I recently discovered a rare live James Dean TV show from 1953 called Danger: Death Is My Neighbor, and I was floored by how prodigious and inventive he is in it. As can be seen in the screen grabs below, Dean was very skinny here, and his clothes couldn't be tighter, and he couldn't be any more libidinal (he even lightly touches his crotch a few times as he looks at Betsy Palmer, and in one key section it really looks like they're about to just screw on the floor on camera).

Dean will lean against a door and look angelic here and then he'll spike that with some private sort of joke that makes him look grotesque; it's easy to see why he just blew all conventions of behavior apart for good. You can watch this show below, and below that is another really good live TV show from 1954 with Dean called Padlocks with Mildred Dunnock, which is well written and unexpected.

The world of Erich von Stroheim, in the films he directed and in the films he appeared in and influenced, is a fetishistic world alert to underwear, boots, high-heeled slippers, and the pleasures of voyeurism. The above shot of the Von in Jean Delannoy’s Macao, Gambling Hell (1942) expresses his melancholy when it comes to sex, his stiff, near-dignified chagrin over it.

The handful of fragmented films he made as a director in the silent era, which are mainly potent ruins of what they might have been, are studded with glimpses like the POV shot of the heroine’s foot in a high-heeled shoe and heavy black stockings in Blind Husbands (1919), his first film as a director and the only one that was released in much the form he wanted.

It should be remembered that the charm of a well-turned foot was often all that was available to voyeuristic men in the 1910s, so foot fetishism was likely more pronounced. Theda Bara only has to display her ankle in A Fool There Was (1915) to ensnare her next victim.

Yet the most memorable shots in Blind Husbands are of the neglected heroine Margaret Armstrong (Francelia Billington), harshly backlit, filled with longing. The Von is pledged to the ugliest realism, but he does have a bit of heart, which he is usually careful to hide.

The Von experiments here with a romantic fantasy Margaret has while staring into a mirror…she fantasizes about a time when her husband was still ardent.

In the lavish Foolish Wives (1922), which was extensively cut by its producer Irving Thalberg, the Von lavishes attention on his own luscious leather boots and also on the footwear of his leading lady, who is billed as Miss Dupont. Here it is all about the bottom of the shoe.

In The Merry Widow (1925), his most commercial film, the Von amuses himself with all sorts of foot foolery. There is a shot under a table of a footwear ménage à trois that results in chance homoerotic contact between male boots.

The Von also treats us to extra-gross close-ups of enflamed foot fetishist Tully Marshall staring at the feet of chorus girl Mae Murray.

The Von has progressed here in The Merry Widow to fetishism of the shoe itself, which somehow seems more attractive than the foot inside it, and this means that fantasy is winning out and romance is out the window, even if he will attempt to insist on it in The Wedding March (1928), where he is forced to marry princess ZaSu Pitts, who has a crippled foot. (Her father makes corn plasters for callused feet!)

By the time of the sound era, the Von was no longer given directorial assignments and made do with writing and acting work instead. This shot from 1949, the year before he played the loyal ex-husband butler to Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard (1950), shows that the Von was not averse to showing a little leg and foot himself (note the sock garters).

Rags (1915) is one of Mary Pickford’s key early features for Adolph Zukor and what would become Paramount Pictures. I had always read that Rags was mostly lost and inaccessible, but a full copy has emerged recently, and Pickford is at her best in it. She plays a scrappy tomboy who is tough enough to intervene in an adult male bar fight, and the source of Pickford's great charm, I think, is in the speed of her transitions, how thought and emotion can rapidly fill and leave her face, which the camera loves. There's a scene below where Pickford's character is leaving her town behind, and she tries to smile, but this pitiful attempt at a smile fades away, and it's so beautifully expressive, the miracle of what can happen on a human face in front of a motion picture camera. The full movie is below these screen grabs for you.

Over a lengthy career in which he played butlers, hotel managers, and other haughty men with power in their own domain, Fritz Feld eventually worked out a signature move; he would open his mouth, hit it with the palm of his hand, and make a popping noise like a champagne bottle being opened, and Feld even signed autographs with the word “Pop” next to his name. “If you’re a leading man and you appear in 15 scenes in a film, you may play one scene weak and do the next one better,” Feld told the LA Times in 1985. “I’ve got to be right on the nose with just one appearance or two. You want people to say, ‘I’d like to see more of him.’ ”

Born in Germany in 1900, Feld went on the stage as a teenager and played a jester on screen in The Golem (1920) before assisting theater impresario Max Reinhardt and traveling to America with him in 1923 to perform in The Miracle. Feld decided to stay in the states and got a small role as a bearded Russian revolutionary in Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928), but it was only in the late 1930s that he started appearing regularly in movies.

He slicked back his curly hair and wore a monocle for his best part in Howard Hawks’s classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938), in which Feld plays psychiatrist Dr. Lehman, a man who explains to madcap heiress Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) that “all people who behave strangely… are not insane” before twitching his eyes like a madman. This tic-ridden doctor also helpfully explains to Susan that “the love impulse in man very frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict,” which sets her imagination whirring. Dr. Lehman has an attractive young wife (Tala Birell) who also has a slight accent; was she once one of his patients?

In a farcical coincidence later in the film, Susan and David Huxley (Cary Grant) find themselves singing outside the window of the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lehman in Connecticut, and Feld’s Lehman takes Susan to jail and tries to unravel the plot, and outside the jail it also turns out that Lehman testified in a case for the all-important Mr. Peabody (George Irving). If we think about it a bit, Dr. Lehman is likely something of a crank, but he does state the theme of the film and set it in motion.

Feld made scads of pictures after that, generally as hyper-active hotel managers, and he married a younger actress named Virginia Christine in 1940 (director Ernst Lubitsch was their best man). He appeared as a tour guide on I Love Lucy in the 1950s and regularly enlivened the comedies of Jerry Lewis in the 1960s and then Mel Brooks films later on, and Feld also ran a community theater in Brentwood.

At the age of 87 Feld made an impression in a short dramatic part as a bum in Barfly (1987), in which he lit Faye Dunaway’s cigarette and then clicked his heels for her, a remembrance of whatever his character’s former life had been. Feld died at age 93, his ever-spry and enthusiastic presence having dotted its way through hundreds of films, and always I would like to see more of him.

The TV series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, a parody of soap operas that aired five nights a week from January 1976 to July 1977, was a sensation in its moment and made a star or neurotic icon out of Louise Lasser, whose deadpan comic timing reliably gets multiple laughs for at least the first 70 or so episodes of its marathon 325 episode run. Lasser was very much of her moment, a brainy, libidinal comedy virtuoso whose career faltered occasionally due to mental health issues.

In Woody Allen’s memoir Apropos of Nothing (2020), he makes it surprisingly clear that Lasser, who was his wife from 1966 to 1970, was in many ways the love or romantic obsession of his life; as told by Allen, their relationship sounds like it began as a romantic and sexual fantasy or bonanza and then foundered on the rocks of reality and trouble beyond their control. Allen admits in that book that many of the most colorful female characters in his movies are based on his observations of Lasser, and he was using her as inspiration well into the 21st century. “At the height of her fame when she was plastered on the cover of many magazines, and had truly triumphed over her problems, I wondered just how huge a star she could have been if she’d never had to fight an uphill battle all the way,” Allen wrote.

Lasser got her start understudying Barbra Streisand in I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962) on Broadway, but her turbulent personal life often held her back; both of her parents died by suicide. She was a leading lady for Allen in several of his early comedies, notably Bananas (1971), where they dither with each other to the point of madness, and she started turning up on some of the smart TV sitcoms before coming to prominence with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, where the five-night-a-week schedule made radical demands on Lasser’s inventiveness.

