Jean Epstein’s Le Tempestaire (1947) is almost enough to shake my devout atheism. Is this a film, an experiment in sonic plasticity, a séance, or some elaborate form of dialectical math — one plus one equals three? Full disclosure: painters, who speak monosyllabic caveman lingo to describe the dynamic force-field-like tension of the picture plane, raised me. Add a “blue” to a “red” and you may get “space.” “Push and pull,” the muscular rhythms resulting from colors that vie for spatial dominance. And Epstein’s penultimate film mirrors the same painterly axiom of sublimated emotion; only here, the dialectic involves sonic and visual elements. Twinned movements. The sea heaves in slow motion. Throwing off well-spoken shrieks. An instrument more alive than the Theremin matches octave for brooding octave my growing apprehension as nature’s working parts are isolated and reshuffled. Everything — sound, image, time itself — decelerates. (Think E.J. Marey brought into a fully cinematic register of experience, without pause or rupture and complete with synchronous, fully dissected hubbub.) Until the grammar, syntax, and disputations of a cresting wave become movie stars. Who knows why this soundtrack qualifies as something far greater than anguished dramaturgy? The results are easier to grasp formally than ‘spiritually’. 

Le Tempestaire doesn’t merely resemble an undulating graveyard — or evoke metaphorical lost souls wailing in the storm. Epstein’s plastic means are so perfectly allied that formalism itself  buckles. As the music troubles the imagery and the imagery brakes to a nigh standstill, we suddenly find ourselves engulfed by the spirits. And, breaking with tradition more powerfully than any filmmaker, stands the figure most responsible for cinema’s manic screen séance. 

Originally published in 1933, Nathanael West's short novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, paints a comically black portrait of the human condition and the world as a whole.  A cynical newspaper editor hires an earnest and kind-hearted would-be reporter simply to prove to himself that the kid is as craven and rotten inside as everyone else in this stinking world. Toward this end, he hands the kid the “Miss Lonelyhearts” advice column. The letters from the lost, the crippled, the beaten and forsaken, and the helpless—people looking for some kind of salvation or simple hope—make up the heart of the book, but even beyond the letters, every one of West’s characters is plagued by some deep ugliness. And in those early years of the Great Depression, the world that surrounds them all is no less bleak. The misery runs to such absurd depths, in fact, that sometimes the only thing a reader can do is look on in astonished horror or recognition.

The book didn’t sell very well (perhaps people didn’t need any reminding that we were all fucked), which makes it all the more amazing that the rights to the book would be snatched up by Hollywood and turned into a film not just once, but three times over the next quarter-century.

When 20th Century Fox acquired the rights shortly after the book’s publication, the initial question must have been “how do we present this material to a glum Depression-era audience?” Well, the answer was simple. You hire Lee Tracy, toss the novel out the window, and rewrite it as a frothy screwball comedy. It was the oldest and most beloved of Hollywood’s ways of dealing with literature.

Directed by Alfred L. Werker (a busy contract director since the late ‘20s) and written by Leonard Praskins, Advice to the Lovelorn stars Tracy as Toby Prentiss, an undependable reporter who is punished for missing a big story by being forced to take over the “Miss Lonelyhearts” column. (The name of the column was the only element of West’s novel to survive the adaptation). Prentiss’s attempts to sabotage the humiliating assignment backfires, however, when his unconventional and shocking bits of advice become a big hit and boost the paper’s circulation. The usual predicaments and hijinx ensue, most of them involving his girl Louise (Sally Blane).

A momentary dark turn opens the third act, when Prentiss’s mother dies after he gives her some medicine bought from a crooked druggist he’d been plugging in his column. It’s not long, though, before things turn wacky again and wrap up nicely and neatly and happily.

While it’s understandable why Fox didn’t want to go plumbing the shadowy corners of human misery in 1933, one has to wonder if West was disgusted with what had been done with his novel, or if he was just happy with the check. After all, it was that same year that he signed a contract to be a scriptwriter for Columbia.

Twelve years later, the animated opening and “Pop Goes the Weasel” on the soundtrack made it clear that I’ll Tell the World was no closer to West’s original vision than Advice for the Lovelorn. In fact it’s difficult to find any connection to West here apart from his name in the opening credits.

