Myth Happens

Anyone looking for queer, carnivalesque, kabbalistically infused New York Dante has come to the right place in Myra Paci's Transeltown (1992). It opens with terza rima and closes under rhododendrons and in between the cleaning of a fish is a sexual invitation, fingers glistening deep in the cut. Its selva oscura is Midtown at the mouth of the Port Authority, established in a silver mist as austere as modernism until it blows off in the triple-X Technicolor of Times Square. Its pilgrim mooches to work in a rainbow beanie and permanently plugged Walkman, a Yoo-hoo-fueled office drone played by the still-student writer-director-editor herself with the quizzically pointed face and terminal taste in sweater vests of many a fine Jewish dyke. The intertitles take over for Virgil, steering the 19-minute film through the circles of Hell's Kitchen with translations as emphatically intoned as slam poetry: Through me one goes into the suffering city. Through me one goes into eternal pain. Through me one goes among the lost. Abandon all hope, you who enter. It is otherwise functionally a silent film, its scant dialogue post-synched and in any case rarely in English. The title card blooms like a hot-hearted eye. It feels explosively transformative and not normal yet.

Gender abounds, mutably. Boi-ish Pootie leans in to the slick cavity of the proffered fish and runs late to work with its stickiness on their shoes like the whiff of an assignation: when next seen, the round-chinned fish-gutter will have traded her butcher's apron and seaman's watch cap for a shtreimel, a wunder-rebbe dovening over the smoke-scaled text of a carp. The Chartreuse-sipping housewife amusing herself with the View-Master through which Pootie observes an arterial, peristaltic ejaculation like a carnal NDE previously collared them under the come-hither neon of the Circus Cinema to push a graphic stack of porn in the five o'clock shadow and overcoat of a dirty mac brigadier. Sharing a deli sandwich with a violently dumped stranger rebounds into a chivalric seduction by a goddess in a sculptural ruck of draperies. The climax to this gauntlet of erotically off-kilter encounters, each charged with a flicker of transfiguration, is the discovery of the comedy's Beatrice: naked, blue-lipped and open-eyed beneath the wheels of a construction site on Eighth Avenue. Cellophane-wrapped like a bouquet, hauled home like a trash-picked couch by a transfixed Pootie, she could be just another beautiful rictus except for the unfinished plaster vacancy between her thighs, the androgyny of angels. Tenderly fed, combed and caressed, lain over like Lilith in the violet hours of the night, with her dissolution into the sort of sexual white gunk that has dripped suggestively through even the sterile monochrome sections of the film she precipitates its naïf of a pilgrim into an urgent, ecstatic fumble toward transcendence which just happens to be found in the catacombs of a porn emporium. Ladies Welcome, the frosted doors of Show World Center cut to the famous lines of Canto III. Its tableaux are Greenaway on a shoestring, a banquet of peppermint-striped candles and Christmas glass, a dentist's chair strung with fairy lights, an orbital sander throwing off bloodied mylar sparks. Its wielder looks like a glam and imperious Hephaistos in her welding helmet and gold lamé, the leather and studs of her tool belt blushing a wicked light. The fusion of anatomies and astronomies in the flame-fringed, endometrial sigil behind her could come from some alchemical sex tape. Paradise is not stasis. In the gardens of suburbia where it is commonly supposed that heteronormativity reigns as supreme as a middle-aged husband obliviously washing his car, the shape-changing cycle of desire starts anew.

None of this phantasmagoria is schematic. It feels as personal a vision as the painterly slides of Pootie ministering to their blonde catalyst—allegorically credited as Coitella, in the same way that other players are revealed to have been Voluptas or Postcard Man—as the light in their barely furnished room ebbs from acceptably sunset shades of goldenrod to apricot to a flagrant, black-light fuchsine and then spectrally lavender-blue. The viewer half knows how to read it, half tags along with the entranced protagonist to the grotesque and wonderful end. Freeze-frames and blow-ups cut the action as non-naturalistically as the switches in film stock shared by co-DPs Giselle Chamma and Tim Naylor. The sound design by Paci and Carter Burwell fills peep-show groans and birdsong between conga and temir komuz. Its double cast of Burwell, Adrienne Weiss, Natalia Neszuu, Dina Emerson flick back and forth across selves like a heartbeat of pupils, a bobble of schmutz. It's such a stickily palpable film, in even the dry exploration of fingers across the architecture of a body, fluidity is implicit. I found it on the Criterion Channel in their seasonal collection of LGBTQ+ Shorts, but it exists at large on the internet thanks to the archive of Miranda July's Joanie 4 Jackie. Its street shots could be city symphony, but it couldn't be bothered less with vérité when the truth of theater is right there. This hope brought to you by my welcome backers at Patreon.

Under very few circumstances while watching Ishirō Honda's Atragon (海底軍艦, 1963) does one have to hand it to Agent No. 23 of the Empire of Mu, the shoregoing operative of a barbarically advanced civilization gathering itself from the bed of the Pacific to reclaim its former colonies which in the millennia since its Atlantean sinking had the temerity to strike out on their own as the nations of Earth, but he is played by Akihiko Hirata in a gold-glint of dark glasses and an out-of-season scarf tucked against the chill of the surface world and when he is held at gunpoint with his back to the tide-line, he only smiles in the slightest of farewells before leaping into the day-for-night-blue surf without even taking off his shoes. "He escaped into the sea?" His introductory getaway was more technically audacious when he drove a stolen taxi straight off a quay, but if he were human he would look like a suicide and once he's in the water instead he rejoins his phosphorescently submerged comrades without so much as catching a bullet. In a high-concept blend of lost-world pulp and post-war politics, he's a wonderfully uncanny touch without special effects, which is not to deprecate the film's ingenious panoply of images from hydronauts in a looseleaf of silver scales to a dragon coiling like a moray from the side of an oceanic trench to the crimson-clouded detonation of a geothermal sun. The people of Mu run hotter than seals: the sea smokes like a geyser around them, a wrench turns red-hot in the agent's contemptuous grasp; one of his colleagues appears capable of generating an eellike stunning charge. "We have special energy. It's useless." Elsewhere their civilization resembles a sort of Egypto-Minoan fusion by way of Verne and Haggard, its laser cannons sheathed in the coils of bronze ceti and the blinkenlights of its enormous computer banks carved around in cyclopean bas-relief. The empress of Mu looks like a nascent anime design with her hood of clementine-colored hair and new wave eyes, a casual ransom of pearls collared over her brilliant draperies and finely ringed mail. Humanity's last, best hope if it can be repurposed from a dream of militaristic nationalism to the defense of global ideals, the Atragon-class submarine of the title suggests a garfish down to its countershading, a sleek leviathan of spy-fi industry artfully equipped with a few indistinguishably magical tricks of its own. When Mu calls in its marker on the land, the inevitable destruction of Tokyo is a one-two doozy of practical and animated effects—business districts jolted to flinders by a precisely triggered earthquake, container ships set ablaze by an enemy sub's lancing ray—but the eye candy doesn't crowd out the food for thought when the sunken empire makes such a successfully fantastical double for the imperial past that Japan must explicitly repudiate in order to inhabit its international future. I wouldn't kick any of it out of bed for eating seaweed crackers, especially not the first glimpse of the sea-dragon Manda, a thick shield-wall of scales, seemingly endless, breathing. I just remain enchanted with the liminal simplicity of Agent No. 23 in his anonymous dark suit, a Magritte figure whose very ordinariness makes him surreal. His voice will narrate a history of his empire from a spool of 8 mm and deliver its modern ultimatum on reel-to-reel. "Admiral, this earthquake isn't a coincidence. Remember me?" He'd be namelessly memorable even if I hadn't loved his actor since Dr. Serizawa. This sea brought to you by my special backers at Patreon.

Saturday's Hero (1951) was already failing to survive contact with the Production Code when the Red Scare stepped in. To give the censors their back-handed due, the results can be mistaken for an ambitiously scabrous exposé of the commercialization of college football whose diffusion into platitudes beyond its immediate social message may be understood as the inevitable Hollywood guardrail against taking its cynicism too thoughtfully to heart. It just happens that any comparison with its source material reveals its intermittently focused anger as a more than routine casualty of that white picket filter: it is an object lesson in the futility of trying to compromise with a moral panic.

