bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“V For Victory”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

The first coach of the Dixie Flyer is divided into three parts: a long Jim Crow section; a cubbyhole which is the Jim Crow smoker, consisting of two seats that face each other on each side of the aisle; and a long section for whites. The Dixie Flyer was hurtling through central Georgia. It was late at night, and alone in the smoker, I had snatched a doze when their voices woke me. They were in the khaki of naval cadets. I could tell from their accent that they were from the North. They were criticizing the famed hospitality of the South. They had wanted to sit together, but nobody in the coach behind would move to another seat. A couple of fellows had refused a direct request even though they would have to sit beside a stranger in any case. Maybe the passengers detected that Yankee twang. So the cadets had come up to the Jim Crow smoker. One was dark-haired and short, looking a bit Jewish. The other was a tall blonde. As they scoffed at the local folk-ways, I ventured my question, “Where are you fellows from?” New York and Newark, they told me. I was just through an irritating experience at the Atlanta bus station and was hot and dog-tired. “God’s country,” I said.
“Separate But Equal”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

I had heard some low-pitched talk between him and the conductor, and then he came over to me. “Could I sit here with you?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. “Help yourself.” I slipped my briefcase to the floor. He was a meek looking fellow, probably in his sixties. As he sat beside me, a man and a woman, loaded with suitcases, got in his vacant seat. “Did you hear what the conductor said to me?” He sounded aggrieved. I told him no. “Well, he came and said, ‘I told you to move before.’ I said he did not tell me to move. ‘I told you to git up,’ he said. ‘You didn’t,’ I said. ‘You must have meant to tell me.’ ‘Well, I’m telling you now. You move over there by that man (meaning you) and let these people have this seat. That man (meaning you) ain’t got no right to all that room.’ “ “I didn’t know,” I said. “I don’t want more than my share of room.” “Don’t you bother. Look back there in the coach. See that long seat back there? Ain’t nobody in it. A body could lie down on it if he wanted to. That’s seven seats a person could sit down in. But he did not tell me to move. This crowded train has just got him excited.
“Georgia Nymphs”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

Ed and I had been talking to J. C. all morning, and at noon he asked us to have dinner with him. He wanted to put the big pot in the little one for us, but we had agreed beforehand not to take advantage of J. C.’s bounty. It wasn’t only or chiefly that his ailing daughter and her young ones needed the fat meat and the greens in the little pot. It was rather that J. C. didn’t have a well, but filled his old wooden bucket from a spring. And on this side of the track the type of community planning seemed to be: house, pig-sty (where pigs were occasionally owned), privy, and then in the dip at the bottom of the draining slope, the common spring. I had been told in Atlanta to drink no more spring water in the back country than I had to. Ed and I had been guzzling all the various Colas of the brood sired by Papa Coca until we felt natural off the water wagon. We told J. C. that we had messages for Widow Thompkins from her son up in Fulton Tower, and while he was suspicious and jealous, he remained the old Southern gentleman that he truly was.
“And/Or”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

For safety’s sake, though he is a lieutenant in the Army now and may never come back to the South, let us call him Houston. He was short and frail, with a dark brown, sensitive face. I first met him at the FEPC hearings in Birmingham when, on short acquaintance, he revealed to me how he was burned up by conditions in Dixie. To judge from his twang, he was Southern-born, and he was Tuskegee trained, but he had the rather dicty restaurant on edge when he went into his tirades. The brown burghers, some of them a bit jittery anyway at FEPC and especially at the influx of a bunch of young “foreign” and radical Negroes into dynamite-loaded Birmingham, eyed him carefully over their glasses of iced tea. I ran into him again in the small Alabama town where he was teaching. He was still quite a talker, in his high-pitched voice with a quaver in it—though he didn’t quaver in other respects. He was brimming over with facts and consequent bitterness, deeper than I expected in a graduate of Tuskegee. To him, as to so many college men, the Negro’s great need was the ballot. He had made a thoughtful study of the disenfranchising techniques and political shenanigans of Alabama in general. He laughed sardonically at the Negro’s being asked to interpret such “constitutional” questions as “What is non compos mentis when it is applied to a citizen in legal jeopardy?” But he knew also how deeply engraved was the symbol at the head of the Democratic column on the official ballot used in all elections in Alabama: a rooster with the words “White Supremacy” arched over its head, and the words under it: “For the Right.”
“Sister Cities”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

