Thanks for the Use of the Hall

I'm not sure I have many recommendations... I ...

2026-01-28T23:02:14.475-05:00

I'm not sure I have many recommendations... I have fond memories of the Rohmer section of James Monaco's THE NEW WAVE. I read the biography but don't recall much of its critical attitude. If I may court egotism, I wrote a little about the Moral Tales at https://www.villagevoice.com/rohmers-moral-tales-return-charting-cinemas-great-dalliances , and I kind of like the unusual slant on Rohmer that I took in the TRIPLE AGENT review at https://letterboxd.com/sallitt/film/triple-agent .

Hi Dan, I recently rewatched La Collectionneuse an...

2026-01-28T13:52:59.446-05:00

Hi Dan, I recently rewatched La Collectionneuse and it really had an impact on me this time. It made me want to do a deep dive on Rohmer. Are there any books or writing on him you like? Did you read the biography on him by Antoine de Baecque and Noel Herpe? I know you’re a big fan of his so any recommendations would be appreciated.

the west in 1911 was still a decently lawless plac...

2025-01-11T00:37:10.484-05:00

the west in 1911 was still a decently lawless place if you know your history

I don't know Morrison's work either, and I...

2025-01-03T17:29:39.203-05:00

I don't know Morrison's work either, and I too have read only WHITE NOISE of DeLillo. It's true, that first volume of MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES is what's really impressive - it ends just as the focus shifts to the Ulrich-Agathe relationship, which has such a different tone.

Dan, I also greatly admire “The Man Without Qualit...

2025-01-03T11:44:13.621-05:00

Dan, I also greatly admire “The Man Without Qualities” (especially the first volume) and it's probably my favorite German-language modernist novel, at least I like it far more than anything by the more famous and acclaimed Thomas Mann.
I love a lot of 20th-century modernist American literature, including Faulkner or Nathanael West you mentioned above, so I was very curious about the four postmodern writers I asked you about, but sadly what I read left me completely cold, It just didn't resonate at all. At first I thought it was just a matter of the fact that I just prefer older literature (because I do), but on the other hand there are some more contemporary writers I like a great deal: Bolaño, Coetzee, Sebald or Javier Marias.
I still have a few books to read, by DeLillo I've only read “White Noise,” and I know that while it's his most popular novel, quite a few people prefer “Libra” or the monstrous “Underworld”. Then there is Toni Morrison, who I am also completely unfamiliar with.

David - I remember another 20th-century modernist ...

2025-01-02T23:18:03.530-05:00

David - I remember another 20th-century modernist work that I greatly admire: Robert Musil's THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES. It was never finished, but what exists appeals to me a lot.

Thank you as always for your kind and quick reply!...

2025-01-01T10:33:38.163-05:00

Thank you as always for your kind and quick reply!
That’s OK! I asked in part because there was a mention of Pynchon and Delillo in your film, “The Unspeakable Act”, and I was just curious about your opinion.
So I'm assuming the typical postmodern American literature just isn't for me, because I read Lorrie Moore on your recommendation (I picked “Birds of America”) and she was great.

David - I'm afraid it's a long time since ...

2025-01-01T10:06:41.404-05:00

David - I'm afraid it's a long time since I was anywhere near "well-read." Of the four novelists you mention, I've read only Pynchon and some DeLillo, with mixed feelings in each case. My previous post pretty much exhausted my list of literary recommendations - but Todd McEwen writes in a semi-Pynchonian way, and appeals to me more. You might try FISHER'S HORNPIPE. Most other contemporary writers I mentioned in that post aren't very modernist - in any case, my reading since then has been minimal...

Hello Dan, it's me again, and again I'd li...

2025-01-01T09:19:39.326-05:00

Hello Dan, it's me again, and again I'd like to ask you about literature as you are well-read and I like your taste. In recent months, I have read several books by Delillo, Philip Roth, McCarthy and Pynchon (the “four great American novelists alive and working” as Harold Bloom once called them) — they’re also very popular in my country, Poland. Unfortunately, none of their books appealed to me and I'm really curious if you like any of these writers, any novel specifically, and if so, which one is your favorite?

