Archives for 2018

“Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.”

E.M. Forster, Howards End

Michael Rabin plays Fritz Kreisler’s “Tambourin chinois” on an episode of Texaco Star Theatre, originally telecast by NBC in 1951. The fifteen-year-old Rabin is introduced by Milton Berle:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.”

E.M. Forster, A Room with a View

Tom Wolfe, who died yesterday, was a card-carrying member of the Grand Old Party of Reality, a journalist whose sole and only loyalty was to the facts painstakingly gathered by hand and scribbled down in his reporter’s notebook. What they told him was what he believed, and the flamboyant manner in which he wrote them up made him rich and famous.

It was Wolfe’s genius to realize in middle age, however, that his gifts were less specifically for journalism than for a very particular kind of novelistic fiction, the kind animated by first-hand reportage. Out of that realization came The Bonfire of the Vanities, an old-fashioned book written in a newfangled style, one that still sounds electrically fresh three decades after the fact. It is the brash, noisy voice of Wolfe’s Sixties journalism bent to the iron will of a novelist’s imagination—but a novelist who has pledged allegiance to the visible world. The Bonfire of the Vanities is The Way We Live Now, only devoid of the Victorian moralist’s anger, amused instead of outraged by the proliferating follies of New York City in the late Eighties: a Trollope de nos jours, disillusioned and proud of it, determined above all things to tell the truth.

And what was that truth? In retrospect, it seems clearer than ever that Bonfire had two things to tell its readers about New York. First, that it was a city of classes, rigidly stratified and riven with envy and fear; second, that it was no less deeply divided by ethnicity. Nothing else mattered. To understand a New Yorker, Wolfe declared, you needed only to plot two points on that pair of intersecting axes, and you could do it without inquiring about his interior life. Was he black or Jewish? Did he wear sneakers or British hand-lasted shoes? That was all you knew and all you needed to know.

All this goes a long way toward explaining the colossal impact Bonfire had back in 1987. I remember reading it with the same sense of bedazzled revelation that George Orwell’s Winston Smith read The Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism. It was as though the veil of euphemism had been pulled back—no, ripped down—and for the first time I saw New York as it was:

Cattle! Birdbrains! Rosebuds! Goyim! You don’t even know, do you? Do you really think this is your city any longer? Open your eyes! The greatest city of the twentieth century! Do you think money will keep it yours?…You don’t think the future knows how to cross a bridge? And you, you Wasp charity-ballers sitting on your mounds of inherited money up in your co-ops with the twelve-foot ceilings and the two wings, one for you and one for the help, do you really think you’re impregnable? And you German-Jewish financiers who have finally made it into the same buildings, the better to insulate yourselves from the shtetl hordes, do you really think you’re insulated from the Third World?

Were people talking like that in 1987? Sure—but they didn’t publish that kind of talk, which is what made Bonfire so thrilling. As I wrote in The New Criterion on the fifth anniversary of the book’s publication, “Rereading Bonfire, I found myself thinking, over and over again, Nobody would print that today….Without access to a realism of this degree of specificity and honesty, it is impossible for a writer to describe New York, or America, as it really is. Yet who can imagine any New York editor allowing such things to get into print nowadays?”

Be that as it may, Wolfe continued to write and publish blockbuster novels based on the facts scribbled down in his notebook, and to remain an important part of the American cultural conversation to the very end of his long and productive life. After H.L. Mencken, he was America’s greatest journalist, and The Bonfire of the Vanities, fictional though it be, is his greatest work of journalism, a book in which the truth about America in the Eighties is encased as colorfully and vividly as a prehistoric fly trapped in gorgeous yellow amber. It is the way we lived then—and the way we live now.

I confess to being shaken by the news of Wolfe’s death. I last saw him in the flesh a year or so ago, and he looked at once frail and somehow ageless. I couldn’t imagine a world without him then. I still can’t.

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Tom Wolfe is interviewed by William F. Buckley, Jr., on a 1970 episode of Firing Line:

From 2008:

“So, what are the first and last words of the book?” Rick asked.

“Ah, the Jane Chord!” I replied.