I have not been down to Charleston in Azalea time. Nor on any of my three trips have I climbed to the top of Charleston’s highest building to look down on the historic spots, which, the natives tell me, outnumber those to be seen from any similar vantage in America. But I am acquainted with some of the memorials to Charleston’s past: the long, double-humped Cooper River Bridge, venerable St. Philip’s Church, whose chimes cast into Confederate cannon, were never replaced; St. Michael’s Church, whose four-dialed clock in the steeple tells the time by which old Charlestonians go, regardless of what radio Bulova announces; the Old Exchange, the Dock Theatre, oldest playhouse in America. From East on High Battery, I have seen Fort Sumter, low-lying, surly in the gray distance. I have strolled the entire Battery and those other famed streets: Meeting, Broad, Church, King, Tradd, and Legare, which the natives defiantly pronounce Legree. I remember the “single houses” set flush with the pavement, characteristically shouldering the street, fronting to the side as it were. Charlestonians told me how in this subtropical climate, galleries and piazzas were faced south to catch the winds from the sea. Like New Orleans, Charleston is a city of hidden gardens, walled in from the vulgar street. Sitting on their long piazzas, the aristocrats can revel over their flowers: wisteria, magnolias, azaleas in the spring; crepe myrtles, and oleanders in the summer; daffodils and camellia-japonicas in the fall and winter. I have seen several age-mellowed houses of the great: Miles Brewton’s Georgian masterpiece, the homes of William Rhett, John Rutledge, and Manigault; the Rainbow Row with its houses of varicolored pastel hues. Of the many examples of famous iron tracery, I especially remember “Sword Gates” with their scrolls, spears, swords, and cross, and the Sass Iron Gates, unbelievably delicate. Behind that wrought filigree I imagined Herbert Ravenal Sass, the contemporary author, lost in reveries of what he calls “The Golden Age of a region of romance leisure, culture, in general a high sense of responsibility for a dependent, helpless race.” I thought how much a “helpless race” had brought to this civilization: the wealth came in large part from slave laborers in the indigo, rice, and cotton fields; and the beauty in large part from slave artisans, skillful beyond ordinary imagining in ironwork, bricklaying, carpentry, and gardening.
“Low Cotton”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

The plantation was a large one, on a backroad. Sandy, the young teacher, thought it wiser that we go there well after nightfall. He wasn’t exactly sure how Mr. Cluttsby would take our visit. I was glad that he told Ulysses to dim the lights when the road wound around Mr. Cluttsby’s big house. Though it was a hundred yards away, we lowered our voices too, feeling conspiratorial. Sandy said he knew the road as well as the back of his hand, and near the big house that was true. We stopped at the darkened commissary where the numerous families came for “furnish,” and where, beside the watering pond, they exchanged news and kidding and tall tales. Sandy told us how he had gradually been accepted by the people. One of his stories dealt with his Christmas party, when he had introduced the plantation Negroes to Santa Claus. But the party ended nearly tragically. When Santa Claus appeared, in red suit and pink mask and white beard, the smallest children screamed in terror and fled to their mothers and fathers. They must have thought that Santa was old Satan. At any rate he was a strange white man. Even the peppermint canes and gumdrops and all-day suckers could not get the party to the proper Christmas spirit of good will to men, and Sandy did not repeat the experiment. Christmas is just another day to these kids. Sandy did not know the farthest little traveled roads so well. Ulysses finally asked, “Are those weeds or cotton I’m driving over?” and in the headlights we noticed the green bolls. We were heading toward an old log cabin, and were in what should have been a yard, but cotton was growing to the doorstep. The cabin was deserted. Ulysses turned around as well as he could in the gray mire, and drove down what we had thought was a road but what was a stretch of low cotton. “I’ll bet I’ve spoiled a bale of cotton,” Ulysses said ruefully. Sandy’s eyes were better in that pitch darkness than ours. “Stop,” he said to Ulysses. Gathering shape in the darkness we saw him coming, black as the night. I had never heard his type of dialect before; it was a staccato mutter, sounding like a speech defect. But we gathered that the man we searched for: “He gone. He ain’t there.” That was all. Just gone. Nothing else was offered.
“Take Your Coat Off, Gene!”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

They were setting up an apparatus and trying out the loudspeaker when I got to the heart of the town. A steady stream of the inhabitants of that section of south-eastern Georgia was already pouring in. Some had got off the train I rode; more were arriving in mule wagons, buggies, old model Fords, jiggling high above the ground, and other makes of cars, dusty and spattered. They found parking places and strolled the streets, truculent, suspicious, ready for a good time, spoiling for band music, oratory, liquor, and fighting. The only white man I knew in town was an old friend, there on government business. I called briefly at his office. He warned me that an explosion was due, since Talmadge’s chief of constabulary had broadcast his threat against troublemakers and his advice that Southern white women should arm themselves. The time was ripe, my friend told me, and I was quite the guy, obviously a strange Negro in the town, and probably northern. I tried not to appear too scared, and hoped to sound casual. “If I get into trouble,” I said, “do I know you?” “Sure you know me,” he said. “I have some contacts here. The worst that can happen is that you’ll be thrown in jail. They’ll hardly beat you up, or anything like that.”
“The Path To Alcorn”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

