Old Books: The Complete Poetical Works of Austin Dobson (Oxford University Press, 1923)

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

January 5, 2015

It was Robert Frost who likened writing free verse to playing tennis with the net down.  And in keeping with that opinion, it certainly is easy to get the impression that most modern poetry is just lazy writing.  Somehow, breaking up your prose into short lines or patterns of print upon the page, not observing any rules of meter or rhyme or stanzaic structure, is supposed to impart great profundity to the prose that you write.  Perhaps there is worthwhile free verse out there somewhere, the same way that there is worthwhile free jazz or abstract painting.  But there is no question that playing tennis with the net up is more like the game of tennis as it was intended. Plus, it is harder to play it that way, it requires more skill, and the results are arguably more rewarding.  

Inevitably, the student of poetry must wrestle with those two giants of 19th Century technical poetic prowess.  They did not settle for playing tennis with the net up—they played their tennis with a double high net, setting themselves to poetic challenges and feats of word-play beyond any other English language poets. Those two men were Algernon Charles Swinburne and Henry Austin Dobson (1840-1921).  More on Swinburne some other time, but for now I have pulled the complete poetry of Dobson off the shelf.  He died in 1921, a giant among poets, had this complete edition put out by Oxford University Press in 1923, and then seemingly dropped off the face of the publishing world.  As far as I can tell, the last editions of Dobson in any form came out in the 1920’s.  And yet, he is still always quoted today in books on how to write formal poetry, particularly with reference to utilizing the French stanza forms in English.  Our edition of Dobson is a particularly treasured cornerstone of the poetry collection of the Dalenberg Library, because even though he is a giant of English poetry, it is amazing that you have to go all the way back to 1923 to find a collected edition of his work.  

Beginning about 1876, there was a vogue among certain British poets to revive the medieval French stanza forms of writers like Francois Villon from the 15th Century.  Austin Dobson was the most successful at creating new English poems in the old forms.  He wrote the first original  ballade in English, “The Prodigals.”  He also wrote triolets, rondels, rondeaus, and villanelles.  Perhaps Dobson’s poetry has not much survived for modern readers because he typifies the British gentleman poet, given to writing idyllic pastoral material (although he did write some powerful World War I poems).  Modern audiences want confessional poems, children’s poetry, or rants, like Ginsberg’s “Howl” and “Sunflower Sutra,” or poetry slams and rap battles.  Aside from those sub-genres, most modern poetry is not even relevant.  The magazine Poetry, for instance, is not even readable (plus it is full of way too much playing with the net down)—it is mostly published so poets can get published, not so anybody can actually enjoy reading it.  But Dobson is still worth reading, even today, because of his amazing verbal skills and his virtuoso exercises in form. 

No form was too tough for Dobson.  Even the most exotic French forms, like the Chant Royal and the Ballade with Double Refrain seem like child’s play for him.  The French forms are intricate and demanding verse structures with lots of rules for the poet to follow.  Dobson actually wrote very few poems in the classic English forms, such as the Shakespearian or Miltonic sonnet.  But thanks to his championing of the French forms, we have some great English poems that came after him.  One of the best known is Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night,” which is written in a French form called a villanelle.  

Austin Dobson published an entire book called “Essays in Old French Forms.” It is like a textbook on how to write the French forms.  One of the most illuminating and entertaining in the book is a poem called “You Bid Me Try,” wherein he educates the reader how to write a rondeau as he pens one in response to a fair young maiden who challenges him to write one.  As you can see from the poem, a rondeau consists of 13 lines in 3 stanzas.  There are only two rhymes, not counting the refrain, a phrase that occurs at the beginning of the poem and is repeated at the end of the second and last stanzas.  In this example, the refrain is “You bid me try.”  Thus, the rhyme formula for a rondeau (designating capital R as the refrain) is:  Ra-a-b-b-a  a-a-b-R  a-a-b-b-a-R.  The final distinguishing rule of the all the French forms is (and this is one of the things that make it so difficult to write them):  No word or syllable once used as a rhyme is allowed to be used again throughout the same poem, even if spelled differently!

    “You Bid Me Try”

You bid me try, Blue-Eyes, to write

A Rondeau.  What!—forthwith?—to-night?

