We watched that movie last night. "Three on a Match" — selected from from The Criterion Channel's collection, "Pre-Code Divas."
What a crazy movie! I'll avoid spoilers and just say: 1. Fantastic example of a woman who cannot be satisfied with conventional married life (even with wealth and a fine lawyer-husband), 2. Shades of "Reefer Madness," 3. Only 63 minutes long, 4. Who knew there was a boy version of Shirley Temple? 5. Don't expect to see much of Bette Davis, 6. Brief but great shots of Humphrey Bogart, 7. Loved the sad piano playing in the girl's reform school, 8. Don't reveal the shocking ending! 9. Inventive method of communicating with the police, 10. I love the pre-Code era, 11. Made me want to watch more Ann Dvorak movies.
It's not even my favorite film noir from 1950 with a lead character named Dix.
But it was watchable, and that was certainly Bogart. And he really does say, "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me."
I'm exploring the phrase "as the day is long" as a consequence of becoming interested in the word "daylong," which the NYT used to describe the raid on Mar-a-Lago — "the daylong search of the former president’s home." I've been using the word "raid," which I'm sure is utterly correct, because I researched it, when I saw, immediately after the news broke, that it was a talking point to say that it was not a raid.
That talking point dropped out of the conversation. I didn't even get a chance to use my research: the OED defines "raid" as "A sudden or vigorous attack or descent upon something for the purpose of appropriation, suppression, or destruction; spec. a surprise visit by police to arrest suspects or seize illicit goods."
But that doesn't mean that supporters of the raid want to use the word "raid." There's the word "search," but is that adequate? The NYT seems to have worried that "search" alone called too much attention to the the avoidance of "raid," and — I'm just guessing! — they appended "daylong."
Meade noticed that first, and when he texted the quote to me with the word "daylong" circled, and the note...
For NYT, “raid” = “daylong search”
I replied:
like it was gentle and leisurely… like a day at the beach
"There is a perception that money can immunise you against mental-health problems when actually, I believe that wealth can make you – and the people closest to you – much more susceptible to them.... Too many of my clients want to indulge their children so 'they never have to suffer what I had to suffer' while growing up.... An over-indulged child develops into an entitled adult who has low self-confidence, low self-esteem, and a complete lack of grit.... There are few people in the world to whom they can actually relate, which of course leads to a lack of empathy.... When one leads a life without consequences (for being rude to a waiter or cruel to a sibling, for example) there really is no reason to not do these things. After a while, it becomes normalised and accepted. Living a life without rules isn’t good for anyone.... I was raised in a small town in rural Kentucky, solidly in the middle class. And it can be very difficult to watch these individuals struggle with the toxicity of excess, isolation and deep mistrust. Succession is a dramatised version of the world they operate in – it is made for television and part of its purpose is to give audiences the pleasure of watching the wealthy struggle. But for someone who has worked with them, I know that their challenges are real and profound."
I don't watch "Succession," and I don't think I would, even if I still had HBO, but I looked at a trailer for Season 3. Rich people and their problems. It's fiction, so of course the characters have problems. You invent characters and you load them with problems.
But what I read between the lines at The Guardian is: Go ahead. Tax the hell out of the rich. You'll be doing them a favor.
I have what I called my "imaginary movie project, " but it's been stalled since 2019. It began in 2019. The idea was to see how I react to these things today and try to remember and relate it to how I felt at the time. I began with the year 1960, when I was 9, and I got up to 1968, with the last of the movies I saw when I was in high school. Oh, how I cried!
Now, my son John is doing a movie blog project, where he identifies his favorite movie of every year beginning with 1920, reaching a new year each day. He got up to the point where I left off, and his 1968 movie just happens to be the same as mine. Then one of his 1969 movies is the movie I watched for 1969. I watched it, but I didn't blog about it. And then I've also watched my movie for 1970, 1971, 1972, and 1973 — my college years! — all without blogging.
