"I gave my heart to one who loves another"
Dil Apna aur Preet Parai (Hopeless love, 1960, directed by Kishore Sahu and gorgeously photographed by Josef Wirsching) features Meena Kumari as Karuna, a young nurse in her first hospital assignment. Karuna's commitment, competence and compassion soon endear her to even the most cantankerous patients—and to the dedicated young Dr. Sushil Verma (Raaj Kumar). Long hours together caring for patients and sharing late-night coffee breaks soon lead to feelings of more than professional admiration.


We discover, though, that Sushil's mother (Pratima Devi) has already promised him in marriage to the daughter of wealthy family friend Lala Vasant Rai. When Sushil's father died, Lalaji paid for Sushil's medical education in Europe. The unstated expectation was that once Sushil became established, he would marry Lalaji's daughter Kusum (Nadira). And, on a family visit to Lalaji and Kusum in Kashmir, Sushil is emotionally blackmailed by his mother to go through with the ceremony:


Karuna's hopes are crushed when she sees Sushil arrive home with his new bride. To her deep chagrin, she is called on to serenade the new couple during a moonlight boat ride with the hospital staff:



Meena Kumari's playback singer for "Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh" is Lata Mangeshkar; the music is by Shankar Jaikishan, with lyrics by Shailendra.

It quickly becomes apparent that Sushil and Kusum are profoundly incompatible. Kusum can't accept Sushil's meager salary, long hours, and close working relationship with Karuna. Kusum is used to getting what she wants, and she is angered and frustrated by the constraints her new circumstances impose on her desires.

One night one of the hospital's long-term patients, Girdhari (Om Prakash), has another of his periodic crises. As she's done before, Karuna calls Sushil's home to summon him to the hospital. But this time she's told by Kusum that Sushil is out. In reality, the couple has a reservation at a local dinner club that Kusum doesn't want to miss. While Sushil and Kusum are sipping their soup and watching an item number by Helen, Girdhari is dying. When Sushil discovers that Kusum lied to him about Karuna's call, he explodes in rage and slaps her; she smacks him back and threatens to kill him and Karuna. She returns to her father the next day, despite Maaji's pleas:


The way would seem clear for Karuna and Sushil to finally acknowledge their feelings for one another, but Karuna cannot forget that Sushil remains married. She avoids him until his younger sister Munni (Kumari Naaz) cajoles her into visiting Maaji as she used to. It's Diwali, and as the devoted Karuna prepares the lamps, Maaji suddenly realizes how great a mistake she's made:



When Sushil returns with sparklers and firecrackers for Munni, she asks the question that's on everyone's mind:


Karuna's emotions are in turmoil; in the melancholy "Dil Apna aur Preet Parai," as celebratory fireworks explode all around her, she decides that she must keep her feelings for Sushil forever unexpressed:



When Kusum suddenly returns, the stage is set for a final battle for Sushil between the good woman dressed in white and the bad woman dressed in black, and the film veers over the melodramatic edge. But up until this point, Meena Kumari's performance is heartrending.


The suffering woman
Meena Kumari frequently portrayed women who were abandoned, mistreated, or who loved without hope. I've only seen a few of her films, but they have all been memorable. In Baiju Bawra (Baiju the mad one, 1952), her first starring role, she played Gauri, who chooses to drown with her long-absent lover rather than saving herself. In Parineeta (The married woman, 1953) she played Lalita, a young woman who falls in love with the son of the rich man next door; class and caste differences, familial hostilities and mutual misunderstandings separate them.

In Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (Master, mistress and servant, 1962) she played Chhoti Bahu, the neglected wife of a rich, dissipated zamindar; desperate, she begins to drink heavily every night in the forlorn hope that her husband will keep her company rather than consorting with his dissolute friends and dancing girls. And finally in Pakeezah (The pure one, 1972) she played the courtesan Sahibjaan, who ultimately leaves her lover because of the dishonor she feels she brings to their union. In the end, she performs at his wedding to another woman; when a lamp shatters, she dances on the broken glass, leaving a symbolic trail of bloody footprints across the white cloth on which she's dancing. You don't need to know anything about Meena Kumari's personal unhappiness and tragic early death to find these films to be powerfully affecting.

Each of these four films is considered a classic of Hindi cinema. Meena Kumari won the Filmfare Best Actress Award for three of them (the exception being Pakeezah), and a fourth award for Kaajal (1965). Kumari's performance makes Dil Apna aur Preet Parai very much worth seeing. Thanks to Edu Productions, you can watch it on YouTube in a more complete print with far better picture and subtitle quality than the execrable Tips DVD that is circulating on certain rental services. 

For an excellent review of Dil Apna aur Preet Parai that includes comments on the film from Edwina, the actress and dancer who played one of the hospital's nursing staff, see MemsaabStory.

In her New Yorker essay "Some Notes on Attunement" (December 17, 2012), Zadie Smith writes about her intense dislike of Joni Mitchell. She describes hearing Blue at a party in college: "a piercing sound, a sort of wailing—a white woman, wailing, picking out notes in a non-sequence. Out of tune—or out of anything I understood at the time as 'tune.'" Her friends are astonished: "You don't like Joni?"

Years later, riding in a car with her husband, she hears something on the stereo: "…it was that bloody piping again, ranging over octaves, ignoring the natural divisions between musical bars, and generally annoying the hell out of me…"

This is the sort of thing she was hearing, or not hearing: Joni Mitchell singing "California," from a live BBC broadcast in 1970:


And then, suddenly, something happened: "This is the effect that listening to Joni Mitchell has on me these days: uncontrollable tears. An emotional overcoming, disconcertingly distant from happiness, more like joy—if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty…I hated Joni Mitchell—and then I loved her. Her voice did nothing for me—until the day it undid me completely." The album that evokes these powerful responses? Blue.

She describes this change as "a sudden, unexpected attunement.""Attunement" is an unusual word, but it can mean becoming responsive or receptive to something; its suggestion of harmonizing seems particularly appropriate for a musical epiphany.

Smith uses the word "attunement" to make a connection to the opening "Exordium" of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.** The Exordium is a sort of parable in which an ordinary man retells the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac in four different ways in order to try to understand it. But no matter how he approaches the story, he can never fully grasp its meaning. Kierkegaard's point is that sometimes there has to be a breakthrough, not so much in understanding, but in acceptance. As Smith puts it, "you need to lower your defenses."

Books, opera, and Bollywood

The subject of today's post is conversion experiences, an indifference or an outright aversion turning into a need, a craving. As longtime readers will know, I've had such experiences with individual works: the very first post on this blog was about my conversion experience with Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. This time I'm going to discuss how encounters with particular works opened me up to three different artistic forms: Victorian literature, opera, and Bollywood films.


Victorian literature: Like many of us, I suppose, I first encountered Victorian novels in college. And while Great Expectations gave me a welcome break from my science textbooks, I wasn't compelled during college or in the years afterwards to further explore the world of the Victorian novel. So I managed to make it to early middle age without reading Jane Eyre, Vanity Fair, or Middlemarch.

And then I read Zadie Smith's essay on Middlemarch in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (Penguin Press, 2009), and, to paraphrase that essay, the scales fell from my eyes. It inspired me to immediately start reading Eliot's great novel; you can read my responses in "Three love problems: George Eliot's Middlemarch." Eliot led me to the amazingly rich novels of Anthony Trollope, a writer I had previously (and ignorantly) disdained for his overwhelming productivity, and then on to Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, the Brontës, and Elizabeth Gaskell. I've also since delved into the 18th-century precursors of Jane Austen such as Fanny Burney, Charlotte Lennox, Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Samuel Richardson. In short, almost all the novel-reading I've done over the past five years has grown from the seed of Middlemarch, for which I will always be grateful to Changing My Mind.


Opera: I've written before about being intrigued by a PBS broadcast of Jean-Pierre Ponelle's film of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) when I was a teenager. But for more than a decade afterwards I felt that opera was a form that had nothing to do with me. First, there was the sound of operatic singing, aptly described by soprano Renée Fleming as "a 'cultivated scream'"*—it just didn't appeal to me. Then there were the characters: druid priestesses, mad Scottish brides, sleepwalking village maidens, and incestuous demigoddesses with spears and horned helmets. And finally there was all of opera's cultural baggage: it was, and ever had been, an art form produced by and for the rich; these were most definitely Not My People.

But then we saw the Mark Morris Dance Group's production of Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. The opera tells the story of Queen Dido's reckless love for the marooned Trojan warrior Aeneas, and her subsequent abandonment, despair and death. This opera was an oddity: it was by a composer we'd never heard of; it was composed in the 17th century, almost a hundred years before Le Nozze di Figaro; it was only an hour long; and it was sung in English. And—it was ravishing. 

After attending the opera—twice—we bought a recording of the work by the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the group that had been the pit band for Morris's company. The role of Dido, sung by Judith Malafronte in the production we had seen, was sung on the recording by a singer then unknown to us, Lorraine Hunt. From that recording, here is Lorraine Hunt singing Dido's first aria, in which she tells her sister Belinda of the agitation she's felt since the arrival of the Trojan stranger:

The words (by librettist Nahum Tate) are, "Ah! Belinda, I am press'd / With torment not to be confess'd. / Peace and I are strangers grown; / I languish 'til my grief is known / Yet would not have it guess'd."

From that moment on, we sought out, almost obsessively, recordings and live performances of Baroque opera, starting with the wonderful Handel recordings by Lorraine Hunt and the Philharmonia Baroque. We moved backwards in time to Monteverdi's operas (Hunt gave a searing performance as Ottavia in L'incoronazione di Poppea at SF Opera), and then forwards to late 19th- and early 20th-century operas. If we  still haven't yet come to a full appreciation of the sort of operas that feature druid priestesses and mad Scottish brides, perhaps it's just a matter of time.


Bollywood movies: For many years I worked at a used bookstore. One of the great pleasures of the job was that while we were buying and selling books, we could play our favorite music in the background. A co-worker began bringing in compilations of songs from classic Bollywood soundtracks that he was picking up at the local flea market for two or three bucks apiece. The music was strange: the sound combined influences from both Indian and Western classical music, but also fifties and sixties pop, reggae, bossa nova. It was kind of cool, but also kind of grating, particularly the high-pitched women's voices. To my untutored ears they sounded piercing and shrill (I didn't know yet that the vocals on most of the tracks were supplied by only two women, Lata Mangeshkar or her younger sister Asha Bhosle), and, of course, I had no clue what they were singing about. As the weeks went by, "grating" began winning out over "cool."

But one Saturday morning I was flipping through TV channels looking for a sports event. Instead I happened across a clip of two lovers serenading one another in Hindi against a backdrop of snowy mountain peaks. We had stumbled across India Waves, a locally produced, super low-budget Bollywood clip show. We were bemused—the clips were rarely subtitled, so we could usually only guess at what was being sung, and were often shown incomplete or in the wrong aspect ratio—but we were also intrigued. We soon discovered other, similar shows such as Namaste America and Showbiz India, and found ourselves occasionally tuning in to one or another of these programs to pass the time on sleepy Saturday mornings.

Perhaps a year after we starting watching, clips from a new Bollywood movie set in New York City started to be shown. Bollywood songs filmed in Switzerland or New Zealand were strange enough, but seeing New York City in this context was somehow even stranger. But we liked the tunes—the high voices had ceased to bother us so much—and seeing the Brooklyn Bridge and Central Park used as the backdrop for Bollywood songs gave us a new perspective on familiar landmarks.

At the time my partner worked in downtown San Francisco, and once a week or so as she was exiting her usual BART station would stop to have her shoes shined at a stand owned by a guy named Dwayne. Dwayne always had music playing on his boombox, and one day my partner heard something strange but familiar: a song from that Bollywood movie set in New York. When my partner recognized the song, Dwayne asked her if she wanted to see the movie—he had a DVD that he would be happy to lend her. So a few nights later my partner came home from work and pulled out Kal Ho Naa Ho. Somehow the idea of actually watching a full-length Bollywood film had never occurred to me; without any idea of what to expect, and having no points of comparison, we slipped the disc into the DVD player.

It quickly became clear that the songs we thought we knew from our clip shows had different meanings in the context of the film. An example is "Kuch To Hua Hai" (Something has happened). By itself it seems to be a light, pleasant song about the joys of falling in love. Both Naina (Preity Zinta, voiced by Alka Yagnik) and Rohit (Saif Ali Khan, voiced by Shaan) are singing about the way their new love has transformed them. But we learn in the film that while Rohit is singing about his love for Naina, she is singing about her love for someone else. And neither is aware of the other's feelings; when they discover their mutual misapprehension, emotional devastation will follow.


At the end of the movie we were stunned, emotionally drained. Over the course of three hours, what had begun as a fast-paced urban romantic comedy had veered into pathos and tragedy and then back to comedy multiple times. And while there was a wedding, if the ending was happy why were our eyes filled with tears?

After Kal Ho Naa Ho (the title translates as "Tomorrow May Never Come"), we were completely hooked. Not only on the charismatic actors—particularly Shah Rukh Khan—but on a style of storytelling that was so unafraid of naked emotion. That was more than 10 years and 300 films ago; our appreciation of Indian films has since broadened into other regions, languages and time periods. But Kal Ho Naa Ho remains a touchstone for us—we still quote its dialogue to one another—and is often the movie we show curious friends to introduce them to Bollywood.

Coda: Joni Mitchell

To bring this post full circle, I have my own Joni Mitchell conversion experience to relate. I first encountered her songs during preteen summer camp sing-alongs: "Big Yellow Taxi,""Both Sides Now,""The Circle Game." But in high school and college, although I had friends who were big Joni fans, I thought her music was precious and hermetic. The lyrics of her most popular songs seemed to be about how bored she was while partying with other privileged people on Mykonos or in Spain, or about mean old daddies who somehow retained her affection, or about record company executives who wished they still lived in Paris. It was a world that didn't include me, or seem to want to. And so for several decades I stopped listening to, or caring about, her music.

And then about five years ago we rented a movie called Love Actually (2003, written and directed by Richard Curtis). The movie had a great cast—Colin Firth, Bill Nighy, Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson—and was entertaining enough, but possessed an artificiality bordering on the meretricious. There was nothing "actual" about the relationships it portrayed; they were entirely contrived and (to borrow a Bollywood term) filmi.

But there was one moment that rang emotionally true. During a Christmas Eve gift exchange with her husband, Thompson's character receives as his "special and personal" gift...a Joni Mitchell CD. Having earlier found an expensive necklace in his coat pocket, she faces the sudden realization that the necklace was not intended for her, but for another woman. She excuses herself for a moment, and as she fights to keep her composure, a Joni Mitchell song comes on the soundtrack: "Both Sides Now." Only this isn't Mitchell's folky version from 1969. Instead, it's orchestrated, much slower and more somber, and the world-weary vocalist sounds like Ann Peebles or Sharon Jones. The raw vocals floating over the strings perfectly heighten the emotion of the scene in the film. As it turned out, the vocalist was indeed Joni Mitchell; the version was from her 2000 album Both Sides Now, the very album that Emma Thompson's character has just received as a gift.


Both Sides Now, with its lush arrangements of standards like "You're My Thrill" and "At Last," and its reworkings of the title song (from Clouds) and "A Case of You" (from Blue) has become a favorite album in our household. Decades after deciding that I no longer needed to listen to Joni Mitchell, a few moments in an otherwise forgettable film made me realize the importance of re-evaluating my judgments, revisiting my conclusions, and trying always to remain open to changing my mind.

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* Renee Fleming, The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer, Penguin, 2004, p. 40.

** "Attunement" comes from the translation of Alastair Hannay, Penguin, 2005. 

In my post on the first entry in this series, "Who cares if Tanu Weds Manu?," I wrote that "Himanshu Sharma's script doesn't...give us any long-term hope for this couple. I found myself thinking 'This is such a bad idea' throughout the final Tanu-Manu wedding scene—not exactly the note on which you want to end a romantic comedy."

It must have also occurred to Sharma—too late—that his main couple are mismatched, because in the very first scene of Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015) they are going to a marriage counseling session.

[Aside: The problems of Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015) begin with its inelegant title. Not to draw any parallels to the delightful William Powell-Myrna Loy Thin Man films—there are no terms of comparison—but what was wrong with After Tanu Weds Manu?]

The sequel takes place four years after the events in the first movie, and the couple have discovered for themselves what should have been apparent much earlier: they have nothing in common. Tanu (a compelling Kangana Ranaut) is bored with Manu and their life in a London suburb, and Manu (R. Madhavan) finds Tanu and her boredom to be deeply irritating.

