Vintage Pictures

Roundup on the Sherman Ranch

A cowboy in Genesee, Kansas, USA, with lasso at the ready maintains a vigil on the herd on the open range, in 1902. His fellow cowpunchers are seen on the horizon.

This image, culled from The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, is a stereographic card that can be seen through a stereoscopic viewer, an optical device for viewing similar images or photographs. The picture is attributed to Keystone View Company, of Meadville, Pennsylvania, which produced and distributed educational and comic and sentimental stereoviews, and stereoscopes from 1892 through 1963.

According to an article at the Collectors Weekly website, “Stereoscopes use two nearly-identical images, each taken a few inches to the side of the other. When viewed through two lenses set 2.5 inches apart, approximately the space between the eyes, the result is the illusion of a three-dimensional picture. In fact, stereoscopes are seen as the precursors to 3D entertainment.”

Sir Charles Wheatstone of Great Britain is credited with inventing the first stereoscope in 1833.

Todd Mason has generously included this post in Tuesday's Overlooked Films/Television over at his blog Sweet Freedom. Don't forget to read the many fascinating entries over there.

BOOK REVIEW

The search for Georges Simenon

“Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy.”
— Georges Simenon in an interview to The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No.9, Summer 1955

Patti Abbott has thrown a mean challenge for this week’s edition of Friday’s Forgotten Books — Georges Simenon and his work — over at her blog Pattinase. So pardon me if this post reads like an author review.

© Erling Mandelmann/Wikimedia Commons

Weeks after the announcement, I have drawn a complete blank on the renowned Belgian author of 220 novels that include 86 featuring his most famous character, Parisian police detective Jules Maigret, who has been described as the Sherlock Holmes of France, and about 200 novellas under all kinds of pseudonyms.

Simenon smoked a pipe, so did Maigret, whom he described thus, "His build was plebeian. He was enormous and bony. Hard muscles stood out beneath his jacket… Above all, he had his very own way of planting himself in a spot... He was a solid block and everything had to break against it." For the uninitiated like this blogger, that is a vivid description of Maigret.

Simenon was a prolific writer who authored some half-a-dozen novels a year though, it is said, he was capable of producing much more. He wrote his first novel at the age of 18. 

This FFB seemed like a good opportunity to acquaint myself with Jules Maigret or at least with some of the non-Maigret novels which, I read somewhere online, have been reprinted. I don’t know how far that is true.

Now Simenon is not the kind of author whose novels you’ll find easily in India unless you borrow them from a friend, a discerning reader, or from a library. So, in a frantic effort to locate at least one of his 200-odd novels before Friday the 20th, I contacted the two secondhand bookstores I frequent but neither of the booksellers had even heard of him — “Georg who?” I don’t blame them: while I have heard and read about Simenon, I have never read anything by him. I then got in touch with two reliable new bookstores and their response was identical — “Georges Simenon? Sorry, out of stock. Would you like us to order any of his books?”

Simenon’s novels are still under copyright and, I suspect, they are going to be tied up in legal knots for a long time. Giving him good company will be Margaret Millar whose books are as elusive as the God Particle. No, they found that one at least, didn’t they?

When you have no choice, you do the predictable thing: you read what others have written about Simenon and his work or what the author himself has said over the years, which isn’t much.

Strand Magazine profiled Georges Simenon’s hero in a lengthy article titled ‘The Great Detectives: Maigret’ by Peter Haining. You can read it here. It is one of the better articles on Inspector Maigret.

Likewise, The New York Times paid a fine tribute to the author following his death in September 1989. You can read that piece titled ‘Georges Simenon Dies at 86; Creator of Inspector Maigret’ right here.

The two articles provide an excellent insight into the master storyteller’s life and his fiction. 

Georges Simenon unveiled Jules Maigret’s statue
in Delfzijl, The Netherlands, in September 1966.
© Wikimedia Commons

Simenon’s fiction has received heaps of praise. As American playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder observed, “The gift of narration is the rarest of all gifts in the 20th century. Georges Simenon has that to the tips of his fingers.”

