Quote of the Day (James Wolcott, on Movie Revival Houses of the Seventies)

“Revival houses in the 70s, nearly all of them shoestring operations, had their own distinct character, a creaky, lived-in, refuge-for-lost-souls wombiness that honored the passage of time and fostered sinking into reverie. It was as if the graininess of the films seeped into the worn carpets and seat cushions. The Elgin, despite its Deco exterior (preserved during its renovation and resurrection as the Joyce, home to contemporary dance), had a disreputable mise en scène, perhaps the residue of its midnight showings of John Waters’s Pink Flamingos. Architecturally, the Thalia was a true weirdo, with its reverse parabolic floor and flimsy soundproofing; ventilation didn’t seem to be a priority, either—'The air in the theater seemed left over from F.D.R.’s third term,’ one Thalia veteran recalled. (Now an adjunct to Symphony Space, the Thalia has been handsomely re-modernized and re-christened the Leonard Nimoy Thalia.) The seats at Theatre 80 St. Marks [pictured] were a stress test for the lumbar region, and the rear screen projection often made black-and-white films look bleachy, but the concession bar served Colombian coffee—singular then—and the audiences seemed more collegial than those at revival houses that attracted more solitary jaybirds. The much-traveled prints were usually far from pristine, at worst a flickering strip of scratches, blotches, missing frames, and faded colors. But there’s something to be said for encountering art in a primitive condition—it makes the synapses work a little harder.” —American essayist James Wolcott, “Revival of the Fittest,” Vanity Fair, February 2018

Though I had a chance to take a film class taught by a well-known film critic while I was an undergrad, I disdained the opportunity. It was a “gut” course—i.e., easy—I had heard, so my guilt overtook my curiosity. 

I had to wait until after I graduated in the early Eighties for my true education in classic movies to begin, in precisely the sometimes scruffy revival houses that Wolcott describes so well.

It started with a short-lived theater on Eighth Avenue in the Forties where I saw Body Heat and Gallipoli long earlier their original runs, before I advanced (or, maybe I should say, backtracked) to more vintage fare. 

At the Thalia, for instance, I saw silent films accompanied by Steve Sterner on piano (though I must say, nothing beat Lee Erwin on the mighty organ in a far different venue, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, for The Phantom of the Opera).

I continued with Theatre 80 St. Marks, where I saw Orson Welles’ 1948 version of Macbeth and wondered if the hideous voices was due more to a poorly recorded soundtrack or the director’s disastrous decision to attempt a Scottish accent. 

(Later, I continued to attend performances at this East Village space when it became for a number of years the home of the Pearl Theatre Company.)

The Regency Theatre furthered my education in film until, after 68 years of operation, it was taken over by the chain Cineplex Odeon (which many of us felt like calling “Cineplex Odious”) in 1987, then transferred my allegiance to the Biograph Cinema.

Though it only lasted from 1988 to 1991, it continued the Regency’s tradition of running weeks of themes so you could catch up on directors and theaters quickly. 

(For instance, in the “Screen Teams” series, for one segment devoted to William Powell and Myrna Loy, I saw the eightysomething but still game Ms. Loy in the audience, waving to fans in the theater’s front seat for well-deserve applause).

By the early Nineties, the proliferation of the VCR meant the decline of the revival houses. You’ll notice that I used the word “decline” rather than “extinction.” 

If you’re in the New York metro area, you will still find theaters devoted to classic or unusual older films—notably Film Forum or the Museum of Modern Art in the city itself and (mixed with current independent films and live events) the Barrymore Film Center near me in Fort Lee, NJ.

Yes, I am a TCM fan, and against all modern trends, I prefer DVDs to streaming. But nothing beats a movie classic on the big screen. 

It’s not just widescreen epics like Lawrence of Arabia, or silent films to live musical accompaniment, that are shown to their best advantage there.

Simply put, nothing beats sharing the laughs of a great comedy with an audience, or seeing how meticulously a black-and-white film was crafted with its contrasts and shadows. 

For any of my readers who haven’t tried yet these vintage theaters that have inexplicably survived into the digital age, seek them out. This is how movies were meant to be experienced in the first place.