Optioned by Columbia before it was even published, Millard Lampell's The Hero (1949) was a mythbuster of a debut novel from an author whose anti-capitalist, anti-fascist, pro-union bona fides went back to his undergraduate days and whose activism had already been artistically front and center in his protest songs for the Almanac Singers and his ballad opera with Earl Robinson. The material was personal, recognizably developed from the combined radicalization of his high school stardom in the silk city of Paterson and his short-lived varsity career at West Virginia University. Structurally, it's as neat and sharp as one of his anti-war lyrics or labor anthems, sighting on the eternally shifting goalposts of the American dream through the sacred pigskin of its gridiron game. Like a campus novel pulled inside out, it does not chronicle the acclaim and acceptance found by a sensitive, impressionable recruit once he's played the game like a Jackson man for his alma mater's honor and the pure love of football, it leaves him out in the cold with a shattered shoulder and ideals, assimilating the hard, crude fact that all the brotherly valorization of this most patriotic, democratic sport was a gimmick to get him to beat his brains out for the prestige and profit of silver-spooned WASPs who would always look down on him as "a Polack from a mill town" even as he advertised the product of their school in the hallowed jersey of their last doomed youth of an All-American. Beneath its heady veneer of laurels and fustian, football itself comes across as a grisly, consuming ritual—Lampell may not have known about CTE, but the novel's most significant games are marked by dirty plays and their gladiatorial weight in stretchers. It goes without saying that team spirit outweighs such selfish considerations as permanent disability. The more jaded or desperate players just try to get out with their payoffs intact. "I was only doing a job out there. I got a wife and kid, I was in the Marines three years. I needed the dough, the one-fifty they offered for getting you out of there." None of these costs and abuses had escaped earlier critiques of amateur athletics, but Lampell explicitly politicized them, anchoring his thesis to the title that can be read satirically, seriously, sadder and more wisely, the secret lesson that marginalized rubes like Steve Novak are never supposed to learn:

"Of all the nations on earth, it seems to me that America is peculiarly a country fed on myths. Work and Win. You Too Can Be President. Bootblack to Banker. The Spirit of the Old School. We've developed a whole culture designed to send young men chasing after a thousand glistening and empty goals. You too, Novak. You believe the legend . . . You've distilled him out of a thousand movies and magazine stories, second-rate novels and photographs in the advertisements. The Hero. The tall, lean, manly, modest, clean-cut, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon All-American Boy, athletic and confident in his perfectly cut tweeds, with his passport from Yale or Princeton or Jackson . . . To be accepted and secure; to be free of the humiliations of adolescence, the embarrassment of being Polish or poor, or Italian, or Jewish, or the son of a weary, bewildered father, a mother who is nervous and shouts, a grandfather who came over from the old country . . . You have to learn to recognize the myth, Novak. You have to learn what is the illusion, and what is the reality. That is when you will cease being hurt, baffled, disillusioned by a place like this. You won't learn it from me. You won't learn it from a lecture, or a conversation over teacups. But you'll have to learn."

Almost none of this mercilessly articulated disenchantment can be found in the finished film. Co-adapted by Lampell with writer-producer Sidney Buchman and chronically criticized by the PCA, Saturday's Hero sticks with melodramatic fidelity to the letter of the novel's action while its spirit is diverted from a devastating indictment of the American bill of goods to the smaller venalities of corruption in sports, the predatory scouts, the parasitic agents, the indifferent greed of presciently corporatized institutions and the self-serving back-slapping of alumni who parade their sacrificially anointed mascots to further their own political goals. It's acrid as far as it goes, but it loses so much of the novel's prickle as well as its bite. Onscreen, old-moneyed, ivy-bricked, athletically unscrupulous Jackson is a Southern university, mostly, it seems, to heighten the culture shock with the Northeastern conurbation that spawned Steve's White Falls. In the novel, its geography is razor-relevant—it decides his choice of college. Academically and financially, he has better offers for his grades and his talent, but its Virginian mystique, aristocratically redolent of Thomas Jefferson and Jeb Stuart, feels so much more authentically American than the immigrant industry of his hardscrabble New Jersey that he clutches for it like a fool's gold ring. The 2026 reader may feel their hackles raise even more than the reader of 1949. The viewer of 1951 would have had to read in the interrogation of what makes a real American for themselves. The question was a sealed record in the McCarthy era; it was un-American even to ask. It was downright Communist to wonder whether what made a real hero was a gentleman's handshake or the guts to hold on like Steve's Poppa with his accent as thick as chleb żytni, who went to jail with a broken head in the 1913 silk strike and never crossed a picket line in his life. For Lampell, the exploitativeness of football could not be separated from the equally stacked decks of race and economics that drove students to seek out their own commodification. "It is a profound social comment that there are so many Polish, Italian, Jewish and Negro athletes. Because athletics offers one of the few ways out of the tenements and the company houses." The Production Code was a past master of compartmentalization, married couples placed decorously in separate beds. The football scenes in Saturday's Hero are shot with bone-crunching adrenaline by God-tier DP Lee Garmes as if he'd tacked an Arriflex to the running back and if the picture had been ideologically that head-on, it might have lived up to the accusations of subversive propaganda which the presence of class consciousness seemed to panic out of the censors. It feels instead so circumscribed in its outrage that it is faintly amazing that it manages the novel's anti-establishment, not anti-intellectual ending in which Steve, proto-New Wave, walks away from the gilded snare of Jackson determined to complete his education on his own terms even if it means putting himself through night school in White Falls or New York. As his Pacific veteran of a brother gently recognizes, in a way that has nothing to do with diplomas, "My little brother is an educated man." It's a hard-won, self-made optimism, surely as all-American as any forward pass. With the vitriolic encouragement of such right-wing organizations and publications as The American Legion Magazine (1919–), its even more expressly anti-Communist spinoff The Firing Line (1952–55), and the anti-union astroturf of the Wage Earners Committee, the movie after all its memos, rewrites, and cuts was picketed and charges of card-carrying Communism levied against writer Lampell, producer Buchman, and supporting player Alexander Knox.

Why pick on him? The blacklist had already done its job. For his prolifically left-wing contributions to the Committee for the First Amendment, Progressive Citizens of America, the Actors' Lab, the Screen Actors Guild, and the American Russian Institute, Knox had been named in Myron C. Fagan's Documentations of the Reds and Fellow-Travelers in Hollywood and TV (1950). By the end of that year, he had taken his Canadian passport and his half-American family to the UK and returned to the U.S. only for the production dates required to burn off the remainder of his contract with Columbia. Since witch-hunts have by definition little to do with facts and everything to do with fear, the picketers didn't have to care so long as they could seize on his Red-bait reputation—The Firing Line would cherish a hate-on for him as late as 1954—but it remains absurdly true that at the time when Saturday's Hero premiered, he was living in London. His name had been insinuated before HUAC as far back as the original hearings in 1947. Harry Cohn might as well have rolled his own with those memos and let Knox give that broadside denunciation of the great American myth.

Fortunately, even a truncated version of Professor Megroth of the English Department of Jackson University is an ornament to his picture, no matter how irritably he would wave it off. Plotwise, the character is strictly from cliché, the only adult on campus to bother with an athlete's mind instead of his rushing average and return yards, but Knox makes him believable and even difficult, the kind of burnt-out instructor who makes sour little asides about the tedium of his own courses and plays his disdain for sportsball to the cheap seats of his tonier students as a prelude to putting the blue-collar naïf he resents having been assigned to advise on the spot. Can I find a hint that Knox ever played Andrew Crocker-Harris in his post-American stage career? Can I hell and I'd like to see the manager about it. Like the subtly stratified fraternity houses and dorms, he looks like just another manifestation of the university's double standards until Steve goes for the Romantic broke of quoting all forty-two Spenserian stanzas of "The Eve of St. Agnes" and the professor is ironically too good a sport not to concede the backfire with unimpeachable pedantry. "You don't understand, Novak. You're supposed to stand there like a dumb ox while I make a fool out of you." His mentorship of Steve is mordant, impatient, a little shy of his own enthusiasm, as if he's been recalled to his responsibilities as a teacher by the novelty of a pupil who goes straight off the syllabus of English 1 into Whitman and Balzac and Dostoyevsky as fast as Megroth can pull their titles off the shelves, making time outside his office hours—in a rare note of realism for Hollywood academia, he can be seen grading papers through lunch—in unemphasized alternative to the relentless demands of the team and especially its publicity machine that eat ever further into its star player's studies and, more fragilely, his sense of self. "You know, if you continue in this rather curious manner, I may be forced to give you quite a decent mark. Be a terrible blow to me, wouldn't it?" That it doesn't work is no criticism of Megroth, who is obviously a more than competent advisor once he gets his head out of his own classism. As he would not be permitted to point out on film, it is hideously difficult to deprogram a national freight of false idols, especially after eighteen years of absorbing them as unconsciously as the chemical waste of the dye shops or the ash and asbestos fallout of the silk mills. He can talk about truth, he can talk about self-knowledge; he can watch horrified and impotent from the stands of a brutal debacle as it breaks his student across its bottom line. He would have played beautifully the quiet, clear-eyed conversation that the PCA rejected as "anti-American." Barely a line remains, cut to shreds, perhaps reshot: "The dream, the dream to be accepted and secure . . . Once you know it's a dream, it can't hurt." Professor Megroth says it like the only thing he has left to teach the still-raw Steve, whom even a joke about industrial insurance can't persuade to stay a second longer at Jackson than it takes him to pack. Alex Knox would never try to reestablish his career in Hollywood, nor revisit the U.S. more than once and briefly, three decades after the fact. He would act in American pictures: if they were internationally shot.