But in the first of a series of improbabilities, their counseling session takes place at a mental asylum that looks like a depiction of Bedlam out a Gothic novel. And when Manu raises his voice during the session, in rush burly attendants to grab him and haul him away for involuntary committal.

Tanu heads back to her family in India, wipes off her sindoor, removes her marriage bangles, and renews her acquaintance with her former boyfriend Raja (Jimmy Shergill). There's still clearly strong affection between the two, but Raja is now engaged to another woman. Tanu consoles herself with the opportunistic Chintu (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub), who hopes, vainly, that flirting and motorbike rides will lead to something more.

Eventually Manu is released and returns to his parents' home in Delhi. While there he spots a young college student who, haircut aside, looks a lot like Tanu: she is Kusum (Kagana in a double role), who is attending Delhi University on an athletic scholarship. Manu and his grating buddy Pappi (Deepak Dobriyal) begin following her around the city, and in time-honored fashion Kusum's annoyance turns to love. What girl wouldn't fall head over heels with a stalker who is obsessed by her resemblance to his ex-wife?

Manu and Kusum plan to wed, but it turns out that in order to marry Manu, Kusum will have to tell her family that she is breaking the engagement they've arranged to another man: who else but Raja? And when Raja and Tanu discover the turn events are taking, they decide to crash the wedding festivities:


The music is by Krsna Solo with lyrics by Raj Shekhar; the playback singer of "Ghani Bawri" is Jyoti Nooran.

Contrivances in comedy work when they heighten the possibilities for farce. But in Tanu Weds Manu Returns, the comedic madness never reaches an inspired level, while the all-too-apparent plot absurdities prevented me from investing the self-inflicted dilemmas of the main characters with any emotional weight.

And in every case but Tanu's, writer Sharma does less with the characters in the sequel than in the original. The excellent Jimmy Shergill is largely wasted, a side plot involving Tanu's friend Payal (Swara Bhaskar) and her husband Jassi (Eijaz Khan) is underdeveloped, and another side plot in which Pappi attempts to elope with his wished-for fiancé goes nowhere.

As a result, this "romantic comedy-drama" doesn't have enough romance, comedy, or drama. The soundtrack of the film—one miscalculation aside—is very good; too bad it's in the service of Sharma's weak script. There are only two reasons to see Tanu Weds Manu Returns, and both of them are Kangana Ranaut.

A mild spoiler alert follows: Perhaps after two tries Sharma will finally figure out the couple that clearly belongs together at the end. If he writes yet another sequel, I hope, unlike Tanu and Manu, he'll avoid repeating his mistake.

Update 26 May 2015: For another perspective on Tanu Weds Manu Returns, see Filmi Geek.

Lovelace abducting Clarissa Harlowe (detail), by Édouard Louis Dubufe (1867)

Ahead of the technology curve as ever, I recently bought a smartphone. (Or should that be "smart phone"? I'm not sure.) So far, I've kept my smartphone as ignorant as possible: I haven't loaded it up with apps, and I've turned off many of its privacy-invading features. I'm sure a few years from now I'll be defending Townsville, obsessively monitoring my resting heart rate, and hooking up with random strangers; not yet, though.

The phone came pre-loaded with an e-book app, which at first seemed useless. The idea of reading a full-length book on a palm-sized phone screen seemed awkward at best. But I decided to try it when I found that I could download, for free, a complete text of Samuel Richardson's 1747 novel Clarissa, Or the History of a Young Lady. [1]

I had been meaning to read Clarissa for over a year. It's a monument of 18th-century literature—almost literally: the unabridged Penguin paperback runs to 1500 pages of small print, and weighs almost three pounds. (Penguin reprinted the first—and shortest!—edition; Richardson added even more material for the second and third editions.) A three-pound paperback was not something I wanted to lug back and forth on my commute. Since I would be carrying my phone anyway, though, I thought I would give reading the e-book version a try.

And the experience wasn't bad. You turn pages by swiping, and they curl back in a reasonable simulacrum of a printed page—cute, and it avoids the problem of endless scrolling. There are page numbers, although they don't correspond to the pages of any print edition. Instead they are the screen numbers of the phone version; each page in the phone version of Clarissa was about a third the length of a printed page in the Penguin edition. You can change the font size, although the default seemed fine, and the screen contrast automatically adjusts to ambient light. You can search within the text, bookmark pages and, with the touch of a finger, underline passages (something that I can't bring myself to do with a physical book).

The main annoyance is that the optical character recognition program used to digitize the text makes pretty frequent transcription errors. In the screenshot of the first page of the novel, for example, the word "disturbance" in the first sentence should be "disturbances" (and is so rendered in the Penguin edition). But most of the errors were readily decipherable, and they didn't seriously interfere with my enjoyment of the book.

Finally, my engagement with the text did not seem less than it would have been with a printed book. That was reassuring, because there are conflicting accounts of how print and onscreen reading compare. In the late 1990s Jakob Nielsen found that reading from screens was 25% slower than reading print, and that when reading from screens people tended to scan and skim. In a New Yorker article last year, "Being a Better Online Reader" (July 16, 2014), Maria Konnikova summarized more recent research which found that the medium still matters: people who read onscreen still tend to skim, and retain and comprehend less of what they've read. Some research suggests that may be partly a result of the distractions that are always present when we're online: the temptation to click links, watch videos, text, e-mail, and surf the web. Don't our devices hold the promise that there's always something else out there that's more fun than what we're doing?

But during my commute, I could read on my phone with few distractions: I get calls or texts only occasionally, and I don't use my phone to play games, watch videos, answer e-mail or surf the web. (The question that naturally arises is, if I do none of those things, why do I need a smartphone? Peer pressure triumphs again.)  So reading a book on my phone while commuting was generally no more difficult than reading a print book: the major sources of distraction were the need to block out the screeching, rumbling noise of the subway and to keep a watchful eye on the surrounding urban realities.

I still prefer reading print, and not because of nostalgia. I do find physical books appealing, especially older ones in which you can actually see the impression of the type on the paper, and which are well-bound and fit nicely in the hand. There is something deeply satisfying about a well-produced book; the codex is a beautiful and useful format that has lasted for centuries. So when I'm sitting in a chair at home, with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine at my elbow, I still read printed books. But when I'm being jostled on a crowded train on my way home from work, I'm glad that I now have an alternative. Nonetheless, because of the privacy, licensing and technical issues I outlined in the post "The future of books," I can't imagine actually purchasing an e-book for my phone. And since almost the entire corpus of pre-1923 literature is in the public domain, I don't think I'll ever have to. Thank you, Project Gutenberg and Open Library.


Back to Clarissa, a novel outsized not only in its length but in its impact. It is written as a series of letters exchanged among its characters; while it was far from the first novel to adopt this format, after its success (and that of its predecessor, Pamela (1740)) the epistolary form became a model for other writers for the next half-century. What also became a model was the story of a virtuous but inexperienced heroine beset by the importunate attentions of more worldly men. Both the form and the plot clearly influenced Fanny Burney's Evelina (1778), in which the naïve heroine is subject to the aggressive pursuit of Sir Clement Willoughby, and Jane Austen's Elinor and Marianne (ca. 1795, later to be reworked in narrative form as Sense and Sensibility) in which the youthful Marianne is courted by the duplicitous Willoughby.

Because of its immensity, though, Clarissa is daunting for readers. As it turns out, while its length is prodigious, its story can be described in just a few sentences. Be forewarned: the next two paragraphs contain spoilers:

The action of the novel takes place over the course of eleven months, from mid-January to mid-December. [2] Clarissa, a young, beautiful, virtuous woman, well-read and well-spoken, wise beyond her years, is emotionally blackmailed by her parents and siblings to marry a rich suitor she strongly dislikes. She's attracted instead to a handsome, witty gentleman from a wealthy and well-situated family, Robert Lovelace. Lovelace is dogged by scandalous rumors of wild living, but Clarissa believes that she can change him—a belief she comes to realize, too late, is delusory.

Lovelace contrives to separate Clarissa from her family and takes her to London, where he holds her against her will in what Clarissa at first believes is a respectable boarding house, but which turns out to be a brothel. She resists, to the point of threatening suicide, all of Lovelace's attempts to seduce her, until he finally has her drugged into unconsciousness and rapes her. She eventually escapes him, and, impoverished and still alienated from her family, overwhelmed by sorrow, slowly declines until she dies. Although as she nears death she forgives the (semi-)repentant Lovelace, she refuses his offers of marriage. After her death, her cousin Colonel Morden challenges her abductor to a duel in which Lovelace is killed.

—End of spoilers—

Clarissa presents several problems, which were apparent even to its earliest readers. The first is that the epistolary form involves a certain amount of repetition, and enforces a slow narrative pace. It is only at Letter 92 at the end of the novel's second volume that the first crisis in the plot is reached, and we are barely a quarter of the way through the book. Patience is definitely required. Richardson himself asked the friends to whom he showed the draft manuscript for suggestions about what he should cut—but then became offended at anyone who actually offered editing advice. Boswell recorded Samuel Johnson's comment that "if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." [3]

The second problem is that, while Lovelace is indeed a black villain—a schemer and a bully, he has clearly deceived, abducted and raped a series of young women, some of whom have died as a result—he is also the book's liveliest and most dangerously charismatic character. He all but takes over as the narrator for the middle third of the book; in later editions Richardson felt he had to add significant details to remind us of how nasty he is, lest we find him too charming.

And the third problem is Clarissa herself. With all of her virtues and wisdom, she is almost too perfect. Towards the end of the novel, Clarissa's piety and equanimity come to seem excessive (if there can be such a thing as excessive equanimity). Her fate inspires our dismay, perhaps, more readily than it excites our sympathy. It is the idealization of Richardson's heroines that drove Henry Fielding to satirize him so mercilessly in Shamela (1741), and to implicitly decry a morality—accepted unquestioningly by Richardson's heroines—that held an unmarried woman's virginity to be more important than her life.

I'm going on to read Pamela, which has many parallels to Clarissa. However, I can't help but feel that Burney, Austen, and the other women writers who followed Richardson's model improved on it. Clarissa and Pamela are paragons of perfection; Evelina and Marianne are allowed to be flawed, complex, recognizably human in their failings, and as a result, for this reader, at least, more fully sympathetic.

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1. The available version seems to be the one prepared for Project Gutenberg by Julie C. Sparks, although the Project Gutenberg credit has been removed.

2. The nearest year to which the days and dates of the letters correspond is 1747; the first two volumes of Clarissa were published in December of that year.

3. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Oxford University Press, 1965, p. 480.

The Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF) this year focussed on Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). Monteverdi is a key figure in the history of music; his work spans the stylistic transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque, from madrigals to the then-new forms of accompanied singing and opera. The BEMF's astonishingly ambitious programming included, on successive days, performances of Monteverdi's Vespro della beata Vergine (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin, 1610) and his three surviving operas: Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria (The return of Ulysses, 1640), L'Orfeo (Orpheus, 1607), and L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea, 1642).

The three operas were fully staged and, amazingly, all featured many of the same vocalists and instrumentalists, and the same musical and stage directors and designers—a feat that, as far as I'm aware, is unprecedented. (The Brooklyn Academy of Music's Monteverdi Trilogy in 2002 included productions from three different companies.) It was a magnificent accomplishment by the BEMF's superb (and apparently indefatigable) artists. Seeing these masterworks over four days was an unforgettable experience.

Stephen Stubbs, from bemf.org

Vespers of 1610
Thursday, June 11, Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory of Music. BEMF Vocal & Chamber Ensembles with the Dark Horse Consort; Stephen Stubbs, conductor.

In his booklet essay about the Vespers, conductor Stephen Stubbs writes that performing Baroque choral music with one voice per part has become the "norm." Following this logic, Stubbs presented the Vespers without a separate choir; the 10 vocal soloists also served as the chorus.

Surely Stubb's assertion is overstating the case (already overstated, in my view) that Joshua Rifkin famously made in his research on J. S. Bach's chorus. Although the Vespers were composed while Monteverdi was serving as the maestro della musica at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua, they were evidently printed as a sort of audition piece for positions elsewhere—including Rome and Venice—where large-scale musical forces were available. And, indeed, when Monteverdi applied for the position of maestro di capella at the Basilica di San Marco in Venice in 1613, he led a performance of what was probably the Vespers. It should be no surprise to anyone who has ever heard the Vespers that he got hired on the spot.

We know that at San Marco, Monteverdi regularly supervised about 40 singers and 12 instrumentalists, with additional vocal and instrumental forces added for feast days and celebrations. [1] Since Monteverdi himself may have led performances of the Vespers involving a sizeable choir, the idea that this music should only be performed with one voice per part seems to be more of an aesthetic choice than an evidence-driven one. Which is fine by me; however, all such choices involve tradeoffs.

One voice per part highlighted the madrigal-like qualities of much of the music of the Vespers, as in "Pulcra es, amica mea" (Thou art beautiful, my love); here it is performed by sopranos Jolle Greenleaf and Molly Quinn of New York City's Green Mountain Project:



In Boston "Pulcra es" was beautifully sung by Shannon Mercer (later Silvia in L'Orfeo and Ottavia in Poppea) and Teresa Wakim (later Proserpina in L'Orfeo and Drusilla in Poppea).

A one-voice-per-part approach meant that the textures and harmonies were very clearly apparent throughout. It also meant that both vocal and instrumental performers were extraordinarily exposed, and the BEMF's virtuosic ensembles excitingly rose to the occasion. Other vocal standouts included tenors Zachary Wilder (later Telemaco in Ulisse and Lucano in Poppea) and Colin Balzer (later L'Humana Fragilità and Ulisse in Ulisse). Special mention should also be made of the excellent playing of concertmaster Robert Mealy and Julie Andrijeski (violins), Phoebe Carrai (violoncello), Erin Headley (viola da gamba), and the Dark Horse Consort's Kiri Tollaksen and Alexandra Opsahl (cornetti).

The main drawback of using one voice per part, however, was that the tutti sections lacked the kind of thrilling sonic impact that larger forces can provide. In particular, the moment at the beginning of the piece when all of the singers and instrumentalists come in together on the phrase "Domine, ad adiuvandum me festina" (Lord, make haste to help me)—a moment that can be electrifying—was underwhelming. Here is an example of the grandeur that larger choir can bring to this music; Jordi Savall conducts vocal soloists, the Padua Centre for Ancient Music Chorus and La Capella Reial de Catalunya:



But if the BEMF performance of the Vespers never quite made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, it still offered many exquisite moments, and was a wonderful introduction to Monteverdi's sound-world—a world that would be further explored in the days to come in the performances of his three surviving operas.

Next time:L'Orfeo

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1. Paolo Fabbri, Monteverdi. Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 137.

Mireille Asselin (Euridice), Aaron Sheehan (Orfeo), and Nathan Medley (1st Shepherd), with members of the BEMF Chamber Ensemble and the Dark Horse Consort. Photo: Kathy Wittman

L'Orfeo
Saturday, June 13, Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory of Music. BEMF Vocal, Chamber, and Dance Ensembles with the Dark Horse Consort. Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, musical directors; Gilbert Blin, stage director and set designer.

The story was performed to the great satisfaction of all who heard it. The Lord Duke, not content to have been present at this performance, or to have heard it many times in rehearsal, has ordered it to be given again; and so it will be, today, in the presence of all the ladies of this city.

—Francesco Gonzaga to his brother Ferdinando Gonzaga, 1 March 1607 [1]

Several letters describing aspects of the first performance of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo on 24 February 1607 have survived. One of the striking things about these descriptions is that no one calls the work an opera. While we think of L'Orfeo as opera's first masterpiece, the form was so new that the contemporary audience did not have a word for it. L'Orfeo was called variously "la favola in musica" (the musical fable), "la favola cantata" (the sung fable), and "la comedia" (the play).

In fact, it was the very newness of the idea of singing theatrical dialogue that probably suggested Orpheus as a subject to Monteverdi and his librettist Alessandro Striggio. Opera had first been developed in Florence less than a decade previously in an attempt to recreate the performance practices of ancient Greek theater, in which it was believed that the text was sung throughout. To counteract the strangeness of this new form, early opera composers sought stories in which it would seem natural for characters to sing. There had been two previous operas by other composers entitled Euridice (one by Jacopo Peri and another by Giulio Caccini, both written in 1600); after all, the power of song is central to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Monteverdi was able to use the newly developed stile recitativo, or sung declamation of text, in extraordinarily expressive ways. Here is La Messaggiera (The Messenger), after bringing the news of Euridice's death to Orfeo, condemning herself to exile and self-torment; the singer is Sara Mingardo, accompanied by Le Concert des Nations conducted by Jordi Savall:


All of the roles in the first performance of L'Orfeo were likely taken by men (again, perhaps in imitation of ancient Greek theater), with the female roles being sung by castrati. We also know that L'Orfeo was created under the auspices of the Accademia degli Invaghiti (Academy of the Besotted, a group of aristocratic aficionados of the arts to which Francesco Gonzaga, Ferdinando Gonzaga and Alessandro Striggio belonged) and was commissioned for the festivities of the Carnival season, which also featured spoken plays.

