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The "Esther" Kerfuffle.

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A few months ago, a radio panel discussion (exploring issues of the moment) was nearly derailed when one of the panellists brought up the name Estes Kefauver as part of a larger point he was making. "Wait," said the interviewer. "Did you just say Esther Kerfuffle?" There followed a brief pause while the panellist in question had to pick himself up off the floor and regain some semblance of composure. Perhaps he was "Esther Kerfuffle" to his friends. We may never know... To anyone who had been a sentient life-form in the US in the early 1950s, Estes Kefauver would have been a household name; instantly recognisable. He was a Democratic politician (a Congressman, then a Senator) who ran for president several times, and was briefly a vice-presidential candidate when Adlai Stevenson ran against Dwight Eisenhower. (Spoiler alert: Eisenhower won the election, so instead of vice-president Kefauver, we got vice-president Richard Nixon. Good times.) But Kefauver wo...
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The Live-Action "Snow White"!

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Welcome back! I hope everyone had a pleasant and refreshing holiday break. As you will no doubt remember, we have been spending the past few months exploring what I called Post-Depression Tragedy ... by which I meant the "dark cinema" of the years that followed the Great Depression. As you may have figured out by now, this was an era when Hollywood was more than willing to get down and dirty, with the sex; with the violence; with the cha-cha-cha (always under the watchful eye of the censors, of course). But "noir" (whereof I am speaking) is notoriously hard to pin down - probably because it was never actually a genre . It was a consequence of a specific moment in history, and the convergence of a number of cultural threads that all came together in post-war Hollywood to create something distinctive, albeit difficult to define. Who's the Femme-est Fatale of all...? As we enter the "Spring season" I want to turn my attention to films that aren't quit...
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Doomed. Everyone is Dooooomed!

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When I launched this current series of films back in January, I dubbed it Post-Depression Tragedy ; partly to compliment the series I had presented last year ( Depression/Comedy ). But beyond that, I personally feel that 1940s film noir is more than just "Dark Cinema". I chose the word Tragedy very deliberately. Scarlet Street , which I didn't screen last week, is about as dark as they come, but it's also cruel and sadistic; and it brutally punishes the main character chiefly because (in the judgement of the screenplay) he is the most pathetic order of life on the planet: a man who isn't a man . Noir can do better. At the very beginning of this series I quoted Jean Anouilh's discussion of Tragedy, which he describes as "restful". True tragedy is never sadistic or cruel because (in his reading) it is inevitable. There is no hope of escape because there is nowhere else for the story to go, and "that makes for tranquillity," as he puts it. ...
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