Alcorn College and its environs were steeped in history too. In July 1830, the trustees of the Presbyterian Church brought some of their slaves to clear a campus out of the thick woodland and to lay the foundations for a college for white young men. Because of the live oaks that they left in beautiful groves, the college was called Oakland, and was intended for general culture and the training of ministers. Its location was in the center of things then, only a few miles on a good road to the flourishing river town of Rodney. Its first president, the Reverend Jeremiah Chamberlain, an eminent Presbyterian minister, engaged in a heated dispute about slavery in the college chapel, and was stabbed with a sword cane in the yard surrounding the president’s home. This assassination was ominous of the later history of Oakland. After the battle at Fort Sumter, the young men of Oakland College left the shady groves for the bivouac. At the close of the Civil War, financially wrecked, the institution was offered for sale.
“The Palmer Case”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

Before I got to know Lutrelle F. Palmer well, I had heard an anecdote that did him honor. It also held promise of what has happened to him since. When the white principals of Richmond’s colored high schools were finally displaced by Negroes, Dr. Palmer was offered the principalship of the new Maggie Walker High School. Richmond wanted him badly, but offered him less than the principals of the white high schools were getting. Palmer naturally refused. The dickering continued; larger and larger salaries were offered. Finally Palmer stated his price, which was exactly that being paid white principals. The representative of the Richmond board spoke in aggrieved surprise: “But, Dr. Palmer, you know we can’t pay you that. That’s what we pay white principals.” As the anecdote was told me at Slaughter’s Café in Richmond, “The white folks offered Palmer all the way up to $3,000. ‘Couldn’t you take just $2,998.98, Mr. Palmer? We can’t go a cent higher.’ The white folks were nearly crying. Even called him Mr. Palmer. But Palmer wasn’t coming on that deal. Not for one penny less.” Palmer admitted gravely, a bit stiffly, that the anecdote was to all intents and purposes true. I have known him for many years, having visited his model high school in Newport News, and having served with him on the staff of the Atlanta Summer School where he supervised educational workshops. About the campus he was always earnest, but in the classroom his reserve was shed and a zeal, almost that of a preacher, took its place. Years ago when I was a school kid, around Howard University I had heard him debate for Wilberforce against Howard; I remember him, even after thirty years, quiet but forceful and convincing, a man for Howard to watch. He had grown bald in the meanwhile, but the piercing, almost glaring eyes beneath the heavy rimmed glasses were the same as when he used to say “Honorable Judges, Ladies, and Gentlemen.”
“Colleges: Retreat Or Reconnaissance”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

One of my favorite yarn-spinners in the South told me this one. He was traveling, as faculty director, with the Alabama State College orchestra, to play for a dance in southern Alabama. Their bus was making pretty good time on the dusty clay roads, and they passed an old jalopy filled with whites. Shouts followed them, but looking back all they could see was a cloud of orange dust. Then the jalopy roared by them, and about a hundred yards ahead turned sideways in a narrow cut and waited. “We stopped the bus,” my friend told me, “and wondered what was up. The crackers came back armed with sticks and stones. They ordered us out of the bus, and told us they were going to teach us not to give our dust to white folks. My boys were good men, all of them, but they knew what they were in for, and they didn’t answer back a word. It looked pretty ugly for awhile. I noticed an old white man, just standing by, looking on. I appealed to him. He wouldn’t deal with me directly, never opened his mouth. So I started talking with the loudest young cracker. He was spoiling for trouble, but so far was taking it out in talk. I told him that we had not meant any harm. He wasn’t interested. I told him we were going to play at a dance for white folks and were just trying to make time as we had had to leave our school late.
“Song Hunter”
Authors: Tidwell John Edgar , Sanders Mark A
Published: November 2023

The morning after the songfest, Willis James and I sat out on the lawn of President Bond’s home, under a large, shady water oak. Barely a current of air was stirring; it was quiet and drowsy. A farm truck might cough and splutter down the red road beyond the hedge, or a mule wagon might poke along, but there wasn’t much else active. Willis gave out with good talk. He was justly pleased at the showing his boys had made the night before. He wanted me to be sure to tell Kemper Harreld and Tic Tillman, his colleagues at Morehouse, and Florence Read, his boss at Spelman, just what he was doing. “I had made out all right with the fellows,” he said. “They took to you O.K. Probably talking about you now over in Macon.” As we were talking, a couple of men in work clothes yelled at each other across the road. “Ssh,” said Willis. “Listen.” “The bear gonna git you,” said the first. “How come he ain’t got you?” the second snapped back. Willis explained that “the bear” was the sun; the first man had meant, “The sun will get you, grab you, knock you flat.” The second one meant, “How come he gonna get me, if he ain’t got you? I’m as good a man as you.” “Where’s Zack?” the talk went on. “He’s gone with the peaches,” came to us over the hedge. The peaches had all been picked, were gone from this section, which was famous for them. Pickers followed them in both northeasterly and southwesterly directions. Pickers’ wages depended on the market; sometimes they were paid by the bushel, sometimes by the day. “It all depends on the white folks,” said Willis. “They’re so smart they don’t standardize. The more money peaches are bringing, the more leniency they show. Only natural.”
My Introduction to the Gospel of Judas
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

