Bonus Quote of the Day (David Denby, on ‘Consummate Actress’ Deborah Kerr)

“Deborah Kerr…started out by portraying nuns and nice English ladies. It is commonly said that she saved her career by playing openly sexual women. This is true, though one hastens to add that, unlike the era’s bombshells, Kerr, a consummate actress, displayed many different ways of being sexy….Deborah Kerr made maturity exciting. There’s no one remotely like her today.”—David Denby, “Critic’s Notebook: To Eternity,” The New Yorker, Nov. 12, 2007

Deborah Kerr was born 100 years ago today in Helensburgh, Scotland. The “openly sexual” characters that Denby had in mind were undoubtedly the compassionate (and neglected) football coach’s wife in Tea and Sympathy and the bitter (and horribly hurt) officer’s wife in From Here to Eternity.

Kerr’s versatility and range enabled her to elevate even decidedly pedestrian material to something like a touch of class. With stronger scripts, such as From Here to Eternity and the 1961 adaptation of Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” The Innocents, she played a central part in the making of classics.

Long after her film heyday, I saw her in a 1980s TV remake of Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution. I chuckled at the starchiness she injected into the barrister’s nurse played in the original by Elsa Lanchester. I kept hoping, in vain, to see more of her.

The next time I saw her was far sadder: in 1994, when Hollywood finally got around to awarding her the Oscar she should have won decades before (and even this time, it was a consolation prize—an honorary Lifetime Achievement Award). My heart sank at the sight of the nervous, aging woman onstage far from the vibrant actress of my memory.

Fortunately, we have those films to remind us of her subtlety, elegance—and a deeper, luminous quality present in the accompanying photo, explained, not long before her death in 2007, by her second husband, writer Peter Viertel:

“The camera goes right through the skin. The camera brings out what you are, and in her case, there was always a kind of a humanity that she had in all of the things that she played . . . I think she made movies that have never worn off their splendor.”

Bonus Quote of the Day (Thomas Mann, on a ‘Luminous’ Munich on the First Day of June)

“Munich was luminous. A radiant, blue-silk sky stretched out over the festive squares and white-columned temples, the neoclassical monuments and Baroque churches, the spurting fountains, the palaces and gardens of the residence, and the latter’s broad and shining perspectives, carefully calculated and surrounded by green, basked in the sunny haze of a first and lovely June day.”—German Nobel Literature laureate Thomas Mann (1875-1955), “Gladius Dei” (1902), in Death in Venice and Other Tales, translated by Joachim Neugroschel (1998)

This quote was too beautiful not to highlight on this day.

Bonus Quote of the Day (Todd Rundgren, on Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Appeal to His Teen Self)

“Both my parents were very much into music. My initial exposure [to music] was classical—Ravel, Debussy—and show tunes, which gave me a sensibility that maybe some of my contemporaries missed. As I got older and started to play guitar, my parents were wary that I might end up an indigent! I wasn’t doing well at school, or developing practical skills. But when The Beatles came out, I thought, ‘This is the lifestyle I want. You play music, you party, and girls chase you everywhere.’ What more could a teenager ask for? ”—American rock ‘n’ roll singer-songwriter and producer Todd Rundgren, quoted in Peter Doggett, “Todd Rundgren: The Mojo Interview,” Mojo, Issue 183 (February 2009) (article not available electronically)

Bonus Quote of the Day (Raymond Chandler, on a Hotel Lobby)

“[The lobby of the Indian Head Hotel]… was full to overflowing with males in leisure jackets and liquor breaths and females in high-pitched laughs, oxblood fingernails and dirty knuckles. The manager of the joint, a low budget tough guy in shirt sleeves and a mangled cigar, was prowling the room with watchful eyes. At the cash desk a pale-haired man was fighting to get the war news on a small radio that was as full of static as the mashed potatoes were full of water. In the deep back corner of the room, a hillbilly orchestra of five pieces, dressed in ill-fitting white jackets and purple shirts, was trying to make itself heard above the brawl at the bar and smiling glassily into the fog of cigarette smoke and the blur of alcoholic voices. At Puma Point, summer, that lovely season, was in full swing.”—American mystery novelist-screenwriter Raymond Chandler (1888-1959), The Lady in the Lake (1943)

I could not let this day pass without noting that it’s the 60^th anniversary of the death, at age 70, of Raymond Chandler, who evoked, as few if any others have ever done, the physical and moral landscape of crime—in this case, Los Angeles. Many have imitated--and almost as many have parodied--Chandler, but I can't think of anyone who's surpassed him.

James Joyce once observed that reading Proust was not for him, because the French novelist never surprised him. That failing could never be ascribed to Chandler. 

From start to finish, especially in his early novels, his style never stops surprising in its mix of poetry, moral judgment, and wise-aleck sense of humor.

Again, Joyce comes to mind here. The Irishman continues to be read not so much for his plots but for his wizardry with language. Similarly, Chandler did not bother himself unduly with action. (Indeed, when director Howard Hawks wired him to ask who had killed the butler in The Big Sleep, Chandler answered simply: “I don’t know.”) But he buffed his style to a high sheen—never overloading a sentence, but always leaving you crave more.

For all intents and purposes, Dashiell Hammett invented the hard-boiled detective story. But Chandler took it to an entirely different level through the character who served as the first-person narrator of seven of his novels, Philip Marlowe. He is as tough as a man has to be to survive as a private eye, but there’s more to it than that—or, in the author’s words: 

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

(The image accompanying this post is of Dick Powell in Murder My Sweet, Hollywood's first adaptation of Chandler's Farewell My Lovely. I haven't seen Robert Mitchum, reputedly the best onscreen Philip Marlowe, and Humphrey Bogart is not bad. But I don't think that Powell can be surpassed in his ability to take a roundhouse punch and keep going "down these mean streets." On the morning after such encounters, Powell's Marlowe can use an icepack and a razor, but for all his seeming tarnish he remains the indispensable knight to save his dark city. In this photo, he looks the way Chandler intended: like he gives a damn.)

Bonus Quote of the Day (John Avlon, on NYC, The Post-9/11 ‘Resilient City’)

“What was really attacked on September 11th was the idea of New York City and America itself—a beacon of freedom, diversity, and equal opportunity. That spirit is intact and undaunted. In fact, our devotion to those ideals has only been strengthened by the selfless heroism we have seen.

“We now recognize that we are all part of a larger narrative, and while our city may never be the same, we will be better and stronger as a result of all we have experienced. Much has been taken from us, but much remains; and even in the dark, a great deal of light still shines upon the city of New York.”—John P. Avlon, “The Resilient City: New York After 9/11,” The Daily Beast, Sept. 11, 2014

The attached image is of the “Survivor Tree” from 9/11, the only tree to survive from that awful day. It has taken on deep significance for the city as a symbol of the same kind of resilience that Avlon—the chief speechwriter for Mayor Giuliani, responsible for writing or editing eulogies for more than 400 firefighters, police officers, and other rescue workers killed on 9/11—writes about above.

Bonus Quote of the Day (JFK, on the Irish, Later Immigrants, and Nativism)

"The Irish were the first to endure the scorn and discrimination later to be inflicted, to some degree at least, on each successive wave of immigrants by already settled  ‘Americans.”—President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), A Nation of Immigrants (1964)

My deepest wish is that the ugly un-American instinct of nativism dies at the hands of an Irish-American leader!

(A tip of my cap to my longtime friend Rob Polner for bringing this all-too-apropos quotation to my attention in the Age of Trump.)