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Where The Sidewalk Ends (1950)
"That's a fancy way of trying to frame somebody - getting yourself knocked off. A guy's gotta be outta his head for that. I didn't know a guy could hate that much. Not even you."
So says gangster Tommy Scalise (Gary Merrill) of Detective-Sergeant Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) in Otto Preminger's Where The Sidewalk Ends, a violent, Freudian noir adapted from the William L. Stuart novel Night Cry (1948) by Ben Hecht, Victor Trivas, Robert E. Kent and Frank P. Rosenberg. Dixon is a sadist with a death wish who takes out his oedipal anger on those hoods who make the mistake of crossing his path in an urban jungle of neon lights, dead ends and moral turpitude. Dixon's late father, Sonny, was a New York mob man and an associate of Scalise, so the cop's pursuit of the latter is very much a personal vendetta against an unwanted surrogate brother, his childhood rival for pop's affections. Every punch he lands along the way is a swing at a daddy who never loved him, a hated figure he has grown up trying to define himself in opposition to. This brutal, haunted knight roaming the beat is what noir is all about.
When Dixon accidentally kills low-rent hustler Ken Paine (Craig Stevens), a patched-up war veteran with a plate in his head, he panics and covers up the manslaughter to conceal it from the 16th Precinct's newly-promoted and very keen Detective-Lieutenant Thomas (Karl Malden). However, fate conspires against Dixon when Paine's death is pinned on Jiggs Taylor (Tom Tully), a taxi driver and father of the dead man's estranged wife Morgan (Gene Tierney), whom Dixon has understandably fallen in love with over the course of the investigation. The cop would prefer to bring Scalise in instead and tries to contrive circumstances accordingly rather than admit the inconvenient truth.
This is one psycho noir that Alfred Hitchcock would surely have lapped up. From the suspense created by having an elderly neighbour sitting at the window to watch the comings-and-goings from Paine's apartment to the wrong man plot twist and the black humour of Andrews' fumbling with a corpse à la The Trouble With Harry (1955), this is Hitch all over. The murky morals of Dixon's behaviour are deliciously complex and Hecht's script tries hard to make us side with an unhinged vigilante who hides behind his badge and abuses his authority. Only his banter with ageing waitress Martha (Ruth Donnelly), affection for his shlub of a partner (Bert Freed) and attraction to Morgan humanise this most obsessive and twisted of beasts. Bad cops are still doing a roaring trade at the box office in the wake of Training Day (2001), with the twin recent successes of Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant remake and Casey Affleck's masterful turn as Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me (both 2010). Mark Dixon deserves to be remembered in their company, along with Dirty Harry and Hank Quinlan from Touch Of Evil (1958). Dixon is also a sort of murderous mirror-image of Mark McPherson in Preminger's earlier Laura (1944). What a fine and underrated actor Dana Andrews was - so sparing, so understated.
Arguably Where The Sidewalk Ends is marred slightly by its unnecessarily wholesome happy ending, which contradicts its otherwise hard-fought ambiguity. Rather than have Dixon insist that the paternal Inspector Foley (Robert F. Simon) read his confession in a fit of guilt and then be forgiven by Tierney, I'd have had Foley toss it unread into the nearest waste-paper basket for a close-up, after which the music would swell, "The End" would rear up on screen and the characters would leave the room patting an uneasy Andrews on the back. But what do I know?
Posted by Joe at 13:45 No comments:
Labels: Ben Hecht, Bert Freed, Crime, Dana Andrews, Gary Merrill, Gene Tierney, Joseph LaShelle, Karl Malden, Neville Brand, Noir, Otto Preminger, Victor Trivas
Mad Love (1935)
Aaahhh! Here's Peter Lorre making his American debut for MGM after triumphing in Fritz Lang's M (1931) and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) for Alfred Hitchcock. He stars as Dr Gogol, a pioneering surgeon in Paris who is in love with another man's wife: Yvonne (Frances Drake), an actress in a Grand Guignol theatre. When her husband, virtuoso pianist Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive, James Whale's Victor Frankenstein), loses both hands in a train wreck, Gogol agrees to conduct an experimental transplant. The bad news? The hands he grafts onto his stricken rival are those of Rollo (Edward Brophy), a circus knife-thrower turned murderer who has recently been executed by guillotine. When the recovering Orlac suddenly starts flinging blades around someone's bound to get hurt and his oediapl nightmare of a father (Ian Wolfe) looks like a prime target. Meanwhile, Gogol continues to pursue his infatuation with Yvonne through a wax statue he has acquired of her, dreaming of bringing it to life as Pygmalion did Galatea. You know this one won't end well. The scene above, incidentally, finds Lorre claiming to be Rollo, the dead man, who convinces Orlac that Dr Gogol has brought him back to life by clamping his head back on with a makeshift neck brace and giving him sinister metal gauntlets for hands. He's trying to drive Orlac mad and it's not a bad effort.
Here's a wonderfully naive trailer for Mad Love in which Lorre graciously answers a phone call from a handsome fangirl:
Aside from its certifiably krazy plot courtesy of Frankenstein (1931) screenwriter John L. Balderston, this lurid horror is full of deliciously over-the-top details and nutty characters, from the wisecracking American reporter (Ted Healy) to the soused British landlady (May Beatty) who sees double and dotes on a pet cockatoo. Clive and Drake are excellent while Lorre is amazingly unsettling as the necrophiliac mad scientist, a bald brother to Max Schreck's Count Orlok in Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu, whose name might conceivably have been taken from Maurice Renard's source novel here, The Hands Of Orlac (1920). Renard's book had already been filmed in Austria by Robert Wiene as the silent Orlacs Hände (1924), starring Conrad Viedt, the same director-actor team behind the seminal expressionist classic The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (1920). It would be remade once more under its original title in 1962, with Christopher Lee and Mel Ferrer. The botched transplant/evil limb theme remains a horror staple, from the convict's brain in Whale's Frankenstein to the homicidal disembodied hand in The Beast With Five Fingers (1946, also featuring Lorre), Jan's decapitated head in The Brain That Wouldn't Die (1962) and Bruce Campbell's haunted fist in Evil Dead 2 (1987). In the era of bio-engineering and full face transplants, the idea could run and run.
Famed New Yorker critic Pauline Kael apparently accused Orson Welles of stealing aspects of Mad Love for Citizen Kane (1941), including some of Gregg Toland's camera angles. Nuts. It is true that Charlie Chaplin pronounced Lorre the world's "greatest living actor" after seeing the film and British novelist Graham Greene was impressed enough by Mad Love to write an essay entitled 'The Genius of Peter Lorre' for World Film News in July 1936. His thoughts on this fading star, whose legacy Greene feared for even then, are worth repeating: "To Lorre alone we owed the goodness, the tenderness of the vicious man. Those marble pupils in the pasty spherical head are like the eye-pieces of a microscope through which you can watch the tangled mind laid flat on the slide: love and lust, nobility and perversity, hatred of itself and despair jumping out at you from the jelly. His very features are metaphysical."
Labels: Colin Clive, Frances Drake, Gregg Toland, Horror, Karl Freund, Peter Lorre
Attack Of The Giant Leeches (1959)
Roger Corman and his brother Gene produced this smart little monster movie, which is set in the stifling swamplands of the Florida Everglades and concerns a pair of grotesquely mutated annelids who have started sucking the blood of local moonshiners and jug-swiggers. There's a thoughtful script by Leo Gordon that makes inventive use of the geography of the area - the underwater catacombs providing air pockets that the leeches use to keep their weakened victims alive - and dares suggest that radiation from Cape Canaveral might have caused the mishap, perhaps an implied critique of America's expensive, adventurist space programme of the period. The direction from Bernard L. Kowalski is economical and captures a nice Southern Gothic mood in the white trash love triangle going on between the proprietor of Dave's General Store (Bruno VeSota), his no-good tramp of a wife Liz (Yvette Vickers) and her parasitical lover Cal (Michael Emmet). Vickers was a veteran of Playboy magazine and Attack Of The 50 Foot Woman (1958) and is the highlight among a uniformly excellent cast, though Gene Roth also deserves a nod for bringing authenticity to the stock role of sceptical county sheriff. The game warden hero (Ken Clark) may be a little too straight-laced for his own good and the titular attack does ultimately boil down to two guys paddling around in the shallows wearing bin-liners with suction cups taped on, but it's a brooding piece of work and one that deserves every credit for having the courage to take its premise seriously. The dynamite ending is suitably unshowy and an endearingly practical solution to the problem.
Labels: B-Movie, Bernard L. Kowalski, Horror, Roger Corman, Science Fiction
Les Vacances De Monsieur Hulot (1953)
The legendary Jacques Tati directing on location at Saint Marc-sur-Mer, Brittany, in 1952 for Mr Hulot's Holiday. The comedian had been a keen sportsman before he entered the Paris music-halls and this summery outing provided him with plenty of opportunity to exploit his athleticism - his famous thrusting tennis serve being the most obvious example, though he is also frequently required to run away from the scene of a crime, as when he accidentally locks someone in the boot of their car or in the episode below where he kicks a pompous tourist up the arse after mistaking him for a Peeping Tom. Hulot's canoe snapping in two to form a Jaws-like sea monster and his elegant trip into the harbour are other examples of Tati's idiosyncratic brand of physical comedy in full flight.
Four years after his feature debut in Jour De Fête, in which he played a manic village postman obsessed with speed, Tati created his most enduring character, a bumbling but genial pipe-smoker who unknowingly causes havoc wherever he goes. Like Tati's idol, Charlie Chaplin, Monsieur Hulot is immediately recognisable from his silhouette and peculiar stance - always leaning perilously forward on his plimsolled tip-toes as though scenting some unseen rose, wearing too-short cuffed trousers and a crumpled hat to accentuate his oddball appearance. This is a man who approaches life from the wrong angle and could easily be knocked off balance at any moment, his very gait and springy step promising calamity.
