July 12, 2024

 Hi folks. Before we get started, I want to re-post the link for my "Pearl the Wonder Girl" Facebook page, which I added to the last blog a bit late, after it was already published. So, just in case you missed it, here it is:

 https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61561883829130

You'll have to copy and paste it. The page is a work in progress, it doesn't have much content yet but you can see a few of the various book covers I created for the final product. I will develop the page further when the book is released for sale, which will happen as soon as I get my latest proof copy in the mail (the one with the reconfigured cover). Anyway, check out the FB page and you will see the various cover designs. The book should be out very soon, and I forgot to mention that it's 442 pages long. You'll definitely get your money's worth.

Well, did you see Biden's press conference? I thought he did great, but the media aren't going to let up because they want Trump to win, just like they wanted him to win in 2016, when he got 99% of the coverage (especially on CNN) and Hillary got nothing. And you know something else? F**k George Clooney. Who the hell is he? An actor, and (as Trump said) a TV actor who never did well in movies. So eff him. What an entitled blowhard. And to hell with all these traitorous Democrat Senators, but especially the media pundits who are stirring the pot because they want another Trump circus so they'll have plenty to talk about for four years. Trump equals big ratings for them. Good Lord are they scum (except Lawrence O'Donnell). Here's what's gonna happen, folks. Biden is gonna win again. Trump is going down the tubes, and this time he'll never come back. He's gonna end up in prison, despite the best efforts of his bimbo "judge" Aileen Cannon (check out her bimbo pictures with her crooked hubby Josh Lorence). As if Trump would know any woman who wasn't a bimbo. Good grief.

I have a new Montgomery Clift film for you: "Terminal Station"(1953), an Italian/American co-production directed by Vittorio De Sica and co-starring Jennifer Jones, who was married to the film's American producer David O. Selznick. The alternate U.S. title was "Indiscretion of an American Wife" and there are two different cuts, one running just 64 minutes (Selznick's), the other 88. Watch the 88 minute one, available in an excellent Kino Lorber print on Youtube. Shot on location in Rome's Stazioni Termini, the story plays in real time, as Jones, a married American woman ostensibly visiting her expatriate sister, hesitates before knocking on an apartment door, then hurredly walks away to the train station (very modern looking, all glass and curved steel). She's nervous and seems torn, as she enquires about the next train to Paris, between leaving and staying in Rome. In a room off the lobby, she tries writing a telegram to a lover, but she can't get the right words on paper and keeps crossing out her message. Finally, she makes a pay phone call to her sister, who isn't home. But her nephew is on the line, and Jones has him pack her a suitcase. "Take a taxi to the station," she implores him, "and hurry. My train leaves at 7:15."

But Monty gets there first. He plays "Giovanni", the man she's been having an affair with. He was expecting her at his apartment, but she bailed out before knocking, as we saw in the opening scene. Firguring correctly that she was going to leave the country without saying goodbye, he confronts her and she melts. And for the next 80 minutes, the movie is a back-and-forth conversation, in various milieus around the train station, about whether she is going to stay in Italy with Monty or return to Philadelphia to her steady-but-boring husband, (translation: doting, too nice, unsexy), with whom she has one child. 

As written by Truman Capote, there is no real reason for this affair except lust and mutual attraction between two very good looking people. Cheapness, in other words. De Sica jumps on this moral lapse by populating the movie with an almost constant parade of quirky male characters, who peer and rubberneck at the couple in the very public setting of the train station. These spectators seem to know the tense twosome are having an affair, and they want to be in on the spectacle, peering through the keyhole as it were, while simultaneously approving or disapproving via gestures and facial expressions. De Sica's point, which Monty reitereates, is that men run Italy. Just ask that crazy broad who killed her roommate.