    Reflect.  Some skill I have, ‘tis true;--

    But thirteen lines!—and rhymed on two!

‘Refrain,’ as well.  Ah, hapless plight!

Still, there are five lines, --ranged aright.

These Gallic bonds, I feared, would fright

    My easy Muse.  They did, till you—

        You bid me try!

That makes them eight.  The port’s in sight;--

‘Tis all because your eyes are bright!

    Now just a pair to end in ‘oo’—

    When maids command, what can’t we do

Behold!—the Rondeau, tasteful, light,

        You bid me try!

The ballade is the king of French forms, holding a place in the poetic pantheon somewhat equal to the sonnet (which is not a French form.)  To confuse the issue, Dobson titled most of his ballades “The Ballad of . . .(something or other.”  But they were really ballades (with that extra e on the end of “ballad.”)  A ballad (without the e) is actually a story-song, often with a folk story flavor.  But that is not what a ballad is in Dobson.  In Dobson, his ballads are ballades.

The ballade has very specific rules.  It consists of three stanzas of eight lines, and another stanza (or half-stanza) of four lines called the envoy.  Often, the envoy is addressed to some muse or princely power or potentate.  The first stanza rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-b-c.  This same scheme is repeated in the second and third stanzas.  The envoy scheme (the last four lines of the poem) is b-c-b-c.  The last distinguishing feature of the ballade is the refrain, which is the repeated line that ends each of the three stanzas and the envoy.

In Austin Dobson’s “The Ballad of Imitation,” he varies the first word of the refrain for slightly different emphasis each time it is repeated, but he otherwise follows the form strictly.  He calls the envoy a “postscriptum.”  Also, to repeat, this is a ballade, not a ballad, but Dobson’s quirky use of language is to title it a ballad.  

---

The Ballad of Imitation

If they hint, O Musician, the piece that you played

    Is nought but a copy of Chopin or Spohr;

That the ballad you sing is but merely ‘conveyed’

    From the stock of the Arnes and the Purcells of yore;

    That there’s nothing, in short, in the words or the score

That is not as out-worn as the ‘Wandering Jew,’

    Make answer—Beethoven could scarcely do more—

That the man who plants cabbages imitates, too!

If they tell you, Sir Artist, your light and your shade

    Are simply ‘adapted’ from other men’s lore;

That—plainly to speak of a ‘spade’ as a ‘spade’—

    You’ve ‘stolen’ your groupings from three or from four;

    That (however the writer the truth may deplore),

‘Twas Gainsborough painted your ‘Little Boy Blue’;

    Smile only serenely—though cut to the core—

For the man who plants cabbages imitates, too!

And you too, my Poet, be never dismayed

    If they whisper your Epic—‘Sir Eperon d’Or’—

Is nothing but Tennyson thinly arrayed

    In a tissue that’s taken from Morris’s store;

    That no one, in fact, but a child could ignore

That you ‘lift’ or ‘accommodate’ all that you do;

    Take heart—though your Pegasus’ withers be sore—

For the man who plants cabbages imitates, too!

POSTSCRIPTUM—And you, whom we all so adore, 

    Dear Critics, whose verdicts are always so new!—

One word in your ear.  There were Critics before. . .

    And the man who plants cabbages imitates too!

1878.  

---

In “The Ballad of Prose and Rhyme,” Dobson is showing off his mastery of poetic pyrotechnics.  This is a variation of the ballade form, called the Ballade with Double Refrain.  Most poets would not even attempt one due to the difficulty of pulling it off successfully.  As you can see, each stanza has two refrains, one in the fourth line and one in the eighth line.  The first refrain is then recapped in the second line of the 4-line envoy, and the second refrain is recapped in the fourth line.  A virtuoso performance!  

---

    THE BALLAD OF PROSE AND RHYME

When the ways are heavy with mire and rut, 

    In November fogs, in December snows, 

When the North Wind howls, and the doors are shut,--

    There is place and enough for the pains of prose;

    But whenever a scent from the whitethorn blows,

And the jasmine-stars at the casement climb,

    And a Rosalind-face at the lattice shows,

They hey!—for the ripple of laughing rhyme!

