Dick Powell is an amazing figure. His career spans several stages which are not only distinct but unreconcilable: from gibbous crooner in pre-code musical comedies, first foist before a disbelieving public in the scabrous Blessed Event (1932), the whole pitch of which seems to be to make us hate him and want him punched, progressing through a series of Busby and sub-Busby musical fare, smirking and twinkling being generally mellifluous; he then “matured,” like cheese, into an uninspiring male lead of no particular qualities, perfectly servicable as the chump hero in Preston Sturges’ Christmas in July (1940); then comes an unlikelier reinvention, as tough guy, stippling on the stubble to play a world-weary Philip Marlowe in Murder My Sweet (1944), a piece of casting which makes no sense but somehow passes muster; and finally, there’s Powell the auteur, his most preposterous role yet, bringing us tough-guy stuff like the nuclear thriller Split Second and a couple of war pics, plus a musical remake of It Happened One Night which we all just pretend never happened, and the legendary John Wayne as Genghis Khan atrocity The Conquerer, which literally killed everyone involved.  

Helen Walker was a sad case, her offscreen life a discordant contrast to the amount of fun she produced in her Hollywood roles. Her career was short, and so was her life.

In brief: New Year’s Eve, 1946. Walker was driving a car borrowed from director Bruce “Lucky” Humberstone (I Wake Up Screaming) and stopped to pick up three hitch-hiking soldiers. The two who survived the ensuing accident, in which the car hit a divider and overturned, testified that Walker was drunk. Everyone was badly injured and Walker was kicked off the film she’d been shooting. Amazingly, her career wasn’t totally over, but the work that followed was intermittent and Walker’s health declined and she died aged forty-eight, having not made a film for thirteen years.

It should have been different. In 1942, Walker is bright and breezy in Lucky Jordan, opposite Alan Ladd in one of his roguish early roles before he succumbed to respectability. Her role mainly requires her to look good and be outraged at her co-star’s crooked ways. She’s damn good, and it’s impossible to square the sharp and sassy dame onscreen with the tragic and disorderly life.

Most of Walker’s early roles were lightweight, showcasing her gift for comedy. Murder, He Says stars Fred MacMurray and is directed by former Laurel & Hardy man George Marshall, whose handling of farce is strikingly pacey and cinematic here. MacMurray was liked by his leading ladies for not hogging the limelight – he saw himself more as a horn player who got lucky than an actual actor, though he was in fact very talented in that department (Jean-Pierre Melville credited him with inventing underplaying in Double Indemnity: “Even Humphrey Bogart was not underplaying before then.”) Walker is similarly low-key, and they compliment one another nicely.

There was a new sort of hip underground subculture that arose in the mid-80s and hung around until the early ’90s. That was about par for a new subculture’s lifespan in those days. In a way it evolved out of punk rock—which was hacking its last at the time—but it was neither musical nor political, not in the normal sense anyway. It was broader, darker, and more intellectual, with books usurping DIY cassettes as the primary medium of communication. It’s hard to thumbnail, but it involved a celebration of industrial decay, serial killers,, the Jonestown massacre, sideshow freaks, William Burroughs, Satanism, dystopias, insane religious cults, the Challenger explosion, Manson, conspiracy theories, Ed Gein, B movies, extremes of human thought, behavior, art and sexuality, all things violent, transgressive, nihilistic and shocking. All of them, for the most part, appreciated from a safe distance. In a way it was related to the mid-19th century school of thought dubbed “Cultural Pessimism,” but instead of merely noting, predicting or tracking a civilization’s decline, this new lot was cheering it on, even looking for ways to speed things up. I was anyway.

In her first lead film role in the John Wayne western Hondo (1953), Geraldine Page takes the space around her physically in a very definite way, but her squinting face and high, persnickety, slightly whiny voice don’t quite have the same authority as her body does yet. She was 29 years old here and already known as a promising theater actress, and she gets a special “introducing” credit for Hondo, for which she was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar even though she is Wayne’s unconventional leading lady.

Clara Bow was born in abject poverty in Brooklyn in 1905, and she was not expected to live. She became a tough street fighter because she had to in order to survive, and as a girl she watched her best male friend burn up in a fire. Her mentally unbalanced mother tried to kill her with a butcher knife when Bow expressed a desire to act in films, and her shiftless father sexually abused her. Getting into the movies was an escape from her milieu and a reaching towards the love that she did not get from her family. What Bow wanted, like so many other movie stars who came after her, was mass love, and her desire for this was as enormous as her unlikely and cheering vitality. In the face of infernal circumstances, Bow held tight to a dream of what her life could be, and the fun she might have in spite of everything.