André Bazin called Hulot "a scatterbrained angel" and he is certainly a benevolent sort of misfit, befriending all around him even when he's breaking social convention and causing annoyance at the Hotel de la Plage by murdering his fellow guests at ping pong or upsetting other diners by playing jazz records at excessive volume. Tati could have chosen to make a joke out of the elderly English woman (Valentine Camax) who is so taken with Monsieur Hulot but instead his hero is kind to her and it's this cheery, accepting worldview that makes the character so winning. Like W.C. Fields, inanimate objects cause Hulot no end of bother, but the truth about the Frenchman is that the disorder that erupts all around him is only directly caused by the man himself some of the time - often it's the fault of others who are so busy trying to avoid and anticipate him that they fail to see what's going on directly in front of them.
Tati, an outsider growing up in Yvelines with Russian and Dutch parents, uses Hulot's clumsiness and ineptitude as a means of disturbing and exposing stuffy French social mores, manners and expectations. He saw his creation as an Everyman figure and once said: "You all have at least five minutes of Hulotism a month, when you take the wrong seat on a train for example." Hulot would appear thrice more on screen - in Mon Oncle (1958), Play Time (1967) and Trafic (1971). Long periods elapsed between each film because Tati was a committed perfectionist, sharing an obsessive dedication to his craft with Chaplin, a trait that led to his being declared bankrupt during the shooting of Play Time.
Mr Hulot's Holiday plays out at an appropriately leisurely pace like a satirical landscape painting brought to life, mocking the French middle classes at play, those frustrated drudges determined to have a good time at any cost during their two weeks away from the office in mid-August. Rogert Ebert said that rewatching the film every summer is like returning to your favourite resort year after year and I think he's right. Families arrive by train, racing from one platform to another, while Monsieur H rolls up in his ridiculously rickety 1924 Amilcar, an auto that looks more like a bumper car with a bicycle attached on either side. We see the dotty old couple who wander along the beach (Marguerite Gérard and René Lacourt): she excitedly picking up shells to show her husband, he tossing them nonchalantly over his shoulder into the nearest rock pool as soon as her back is turned. There's the quixotic old major (André Dubois), the jaded hotel manager (Lucien Frégis), haunted by the muddy footprints all over his nice clean lobby, and Martine (Nathalie Pascaud), the pretty girl all the boys are after - not least the bookish young Marxist who persists in boring her by reading aloud from his weighty political tracts. All are presented together in Keatonesque wide shots, as Tati believed this would keep the focus on group dynamics and emphasise the town as a microcosm for humanity as a whole. Meanwhile the dialogue-free soundtrack has a lovely score by Alain Romans and is otherwise peppered with the amusingly banal and overlapping background chatter of holidaymakers, a naturalistic device used here several decades before Robert Altman was credited with inventing it. All life is here. And death too. There's even a funeral that Monsieur Hulot manages to sabotage by accident, his spare tire sodden with wet leaves mistaken for a wreath by the family of the bereaved. The costume party and mishap in the fireworks shed though remind us that Tati is celebrating humanity, not burying it.
A bronze statue now peers out over the bay at Saint Marc-sur-Mer to commemorate the filming of Mr Hulot's Holiday. The good news for Tati fans is that Sylvain Chomet, the animation genius behind Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003), is due to release a new film based on an unused Tati script very shortly. Written in 1956, it's called The Illusionist (2010) and is about an unsuccessful French stage magician who tries his luck in Edinburgh. I can't wait.
Posted by Joe at 09:57 2 comments:
Labels: Comedy, Jacques Tati, World
Bela Lugosi - a year after spooking audiences with his signature role - gets to do a variation on the Drac act all over again in White Zombie, this time as a black magic sorcerer. This murky little horror from brothers Victor and Edward Halperin, who directed and produced respectively, is generally thought to be the first zombie movie proper and leaves viewers with an invaluable life lesson: never trust a man whose first name is "Murder".
White Zombie concerns innocents abroad Neil Parker (John Harron) and Madeliene Short (Madge Bellamy), an American couple who visit Haiti in order to get married. There they meet plantation owner Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer) who falls in love with Madeliene and enlists local weirdo Murder Legendre (Lugosi) to perform a spell on her. Naturally, this Satanic fiend with spit-curled eyebrows has other ideas. He persuades Beaumont that Madeliene needs to die and be resurrected before she can become his - only then will he be able to control her revenant form using a voodoo doll carved out of a wax candle. Can Neil and kindly missionary Dr Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn) save the girl from "sins that even the devil would be ashamed of" before it's too late... ?!
White Zombie's story lazily appropriates more than a few ideas from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Swapping Transylvania for the West Indies, the young hero is very much a naive, Jonathan Harker type while Dr Bruner recalls Professor Van Helsing, explaining the supernatural to the lad in a non-specific Euro accent. This figures, as the production was shot on the Universal lot (though financed independently), recycling old sets from Tod Browning's Dracula plus The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1923), The Cat & The Canary (1927) and Frankenstein (1931), in a bid to cash-in quickly on Lugosi's rising star. The latter is naturally the best thing in White Zombie, his fixed stare and mysterious, double-jointed hand clasp somehow very eerie and threatening. Staging this zombie schlocker in its traditional homeland, the superstitious backwaters of the Caribbean, makes for a very original and evocative setting, a world away from the clichéd gothic castles and pine forests of Eastern Europe. OK, so Legendre's clifftop lair is a little too lavish but the island is otherwise no tropical paradise - pitched in darkness, its palm trees drooping ominously, its hillsides dotted with headstones, its skies haunted by the hysterical screeching of vultures.
The scene at Legendre's sugar mill - staffed by the undead because they provide a cheap source of non-unionised labour who "work faithfully" and "are not worried about long hours" - must be every middle-manager's wet dream. A cinematic satire of the deadening effects of industrial capitalism on the workforce before Modern Times (1936) and George A. Romero? Perhaps not. Some of the acting is a tad hammy, it has to be said, the cast mainly comprised of faded actors from the silent era, unused to the subtleties of spoken dialogue, who tend to make heavy use of the significant dramatic pause: "Dr Bruner is a trifle sceptical as to your... motives, sir." One contemporary British reviewer of White Zombie, writing in The Kinematograph Weekly, warned that it was, "not for the squeamish or the highly intelligent." Too cruel. Time Out's Paul Taylor was kinder more recently, arguing that this "poetic" film is deliberately shot to evoke the dreamlike state of a trance, "insinuating ideas and images of possession, defloration and necrophilia into a perfectly stylised design, with the atmospherics conjuring echoes of countless resonant fairytales." Either way, the Halperins were not to be deterred from making a sequel four years later, Revolt Of The Zombies, this time set in Cambodia just after WWI without Lugosi, only using the recurring image of his hypnotic eyes to suggest evil doings about to go down.
Labels: Bela Lugosi, Horror, Victor Halperin
The Belles Of St. Trinian's (1954)
Zowie! The immortal Alastair Sim as long-suffering headmistress Millicent Fritton in Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat's popular naughty schoolgirl franchise adapted from Ronald Searle's famous cartoon series. The Scot (1900-76), a failed tailor and one time elocution instructor, softens his voice and dons pearls and a blouse here but otherwise goes about his business in a very matter-of-fact manner, avoiding the camp innuendo of a pantomime dame to make Miss Fritton a living, breathing character. You quite forget you're watching a large man in a fright wig after a while and that's as it should be with theatrical cross-dressing. Only in the scenes in which he appears twice, once as Millicent and once as Clarence, her con-man brother, is the illusion broken but, technically, the seams never show.
Though fondly remembered, this opening sally in the St. Trinian's saga is, in truth, rather too slow and short on jokes to be really funny. The plot concerns the kidnapping of a race horse, Arab Boy, due to run in the Cheltenham Gold Cup and on whom Miss Fritton has bet the school's entire £400 budget. George Cole, Sims' protégé, does well as Cockney spiv Flash Harry, who appears to live in the bushes opposite the school and assists the pupils in their various extra-curricular activities - namely, bookmaking and selling bootleg gin distilled in the science lab. This dodgy geezer role would give Cole the template for an entire career, culminating in his much-loved turn as Arthur Daley in the hit TV series Minder (1979-94). The girls meanwhile are rather a homogeneous mass of hellions and anarchists: the fourth formers bearing African tribal shields and spears, pelting each other with flour bombs and stretching their enemies out on the rack; the twenty-something sixth formers all sultry coquettes in risqué miniskirts. Only capo di tutti capi Bella Fritton (Viviene Martin), insurgent leader Jackie (Diana Day) and swotty informer Florrie (Jill Braidwood) stand out, while the rest of the jaded teaching staff, including Beryl Reid, Joan Sims and Irene Handl, are criminally underused. Joyce Grenfell, as unlikely undercover cop Ruby Gates, reunites with Sim after their short scenes together in Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) and Mario Zampi's Laughter In Paradise (1951) and brings a rare note of innocence to proceedings, as well as a funny walk that serves as a quite literal rendering of the term "flat foot." Her attempts to referee a violent hockey match while Sim smirks behind a prize table draped with the Union Jack is a definite highlight. Also worthy of note is the jaunty theme by Malcolm Arnold.