When the brain gets dry as an empty nut,

    When the reason stands on its squarest toes, 

When the mind (like a beard) has a ‘formal cut,’—

    There is place and enough for the pains of prose;

But whenever the May-blood stirs and glows, 

And the young year draws to the ‘golden prime,’

And Sir Romeo sticks in his ear a rose,--

Then hey!—for the ripple of laughing rhyme!

In a theme where the thoughts have a pedant-strut,

    In a changing quarrel of ‘Ayes’ and ‘Noes,’

In a starched procession of ‘If’ and ‘But,’—

    There is place and enough for the pains of prose;

    But whenever a soft glance softer grows

And the light hours dance to the trysting-time, 

    And the secret is told ‘that no one knows,’—

Then hey!—for the ripple of laughing rhyme!

        ENVOY.

In the work-a-day world,--or its needs and woes,

There is place and enough for the pains of prose;

But whenever the May-bells clash and chime,

Then hey!—for the ripple of laughing rhyme!

1878.

Forgotten Tales in Orange Wrappers: Beadle’s Dime Novels

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

December 29, 2014

A cornerstone of the Dalenberg Library is a collection of about six-hundred 19th Century dime novels.  These are the wellspring from which pop-lit (as we know it from the 20th Century) evolved.  The dime novels, which entertained several generations of pre-radio, pre-television Americans on their stagecoach or train rides was the precursor of comic books, pulp magazines, and ultimately paperback novels.  However, most of the Dalenberg Library holdings are from the later “nickel libraries” and boys’ story papers, and we only have a handful of specimens from the company that originated this literary format:  the House of Beadle & Adams.   One of them is Beadle’s Dime Fiction No. 7, featuring the story “Gottlieb Gottsoock,” published May 16, 1865.  It is a 40-page “octavo” sized pamphlet with the famous orange wrappers that distinguish Beadles of this period.  

The first orange-wrapped dime novel from Beadle’s dated from 1860, so ours from 1865 is a rare early specimen.  This particular series title, “Beadle’s Dime Fiction,” lasted only for nine issues.  It is printed on better paper than most of the later dime novels in the Dalenberg Library.  The pulp paper process that became the standard for cheap fiction publications (thus the later term “pulp magazines”) was not invented until the 1880’s.  The rag content in the paper of early dime novels was higher than what became standard later. Also, this pamphlet is sewn rather than stapled.  Plus, the prose is rather better written than what passed for dime novels by the 1890’s.  This particular issue is credited to author George Henry Prentice, who is credited with a handful of dime novels form this period.  One writer believes that he is a pseudonym for Edward S. Ellis, who is most famous as the author of the first science fiction dime novel, “The Steam Man of the Prairies.”  The frontier story and characters of “Gottlieb Gottsoock” are in the frontier tales tradition of James Fenimore Cooper, as are Ellis’s stories.  

“Gottlieb Gottsoock” is a humorous story of pioneer settlers circa 1815.  Where was the frontier then?—probably somewhere around Indiana/Illinois.  The tale is about a young lass who has three suitors:  the handsome, brave lad who eventually wins her; the not-so-handsome cowardly lad whose true colors come out in the course of the story; and the chubby, 40-ish Dutchman, Gottlieb Gottsoock, who is never really in the running.  The Miami Indians, repeatedly referred to as savages in these pages, but played roundly for comic effect, raid the frontier town during a party and captives are taken.  After some comic episodes, the captives are rather easily rescued, and the Indians flee, never to raid again, because by then the frontier has moved further west.  