2024-08-31T23:07:28.569-04:00

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2024-08-31T23:06:28.113-04:00

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2024-08-31T22:59:13.367-04:00

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2024-08-31T22:47:53.075-04:00

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David - I don't actually have a list of favori...

2023-04-12T19:40:46.511-04:00

David - I don't actually have a list of favorite albums, but here's something I gave to a friend when he asked me something similar about a decade ago. It's all modern pop or rock.

Richard Thompson (I WANT TO SEE THE BRIGHT LIGHTS TONIGHT, HENRY THE HUMAN FLY)
Gene Clark (THE FANTASTIC EXPEDITION OF DILLARD AND CLARK, WHITE LIGHT)
Big Star (RADIO CITY, THIRD)
Neil Young (AFTER THE GOLD RUSH, HARVEST, TONIGHT'S THE NIGHT)
Leonard Cohen (first album, VARIOUS POSITIONS)
Game Theory/Loud Family (THE BIG SHOT CHRONICLES, TWO STEPS TO THE MIDDLE AGES)
Joni Mitchell's BLUE
Simon and Garfunkel's BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER
Liz Phair's EXILE IN GUYVILLE

Hello Dan, it’s me again. As a list-maniac I thoug...

2023-04-08T15:03:28.553-04:00

Hello Dan, it’s me again. As a list-maniac I thought I would also ask you about your favorite albums, especially since I know you like Richard Thompson whom I really admire.

Best regards,
David

It's been a long time, but I liked them less t...

2023-03-08T10:28:17.192-05:00

It's been a long time, but I liked them less than my favorites, found them a bit more difficult to integrate in my mind. I can easily imagine myself going up on them upon rereading.

Thank you for responding so quickly! So many marve...

2023-03-07T17:52:36.768-05:00

Thank you for responding so quickly! So many marvellous books, I’ve read all of them except the last four (but „The Man Who Loved Children” has long been on my to-read list).
I also plan to read D. H. Lawrence's „The Rainbow” and „Women in Love” as I really, really loved „Sons and Lovers” — do you like them?

Excited to see a real comment! A semi-inactive blo...

2023-03-07T14:55:07.705-05:00

Excited to see a real comment! A semi-inactive blog gets about a hundred spam comments for every one of those. Unfortunately, I don't have a thought-out, official list of favorite novels. A few that occur to me, beyond the two amazing books that you mentioned: a number of Dostoyevsky works, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes from the Underground; some D. H. Lawrence, especially Sons and Lovers and Lady Chatterley's Lover; Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights; Stendhal's The Red and the Black; Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts; Nabokov's Lolita; Bolaño's The Savage Detectives; Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children; Coetzee's Boyhood>; Todd McEwen's Fisher's Hornpipe. I want to include Lorrie Moore, but I think maybe I'd choose her short story collections over her novels.

Hello Dan, I'm a big fan of your film criticis...

2023-03-07T13:50:50.407-05:00

Hello Dan, I'm a big fan of your film criticism and those color-coded lists of your favorite films — thanks to them I've seen dozens of outstanding movies I probably would never have heard of otherwise.
My question may seem odd as it's not film-related, but I would love to know what are your favorite novels, let's say, your TOP 20? I think you mentioned on Twitter once that you like „The Man Without Qualities” and „Tom Jones”, which sounds great.

Best regards, David

Can't discuss here...

2023-01-11T10:47:44.859-05:00

Can't discuss here...

Hi, would you please let us know where ? No luck s...

2023-01-11T10:35:00.153-05:00

Hi, would you please let us know where ? No luck so far finding them…

Working Within the Shot. As noted above, Edwards ...