If an actor is said to be “underplaying,” what does that mean exactly? It might mean not doing the obvious thing and not displaying the obvious emotion. Or it might mean feeling various emotions but holding them back and only sharing a tiny portion of them. This is a risky strategy, because most audiences might just think you can’t “act,” at least not in the expected way. When Myrna Loy made The Rains Came (1939), she was thirty-four years old and an established star. The film is what used to be called a “well-mounted” production, filled with dramatic incident and exotic settings and lots of extras and love crises and natural disasters. The role of Lady Edwina Esketh, a dissolute, promiscuous noblewoman who redeems herself through sacrifice and love, would seem to provide a juicy opportunity for showboating. It’s easy to imagine Bette Davis in the role, her eyes popping with restless desire. Whereas Loy had the kind of eyes that always seemed half-closed even when they weren’t.

Loy’s playing of Lady Esketh is cool, modest, almost non-committal, and this approach can seem alienating at first, but if you focus closely on what she’s doing, her under-the-radar work starts to pay dividends. The film’s producer Darryl Zanuck called her into his office midway through the shooting and complained about her performance, but Loy stuck to her own interpretation. She was known for her dry handling of light comedy, high comedy, even farce, and she refuses to play Lady Esketh full out as temperamental or mercurial, as practically any other actress of her time would have done. Instead, Loy keeps her cards close to her vest and lets her knowing attitude do the rest. Her expressive voice is light and almost fey, but very grounded, with ringing intonations, and this makes it different from a huskier yet more vacillating voice like Jean Arthur’s.

Even when Lady Esketh changes her tune, Loy doesn’t go all Noble. In fact, underneath the self-sacrifice her Lady Esketh seems to be as flip and above-it-all as ever, somehow, and this works well for the film. “I hate scenes,” she tells her lover George Brent, and this would be a laugh line for a Davis or a Joan Crawford, but Loy is an actress who actually does hate “scenes” or drama. She’s basically detached, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have feelings. It’s just that she doesn’t parade them around as other performers do.

This instinct Loy had for underplaying didn’t always work out so well. In Parnell (1937), Loy and Clark Gable do a lot of walking around and talking quietly to each other, and they come off like zombies in period dress. But her moderation in many other films was so unusual and original that Loy fashioned her very own type of screen character. She was almost never a working girl, but more usually a wife, a mistress, a lady with money and time for play, so fetching that she got away with lots of nose wrinkling and eyelash fluttering without ever seeming coy.

As a young girl, Loy had seen Eleonora Duse on the stage, and she had admired the restraint of that fabled actress. “Oh, I could have cried all over the place in many of my films, but it just didn’t feel right,” she said in her charming 1987 memoir, Being and Becoming. “The audience loses respect for the character. It seems that instinctively I’ve done this kind of underplaying a good deal in my work. That brand of acting had impressed me since first seeing Duse. She had an inner light, you see; you’ve got to have it…You can’t be thinking about how many people you’re having for dinner.” According to Loy in her book, nearly all of her leading men and many of the other men she met developed crushes on her, and that’s understandable. She had the damndest nose, turned up at the end and elaborately structured, and that reserved, hard-to-get manner that promised the deepest bliss if you could melt some of her reserve.

Loy was born in Montana, and she began her career early as a dancer in live prologues for silent films. She was an extra in the original Ben-Hur (1925), and for the next nine years she made eighty-odd movies, mostly in bits. As a maid in Ernst Lubitsch’s So This Is Paris (1926), Loy just walks across a room. She’s a lady in waiting to Lucrezia Borgia in Don Juan (1926) and a chorus girl in the first talking movie, The Jazz Singer (1927), and she was continually cast as vamps and tramps, often of Chinese, Latin or all-purpose “foreign” extraction.

In her first full talkie, The Desert Song (1929), Loy plays Azuri: “That name means tiger claws!” she informs us, in a hilariously BEEG! accent that she came up with herself. She’s very sexy in that movie, but she’s also making a kind of joke of sex, and this campy attitude also informs her Yasmini in John Ford’s The Black Watch (1929) and her gypsy temptress Nubi in The Squall (1929). Loy is enjoyably over the top in these roles and in some of her other vamp parts of this time, and she worked so often in this exaggerated fashion that maybe she was just all tired-out by the time she became a star in 1934 with The Thin Man, and so she made a low-key style out of this tiredness.

