Peace and Everybody
I watch four pictures. I read books of newspaper comics. I read books of nonfiction and fiction.
Film Selections: Noir and Neo-Noir
High Sierra, directed by Raoul Walsh, 1941. Solid noir caper with touches borrowed from the western genre. Humphrey Bogart plays a criminal just out of prison who promptly takes a job working a heist with some unreliable strangers, including a luscious moll played conservatively by Ida Lupino. Bogart’s protagonist also falls in with a sympathetic poor family who doesn’t know his background or profession; he becomes enamored with the idea that he might marry into the family and settle down. The story pulls his character in these irreconcilable directions, the character’s cool lethality when he’s on the job contrasted with his sentimental friendliness when he’s working to be a nice guy. Naturally Bogart’s understated stolidity and badass line-delivery are perfect for the role, though apparently he knew this before the studio realized it and had to lobby hard for the part. The protagonist is strained until he meets a sad but deserved fate in a mountaintop manhunt which seems to have inspired the climax of the 2016 crime western Hell or High Water.
Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder, 1944. I wrote about my first viewing of this movie back in 2022, and I bet that review holds up fine. (I don’t feel like re-reading it.) Still a great movie, and I watched it with the same friends with whom I went to that underground VHS screening of The Wicker Man. One of them had never seen a film noir and the other one considers this to be the quintessential noir picture. Fred MacMurray, star of Double Indemnity, was later in Wilder’s masterpiece The Apartment, which I plan to watch soon.
The Roaring Twenties, directed by Raoul Walsh, 1939. Bogart worked with Walsh on this picture a few years before they did High Sierra, with Bogart playing a supporting role in a hybrid social drama/gangster picture starring James Cagney. Precisely as with the similarly-themed Angels with Dirty Faces from the year before, Cagney in The Roaring Twenties plays a relatively goodhearted gangster while Bogart plays his downright evil accomplice and trouble-getter-intoer.
The big difference with The Roaring Twenties is that it’s looking back into the recent American past, telling a story that spans from the end of the Great War to the 1929 market crash. The film dramatizes the historical ups and downs of that decade to establish the sordid rise and fall of Cagney’s character, a returning veteran who can’t get work and so goes into the bootlegging trade at the onset of Prohibition. It’s a pretty good picture overall with glossy production values and a few genuinely cool special effects. Cagney is well-cast in a softer version of one of his many tough-guy roles, while Bogart and a number of lesser-known actors round out a solid if unmemorable cast of gangster movie archetypes. The film has a lot on its mind and errs on the side of getting in all of its intended points about the roaringness of the Twenties at the expense of characterological depth. A slick production, well-made artifact and glimpse into how the Twenties were romanticized by film studios of the late Thirties.
Hard Eight, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996. Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut auteur production doesn’t hold up especially well, though it’s nowhere near as bad as his recent creative misfire One Battle After Another or his 2014 career-low Inherent Vice. The brilliant actor Philip Baker Hall plays a creaky professional gambler whose guilty conscience and lack of anything to live for compel him to mentor a derelict young loser played by John C. Reilly. Gwyneth Paltrow gamely steps in as a prostitute who becomes entangled in both men’s lives, while Samuel L. Jackson turns in fine work as a lowlife who wants to cynically blow apart the counterfeit happiness the other three have scraped together.
Hard Eight has many of the hallmarks of Anderson’s work, including handsome photography, meaty roles for gifted actors, impressive and carefully-choreographed long takes, and a tragicomic story suffused with a mounting sense of dread and the threat of humiliation and loss. It’s not a bad movie but it’s an immature first effort compared with the ingenious Boogie Nights that immediately followed, not to mention other career highlights from the following decade. Hard Eight finds Anderson straining as a writer, especially in some heavy-handed dialogue in a long scene comprising the film’s key turning point. This scene finds Hall, Reilly and Paltrow’s characters emoting their way through an inauthentic-feeling scenario in a cheap hotel room, three very skilled actors trying and failing to make the dialogue work.
The last time I had watched Hard Eight, I hadn’t yet seen Michael Mann’s excellent first feature Thief. Watching Hard Eight this time, I detected some structural and thematic nods to Thief, sorta like how I perceived Anderson’s latest picture One Battle After Another to be modeled on the 1977 Star Wars.
Comics Update
After finishing the Get Fuzzy collection by Conley, I read a 1984 paperback edition of a late-Seventies Beetle Bailey collection by Mort Walker entitled Peace, Beetle Bailey. I used to fall in for this banal US Army-themed strip in the newspaper comics page every day growing up, but I only read this book collection because I lucked upon it in a Little Free Library right when I was looking for my next book of classic newspaper comics.
Beetle Bailey is a rigamarole of mediocre gags about contemporary peacetime military life and the cast of stereotypes that populate Walker’s account of it — lazy infantryman Beetle, bloated hardass Sarge, the henpecked General hiding in bars from his wife and lusting after his buxom secretary, the token black soldier with an uncooperative Afro, the dumb hick, the uniformed dog, the put-upon mess sergeant “Cookie,” and so forth.