So now there's a horrible disconnect between watching and writing, but let me solve the problem by writing about all 5 movies right now. Here they are — in their ghoulish, gouldish glory:
1. That's a lot of Elliott Gould! He was Ted in "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," one of the doctors in "MASH," and Philip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye." And he could just as well have been the bumbling fool played by Woody Allen in "Play It Again, Sam" or the bumbling fool played by Warren Beatty in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller."
2. Whatever was happening to American manhood in the early 70s, it was embodied in Elliott Gould. Let me pick one scene to help you contemplate this issue. It's this, the beginning of "The Long Goodbye":
3. We might understand early 70s American manhood through what it is not. It is not Humphrey Bogart. In "The Long Goodbye," Elliott Gould plays Philip Marlowe, the character Humphrey Bogart famously played in the 1940s, but he's 70s Marlowe, and there's a big difference. We're tasked to remember Bogart and compare, but in "Play It Again, Sam," Humphrey Bogart appears— an actor impersonates him — and advises the Woody Allen character on manly behavior. Allen tries repeatedly to follow the advice, fails ludicrously, but ultimately finds a way to incorporate some of the advice into his own version of a man.
4. Why was I absorbing so much movie material about the struggles of the 1970s man? What about me, a woman? There were some women in these movies. The great Julie Christie bested Warren Beatty in the wild West whorehouse business in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." Diane Keaton was a fine match for Woody Allen in "Play It Again, Sam." Sally Kellerman embodied order in "MASH" — where the yin and yang are reversed and then men are the chaos.
5. The movie with the most substance was "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." Here's something I wrote to John when he had just watched and loved that movie: "You didn’t live through the period when adults were doing those things, so what they were satirizing wasn’t really available to you. I saw it when I was 18 and that’s what the generation just ahead of me was doing. They seemed quite awful to me so it was easy to laugh at them and feel not at risk to be anything like them. I was half the age you are now when I saw that. Adulthood, even (or especially) among the supposedly hip people, looked sad and clueless."
6. Things? What things? — you may be asking. There's an Esalen-type retreat, training Bob & Carol in how to be progressive in their sexual relationship, and that challenges the more conservative Ted & Alice.
7. Three of those 5 movies were directed by Robert Altman. Oh, my, was he a big deal. I thought "MASH" was excellent at the time (and I never watched the TV show "MASH" because I didn't want to see different actors and different stories). But "MASH" didn't mean as much to me this time. My favorite at the time was "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," and I felt about the same this time. "The Long Goodbye" annoyed me at the time, but I thought it was great on rewatch. When I got to the end this time, I went back to the beginning and watched it again.
8. I could have said a lot more about these movies if I'd written about them one by one as I did my rewatchings. What held me back?
9. Something about college? We watched so many older movies in those years as Cinema Guild — right across the street from our dorm — served up 2 classics every day. So many decades of great old films to see — nightly double features for 50¢. Why go to the regular movie theater and pay $2, just because something's new? There was the lure of the old. All the Bergman films, the silents, the noir, the Fellini, the Marx Brothers, the Kurosawa, the Cary Grant movies, Katharine Hepburn, the entire French New Wave. We were hungry for movies, but we had half a century of great stuff to catch up on. And, of course, back then, you had to see a film when it was playing or it would be gone and maybe you'd never get a chance to see it again. Here's "Ikiru" or "Design for Living" or whatever. Better get over to Cinema Guild or you'll regret it — maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.
10. I might be that what held me back from writing about those movies is that it's too personal. 1969 to 1973 — those were the years when I met and married the man who was my first husband, and those movies had so much to do with our relationship. Writing is an invasion of your own privacy and the privacy of others, but the writer is always deciding where and how far to invade.
"There is nothing romantic about either Katharine Hepburn or Humphrey Bogart, for both look bedraggled throughout."
From a 1951 review of "The African Queen," quoted at Wikipedia. We watched the movie last night. I think it was about the 3rd time for both of us. I saw it in the 1970s when it was on TV for the first time (which was portrayed in the media then as a big event), and I watched it at least once in the 80s or 90s when my sons were growing up.
More from Wikipedia about the contemporary reviews: Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times called it "rather contrived and even incredible, but melodramatic enough, with almost a western accent, to be popularly effective." Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it "a slick job of movie hoodwinking with a thoroughly implausible romance, set in a frame of wild adventure that is as whopping as its tale of off-beat love ... This is not noted with disfavor."