2022-07-31T19:47:29.440-04:00

Working Within the Shot. As noted above, Edwards is aware of the advantages of completing actions or events within a single shot, though he is not doctrinaire on the subject. Mister Cory shows Edwards’ love of physical comedy even at this early stage of his career, and when staging a gag he inevitably follows the silent comedian’s preferred practice of containing the action within a shot. Examples include: the long, Chaplinesque scene of Cory painfully navigating a crowded dining room with a tray of dishes; the follow-up shot of Cory repeatedly scolded by Earnshaw while cleaning up; later, a sleepy Cory walking into a shower fully clothed. In action scenes, where editing is the rule rather than the exception, Edwards cuts freely, but he tends to cut between peaks of action rather than during them. The best example is the well-staged and emotive fight between Cory and his kitchen co-workers after his imposture with Abby is exposed: there are several cuts in the scene, but nearly every blow and its effect are kept together within the same shot. Even in scenes without much action, but where an event increases the level of drama, Edwards shows a marked, Preminger-like tendency to avoid the conventional cut to a closer shot, instead preserving the original shot over the dramatic transition. Examples include: the painful surprise of Abby opening the kitchen door, in long shot, to discover Cory’s true social status; the placid long-shot breakfast scene at the Vollard home in Chicago, where Jen has an animated reaction to discovering Cory’s name in a formal invitation; the unnerving moment just before the climax when gangster Matrobe (orchestra leader Russ Morgan) hits Cory with his hat.

Despite his pleasure in depicting contemporary environments and social behavior, Edwards tends to draw on the stylistic resources of the generations that preceded him. In fact, an imaginary combination of Lubitsch’s respect for the limitations imposed by appearances, and Keaton’s exploitation of spatial continuity for humor, is a respectable approximation of Edwards’ filmmaking personality.

As the studio system’s power waned and Edwards embraced the role of independent producer-director, he experimented with more dissonant, modern subject matter in films like Experiment in Terror (1962) and Days of Wine and Roses (1962). But, whether by design or circumstance, he soon established himself as an exponent of retro cinema with the physical comedy of the Pink Panther films and The Party (1968), the camp nostalgia of The Great Race (1965), and genre evocations such as Gunn (1967) and Wild Rovers (1971). Mister Cory, which seems to me as exciting and personal as any of Edwards’ later work, derives much of its appeal from the pleasing tension between the unsettled archetypes of 50s melodrama and the more stable virtues of Edwards’ sensibility.

Dan Sallitt is a filmmaker and film writer living in New York. He was the film critic for the Los Angeles Reader, and his writings have appeared in the Chicago Reader, Slate, Wide Angle, Senses of Cinema, and other venues. His movies include Honeymoon (1998) and All the Ships at Sea (2004). He blogs at Thanks for the Use of the Hall.

In all these cases, by sacrificing a small amount ...

2022-07-31T19:46:35.685-04:00

In all these cases, by sacrificing a small amount of clarity, Edwards creates a distinctive, restrained behavioral surface that demonstrates Cory’s grace and skill instead of signaling it. The effect suggests Edwards’ affinity with Ernst Lubitsch, who, as Andrew Sarris once wrote, “taught the American cinema the importance of appearances for appearance’s sake.” One wouldn’t push the comparison too far: for one thing, Lubitsch favors a theatrical, artificial acting style, whereas Edwards aims for a relaxed naturalism that is almost Hawksian. In both Lubitsch and Edwards, however, one senses that the filmmaker enjoys letting characters manage their appearances successfully, and offers the audience the quiet pleasure of their success.

Power to the Character. Related to the above is Edwards’ tendency to give Cory a bit of power at moments when a film convention might normally take power away. A good example, in a comic mode, is the working out of the gag of busboy Cory having to learn to carry overloaded trays of dishes. His first attempt goes badly (though Edwards spares Cory’s dignity by staging the disaster off screen); a little while later, Edwards sets up another calamitous gag, only to have Cory sidestep the danger deftly. He has progressed from novice to expert between scenes, in Keatonian fashion. Later, when Cory contrives a first meeting with Abby, we are well prepared for him to take aggressive advantage of his opportunity – but, in a writing coup, Edwards has Cory deliver a few good lines, then strategically walk away from his bewildered prey, abandoning a playing field where Abby holds a clear advantage. In the eight-ball pool scene where Jen surprises Cory by narrating every step to date of his well-hidden plans, the clearly discomfited Cory, with no further need to throw the pool game, recovers a modicum of power by sinking three balls at once – in a single shot, of course.

