Encounters with M. Emmett Walsh

Although I first saw this actor in a movie back in 1985 in Portland, OR, I had several unexpected and memorable encounters with the legendary character actor M. Emmett Walsh in the past few weeks.

Cameo in Knives Out

The now-84-year-old actor has a cameo role in the holiday suspense/comedy movie Knives Out, where he plays an elderly security guard in charge of a grainy surveillance video that the plot hinges on.

That led me to download a copy of the first film I saw him in, the Coen Brothers' first film Blood Simple, a dark indie classic from the mid-80's that glitters with stabs of comedy.   I saw Blood Simple (and I can recall the theater and the girlfriend of the time) in the middle of my medical school years, during the year I lived and did research in Portland, OR.  The Coens' went on to bigger hits like Fargo.

Podcast with Gilbert Godfried

What makes this worth writing about, around the same time these past weeks, I stumbled on a podcast series that has been running several years by the eccentric comedian Gilbert Godfried, where he interviews ... very old celebrities (Dick Cavett, Buck Henry, Emmett Walsh....), what they jokingly call the "they haven't died yet" podcast.    It's called Gilbert Godfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast - here.   He interviewed Walsh a couple years ago. 

Three Quotes

Walsh was born in 1935 and was raised in far upstate Vermont, and attended Clarkson University, graduating in 1958.  He had a degree in business administration.   His filmography begins ten years later, in 1969-70, with a small roles in "Alice's Restaurant," "Midnight Cowboy,"  "Little Big Man," and "Cold Turkey."

Although he looks his age, perhaps deliberately playing-frail in Knives Out, Walsh is wonderfully sharp and articulate in his podcast interview (May 2018).

Here's the first memorable quote from the Godfried interview.  He had majored in business, and taken accouting classes, which he was very proud of, and he said it gave him a big advantage in his life as an actor, because he was always able to manage money and income-average, handling the cash that came in spurts of activity, which he observed most of his actor colleagues did not manage well.  He was very proud of his business classes in college, and attributed much of his working success as an actor to them.

The second memorable quote is that thanks to his college classes in business, he always understood his place as a character actor.   "When I walk into that audition," he said, "The casting director has twelve problems.  If I can fit that role for him, then he only has eleven problems.   That's my role in getting the movie made. Period." 

The third memorable quote we hear in the voice of one of his characters, in a movie of his I'd never heard of, the little-known 2007 film Christopher Plummer, "Man in the Chair."  Plummer plays a washed-up forgotten director and Walsh a sad, washed-up screenwriter, who are brought together and given a purpose when a cocky high school kid needs them to help him make a student film. 

Walsh delivers this quote beautifully:  "The film industry is a money trench, where thieves and pimps run free down plastic hallways and where good men die like dogs."   (pause)  "There's also a negative side."    The quote is from Hunter S. Thompson.

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I also recall Walsh from his comic role as a crazed assassin in Steve Martin's The Jerk (1979), his role in the Coen Brothers' comedy Raising Arizona (1987) and as the AA sponsor in the Michael Keaton movie Clean and Sober (1988). 

Although I discovered Godfried's long-running podcast series just recently, in 2019 there was also a full length documentary about Gilbert Godfried himself - here.

BOOKS AND FILMS - CY2019

For my business strategy blog, Discoveries in Health Policy, click here.

For earlier book lists, see 2015 here, 2016 here, 2017 here, 2018 here.

PDF of this blog in the cloud - here.

Technology and Business

  Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and their Lasting Impact.  Vaclav Smil.

  Fifty Inventions that Shaped the Modern Economy.  Tim Hartford.

  Getting (More Of) What You Want: Secrets of Economics and Psychology.  Margaret Neale, Thomas Z.Lys.

Smil has the theme that the most profound and impactful inventions of 1700-2000 were mostly born in a few decades in the late 1800's.  (See similarly Northwestern's Robert J Gordon.)   It takes some twisting to get there - for example, he pegs the discovery of something to those years, such as the airplane (Kitty Hawk in 1903 fits his epoch of peak industrial discoveries, with the 747 just a later development!)  Despite this logical yoga he pulls off, I found it an interesting read.  Names we know as nouns from science class - Ohm, Joules - made discoveries that at the time were absolutely pivotal to the creation or evolution of things like electric motors.  And discovering nearly everything as hard - Edison's lightbulb was tied up in patent wars for 20 years, and Diesel's invention of the oil engine got so bogged down during commercialization that Diesel committed suicide.  

