Author Archives: Lloydville

THEY LIVE BY NIGHT

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This film has to rank with Erich Von Stroheim's Blind Husbands and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane as one of the most astonishing directorial debuts in the history of American cinema.  It's one of the greatest of all films noirs yet also a film that looks forward beyond noir to the various traditions that would supplant it.

Like Out Of the Past, They Live By Night
is at its core a love story.  Both are hopeless love stories, but
for different reasons.  In the former, fate and moral confusion
suggest a universe in which men and women can no longer co-operate —
in which love and passion have become recipes for disaster.  In
the latter, the love at the film's center is the only good thing left
in a world that has become bewildering and malevolent.

You could say that Out Of the Past
represents the worldview of the generation of men who fought WWII and
came home with a feeling that the world didn't make sense anymore — that
there was a permanent disconnect between the central experience of
their lives and the society they now had to become a part of.  They Live By Night,
by contrast, represents the worldview of the next generation, which
would have to live with the consequences of this post-war moral
bewilderment.

Noir historian Eddie Muller, among others, has pointed out that the Granger and O'Donnell characters in They Live By Night
are in some sense models for the Dean and Wood characters in Nicholas Ray's later Rebel Without A Cause — that in his first film Ray was starting to invent the idea of the 50s movie teenager.  The Granger and O'Donnell characters are not, in fact, teenagers, but they are as innocent and bewildered as teenagers
— and their “rebellion” is just as unconscious, as instinctive, as the
rebellion in the great teen dramas of the 50s, best exemplified in
Rebel Without A Cause.

In 1947, when Ray made They Live By Night, the noir crime
thriller was the only kind of film that allowed a Hollywood director to
deal explicitly with the kind of alienation and despair that Ray
clearly saw as major elements of post-war American life.  By the
time he made Rebel Without A Cause,
in 1955, he realized that he could deal with these elements in the context of
ordinary American middle-class life.  That in itself was a sign
that film noir was coming to the end of its usefulness as a form — filmmakers could explore the noir sensibility anywhere, and deal with its nature and causes more directly.

BEACHES

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The beach along the malecón
in La Paz is narrow and the water is shallow — not good for
swimming.  But within 20 minutes of the town are beaches of
greater charm and a few of magical splendor.  The first one we
visited was Pichilingue — not a spectacular beach in itself but
featuring a big palapa-roofed restaurant next to the water with sublime
seafood.  I had some stuffed clams there that were memorable — Nora gave a very high rating to the piñadas.

Adults can sit in the shade of the palapa roof, eating and drinking
exceptionally well, while their kids frolic in the ocean, which makes
for a pleasant afternoon.  Harry and Nora went kayaking and Lee
made friends with a panga captain who offered to take us on a tour of
Espíritu Santo island for a price far lower than we'd pay if we
arranged the trip in La Paz.  We checked on this back in La Paz,
found he was right, and came back the next day to sign up for the
cruise.

On a different day we spent an afternoon at Balandra beach, which was
truly breathtaking.  It curves around a shallow bay, which you can
walk across to visit the famous mushroom rock, an iconic landmark of
the area.


 
There's a reproduction of it in the central square of
La Paz, across from the cathedral:

Smaller reproductions can be
bought as souvenirs, though I really can't imagine who would buy such a thing:

Some American tourists in La Paz told us
that the rock had actually toppled off its stem a few years ago and had to be
bolted back together — which turned out to be true.

For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.



[Original photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

NOIRISH: THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE THRILLER

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Film noir
owes a lot to the hard-boiled detective fiction of the 30s and to the
cycle of films this fiction inspired.  Like the gangster film,
this fiction mined a Depression-era fascination with the
underside of American life, examining it from a tough-minded point of
view that reflected the disillusionment of hard times.  But it
was, at bottom, a romantic genre — the detective, however, cynical,
had a code of honor that kept him untainted by the muck he had to slog
through.  He may not have trusted the police, or other
representatives of official society, but he was a law unto himself,
dispensing rough justice in spite of the failures of the established
order.  (Clearly there's a connection here, too, with the Western,
in which a lone-hand hero often must assert the values of decency and
order in the absence of official institutions dedicated to the purpose.)