Lee Tracy returns, this time as Gabriel Patton, in a comedy directed by Leslie Goodwins and written by Henry Blankford. Patton is a motormouth insurance salesman whose gift of gab earns him a job as a sports announcer on a local radio station, and later as the station’s on-air advice columnist (I guess that’s the connection, though the name “Miss Lonelyhearts” was dropped by this point.) More hijinx and girl trouble follows. And musical numbers. Mostly musical numbers. When the tap dancer began her routine (the film also includes four songs and a jazz piano number) I found myself thinking that it was probably a good thing that West had been dead for four years by the time this came out.

Again, however, you can almost understand the motivation. The war was coming to an end, the Allies had been victorious, and it simply wasn’t the time to remind the masses how awful life could be.

It would be another thirteen years before Miss Lonelyhearts raised his weary head again. In 1958 United Artists decided that audiences were either mature or cynical enough to deal with a film version that remained true to West’s novel (or at least true to the popular stage play based on the novel). They gathered an all-star cast which included Montgomery Clift, Robert Ryan, Maureen Stapleton, Myrna Loy, Thomas Hart, and Jackie Coogan.  Screenwriter Dore Schart adapted the play, and the film, Lonelyhearts, was directed by Vincent Donehue, who was perhaps the obvious choice given that he also directed Peter Pan.

Would the bravest of men dare to look right in the eye of a seahorse, that horse-headed question mark, freshly surging from the depths to the surface of dream?

This handsome son of the sea, rising more vertically than the latest model elevator, this centaur whose mere presence is disturbing enough to put everything into question, what other could better symbolize Klee’s work?

For compared to this fateful and solitary little Pegasus, how much less impressive we find the weightily affirmed mastodons.

That is because there has always been, and will always be, a certain Reality to act as shepherdess to the monstrous flock.

The whales graze peacefully among the iciest of liquid steppes.

If I can trust my memories of natural history, these good substantial mothers, as clumsy at diving as the roly-poly ladies on middle-class beaches, because they do not have (like those roly-polies) the resource of shops in which to rumple ribbons, silks and trims, spit great gouts that transform water into sprays like plumes, so striking on regionalist headgear, for, thank heavens, the wives of subprefects, solicitors and colonels have not all, despite the present century, lost their sense of majesty.

You don’t often hear people referencing Philip Wylie these days, but from the late Twenties through the late Sixties, he was one of the most popular, prolific, influential and at times controversial writers in America. Wylie not only wrote novels, short stories, and articles for everything from the Saturday Evening Post and Popular Mechanics to Harper’s and academic journals, but newspaper columns and screenplays as well. Part of the problem, why he’s so thoroughly forgotten today, may be that even in his lifetime, as ubiquitous as he was, he was almost impossible to pin down. In many ways, he was reminiscent of Gore Vidal, and it’s entirely likely, and for the same reasons, Gore Vidal will be just as sadly forgotten forty years from now.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Wylie grew up in Montclair, New Jersey and graduated from Princeton in 1923. He began writing science fiction and mystery stories for the pulps, and his 1930 novel Gladiator has long been rumored to have been the central influence on the creation of Superman. Other stories and novels were said to have inspired Flash Gordon and Doc Savage. In the early Thirties he also began writing screenplays, working on both Island of Lost Souls and James Whale’s The Invisible Man. But Wylie was a polymath with a solid working knowledge of psychology, biology, physics, anthropology, sociology and engineering, elements of which would work their way into not only his science fiction, but his social criticism, his writings on policy issues, even articles about deep sea fishing and gardening. A 1952 article on growing orchids led to a nationwide gardening fad. He wrote cleverly and thoughtfully about gender issues, and though grossly misinterpreted at the time as a misogynist, Wylie, as a male writer, was actually decades ahead of his time. He wrote about UFOs and education. He railed against censorship of any kind. He touted the importance of civil defense preparedness years before backyard fallout shelters or duck and cover drills came into vogue. His incredibly popular “Crunch & Des” stories, about the adventures of a charter fishing boat captain in the Gulf of Mexico, resulted in a short-lived 1955 television series starring Forrest Tucker, and his 1933 novel When Worlds Collide was adapted into George Pal’s 1951 apocalyptic sci-fi epic.