Jones' nephew is played by the great Richard Beymer of "West Side Story" and "Twin Peaks" fame. He has had a seven decade career but is fifteen here - tall and handsome, but still a kid - and he very clearly has a crush on his stunningly beautiful Aunt, whose rescue he comes to when he sees Monty slap her. He doesn't trust Monty from the moment he sees him, and Monty wears an unfriendly scowl throughout their introduction. All he wants is Jennifer Jones, no kids please, no excess baggage. He even tells her, "I don't want to hear anymore about your family." If they hadn't cast Mongomery Clift as "Giovanni", the character would be entirely unsympathetic, wanting this foolish woman to leave her family after a weeks-long fling in a foreign country on a whim. She even says, "I just thought I'd have a little adventure." But Monty doesn't see it that way and lets her know it. He's in love, Italian style, where what a man says, goes. But nephew Beymer keeps turning up: around corners, near the gift shop gift, in front of the police station, because he knows Monty is up to no good. Again, this is a real-time "conversation" movie like the "Sunset/Sunrise" pictures of Richard Linklater. The difference is that this movie is more romantically tragic. 

The acting is tremendous. Jones uses a lot of facial tics and eye movements, but those only add to her considerable allure. She is my favorite actress (tied with Gene Tierney) ever since I saw her in "Portrait of Jennie". Both ladies, in their roles, get to the bottom of the human heart, and both suffered from mental illness in real life. As great as Monty is, he's second banana to Jones here, playing a hard-guy macho male, a chauvinist who cares for nothing except what he wants. He even says to her, early on, "You think I don't know what it is to want?" This is in response to her agonising over whether to leave her husband and daughter for a man she hardly knows but who has apparently lit her fire, big time. She has broached the subject by suggesting that Monty, being single, can't possibly know what it's like to be trapped in an unfulfilling marriage. "You don't know what it is to want," she tells him, meaning romance, and Monty shuts her down by overriding her, because he wants lust: "Oh yeah? I don't know what it is to want, eh?" 

The couple end up attracting the attention of the police (I won't tell you why), and the plot turns at this point. Make sure you watch the 88 minute version so you'll see everything that leads up to this. I have the movie on DVD, which has both versions and I've seen both several times. Selznick's version is the short one, with the extraneous stuff cut out. But De Sica added it for a reason. You'll see what it is, a segment providing perspective for Jones that acts as a moral compass.

Anyhow, it's a 10/10 classic. You can't do better than Montgomery Clift and Jennifer Jones. This brings us up to ten Monty movies now, with seven more to go. Which one should we watch next? Maybe "Suddenly, Last Summer"...

My music this week has included Steve Hackett's, "The Circus and the Nightwhale", an old-fashioned "concept" album from the Genesis guitar master, whose playing is prominent and outstanding throughout. I have had a recent re-immersion in Hackett's music, or perhaps a first-time immersion, as I never got past "Spectral Mornings" the first time around. It turns out he's more of a hard rocker than I ever realized. He got shut out of Genesis as a composer, and has an ideosyncratic playing style that includes shred techniques and all kinds of electronics. If you like progressive music, it's alive and well in records like this one. I am also listening to "The Underfall Yard" by England's Big Big Train, yet another band introduced to me by Pat. BBT have elements of Genesis and Marillion in their sound, but make it their own with a more symphonic approach than those bands. Give 'em a listen.

Last night I watched a classic episode of "Way Out". Remember that show? I told you about it a couple months ago, it's a suspense anthology of the type that was popular in the early 60s, hosted by Roald Dahl, and anyway, this episode is called "The Croaker", starring John McGiver as a mad scientist who turns people into frogs. When you see him, you'll remember McGiver as "Lord Beasley" from Gilligan's Island. The episode also features Richard "John Boy" Thomas as McGiver's bratty, blackmailing 12-year-old neighbor. This one is an absolute must see, lol. Check it out on Youtube.

And that's about all for today. Work continues on My Other Book, which was essentially finished until I underwent the Truth Revolution that changed my life earlier this year. I learned so much during that experience, including the fact that The 1989 Event lasted all Summer and not a mere 12 days as I had previously thought. But I also learned of incidents that happened in 2009 and possibly 2010, mindboggling truths that I must now incorporate into the book. The trick is to insert these additions seamlessly, so as not to disturb the flow of the already finished product. And in addition to that, I have already compiled a massive 270,000 words for the new, all-encompassing version of 1989, which I predict will become a five book series, each one 500 pages long. Stay tuned, and don't take any wooden nickels in the meantime.