This story is not a classic that would ever be reprinted in an anthology.  Most popular fiction in the 19th Century features a portrayal of blacks and native Americans that is anything but politically correct by today’s standards.  People who boycott Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn over the use of “the N word” haven’t read dime novels—Twain was very forward-looking in his beliefs toward women and “minorities” to the point of being ahead of his time—in contrast, the dime novels are shot through with stereotypes and racist lingo to the point where they might easily make most modern readers squirm.  But, if you can get past that and immerse yourself in these stories of a bygone era, and try on the identity of a 19th Century reader consuming rousing tales for entertainment on the stagecoach or train, it can be rewarding to read these things.  Such an exercise provides a completely different point of view than you get from reading the 19th Century literature that we still read in school.  Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, and Mark Twain are on a completely different plane than what people were usually reading in those days.  James Fenimore Cooper was very popular in the 19th Century, and this particular dime novel is more in that vein.  It is interesting to read a story that was written at a time when our country was still expanding and most people believed in Manifest Destiny.  There were 36 States in the Union in 1865 when this book was published, and it is reminiscent of a time (1815) when there were only 18 States.  Nowadays, Manifest Destiny is a concept that is much maligned by modern pundits of political correctness, since it justified the removal of the Native Americans, war with Mexico, and other “bad” things.  Oddly, however, one does not see any great move these days to give anything back to Indians and Mexicans, and we are still very occupied as a nation with keeping the Mexicans out of the land we took from them.  So, while Manifest Destiny is no longer the creed of Americans, we continue to reap its rewards.  

There is poignancy to the final lines of “Gottfried Gottsoock” as the author writes:  “The onward tide of emigration carried the Indians so far to the west, that our friends [the characters in the story] were never again exposed to the danger which we have attempted briefly to chronicle.  The character of their settlement gradually changed; from being a frontier one it became inland.  Other families beyond them became [the] borderers. . . .” This sums up, after all, much of the overarching story of our nation, how we came to be where we are today.  Modern political correctness would dictate that we should be guilty about the displacement of the Indians.  But there is a more rational and insightful way to look at that topic.  Despite all the suffering and injustice that was wrought by Manifest Destiny, we must recognize that the fate of the Indians is the fate of all peoples, and perhaps all species, since time immemorial.  The Romans were supplanted by the Barbarians (who mostly just became another version of Romans in their stead); the Angles and Saxons were supplanted by the Normans; the Neanderthals by Homo sapiens; the dinosaurs by the mammals; the prokaryotes by the eukaryotes; and so on and so on, all the way back to the Big Bang.  

That last bit might seem like an argument for Social Darwinism, but that is most emphatically NOT my point.  Social Darwinism poses a value judgment that the victor is somehow superior to the conquered.  I am implying no judgment about the value or the rectitude or the Divine Chosen-ness of the supplanters vs. the supplanted.  In fact, the American Indians may well have had a better way of life than most modern Americans.  It is not hard to convince a modern commuter of that fact while he or she is sitting in gridlocked traffic on the thoroughfares of any of the cities that were built on land bought from the Indians for the price of a few beads.  All I am saying is that the natural order of things is for conquering peoples and conquering species to wash over, subdue, and replace the conquered.  There is no guilt to be had by the conquerors. Someday we too shall be gone, our cities crumbled, something beyond (and not necessarily better) than us in our place.  

Post-script for the Christmas season:

On page 25 of this month’s featured dime novel, when Gottfried realizes that he has been captured by the Indians, he exclaims “Doonder and Blixen!”  This was a mild oath that one swore (if you were Dutch) in lieu of cursing, when you did something like accidentally hit your thumb with a hammer.  The phrase, and various other variations in its spelling, means “Thunder and Lightning!” in Dutch.  It was one of the subtle jokes that Clement Moore put in his famous night before Christmas poem, although today we know it in Anglicized form as “Donner and Blitzen.”  I haven’t checked the provenance of the names of Santa’s other reindeer, but perhaps there are more jokes buried in the old poem.  

Sunday Film Series, #2: The Big Heat (USA 1953)

Glenn Ford (1916-2006) in The Big Heat.  While Ford was in memorable roles from the 40’s, through the 70’s, including Superman’s adopted Earth father in the memorable 1978 film, the 1950’s was his greatest decade.  Aside from the two Fritz Lang films, he was captivating as the villain in Delmer Daves’ 1957 film 3:10 to Yuma, which could arguably be called a noir western.  

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

December 28, 2014

Columbia Pictures presents Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brand in “The Big Heat” with Alexander Scourby, Lee Marvin, Jeanette Nolan, based upon the Saturday Evening Post serial by William P. McGivern.  Screenplay by Sydney Boehm.  Produced by Robert Arthur. Directed by Fritz Lang.  