Gilbert Blin's production of L'Orfeo for the BEMF made no attempt to recreate the first performance. Instead, Blin made the connection to Carnival and the commedia tradition explicit by making the singers the members of a troupe of travelling players; the piece opens with the singers hauling a cart of costumes and props onstage. It was a clever mashup that worked surprisngly well (Anna Watkins designed the simple and effective costumes). And placing the instrumentalists onstage, with the singers performing around and among them, enhanced the production's feeling of intimacy.

Some of Blin's other inspirations, though, were not so happy. He added a silent dancer (Carlos Fittante) who enacted various unnecessary and frankly distracting roles in each of the five acts and prologue (a jester, Hymen, Pan, Thanatos, Amor, and Harpocrates, the God of Silence). Blin also had the singers periodically unroll paper scrolls which stated the (generally obvious) moral of the scene we'd just witnessed.

Fortunately, the performances of the BEMF vocal and instrumental ensembles was of such a high standard that these superfluous additions did not detract significantly. Aaron Sheehan sang superbly in the taxing role of Orfeo, while the lovely Mireille Asselin was a sweet-toned Euridice. Teresa Wakim as the abducted Proserpina and Shannon Mercer as the sorrowing Silvia/La Messaggiera sang movingly, and Matthew Brook was an appropriately impassive Caronte (Charon). The Dark Horse Consort of trombones and cornetti added appropriately somber sonorities for the scenes in the underworld.

If no other operas by Monteverdi besides L'Orfeo were known he would still be a hugely important figure in music history. Fortunately for us, scores for two of the three operas he wrote for Venetian public theaters towards the end of his long life have survived, and they are the two greatest operas of the seventeenth century. Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria (The return of Ulysses, 1640) and L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea, 1642) will be the subjects of my next two posts.

Last time:Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610
Next time:Il ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria

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1. Quoted in John Whenham, ed., Claudio Monteverdi: Orfeo. Cambridge Opera Handbooks, 1986, p. 171. Translation by Iain Fenlon slightly modified.

Caitlin Klinger and Melissa House (Naiadi) and Matthew Brook (Nettuno). Photo: Kathy Wittman

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria
Friday, June 12, Boston University Theater. Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, musical directors; Gilbert Blin, stage director and set designer.

At the end of the 1630s Monteverdi was over 70, and it had been nearly a decade since he had composed an opera. But in 1637 the first public opera theater, the Teatro San Cassiano, had opened in Venice. Before this, opera had been almost exclusively a courtly entertainment presented in private palaces to an audience of aristocratic patrons and their invited guests. But after the success of the initial season at the Teatro San Cassiano, other Venetian theaters as well soon began presenting opera productions to paying audiences of aristocrats, tourists, courtesans, gondoliers and servants.

Monteverdi was drawn to these new venues for his work, and the 1639-40 season featured a revival of his 1608 opera Arianna (from which only the famous "Lamento d'Arianna" now survives). And he soon began working on a new opera.

Monteverdi's return to opera was inspired by the story of another unexpected return, derived by librettist Giacomo Badoaro from the second half of Homer's Odyssey: Penelope, the wife of Ulisse (Ulysses), has been waiting for him to return from the Trojan War for 20 years. In the meantime, she is being besieged in her home by wealthy suitors eager to take Ulisse's place. Penelope refuses to consider remarriage, despite having no hope that she will ever see her husband again.

Here is Marijana Mijanovic as Penelope, accompanied by Les Arts Florissants conducted by William Christie, in the production of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria (The return of Ulysses to his homeland, 1640) from the 2002 Aix-en-Provence Festival:


But Penelope is unaware that Ulisse, under the protection of the goddess Minerva, has secretly made it back to Ithaca and, reunited with his son Telemaco (Telemachus) and the loyal shepherd Eumete, has begun to plan how—despite being unarmed and vulnerable—he will regain his home, his wife and his throne.

Public opera represented an enrichment of certain possibilities for Monteverdi, but a diminishment of others. Elaborate stage machinery and spectacular sets were constructed to attract audiences with new visual effects. In Ulisse these included Minerva and Telemaco flying through the clouds, Giove (Jupiter) and Giunone (Juno) descending from the heavens in a machine, Ulisse vanishing (through a trap door) amid smoke and flames, and Nettuno (Neptune) rising from the sea. But to hold costs down, the theaters hired only small orchestras and did not have separate choruses. The score of L'Orfeo, an opera presented privately for the ruling Gonzagas in Mantua, called for more than 30 instruments; the score of Ulisse has only five string parts in addition to a small continuo group.

But in exchange for the rich musical palette of court opera, public opera offered the freedom to depict a wider array of character types. Court opera had an elevated tone and focussed on mythological stories. Public opera also drew on stories from classical literature, but in addition to noble and divine figures the librettist Badoaro included in Ulisse characters who were scurrilous (the drunken, gluttonous Iro), underhanded (the suitors), comic (the aging nurse Ericlea), and amorous (Penelope's handmaiden Melanto).

Mary-Ellen Nesi (Penelope) with Laura Pudwell (Ericlea). Photo: Kathy Wittman

The Boston Early Music Festival production of Ulisse was strongly cast, well-directed and -designed. Mary-Ellen Nesi brought a queenly bearing and powerful emotions to the sorrowing Penelope, while Colin Balzer offered in presence and voice a convincingly heroic Ulisse. Other standouts in an excellent cast included Zachary Wilder's Telemaco, Mireille Asselin's Minerva and Danielle Reutter-Harrah's ardent Melanto.

Gilbert Blin's elegant and versatile set and Anna Watkins' costumes were appropriate to the periods of the opera's composition (the set) and setting (the costumes). But there were some elements that didn't work quite as well: the singers' wigs, intended to evoke the elaborately braided hairstyles of ancient Greece, were a bit too obviously fake, and some of the props were cheap-looking.

Colin Balzer (Ulisse). Photo: Kathy Wittman

And while most of Blin's directorial choices were effective, one was not. The final duet between Penelope and Ulisse, the key moment when she finally opens her heart again to love, was accompanied by a distracting set-change. As Nesi's and Balzer's voices intertwined, clouds descended, the rear wall of the stage disappeared, and the sea was once again revealed. Perhaps this was intended to remind us of the great distances Ulysses has travelled to reach this moment. Or perhaps it was meant to suggest that even as he returns to his longed-for wife and home, Ulysses yearns to voyage again (as in Tennyson's great poem "Ulysses"). However, in my view the set-change would have been more effective had it occurred in the final moments after, rather than pulling focus during, this gorgeous and moving duet.

From the 2002 Aix production, Kresimir Spicer (Ulisse) and Marijana Mijanovic in the final duet, in which Penelope, after 20 years of self-sacrifice and self-denial, finally allows herself to say "yes":


Despite minor misjudgments, the BEMF Ulisse was a wonderful production of an opera that is far too rarely staged. And it would have been our peak experience of the 2015 Festival—except that Sunday's performance of L'incoronazione di Poppea was even better.  

Next time:L'incoronazione di Poppea 
Last time:L'Orfeo

David Hansen (Nerone) and Amanda Forsythe (Poppea)

L'incoronazione di Poppea
Sunday, June 14, Boston University Theater. Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, musical directors; Gilbert Blin, stage director and set designer.

The culminating performance of the Monteverdi Trilogy at the 2015 Boston Early Music Festival was, fittingly, Monteverdi's last and greatest opera, L'incoronazione di Poppea (The coronation of Poppea, 1642). In his essay "Thoughts on Late Style," (London Review of Books, 5 August 2004), the critic Edward Said wrote that "the accepted notion is that age confers a spirit of reconciliation and serenity on late works....But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction?"Poppea, composed when Monteverdi was 75 years old and first performed just a few months before his death, is one such dark and challenging late work.

As I wrote in the Opera Guide to Poppea, Giovanni Busenello's libretto contains some of the most cynical, corrupt and ruthless characters in all opera. The Roman emperor Nerone (Nero, sung by David Hansen) sleeps with Poppea (Amanda Forsythe), the wife of his subordinate Ottone (Otho, sung by Nathan Medley), and forces his advisor Seneca (Christian Immler) to commit suicide when his counsel becomes inconvenient. Nerone's wife Ottavia (Octavia, sung by Shannon Mercer), seeing herself supplanted, blackmails the cuckolded Ottone into conspiring to murder Poppea. In this attempt Ottone is aided by Drusilla (Teresa Wakim), his former lover, whom he dumped for Poppea; Drusilla hopes that, once Poppea is dead, Ottone will return to her. When the murder conspiracy fails, Ottavia is repudiated, Ottavia, Ottone and Drusilla are banished into exile, and Poppea is crowned the Empress of Rome.

According to Tacitus and Suetonius, the fates of most of these characters would be grim. In exile, Octavia was murdered on Nero's orders. Poppea was empress for two years, until Nero in a fit of rage kicked her and her unborn child to death. A few years later Nero would be overthrown and killed; his death would inaugurate a civil war. During Year of the Four Emperors that followed Nero's death, Otho would become the ruler of Rome for all of three months; his brief reign would be ended by suicide.

The BEMF production of Poppea, with stage direction by Gilbert Blin, did full justice to multiple modes of this complex work. Poppea encompasses comedy, tragedy, irony, and pathos—sometimes all in the same scene—and still has the power to unsettle us more than 370 years after its first performance. As with the other operas in the Monteverdi Trilogy, it was superbly cast, with many of the same ensemble of singers who had performed in L'Orfeo and Ulisse.

David Hansen as Nerone was on the incisive, if at times acidulous, end of the countertenor tonal spectrum. In his timbre and free use of vibrato Hansen reminded us more than anyone of David Daniels. Hansen's sound wasn't always appealing, but it was always illustrative of his petulant, imperious and mercurial character.

The most alluring voice in the cast belonged to Amanda Forsythe, the singer portraying the opera's most alluring character, Poppea. Forsythe's sweet-toned soprano offered a striking contrast to Poppea's utter shamelessness, and at the same time beautifully exemplified her seductive power and blithe heedlessness of the destruction she's wreaking on the lives of everyone around her.

Another excellent performance was given by Teresa Wakim as Drusilla, a woman who, perhaps knowingly, deceives herself about her former lover's residual feelings. Drusilla has to inspire the sympathy of anyone who has ever convinced him- or herself that, in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary, the object of their passion returns their feelings; and isn't that an uncomfortable position that's been occupied at one time or another by every one of us?

And Nell Snaidas was delightfully irrepressible as Amore (Cupid), who, in the opera's prologue, correctly predicts his victory over La Fortuna (Fortune, sung by Erica Schuller) and La Virtù (Virtue, sung by Danielle Reutter-Harrah)); Snaidas also excelled as the comically amorous page Valleto.

The strong cast, the dazzling playing of the Boston Early Music Chamber Ensemble under the musical direction of Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, Blin's elegant set and Anna Watkins' handsome costumes combined to make the final production of the Monteverdi Trilogy exceptional.

Poppea itself ends with one of the most gorgeous duets in all opera, "Pur ti miro" ("I gaze at you"), sung by an ecstatic Nerone and Poppea at the moment of their victory. But this duet is as bitter as it is beautiful. As I wrote in the Opera Guide to Poppea, "as they sing so gloriously of their love, Nerone and Poppea are surrounded by the bodies of their victims, and this moment of Poppea's triumph is shadowed by our knowledge of her later violent death...As Nerone and Poppea sing 'Più non peno, più non moro' ('No more pain, no more death') their voices clash on 'pain' and 'death.' The opera may be ending 'happily' but there will be plenty of pain and death to follow."

Sylvia McNair (Poppea) and Dana Hanchard (Nerone) perform "Pur ti miro" with the English Baroque Soloists conducted by John Eliot Gardiner:



In the final moments of the BEMF production, Blin devised an understated but disquieting gesture. As the lovers sang the affirmations of the final words, "si mio ben, si mio cor, mia vita, si" (Yes, my love, yes, my heart, my life, yes), Nerone turned away from Poppea and stared out at us. It was a chilling look, a reminder of the darkness we'd witnessed and a suggestion of the horror to come. A brilliant end to an unforgettable experience.

Other posts on the 2015 Boston Early Music Festival:

Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610
L'Orfeo
Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria

Photo: Zach Gibson/The New York Times

Nadine Sierra as the Countess; photos courtesy SF Opera

The San Francisco Opera's recent production of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), seen at the closing Sunday afternoon performance on July 5, was brimming with problems that would have wrecked a lesser opera:

The conducting by Patrick Summers often resulted in a lack of coordination between the orchestra and the singers. My partner and I speculated that for this closing performance of the summer season much of the orchestra was made up of substitutes. Working against this theory, though, is that the lack of coordination was also apparent in the recitatives. Those were accompanied on fortepiano by Summers himself, so perhaps he was just having an off—really off—day. Whatever the reason, the audible lack of coordination affected at least one aria for almost every major character, especially in the first two acts.

The direction by Robin Guarino highlighted some narrative details, but sometimes ignored essential aspects of character and situation. The Count seemed especially under-directed: in the second act, when he bursts into his wife's bedroom suspecting her of harboring a lover, he was oddly static, often standing in place and singing, instead of striding around the room or otherwise displaying signs of agitation.

And while some minor comic moments were more pointed than in any other production I've seen, some major comic moments were flubbed. In Act I, for example, when Cherubino is trying to hide from the Count, Guarino has him creep across the entire width of the stage covered in a sheet in order to hide behind the famous chair, when there were any number of closer and safer refuges at hand. Better blocking would have placed Cherubino nearer to the chair at the Count's entrance.

John Del Carlo as Dr. Bartolo, Lisette Oropesa as Susanna, and Luca Pisaroni as the Count

The lighting by Gary Marder was puzzling, often giving little sense of the time of day. The opera's four acts take place over the morning, afternoon, evening and night of a single "crazy day," as the opera's subtitle has it. In particular, at the end of Act III the garden of the Count's chateau was pitch-dark, although the rest of the stage reflected the late-afternoon light. If this was intended to suggest why the characters will later have difficulty recognizing each other in the garden, it needed to be better coordinated with the ostensible time of day on the rest of the stage.

The sets, while handsome, sometimes did not make spatial or theatrical sense. In the first act, for example, when Figaro tells his bride-to-be Susanna that their room is ideally situated because it is located between the bedroom of the Countess and that of the Count, the door to the Count's room is missing. We see only a door to the Countess's room on an upper level at stage right, and another door on the lower level at stage left that apparently leads to the rest of the house (it's the door from which Cherubino enters, for example—he's hardly likely to have walked through the Count's chambers, since the Count is angrily searching for him). And surely the Count's room would not be situated so that he is forced to walk through his servants' bedroom and up a long flight of stairs in order to reach the room of his consort.

Guarino's direction undermined what little sense of real space there was: Later in that same act, when a crowd of servants enters Susanna's and Figaro's room, half of them come through the Countess's door. Did she really sit there while a dozen servants trooped through her boudoir? I won't even discuss the absence in the last act of pavilions in the garden, which undermines the comedy.

And yet…, despite the miscommunication between pit and stage and the directorial and design misjudgments, this Figaro was rescued by its brilliant young cast. Philippe Sly, who had previously been terrific in the SF opera productions of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte in 2013 and Handel's Partenope last fall, as Figaro became a star. His charismatic, comic and physically agile Figaro made the continuity with Beaumarchais'Barber of Seville especially apparent. But when in the garden scene we see him wounded by what he thinks is Susanna's infidelity, he revealed unsuspected depths of emotion.

Philippe Sly as Figaro and Lisette Oropesa as Susanna

His Susanna was Lisette Oropesa, who also added layers to her character's endearing charm as the performance progressed. At times in Act I she was covered by the orchestra (another issue with Summers' conducting), but by the later acts her sweet-toned soprano was clearly audible.

Nadine Sierra brought a rich, lyrical voice to the sorrowing Countess. She was also convincingly youthful—in Figaro it is only a few years after the action of Barber of Seville, which would mean that the Countess is in her mid-20s—and was recognizably an older and sadder version of Barber's spirited Rosina. Her final forgiveness scene brought tears.

