bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Coffin
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In a shot unlike any other in Grand Hotel, the Baron’s coffin is loaded onto a Dickensian horse-drawn hearse and taken away. Outside the hotel’s luxury, beyond the film’s carefully planned sets and calculated lighting, something leaks through. Workers go about their unnamed business, moving in and out of overexposed sunlight and underlit shadows, as if in a documentary, or a dream. Men load packages, laughing and shouting, as the Baron’s body leaves the hotel. Any detailed description of this scene would necessarily include these elements.
Flaemmchen
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Flaemmchen (or Flämmchen, as Baum writes the name), is the diminutive of Flamme, “little flame.” While her name suggests the character’s sexual appeal and casual virtue, it also evokes the German expression auf kleiner Flammen kochen, literally “to cook over little flames” or “to make do with very little,” a connotation suiting Flaemmchen, who, as she admits to the Baron, gets by on “one meal a day.” The translation into English, however, sheds these connotations, and by doing so shifts Grand Hotel’s register from allegory to novel. In a famous objection to what he referred to as Anthony Trollope’s “fantastic names,” Henry James proposed: It is impossible to imagine what a novelist takes himself to be unless he regard himself as an historian and his narrative as a history. It is only as an historian that he has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere.
Garbo
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Although to a modern audience, the Greta Garbo of Grand Hotel appears at least in her mid-30s, she was only 26 during the movie’s filming and thus 6 years younger than Julia Roberts in Notting Hill, 10 years younger than Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality, and 11 years younger than Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, all of whom seem, to contemporary eyes, far younger. Why? We know, of course, that standards of beauty evolve and that Garbo’s statuesque perfection (celebrated by Roland Barthes) has given way to a more idiosyncratic “cuteness.” When did this transformation begin? A quick answer: at some point between 1932, with Grand Hotel, and 1945, when the remake, Week-end at the Waldorf, replaced Garbo with the cute-not- beautiful Ginger Rogers, 34 at the time, but still capable of doing (as Garbo never was) what David Thomson calls “her child impersonations” (see The Major and the Minor, where the Garbo’s stardom, however, does seem vaguely threatening.
Kringelein’s Disease
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Kringelein is dying, but the movie cannot name his disease, whose narrative function resembles that of Rick’s mysterious crime in Casablanca. Rick “cannot return to his country,” as Major Strasser summarizes. “The reason is a little vague.” Like Gatsby’s past, Rick’s offense must remain unspecified, for while anything less than murder (e.g., theft, forgery) would make Rick simply a common criminal, any capital crime would disqualify him as Ilsa’s suitor. Similarly, Grand Hotel’s narrative evades particulars. Naming Kringelein’s disease (e.g., cancer, ALS) would evoke both existing symptoms and inevitable outcome, thereby disabling the movie’s fragile happy ending, Kringelein’s flight to Paris with Flaemmchen. Since in her memoirs, Vicki Baum was less discreet (Kringelein, she revealed, has stomach cancer), we suspect that Grand Hotel’s silence results from an attempt to avoid what Susan Sontag identified as cancer’s connotations: scandal, contamination, the violation of a taboo. Thus, Grand Hotel’s spectator becomes like a cancer patient, “lied to, not just because the disease is (or is thought to be) a death sentence, but because it is felt to be obscene.” Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor contrasts cancer with tuberculosis, romanti- cally associated with heightened artistic sensibilities (the myth of Keats, The Magic Mountain). Just four years before Baum’s Grand Hotel, another novel appeared, also in German, written by a clerk, dying like Kringelein: The Trial.
Numbers
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Like Pride and Prejudice, Grand Hotel assigns precise value to every detail. Thus, we know: Kringelein’s monthly salary is 320 marks. Every minute on the lobby telephones costs 2 marks 90. Flaemmchen was to earn 1,000 marks, plus clothing expenses, for becoming Preysing’s temporary mistress. The Baron owes the burglary ring 5,000 marks. Kringelein has 13,600 marks in his pocketbook: 3,400 from his savings and 10,200 from his gambling winnings. Kringelein gives Flaemmchen 3,200 marks to go with him and promises her the rest of his money after he dies.
