Legacy Not

Visiting the former workplace last week, I was struck at how what I once regarded as my potential “legacy” has been utterly erased: both the design sense I attempted to inculcate for the last three decades of my alleged career, and the consciousness of institutional history I labored to leave behind.

I might as well never have walked into the place forty years ago. I thought at one time that I was building something, but it turns out that all the while I was piling sand.

“I never knew the old Vienna…”

(Another in a series of repurposed film reviews)

The process of transmuting a novel from the page to the screen unavoidably involves some measure of diminution, often drastic, of the source material. The Third Man is one of the rare exceptions to that rule, taking as its point of departure one of novelist Graham Greene’s lesser tales and turning it into one of the supreme achievements of postwar film noir. A certain amount of credit is due to Greene himself, who wrote the screenplay, but the author has acknowledged that director Carol Reed’s handling of the material (including some creative differences in points of plot development on which Reed prevailed) was decisive. Also, Orson Welles, whose character dominates the picture all out of proportion to his actual screen time, contributed some of his own dialogue, including the memorable, oft-quoted “cuckoo clock” speech.

A little historical background might be in order here: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, “Germany” consisted of, oh, three or four hundred pissant little kingdoms and principalities (I exaggerate for effect here), plus half a dozen bigger ones, the most powerful of which was the Kingdom of Prussia. In the 1870s, Prussia’s gifted and overbearing statesman Otto von Bismarck oversaw the unification of these disparate components into the German Empire, with the Prussian king as emperor (or “Kaiser”) and Bismarck as the Empire’s first Chancellor. Left outside of this amalgamation was German-speaking Austria, which was already the center of its own empire, then known as Austria-Hungary, and which included in its subject territory large swatches of president-day Hungary, Poland, Romania, the former Czechoslovakia and the former Yugoslavia, and little bits of Italy. Fast forward fifty years, and after being on the losing side in World War I, Austria is shorn of its empire, thereby freeing a lot of its former subjects to go back to their former pastimes of burning one another’s homes, violating one another’s womenfolk and cutting one another’s throats, a social dynamic toward which it sometimes seems as though our own unhappy fractious imperium is latterly tending. Austria, once a big, honking (albeit ramshackle) polyglot multi-ethnic empire, is now reduced to a smallish, mainly German-speaking country (I trust you’re taking notes: there’ll be a quiz afterward). Fast forward another decade or so, and neighboring Germany, under the dynamic leadership of, by golly, a transplanted Austrian, seems to be going great guns compared to its still-demoralized southern neighbor:

Springtime for Hitler and Germany, 

Deutschland is happy and gay!

We’re marching to a faster pace:

Look out, here comes the master race!

The way the Austrians prefer to remember it, Hitler rolled into Vienna in 1938 and forcibly incorporated it into Germany (or the “German Reich,” as they were styling themselves by then) in what became known as the Anschluss. To much of the rest of the world, it didn’t even meet the “date rape” test, and when the Third Reich went to war with the other major powers of the world the following year, the Austrians were not found wanting by their cousins in martial zeal. Hitler’s project ended badly from the Nazi standpoint in 1945, and although Austria had its national identity restored, it was subject like its senior partner to occupation by the victorious belligerents, France, Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union, with each power governing a section of the country.  Vienna, the capital, was likewise subdivided, and it is against this backdrop that the story of The Third Man is laid. Here endeth the historical digression.

