0 Now Wait for Last Year (1963)

Time travel via taking drugs is a strange idea, although it's maybe not so strange that Philip K. Dick would take it on. (What's strange to me is that Daphne du Maurier tried it too.) As usual, there is a lot going on here. Earth is involved in an interstellar war in which Terrans (so-called) have an uneasy alliance with Lilistar, who are genetic cousins. But it appears likely their common enemy, an alien insect race, might make the better partner. Leaders of nations and captains of industry clash with mixed motivations. It's not actually a very interesting story. But Dick has a way about him. Here he introduces parallel universes as well as time-travel paradoxes—or more accurately, perhaps, uses the one to explain the other, as convenient—and quickly lets the implications run to infinity. So a wise leader of Earth has spent years yanking in counterparts of himself to serve various roles, dipping in as needed to alternative time streams and/or parallel universes. In the present time and space of most of the novel the leader, Gino Molinari aka "The Mole," has a perplexing medical condition in which he continually contracts fatal diseases from which he always mysteriously recovers. This is never exactly explained. But there is one very funny scene in which he stalls for time in a delicate political negotiation by lapsing into a severe medical condition that requires immediate major surgery. What this "ploy" accomplishes is explained a little better—the political gamesmanship. But many other things happen that make little sense. Eventually the drug JJ-180 appears and something like a plot clanks into view. The ideas are interesting in flashes, not unusual, but here I'm not otherwise very satisfied with the clinical way Dick sets up his pieces and moves them about—a doctor and his wife, an antique dealer, have a bad marriage. The Moles spins and pirouettes to a tune only he can hear, evidently successful at minimizing risk and danger to Terrans—a hero. People take JJ-180 and move about in time. There are questions about why some go forward and some go back. There are questions about moving physical objects between time streams, and of course there are the usual questions about various time travel paradoxes. Questions, questions, questions. I want some answers!

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Now Wait for Last Year (1963)

0 Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1963)

Fun facts to know and tell: The publication date for Dr. Bloodmoney is 1965, the subtitle is "or How We Got Along After the Bomb," and the scenario is a post-apocalypse Earth wrecked by nuclear war. Yet Philip K. Dick's novel was actually written prior to the release of Stanley Kubrick's movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (the first test screening for which, as an entirely gratuitous aside, was November 22, 1963), Thus, the tie-in is more likely the inspiration of an editor with an eye cocked on the market, as reported in Wikipedia. Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano called Dr. Bloodmoney a masterpiece, but I'm not so sure. Certainly it has many of the wholly unexpected and wonderfully weird hallmarks of Dick: a pair of emotionally symbiotic twins, one living inside the other ... an astronaut stuck in orbit reading Of Human Bondage to the survivors below ... mutant strains of animals and humans from the radiation ... and not one but two devastating nuclear events. Mental illness once again tends to reflect deeper understanding. And all of it is related in straightforward, unadorned fashion. I'm just not sure it altogether works. There is a fairly startling lack of any sense of trauma and/or dread among the survivors. They worry about a lot of weird little things, but the basic situation is so calmly accepted by one and all, less than 10 years after ruinous nuclear incidents, that it becomes hard to believe and a little dull for that. Even Dr. Strangelove, a comedy, strikes notes that put its events into perspective. On the other hand, Dr. Bloodmoney, which doesn't seem to me particularly comic in its intent, can be funny. Reading Of Human Bondage aloud from space, for example. One of Dick's canniest strategies always is the simplicity of his language, which can set the strange ideas into evocative context, but here it more often felt banal. There was not a single character I cared much of anything about—and in general there are way too many of them, with no obvious purpose except to square up narrative circles. I suppose there's something useful suggested by the banality, and even the smallest of Dick's ideas can open up wide. But this feels so emotionally disconnected from its own realities as to approach a kind of disassociativeness in its own right, which I appreciate. But to what end? Compared to Cormac McCarthy's The Road, for example, this too often feels like a kindergarten make-believe to me.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1963)

0 Impressions, "It's All Right" (1963)

Oct. 12, 1963, #4
(listen)