"One way that fascism comes," Millard Lampell wrote as a senior at WVU in 1940, "is by an almost imperceptible system of limitations on public liberty, an accumulation of suppressions. The attack on civil liberties is one invasion the United States army can't stop. The only safeguard of democracy at the polls is the determination of the people to make it work." Boy, would he have had a lousy 2024. He didn't have such a good 1950, when he was named in the notorious Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television and in short order vanished from American screens until the 1960's. Sidney Buchman followed much the same trajectory, starting with his refusal to name names before HUAC the same month that Saturday's Hero opened. Since he was encouraged to write one of those confessional letters clearing himself of all Communist sympathies, I am pleased to report that Alexander Knox completely blew it by digressing to castigate the House Un-American Activities Committee for exactly the kind of lawless groupthink it claimed to have formed to root out, which he was unsurprisingly right damaged far more of America's image on the world stage than a couple of socially progressive pictures. Is there an echo in here? The blacklist passed over the majority of the remaining cast and crew—veteran direction by David Miller, a journeyman score by Elmer Bernstein, and effective to exact performances from John Derek, Donna Reed, Sidney Blackmer, Sandro Giglio, Aldo Ray, and no relation Mickey Knox—but even the topical boost of a series of college athletics scandals couldn't save the film at the box office. It was Red and dead.

"Athletics! No interest whatsoever in football, basketball, tennis, beanbag, darts, or spin-the-bottle." I have about as much feeling for most sports as Professor Megroth, but I learned the rules of American football because my grandfather always watched it, always rooting for the Sooners long after he had retired from the faculty of the University of Oklahoma. I would have loved to ask him about this movie, the sport, the politics; I would have loved to catch it on TCM, for that matter, but instead I had to make do with very blurrily TCM-ripped YouTube. The novel itself took an interlibrary loan to get hold of, never having been reprinted since its abridged and pulp-styled paperback from the Popular Library in 1950. It's such a snapshot, except the more I discovered about it, the less historical it felt. "I console myself," the novel's professor says, unconsoled, as he shakes hands for the last time with Steve, "with the thought that even if I had said all this, you would not have believed me. You would have had to find out." And then, just once, could we remember? This education brought to you by my curious backers at Patreon.

That was the year that was no good. I kept up with my website and my presence on AO3 and slept terribly and spent six days in hospital.

I published one new piece of fiction, although a meaningful one to me:

"Hyperboloids of Wondrous Light" in Not One of Us #81, January 2025.

Very little new poetry:

"The Ghost Summer" in Weird Fiction Quarterly Winter 2025: Ghosts, April 2025.
"The Burnt Layer" in Not One of Us #84, September 2025.
"Below Surface" in Not One of Us #83, June 2025.

One reprint:

"Twice Every Day Returning" in Afterlives: The Year's Best Death Stories 2024 (ed. Sheree Renée Thomas), Psychopomp, December 2025.

Nearly as much fanfiction as all of the above, counting the fills I transferred to AO3 and the one I left in place:

"Fall from the Sky" (Repeat Performance), January 2025.
"Floriography" (M*A*S*H), January 2025.
"A Good Accountant, All Right" (I Walk Alone), January 2025.

Very much less than I had wanted for Patreon:

Cover Up (1949), January 2025.
Decoy (1946), January 2025.
Grand Jury Secrets (1939), February 2025.
Lost Boundaries (1949), February 2025.
A Bomb Was Stolen (S-a furat o bombă, 1962), February 2025.
Black Kitten Micro-Thon 2025 [Final Offer (2018), "Come Back Mrs Noah" (1977), "Contact" (1981), Other Other (2024), Once in a New Moon (1934)], February 2025.
"Poison" (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 1958), March 2025.
No Publicity (1927), April 2025.
A Bell for Adano (1945), May 2025.
City of Fear (1959), June 2025.
Ladies (2024), June 2025.
The Sea Wolf (1941), July 2025.
None Shall Escape (1944), July 2025.
I Won't Play (1944), August 2025.
The Gaunt Stranger (1939), August 2025.
The Perfect Murder (1988), August 2025.
The Hot Rock (1972), September 2025.
The Innocents (1961), September 2025.
Heat and Dust (1983), September 2025.
The Immortal Story (1968), October 2025.
Marooned (1994), October 2025.
Girl Stroke Boy (1971), October 2025.
Fear in the Night (1972), November 2025.
Enys Men (2022), November 2025.
Blind Spot (1947), November 2025.
Defence of the Realm (1985), December 2025.
A View from a Hill (2005), December 2025.

My major achievement of the last twelve months looks like not dying. More than one member of my family could say the same. Happy New Year. A healthy year, a more than endured one. Mir zaynen af tselokhes.

Even for a conspiracy thriller, Defence of the Realm (1985) is an uncomfortable film. Its newsroom seems wrapped in a clingfilm of nicotine, its night scenes suffused with the surreal ultramarine that blurs dusk into dawn, its streets and offices as fox-fired with fluorescence as if faintly decaying throughout. An airbase glows as suddenly out of a darkness of fenland as science fiction. Precisely because no one can be seen in it, a window becomes a threat. It is not a sound or a secure world to inhabit and yet because it is ours, its characters walk on our own plain air of pretense, behaving as if its tips and headlines can be relied on until all at once the missed footing of a microcassette or a photocopy becomes an abyss and the most accustomed institutions nothing to hang on to after all. It came out of a decade whose mistrust of its government was proliferating through public discourse and art and felt neither safely transatlantic nor old-fashioned when I first learned of the film, twenty years ago when top-down lies about weapons of mass destruction were particularly au courant. Forty years after its release, its anxieties over the exercise of unaccountable power within a superficially democratic state haven't aged into a fantasy yet.

As a conspiracy thriller, it is not an especially twisty one, which works for rather than against its escalation from tabloid expediency to an open referendum on the British security state; it has one real feint in the juicy hit of its Profumo-style affair after which it can let itself concentrate on the unnerving, bleak, inevitable revelation of a world whose dangers spring not from the rattled skeletons of the Cold War but the actorly handshakes of the Special Relationship. We hear a bulletin on the bombing of the American embassy in Ankara before we see the titles that set the isolated scene of a car speeding down a night-misted road somewhere in the sedge flats of "Eastern England." Further overlays of current events will come to sound more like the Lincolnshire Poacher than Channel 4, a wallpaper of committee hearings and police reports pinging their transmissions among the paranoid legwork of blow-ups and coil taps. "Clapping eyes on it is one thing. Getting a copy out is another. " The flame of truth in this film is more like one of those old incandescent bulbs that take a second or two to sputter on, dust-burnt and bug-flecked. For a while it seems not just carried but incarnated by Vernon Bayliss, one of the rumpled nonpareils of 1980's Denholm Elliott—nothing but the rigs of the Thatcherite time explains what his old leftie is doing as the veteran hack of a right-wing rag like the Daily Dispatch, but it's a riveting showcase for his voice that crackles with cynicism while the rest of his face looks helplessly hurt, his disorganized air of not even having gotten to the bed he just fell out of, a couple of heel-taps from a permanently half-cut Cassandra of the Street of Shame. "Vodka and Coca-Cola! Détente in a glass." His inability to drink his ethics under the table and accept the gift-wrapped stitch-up of the Markham affair may be a professional embarrassment, but it gives him a harassed dignity that persists through his cagily tape-recorded conversations, his blatantly burgled flat, his obsessive spiraling after something worse than a scoop, the facts. "Oh, well," he snarls with such exasperated contempt that the cliché sounds like another shortwave code, "don't let the truth get in the way of a good story." It makes his successor in the threads of the conspiracy even more counterintuitive and compelling, since just the CV of his byline establishes Nick Mullen as the kind of ingeniously shameless journo who never has yet. Gabriel Byrne looks too wolfishly handsome for an ice-cream face, but he has no trouble passing himself off as a plainclothes copper in order to upstage the competition with an extra-spicy soundbite gleaned from an all-night stakeout and a literal foot in the door. His neutrally converted flat looks barely moved into, its mismatched and minimal furnishings dominated by the analog workstation of his deep-drawered desk with its card file and telephone and cork board and typewriter, a capitalist-realist joke of a work-life balance. Whatever he actually believes about the exposé he's penned with everything in it from call girls to CND, it comes an obvious second to drinks with the deputy editor and being let off puff pieces about the bingo—fast-forwarded four decades of slang, Nick might say in line with his corporatized, privatized generation that caring is cringe. "Give me a break. You know how it is. It's a bloody good story!" And yet because he's not too successfully disaffected to show concern when a mordantly ratted Vernon raises a belligerent glass to his shadow from Special Branch, in little more than the time it takes to jimmy open a filing cabinet he will find himself not merely retracing his older colleague's steps but telescoping through them, the real story coming in like a scream of turbines and terrifyingly so much less clandestine than it should have had the decency to be. Le Carré is invoked with debunking condescension, but it is just that chill of his which pervades this film whose obscured, oppressive antagonist is not a foreign power or a rogue agent or even a sinister corporation but the establishment itself, blandly willing to commit any number of atrocities to contain a scandal that goes considerably further than the death of a young offender or the indiscretions of a former chairman of the Defence Select Committee. The old scares still work when Vernon's integrity can be questioned with the reminder of his Communist youth, but the cold isn't coming from the other side of the Iron Curtain: if you can't see your breath in Whitehall, you must not be looking. Hence the warmest character on this scene is its most disposable and its antihero in ever greater danger as he makes not only the tradecraft connections of collated data, but the human ones of outrage, trust, and shame, learning to shiver as he goes, but fast enough? His faith in his own disillusion is touchingly unequal to the pitiless weirdness of the tribunal of nameless civil servants who cross-question him like judges of the underworld in triplicate before turning him loose into a night so vaporous and deserted, its traffic lights blinking robotically in the mercury sheen, it seems that in the ultimate solipsism of conspiracy Nick has become the one real person in all of London. After all, a state need not kill if it can atomize, terminating communication either way. "The only person who knew the answer to that question was Vernon."

