex tale in 75 to 90 minutes. One of the big problems in our era is that things are bloated. Mysteries and thrillers are sometimes 500, 600 pages, and average movies clock in at 120-140 minutes. Maybe because I'm older now and feel time is more at a premium, I like things lean...

Well, the Labor Day weekend is upon us. I always take off a few days to relax, and this year is no exception. I'll continue to blog everyday, but I'm not going to do any of my freelance work. I will make one of my periodic stabs at having some fun. I hope to catch a neo-burlesque show, and maybe I'll even loosen my wallet and get a couple of lapdances at a regular stripclub. August was really a grind. I need to chill.

Today would have been my father's 79th birthday. He died in 1977, when he was 49, almost 50. He was a decent hardworking man who got a raw deal, had a bad rare illness and a miserable death. I wonder if I wouldn't be so obsessed with dark movies and books if I hadn't seen the bleak drama of my father's final days...he was a pessimistic person who never thought he was going to live to be old, and he didn't. In his own way, he was a film noir kind of guy.

I did the DVD time-travel thing last night when I picked up a copy of Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959). When I say "time travel," I mean that it feels like traveling back to the era of my childhood to re-experience the cinema sights that had delighted me long ago.

I first saw this picture as an eight-year old and loved it, and although I'd viewed it again at a screening during college and later in the 90s on a television on VHS, it wasn't until last night that I was able to see the film in a restoration that made it look as spectacular as it must have been forty-seven years ago. The Fox disc has a short feature about how the movie was digitally restored, and the comparison of the various versions over the years was amazing indeed.

As is sometimes the case with films I remember with a particular fondness, this one is not only good on its own merits as an adventure story and sly battle of the sexes, but also seems to be a wellspring of certain themes of my eventual life. I don't know if it's coincidental, but it is certainly curious.

James Mason plays an 1880s geology professor from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland who assembles an expedition to the center of the earth. He exhibits the same crankiness towards women (his cook, his niece, and a co-member of the expedition) that I myself often feel...he is appalled that he has to take a woman along on his journey (the lusciously mature Arlene Dahl) and never stops throwing crotchety barbs her way--which she briskly returns in kind.

As I watched Mason's character last night, I couldn't help but notice how the professor's middle-aged grumpiness towards women so resembles my own...a kind of distrust of females that is, however, more bark than bite, like a defense mechanism towards creatures of whom we realize we are totally in thrall. The film clearly satirizes Mason's attitudes, which makes it somewhat progressive for its era. I also identified with the professor's obsession with his work to the point of single-mindedness; I have been known to be dedicated to my various pursuits with a most zealous preoccupation and (sometimes misguided) sense of mission.

Pat Boone portrayed Mason's student, and one of the other explorers. He is engaged to a most bonnie lass (the winsome Diane Baker) back in Scotland. Between the sight of Arlene Dahl at her late thirties peak (in form-fitting Victorian costumes, no less), Diane Baker in her twentysomething bloom (similarly adorned in fetching attire), and the spectacular vistas of an underground world emphasized by the majestic music of Bernard Herrmann, this movie must have been like a hallucinogenic drug on my eight-year-old system. The combination of daring boy's adventure, resentment of beautiful but alluring females, very convincing giant lizards, the discovery of the lost city of Atlantis, a field of giant mushrooms, and a vast underground ocean complete with swirling vortex, must have marked my consciousness as if with a psychic knife.

The movie also has a discreet and cumulative eroticism in the non-stop banter between Mason and Dahl. Arlene acts both as a fellow explorer and the maternally nurturing member of the group; she makes soup, steak, and hash from the giant mushrooms, and prepares dinner for the "boys." There is even a bit of dialogue wherein Mason tenderly recalls to Dahl how his mother served him porridge when he was a lad. When Dahl finally has to remove her corset and let down her mane of gorgeous red hair, her body soon to be saturated in an underground flood, the revelation of her plump white arms through the sleeves of her torn blouse comes across as a subtle sensual climax. I don't think the filmmakers were unaware of this erotic aspect, because at the end of the movie, when the explorers are being propelled upwards through a volcano on a protective altar from Atlantis, there is a prolonged shot of Dahl's face that implies nothing less than an onrushing physical pleasure similar to that of orgasm.

What's even stranger about seeing this movie again is that when I turned off the DVD player and looked around my shadowy studio apartment, cluttered as it is with stacks of books, magazines, tapes and DVDs that resemble upwardly jutting stalagmites in a cave, I realized that my personal space has an undeniable resemblance to the claustrophobic grottos in which Pat Boone gets lost during one section of the film! Could it actually be that the inspiration for Sir Cranky's interior decorating is the center of the earth as imagined by Twentieth Century Fox in 1959?

Lately, I’m feeling more skittish in talking about my feelings here. I wonder if I’m insulating myself for some self-protective reason, as if to keep a tight rein on my emotions.

