50 new things in 2023, part 8/50

This week's new-to-me thing was the 1931 movie The Front Page, which stars Pat O'Brien as reporter Hildy Johnson (who wants to quit and move to New York with his fiancée to work in advertising) and Adolphe Menjou as his wily editor Walter Burns, who will stop at nothing to make him stay.

I was expecting screwball comedy, and I did get . . . some. Along with a hefty dose of pitch-black cynicism about reporting, policing, and politics, and some genuinely very dark content. This is a movie that opens with a scene of the gallows being tested, to ensure that all's ready for the hanging of Earl Williams (George E. Stone), an unemployed "Bolshevik" (he insists he's an anarchist) convicted of shooting a Black police officer during a protest. The sheriff and mayor of the unnamed-but-definitely-Chicago city, facing re-election in a week, have railroaded Williams to court Black voters as well as to reinforce the sheriff's slogan "Reform the reds with a rope!" Pretty much everybody in the movie, with the exception of Williams and his only friend, streetwalker Molly Molloy (Mae Clarke), is callous and self-serving. Nastiness flies in the dialogue, including enormous amounts of casual racism, sexism, and homophobia. Some of it's from characters we're not supposed to like, but by no means all, so be warned.

It's a fast-talking, aggressive little movie, with endless scenes of people shouting into telephones. Most of it didn't strike me as very funny, and I found both Hildy Johnson and fiancée Peggy Grant (Mary Brian) pretty dull. However, the movie shows traces of a tender heart, particularly in Williams and Molloy, who have a lovely brief scene together where he argues for the goodness of humanity, and she, out of bitter experience, disagrees--but they each see the other as a good person.

Spoilers here, not that the plot is very important

I wish we knew what became of them. Molly's courage in the face of dismissal and belittling from the cops and reporters made her my favorite character, and I found her onscreen suicide attempt genuinely shocking. And while Williams gets his reprieve for shooting the cop, nothing in the film gives me confidence that he won't be charged for shooting the psychiatrist and attempting to escape.

Besides Williams and Molloy, my other favorite character was Roy Bensinger (Edward Everett Horton, funnier than the rest of the cast put together), a health-obsessed reporter who struck a strangely modern note by, when everyone else was getting hamburgers, ordering a lettuce sandwich on gluten bread. He's very insistent about the gluten bread. (Nowadays it would be gluten-free, of course.)

There's a lot about The Front Page that's eerily modern. Crooked "law and order" politicians, unscrupulous lying press, brutal and corrupt cops. The actual mechanics of the film haven't aged well--it's so stagey you can practically hear the creak of the floorboards, and it feels much older than films from just a few years later--but its concerns are looking, sadly, timeless.

I can't exactly say I liked it, but I found it interesting in a number of mostly-uncomfortable ways.

Wednesday reading

Reading now: I'm between books at the moment.


Recently finished: I have finished Moby Dick at last! I'm still mulling it over, and I'll probably re-read it at some point, because I know there was a lot going on structurally and thematically that I didn't fully catch. I knew the basics of how the plot resolved, of course, because it's seeped into pop culture. But the actual ending, the epilogue and especially that last sentence, is still echoing in my head. And I'm pondering why abridged editions of Moby Dick exist, because it's not an abridge-able novel. The things that aren't plot, the asides and diversions and whale facts, are where most of the actual story resides.

After that, I wanted something light, so I tried Cairo Malachi and the Adventure of the Silver Whistle, a m/m romance by Samantha Sorelle. The opening sentence is: "The first time I met the love of my life, he died in my arms," so it's got a bold premise going for it. The main character is a (fraudulent) medium, and his love interest is indeed a ghost. It's a fun book, which does some fun things and is pretty original within its genre limits. But as a reader, I've been chafing at the genre limits of m/m romance for some time. What I really want is books that are fully-fledged books in their genre (sff, mystery, historical) with deep worldbuilding and complex characters and enough plot to hold the rest together, that also include m/m love stories. Also, ideally, prose that's got a little life in it and isn't just functional. There are very few of these books. (Several of Natasha Pulley's books just about hit the sweet spot for me, problematic as they are in certain ways *coughOrientalismcough*. Wish there were more by other writers. Preferably including queer male writers. Seriously, where are the queer men writing genre? I know publishing gets more awful by the minute, and there's a glut of cheap self-pubbed m/m mostly by women that's maybe pushing other types of m/m stories out of the market. But it's frustrating.)

Anyway, despite my complaints above about wanting more substance, I was still in the mood for something light so I also read Legends and Lattés, by Travis Baldree. This is a cute little story, completely unabashed about its roots in TTPRGs, about Viv, an orc fighter who retires from adventuring and opens a coffee shop in a city that's never heard of coffee. Baddies try to baddie, but new and old friends help Viv out, and there's community and love and all that stuff. It's . . . nice? Not really fully satisfying to me, because I am a picky asshole, but it's a sweet, fluffy cinnamon roll of a story. Which is exactly what it intends to be.


Reading next: Maybe Natasha Pulley's The Half Life of Valery K, about Soviet nuclear science and, apparently, gay love. Or maybe I'll finally start The Steerswoman, which I've had for a while now. I've also recently acquired the 4th and final volume of The Department of Truth. Might give that a go today, since I've been wanting to see how it turns out.

OFMD fun

The latest installment of Kristian Nairn's post-episode Instagram streams is incredibly fun. This week's guests are Con O'Neill and David Fane. David is charming, Con is filthy, Kristian is streaming from a car parked in a seedy part of Belfast, and there is briefly a dog.

About 40 minutes, here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssL7XZJCSdA