A breezier book is Fifty Inventions, with a deliberately eclectic cornucopia of topics, from "The Plow" to "Barbed Wire" to "The Bar Code" in short chapters.   (If you like this, one of my very favorite books of recent years was Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now, with six topics; also a PBS series).  

Getting (More Of) is one of hundreds of books on negotiating, but I found it an entertaining and worthwhile read on an airplane this year.

  

Biography From The White House Today

   Anthony Scaramucci, Trump, the Blue-Collar President

   George Sorial, The Real Deal 

   Chris Christie,  Let Me Finish:  Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey

   Genl. James Mattis, Call Sign Chaos

I'm back and forth from home in Hollywood to Washington twice a month, and buzzed through these on some of the redeye flights.  Scaramucci is probably the most entertaining, Sorial (a longtime, now-retired Trump Inc. attorney) the most hagiographic.  Mattis barely mentions his year in the White House; get this only as a biography of his military career.  

Chris Christie's book, while no doubt partly ghostwritten, has the breezy entertainment value of watching Christie on Bill Maher.   It's the page-turner from this set and fun as an audiobook as well, read to you by Christie himself.

Books on the Constitution and the South

Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, by Steven Luxenberg.  Includes a rich view of US and southern history of the 1800s; can be paired with the PBS series Reconstruction: America After the Civil War by Henry Louis Gates.   

I've also read parts of The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era by Stanford Law's Gienapp and Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution, by Harvard Law's Lawrence Lessig and I'm sure these are worthwhile, but slower going. 

Second Creation describes how there were countless mysteries and degrees of freedom in setting up a legislative and an executive branch in the first several years after the Constitution was penned.  (Think by analogy: How the Medicare program developed, or the FDA, and continues to evolve, relative to the sometimes sparse language of the actual statute that creates them.)   Fidelity and Constraint talks about the constant tug of war between judicial literalism and social and political dynamics.   

A different view than Separate is provided by Spying on the South, by Horwitz.  Frederick Law Omsted - the architect whose works include Central Park, Boston's parks, and Stanford's campus - started his career as a journalist with long travelogues about a Yankee's view of the South ("The Cotton Kingdom.")  Horwitz, a prolific international traveler and author, retraces the 1855 journeys of Omsted, today.   Pair with: while it's not a great movie, I enjoyed the quirky indy movie Sword of Trust with Marc Maron.

 A Few Films from 2019

The HBO dramatization series on Brexit with Benedict Cumberbatch.

Reconstruction, the PBS series with Henry Louis Gates.

A whole list of good biographical film documentaries again this year:

Citizen Jane, about urban activist Jane Jacobs, and Moynihan, about the Harvard professor, U.S. Senator, and ambassador.  Add Raise Hell! about journalist Mollie Ivins, and the multi-part PBS documentary about Bill Gates.  Meeting Gorbachev by German filmmaker Werner Herzog and Where's My Roy Cohn?   Saw Mike Wallace Is Here during its one-week run in an audience of about 4 in Beverly Hills, but enjoyed it.  Finally, The Brink, a interesting and up-close movie about Steve Bannon. 

2019 also brought us a film drama based on a biography, Can You Ever Forgive Me, with Melissa McCarthy and screenplay by one of my favorite writer-directors Nicole Holofcener; life of author and forger Lee Israel.  And still two other films-from-real-life:  These are the holiday Netflix film based on real people, The Two Popes, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, and the holiday film Bombshell, based on real-life events in 2016 at Fox News.

I enjoyed re-watching the 1980s film Being There, Peter Sellers' last film, finding something interesting going on in every scene.  On a truly idiosyncratic note, maybe somehow the Two Popes movie reminded me of an old-school 1960s Catholic comedy with Haley Mills called "The Trouble With Angels."  It turns out there is a revisionist feminist viewpoint (!) on this nearly-forgotten comedy; see a Youtube short film here, I wrote about it in an essay here. 

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Footnotes

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Money Laundering!