Originating as a screenplay by Martin Stellman who already had the anti-establishment cult non-musical Quadrophenia (1979) under his belt and directed by prior documentarian David Drury, Defence of the Realm had grounds for its nervous clamminess even before the photography of Roger Deakins, who gave it a color scheme which tends even in natural light toward the blanched or crepuscular and a camera which monitors its subjects from such surreptitious telephoto angles—when it isn't jostling against them like an umbrella in a crowd—that no closed-circuit, reel-to-reel confirmation is required for it to feel unsafe for them to be captured on film at all. "Age of Technology, eh?" Nick remarks affectionately, rescuing Vernon from the poser of the portable tape recorder. "You haven't even caught up with the Industrial Revolution." Suitable to its techno-thriller aspects, the film is as mixed in its media as parapsychological sci-fi, but whatever pre-digital nostalgia the viewer may feel toward an Olympus Pearlcorder S920 or a Xerox machine should tap out at nuclear-armed F-111s. "R.A.F. Milden Heath, Home of the 14th Tac. Fighter Wing U.S. Air Force" hardly needs the geographical triangulation of Brandon and Thetford to translate it into RAF Lakenheath where two separate near-accidents involving American nukes on British soil really had, in 1956 and 1961, occurred. Only the first had been officially acknowledged at the time of the film's production and release. The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was still in full protest, the American nuclear presence a plutonium-hot, red-button issue; it was no stretch to imagine another incident kicked under the irradiated carpet at all costs. The film's more disturbing skepticism is reserved for the trustiness of its hot metal news. Its portrait of the fourth estate is not wholly unaffectionate, especially in cultural details such as the racket of a banging-out ceremony in the composing room, the collage of pin-ups in the stacks of the manila-filed morgue, or even the pained groan with which Bill Paterson's Jack Macleod observes the disposal of a cup of cold coffee: "Aw, Christ, what did that geranium ever do to you?" The Conservative sympathies of the paper, however, are flagged on introduction as its senior staff slam-dunk the character assassination of a prominent opposition MP and it is eventually no surprise to find its owner in more than tacit collusion with the faceless forces of the security services, considering his side hustle in defence contracting. "The man's into the government for millions . . . They build American bases. Can't jeopardize that, old son." It is not just the individual journalists in Defence of the Realm, but the entire concept of a free press that seems fragile, contingent, compromised. For all its triumphal, classical headline montage, the film goes out on a note of thrumming ambiguity, whether the conspiracy will perpetuate itself through its own media channels, whether everything we have seen lost will be worth the sacrifice or merely the valiant humanity of trying. These days I would be much more hostile to the magical thinking of a secret state except for all the authoritarianism. Move over, Vernon, even if both halves of your favorite beverage would try to kill me. "It's a free country. I think."

Denholm Elliott won his third consecutive BAFTA for Defence of the Realm and deserved to, stealing a film so three-dimensionally that his exit leaves the audience less twist-shocked than bereft: what a waste that he and Judi Dench never played siblings or cousins, their cat's faces and wide-set jasper eyes. Ian Bannen appears even more sparingly as Dennis Markham, but he only needs to be remembered as Jim Prideaux to trail that cold world in with him. As his PA, Greta Scacchi's Nina Beckman is self-possessed, unimpressed, and it feels like a mark of the film's maturity that she does not fall into bed with Nick when he's of much more use to her as a partner in counter-conspiracy, meeting on the red-railed Hungerford Bridge where we cannot tell if the reverse-shot pair on the concrete arches of Waterloo Bridge should be taken as tourists, commuters, more of the surveillance apparatus that feels so very little need to disguise itself. It is not faint praise that Gabriel Byrne thinks convincingly onscreen, especially when Nick gives an initial impression of cleverness rather than depth. I can respect the way he lives in the one tweed jacket down to falling asleep in his car in it. After two decades of keeping an eye out, I pounced on this film on Tubi despite its rather disappointingly scrunchy transfer and enjoyed it in much better shape on YouTube. Whatever else has dated of its technologies and mores, I have to say that a distrust of American nuclear capacities sounds healthy to me. This détente brought to you by my industrial backers at Patreon.

I rarely see movies like Mark Jenkin's Enys Men (2022). More often I dream them.

A sort of double hat trick for its writer-director-cinematographer-editor-composer, it could as easily be described as the ecology of a haunting. In post-synched 16 mm as brilliantly saturated and scratchy as home movies, the woman whom even the credits identify only as the Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) moves through the ritual of her days on a small island off the westernmost coast of Cornwall where she seems to have been stationed as the observer of a clump of rare flowers, nodding their stiff white petals and bright red pistils at the edge of the sea-cliff whose soil temperature she meticulously records in her logbook along with the date and the customary observation No change. Each time she climbs the loose-bedded step-stones to the cold chimney of the abandoned tin mine, she drops a stone down the drowning black of the shaft just to hear the distant, ricocheting splash. Each time she returns to her slate-shingled, ivy-striped cottage, she fires up the petrol rale of the generator and makes herself a cup of tea while the lucky dip of her cream-colored Dansette breathes through static as if through storm. If the near-total isolation troubles her, she doesn't show it, an elfin figure in her middle fifties with a barely silvered shag of brown hair and a wry weather-grained face, characteristically layered in her white seaman's jumper and red rain jacket and jeans as blue as her Atlantic eyes. Roaming the island between duties, she seems as self-sufficient as her candlelit bedtime reading of Edward Goldsmith and Robert Allen's A Blueprint for Survival (1972). Periodically she receives supplies and wall-banging sex—she bakes him saffron buns—from the rugged, just as namelessly credited Boatman (Edward Rowe), but no other presence seems as important as the standing stone she crosses in her daily transit of the island, its angular hunch eclipsing her from view so that she seems to pass through rather than behind it. The woodcut in her cottage depicts it ominously rooted among ribs and skulls, but its silhouette seen from her front door suggests rather a cloaked, skirted figure proceeding at tectonic speed. In her dreams, perhaps, it comes like a guiser to her door. The film lingers with animate richness on such details of the natural world, the yolk-flowered tremble of gorse in the sea-breeze, the swing of a black-blacked gull above the ledges, the lichen everywhere scaling and tufting the old walls and outcrops of the stone of the island's name. It lingers the same on apparently unnatural ones, the ring of bal maidens stamping the earth like the engine-clank of the old workings, the miners whose smutched faces peer out at her from beneath the candle-melted brims of their hats, the ruined church clean and whitewashed, its altar piled with branches of flowering hawthorn. What narrative emerges from the sparsely worded script is done with chimes and discontinuities, refrains and layers as reliable as any residual haunting. Actually, however mystifying, contradictory, folded, spindled or mutilated it may look, it is time in this movie that doesn't lie.