Nadine Sierra as the Countess

I've rarely seen a Count who brought to the role as much dark magnetism, both physical and vocal, as Luca Pisaroni. His third-act aria "Hai già vinta la causa," where the Count moves through suspicion, anger, frustration, and dejection to vengeful resolution, was a mini-symphony of emotion.(Pisaroni was also a great Figaro in SF Opera's last production, one of my Favorites of 2010.)

With all the vocal and dramatic powerhouses onstage Angela Brower's Cherubino sometimes seemed a little overshadowed. But she was winsome and convincing as a teenaged boy buffeted by new feelings he barely understands and can't control. Guarino's direction suggested that Cherubino's attraction to the Countess was reciprocated—if not fully acknowledged—by her, foreshadowing developments in the third play of Beaumarchais' Figaro trilogy, The Guilty Mother.

Utimately this production mirrored Figaro's schemes to thwart the Count: constantly threatening to slip into disaster, but in the end, a triumph.


For more on the background, characters and music of the opera, see Opera Guide 2: Le Nozze di Figaro.

There is no Pre-Code Hollywood

"Pre-Code Hollywood" is a term that's generally used to refer to movies made between the advent of sound in the late 20s and the establishment of the Production Code Administration in mid-1934. But by 1934 the studios had already been operating for a decade under a series of increasingly stringent content restrictions adopted by the trade organization Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA).

The MPPDA had been created by the studios themselves to deflect criticism about the depiction of sex, violence, alcohol (Prohibition was still in effect until December 1933), drugs, and religion in films. Will Hays, a former chair of the Republican National Committee and a devout Presbyterian, was hired by the studios in 1922 to head the MPPDA because he could convincingly seem to represent middle-American values. Hays' first guidelines were written in 1924, so there is no period in the sound era when studio filmmakers were operating without content proscriptions: there is no pre-Code Hollywood.

The appearance of self-regulation was used by the studios to undercut attempts to impose government censorship. As Mark Vieira points out in Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, the studios were mainly concerned with their long-term financial interests. They wanted to avoid any public ill-will that might lead to anti-trust legislation aimed at the studios' monopolistic practices such as vertical integration, block-booking and blind buying. [1] (Vertical integration was studio ownership of movie theaters; block-booking was the distribution of desirable movies to independent theater owners only as a package with other, less popular movies; blind buying was the practice of forcing theaters to bid on movies on the basis of a sketchy prospectus before the films were even produced.)

When sound became widely adopted in the late 1920s, the moral panic surrounding movies reached a new pitch. Catholic priest Daniel Lord later wrote, "Silent smut had been bad. Vocal smut cried to the censors for vengeance." [2] The studios responded by adopting a new set of guidelines in early 1930 as "A Code to Govern the Making of Talking, Synchronized and Silent Motion Pictures." The Production Code, popularly known as the "Hays Code," was primarily authored by Lord and Exhibitor's Herald World editor Martin Quigley. It was promoted as governing filmmakers' approach to any controversial material.

 ...but pre-1934 movies are different

The studios were placed in a double bind: self-censorship made for good press, but sensationalism sold tickets. Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Studios, told one of his executives that "the public now knows that we stand for clean pictures and that invariably they are too damn clean and they stay away on account of it." [3] So it was in the studios' short-term financial interest to circumvent their own guidelines, and they did it regularly. Before mid-1934 adherence to the MPPDA's guidelines was voluntary, and the organization had no enforcement power. Hays' role was primarily one of public relations, while the content rules he promulgated were often skirted or ignored outright. Until mid-1934, Hollywood filmmakers continued to push the boundaries of what was permissible.

The justification for including forbidden content was "compensating moral values"—a conclusion in which the sinful repent, the erring make sacrifices, and the incorrigible are punished. Thus, the phenomenon of the Hollywood ending: a final scene that slaps a moralistic denouement on all the eyebrow-raising events of the previous 90 minutes.

The Production Code and its discontents


Among the prohibitions of the Code:

"I. Crimes against the law: These shall not be presented in such a way as to throw sympathy with the crime...Illegal drug traffic must never be presented."

"Vi. Costume: ...Undressing scenes should be avoided, and never used save where essential to the plot."

Night Nurse (1931, directed by William Wellman, screenplay by Oliver Garrett and Charles Kenyon, based on a novel by Dora Macy) inspires sympathy for not one, but two crimes: bootlegging and murder. Sinister chauffeur Clark Gable is apparently plotting to marry party-girl divorcée Charlotte Merriman and starve her two children to death so that he can seize control of the kids' trust funds. The only thing standing in his way are Merriman's conscientious day and night nurses, Joan Blondell and Barbara Stanwyck.

The compensating ending—spoiler alert, the first of too many to note individually, so be forewarned that the spoilers are in the final paragraph of each film summary—is the killing of Gable by gangster cronies of Stanwyck's affable booze-smuggling boyfriend Ben Lyon. So much for the restitution of the moral order. Along the way we get to see Stanwyck and Blondell frequently stripping down to their lingerie while changing into and out of their nurses' uniforms. Undoubtedly these scenes were essential to the box office plot.


"VII. Dances: Dances suggesting or representing sexual actions or indecent passions are forbidden. Dances which emphasize indecent movements are to be regarded as obscene."

"II. Sex: ..Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden."

Three on a Match (1932, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, screenplay by Lucien Hubbard) features periodic montages of newspaper and magazine headlines accompanied by film footage to establish the passage of time. For the year 1925, under the headline "What I Found Out About My Daughter of Fourteen" from the (fictional?) True Facts magazine, there's a shot of two women dancing in each other's arms while lasciviously grinding their hips together. The film is another "child in peril from an unfit mother" plot: this time, Ann Dvorak's cocaine-sniffing, alcoholic mother is in an adulterous relationship with Lyle Talbot, her supplier and a compulsive gambler. It was as though the filmmakers set out to violate as many provisions of the Code as they could in one movie.

Dvorak must redeem herself through sacrifice. She and her son are held captive by gangsters led by Edward Arnold and a snarling Humphrey Bogart, who are trying to recover money that Talbot has borrowed and lost at the card tables. After scrawling a message in lipstick on her negligée identifying the location of her son, Dvorak delivers it to the police by leaping out of a window and plummeting to her death in the street below.


"II. Sex: The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing."

Female (1933, directed by Michael Curtiz, screenplay by Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola) demonstrates that auto-company president Ruth Chatterton can run a company, drive, and shoot the bowls off of phallicly erect clay pipes as well as any man.

The castrating woman? Ruth Chatterton in Female.

She also takes on the predatory male sexual prerogative: she invites a series of handsome underlings to her home to discuss business over dinner, plies them with vodka (a comparison is made to Catherine the Great (!)), has her way with them (discreetly off-camera), and then discards them in the morning.

Chatterton's bared teeth are a nice touch.

But then she meets engineer George Brent, a man of the "dominant, even primitive" type, who resists her seduction attempts until she's willing to put him in the driver's seat—literally. He proves his virility by shooting clay rabbits (another sort of rabbit test?) and winning a baby...pig (I'm not making this up).

As this mock-family drives off into the sunset—Brent, of course, at the wheel of Chatterton's car—she tells him that she will turn over the business to him, stay home and raise "nine babies" (presumably not counting the pig). Because, of course, a woman's social, economic and sexual equality must be subsumed to her real needs: a take-charge man, motherhood and domesticity.


"Dominant, even primitive" men, though, could also threaten marriage and domesticity. In A Free Soul (1931, directed by Clarence Brown, screenplay by Becky Gardiner and John Meehan, based on a novel by Adela Rogers St. Johns), Norma Shearer is shown to be in sexual thrall to manly mobster Clark Gable. She breaks her engagement to "clean, fine" polo player Leslie Howard to shack up with Gable, whose character reveals his "mongrel" origins by consorting with his Irish, Chinese, and black employees. When Shearer finally tries to break it off with Gable, he threatens her...with marriage.

The compensating moral ending? As in Night Nurse, it's another murder: Howard shoots Gable, and then is acquitted on Shearer's tearful testimony of her own sexual guilt. But there's no marriage: Shearer needs to take some time to get Gable "out of her blood." Evidently it didn't work: in the following year's Strange Interlude, Shearer's character, married to another man, deliberately gets pregnant by Gable.


In The Divorcée (1931, directed by Robert Z. Leonard, screenplay by Nick Grinde, Zelda Sears, and John Meehan, based on a novel by Ursula Parrott), on discovering that her husband Chester Morris has been unfaithful to her, Norma Shearer "evens the balance" by spending a tipsy night with his best friend Robert Montgomery. A divorce ensues, and, it's strongly implied, both Shearer and Morris bed multiple other partners, including (in Shearer's case) a married man.

As in the later Female, though, sexual freedom outside of marriage could not be shown to bring a woman fulfillment. When Shearer encounters Morris again one New Year's Eve, they decide to give marriage another chance. After all, it worked out so well the first time...


"XII. Repellent subjects...[include] a woman selling her virtue."

Waterloo Bridge (1931, directed by James Whale, screenplay by Benn Levy and Tom Reed, based on the play by Robert E. Sherwood) features Mae Clarke as a kind of poor woman's Barbara Stanwyck. An unemployed chorus girl without family or friends, Clarke turns to picking up soldiers on leave in WWI-era London and cadging rent and food money from them the morning after.

One night she encounters Kent Douglass, an earnest volunteer who is unaware of the way she's keeping body and soul together. He falls in love with her, introduces her to his wealthy family, and wants to marry her. But Clarke confesses her past (in fact, her present) to Douglass's sympathetic but sharp-eyed mother Enid Bennett because she feels that she can never marry; she can never bring her shame into the family of the man she loves.

But her resolution wavers as Douglass is about to return to the front, and in a tearful goodbye on Waterloo Bridge he convinces her to marry. Instead, though, immediately after they part Clarke is killed in a Zeppelin raid. As in the later Three On A Match, apparently the only compensation for some transgressions is death.


Although if your transgressions are more upmarket, perhaps repentance will do. In the notorious Baby Face (1933, directed by Alfred E. Green, screenplay by Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola) Barbara Stanwyck sleeps her way from the street-level personnel office of the Gotham Trust Bank floor by floor to the penthouse apartment of its president, George Brent. In a famous series of tracking shots, the camera actually follows her progress up the side of the building. (Among her early stepping-stones is a young John Wayne; also notable is Stanwyck's loyalty to and friendship with her black maid Theresa Harris.)

In the final seconds of the film, though, after the bank fails and Brent attempts suicide, Stanwyck embraces the role of devoted wife and rejects her former material values (although when rejecting material values it helps to be carrying around a case filled with jewels and a half-million dollars in cash). For me, Baby Face wins the prize for the most patently tacked-on last-minute compensating reversal.


"VI. Costume: Complete nudity is never permitted...Indecent or undue exposure is forbidden...Transparent or translucent materials and silhouette are frequently more suggestive than actual exposure."

There is no last-minute compensating reversal, though, in Red-Headed Woman (1932, directed by Jack Conway, screenplay by Anita Loos, based on the novel by Katherine Bush). This is one film that does not end with moral restitution by repentance, sacrifice, punishment, or death. Along the way it violates pretty much every section of the Code, including a brief glimpse of its heroine Jean Harlow's bare breast; in virtually every scene she's dressed in diaphanous lingerie or a clinging evening gown.


Harlow uses her overwhelming sexual power to wreck the marriage of small-town bigshot Chester Morris, marries him herself, then dumps him for New York industrialist Henry Stephenson. While exulting in the role of Stephenson's mistress, she's simultaneously bedding his suave chauffeur Charles Boyer. When Morris passes incriminating photos of Harlow and Boyer to Stephenson, Harlow confronts Morris. Finding him planning to return to his ex-wife Leila Hyams, Harlow shoots him (wounding him critically but not fatally).

Does a scandalous trial ensue? Prison? No—in the final moments of the film we see Harlow in Paris snuggling with her latest elderly sugar daddy in the back seat of a limousine. In the final shot the camera pulls back to show the professionally impassive driver—Boyer.

Then everything changed

Everything changed in mid-1934, when the Production Code began to be taken seriously. In response to threats of boycotts and blacklists by the Catholic Legion of Decency, the film studios created the Production Code Administration (PCA) to enforce the Code's strictures. As of July 1, 1934, films produced by the major studios were required to receive a certificate of approval from the PCA, which was headed by Hays appointee Joseph Breen. The hard-nosed Breen was given censorship power over stories, scripts and finished footage, and did not hesitate to use it. They really couldn't make 'em like that anymore.

Which may not have been entirely a bad thing. As Bollywood films (which are still subject to censorship) often show, suggestion can be much sexier than depiction. And because movies could no longer rely as heavily on lurid or sensational stories, they had to find other ways to bring in audiences: the next few years saw genres such as the romantic comedy and the musical flourish. I have to confess that if the film archives caught on fire and I only had enough time to save one Jean Harlow film, I would run right past Red-Headed Woman to grab 1936's Libeled Lady, a film produced under Breen's rigid censorship.

And there were occasional (if rare) exceptions to the formulaic application of the Code. In the comedy Too Many Husbands (1940), Jean Arthur's first husband Fred MacMurray, believed lost at sea, inconveniently returns six months after she's married MacMurray's friend and business partner Melvyn Douglas. While the men compete to share her bed, Arthur finds that she can't decide between them. As I wrote in part 2 of the post on The films of Jean Arthur, Too Many Husbands features "amazingly risqué dialogue, and an ambiguous ending that manages to offer the suggestion of a continuing ménage." Breen must have suffered a momentary lapse of attention.

In the 2012 Sight and Sound critics' poll of the 250 top films of all time, six were released by major Hollywood studios in the eight years between 1927 and 1934; fourteen—more than twice as many—were released by major Hollywood studios in the eight years between 1935 and 1942. As film historian Thomas Doherty writes, "The inconvenient truth is that Hollywood's output...reveals no ready correlation between freedom of expression and aesthetic worth." [4]

So-called pre-Code Hollywood films can be highly entertaining; they offer glimpses of major stars such as Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart in their formative roles, as well as early stars such as Chester Morris, Mae Clarke and Ann Dvorak whose careers faded a few years after the Code began to be enforced. They are also often surprising and even sometimes still shocking. As Lord wrote, "The stories are now concerned with problems. They discuss morals, divorce, free love, unborn children, relationships outside of marriage, single and double standards, the relationship of sex to religion, marriage and its effects on the freedom of women...These subjects are fundamentally dangerous." [5] Such dangerous subjects were treated far less frequently and openly after 1934.

The Code's demise was slow and painful. It began in the 1950s with the breakdown of the studio system, the rise of television, and Breen's retirement. Doherty suggests that the 1960 release of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho by Paramount Pictures "killed off" the Code. "The notorious montage of murder in the bathroom of the Bates Motel is the scene of the crime," he writes, "the place where Joseph Breen's moral universe went swirling down the drain." [6] The Code was formally abandoned with the advent of the Motion Picture Association of America rating system in 1968.

The relaxation of censorship corresponded with the emergence of a new generation of directors in the 1960s and 1970s (Kubrick, Scorsese, Altman, and Coppola, among others) and what is widely considered a renaissance in American filmmaking. But that's a story, perhaps, for another post.

All of the films discussed in this post can be seen in what are generally the most complete prints available in the excellent "Forbidden Hollywood" series released by Turner Classic Movies.

The photograph at the top of the post, "Thou Shalt Not," was created in 1941 by studio photographer A. L. Schafer to satirize the prohibitions of the Production Code.

----

1. Mark A. Vieira, Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999, pp. 7-13.
2. Quoted in Vieira, p. 13.
3. Quoted in Vieira, p. 14.
4. Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934, Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 345.
5. Quoted in Vieira, p. 55.
6. Doherty, p. 343.

Marin Marais: Sémélé,Tragédie en Musique
American Bach Soloists Academy Orchestra and American Bach Choir, Jeffrey Thomas, conductor. San Francisco Conservatory of Music, August 14, 2015.

If you know the music of Marin Marais, it is probably through the recordings and performances of Jordi Savall. Savall provided the superb soundtrack of Alain Corneau's 1991 film Tous les matins du monde (All the mornings of the world). The Tous les matins du monde soundtrack and Savall's other Marais recordings primarily feature music for solo viola da gamba or small consorts, and if you're not already familiar with them I can't recommend them too highly.

But there is another side to Marais. In addition to his exquisite music for viola da gamba he also composed large-scale orchestral pieces, including several operas for the Académie Royale de Musique, the court opera of Louis XIV. Marais served as the conductor of the resplendent Académie orchestra for five years in the early 1700s.