Lasser’s Mary is a housewife who focuses on imperfections in her surroundings because her marriage to Tom (Greg Mullavey) has become unsatisfying, particularly in the bedroom, where he has been having trouble: “It is a little yellow, isn’t it?” Lasser’s Mary asks in the first episode of the “waxy yellow build-up” on her kitchen floor. The sexy but rather enigmatic cop Dennis Foley (Bruce Solomon) pursues Mary, but she reads her magazines and drinks her Orange Crush soda and focuses on getting Tom back in shape.

Lasser gets huge laughs on the very progressive Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman with her comically slowed-down reactions. She sounds so out of it that unusual perceptions and meanings seem to rise up out of her ultra-stoned line readings, and this could get very existential; by episode 47, Lasser’s Mary wonders, “Who am I? Where am I? Why am I?” Mary has a full-on breakdown in episode 130 that incorporated a moment from Lasser’s own life at that time (she caused a scene in a store after trying to purchase a large dollhouse, which led to her being arrested after police found cocaine in her purse). After her recovery, Mary reconnects with her husband Tom, and there is an extraordinarily erotic and unexpected scene in episode 142 where she carefully leads him into discovering the pleasure of sexual exhibitionism in front of their bedroom mirror.

Inspiration understandably started to flag for this very risky series at a certain point, but the last episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman has to be one of the most uncompromisingly chilling and depressing “no escape” endings of all time, especially for what has basically been a comedy. Though she got into some trouble hosting Saturday Night Live in 1976, Lasser also got to write and star in her own TV movie Just Me & You (1978), which is treasurable for a hilarious extended scene where Lasser does battle with a fast food order machine. “The box is hostile, don’t you think?” she asks her co-star Charles Grodin, before she asks, in true Lasser fashion, “Are those machines for sale, you know, for home use?”

Lasser worked sporadically after that, getting laughs once again in a Thanksgiving horror movie called Blood Rage (1987), which deserves cult status, turning up as a friend to Ellen Burstyn’s Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream (2000), and also turning up on the TV series Girls in 2014. Lasser worked as an acting teacher (what must her classes have been like?) and was finally seen in the excellent Funny Pages (2022) as an elderly woman sitting in a drugstore and waiting for her medication, like a Mary Hartman who has survived for decades on pills to keep her ever-buzzing anxiety at bay. And I had to wonder why more people weren’t celebrating Lasser’s talent and resilience before it was too late, and now, unfortunately, it is too late.

It has been difficult to see Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman through the years, and it doesn’t seem to be available on streaming platforms at the moment. But if you’d like a taste of Lasser’s creative sensibility, here’s a copy of her TV movie Just Me & You, where she approaches the modern world in her comically stealthy and very original way.

There's a scene at the end of the three-reel version of Laughing Gravy (1930), a Laurel and Hardy short, where Laurel's rich uncle leaves him money on the condition that he stop living with Hardy. Serious moments in Laurel and Hardy movies are rare, and so when they happen they really land.

I only knew the two-reel version of this short when I wrote a long Laurel and Hardy article a while back, and so I missed this crucial moment where the implication is that relatives of the boys do not like them making a life with each other, whatever that entails. Hardy's reaction is very poignant. He says, “Isn’t it funny? We almost never see ourselves as others see us.” This issue gets resolved quickly and comically, but it has been raised.

Here is a link to my earlier piece on The Boys for Bright Lights Film Journal:

https://brightlightsfilm.com/nuts-and-nice-messes-on-laurel-and-hardy/

And here is the three-reel Laughing Gravy (1930):

I don’t remember how I happened to have or get Richard Olney’s Simple French Food (1974), a classic cookbook of its kind, but Olney himself captured my imagination as a character after I read Justin Spring’s The Gourmands’ Way (2017), in which Olney was profiled. I started leafing through Simple French Food and was struck by the very elevated tone of its writing, but it wasn’t until the pandemic of 2020-2021, when all social life was curtailed, that my long-time sweetheart Keith Uhlich started cooking from it for us on weekends.

The dish that particularly ravished us, to use an Olney term, was the Braised Chicken Legs with Lemon, which calls for 20-25 garlic cloves; you peel the cloves without crushing them, parboil them for five minutes, and then poach them for 40 minutes in chicken stock. After the lemon sauce is prepared, the garlic cloves then go in the oven with browned chicken legs for 40-45 minutes.

When the dish is brought out of the oven, all this attention to these garlic cloves, which hold their shape, has disarmed and transformed them into something unclassifiable, slightly sweet, a bit smoky, gentle, yielding, and beyond delicious. About the lemon sauce, in which the lemons dissolve into some higher form of themselves, Olney rightly brags, “the sauce must be tasted to be believed.” (By all means serve it over steamed rice as Olney commands so that the lemon sauce can soak into it.)

Keith made this Olney dish over and over, and we never tired of it, and when we could have guests over again it was always a hit. But the Braised Chicken Legs with Lemon, which seems to me a masterpiece, doesn’t get Olney much attention online (I saw some complaints that it took too much time, that certain steps weren’t necessary, etc.). His best-known recipe, half a century later, is probably his Chicken Gratin, which we tried once and didn’t particularly care for. Olney himself seems rather uncertain about it in his most famous book: “The acidity of the white wine and the lemon causes the cheese custard to curdle during the cooking, creating a texture that, personally, I find pleasant but which may not please everyone. Try it….” Surely he would be surprised that this recipe, which he was so defensive about, is the one that has lasted, at least for now.

Olney was not fond of Julia Child, who was cutting about him in his New York Times obituary: “I think he enjoyed being difficult,” said Child. “But on the other hand, he could be absolutely charming if you treated him like the genius he considered himself to be.” Olney favored improvisation once cooking rules or structures were learned, and he looked askance at Child’s “it must be done exactly this way because I have tested and perfected this” point of view.

But the more free-form Alice Waters, who ran the influential Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, considered Olney her culinary guru in the 1970s. His lover and protégée Jeremiah Tower, who worked at Chez Panisse, spoke admiringly and lasciviously about how Olney was always dressed in an open shirt, espadrilles, and a barely-there bathing suit at his home in France.

Olney was born in Marathon, Iowa, in 1927, and he spent a bohemian youth as a painter in Paris in the 1950s, where he befriended a creative circle that included James Baldwin (seen below in an Olney painting), Ned Rorem, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Anger. Seeking to create a world of his own, Olney bought a primitive farmhouse in the village of Solliès-Toucas in Provence for around $2000 in 1961, paid for by an Ingram-Merrill grant for his painting.

Olney lived in his house as a relative hermit with no radio, no television, no car, and no telephone for almost 40 years, from age 34 to his death at 72 in 1999; he had a record collection (some 78s of Edith Piaf and one-named French divas such as Mistinguett, Damia, Fréhel) and player, but that’s about it. He slept in an alcove near where he cooked, and for him cooking and drinking wine was his life. Olney was perhaps a bit like the character of Jean des Esseintes in J. K. Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884), a dandy who shuts himself away to contemplate the minutest pleasures and sensations.

Solliès-Toucas is in the extreme southeast of France, near the Mediterranean, and that was reflected in Olney’s cooking; he was not afraid of tomatoes or oregano, and he loved to offer his guests freshly made egg noodles created by his “quasi-miraculous” pasta machine, and for cooking the egg noodles he had this to say: “Cook them in a large quantity of salted, boiling water to which a dribble of olive oil has been added (an old Italian habit, which the French, mistakenly, do not always respect).”

Olney was not big on sweet desserts and preferred to end a meal with cheese and fruit. He enjoyed Pommes Aligot, potato puree with fresh Cantal cheese, but he was also pledged to more outré fare; you may not want to eat sweetbreads (thymus glands), frog legs, lamb testicles (called “frivolities”), tripe, ears, rinds, and tails as he did. But you should try his carrot pudding (odd, but seductive), lettuce custard, mushroom pudding, endless gratins, potato custard (so delicious!), potato tart, zucchini pudding soufflé. A photo of Olney’s heaven-in-every-bite potato custard is below, cooked by Keith on the spur of the moment one late afternoon. Potatoes, eggs, heavy cream, butter, prosciutto, sweet onions…a “breath” of nutmeg…baked in the oven….