Here's the biggest single for the Impressions and for lead singer and songwriter Curtis Mayfield too, at least until his solo career got underway in the '70s and he matched the chart performance with "Freddie's Dead." But that was 1972 and this is 1963 and therein lies all the difference. In many ways you wouldn't even know it's the same artist. That was the year that gave us "Be My Baby," "Blowin' in the Wind," "Guantanamera," "In My Room," "I Want to Hold Your Hand," "Louie Louie," "Ring of Fire," and "Surfin' Bird," so it's easy to lose track of "It's All Right" in the shuffle. Built for comfort, it moves slow—"When lights are low / When you move it slow / It sounds like a motor," as the song explains—powered by luminous harmonies and inflected by a nagging guitar upstroke and the kindest horn section you may ever hear. It is at once earthly and celestial. "When you wake up early in the morning / Feeling sad like so many of us do," you will know just what to do, now that you are reminded of the existence of this song. It's pitched at such a simple level that when the handclaps start near the end they are amazingly effective—the rousing moral equivalent of a guitar solo. And there is always hope, that is what this song is here to tell us. It's about enduring. "Someday I'll find me a woman / Who will love and treat me real nice / Then my woe's got to go / And my love, she will know / From morning, noon, and night ... / ... whoa, it's all right." Aw yeah.

Detail: Impressions, "It's All Right" (1963)

0 The Grifters (1963)

It's true I have misgivings about a few of Jim Thompson's most highly regarded novels, such as The Killer Inside Me and After Dark, My Sweet. Nothing major, just a little underwhelmed for one reason or another. For all its strengths, I think I might have to put The Grifters in that category too. It's obviously significant in terms of the rehabilitation of Thompson's reputation that came after his death, providing the source for a 1990 neo-noir movie with John Cusack, Angelica Huston, and Annette Bening, directed by Stephen Frears, produced by Martin Scorsese. And Thompson obviously went to a good deal of effort to research the con artist and his many tricks. But it only seems to provide distracting shape and underpinning to his more typical impulses (incest, alcoholism, gambling, etc.). The explanations of the tricks inevitably bear a certain pedantic tone, and though the tricky tricks remain interesting it's not exactly why we read Jim Thompson novels. (If it's con games you're after, see linguist David Maurer's 1940 The Big Con.) Yes, the Thompson elements are classic: a seamy Freudian tale of the relationship between con man Roy Dillon and his mother Lilly, who was 13 when she had him, further complicated by Roy having a girlfriend, Moira. There's a hot nurse named Carol too, a concentration camp survivor. As always, it is more or less about the rot that creeps into human relationships, a sickness unto death, with a thousand and one identical faces. Lilly is a monster and all the women here seem to have that potential. But it also feels just slightly artificial, as if Thompson has donned a girdle. It often feels programmed: a few tidy details on the intricacies of "short" and "long" cons here, some all-in-a-day torture with a cigarette there, and lots of lascivious blurp all over the place. The writing does feel more fresh and urgent than in many of his '50s novels, which saves it. Between the research and the writing, The Grifters is pretty good Thompson, even as it attempts to slot into some commercial format of popular taste. I won't argue with anyone who calls it essential. It's good enough, and you don't want to miss it if you're reading him.

In case it's not at the library.

Detail: The Grifters (1963)

0 Contempt (1963)

Le mepris, France/Italy, 102 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Writers: Jean-Luc Godard, Alberto Moravia
Photography: Raoul Cotard
Music: Georges Delerue (Piero Piccioni, Italian/Spanish version)
Editors: Agnes Guillemot, Lila Lakshmanan
Cast: Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance, Fritz Lang, Giorgia Moll, Jean-Luc Godard

The first thing that always surprises me about Contempt is how beautiful it is. That's a natural enough result of setting much of it in the daylight of Rome and Capri, casting Brigitte Bardot, and shooting in color—magnificent color. In fact, according to the consensus view revealed at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, it's now considered director Jean-Luc Godard's best after Breathless. I know Contempt was the Godard that left me most impressed walking out of the theater after seeing it for the first time (in a '90s rerelease). But the more I look at it the more frozen in stasis it seems to become, immobilized, inert, dare I say impotent, like the classical statuary on which it loves to linger.