When Sémélé received its premiere in April 1709, Marais was at the height of his fame. His opera Alcyone had been a huge success three years previously, and Sémélé was explicitly modelled on the earlier opera. Both operas featured a remarkable instrumental evocation of disaster: in Alcyone, a storm; in Sémélé, an earthquake. And both operas were based on tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

In Ovid's telling of the myth of Semele, when Jupiter becomes enamored of the beautiful young daughter of the king of Thebes, Juno becomes jealous. Visiting Semele in disguise, Juno tricks her into extracting the promise of a gift from Jupiter. When he swears an unbreakable oath that he will fulfill her wish, Semele demands that he prove his identity by revealing himself in all his glory. However, as Jupiter knows too well, no mortal can withstand the sight of him unveiled, and Semele dies. In Antoine Houdar de la Motte's libretto, though, Jupiter foils Juno by making Semele immortal; meanwhile, the luckless Theban citizens perish in "a torrent of fire."

But unlike Alcyone, Sémélé was not a success. While in the decades after its premiere Alcyone was revived four times, after its initial run Sémélé remained unperformed for nearly 300 years; it received its first modern performances in France only in 2006. But last week, as part of its Summer Festival & Academy "Versailles and the Parisian Baroque" under the leadership of artistic director Jeffrey Thomas, American Bach Soloists addressed this historical neglect by giving the first-ever performances of Sémélé outside of Europe.

Jeffrey Thomas backstage. Photo by Gene Kosoy, courtesy of ABS

In their program notes Jeff McMillan and Jeffrey Thomas attribute the opera's initial failure to Le Grand Hiver, the bitterly cold winter of 1708-09. The Seine froze, grain shipments were disrupted, and food riots broke out in many cities. While temperatures had moderated by April, the winter wheat crop had been destroyed and bread shortages continued. The general atmosphere of crisis may well have had an inhibitory effect on opera attendance.

Sémélé itself features a communal crisis, brought about not by the forces of nature but by human vanity and pride, a goddess's vindictiveness, and a god's rash promise. This social dimension is perhaps the greatest difference between Marais' version of Ovid's tale and Handel's opera of 35 years later on the same subject. Marais' opera features choruses and dance interludes which involve the entire city of Thebes in the tragedy, whereas Handel's opera keeps the focus entirely on Semele herself.

Another difference for those who know the Handel opera is that Marais' is much more richly scored, with a special emphasis on the low strings. For the Festival performances of Sémélé members of the ABS orchestra were supplemented by the ABS Academy, instrumentalists from their young artists' program. There were five contrabasses on the crowded stage, something I had never seen before, and the reason for their numbers became clear during the climactic earthquake scene.

The nearly 30-strong American Bach Choir and the 50-odd members of the ABS Academy Orchestra created a huge and beautifully intricate sound in the relatively intimate confines of the San Francisco Conservatory's Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall. The vocal soloists, all drawn from Academy participants, were uniformly excellent; special mention should be made of Rebecca Myers Hoke as Sémélé, Sara LeMesh as Junon, and Christopher Besch as Jupiter, who handled their virtuosic roles beautifully.

The opera was given in concert—there would have been no room for a staging—but this led to the only issue with this otherwise splendid performance. Following the practice established by his predecessor Jean-Baptiste Lully, Marais filled Sémélé with dance numbers. But that meant that the narrative was regularly interrupted for extended instrumental interludes. Perhaps because we were hearing the opera for the first time, one menuet or passepied, delightful as they were initially, soon began to sound like another.

The dance music also brought the drama to a complete halt. In a staged performance the spectacle of the dancers might have allowed us to overlook the resulting dramatic stasis (or in the hands of an inventive choreographer, the dance sequences might have been a way of continuing the drama by other means). But when at the key moment of crisis in Act V when Jupiter is about to reveal himself Marais inserted three dances for the Thebans, the sense of dramatic deflation was palpable. Judicious cuts in the dance music would have made for tauter theater.

But to make this complaint feels unappreciative. To have the opportunity to hear this magnificent and unjustly neglected score was truly a privilege, and Thomas and his musicians are to be commended for performing it so beautifully.

Update 22 August 2015: Here is a small taste of the score from the recording by Le Concert Spirituel conducted by Hervé Niquet. In this duet, Shannon Mercer as Sémélé and Marc Labonnette as her father Cadmus urge Jove to descend; this brief duet occurs right after the Second Air for the Thebans and just before the Third Air for the Thebans and the earthquake scene:
  

Alfred Hitchcock was famous, or perhaps notorious, for making changes to novels and short stories when adapting them into films. Vertigo (1958) is a classic case in point. It was based on the 1954 novel D'Entre les Morts (From among the dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. The novel is centered on a detective, Flavières, who is hired to follow Madeline, the wife of an old friend. Flavières soon falls in love with Madeline, who believes herself possessed by an ancestor who committed suicide. When Madeline herself dies, Flavières is bereft; when he meets a woman who reminds him of Madeline, he begins to obsessively make her over in Madeline's image in a doomed attempt to recapture the past.

There are many differences between the novel and the film. Hitchcock altered the novel's settings and character names, and added characters and scenes that didn't exist in the book. Perhaps the most radical change was in the timing of the revelation of Madeline's identity: in the novel, there is a surprise twist at the end, while in Hitchcock's film, that twist is revealed at the beginning of the film's second part. As Hitchcock told François Truffaut, "Everyone around me was against this change; they all felt that the revelation should be saved for the end of the picture…We're back to our usual alternatives: Do we want suspense or surprise?" [1] As ever, he had no hesitation in making substantial changes to the source in order to make it more Hitchcockian.

One of those changes relates to a key scene in both the novel and the film: Madeline's attempted suicide by drowning. In the novel, Madeline is standing alongside the Seine when she suddenly steps off the quay and plunges into the water. Flavières, who has been following her, leaps in after her and pulls her out. She is conscious:

Her eyes were open, gazing pensively at the sky, as though trying to recognize something.
"You're not dead," Flavières said simply.
Her eyes turned towards him, and her thoughts seemed to come back from some other world.
"I don't know," she said softly. "It doesn't hurt to die." [2]

Flavières carries her into a nearby café. There Madeline is able to stand, shakily; the proprietress gives each of them some dry clothes to change into, and they return to Flavières's flat. As they enter, the phone is ringing: it's Madeline's husband, who is concerned about her lengthy absence.

In the film this incident is altered and elaborated in ways that are highly significant. Madeline (Kim Novak), followed by detective Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart), drives out to Fort Point underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.


Suddenly, she leaps into San Francisco Bay:


Scotty jumps in after her and pulls her out:


He carries her unconscious body to her car, where he tries to revive her without success:


There is a cut. When we next see Scotty, he's in his apartment; Madeline is in his bed, and her clothes—all of them—are drying on a line.


Madeline is awakened by the ringing of a phone: it's her husband, calling Scotty to find out where she is. She is shocked, first to discover that she's in a strange bed:


And next, by her realization that she's been completely undressed:


This moment—awkward and embarrassing for both of them—is also the moment when love begins to dawn between Madeline and Scotty.

I had thought that this scene was simply one more example of Hitchcock improving on his literary sources: it provides a basis for Madeline and Scotty's subsequent intimacy, while at the same time providing hints of Scotty's obsessiveness and perversity (particularly with regard to his minute attention to women's clothing).

But I think I've discovered that this scene has a cinematic as well as a literary source. Hitchcock seems to have adapted pivotal elements of this scene from another film: Hot Saturday (1932), a pre-Code film directed by William Seiter and starring Nancy Carroll, Randolph Scott, and Cary Grant.

In Hot Saturday, Ruth Brock (Carroll) tries to escape rumors that she's spent the night with rich ladies' man Romer Sheffield (Grant) by fleeing to the campsite of her earnest childhood friend Bill Fadden (Scott). Bill has returned to town after seven years away to do some geological exploration (but he's too shy to declare his real reason: his love for Ruth). A violent storm is raging, and as Ruth tries to reach the cave where Bill is staying, she slips and falls unconscious:


Bill hears a noise, investigates, and carries the unconscious Ruth into the cave:


Bill tries to revive her, without success.


 When Ruth awakes, her clothes—all of them—are drying on a line:


Ruth is at first shocked to discover that she's in Bill's bed:


And next, by her realization that she's been completely undressed:


The parallels between these two scenes seem too close to be coincidence. Although I know of no incontrovertible evidence that Hitchcock was familiar with Hot Saturday—it does not appear in the indexes of any of my small collection of books on Hitchcock—it was one of Cary Grant's first starring roles. Grant went on to star in four of Hitchcock's movies, and occupied a special place among Hitchock's leading men. Donald Spoto, in his biography of Hitchcock, wrote that "Cary Grant...represents what Hitchcock would like to have been." [3] Hitchcock himself, in an after-dinner speech given at the Screen Producers Guild in 1965, jokingly referred to Grant as his alter ego: "You may be sure that in securing an actor for my next picture I was more careful. I gave casting an accurate and detailed description of my true self. Casting did an expert job. The result: Cary Grant in Notorious." [4] It seems inconceivable that Hitchcock would not have seen all of Cary Grant's early films.

We know, too, that Hitchcock—shall we say, obsessively?—restaged and reworked similar scenes over multiple films. Such recapitulations have been the subject of at least one book, the not-very-enlightening Hitchock's Motifs by Michael Walker. Perhaps the most famous example is the heroine dangling from the face of Mt. Rushmore in North By Northwest (1959), prefigured more than two decades previously in Young and Innocent (1937):

Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant in North by Northwest:


Nova Pilbeam and Derrick De Marney in Young and Innocent:


In North by Northwest Hitchcock is restaging, on a grander scale, a powerful scene from one of his earlier films. What makes the Vertigo scene I've discussed in this post so unusual is that Hitchcock seems to have been adapting a scene from another filmmaker's work, rather than his own.

Boileau and Narcejac's Vertigo can be borrowed with a free account from the indispensable Open Library. Hot Saturday is available on DVD in Universal's Pre-Code Hollywood Collection, and is worth seeing as an early example of Cary Grant's screen persona (as well as for its eyebrow-raising sexual mores).

------

1. François Truffaut, Hitchcock, Revised Edition. Simon and Schuster, 1985, pp. 243-244.
2. Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Vertigo. Translated by Geoffrey Sainsbury. Dell, 1958, pp. 41-42.
3. Donald Spoto, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. Ballantine, 1984, p. 442.
4. Sidney Gottlieb, ed. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews, University of California Press, 1995, p. 56.

A monsoon-drenched Rekha in Utsav (The Festival, 1984)

The development of Hindi cinema offers an abundance of fascinating material to any writer. Studios such as the Hindustan Film Company, Bombay Talkies and RK Films were built on their founders' visions of possibility, willingness to take risks, tireless labor, and sometimes ruthless business practices. One of the biggest female stars of the 1930s was a big-boned blonde woman named Mary Evans who did her own acrobatic fighting and horseback-riding stunts as "Fearless Nadia." Heroes such as Ashok Kumar, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand came to Bombay without connections or experience, and within a few years became screen idols worshipped by millions. Amitabh Bachchan, a gangly outsider who had once failed a voice test to become an announcer for All-India Radio, was cast as the lead in Zanjeer (Chains, 1973) after four better-known actors turned down the role; his searing performance made him a superstar.

So while the still of Amitabh's frequent co-star Rekha on the cover of Mihir Bose's Bollywood: A History (Tempus, 2006) was certainly arresting, I picked up the book because of its back-cover claim to be "the first comprehensive history of India's film industry." Unfortunately, the hopes raised by that description were dashed almost immediately. Bose's book is superficial, partial, and reads as though an unedited first draft was mistakenly sent to the printer.

An early warning sign was the repetitive writing. At the beginning of the first chapter, we are told the story of a woman at a screening of the Lumière Brothers' film "'Condeliers' Square'" leaping to her feet because it appears that a "hansom cab" is about to burst through the screen (pp. 38-39). Then, on the very next page, we hear about a Lumière showing in which audience members seeing "L'Arrivée d'un gare de la Ciotat…vacated their seats in a hurry" in fear that an arriving train will crash through the screen. Was it the hansom cab, the train, or both?

Repetition is only one problem; the book is also filled with errors, typographical and otherwise. In the stories about the Lumière Brothers, for example, the titles of both films are misstated (the second one nonsensically), and there is no hansom cab in "La Place des Cordeliers" (not "Condeliers"): there is a horse-drawn streetcar and a delivery van, but no hansom cab, as you can see for yourself. Neither story is given a source, so there is no way to judge the credibility of the reported audience reactions. Repetition, errors, and vague sourcing remain issues throughout the book.

Names are frequently misspelled: the Hollywood actors were Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, not "Mathau" and "Lemon" (p. 256); the Hollywood producer of Algiers (1938) was Walter Wanger, not "Wagner" (p. 138); Shashi Kapoor's wife Jennifer's actor father was Geoffrey Kendal, and the drama award named after him is the Kendal Cup—neither is spelled "Kendall" (p. 270).

Worse than careless spelling, though, is Bose's carelessness with facts: actor Hrithik Roshan did not appear in Karan Arjun (1995), but instead served as an assistant to his director father Rakesh, so the film can hardly be "notched up" among Hrithik's "blockbusters" (p. 347). The name of Rekha's great 1981 courtesan film is Umrao Jaan, not Umrao Jaan Adda—the latter is the title of Mirza Hadi Ruswa's 1899 novel on which the film was based—and it does not quite tell "the story of a thirty-year-old abducted and sold to a brothel" (p. 235). Bose writes that "Karan Johar's Kuch Kuch Hota Hai was shot largely in Scotland," a claim that is true only of its title song (p. 349).

Writing of playback singing, Bose states,

In the 1930s and 40s, it was the norm for actors and actresses to both sing and act…But within a decade this breed completely vanished, so totally that cinemagoers of today's Bollywood would struggle to believe they ever existed…Bollywood had created a divide between singing and acting which has never been bridged. (pp. 93-94)

That this practice had "completely vanished" by the 1950s would come as a surprise to actor-singers Talat Mahmood and Kishore Kumar. Major contemporary stars Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, and Aamir Khan have all on occasion done their own playback singing. Further examples abound; while playback singing remains the standard practice, this is hardly "a divide…which has never been bridged." Here is Amitabh singing the Holi song "Rang Barse Bheege Chunarwali" from Silsila (1981):


For a description of the film, including the significance of this scene, please see my post on Silsila.

Bose claims that an early Indian filmmaker, Dundiraj Govind Phalke, was "far ahead of his time" (p. 53) when in the credits of his 1919 film Kaliya Mardan he showed the faces of his actors dissolving into those of their characters in full makeup and costume. However, this practice was widespread in the silent film era: for example, it occurs in Louis Feuillade's Fantômas serial of 1911-1913.

Bose is not a film historian or critic—his background is in sports and business journalism, two fields that are prone to hyperbole—and it shows when he commits errors of overstatement like these. But Bollywood: A History is also filled with non sequiturs and garbled grammar. Here are some examples, chosen pretty much at random:

Page 132: "Like Ashok Kumar, but perhaps even more so, he [Dilip Kumar] taught himself acting…" So Dilip Kumar is even more like Ashok Kumar than…Ashok Kumar?

Page 266: "It may be a coincidence that 1969, the year of Bachchan's debut in films, was also the year Indira Gandhi made her decisive turn in Indian politics, a few months after Bachchan's arrival in Bombay but, nevertheless, it is of some significance." Or not.

Page 299: "Yet, if the Indian media was easily cowed down during the Emergency, one of the most fascinating aspects of that time was that it came just as many things were bubbling away, which was to determine the course of Indian life for the decades ahead." Was it?

Page 344: "If Aamir Khan is the modern-day Raj Kapoor, although very different in many ways, then Shah Rukh Khan, a Muslim born in New Dehli on November 2, 1965, and, like Aamir, married to a Hindu, Gauri Khan." Lucky Gauri!

Of course, occasional misspellings, grammatical awkwardnesses and factual errors are inevitable in any book-length project (this blog certainly has its share), but the sheer frequency of these problems in Bose's book is unacceptably high. And while omissions are perhaps inevitable, missing entirely from Bose's history or receiving only glancing mentions are such major heroines as Helen, Sharmila Tagore, Mumtaz, Sridevi, Mala Sinha, Shyama, Neetu Singh, Madhuri Dixit, Kajol, and Rani Mukerji, among many others. Also, Bose's discussion of dance—a highly significant element of Indian musical films—is very brief and wholly inadequate.

So Bollywood: A History is poorly written, sloppily edited, and narrowly conceived. Surely there's a recent one-volume history of Hindi cinema that's written in a lively style, is well-sourced and credible, and which gives appropriate emphasis to both the men and the women who have created and sustained this film industry. Isn't there?