Holly Martins is a writer working the lower end of the literary food chain: he pens cowboy novels of the mass-market paperback variety, and although he appears to have a devoted following among the lower socioeconomic strata, he’s not doing so well that he can afford to turn down an invitation to join his old pal Harry Lime, who has set himself up as a successful businessman in occupied Vienna. Precisely what kind of business Lime has been engaged in is not initially made clear, and in any event, the clueless Martins comes to the rather knocked-about city with his head planted securely up his arse, where it remains for much of the movie, and is shocked to discover that Harry has been tragically killed in a traffic accident. Arriving just in time to attend the funeral, Martins attracts the notice of a world-weary British military policeman (a starchy Trevor Howard, with an affect of acerbic disdain he does not trouble to conceal from the American), who advises him to go home. Instead, the writer undertakes his own investigation into the circumstances of Lime’s death, in the course of which he forms an attraction toward his friend’s mistress (she regards him with the sort of affection and esteem in which you and I might hold something we were obliged to scrape from the soles of our shoes), and discovers some very uncomfortable truths about the nature of Lime’s enterprises. Fun factoid: Penicillin had been produced in limited quantities during the war, and for military use only. It did not become available for civilian use in the United States until almost the end of the conflict and was direly needed, and extremely hard to come by, in war-ravaged Central Europe throughout the latter 1940s.


Stylishly photographed (an industry colleague jokingly sent director Reed a spirit level afterward, so that he could set up his cameras straight) and highly atmospheric, and not without its moments of levity, as when the hapless Holly Martins is mistaken for a “serious” novelist and hauled before a literary audience to give a lecture, The Third Man is among the greatest English-language films produced since the last world war, and it’s a little surprising that it isn’t better known. The usual qualifier applies that the pace of editing, although brisk for its time, may be a little downtempo by the reckoning of anyone born since 1980. Some people have found the movie’s once-famous zither music an intolerable annoyance. Final fun factoid: the director’s stepdaughter, Tracy Reed, was the only woman in the cast of Dr. Strangelove (as General Turgidson’s “secretary,” and as “Miss Foreign Affairs” in the Playboy centerfold seen in the B-52 in that film).

Silence, Security, Logic, Prudence

(A few years ago I compiled about fifty film reviews for a cherished younger relative who probably did not follow up any of the garrulous recommendations of her senescent kinsman, so I think I will post selections now and again for the delectation of my one or two followers here. Also, it’s less effort than devising new content.)

Audiences in the pre-Star Wars era (or more properly the pre-2001: A Space Odyssey era, although Kubrick’s extraordinary vision, unlike the space operas of George Lucas, remains sui generis almost half a century later) used to put up with some pretty cheesy sets, costumes and effects in their science fiction—the original “Star Trek” television series was considered cutting-edge in 1966, but even then we could see that the instrumentation on the Enterprise bridge consisted of plywood and Christmas tree lights. So prolific French director Jean Luc Godard (not to be confused with Jean-Luc Picard) decides to do a science fiction flick, and he spends nothing on sets and effects when he makes Alphaville (full title: Alphaville: A Strange Adventure of Lemmy Caution), and that “nothing” is money well (un)spent. The result might be off-putting to an American audience today—hell, they weren’t exactly lining up around the block fifty years ago, and poor old Bosley Crowther, not surprisingly, didn’t know what to make of this shit—but after all, like the most intelligent sci-fi, Alphaville was not about how human beings will live in the future, but about how we’re living now.  That’s the “now” of then, of course, but the sterile, alienating future that Godard saw from 1965, and conveyed by means of shooting some of the most anti-human modernistic architecture of the “new” Paris (trends which have, mercifully, been held in check in Paris proper, which remains one of the fabled beauties among the world’s cities), will not look entirely unfamiliar to contemporary audiences.