Room Assignments
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The new arrangement’s ability to imply a realistic space depends on its being asserted only in passing. In classic Hollywood filmmaking, a descendant of the nineteenth-century novel, overt schema appear as what Barthes called “prattle,” a vestige of earlier narrative forms’ insecurity about communication. The modern viewer will experience any obvious communiqués as “corny” and heavy-handed. Thus, although the film either shows or tells us exactly where most of the main characters are staying (Dr. Otternschlag is the exception), this information almost never calls attention to itself. It remains available for retrieval, but only by the kind of fetishistic re-viewing discouraged by the studios, always eager to sell their next product. Room numbers, therefore, simply appear on doors, usually in the background, unannounced. When someone actually mentions a number, the film works to divert our attention, like a magician using sleight of hand. Ballet master Pimenov’s request for his room key, “Number 168,” for example, occurs so quickly and inconsequentially (we never see him enter or leave his room) that noticing the number requires actively looking for it—as opposed to following the story.
Telephone
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
In their celebrations of photogénie, proposed as “the purest expression of cinema,” the French impressionist filmmakers often treated narrative as an obstacle to be overcome. “The telephone rings,” Jean Epstein complained, pointing to the event that so often initiates a plot. “All is lost.” Instead of stories, the French championed the movies’ intermittent intensities (a face, a landscape, an actor’s movement, the fall of light across a room) that break free from the sometimes indifferent movies containing them. As a production strategy, however, photogénie was complicated. The impressionists’ own films proved static and dull: intensities, it turned out, work best when they emerge from a narrative background and seem to arrest the story that generated them. (Sunrise’s trolley sequence, a respite from the movie’s conventional melodrama, provides this effect’s ideal example.) Nevertheless, if the impressionists were right to equate photogénie with the cinema itself, the Hollywood studios could not ignore the concept. Hence another “equation of pictures”: how to balance the demands of narrative with the attractions of photogénie? Grand Hotel offers one solution. Even if we ignore the switchboard scenes, the movie contains 21 calls, many of them important to a plot that symbolically turns on Preysing’s murder of the Baron, when the telephone becomes an instrument of violence. And yet, by consistently using an overhead angle to remake the switchboard into a visual design, Grand Hotel creates photogenic “intensity” out of what would otherwise function as simply a narrative building block. In those shots, the telephones are ringing, but nothing is lost.
X
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
This figure, joining two (unfinished) triangles at a nexus, repre- sents one image of Grand Hotel’s structure: Flaemmchen connects the two triangles of Grusinskaya-Baron-Flaemmchen and Preysing- Kringelein-Flaemmchen. By revealing her character as the movie’s center, the fulfills Crawford’s ambition to make the soubrette part more important than the grande dame’s, an achievement not accomplished by the Broadway musical until South Pacific, which would banish the grande dame role into Bloody Mary’s parody. In fact, at the time of Grand Hotel, Crawford and Garbo were the same age (26). And despite the X (which, as a butterfly, insinuates itself into her ballet costume), Garbo dominates the movie.
Elizabeth Imbrie
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Playing the Eve Arden role, a wisecracking working woman, Ruth Hussey was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She didn’t win, and although only 25 at the time of The Philadelphia Story, she would never get close to stardom again. A Brown philosophy major, she seems to have simply grown impatient with Hollywood. She shifted to Broadway, where she had her greatest success in 1945’s State of the Union, in a role given to Katharine Hepburn for the movie version. Hussey provides yet another link to The Great Gatsby, a book that everywhere shadows The Philadelphia Story: In the 1949 film version, she would play Jordan Baker, Nick Carraway’s friend who has cheated at golf.