Much more of a tone poem than a puzzle for the viewer, Enys Men inhabits with ambitious directness its nonlinearity that another film might have been tempted to treat more trickily, observing effects before causes and explanations before questions as though there were no more ordinary way to exist in time. On the one hand, some kind of progression can be tracked in the dates of the logbook, the growth of lichen, the wear and tear on a pair of brown walking boots whose brave red laces are part of the film's primary rhyme of colors. On the other, persons attempting to pinpoint the break in its objective hour and a half will be peeved. Time on this island has always—when has it ever done anything else, anywhere—gone strange. As incongruous as her modern, transient figure appears against the immemorial spaces of wind and moor and wave, the Volunteer should be regarded as no less a part of their accumulated fragmentation of personal history with history of place, the history of Cornwall that renders a quizzical joke out of the earnest check-in, "Do you like it here on your own?" She couldn't get a layer of time to herself if she tried with so much of it underfoot in the flaking rust of old rails, a brand name of tinned skimmed milk. Her cottage's history wakes her with the coughing of the burly Miner (Joe Gray) who borrows one of her books to read on the toilet like any careless flatmate before collecting his pick and hammer for a day's work that by his clothes must have gone off shift before the First World War. Its future ghosts in with the teatime broadcast, tinnily exploding any meaningful sense of a present that seemed as factual as her thin strong hand pencilling in 21st April 1973 when the memorial it describes has stood for "nearly fifty years," the harbor-set cenotaph of a loss at sea scheduled for "the 1st of May 1973, near the old miners' quay on the abandoned island of Enys Men." From their rag-white ribbons and stockings, the children who sing daleth an hav with a drum and sprays of newly broken may-blossom are older in the island than the crew of the late nineteenth century lifeboat who grin still dripping with the sea that drowned them, but behind them the cottage is a gape-roofed, ivy-tumbled ruin, as long uninhabited as it might be explored to this day. At its door in her nightdress as when, face to face with the standing stone on her threshold, she juddered like a frame of gate-stuck film, the Volunteer calls, "Who's there?" She has already been answered. The dark-haired, impassively adolescent Girl (Flo Crowe) perches like a cormorant on the cottage's glass-roofed shed, her corduroys white and her cardigan blue so that a viewer may wonder where the red will come in. The Preacher (the late, great John Woodvine) in his clerical black and white bands addresses her with the solemn injunction of a maritime hymn, the Bible under his arm glistening like the mica-misted granite of the menhir at his side. Picking over the jumbled crags of the shore with their verdigris stains and sunbursts of orange sea-lichen yields a bloodied oilskin and a paint-cracked plank, the foretellings of once and future tragedy. "Are you there? Hello? Can you hear me?" Time isn't even looping so much as it's free-associating, cross-linked even more obviously than a VHF transmission we hear from both ends of the airwaves. Now it folds on a single point, the lace-and-thorn christening of the Baby (Loveday Twomlow) whose addition to the company of the Girl and the Volunteer lends a sort of pitch-shifted triple-goddess vibe to the slowly remembered singing of Philip Paul Bliss' "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning" in which the Preacher with his aged rock of a voice leads them. Now it merely reverses, an upward glitter of water in the flooded mine. Above all, it seems to be bending toward the event horizon of May Day, a painful double entendre when the failed rescue of the supply boat Govenek scores the date through from 1897 to 1973, but earth is as powerfully commingled with sea in the changeover as they always have been in the ore-riddled, salt-girt life of Stone Island. Lichen has appeared on one of the flowers, the Volunteer records for the first time in the last days of April, before discovering a grey-green frill of her own in the white scar that twists across her stomach. The lichen has grown on the flower, thickening over the seam of her skin like the coat of the standing stone. Her entries stop like a clock: The lichen has spread to all of the flowers. No change. No change. No change. Its proliferation suggests its own explanation for the haunting, if that's even beginning to sound like the right word for a process as natural as reclamation or grief: a new organism created by the symbiosis of the human and the land. How should it surprise us to see the Volunteer presently step out of the menhir as if leaving the house on her usual rounds? The earth, like the body, keeps the score.

Enys Men was one of the few movies I was able to watch last summer when I had functionally ceased to sleep and was in no state to say anything about it except perhaps to have likened it to the film of a novel never written by Alan Garner or suggested that when Scarristack of Greer Gilman's Cloud gets its film industry up and running, it might produce cinema like Jenkin's. Like a descendant of Powell and Pressburger, it has all the ingredients of folk horror arranged to much more numinous than jump-scaring effect, the enmeshment of memory with the land that does not so much return the repressed as hold it in trust. The sound design is compact with anachronism, both in the sense of cues and voices bleeding back through the picture and the persistent reminder that the AM radio seems to be tuned to the twenty-first century, its local news and football scores cut with Brenda Wootton's "The Bristol Christ" (1980) and Gwenno's "Kan Me" (2022), which is incidentally the credits music. The hand-processed film flares and flickers like an unrestored rediscovery, washing nature and spirit photography alike with neg sparkle and the occasional vinegar-red flameout. Sifting its symbol-set of recurrent images and phrases for a key feels beside the point when so much of the movie exists in multiplicity—even the standing stone has a stunt double, its original being Boswens Menhir—and its makers' resonances may not be mine, but its tactile, liminal landscape is live with them. I thought: We have become stone in the stone. Earth mastered us. I thought: But everywhere in the room, that morning, there was a great mess of little twigs and leaves, hawthorn leaves, and rowan. And everywhere a great smell of the sea. I got it from Kanopy, but in the right region it can be viewed on BFI Player or Blu-Ray/DVD and it streams on all the usual suspects. I may not know enough about lichen to be its ideal audience, but I do care enough about time. This year brought to you by my own backers at Patreon.

I have joked for years about my paper gaydar, an improvement on my previous gaydar of a rock, but a viewer should not need even the gaydar of scissors to appreciate the rarity and joy of the happy ending granted its candidly queer couple by the semi-precious shoestring gem of Girl Stroke Boy (1971). It has as little time for coding as for pleas for tolerance when it can have a snow fight instead. Especially in these ever more gender-essentialist days, its cheerful one in the eye for cisheteronormativity feels more than historically affirming.

Queering its social message conventions from jump, the film wastes no time setting the outrageous scene: the straight, white, snowbound middle-class home which a jam in the central heating has rendered a sort of Buñuelian steambath of locked windows, stuck doors, and taps that burn to the touch in which George and Lettice Mason (Michael Hordern and Joan Greenwood) are literally sweating the arrival of their adult son with his girlfriend, a momentous day for a household that has not so covertly worried about his sexuality for years. "Mallinson, you know, woodwork and biology, said that Laurie was the only boy in the class who never giggled during sex instruction." He's never had a girl that his parents know about, much less brought one home to meet them. Anyone expecting a white wedding reset to straight time, however, should clutch their pearls now because while the Masons have braced their suburban sensibilities for the daughter of a West Indian High Commissioner, at the sight of the resplendently femme Jo Delaney (Peter Straker) with her soft midi-Afro and fashionably leopard-lined eyes and several inches on their son even without the go-go heels, their social script drops all its pages on the floor. The appalling scribble shoved by Lettice at her mortified husband says it all: Is it a man? To the credit of the lovers, neither of them has walked into this ordeal unprepared. Fresh out of hospital for some unspecified crack-up which may have boiled down to contact with his family, Laurie (Clive Francis) is fair and fragile and sardonic and devoted to Jo, emphasizing her pronouns with dry unexpected firmness where he remarks ruefully of himself, "Mother really wanted a romantic hero for a son. I must have been a terrible disappointment." Jo kisses him lightly but meaningfully on the cheek; her own introductory act after an altercation with the radiator is a grave, sly fumigation of the parlor with her cologne, sounding out the local density of whiteness with icebreakers of mud huts and Tarzan. They may have an ally in George, the beleaguered secondary modern school head whose air of vague acquiescence to the absurd suggests an openness to new ideas so long as his instinct to please everyone doesn't strand him on the side of the status quo. "Your father's all right. I like him. Well, the bits of him that she's left." The problem is Lettice, the tiny, implacable romance writer who plumes herself on her progressive bona fides while blithely describing the heroine of her latest novel as an "octaroon" and professes confidence in her son with the lethal encouragement, "Darling boy, I hope you'll always do exactly what you think is right, after first having talked it over with me." Her conversation is a textbook in transmisogynoir, starting at microaggressions about spices and hair and spiraling into the ludicrous yet all too real determination to prove the masculinity of her son's girlfriend as if it would be news to him, the virginal innocent deceived. Her eye on the position of the toilet seat would challenge a cat at a mousehole. Her baited hooks on the natures of the sexes are as uncalled-for as they are off-base. At least when she bullies her inarticulately uncomfortable husband into dialing the Delaneys (Rudolph Walker and Elisabeth Welch) at their official address in Belgrave Square, the inappropriateness of her enquiry provokes the clapback it deserves: confused, scandalized, and inevitably, "Is that girl Laurie a boy?"