Wilder’s remark must be seen in the context of Simenon’s own views on writing fiction and on the way he likes to write fiction, which is keeping it simple. “I have always tried to write in a simple way, using down-to-earth and not abstract words,” he says. I don’t know when he said this but in 1955 he told The Paris Review, “Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence — cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut.”

It is possible Simenon may have been influenced by Hemingway’s plain and uncomplicated narrative style.

© University of Liege, Belgium

 
Can you write without the use of adjectives and adverbs? I knocked off a few over the course of a fourth revision of this post and I am quite satisfied with the result. Now if only I had read just one of Georges Simenon’s novels, I could have added substance to this piece as well.

FILM REVIEW

The Beast (1988)

The Beast is my contribution to Tuesday’s Overlooked/Forgotten films and television over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom. Don't forget to check out the other fascinating reviews over there.

Konstantin Koverchenko (Jason Patric) to Daskal (George Dzundza), his commander: “Sorry, sir. Not much of a war. No Stalingrad. How is it that we're the Nazis this time? How is it? I tried to be a good soldier. But you can't be a good soldier in a rotten war, sir. Now I want you to live to see them win. Go...I said go!” 

The Beast, or The Beast of War, is a compelling film based on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The film, directed by Kevin Reynolds, who made Red Dawn, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Waterworld and The Count of Monte Cristo, tells the story of a feisty band of mujahideen (Islamic insurgents engaged in jihad or holy war) who set out to blow up a Soviet T-55 tank that has lost its way in the desert terrain after destroying an Afghan village.

Khan Taj (Steven Bauer), whose family is wiped out in the attack, swears vengeance and, accompanied by a handful of mujahideen fighters, goes after the menacing tank — the beast — with a mad zeal and rocket-propelled grenades that are no match for the armoured vehicle and its powerful guns.

Commanding the tank is Daskal (George Dzundza), a cold-blooded Russian officer, who drives the tank and its crew on a suicide mission against the rebels in one of the most hostile terrains in the world. Daskal is proud and ruthless and puts his tank’s interests before that of his soldiers in his battle against the insurgents.

The cat-and-mouse game between the Russians and the mujahideen, led by the turbaned Khan and played out in the treacherous mountains of Afghanistan, runs through much of the nearly two-hour long film. Assisting the Khan and his men is Konstantin Koverchenko (Jason Patric), the tank driver, who gets on the wrong side of his commander, on matters of principle, and is left to die in the scorching desert. The bespectacled Koverchenko is stoned by Afghan women out to seek revenge against the invaders but is saved in the nick of time by Khan. 

The Khan’s noble deed of rescuing the Russian soldier is an allusion to the famed principles of Pashtunwali, the Afghan people’s code of honour that, among other things, includes nanawatai which means giving sanctuary even to the enemy.

The Russian soldier is torn between his loyalty to his country and his desire to help the Afghan people in a war he knows isn’t right. He chooses the latter. Khan and Koverchenko strike up a friendship and the verbal communication between the two battle-hardened men is what makes this film quite entertaining. Koverchenko teaches Khan how to use the RPG with deadly effect.

The Beast, released in September 1988, five months after Mikhail Gorbachev ordered his troops out of Afghanistan, is a low-budget film with (pardon me) a second-rung of decent actors which, apart from Jason Patric, include Stephen Baldwin who plays one of the tank’s soldiers and Steven Bauer who is convincing as the Pashto-speaking mujahideen leader.

I liked this film because it is, in many ways, a Cold War film, and because of its realistic portrayal of Afghanistan, its hostile land under a merciless sun, and the courage of a people who desperately want their freedom back. There is plenty of action as the T-55 and the mujahideen play hide and seek in the "dust bowls" of the mountain country.

BOOK REVIEW

Run, Mann, Run! By James Keenan (1975)

This novel is my contribution to Friday’s Forgotten Books meme over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase. Hop over and check out the fine mix of reviews by other bloggers.

“It was a hot day in Dornville when Mann drove in; it got a lot hotter when he was framed for murder!”