Intoxication
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Sometimes what has become objectionable behavior can date a film as much as its characters’ clothes. Dexter pushes Tracy to the ground, and a modern audience thinks “domestic abuse.” As he waits to meet the Lords, Connor lights one cigarette after another, and we think “lung cancer.” So drunk she can barely keep her eyes open, Tracy drives Mike home from Dexter’s house. Indeed, all the movie’s visible signs of intoxication, and the resulting hangovers, are played for laughs, with censure reserved for Dexter’s prior, and hence conveniently off screen, alcoholism. “I’d sell my grandmother for a drink,” Mike proclaims at noon on wedding day, blithely adopting the prevailing mores.
Joe Smith
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Somewhere back among what Fitzgerald called “the lost Swede towns” of the upper Midwest, always Hollywood shorthand for the “real America,” Macaulay Connor has grown up in South Bend, Indiana (Tracy: “South Bend! It sounds like dancing”), and Liz Imbrie of Duluth (“it’s west of here, isn’t it?”) has been married to “Joe Smith, hardware.” Like Tracy’s missing brother, Junius, Joe Smith will remain offscreen, fostering some anxiety in the viewer accustomed to having all characters present and accounted for. (The obvious analogy: sounds issuing from unidentified offscreen sources, a recurring feature of horror films.) Nevertheless, “Joe Smith, hardware” offers the pleasures of the uncanny. Jimmy Stewart, whose Best Actor Academy Award for The Philadelphia Story seemed a payback for the more deserving, but nonwinning, performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, kept the Oscar statuette proudly displayed in his father’s hardware store on Philadelphia Street in his oxymoronically named hometown, Indiana, Pennsylvania.
Notecards
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
While waiting with Liz to meet the Lords, Mike catalogs objects and wedding presents on notecards. After running through his research on Kittredge and Seth Lord, he stops at Tracy’s card, asking, “What’s her leading characteristic?” “I can fill them in right now,” he tells Liz. “The young, rich, rapacious American female. There’s no other country where she exists.” This desire to simplify signification mimics studio era filmmaking, which reduced actors to types for the purposes of narrative economy. As played by Jimmy Stewart, Mike himself is a type, the goodhearted, down- to-earth midwesterner, and by 1940, Katharine Hepburn certainly represented precisely the type of character The Philadelphia Story asks her to play.
PA55
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
As Mike and Tracy leave the suburban library, they pass a car with the license plate PA55, an object that demonstrates Hollywood’s use of marginal details. While the PA indicates “Pennsylvania,” and thus contributes to the movie’s verisimilitude, the 55 is random: changing the number would have no effect on the film. Indeed, the number’s realistic effect depends precisely on its meaning- lessness. Any obviously significant number (e.g., 1940, 1776, Hepburn’s age) would undermine its status. The realism of these “futile,” “useless” details, in other words, derives from the assumption of reality’s inscrutability. As Barthes observed about what he called “the reality effect”: “The pure and simple ‘representation’ of the ‘real’ . . . thus appears as a resistance to meaning; this resistance confirms the great mythic opposition of the true-to- life (the lifelike) and the intelligible.” The Philadelphia Story’s characters rarely engage with any parts of the set (Dinah’s piano and Tracy’s swimming pool are the great exceptions.
Zingers
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
With Barry’s play as its blueprint, The Philadelphia Story relies on a verbal repartee that becomes a means of intimacy. Zingers abound: Liz uses them to bring Mike down to earth, Dinah punctuates family conversations with them, and Dexter deploys them as weapons against Kittredge. “I suppose I should object,” George remarks, upon finding Tracy and Dexter together. “That would be most objection- able,” replies Dexter, a typical exchange. Barry’s dialogue, as Cukor explained to Gavin Lambert, “seemed to be realistic, but it wasn’t really. The words always had a kind of rhythm underneath them, and the speech was sometimes quite elaborate.” “Can you use a type- writer?” Dexter asks, eager to have a formal copy made of Connor’s dirt on Sidney Kidd. “No thanks, I already have one,” Liz replies.
