Marlene Dietrich

(Publicity still for The Song of Songs)

Leonard Merrick: A Digital Reader

Leonard Merrick (1864-1939) was an English writer of good books, now generally forgotten. Thankfully, he's having a resurgence. Three years ago, he didn't have a Wikipedia page. Now he does. Many of his works are available on the Internet Archive. However, they're unorganised. Here's a chronological list of his novels with links:

Mr Bazalgette's Agent (1888)
Violet Moses (1891)
The Man Who Was Good (1892)
Cynthia (1896)
One Man's View (1897)
The Actor-Manager (1898)
The Worldlings (1900)
Conrad in Quest of His Youth (1903)
The Quaint Companions (1903)
The House of Lynch (1907)
The Position of Peggy Harper (1911)
When Love Flies Out the Window (1914)

Top 60 Westerns (I have seen...)

Over at Scribbles and Ramblings, Sachin has compiled a list of cinema's 60 greatest westerns. To do this, he watched 82 westerns over 2 months! Needless to say, Sachin saw more westerns in 60 days than I've seen in my entire life, but let's see how I measure up, so here's the full list. Films I've seen are in bold.

1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966, Sergio Leone)
2. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968, Sergio Leone)
3. The Ox-Bow Incident (1943, William A. Wellman)
4. The Gunfighter (1950, Henry King)
5. My Darling Clementine (1946, John Ford)
6. Decision at Sundown (1957, Budd Boetticher)
7. Sholay (1975, Ramesh Sippy)
8. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford)
9. The Westerner (1940, William Wyler)
10. Unforgiven (1992, Clint Eastwood)
11. For a Few Dollars More (1965, Sergio Leone)
12. The Wild Bunch (1969, Sam Peckinpah)
13. Ride Lonesome (1959, Budd Boetticher)
14. Yellow Sky (1948, William W. Wellman)
15. Rio Bravo (1959, Howard Hawks)
16. Johnny Guitar (1954, Nicholas Ray)
17. 3 Bad Men (1926, John Ford)
18. Red River (1948, Howard Hawks)
19. The Professionals (1966, Richard Brooks)
20. Bad Day at Black Rock (1955, John Sturges)
21. Shane (1953, George Stevens)
22. 3:10 to Yuma (1957, Delmer Daves)
23. Winchester ’73 (1950, Anthony Mann)
24. High Plains Drifter (1973, Clint Eastwood)
25. Stagecoach (1939, John Ford)
26. Jeremiah Johnson (1972, Sydney Pollack)
27. The Searchers (1956, John Ford)
28. The Shootist (1976, Don Siegel)
29. The Great Silence (1968, Sergio Corbucci)
30. The Proposition (2005, John Hillcoat)
31. Keoma (1976, Enzo G. Castellari)
32. Destry Rides Again (1939, George Marshall)
33. Hang ‘em High (1968, Ted Post)
34. Dead Man (1995, Jim Jarmusch)
35. Seven Men from Now (1956, Budd Boetticher)
36. Warlock (1959, Edward Dmytryk)
37. The Magnificent Seven (1960, John Sturges)
38. High Noon (1952, Fred Zinnemann)
39. Forty Guns (1957, Samuel Fuller)
40. Comanche Station (1960, Budd Boetticher)
41. Pale Rider (1985, Clint Eastwood)
42. Heaven’s Gate (1980, Michael Cimino)
43. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007, Andrew Dominik)
44. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976, Clint Eastwood)
45. A Fistful of Dollars (1964, Sergio Leone)
46. Django (1966, Sergio Corbucci)
47. The Naked Spur (1953, Anthony Mann)
48. Wagonmaster (1950, John Ford)
49. Dances with Wolves (1990, Kevin Costner)
50. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971, Robert Altman)
51. Meek’s Cutoff (2010, Kelly Reichardt)
52. Tumbleweeds (1925, King Baggot)
53. The Furies (1950, Anthony Mann)
54. Rancho Notorious (1952, Fritz Lang)
55. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973, Sam Peckinpah)
56. The Shooting (1966, Monte Hellman)
57. The Big Trail (1930, USA, Raoul Walsh)
58. Silverado (1985, Lawrence Kasdan)
59. The Man from Laramie (1955, Anthony Mann)
60. El Topo (1970, Alejandro Jodorowsky)

At Sea

Because Leviathan made me think of ships and slow movies, here's Petter Hutton's 2007 At Sea. It's one hour long, about a ship, ostensibly a documentary and Film Comment named it the best avant-garde film of the past decade. It also has less than fifty votes at the IMDB, which is a shame. If you like contemplative cinema, amazing images or James Benning, enjoy:

Spit it out and let it go.