Run, Mann, Run! by James Keenan is probably the most forgotten book I am writing about since enrolling in FFB. There is absolutely nothing about either this novel or its author online, as far as I know, except for its availability on a handful of book retail sites. Even then, there are no images of the book cover or the author. I have no idea who James Keenan is or if he has written other books. My copy of the paperback (left) simply begins and ends with his story (Major Books, Chatsworth, California).

However, my search did throw up a book and a film that sounded exactly like this title, only it wasn’t the same. The book Run, Man, Run is a crime novel written by Chester Himes in 1966 and is about racism in New York City. The film of the same name is a spaghetti western directed by Sergio Sollima in 1968. Note the missing ‘n’.

The Mann in Keenan’s story is Perry Mann, an ex-Vietnam soldier, who travels hundreds of miles to a dark cabin in the hills of Dornville, a sleepy Ozark town, to meet his close friend and business partner, Pearl Dobson. The two men served in Vietnam together and have been crop dusters in Salinas, California, after the war till, one day, Dobson leaves for the hills where he grew up, to make millions for himself and his friend. Mann finds Dobson strapped to a chair and tortured to death. His grandparents and their dog have been shot dead too.

Mann, a tall, lean man in his late twenties, drives down to Dornville to report the murders and steps right into hell he hadn’t bargained for. His nightmare begins as soon as he comes face to face with Deputy Sheriff Merl McKinstry who is built like an ox and is crooked as a fish hook. He controls everything and everyone in the county whose folks, including the attorney general and the judge, are too terrified to oppose his mean and wicked ways. If McKinstry says “Squat!” people squat.

McKinstry had his henchmen, fellow deputies, kill the Dobsons and later set their cabin on fire because he had found out Pearl Dobson’s secret — a hidden cave called Witch Cave on the Dobsons property that has uranium deposits worth millions of dollars. McKinstry frames Mann for the murders but doesn’t kill him because he thinks the brave young man knows the exact location of the cave.

Mann finds no friends in Dornville whose inhabitants don’t like strangers in their midst, especially those accused of murder. His attempt to escape from the town, with the help of the lovely Penny Gay Parsons, who McKinstry boasts he has had since she was fourteen, fails, and he is back at the sheriff's mercy. Mann is unarmed and uses only his wits and fists to get out of situations. 

McKinstry’s grand visions of rolling in money, however, come to a naught when Margaret Nome, a tall and handsome woman and the editor of the local paper, enters the scene. Her agenda is as sinister as that of the sheriff: she wants Witch Cave all to herself. The cave is her route to riches and a new life far away from Dornville.

Maggie Nome kills McKinstry in cold blood and pins the blame on Perry Mann who then sets out to clear his name and get out of Dornville with Penny Gay.

Run, Mann, Run! reads like a western novel. The small county has an attorney general, a judge, and a sheriff, but no law. Mann tries to escape because Penny Gay’s timid father warns him that McKinstry’s hoods are going to lynch him. The people of Dornville are not law-abiding citizens; they are a mob willing to hang anyone they are told is guilty of crime. The county, set among the hills, is reminiscent of a western town in many ways, with its small establishments like a telephone office, a beer parlour, a little grocery, and a Missouri Pacific depot with only one train a day.

James Keenan portrays a stark picture of Dornville, a town more dead than alive. You don’t want to be there even if you were elected mayor. In contrast, Perry Mann is a man of virtue, of grit and purpose, whose singular aim is to avenge the murders of Pearl Dobson and his grandparents without taking the law into his hands. In the end Mann doesn’t run, he stands his ground.

Run, Mann, Run! is a rather predictable story with an unpredictable end, that is if you haven’t guessed it halfway through. While it is well-written and fairly gripping, I wouldn’t recommend it as a must-read.

So, does anyone know who James Keenan is?

FILM REVIEW

Becker (1998)

“Why do women always scream when they're surprised? Can't you just clutch your heart and drop dead like a man?”
— Dr. John Becker

Now that the internet connection at home has been restored fully (see earlier post), I thought I’d do a quick short piece for the Overlooked/Forgotten films and television meme over at Todd Mason’s blog Sweet Freedom. I saw a couple of fairly good films over the past few days, not counting Hitman, but neither of them fits in the above category (this one may not either).