Olney’s writing style is intricate, personal, and often highfalutin, even camp; he doesn’t let a dish simmer but “murmur,” and at another moment he writes a meal should be cooked with only “the suggestion of a simmer.” Olney also advises adding but “a memory of nutmeg” or even the “suspicion” of nutmeg, if you must. (I love nutmeg, the more of it the better, and that may be a matter of personal taste, but my palate is admittedly remedial.) He is such an aesthete when it comes to cooking that he seems to disdain giving recipes at all; at one point he outright states about cooking that “there is no reason ever to do precisely the same thing twice.”

Olney was a romantic who loved the elective affinities of certain foods, how good chicken could taste like the mushrooms it was cooked with while the mushrooms would taste like chicken, the ingredients still themselves but made greater, more succulent, through their carnal alliance. Olney wants us to go for “the caress” of an herb or two; he wants food to “ravish” him and his guests, like a “suave” seducer, and he warns against verbally critiquing a dish for faults after bringing it out when guests are unlikely to notice them. He counsels on certain of his suggestions for dishes to leave out ingredients you find “distressing” or have “no taste” for.

Olney liked “daubes,” or messes of a little of this, a little of that, leftover ingredients whipped up into an artful statement. Always Olney pledges himself to the pleasures of what can be experienced, in his old-fashioned, lofty phrasing, “at table.” Most Olney dishes are complex, with subtle interminglings of flavors. Though he always seeks the new, Olney admits that there are certain recipes that are so delicious that he would gladly eat them every day, or eat nothing but a certain meal (beef and marjoram ravioli, potato and leek soup).

Advising on serving a garlic purée, Olney writes, “The flavor is not aggressive, as many a novice might expect, and the self-appointed enemies of garlic will be unaware of its presence if it is used with discretion.” On mushrooms: “The greater a mushroom’s delicacy, the simpler—and more respectful—should be its preparation.” Regarding fried chicken, Olney favored the very old-fashioned French method of marinading the pieces with lemon juice, olive oil, and fines herbes for a few hours beforehand, with bitter orange squeezed over them when served for chicken legs. He warns against “the ignoble iceberg” lettuce, finds hardboiled eggs in salads as essential as salt, and is against vegetable oil. Olney is ever on the hunt for the exciting, the amusing, the attractive, the delicate, the exquisite, the subtle, the provocative. He demanded the impeccable, he aimed for the sublime.

Olney was basically the enemy of the sort of American food and cooking that has in-your-face flavor like a punch in the stomach. He had this to say on brussels sprouts: “For aggressiveness and determined lack of subtlety, sprouts have no peer. To be good—or so it seems to me—they demand shock treatment, a counteracting flavor to soften harsh relief without altering character—bacon, anchovy, vinegar, hard-boiled eggs.” On Vegetable Soup with Basil and Garlic, he says, “The thing, in itself, is like some unleashed earth force, sowing exhilaration in its wake—but, in that wake, nothing else may be savored, for it has a distinctly paralyzing effect on the palate.”

No doubt he was difficult; his posthumously published memoir Reflexions (1999) consists of almost nothing but score-settling with the many people who have irritated him or done him wrong, or caused some kind of scene he found distasteful, and he complains about various restaurants throughout. But he loved the sharp-witted, glamorous food writer Elizabeth David and his novelist friend Sybille Bedford, who got his first book published, and he pays them tribute.

Olney did a food book series in the late 1970s for Time-Life, and he showed David a letter that Julia Child sent his bosses about precise measurements for the recipes; after reading it David sighed, “Poor old Julia… Now she is Minister of Measures.” Post-1970 or so, most of Olney’s memoir comes from diary entries, which tend toward the negative and complaint, which is why most diaries shouldn’t be kept, let alone published.

Olney was looking for transcendence, and he often found it, as he put it, “at table.” Of a luncheon with his beloved friend Lulu Peyraud, Olney writes, “It was the kind of day that assumes greater importance in retrospect, memory distilling the limpid blue sky, the intermingled scents of the sea air, the bouillabaisse, and the cool fruit of the wine into a sort of abstract symbol of well-being.”

After Olney’s death in 1999, his large family of brothers and sisters wanted his house on the hill to be kept the way he left it, and they appointed a man named Marc Lanza, who lives there with his wife and children, to look after it and keep the spirit of the place alive. Olney’s Simple French Food is a book that can be owned and enjoyed even if you care nothing about food and its preparation, for it is an art object in and of itself.

Below is a 1969 television version of Noël Coward’s durable and exciting first great stage success The Vortex (1924), starring Margaret Leighton, who is at her best in a difficult role, and Richard Warwick, who is very sensitive and attractive. (The photo above is of Coward with his original leading lady in that play, Lilian Braithwaite.)

And below that is a rare-ish film, The Scoundrel (1935), in which Coward himself plays a waspish publisher and relishes the many tart lines given him by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who won an Oscar for best original story. Two slightly out-of-the-way instances of Coward’s wit, talent, and example for your pleasure and mine.

Below is a 1958 TV movie adaptation of Thornton Wilder's novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), directed by Robert Mulligan, in which Judith Anderson plays a fluty dowager, a vulnerable, drunken, self-loathing mess. It's fascinating to see the formidable Anderson tackle this kind of Mary Boland/Patricia Collinge part, and her characterization is so specific and detailed that it feels like Anderson is working from close observation of someone she knew or met; she uses a higher voice than usual, and so when it gets low to demand her liquor back, this has a large impact.

This character could easily be unbearably repetitive in the wrong hands, but Anderson is excitingly bold and thorough. "In my day, the art of conversation was studied," she cries, "like beautiful music...beautiful...beautiful!" The beautiful music is all there in Anderson's voice; she has no peer for vocal variety and expressiveness.

And here is Judith Anderson in a 1959 TV recording of her legendary performance in Euripides’ Medea. I played Jason in Medea in the 7th grade under the direction of my mentor Paul Fornatar, but I didn’t get to see Anderson as Medea until I was in college, when TLA Video in Manhattan had a tape of this production. It was only many years later that I finally found this recording again, and so I share it with you now. A performance like this comes around only once in a great while.

Most of Nat Pendleton’s 113 credits come from his regular appearances in 1930s movies as slow-witted cops, football players, bouncers, gangsters, and gangster sidekicks, and the muscular body that made him a wrestling champion at Columbia University, where he received a degree in economics, and an Olympic silver medal winner in 1920, was often covered up. Pendleton spoke several languages, and he was an avid reader and chess player, but in movies he was invariably a dumb palooka, often menacing in character or officious, but too dopey to be any kind of serious threat.

After creating and then selling a successful import/export business and then working for General Motors, Pendleton took a bit role as a barber in Rudolph Valentino’s costume picture Monsieur Beaucaire (1924) and made his sound debut in The Laughing Lady (1929), a Ruth Chatterton vehicle in which he is a lifeguard who saves Chatterton’s life and then gets drunk and breaks into her room hoping for sex.

Pendleton did a light Irish accent for his small role in The Big Pond (1930), and after various minor parts he menaced Harpo Marx in Horse Feathers (1932) until Harpo took a finger of Pendleton’s big hand and put it on a hot dog bun and bit into it. In Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Sign of the Cross (1932), Pendleton was a lug named Strabo who rounds up Christians for money.

But that same year Pendleton wrote the script for a starring vehicle for himself, Deception (1932), which was shot at Columbia and hasn’t been seen or heard much since. From the description of the plot, it sounds like Pendleton used some of his knowledge of how crooked professional wrestling could be, and presumably he wrote himself a more sympathetic character than he generally played.