Searle had begun drawing his St. Trinian's girls in 1942 as a searing antidote to the jolly children's fiction of the period, typified by the prolific output of Enid Blyton, the Jennings novels of Anthony Buckeridge and Richmal Crompton's Just William stories. Searle was then called up to serve in WWII, where he was stationed in Singapore, captured by the Japanese and then almost worked to death building the Siam-Burma railway through the Kwai jungle. As a POW detained at the notorious Changi labour camp, Searle sketched by night to keep his sanity, his body wasting away from hardship, malaria and the brutal punishments of the guards. By the time he returned to England, his view of human nature had blackened sufficiently so that it began to show through and shape the inky mire of his drawings. His St. Trinian's illustrations appeared in the magazines Lilliput, Life, Punch and Holiday and were compiled in a series of anthologies that began with Hurrah For St. Trinian's in 1948 and ended with Souls In Torment in 1953, by which time Searle had grown so sick of his marauding femmes that he decided to wipe them all out with an atomic bomb, moving on to savage life behind the walls of a boys' private school in the popular Molesworth books (1953-59) with Geoffrey Willans. The artist has a small cameo in The Belles Of St. Trinian's, playing one of the aggrieved parents who arrive amidst the warfare, only to be trampled by the Old Girls' reunion. Searle had met producers Launder and Gilliat when he was asked to draw the title cards for their previous school comedy The Happiest Days Of Your Life (1950), which had also featured Sim, Grenfell and Richard Wattis (the Minister for Education here). His artistic style is referenced throughout the film via the messy ink blots that stain the school's wood-paneled corridors.
After Belles, this big screen franchise would march on to three sequels - Blue Murder At St. Trinian's (1957), The Pure Hell Of St. Trinian's (1960) and The Great St. Trinian's Train Robbery (1966), with Grenfell and Cole outlasting Sim, before an ill-advised revival in 1980 written by Launder and Searle, The Wildcats Of St. Trinian's. And the recent remakes with Rupert Everett, Russell Brand, Gemma Arterton et al? Just say no. Why anyone but a pea-brained raincoat-rustler would favour these pointless, soft-core retreads over the charming fifties-sixties originals is beyond me. As for the 2006 Hollywood remake of School For Scoundrels, replacing Alastair Sim with Billy Bob Thornton, I don't even want to know.
Labels: Alastair Sim, British, Comedy, Frank Launder, George Cole, Irene Handl, Joyce Grenfell, Malcolm Arnold, Richard Wattis, Sid James, Sidney Gilliat
Laura (1944)
"The death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."
- Edgar Allan Poe, 'The Philosophy Of Composition' (1846)
Although Otto Preminger's near-perfect noir, taken from a brilliant novella by Vera Caspray, is ostensibly about the title character played by the flawlessly beautiful Gene Tierney, assumed murdered after a dead doppelgänger turns up in her apartment with no face, it's really more concerned with the three would-be suitors who project their fantasies onto her. And, indeed, with the way in which cinema itself objectifies and mythologises women, making voyeurs of us all. Waspish columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), Southern gigolo Shelby Carpenter (Vincent Price) and Detective Lieutenant Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) act as stand-ins for the audience. That means you, out there in the dark. You, who pay to watch actresses perform and sit there imaging they were yours. Preminger also has some fun at the expense of the mystery genre, deconstructing and parodying its clichés and conventions. The scene in which Andrews gathers together his suspects at a cocktail party to name the person he's going to arrest feels like a spoof of the melodramatic and old fashioned Agatha Christie school of whodunnit crime fiction.
Of the leading men, Andrews' cop usually draws the most critical interest. McPherson is a man with a "silver shinbone" who plays with a handheld child's baseball game to concentrate his mind and keep himself calm. He develops an unhealthy obsession with Laura, whom he believes to be dead, rifling through her possessions and diaries, passing hours transfixed by her portrait and visiting the crime scene so often that Waldo asks him, only half-jokingly, whether he's sub-let the place. Later Lydecker warns McPherson that he'll end end up in a psychiatric ward, "I doubt they've ever had a patient who fell in love with a corpse," he sneers. Then Mark dozes off in front of the fireplace, sleeping off the contents of a bottle of "MacGuffin" brand whiskey, only for Laura herself to walk in, as though from his dreams. Whether or not McPherson has subconscious necrophiliac tendencies, as Waldo and some of the film's more hysterical critics seem to think, the character was certainly one Los Angeles cops empathised with when they began investigating the Black Dahlia case in 1947, as the victim, Elizabeth Short, was a raven-haired vamp in the Tierney mould. A particularly gory case of life imitating art.
Vincent Price's Shelby Carpenter, meanwhile, is a high society parasite who uses his matinee idol looks and Kentuckian charm to schmooze and flatter his way into Laura's New York advertising firm and then into her affections. "I approve of that hat," he purrs, later complimenting her old maid of an aunt, Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson, immortal as Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock's Rebecca, 1940), in similar fashion. Carpenter says he "can afford a blemish on my character but not on my clothes" and he's not kidding. Being charming is his business so he needs to look sharp. Ann acknowledges this when she later pleads with Laura to let her have Shelby because he is "expensive" and only she can really "afford" to keep him. The way the character is exposed without his methods ever being explicitly spelled out is elegantly done. Shelby is a manipulator, certainly, but a killer?
Which brings us to Lydecker. His calling Carpenter "a male beauty in distress" is as acute as it is savage, typical of a broadcaster and commentator who makes a "lavish" living as a character assassin. Viciously jealous of his rivals for Laura's hand, he writes such a devastating satire of Jacoby (John Dexter), the artist who painted the luminous portrait of her, that she can no longer take him seriously and duly ends their relationship. Webb based his prissy performance on a combination of Alexander Woollcott and Walter Winchell, the latter also inspiring Burt Lancaster's brilliant turn as J.J. Hunsecker in Sweet Smell Of Success (1957). Lydecker could have been a comic turn, a sniping effeminate who slays enemies in prose to compensate for his lack of manliness elsewhere, but the urbane Webb makes much more of him than that, using these very qualities to his advantage. His guilt is there in the first scene, when he rises from his bathtub to tell Detective McPherson, quite openly, that, "murder is my favourite crime." The cop fails to distinguish this confession from a barrage of similar witticisms and Lydecker perhaps permits himself a discrete smile off-camera. The man is a control freak who most pro-actively attempts to remake Laura according to his own tastes, choosing her hairstyle and clothes and filling her home with his own ornaments. He's noir's own Henry Higgins, with a shotgun concealed inside a grandfather clock ready for the next suitor that comes calling. Well, the Second Amendment does give him the right to bear arms and he certainly considers Laura his property and is willing to defend her at any cost. "Goodbye, Laura. Goodbye, my love."
And what of the girl herself? We never get to find out who the real Laura is. Gene Tierney is only seen in flashback for the first half of the film, playing the sunny but ambitious career girl who dares approach Lydecker in a restaurant, in a story we may not be able to trust anyway as it told by Waldo, an extremely unreliable narrator. She accepts his overtures, exploits his influence, lies to him and finally cheats with Jacoby before carrying on with Carpenter, or so Lydecker says. Hardly trustworthy behaviour but then how can we even be sure that's the way it went down? When she does make her entrance in the present, Laura is evasive and deceptive, ignoring Mark's instructions to stay indoors and see nobody and vague about the details of her absence. McPherson, in love with her, still can't be sure of this mystery girl while her own maid, Bessie (Dorothy Adams), thinks she's a ghost. She may not be altogether wrong. A happy ending? Who knows?
Laura came about after Otto Premiger had made a botched attempt to stage Caspary's 1941 script, Ring Twice For Laura, on Broadway. He then proceeded to pester Fox head honcho Darryl F. Zanuck into purchasing the rights to the novel Caspary had subsequently turned it into two years later. Zanuck though preferred Rouben Mamoulian to direct but fired him early on. Producer Preminger then took over directing duties as well, retaining the portrait Mamoulian's fiancée had painted of Tierney - oils over an existing photograph - and had cinematographer Joseph LaShelle light it with an eerie, expressionistic glow. Appropriately for a film with Laura's Gothic preoccupations, it has had quite an afterlife through David Raksin's dreamy theme, which was given lyrics by Johnny Mercer in 1945 and became a huge hit. There were also two versions of the film broadcast by the Lux Radio Theater, one in 1945 with Andrews, Tierney and Price and one in 1954 with Tierney and Victor Mature as McPherson. A further adaptation for the Screen Guild Theater (episode 236) saw Andrews, Tierney and Webb reprising their roles. Price would be reunited with Tierney two years later in Dragonwyck and with Andrews in 1956's While The City Sleeps. Andrews would make two further appearances for Preminger in Fallen Angel (1945) and 1950's Where The Sidewalk Ends, where he was reunited him with Tierney, whom Preminger had also used in Whirlpool (1949).
Labels: Clifton Webb, Dana Andrews, David Raksin, Dorothy Adams, Drama, Gene Tierney, Joseph LaShelle, Judith Anderson, Noir, Otto Preminger, Vincent Price
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
Pulp novelist James M. Cain was so pleased with Lana Turner's performance as Cora Smith in the Tay Garnett, MGM version of his 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice that he gave her a leather-bound first edition inscribed with a loving tribute: "For my dear Lana, thank you for giving a performance that was even finer than I expected." Turner later said that it was her favourite role and she certainly seized the opportunity to prove herself a fine actress as well as a star. Her entrance here - a lipstick rolls across the floor of a roadside lunchroom, drifter Frank Chambers (John Garfield) stoops to pick it up and finds his eyes travelling up the shapeliest pair of legs you ever saw - may even have the beating of Barbara Stanwyck and her anklet in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), another Cain adaptation. Chambers doesn't have a prayer against this death trap in white, whose short shorts are so short the very sight of them causes hamburgers to catch fire. Chambers sympathises - he's dead meat too. Cora means the end for him and vice versa. He'll fry for loving another man's wife and knows it but is powerless to save himself from the inevitable.
Luchino Visconti got there first with an unofficial adaptation of Cain's work in 1943, Ossessione, which he had first discovered through a French translation given to him by Jean Renoir. The Italian's debut was banned by Mussolini's government and MGM later tried to block its distribution outside of Italy because of copyright infringement. The gritty social realism of the novel would have appealed to Visconti at the time though the story is as universal as they come: man falls for married woman, conspires to bump off her husband, pair turn on each other when the vultures begin to circle and everyone ends up dead.