The bean cliché never comes up in the text of the column, though actual beans — soybeans — are part of the discussion, which created the temptation to use a bean cliché in the headline.
His decision to go it alone, rather than making common cause with longstanding allies, was ill advised, and his tit-for-tat trade war has caused significant pain for many Americans.... But Mr. Trump was right to argue that China has engaged in unfair competition. The question is whether he can win significant concessions....
This is a surprising amount of support for Trump from the NYT. Mr. Trump was right...
The failure of previous administrations to hold China to account on [currency manipulation] has passed beyond remedy.... The looming risk... is that Mr. Trump will accept a deal that allows him to claim a superficial triumph without forcing China to make enduring changes.
Trump is the one who's willing to walk away from deals, and though the NYT doesn't give recognition to that strength of his, the NYT is showing some support. How about if you, NYT, don't attack him when he does walk away from a deal? You have the power to remove some of the pressure to claim "a superficial triumph." Stop undermining him. Give him half the support you gave the "previous adminstration[]," which escapes even getting named as you mildly observe its "failure."
In particular, the United States should reject any Chinese offer to guarantee large-scale purchases of American agricultural products like soybeans or energy products like liquid natural gas — indeed, guaranteed purchases of any kind....
Now, about that cliché — trading X for a hill of beans. First, the cliché is especially bad because we have the soybeans, so if X equals "the Future" and we trade, we get the Future, which would make it a great deal, and that's not what you mean to say.
But put that problem aside. And put aside the problem of using clichés generally. I disapprove, but I'm not going to harp on that. You're trying to use a cliché, but you've got the wrong bean cliché. You trade X for a handful of beans. It's from the "Jack and the Beanstalk" story. The "hill of beans" cliché is doesn't amount to a hill of beans. Use "handful" when referring to a trade and "hill" when you're just looking at something that's supposed to be big and judging it to be small.
I don't know where "hill of beans" got started. According to The Farmer's Almanac the phrase "not worth a bean" was around as far back as 1297. A bean is worth even less than a hill of beans, so it's odd that "not worth a hill of beans" developed later, "around 1863," when "'a hill of' was often inserted into phrases to emphasize their meaning." I get the sense that "beans" was a euphemism for "shit." I'm seeing (in the OED):
1874 Hotten's Slang Dict. (rev. ed.) 171 Full of beans, arrogant, purseproud. A person whom sudden prosperity has made offensive and conceited, is said to be too ‘full of beans’. Originally stable slang.
Anyway, "doesn't amount to a hill of beans" was a well-worn colloquialism when Humphrey Bogart deployed it in World War II in the name of personal sacrifice for the greater good:
By the way, in "Jack and the Beanstalk," Jack is a fool who is tricked into selling his family's cow for a handful of beans he's told are magic. But in the story the beans actually do turn out to be magic, and in the end his family gets rich. So there's good reason to shy away from the "handful of beans" cliché.
Indeed, Trump often looks like the hero in this story, seeming to be a fool, and our story-addled minds may fall into believing things will work out great for him in the end. Jack was vindicated, after all.
1. I'm watching the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination today, now that they've moved beyond the introductory orations, and I'll make some notes here, using a numbered list, updated throughout the day. I'm using a DVR, so I'm behind real time, and the updates will come as I get to things in my recording, but just as the people in the gallery are — under Senator Grassley's rule — free to shout out whatever they want at any time, you can talk about what you like in the comments. I mean, you can talk about anything in the hearings. The people in Grassley's domain might be yelling about anything. I can't make out the words. I've tried. Was someone shouting "Death is death"? I don't know!
2. Grassley, the Committee chair, seems to have made a decision — in consultation with whom, I don't know — to allow the protests to interrupt the Senators and the nominee willy nilly. Grassley is not terribly articulate, but he mumbled something about "free speech" and the ability of 300 million Americans to make our own judgment. I interpreted this to mean that he (presumably in consultation with others) has decided that the disruption hurts the anti-Kavanaugh side. Kavanaugh either actively agrees or understands the game, and he's showing patience and fortitude and an ability to maintain focus as he gets right back, in the same calm voice, to whatever point he was in the middle of making. The protesters probably think they represent society's victims, but they sound like nothing but noise, and they're making the serene and diligent Kavanaugh seem like the victim of crude disrespect.