Pendleton’s best year in pictures was 1933, when he got his finest mainstream role as a softhearted gangster named Tony Gazotti in W.S. Van Dyke’s Penthouse (1933). Pendleton’s Gazotti is tickled by the tough talk of his own lawyer (Warner Baxter), and he has a very human moment in the backseat of a cab with him where he speaks of school and wonders plaintively, “What’s algebra?” Van Dyke is very much showcasing Myrna Loy in this movie, but he provides a smaller showcase for Pendleton, even giving him a somewhat noble death scene. This is one of the rare movies Pendleton made where his character was given some shading.

Pendleton was a hunky laborer with his shirt off in the opening scenes of Baby Face (1933), where he wants to go take “a walk by the quarry” with Barbara Stanwyck’s Lily, who reacts to this very good-looking guy in an ambiguous way, as if she did go for a “walk” with him at some point and might even have enjoyed it, but she’s too fed up for another round. Best of all, Pendleton played an acrobat with a yen for Mae West in I’m No Angel (1933) where West, who was noted for her love of muscle men, feels Pendleton’s arm and torso in a tender yet slightly contemptuous way. Only someone as modern as West was going to view Pendleton as a sex object in this era.

In the epic The Great Ziegfeld (1936), which won a best picture Oscar, Pendleton does a German accent and wears a blond curly wig to play Sandow, a strongman who is sold to the public by showman Florenz Ziegfeld (William Powell) for his “sex appeal” to mainly older women, who line up to feel his muscles, and this is viewed by the movie itself as vaguely distasteful. In this same period, Pendleton turned up in The Thin Man (1934) and the third movie in the series Another Thin Man (1939) as a dim-bulb cop who very much needs the help of Powell’s Nick Charles and Myrna Loy’s Nora Charles to solve a case.

Pendleton wound up in an ongoing part as an ambulance driver in the Dr. Kildare movies at MGM, and his career petered out in the 1940s; he died in 1967 at the age of 72. In retrospect, it feels like Pendleton was cast the way he was, and often played his roles the way he did, in order to make himself less attractive, as if his good looks were a kind of threat. Surely he could have played a more appealing hunky lead; imagine him doing the part that Max Baer got to do opposite Myrna Loy in The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933) at MGM. If he stood still, Pendleton was beautiful, but when animated he was trained to make himself almost ugly in his reactions on screen, alas.

The tone of Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was, a dual biography of the artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, is authoritative, sophisticated, and bracingly unsentimental, even tart. Durbin takes large risks here with structure and emphasis, giving us just a taste of their childhoods and dealing with their deaths in an epilogue; what really ensorcells him is their young adulthood, their twenties and thirties, when they were a golden couple in the underground artistic world of Manhattan in the early 1960s.

Durbin is the author of two novels, MacArthur Park (2017) and Skyland (2020), and he brings a novelistic imagination to this biography, which he researched over a five-year period; it is clear that he is so steeped in his subject that he can tell you if drinks were watered down at a certain bar or even what a club smelled of as you walked in. Durbin will not only tell you that Susan Sontag owned a rocking chair that squeaked, but that when Hujar rocked in it he somehow managed to not make a sound, and this granular amount of detail always reveals something about the characters in the book.

Sontag dedicated her name-making collection Against Interpretation (1966) to Thek, who gave her its title, and her author photo was taken by Hujar. This was a period when Sontag, Thek, and Hujar were hanging out all the time, talking, laughing, and going out dancing. Durbin makes you understand this earlier hedonistic Sontag so that when the more-familiar imperious Sontag surfaces in the 1970s, driving off after a shared airline flight with Thek and leaving him stunned in the lurch, it has an impact the way it would in a novel. Sontag is quoted here saying “perhaps with some chagrin” that Thek would likely be only a footnote in art history, but of course she was famous for changing her mind.

Characters sometimes come alive in this biography for two-or-so colorful pages, like the bold sexual adventuress Felicity Mason, who was both matron and vixen. Here is how Durbin describes Steve Lawrence, who would collaborate with Hujar on a visual publication called Newspaper: “Lawrence was tall, with a narrow face bewitched by acne scars that snagged his natural handsomeness with something boyish and arresting.” Note the unusual use of the verb “bewitched” here, the way Durbin makes Lawrence seem to stand in front of us in one evocative sentence. This is how he describes Andy Warhol, for whom both Thek and Hujar sat for screen tests: “What Warhol divulged was the guts of his era, the squirming insatiable human desire to be seen and to be known and to be wanted and to be loved, and how terribly empty, how terribly sad all that attention could be. It might even kill you.” That last little rhythmic sentence is like the flash of a knife.

It sometimes feels like Durbin, through sheer concentration, has managed to somehow enter this past so that he can introduce the people there like a host at a party, and he often treats them with a winningly dry humor. Part of this conjuring act comes from how Durbin intimately understands the period he is writing about and its attitudes, so there is none of that tiresome worry and explanation so common now in biographies. There is a degree of obsessiveness here in the writing that matches the obsessiveness of Hujar and Thek when it came to their work. (The word “feral” for Durbin seems to be a term of approbation.) Cult figures in their own lifetimes, Hujar is now the better known of the two because his photographs can be easily discussed, exhibited, and shared, whereas Thek’s own sculptures, paintings, and installations were often lost to time.

The cover of the book, which shows Thek and Hujar in swimsuits early in their relationship, is extremely alluring, so much so that when the biography was first announced I printed the cover and put it on my desk. In staring at it (very happily) for a while, what finally strikes me is the tilt of Thek’s head, the slight squirmy-cuddly angling of his body, next to Hujar’s straight posture and uncharacteristically sunny smile. Though he was neglected in his lifetime and had a temper that limited his opportunities, Hujar is seen in Durbin’s book as practically a savvy networker when compared to Thek, who could never seem to stay in one place for long and who gradually descended into something like madness. Hujar accepted his own sexuality while Thek, who was raised Catholic, had a self-defeating longing for marriage that no woman could believe in for long.

Hujar’s work gains more fame by the minute; do an image search and you can see why. When he photographed Fran Lebowitz (a close friend) or John Waters, they were still youthful strivers, but now they are luckily both beloved cultural institutions who can talk Hujar up very excitingly. Nearly all of Hujar’s models seem to understand what he is looking for, which seems to me a curious in-between mode where the mask of their persona is just halfway off. (In the photos of Waters, he is doing the Hujar look better than just about anybody else, and that look seems to be Sexy Corpse.) In his best-known photo of Sontag, she is stretched out on her back, all image, the Dark Lady of Letters, yet search out his contact sheet from that session and you can see her trying out campy poses (back of hand to head) and even staring into the camera at Hujar with what looks like a direct appeal of love.

It seems fitting to end this piece on a description of Hujar’s last photo session with Thek. It was 1975, and Hujar was getting photos together for a book that Sontag was doing the introduction for. He and Thek had been on the outs for a while; they had a lot of damage between them, and at a certain point there was one insult too many. The photo of Thek below is so beautiful to me in its desperation, its scream of finality. And Durbin twists the knife by quoting a letter that Thek wrote Hujar afterward when he was in a more reflective and reasonable mood than usual: “Any time you want to make love, just ask me,” Thek wrote. In this one line, Thek strikes a note of true Greenwich Village religion, the wonderful world that was where love at its best was free.

Hedy Lamarr was often called the most beautiful woman in Hollywood during the late 1930s and 1940s, and sometimes she was even called the most beautiful woman in the world, but it is in candid photographs with windswept hair in the 2017 documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story that her real beauty is revealed; she looks brainy, restless, flighty, even a little silly. In still photographs where she is overly made up and in most of her movies, Lamarr has a distant, lacquered quality, as if her mind were elsewhere, and what this documentary reveals very convincingly are the flashes of genius she experienced in her side-career as an inventor, a hobby for her that has caused much comment and press coverage in recent years.