Tay Garnett's film could hardly be considered a remake of Ossessione but it's certainly a faithful rendering of Cain's yarn, the few minor changes it does make actually improving on the source. Perhaps the most significant alterations in Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch's screenplay concern race. In Cain's story of two souls at odds with the universe - whose murder of the man that stands between them is a desperate bid for freedom from the suffocating constraints of sublunary existence - Nick, the husband, here played by Cecil Kellaway, is a Greek immigrant with the surname Papadakis. His obvious pride in living out his conception of the American Dream beside a California highway is poignant and sad and, in spite of his constant singing and taste for sweet wine, he is a less buffoonish innocent than Kellaway's Nick Smith in Garnett's film.
Similarly, in Cain's hands Cora is an Iowa farm girl gone West, who has dark hair and is touchy about her "Mex" looks. Cora Papadakis also seems to have a deep-rooted racist horror of the man she married, whom she considers "greasy" and only wed to escape a dreary life working in cheap Hollywood hash houses. The idea that he might want to have children with her is so sickening to Cora that she considers suicide and it's this repulsion that ultimately provides the impetus for the lovers' putting their fake drink-driving smash into action. The film has a better idea here, with the innovation that Nick is preparing to sell the Twin Oaks diner and gas station and move up to Canada so that Cora can nurse his disabled sister - this thoroughly unattractive proposition providing a more urgent and compelling deadline for her to commit murder. Hume Cronyn's lawyer, Arthur Keats, is also rechristened after being called "Katz" in the book, a typically Jewish name but also a pun on "cats" - felines recurring symbolically throughout Cain's narrative, from the one that aborts the first attempt on Nick's life by getting itself grilled on the fusebox to Cora's insistence that she needs to act like a "hell cat" just once in her life to cut loose from her husband. The woman Frank later has a fling with, Madge Kramer, also trains the big game variety for a living and gives him a puma kitten as a gift.
Frank is significantly younger than Garfield in the novel, 24, a hobo with muscles honed by "socking railroad detectives" who is in thrawl to the road and the myths it fosters. District Attorney Kyle Sackett (Leon Ames), who along with Keats seems more interested in the intellectual sport of his profession than dealing in justice, gets a more prominent role in this version. It is he who picks up Frank as a hitchhiker and drops him at the Twin Oaks in the first place. He seems to haunt Frank and Cora from that moment on. Cora's entrepreneurial ambition for Nick's business is also made apparent much earlier in Garnett's film, which helps flesh out the character, her determination to achieve commercial success speaks volumes about the lasting scars left by the Depression on the national psyche. Finally, this Postman was obviously not at liberty to dramatise some of the novel's more explicit sexual content (the couple are already pawing each other and biting bloodied lips by page nine and later have passionate sex at the crash site halfway down the ravine: "I had to have her, if I hung for it") but does retain its sudden spasms of violence. Kennedy (Alan Reed), the crooked gumshoe blackmailer, may not have his face beaten to "raw beef", as Cain has it, but Garfield certainly spreads the blood around and to the evident erotic thrill of Turner. Bob Rafelson's 1981 remake, starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, famously restored Cain's raunch.
Interestingly, there's no explanation or even allusion to the title anywhere in the original text of The Postman Always Rings Twice. The 1946 film's interpretation of its meaning, given by Frank at the end, is that fate is ultimately inescapable: you might manage to evade it once by luck but, rest assured, you'll get what's coming to you in the end. The phrase is said to have cropped up in a conversation between Cain and screenwriter Vincent Lawrence. Garnett and company took their spin on it from Roy Hoopes' biography of the author.
Turner and Garfield make a winning team and the intimacy of the nightswimming scenes at the beach apparently prompted a short-lived real-life romance between the two. Both reprised their roles for a Screen Guild Theater radio dramatisation, broadcast on 16 June 1947 (episode number 311), which managed to condense the plot into a sweet half hour. You can listen to it here. Meanwhile, here's a sharp parody of the movie starring Groucho Marx, Dinah Shore and announcer Harry Von Zell from a 1946 episode of the Bird's Eye Open House that manages to crack through it in even better time, both men ending up dead in a little under 10 minutes.
Groucho Marx & Dinah Shore - The Postman Always Drinks Twice.mp3
Labels: Cecil Kellaway, Drama, Hume Cronyn, James M. Cain, John Garfield, Lana Turner, Leon Ames, Noir, Tay Garnett
Key Largo (1948)
Bogie's war veteran Frank McCloud pitches up at a shabby hotel in Florida's Key Largo to pay his respects to the father (Lionel Barrymore) and widow (Lauren Bacall) of an old army buddy, George Temple, who died in action. There he finds the lobby filled with shady characters determind to foul up the already balmy atmosphere and a bartender who won't serve him a beer. Something's wrong. McCloud soon learns that deported gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) and his "fishing buddies" have occupied the hotel in order to carry out an exchange of counterfeit bills before casting off back to Cuba. What's more, there's a tropical hurricane on the way and things look like they're about to get tense.
Paul Muni had starred in the stage version of Maxwell Anderson's 1939 play but John Huston and producer Jerry Wald thought it would make an ideal vehicle for Bogart and Bacall so Huston set to work on a screenplay with Richard Brooks, updating the action from the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War to WWII and adding touches to suit Bogie, such as McCloud's love of sailing. The end result is very much about McCloud's Hamlet-style battle with his own conscience. Disabused of his ideals following his experiences in Italy during the war, McCloud had been inspired to fight because he "once believed some words" spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt at the UN: "We are not making all the sacrifice of human effort and human lives to return to the kind of world we had after the last war." But after the horrors of conflict, seeing death all around him from every hilltop, Frank's now come to believe that all that matters is looking out for number one: "One Rocco more or less isn't worth dying for." This kind of attitude doesn't do much for his approval ratings with Bacall: she loves him when he proves to be a capable seaman, hates his "cowardice" in refusing Rocco's invitation to a shoot out and loves him all over again when he gives the shaken Claire Trevor a drink and takes a slap in the puss for his insolence. To get the girl, McCloud must rediscover his faith in Roosevelt's words and understand that the deaths of George Temple and a million boys like him count for nothing if a man like Rocco is allowed to live and thrive and drag America back to the bad old days. He must rise up and take a stand one more time. "When your head says one thing and your whole life says another, your head always loses," in Bogart speak.
In Film Noir (1992), Joan Cohen called Key Largo "gangster-gothic", an accurate description of the shadow Robinson's performance casts over the picture. A vain, deluded toad of a man, Rocco is introduced puffing a cigar in the bath and dreaming of his glory days during Prohibition. Later this fallen Capone struts around the delapidated Hotel Largo in a fat tie and two-tone shoes, taunting an old man in a wheelchair and bullying Trevor's washed-up, alcoholic lounge singer, another relic of the good times who stands as a living reminder of how far things have changed. He hates her drinking and controls her through it, forcing her to sing 'Moanin' Low' for her scotch in a weak, threadbare voice that he then dismisses as "rotten" and uses as an excuse to keep her thirsty. Trevor is excellent and well-deserving of her Oscar. Was there ever a more bitterly ironic misnomer than "Gaye Dawn"? Rocco is a man from another time and badly out of place. He's frightened of the storm and should be embarrassed to find himself languishing in an off-season palm tree resort on the southernmost tip of the United States. Hardly the Chicago of the Roaring Twenties. Like Cagney in White Heat (1949), this was Robinson's closing statement on the Warner gangster pictures that had defined and typecast him in the early part of his career.
Huston's film has lovely deep-focus photography from Karl Freund (who also shot Fritz Lang's Metropolis, 1927) and an immensely strong sense of place, the hotel a perfectly self-contained, microcosmic environment that never once feels confined or stagy thanks to the dramatic device of the hurricane, which makes it a necessity that everyone stays indoors. The storm itself is also very effective (partially done by using recycled stock footage from an old Ronald Reagan movie, Night Unto Night, directed by Don Siegel in 1949), the plight of the Seminole Indians huddled outside seeking sanctuary adding to the tension. One of the two Osceola Brothers on the run from the cops is played by Jay Silverheels, who went on to star as Tonto in The Lone Ranger TV series between 1949 and 1957. As for the rest of the star-studded cast, special mention should go to two of the actors playing Rocco's genuinely unpleasant henchmen - Thomas Gomez as the corpulent, gum-chewing Curly and Harry Lewis as the spivy, psychotic hyaena Toots. Robinson, Bogart and Trevor had all appeared together before in The Amazing Dr Clitterhouse (1938), the latter two also united in Dead End (1937), while Bogie and Bacall of course appeared together in To Have & Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946) and Dark Passage (1947), as well as in the similarly tropical Bold Venture radio series.
Max Steiner - Key Largo.mp3
Labels: Claire Trevor, Crime, Drama, Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, Jerry Wald, John Huston, Karl Freund, Lauren Bacall, Lionel Barrymore, Max Steiner, Maxwell Anderson, Noir, Richard Brooks
"There is no den in the world wide enough to hide a rogue. Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 'Compensation' from Essays (1841)
Orson Welles showed that he could play by a producer's rules and turn a profit when it suited him with this gripping if conventional post-war noir thriller, his third director's credit and least favourite among his own work. Welles stars as Nazi fugitive Franz Kindler, one of the architects of the Holocaust who is now lying low in small-town Harper, Connecticut, teaching "the sons of America's first families" under the name Charles Rankin and relishing the irony of his position and forthcoming marriage to Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), daughter to a Supreme Court justice (Philip Merivale). Little does Kindler realise that Agent Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) of the Allied War Crimes Commission is in town and on the trail of his old colleague Konrad Meinike (Konstantin Shayne), a religious convert whom Wilson has released in the hope that he will lead him straight to Kindler.