This is a far cry from the existential estrangement of the classic noir
protagonist whose code of honor has broken down somewhere along the
line — whose chief problem is not doing the right thing but having no
clear sense of what the right thing is, or why it matters in a world
gone haywire.

The key to traditional hard-boiled detective fiction is a mystery to be solved,
which becomes emblematic of a moral imbalance that needs to be
righted.  Solving the mystery and righting the balance restore
hope.  In a true noir there's a sense, or at least a nagging suspicion, that hope is a fool's game.

The following detective thrillers are often identified as films noirs:


Murder, My Sweet


The Lady In the Lake


I Wake Up Screaming


Laura


The Big Sleep


Behind Closed Doors


The Mask Of the Dragon


Vicki

They all have noirish elements, and often look like films noirs, but they belong to an older tradition, one in which atomic-age angst and despair ultimately have no place.

[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows . . .
Murder, My Sweet and The Lady In the Lake are included in the Warner noir DVD series . . . 
I Wake Up Screaming and Vicki are included in the Fox noir DVD series . . . The Big Sleep and Laura are included on almost all lists of films noirs . . . Behind Closed Doors is included in Kino's film noir DVD box set . . . and The Mask Of the Dragon is included in the VCI Forgotten Noir DVD series.]

LA PAZ

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Mexico
1 leaves the coast of the Mar de Cortés just south of Loreto and cuts
back into the interior of the peninsula before veering east again and
doubling back to the great sea at the Bahía de La Paz.  The city
of La Paz, nestled in the wide curve of the bay, was our main destination on this trip and Harry recorded the
attitudes of the passengers at the moment we arrived there.

Here's John Steinbeck on La Paz, as it was back in the 1940s:

La Paz grew in fascination as we
approached.  The square, iron-shuttered colonial houses stood up
right in back of the beach with rows of beautiful trees in front of
them.  It is a lovely place.  There is a broad promenade
along the water lined with benches, named for dead residents of the
city, where one may rest oneself . . .  [A] cloud of delight hangs
over the distant city from the time when it was the great pearl center
of the world . . .  Guyamas is busier, they say, and Mazatlán
gayer, but La Paz is antigua.

We didn't approach La Paz from the water, as Steinbeck did, and it has
changed plenty since his time, but a cloud of delight still hangs over
it, purely Mexican, not fueled by American tourist dollars, and it it
still antigua, old and wise.  It's a tourist town, but it caters to
Mexican tourists, and so is graceful and slow in its rhythms, without
the frenzied party-til-you-puke atmosphere of Cabo San Lucas or the
Pacific coast above Ensenada.

There is nothing spectacular about the place, its allure is quiet . . .
but powerful.  After a day there I never wanted to leave, and I
wish I was there right now.

I thought it would be good to stay for at least a night or two at the
Hotel Perla, the first “destination hotel” in La Paz, built in the
1940s, which for a short time, into the 50s, was host to Hollywood and
literary celebrities, a kind of proto Cabo San Lucas — but the Perla was full, which led us happily
to the second destination hotel built in La Paz, not long after the
Perla, the Los Arcos.  The rooms in the main building were too
pricey for us, but we got fine rooms in a more recent extension of the
hotel across the street, the Cabañas de Los Arcos.

The main hotel was full of American fishermen, the cabañas were full of
Mexican families and so pleasant that, after a couple of days spent
searching for even cheaper accommodations, we sent my sister Lee forth
to negotiate a lower rate for an extended stay at the Los
Arcos.  This she accomplished, and when we checked out we
discovered that they had applied the rate retroactively to our first
days there as well.

This rate was cheaper than you'd expect to find at a Holiday Inn next to an
ugly Interstate off-ramp in the United States, though the big rooms had
views of the Mar de Cortés, the service was superb and the hotel was
located on the malecón, the
broad promenade along the water that Steinbeck mentions and that is the
heart of La Paz's daily public life, especially after dark.

I felt I had come home.


For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.


[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

SCHIZO-NOIR

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The dramatic methods and strategies of a police procedural film, and
what might be called the moral climate, are quite different from those found in a classic film noir
— a proposition that can be demonstrated by taking a look at films
which try to combine the two forms.