I first saw the Gospel of Judas on Sunday, December 5, 2004, in a restoration studio just outside of Geneva, Switzerland. I was exhausted but exhilarated. The day before, I had given two lectures on the history of early Christianity for the Program in the Humanities at my home institution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I then drove straight to the Raleigh-Durham airport for an overnight flight to Geneva. From there it was a quick taxi ride to the hotel. The schedule was tight: I didn’t have time to unpack before meeting my contacts.
Judas in Our Earliest Gospels
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

Fact may be stranger than fiction, but it is also harder to find. One of the most interesting things about the people connected with the life of Jesus— whether Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalene, the disciple John, Pontius Pilate, or any- one else—is that numerous legends survive about them, but few certifiable facts. Just take Mary Magdalene, for example. People today typically think of her as a reformed prostitute who was a particularly close disciple of Jesus— closer than most of his male disciples. Those who (think they) know even more about her recognize her as the one who anointed Jesus’ head with costly per- fume prior to his betrayal and arrest; some think of her as the woman who was caught in an act of adultery and whom Jesus saved from being stoned to death by saying, “Let the one without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her.” Recently, because of the blockbuster success of Dan Brown’s page-turning thriller The Da Vinci Code, people have come to think of her not just as Jesus’ adoring disciple but as his adoring spouse, with whom he had sex and fathered a child.
Judas in Later Gospel Traditions
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

The earliest Christians lived in an oral culture. It is hard to establish reli- able demographic figures for the ancient world, but the best estimates suggest that at the time of the first Christian centuries, in the Roman Empire, only about 10 percent of the population was literate. That means that nine out of ten people could not read, let alone write. Those who could write—and by that I mean be able to compose entire paragraphs—were a much smaller per- centage. The vast majority of people living at the time of Jesus and in the centuries after could not write a sentence if their life depended on it.
Before the Discovery: Our Previous Knowledge of a Gospel of Judas
Authors: Ehrman Bart D
Published: November 2023

Thirty years ago, most of the reading public did not know that we have numerous Gospels from early Christianity that did not make it into the New Testament. To some extent that changed when Elaine Pagels published her best-selling study The Gnostic Gospels, a book that captivated a wide read- ership. But even Pagels’s book did not reach the masses: it was mainly written for, and read by, highly educated people with an interest in the history of early Christianity.
Harper
Authors: Robertson Lindsay G
Published: November 2023

While the Illinois and Wabash speculators were exploiting the young nation’s instability to further their claims to lands in the Northwest Territory, the New England Mississippi Land Company was attempting the same to appropriate title to lands farther south. Ultimately, the New England Mississippi Land Company’s chief counsel, Robert Goodloe Harper, would present both its claims and those of the United Illinois and Wabash Land Companies to the Supreme Court, tying together two of the Court’s most important early decisions, Johnson v. M’Intosh and Fletcher v. Peck, and setting the stage for the judicial conquest of Native America.
The Opinion
Authors: Robertson Lindsay G
Published: November 2023

John Marshall’s goal in drafting Johnson was to deny the Illinois and Wabash claims and lay the groundwork for the successful resolution of the claims of the Virginia militia grantees and their transferees. His judgment on the Proclamation of 1763 challenge would take care of the former but do nothing to help resolve the latter. Protecting the Virginia militia grantees required establishing that by its grants Virginia had actually conveyed a property right that would oblige Kentucky to recognize the grantees’ claims to land. This required first establishing that Virginia itself possessed a right that it could convey. It may be recalled that the British Crown had claimed a “preemption” right to lands west of the Proclamation of 1763 line: an exclusive right to purchase those lands, whenever the Indians were willing to sell. Virginia’s right had to be something more. If Virginia had conveyed to the militia grantees an exclusive right to purchase lands and Kentucky had chosen to ignore the preemption right and dis tribute the lands itself, the militia grantees would have had no legal remedy against Kentucky. A state-granted preemption right was enforceable only against other claimants within the state. Marshall’s challenge was to establish that Virginia had actually owned the Chickasaw lands.
Judging and Hoping
Authors: Mailloux Steven
Published: November 2023

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran vividly stages Iranian receptions of novels by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen. This “memoir in books” itself became a popular object of reception as a 2003 best-seller in the United States, a reception demonstrating the rhetorical effects of reading about reading in a globalized culture that is always local. American reviewers and academic critics of Reading Lolita not only testify to the power of these effects but also interpret and evaluate the acts of reading represented in the book they are reviewing. Specifically, they judge the hope offered by a book about college students reading and judging classic novels of “Western secular values” within a political context dominated by a theological autocracy—the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Richard Wright’s Native Son
Authors: Goldstein Philip
Published: November 2023