Born in Vienna to a father who adored her, the young Hedwig Kiesler was the type of child who would take apart a music box and put it back together just to see how it worked. After appearing in Gustav Machatý’s erotic classic Ecstasy (1933), where she did a nude swimming scene and simulated an orgasm on screen, she escaped Europe and a confining marriage to powerful munitions manufacturer Fritz Mandl to go to Hollywood, where she was signed by MGM, a studio that first gave her “pep” pills and sleeping pills, and given a new name.

Lamarr had to keep her Jewish background hidden, and she was very concerned about the threat of Nazism while working as a top glamour girl in movies in the early 1940s, and so in her spare time she thought up a way of jamming torpedo frequencies so that Nazi submarines would no longer be able to detect them. Bombshell director Alexandra Dean fleshes this out by including Lamarr’s notebooks on screen with some visuals that make her ideas understandable for a non-science person, and these ideas seem very impressive.

Lamarr got the composer George Antheil to collaborate with her, and he came up with a way of implementing her invention with rolls from a player piano; based on what we hear in Bombshell, it is Antheil’s contribution to the frequency hopping idea that got it disregarded by the navy. Lamarr took out a patent on it, but she was advised to sell war bonds instead, and so she sold kisses to soldiers and earned millions of dollars for the government. In the 1950s, the American military did begin using her invention in aerial warfare, but Lamarr never received any money for it, and her patent expired in 1959.

In the very sad last 40 years or so of her life from 1960 to 2000, Lamarr was a has-been, a drug addict (she became addicted to meth), a shoplifter, and then a victim of plastic surgery so ill-advised that it left the once-perfect beauty of her face disfigured, which is why she spent most of the last 20 years of her existence in seclusion. It is as if Lamarr bought into the idea that her only value had been her famous face and body. (In the 2017 documentary, her granddaughter says that Lamarr would send her autographed photos from her movie heyday in lieu of real-life meetings.) But around 1990, Lamarr finally started to get some recognition for her contribution to the concept of frequency hopping, which is the basis of Wi-Fi.

As an older woman living on meager pension checks, Lamarr held out hope that her major invention might bring her some financial security, or at the very least some credit. In Bombshell we hear her discussing her inventions and her life and film career in an interview she did in 1990 for Forbes magazine, and her voice sounds alternately spiky and wistful. “They say I was a bad actress,” Lamarr says at one point, and she sounds melancholy about it. “I sometimes think I did more acting off the screen than on.” It’s true that on camera she often seems blank or hidden, though she is very sexy and touching in the near-silent Ecstasy and she commands the camera in near-static close-ups in Algiers (1938), which made her a star, and in which pretty much every shot of her is a film-stopping amazement.

Lamarr manages to be extremely erotic in her temptress stances yet a hoot at the same time in her biggest financial hit, Samson and Delilah (1949), a biblical epic in Technicolor for Cecil B. DeMille, and she was pure camp in White Cargo (1942), where her delivery of the line, “I am…Tondelayo,” inspired a generation of drag queens. But she was far more real and appealing in a movie that she made for King Vidor, H.M. Pulham, Esq. (1941), where she plays an independent and exciting career woman with a male name, Marvin. Vidor is the only director who truly seems to understand Lamarr, seeing beneath her mask of beauty to the restless and often-inspired intellect underneath.

Her financial difficulties came about in part because she sank most of her savings into Loves of Three Queens (1954), a color epic she could not find distribution for, and by that point Lamarr was 40, which was a death knell for the careers of love goddesses of that time. She built a resort in Aspen, Colorado, that was lost to her after one of her many divorces; she was always thinking big, achieving something big, and then being disappointed.

When Lamarr started having plastic surgery to try to hold on to the face that had made her a star, she even had ideas about taking skin from different parts of the body and thoughts about where scars could be easily hidden. Yet her ghostwritten memoir Ecstasy and Me (1966) was an exploitation book that leaned into many descriptions of lurid and fictional sexual encounters meant to shock and titillate readers. Lamarr was horrified when she read it, and she tried to have it stopped legally, to no avail. The times she lived in and the pressures of having That Face finally extinguished the mind that kept trying to distinguish itself and contribute to society and make a mark.

In the interview tapes for Forbes from 1990, Lamarr does not sound bitter. In fact, this is how the documentary ends, with Lamarr reciting these lines: “I’ll read you something pretty: ‘People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered—love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, alternative motives—do good anyway. The biggest people with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest people with the smallest minds—think big anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight—build anyway. Give the world the best you have and you’ll be kicked in the teeth—give the world the best you’ve got anyway.’”

I visited Greta Garbo's apartment at 450 East 52nd Street on November 17th, 2022, and this remains one of the happiest days of my life; it might even be the happiest. Going there was like entering a shrine or place of worship, and I was especially surprised by the large wooden carving of a woman in the sitting room, which looked like something for the prow of a ship. Garbo spent almost 40 years in this apartment, and it still vibrated with her intense, contemplative presence.

Below is an article I wrote about this visit for my longtime sweetheart Keith Uhlich’s site (All (Parentheses)). This was maybe my happiest day because Keith was with me; he can be seen taking the photo of me in Garbo’s apartment in the “about this site” section of Stolen Holiday. Here is the piece below.

(All (Parentheses))

Garbo on 52nd Street

Greta Garbo never made a color film, but in life she was an aesthete who needed to be surrounded by what she called “my colors”: rose, salmon, green, red, pink. Love of these colors influenced the paintings she collected, which hung on the walls of what for nearly 40 years was her sanctuary, floor five at the Campanile, a secluded building in Manhattan …

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4 years ago · Dan Callahan

It is the 1986 Golden Globes, and Barbara Stanwyck is being given the Cecil B. DeMille Award by Kirk Douglas. The image above is a screen grab of Stanwyck’s face as she looks up at Douglas, and it stopped me in my tracks because it seems to express very concentrated rage. Look at her eyes, the set of her mouth, the way she is holding her face in position with that one finger, which she eventually releases to slice into the air like a knife as the image dissolves to Douglas on the stage. If she were a monarch, this gesture would signal, “Off with his head.”

And then I thought: Stanwyck was close with Robert Wagner, and so she likely heard from him or from Natalie Wood herself what Douglas did to Wood in the 1950s. I’m making a lot of assumptions here, I realize. Maybe Stanwyck didn’t like the way Douglas behaved on the set of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946). Maybe it was something else at this moment in time. But I think the possibility is there that Stanwyck, who had been raped herself as a teenager, was using this moment to send a message via the camera, the tool of her art.

She could not receive justice herself, and she could not get justice for any of the other women who had been abused, but Stanwyck could perhaps send a message that might be read by those alert enough to receive it. This is, at least, a possibility. And after she delivers this look, her face settles into a more mysterious or private emotion as Douglas reads to her a telegram from then-President Ronald and Nancy Reagan. She still has the finger up on her chin, but the mouth has softened just a little, and the eyes have retreated.

I debated for a long time whether to put this up or not. It involves quite a lot of conjecture, and it’s so unpleasant. But then I felt that the possibility was strong enough, and that what Stanwyck was doing in these close-ups at an award show late in her life, with her career almost over, was so dramatically symbolic that it deserved a spotlight. It’s haunting to me, and it must have been to her, too, to be able to do so much and yet not enough. To have to accept, in a way, defeat, which was not Stanwyck’s nature. She couldn’t get anything tangible done in 1986. But the images are there. I noticed them. They deserve to be noticed. The video of this award show moment is below.

In the screen capture above, Ruth Gordon has just been told that she is seriously ill and hasn’t long to live in Boardwalk (1979), an obscure and very unpleasant movie in which she is paired opposite Method guru Lee Strasberg (they play a longtime couple but have no chemistry at all and even seem actively uncomfortable with each other, just one of many problems with this movie). But this big scene for Gordon and what follows it were so striking to me that I had to bring it to your attention. The look on her face here is stricken, but she is holding back her emotions, which is always a good choice both on stage and screen and in life. What happens afterward displays a side of Gordon’s talent that was never disclosed in any of her other screen work.