Well, as I’ve said in other entries, I’ve been under a lot of unusual tension in the last few months, from worrying about my kid sister’s health to stressing about finances as a freelance worker. This has all been aggravated by the fact that my tighter budget has forced me to seriously cut back on my social life, fifty percent of which took place in stripclubs.

My recent aversion to spending too much money is almost translating into a new aversion for strippers...as if I’m beginning to see them like vultures hovering over my rotting financial carcass. All right, maybe I’m exaggerating...blame all the film noir I watch for these verbal excesses...because, after all, I still make an okay living...but life is dicey nowadays if you’re not rich and that is very frightening to me. Maybe I’m afraid I’d just sit down and start to bawl if I let it all out...bawl from the sheer nervous accumulation of it all...

Two weeks ago, my aunt Sophie died. She was my mother’s older sister, and the two of them had not spoken to each other since the late 1960s. I saw Aunt Sophie briefly at my father’s funeral in 1977, and even then she and my mother did not talk. Apparently she had the same difficult type of personality as my mother does.

My mother had next to nothing to say about Sophie’s death...although she did complain to one of my sisters about some injustice my aunt had supposedly perpetrated on my mother in 1951. Even though they both lived in Chicago, they never communicated...and Sophie did not call my mother, either, as the end was near. I found all this depressing, until I reminded myself that if these two crazy broads wanted to be stubborn, why should I get morose over it in 2006?

Still, it’s no wonder to me (though somebody else might see this differently) that on the most basic, primal level, I prefer women in the controlled environments of a stripclub or a piece of fiction (whether cinematic or literary), because I’ve seen females pull a lot of gloomy, bleak, manipulative shit...to which my easy-going nature is ready prey. And I’m thinking of stuff not just that my mother or aunt did, but also the emotional misdemeanors of all the screwy skirts I’ve had an unerring instinct (with a couple of decent exceptions) to hook up with in my own life. The coldness of my mother and aunt toward each other is just another example of the icy willfulness my mother has exhibited toward my sisters and myself. But I was able to find a similar kind of coldness in most of the girlfriends I picked, too...

One of my aunt's daughters, my cousin Grace, dutifully took care of her mother in her final illness despite Sophie's (reportedly) unending orneriness. Grace’s sister, my other cousin, is debilitated from a chronic disease and living in a nursing home in Oregon.

I only heard about my aunt’s death when Grace called my sister Brenda, who has made an effort in the last decade to stay in contact with Grace and her sister.

For me, these family ties are flimsy; I never felt particularly close to my cousins, and when my aunt and mother stopped talking, we stopped seeing each other entirely because the adults no longer got along. Then shortly afterward I went off to college and to New York and put all that family drama behind me. Years passed...

Like many people, I’ve attempted to create my own family, or family-like group, in the friends I’ve made here in New York...which is why seeing good pals leave New York is always unsettling (see the previous entry, "Rescued by a Greek salad.") I miss them for their own sakes, and for mine.

My life is like this: I am caught between my nostalgia for the fascinating world of the past, and my aversion for the mundane and sometimes sad realities of my middle-aged present. I constantly and vividly relive the past--particularly the 40s and 50s--through movies and books and memorabilia. Yet, with the news of an elderly aunt’s death, or my writer/actor friend Sid’s move to another part of the country, I feel unmoored from the carnival-like pier of my escapist illusions, as if I am drifting out in a small boat with rickety oars into a foggy ocean barely lit by the neon of the shore...a neon which may only exist in my mind.

Forgive my feeble stab at film noir poetry, but it sums up my mood perfectly.

Just trying to get through Monday...

The morning was a struggle to concentrate so I took a walk at lunchtime. Went to a newsstand to browse magazines for a few minutes, then went over to Whole Foods at Columbus Circle and got myself a Greek salad for lunch...it was quite tasty, and it picked up my spirits to eat something healthy like that...cheese and olives and lettuce and artichokes and little tomatoes...

I have definitely cut back on sugar and snacks since I had my physical in early August...good boy Cranky...

Saw a couple of lookers on my walk. One was a very tall blonde who accentuated her height with three or four inch peep-toe heels. She wore a 40s style pink flower print dress that really let her body move underneath it. She had a subtly alluring bottom...then I saw another gal, was she ever "stacked" as we used to say, and her tight top lifted it up, but didn't show it off in a trashy way...she had good posture as she walked by on her shapely legs with very pretty peep-toe heels with little pink bows on the vamps...

Nice scenery, and combined with the Greek salad, my spirits improved...

I got back to work after lunch and achieved what I had planned to do this day...

But I've definitely felt kind of down these last few days...

I had to give myself the "Sunday night pep talk" yesterday, reminding myself that although I'm not wealthy, famous, or immortal, I have worked hard and consistently my entire adult life, and achieved a good amount of substantial work...

I'm just at that age where the questions, "Isn't there more? Where's that brass ring I read about?" too frequently come nagging.