I also watched a recap of the week’s episodes of Two and a Half Men and something about Charlie Sheen’s character, the self-centered Charlie Harper, rang a bell. I mean, he reminded me of someone I had seen on television before, in another entertaining sitcom. 

Not Frank Barone. The patriarch of the Barone family is cranky and obnoxious and openly critical of his wife Marie but he’s not egocentric in the way the lustful Charlie is.

It was someone else…someone with a medical degree and a stethoscope around his neck, someone who hated the world and made sure that everyone hated him. A description like that could only fit Dr. John Becker who one reviewer at IMDb aptly called a “misanthrope” — yes, he would be the original Charlie Harper minus the obsession with women and sex. 

Becker, played by Ted Danson, is a good doctor and a cynical bastard and is convincing in the shoes of both the characters. He runs a clinic in the Bronx along with Margaret (Hattie Winston), his superefficient receptionist whose opinion of her employer is none too flattering, and Linda (Shawnee Smith), his assistant who has her head in the cloud and her two feet above the ground.

Dr. John Becker: The world is full of idiots, and someone needs to point it out to them or they will never know. 

But, Dr. Becker is a decent man who cares about his patients though he is also wont to send them off with a cure and a depression at the same time. 

After peppering Margaret and Linda with a liberal dose of his profound cynicism, Becker takes his misanthropic ways to his favourite diner across the street, to Reggie (Terry Farrell) who runs the place, his blind friend Jake (Alex Désert) who runs a newsstand inside the diner, and the effeminate Bob (Robert Benito), the fast-talking super at Becker’s apartment who drops in frequently, to ask Reggie for a date rather than to order a meal. Reggie and Becker have a thing for each other but neither will admit it.

Dr. John Becker: If you and I were the only people on the face of the Earth, that would be the only thing we'd have in common.

John Becker, who smokes cheap cigarettes, hates his life and hates other people’s lives too and has a grouse about everything and everyone, a fact he doesn’t hide from Reggie, who is quite exasperated by his attitude, and Jake, who takes his friend’s sarcasm in his stride. 

Ironically, Becker’s angst, about nothing really in particular, is what gives the sitcom its entertainment value. The thirty-minute serial, which ran from 1998 through 2004, is hilarious with deadpan Beckerisms coming at you from the start, as the mighty opinionated Becker takes on the world even if no one takes him seriously. Becker’s rile is so much bile but, hey, there’s a John Becker in all of us.

The tagline of Becker, created, written and produced by Dave Hackel, is “His bedside manner is no manners at all!” I’d modify that to “If you are happy and feeling on top of the world, steer clear of Dr. John Becker!”

Dr. John Becker: Oh great, no cigarettes, the perfect cherry on this crap sundae of a morning.

Ted Danson is a talented and versatile actor and one of the best comedians to come out of Hollywood in the past three decades. I remember him most in his comedy roles, especially in Three Men and a Baby and its sequel Three Men and a Lady, as well as the very touching film Dad alongside Jack Lemmon and Ethan Hawke, and Getting Even with Dad with Macaulay Culkin. He plays a father in the initial two films, a father and a son in the third, and once again a father in the fourth – roles that seemed to have been made for him. I have heard much about his long-running sitcom Cheers though I have never seen it.

Hitman: The movie of the game

Last week, my home Wi-Fi modem went bust and I was without an internet connection till this morning when the new D-Link wireless modem router I purchased on Saturday finally put us back into cyberspace. Since I started blogging, I have been watching very little television, save for the odd serial like Two and a Half Men or a classic on TCM or MGM. The lack of internet over the weekend left me more time to catch a film or two (as well as renew my USB-based wireless broadband device). I watched Hitman (2007) on HBO with my teenage son and I quite enjoyed it.

While I was vaguely familiar with this movie, my son knew all about it. He told me that it was based on the ‘Hitman’ game series first released in 2000. In fact, he even had one of the game CDs in his PlayStation collection. I have never played this game with him before.