Upon hearing the name of film director Fritz Lang, movie buffs these days usually think of the German expressionist silent science fiction masterpiece Metropolis from 1927.  But while there is much to recommend that film, I would dare to say that it is more style over substance, and even in the more-or-less reconstructed versions that have appeared in recent years, the story is still rather incomprehensible.  You come away from the film not exactly knowing what the plot was all about or even what the message was—instead, one watches Metropolis for its amazing images and for its place in cinema history as one of the crowning glories of the German expressionist style that goes back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1919.  

Lang’s most enduring contribution to cinema was in creating the language of what would become film noir, first in his pre-noir films in Germany such as M (1931) and the Dr. Mabuse pictures, then later (in his American period) in actual American noir films, such as The Big Heat and Human Desire.  Lang directed 23 features during his 20 years in America (from 1936-1957.)  His American output has long been overlooked in favor of his famous German films. But Lang’s American work has undergone quite a re-appraisal in recent years.  It took some hindsight to even recognize “film noir” as a distinct genre, as most film-makers during the peak years of American noir (from 1940-1959) did not know they were making “noir” films.  They would have said that they were filming melodramas or hard-boiled detective stories.  It took a loftier critical perspective after much elapsed time to categorize certain films as belonging to a genre called “film noir.” Critics argue even today about what films should be included or excluded from the category.  Suffice it to say that favorable reappraisal of Lang’s American work has occurred because he is now recognized as one of the originators of the genre before the genre even existed, and then one of the great practitioners of the genre after it was in full flower but not yet recognized as a distinct genre.    

Definitions are hard to come by, but for Dalenberg Library purposes, “film noir” is a type of cinema most exemplified by black & white American films of the 1940’s and 50’s, that exists at the intersection between the unique camera eye of German expressionist film-making and stories inspired by the pulp magazines and hard-boiled novels (often, but not always, detective novels) of the 1930’s to the 1950’s.  That definition does not quite sum it up, however, because there is also a certain intangible feel that makes some films “noir” and others not.  Usually, this is a brooding sense of moral ambiguity in the situations or characters of the story.  Fritz Lang’s M, an important precursor to film noir, captures much of this ambience.  The story is about a serial child molester/murderer (played by Peter Lorre, who later became a stock actor in films noir).  Lorre’s character has so alerted the police to be on the watch for him that the extra police presence on the streets has cut into the livelihood of the criminal underworld, forcing the mob to mobilize to track down the pedophile.  This plot, which has a criminal as the protagonist and more criminals as the ones who are trying to put a stop to him, is about as morally ambiguous as a film of the 1930’s could get; it is essentially a film where the protagonist and most of the characters are either villains or at best anti-heroes.  

The Big Heat, like many of the American Fritz Lang films, has toned down the expressionist elements, but they are still there in subtle, yet powerful, ways.  Probably the most expressionist visual element in the film is the half-mask that Gloria Grahame wears on the grotesquely scarred left side of her face after Lee Marvin brutally throws scalding coffee on her.  The mask is a metaphor for her conflicted character with it’s pretty side and ugly side, the mask commenting on the woman herself, as we see her sell her soul to the mob, even commit murder, but still long for the idyllic middle class married life that Glenn Ford used to have (before his wife was murdered by the mob.)    

Glenn Ford plays a cop who tries to go up against the city-wide crime syndicate that has corrupted the police department. But in retaliation, the bad guys murder his wife, leading him to give up his badge and go it alone in plain-clothes seeking revenge.  The film is psychologically complex for the way that all the characters are foils to all the other characters.  For instance, the mob boss has compartmentalized his life as an honorable businessman away from his life as a criminal, and the policeman has compartmentalized his gritty job on homicide detail away from his perfect middle class suburban existence.  The dead wife and Gloria Grahame’s femme fatale are foils to each other, and the comparison/contrast between the two is a running theme. Even the gang moll (Grahame) and the policeman (Ford) are played off against each other as they both deal with murderous impulses, and one gives in to those impulses while the other holds back (lest he become as bad as the villains he is pursuing.)  