By the forties, Edward G. had begun to do very well for himself playing methodical little men on the right side of the law - here a pipe-tapping Simon Wiesenthal type - having made his name as Rico "Little Caesar" Bandello at Warners (James Cagney too would undergo a similar post-Code moral makeover, going from glamorous hood in The Public Enemy of 1931 to a heroic Fed four years later in G-Men). Robinson's Mr Wilson coolly makes known his presence in Harper by insinuating himself into the dinner party set, befriending the Longstreets and taking in the occasional game of checkers at the general store with 25 cent hustler and local busybody Mr Potter (Billy House, physically resembling Lionel Barrymore's miserly Bedford Falls villain of the same name in the same year's It's A Wonderful Life). Wilson is just as much a stranger in these parts as his prey and the town - its incongruous Gothic clock tower aside - comes to represent the sort of Rockwellian, all-American suburban heartland of white picket fences, well-to-do homes and gently tumbling autumn leaves that Welles's friend Joseph Cotten so gleefully picked apart in Shadow Of A Doubt (1943) or that the gas-guzzling Dennis Hopper haunted so menacingly in Blue Velvet (1986). Beneath its green lawns lies a thick, lingering morass of paranoia and mistrust. In spite of Mary's denial and insistence to the contrary that, "In Harper, there's nothing to be afraid of", a very real fear of intruders infiltrating the community abides. At her own cocktail party, this sickly mood bubbles to the surface when the guests become excited by ghoulish talk of serial killers and the fate of Meinike, the missing stranger. McCarthy's Red Scare was just around the corner.
Welles's direction is certainly more self-consciously routine than usual but he still finds interesting things for cinematographer Russell Metty to do by way of looming silhouettes and claustrophobic close-ups. A pounding, melodramatic score by Bronislaw Kaper serves to compliment the action and ratchets up the tension at key moments, as when Kindler strangles Meinike in a dappled woodland while local school boys follow a paperchase close by. As an actor, Welles mostly steers clear of Nazi stereotype and is all the more unnerving for it - his Kindler is the sort of fellow who quietly poisons dogs, whistles while doodling swastikas in public phone booths and ducks out of his own wedding reception to bury a corpse, returning in a change of clothes looking suaver than ever. He longs for World War III and The Stranger is deadly serious about the threat still posed by surviving fascists, even going so far as to feature a scene in which Wilson forces Mary to watch real news reel footage of a concentration camp to convince her to accept the facts and turn on her husband.
This was a theme Welles dealt with regularly in his contemporary newspaper column for The New York Post, never forgiving the German people for embracing National Socialism and attributing the rise of Hitler to their "infatuation with Faust", a stance at odds with his usual libertarian political outlook. His attitude had not changed by 1950, when he was interviewed about the commercial failure of Macbeth (1948) by Sight & Sound's Francis Koval: "I don't take it as a compliment that the picture is having terrific success in Germany, where people are probably attracted to the medieval savagery of the subject," he speculated. The following speech over dinner in The Stranger, when Charles Rankin inadvertently reveals himself to Wilson, summarises Welles' view of the Nazi mentality and provides an especially chilling moment:
"The German sees himself as the innocent victim of world hatred and conspired against and put upon by inferior people, inferior nations. He cannot admit to error, much less to wrongdoing, not the German. We chose to ignore Ethiopia and Spain, but we learned from our own casualty list the price of looking the other way. Men of truth everwhere have come to know for whom the bell tolled, but not the German. No. He still follows his warrior gods marching to Wagnerian strains, his eyes still fixed upon the fiery sword of Siegfried, and he knows subterranean meeting places that you don't believe in. The German's unbroken dream world comes alive and he takes his place in shining armour beneath the banners of the Teutonic knights. Mankind is waiting for the Messiah, but for the German, the Messiah is not the Prince of Peace. He's... another Barbarossa... another Hitler."
The Stranger's story came from an original screenplay written by Victor Trivas, which was worked on by Anthony Veiller and Decla Dunning as well as an uncredited Welles with help from John Huston. Despite his input, Welles still considered the final shooting script to be a "bastardised" version of the original draft and, according to author Clinton Heylin, the director "felt he had been obliged to grit his teeth one time too many, as he again saw plotlines left trailing, themes half-expressed, subtleties sacrificed for a peculiarly subjective, only nominally consistent paciness, indicative of the kind of ur-thriller The Stranger was not meant to be."
Welles had wanted to cast his old Mercury Theater pal Agnes Moorhead in the Robinson role and to feature a more specific explanation of Kindler's obsession with clocks and their mechanisms as a metaphor the "ideal social system", but he was thwarted on both counts. These disappointments were ultimately what led him to declare in 1958 that the finished Stranger is, "the one of my films of which I am least the author." Perhaps but, for me, The Stranger is a distinctive, sorely underrated thriller, packed with ideas and deserving of better, not least for its unforgettable clock tower dénouement, which serves as an odd, noirish link between Harold Lloyd and Back To The Future (1985). As The Stranger has fallen into the public domain, you can see it in its entirety above.
Posted by Joe at 15:32 1 comment:
Labels: Anthony Veiller, Edward G. Robinson, John Huston, Loretta Young, Noir, Orson Welles, Russell Metty, Sam Spiegel, Thriller, Victor Trivas
The Battle Of The Sexes (1959)
Constance Cummings and Peter Sellers find themselves at odds in Charles Crichton's excellent small business comedy The Battle Of The Sexes. Implausibly and very loosely based on 'The Catbird Seat', a 1942 New Yorker short story by the wit and cartoonist James Thurber, the piece recounts the upheaval endured at a fusty Edinburgh tweed manufacturer, the House of MacPherson, when its aged owner (Ernest Thesiger) dies and passes on the reins to his idiot heir (Robert Morley). The latter brings in ambitious, assertive American business consultant Angela Barrows (Cummings) to help modernise the firm's modest but antiquated set-up, which is still reliant on cottage industry (quite literally, that of the aged highland crofters who weave the fabric). The meek and equally elderly all-male staff, led by abstemious chief accountant Mr Martin (Sellers), soon rebel against her introduction of a proper filing system, electronic adding machines and a malfunctioning intercom system before matters really come to a head with the suggestion of investing in a new factory and abandoning traditional materials in favour of cheaper synthetic fibres (also the cause of much chagrin in Alexander Mackendrick's Ealing caper The Man In The White Suit, 1951). Martin finds himself forced to test his Machiavellian mettle, plotting a murder no one could possibly believe him capable of.
Audiences today are advised not to take this film's apparent sexual politics to heart - it's better to think of it as an ahead-of-its-time satire on the dubious influence wielded by freelance consultants, those self-proclaimed "experts" whom bosses bring in to legitamise the mass sacking of half the workforce in the name of efficiency, rather than as a sexist allegory warning against meddling women in the workplace. The showdown in Cummings' apartment, when a nervous Sellers tries to bump her off through hapless improvisation, is brilliantly choreographed and perhaps owes something to another classic Mackendrick comedy, The Ladykillers (1955). Having a supporting character with the surname Darling (Jameson Clark), which causes embarrassment every time anyone addresses him ("Not you, Darling!"), was a joke almost certainly borrowed by Richard Curtis for the BBC's Blackadder Goes Forth (1989). And perhaps more recently by Gordon Brown at the Treasury. Sellers is at his best in this sort of thing, far more understated and subtle than he can be, while The Battle Of The Sexes is also notable for an early cameo from Donald Pleasence and a hilarious opening scene that dares to make fun of the penchant among Scottish men for wearing tartan mini skirts (sorry, "kilts") by playing the can-can over footage of a troop of marching bagpipers. For a more thoughtful exploration of the culture clash that takes place when progress-minded Americans hit the highlands, go for Bill Forsyth's wry Local Hero (1983), but Crichton's comedy still packs plenty of native charm.
Labels: British, Charles Crichton, Comedy, Donald Pleasence, Ernest Thesiger, James Thurber, Peter Sellers, Robert Morley


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The first full Sunday of the 2017 NFL season kicked off at 1 p.m. ET and it took approximately three minutes for the Browns to go full Browns. Cleveland went three-and-out on its opening drive of the season behind new quarterback DeShone Kizer against the Steelers and was forced to punt.
Britton Colquitt stepped back near the Browns' goal line for his first of many punts this season, and what many expected to be a bright spot for Cleveland turned into a disaster when the Steelers broke through for a clean block. The ball bounded into the end zone where it was recovered for a touchdown, the first of the day, in very Browns fashion.
Browns fans are no stranger to disappointment and misery, but usually it takes a little longer than four plays into the season for that to kick in. After some legitimate optimism creeped into the minds of Browns fans this preseason with Kizer's emergence and Myles Garrett looking like a great choice at No. 1, the past week has been a sobering reminder that this is Cleveland. Garrett suffered an ankle injury in practice that will keep him out of the opener at the least, and now the season has begun with a blocked punt being recovered for a touchdown by the rival Steelers.


I AM DONE WITH SUMMER SEMESTER. As far as I know, I've passed all of my classes with grades high enough to get credit for them. I completed five classes, four of them upper-division, three of them graduate-level for a total of sixteen semester hours. I have learned an incredible amount. I have seen things that I never dreamed I'd see. YOL. Well… I must now take a nap before I reply to all of the e-mail I have that I haven't answered yet.