Quote of the Day (Brian Cashman, on His First George Steinbrenner Trauma)

“I told him [the late New York Yankees principal owner George Steinbrenner, pictured], ‘This way is faster.’” [Incorrect: The “shortcut” to a haircut appointment, the Third Avenue Bridge, was closed for renovations.] “And he starts going ballistic: ‘’You effing idiot. Take me back to the effing stadium.’ He’s crushing me from the back seat. I mean, my hair was blowing forward because of his bellowing from the back. It was relentless, because that’s how he was. If somebody told me the same story and said they crawled up into the fetal position, I could understand it.”—New York Yankee General Manager Brian Cashman, on “the worst experience of my life” (with then-boss George Steinbrenner, naturally) as a summer intern in the mid-‘80s, quoted by Bruce Schoenfeld, “‘I Feel the Pain More Than I Feel the Joy,’” The New York Times Magazine, Aug. 16, 2026

Good God, wasn’t George Costanza available to take The Boss around?

This incident must have been pretty bad. Now, most people would call losing a loved one “the worse experience of my life.” Maybe even losing a job.

In the case of the Yankee GM, I might plop for a divorce that exposed an extremely messy private life to tabloid and late-night talk show ridicule. Maybe even the anecdote in this September 2019 Ian O’Connor profile relating how Steinbrenner humiliated his young charge into personally collecting players' spring training rental car keys before they headed north.

But no, Brian Cashman says this incident driving The Boss around was the worst. Between the sheer physical sensations (the high-decibel insults! the hair blowing! the pushing from the backseat!) and the full-on exposure to baseball’s most impulsive, truculent owner, maybe it was.

If you listen to New York sports radio or podcasts to any extent, you might find some Yankee fans who wish that Steinbrenner was even tougher on Cashman.

Bronx Bomber fans are like Notre Dame football fans: success early in team history has only increased the fury over the lack of a title in recent years, though there’s a good excuse: the games have changed radically since the glory days of The Gipper and Babe Ruth.

So, from now until some point in mid-fall, Yankee fans are on The Cashman Watch: Will George’s son Hal stick by him, or will he be given his walking papers? Many will be venting on sports talk radio if manager Aaron Boone is let go for his squad’s underperformance but that great Houdini Cashman survives yet again.

Until then, just remember the wisdom of Annie Savoy in Bull Durham: “It's a long season and you gotta trust it.”

(The image of Brian Cashman that accompanies this post was taken on Oct. 7, 2012, at the American League Divisional Series Game 1 between the Yankees and Baltimore Orioles, by Keith Allison.)

Photo of the Day: Shoe Shop, Old Economy Village, Ambridge PA

When it comes to all the subjects I could write about, too often my curiosity exceeds my time and energy. So it proved on a visit with a close relative in Pittsburgh in October 2019, when we took a day trip to Old Economy Village, 18 miles away from the Steel City in the Beaver County town of Ambridge.

Despite my intention to write about this site, other matters got in the way, such as holidays, COVID-19, disruptions in my career, and other situations. For the longest time, I had forgotten about my time there.

I doubt if many people outside Pennsylvania have heard of this National Historic Landmark, let alone visited it. But this set of buildings tells a fascinating story of how one of the many religious sects that spring into being in 19^th-century America lived and worked communally.

If you want to learn how these believers demonstrated a spirit of entrepreneurship as they sought to live according to the dictates of their faith, viewing the 18 buildings from this community is an excellent place to start.

The accompanying photo I took while there shows the shoe shop. It’s part of the Mechanics’s Building, which also housed tailors and hat makers; for a time, printing operations; and underneath, a wine cellar.

While the Society (or, as they were called, the Harmonists) made and repaired shoes for themselves, it would also do so for the public on request. The footwear would then be sold in the organization’s store.

On display here are tools of the trade, including benches; clamps; adjustable tin patterns; knives, hammers, awls, and other materials for finishing the leather; and lasts that were individually sized to a person’s feet. (Until the 19^th century, believe it or not, one last was used for both left and right feet. Imagine the discomfort!)

What fascinates me as well about the Harmony Society, a sect of German Lutheran separatists, is its place in the history of American utopian communities. One, Brook Farm, founded by Bronson Alcott (yes, Louisa’s father) in 1842, foundered quickly.