Enjoyed a couple books about international fraud and money-laundering:

    Moneyland, Oliver Bollough

    Lying for Money, Dan Davies

These can be paired with the Netflix movie Laundromat, in which an all-star cast ranging from Antonio Banderas to Meryl Streep looks at the Panama banking scandal.   On the topic of global finance, looking forward to the upcoming documentary Citizen K, about oligarchs in Russia, by noted filmmaker Alex Gibney (he did Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room, 2005.)

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Biography

I get more biography from film documentaries than books, but I enjoyed Robert Caro's memoir about his working life, "Working," and I stumbled across a 1930s book that was an interesting read, Edith Wharton's largely forgotten autobiography "Looking Backward," which brings the 1880's and 1890's in New York and New England back to life.  

Also stumbled across Jessica Pan's memoir of a year in her life, "Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come." About life as a young ex-pat, freelance author, living with her new husband and settling into life in London, built around the theme of adventures in becoming more extroverted and overcoming shyness.  For me, both Working and Sorry were page-turners I finished in a day or two,

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The 1930s

I am fascinated by the 1930s, ever since I ran across a book called Squire in the White House (1940), by Joe Flynn, a best seller in its day by someone who hated FDR.   A lot of people hated FDR - we forget.   And contemporary books from the 1930s, if they were popular then, are often a dollar or two on Amazon.  So I've developed a book shelf of both US, English, and German books written in the 30's.

Clustered together, on a friend's recommendation I FINALLY got around to In the Garden of the Beasts and really enjoyed it - a page turner.  About the American ambassador in Berlin in the mid 1930s.  Hint: I just invested in the eBook and paired audiobook, after having left the big hardcover book, a Christmas gift, untouched on the shelf for three years.

Also read the new book 1931, by Swiss economist Tobias Straussman, about the national and international decisions that shaped the awesome economics and politics of the early 1930s.

As a 1930s hobbyist, I dug up and read three 80 year old books that were all written "as it was happening" during the period, Darkness Over Germany (by a Brit traveler in Germany), Nazi Means War (by an American journalist in Germany around 1934) and Germany's Master Plan (a contemporary US analysis of what Germany was doing and how) and  a fast-reading work of fiction, Katherine Kressman Taylor's book, Address Unknown, a novella which builds to a plot twist worthy of an O.Henry story.  

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Local Color (LA)

Really enjoyed a book on the history of Los Angeles, focused on three inimitable, eccentric, and impactful characters from the early 20th century, The Mirage Factory by Gary Krist.  See also The Library Book (about LA and the old and modern history of its LA public library) by popular author Susan Orlean.  And over the holidays I finally finished a Christmas book from a year ago, Dear Los Angeles, a cornucopia of extracts from letters and diaries 1750-2018.

Reading Time?

In part, I logged 120,000 miles on airplanes, which at 400 mph is 300 hours - almost 8, 40-hour work weeks.  A fair part working on a laptop, but part reading.  Anyway, between two to three nights in a hotel and six hours on a plane a week, a few hours at a gym or hiking, and often a matched copy of the audiobook at 2x speed, I can often get through one book a week.

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Tee'd Up for 2020

A new book, Exposed: Why Our Health Insurance is Incomplete and What Can Be Done About It, by Christopher T. Robinson; Harvard Press, here.   Along with the late Princeton economist, Uwe Reinhardt, posthumous book Priced Out! about the US health system. 

Debating Modern Medical Technologies: Politics of Safety, Effectiveness, Patient Access. Karen Maschke, Michael Gusmano. 

Beyond The Prototype: Roadmap for the Fuzzy Area between Ideas and Outcomes, by Douglas Ferguson.

The Five Year Mission: Awkward First Draft

The recent book, "Dear Los Angeles," contains some 500 pages of diary extracts, letters, and excerpts from memoranda from the 1700s to the 2010's, arranged by date (Jan 1, Jan 2, Jan 3...).

For August 2, 1966, author Gene Roddenberry had penned this:

This is the story of the United Space Ship Enterprise. Assigned a five-year patrol of our galaxy, the giant starship visits Earth colonies, regulates commerce, and explores strange new worlds and civilizations.  These are its voyages - and its adventures.

The series Star Trek premiered in September 1966.  By August 10, Roddenberry had:

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

10 pm December 23 Hollywood

Many relatives join us for the holiday week.  The slow passage of time led me to notice that there is no name for the second evening before Christmas - December 23.