We needn’t pay much attention to the story, which is the sheerest twaddle: I don’t think that Godard did. In brief, tough-guy detective Lemmy Caution, a character who had already been played by expat American actor Eddie Constantine in a dozen cheapoid French movies with titles like Dames Get Along, is plucked out of his accustomed genre and into this tongue-in-cheek, highly philosophical production, wherein his character is assigned to go undercover in Alphaville, a city on a planet in a distant galaxy (he arrives there by car).  No one’s striving for verisimilitude here, of course (if they were, you wouldn’t hear “light year” being employed as a measure of time), but particularly to French audiences accustomed to Lemmy Caution’s usual vehicles, this must have seemed like…oh, not just William Shatner cast as Hamlet, but William Shatner playing Captain Kirk as Hamlet and directed by Quentin Tarrantino. Gumshoes don’t get much more hard-boiled than Eddie Constantine, who has what you call a “lived-in” face. He looks like an iguana in a trenchcoat, suffering from a bad hangover. He’s up against the faceless masters of Alphaville, including evil Professor von Braun (a tip o’ the hat to then-NASA chief scientist and ex-Nazi Wernher von Braun) and his most fearsome creation, the supercomputer Alpha 60—depicted, oddly, as a backlit window fan mounted behind what appears to be a set of bedsprings—which is much given to croaking weighty Gallic aphorisms on the order of: “Once we know the number one, we believe that we know the number two, because one plus one equals two. We forget that first we must know the meaning of plus.” “Everything has been said, provided words do not change their meanings, and meanings their words.” “Sometimes reality is too complex for oral communication. But legend embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world.” “Is it not obvious that someone who customarily lives in a state of suffering requires a different sort of religion from a person habitually in a state of well-being?” And so forth. These are not lines of dialogue that would have made it past an American studio script conference fifty-four years ago—or today. It’s all very French and, to my mind, more fun than a barrel of ferrets, but perhaps too weird for casual viewing.

At the time the film was made, it was an article of cultural faith that the mighty Computer (state of the art in 1965 deploying rather less processing power than my watch can draw upon today) could be laid low by the power of paradox (“So who shaves the barber, huh? Answer me that, ya big hunka vacuum tubes!”) or, as here, by human love. Since then, of course, automated systems have grown far more cunning, and if they’re still short of sentience, the average intelligence of the people who directly interact with these has gone way down since the pocket-protector and slide rule set commanded those heights, and the elements of human love, or its counterfeits, are likelier wielded against rather than on behalf of the human consumer.

You probably need to see Alphaville.

Living in the Future

For a long time I have taken 1970 as the baseline of my life, although 1972 would probably be the more apt marker: I think that could the eighteen and twenty year-olds and I be magically brought together in some bardo analogue, the guy in the middle might find more in common with his superannuated future incarnation than with the mewling ninny he’d been two years earlier. At least, I venture to hope that he’d find me less embarrassing. On the other hand, it’s amusing to measure my emotional progress from the same Moment Zero as UNIX does.

Whichever point I might choose, I’m struck as I look back at how incurious both young men were about the world in which they would pass their maturity. I can’t recall ever giving much thought about what the world of the twenty-first century might be like. I suppose there was a vague notion that urban architecture would resemble the skyline depicted in “The Jetsons” (as it does indeed now in parts of China), and perhaps there was an expectation of flying cars, which I’m grateful, observing the behavior of drivers down below, has not yet come to pass.

I did take for granted, I think, the civic mythos with which my cohort had been raised: infinite upward mobility. Every year, things were going to get better. Middle-class families—I knew no other—would move up the sequence in automotive lines (in General Motors terms, Chevrolet to Pontiac to Oldsmobile to Buick to, eventually, Cadillac), and to progressively larger and better-appointed homes. There had been signs, of course, of strain in the system, including the debasement of the coinage in 1965, but, not alone among the citizenry, I hadn’t paid much attention to these. I did not foresee, for example, that after 1968 I would not again reside in a single-family dwelling with more than one toilet until late in 1999.

The 1973 oil embargo—I was twenty-one by that time—that got my attention, and around the same period the price of residential real estate began to climb at rates which appeared steep at the time, although mollusc-slow by the standards of our recent bubbles. It occurred to me by 1974 that perhaps the economic escalator might not have room for all of us, and still I did not attempt to form a mental picture of The Future, which I assumed would take care of itself, and which in any event was a long way off.