Gordon for most of her life was a stage actress who could play light comedy, Restoration comedy, or Ibsen or Chekhov. She was also known for being capable of writing her own vehicles, and in middle age she wrote some screenplays with her husband Garson Kanin for director George Cukor that included Adam’s Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952), two of the best pairings of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. And then in old age she emerged to win an Oscar for her kooky/sinister neighbor in Rosemary’s Baby (1968), and she also attained cult status in Harold and Maude (1971).

Towards the end of this run as an old lady character star, Gordon seems to have said yes to practically any project, supplying her eccentrically timed “Ruth Gordon” performance to vehicles for Pia Zadora, Gary Coleman, etc. She is always good value even in the worst projects, but only in this scene in Boardwalk was she given the chance to show what she could do with a dramatic opportunity.

So Gordon’s character has been told that she’s dying, and she has held back her feelings until she gets outside. We see her emerge from the doctor’s office, and now that she is alone we see her begin to fully take in the idea of her own death; she seems dazed and touches her face lightly as if to make sure that she still exists. We see her walking by what looks to me like Gramercy Park, and as she moves along the fence she slowly reaches her arm out as if to balance herself and then equally slowly collapses and starts to cry, and then she looks up desperately for some sort of solace.

Let me reiterate: Boardwalk is not a good film, and it really isn’t worth watching. But this scene is a precious glimpse of a side of Gordon’s talent that was never used elsewhere in the movies. Below are some screen grabs of this silent dance of despair. As Gordon used to say in her various memoirs, think it over. Maybe this was all technique, but to me it looks wrung from the depths. She seems to be really feeling it. And it’s beautiful and very raw in its contained beauty.

There is a scene in The Song of Bernadette (1943) where Antoine (William Eythe) says goodbye to Bernadette (Jennifer Jones) as she rides away to join a convent. What is happening between them is so subtle that you might even miss it if you aren’t watching closely, which is what makes it so touching.

Antoine shyly indicates that if Bernadette were not going off to become a nun that he would have liked to have married her. When Bernadette understands what he is saying, Jones lowers her eyes, and then she looks at him, and what happens on her face is so restrained, so private, and so full of deep feeling underneath.

Director Henry King shows us Antoine standing in the road at an angle as Bernadette is driven off, and then we see Antoine himself look down. Nothing is underlined here, nothing is made obvious, which is why my heart breaks for both of them. See what happens to them below.

“Goodbye, Antoine,” says Bernadette….

What is perfect pitch? Jo Stafford was said to have it, though she modestly said that she really had “good relative pitch.” Listen to her sing and she has a way of hitting a note straight in its center so that the effect is one of shimmering, aspirational perfection, ghostly, haunting, almost icy, but with a sort of earthiness underneath, a highly unusual blend.

Great singers like Billie Holiday and Patsy Cline doted on Stafford and her sound, and Holiday often mentioned in interviews how much she admired Stafford’s voice because it sounded like a musical instrument. Tough-talking jazz great Annie Ross said that Stafford “never hit a bum note” in her working life as a singer, though she did have a comedy sideline with her musician husband Paul Weston where they pretended to be the world’s worst lounge act, a pair of musical unfortunates named Jonathan and Darlene Edwards.

You would think that singing off-key as a comedy act would wear thin pretty quickly, but Stafford’s bum notes as Darlene are ever-renewingly hilarious, some of the worst possible singing to go with her catalogue of some of the best singing of its time. (Another famous Stafford fan: Lucille Ball couldn’t get enough of the Jonathan and Darlene Edwards act when Stafford and Weston would do it at Hollywood parties and thought it one of the funniest things she had ever seen.)

Stafford started out in a singing group with her sisters, and then she was part of a group called the Pied Pipers, which sang with the Tommy Dorsey band and backed the Frank Sinatra hit “I’ll Never Smile Again.” The turning point for Stafford was her decision to sing a collection of folk songs for the 1948 album Jo Stafford Sings American Folk Songs, a record that influenced the nascent folk music scene and particularly Judy Collins, who loved it as a child. Stafford’s singing is at its most otherworldly on songs like “Shenandoah” and “Barbara Allen,” and she isn’t afraid to mix these with more up-tempo numbers for variety.

Stafford had a wide range as a singer, but her best work is generally in the realm of story songs and sacred music, especially when she sang it with Gordon MacRae for their duet albums. She was very much a recording star; she didn’t like singing live. Give her a recording studio and some beautiful Weston arrangements and Stafford would hit one home run after another. The only thing she can’t really do are songs in a cynical/heartless vein; I don’t really want to listen to her do Cole Porter songs from Kiss Me, Kate or something like “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Her forte is what could be termed parlor songs, songs like “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” or “Flow Gently, Sweet Afton.” And she really soars with a ballad like “Through the Years,” which lands precisely because of her reserve, her ultra-fast vibrato that is barely a vibrato at all, her ministering quality.

I first became aware of Stafford after reading the Mary Gaitskill novel Veronica (2005), which contains a section where Gaitskill writes about how men who served in World War II had a special place in their heart for Stafford, who entertained the troops so much that she was known as GI Jo. These men listened to her albums in the immediate post-war period of prosperity, and I think Stafford had such a meaning to them because her voice has healing qualities. She knows they have been through hell, and she gently lifts them out of it; you can almost feel yourself detaching from the worst of life and floating away from it when you listen to her voice.

I must have heard Stafford’s biggest hit song “You Belong to Me” (1952) at some earlier point, but it was only when I heard it in Terence Davies’s movie The Deep Blue Sea (2011) that I started seeking out Stafford’s albums. Once I got her folk music album and Songs of Scotland (1955), I listened to them over and over again, as if her voice might lift me up and enrich me, make me better, happier, more whole. And I believe it did so. I can remember years like 2015 and 2016 when I would play Jo Stafford records like Autumn in New York (1950) and Starring Jo Stafford (1953) while having dinner with my longtime sweetheart Keith Uhlich in the dining room of our house in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and thinking, “It does not get better than this….being here with Keith and eating the food he cooked and listening to the voice of Jo Stafford.”

Listen to her sing songs like “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Red River Valley” on Starring Jo Stafford and hear how much she can do to both honor and ameliorate their poetic melancholy. What is it about her voice that moves me so much? I think it has something to do with how private she seems, as if she is leading you discreetly into some secret place in order to give you something she finds precious, out of the goodness of her heart. There is a creative tension between what sounds like personal reticence and something more low-down, something passionate that she has to keep under some restraints so that it doesn’t overwhelm her, or us. Below is a photo of Stafford with her husband Paul, a singer’s singer with a musician’s musician.

Stafford knew when to stop; by the mid-1960s, her voice wasn’t quite up to her own standard anymore, and so she retired, only coming back once to sing for a tribute to Frank Sinatra in 1990. (But she did let her bad singer alter ego Darlene Edwards cluelessly continue on and even had her do a cover of the Bee Gees’s “Stayin’ Alive.”) She lived until the age of 90, and her voice is still there, immaculate and tender, on her records. Stafford has become one of my very favorite singers, a singer I return to over and over again, in times of trouble, in times of great happiness, she is there. You can listen to some of her music on Spotify, where you can find her folk music album and several others I’ve mentioned.

Below is one of her best late albums, I’ll Be Seeing You (1959), a tribute to the soldiers she had loved and inspired and given such solace to. Stafford is so American in that she approaches perfection, and yet she makes that perfection seem attainable. She offers us a balm, a benediction; it’s as if she wants to protect us all with her voice. I’ve never encountered anything else like it.