This pleasure in pulling power away from the protagonist for the sake of the plot or a gag, then restoring it at the filmmaker’s option, recalls not only Keaton’s comic rhythms, but also Hawks’ comedies, which are distinguished both by the unusual victimization of the comic hero, and by the hero’s single-minded focus on restoring mental equilibrium and authority. One of the reasons that the last twenty minutes of Mister Cory loses force is that the ascendance of a moralistic narrative – Cory, having acquired all he strove for, is punished for overreaching – requires Edwards to withdraw the special favors that he liked to bestow upon his ambitious protagonist.

This piece seems to have vanished at the above sit...

2022-07-31T19:44:27.800-04:00

This piece seems to have vanished at the above site - but I think this is the original version. In multiple parts:

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Mister Cory: The Centre Still Holds

One of Blake Edwards’ earliest and best films, 1957’s Mister Cory can be placed into a category, if not exactly a genre, that was popular at the time: the color, usually widescreen drama of personal aspiration and loss, staged in beautiful and prosperous locations. Modern viewers are likely to make a mental comparison to Ross Hunter-Douglas Sirk dramas like Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1956), and Imitation of Life (1959), all of which share with Mister Cory a general narrative/marketing format, as well as a studio (Universal) and a cinematographer (Russell Metty).

In this comparison, Edwards and Cory are likely to come off as faintly old-fashioned, a throwback to a vanishing Hollywood. Sirk, along with contemporaries like Nicholas Ray and Vincente Minnelli, defines 1950s melodrama for the 21st-century filmgoer, who associates the form with the distortions of the American self-image that cropped up after World War II, a subtle or overt exaggeration or destabilization of image or narrative, and an accompanying questioning of prevailing social values. Edwards, who both directed Cory and adapted it from a Leo Rosten story, does not shy away from emotional violence or a clear-eyed look at the workings of class inequity. But somehow the center continues to hold in Edwards’ work: he is not temperamentally inclined toward the distancing of Sirk, the kinetic instability of Ray, or the expressionist emotionality of Minnelli.

Here are some of the elements of style that make Mister Cory distinctive:

Behavioral Surfaces. Mister Cory is about imposture, and its salient quality is its willingness to honor its protagonist’s self-presentation. For purposes of narrative clarity, most films find ways to tip the audience off to imposture, often through cues given by the actor, sometimes by cutting to telltale evidence or the reaction of another player. Edwards prefers to make the imposture as convincing to the audience as possible, dealing with issues of clarity in other ways. For instance: Cory (Tony Curtis), asking maitre d’ Earnshaw (Henry Daniell) for a busboy job, smiles faintly when Earnshaw requests to be addressed as “Sir,” but saves himself by launching into a well-told lie that erases the smirk from his expression. In this case, context gives enough the audience enough information to interpret Cory’s intention, and Edwards simply allows the actor to dissemble convincingly. In a subsequent scene, Cory gently hustles a group of older men into a putting contest on a practice green. Here, Edwards goes to the trouble of inserting an explanatory scene before the hustle, in which Cory reveals his agenda to a passing co-worker. Economy of construction is sacrificed so that Cory’s imposture with the men can be easygoing and convincing, devoid of “stage lies.” Edwards takes a more daring approach to the important scene in which Cory sabotages a motorboat to make time with his romantic object Abby Vollard (Martha Hyer), but is surprised when his victim turns out to be Abby’s younger sister Jen (Kathryn Grant). Edwards avoids all obvious tip-offs – such as the mandatory reaction shot of Cory realizing his mistake – and plays the scene so smoothly and pleasantly that it isn’t easy for the viewer to realize that Cory’s plan has gone awry. The full story is given directly to the audience by Jen, a number of scenes later; but Edwards seems to feel in this case that the audience can handle the temporary confusion.

Tom - write me for news on the above topic.

2021-09-29T10:33:44.644-04:00

Tom - write me for news on the above topic.