It fell on a Monday this year, and our dog Trixie and I headed out at 9 or 10 pm into Hollywood.   We drove up La Brea to Sunset & LaBrea, where there is a small mini mall on the west side.  Not the mini-mall facing Sunset from the northwest corner, or the one opposite at the northeast corner, the one just further north on La Brea.

This mini-mall is one of those mysteries of Los Angeles, with shops indiscriminately tossed together.   On the ground floor there is a large laundromat - empty at 10 pm but for one woman.  Next to that, a hole-in-the-wall Middle Eastern place called Sultani where I've stopped a couple times.  Next to that, a dingy dive bar out of either the film noir era or the movie Barflies.  Next to that, a third-rate-looking liquor store.  Next to that, a remarkable Persian ice cream shop.

The Persian ice cream shop, inhabiting this mall for 25 years, is called Mashti Malone's.  Supposedly the prior shop there had paid for a large shamrock on the boulevard sign and they couldn't afford to change it, so Iranian "Mashti" became "Mashti Malone" to fit the shamrock neon sign, the shamrock now embellished with middle eastern letters.   They have over a dozen flavors of ice creams, including exotic Persian flavors like lavendar and rosewater. 

I got my usual - stracciatella, because I know what this means in Italian.   I also got two cartons of Bahklava, which will be a cover for when I get home and there would be doubts I have not walked the dog but only driven for ice cream.   ("Look, I got bakhlava for everybody and all the guests!") 

In the parking lot, which was two-thirds empty, a young black woman wandered around, apparently being the guard to keep non-customers from stealing the spaces.   But there were almost no cars coming and going and most of the spaces were empty.  Walking past her, I nodded hello.  She had a spiral high school style notebook filling top to bottom with handwriting, but what she was writing I have no idea.  It would be interesting to know.   Maybe she will be there another night.  I know the bahklava will be.

As Trixie and I pulled out, Trixie's passenger window was down and she was in Universal Car Position, front paws on the window edge, head out, tongue hanging.  At the corner of the lot a middle-aged woman stood by a misshapen bag of possessions and was ranting loudly into the night sky.   We waiting for an open stretch and pulled out on La Brea, and turned southbound.

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A 1995 essay by Christopher Hitchens, about Sunset Boulevard, quotes Joan Didion as having remarked, the intersection of Sunset and La Brea (shown here) was "the middle of nowhere."

A Feminist Revisioning of "The Trouble With Angels" (And Notes on Other Movies)

Recently, a friend mentioned a favorite movie of his that was always enjoyable to see again. 

A week later, I ran across an interesting short movie video-essay on YouTube on a movie I've liked on multiple viewings - The Trouble With Angels.

The Trouble With Angels doesn't show up on any top-10 lists.  It's a 1966 comedy that follows Mary Clancy (Haley Mills), a teen girl from a single-parent family whose father whom we infer is an orphan and whose uncle has deposited her in one boarding school after another.  Mary runs through boarding schools the way the Von Trapp family went through nannies.   Her guardian/uncle isn't interested in her (he always has a new convertible and a new girlfriend) and she's ended up at an all-girls Catholic school at an old mansion in the woods somewhere.  She quickly acquires a sidekick, and they get into a series of rebellious escapades (from invading the nuns' quarters during Mass to smoking in the attic. )   In a surprise ending, Mary decides to stay at the convent as a novice in the last minutes of the film, as the school-year ends.

It's held my attention on repeated viewings because it's a well-crafted film - like a well-made play, diverse characters are presented ins sequence, protagonists and antagonists align, there are highs and lows and tension and surprises.  The music is a catchy theme (by a major film composer) that's reprised in a variety of orchestrations.   The film has been criticized for Mary's sudden and (to some) unsupported decision to stay as a novice; but I have two takes on that.  First, Mary is clearly a developing character and grows emotionally through her experiences in the film, and develops both insight and affection for the nuns' lives and personalities as the year moves along.  The movie, on second viewing, has a series of very carefully woven set-pieces that expose Mary to puzzlement, insights, and development.   Second, it IS intended to be a surprise that Mary makes that decision, the author intends to make the point that life is an unexpected and mysterious thing, and we should be open to sudden change and new experiences and directions.  Indeed, on second viewing, Trouble With Angels delivers us with a radical challenge: What events and relationships are going on in our lives, earlier today, tomorrow, this year, which if fully understood, would bring us to a radical new insight and new plan, for next year?