More than anything else, what gives this movie its noir flavor is the deeply flawed nature of the two main characters.  Glenn Ford’s policeman is fundamentally a good guy, but his flaw is his impulsiveness and poor judgment as he jeopardizes the safety of his family to go up against the boss of the crime syndicate, making him ultimately responsible for his own wife’s murder.  Likewise, Grahame’s femme fatale lies to her jealous, controlling boyfriend about going to the cop’s hotel room, and her punishment (which she brings on herself) is to be disfigured by a pot of hot coffee to the face.  Other films noir feature anti-heroes, reluctant heroes, villains as heroes, even heroes with few redeeming qualities, but in The Big Heat, we have heroes struggling with the consequences of their own poor decisions, navigating a minefield of ethical dilemmas.  The femme fatale longs to be a good girl, but she has to become a murderess in order to be a hero.  The cop wants to bring the bad guys to justice, but in the process he comes perilously close to becoming just as bad as the bad guys.

Fritz Lang was back the following year (1954) directing Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame in Human Desire, a sordid potboiler noir with Ford being sucked into Grahame’s seductions and featuring Broderick Crawford in a memorable turn as her fat, abusive, jealous husband.  Featuring a similar cast and different angles on film noir by a man who helped create the genre, and clocking in at 91 minutes each, The Big Heat and Human Desire are an excellent option for programming a double feature.  

In 1957, Lang returned to Germany after a long absence (20 years in America) and directed his last three films, the last being The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse in 1960.  Failing eyesight forced him into retirement after that, but he left a legacy of fine films that stretched all the way from 1918 to 1960.   He passed away in 1976.

Sunday Film Series, #1: Jour de fete (France, 1949)

By Dale D. Dalenberg, M.D.

December 18, 2014

We screen a lot of films at the Dalenberg Library of Antique Popular Literature, and in keeping with the “antique” in our name, a lot of the films are old.  Modern cinema may be ok—some of the greatest actors and directors in film history are working even today—but there is a lot that was very fine in films of yore that one has to search for in films today.  Unfortunately, we live in an era of remakes, reboots, and retreads.  Many film-makers and their production companies or studios have forgotten about principles like character and story and originality, and seem compelled to re-make every old idea over and over again just to take advantage of a new generation of special effects.  The desire to produce a blockbuster that appeals to the widest possible audience (and makes the greatest possible amount of money) has produced an endless string of forgettable flash-in-the-pan mega-hits targeted at the mindless rabble.  Many films these days are too loud, with too many explosions, and too much sensory overload, yet with a total lack of character and story and sheer memorability.    Gone are the days when film-makers could fashion a film to build suspense and atmosphere just to finally show the monster in the final reel or to wrap up the story with a single well-placed gunshot.  

At the Dalenberg Library, we believe in special effects in the service of the story, not just as an end unto themselves.  We believe in re-visiting the blind alleys and dark corners of film history, all the way back to the beginning (i.e. the Lumière Brothers in 1895.)  And, as always, we believe that Context Is Everything (which you learned several months ago is the cornerstone of Dalenberg’s Context Theory of criticism—and that applies as much to the movies as to literature.)  

The Sunday Film Series is a weekly delving into films that are just as likely to come from those blind alleys and dark corners as they are to come from the mainstream hits and blockbusters of the past.   Generally, we will spotlight films from pre-1985.  Why that year, exactly?—because, way back when the Dalenberg Library newsletter, later this antique popular literature blog, was originally conceived, it was  as a way to educate Dr. Dalenberg’s children about arts that came from before they were born.  Said chikldren happened to commence being born in 1985.  

For Sunday Film Series #1 we have chosen the first feature length movie directed by Jacques Tati, the legendary French film comedian.  Jour de Fete was the first of Tati’s 6 feature films, a small but legendary output in the realm of screen comedy.  These films were released between 1949 and 1974.  In Tati, the French gave us a figure as memorable as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, a physical comedian trained in mime and slapstick comedy, but one who brought an odd surrealism and wickedly subliminal social commentary to his movies.  The later Tati (from 1953’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday and onwards), with his jaunty, angular walk and gestures, sporting his signature raincoat and pipe, is as unmistakable as Chaplin’s Little Tramp character. In Jour de Fete, we are introduced to an earlier iteration of Tati, halfway between the music hall and Monsieur Hulot. 