Digression: until around that time, it was rather easy for those of us who had been raised in stultifying suburban comfort to dispense with the bourgeois amenities, but this owed in part, I believe, to our awareness that if we ever did tire of going without these conveniences, we could at any time shrug off our renunciation and sit down at the table again. Gradually it dawned on us that the table had a finite circumference, and that it was rimmed by only so many chairs. As a friend of mine observed in 1987, anent the rise of the so-called yuppies, “People have realized that some of us are going to be left out, and they’re saying not me.”

Still, The Future. In the early nineties, when I was about forty, the pace of technological change appeared to have gone on afterburners, and this seemed exciting. I can’t claim to have been exactly au courant in my thinking: for example, I thought that this whole “internet” thing was a passing fad, a misapprehension shared at the time, to their subsequent sorrow, by numerous captains of industry who have spent the intervening decades attempting to corral the thing. And indeed, the pace of change appears in substantial part to have moved into cyberspace. An American plucked from, say, downtown San Francisco in 1948 into the same spot in 1968 would instantly notice the change in tailoring, grooming, automotive styling. Notice? Hell, he’d be gobsmacked; would fall to the sidewalk shitting himself and bleeding from the ears. Move a San Franciscan from 1998 to 2018 and he’d likely register a shift, but it would be the online environment (if he could find a “cyber cafe”—remember those?) that would appear outlandishly foreign to him.

But here we are. Occasionally, as I walk to the corner Whole Foods Market (the “Food Hole” as we call it, with latterly imperfect affection), I play a mental game, imagining either of my two baseline selves to be vouchsafed or cursed back then with a view of the world through my 2018 eyes. What would they make of it? The apparel of the XXI century would not appear far removed from 1972, although the tattoos—these were a class-signifier back in the day, and not a positive one—and the piercings would be startling. I suppose also that I imagined by now that we’d be going about in outfits with ribbed fronts and flared shoulders (we almost got to the latter element, at least in women’s “power” attire, in the early eighties), whereas jeans and apparel that would not have appeared inconsistent with these still abound in the visual field I’ve granted to my boggle-eyed youthful voyeurs.

The sheer shabbiness of the urban environment would, I think, have astonished my younger selves. Again, the idea of eternal upward mobility, of prosperity ever expanding, was part of the package my cohort was raised on. Beginning in 1979 I began to commute each day from Oakland to San Francisco, and as I passed the Mechanics Monument at Battery and Market streets marked the presence of the “potato lady,” as I and a coworker called her, who stood beside that civic statue, begging for change in her shabby brown coat (she resembled, as we thought, a largish baked potato. It must have been humiliating for her—she looked fiftyish to us—but we regarded her with dismissive contempt: compassion is not an affliction of the young). It occasioned remark because there were no other mendicants routinely to be seen in the Financial District back then.

Fast forward to 2018. San Francisco is overrun with beggars. I never, for the last quarter-century of my alleged career, made it between work and home without being solicited. Nor indeed, for longer than that, did I dwell in Oakland without a sharp awareness of the city’s criminal lumpenproletariat. This, too, would not have figured in my youthful picture of the present century, had I troubled to formulate one. Until I moved to Oakland, and actually for three or four years thereafter (for I fetched up at first in one of the tonier districts of this troubled city), “crime” was something that happened to other people, whereas for many years awareness of it has been a natural condition of my existence here, something akin to the tetanus that keeps our fingers slightly curled by our sides.

In 1962 we had “The Jetsons.” Placed before us just twenty years later, the vision of the twenty-first century, still distant, was Blade Runner, and I think we can all agree that while neither prophecy was perfect, Ridley Scott and his production team landed closer to the mark than did the showrunners at Hanna-Barbera.