It is well known that Native Son is a naturalist protest novel in which Wright shows how racial discrimination and class oppression destroy Bigger Thomas, the novel’s hero. It is equally well known that Native Son depicts Bigger’s existential struggle for liberation. Less familiar is the incompatibility of these accounts. As the contrary responses of many critics testify, to treat the novel as protest fiction is to deny that Bigger wins liberation, whereas to treat the novel as a modernist or existential depiction of Bigger’s liberation is to deny that the novel protests his oppression and victimization.1 In other words, if he is liberated, the system does not defeat him, whereas if the system defeats him, he does not liberate himself. A liberated victim is a contradiction in terms. Edward Margolies comments, “Wright does not seem to be able to make up his mind. The reader feels that Wright, though intellectually committed to” the communist views of Max the lawyer, “is more emotionally akin to Bigger’s” existential views (79–80).
Learning from Philistines
Authors: Diepeveen Leonard
Published: November 2023

In an article entitled “Left Bankers Believe Bob Brown’s Pill Box Book Reading Machine Will Help Them Absorb Dozen Gertrude Stein Novels in Afternoon,” a reporter in the second decade of the twentieth century quipped: His idea is a mechanical reading machine which will move so swiftly that only major words will assault the mind and leave their impressions. Commas, capital letters, periods, the thes, buts, and all punctuation marks and articles—will be minimized, slaughtered, made entirely useless. And, with the public accustomed to such reading, surrealism will be more understandable. (Montparno)
Discourses in Dialogue
Authors: Templin Charlotte
Published: November 2023

Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, published in 1972, was the first important novel to emerge from the women’s liberation movement. The early novels of such writers as Shulman, Erica Jong, and Marilyn French were lightning rods—the focus for a multitude of fears about changes in the status quo in a time of significant social transformation. The reception of these novels, and in particular of Shulman’s novel, reveals the complexity of the network of discursive structures and the way they organize aesthetic responses.
Kiss Me Deadly
Authors: Staiger Janet
Published: November 2023

Media studies have been engaged in academic analysis of audiences for at least ninety years. As early as 1914, the Reverend J. J. Phelan used surveys to study movie preferences of children, and in 1915 William Healy published a book on the relationship between watching films and juvenile delinquency, basing his arguments on case studies (Jowett et al. 26). Since then, the mass audiences of film, and then radio and television, have produced a profitable field for reception research on both everyday and fan spectatorship. Scarcely a subject or method has not been explored in at least an introductory way (Staiger, Media). A rich literature exists on fans, cult movies, stars, readers of various subjectivities, and violence, horror, and sexually explicit materials.
History
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

31 March–29 June 1929: Vicki Baum publishes Menschen im Hotel (rendered in English as Grand Hotel) as a serialized novel in the Berliner Illustritre Zeitung. The novel will appear later that year in book form, this time under the title Menschen im Hotel: Ein Kolportageroman mit Hintergründen (Hotel People: A Pulp Novel with Undercurrents). January 1930: Menschen im Hotel opens as a play in Berlin, directed by Gustaf Gründgens, who will soon play underworld boss Schränker in Fritz Lang’s M. Gründgens will became famous as a director and actor, particularly for his stagings of Faust; he will Jews will lose their lives, Hitler and Hitlerism will pass; the Jews will still be there.” (He sees Communism as the greater threat.) Dr. Groedel, himself Jewish, will soon leave Germany for a New York practice. In 1936, he will attend Thalberg on his deathbed.
Jazz
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Disgusted by Grusinskaya’s premature departure from the theater, her manager (Meierheim) pronounces the death-knell of the ancien régime. “After this,” he tells Pimenov, “it’s no more ballet for me. Jazz, just jazz.” Arno J. Mayer’s famous book long ago detailed “the persistence of the old regime,” the aristocratic tastes and values that survived all of Europe’s bourgeois revolutions, enduring until World War I. With its ballerina heroine and Blue Danube sound- track, Grand Hotel represents that “persistence.” “I am only old fashioned,” Grusinskaya admits to the Baron in Baum’s novel. “I am from another world, another century.” The name for the new century, on the other hand, will be the Jazz Age, and this shift from high to vernacular culture represents many of the other postwar transformations: the relocation of power to America, the search for non-European musical influences, the aristocracy’s final collapse.
Learning to Dance
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

To Flaemmchen in the Yellow Room, Kringelein confesses that he has never before danced in public. He stumbles, concentrates on his feet, and moves hesitantly. Why doesn’t Kringelein know how to dance? Grand Hotel’s “realistic” answer is Kringelein’s status as a poor factory bookkeeper (“Room 23, Building C, third floor”) who doesn’t get out much. The real answer is because he doesn’t go to the movies. During the studio era, for a provincial audience unaccustomed to travel or sophistication, the cinema served as an ongoing instruction manual, teaching its viewers how to do unfamiliar things: check into a luxury hotel, walk a dog through a lobby, order a cocktail, get in and out of a limousine, tip a bellboy, flirt with a pretty young stranger, dress for dinner, dance.
Values
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

For American audiences in 1932, Grand Hotel may have seemed “grown-up” and “European” simply because its characters were so casually “corrupt,” especially about sex and property: Flaemmchen is a prostitute, who admits to living off men. She agrees to Preysing’s offer of “an arrangement.” Preysing lies to the Saxonia Company about his deal with Manchester.
Buenos Aires
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