Jour de Fete has Tati as a bumbling village postman who struggles to keep up with his deliveries on his bicycle and occasionally falls victim to the townspeople who prey on his simplicity.  The story takes place in a small French village on the day a carnival comes to town (the title, usually translated as “The Big Day,” might better be translated as “The Day of the Festival.”)  Somewhere between getting too drunk at the party and watching a film about the wonders of America’s automated postal system, Tati’s postman character decides he is going to improve his deliveries with American-like speed and efficiency.  The results are quite hilarious as he jets around town on his bicycle devising all kinds of shortcuts, throwing mail hither and yon, all to speed things up.  One of the funniest moments occurs when Tati throws a package containing new boots to the meat-cutter who is in mid-swing with his butcher knife.  The package falls under the knife and gets sliced in two, causing the butcher to declaim that he has no use for boots with the toes cut off.  Tati tries to console him at first but then dismisses the problem as an inevitable outcome of American efficiency.   

The film is a charming evocation of small town life in a French village with the hapless postman more or less playing the village idiot.  It is a sweet film in the end, offering up a moral:  news that comes in the mail is quite often bad news anyway, so we should let it take its own sweet time.  At the end of the film, the postman slows down, stops to help his fellow villagers harvesting in a field, and one assumes he has learned that there is no reason to hurry the mail.  The themes of attacking the modern obsession with progress and American-style consumerism are repeated often in Tati’s films.  In that respect, they are somewhat related to Chaplin’s point of view in Modern Times, another film which depicts Modern Man overwhelmed by technology.  Tati’s satire on the sterility of modern life and the emptiness of consumerism reached a peak later in his films Mon Oncle (1958) and Playtime (1967).  

Tati might be frustrating to watch for a young, modern American audience jaded by vulgar comics and living many more decades beyond vaudeville and silent movie comedy than when these films were made.  Tati sets up most of his jokes so predictably that you know what is going to happen.  If there is a rake, you know he is going to step on the rake, and you know it is going to rise up and conk him in the head.  But the hilarity comes in the physics of the slapstick.  Most Tati slapstick scenes involve a series of set-up moments followed by a rapid-fire sequence of improbable events that you mostly knew were going to happen, but they make your head spin anyway.  Tati stacks all the dominos first, and then he knocks them over all at once.  Watching the dominos fall in a Tati stunt is like watching physics, like paying attention to the clockwork.  Probably the finest scene in Jour de Fete is an extended scene where Tati tries to mount his bicycle while drunk.  It is fascinating to watch him work his way through the physics of the slapstick as he does every possible permutation of man and bike, first with the bike on one side of the fence but the man on the other, then vice versa, then trying to go forward with the front wheel facing to the side, then trying to pedal while he is stuck in a hedge, and so on.  Buster Keaton allegedly once said that Tati was the one who had carried on the true tradition of silent comedy in the sound era, and that is nowhere more evident than in the drunken bicycle business in Jour de Fete.  

Finally, no discussion of Jour de Fete is complete without a discussion of color vs. black & white.  While attacking modernism on the screen, Tati dreamed for this film to be the first French feature released in color.  He actually had two cameras running on the set at all times, one shooting on black & white film, and one shooting on color film.  The original intention was that the black & white only be a back-up, since the color film process being used was very new and had not yet resulted in a print being made for screening of any film.  The process was something called Thomson-color, which was going to be a French rival to Technicolor.  Unfortunately, the Thomson firm went bankrupt before the film could be processed, and the color version languished in the vaults for years because a screenable print could not be made.  It took quite a bit of detective work and experimentation with the film before the processing necessary for the Thomson-color film could be reproduced. A full-color version of Jour de Fete was finally released in 1995 as Jacques Tati originally envisioned it.  The new 2014 Criterion Collection edition of the film has three versions:  the black & white 1949 release; the 1995 full-color re-release; and an interesting 1964 version.  For the 1964 release, Tati hired an animator to hand paint splashes of color into the movie, an orange balloon here, a French flag there, some festoons at the festival. . .plus he introduced extra footage of an artist who has come to the village to sketch the folksy scenes.  Frankly, the film works best in old-fashioned black & white, but while the movie makes a statement against giving up the old ways in favor of mindless progress, it is interesting to see Tati’s attempts to harness technology to bring color to his vision.  Tati’s first full-color release had to wait until 1958 with his film Mon Oncle.  