Spanish director Luis Buñuel made L'Age d'or in 1930. Officially, he wrote it with Salvador Dalí. When the film was released it caused a scandal, and it didn't see the light up day in some parts of the world until much later. It's now considered a classic. But that's not what's interesting. What's interesting is this:

I haven’t seen L’Age d’or since it was made, so I can’t really say what I think of it. Although Dali compared it to American films (undoubtedly from a technical point of view), he later wrote that his intentions “in writing the screenplay” were to expose the shameful mechanisms of contemporary society. For me, it was a film about passion, l’amour fou, the irresistible force that thrusts two people together, and about the impossibility of their ever becoming one.

That's from Buñuel's autobiography, My Last Sigh. The autobiography is generally light on the details of Buñuel's filmmaking, and when information does crop up it's usually as an aside (often in parentheses) in the style: I once saw a dead goat eating a fig (Later, I tried unsuccessfully to recreate this image in The Discreet Phantom of the Garden.) Anyway, my point is that after making L'Age d'or Buñuel didn't see a need to watch it again. I don't know if this is because of a general apathy toward his own films or another reason, but it seems like good approach. There are those who endlessly tinker with their work after it's been released to the public and those who mark the occasion by starting something new. I like the latter. Getting things done is more important than perfection, and once it's done why go back to it?

The Jackal of Nahueltoro

El Chacal de Nahueltoro (English: The Jackal of Nahueltoro) is a 1970 Chilean film by Chilean director Miguel Littín. Much like Jorge Sanjinés, the Bolivian filmmaker whose The Blood of the Condor was the focus of the first entry in my YouTube Film Treasure Series, Littín is a political leftist who's made a career of films about history that often focus on the plight of the poor.



The Jackal of Nahueltoro is based on a real life murder: a man kills a woman and her children. He's apprehended, imprisoned and eventually sentenced to death and executed by firing squad. Before he dies, the government educates him ("improves" him) and gives him a shiny new pair of shoes. The irony, of course, is that nobody cared about the man before he committed murder. The government didn't want to educate him. He didn't have nice shoes. If he would have had these things, he might not have become a criminal. Giving these things to citizens chosen to die rather than those fated to live is also a waste of resources. That's the message, but it's Littín's raw, visually expressive presentation that makes the film unforgettable.

Joseph Conrad Stinks

While trying to think of candidates for my list of good shorts novels (that I've read), I moseyed on over to Project Gutenberg's etext of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Scanning through it, I remembered the rotten hippo meat:

I don't pretend to say that steamboat floated all the time. More than once she had to wade for a bit, with twenty cannibals splashing around and pushing. We had enlisted some of these chaps on the way for a crew. Fine fellows—cannibals—in their place. They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them. And, after all, they did not eat each other before my face: they had brought along a provision of hippo-meat which went rotten, and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now.

Not enough novels include smells. A novel is words, and words are abstractions, but for some reason describing something we can see seems more natural than describing something we can smell. Hearing, touch and taste also have a more comfortable place in literature than smell. Who knows why we snub the nose...

Good Short Novels

A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess)
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich (Danilo Kiš)
Animal Farm (George Orwell)
Bear (Marian Engel)
Day of the Locust (Nathanael West)
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
Heart of a Dog (Mikhail Bulgakov)
Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
Identity (Milan Kundera)
Mount Analogue (René Daumal)
The Dwarf (Pär Lagerkvist)
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
The Street of Crocodiles (Bruno Schulz)
We (Yevgeny Zamyatin)

Cień chmury nad ukrytym polem

Stara Rzeka (English: Old River) is a drone band from Bydgoszcz, Poland. Cień chmury nad ukrytym polem (English: The shadow of a cloud over a hidden field) is their first album. Three of the tracks on the album clock in at over twelve minutes, and the whole thing makes for excellent writing, atmosphere or falling asleep music. I'm listening to it while the sun rises. The album closes with a cover of Nico's "My Only Child".

Blood of the Condor

There are a lot of great films on YouTube. Sometimes they disappear, but that's life. I still can't find my favourite scarf that I lost. Consequently and until I find that scarf here's the first entry in a series of posts I'm calling the YouTube Film Treasure Series. If I were a Soviet bureaucrat I'd call it YTFTS.

Yawar Mallku (English: Blood of the Condor) is a Bolivian feature film by Jorge Sanjinés, a Bolivian director who started making films in 1966 and has been making them ever since. He'll be 80 years old in a few years. His latest film, Insurgentes, came out in 2012 but doesn't even have an entry on the IMDB, and I've no idea how to get to copy.