When I was in my early teens, I went to some Halloween event dressed as Lazarus, or at least the way I’d always pictured him: Full Arabic robes, desiccated, rotting flesh, and a blood-smeared mouth. Nobody seemed to get the joke, which I found hard to believe. Even as a kid in Sunday School it seemed pretty clear to me Lazarus was a zombie. According to the Bible story, he’d been dead long enough for his corpse to begin putrefying. Then Jesus came along, raised him from the dead, and unleashed him across the countryside. You never hear much about what happened to Lazarus after that, but I imagine he left a trail of carnage wherever he went.

To the long-suffering near-masochists known as Zappa fans, the unmistakable work of Bruce Bickford is a familiar sight. Easily the best thing about Baby Snakes, his fascinating animated sequences mitigate against the longeurs of Roy Estrada and that doll. But Bickford has had a long career independently of Zappa’s patronage, and is perhaps the only outsider artist to work in the medium of animation. A personal appearance at London’s Horse Hospital in 2010 – along with a screening of the documentary portrait Monster Road and of his film Cas’l– still seemingly a work in progress at that time – offered a chance to find out more.

Monster Road, as well as being insightful, amusing, and sometimes tear-jerkingly sad, is a valuable resource for understanding this little known artist and his work. In one memorable scene, Bickford is heard on the telephone, telling a media company that he used to work with Frank Zappa in the 1970s. One imagines that they are puzzled as to who Zappa is, never mind Bickford himself. They say his work will be outsourced, much to Bickford’s bemusement. This brief segment contains two truths about Bickford: that he is somewhat out-of-step with modern ways to distribute and market one’s work, and that Zappa’s shadow still looms large over the animator, despite him having a worldview (and a technique to match) that is considerably more supple and imaginative than Zappa’s curmudgeonly burlesque. Bickford’s work bears more fruitful comparison with the work of David Lynch and Sergei Eisenstein, as I will show.

He wasn’t as culturally attuned as Roger Corman. He wasn’t as obsessively prolific as Jess Franco. He wasn’t as personally flamboyant as Ed Wood. Still, writer/producer/director Del Tenney is a legend in the annals of low budget horror. That he’s a legend is in itself legendary, given that he’s remembered for only four films, all of which were made during a two year stretch in the early 1960s. I’m hard-pressed to think of another director with a filmography that brief who earned a legacy like Tenney’s. They weren’t great films, some weren’t even particularly good, but they had a spark to them, and they were undeniably memorable, sometimes for reasons that had nothing to do with the films themselves.

“My friends used to come up to me and ask, ‘How could you do all those terrible films?’’’ Tenney was fond of saying. “And I tell them, ‘I cry all the way to the bank,’”

He was born in Mason City, Iowa, but in the early ‘40s his family moved to Los Angeles. Tenney began studying theater in school, and by age 15 he was already working, both on stage and later as an extra in the likes of The Wild One and Stalag 17. His focus was on theater, though, so in the late ‘50s he moved to New York and found work in summer stock. A number of the young actors he worked with then, like Roy Scheider, Dick Van Patten, and Sylvia Miles, would later appear in Tenney’s films, many making their screen debuts with him.

By the early ‘60s Tenney and his wife, actress Margot Hartman Tenney, had also started directing productions of their own. After a conversation with a friend who was involved in (as it was described in polite company) “the exploitation film business,” Tenney took a job as assistant director on a couple of pictures, including the merely sleazy Satan in High Heels (a nasty little cheapie involving carnival strippers, junkies, robbery, sex, and murder) and nudie cuties like Orgy at Lil’s Place, (which concerned two girls who decide to get into the nude modeling racket). In later years, while Tenney spoke freely about the former, he rarely mentioned the latter. Still, his experience there inspired him to start making films of his own.

While in the theater he preferred to stick with Shakespeare and the classics, when he moved into film it was all about the bottom line. His goal was not to make great art, but to make a few quick bucks, and to do that he knew what audience he had to aim for. He was determined to give them exactly what they wanted.

Seeing potential in a story his wife had told him about a girl she knew in college who was found murdered, in 1962 Tenney sat down and began working on a script he initially called Black Autumn. Later it would be called Violent Midnight. Then shortly before its release the distributor changed the title to Psychomania, thinking it would cash in on Psycho and  pull in the kids.

Financed by his father-in-law and filmed (as all his pictures would be) in Stamford, CT,  Psychomania focused on a string of brutal sex murders in a small college town. The obvious suspect is that eccentric painter with a family history of mental problems who lives all alone out in the boonies and paints nude models who often end up getting stabbed (Lee Philips). The above-mentioned Dick Van Patten and James Farentino co-star as a couple of suspicious detectives, and Sylvia Miles appears, well, doing that great Sylvia Miles thing.