As military strips go, Walker was no Bill Mauldin: alongside the quaint humor, Walker streamlined his work into a soft, flat, open, rounded, high-contrast cartooning style that goes light on backgrounds and heavy on reassuring spot blacks. It’s painfully predictable in its repetitiveness, but one has to respect the sure-handedness with which Walker for decades turned in three daily panels replete with corny punchline.
A barracks makes a good setting for a strip because the military draws together all different sorts of people and puts them into peculiar situations each day. Nevertheless, it would have been wild if Walker had ever taken the cast to like some godforsaken war zone and Beetle Bailey had held Sarge’s guts in his hands while promising a dying Sarge he would take care of his dog, and then have to sneak dehydratedly for hours through the jungle under withering enemy fire to connect with another unit and bring in reinforcements, stopping to snack on actual beetles because he has nothing else to eat. In my scenario this would all be drawn in the same reassuringly simple bulgy Seventies style, with the same lame punchlines.
What I’ve Been Reading Besides Comics
When We See You Again from 2026, by Rachel Goldberg-Polin. I mused a few years ago about experiencing some emotional effects from the death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin and the rest of the “Beautiful Six.” This is the recent memoir written by Hersh’s mother, the formidable Rachel, whom I regularly appreciate as an incredibly charismatic, eloquent and thought-provoking guest on Call Me Back with Dan Senor. Rachel is not a natural as a book-writer, but I suspect that her editor and publisher chose not to interfere too much with what seems to have been an intuitive writing process, ultimately comprising an ambling series of chapter-length meditations on experiences including immigration, fear, resilience and grief along with weighty issues like faith, fate and the belief in an afterlife. This is the account of a horrible set of trials endured by one person, now famous and influential for reasons she never wanted, providing just one excruciatingly sad and hopeful perspective on a period in the history of the Middle East which has resulted in so much necessary and unnecessary pain, destruction and bloodshed. Not an easy read, but meaningful enough to some of us to be worth engaging with.
Earth vs. Everybody from 2009, by John Swartzwelder. Swartzwelder is the legendary lone wolf/right-wing crank of the writing staff of the classic years of The Simpsons, having conceived a number of the best episodes the series ever produced. I’ve been meaning for years to get around to trying out one of his self-published comedy novels and this was the easiest one to get my hands on through my local library system. It’s one in a series of kooky, absurdist cartoon-noir novels about an old-timey private detective protagonist named Frank Burly who bumbles through misadventures parodying the hard-boiled and science fiction genres. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever read, and is the only fiction besides Wodehouse that I can recall making me laugh out loud while reading alone. Highly recommended.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being from 1984, by Milan Kundera. I read this because I enjoyed the film adaptation last year and also read online somewhere that Kundera disavowed the film and felt that it didn’t convey the points of his novel.
I can see why, especially in terms of structure. The book unfolds in a kind of narrative spiral outwards, establishing a locus of storytelling between the married couple who represent two of the book’s four rotating protagonists, and then circling outwards in both time and geography, so that we learn of certain aspects of the fates of various characters long before Kundera then circles past them again to help us understand the deeper significances of their lives. The story also expands outwards from Prague and across the events of the 1968 Soviet invasion, moving backwards, forwards and around in time and space while Kundera alights on various philosophical topics of great depth. He and his characters are interested in how human beings struggle to give our lives political and spiritual meaning, or how to process uncomfortable desires through dreams, or how impossible it is to know if one is ever making the right decision about anything because you never get another chance to do anything over again. Kundera even puts some metafictional distance between himself and his own tale, occasionally reminding the reader that she is engaging with fictional characters in a novel, which has a heightening effect on the wisdom of his heady musings.
I found this to be quite a well-written novel about interesting themes and characters. It hasn’t rocketed to the top of any lists for me, but I’m glad to have found out what all of the fuss has been about for all these decades. I still like what the movie version accomplished, but now I see the degree to which the movie was really taking the bare narrative and characterological bones of Kundera’s book and making a pseudo-intellectual, self-serious prestige erotic drama out of them. Which isn’t a bad thing in itself, but quite different from what Kundera was chasing.
Sapir: Ideas for a Thriving Jewish Future: The Issue on (Fixing) America, Volume Twenty-One, Spring 2026, edited by Bret Stephens and written by various. The moment I finished reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a San Francisco bar near my current crashpad, I flipped over to an article by Allen C. Guelzo in this new issue of Stephens’s periodical and read in the very next paragraph:
Much as every despot has come to power promising better future worlds of various sorts, the totalitarians really look first to control and manipulate history. The great Czech novelist Milan Kundera saw this in the Eastern European Soviet bloc. “They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it’s not true,” Kundera objected. The autocrats “want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.” This is why “the first step in liquidating a people…is to erase its memory,” Kundera (like Solzhenitsyn) insisted. “Destroy its books, its culture, its history, then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”
I still have two books lingering from the reading list I laid out for myself last year, but I’m having trouble getting my hands on satisfactory free printed copies of The Scarlet Letter and Crime and Punishment. This induced some recent biblionxiety about what to read next, so for now I decided to just queue up stuff I genuinely want to read or re-read for fun. They are Little Free Library copies of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (first reading), Uzumaki by Junji Ito (first reading), Herzog by Saul Bellow (re-reading) and The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (re-reading). I’ll reserve the right to pivot if the newest Einat Wilf and James Ellroy books come in at the local library.