Do I have to start to lower my expectations for my life? Horrors.

Over the weekend, my longtime actor/writer friend Sid left New York permanently with his wife and son. He's originally from Cleveland, lived in New York for about thirty-six years, and he and his wife Terri finally managed (after a long process) to sell their house in Queens and get a decent price which will enable them to have a bit of a nest egg. Sid lost his job several months ago and, like so many middle-aged people (he's 59), found it impossible to find another decent one. So the sale of the house and the move away from New York became a necessity.

Although I'm sure I'll talk and email Sid, and visit him and his family when they get settled in a new house (their move came about suddenly so their son could start school in Cleveland, and they are staying with relatives for the interim), it's still a downer. We shared a lot of good times over the years, separated only by a subway ride. But they'll definitely have a more financially viable life in the Midwest.

I've had many pals over the years who've left New York, and it's always a drag to add more to the list.

And that goes for the strippers I got to really like before they moved on to other clubs, or other pursuits.

Whew! Talk about a blue Monday. Why don't I just pretend it's already Tuesday?

It's Sunday...I don't want to work today even though I was planning to...even though I didn't work yesterday either, and didn't accomplish a hell of a lot on Friday, come to think of it...this is what happens when you don't take a vacation you are overdue for...the desire to loaf spills over into ALL your days...nonetheless I do get my work done and things are moving along on schedule...I am disciplined when it comes to earning my daily bread...

I hope my blog is still interesting enough for most people, since I haven't been hanging out with strippers much this summer...I've done most of my girl-watching on the streets this season, or at neo-burlesque shows...

And DVDs have definitely had the upper hand over strippers these last two or three months.

Lately, my life is half-actual, half-digital. Sometimes the things I see on DVDs seem more vivid (or at least more memorable) than the things I do in the real world...

I doubt that I'm alone in this; in having my life truly split between the actual and the imaginative. But you do have a greater risk of this when you live by yourself...

As I had my coffee this morning, I was happily surprised to find a story about one of my fave 1950s strippers, the late Candy Barr, on p. 50 of the New York Daily News. Good photos, and a solid summary of her life by David Krajicek. I myself wrote about her on this blog on January 4, 2006, shortly after she died, and I'm always interested to read more about her. What a sexy dame! Check out the history of my posts if you'd like to read that entry, and also find a link to some good pix of Candy.

After breakfast I took a walk past Columbus Circle in the cloudy gray light of a drizzly morning and went up to Lincoln Center, where Tower Video is. I browsed aimlessly for a little while...I think I use browsing as some people use chocolate; it soothes my soul.

The other night I went to a video store in the East Village and picked up a new Fox Film Noir DVD that just came out, called Vicki. It's a 1953 remake of I Wake Up Screaming from 1941, which came out a couple of months ago on the same label and about which I wrote here previously. Both films are about a girl who becomes a top model and New York celebrity, and is murdered just as she's about to go to Hollywood. A sadistic police detective decides that the press agent who lifted Vicki to stardom is the chief suspect. In the original, Vicki was played by Carole Landis, the press agent by Victor Mature, and the detective by Laird Cregar; in the remake, the cast is Jean Peters, Elliot Reid, and Richard Boone. Betty Grable played the murdered girl's sister Jill in the original, and the true heroine of the story; Jeanne Crain played her in the later version.

Vicki had its moments, and Richard Boone was good as the cop in his pre-Have Gun, Will Travel days, but Elliot Reid was not a good leading man. He was more of a light comedian/character type. There were a lot of good character actors in small roles, like John Dehner, Frank Gerstle, and Carl Betz, but the film was mostly miscast; Jean Peters would have been better as Jill, and Jeanne Crain as Vicki--because Miss Crain's face comes across as far more glamorous than Peters' and more suitable for that of a superstar model (even though Peters was certainly a dish in her own way and one of the sexiest stars of the 40s and 50s).

One person who did stand out was Aaron Spelling, in his pre-tv mogul days as an actor. He plays the part of a creepy hotel switchboard operator which was played by Elisha Cook Jr. in the original. Spelling was effective, especially with his bug eyes, but it's easy to see why he might not have wanted to continue playing these kinds of weirdo roles which his looks most suited him for, and instead decided to embark on the career that would make him one of tv's most successful producers.

If I taught a class in film direction, I would show these two movies back-to-back to demonstrate how two films with the same story can be so totally different. I Wake Up Screaming is rich and evocative and imaginative, and Vicki is flat, mundane and almost like a claustrophobically cheap television show of the early 50s.

I see that Fox Noir is also releasing Boomerang, a story about a wrongly accused man, which stars Dana Andrews, Arthur Kennedy, Lee J. Cobb, and Jane Wyatt. I can't get enough of Jane Wyatt's sexy face and voice, so this will probably be one of my next purchases...

I hear Miss Wyatt is in her early 90s now, God bless her!

Anyway, have a good Sunday, everyone.