Noir killers, family men, Methodist clergy, and debauched authors

Here's an old CBC interview with Somerset Maugham, possibly 'the most debauched man of the 20th century',whom Ward Cleaver held up as a model for his youngest son.

One of Maugham's novels was the basis for a 1944 noir film called Christmas Holiday.

Speaking of noir, Ward -- er, Hugh Beaumont -- was in several noir films, joining the ranks of actors who were known for their TV roles as loving parents but who had earlier played murderers. He was a 'confident sociopath' in Money Madness and starred in Apology for Murder, a cheap knockoff of Double Indemnity (which featured another of TV's loving parents). Outside the movies, Beaumont was an ordained Methodist minister.

That last movie, Double Indemnity, was based on a novel by James M. Cain. Here's a quotation from Steve Erickson's article on James M. Cain:

Noir was to cinema as punk was to rock and roll. European refugees like Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, and Billy Wilder brought with them a worldview forged of equal parts German Expressionism and Nazi barbarity.

Siodmak directed the aforementioned Christmas Holiday, which was about a prostitute who married a murderer, the latter role being played by Gene Kelly. So, Gene Kelly, Hugh Beaumont, and Fred MacMurray all had roles as noir killers.

Like another noir movie that was adapted from Maugham's work, Christmas Holiday was altered to accommodate the Hays Code. Rain (1932) was not.

Frye, YouTube intelligence, & a new Schrödinger bio

Northrop Frye in 1970: 'All the mass media have a close connection with the centres of social authority, and reflect their anxieties. ... [Such] communication is a one-way street. Wherever we turn, there is that same implacable voice, unctuous, caressing, inhumanly complacent, selling us food, cars, political leaders, culture. ... It is not just the voice we hear that haunts us, but the voice that goes on echoing in our minds, forming habits of speech, our processes of thought.' Of course, the RCMP kept a file on Frye, as they did on Sartre and Tommy Douglas.

From David Winters' review of Marek Bieńczyk's Transparency: 'Nowadays, as with shop windows, seeing through things is what stops us from seeing beyond them.'

Here's a neat new YouTube channel: the Intelligent Channel, which features Richard Belzer's interviews and Paul Holdengräber's new show (in which he interviews Colum McCann, Elizabeth Gilbert, etc.).

'There's nobody who writes better about failure than Thomas Bernhard':


Piece of Monologue quoting Claire Messud on Bernhard: 'Then I picked up The Loser, and was not only mesmerized, and horrified, but felt, also, profoundly spoken to: here was a book — a ranting monologue, more naturally than a novel — obsessing unflinchingly about the things that have always obsessed me. About art, and ambition, and failure, and delusion, and death. It is a book about anger. A book without paragraphs, which in its very form enacts anger. A book prone to wildly long sentences, preposterously violent judgments and enraging constructions.'

From Johns Hopkins University Press, Steven Gimbel has a new book called Einstein's Jewish Science: Physics at the Intersection of Politics and Religion: 'You cannot understand Einstein's science, Gimbel declares, without knowing the history, religion, and philosophy that influenced it.'

A review of John Gribbin's new biography of Erwin Schrödinger: 'Gribbin’s coup is to trace the origins of what is now called the Many-Worlds Interpretation to a lecture delivered by Schrödinger in Dublin in 1952, some five years before a paper by Hugh Everett more usually credited with the idea.'

Jennifer Egan's 'Book Bag' at Daily Beast.

I made my first Amazon list, in which I listed great non-fiction works that are available on Kindle for less than $20 and that were published between 1970 and 1985 (with one Bill Bryson exception). I focused on books that are accessible to non-specialists and that were produced by good publishers (as opposed to the e-book publishers who sell typo-ridden, public domain works).

The Complete Review rates Vertigo by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the novel on which the amazing Hitchcock movie was based.


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