Abstract : A program called 'AM', is described which models one aspect of elementary mathematics research: developing new concepts under the guidance of a large body of heuristic rules. 'Mathematics' is considered as a type of intelligent behavior, not as a finished product. The local heuristics communicate via an agenda mechanism, a global list of tasks for the system to perform and reasons why each task is plausible. A single task might direct AM to define a new concept, or to explore some facet of an existing concept, or to examine some empirical data for regularities, etc. Repeatedly, the program selects from the agenda the task having the best supporting reasons, and then executes it. Each concept is an active, structured knowledge module. A hundred very incomplete modules are initially provided, each one corresponding to an elementary set-theoretic concept (e.g.,union). This provides a definite but immense 'space' which AM begins to explore. AM extends its knowledge base, ultimately rediscovering hundreds of common concepts (e.g., numbers) and theorems (e.g., unique factorization). This approach to plausible inference contains great powers and great limitations.


Who are other good organists, and what are their best recordings?
Thread 10820 has a few organists listed.
The dead ones don't play very well.
On the other hand, they come cheap and are very easy to get along with.
Bach was the best at composing, now he is decomposing.
'Well, there is me.... and, um.... er, ah... oh! dear! I just can't think of the other two'.
There can be no 'greatest' organists. Only great scholarly interpreters of a given period's music and its composers. Some would lionise an authority of romanticism, or of the baroque or renaissance, but few, if any, could be said to have definitively mastered every epoch. Even within epochal specialty, the magisterial interpretations of, say, the fifties, will seem pitifully dated and not up to current scholarship's snuff.
The greatest organist ever was Johann Sebastian Bach.
At least with organists closer to our own time we have recordings. The greatness of pre-recording organists is speculative. They were great compared to what?
Even within epochal specialty, the magisterial interpretations of, say, the fifties, will seem pitifully dated and not up to current scholarship's snuff.
So, basically, what we think today about how things should be played is superior to what they thought about how it should be played, even though they were generations closer to the people that composed the music and generations closer to the teachers over the years that carried that information forward.
It's way too easy to talk crap about people in the past without understanding what and why they did it. If it were not for those organists of the mid-1900's many of us would never had heard of Bach or had any interest in playing his music. But many did, even though the buildings and organs were not conducive - but their love of the music moved them to play it anyhow.
Only in music could someone propose a theory, most musicians jump on it and proclaim it gospel, and in 50 years someone else proclaim it crazy and that anyone who accepted it is an unlearned fool.
Is it possible Bach would have hated the instruments current builders and performers think are best for playing his music? How do we determine Bach was a better organist than Buxtehude and either was better than Couperin? It is possible those performers closer in time to the source and relying on techniques and interpretations passed on to them by teachers who actually studied with the composers, were more accurate than the assumptions of modern scholars.
Except that merely living contemporaneously to a great musical figure, say, Franck, does not necessarily translate into authoritative interpretations of such a figure. Humble little me can trace my tutorial lineage back to said Franck, as can, probably, quite a few of my colleagues on this forum, which makes any of us a greater interpreter of his music than a player who just happened to live at a time nearer his own. There is some of that peculiarly American disrespect (if not outright scorn) for scholarship in evidence here, the which would not be shared by more enlightened societies and folk.
So, basically, we are stupid and you are not...I can agree with that. In fact, "the which would" is showing.
There is scholarship, then there is scholarship. Of course, who wouldn't have wanted to actually hear Franck or any other composer play? His contemporaries indicated that he never played anything the same way twice - a composer privilege that is hard to argue with. Someone who studied with him knew how he played his works. Most teachers convey what they have learned to their students who then pass that knowledge along through succeeding generations of students.
Back to scholarship. There are scholars who agitate on minor points, propose performance practices that are in left field, and publish papers to draw attention to themselves. The "buzz" they create allows them to climb from teaching positions at West Mediocre College to positions in major schools. I don't have a lot of respect for this kind of "scholar." What they produce is often little more than their own preferences in interpretation not supported by composer contemporaries. I trust contemporary accounts more than some tin-eared wannabe 100 years after the fact, who is doing little more than promoting his own likes and dislikes. Not all scholarship is scholarly.
Then there are scholars like Beverly Jerold, a significant scholar who actually knows that of which she speaks and writes. She also calls down some of the supposed scholars who go off on speculative flights of fancy. I saw one letter from her in TAO responding to one of those flights of fancy where she indicated that her research did not support what that writer had proposed as authentic. She is the kind of scholar that keeps the organ profession honest. I respect her.
,,,which would not be shared by more enlightened societies and folk.
Whose Beethoven is better? Klemperer, Eliot Gardiner, Marriner, van Karajan, Ozawa? Much of this is subjective based on one's taste. I love period instruments - especially woodwinds (to me, there is nothing more beautiful than an 18th cent. Clarinet in A); other can't stand them.
I suspect that C.P.E. Bach was more enlightened and knowledgeable about his father's playing than anyone alive today. If I were looking for info on how to play J.S. Bach I would start with what C.P.E. had to say. But you are correct, Salieri. There will never be agreement in period performance circles. Some days I think a plague on all their houses would be a good thing. LOL.
Except that merely living contemporaneously to a great musical figure, say, Franck, does not necessarily translate into authoritative interpretations of such a figure. Humble little me can trace my tutorial lineage back to said Franck, [...] which makes any of us a greater interpreter of his music.
Although I agree with the thrust of MJO's point, this portion of it is easily demonstrated as patently ridiculous. Just consider our tutelage back to Bach. Widor and Lemmens, probably closer to Bach than any of us are to Franck, said that the Bach technique was absolute legato - a truly laughable assertion! On the other hand, those contemporaneous with Franck, likely in the same schools, with the same teachers, and with audiences having in mind a particular style, would likely have approximated his technique.
Tutelage means nothing without scholarship, as I'm sure Jackson will agree. Look at all the sources available, and interpret them intelligently. And eschew the intellectual sloppiness of those who think playing in the 50's was good enough.
His contemporaries indicated that he never played anything the same way twice - a composer privilege that is hard to argue with.
Bravo. Scholarship is not scorned here. It is simply taken for what it is... an educated guess.
It's interesting that no specific people are nominated in all of these comments. Were one to ask about violinists, you'd get a good list; about flutists, likewise; about oboe players, yes; about 'cellists, yes; about pianists, yes. None of the above composers, unless you go to Paganini, maybe.
I nominated one organist. Actually Leonhardt is another.
Francis, sorry, i thought "walcha" was a humorous commentary. My ignorance.
Olivier Latry and Marie Claire-Alain are hard to beat as all-around interpreters of many genres. If I had to pick all-around performers it would be those two. I've heard both in concert on several occasions, and many recordings. I have never gone wrong with their recordings. That said, both are most truly experts and masters of the French symphonic and 20th century repertoire. Particularly Jehan Alain (of course) for Marie Claire, and particularly Messiaen for Latry.
For more of a pointed Bach and/or pre-Bach focus, I recommend Wolfgang Zerer and Harald Vogel and, closer to home, Craig Cramer (prof at Notre Dame). I love the way people like Latry play Bach as well, but just be aware of national differences. The Germans tend to play Bach very straightforward, with emphasis on clarity of execution of just what's on the page. The French tend to think about more nuanced phrasing and interpretation - easing in and out of phrases, etc. At times the German approach can seem cold, and at times the French approach can seem overwrought or overthought. But I think the very best players from both sides combine sensitive musicality with clarity for the "best" Bach playing.
Peter van Dijk is another very impressive player, especially of the pre-Bach generations (Sweelinck, Scheidemann, Bohm, etc.).
This is just like Major League Baseball's decision decades ago to let the fans vote the starters for each division for the All-Star game. (And then once each division team had its nine starters, the opposing managers choose the rest of the team insuring "quality control."
And then one might ask, how important in the scheme of things is the selection of the nine starters for posterity's sake?
I have heard Joseph Ripka in recital on several occasions and have been very impressed by his musicality and virtuosity. I think he is one of the "best" of the younger generation.
his Dupre and Vierne on YouTube are excellent.
But in what other field would most musicians do this? I can't really see most musicians doing this for psychology, biology, physics, history, or most any other field of endeavor.
Does this possess even a shred of veracity?
It's just a wild-eyed boast.
What, pray, is being referenced?
In reality, it happens in other fields, as well. I lived through the organ reform movement and heard more unsubstantiated BS than could be believed. You are going back to posts from July 2014. A little bored today, are we? LOL.
True, there never was, nor never will be the likes of what Bach is said to have been.
Perhaps ditto the average talented organist of the renaissance and baroque who could sit down and improvise toccatas, fugues, chorale fantasies, ricercars, passacaglias, and more, that would take many of us months to learn. Such was the musical culture of those eras.
Having said that, it is, I think, a certainty that the technique and virtuosity, not to mention the historic scholarship and pure musicianship of the great modern organists far surpasses that of any past age. And, it only promises to get better. A student at Rice's Shepherd School of Music, for instance, is expected to memorise something like an impressive Bach piece or some such every week and perform it flawlessly! Not too many generations ago a PhD in a major church or institution (if, indeed, he even had the PhD which is now de rigeur) couldn't begin to do that, let alone play with the scholarship evidenced by modern students and professors.
On the other hand, there are times when I'm listening even to the likes of Olivier Latry (and others!) improvise it seems like just so much blather, little real mastery of contrapuntal technique is evident, not so much formal interest, not so much real music. The great works of Bach and Buxtehude (not to mention Frescobaldi or Couperin, et al.), on the other hand, were lessons in what and how to improvise - and their students could do it.
I can't really see most musicians doing this for psychology, biology, physics, history, or most any other field of endeavor.
In science, dare I mention Global Warming?
best is relative and fleeting. better is the one that moves a soul toward eternal life by providing authentic worship through music whether it be chant, polyphony or an organ piece that moves deeply.
Who in their right mind would refuse having the skill of a Virgil Fox, Biggs, Guilmant, Widor, Vierne, or many other of the greats? We should all play so well, although I don't have to worry about that. LOL.