Hitman, the film, is about a cold-blooded super assassin called Agent 47, played by Timothy Olyphant, who works for a secret entity called “The Organisation” or “The Agency” that could well be the CIA. Agent 47 knows no emotion other than the motion of killing, and killing quietly and swiftly. He is embroiled in a political conspiracy and finds himself on the run from Interpol and the Russian military even as his handlers disown their once blue-eyed boy and put his enemies on his trail. As Agent 47 goes on a killing spree, he meets Nika Boronina (Olga Kurylenko), the mistress of Russian President Mikhail Belicoff (Ulrich Thomsen). He is ordered to kill Nika because she supposedly witnesses his assassination of Belicoff who turns out to be a body-double.

Agent 47 spares Nika’s life because, in spite of being genetically engineered, he is still capable of developing feelings and falls in love with her. In the end he kills all his enemies including the hitman sent out to eliminate his girl —“I told you to leave her alone. You should have listened,” he says, posing with his long-range rifle over the dead body of the sniper on the terrace. 

Timothy Olyphant looks the part of the Hitman from the video game. He is tall, well built, and bald with a tattoo at the back of his head which distinguishes his kind of people from others. He is not the only numbered agent. He wears a dark suit and a red tie. He has a stern look on his face, he speaks without moving his lips much, and he seldom smiles. He raises his gun, fires point blank, and walks away. Just like that. When he is not using his two silver guns, he uses his hands and legs to engage his enemies in mind-boggling martial arts. But, in spite of his don’t-you-mess-with-me persona, Agent 47 doesn’t look as menacing as you would expect a hired genetically-engineered assassin to look.

Agent 47 is also highly trained to observe and store everything in his brain, or maybe he has a sixth sense, that enables him to perceive certain things that normal people cannot. For instance, while dining with Nika in a restaurant, she asks him, “The woman, two tables behind you — what’s she wearing? Agent 47 counters: “The one with the red hair and the silk dress — facing you?” When Nika nods, he says quietly, “That’s not a woman,” referring to the transvestite that Nika and the viewers can see over his shoulders.

Hitman is full of the Arnold Schwarzenegger type of one liners, inane but funny. Here are a few of them, courtesy IMDb, just so I get the quotes right.

Yuri Marklov (screaming): You bastard!
Agent 47: Yell all you like — the Lord himself won't hear you.

Agent 47: Nika…
Nika Boronina: Yes?
Agent 47: Stop talking or I'll put you back in the trunk.

Agent 47: Eat your sandwich. I need to get some sleep.

Nika Boronina: What are you going to do?
Agent 47: What I do.

Nika Boronina: What colour underwear am I wearing?
Agent 47: You're not wearing any underwear.

Like I said, Agent 47 doesn’t talk much.

Hitman is entertaining, the kind of film you can watch when your modem goes kaput and you are suddenly left without internet. Now for 'Hitman' the game…

BOOK REVIEW

The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock 

by Anna Katharine Green (1895)

This novella is my contribution to Friday’s Forgotten Books meme over at Patti Abbott’s blog Pattinase. Hop over and check out the fine mix of reviews by other book lovers.

“God! What have I done!” 

Last evening, I spent a pleasant one hour reading The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock, a 50-page novella by American poet and novelist Anna Katharine Green who is regarded as one of the earliest writers of detective stories. She introduced her now little-known detective, Inspector Ebenezer Gryce of the New York Metropolitan Police Force, in The Leavenworth Case in 1878, well before his more famous counterparts Sherlock Holmes came to life in A Study in Scarlet (1887) and Hercule Poirot made his debut in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920).

In The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock, which I read as an ebook on my desktop, Ebenezer Gryce is a young, energetic and determined police detective who is entrusted with the investigation of the high-profile murder of Mr. Hasbrouck, a wealthy and influential resident of the Colonnade in Lafayette Place. The murder creates a stir in the neighbourhood as men and women peer out of their windows and doorways and gather in small groups to talk about the crime and who might have committed it.

After his customary interrogation of Mr. Hasbrouck’s family, consisting of his wife and three servants, Ebenezer Gryce steps out onto the balcony and looks at the people gathered below, when he spots an attractive woman holding on to her husband who matches her good looks. The seemingly devout couple, he discovers, are Doctor Constant Zabriskie, a blind but highly skilled doctor, and his wife, the very graceful Helen Zabriskie. He also finds out that Hasbrouck and Zabriskie were not just neighbours but also esteemed friends.