As a case in point, consider Trapped,
starring Lloyd Bridges and doomed starlet Barbara Payton.  Bridges
and Payton play a counterfeiter and his moll.  The counterfeiter
gets a chance to redeem himself by co-operating with Treasury agents
but is sucked back into his old ways and hurtled toward ruin.  We
identify with Bridges in the role because he has an appealing screen
persona and because he's the star, which should be enough to place the
film squarely in the noir tradition.

The filmmakers, however, have chosen to place the Bridges character and his story inside a docu-noir
celebrating the Treasury department, its agents and procedures.  John Hoyt,
who usually plays villains, is the chief Treasury operative, acting
undercover.  The narrative encourages us to root for him — the
casting makes this all but impossible.

This might at first seem like an interesting formula, producing a
complex tension between the two narrative traditions, but it all falls
apart in the final reel, because the filmmakers eventually have to
choose which tradition to favor when constructing the climax. 
What they do is simply eliminate the Bridges character from the final
action sequence and ask us to identify totally with the agency and its chief
representative.  The denouement therefore has no punch, since it
doesn't involve or impact the character we've been previously encouraged to identify most closely with.

Crime Wave is another conflicted noir
with a slightly different dynamic.  It starts as a straight-ahead
procedural, with
Sterling Hayden as a police officer trying to hunt down some escaped
cons who've killed a cop in the course of a bungled robbery.  The
film veers into noir
territory when it switches focus and concentrates on a character played
by Gene Nelson, an innocent ex-con who gets caught up in the
case.  (We know that the Nelson character is a co-equal
protagonist with the Hayden character because he's hooked up with the
very vexing female lead, Phyllis Kirk.)

This is when things start to get interesting, because after we switch our attention to Nelson the Hayden
character, delightfully brutal and pig-headed but undeniably
charismatic, starts making mistakes, mistakes that plunge the Nelson
character deeper into his vortex of doom.  It takes some narrative
sleight-of-hand at the end of the film to redeem Hayden's cop,
and the police, who become the agents of the Nelson character's
salvation, thus restoring the pro-police bias of a procedural.  (The sleight-of-hand involves a classic film noir
heist-gone-wrong which turns out to have been not exactly what it
seemed to be — in other words, a bit of a cheat, though still
entertaining.)

This film does manage to have it both ways, after a fashion, but the core of it is noir,
because we spend so much of the time out of sympathy with the
police.  The cop and the innocent-man-wrongly-accused both seem
trapped in a hopeless and bewildering moral maze.

I think you can call Crime Wave a true noir.  Trapped is so schizophrenic that it's simply unclassifiable.

MAR DE CORTES

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There
is just no way to describe the coast and the islands of the Mar de
Cortés.  Parts of it remind you of stretches along the coast of Alta
California as it must have been in frontier times.  Most parts of
it seem like a landscape from another planet, or like our own earth
reduced to its purest elements — sea, land, no frills.

Every mile of Mexico 1 that takes you within sight of the Mar de Cortés is beautiful and inspiring.

Driving east from San Ignacio we hit the Mar de Cortés just north of
Santa Rosalía.  Then we drove south in a state of enchantment to
Mulegé, a town built next to a palm-lined estuary, and stopped for
lunch at Dony's taquería,
where we had some fine shrimp and carne asada tacos at a sidewalk
counter.  Then we followed the road down the coast to Loreto,
where we spent the night.

Loreto is rumored to be the “next cool place” in Baja California, which
means that developers are building fancy condo compounds near it. 
The town itself is pleasant enough, though a bit touristy.  It's a
famous place from which to set out on the Mar de Cortés for fishing,
and we found that American fishermen tended to be the most
objectionable tourists in Baja California — mostly white, middle-aged
men with loud voices pretending to be Ernest Hemingway and behaving as
though Mexico was a country populated entirely by domestic
servants.  (We eventually became fishermen ourselves, however, and met some
very nice pescadores among the blowhards.)

The La Pinta inn we stayed at in Loreto was the shabbiest one we
encountered on our trip but it had a big pool right next to the ocean
with an island in the middle of it that thrilled Harry and Nora. 
Nora also had her first piñada here, a pineapple smoothie.  She became an afficionada
of the concoction and had them everywhere, rating their
qualities.  The ones with a cherry and a pineapple slice included
always rated highest, especially if they were served in a large
frosted-glass goblet.

Lee had her first fish ceviche
at the restaurant at the inn, which became an obsession of hers for the
rest of the trip.  All of it was good, but the best was a ceviche made from a trigger fish I caught myself . . . but that's a tale for another time.