We should all play OUR best, not aspire to be THE best. Vanity.
The new co-titulaire of NDdeP, Vincent Dubois, is a very fine player and by all accounts a very fine sevice player at NDdeP. His improvisations are much more tonal than Latry, who I am frankly worn out of in terms of his improvisation. Mssr. Dubois is making a tour of the US and will be in my part of the world in April (South Florida). He is young and represents the next generation of French players.
Vanity? You say that like it's a bad thing. ;-) Why not have both?
Too bad Florence Foster Jenkins didn't play the organ.
I think she does! I am sure I heard her or her close relative at a Baptist church.
After much thought and refection on this subject I must disagree with Adam. I thing an organist who is alive would be much better at playing than someone who is dead. Unless, of course, you believe in organ playing vampires who have spent centuries perfecting their craft.
Mr Cordova makes what would seem to be an unassailable observation!
The curious thing about the organ world, particularly with regard to the sorts of serious musicians and entertainers who inhabit it, is that it is an amalgam such as which I don't think exists in any other serious musical sphere. One finds in the gamut such impeccable scholars and artists as Hans Davidsson who make genuine contributions to our music and culture, to such gaudy entertainers as Cameron Carpenter; it treasures its Cliquots and Silbermanns, but doesn't even so much as squirm at the presence of theatre organs and their enthusiasts in its midst; the AGO and the entire organ community seem at home with both. This is existential oxymoronicity. I think nothing like this is to be found in any other serious music community, whether it be artists of the piano, violin, oboe, symphony orchestra, or so forth. Not only does the organ world save seats for its entertainers, it even teaches entertainment music in many of its hallowed universities. One of the university professors (who is one of our nations premier organists) here in Houston recently played a rededication recital (on an historic Holtkamp that reuter had tonally destroyed) which consisted mostly (about 7 out of 9 selections) of things like the Ride of the Valkyries. Such junk is actually being taught at his studio. Their recital programs are littered with it. This doesn't happen in the serious piano world, or any other world of serious music. Nor would the likes of the horrid scholarship of someone like Virgil Fox receive more than a raised eyebrow in any musical world other than that of the organ. Equally astonishing is the organ world's embrace of instrumental simulacra, whose apologists include otherwise highly qualified organists. These fakes, sophisticated and expensive synthesisers that they are, are often convincing to those who don't hear very well (or just aren't listening closely to what they're hearing), may be found, not just as practice instruments at home, but in important churches. In the piano world or any other serious musical world this would be unthinkable. There is something seriously amiss in the organ world. It defies understanding.
Give Fox his due. His Bach scholarship was suspect. However, he came into his own with Romantic literature where his scholarship and performance practices were right on. Organs and organ literature did not cease development during the Baroque era, but continued to develop. Organ music and organs have unfortunately become museum pieces with scanty attendance at many recitals and programs. One hundred years ago, those recitals would have been full. I am glad to see programs branch out beyond Bach and contemporaries. Otherwise, I think the base supporting the instrument will continue to shrink. The trouble with exclusive "enlightened" little societies wed to one time period is that the people stay home and more churches move away from the organ. It is, I'm afraid, a case of adapt or die.
In some ways, Fox was the renegade that could not resist the temptation to cross the line to entertain. Was it ego? Desire for fame and fortune or a desire to expose the world to the great eds of Bach?
Then again, Bach himself, was nurtured in a "religious music performance" environment. This is why the Catholic Church struggles with the clarity needed to discern between worship and performance, sacred and secular, authentic and fabrication.
The blur creates all kinds of confusion on philosophical, theological and artistic levels that is truly and ultimately rooted in the sin of division. Bach was probably the greatest musical genius of all time. His unfortunate spiritual situation gave rise to the odd blend of sacred and secular, the Cantata and Oratorio, which puts one foot in performance and another in meditation, not even pure worship. He always believed his music glorified God as he often wrote that familiar inscription on his works, but if we lived in a perfect world, Bach WOULD have been a Catholic, and we probably would have had many Masses and liturgical works from his quill. We don't, however, and our world (I included) revere our next to best Bach.
The wild and wooly world of organ performance truly does border on idolatry. OK... now I hear you all screaming "Puritan." But, consider what MJO is saying. This phenomenon exists in no other art - the phenomenon of confusion, the schizophrenic mentality that dominates the thinking of our own colleagues is both maddening and at the same time perplexing... and yet we carry on, bringing the likes of Wagner and Mozart into our sanctuaries, not quite convinced ourselves whether it is good or bad, right or wrong, or we just plain chalk it up to the excuse that this is an imperfect world, and then we carry that ultimatum right into Gods perfect Church, where it does not belong.
And then, the Hiroshima of Christendom occurs in VII, and all hell breaks loose (literally), and no holds are barred, nothing is forboden, and Konfuzion is made King. Aspiring artists (organists, performers and composers) wander into the sanctuary only to realize 'anything goes', and it is THERE that all of our anything goes.
MJO says let us not confuse entertainers with artists or scholars. I do not agree. We are All entertainers of God's pleasure, whether we are employed in the concert hall or the sanctuary... the crux of the matter is that we do not discriminate about WHAT belongs (artistically, theologically, philosophically) in one or the other. We have lost the sense of what is sacred (holy) to that which is not. We do not know how to burn the fire that creates smoke pleasing to God. We think the blaze of Cain is just as 'Abel'.
The wild and wooly world of organ performance truly does border on idolatry.
So, you haven't yet experienced the wild and wooly world of violinists? LOL.
I suspect that one of our problems as organists is that we are trying to deal with 500 years of literature. Frankly, much of it is no longer applicable to current rites, while some of it never fit within the mass, to begin with.
Frankly, much of it is no longer applicable to current rites, while some of it never fit within the mass, to begin with.


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I need to stabilish UHF and GPRS communication to a CR1000.
I mean it must transmit DATA to a control tower (airport) via radio in real time, and thansmit every 15m min or 1h to a Data Center.
is it possible to stabilish two connection? How to setup it?


Fill martini shaker or 3-cup covered container half full with ice. Add all ingredients except cranberries and lime slices; cover and shake.
Pour into martini or tall stemmed glasses, straining the ice. Garnish glasses with fresh cranberries and lime slices on picks.


Volunteer parent coaches are an integral part of this program. Sign up today to be a mentor for local children, teach basic skills, and help us bring recreational youth sports to Castle Pines.
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Remember, Castle Pines Athletics is a recreational program. Our goal is to keep sports fun for our children, while emphasizing basic skill development and physical fitness. This is NOT a competitive, intense, high stress, fast-paced, sports league. Our coaches are charged with the task of teaching basic skills, lifting spirits and attitudes, and reminding kids to have fun!
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Michael Adesanya's debut memoir, "Adéwálé: My Mother's Son" set for Dec 10 release
TweakCentric Solutions Limited has announced the publication of Stanford GSB alumnus and Africa MBA Fellow, Michael Adesanya's debut memoir, Adewale: My Mother's Son.
Set to be released on Thursday, 10th December 2020, Adewale: My Mother's Sonis an inspiring account of the life of the author.
Adéwálé: My Mother's Son chronicles Adesanya's life from pre-inception against the background of his one-of-a-kind mother, Ìyá Wálé who strives hard through life's travails with her quest for success in spite of the multitude of challenges. According to Gbenga Awomodu, Managing Partner at TweakCentric Solutions, "Michael Adesanya's debut is a very inspiring account of a resilient mother and the boys she birthed and groomed into significance. It is a classic Nigerian story of hope and victory against all odds."
The memoir brings to life the inevitable role of a mother's sacrifice, and the successful young man Michael has become is not far-fetched from his childhood zeal and staying power. Michael's story relays emphasis on hope and the will to forge ahead without the means being present. He appraises ÌyáWálé, from the beginning to the end, as the hero without cape or superpower but bountiful, unquenchable love. The one with so much strength despite bleak hope. This is the resilience every young person needs.
Adesanya, in a candid and vulnerable manner, shares the mistakes and the remake of his mother's steps in life. These experiences resound hope for every woman who is at the verge of giving up. From poverty to pain, disappointment, to the absence of a father figure to true forgiveness, he touches every aspect of the lows.
Through his lens, the communal lifestyle of his hometown in Sagamu, Ogun State is highlighted even as he makes a case for further socioeconomic development. This he regards as a step in the right direction till the country becomes a better place.
His undaunting interest in societal change and development through science and technology – the book reveals, is a long-standing desire burning from his childhood experiences.
A man's story is as true as his life. In it, he mirrors the challenges of fellow men, the highs and the victories, the lows and the breaking points. Yet, it takes more than guts to share this with people. "I envy those who can just talk about themselves; those who know their self. I grew up around men who waited until their deathbeds," Adesanya writes.
Thankfully, he has summoned the courage to tell his story for the good of all.
Michael Adesanya's debut memoir is an excellent gift to every young person who is about to give up or being complacent with their present situation.
A first-class graduate of Chemical Engineering from the University of Lagos, Michael Adesanya is currently building sustainable retail solutions for Africa. He is the co-founder of Suplias, where thousands of retail outlets in Africa connect directly with consumer goods manufacturers through a mobile app. He has worked in reputable companies such as Accenture, P&G, Gap Inc., Jumia Nigeria, Pomelo Fashion, and Pepsico.
Adesanya's memoir is available for pre-order all through November 2020 viawww.michaeladesanya.com and leading bookstore, RovingHeights. It will also be available in stores from 10th December 2020.
For more information, please visit www.michaeladesanya.com.