3. Kavanaugh has a little booklet-sized copy of the Constitution, and he's got the effective stage business of holding it up when he says "Constitution." We can see how small it is. It does not partake of the prolixity of a legal code, we constitutional scholars know very well. So he demonstrates his dedication to the document, but also — for those who can see it — demonstrates that everything he contends is in there can't possibly be there except as a high level abstraction, leaving the specific details for most things to be discovered elsewhere. Attesting to his dedication to precedent, Kavanaugh held up the Constitution and said it's rooted in Article III, where the words are "judicial power." The judge still must figure out what the judicial power is, and Kavanaugh was soon enough off onto what's in Federalist 78, but why Federal 78 and not something else? He has his favorite sources, and those sources require interpretation too. Once you find the judges are required to follow precedent, you still have to figure out how far. Kavanaugh keeps bringing up Brown v. Board of Education, but not in the context of precedent, and Brown v. Board of Education went against precedent. This is all first-week-of-Conlaw1 stuff, and of course, Kavanaugh knows it. He's got to simplify to talk to the Senators and to the American people, and it's sophisticated not to get too sophisticated.
4. Kavanaugh says that in all of the roles he undertakes, he looks at how the people who have gone before him have done their work. As a judge he is following the case law, and now, as he sits before this committee, he's following what he calls the "nominee precedent." He's read the old transcripts of hearings, and he's using the precedent, notably the precedent of the very influential Ruth Bader Ginsburg performance of the nominee role. What does it mean to "follow" those who have gone before? Obviously, he follows them in the literal sense of chronology. But he's not bound to do the same. Presumably, he'll use what works well and avoid what he can see with hindsight does not. Maybe someone will ask him if his adherence to judicial precedent is analogous. In "nominee precedent," you're following Ginsburg and not Bork. Aren't you picking and choosing, based on what's pragmatic? There's no authority that binds. Bork's Senate performance is like Plessy v. Ferguson. It's bad. You're using your human judgment and power to see that it's bad, and that's how you follow it.
5. One reason Kavanaugh, like Ginsburg, won't talk about how he will decide cases is that he puts great value on judicial independence. He wants litigants coming before him to feel that he has an open mind, and that the one with the better legal argument wins. If he'd talked about the subject to the Judiciary Committee, he'd feel morally bound to the Senators, and then he wouldn't be a proper judge, but a "delegate of the Judiciary Committee." Saying that, he was implicitly telling the Senators that they are violating the Constitution if they try to nail him down about anything.
6. This only gets me to the end of Grassley's questioning (and he reserved some of his time). You see why I can't really live-blog this thing or even delay-blog it completely. There's too much. Not sure how much of this I can do. Feel free to encourage me.
7. Dianne Feinstein endeavored to be gracious, but her patience wore thin as K consumed her time with his spelled-out explanations of specific cases and the rigors of judicial methodology. I was about to compliment her on refraining from interrupting when she interrupted him. She'd say, "Sorry to interrupt, but..." Once he kept speaking a little and then said, "Sorry to interrupt" — that is, apologizing for interrupting her interruption. K expressed empathy with DF's concerns. He was super-nice to her, and as things progressed, what I read in her face was pain — pain over wanting him to feel pain. But he's so heavily swaddled in judicial values that he's safe from everything. As a judge, he does what he must do as a judge, even when it pains him. He's pre-pained, inoculated to pain, and there's no way to further pain him. The children who die in school shootings... the women who would die from illegal abortions... these causes for empathy receive his empathy, but they do not change what he must do. His cold, dry judicial virtue is supreme and sublime, and he must, as ever, humbly submit. Feinstein was reduced to scoffing that K had learned (from Senators?) to "filibuster."