Rock documentaries tend to follow a highly conventional formula: Gather the remaining/surviving members of the band to recount its history, and a few Important People to testify to the band's significance. Intersperse the interviews with footage and photos of the band's origins and early success; descent into drug and alcohol addiction, mutual recrimination and breakup; and then eventual triumphant reunion/re-emergence (which is often the impetus for the documentary). Edit into a tidy 90 minutes, and you have your movie.

Joe Angio's Revenge of the Mekons (2013) conforms to much of this template, but the film explodes the limitations of its formula because the band that is its subject is anything but conventional. Although the Mekons are about to celebrate their 40th anniversary, they've never tasted mainstream popularity—either they've never aspired to it, or they simply have had no idea how to go about attaining it. As singer Sally Timms says when a clueless radio interviewer asks them to explain their "success,""The stock answer is the lack of it. Success is the thing that usually kills bands in the end. We haven't had any success, so we've had none of the attendant problems."

Of course, "success" depends on how you measure it, but four-figure album sales and the long grind of low-budget touring can also kill bands. The Mekons' good humor and mutual regard, though, seem to have survived their four decades together intact. They never got around to (or perhaps couldn't afford) the standard drug binges and resultant rock band acrimony, and they can't get back together because they've never broken up. As original Mekon Kevin Lycett told Spin magazine in 1986, "We couldn't be bothered." [1]

What they have done is continue to produce new music of consistently high quality. Depending on what you count they've issued something like 20 albums and nearly as many singles and EPs, and they now have a catalogue of well over 200 songs to draw on for their live shows.

Formed in 1977 by a group of leftist art students at Leeds University who hung out with the Gang of Four, the Mekons were initially more of a conceptual art project than a band. (The Mekon is the alien arch-villain of the futuristic Dan Dare comics.) None of the original members could play at more than a rudimentary level, and their sound was deliberately raw. In Angio's film we see Mary Harron (later a director and screenwriter) reading from a review she wrote of the band in 1979: "Although at times the Mekons sound wildly experimental, that's just a byproduct of confusion."


Despite (or perhaps because of) their defiant amateurism, the band was actually signed to Virgin Records and released an album in late 1979. The front cover showed a monkey sitting at a typewriter picking out the Shakespearean title of the album—almost (The Quality Of Mercy Is Not Strnen), while the back cover displayed a band photo of...the Gang of Four. Although the claim that this was an error by the record label is repeated in Angio's film, at the time the Gang of Four were on EMI, not Virgin—it sounds very much like a Mekons prank.

The Mekons were non-conformists even among punks: The Quality of Mercy includes the wistful "After 6," whose verse is a delicate tune that sounds like it could've have come from a less-slick version of Wire's 154 (the two albums were released almost simultaneously that fall). Clearly Virgin didn't really know what to do with them, and after releasing a double single (another Mekons paradox) let them go.

The band weathered the demise of punk rock by radically reinventing itself. When punk as both a social and musical movement began to ebb around the time of Margaret Thatcher's 1983 re-election and the miners' strike of 1984/85, the Mekons responded by incorporating elements of British folk and American country music into their sound. While the movie quotes Rolling Stone as saying that the Mekons invented alt-country, it isn't quite true. They weren't even the first punk band to go country: the Johnny-Rotten-less Sex Pistols had covered rockabilly Eddie Cochran in 1978, and in 1981 the Dils had re-formed themselves as the "cowpunk" Rank and File.

What made the Mekons unique was that they didn't attempt to turn country into punk, nor did they attempt to straightforwardly imitate country. Instead they found at the tail end of punk a kindred sensibility in classic country's pessimism, world-weariness and sense of inevitable loss, and they created a hybrid that drew on elements from both forms.


They incorporated traditional instruments such as the fiddle of Susie Honeyman (the Charlotte Rampling of rock) and the accordion of Rico Bell, but also employed pounding drums and squalling guitar feedback. For a taste, listen to the dueling vocals and guitars of Tom Greenhalgh and Jon Langford on "Hard to be Human" from their 1985 album Fear and Whiskey. (Since 1984 their excellent drummer has been Steve Goulding, formerly of Graham Parker and the Rumour; that's him, too, doing the famous drum part on Elvis Costello's "Watching the Detectives.")

They weren't remiss in paying homage to their influences: Fear and Whiskey includes a cover of Hank Williams'"Lost Highway," the 1985 Crime and Punishment Peel Sessions EP includes Merle Haggard's "(I'm Going Off Of The) Deep End," the 1986 album The Edge of the World includes a version of "Alone and Forsaken" which mashes up Hank Williams' original lyrics with the Velvet Underground's "Black Angel's Death Song," and in 1988 the Mekons and ex-Fall member Marc Riley collaborated on a tribute album to Johnny Cash, 'Til Things Are Brighter.

After four excellent albums in as many years on independent labels, the band had a brief brush with mainstream fame when they were signed by A&M Records in the late 1980s. In the film we see a giddy marketing promo done for A&M record pluggers, and a video for their song "Memphis, Egypt," that would have looked extremely strange on MTV (if it was ever aired). As Honeyman recounts in the movie, during the label's annual Christmas party all the new acts signed that year were announced—but the Mekons were somehow omitted from the list. It was an ominous sign of the amount of effort the label was going to put into promoting the band's new album, Rock 'n' Roll (which some of us still consider their best). As Honeyman says, "We left thinking, 'Back in the van.'"


After A&M unceremoniously dropped them, the band continued (and continued to change). They toured, participated in art installations, collaborated with author Kathy Acker (supplying bawdy sea shanties for performative readings of her 1996 novel Pussy, King of the Pirates), and periodically issued new albums. Angio's film has some remarkable performance footage of the Mekons over the years.

But "The Curse of the Mekons" (the title of their first post-A&M album) has continued to haunt the band to the present day. Their labels haven't adequately promoted their records, and critical raves somehow have never translated into robust album or ticket sales. At the beginning of Angio's film we see the band setting out on tour (loading their own instruments into the van; Langford says only half-jokingly that "We used to have a roadie, but he became too successful to work with us anymore.") In the middle of their set during the first show of the tour a classic Mekons moment occurs when they urge the crowd to come see them at the next night's show in Sheffield—only to learn from their fans that the gig has been cancelled ("There was an e-mail," the nonplussed band members are told).


Perhaps the most compelling sequence follows the writing sessions for their 2011 album Ancient and Modern. From a sentence in Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams ("He found himself, as he had hoped, afar and forlorn; he had strayed into outland and occult territory") we see the song "Afar and Forlorn" slowly take shape through the process of writing lyrics, rehearsing music, recording, and live performance. It's a stunning montage that takes perhaps two minutes in the movie, but spans at least a full year of real time. It makes you wonder just how long Angio spent shooting footage for the film; then again, the Mekons seem to inspire obsession in their fans and followers.

("Afar and Forlorn" is far from the only Mekons recording with a literary genesis; apart from the Kathy Acker project, the title of their 2000 album Journey to the End of the Night is taken from Céline's novel, Rock 'n' Roll's "Only Darkness Has The Power" is based on a passage in Paul Auster's The Locked Room, and Fear and Whiskey's "Flitcraft" on a parable told in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon. I'm sure there are many others. Perhaps that's why the Mekons can count writers such as Jonathan Franzen, Luc Sante, and Greil Marcus—all of whom appear in the film—among their fans.)

So Revenge of the Mekons transcends its genre in the way that the Mekons themselves transcend theirs: by combining familiar elements in continually surprising ways. Highly recommended.

For more information:

• Revenge of the Mekons official site 

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1. Michael Kaplan, "Punks on the Lost Highway,"Spin, October 1986, p. 12.

Richard Thaler was one of the inadvertent founders of the field of behavioral economics. I say "inadvertent" because it wasn't clear to Thaler or his colleagues exactly what he was doing when he started looking into what he called "The List": discrepancies he'd noted between the predictions of economic theory and the choices people actually make. Those discrepancies profoundly violated the principles of traditional economics—and, crucially, did so in ways that weren't attributable to random error.

Here's an example: Thaler gave half of the students in one of his Cornell classes a university coffee mug. The students with a mug were then asked to write down the minimum price at which they would sell it, and the students without a mug the maximum price at which they would buy one; sellers were then matched with buyers. According to classical economic theory, if the mugs were distributed randomly about half the students with a mug should value them less than students without one, and so roughly half the mugs should change hands.

That's not what happened—repeatedly. What Thaler found is that students with a mug—chosen randomly each time—generally valued it significantly more than students without one. On average only about 5% of the mugs changed hands, as opposed to the predicted 50%. That's a difference of an order of magnitude.

You may be thinking, "Who cares about a coffee mug?" But that's precisely the point: no one cares much, unless they already possess one. Simply owning a mug, even when they didn't pay for it, even when they had owned it for only a few minutes, made students value it more. This is a violation of a key tenet of rational choice economics, in which preferences (in this case, for owning or not owning a mug) are assumed to be stable.

The coffee mug experiment illustrated some key principles of the then-emerging field of behavioral economics—that is, economics that tries to take our observable behavior into account, instead of treating us like the super-rational, utility-maximizing, optimal-choice-making agents of traditional economic theory. (Thaler calls these theoretical beings "Econs.") The first principle is loss aversion: losses are more painful to us than gains are pleasurable—in fact, Thaler's colleagues Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky found that losses give us at least twice as much pain than gains of the same amount give us pleasure. (I've also written a post on Kahneman's fascinating book Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011).)

The second principle is status quo bias: we are resistant to change. We tend to stick with what's familiar or what requires the least effort, even when we recognize that there may be benefits (in the mug experiment, cash) if we're willing to change. Together, these behaviors result in what Thaler calls "the endowment effect": our tendency to value things we own more highly than things we don't—and more highly than things, including cash, that we could exchange them for.

The endowment effect depends on our ignoring what economists call "opportunity costs." As an example, imagine that you're a sports fan who has just been given a free pair of tickets to a key playoff game. You might be able to sell the tickets for $1500, but many fans would choose to go to the game—after all, the tickets were free, weren't they? To an economist, though, there's no difference between using free tickets worth $1500 to go to the game and paying $1500 out of pocket to go to the game, since you could have had that money if you had sold the tickets.

This example also illustrates the effects of framing on our choices. If a friend were to give you as a gift a bottle of wine they'd bought at auction for $150, you'd probably elect to drink it (on a suitably special occasion, of course). However, if you were asked whether you'd be willing to spend $150 out of pocket on a bottle of wine and then drink it, you might very well say no. Again, to a traditional economist there's no difference between the outcomes of the two scenarios—in both, if you choose to drink the wine you'd be a bit tipsier and $150 poorer than you might otherwise have been—and so your choice should remain consistent. It shouldn't matter how the scenario is framed.

That almost no one but an economist thinks this way, though, did not seem to bother economists for about two centuries. Instead, economic models that assumed hyper-rational behavior came to determine much policy and law. But it turns out that many of our actual behaviors are, as an economist would say, sub-optimal. The status quo bias, for example, means that when we are required to opt in to beneficial programs, such as employer-matched 401(k) accounts, too often we don't.

Thaler co-wrote a book with legal scholar Cass Sunstein entitled Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008), which used the insights of behavioral economics to argue that instead of requiring people to opt in to beneficial programs, we should use the status quo bias for good and instead require them to opt out. Changing the default option can radically change participation rates.

But, of course, there's no reason why the principles of behavioral economics can't be used for other purposes as well, and they are: by political groups, advertisers, and companies trying to shift your choices in ways beneficial to them. Misbehaving is an entertaining way to increase your awareness of how, and how easily, we can be manipulated. And with that knowledge, perhaps, we can try to make our choices—political, social, and economic—more conscious ones.

Update 5 Oct 2015: Thaler has created a Misbehaving website which includes outtakes (passages cut from the final manuscript), resources for learning more, "characters" (colleagues mentioned in the book), and a blog discussing real-world applications of behavioral economics.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ernst Lubitsch directed comedies that should be familiar to every lover of classic Hollywood. Among them are Ninotchka (1939), in which Soviet commissar Greta Garbo is seduced by decadent Paris and suave Melvyn Douglas; The Shop Around the Corner (1940), in which James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan fall in love with one another as anonymous pen pals, although neither realizes that their correspondent is actually an annoying co-worker; and To Be Or Not To Be (1942), Carole Lombard's final film, in which she plays an actress in Nazi-occupied Poland who uses her thespian skills to foil the Gestapo.

But a decade before he created "that late series of masterworks...which stands as one of the enduring glories of the American cinema," [1] Lubitsch had directed a series of films that brought to American movies the lighthearted but sophisticated sensibility of operetta—the famed "Lubitsch Touch." As LA Times critic Michael Wilmington once described Lubitsch's films, they are "at once elegant and ribald, sophisticated and earthy, urbane and bemused, frivolous yet profound." [2] What follows is a brief survey from our recent viewing of some of Lubitsch's early sound films.

The comedies

 
Trouble in Paradise (1932; written by Lubitsch and Samson Raphaelson, based on a play by Aladár László): When people speak of the "Lubitsch Touch," this is the kind of film they have in mind. Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins portray expert thieves masquerading as aristocrats, who find each other's duplicity romantically and professionally irresistible. Kay Francis plays a French parfumier who is their intended next victim, until Marshall discovers that she's already being robbed...by her accountant. His chivalrous feelings soon begin to develop into something more; can he steal from a woman he loves? Charles Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton provide their usually brilliant comic support. Lubitsch himself later wrote that "As for pure style, I think I have done nothing better or as good as Trouble in Paradise" [3]. It's tempting to agree with him; this is one of the greatest classic Hollywood comedies.


Design for Living (1933; written by Ben Hecht, based—very loosely—on the play by Noël Coward) revisits the love triangle at the heart of Trouble in Paradise, but reverses the genders. In bohemian Paris Miriam Hopkins plays the muse to painter Gary Cooper and playwright Frederic March. Edward Everett Horton is the hopelessly bourgeois husband Hopkins ultimately abandons for art and love; the film's ending, with its suggestion of an adulterous ménage à trois, was scandalous. I find that this film doesn't quite match the effervescence of Trouble in Paradise, mainly because of its earthbound male leads, but it's still very much worth seeing. Don't expect to hear much of Coward's dialogue, though.

The musicals

 
The Love Parade (1929; written by Guy Bolton and Ernest Vajda, based on the play Le Prince Consort by Jules Chancel and Leon Xanrof) is a film of many firsts: it was the first sound film directed by Lubitsch, and it was the first film musical to integrate the songs into the narrative rather than staging them as separate numbers. It was also the first movie role of a moderately successful Broadway actress named Jeanette MacDonald. Her co-star was a French music-hall performer who had appeared in one other Hollywood musical, Maurice Chevalier.

You may feel, as I did, that the names Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier in a movie's credits are not enticements to viewing. I thought of her as the increasingly implausible ingénue of a series of often-parodied musicals with the bland Nelson Eddy in the late 30s and early 40s. And I knew Chevalier mainly from his creepy performance as an aged roué in Gigi (1958), and from a sequence in Marcel Ophuls'The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) in which, accused of collaboration during WWII, he shifts uncomfortably in front of the camera as he makes an unconvincing denial.

But in the Lubitsch musicals, I encountered something quite different from my preconceptions of both of these performers. In contrast to her image in many of her later films, MacDonald is often photographed by Lubitsch wearing sheer negligées or clinging Travis Banton gowns. She sings in a high soprano with a tight vibrato—not a particularly sensuous sound, at least to my ears—but the lyrics and settings can be quite suggestive.

In MacDonald's first appearance in The Love Parade, she's reluctantly awakened from a "wonderful, gorgeous" dream, caresses herself, sighs, and hugs her pillow (not the only time pillows will be human surrogates in a Lubitsch film). Dressed only in a filmy negligée, she then sings of her "Dream Lover" (music by Victor Schertzinger, lyrics by Clifford Grey).

MacDonald is Queen Louise of Sylvania, whose courtiers are anxious to get her married. Chevalier is Count Renard, a womanizing attaché to Sylvania's Parisian embassy, who is recalled after a scandal involving the ambassador's wife. The Queen is intrigued rather than angered by the Count's reputation, though, and soon develops romantic feelings for him.

These films were made before Chevalier's Gallic charm curdled into Gallic smarm. He and MacDonald have excellent comic and romantic chemistry, as shown in "Anything to Please the Queen":



Louise and Renard marry, but he quickly discovers that as the Queen's consort he has no real power or function. Chafing at his subordinate role, he threatens to leave her unless he is treated like a king, and the couple and the kingdom are thrown into crisis.

The Count's demand to make the decisions for the powerful and independent Queen Louise is the most dated thing about The Love Parade, but in other ways it can seem remarkably modern. The conventional view of early sound films is that they were severely constrained by the limits of the new technology: cameras were placed in soundproof boxes, and due to the fixed microphones actors had to remain in place while speaking. Although The Love Parade doesn't always avoid a certain staginess, the camera zooms and pans a good deal, and there's a Busby Berkeley-like "March of the Grenadiers" number.