Alcott would have done well to see how Old Economy Village under its leaders, the preacher George Rapp (1757-1847) and his adopted son Frederick Rapp (1775-1834), the community’s business manager, managed to thrive for so long.

Part of it goes back to the old real estate mantra “location, location, location.” The 3,000 acres that the Rupps and other Harmony Society leaders purchased were along the Ohio River, offering plenty of opportunities for shipping their products to the established Eastern states, as well as to growing midwestern and western markets via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

Moreover, the fertile soil made for excellent farming. Each household had its own garden which provided fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

Families, then, were self-sufficient—and the collective abundance was so great that politicians and businessmen in the area took notice. It was a vibrant community with a diversified economy that, as the saying went, placed “the agriculturalist beside the industrialist.”

The Beaver County location was the third that the “Harmonists” created in the United States. The first, in Harmony, PA, was founded in 1804. Eleven years later they moved to New Harmony, IN. After a decade, desiring more opportunity to sell their goods east and dismayed by unfriendly neighbors they moved back to Pennsylvania to a community they named “Harmony.”

(They then sold the Indiana land for $150,000 to the Welsh industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen, whose secular, utopian community collapsed after only two years.)

The Harmonists were already attracting considerable notice in their first two decades since coming to America, not always positive. Their practice of celibacy especially came in for biting criticism, notably from the English poet Lord Byron in his mock-epic Don Juan:

When Rapp the Harmonist embargo'd marriage
In his harmonious settlement (which flourishes
Strangely enough as yet without miscarriage,
Because it breeds no more mouths than it nourishes,
Without those sad expenses which disparage
What Nature naturally most encourages)—
Why call'd he 'Harmony' a state sans wedlock?
Now here I 've got the preacher at a dead lock.
 
Because he either meant to sneer at harmony
Or marriage, by divorcing them thus oddly.
But whether reverend Rapp learn'd this in Germany
Or no, 't is said his sect is rich and godly,
Pious and pure, beyond what I can term any
Of ours, although they propagate more broadly.
My objection 's to his title, not his ritual,
Although I wonder how it grew habitual.

Nevertheless, even though the number of Harmonists had already declined to about 500 by the time they settled again in Pennsylvania, the group prospered greatly, exporting their goods not just within the United States but also, by 1825, to 10 European countries. That wealth accumulated through shrewd early investments in the nation’s emerging coal, oil, and railroad industries.

Like the Shakers, the Harmonists had no trouble sustaining themselves economically, but their strict celibacy rules led to the end of the group at its Beaver County settlement. But visitors can still see today how they worked, lived, and even played (yes, the second floor of their Feast Hall served not just for meals but for musical performances on special feast days).

Quote of the Day (Damon Linker, on a Destructive ‘Authoritarian Outlook’)

“Setting aside the question of whether an authoritarian outlook is harmful in religion, and there is a considerable religious and philosophical literature on the subject, an authoritarian outlook can certainly be destructive in politics. A nation in which such an outlook is explicitly encouraged and esteemed will be tempted to support political leaders who promise to shield us from the inherent complexity and difficulty of truth itself. This temptation is especially dangerous in liberal democratic nations, which depend on citizens informing themselves about exceedingly complicated issues, making use of alternative sources of information, doubting the assertions of public authorities, and thrashing out an inevitably tentative truth in open-ended argument and debate. This is the unavoidable price of citizenship in a free society. It is our citizenly duty to be suspicious, and to cultivate suspicion, of any and all who would rescue us from the rigors of our own freedom.”— American journalist and author Damon Linker, “Without a Doubt” (review of Richard John Neuhaus’ “Catholic Matters”), The New Republic, Apr. 3, 2006

Appreciations: Graham Greene, With a Poignant Tale of a Holiday Affair, ‘Cheap in August’

“It was cheap in August: the essential sun, the coral reefs, the bamboo-bar and the calypsos – they were all of them at cut-prices, like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain sale. Great groups arrived periodically from Philadelphia in the manner of school-treats and departed with less bruit after an exact exhausting week when the picnic was over. Perhaps for twenty-four hours the swimming-pool and the bar were almost deserted, and then another school-treat would arrive, this time from St Louis. Everyone knew everyone else: they had bussed together to an airport, they had flown together, together they had faced an alien customs; they would separate during the day and greet each other noisily and happily after dark, exchanging impressions of ‘shooting the rapids’, the botanic gardens, the Spanish fort. ‘We are doing that tomorrow.’”— British novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter Graham Greene (1904-1991), “Cheap in August,” originally printed in The London Magazine, August 1964, reprinted in May We Borrow Your Husband (1967)