And politics? The Soviet Union appeared to be a permanent feature of the global landscape. In 1970 or thereabouts I read an article ludicrously titled “Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?” What a joke! In the event, of course, the author, who predeceased his subject by just eleven years had a better take on it than I did in my late teens. So, communism essentially dead. And fascism of course, except—what the fuck?—in the United States of America, in the XXI century promised by the Jetsons or at least by Stanley Kubrick, fascism claws its way out of the six feet of earth and loam heaped upon it, yanks out the stake pounded into its heart in 1945, and rises gibbering, vicious and ravenous seventy years later incarnated—“the second time as farce”—as President Donald Trump.

I did not see this coming. And I think that the late USSR may serve as a cautionary example that a Great Power in decline can vanish, historically speaking, in a heartbeat. Indeed, if there are historians still doing business half a dozen decades from now, I suspect that they will record that the two global empires of the late twentieth century ultimately committed suicide out of sheer self-loathing. And the coroner may report that in each instance it was assisted suicide.

Somehow we have blundered into a future wherein the American genius has contrived to deliver a society combining most of the worst features of anarchy and authoritarianism while signally failing to deliver the putative benefits of either scheme. I want my money back.

I want my future back.

What Dreams May Come

Seventeen months? Well, there were issues. Also, the election cycle became increasingly alarming and dispiriting, although I won’t claim not to have been gobsmacked by the triumph of the short-fingered vulgarian. What I expected was that Clinton would prevail, and preside over a critically injured polity. The actual outcome was, of course, incomparably worse, but this is properly the subject of another post.)

A century ago, and certainly by the time I was born, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams was considered canonical in many circles, although since that time, like Freud himself—these latter decades the object of some spirited iconoclasty—his take on these things has fallen out of favor. Even the “Viennese quack,” as Nabokov styled him, reportedly acknowledged that too much could be read into a cigar.

The modern thinking, I believe, is that our dreams consist largely of random imagery, albeit with a bias toward recent input and experience, and that to the extent we may draw conclusions from these regarding the psyche of the dreamer, it is properly from the narrative that the sleeping mind attempts to impose upon the farrago of pictures and situations it has spontaneously spewed forth. I regard this approach as generally plausible.

Most evenings my own dreams are as random, I suppose, as the next fellow’s, but certain scenarios, all of these in some measure of a stressful character, recur rather regularly, and I suspect that taken together they limn in broad outline a picture of my personal anxieties. In no particular order:

The Week of Reckoning

This one I apparently share with millions of others going back decades: I’m back in college. It’s finals week. I have barely attended class all quarter; have never cracked a textbook; have certainly not studied for the test. I’ve a day, if that, to make up all the neglected work, write the papers, master the subjects, pass the exams. I am not filled with optimism.

Oddly enough, I lived that dream back in 1971. It was notably less stressful in real life. Of course, I did flunk out of school (one professor told me shortly afterward that he regretted that the University of California did not provide for a grade lower than “F”).

Icarus Descending (not):

I prefer those dreams of flight in which I soar effortlessly, without even the occasional exertions of birds. Usually, though, my airborne course is a chore, like doing the breast stroke through a viscous, unforgiving medium. When finally I attain some ledge analogue, generally a narrow and unwelcoming perch, I linger to catch my breath and then find myself assailed by crippling doubts as to whether, once I leap back into the vast spaces above the unforgiving pavement, my aerial powers are to be entirely relied upon.

Drive, He Said

At—or near—the wheel of a motor vehicle, usually in highly inclement weather, usually at night, usually at high speed; in every scenario imperfectly in control of the said motor vehicle, sometimes even attempting to steer in from the passenger or even the back seat.

Smoke Signals

I quit smoking—well, a long time ago. I dream that I have taken it up again, and wake up with a sense of crushing disappointment in myself.

Funny Money

I retrieve my wallet in a retail environment and am appalled to realize that my last retail transaction returned to me several bills so nakedly counterfeit that they will not possibly pass muster here. The faux currency is always on coarse green newsprint, and resembles crudely printed retail coupons. Semi-related: I drop something of great value; am unable to locate it in the fog at my feet.