It can be dangerous to take a filmmaker at his word. Or, if not dangerous, it can cause you to stop thinking. Preston Sturges’ explanation of his intent with The Palm Beach Story was that he wanted to explore/illustrate “the aristocracy of beauty,” or, as Claudette Colbert’s character puts it, “It’s amazing what a pretty girl can do without doing anything.”

With typical Sturges complexity, the plot of this film sets up three intertwined problems: (1) the marriage of Tom and Jerry is in trouble because (2) he can’t interest anyone in his crazy idea of an overhead airfield made of wire mesh and (3) he won’t let Jerry use her charm to help him.

Jerry resolves to divorce Tom so she can help him from outside the marriage, removing his right to be jealous. The film now follows her adventures, with Tom following her. The REAL problem of the film is the marriage, but all the lesser problems have to be solved so it can be rescued.

Jerry has to somehow get to Palm Beach with no money, obtain a divorce with no money, and meet and marry a millionaire who can finance Tom’s tennis-racket airport. While the intuitive solution to making this interesting dramatically – screenwriting 101 – would be to make the most of these obstacles, Sturges goes the advanced route, having solutions fall into her lap at every turn.

Jerry has already had $700 thrust into her astonished hands by the Weenie King, a deus ex machina in the wizened flesh, but that money has been spent settling old bills. Now she has to make her own way, or so you might think.

It starts with the cab driver, played by Frank Faylen, the sinister asylum attendant from The Lost Weekend. He glances down, sees that Jerry has what Frank Capra considered the best body in Hollywood, and consents to drive her to Penn Station for no fare.

At the station, Jerry immediately meets a whole carload of rich millionaires, as you do. They take care of her train fare problem and supply her with a stateroom, but none of them seems particularly marriageable to say the least, so Sturges contrives a few misdemeanors to drive Jerry into the arms of John D. Hackensacker, one of the richest men in the world, who happens to be traveling by lower berth on the same sleeper train. He also has her lose her clothes, but rather than being a problem, this just cements the introduction and allows Hackensacker to act the role of heroic rescuer, which he might otherwise be judged ill-suited for.

Sturges’ casting genius is in full bloom here – Rudy Vallee was a 1930s crooner whose attempts at becoming a Hollywood star had flopped catastrophically. Sturges realized that the pathos of this bygone idol had a comic side, if you were prepared to be a little cruel. Vallee appears not to have noticed that he was becoming a figure of fun – perhaps he thought the joke was the film’s pretense that he, a singing star and ladies’ man, was a ridiculous schnook. In fact, no such irony is intended: he just embodies the character perfectly.

Jerry has now found a man dopey enough and rich enough to give her ex the $99,000 he needs – twice. This should seem like lazy, implausible and self-defeating plotting, but it isn’t – well, alright, it’s implausible, but Sturges is getting a lot of his best laughs out of implausibility here. It’s all fuel for his romantic comedy plot because if Jerry succeeds, the marriage is over, and the marriage is all we really care about. Well, actually, that’s not true. We care about John D. Hackensacker, ridiculous figure that he is. Schnooks are usually too priggish and oafish to care about, and Rudy Vallee certainly embodies a characterization impossible to take seriously as romantic rival, but he’s sweet and noble too, and while his sister, played by Mary Astor in another startling bit of casting against type, seems indestructible, Hackensacker has some real human vulnerability. You could probably drop him on his head without injury, but you can’t go breaking his heart.

During an appearance on Firing Line in December of 1967, radical activist, community organizer and author Saul D. Alinsky told host William F. Buckley Jr., “Controversy is a matrix of everything creative that comes out of life.“ He further quipped, “All progress comes in response to a threat.”  The core of his argument that evening, however, was that the only way people can get power is when they take it for themselves. As undeniably intelligent as he  was, Mr. Buckley seemed to have a difficult time comprehending any of these notions. Or at least he pretended to have a difficult time for the sake of his audience.

Out of simple contrariness, when I was about twelve or thirteen I began working my way through the entire political spectrum, from the extreme Right to the extreme Left and beyond. I became an outspoken True Believer at each stop along the way—I was a fascist, a conservative, a revolutionary Marxist—sometimes for a few days, sometimes a few weeks. By the time I was in high school, I considered myself a Bakuninist with strong Nihilist leanings. It was around that time I first read Alinsky’s last book, Rules for Radicals, originally published in 1971, less than a year before his death.

After three decades of working tirelessly to mobilize the nation’s urban poor to empower themselves one neighborhood at a time, the book was Alinsky’s attempt to distill the lessons he’d learned from personal experience, adapting them for the new generation of young student radicals emerging from the Sixties.

Language matters. Aside from its immediate impact on our perception of great political events, including war, language also defines our understanding of these events throughout history, thereby shaping our relationship with the past, the present, and the future.