It's a lot less playful than most Godard I know from the '60s, for one thing. In fact, it's almost stately, pitched at a snail's-crawl pace with Georges Delerue's remarkable score swelling like ripened fruit, intruding at will across anything in our field of vision. More money seems to be involved with this project too. The early '60s was a heroic era of art film, remember, one of those periods when money materializes for all kinds of crazy things. Godard and producer Carlo Ponti were kicking around names like Kim Novak, Frank Sinatra, Sophia Loren, and Marcello Mastroianni before settling on Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. Jack Palance plays a leering, smacking American movie producer. And really, any movie that's about making a movie and has the wherewithal to cast Fritz Lang as Fritz Lang definitely has something going for it.



As it turns out, Contempt has much in common with Godard's breakthrough Breathless, at least in their broad outlines. In the first third, a moral crime is committed. In the middle third, a man and a woman in a relationship pass daytime hours in an apartment in a city. And in the last third, destiny plays a hand. The centers of both films are those middle sections, but whereas in Breathless the couple is deepening their romantic connection, in Contempt the relationship is dying before our eyes. Ultimately, it's a movie about the end of a relationship, though in turn that is weighed down with so much allegorical whatsits that the film operates more effectively on a cerebral level, undercutting itself.

Specifics may help illustrate: Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli) is a crime novelist who has been brought in as a screenwriter to help salvage a movie project directed by Fritz Lang. The producer is an American named Jerry Prokosch (Jack Palance), a smarmy, power-mad buffoon who brought Javal in partly because he heard Javal has a beautiful wife. And he does—Camille (Brigitte Bardot). The incidents that transpire between the three of them (and a second woman, an interpreter) are ambiguous but provocative, there are no innocents in this drama, and practically overnight the relationship between Paul and Camille ruptures. In many ways Contempt is strongest when it simply watches as the couple probes for the fault lines between them, especially in the long apartment scene.

But the film is also so vividly full of a culture of moviemaking (among other things) that it wouldn't be too hard to construct different cases for what it is actually "about." The American producer Prokosch is a loathsome creature who crawled out of Hollywood. "I like gods. I like them very much," he says at one point, in a screening room looking at rushes. "I know exactly how they feel. Exactly." A few minutes later, after throwing a calculated fit by way of bringing on Javal over any objections Fritz Lang might have, Prokosch says, "When I hear the word 'culture' I bring out my checkbook," and proceeds to write a check on the backside of a girl who obligingly bends over for him. (To which an urbane Lang, wearing a monocle, responds by saying, "Years ago, the Italians said 'Revolver'"—which I think takes the reference at least one step too obvious.)

But now you see how quickly we are so far afield of a drama about a crumbling marriage. Contempt takes the scenic route figuratively, turning corners into ingenious little nod-and-wink sleight-of-hand cinema tricks, which distract. It's beautiful, the music is beautiful, and it's always clever. But I'm not sure it has much of a heart, especially for something about the end of a marriage. The levels of contempt in this film are obviously many, so perhaps that is another one—contempt for the institution of marriage.

As for Brigitte Bardot, she is objectified from the first, in long scenes that veer dangerously close to soft-core porn. Yes, that opening scene, for example, is a tender moment of intimacy between a husband and wife. But honestly? It sets off distracting Brigitte Bardot four-alarm fires in my head and I suspect the heads of many many others. Our being privy to it this way somehow changes and supercharges it, not to mention the monumental vanity—and the other monumental asset—on display in the exchange. Nor does it feel natural, especially with the red and blue filters cast randomly over it in cuts, at pains to further emphasize the artificiality. It's the first scene, and with all that perhaps easy to miss that already Camille is tired of Paul, an interesting subtlety. But why should it have to be lost? (I know, I know. Godard has his reasons.)

Indeed, Contempt is reasonably good at tracing the endings of a faltering relationship, which is what makes it so disappointing in a way that it is also juggling a hundred other tricks and stunts, often intriguing but contributing less. It's not that I always have to have my satisfying narrative thread—though perhaps I do, I certainly like things better when they are there, I must admit—but rather more like: If you're not really interested in a narrative thread, perhaps it's better not to include one at all, let alone one that appears to be serious? There are some shots here—such as a mask floating in a blue sky—that I would be happy to gape at for 90 minutes with or without any distracting "narrative context." It's that beautiful.

Detail: Contempt (1963)