Room for More

I’ve lived here at The Crumbling Manse™ for eighteen years, longer than the second-place finisher among my residences (see below), and although I’m devoted to the place, it could frankly use a bit more space (or we could use a bit less in the way of inessential chattel, an issue I’m hoping to address in the coming months). The space I have in mind has nothing to do with this recurring dream, in which I am startled to discover two or three hitherto undiscovered, neglected and vaguely sinister rooms on one side of the house.

Home Again, Home Again

From 1977 until early 1993 I dwelt in a handsome craftsman bungalow, rather similar to this one, in Oakland’s then-affordable—though not at that time by me—Rockridge neighborhood. It was sold out from under me after 186 months, and I quit the premises with bitter regret in March 1993. I’ve never been back thereafter except in my dreams, but in my dreams I am a regular, panicked visitor: Shit! What the hell am I doing here? I need to get the fuck out before the real owners get back home!

Spouse Again, Spouse Again

I was married from 1976 to 1986—technically to 1988, but the domestic arrangements had fallen to flinders by this time in ’86—to a woman who’d first caught my eye in 1968, and whom I’d actively begun courting by the end of the following year. The endgame was dreadful, and the anguish considerable, and the wounds, on this end at least, still raw the last time I saw her over a quarter of a century ago. I like to think that I’ve moved on, but she certainly has maintained a claim in Freudland, appearing there at intervals overnight—sometimes cordially, oftener not. The recurring dream, though, is invariably framed as a memory: it is the early 1990s, and she has returned from Europe and announced that we are to be reconciled, and I, as I might very well have at that nadir of my spirits, readily consent. And then, in the dream-alternate, things go south very quickly. I wake from these, and they have the force and immediacy of a “recovered memory,” and I groggily think, “Wait, did we actually—” before I reassemble my world. I’m grateful that these visitations, formerly more frequent, are down to a couple of times a year.

Let There Be Light, Or Not

This actually does not relate to a specific series of dreams, but I find that electric lighting does not work in my dreams: when I attempt to engage one of these things it either does not work at all, or emits a flickering, useless glow. For many years I took this to be a peculiarity of my individual interior landscape until I happened upon an allusion to it in the film Waking Life. This remains a reliable indicator that one is dreaming; but its remains as well an indicator I reliably though not invariably fail to take into account on these occasions.

Piss Me Off

From time to time my dreams will steer me toward a public or private convenience in an irregular (sometimes gruesomely so) state of maintenance, but occasionally these facilities will present themselves as plausibly unobjectionable. I’ve trained myself to test these for reality in sleep, but as with the lights, above, it’s not infallible. Fortunately a number of factors, including a clogged prostate with hundreds of thousands of miles upon it, have thus far spared the bedsheets.

These then, are my anxiety dreams. And yours?

“The Day the Earth Caught Fire”

I have a weakness for British science fiction films of the fifties and early sixties. They appear as a rule not to have had enormous budgets available for purposes of visual spectacle, and accordingly worked on smaller canvases. The results were generally more intelligent than those yielded by the more lavishly-funded American productions of the same era, not that this is a terribly difficult bar to clear. The 1960 Village of the Damned, based on John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos, was a good example, delivering a ripping yarn, intelligently scripted, with a minimum of elaborate sets or special effects.

Recently some arbitrary chain of associations recalled a few seconds viewed in childhood, a scene caught on a television broadcast of a man, hideously blackened and burned, staggering down a stairway along the side of a large spherical storage tank. With no more than that vague memory, I was able to coax the title, which I probably never knew, from my default search engine. Indeed, there was a link on the first page of results, because I was apparently not the only tyke in whose memory that image had lodged. The film in this case was Quatermass II (released stateside as Enemy from Space, for pity’s sake!), an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style thriller in which the hostile extraterrestrials mount their incursion from a supposed synthetic food plant, played in the film by an oil refinery. Watchable, despite the unfortunate casting of Brian Donlevy as Professor Quatermass, and it brought director Val Guest’s name to my attention, which in turn put me onto The Day the Earth Caught Fire.

