I saw a few good movies this week...

I Shot Jesse James (1949) told a story about Bob Ford, played by the late John Ireland, and his last months of life after killing his best friend Jesse for a reward and amnesty from prosecution as an outlaw...I don't know if the film's story was true, but the plotline has Ford killing Jesse so that he can get enough money to go straight and marry his actress girlfriend (the tasty Barbara Britton)...Ireland was quite good in the role, especially in one scene where he's sweating that he's about to be ambushed on a dark street.

Forbidden was a 1953 Tony Curtis vehicle, and the late Joanne Dru was the leading lady. The story was standard romantic suspense claptrap, set in Macao, and Tony was still getting his feet wet as an actor, so it was mostly worth seeing for the more polished Dru...she was gorgeous in the real 50s way...I mean, I can imagine guys going home back in the 50s and whacking off after seeing her image fifty feet high on a screen in all those sexy clothes and lustrous lipstick...I only found out after seeing the movie that she was married to John Ireland in the 40s and 50s, whose own film I'd seen just the day before! Strange coincidence that I happened to see Mr. and Mrs. Ireland's films back to back. According to stuff I read on the Web, Ireland was reputed to have a large penis, and was allegedly quite a womanizer. Now I can't get the image of out of my mind of the luscious Dru getting plowed by the mighty Ireland schlong!!

In a film buff magazine, I read an excerpt from an unpublished autobiography Ireland was working on...he was quite a good writer. Too bad the book has not been published, to my knowledge. I think he had five kids, between two wives...maybe they could get their dad's manuscript into print someday? I'd like to read it and I'm sure others would too. Ireland is a real cult favorite.

The third movie, Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend from 1991, is a story about a lonely security guard in Nebraska who spends all his money on call girls, and then starts videotaping the sessions--a bad move on his part. It was a mostly funny but sometimes sad movie, and one of the actresses, Monica McFarland, was extremely sexy as one of the trashy hookers. I wonder if she went on to do more movies. Excellent at dialogue, and a nice pair of tits jiggling in her bra.

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I've been slogging through the holiday season, mirthlessly. Haven't visited any stripclubs, and I can't say I feel very motivated to do so. A friend was teasing me that I'd finally "kicked" the stripclub habit. I doubt it...instead, maybe I'll go get a massage at one of these Asian spas in New York. Maybe that'll pick up my spirits...and maybe I'll feel I'm getting more for my "entertainment dollar."

Ah, I probably won't do that, either...

I've sent out the novel I wrote this summer to a couple of people in publishing, an editor I know and an agent he referred me to, and although they liked the writing, the book didn't come together for them as a piece of noirish fiction. Two of my knowledgeable friends read it, however, and liked it except for the ending...still, I reread the book myself again after two months and I wasn't too pleased with it anymore...I think I'll be doing some rewriting. Last night in a bookstore I literally stumbled on a 40s novel with the same classic, time-honored theme as my book (unbalanced femme fatale snares mild-mannered guy) but a totally different plot, era, and setting, a book I'd never heard of before; but I bought it and started to read it and studied very carefully how the book built up its psychological tension...and I think I may have figured out the mistake I made in my own manuscript, which made the editor and agent feel it didn't work like a story of suspense but rather as a mainstream "relationship" novel. Yes, now I see why they felt that...I waited too long to make the menace of my female character come to the fore.

Both the agent and editor recommended I should write a mainstream novel, and forgo crime or noir elements...they may be right, but I think I'm going to see if I can bring the suspense element in this manuscript into proper focus before going the "mainstream" route.

The reason I hesitate to write a "mainstream" book is that I hardly read that kind of fiction anymore...I used to read it a lot, but now I mostly read psychological suspense fiction, which gives me the characterizations I crave with the suspense elements I also enjoy. And from the purely pragmatic point of view, genre fiction is more marketable, and I want to make money writing fiction.

I was excited last night, having felt that I'd identified my novel's defect after thinking about it for weeks...I stayed up until 3:30 a.m. eating eating chocolate, drinking Coke, and reading this 40s novel. In seeing how another author tackled and tamed a similar structural problem, I felt my own way was being cleared for revision. It was a weird coincidence, too, to stumble on this book...I saw it just as I was about to leave the bookstore.

Yet, there is the seed of doubt in my mind, that maybe I'm not cut out to write suspense fiction after all, and the whole revision might be an exercise in futility...

Sometimes my life feels so drab. I mean, drab can be okay too, because drama can be bad...it's the "no news is good news" approach to life, which my late maternal grandmother espoused. Now, as a young beleaguered Jewish woman who had to leave Russia and its pogroms in the early twentieth century, she had a solid reason to hold that philosophy...but do I?