On the Mar de Cortés, sunsets like the one above, at Loreto, which look unreal at first, quickly begin to seem routine — I guess because they are.

For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.



[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

A BOX OF NIGHT

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It's always a cause for celebration when Warner Home Video comes out with a new box set of films noirs. 
These are first-rate collections of wonderfully entertaining films in
superb transfers, with generally very good (and sometimes genuinely
illuminating) commentaries.

The fourth set in the series was released last month — it has ten
films, as opposed to the five in each previous set, and I'm working my
way through them with tremendous excitement.  I've already
discovered that Act Of Violence, directed by Fred Zinneman, is one of the best of all noirs, and one which exposes very clearly the peculiar strain of post-WWII anxiety that fueled the tradition. 
In the story, two basically decent war vets have their lives ravaged by
the memory of wartime experiences that they can't either deal with or
run away from.  Only the women in the film are strong enough to
try and confront the buried demons directly, but even the women can't
head off the trainwreck that fate has ordained.

I've added the film to my own personal canon of genuine films noirs, and added another film in the set, Mystery Street, to the noirish but not really noir category of police procedurals.

MEXICO 1

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Traveling
by car down the Baja California peninsula is one of the world's great
drives.  You pass through ever-shifting landscapes of the most
extreme, surreal beauty — from high desert to low, from mountain to
plain, from the shores of the Pacific Ocean to the shores of the Mar de
Cortés.

The surface of the two-lane highway is very well maintained these days
— the era of the lethal potholes is over.  Gas supplies are
plentiful at the government-owned Pemex stations along the way, though
you'll have trouble finding premium gas, if that's what your car
prefers, between El Rosario and Santa Rosalia.  (Stations do run
out of gas from time to time, mostly depending on how many big campers pass
through them in any given week, but if you fill up wherever possible
whenever your tank drops below three-quarters full you'll never get
into any serious trouble.)

Mexico 1 is a marvel of engineering but most of it leaves you
little to
no margin for error.  Shoulders are rare, especially on stretches
which
snake through high mountain passes with terrifying drop-offs just
inches from the edge of the road.  At every blind curve on such
stretches you just have to pray that oncoming vehicles, especially the
big trucks, will stay in their lanes and leave you enough room to
live.  It's on stretches like this that you want to be thinking
about Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe and not about the drop-offs, though
this is difficult sometimes because of road signs reminding you of the
present hazards with icons of tall trucks flying off the edge of the
mountain.  Often you really do need supernatural aid to maintain
your nerve — as the trucker below, with his Jesus and Mary mudflaps,
clearly knows:

Even when the road cuts straight through level desert it's usually
built up on a high causeway with steep sides, no shoulders and few
turn-outs.  If you had to veer off the pavement suddenly, even
here, you'd probably roll your vehicle, though the roll probably
wouldn't end in flaming death, as it certainly would in the high
mountain passes.  And this is not to mention the livestock that
occasionally decides to share the road with you.

This is a road you never want to travel at night, or at speeds much
above the 80kph limit.  I mean, don't even think about it.

The road from San Ignacio to Santa Rosalia on the east coast of the
peninsula is one of the most hair-raising stretches of Mexico 1. 
But you're more than rewarded near the end of it by your first sight of
the Mar de Cortés, which is less like a real sea than a sea out of some
ancient legendary tale.  It enchants everything.

For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.


[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

CAMARONES

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The
best way to cook shrimp is just to boil it in beer, in the shell, until
it turns bright pink and fills your kitchen with that distinctive
boiled shrimp aroma.  Then you drain it, dump it out on some
newspapers spread on your table, salt it heavily in the shell and get to work — with drawn butter or spicy cocktail
sauce for dipping and plenty of cold beer to wash it down with.  A
better meal than this cannot be had anywhere, at any price.

But if you're looking for something a bit more exotic, or if you're
stuck somewhere dreaming about Mexico and wishing you were there, try
this amazing dish from Rick Bayless, the Mexican food guru — camarones enchipotlados, shrimp in chipotle sauce.  (Bayless' excellent book Mexican Everyday can be found here.)

You need a 15-ounce can of Muir Glen organic, fire-roasted diced
tomatoes.  (This is worth tracking down.)  You need a can of
chipotle chiles en adobo —
the La Morena brand is easy to find and excellent.