8. Orrin Hatch. Maybe I should skip the Republicans. It's not as though they're giving me a breather.
9. Patrick Leahy. The gravelly-voiced Senator — who I'm surprised to see is only 78 — laid an elaborate trap that hyper-focused on some typo-ridden email that a fellow named Miranda had stolen from him. The idea seemed to be that Kavanaugh knew about this terrible theft (which I think may have upset Leahy not so much because it was "stolen" as because it was so embarrassingly badly written). It was was only a draft as anyone could see, so anyone would know it was stolen, stolen... Or something like that. Miranda was a mole, a mole, I tell you!! I think this is video of Leahy...
Kavanaugh kept his cool, but he needed to see the email under discussion, so we had a minute of watching Kavanaugh read. Then Kavanaugh asked Leahy to tell him where to look to see what he was talking about, and Leahy, facing the requirement that he too read on camera, and quite apparently not up to the task, said he'd move on to some other question. So much for the trap. Leahy proceeded to some other document-heavy trap that didn't work, and he tried to blame Grassley for keeping something confidential and — with the 85-year-old Feinstein sitting between them — the 84-year-old Grassley went ballistic on Leahy. Zero progress was made against Kavanaugh, and I think Kavanaugh had to suppress laughter. Here at Meadhouse, we frequently paused and laughed and were all Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic...
10. From my handwritten notes, quoting Dick Durbin: "The things I did were unimaginable." He was referring to his work in a slaughterhouse, after getting Kavanaugh to say that the "dirtiest job" Kavanaugh ever had was construction work (or maybe mowing lawns). I wonder what exactly Dick Durbin did in the slaughterhouse, but it was a set-up to excoriate Kavanaugh for going out of his way to decide a case against some workers in a slaughterhouse. It reminded me of the Gorsuch hearings, the way the Democratic Senators got pretty far along toward proving Gorsuch didn't care if a man froze to death. GOP nominees lack empathy. They don't know the suffering in the real world. That's the theme.
11. Senator Whitehouse had some good material, but he was too disorganized and self-indulgent to make it work. A hardworking, on-task, on-the-ball Senator might have built the argument deftly, but Whitehouse was not the man for the job. The idea was something about the role of the Federalist Society in getting judges (including Kavanaugh) nominated, the participation of right-wing groups in bringing cases and filing amicus briefs, and the success of corporations in winning 5-4 Supreme Court cases (where the 5 Justices in the majority were appointed by Republican Presidents). Whitehouse kept reminiscing about his own cases — back in the day when he was a lawyer — and musing generally about various suspicions that have crossed his mind and it's just not good if people think the Court is political. Of course, Kavanaugh coasted through all of this, repeating the standard message that he's dedicated to judicial independence and deciding cases according to the law.
12. Not long after that I got tired. The channel I was watching (Fox News) turned away to cover President Trump and someone from Kuwait — a great country with a lot of great people many of whom Trump has known for a long time. It was refreshing to hear Trump talk after all that Senatorial smeech. The reporters were yelling questions at Trump, and Trump was rattling out answers. Woodward's book is "fiction." Canada will come to a trade agreement. Three million innocent people are surrounded in Syria and Trump is watching, so the Syrian military had better be careful. After that it was hard to settle in to Mike Lee walking Kavanaugh through the Quirin case. It has rained all day, and it was getting dark. What a crazy slog! It's absurd to expect the nominee to be up for this grilling for 8 hours with scarcely a rest. But it was kind of hard on me too. And it's almost 7 o'clock. The "Team of 9" we're thinking of here is not the Supreme Court, but the Milwaukee Brewers. It's the 3rd game of the series with the Chicago Cubs, and we've won the first 2. What an amusing game last night, no? I love when runs are scored in all sorts of weird ways. What was it — 8 runs in a row scored on plays that were not hits?
13. So that's it for me on the Kavanaugh hearings today.
14. It was the emir of Kuwait. Here's video:
15. Here's the video of the Kavanaugh hearing today, including the part that is still happening as I write this (at 7:17 PM Central Time). How brutal! I do wish I'd jumped ahead to see the more junior Senators. I'm especially interested in the 3 who might be running for President (Klobuchar, Booker, and Harris). I'll probably get to these tomorrow.