In its transposition from play to movie, The Philadelphia Story relocates missing brother Junius’s embassy from London to Buenos Aires, while also assigning to Dexter the Spy job held in the play by another brother, Sandy Lord, eliminated entirely from the film. Dexter, too, has been working in South America since his divorce. In 1940, “Buenos Aires” represents both a capitulation to world events and a gesture toward verisimilitude. With England at war since 1939, London has become too important to house a dilettante journalist like Dexter and, in a comedy, too dangerous for even an offscreen Junius. Like almost all screwball comedies (To Be or Not to Be is the exception), The Philadelphia Story depends on a strict isolationism. Thus, the movie cannot acknowledge the European war, even implicitly. “Buenos Aires” represents a kind of euphemism—an actual place, too remote to evoke any immediate connotations that might interfere with the narrative’s machinery. (See The Maltese Falcon: Honolulu.).
Dive
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

With classic Hollywood movies, even the smallest details open into complexities. After quarreling with Dexter, who has called her (among other things) a “virgin god- dess,” Tracy sheds her bath-robe and then, dressed only in a pale-striped white bathing suit, walks determinedly to the diving board. Having climbed up, she pauses, glances off screen left (in the direction of the now- departed Dexter), squares her shoulders, and dives into the pool. The shot lasts under 15 seconds, unaccompanied by any dialogue or music. It seems longer. Tracy’s dive is one of The Philadelphia Story’s most memorable images.
Framing
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Cukor told Peter Bogdanovich that although he didn’t believe in “meticulous,” line-by-line rehearsing, he often asked his actors to practice “the movement” of a scene: “They walk through it and they indicate it; they try it themselves. And I’m looking for camera angles; it just helps me, really.” Cukor, of course, was talking about framing, an aspect of filmmaking neglected by most critics. Eisenstein’s abiding prestige has always made editing seem the cinema’s most important tool, and unless a movie’s framing deploys the obvious devices inherited from German expressionism (grotesque tilts, extreme low or high angles), it usually gets ignored. Cukor’s choices, however—subtle, almost perfectly transparent—contribute enormously to The Philadelphia Story’s effect. They amount to the movie’s invisible writing, which can be made to appear only through comparisons to other, less-successful films. Juxtaposing identical scenes in The Philadelphia Story and High Society, the musical remake, confirms that the aptness of Cukor’s framing is primarily a function of his camera’s distance from the events being recorded.
Light
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

The greatest classic Hollywood films seem endlessly mysterious, evocative, surprising. Despite the increasingly sophisticated analytical tools developed by film studies, the effect of these movies, so often dependent on formulaic plots and stock characters, continues to elude complete explanation. In the 1920s, the French impressionist filmmakers struggled to make explicit the intuition they called photogénie, “the purest expression of cinema.” Jean Epstein’s approach suggests a discourse seeking to account for the cinema’s magic while approximating its spell: The cinema is essentially supernatural. Every thing is transformed. All volumes are displaced and reach flashpoint. Life recruits atoms, molecular movement is as sensual as the hips of a woman or young man. The hills harden like muscles. The universe is on edge. The philosopher’s light. The atmosphere is heavy with love. I am looking.
Vegetation
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

With its lush, suburban setting, The Philadelphia Story rejects screwball comedy’s typical New York world of art deco apartments and stream- lined skyscrapers. Instead, the Lord mansion appears in its establishing shot proudly surrounded by trees, lawns, and shrubbery. Inside, the house is a virtual arboretum, with plants sprouting from corners and flowers floating on every tabletop. As the film progresses, the vegetation becomes increasingly prominent. Indeed, after Mike and Tracy walk home from the library, through a park she casually identifies as “part of our place,” only three brief scenes will take place indoors: Mike’s nocturnal visit to Dexter, Dexter’s goodnight to Liz, and the final flurry of proposals that leads to the wedding in a room crammed with enormous bouquets. Significantly, no one is ever shown tending to anything; all the flora seem to operate on their own. In other words, the movie ignores physical labor while displaying its picturesque results, precisely the practice of studio filmmaking.
Yare
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

This esoteric word, initially an assessment of Dexter’s sailboat, the True Love, appears twice in The Philadelphia Story, the first time suggesting the filmmakers’ assumptions that (a) Kittredge must not understand it, and (b) the audience will also require an explanation. “Yare, what does that mean?” George asks, stand- ing in for us. Tracy’s definition (“quick to the helm, fast, right, everything a boat should be”) may suggest her intellectual superiority over George, whom Dexter has described as “beneath” her (“a difference of mind”). But since Tracy has proved incapable of spelling omelet, her vocabulary signifies not differences of intelligence but of class. The film could more effectively imply George’s intellectual inferiority by demonstrating his ignorance of a common word known to the audience.
Golden Gate Bridge
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon immediately establishes its setting by superimposing “SAN FRANCISCO” over stock footage of the Bay and Golden Gate bridges. Popular narratives, as Barthes saw, are “marked by the excessive fear of failing to communicate meaning”; hence, they rely on “a certain redundancy, a kind of semantic prattle.” Studio Hollywood will always assume the viewer’s ignorance of even unmistakable landmarks: The Eiffel Tower must come equipped with an explicit marker, “PARIS.” And yet, commercial filmmaking also practices a certain laconic economy, dependent on the audience’s knowledge of stereotypes.
Journeys
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