In Memory of Mike Nichols (1931-2014)

Director Mike Nichols passed away November 19 leaving behind a legacy of fine work for the stage and the screen.  I must confess that I came along too late to know of him as part of a legendary comedy duo (with Elaine May), but now that I’ve learned about them, I am intrigued to find some of their old recordings.  And I was too young for several of his films when they first came out, although I caught up with some of them later in college, most memorably The Graduate (1967).  Equally at home directing for the screen or the stage, it is fitting now to revisit Nichols’ first film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? from 1966, as it is one of the finest stage to screen transformations in film history.  

I can’t imagine what it must have been like for a first-time film director to try to direct such massive talents (and massive egos) as Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.  But whatever the day-to-day challenges were of such an undertaking, it paid off.  Aside from being married, divorced, and remarried in real life, Taylor and Burton appeared together in a total of 11 movies and one television episode.  Based on what I’ve seen of the movies, only this one bears re-watching (although Cleopatra has a certain morbid fascination, not unlike going to NASCAR just to see the wrecks). Burton’s performance is an almost Shakespearian masterpiece of self-loathing and Elizabeth Taylor never before or since was given such powerful material to perform.  Nor did Taylor’s past as a haughty beauty queen of the cinema stop her from trying to look every bit the floozy for this film.  She was in her mid-30’s when she acted this film, but she looks and acts every bit the middle-aged housewife past her prime.  Compare the Oscar-winning performance in this film to her other Oscar-winning performance in Butterfield 8 (1960) where she is totally unconvincing as a call girl.  Taylor was never a Method actress, but somebody drew that out of her in this one film, and that somebody must have been Mike Nichols.  

The story is about George and Martha, a failed professor and his boss’s bitter daughter, having a savage all night bicker in front of their house guests, a young professor with career aspirations and his young wife.  The two couples turn out to be foils to each other as we discover, in the course of the play, each couple’s hidden secrets and play them off against each other.  As a film adaptation of a stage work, Virginia Woolf? is a masterpiece.  The decision to film it in black and white enhances the claustrophobia of George and Martha’s cluttered, unkempt little home, and makes the emotional drama of their all-night verbal sparring all the more stark.  As most films do with stage plays, the drama is opened out to include other venues.  In some films that works, and in others not so much.  However, if you don’t open up a stage play that way on screen, it risks having a stage-bound movie, like in the early days of sound in the movies when they hadn’t figured out yet how to do outdoor scenes.  In the original Edward Albee play, all the scenes take place inside the house, but in the movie the back yard and a road house up the street are used to good effect.  Believe me when I say that this drama is physically uncomfortable to watch.  Once the verbal fireworks start, it really make you cringe as the characters relentlessly savage each other.  So when the characters left the house, I was literally hoping for a respite, only to find both couples at the road house going at it with fresh vigor.  The film effectively makes you feel trapped, much like George and Martha’s house guests.  The two closest things to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are Jean Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit,” and  Luis Buñuel’s film The Exterminating Angel.  The common theme here is “Hell is other people.”  In Virginia Woolf? George and Martha have created their own hell, and we see an incipient version of the same sort of hell taking form in their young house guests.  

With the passing of Mike Nichols, all of the principals involved in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are gone, except for George Segal (now 80 years old.)  Richard Burton died at age 58 in 1984; Elizabeth Taylor at 79 in 2011; Sandy Dennis at 54 in 1992. Edward Lehman (the producer and screenwriter) passed in 2005, and Alex North (who wrote the score for this and many more films) passed in 1991.  Edward Albee, the playwright, is still ticking away at age 86, his two best-remembered plays “The Zoo Story” and “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” now 5 decades in the past.  Thankfully, 5 decades ago, an author could make money with a work like Virginia Woolf? and cutting-edge film-makers like Mike Nichols could make their fame with it.  Is that true today?  I like this quote from Albee:  “All serious art is being destroyed by commerce.  Most people don’t want art to be disturbing.  They want it to be escapist.  I don’t think art should be escapist.  That’s a waste of time.”