Anyway, I read, I write, I do my freelance work, I make feeble stabs at cleaning my cluttered apartment...but if I can finish this book properly and sell it, or at least some damn book in the near future, I think it could mean better money and a better life down the line.

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Meanwhile, getting back to pulchritude, here's a link to the Joanne Dru page at the excellent Brian's Drive-In Theater site, where you can see how alluring she looked in Forbidden.

BriansDriveInTheater

I usually don't wait eight days before posting again, but this past week was very distracting. I had so many things to do that I found myself concentrating on work and then concentrating on trying to relax from work. Didn't feel like writing much...

Boy, I wish I could take a month off from everything...

I did see a very good movie this week which I can recommend to you. It's a 1946 black-and-white film noir called Black Angel, starring Dan Duryea and June Vincent. Duryea, of course, was one of the great actors of 40s films, but I hadn't been aware of June Vincent before, and she really opened my eyes. Reading up on her on the Web, I learned that she primarily did B movies and tv in the 50s and 60s. She retired from acting in the early 70s, judging by her Internet Movie Database entry.

In Black Angel, June gives a beautifully subtle and understatedly sexy performance as Cathy, a devoted wife racing against the clock to prove her husband Kirk's innocence in a murder case. Kirk was involved with another woman, a bitchy singer who happened to be the wife of Duryea's character, Marty. When the singer is strangled, Kirk is convicted and sentenced to be executed. Cathy and Marty team up to find the real killer, and the final twist is a doozy. I watched the film with a few friends and none of us saw the twist coming.

I liked the film so much I watched it again before returning it to the video store. The atmosphere, the dialogue, the music, the actors--Peter Lorre is in it, too, playing a creepy nightclub owner--everything adds up to a really fine thriller based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich. It's readily available on DVD.

Getting back to the real world now...I hope this week is a little less discombobulating for me!

Went to my storage space again today, lugging over books and magazines in my collapsible cart from Staples. It felt good, productive. Gave me hope that I will have a less cluttered apartment to look forward to at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Saw a cute Eurasian lass of about twenty-five on my walk over to the storage facility. Black high-heeled boots, a bright red winter coat, and her brown hair in a ponytail. I was so distracted looking at her and pulling along my cart that I had to remind myself to watch out for traffic as I crossed the street.

The cover of New York magazine this week features a closeup of a beautiful Asian girl's profile as she holds a bare and shapely female foot that is adorned with a perfect red-polish pedicure. There's nothing explicitly pornographic about the shot, but it is definitely pure quality smut. Love it! It's for an article about the spa industry in New York, and women's increased dependence on former luxuries like pedicures and bikini waxes. I skimmed the piece over at Borders this afternoon, and it tells about the difficulties and hardships of the immigrant (mostly Asian) workers in those spas, and about the psychological head trip that goes on between the workers and the customers, which because of the nature of the job--like washing feet--can have a distinct slave-master dynamic. I'm sure men and women all over town reacted strongly to the stimulating properties of this cover; and earlier this week, when I went to pick up the magazine to peruse it at a local newsstand, it looked as if the cover had been defiled by someone's semen! There was a big crusty dry spot right in the center of the image, in the space between the Asian girl's lips and the bare sole of the female foot. Perhaps it was just my imagination, and that issue had just been messed up by something else; but who knows? Nothing like a little implied lesbian sadomasochism on the cover to sell periodicals, right? And to inspire furtive frenzies of gooey appreciation from male readers too!

The stagehands strike is over on Broadway and the crowds have returned to midtown Manhattan, where I live. A little discombobulating, the comeback of the throngs. I was enjoying the quietude, even though I knew it was hurting business for restaurants and actors and souvenir shops. I wonder how many other denizens of my neighborhood secretly savored the unexpected peacefulness of the barren streets of a temporarily shuttered and picketed Broadway?

Now that the hordes are back, I noted tonight how so many people in New York walk as if you're supposed to get out of their way. Maybe it's because I've retained my Midwestern belief in compromise, but when I walk along a crowded sidewalk I'm always ready to shift in concert with an approaching person, if necessary. But I get the feeling many people expect the waves to part for them. Is this because maybe they sense subliminally that I will move aside, and that they really don't have to alter their course? Still, it annoys me. Makes me feel submissive to them, which I don't like. Feeling submissive is something I only enjoy in erotic fantasy with a playfully aggressive female, but not in the real world. I hate to feel submissive to anything or anyone in the real world. At my core, I am very anti-authoritarian and rebellious. Other people got this out of their system in their hippie twenties--I never did. I was never a hippie, anyway. Maybe it's extremely arrogant of me, but I often look at people and ponder, "What makes you think you're better than I am, you stupid fuck?"