TweakCentric Solutions LLC is a dynamic marketing communications, content solutions and related consultancy services company based in Lagos, Nigeria. The team at TweakCentric Solutions boasts of extensive experience in the development and execution of strategic marketing projects, corporate communications campaigns, and storytelling for personal brands.For more information, please visit: www.tweakmycontent.com
Adesanya is a professional salesman with over 10 years of experience across industries, from consulting to consumer goods, fashion, e-commerce and supply chain management. A Stanford GSB alumnus and Africa MBA Scholar, Michael is currently building Suplias – an online packed food distribution company.For more information, please visit www.michaeladesanya.com
Tags Gbenga Awomodu Michael Adesanya Stanford GSB TweakCentric Solutions Limited
Barcelona's Pique suffers Knee injury
Obi laid foundation for educational revolution in Anambra State - Cleric

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Paddy Power to 'unsponsor' Motherwell FC as it continues 'Save Our Shirt' drive
By Rebecca Stewart-22 July 2019 10:25am
Paddy Power has revealed itself as the official 'unsponsor' of Motherwell FC / Paddy Power
After causing a stir last week when it sponsored (and then "unsponsored") Huddersfield Town as part of a clever PR stunt designed to return the "sacred" football shirt back to fans and away from advertisers, Paddy Power has inked a similar deal with Motherwell FC.
The bookmaker has revealed it will back the Scottish Premiership side as title sponsor this season, but its logo won't feature on the club's kit.
The partnership makes Motherwell the second team to sign up to Paddy Power's wider 'Save Our Shirts' campaign, in which it is calling on brands to stop sponsoring football shirts – including competitors.
Last week, the betting shop received a lot of flack online after revealing a "bold" kit design for Huddersfield Town. The shirt featured the Paddy Power logo prominently emblazoned in a sash-style motif across the front of the shirt, drawing derision from fans as "the worst kit of all time". It was not only widely mocked but also in breach of FA guidelines.
However, on Friday (19 July) the brand revealed it was to "unsponsor" the team and relinquish its space on the front of the Huddersfield Town shirt, encouraging other advertisers to do the same.
Financial details of the Paddy Power-Motherwell deal weren't disclosed, but the club's chairman Jim McMahon said it was its "biggest shirt sponsorship in history".
A Paddy Power spokesman said: "We're delighted that The Well are joining in the fun for the upcoming campaign and we've been impressed with their ability to keep their involvement top secret, despite all the noise of the past week.
"We've been planning this with them for months, and it feels great to finally unveil their involvement and their beautiful home and away kits for next season."
This article is about: World, Paddy Power, Football, Sponsorship, Marketing, Brand


The Luxury, Is It Worth It?
There's a lot of mix feeling when it comes to splurging on luxury.
You'll definitely ask yourself if the product is worth the hype and what's so good about it?
So for the past year, the penny pincher me finally decided to explore in the world of luxury with skincare. And I wanted to share with you my favourites incase you were looking into them too.
This could be quite a pricey one but it's literally the most amazing vitamin for the skin. I use the essence right after cleansing and it's such a great product to prep the skin for the rest of your regimen, gently exfoliates and moderates skin renewal. I've notice an increase in hydration, more even complexion and most importantly my skin doesn't look dull anymore. Words can't describe how much I love this product, most definitely recommend!
When it comes to skincare, my main concern is to focus on hydration level as my skin is super dry! I love using the Estee Lauder Serum + Eye Cream together after the SKII essence because it absorbs so much better and next thing you feel is the velvety soft skin. I swear this combination together makes your skin feel so plump and glow-y amazing!
So in the end,"The Luxury, Is It Worth It?"
Let me know in the comments below a luxury brand that worked for you.


Uga Escapes consolidated its position in the leisure industry this month by unveiling its newest addition to its range of luxury boutique hotels, Chena Huts, a chic hideaway nestled deep within Yala constructed with an investment of Rs. 800 million.
The luxury boutique hotel is located on a seven-acre expanse of land and comprises 14 guest pavilions or huts. Each hut houses a living room, bedroom, en suite bathroom and sheltered outdoor deck with a built-in plunge pool. Additionally, by utilising unique design elements such as thatched roofs, Chena Huts merges seamlessly with the surrounding environment to allow guests to appreciate the region's rare flora and fauna and feel one with nature.
"With the current upsurge in tourism which is being experienced in Sri Lanka, this latest addition to Yala will only strengthen our foothold in the luxury hospitality market. Yala is a very popular destination with local and foreign tourists. With Chena Huts, guests will no doubt receive an opportunity to experience the wildlife Yala is famous for while being immersed in luxury and an amazing location," said Uga Escapes Managing Director Priyanjith Weerasooria.
Chena Huts borders a tropical forest on one side and a picturesque lake on the other in an area frequented by exotic birds such as ibises, storks and flamingos. The nearby beach also offers visitors rare sightings of sea turtles laying eggs and elephants scouring the thick foliage in search of fodder.
Offshore, a lighthouse marks the location of the Basses, a network of reefs dotted with ancient shipwrecks. Along its fringes a submarine canyon regularly attracts a large assembly of blue and humpback whales.
This serene landscape makes Chena Huts a haven of tranquillity and comfort, with fully air-conditioned, opulent spaces, replete with plunge pools, offering guests spectacular views of the surrounding wilderness and seascape.
The hotel's Basses fine dining restaurant continues this effect by sporting a scale model of the series of reefs after which it is named including a model of a famous Portuguese ship that sunk in the 16th Century.
Each of these sophisticated elements, together with Yala's rich biodiversity, ensure that Chena Huts is poised to be among the most luxurious resorts of Sri Lanka's premier safari destination.


In this workshop you'll become familiar with 3D printing technology, the materials you can use.
Danny Kuo is a Dutch designer based in Shanghai. He currently works at Opendesk and has been a passionate volunteer at Xinfab since 2015. As a designer, Danny is concerned about how technological progress is changing our reality. With conscious design thinking, Danny aims to improve lives through his products and offer something everyone can enjoy.


Ashby Hospitality Group has a long and enviable history within the communities that we serve. We have worked tirelessly to bring neighbors together to enjoy fresh, delicious meals, well-crafted drinks, comfort food as well as the newest trends. Our servers and bartenders are trained to be warm and friendly which greatly adds to your overall dining experience. They understand the importance of working together towards one common goal- to make our guests feel welcomed and that their day was made better by a visit to one of our restaurants.
Ashby Hospitality Group got its beginnings in 1983 when Bob Ashby, along with his wife, Sandy, opened their first restaurant in the Pike Creek area of northern Delaware. It was the original McGlynns Pub in the Polly Drummond Shopping Center and it quickly became a favorite neighborhood spot. Two other McGlynns Pubs followed – one in Peoples Plaza in Bear (1998) and the other on the banks of beautiful Silver Lake in Dover (2008). The emphasis continues to be on great food made with quality ingredients, friendly and knowledgeable staff, and an atmosphere of fun, casual dining where " everybody knows your name." Among the numerous awards bestowed upon us throughout our 34 years in business, the one that we are most proud of is Favorite Neighborhood Restaurant.
It continues to be a meeting place for locals, sports teams, professors, students and residents as it is located in the heart of the University of Delaware campus.
In 2011, another historic property got the attention of Bob Ashby. The Historic Odessa Foundation, in partnership with Ashby Hospitality Group, reopened Cantwell's Tavern in the center of Odessa, a town dedicated solely to the accurate preservation of the buildings and properties in this tiny area. The former hotel is now a charming restaurant where locals gather and visitors can rest their feet after a day of touring.
The Roaming Raven has been an exciting addition to the Ashby Hospitality Group since 2014. This shiny, sleek food truck has rolled up to a wide variety of events throughout Delaware and nearby PA and MD. With a full kitchen, we can offer catering for any affair.
We have partnered with Brian Ashby, Bob and Sandy's oldest son, to offer a farm to table menu in downtown Wilmington, Delaware. Opening in 2014, 8th & Union Kitchen has garnered excellent reviews with seasonal offerings and local fare. Join us at our newest restaurant to see what all the buzz is about!
As 2017 began, Ashby Hospitality Group will see changes as Marc Ashby and long time employee, Jeremy Hughes, take over the business. The same attention to detail and customer satisfaction will be the driving forces of every decision. We will continue to give back to the communities that have made us successful and hope to earn your continued patronage as AHG sets out with new ideas and fresh concepts for your dining pleasure. We look forward to seeing you soon!


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Razer launches fitness-centric Nabu smartwatch
Rather than going for full functionality, Razer takes a fitness-oriented approach with its new smartwatch
By: Derek Strickland from Jan 6, 2016 @ 15:38 CST
CES 2016 - Razer's latest venture in the wearable computing sector has produced the Nabu Watch, a durable smartwatch that's aimed at fitness buffs.
While Razer's new Nabu Watch certainly counts as a smartwatch, the wearable doesn't exactly sport the functionality of an LG Watch Urbane or an Apple Watch. The device is more of a watch-faced fitness tracker, and you won't be able to view a colorful apps as its display is limited to a single color--you guessed it, lime green. As a result, however, the Nabu Watch has stellar battery life that can last up to a week with regular use.
Razer's latest wearable sports an OLED 128 x 16 single color display with a single button for screen interaction. Spec-wise, the usual suspects are in attendance, including a 3-axis accelerometer, vibration capabilities, wireless syncing via low-energy Bluetooth (BLE) connectivity, and charging via a magnetic USB cable. Since its tailored for sport and fitness, the Nabu Watch is quite durable and is shock resistant up to 5m, and is perfect for swimmers with a waterproof rating of up to 50 meters (165 feet) of submergence.
Cross-compatible with Android and Apple, the Nabu Watch runs on Razer's own custom Watch Hardware OS and has a mobile companion app that's tailor-made to track fitness and calorie intake.
Razer's Nabu Watch comes in two flavors, the Forged Edition which is available now at $200, and the $150 regular version that will be released in late January.
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