If you take into consideration all his two-reel comedy shorts, educational and industrial films, TV episodes and features, it’s estimated that Sam Newfield directed well over 300 films in a career that spanned from 1919 to 1958. Exact numbers are hard to come by, as he directed under several pseudonyms (most regularly Peter Stewart and Sherman Scott), and new titles are still being uncovered and added to his filmography today. In any case there’s no doubt Newfield reigns as one of the most prolific directors in American film history. That you’re likely unfamiliar with the name may well have something to do with the fact he made most of his films for Poverty Row studios like Victory, Puritan, Lippert, and Tower, though he spent the bulk of his career at Producers Releasing Corporation, which in the 1940s was run by his older brother Sigmund Neufeld. It’s estimated he directed roughly 80 percent of the films PRC released, making the pseudonyms a necessity (they didn’t want audiences noticing it was just one guy directing all these cheap, subpar films). While none of Newfield’s pictures are included on the AFI’s Top 100 (or Top 2,800), he was quietly, and in some cases infamously, responsible for a number of significant cinematic firsts.

Newfield (born Neufeld but later Anglicized) made it through one year of high school before dropping out. Shortly thereafter he moved from New York to California where he began directing industrial and educational films. By the mid-’20s he was making two-reelers for nearly every studio in town, including a popular string of comedy short subjects featuring Buster Crabbe (they would make over 40 films together). In the early ‘30s he moved into features, cranking out endless quickie Westerns for Sam Katzman’s Puritan and Victory studios, and teaming up with his  low-budget producer of a brother for the first time at Tower Pictures to make 1933’s Reform Girl, a no-budget crime melodrama about a young woman fresh out of prison who decides to earn money by pretending to be a political candidates long-lost daughter.

They weren’t great films, no. There was no money for fancy sets or costumes or cameramen or editors or actors who knew what they were doing. In some cases adjectives like “incompetent” or “incoherent” might be apt, but they filled that empty slot on the moviehouse schedules, and that’s all that mattered. Newfield worked fast and cheap (he’d go anywhere and make anything so long as someone was offering a check) and was not burdened by a single shred of artistic pretension, which made him invaluable among the Poverty Row studios.

Even as he was churning out generic crap, however (scan through his countless Westerns and it can seem like the titles were created by simply plucking two random standard Westerny words out of a hat and sticking them together), every once in awhile something unique and unexpected snuck through. In 1937 while working at Associated Pictures, he directed Harlem on the Prairie, the very first African-American Western starring jazz singer Herb Jeffries.  Jeffries saw a potentially eager  audience for black Westerns, so he made four  as Harlem, America’s first black cinematic singing cowboy.

A year later Newfield, among the ten or twelve other films he directed that year, made one of his most notorious. The Terror of Tiny Town was fairly standard as far as Western storylines are concerned—an evil gunslinging villain rides into town and the townsfolk try to figure out what to do about it. Difference was, Newfield’s picture featured an all-midget cast, led by the great Billy Curtis as the hero Buck Lawson, and ‘Little Billy’ Rhodes  as the mean as a polecat villain Bat Haynes. It’s mostly played for laughs (the midgets ride Shetland ponies, walk under swinging barroom doors, and sing cowboy songs), but a year before The Wizard of Oz, audiences had never seen so many midgets onscreen at once . It would remain history’s  only all-midget film until Werner Herzog released his grim dystopian fable Even Dwarfs Started Small in 1970.

Then in 1939 while working with his brother again at Sigmund Neufeld Productions, he directed Hitler, The Beast of Berlin. Prior to American involvement in WWII, the major studios agreed to remain neutral on the tensions in Europe and on the question of the Nazis in particular. The older Neufeld, however, seemed to make a point of thumbing his nose at the majors whenever possible. The film was a thriller concerning the underground resistance movement in Germany, and might well have been the very first bluntly  and staunchly anti-Nazi film released in the US. It would take the rest of Hollywood another two years to catch up.

In 1940, Neufeld took control of PRC, and his little brother Sam set up shop as the studio’s in-house director. Sam kept churning out dozens of films a year (he had to in order to make any money at all, given he was only pulling in $500 a picture) and Sigmund kept thumbing his nose at the majors, using their own fake morality and cowardice to his advantage.

Normally PRC was in no economic position to hire name actors or directors, and so had to rely on less than stellar casts to fill out their pictures. But whenever a known actor or director found himself blacklisted on account of some scandal or another, Sigmund would pick them up on the cheap and Sam would put them in a string of films. When Lugosi’s drug problems started getting in the way and no one would hire him, he went to PRC and made one of their most popular (if not exactly esteemed) films, The Devil Bat. When Edgar G. Ulmer was outcast after having an affair with the wife of a Universal executive, he found himself at PRC, where he directed Detour, one of his greatest films and still held as one of the best noir films ever made. When rumors of Lionel Atwill’s Christmas orgy began coming out and he was arrested on morals charges, PRC kept him working.