Doorbell
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Returning home after visiting the Archer murder scene, Spade takes off his coat and sits on the side of his bed, pouring a drink. A doorbell buzzes insistently from off screen. Spade looks to his left, apparently toward the sound. acknowledge the scandal of some illogicality, some disturbance of ‘common sense.’” The Maltese Falcon defends itself with speed, rushing Spade from murder scene to telephone to apartment, using the rapid dissolves that provide the movie with almost all of its transitions and keep the viewer from asking too many questions. Ultimately, Spade’s call and Iva’s admission match; by confirming each other, they forestall scrutiny of the movie’s logic. Spade’s unnecessary stop also serves to fill in spaces mentioned elsewhere in the film. “The readerly abhors a vacuum,” Barthes insisted, using his own term for commercial storytelling; its goal is always “an illusion of continuity.” A drugstore immediately “across from” Spade’s apartment is too close to leave unseen.
Edeson
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
With a nearly famous last name (Thomas Edison, after all, had been one of the movies’ inventors), The Maltese Falcon’s head cameraman, Arthur Edeson, had a long and distinguished career. In 1919, he had helped found the American Society of Cinematog- raphers, and he quickly developed a reputation as Douglas Fairbanks’s preferred director of photography. “The Maltese Falcon called for strong, modernistic, eye-arresting camerawork,” Edeson recalled, and his compositions, with their deep-focus low angles, resemble those of the more celebrated Gregg Toland, who shot Citizen Kane the same year. Edeson would go on to film both Casablanca and The Mask of Dimitrios, but the complete absence of any mention of him in two standard reference books on John Huston (Lesley Brill’s John Huston’s Filmmaking and Robert Emmet Long’s collection John Huston Interviews) confirms just how success- ful la politique des auteurs has been in gathering attention to directors. Both Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon were directorial.
Flitcraft
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
“A man named Flitcraft,” Spade tells Brigid in the novel, “had left his real-estate office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned.” He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement less than half an hour before he went out to luncheon. His wife and children never saw him again. His wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living.
Kitchen
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Twice in The Maltese Falcon, Spade’s apartment “kitchen” changes status from its existence as merely an undefined door to an imaginary room. In the first instance, Spade’s conversation with Brigid continues even as he slips through the door and offscreen. His emergence with a coffee pot (the narratively appropriate synecdoche) encourages the viewer to “fill in” the unseen area, supplying it with the appliances and utensils that name it “kitchen.
L a Paloma
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
“Do you know who he is?” Effie asks Spade, referring to the man who has delivered the Falcon to them before dying at their feet. “Yeah, he’s Captain Jacobi, master of the La Paloma.” Hammett’s novel had explicitly rejected the redundancy: “What about Miss O’Shaughnessy?” she [Effie] de- manded.
Maltese Cross
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
The Maltese Falcon inadvertently deploys the iconography of Nazism, almost certainly familiar to an audience in 1941, when Hitler’s European conquests had reached their peak. The eagle statue on Spade’s desk, its head turned to the left, had been a widely circulated image of Germany’s ruling party, and the globe on Spade’s office cabinet refers obliquely to the world events dominating newsreels. In Bogart’s next major success, Casablanca, maps of Africa will give way to a spinning globe that stops on Europe, and the of Spade’s desk, he leans forward to leer at Miss Wonderly. The most important code defining “Archer” is, however, Jerome Cowan, the character actor who plays him. Only two years older than Bogart, Cowan appeared in 132 movies, typically in comic parts. By The Maltese Falcon, he had already been in 39 films, never as a star. Thus, the audience would not be surprised by his sudden disappearance from the movie. He is also the only character with a mustache. At some point in the late 1930s, somewhere between The Thin Man (1934) and The Maltese Falcon (1941), the pencil mustache shifts from being the signifier of urban sophistication (William Powell) to that of a lounge lizard’s lechery (Jerome Cowan). Thus, precisely because the cinema lacks literature’s assertive power, its history amounts to a record of cultural taste, the vagaries of style, the ceaseless dissolve of fashion.