As a comedy of manners whose joke is not after all on the outré intersections but the straight and exceeding narrow, Girl Stroke Boy is an amazing transmission from 1971. As an experience of cinema, it's a more awkward proposition. Director Bob Kellett was an accomplished farceur and it's a clever reversal to play the cishet older generation for burlesque while allowing the queer young lovers to be the mimetically textured pair, but since most of the scenes are four-handers, the tonal results are uneven and the shedload of transphobia can wear on the viewer even when it is visibly, risibly in the wrong. It would slice the 86-minute runtime in half, but no member of the audience who ever once had to grit their teeth through misgendering, passive-aggression, or just plain familial rudeness would fault Jo and Laurie for lighting out for London in the middle of the night. What saves the film is that it is always on the side of the lovers, especially the self-possessed Jo who meets this nightmare-in-law with the grace and fierceness of someone long past needing to explain herself, if she ever did. "Well, there's at least six couples in my block of flats that don't agree." She is never treated as a trap or a riddle, her femininely tilted presentation as drag or a gag or an effort at heterosexual camouflage. Beyond her portrayal by a cis male actor, the character can be textually confirmed as AMAB and so what? Both she and her boyfriend arrived as flamboyantly as if they had heisted half of Carnaby Street on their way out to Shenley Hill and it just happens that she's minimally accessorized with polished nails and her mod handbag and a silver labrys pendant when she says bluntly across the breakfast table, "Sex isn't what you wear. It's not being face up or face down in bed. Nowadays it's simply a matter of personality . . . Look, who gives a hell whether it's a girl or a boy? We're all a bit of both, aren't we, Mrs Mason? I bet you don't get many absolute heteros in your school." Full Judith Butler ahead, gender as performance does not require conformation to its most stereotypical signifiers. Jo's level-headedness does not invalidate her femininity any more than her light-chested voice, any more than Laurie should be considered less of a man just because his sharp-tongued inclination to put in his oar casts him fairly as the bitchier of the two. Certainly the higher-strung, he channels the audience's own incredulity in the face of a delusion that might nowadays call itself gender-critical feminism: "Mother dear, doesn't it ever occur to you that I might know everything that she is and isn't by now? I know that she's never going to beat you at Scrabble. I know that she's never going to be Home Counties Badminton Champion or President of your Needlewomen's Guild or good at church flower decoration—" The most extensive meditations on sexuality and gender are not loaded onto the queer characters, however, but free-associated by the heat-rumpled George as he botches his way toward acceptance through a waveringly touching mix of conviction and cluelessness, early on throwing down the unprecedented gauntlet of "Laurie says she's a woman, she says she's a woman. With such evidence, I am prepared to take her femininity on trust," and even after his wife has browbeaten him to accept her conclusion of the assembled facts, holding his ground as if somewhat surprised to find himself standing on it:

"Whatever my son's taste in sex, I'm not ashamed of him. If Jo is a man, I don't think I'm disgusted. If they have a taste for one another and it adds to their life, then as far as I'm concerned they can be as loving as they like. We're none of us so normal, so self-dependent that we can turn down all the good sex that comes our way—or the chance of having someone to love us. Don't you agree? I don't give a damn if she's a man. If she is, she's a jolly good chap."

Coming from a father so generally, pricelessly flustered that he fumbled which sexual orientation he was supposed to be championing in the clinch, it's an extraordinary statement. It is not at all clear that he has a real handle on the concepts of sex and gender that he mangles so magnificently together in his last word and it doesn't matter. Jo was right to single him out for a sotto voce appeal for support. Quite a lot of parents in 2025 can't get as far.

( And no one is coming to dinner tonight! )

The title remains unfortunate. Girl/Boy obviously plays on the perceived ambiguity of Jo as well as her pairing with Laurie, but it's naughtier than it needs to be when spelled out; it misserves a film that is relaxingly, radically matter-of-fact about the presentation of its lovers. I cannot speak to the stage source material of David Percival's Girlfriend (1970), but the screenplay by Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin steers remarkably clear of sad, hysterical, desexualized queer clichés while its intimacy is sexily, dreamily limned in montages of languorous heat and playful cold by DP Ian Wilson who would later shoot both Edward II (1991) for Derek Jarman and The Crying Game (1992) for Neil Jordan, the latter of which reassured me that I had not been reminded occasionally of Jaye Davidson's Dil by Straker's Jo only through the common ground of transfeminine Blackness. One especially lovely composition offsets her with orchids in the conservatory, a sensuous one intertwines their fingers over the curves of a tiger cowrie and interchanges their profiles like coins, a droller one cages the Masons behind the rungs of a ladder as they attempt to extol the virtues of heterosexuality to an openly hilarious Jo and a Laurie who looks distinctly as though checking himself back into hospital would be less of a strain on his disbelief. "Dad, is this what is called a man-to-man talk?" So soon after decriminalization, so soon after Stonewall, the film shows no self-consciousness or sensationalism over the kisses and embraces of a pair of actors, their stymied efforts at lovemaking. They touch one another with casual affection, sometimes with active desire, sometimes in defiant, assertive display. They are not a perfect couple. On the floor in front of the opened refrigerator on the theory that it should be the one place in the house cool enough to fuck, they briefly fight instead, the mood spiked by the cramp in his calf and her discomfort in the fish-fry heat even before his territorial nerves irritate her into an allusion to some past sexual failure and just a moment ago they were lying so comfortably together even in the horrible wicker of the guest bed, it's a relief to the viewer when they manage to laugh it out and get on with the getting off. "Not so loud! Look, I can't put a notice on the door—coitus don't-interrupt-us." It makes them more real, less like any idea of representation beyond the fact of their love for one another, their individual quirks, and the genuine stress of spending any kind of night in a house containing racist knick-knacks and a TERF. "It's like having it off in the British Museum!" Structurally, the interracial angle is submerged almost at once in the gender trouble, but it does persist in the reality of their relationship and it's pleasant to see just how much of an issue it isn't for Jo and Laurie, an entire other message picture dodged. That said, I had no idea a film had been released ten years before my birth in which a character defends their partner's pronouns to their parents, giving yet another lie to this tsunami of transphobia currently swamping the U.S. and the UK. The arc of the moral universe could tesser any time now.

I had no idea about this film, period, and in its small, contrary way, sometimes well-made and sometimes wobbly and often suggesting that someone forgot to fetch the budget out of the boot of the car—it was shot in two weeks in an actual house credited to "Faggot's End," which looks in real life like Faggotts Close—it may be important beyond its apparent premise of Guess If Pat's Coming to Dinner. I found it in the filmography of Clive Francis and then on MyFlixer, although if you prefer not to wrestle with the necessity of adblock it can be more usually streamed and against all odds exists on a rather handsome Indicator Blu-Ray. I wouldn't hold it against any viewer not to want to spend a weekend melting with the Masons, but my hard sell on romance had no defenses against Laurie and Jo with their in-jokes and frank sex talk and soft gestures of loving, their astringent and forthright complement that I imagine made them treasures of elder queerhood. "We care for each other. We show others we care. Isn't that how it's done?" And let them still be doing it, onscreen and off. This personality brought to you by my absolute backers at Patreon.

The sheer lamination of meta in the source material must have attracted Orson Welles to The Immortal Story (1968): a story about the failure of the creation of a story. Perhaps to cap the parallel, it should have remained, like so many of its writer-director's projects before and after, unfinished, but instead it was the last non-documentary feature he completed in his life, a lyrical, theatrical, troubling curio around which the rest of a projected anthology of adaptations never materialized, stranding it like a chip from a mosaic of dream. The 58 minutes it clocks in at are at once ethereal and formal, so sensorially precise, what they detail cannot be real. If I had heard of it before last week, appropriately I had forgotten.

The screenplay by Welles from the 1958 Isak Dinesen novella preserves its nest of narratives sometimes down to the word, even as it chronicles how slipperily they can twist away from even the most controlling teller. Late in the nineteenth century of tea-trading Macao, the autocratically self-made Mr. Clay (Welles) has become obsessed with a story he heard long ago on his passage to China, of a penniless sailor hired by a childless old man to service his beautiful young wife for a fee of five guineas. It is not the titillation of this scenario that occupies his gout-ridden hours in the great house that belonged originally to the partner he ruined over the miserly debt of three hundred guineas, which may be the stuff of scandal to the European colony but for the aged merchant is merely one more sum in the million-dollar litany of his own ledgers read nightly back to him by his head clerk Elishama Levinsky (Roger Coggio). It is its unreality, which so offends this man of closed accounts and futures only in the sense of investments that he determines to render this maritime legend fact: "People should only record things which have already happened." Unmarried himself, he will arrange for the union of a woman procured for the role of the wife and a sailor authentically solicited from the docksides, wined and dined, proffered the traditional piece of gold and brought to the candlelit bride-bed "in order that one sailor in the world will be able to tell it from beginning to end as it actually happened to him." They will engender between them not a child, but a true history. The defeat of this project will be apparent to anyone with half a head for story. The tale of the lucky sailor has its own reality to which historical truth is irrelevant, its own vitality of the oral tradition which is predicated on exactly the fact that it can be told by any man on the sea as if it happened to him because it never did. It is known across ships, it lives on them, it replicates itself through the reception of travelers from London to Singapore. It can never be made to happen for scare-quotes real because in the narratological sense which eludes the literal-minded god-game of Mr. Clay, it happened the first time it was told. The most he can achieve with his mortal marionettes is the second order of a reenactment, inescapably aware of its own script—Welles doesn't need to force the further metatext of capturing this stagecraft of bodies on film, it shimmers under the surface of the production like the ironies inherent in Dinesen, the pitfalls of collective art. "You move at my bidding," Mr. Clay crows at the hymeneal scene, directorially prepared to oversee its consummation until the curtains like a furious proscenium are jerked closed in his face. "You're two young, strong and lusty jumping-jacks in this old hand of mine," but his desire can dictate only the act. The idiosyncrasies of their chemistry, their conversation, their lovemaking and most of all what any of it may mean past the morning remain out of his grasp, these surrogates for his authorial potency whose own histories he seems curiously, adamantly oblivious to. Does he recognize the elegant, embittered Virginie Ducrot (Jeanne Moreau) as the daughter of the man he drove to suicide, now the mistress of another of his clerks after her own tumultuous sexual adventure at sea? Can he hear more than fantasized frustration in the reticence of his choice "catch out of the harbor of Macao," the ragged yet quietly independent Paul Velling (Norman Eshley), shipwrecked a silent, solitary year? It seemed not to register with him when Elishama alluded to a flight from Poland before reading from the amulet of the prophet Isaiah which is his one remnant of a trauma-drowned childhood. All these true stories lie within his reach and he disregards them, hellbent on masterminding the simulacrum of a meme, perhaps because in his greed for realism he prefers the roles to the actors, more likely because it has never occurred to him to listen. It is left to the other principals of this chamber fable to share themselves through their stories, their silences, their songs, their lies, a cat's cradle of relationships at once foreclosed and facilitated by the moves of the tale which from the start is unraveling beyond its boughten bounds. "No man in the world can take a story which people have invented and told and make it happen . . . One way or another, this story will be the end of Mr. Clay."