The title is regrettable, although probably catchier than The Several Weeks Over the Course of Which the Weather Got All Fucked Up and Eventually Much Hotter, but the film is eminently satisfactory. The scientific premise is sheer codswallop, of course, but it’s not as though our current multiplex-bound franchise series are guiltless on that count: the story has it that the US and the USSR have each detonated weapons of unprecedented megatonnage simultaneously at each of the poles, and this has not merely knocked the earth off kilter by eleven degrees, but has also sent it spiraling toward the sun, an “inconvenient truth” that the sundry national authorities are reluctant to make public because they correctly anticipate that the masses will get all pissy about it.

Much of the action is set on the premises of a London newspaper (the Daily Express made its physical plant available), where former star reporter Peter Stenning is inexplicably still employed, notwithstanding his steady descent into alcoholism and the concomitant decline in the timeliness of his work product. Edward Judd’s portrayal is perhaps intended to convey raffish charm, although if so this eludes me. More entertaining is Leo McKern, then about forty, as the paper’s cynical science editor who looks out for Stenning and is one of the first to recognize the implications of the story that the semi-disgraced newsman has stumbled upon. Equally entertaining, and easier on the eye, is Janet Munro as Jeannie Craig, who occasionally works the switchboard at the Meteorological Office and picks up some intelligence which she irresponsibly leaks, Snowden-style (not that London is going to see snow ever again) to our sottish and besotted hero. There are, surprisingly for the era and the genre, a few flashes of nudity, which must have seemed almost subliminal to theatre audiences of the time, but which yield themselves up to the magic of modern consumer video, and which did not in the event and at the time elude the trained and vigilant institutional eye of the British Board of Censors, which forbade the film’s exhibition to persons under the age of sixteen.

The portrayals of the broiling earth, including a set piece of a hot fog rising off the Thames to engulf the city, and later shots employing competent matte paintings to depict a parched London, are well done. The screenplay is mainly intelligent and the cast performs by and large ably, although I suspect that Stenning’s line of patter, to which Jeannie readily succumbs following some rather pro forma resistance, would not get him far with a twenty-seven year-old today (I do not claim to be privy to the courtship protocols currently obtaining among that demographic). The production rather presciently raises questions about how humankind would cope with changes to accustomed climate patterns, although needless to say it can no more than provide a gloss on these over the course of its ninety-eight minutes running time, and its producers were likelier more interested in exploring cold war anxieties than in atmospheric carbon content.

One considerable, and one lesser downside: first, the post-synching is atrocious, distractingly so. At times it’s like watching a badly-dubbed foreign film, an ordeal to which I’m ordinarily unwilling to subject myself. Second, late in the film (following an uncredited appearance by Judd’s chum Michael Caine as a traffic cop) we are subjected to a few minutes of rioting teenagers, portrayed as stereotypical anarcho-beatniks about as plausibly as Hollywood was to do “hippies” a few years later. This also involves Stenning in a brief bout of fisticuffs that appear to have been choreographed by the same guy who did the post-synching. There is as well a small concluding outrage in that the film’s deliberately ambiguous ending was compromised by the American distributors, who insisted on the addition of pealing church bells over the final seconds to suggest that the boffins’ desperate scheme to put the planet back into its proper orbit had succeeded after all. But as against these cavils the film nevertheless holds up very well after half a century and more, and is well worth a look. Indeed, the curious can (no longer) find it online here.

Above: As the planet heats up, actress Janet Munro cools off.

“When the rapture comes, can I have your t-shirt? Uhh…never mind.”

In today’s NYT:

By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night, he and his millions of supporters completed what had seemed unimaginable: a hostile takeover of one of America’s two major political parties. 

Just as stunning was how quickly the host tried to reject them.