Many of her albums can be purchased through the website Corinthian Records, which was Stafford’s own company, through which she sold the music that she owned in her later years. Here is a link:

https://www.corinthianrecordsonline.com/store

Alfre Woodard was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for her work in Cross Creek (1983), but that same year she won an Emmy for an episode of Hill Street Blues called “Doris in Wonderland,” and this performance on television established her as one of the finest actresses of her time. Woodard’s Doris is the mother of a little boy who has been accidentally shot by a police officer, and she seems stunned as the cops talk to her at her apartment, but as the scene goes on the reality of what has happened starts to break through for her in short little panicked bursts of recognition.

Everything that Woodard does in this episode of Hill Street Blues is fresh, unexpected, and original, and very realistic, which would come to be hallmarks of her work; her face seamlessly transitions in close-up between stiff outrage and even a bit of wised-up humor. In the key scene where Doris tells the cop who killed her son, “I don’t hate you,” Woodard also summons a moral authority that is impossible to act or fake. You can’t just tell an actor, no matter how talented, “I need you to summon moral authority,” for you either have this in you or you do not. Woodard does, and in the two subsequent episodes of this acclaimed series on which her character appears she also shows Doris finally sinking into heavy grief.

Woodard won a second Emmy for the pilot episode of LA Law in 1986, and she was asked to carry an even heavier burden here. Her character is dying of leukemia, and she has been violently gangraped by a bunch of sneering young men. The big scene she has in court would seem to call for histrionics, showy rage, but Woodard does not make that expected choice. She chooses to emphasize this woman’s vulnerability, losing control in a way that feels helpless and inward, and this is far more upsetting than if Woodard had chosen to grandstand. The only problem with watching a lot of Woodard’s performances is that you will start to be dissatisfied by actors who make flashier and more conventional choices.

I wrote an article about Woodard in 2013 for RogerEbert.com after she appeared in 12 Years a Slave, but I was unable to see a lot of her work on television at that time, and so that piece now feels incomplete to me. Woodard has been nominated for 18 Emmys, with four wins, and television is where she has been able to do some of her best work.

On the prestige network series St. Elsewhere, on which she had a recurring role around the same time as her second Emmy win for LA Law, Woodard got to do a romance opposite a young Denzel Washington, and it is very enjoyable to watch her spark to this very demanding and extremely attractive male partner. Woodard also did a short-lived sitcom with Geena Davis called Sara in 1985, where she proved that she could land a punchline to a laugh track as well as break our hearts.

In a TV vehicle called The Child Saver (1988), Woodard pushes herself to meet the compelling melodramatic demands of the story, in which her ad exec character becomes consumed by the need to save a special little boy from a life of drug-dealing on the streets. In A Mother’s Courage: The Mary Thomas Story (1989), Woodard proved her range by playing a much tougher and lower-class woman than the yuppie she had so convincingly portrayed the year before. The only thing these women share is Woodard’s trademark: an uncertainty that she insists on in even her strongest characters. When her characters stand up for themselves, Woodard always makes you see that this is not easy.

She got two of her best opportunities on TV in the 1990s in adaptations of major plays: August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (1995) and Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1997), both of which I have written about before. But at the end of that decade she again played her character from St. Elsewhere, Dr. Roxanne Turner, on a 1998 episode of the show Homicide: Life on the Street that showed how much a person might change. Turner is now discreetly helping patients to die who are in extreme pain, and she gets into a very messy argument about such mercy killing with a cop. Woodard is riveting here in close-up, giving an impassioned intensity to Turner’s moral position.

Woodard won a fourth Emmy as a paranoid schizophrenic who is made to go off her meds on two 2003 episodes of The Practice. As in so much of her other work, it feels as if Woodard is being tempted to take the easy route and chew the scenery, but her standards never allow her to do that. If she is asked to play a mentally unwell woman who once killed children, as she is here, Woodard is going to explore that and make you feel just how frightening that would be to live with.

In her scenes on the stand where her character’s mind is clouding and deteriorating, Woodard feels more like someone in a documentary than an actor on a crowd-pleasing show like The Practice, so much so that your initial instinct is to look away from her, but Woodard won’t let you do that. Acting for her is a calling as well as a way to earn a living, and her particular calling demands the most acute psychological realism.

In her arc on Desperate Housewives (2005-06), Woodard couldn’t fit into the tone of that superficial show, but ask her to go for broke in sexy trash like True Blood (2010-12) and she happily fulfills that assignment, as if saying, “Oh, you want weird? I’ll give you weird, but you might not like it!” She was mother to Taraji P. Henson’s Cookie on four episodes of Lee Daniels’s Empire in 2018, and she slipped into that hyperbolic world as well, though of course Woodard works so much that I have sometimes seen her at a loss. If a series is truly unserious in a way that gives her no handholds, Woodard will get through it somehow, but she doesn’t have the kind of reserves of “showing off for its own sake” that so many stars have. That’s part of what makes her so special.

In 2019, Woodard gave her greatest performance so far in the feature film Clemency, in which she played a death row warden. Not enough people saw that movie, and a botched execution in the first 15 minutes might have scared off even those brave enough to try it. But in retrospect, Clemency is the movie and the chance that Woodard had always seemed to be working towards, preparing for, remaining in readiness for.

Her Bernadine Williams seems to shrink steadily in her big and unfair job, physically, psychologically; there are times when she seems like a shy little girl on a playground rather than a woman with too much authority who is also a pawn in a system she did not create. In the last scene, where the camera holds on Bernadine’s face as she crumbles from within, Woodard never falters, never makes it easier for us or for herself, never emotes in a way that could feel like a release for her audience or for Bernadine or for herself. (Woodard has said that after she finished Clemency that she found herself starting to cry while out and about at the farmer’s market, because Bernadine can’t cry like that.)

And then comes that extraordinary moment when Bernadine finally flees the execution room. I’m sure most of you have experienced a moment in your life where you have physically fled from a situation “inappropriately,” as Bernadine does here, and Woodard gets this release exactly right. It is not a moment of triumph. We don’t even know what Bernadine might do next, or where she can go, even just in that moment. But the pressure on her has become intolerable, and so she finally has to leave. Get out!

Woodard has been married to Roderick Spencer since 1983, and they have two children together. The same year as Clemency, Spencer wrote her a vehicle called Juanita about a woman traveling and exploring her opportunities. In interviews, Woodard has said that Spencer sees her as zany and wacky, and this is a mode that she has barely ever been asked to explore on screen, but it isn’t too late.

Woodard has had many of her best opportunities on television, yes, but Clemency shows that she can carry a feature. She has 136 credits on IMDb, and no matter how obscure or far-out those credits are, I will watch her in anything because I know what I am going to get is gold. Woodard is a star and even a kind of diva, but she is a stealth diva. The industry isn’t going to push her towards us; we have to come to her.

I first heard Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Chicago Lyric Opera when I was a kid, in the production with Maria Ewing where she was fully nude at the end of her dance of the seven veils. Ewing was excellent, and her performance held up when I recently looked at and listened to the film of it. But when I heard Ljuba Welitsch sing Salome, first in a recording of the last scene from 1944 and then in a live performance from the Met from 1949, I was agog, transported. And ever since, La Welitsch is Salome to me, and I really never want to listen to any other singer even try to sing this role.

Welitsch was born in Bulgaria in 1913, and Strauss himself coached her for the 1944 performance. She caused a sensation wherever she sang her Salome for around ten years, but at age 40 her voice was already starting to go, and so Welitsch transitioned to acting on stage and on film. Her voice as Salome is perfection because it is a piercing voice, hard and inflexible and stubborn, both childish and deadly. I’ve heard that when she sang it at the Met that Welitsch would actually sit on the severed head of John the Baptist and grind on it suggestively, and that some audience members would flee up the aisles at such effrontery.

Below is a link to the 1944 performance and the full opera from 1949, with an interview with her at the end. Treat yourself to them.