Of this folkloric quartet, I am predictably fascinated by Elishama, effectively the stage manager of this devil's comedy who explains his complicity in it with a sort of corporate stoicism: "I'm in Mr. Clay's employ. I cannot take on work anywhere but with him." With his Dickensian wire-rims and slicked-ink hair, he looks a familiarly servile figure in his coat as pen-black as his eyes, his hands so often folded as if with his hat in them, pale-faced as a horn-shell. The film flags his Jewishness long before he introduces himself by name, but any threat of caricature blows off with the wry courtesy with which he contradicts his master as to the nature of the story which he heard so many more times in the tempest-tossed travels that led him to Macao, and the longer the film spends with him thereafter, the more enigmatically he will emerge as a small man of substance, disillusioned, ironical, not without compassion, not even old for the concentrated fatalism of his scant room by the company's godown, "things not yet to be recounted which moved, like big deep-water fish, in the depths of his dark mind." Dispatched on a pimp's errand, he approaches it without excuse; the straw of his sober pork-pie hat is a concession to the climate, but it lends a dapper silent clown's dignity to the implacable matter-of-factness with which he waits for Virginie to realize that, like himself, she is infinitely purchasable by the mad rich men of the world. "I suppose that nobody could insult you even if they tried," she appraises him challengingly, meaning it to, like the slap in the face she gave him for delivering his master's proposition. With the same grave lightness as if taking it as a compliment, Elishama replies, "Why should I let them?" The executor of his employer's whims, he makes at the same time a strange, tacit confederate for his chosen heroine, so unfailingly respectful of her person rented for the three hundred guineas of her father's final debt—instructed to offer her a hundred, he in fact brought the correct amount—that when she begins to disrobe vehemently in front of him, the haste with which he gets the door slammed between them is the clumsiest we have seen this self-contained man, his faintest compression of reluctance as he reopens it at her call as good as another character's monologue. Paul he deals with as an impersonal factotum, but to Virginie he reveals his own stark, poignant history, hears out in turn her fears of reentering the house of her childhood, play-acting the seventeen-year-old innocent she has not been since the night of an earthquake in Japan. Her table is scattered with a time-stained deck of Tarot, but it is Elishama who foretells like the pattern in a shawl or a bottom line of figures the fatal conclusion of Mr. Clay's desire. He alone discerns that her real price is revenge. In our one direct insight into his interiority, we were assured by the intermittent narrator that he "might well have been a highly dangerous person except that ambition, desire in any form had been washed and bleached and burnt out of him," but he does not seem all that much more innocuous in its absence, a dispassion that should not be mistaken for weakness. From the right, unpredictable angles, his sharp-lined, heat-sweating face is more beautiful than the tall young sailor's in its aureole of angelically fair hair. "I thought you were a small rat out of Mr. Clay's storehouse," Virginie reconsiders him, standing before her still like a question she cannot avoid answering, "et toi—tu es le Juif Errant."

It is a stupidly gorgeous film to look at. If Welles had never worked in color before, if he spoke disparagingly of it as an element of film, he knew how to use it: cinnabar-red, malarially gold, boat's-eye blue or the bridal white of mourning, contrasted in such lapidary profusion by DP Willy Kurant that even open-air shots such as the veils of smoke against a dust-lichened wall that bloom across the initial conversation of Elishama and Virginie look as dreamily artificial as the room red-walled as sealing wax and side-splashed with the sheen of a five-guinea coin in which Mr. Clay makes his ritual pitch to Paul. The set decoration by André Piltant fabricates its port of Macao—in Dinesen it was Canton—out of landlocked Chinchón and a handful of its Spanish neighbors through the gloriously stagelike expedient of dressing their balconies and pillars and arcades with lanterns and banners, papering the walls like theatrical flats with signs in Chinese and the occasional Portuguese and stocking the market square with Chinese extras from chestnut-sellers to children at play. The harbor is suggested by nothing more than the ragged tilt of sails, just as the ellipses of the climactic sex act will be explicitized by the chirping of crickets in the equally imaginative sound design of Jean Nény. The score itself is selected from the melancholy solo piano of the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes of Erik Satie. Edited chiefly by Yolande Maurette, the film moves at a pace it is not meant as a disservice to call entrancing, since it isn't a euphemism for glacial, especially when it strolls into handheld camera or breaks itself up in a quick-cut flourish of gossip or conspicuous consumption or the blowing out of candles lensed like calla lilies. Every now and then it can feel caught between its art forms: the greyed and jaundiced streaks of makeup used by Welles for the ailing Mr. Clay would convince even from the front row of a theater, but at the distance of a close-up are obviously paint, all the odder since Moreau's rouge and powder are judiciously in character. If it makes the film feel a little handmade, it's of a piece with the carefully spare props and costumes, an ivory-headed cane, a poppy-colored wrapper, the nacreous whorl of a turban shell, a print of the Empress Eugénie of France. It's too tactile to reduce to a hall of narrative mirrors. After all its talking, it ends with an unheard song.

Because Welles hardly ever met financing without conditions, The Immortal Story was a co-production of the Office de radiodiffusion-télévision française and can in fact be viewed in the alternate cut of Une histoire immortelle, shorter by eight minutes, deeper by a few lines, texturally altered by the revision of voices as well as language—Moreau handled her own ADR in French and English, but Welles was dubbed by Philippe Noiret while Coggio in the French-language version can actually be heard as himself; he has a drily musical, effective voice that runs against his deferential appearance and I prefer it to the lighter dubbing of Warren Mitchell, although the two versions are best viewed in any case as their own movies. I discovered the English-language one on TCM and it turned out to have an entire small collection on the Criterion Channel, but it can be watched on the Internet Archive from its fairy-tale-like opening to its ultimate, perhaps inevitable punch line. "Yes, a comedy. I'd forgotten the word." It would be nice if further little jewel-boxes of Dinesen had followed, but then I'm still bummed that Welles' film of Charles Williams' Dead Calm (1963) once again with Moreau fell apart in the final stages of production. At least, unlike Mr. Clay, he made this one story as real as any performance ever is. This ambition brought to you by my recounted backers at Patreon.