You need one
chayote, a kind of Mexican squash — zucchini will also do.  Make
sure you have some fresh cilantro, garlic and olive oil on hand — and
about a pound of fresh shrimp, peeled and veined.  (Some fancy
grocery stores sell uncooked shrimp that's been peeled and veined for
you, with the tails left on, and that's worth the slightly extra cost,
since peeling and veining uncooked shrimp is exceedingly boring.)

Put three tablespoons of olive oil into a large skillet.  Peel and
chop up the chayote into small chunks and sauté it lightly over medium heat in
the oil.  Drain the diced tomatoes, saving the liquid, and put
them into a blender.  Add one or two chipotle peppers and a
tablespoon of their canning sauce and blend until smooth.  Finely
chop or press three garlic cloves and add them to the skillet — wait
about a minute until the garlic is brownish and fragrant, then add the
sauce from the blender, with the liquid from the tomato can.  Cook
this for about five minutes, to let the flavors blend, seasoning it
with salt to taste.  Then add the shrimp.

Cook the shrimp in the sauce, stirring constantly, until it's as done
as you like.  After about four minutes the shrimp will no
longer be translucent and so ready to eat, but I like my shrimp better done
than that.  You have to keep checking by taste to get it just
right.  Add water or chicken (or fish) broth if the sauce gets too
thick and pasty.

Eat the shrimp, with some roughly chopped cilantro on top for a
garnish.  It's good with rice or just by itself, and great with a
strong beer, like Negra Modelo, served ice-cold.

You'll be astonished at how easy and delicious this dish is — it brings the sea and Mexico to you, wherever you are.




[Original photos © 2007 Lloyd Fonvielle and Harry Rossi]

DATE PALMS

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On our third day in Mexico we drove from Catavina, in the center of the
Baja California peninsula, to Guerrero Negro, on the Pacific coast,
where we grabbed some lunch.  Guerrero Negro is a fairly charmless
town whose principal industries are harvesting sea salt and servicing
the tourists who come to whale-watch in the nearby Laguna Ojo de
Liebre.  (Whale-watching was out of season while we were in
Mexico.)  The town has some good restaurants, however, and we had
some great seafood at one of the better of them, the Malarrimo.

Just north of Guerrero Negro is the boundary line between Baja
California and Baja California Sur, where the magic of the peninsula
really begins.  We drove that day only as far as San Ignacio, back
in the center of the peninsula on the way to the Mar de Cortés, because
we were told that the last stretch of mountain road leading down to the
east coast of the peninsula was challenging and not to be driven when
tired.  That proved to be an understatement.

San Ignacio grew up around a freshwater lagoon, which the Spanish
missionaries tapped for irrigation.  What they planted, in great
abundance, were date palms, and so San Ignacio is a most improbable
palm-shaded oasis in the middle of the desert.  The town’s
once-famous dates have been undercut on the Mexican market by cheaper
dates from abroad, so the town has a sleepy, vaguely depressed air,
though it’s still extremely charming, with a central square planted
with tall shade trees and one of the most beautiful missions on the
peninsula.

We ate our first lobster at an old restaurant in town that looked as
though it had seen better days — lobster tacos for me and a whole
lobster for Harry.

The lobster in both forms was a bit over-cooked and over-priced but still delightful.

We stayed at yet another La Pinta inn, one of the few choices for accommodation in
San Ignacio.

When we got to the town it was being spruced up for its annual date
festival, to be held the following week, but there were no dates for
sale anywhere we could find . . . because, we were told, “the date
harvest isn’t until October.”  The mystery of this only added to
the slightly unreal loveliness of the place.

For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.

[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

NOIRISH: THE POLICE OR AGENCY PROCEDURAL

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The films below are sometimes called films noirs but they make up such a distinct category that they're almost always qualified with the the sub-label docu-noirs:




House On 92nd Street


The Racket


Call Northside 777


Panic In the Streets


Border Incident


The Narrow Margin
Mystery Street



Naked City


Arson, Inc.