We always had Agatha Christie books around the house when I was a kid, and I would often watch the PBS Mystery series with my mother. This was a golden time for British TV series based on Christie books: David Suchet was doing the Hercule Poirot short stories, and Joan Hickson was doing the Miss Marple novels, and they were and are perfection. But my own favorite Christie series then was Partners in Crime from 1983, which features the husband-wife team of Tommy and Tuppence, played by James Warwick and Francesca Annis.

Tommy and Tuppence were first introduced in Christie’s second book, a spy thriller called The Secret Adversary (1922). Tuppence is a clergyman’s daughter who has rebelled against her large family with bobbed hair, short skirts, and a devil-may-care attitude; her real name is Prudence, and no one remembers how she got her nickname. Tommy is characterized as faithful to his mother and penniless, and Christie makes it clear that neither Tommy nor Tuppence is conventionally physically attractive, but they have wit and energy that is magnetic to others. Annis and Warwick did an introductory TV movie of The Secret Adversary in 1983 that ran before the short story adaptations, and though they are not quite what Christie had in mind, they both capture the spirit of the characters, and they have chemistry.

Christie was 30 years old when she wrote her first book in 1920, a mystery featuring her Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot, and she came out with her first major work, the Poirot thriller The Murder of Roger Ackroyd with its very artful twist ending, in 1926. When Christie wrote the Tommy and Tuppence stories in the 1920s and had them published in magazines, she herself was married to her first husband Archibald Christie. By the end of that decade, Archibald took a mistress and insisted on a divorce, much to Christie’s chagrin, and she divorced him in 1928, the year before the Tommy and Tuppence stories were published in book form as Partners in Crime.

Christie has Tommy and Tuppence take famous crime writers as inspirations for their various cases: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, and other mystery writers of the time who have fallen into obscurity, and the TV series smartly only makes a faint gesture towards this. In the Christie stories, Tommy is 32, Tuppence perhaps 24. They tease each other about the prospect of infidelity like Nick and Nora Charles do in the Thin Man movies, but in a lighter way, for they are very much bright young things of the 1920s, whereas Nick and Nora are denizens of the far grimmer and harder-edged Depression 1930s.

“Tuppence, you’re a real rake at heart,” Tommy tells his wife in “The Crackler,” referring to her humorously with a very male word. “What a good thing it is that you are married to a sober steady middle-aged man like myself.” Tuppence loves to go out and drink and dance and shop and buy clothes, and she has around 40 hats, and when Tommy wonders at this his aesthete wife claims that there are “nuances” in them. On the last page of The Secret Adversary, Tuppence wants to buy “old furniture, and bright carpets, and futurist silk curtains, and a polished dining table, and a divan with lots of cushions….”

In the stories, Tuppence’s housework is so perfect as to be “monotonous,” for she was a nurse during WWI, and in their detective office she pretends to be Tommy’s secretary Miss Robinson, but she often takes the lead in their cases and will not be sidelined, as Myrna Loy’s Nora Charles sometimes is on screen. Tommy has seen men killed in the war, and so has Tuppence, and so this gives their determination to live life to the fullest a desperate Lost Generation edge, particularly with Tuppence, and it this edge that Annis captures so uninhibitedly in the 1983 series.

Annis had done Lady Macbeth on screen in 1971 for Roman Polanski, and she had played Juliet on stage and Madame Bovary on TV, and so according to Warwick she was not inclined to play a character named Tuppence after these prestige gigs, but the producer of Partners in Crime offered her “lots of hats, lots of money, and star billing,” and so she agreed. Clearly she is enjoying herself immensely as Tuppence, and you either share in this rather lustful enjoyment or you do not; I happen to love how she fills expository lines with such libidinal enthusiasm.

Some online thinks Annis overplays in Partners in Crime, and certainly she gilds any lily in sight, particularly when Tuppence impersonates a haughty Russian ballerina in “The Case of the Missing Lady,” where Annis’s always-heavy lipstick is cleverly drawn to a Mae Murray-like pout and she does shameless comic business when continually delaying a dying swan solo dance (a routine not present in the Christie stories).

Annis is in her late thirties for Partners in Crime but can pass for younger except in a few stray close-ups that see past her extremely heavy make-up, with its very heavy eye shadow under penciled brows and the heart-shaped lipstick drawn on her upper lip. One welcome addition to the series that is not addressed in the book is how sexually excited the couple is for each other, with Annis’s Tuppence doing some arch posing and knee-sitting and expressing post-coital satiation in the morning and Warwick’s Tommy clearly giving off a “I really lucked out here!” vibe in his interactions with his very spirited flapper wife.

The TV Beresfords have a poster of Valentino in The Son of the Sheik (1926) on their office wall, and a photo of bee-stung-lipped 1920s idol Mae Murray, and they have a movie-mad office boy named Alfred, who appears in the later T ‘n’ T books from Christie as their life-long assistant/butler. (“He’s useless most of the time, and then suddenly he’s completely expendable,” jokes Annis’s Tuppence in “The Crackler.”)

In the Christie story “The Crackler,” an Inspector Marriot says to Tommy, “Will have your little bit of fun, won’t you, sir?” And then he smiles at Tommy and Tuppence in a paternal way and says, “If you’ll not take offence at my saying so, it’s a pleasure to see two young people enjoying life as much as you two do.” For Tommy and Tuppence fans, this is their appeal in a nutshell, or a bandbox. The Partners in Crime stories still sparkle because Christie herself is so much enjoying this light fare as she spreads her wings as a professional writer.

As her career gathered steam and became a phenomenon, Christie was stimulated by challenges to her technique with difficult puzzle-piece-like plots, and this reached a height with two Poirot mysteries, Murder on the Orient Express (1934), in which Poirot’s deductions are truly prodigious, and Death on the Nile (1937), And Then There Were None (1939), the Miss Marple mystery The Body in the Library (1942), and one of her personal favorites, Crooked House (1949). She also had her theater triumphs with The Mousetrap, which opened on the London stage in 1952 and is still running, and Witness for the Prosecution the following year. But Tommy and Tuppence should not be forgotten or overlooked.

Tommy and Tuppence have children (Tuppence announces her pregnancy at the end of Christie’s Partners in Crime, but Annis does not in the series), and they acquire a Manchester terrier dog named Hannibal, just as Nick and Nora have their wirehaired terrier dog Asta. But we don’t see or hear much of their children, or grandchildren; it seems clear that Tommy and Tuppence are the sort of happy couple who are most important to each other. They are the only Christie sleuths who age in real time, and she took them up in middle age for the spy thriller N or M? (1941), which is more serious and upsetting than their earlier espionage novel, and in old age for By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) and Postern of Fate (1973), in which their loyal office boy Albert has become their butler.

Tommy and Tuppence have not fared well in the 21st century on TV. There was a very ill-advised attempt to adapt By the Pricking of My Thumbs in 2006 where Christie’s Miss Marple was shoehorned into the story, Tommy (Anthony Andrews) was made unlikable and officious, and Tuppence (Greta Scacchi) was saddled with a drinking problem! Just as bad was a version of N or M? on TV in 2015 in which the story was updated to the 1950s and Tommy and Tuppence were portrayed as both annoyed with each other and annoying. Presumably the writers of these poor adaptations were seeking to “modernize” the characters by making them unhappily married, as if a man and a woman could never be blissfully happy together as Tommy and Tuppence are in the books and in the 1980s series.

In Postern of Fate, the last novel Christie wrote, Tommy and Tuppence are elderly now but very energetic and unchanged; when Tuppence comes upon a mystery in a children’s book, she is right on the case as usual, and she gets Tommy involved, and he sighs, “Just when we were looking forward to a delightful, peaceful old age,” and Tuppence gaily replies, “No peace for the pensioners.” They are not as physically spry, of course, but this does not stop them.

Surely it would be fun to get Annis and Warwick to do two straight adaptations of By the Pricking of My Thumbs and Postern of Fate as bookends for their original series, which paints a picture of happily married life that is still amusing and convincing.