Clip out the sexiest Tom Barrett photos you can find in newspapers or campaign literature. Scatter them around your house, and save the best one for the bedroom. Look at it every night before you go to sleep. With any luck, your subconscious will do the rest by supplying you with a more suitable sexual partner in your dreams.
And then Meade stopped by the comments. Noting first her line "I should mention that I'm happily married, with an attractive husband," Meade said:
Man, talk about damning with faint praise! Dear Violated: First of all you have not been violated. You have been the violaTOR... of your marriage, of your husband's due respect, and of your own fantasies.
Photos of Tom Barrett? Tell All needs to turn in his newspaper-advice-columnist badge. And the last thing you need is to waste your time with a psychotherapist.
What you need to do is to practice sweet surrender to your husband so that, with any luck, he will discover his manhood and learn that what his wife and most heterosexual women want more than anything is to be sexually dominated by a man who will stand up and be strong, decisive, and confident.
Try this, Violated: Everyday, tell your husband that you approve of him, that you love everything about him, and that he has your open consent and carte blanche in your sexual relationship. Together, just the two of you, over and over again, watch scenes like this one from the movie Casablanca where Ilsa tells Rick that he will have to do the thinking for both of them.
Good luck, Violated. Try to give up thinking of yourself as a victim and remember, if things don't work out in your private love life, you will always have Scott Walker.
Although far rarer than their prank cousins, exploding cigars used as a means to kill or attempt to kill targets in real life has been claimed, and is well represented as a fictional plot device. The most infamous case concerning the intentionally deadly variety was an alleged plot by the CIA of the US in the 1960s to assassinate Fidel Castro. Notable real life incidents involving the non-lethal ilk include an exploding cigar purportedly given by Ulysses S. Grant to an acquaintance and a dust-up between Turkish military officers and Ernest Hemingway after he pranked one of them with an exploding cigar....
A well known use of the exploding cigar in literature, for example, appears in Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel, Gravity's Rainbow.... Other book examples include Robert Coover's 1977 novel, The Public Burning, where a fictionalized Richard Nixon hands an exploding cigar to Uncle Sam...
Film examples include... in The Beatles' 1968 animated feature film, Yellow Submarine, where an exploding cigar is used to rebuff a psychedelic boxing monster... Appearance of exploding cigars in the Warner Bros. cartoon franchises, Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes was fairly common, often coupled with the explosion resulting in the pranked character appearing in blackface. Some examples include: Bacall to Arms (1942), wherein an animated Humphrey Bogart gets zapped by an exploding cigar leaving him in blackface...
The pattern was set in the 1930s and ’40s by Edward G. Robinson (“Little Caesar”), James Cagney, George Raft, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni — all small men who usually played tough and cruel. Sometimes camera angles obscured the physical facts — Robinson looked absolutely huge as Wolf Larsen in “The Sea Wolf” in what can be called, without irony, a towering performance — and sometimes the camera just didn’t care as when, for example, Cagney regularly beat up men obviously twice his size.
Slightly later came John Garfield, and the smallest of them all, Alan Ladd who played big in “The Blue Dahlia,” “The Glass Key,” “The Badlanders” and who more than holds his own against Ben Johnson and a tree-like Van Heflin in “Shane.”...
Famously slight Paul Newman displayed his chest and pugilistic abilities in movies like “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” “Hud,” “The Long, Hot Summer” and “Cool Hand Luke.” James Dean would have made the list had he lived longer. Now aging tough guy-short guys (by short I mean under 5-foot-9) include Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino, Mel Gibson, Jean Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone, who created not one but two iconic American males, Rocky and Rambo.
And these days we have a bumper crop of undersized super heroes — Tom Cruise, Tobey Maguire, Mark Wahlberg and Robert Downey Jr., along with the occasionally macho Johnny Depp and Sean Penn.