Loan Shark


Fingerprints Don't Lie


F. B. I. Girl


Portland Expose
A Bullet For Joey




In fact they're
all police or government-agency procedurals (or, in one case, a newspaper procedural.)  They usually feature some
highly positive documentary-type footage about the law enforcement
group involved and are sometimes shot within the
facilities of the institutions they depict.  (The newspaper procedural, Call Northside 777,
about a crusading journalist who saves an innocent man from prison, was
based on a real case and shot on some of the locations where the original incidents occurred.)

These films are designed to show the effective functioning of
government agencies or other establishment organizations, and while this sort of reassurance may have
addressed the same strain of post-war anxiety that film noir explored, it obviously did so from a completely different perspective than you find in the classic film noir, where suspicion of all social institutions is part of the general atmosphere of dread.

In the films above, the city may well be a dark and threatening maze,
but we enter it in the company of an upright guide, backed by the full
force of the official society, and we overcome the danger we face there
— we clean up the mess.

These films make up a vigorous genre in themselves and have become
fascinating social documents — but I don't think it makes any sense to
call them films noirs.

[The noir credentials of the films above are as follows . . .
House On 92nd Street, Call Northside 777 and Panic In the Streets are part of the Fox film noir DVD series . . . The Racket,
Border Incident, Mystery Street and The Narrow Margin are part of the Warner film noir DVD series . . . A Bullet For Joey is part of the MGM film noir DVD series . . . Naked City is found on almost all lists of films noirs . . . the rest are included in the VCI Forgotten Noir DVD series.]

TOGETHER

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In
Mexico, whenever anyone asked where my sister Lee and her kids were
from she always said Alta California.  This delighted Mexicans,
who probably think all Americans believe there is only one California,
the U. S. state.  In fact there are two others, Baja California
and Baja California Sur, both Mexican states located in the Baja
California peninsula.  Mexicali is the administrative center of
Baja California, to the north, and La Paz is the administrative center
of Baja California Sur.

At the La Pinta inn in Catavina my sister ran into a Mexican woman who
had lived in Los Angeles but had moved back because she didn't have
“the right papers” and didn't feel good about it.  My sister
remarked on how unfortunate it was that papers could keep the
Californias apart.  “I know God meant us to be together,” the
woman said, “but something has gone wrong with it.”  “Maybe we'll
all be one California again,” my sister suggested.  “I think it
will happen,” the woman said, without much conviction.

The woman seemed a bit puzzled about why someone from Alta California
would choose to visit the poorer Californias to the south. 
“Because it's so beautiful,” my sister said, ” and the people are so
wonderful.”  The woman nodded dubiously.

I suppose it's not surprising that the Mexicans' envy of American
prosperity should cause them to be defensive about their own country,
but I don't think money is the root of the issue.  It's more about
children and the future.  Mexicans worship children — their eyes
light up with almost supernatural joy at the sight of niños, even gringo niños. 
The poorest of Mexicans will introduce you to their children as though presenting
movie stars.  I think when they head north, to endure the
humiliations and hardships of life in El Norte, it's not to get
flat-screen TVs for themselves but a better future for their kids.

The poverty of Mexico, at least in Baja California, south of the
tourist zone, rarely seems ugly or degrading — the everyday culture of
the nation is rich and humane.  But it's so often frozen where it
is — economic progress is coming but coming slowly.  Looking into
the eyes of their niños, many Mexicans may feel that don't have time to wait for it.

They may not realize how much they stand to lose up north.  The
idea of making grueling sacrifices for one's children is losing
currency in America, and many Americans no longer believe that their
children will have better lives than they've had.  The ragged
Mexican man walking miles through the desert country of the borderlands
to get a back-breaking, low-paying job in the United States probably
has a picture of some children in his pocket.  If you're tempted
to fear and despise him, think of that.  He may have more to give us than we have to give him.

For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.



[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi]

A CREHORE FOR TODAY

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Amy Crehore recently completed the painting above for a gallery show in which artists were asked to create works that evoked a
favorite book — this one was inspired by Nabokov's Lolita. 
I think it's profound but wouldn't dare to try and analyze it too
closely — the artist might cut off my tongue as revenge for trying to reduce the painting to words.

More of Amy Crehore's images can be seen here.