Maybe it's a good thing I'm not physically imposing, because I might regularly want to beat the shit out of people who cross me. On the other hand, maybe if I was physically imposing, I would know that I very well COULD beat the shit out of people who crossed me, and I wouldn't feel intimidated and resentful of them.

But, angry as I am, I position myself as a man of peace.

Ah, maybe I'm missing the feminine touch in my life! My soul is hardening because of the lack of pretty women sitting on my lap. I went out tonight with the express purpose of giving myself a little entertainment at the strip joint, but I decided to have dinner instead. And dinner seemed to have quelled my hungers--gustatory, existential, and otherwise. I started thinking about spending forty dollars to have some girl who couldn't give a shit about me writhing on my lap for six minutes, and I thought, "Wouldn't I rather spend that forty on volume two of the collected works of Italian filmaestro Mario Bava?"

It all boils down to cold, hard cash. If I didn't worry about the money, I would go for the dance. As it is, I didn't go for the Bava boxed set of DVDs either, but just walked home through the windy, cold night.

Last weekend I finally caught up with a movie I'd read about here and there over the years called The Killing Kind, starring Ann Sothern, John Savage, Sue Bernard, Luana Anders, and Ruth Roman. I found it on a low-priced DVD compilation of psycho-thrillers, and it's a mark of the film's riveting and disturbing power that despite the low-grade digital transfer, this 1973 film really kept me watching. Then, when I opened the New York Times on Tuesday 11/27 to read Dave Kehr's always interesting DVD review column, I discovered that Dark Sky Films has just released a brand new edition of this film on disc, so I'm going to have to get that one to check it out in a better condition than the DVD I watched.

The Killing Kind is about Terry (John Savage), a shy young guy who reluctantly participates in a beachside gang rape with his aggressively moronic pals, and gets sent to prison for two years. When he gets out he goes home to his mother Thelma (Ann Sothern), an ex-dancer and model (now pudgy and fiftyish in her housedresses) who manages a boarding house populated mostly by dotty old ladies, but also by an aspiring model (Cindy Williams). It quickly becomes clear that not only is Thelma overly doting on her son ("You want some chocolate milk?" she keeps offering) but her interest in him borders on the voyeuristic and incestuous. She loves to take pictures of him, even surprising him in the shower with her camera. Terry, meanwhile, although passive on the outside (strumming a guitar constantly, blankly staring out into space), is actually a proverbial seething cauldron of twisted rage, and he takes vengeance for his incarceration (and who knows what else in jail) on the glib and floozy-like lawyer (Ruth Roman) who couldn't keep him out of prison, the raped girl (Sue Bernard) whose testimony sent him there, and even on the aspiring model (Williams) when she dares to question not only his manhood, but his very sanity. Even Terry's next door neighbor, a frustrated spinster-type (Luana Anders) feels his fury when she attempts to seduce him by the outdoor pool next to the boarding house.

Yes, this is one creepy movie. Ann Sothern is terrific in her role, by turns poignant, pathetic, and perverted as she brings the sickly possessive Thelma to life. John Savage is scary as hell with his brooding silence and demented smile. The boarding house is an American Gothic special, full of cats and, in one scene, even a rat that is utilized to full disgusting effect. The ending is shocking but seems inevitable, as all the neurotic/psychotic passions between mother and son, and son and the world he encounters, explode in a final murder and grim release from life's burden of madness.

What adds poignancy to the movie is seeing 40s and 50s movie goddesses like Ann Sothern and Ruth Roman in the roles of these particularly unsavory middle-aged women, their beauty decayed into flab and wrinkles and harshly dyed coiffures, their once-glistening pinup gloss long gone, with their characters' psyches wreaking havoc not just on others, but ultimately on themselves.

Trivia bonus: I've read that Ann Sothern's gorgeous 1940s eyes inspired the work of pinup artist Bill Ward, whose cartoons of dark-eyed leggy temptresses are currently on view in beautiful books published by Taschen and Fantagraphics.

But back to the movie: it was so creepy I had to turn it off in the middle and resume watching it the next night. Although not especially bloody, its psychological violence was bluntly delivered, and this is a film that belongs on the shelf next to similar classics like Hitchcock's Psycho.

So check it out if this is your cup of grue. Here's a link to Dark Sky Films for more info on The Killing Kind. I don't work for this company or anything, I'm just passing along the word to lovers of fascinating films!

DarkSkyFilms