Pandemic Picks from January 2021

Oops. My May 2020 resolution to send out a monthly Tiny Letter didn't really stick. That's one less email clogging up your boxes, I suppose. But I was back! in January, with lots of movie related thoughts.

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In 2021, I’m reclaiming my love of going to the movies. So what if every cinema I loved in this city is dead or in mortal peril? I’m stuck at Cinema du Living Room and I know I’m happier when it’s screening more than Star Trek re-runs seven days a week. Time to start programming the hell out of this place. 
 
I finally gave in to the hype and watched Mank, David Fincher’s period drama about Herman J. Mankiewicz and how he came to write the screenplay for Citizen Kane. I didn’t hate Mank like I expected, which is something. But… I wasn’t exactly blown away. So, instead of telling you to watch Mank, I have a couple more worthy recommendations.
 
First, an actual Orson Welles movie: 1946’s criminally underhyped noir, The Stranger. Welles directed, and he and his mustache play Franz Kindler, a former Nazi hiding out in a small town bastion of Connecticut bluebloods. A war crimes investigator, Edward G. Robinson, is hot on Kindler's trail. Will he be able to get the evidence to nab the monster?
 
While The Stranger isn’t a masterpiece (and deserves its B movie status), it’s more than worth your time. The cinematography ranges from good to the shadowy sublime. Edward G. Robinson  is wonderfully understated, playing against type. Short, chubby, with the “face of a depraved angel,” Robinson serves up exactly the kind of cinematic comfort food I’m craving. (As the kids say, we stan a short king.) Almost a year into the never-ending staycation, I realize I need more than a giant plushy. I need a gruff but gruff teddy bear, someone in the cuddly zone between Edward G. Robinson and Simon Oakland.
 
And if you’ll allow me to be serious for a moment, The Stranger is a great movie to screen for International Holocaust Remembrance Day (January 27, commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army.) According to its Wikipedia entry, “The Stranger was the first commercial film to use documentary footage from the Nazi concentration camps.” The bits of documentary film reels seen in the movie were used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. Welles had seen the film in the course of his participation in the United Nations Conference on International Organization, a post-war meeting of allied nations in late spring 1945. Welles was clearly deeply affected by what he saw at the Conference. The Stranger’s plot reads as both metaphor for the urgent task of de-Nazification, as well as the difficulty of convincing the world to care about Nazi crimes.
 
I imagine playing a Nazi hunter was a meaningful role for Edward G. Robinson (b. Bucharest, 1893). His brother was gravely injured by an antisemitic mob in Bucharest, after which his family emigrated to America. The Stranger deals frankly with the destruction of European Jewry, at a time when the scale of the Nazi’s crime was still not entirely accepted. 
 
My next film recommendation is a bit further afield. If you’re missing the experience of live theater, allow me to point you to Netflix and the superb new adaptation of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. It tells the story of real-life blues pioneer Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey. She and her band have left their tour of the American south for a one-day Chicago recording session with a white recording studio. Even the blues was a just another commodity to be exploited and transformed by its encounter with white supremacy. August Wilson’s genius was to imagine what it felt like for the people caught up in that encounter, and he had two Pulitzer Prizes to prove it. 
 
This latest adaptation is brilliant, avoiding stage to screen pitfalls. Wilson’s words sing, brought to life by a stellar ensemble, including the final film performance from Chadwick Boseman. Ma Rainey isn't exactly a light evening’s entertainment, but it's eminently worth your time.
 
I must also mention the passing of a quiet legend at the beginning of this new year, Crossing Delancey director Joan Micklin Silver, koved ir ondenk. Though Hollywood had almost no interest in her unique vision, Micklin Silver still managed to leave an impressive body of work, produced mostly from the margins. Of greatest interest to Yiddishists is Hester Street, her adaptation of Ab. Cahan’s Yekl, starring a luminous 21 year old Carol Kane as the rejected greenhorn wife, Gitl. 
 
Micklin Silver excelled at literary adaptations and she had an eye for material in which women could shine. Take her 1976 short film based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, Bernice Bobs Her Hair. It’s a delicious slow burn, in which a mousy young woman is Pygmalioned by her fickle cousin. If you can relax into the film’s easy pace and lo-fi aesthetic, you’ll be rewarded by a shocker of a climax that had me gasping out loud, and an ending that will make you cheer. With excellent performances by Shelly Duvall and Veronica Cartwright, it’s available on Youtube and you should watch it now.