And it has to be said that the film's sexual mores aren't entirely prehistoric. When Louise first meets Renard, he offers to remain by her side "from morning to night"; after their reconciliation, he makes the offer again, but she suggests that instead he should stay with her "from night to morning." The frank acknowledgement of her desire and the lack of sexual hypocrisy are characteristic of Lubitsch's Pre-Code films.

With its intimacy, quick pace, racy dialogue and narratively-integrated songs, the film was unlike any other musical of the era. And audiences responded: it was a huge hit, rescued Paramount Studios' financial fortunes, and made both MacDonald and Chevalier into major stars.


Monte Carlo (1930; written by Ernest Vajda, based on plays by Hans Müller-Einigen and Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland and a story by Booth Tarkington) was Lubitsch's follow-up to The Love Parade. Countess Helene (MacDonald) is a runaway bride fleeing her wedding to the priggish Duke Otto (Claud Allister) for the third time. She takes an express train to Monte Carlo, where in a bid to become financially independent she gambles recklessly and loses everything. In the casino she's spotted by Count Rudolph (Jack Buchanan), who is intrigued by this mysterious and daring beauty.

Rudolph later encounters a man who tells him that he's seen the Countess in the morning, dressed only in her negligée, hair tousled…Rudolph is crestfallen and jealous until he finds out that the man he's speaking with is the Countess's hairdresser. Rudolph then bribes him to become his replacement, "Rudy," in order to insinuate himself into Helene's life and heart.

The plan works, and the Countess is falling in love with Rudy, until her maid (Zasu Pitts) reminds her of the incompatibility of their social stations. Helene rejects the man she thinks is a humble hairdresser just as Duke Otto shows up to retrieve her. Financially desperate, she's on the verge of once again agreeing to marry Otto when she attends an opera whose plot exactly parallels her situation. The opera ends unhappily, with the central couple separated forever, and the Countess begins to reconsider her rejection of Rudolph...

Alas, the seemingly effortless "Lubitsch Touch" required just the right combination of ingredients to succeed, and in Monte Carlo the recipe is off. Fatally for the movie's charm, it features Buchanan as the romantic hero rather than Chevalier. (If Buchanan looks and sounds vaguely familiar, he was later to play director Jeffrey Cordova in the Fred Astaire-Cyd Charisse musical The Band Wagon (1947)). Buchanan's leering smile lacks warmth, and he's not nearly as dashing a figure as Chevalier. And although Richard Whiting and W. Franke Harling's music was a hit at the time, I found it to be forgettable, with Leo Robin's lyrics often straining too hard to be clever. It doesn't help that the disjunction between the fantasy world of the super-rich in the film and the looming reality of the Great Depression is so glaring. Better things were to come.


The Smiling Lieutenant (1931; written by Samson Raphaelson and Ernest Vajda, based on the operetta Ein Walzertraum by Oscar Straus, Leopold Jacobson and Felix Dörmann): After his experience with the uncharismatic Buchanan, Lubitsch must have realized that Chevalier was a much better leading man. His next filmfeatures Chevalier as the dashing Lieutenant Niki von Preyn, whose smile and wink at his girlfriend Franzi (Claudette Colbert), the leader of an all-girl cabaret orchestra, is intercepted by the sheltered Anna, Princess of Flausenthurm (Miriam Hopkins). Anna soon convinces herself that she is in love, and decides that she wants to marry the unwitting Niki—and what Anna wants, her father the king arranges. Niki wakes up one morning to discover that he's now Anna's prince consort.

But he refuses to have anything to do with her, and continues to have assignations with Franzi. Anna, hurt and frustrated, has Franzi brought to the palace so that she can confront her. Really, though, she wants to see this alluring Other Woman and learn the secret of attracting Niki's attentions. In a burst of sisterly sympathy for the unhappy Anna, Franzi gives the frumpy princess the answer in "Jazz up your lingerie" (music by Oscar Straus with lyrics by Clifford Grey):



The Smiling Lieutenant is soufflé-light, and wouldn't succeed if it weren't for its delightful cast. Hopkins went on to star in Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living; Colbert would work with Lubitsch again, along with Design for Living's Gary Cooper, in Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938); and Chevalier went on to reunite with Jeanette MacDonald in Lubitsch's next musical project, One Hour With You.


One Hour With You (written by Samson Raphaelson, based on the play Only a Dream by Lothar Schmidt) was a musical remake of Lubitsch's silent film The Marriage Circle (1924). Chevalier is a Parisian doctor, Andre, and MacDonald is his wife Colette. Their marriage is happy until Colette's married friend Mitzi (Genevieve Tobin) makes a play for Andre, who, despite his passionate love for Colette, is sorely tempted:



The music is by Oscar Straus, with lyrics by Leo Robin; by the way, the spyglass effect isn't Lubitsch's, but was unfortunately superimposed on this clip by the folks who uploaded it.

When Andre seems to find Mitzi's charms irresistible, the couple's predatory friend Adolph decides that he will offer to console the unhappy Colette. In her hurt and anger she seems willing to entertain his suggestion...but has Andre actually been unfaithful after all?

One Hour With You plays up its own theatricality, as characters directly address the camera and sometimes speak, as well as sing, in rhyme. I think it's the best of Lubitsch's Pre-Code musicals, in part because there are real emotional dilemmas at its heart. Although it was later nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, it was not a huge financial success, and Lubitsch decided to return to the spectacle (and the unreality) of the world of operetta for his next film.


The Merry Widow (1934; written by Ernest Vajda and Samson Raphaelson, based on the operetta by Franz Lehár, Victor Leon and Leo Stein): If The Love Parade was a film of firsts, The Merry Widow was a film of lasts: it was Lubitsch's final film with MacDonald and with Chevalier, and it was his final musical for almost a decade and a half (he died of a heart attack after 8 days of shooting on That Lady in Ermine (1948)).  It also represented the end of an era in which sexually suggestive dialogue and situations could easily make it past the censors: several minutes of cuts were demanded by Joseph Breen's new Production Code Administration before the film was approved for release.

The merry widow of the title is Sonia (MacDonald), who owns 52% of the kingdom of Marshovia (which bears a certain resemblance to Sylvania and Flausenthurm). When, after her year of mourning is over, Sonia leaves for Paris, King Achmed (George Barbier) becomes concerned that control of the Marshovian economy may fall into foreign hands. He decides to send a loyal subject to woo and marry her, and when the king finds the notorious ladies' man Count Danilo (Chevalier) in the boudoir of the Queen (Una Merkel), his choice is obvious. He dispatches Danilo to Paris to carry out his mission under the watchful eye of Ambassador Popoff (Edward Everett Horton).

After Danilo and Sonia meet and flirt at Maxim's, she discovers the marriage plot, and will have nothing more to do with Danilo; meanwhile, Danilo has truly fallen in love with Sonia, and is put on trial in Marshovia for refusing to go through with the scheme.

The music is by Lehár, adapted by Richard Rodgers with English lyrics by Lorenz Hart.

Of course, we know how everything will turn out in the end, but the plot is mainly an excuse for the lavish  (and Oscar-winning) sets by Cedric Gibbons and Fredric Hope, a spectacular Maxim's can-can number, gowns by Adrian, a seemingly infinite number of couples dancing to the famous Merry Widow waltz, and the still-effective MacDonald-Chevalier chemistry.

But it wasn't enough. With the advent of Busby Berkeley musicals like 42nd Street (1932) and Gold Diggers of 1933, and with the dawning of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers partnership, movie musicals had gotten jazzier. Perhaps the operetta-based musicals favored by Lubitsch had begun to seem old-fashioned. In any case, The Merry Widow was not a financial success. For the next several years Lubitsch would take a step back from directing to focus on producing. When he returned to directing, he created the great comedies mentioned in the first paragraph of this post, but he would never complete another musical.

Trouble in Paradise and Design for Living are available from the Criterion Collection, as arethe four Pre-Code Lubitsch musicals (The Love Parade, Monte Carlo, The Smiling Lieutenant, and One Hour WIth You) in an Eclipse Series box set. The Merry Widow is available in a restored version from Warner Archives/TCM.

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1. Dave Kehr, "The Lubitsch Touch, in Song: Warner Archive Restores ‘The Merry Widow’," New York Times, June 20, 2013: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/movies/warner-archive-restores-the-merry-widow.html

2. Michael Wilmington, "LACMA Marks Lubitsch Centenary," Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1992:
http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-29/entertainment/ca-78_1_ernst-lubitsch

3. As quoted in Herbert Weinberg, The Lubitsch Touch: A Critical Study. New York: Dutton, 1968, p. 286.

They have a complicated and highly choreographed plan to steal your money and three hours of your time. You know when and how they will strike, and yet you still can't escape. They are invulnerable (to criticism) and elude all pursuers (at the box office). And, they will inevitably return. Yes, I'm talking about the movie series Dhoom.

I hadn't thought that I would write anything about the Dhoom movies—even though, like much of the population of the planet, I've seen all three of them (so far)—both because it felt like too much had already been said, and that when it comes to movies like these words don't really matter. You know after seeing five seconds of trailer and hearing the first notes of the theme music whether you're going to see the next Dhoom or not. In that determination, any opinion I might express is meaningless.

But as I watched Dhoom 3 (2013) recently, I realized that there was an aspect of the Dhoom series that I don't think has been explored before. Of course, many people have traced the homages and borrowings of the series, but I think one key influence has been missed.

The Dhoom series has understandably been compared to the James Bond films. And like the Bond films, the Dhoom series has instantly recognizable theme music, lots of chase scenes, and ambiguous women who are (at least initially) allied with the villain.

But unlike the Bond films, whose villains with rare early exceptions (Dr. No, Rosa Klebb, Goldfinger) all seem to blur into one another, the Dhoom series is increasingly centered on the anti-hero. So far played by John Abraham, Hrithik Roshan, and Aamir Khan, the Dhoom villains are far more charismatic, and have far more screen time, than the pursuing good guys: police detective Jai (Abhishek Bachchan) and his buffoonish buddy Ali (Uday Chopra).

Jai and Ali, outwitted again

In their focus on the anti-hero, the Dhoom films are actually far more like another series: the Fantômas novels and films. Like the Dhoom villains, Fantômas is a criminal mastermind, the master of a thousand disguises, who returns in each installment to commit ever-more astonishing crimes. And like the Dhoom villains, Fantômas has two nemeses who pursue him relentlessly, but ineffectually: the police detective Juve and his younger journalist partner Fandor. Finally, as in the Dhoom series, there are ambiguous women with divided loyalties: Fantômas' daughter, Hélène, and his lover, Lady Beltham.

But the first Fantômas novels and films were produced nearly a century before Jai and Ali jumped on their racing bikes. Despite being created in the pre-WWI era, and despite having origins in sensationalistic 19th century fiction, the Fantômas novels and films are surprisingly modern. In his book Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Paris (University of California Press, 2000), historian Robin Walz has identified four distinguishing elements of the Fantômas series:

1. Indeterminate identities: Fantômas takes on multiple disguises or identities over the course of a given episode, and in fact has no fixed identity. I don't want to give away too much about Dhoom 3 (although I think I'm the last person in the world to see it), but a key plot point involves disguise and impersonation.


2. The swerve: The anti-hero can't be thwarted or captured, even when he announces where and when he will strike; he seems to appear and disappear at will. Fantômas escapes at the end of each novel and film; in the Dhoom series, the anti-hero is never brought to justice. Even when, in Dhoom 2, the villain apparently dies, we learn that his death has been faked to throw the police off his trail.


3. Truquage, or gadgetry: The Fantômas novels are filled with the latest technology, which Fantômas uses to his advantage in staging his elaborate crimes. The same is true of the Dhoom films; in Dhoom 3 the technology is either theatrical (the villain Sahir is a magician and circus performer in a Cirque du Soleil-type spectacle) or centered on the motorcycles that he uses to escape the scenes of his crimes. In one spectacular chase scene, an apparently cornered Sahir rides his motorcycle up and off the end of a raised drawbridge over the Chicago River; as he plummets towards the water, his bike transforms into a jet ski. And when Jai commandeers a boat and races after Sahir, it turns out that the jet ski can also function as a one-man submarine, and then again as a motorcycle. What chance do the hapless police have against such ingenuity?


4. Spectacular criminality: Fantômas's crimes are not motivated by ordinary criminal incentives, such as getting rich. Instead, Fantômas wants his deeds to be as spectacular and shocking as possible. He mocks the police as he plans, executes and gets away with his crimes despite all their precautions. In the Dhoom series, too, the crimes and escapes are elaborately planned, highly choreographed, and designed for maximum sensationalism.


Of course, there are also differences between the series. Fantômas is a shadowy figure, often acting through others; his lair is never seen, and his backstory is never revealed. It's telling that his signature costume, the cagoule (hood), completely masks his features. The Dhoom films spend far more time focussed on the villain than on the supposed heroes. In Dhoom 3, for example, we learn in detail why Sahir repeatedly targets the "Western Bank of Chicago." Clearly, there are super-criminals in Chicago; it's just that (to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht) most of them own banks rather than rob them.

Another difference between the series is that Fantômas' crimes have a gruesome human cost: he wrecks passenger trains, puts sulfuric acid in department-store perfume dispensers, and sinks the world's biggest ocean liner (the "Gigantic") with the loss of everyone on board. In the Dhoom films, the crimes don't involve mass murder, but clever heists. Despite the lengthy chase scenes, explosions, car crashes and so on, no one ever seems to get hurt. In Dhoom 3, after he robs the bank Sahir doesn't even keep the money—he announces his theft by sending millions of dollars fluttering down over the streets of Chicago.

And it's impossible to imagine Fantômas serenading his love interest on the streets of Chicago, as Aamir Khan does Katrina Kaif in Dhoom 3:



Dhoom 3 can be pretty entertaining for about three-quarters of its running time if you're in the right mood, as long as you don't think too hard about its premise, have a high tolerance for chase scenes, can ignore multiple geographical and cultural incoherencies, don't care that the two women characters have about four lines of dialogue between them, and aren't concerned about its multiple borrowings from other film franchises. But towards the end writer/director Vijay Krishna Acharya seems to exhaust his ideas, or perhaps just his budget, and wraps up the plot over-hastily.

Certainly, to audiences in India and worldwide none of that mattered: Dhoom 3 quickly became the highest-grossing film in Bollywood history (without adjusting for inflation), although by some reports it has since yielded the top spot to another Aamir Khan film, PK (2014).

And inevitably, Dhoom 4 has already been announced. Even Dhoom 5 has already been anticipated, in Om Shanti Om (2007); in the "Dhoom 5" trailer in that film the focus on the anti-hero has been taken to its logical extreme, with the vestigial Jai being entirely eliminated. Can Dhoom 19 be far behind?

Name a woman writer from the early 19th century:

• whose novels were at first published anonymously;
• who, though she herself never married, wrote novels about young women negotiating the pleasures and perils of courtship and matrimony;
• whose first published novel was issued when she was 35;
• whose second published novel begins, "It is a truth universally acknowledged…" 

Think you've got the answer? Here are some more clues:

• her most famous work features an impetuous and frivolous young woman who unwisely elopes with a dashing but impecunious officer, and a more sensible heroine who sees the possibility of her own romantic happiness becoming ever more elusive;
• another of her novels features a well-meaning but mistake-prone young woman who is given social, moral and romantic advice by a family friend—who, of course, is secretly in love with her himself;
• one of her young heroines falls passionately in love with a man who seems to share her ardent sensibility, but who turns out to be a fortune-hunter who abandons her to marry an heiress. Deeply hurt, she falls into a crushing despondency. As she slowly recovers, she comes to appreciate and accept, if not, perhaps, entirely return, the calmer but more steadfast love of an older man.

The answer is given away in the title of this post: it's the Scottish writer Susan Edmonstone Ferrier. Ferrier obviously knew and admired the novels of Jane Austen, as the plot summaries above suggest; echoes of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Emma (1815) are especially apparent. But although she is indebted to Austen for elements of her plots, Ferrier is also a rewarding novelist in her own right.

Part of what is original in Ferrier is her setting: each of her three novels—Marriage (1818), Inheritance (1824), and Destiny (1831)—mainly takes place in the Scottish Highlands. Ferrier's young heroines don't exist in isolation, but are placed within interdependent communities, anticipating by several decades writers such as Anthony Trollope and George Eliot. She surrounds her lovers with interfering parents, crotchety old lairds, and gossipy maiden aunts; the aunts are Scottish (although less subtle) versions of the sorts of comic characters so memorably created decades later in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford. And the action takes place, not in tidy English villages, but in vividly described Highland landscapes of rugged beauty.