This afternoon I voted Miss Jessel from Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) one of my favorite ghosts on film, a tall order but a true one. A masterstroke of sound design and suggestion, she's not spectral, she's uncanny: as real as the reflection she casts on the sunlit shiver of the lake, as motionless in the heat as the bulrushes she stands so far out among, she could be walking on water, though we will learn she drowned herself in it instead. Her slight, dark-dressed figure in long shot gives no impression of a threat, nor even any particular emotion such as hunger or melancholy that would make her apparition easier to read. Her incongruity becomes its own eeriness, the noonday drabness of her presence more frightening than its disappearance between one look and the next, which is after all only characteristic of her kind, though part of the film's chill is that really it has no such rules by which a haunting may be mapped and governed, only the inexplicable facts of things that should not be. Once we have heard that she grieved sleeplessly for her rough, flaunting lover until she died of him, the governess played like a doorway of possession by Deborah Kerr can hear her sobbing, a desolate, gulping, wretchedly echoing sound that when finally traced to the schoolroom has nothing to do with the still-faced, dry-eyed imprint of Miss Jessel at her desk and yet when the governess rushes to the empty chair and touches the slate left by her own earlier lesson, it is wet with tears. Without a parapsychological conversation in sight, it gives the effect of a ghost that has stained through time in all its layers, desynched to perpetuity. The parallel sightings of Peter Wyngarde's Peter Quint with his cock-strut and his bestial snarl of a smile, always smeared through sun-mist, night-glass, steam-sweat until he can cast his unfiltered shadow from a crumbling ring of statues at last have their own rude potency, as malignantly charged as one of the more explicitly libidinous legends of Hell House, but it is his ruined lover who looks as though you could never scrape her off the air, so soaked into this patch of reality that trying to part her from the grounds of Bly would be about as efficacious as trying to exorcise an ice age. Their voices whisper like tape loops on the candlelit stairs. The children are watching. The children are watching. The children are watching. Like the uncredited radiophonics of Daphne Oram that accompany her first, summer-humming manifestation, Miss Jessel or whatever has been left of her belongs to the weirdness of time just really starting to flower in British film and TV, more Nigel Kneale than Henry James or even Truman Capote and yet she fits as exactly into the sensibilities of the Victorian Gothic as she would into the bright horror of that lakeside to this day. She was one of three images left on film by the artist and director Clytie Jessop and I doubt you could get her off the print, either. This excellence brought to you by my watching backers at Patreon.

The joke of The Perfect Murder (1988) is that it is neither. Then again, despite its production credit, neither is it a Merchant Ivory except in the sense that it was executive-produced by Ismail Merchant in Mumbai. Directed by Zafar Hai who co-adapted the 1964 CWA Gold Dagger-winning source novel with its author H. R. F. Keating, it is an endearingly unwieldy triple-decker of comedy, crime, and city symphony, not necessarily in equal proportions or even order of priorities, but in a film so lovingly dedicated to the significance of imperfection, perhaps to expect anything else would be, like the case that gives the story its aptly misleading name, upside down.

Take the plot, a rococo compendium of cases from a smuggling ring to an attempted murder to a lost item report which pile chaotically onto the beleaguered hero only to cross-link at the last minute into the pattern so beloved of classically constructed mysteries in which even the silliest and most discursive puzzle-pieces can find a home. Or don't, since its Chandleresque twists and turns serve just as well as the frame for an essentially hangout movie that makes as much time for a kidnapping of mistaken identity as for the lie detector of a Nandi bull. Brought to the screen for the first and only time in his forty-five-year career by Naseeruddin Shah, Inspector Ganesh V. Ghote of the Bombay CID is an everyman of detectives, concerned, harassed, and unassuming in the khaki of his policeman's uniform that gives him far less authority dealing with government ministers and affluent businessmen than he might wish in the pursuit of justice. His self-deprecating honesty carries him through professional pratfalls like arresting the colleague he was sent to collect from the airport and tenacious gambles like anticipating the secret of a monsoon-drenched chandelier, but can't do much about the mundane middle-class problems of his salary and his schedule. "At the moment I'm trying to save to buy a color TV." Especially facing an impatient ACP, the last thing this modest, apologetically persistent officer needs is a wild card in the delicate negotiations of his job and of course that's exactly what he gets with the arrival of Stellan Skarsgård's Axel Svensson, Sweden's contribution to an international study of comparative police methods who wouldn't last ten seconds in a Nordic noir. It is culturally clever, but also just fun that the criminologist from the global north is decidedly the sidekick of the adventure, a lankily cheerful add-on who can be distracted by the most routine details of life in modern India—the marigold-garlanded mahurat shot of a Bollywood musical, a saffron-swathed sadhu under the colonnade of the Taj Mahal Hotel—looking at all times with his wilted straw hair as though he's been pulled out of the laundry half-steamed. "I've been running since I came to this country." He messes about the crime scene quoting Hamlet in Swedish. He moons romantically over suspects and film stars and requires as dramatic a rescue as any damsel in distress. Just this side of a jam Watson, he isn't the total drag on the investigation that Ghote accuses on the sullen, tinderous afternoon their latest failure has left them uncharacteristically on each other's last culture-clashed nerves, but even after the rains have ecstatically broken and the whole back-to-front left-handed spanner of a case with them, he remains most valuable as the inspector's wingman, his flash-temper Viking-height backing up the Maharashtrian manners of Ghote as he holds his ground against official caution and unavoidable corruption and comes up at last with the colorfully elusive truth. "Upside down!" they salute the circumstances of their bonding, an affectionate in-joke now that Axel has fallen in love with the city in all its helter-skelter absurdity and Ghote has upheld the honor of its detecting. "Welcome to Bombay!"

Indeed, in the vibrantly semi-documentary photography of frequent Merchant Ivory DP Walter Lassally, The Perfect Murder is a love letter to Bombay on the verge of its millennial renascence into Mumbai, not merely in the historical tourist postcards of the Victoria Terminus or the Gateway of India, but the street-level flânerie which does not treat ironically a stately elephant proceeding with the rest of the rush-hour traffic down Marine Drive, a Lovemate local train rattling between the washing-strung frontages of chawls, the chlorine-blue of the swimming pool at the Oberoi Towers and the cupped hands of beggars thrust like razor clams through the sand of Chowpatty Beach. The flooded green of a lawn of black umbrellas under the monsoon's curtain has no less reality than the green baize of an office inside the liner-white block of Mantralaya. It earths the Dickensian tendencies of the human characters whom Ghote has to wend his dogged way among, inconveniently factual even at their most flamboyant. Amjad Khan pulls out the Sydney Greenstreet stops as the expansively blusterous and epicurean builder Lala Heera Lal while Madhur Jaffrey in two scenes as his imperious wife blocks even the mildest hints of questioning as keenly as crucible steel. "What a woman. She was all the time giving me the feeling of being without my trousers on." Approaching the rest of the suspicious household nets a varied array of deflection, obstruction, and wasted time from Sakina Jaffrey as the languid daughter-in-law, Dilip Tahil as her ostentatiously clubbable husband, and Nayeem Hafizka as the histrionic younger brother whose room is exhaustingly tacked with self-portraits as Sherlock Holmes and posters for Spellbound (1945) and Vertigo (1958), insisting on playing the proper part of a murder suspect all the while the victim who could be a witness lies shtum under medical care and Parsi prayers, Dinshaw Daji's Mr. Perfect. "This is the sort of difficulty you have in police work in this city. If only people would behave in a simple, reasonable, logical manner!" It's too much to ask of even the heroes of this caper, out of sorts, out of place, out of luck, splashed with Holi dye or literally losing their shirt. Spouses in real life, Shah and Ratna Pathak have fun with the fractious marriage of the Ghotes, which would be far less in the soup if he would just once come home from work on time; the wistful fantasy he builds of her as the tranquil, docile, ideal Hindu wife would swerve too close to a shrew joke except for the time he brings the rescued Axel home for supper and Pratima turns on the best-bangled, bindi-dabbed, lord-and-master act with cut-diamond sarcasm. To complete the family business, their infant son Ved is an early cradle-credit for Imaad Shah. The sun in the intermingled score of synths, sarangi, and tabla by Richard Robbins, Sultan Khan, and Zakir Hussein catches on fish-scale silver, mango-skin gold, the half-risen skyscrapers of a city pushing itself toward maximum. Keating who famously wrote the first nine Inspector Ghote novels without visiting India for himself makes his Hitchcock cameo at the international terminal, waiting to catch the next flight back to Europe.

It can be an awkward movie. Its mix of Englishes and untranslated Hindi is no strain to be immersed in, but the loose, improvisatory feel of much of its dialogue means it has no pacing to speak of even when it has to hit its marks of revelation and its tonal shifts are sometimes more collision than collage; it is refreshing to find a detective film without an exchange of gunfire, but it could have deleted one of its billboard-tearing, barrow-overturning chase scenes that never fail to leave a wackier level of disorder in their wake than the sufficient bewilderment of yet another investigative dead end. All the same, when Axel with his farewell gift of a kurta draped like a college sweater around his shoulders swings back at the gate to shout his characteristically no-chill support for Ghote across the crowded terminal, the viewer may regret that with an eventual twenty-five novels to choose from, there were not more screen translations made of these odd little mysteries, "altogether upside down." I watched this one because I was intrigued by its peripheral Merchant Ivory-ness in the same way as the occasional co-productions of Powell and Pressburger for other writers and directors and as was the case with Vernon Sewell and Gordon Wellesley's The Silver Fleet (1943), I did not regret its hour and a half of my time. I got its dead-out-of-print DVD out of the Minuteman Library Network since the quality of the version available on YouTube actually is ghastly even without the random audio drop-outs or the smear like tape across the lens. It deserves better, this sweet and slightly bemusing snapshot starring a pair of actors who have had my phone book recommendation for years. This welcome brought to you by my upside-down backers at Patreon.