Archives for November 17, 2003

I was thinking about Crossfire, a 1947 film noir with a dream cast (Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan and Gloria Grahame, thank you very much), when a synapse fired in my brain and I finally remembered something I’d always meant to post.

I took down Lee Server’s Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care” from my bookshelf, turned to the chapter about Crossfire, and there it was–a wonderful little “found poem” that Server stumbled across in the screenplay. It’s a list of the film’s settings, compiled for the use of the production department:

Int. Cheap Rooming House

Ext. Police Station

Int. Hotel Washroom

Ext. Park Bench

Int. Hamburger Joint

Int. Moviehouse Balcony

Int. Bar

Int. Ginny’s Bedroom

Int. Street of Cheap Rooming Houses

Has there ever been a pithier summary of what makes film noir noir?

It might just be a slowish week here at “About Last Night.” Our Girl is up to her elegant neckline in life-related for-profit activity, and I’m kind of busy myself. Yesterday I saw a four-hour-long play. Today I’ll be writing a non-theater piece for the Wall Street Journal (can’t say more, details to follow). Tomorrow I write my drama column for Friday’s Journal (I saw two really good shows and a stinker). Wednesday will be totally devoted to the National Book Awards. I vote on the nonfiction prize in the morning, then I’ve got to run home, put on a black tie, and go to the Big Fancy Dinner that evening. On Thursday I plan to see Master and Commander, and I’ll be checking into a rest home the following morning. (Just kidding.)

The point is that postings this week may possibly be sporadic and/or erratic. Or not. You never can tell around this joint. At any rate, I posted quite a few items in the past couple of days, including the latest on the Great Blogosphere Contretemps, about which infinitely more below–the air is full of links–so there’s no shortage of stuff to read.

Which reminds me: if the Great Blogosphere Contretemps has brought you to “About Last Night” today for the very first time, go here to read an old posting explaining who we are and what we do. Alternatively, you can browse the right-hand column, starting at the top. Either way, all will be made manifest.

Contrary to any impression you may have gotten from the newspapers, we’re glad you stopped by. Please come again–and bring a friend.

P.S. To those who inquired, my Wall Street Journal piece about the Looney Tunes Golden Collection is finished but not yet published. I’ll let you know when it hits. (And yes, I do have some fresh Top Fives up my sleeve. All I have to do is write them and code them and post them and love them….)

P.P.S. To those of you who’ve been running into me at parties and asking who Our Girl is, she is beautiful and mysterious and wanted in at least seven countries. That is all you know and all you need to know.

P.P.P.S. Our Girl is finally getting her very own e-mailbox, possibly as soon as this week! Watch this space for details.

Reports of my innocence have been greatly exaggerated.

But not out. It’s only a temporary thing–“it” being an angry swarm of deadlines that’s had me in solitary confinement all weekend. If I were a quarterback, this week would be a blitz, and I’m trying to do a little better than just throw the ball away. And I’m not yet quite out of danger of being sacked (strictly metaphorically speaking, I think). (Speaking of football, congratulations to the Edmonton Eskimos on winning the Canadian Football League’s storied Grey Cup, which, as Colby Cosh explains here, has it over the Lombardi Trophy for colorfully checkered history and sheer longevity: number XCI!)

I almost forgot to link to last week’s Washington Post appreciation of one of my favorite guilty pleasures, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee crime novels. I discovered McGee some years ago when a friend brought The Long Lavender Look to my sick bed. I was skeptical, but the only alternative was my course reading, which was probably Fredric Jameson or some such thing. And the epigraph caught my eye:

When I play with my cat, who knows but that she regards me more as a plaything than I do her? –Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The hook had grazed me. Twenty pages into the mystery proper, I was on the line for all twenty books in the series.

I even got Terry to read the McGee novels. He was not very impressed, but even his more discerning critical judgment was not enough to keep him from gobbling them up like so much buttered popcorn. Terry’s some fast reader; I think he gave over three or four days of his life to McGee, cursed me heartily, and moved on.

But I’ll never be done with McGee, and Jonathan Yardley’s piece gives a vivid sense of why this is. While the romanticized, impossible Travis “I bed at least one new girl every book, but I’m a highly principled gentleman” McGee may be a silly character (Parker would eat him for lunch), the plots of the novels give off the authentic whiff of mundane reality. They are Floridian through and through, revolving around prosaic real estate development schemes and small-time swindles. The book Yardley focuses on, The Dreadful Lemon Sky, is a very good choice. But you’re going to have to read all of them anyway, so why not take his advice and start at the beginning with The Deep Blue Good-By?

Felix Salmon, who knows infinitely more about blog-techy stuff than I, writes to suggest (rather emphatically) that Our Girl and I should “change [our] default settings on About Last Night and make links open in the same, not a new, window.” Felix has complicated reasons for making this suggestion, mostly relating to something called “tabbed browsing” about which I am deeply clueless.

It’d be easy enough to make the switch, but I’m not going to do it just because one (1) reader thinks it’d be a good idea. What say the rest of you? If you have an opinion, send it to us at “About Last Night” (with the phrase DEFAULT SETTING in the message field). OGIC and I will happily abide by your collective preference on this matter.