The exotic seaside setting might be familiar to readers of the globe-trotting Graham Greene, but the melancholy that gradually supplants the light wit in this short story? It’s a far different variety than the tortured moral dilemmas elsewhere in the Greeneland landscape in novels like The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.

An Englishwoman, Mary Watson, has come to a Jamaican resort: i.e., when it is “cheap in August.” At 39 years old, in a marriage to an American academic that has become increasingly lifeless, she has concocted an excuse to escape for the kind of “holiday affair” that friends her age have talked about.

She does not expect three weeks with “no opportunities for infidelity, only for writing post-cards” to her husband—a period in which she finds herself increasingly isolated from the “jolly bunches” at the resort who have abandoned any attempt to look attractive.

Nor does she expect at the end of that time to find herself being propositioned by an especially unprepossessing fellow tourist, an obese 70-year-old old enough to be her father who goes by the name of Henry Hickslaughter.

He is hardly an attractive figure: unsuccessful in business, distant from his siblings, and, as becomes increasingly apparent, lonely (“I don’t write love letters. Never did and I’m too old now”). Yet in spite of herself, she finds herself drawn to this “old shoe comfortable to wear.”

In terms of brevity or intensity of passion, what they share this night is not even a brief encounter but a temporary reprieve against the desolation encroaching on their lives. They will never see each other again, but Mary, out of pity, has alleviated the plight of “the fat old frightened man whom she almost loved.”

For Greene, cinema not only provided at times a livelihood (a short-lived stint as a critic in the late 1930s) and the extra assignment (his classic screenplay for the 1949 thriller The Third Man), but an eye for telling details that reveal character.

His use of simile and metaphor is especially pronounced in “Cheap in August,” such as, in the paragraph leading off this post, “like the slightly soiled slips in a bargain sale”; rear ends that “lurch by like hippos on the way to the water”; and, most surprisingly (to me, anyway), “the air-conditioners made a continuous rumble in the starry palmy night like over-fed hotel guests.”

Collectively, these go far towards depicting the dense humidity and downscale resort in which Mary and Henry, disappointed in where they are in their lives, take stock of themselves.

Moreover, in detailing so carefully these 24 hours in a pair of lovers thrown together by subdued discouragement with life, Greene demonstrates what he meant in this passage in perhaps his best-known novel, The Power and the Glory:

“When you visualized a man or a woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity . . . that was a quality God's image carried with it . . . when you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

In recent years I’ve seen several screen adaptations of Greene’s work, including Our Man in Havana, The Fallen Idol, and, of course, The Third Man. (I would like to see the September 1975 Thames Television adaptation of “Cheap in August,” but it doesn’t look like it’s currently available on mainstream streaming services, or on DVD.)

But I haven’t read him since high school and college, when I went rapidly through The Power and the Glory, A Burnt-Out Case, The Honorary Consul, Doctor Fischer of Geneva, The Human Factor, and his second memoir, Ways of Escape. Clearly I knew to go back for more of his voluminous output, especially two of his most famous novels, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.

Quote of the Day (Isaac Bashevis Singer, on a Polish Holy Man)

“When Reb Sheftel stood at the lectern in the synagogue in his prayer shawl and phylacteries, he looked like one of the ancients. He had a high forehead, and under shaggy eyebrows, large eyes that combined the sharp glance of a scholar with the humility of a God-fearing man. Reb Sheftel imposed a variety of penances upon himself. He drank no milk unless he had been present at the milking. He ate no meat except on the Sabbath and on holidays and only if he had examined the slaughtering knife in advance. It was told of him that on the eve of Passover he ordered that the cat wear socklets on its feet, lest it bring into the house the smallest crumb of unleavened bread. Every night, he faithfully performed the midnight prayers. People said that although he had inherited his grain business from his father and grandfather he still could not distinguish between rye and wheat.”—Polish-American novelist, short-story writer, and Nobel Literature laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991), “The Dead Fiddler,” translated by Mirra Ginsburg, in The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982)