Inspector Ebenezer Gryce’s investigations lead him to the house of the Zabriskies where he meets Helen, apprehensive in her bearing, and Constant, who is so agitated as to confess outright that it was he who killed his dear old friend. The dutiful wife, in a desperate effort to save her husband, pronounces his confession as the rambling of a blind man with an unsettled mind. She insists that her husband is hallucinating and is taking responsibility for Mr. Hasbrouck’s unaccountable death. The doctor is equally adamant and implores the inspector to take him in rather than be certified as a mad man. 

Anna Katharine Green

“No, no, it is false! I will never believe that your hands have been plunged in blood. You are my own pure-hearted Constant, cold, perhaps, and stern, but with no guilt upon your conscience, save in your own wild imagination.”

Stricken by guilt, Doctor Zabriskie makes an unexpected offer to Inspector Gryce and his superiors at the New York Metropolitan Police Force, a proposition that causes further anguish to Helen, even as experts judge him insane and incapable of shooting anyone. To prove his sharp skills with a pistol, even in his blind condition, and show that he is as sane as the rest of them, the doctor offers to shoot at a clock no sooner it strikes five.

“Can you shoot a man dead without seeing him?” asked the Superintendent, with painful effort.

“Give me a pistol and I will show you,” was the quick reply.

The blind doctor hears the clock go off, turns and fires, except it’s the wrong clock, held by his wife and set to go off a full minute before the one he was supposed to fire at, to prove his sanity and his capability with a gun. Helen dies on the spot but not before telling her husband that she could never have survived the proof that he had, unwittingly, killed Mr. Hasbrouck.

Inspector Ebenezer Gryce suspected the truth behind the murder long before this tragic turn of events. Doctor Zabriskie, it seems, loved his wife deeply but was also insanely jealous. Suspecting Helen of having an affair, he returns home one night with the explicit purpose of shooting her mysterious lover. In spite of his blindness, the doctor never misses his doorstep but that night he does and stops at the next door…that of Mr. Hasbrouck.

“Am I not correct in my surmises, Dr. Zabriskie, and is not this the true explanation of your crime?”

With a strange look, he lifted up his face. “Hush!” said he, “You will awaken her. See how peacefully she sleeps! I should not like to have her awakened now, she is so tired, and I…I have not watched over her as I should.”

This may seem like one spoiler too many but there is more to this fascinating story.

The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock is only the first of forty books by Anna Katharine Green I have read and I am already willing to certify that she is the original queen of detective fiction. She tells a captivating story in a simple and lucid style even as she astounds the reader with her rich and flawless narrative. There is an old charm to her writing reminiscent of the period she lived and wrote in.

Green has an uncanny eye for detail, particularly legalese, which she may have inherited from her father, a defence lawyer from Brooklyn, New York. Her characters, though just three in number, have depth and are entirely convincing. For instance, Green’s characterisation of the blind and intelligent doctor, Constant Zabriskie, and his lovely wife Helen Zabriskie is so real they seem to come alive through the pages, as if you were watching them play out their emotional drama on screen. 

Inspector Ebenezer Gryce, on the other hand, is an excellent specimen of a detective who, I have no doubt, influenced fictional sleuths of the future. He is a clever and calm-headed detective who holds on to the case till he has solved it. He goes about solving Mr. Hasbrouck’s murder with precision and in the absence of clues because there aren’t any. The mystery unfolds as you read. He is described as “eccentric” though I did not find him peculiar in any way. In fact, Gryce is portrayed as sensitive and considerate, especially towards Helen for whom he has a deep admiration. He sympathises with her plight and tells her, rather quietly, that he is her friend. This is his story and he recounts it as a spectator in spite of being at the heart of the mystery.

The Doctor, his Wife, and the Clock is a superb piece of fiction by Anna Katharine Green and one of the best short novels I have read in recent times. I intend to read her other books most of which are available online legally.