FROM THE PACIFIC COAST TO THE HIGH DESERT

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The
first time I visited Ensenada (above) in the late Sixties it was a
small, dusty
tourist town.  Now it's a big, sprawling tourist town but still
has some charm.  Above Ensenada on the Pacific coast, yuppie scum,
mostly from Alta California, the world headquarters of yuppie scum, has
turned the region into into a nightmare of condos, tourist traps and
perverted, groveling commercialism.  This is where you see the
true face of Alta California, “The Wellness State”.  The influence
of the Great Satan begins
to wear away the further south you go — only to
flare up again like a festering boil at Cabo San Lucas at the tip of
the peninsula.

On our first full day in Mexico we made it as far as Catavina, a tiny
town in a bizarre high-desert setting in the middle of the
peninsula.  (Mexico 1, the only road that goes all the way down to
Cabo San Lucas, zig-zags back and forth across Baja California, from
one coast to the other.)  The desert around Catavina is covered in gigantic, car-sized boulders
and tall cactus — like much of Baja California its landscape is
surreal in the extreme, with an effect on the psyche that can't be evoked by
photographs.

In Catavina we stayed at a La Pinta inn.  These are dotted along
Mexico 1, are run by the government and are very pleasant, with a
cantina and restaurant surrounding a small courtyard fountain and rooms
surrounding a larger courtyard with a pool.  Mexicans pay about
$57 (American) a night there — rates for tourists can rise up over
$100 a night, but my sister quickly discovered that Mexican hotel
clerks love
to bargain, especially if the negotiation is conducted with humor, so
we paid well under the tourist rate wherever we stayed.  The
clerks always seemed genuinely delighted when Lee managed to talk them
into lowering their rate, as though they were appreciating a clever
goal from an unlikely player in a soccer game.

The terrace behind the restaurant at the Catavina La Pinta looks out
over the mystical desert and has a shrine dedicated to Nuestra Señora
de Guadalupe, which puts everything into perspective.  When
driving the roads of Baja California you want constant assurances that La Morenita
is with you, and you want a chance to thank her for getting you to
wherever it is you've gotten.  This is psychologically sound,
whatever you think of the theology of it, because it reminds you to
never, ever
take Mexico 1 for granted.  It's full of surprises, most
delightful but some hair-raising.  I'll write more about Mexico 1 in a later post.

For previous Baja California trip reports, go here.


[Photos © 2007 Harry Rossi & Lloyd Fonvielle]

NOIRISH: FILMS OF INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE

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It's hard for me to imagine why anyone would find it useful to call any of the films listed below films noirs, but people have:



Contraband
Casablanca
To Have and Have Not
Notorious


Macao


I'll Get You


The Man From Cairo
They Were So Young
Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report)



These are all
thrillers involving romance and international intrigue, where the occasional
disorientation and jeopardy of the protagonists results from being
embroiled in a foreign locale, fighting a foreign system.  The
whole crux of the film noir
tradition is that the disorientation and jeopardy take place on
familiar soil, within familiar systems that have somehow grown alien, bewildering
and malevolent.  Night and the City is by contrast a true film noir, even though it happens to be set in London. 
It unfolds in a world its American protagonist knows well (though perhaps not
well enough) — his jeopardy and his doom have nothing to do with the
fact that his surroundings are foreign.

Rick in Casablanca masquerades
as a cynical, even nihilistic anti-hero who believes in nothing —
which gives him at least a superficial link with some film noir
protagonists — but he proves himself to be a knight in shining armor,
willing to sacrifice the most important thing in his life for transcendent
ideals.  If this is film noir, what the hell do you call Gun Crazy or Detour — or Night and the City, for that matter?  Film noir noir?




I guess Macao gets labeled a film noir because it stars film noir icon Robert Mitchum and was made right after His Kind Of Woman, which also paired him with Jane Russell and which is an actual film noir,
or at the very least a comic parody of one.  The rest are mostly
standard spy thrillers involving an innocent American caught in a web
of foreign intrigue.

I think you could make a case that John Le Carré's existentially bleak spy thrillers enter the realm of noir, or neo-noir, but the romantic adventures and thrillers above don't come close.

[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows . . . Contraband is included in a film noir DVD box set from Kino . . . Casablanca, Notorious and To Have and Have Not are listed on the Wikipedia “expanded list” of classic films noirs . . . Macao is among the films noirs listed in Nicholas Christopher's Somewhere In the Night . . .  I'll Get You, The Man From Cairo and They Were So Young are included in the VCI series Forgotten Noir.]