Laura Ivins' Film Essay

Somehow, I stumbled across a four-minute film essay on YouTube, "The Female Gaze in Ida Lupino's The Trouble With Angels."  It's by Laura Ivins of the film program at Indiana University (and there's a blog that complements the video here).   She draws from a feminist viewpoint that's been written about regarding Trouble.   trouble is based on a book written by a woman, the screenplay is by a woman, the director is a woman, nearly all the characters are women.   A to Z, it's about women with diverse ages and personalities learning about each other, building relationships, and navigating largely in a world without men.   Mary's decision to stay as a novice can be seen as her creative and bold escape from a grim vision of the disappointments and limits of classical daughter/mother/wife roles that fail, by far, to live up to their promised stereotypes of happiness. 

The film is available for a few dollars rental from  major VOD venders.

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Core Creative Team for Trouble

Trouble is based on a book by Jane Trahey; a script by Blanche Hanalis; directed by Ida Lupino; music by Jerry Goldsmith.   All four were remarkable people.  Jane Trahey was both a writer and also very successful in advertising.  Blanche Hanalis contributed to many scripts and was the creator of Little House on the Prairie.  Ida Lupino was a successful actress before she became a success director and one of the very few women directors of the 50s and 60s.  Jerry Goldsmith was a very productive film composer with many well-known credits.  They were 42, 50, 47, and 39 in 1965 when the film was made.  Speaking of ages, the lead Haley Mills was 19 in 1965, but her co-star June Harding was 28.  In 2019, Mills is alive at 73; Harding died in 2019 at 81.

More About Craft

Ivins' video notes a moving scene where the normally stiff Mother Superior breaks down alone in the chapel with the casket of another nun.  There is an earlier scene (it takes place at midnight by a fireplace) where there is a 1:1 set piece between Mother Superior and the nun who'll die, carefully placed to provide a backdrop for what the girls see when the Mother Superior responds, publicly and privately, to the death.  This is one of many examples of how carefully crafted the arc of the film is; most every scene is there for a reason playing back to earlier, or forward to later, scenes.  (The scene of a student field trip to a nursing home shows very old women from the secular world abandoned after husbands die and children movie away, one of the things that makes the social life of the convent a little more attractive to Mary.)  I'm the first to say I'd miss 80% of this on  a cold first viewing, which helps to explain why (as Ivins quotes) first-run reviewers for NYT and Washington Post usually felt the movie lacked enough motivation for Mary's character development.  It's one of those movies that is even better to watch for the storytelling when you know what's going to happen in the end.

The Social Clock

It's important to wind back the social clock to take in Trouble With Angels.  Today, the setting of a convent and the plot twist of a bright young girl becoming a nun is frankly bizarre, like having a character having three heads.  In the 1950s and early 1960s, entering training as a priest or nun was an unusual choice, and a head-turning one, but in a strongly Catholic community it wouldn't be bizarre.

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Sequel

The nuns appear in a 1968 sequel, Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows.  "Trouble" is essentially a 1950s film, probably conceived around '64.   "Where Angels Go" has definite allusions to a changing culture, if embryonic, and there are two versions of the "Where Angels Go" poster, one old-fashioned and one in a "mod" 1968 style.   (1968 is same year as "Yellow Submarine" and just one year before 1969's "Easy Rider.")

Humor

YouTube has a recut of the Trouble With Angels in the format of the trailer for a horror film - here.

A Few More Actresses

The cast.  Some of the background actors had interesting stories.  Camilla Sparv, a Swedish actress who plays the "young beautiful sexy nun," was married to Herbert Hoover III, of the Hoover vacuum fortune, then Robert Evans, a very successful film producer.  Another young background nun, Dolores Sutton, had a long film and stage career.  Portia Nelson, known as a nun both in Troubles and in Sound of Music, had a long cabaret career, was a prolific songwriter, and composed a poem often quoted in 12-step programs.  Rosalind Russell, of course, had a long acting career ranging from His Girl Friday in 1940 to Auntie Mame and Gypsy  in 1958 and 1962.  She was a devoted Catholic and won a special Humanitarian Academy Award for her work with medical and social causes.  Russell also uses a classic mid-Atlantic accent, more familiar from the 1930s and 1940s.