Ferrier is also notable for the degree of religiosity in her novels: the characters we are intended to think best, both men and women, have deep faith, while the shallow, selfish, and duplicitous ones are generally irreligious. The novels' moralism extends to their narrators, who sometimes pass explicit judgments on the characters. In her third and final novel, Destiny, for example, Reginald, up until now the hero of the book and betrothed to his gentle childhood sweetheart Edith, makes a secret declaration of love to the worldly, dazzling, but superficial Florinda:

And again he pressed her hand to his lips, and a long silence ensued ; each seemed as though they feared to break the spell which blinded their hearts and senses to the self-delusions, which all unregulated minds, and selfish spirits, so passionately love to indulge. [1]

A more subtle writer such as Austen might only imply, rather than state, her own attitude towards her creations in order to suggest, rather than dictate, the reader's. But occasional over-explicitness aside, Ferrier is full of insight into human nature, and excels at constructing both comic and dramatic situations for her characters.

From Marriage:

A dispute here ensued. Henry swore she should not steal into her father's house as long as she was his wife. The lady insisted that she should go to her brother's fête when she was invited; and the altercation ended as altercations commonly do, leaving both parties more wedded to their own opinion than at first. [2]

From Inheritance:

Mr Adam Ramsay was a man of a fair character and strong understanding, but particular temper and unpleasing manners—with a good deal of penetration, which (as is too often the case) served no other purpose than to disgust him with his own species. [3]

From Destiny:

Mr M'Dow's principal object in this world was self...He was no dissembler ; for a selfish dissembler is aware, that, in order to please, one must appear to think of others, and forget self. This fictitious politeness he had neither the tact to acquire, not the cunning to feign. [4]

If Ferrier's keen observations are reminiscent of Austen, her contemporary, she also makes use of conventions from the 18th-century novel of sentiment as exemplified by writers such as Fanny Burney and Samuel Richardson. Heroines faced with an emotional crisis are likely to fall into an insensible swoon; incognito heroes give voice to utterances such as "Think of me as one whom a single rash, imprudent, but I may add, guiltless act, has divested of home, friends, and country ; but believe me when I say, the time is not far distant when I may again claim them all." [5]

But it is Ferrier's dry wit and her vivid characters—some, at least according to her letters to her friend and collaborator Charlotte Clavering, based on real-life models—that will recommend her books to modern readers. Marriage is by common consensus Ferrier's best work, but the others are not greatly inferior to it. In my view, the books all have the same shortcomings and similar strengths, and the former are far outweighed by the latter.

 
Marriage: The beautiful but petulant Lady Juliana is intended by her father to marry the aged Duke of L—, and her father speaks with unusual frankness about the motives for the match:

'I'll suffer no daughter of mine to play the fool with her heart, indeed! She shall marry for the purpose for which matrimony was ordained amongst people of birth—that is, for the aggrandisement of her family, the extending of their political influence—for becoming, in short, the depository of their mutual interest. These are the only purposes for which persons of rank ever think of marriage.' [6]

Facing a forced marriage to a very wealthy but much older man, Lady Juliana elopes with her handsome but penniless lover Henry Douglas. They wind up at his family's rural Scottish estate, far from the refinements of London. Both regret the decision to marry almost immediately—but not before she conceives twin daughters, Adelaide and Mary. Lady Juliana separates from her husband and goes back to London with the infant Adelaide, who grows to young adulthood under her mother's influence. The neglected Mary is left behind with Henry's brother and his wife in Scotland, where she is taught by precept and example to be kind, thoughtful, selfless and devout. (This isn't just a simple contrast between the evil city and the virtuous countryside; we learn that Mary's foster mother, Alicia Douglas, spent many years in London, while a number of the Highland characters are shown to be frivolous, self-involved or otherwise difficult.)

Adelaide—beautiful, polite, but cold and vacant—faces the same fateful choice as her mother: marriage to a handsome but impoverished lover, or to an elderly but fabulously wealthy duke. Will she repeat her mother's mistake, or make her own?

Meanwhile, Mary loves, and is loved by, Colonel Lennox, a man of small fortune. But

both were aware, that wealth is a relative thing, and that the positively rich are not those who have the largest possessions, but those who have the fewest vain or selfish desires to gratify. From these they were happily exempt. Both possessed too many resources in their own minds to require the stimulus of spending money to rouse them into enjoyment, or give them additional importance in the eyes of the world... [7]

But her mother opposes her choice, and warns her against love-marriage. Will Mary be able to reconcile her mother to her choice and find happiness with the man she loves?


Inheritance: Gertrude St Clair is the presumptive heir to the fortune of Lord Rossville. She is loved by two men: openly by the elegant but mercenary Colonel Delmour, and secretly by the kind, sensible Mr Lyndsay, whom she views as an older brother and looks to for guidance and protection.

Colonel Delmour certainly was in love—as much so as it was in his nature to be—but, as has been truly said, how many noxious ingredients enter into the composition of what is sometimes called love! Pride—vanity—ambition—self-interest, all these had their share in the admiration which Colonel Delmour accorded to the beauties and the graces of Miss St Clair. In any situation of life, his taste would have led him to admire her—but it was only as the heiress of Rossville his pride would have permitted him to have loved her. [8]

Each of Ferrier's novels features an example of a bad mother, but Gertrude's, the self-involved, self-dramatizing and emotionally manipulative Mrs St Clair, is possibly the worst of the lot. Not only is she a very difficult personality, she is harboring a secret that could destroy Gertrude's prospects. And when the threatening, mysterious Lewiston, believed drowned in a shipwreck, returns as if from the dead, Gertrude's future—both financial and romantic—is thrown into crisis.

What is the nature of Lewiston's hold over Gertrude's mother and herself? And will Gertrude recognize the true natures of the debonair but duplicitous Colonel Delmour and the reticent but sincere Mr Lyndsay in time?


Destiny is Ferrier's most elaborately plotted novel. As children in rural Scotland, Edith Malcom, her brother Norman, her stepsister Florinda, and their cousins Ronald and Reginald are inseparable playmates. As they grow older, though, fate divides them: Norman dies of a sudden illness, Florinda is taken to London by her mother, Ronald is lost at sea, and Reginald prepares to head out on the Grand Tour; only Edith will be left behind.

Reginald and Edith have been sweethearts since childhood, and on the eve of his departure he gives her a ring as a symbol of their betrothal. But while he's abroad he encounters Florinda, whom he hasn't seen for nearly a decade. She has become a flirtatious and worldly beauty, and Reginald becomes infatuated with her. When he returns to Scotland to fulfill his promise to Edith, Florinda follows, and Reginald is faced with a painful choice: he must betray the sweet-natured Edith or renounce the dazzling Florinda. To complicate matters, a handsome naval hero (shades of Persuasion), one Mr Melcombe, begins to pay marked attention to Edith—but his past is shrouded in secrecy.

Destiny was Ferrier's last novel, in part due perhaps to her failing eyesight, and in part because she made "'two attempts to write something else, but could not please herself, and would not publish anything.'" [9] She died in 1854.

'How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of the world,' is a feeling that must be more or less experienced by every one who has feeling enough to distinguish one sensation from another, and leisure enough for ennui. There are people, it is well known, who have no feelings, and there are others who have not the time to feel ; but, alas! there are many whose misfortune it is to have feeling and leisure, and who have time to be nervous—have time to be discontented—have time to be unhappy—have time to feel ill used by the world—have time to weary of pleasure in every shape—to weary of men, women, and children—to weary of books, grave and witty—to weary of authors, and even of authoresses... [10]

If you enjoy writers such as Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, you are not likely to weary of Susan Ferrier.

A note on the illustrations: With the exception of the portrait of Ferrier, which is a rendering of a miniature by Robert Thorburn, the illustrations in this post are by Nelly Erichsen. All are taken from the 1894 edition of Ferrier's novels published by J. M. Dent & Co., London, and were downloaded from the Open Library.

--------

1. Susan Ferrier, Destiny, Dent, 1894, vol. II, ch. xlvii
2. —, Marriage, Oxford World's Classics, 1986, vol. I, ch. XXI
2. —, Inheritance, Dent, 1894, vol. I, ch. xvii
4. —, Destiny, vol. I, ch. v
5. —, Destiny, vol. II, ch. xci 
6. —, Marriage, vol. I, ch. I
7. —, Marriage, vol. III, ch. XX
8. —, Inheritance, vol. I, ch. xxxii
9. Quoted from an unnamed source in R. Brimley Johnson's introduction to Susan Ferrier, Marriage, Dent, 1894, p. xiv
11. Ferrier, Inheritance, vol. I, ch x

Another in the occasional series of my favorite recent articles, posts, etc. from around the web:

Metropolis (dir: Fritz Lang, 1927)

1. Stop the robot apocalypse

There's a branch of moral philosophy called "effective altruism." William MacAskill is one of its founders, and he's written a book called Doing Good Better (Gotham, 2015), recently reviewed by Amia Srinivasan in the London Review of Books (24 September 2015).

MacAskill's basic argument is that you can do more good in the world by becoming rich and philanthropic than by making (in his view) pointless self-sacrificing gestures like becoming a schoolteacher in the inner city, a doctor in rural Kenya, or a librarian anywhere.

His calculation depends on two main arguments. First, the idea of impact: the greatest good we can do for others is that which will make the biggest improvement in the lives of the largest number of people. Second, the replacement theory: if you don't become a teacher, someone else will, who will be almost as good at it as you are. But if you don't become an investment banker, someone else will, who may not use their wealth for as much good as you would. In other words, philanthropy—paying other people to do good on your behalf—is better than doing good yourself.

That's not the only strange conclusion these arguments lead to. Taking the replacement theory first, it would seem to justify doing harm in one's daily life, as long as you compensate with sufficient charitable giving. By this logic, in a disaster Bill Gates should trample the rest of us to death to escape (and we should let him) because his survival will have so much more of a charitable impact than ours. The comparison that occurs to me is carbon offsets: charitable giving is like a moral offset. And as with, say, donating to the Nature Conservancy because you drive a gas-guzzling carbon emitter, it can be difficult to determine whether the good done by the charitable gift actually outweighs the harm of the daily activity.

But the idea of impact gets really odd: if doing the greatest good means having the biggest impact on the lives of the largest number of people, then working on ameliorating or preventing future species-threatening catastrophes--a large asteroid impact, say--is more important than helping individuals who are alive right now. And the greatest existential threat to humanity, in the eyes of many people in the tech industry? Robot apocalypse.

A robot Björk in "All is full of love"

2. Superintelligence and human insignificance

In his recent book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford, 2014), NIck Bostrom speculates on a posthuman future in which superintelligent machines colonize the universe. Sure, superintelligent robots might enslave or destroy us, but in Bostrom's view they also might ensure the essential immortality of human consciousness.

But this scenario actually makes the effective altruism paradox worse. As Raffi Khatchadourian writes in the New Yorker,

Imagining one of his utopian scenarios—trillions of digital minds thriving across the cosmos—he reasons that, if there is even a one-per-cent chance of this happening, the expected value of reducing an existential threat by a billionth of a billionth of one per cent would be worth a hundred billion times the value of a billion present-day lives.

That's a lot of "billions," but the message is clear: the future, especially the remote future, is vastly more important than the present.

There are a few things to say about this idea. First, robots colonizing the universe is only a "utopian scenario" in the most hopeful view. Second, it looks to me like the probability of humans eliminating ourselves through environmental destruction, nuclear conflagration, or bioengineered plague is higher than the likelihood that we will create "trillions of digital minds thriving across the cosmos." Thirdly, before they become repositories for our consciousnesses, intelligent machines are likely to put us out of work, creating a mass unemployment crisis that may itself have catastrophic consequences. Finally, the "billionth of a billionth of one per cent" standard for action against an existential threat seems laughably low—I think you might reach it when you take out the recycling.

A local business and an adjacent apartment building catch fire Sunday morning

3. Kicked to the curb by altruism

So if present-day humans are insignificant, and if getting rich so that you can make larger effective charitable donations is an imperative, then it is only logical for those who own property to forcibly remove lower-income residents in order to raise real-estate values and increase their own wealth—a process I see happening all around me. (And in a nicely closed feedback loop, evictions create the need for more altruism, which creates the need for greater wealth, ad infinitum.)

As Neil Smith points out in The New Urban Frontier (Routledge, 1996), it is in the interest of those who own property to raise rents. In Alex Pareene's Bookforum review of DW Gibson's oral history of gentrification, The Edge Becomes the Center (Overlook Press, 2015)—a sequel of sorts to Smith's book—he writes that landlords and developers:

• would rather leave a building empty than rent to the poor,
• deliberately thin housing stock by converting multi-unit buildings into single-household dwellings,
• destroy the earning power of middle-class renters by pushing city planning departments to rezone manufacturing areas as residential, because manufacturers put their capital into expanding their businesses rather than using it to raise the value of their real estate,
• displace lower-income renters (you and me) in favor of the global rich who can pay what the market will bear—even as that increases radically from year to year.

More market-rate development doesn't redress these issues, it just creates more "ultraluxurious pieds-à-terre." Pareene writes,

The pro-development crowd also likes to remind us that “people don’t have the right to live wherever they want”—and that if certain of them can’t afford “hip” neighborhoods anymore, that hardly rises to the level of a tragedy worthy of government intervention. Of course, it’s always been the case in America that certain people have the right to live wherever they want—that’s the right that allowed the republic to stretch from sea to shining sea—but let’s concede the point. Once you’re there, though, and once you’ve established yourself in a community, it seems profoundly antithetical to any intelligible notion of liberty that you should be forced to leave merely because someone else shows up with a briefcase full of more cash than you can put together on short notice.

4. The inevitability of climate change

If combatting gentrification is almost impossible because it's in the interest of rich property owners and the city governments which regulate them, combatting increasing carbon emissions is almost impossible because it's in the interest of all of us—at least, in the short term. Increased carbon emissions directly correlate with economic growth, something that all nations seek to ensure. If the arguments of "effective altruism" lead to the radical discounting of the present in favor of the future, failure to act on carbon emissions radically discounts the future in favor of the present.

The United Nations climate change conference will take place in Paris in late November and early December, and many journalists are writing hopefully about its possible outcomes. Unlike most journalists, though, David Campbell has actually read the documents being submitted as a basis for a potential agreement at the conference. And as he writes in the LRB, the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change enshrined a distinction between developed and developing countries which will doom any attempt to reduce global carbon emissions for at least the next several decades.

Currently the major industrializing countries—including China and India—are classified as developing countries. And as a matter of "climate justice" (rather, economic justice), the burden of reducing emissions has been placed on developed countries. It is impossible to argue with the culpability of the developed world for getting us into this mess—and the US Congress has famously never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for developed nations to reduce their emissions. US emissions fell slightly between 2007 and 2012, but that was due to the Great Recession, and they have begun to climb again. And the per capita carbon emissions of the US are more than twice those of China, and about ten times those of India.

However, China is now the largest absolute carbon emitter by a factor of nearly two. (The US is in second place, followed by India, Russia, and Japan.) China has submitted to the conference its 'Intended Nationally Determined Contributions' (INDC) document, which declares that it will continue to increase its annual emissions until at least 2030. India's INDC does not even mention a future target year for peak emissions.

India's Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Prakash Javadekar, said in a recent interview:

We are asking the developed world to vacate the carbon space to accommodate us. That carbon space demand is climate justice. It’s our right as a nation. It’s our right as people of India, and we want that carbon space.

Only, there is no "carbon space." In 2013, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time since about 15 million years ago, when seas were at least 80 feet higher than they are now. We are in uncharted territory.


5. Procrastination

With individuals, as with nations, the ultimate consequences of procrastination tend to get worse with passing time. So why are most of us still prone to put off necessary action? Forget working to prevent climate change or robot apocalypse—I can't even clear off my desk.

The tendency to procrastinate is present in all of us to some degree. However, for some it is so powerful an impulse that it becomes impossible to hold a job or maintain a romantic relationship. Clearly procrastination has deep roots which can be difficult or impossible to overcome rationally. As Robert Hanks writes about his own almost crippling levels of procrastination in his heartrending essay "On putting things off" (LRB, 10 September 2015),

The broken promises, the unprofessionalism, the evasions and quasi-explanations you offer to others, the outright lies you tell yourself: better leave this till after the weekend; I’ll have it finished by the end of Tuesday; they won’t mind getting it on Wednesday...Reading as a way of putting off thinking; thinking as a way of putting off feeling.