The Jane Chord, to which Bill Buckley introduced us years ago, is a concept originally promulgated by Hugh Kenner. The idea is that if you make a two-word sentence out of the first and last words of a book, it will tell you something revealing about the book in question. Or not: the Jane Chord of Pride and Prejudice is It/them. But every once in a while you run across a Jane Chord so resonant that it makes the room shiver–the chord for Death Comes for the Archbishop is One/built–and even when a famous book yields up nonsense, it’s still a good game to play….

Read the whole thing here.

“If we refuse to fight for the dignity of truth, we have substituted expediency for justice.”

Samuel Newman, teleplay for “The Case of the Witless Witness” (Perry Mason, originally telecast by CBS on May 16, 1963, courtesy of Mrs. T)

Mrs. T and I went on Sunday to see a big-screen showing of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the latest in the ongoing series of classic films that TCM and Fathom Events are piping into multiplexes throughout America.

I considered writing about the experience, which we both found wholly enthralling, but it happens that I wrote a Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column last April about seeing Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest as part of the same series, so I decided instead to post a lengthy excerpt from that column. I hope you enjoy it.

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Turner Classic Movies, the cable channel that shows uncut, uncolorized classic films around the clock, has done more to improve the lives of movie buffs than anything or anyone since Thomas Edison. TCM’s latest venture, though, is worthy of special note: TCM Big Screen Classics, undertaken in collaboration with Fathom Events, screens classic films each month in multiplexes throughout the U.S. Now that the revival houses that used to show such films on a regular basis are on the way to extinction, most people “know” old movies solely from watching them on TV, or on hand-held devices. Thanks to TCM, you can see them the way they’re supposed to be seen.

Why the scare quotes? Because you don’t really “know” a film until you’ve seen it in a theater. Well into the ’60s, movies were normally shown in auditoriums equipped with screens up to 100 feet wide that held between 250 and 1,000 viewers (New York’s Radio City Music Hall seats 6,000). Golden-age directors took it for granted that their work would be seen on such screens, and when Hollywood embraced wide-screen filming in the ’50s to compete with TV, big-theater projection became even more central to the moviegoing experience.

All this started to change with the introduction of multiplex cinemas. Projection screens started shrinking, and theaters that continued to show older films increasingly did so in houses holding no more than 100 viewers. These miniaturized theaters were incapable of providing the eye-popping experience of viewing a classic film on a full-sized screen—and when the same films were reformatted to fit the TV screens of the ’60s and ‘70s, it became even harder for younger viewers to fully appreciate them. Squeezed-down “pan-and-scan” versions of wide-screen films are an assault on the integrity of works of visual art whose scenes were meticulously composed to fit the rectangular screens required by such processes as CinemaScope and VistaVision. Watching them on TV is like looking at “The Last Supper” through the wrong end of a toy telescope.

Fortunately for film buffs, TCM always telecasts letter-boxed versions of wide-screen films, and now that flat-screen TV sets are ubiquitous, they can be viewed at home with reasonable ease. But even the biggest TVs come nowhere near approximating the all-enveloping sensation of watching a wide-screen film in a full-sized theater.

That’s why I made a point of going to a Big Screen Classics showing of “North by Northwest.” This was the first time that I’d seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 masterpiece of suspense in a theater, and I can’t begin to tell you how many subtle details that typically go unnoticed in your living room all but exploded off the large screen on which I watched the film….

For me, though, it was even more instructive to watch “North by Northwest” in the company of a theater full of other people, many of whom were clearly seeing the film for the first time. When you’re watching it by yourself, it’s easy to forget that “North by Northwest” is less a cloak-and-dagger adventure story than a high romantic comedy with a light glaze of thriller sauce. Why is this the case? Because most of us tend not to laugh out loud when we’re alone. Not so the audience with whom I saw it last week. Instead of sitting somberly like a bunch of grim-faced graduate students, we all hooted at Ernest Lehman’s fizzy, flawlessly timed one- and two-liners (“I’ve got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me”). We even clapped at the end! That’s what the Big Screen Classics series is all about: It’s a priceless reminder of what we miss by watching classic films at home instead of on a big screen in the company of a happy audience….

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Read the whole thing here.

To read about the experience of seeing William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives in a theater, go here.

The original theatrical trailer for Sunset Boulevard:

John Cage performs his Water Walk on I’ve Got a Secret. He is introduced by Garry Moore, the show’s host. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on February 24, 1960:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)