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I had remembered Mary's guardian as her father, but he's her uncle, so it's implied she's an orphan.  Maybe the hands-off detachment he exhibits toward her is too grim or upsetting to attribute to a father, and it's more survivable that an uncle would treat her so off-handedly.  If her father was the awful one, it would attract too much emotional attention from the viewer, whereas the uncle can appear on stage once or twice briefly and we just brush him off and focus on Mary.

For a TCM Robert Osborne intro to Trouble, here.

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I don't think I could ever make a best-5 or best-10 movie list, but on a plane recently I jotted down some favorite movies of mine.

• Smashed (2012) LA-set movie about a Gen-X couple with alcoholism, sort of an updated Days of Wine and Roses; with Mary Kate Winstead.
• Trouble with Angels (1966)
• Children of a Lesser God (1986) From a play; about a young deaf woman and a teacher who falls in love with her; from a play.  With Marlee Matlin and William Hurt.
• Cinema Paradiso (1988)  Set in Italy in the 1980s and 1940s; this one does make some best-10 lists.
• Being There (1979)  A slow-moving and surreal film; for me, it's engrossing to watch for development and detail from beginning to end.  Peter Sellers' last film; Shirley MacLaine.
• Mary Poppins (1964) and Sound of Music (1965).   The Julie Andrews fan club? Surprisingly, I find I can watch both of these beginning to end every year without a moment's loss of attention.  There's a school of thought that the main character in Mary Poppins is actually the father - he has the most challenges and the biggest character development, and it's interesting to watch from that viewpoint.  
• Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)  Seven independent short films bundled together.  By the Coen Brothers (I also loved the very different Fargo); in Buster, the first and last chapters are my favorites.
• Celluloid Closet (1995)  This is a documentary about the history of gays portrayed in film.  I've felt it's one of the best documentaries I know, and it is not only a history of 100 years of film, but also a 90 minute tour of 100 years of American history and visual and social change.
• Beautiful Mind (2001)  Award-winning movie of John Nash, a Nobel Laureate burdened by schizophrenia.  It swept Best Picture, Best Director, Best screenplay, Best Actress, and nominated for Best Actor.
• Threepenny Opera.  I love this originally German musical or operetta by Brecht and Weill, 1929.  There are three filmed versions, 1931 (original German with English subtitles); as "Mack the Knife," a 1989 US version with Raul Julia; and finally, there was a stunningly well done 2018 German version released as "Mackie Messer: Dreigroschenfilm" only in German and I've seen the DVD which sadly lacks English subtitles.  This last version brilliantly cuts back and forth between Brecht and his colleagues and a filmed version of the play and ends with characters marching out of the play and into present-day London.   (E.g. breaking the fourth wall, as Brecht did).   Really well done; ought to be released on Netflix with subtitles.
• Nothing in Common (1986)  Not-well-known film about Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason in a difficult but evolving father-son relatinoship.
• Downfall (2004)  Famous modern drama about the last ten days of Berlin before the Russian military victory; most of it set in Hitler's bunker. 
• Casino Jack (2010) and Miss Sloane (2016).  Two very different movies about Washington behind-the-scenes and lobbyists.   Casino Jack is a hoot to watch (Kevin Spacey stars), while Miss Sloane has one of the best surprise endings of any movie, for my money.  
• Chicago (2002) and Cabaret (1972).  Two all-time successful musicals.
• Love Actually (2003) and Magnolia (199).   Not usually placed together, both are famous for being big-cast, extra-complicated but slickly-moving films with a half-dozen or more major subplots going on at once.
• The Expert (YouTube, 2014, 7 minutes).  Incredibly funny and para-realistic view of strategy consulting and working with clients.   Every character represents a real-world role.   23M views on YouTube.

Three Books I Skimmed That Weren't Very Good

It's a cliche' to make best-ten lists or talk about favorite books that you read lately.   Here are three I picked up from the library, skimmed, and turned right back in.

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Arlie Russell Hochschild (2018)

Amazon: 621 reviews x 4.5 Stars

Great title, timely topic.  Skimmed it to find very predictable material: people at the bottom, lots of them, mad at people at the top, few of them.  Marx noticed this too.

Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company

Marc Benioff (and Carlye Adler) (2009)

Amazon: 155 reviews x 4.5 Stars

Great title.  I love learning about the history of technology and technologic change, from the 1800s right up to today and tomorrow.  But this book is one- or two-page sections about obvious cliche's.  Along the lines of: "Focus on Making The Customer Happy!" and "Make Your Customer Your #1 Sales Agent!"  Sure, these are true, but Winston Churchill won WW-II with the rule, "Never never give up" and yet there's a lot more to say about how he did it.   

I would have liked, and might have expected, cases studies about Salesforce at inflection points - "A" was going wrong, and we considering doing B or C, and chose B, but it didn't work, so then we argued about trying D or E, choosing E for these reasons.   That's not this book, despite the title.

Our Dogs, Ourselves: The Story of a Singular Bond

Alexandra Horowitz (2019)

Amazon: 14 reviews x 4 stars

Great cover.   How could you not pick up this book?   Flipped through it; it's the 30th book about human-dog relationships in five years, I think.

Interesting 1939 Film: Confessions of a Nazi Spy

Amazon Prime Video served up a little known free movie to me recently, HOLLYWOODISM, a 1998 documentary about the history of Jewish pioneers in the film industry from 1910 to the 1950s. 

Based on a book by Neal Gabler and first aired on A&E,  I'd give HOLLYWOODISM a B-rating but it has some interesting points. 

I'd previously read that in the 1930s, American Jews in leadership positions were reluctant to say too much about Hitler and German anti-semitism.  In some cases, the U.S. government told them not too. 

Yet at the same time, there was a largely forgotten level of interest in Nazism in America in the 1930s; it was far from a taboo subject.   See the ten minute recent documentary, A Night at the Garden (here), about the mass-scale 1939 New York Pro-German (Pro-Nazi) rally (Wiki here).  That rally wasn't an isolated event.  See recent books like Hitler's American Friends (here).  And Hitler in Los Angeles (here).  There was also the pro-fascist book by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Wave of the Future, appearing as late as 1940 (here).

Just two months after that landmark scale of that Pro Nazi rally, in Spring 1939, Warner Brothers released "Confessions of a Nazi Spy," which was intended to make real the breadth and energy of pro-Nazi interests in the United States.   Thus, the movie falls between the Anschluss of Austria (March 1938), Kristallnacht (November 1938), and the invasion of Poland (September 1939).

Confessions of a Nazi Spy

Confessions of a Nazi Spy isn't a class-A film, but it was a very interesting one.  See Wikipedia here, see an online ten-page deep dive article by S.J. Ross, here.

The plot.  Basically, we are introduced to some unhappy or disgruntled German-Americans who are lured into the spy world by ringleaders of Nazi interests in America, playing out against a background of "German Bund" or German-American clubs, associations, and summer camps.    Eventually, the Feds are tipped off and a film noir detective drama ensues.   German-Americans are made more sympathetic because if they try to turn down Nazi requests they are brutally threatened for life and limb.

As noted in HOLLYWOODISM, Confessions never mentions anti semitism directly but there are several clear indirect references, e.g. a reference to rights of man regardless of religion.

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Tidbits

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There are numerous references to Hitler's social engineering and propaganda, something timely today in 2019 as we discuss politics, social media, and fake news. 

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The movie Confessions builds up to wide arrests of infiltrated Nazi spies in American military and industry, which is hailed as a victory.  However, just the same spirit of bravely ferreting out and rounding up the enemy in his stateside nooks and crannies also occurred, largely falsely, as part of McCarthyism. 

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Confessions also shows many "bad Germans" in the US amongst the acknowledged "good Germans," but it's impossible not to forsage the concentration camps for Japanese of 1942, in this 1939 movie.

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Edward G. Robinson has a lead role as an FBI agent.  EGR was born Emanuel Goldenberg in a Yiddish-speaking family and came to the US age 10 in 1904.   (He attended City College of New York with the plan to become an attorney.)

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As mentioned in HOLLYWOODISM, there is another obscure and unusual 1940s movie with Cary Grant about anti-semiticism in the executive world of New York, Gentleman's Agreement (1947).   This too was part of an era when Hollywood dealt rarely and gingerly with anti-semiticism, even less so as the McCarthy hearings dawned and often associated Jewishness with Communism.