Is there something comparable for women? Maybe we could make a list of women who have fairly average looks who play beautiful women on screen. My favorite example of this is Bette Davis in "Mr. Skeffington," where the raving over Bette's beauty occasionally crosses the line into the laughable. No man could resist her:
Ah, yes! I remember laughing out loud in the theater when she comes down the stairs and a man exclaims "Fanny! You look beautiful!" And check out that death-bed dialogue: "A woman is beautiful only when she is loved." That's what the plain women in the audience — next to the hubbies they dragged to the chick flick — long to believe.
The post is about whether it's ethical for a judge to perform a marriage ceremony for the defendant he's just sentenced. Lawprof Stephen Gillers had said "It would show very poor judgment for the court to perform this ceremony or even to entertain the possibility. He should have shot this down as soon as they asked. He's not there to perform weddings; he's there to send a man to jail" and "I suspect that in 232 years of American history, it's never happened that a [federal] judge has performed a marriage ceremony for a defendant awaiting sentencing in a serious felony case in his own court."
But Cassell himself had performed such a marriage. He says: "I thought it was important to honor the request for the defendant for the service because I thought it would improve his prospects for rehabilitation if he knew he had lovely wife willing to wait for him." But he concedes that it might be a ploy for leniency or inadvisable for some other reason. (Gillers was commenting on a child pornography case where the 42-year-old defendant was marrying a 21-year-old.) In classic judicial fashion, Cassell thinks the matter can be trusted to the discretion of the trial judge.
So that's the post. It's interesting.
But what's with dissing Madison? If we could reanimate James Madison and show him this place, would he really have such a problem with us?
***
Several other commenters at VC bring up "The African Queen." I couldn't find a YouTube clip for the glorious scene they were referring to, but I did run across the trailer, which might make you want to rewatch the whole movie to get to the part the commenters were talking about. (Not sure what they meant to prove there, as the ethics are demonstrated by a Nazi.)
AND: Thanks to commenter Bearbee, here's that marriage scene (a big spoiler if you haven't seen the movie):
AND: Just watched the clip. "By the authority vested in me by Kaiser William II, I pronounce you man and wife. Proceed with the execution." So those weren't Nazis. The movie takes place in 1914, at the outset of WWI. Sorry for the vague memory. So Rosie's dress wasn't all that old-fashioned. Note too that it's the ship captain who performs the marriage (and gives the sentence), not a judge.
Over in the comments at Sheila Variations, they are discussing the ending of "Casablanca":
Sadly, I think if I was on that tarmac, I'd go with Rick Blaine. If his WORK is so important to Lazslo, then let Lazslo marry his work!! Let me have my grand passion and leave me alone!! Greater good, my ass. We only live once, and I want to gather ye rosebuds while ye may.
Then the discussion gets sidetracked to whatever anyone feels like saying about the movie or whatever (including a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich), and someone writes:
One of my favorite moments in the movie is Bogie giving the subtle head-nod across the bar to the orchestra - for them to pick up Marseillese ... member that? Apparently, they did that shot before they knew how the scene would go - so in real life, Bogie had no idea what he was nodding to. Feckin' amazing - it is such a moving moment. Bogart, the "I stick my neck out for nobody" cynic - giving Lazslo and the orchestra permission to drown out the Nazis. But Bogart was just told "Okay, we need a shot of you nodding - So nod." Bogie, man. He blows me away.
And someone else says:
That whole scene - Henreid upping the ante on Strasser, paying the band, the bandleader looking at Rick, the nod, the whole crowd scene - is the most gloriously manipulative scene ever! I laugh and cry and sing along and wriggle with schmaltzfreude and watch it over and over...
And then:
that scene of the orchestra rising to the occasion - and the crying French woman (the one who was wasted in the first scene and had to be escorted out of the bar) - she KILLS ME!! Crying and singing along to that song with all her might.
And all this talk of the Marseillaise reminds me that it is Bastille Day and that I wanted to link to Nina's post exposing the alarming words of the French national anthem (which begins with an innocent enough call to children to come along):
The howling of these fearsome soldiers They are coming into our midst To cut the throats of your sons and consorts...
Let impure blood Water our furrows
Reveling in cutting the throats of the impure? A bit like our modern terrorist enemies, isn't it? But a national anthem can be a call to arms, and it worked brilliantly as a call to arms in "Casablanca."
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