This chart, with its blank spaces, suggests The Maltese Falcon’s mixture of precision and incompleteness. The prologue’s scroll (“In 1539 the Knight Templars of Malta paid tribute to Charles V of Spain by sending him a golden falcon . . .”) and Gutman’s history lesson track the peregrinations of both statue and pursuers. But about biographical details not crucial to its immediate narrative, the film remains discreet. When was Gutman born? Where was Brigid before Istanbul? What is Cairo’s real national- ity? How did Gutman find Wilmer, whom Spade identifies as a New Yorker? When Victorian fiction’s full-disclosure character introductions gave way to modernism’s elliptical impressionism, readers learned to accept a new condition: judgments must be made even in the absence of sufficient information. Ford Madox Ford described this situation: Supposing that your name is John, and that you have a friend called James, and for private reasons of his own James takes you into his billiard room and tries to shoot you with a rifle.
Red Herrings
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

While The Maltese Falcon’s plot offers numerous false trails, red herrings that lead nowhere, Effie plays a decisive role in two of them. “Suppose I told you,” she remarks to Spade the day after Archer’s murder, “that your Iva hadn’t been home many minutes when I arrived to break the news at three o’clock this morning?” Spade quickly dismisses Effie’s suggestion: “You’re a detective, darling, but she didn’t kill him.” But how can he be so casually sure? Given Iva’s infatuation with Spade, Effie’s revelation provides her with not only the motive but also the opportunity to have killed her husband. This possibility, of course, will come to nothing, and indeed the movie will simply abandon it, never providing any explanation for Iva’s whereabouts on that night.
Threes
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

be surprising, therefore, that it took Warner Brothers three tries to succeed with The Maltese Falcon. If we posit the 1931 version as the “informational” presentation of Hammett’s story (the facts, characters, and situations are all there) and Satan Met a Lady as the “symbolic” account (the same events and people have become comically allegorical), then the success of Huston’s Maltese Falcon derives from its “third meanings,” the photogenic appeal of Bogart’s louche resourcefulness, of Greenstreet’s rolling Shakespearean rhythm, of Astor’s perpetually surprised features, of the sets’ austere elegance, of the unexpected contents of Cairo’s pocket.
Umbrella
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

In rainy San Francisco, only Joel Cairo carries an umbrella, which he erotically caresses as he flirts with Spade. The umbrella’s dainty handle and polished sheen, Cairo’s white gloves and bow tie, his prissy manners and dainty stature— the signs converge to suggest the stereotyped homosexual, a figure banned from explicit representation by the Hays Office. Huston’s film quickly covers its traces: When Spade emerges from his office after his encounter with Cairo, the wet sidewalks retroactively justify the umbrella, providing an alibi for the previous scene’s codes, naturalized by “the weather.
Yells
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

The Maltese Falcon’s abstract, hermetic quality derives partially from its minimal evocation of off screen space, as if its plot were a chemistry experiment dependent on the reduction of variables. The avoidance of location shooting, the suppression of sounds coming from the edges of the story space (like the street and office noises in Godard’s Masculine-Feminine), the strict adherence of the camera to the main characters—these choices produce a self-contained world that rarely refers beyond itself.
Art Director
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Vincente Minnelli was one of only two major Hollywood filmmakers who began as art directors (the other was Hitchcock). Having started in Chicago designing shop windows for Marshall Field’s, Minnelli quickly graduated to New York, where he worked for the Paramount Theater, moonlighting with Earl Carroll’s Vanities. For Carroll, Minnelli displayed his two principal influences: contemporary art deco and the Russian Ballet’s lush, decadent orientalism (“a decidedly Negroid sense of color,” Robert Benchley called it in the New Yorker). In 1933, he became art director of Radio City Music Hall, which, after an enormously publicized December 1932 opening, had nearly failed. At Radio City, Minnelli produced the kind of elaborate, sophisticated kitsch that paralleled Busby Berkeley’s simultaneous inventions for Warner Brothers (see 42nd Street). By 1934, Minnelli was staging his own monthly Radio City spectacles: “Coast to Coast,” for example, took audiences on tours of the Riviera, Ascot, Africa, and San Francisco, all concocted from picture books and paintings of places he had never seen. Two years later, he was directing Broadway musicals, including some work on a 1936 revival of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies (in which Bob Hope introduced “I Can’t Get Started”). His finale, 1939’s Very Warm for May, was a famous flop, the last of the Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein collaborations, wrecked by changes Minnelli ordered out of town. Even the show’s great hit, “All the Things You Are,” couldn’t save it.
Cat (Agnes’s and Bertrand Russell’s)
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