Sanjinés is definitely what you'd call a "political" filmmaker. Blood of the Condor is a good example of what that means. It's set in Bolivia and concerns a member of an indigenous Andean tribe who leaves his rural mountain home and heads for the capital La Paz to get blood for a wounded family member who needs it. The city is a scary place, and despite the tribe member's best attempts he fails to get the blood or generally blend in with urban society. Although he tries to act western, none of the Spanish-speaking city people accept him as a worthwhile citizen. Meanwhile, the tribe itself is being wiped out by the American Peace Corps, which has set up a medical clinic that purports to be providing free medical services but is actually secretly sterilising the women of the tribe. When the tribe finds out, its members use the dead man who needed blood as a martyr and rise up against the imperialist Americans, leading to one of the most famous and effective freeze frame endings in film history—the tribe members lifting their guns in defiance. Although far less known, it's right up there with the last frame of Truffaut's The 400 Blows.

The copy of the film on YouTube doesn't have English subtitles, but subtitles aren't really necessary.

Book Covers, Colours and Thumbnails

Sometimes the cover that looks better big isn't the same one that looks better small. Since a lot of people will only see the thumbnail version of a book cover, it's important to make sure you choose one that looks good "from a distance". For example, the black outline and shadow text effects on the first of these covers looked awful as a thumbnail. The second cover was a notable improvement (even though I still prefer the first cover at normal zoom.)

Samuel Fuller

One of America's best film directors, and one of its most distinctive auteurs, was born in 1912, lived eighty five years and made the kind of raw, brutal and primitive (in the most positive sense) films that independent filmmakers have seemingly forgotten how to make. It's always a pleasure to pull another Sam Fuller picture out of the vault, or The Pirate Bay, and make it play. So far, I've seen:

• Fixed Bayonets! (1951) about comradery during the Korean war.
• Park Row (1952), an absolute gem about the beginnings of the newspaper business in 19th century New York.
• Pickup on South Street (1953), where men steal and ideologies crash in one of the cinema's greatest film noir.
• Forty Guns (1957), a visually dazzling pre-David Lynch western with Barbara Stanwyck.
• Merrill's Marauders (1962), where WWII Burma comes alive and dies.

And there are many more to go, but in doses, man, in doses. Every hour spent with Samuel Fuller is an hour well spent. I'm that way with Yasujiro Ozu, too. Both men made amazing art.

Tender Is The Night

I first read The Great Gatsby in high school. I stole the book. It still sits on my shelf. Later, I watched the Jack Clayton adaption, written by Francis Ford Coppola, and I look forward to seeing the Baz Luhrmann one, too. Later still, I played the great Gatsby video game. Somewhere between the movie and the game, I'd also read the book a second time, and maybe a third time. I still get the itch to pick it up and read it (or load it onto my ereader). It's a great novel, and a short one. But it wasn't until a few years ago, i.e. about a decade after high school, that I read anything else by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tender Is The Night. It was nothing like Gatsby, not as elegantly written and not as compact, which made it a disappointment, but that's about as smart a reaction as hating cats because they're not dogs. Time passes. I remember Gatsby as a whole. I remember impressions from Tender Is The Night. Impress yourself with this:

Nicole seized Dick's arm crying, "Look!" Dick turned in time to see what took place in half a minute. At a Pullman entrance two cars off, a vivid scene detached itself from the tenor of many farewells. The young woman with the helmet-like hair to whom Nicole had spoken made an odd dodging little run away from the man to whom she was talking and plunged a frantic hand into her purse; then the sound of two revolver shots cracked the narrow air of the platform. Simultaneously the engine whistled sharply and the train began to move, momentarily dwarfing the shots in significance. Abe waved again from his window, oblivious to what had happened. But before the crowd closed in, the others had seen the shots take effect, seen the target sit down upon the platform.

I have the urge to read both novels again.

Germany Abolishes Word

Leave it to the Germans to formally abolish a word (a long compound noun, or longcompoundnoun in Germany) via a state parliament.

Put your boots on before you summit.

Sometimes nouns are also verbs. It's funny when that happens and you don't know it. That happened to me today. I was on Google News and saw the headline "Winnipegger summits Everest despite breathing problems". Aha, I thought, I've spotted yet another mistake! (Taking pleasure in finding others' mistakes, even when you don't point them out, is usually a sign that it's been an unproductive day.) But instead of feeling smug and smiling, I went on over to dictionary.com and did a search for "summit". Dictionary says: it's a noun and a verb. My smugness faded away but my smile remained. I'd learned a new word. Still, the neat thing about this discovery (one day I will summit the vocabulary) is how my attitude to the news story changed. I actually read it. When I thought "summit" was only a noun, I didn't want to click on the link. I mean, why reward such stupidity? And this was despite that whether "summit" was or was not a verb, I knew exactly what the headline meant. In fact, whatever the dictionary happened to say the writer had already told me what he wanted to tell me. The only thing that he had possibly broken was a rule, which is merely a convention. Thus, I learned two lessons. One, before declaring anyone wrong, even quietly and to yourself, take the time to check. The internet is quite good at that. Two, refrain from knotting your panties over broken rules.