Newspapers
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
Like so many Warner Brothers movies, often advertised as “torn from the headlines,” The Maltese Falcon uses newspapers to advance its plot: The close-up of the San Francisco Post-Dispatch front page, with its headline “THURSBY, ARCHER MURDERS LINKED!” provides the transition between the Dundy-Polhaus inter- rogation of Spade and his arrival at his office the next day. become increasingly out of sync with its viewers’ as the movie ages. The movies, in other words, even when new, are always history.
Quay
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
How does a set-bound film stage the burning of a large freighter? In The Maltese Falcon, a dissolve takes us from the “Shipping News” notice of La Paloma’s arrival to a medium shot of a fireman scaling a ladder toward what seems a burning ship. The cut to grainy stock footage of a smaller boat (a documentary image roughly docked to the quay of the movie’s narrative) calls attention to the artificial nature of what follows: a mastless vessel rising to a visible ceiling, attended to by men wearing uniforms labeled “Los Angeles Fire Department.
Value
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
These values, a brief history of fetishism and its production, suggest Hollywood’s success in stimulating desire for the referential grail. In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechani- cal Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin argued that the new media, especially photography and film, had annulled the traditional distinction between original and copy: Asking for “the original copy” of a snapshot dead-ends in an oxymoron. And yet, Ben- jamin was wrong to predict that mechanical reproducibility would destroy “cult value.” If in the cinema, an “original” does not exist (where are The Maltese Falcon’s hotels and apartments and streets? like all sets, struck after their usefulness has ended), that condi- tion has encouraged an even greater longing for it. The movies were always designed for exchange value, that ungrounded worth existing only in circulation and desire. The Maltese Falcon itself represents this situation, converting its viewers into seekers for the unattainable.
Webley-Forsby
Authors: Ray Robert B 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
“A Webley-Forsby 45-automatic, eight-shot,” Spade replies, responding to Polhaus’s request to identify Archer’s murder weapon. “They don’t make them any more.” In fact, they never did. Even under its actual name, Webley-Fosbery produced only 38-caliber eight-shot revolvers. Hammett, who got both the name and the caliber correct, almost certainly underestimated this gun’s rarity: some reports suggest that as few as 40 were manufactured. By making Spade able to recognize an impossibly rare weapon that he would have almost certainly never seen, Hammett was endowing his hero with the kind of specialized knowledge championed by Sherlock Holmes. But why does Huston’s film depart from Hammett’s text? On the one hand, “Forsby” sounds like “Thursby,” a near-rhyme linking Archer’s murder weapon to his suspected killer. On the other, The Maltese Falcon’s effect depends far less on precise verisimilitude than on convincing presentation. If Spade’s description of the gun sounds right, the audience will accept it. Would it also accept the following uncanny coinci- dence? The revolver’s original manufacturer, an Englishman prove far longer than Hammett’s 200 pages. The film, in other words, both abridges and expands its written source, providing a more exhaustive history. In doing so, it confirms Irving Thalberg’s remark, cited elsewhere in this book: “In the future, the movies will be the best record of how we once lived.” A contemporary viewer will likely mistake “Wells” for “Welles,” the Orson Welles whose own accounts of Charles Foster Kane and the Ambersons amount to counternarratives that resist Hollywood’s “history as usual.” As if to further the confusion, Orson Welles’s initial fame derived from his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, designed to resemble a breaking- news report. The mass panic caused by Welles’s show resulted not only from its perfect mimicry of the news (the harried announcers, abruptly cut off; the crackling static), but also from its audience’s late tuning in (many people had been listening to Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy). This latter factor seems peculiar to film, radio, and television. When, if ever, do we begin reading in the middle of a novel? Yet we often tune into a program already in progress, understanding and accepting the irretrievability of the missing scenes. Like Welles’s listeners, Spade enters the Falcon story in medias res: like them, he must learn to accept that story as a story, and not as something historically true.