In the opening kitchen sequence, Agnes sits holding her cat, LadyBabby, preparing to decorate her with a blue ribbon. After threeshots (lasting 26 seconds) of Mrs. Smith, Grandpa, and Rose, thecamera rediscovers Agnes, completing a bow in the ribbon thatnow encircles Lady Babby’s neck.
Entrance (Mr. Smith’s)
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

As the family sits in the dining room, eating ice cream after the flurry of Halloween adventures (a scene that reveals Garland’s left-handedness), Mr. Smith suddenly enters. Although Esther’s previous arrival has been announced by the offscreen, right, sound of the front door’s closing, neither a door nor footsteps precedes Mr. Smith, whose abrupt appearance from a direction without a previously established door seems uncanny. In fact, this stealthy entrance is narratively motivated. With all immediate crises averted (Tootie’s lip has been repaired, Esther and John have overcome their shyness), the movie seems to be ending after running for barely an hour. Mr. Smith’s abrupt entrance, however, resembles his only other noticeable arrival, when he halts Rose’s and Esther’s singing of “Meet Me in St. Louis” and does his unwitting best to ruin Rose’s long-distance call. Mr. Smith’s entrances, in other words, disrupt utopia, and the unexpectedness of this one implies that something bad is about to happen. It will: Mr. Smith announces the move to New York.
Names
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

In Meet Me in St. Louis, the original stories’ “Waughop” becomes “Braukoff,” a homonym for “beerhead.” This unsubtle character- ization reveals the calculus of names permeating the movie. Braukoff reduces to “Germanic,” “alcoholic,” “hostile,” metonymized in the name’s pronunciation: a severe brow punctuated by the staccato, pestilent burst of a cough. In the midst of World War II, his name stamps him indelibly. (Tootie: “I hate you, Mr. Braukoff!”) In comparison, the protagonists’ surname, the bland and obviously preferable “Smith,” conceals the family’s Catholicism (present in the book) while also referring to it (New York governor Alfred E. Smith, who in 1928 had become the first Catholic presidential candidate). The universal Anglo-American surname, redolent of industry and steadiness, Smith carries no negative connotations.
Orioles
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Although a Baltimore team called the Orioles (with John McGraw and Willie Keeler) competed in the National League from 1892 through 1899 and in the American League in 1901– 1902, by 1903 the “Baltimore Orioles” no longer existed, having moved to New York to become the Highlanders (and eventually the Yankees). Thus, the team anticipated the Smith family’s relocation. The modern Baltimore Orioles would only resume 50 years later when the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore in 1953 and revived the name. The allusion, in other words, provides another example of Meet Me in St. Louis’s selective, intermittent historical accuracy, designed less to reproduce the real 1903–1904 than the popular memory of it. Like the sham- poo that Rose is “bringing from downtown” For most of the musical numbers, Minnelli admitted, Judy Garland provided “the much-needed continuing thread in the integration of the songs to the story.” In the case of Meet Me in St. Louis, the audience knows that Judy Garland sings: her stardom derives from that talent. Thus, the audience will readily ascribe this ability to Esther, making it seem “natural” for her to break into song. With this predilection for spontaneous singing already built into Esther’s character, the film can seem “realistic” by simply coaxing this character trait to the surface.
Red
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Although we know that MGM constructed a full-scale model of 5135 Kensington Avenue, all areas of the house seem to shift in relationship to each other, thereby rendering the exact architecture uncertain. Where is the kitchen in relation to the front door? Does the older sisters’ bedroom connect to that of Agnes and Tootie? How did Mr. Smith enter the house on Halloween? How many rooms are there on the ground floor? In 1969, having lost his nerve during a solo race around the world, Donald Crowhurst began to sail aimlessly up and down the coast of South America, forging progress by means of fake radio signals, bounced from different satellites to indicate navigationally significant positions. Like Crowhurst’s “voyage,” the Smith house is an effect of carefully orchestrated, but frequently contradictory, clues; it is, in other words, despite the presence of its referent, a working simulation. Or, in another analogy, it resembles the pulse achieved by certain African music, never itself played, but implied by the different elements surrounding it.
Tennis Racket
Authors: Ray Robert B
Published: November 2023

Judy Garland enters Meet Me in St. Louis carrying a tennis racket, thereby suggesting that her character has a rich off screen life in places not covered by the movie. We do not quite know how to account for this effect. A photograph seems “real” to the extent that its people and objects appear to have an existence that exceeds the image, both before and after the shutter’s click. Thus, candid snapshots often seem more “genuine” than composed portraits. By combining narrative with photography and stringing images into sequences, the cinema complicates the matter. Judy Garland entering the frame carrying a tennis racket, for example, while part of a story, is not the equivalent of the sentence “She entered carrying a tennis racket,” a statement with no truth value before its composition.