Quote of the Day (Mark Kramer, on Baseball’s Tommy John)

“Tommy John is an American hero in his own right, esteemed by millions of baseball fans. He has entered a kind of timeless boyhood that seems especially appropriate to the clockless game of baseball. He's not the oldest pitcher pitching; he's not in the teary final months of a long career; he continues to be good and never was the best; he's neither outrageous nor electrifying during interviews. What he has done is endure and gather admiring fans through 20 seasons of play, while sharing with the public his religious convictions and dramatic off-field struggles—the surgical repair of his injured pitching arm, the near death of Travis. He is a hero for the age of the born again and the silent majority. Blessed with athletic talent and a picture-book family, driven by self-discipline and piety, given to forthrightness and modesty, abstemious among colleagues sometimes given to excess, he has become a national demonstration that around these parts, love of church, country and family is still what gets rewarded.”—American sportswriter Mark Kramer, “The Timeless Boyhood of an American Hero,” The New York Times, Sept. 11, 1983

I can count on the fingers of one hand my encounters with current or retired baseball players, but one was Tommy John. I saw him in early 1982 in a restaurant-bar in Fort Lee, NJ called Clams Casino—something of a hangout for alumni of my high school, as a friend worked as a bartender there.

It was still relatively early in the season, before John was traded from the New York Yankees, and he was at the restaurant a bit late in the evening following a game. Fans quickly gathered around the star pitcher, with many asking after his two-year-old son Travis, who the prior year had been in a coma for 19 days following an accident. 

John was gracious to everyone giving him their best, even though it was interrupting time I’m sure he would have preferred with his family.

I think many people saw the pitcher on multiple other occasions reacting similarly: with modesty, grace and gratitude for what he’d been given.

I flashed back to that evening over a week ago, when I read John’s farewell and thank-you to Yankee fans. He was unable to attend the annual Old Timers’ Game that weekend because he was in hospice care.

So it was no surprise that he died at age 83 this past weekend from bladder cancer, nor that tributes poured in for him from those he thrilled while on the mound or touched in personal encounters.

I can think of only one other Yankee, Lou Gehrig, whose name is tied so closely to modern medicine. The Hall of Fame first baseman gave his name to the neuromuscular disease that took his life; John, to a career-saving medical specialty that helped him—and later, countless other pitchers—return to the mound.

All credit to Dr. Dr. Frank Jobe, the Los Angeles Dodgers team surgeon who developed and performed the innovative technique in 1974. 

But John was not merely a passive recipient of another’s genius. He took the risk of this surgery, then put in the long, countless hours to make sure he could not only return to baseball, but with the same or greater mastery than he had before.

In this respect, John was a revolutionary figure in the evolution of the game. But I chose the quote that leads off this post to illustrate that paradoxically, he was also a throwback.

The two people mentioned in this article as the southpaw’s heroes, Billy Graham and Richard Nixon, illustrate his religious and political conservatism.

But John came of age before the dawn of the 24-hour news cycle or social media when athletes, no matter what their personal beliefs, did not go out of their way to proclaim them, and when fans could care less what their heroes thought so long as they helped the team win a championship.

As a starter who managed to excel even without a 100-MPH fastball, John was a throwback in another sense. His career is confounding to modern pitching coaches and sabermetricians who urge starters to throw as hard as they can for five or six innings before turning the ball over to a battery of relievers expected to hold the lead with similar hummers.

In contrast, John believed in going deep into games and, when possible, even completing them. He didn’t have to throw overwhelming heat; he could make his admittedly underwhelming fastball drop like a sinker, and his curve bit the inside or outside corner. More often than not, hitters swore at their ineffectuality in grounding out.

John’s death has left many of his baseball contemporaries arguing with greater urgency the case for his eventual enshrinement in Cooperstown. If that push is like others posthumously propelling Dick Allen and Ron Santo into major league baseball’s Valhalla, he might have a real chance this time.

(The source of the image accompanying this post, of Tommy John around 1981, is the New York Yankees via tradingcarddb.com.)