{NOTE: During his lifetime, Charles Manson was rarely allowed to speak on his own terms. At least not without being interrupted, edited, or interpreted in order to leave him sounding like a gibbering hippie lunatic spouting incoherent nonsense. That’s what we do to people whose ideas pose a viable potential threat to the status quo. Before anyone has a chance to hear directly what the likes of Manson or the Unabomber have to say, tell the mob it’s all incoherent gibberish, and no one will pay the slightest attention. Who has the time to waste listening to nonsense  from a crazy person? Problem solved.

With the passing of one of the most insightful and important thinkers of the 20th century, a man who had been mythologized nearly out of existence while being touted as the most Evil Bugaboo the World Has Ever Known, we would like to offer him the simple respect of letting him at last speak for himself. Below is the testimony Manson offered in his own defense during the Tate-LaBianca murder trial in 1970. It’s worth noting that the jury was ordered out of the courtroom when he took the stand, and so never heard any of the following.}

There has been a lot of charges and a lot of things said about me and brought against the co-defendants in this case, of which a lot could be cleared up and clarified…

I never went to school, so I never growed up to read and write too good, so I have stayed in jail and I have stayed stupid,  and I have stayed a child while I have watched your world grow up, and then I look at the things that you do and I don’t understand…

In 1932, Richard Sharpe Shaver was working on the assembly line at a Ford auto plant in Detroit when he began noticing something strange. Every time he picked up his spot welder, he found he could hear the thoughts of the other workers all up and down the line. If that wasn’t odd enough, he also began hearing the anguished screams of what he determined to be people being beaten and tortured in caverns miles beneath the earth’s surface. Shaver concluded that it was the unique configuration of the coils in his spot welder that allowed him to access these thoughts and distant sounds.

In the 1930s, writers like Dashiel Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain made some serious headway toward rehabilitating crime fiction. What had long been dismissed as a gutter genre aimed at lowlifes, the undereducated and the psychically damaged started to be taken more seriously as a legitimate literary form. The success of film adaptations of The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and The Postman Always Rings Twice only helped matters. With the exception of Cain (who could get pretty nasty), the books themselves remained fairly traditional and straightforward tales of stalwart detectives on the trail of nogoodniks and sinister types. It’s up to the detective to solve a mystery, see that justice is served, and once again re-establish the conventional social order.

Towering at six and a half gangling feet, with a long face that drooped like a pensive sunflower over everyone he met, playwright Robert Sherwood loomed large in New York culture, in more than one sense, from the 1930s through the war and beyond. Between 1936 and the coming of war in Europe he gradually transformed from a writer of Pulitzer-winning antiwar plays to a gung-ho war propagandist and speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt. In his shift from isolationist to interventionist, he helped prod the rest of America in the same direction.

In December1942, Frank Sinatra sang his first solo concert at the Paramount Theater movie palace in Times Square. Since his first hit record in 1940, the skinny Hoboken crooner with the velveteen voice had been amassing a passionate following among adolescent and teenage girls. When he walked up to the microphone on the Paramount stage on December 30, 1942, the packed house, estimated at 5,000 girls (in a space with an official capacity of 3,500), exploded in deafening shrieks and screams. Sinatra and his bandleader Benny Goodman were shocked and petrified. Although Goodman’s swing music had been motivating high schoolers to jitterbug in the aisles of the Paramount and other venues since the late 1930s, he’d never provoked such a bacchantic frenzy as this. The girls drowned out the entire concert. Many wept, and several fainted. The cacophony and pandemonium were as great as at any Elvis or Beatles concert in later years. Afterward the girls mobbed the stage door, hoping for an autograph, or at least a glimpse. The crowd surged out onto Broadway and 43rd Street, causing a traffic jam as frustrated and bewildered cops fought to maintain order.

In 1973, Brian De Palma released Sisters, his Siamese twin mystery thriller starring Margot Kidder and Charles Durning. After a string of social satires which, to be honest, haven’t aged very well, Sisters was De Palma’s breakthrough film, the one that would cement the form and style for which he’d come to be known. A year later he released the horror/comedy/glam rock opera Phantom of the Paradise starring the great Paul Williams. Hitting theaters more than a year before Rocky Horror, Phantom combined elements from Faust, Phantom of the Opera and about a dozen other sources into a bright, fast, wicked comic book satire of the music business. The film went on to become a cult favorite.