1) Crossing Delancey, and

2) The Miracle of Morgan's Creek.

Netflix's dearth of Robert Benchley films has already been noted. Just because it did manage to include the Criterion Collection's two-DVD set of The Rules of the Game (which I just watched and enjoyed; the Peter Bogdanovich commentary seems to have been cranked up to His Girl Friday speed, though I do have a fever and could just be slow-witted) doesn't mean it's off the hook.

Criterion is releasing Hoop Dreams on May 10, which is swell; I'm especially looking forward to the stars' special audio track. I also notice that ghostly New Yorker critic Michael Sragow has written a passel of essays for Criterion's website, including this one on Le Cercle Rouge:

With his 1970 gangster epic, Le Cercle Rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville finally landed his white whale.

The French maverick who changed his last name from Grumbach out of admiration for Herman Melville had long since established himself as that most contradictory, elusive and essential character in narrative moviemaking—an individualistic genre master. Bob le Flambeur (1956), Le Doulos (1962), and Le Samourai (1967), stood out as elegant explorations of underworld style, duplicity, and professionalism. Of course, Melville had other credits, including his formidable 1950 rendering of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles. But his on- and off-screen affection for hard-guy glamour (he always wore a signature Stetson hat) and his aesthetic preference for the tough-minded, strong-boned storytelling of American directors such as John Huston (another Herman Melville admirer) drew him toward life-or-death drama in a criminal vein. Don't be a philistine—keep reading...

Sragow, whom I'm happy to see is alive and well (I don't like change, and seeing "MS" disappear from the Goings on About Town was most disturbing), also has smart, lively essays about The Long Good Friday, A Night to Remember, the David Lean Oliver Twist, Sanjuro ("in the Kurosawa movie family tree, Sanjuro [1962] is the sassy kid brother to Yojimbo, and like many light-hearted younger siblings, it’s underrated..."), and Fools' Highway (which I haven't seen, but has a way cool cover).

Sragow also writes admiringly about The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is insanely enough out of print. I actually discovered this recently while browsing through Amazon Marketplace's dirt-cheap DVDs. It seems crazy that it's so hard to find—surely brand-new college students in sexual and existential agony are discovering Kundera along with Portnoy's Complaint and Brodkey's First Love and Other Sorrows? I may be stuck in a time warp, but if that's not what they're reading (aside from the Jonathans, of course), I'm not sure what's to become of us. (The cover of the newest edition of the Brodkey, I notice, has an oddly Salingerish twang to it, and a little Woody Allen circa Without Feathers...I'm not sure, and it's pleasing enough, but it seems to want to be part of an earlier era than it was. Which I have nothing against, of course.)

Sragow writes of Unbearable Lightness:

When asked why novelists don’t often make great playwrights, Kurt Vonnegut said, “It’s because they don’t know that theater is dance.” That notion applies triply to the kinetic art of movies. The triumph of The Unbearable Lightness of Being is that Kaufman and company choreograph the diverse segments of Kundera’s fiction like a folk dance, a rock musical, and a pastoral ballet.

Kundera's prose could be compared to dance as well, but Sragow makes this point beautifully. Perhaps especially because I have Daniel Day-Lewis on the brain lately, I think it's very wrong that this DVD is out of print. As Kundera wrote, "When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object." True enough, so let's put an end to indecency!

Speaking of Crossing Delancey, blogger Norman Geras does a little of what Randy Cohen is planning to do a lot of, that is, map the cultural references of Manhattan—and a few weeks sooner. But Geras does it with movies and music rather than books:

Yesterday at about 12.30 I found myself crossing Delancey. I thought, 'Hey, I'm crossing Delancey'. That's how it is for me in this city. Everywhere I go there's something charged with meaning. The day before yesterday I was walking up from Times Square towards Central Park and I came to Carnegie Hall. For me Carnegie Hall is - or was, first - this. That's back in Bulawayo as the 50s were turning into the 60s or thereabouts. The Benny Goodman concert. Above all 'Sing Sing Sing'; and, within that, a piano solo by Jess Stacey that is two or three minutes of immortality. I went in, to see what was on, and coming up on Sunday (today) at 4.00 was The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater. That's me at the ticket window then. Sold out. Expletive deleted.

Anyway, the whole city is replete with personal and cultural meanings. Take it away you pomos; give out your stuff. Me, I'd prefer to walk the streets of New York - any day of the week.

Why I was crossing at Delancey at 12.30 yesterday was that I'd just been at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side and signed up for the 'Piecing It Together' tour. This was to see some of the tenements at 97 Orchard Street and to be told about two families who had lived there - and about the garment industry - by our tour guy, J.R. McCarthy, Educator. J.R. is a man of words and of some pazazz in their delivery. By him we were told that between 1865 and 1935 20 million immigrants from Europe had passed through this district, and that if you are Jewish in America there's an 80% chance that your first ancestor in the country started off living somewhere close by. I was surprised also to learn - though I have not checked this, so can't vouch for it - that German-Americans constitute the largest single US ethnicity. We were taken through the lives of Harris and Jenny Levine, who lived in this tenement in 1897, and their children Pauline, Hyman, Max, Eva and Fay. We then moved on to the Rogarshevsky family. J.R. finished in some style.

I headed off to meet a New York city blogger in Greenwich Village, and that involved crossing Delancey.

(All links his.) I hope Geras can forgive me for reprinting his whole post. I just thought it was perfect. If you haven't been to the Tenement Museum, by the way, it's really worth the trip—the tours are great and only take an hour, and you learn a whole lot and it's actually fun.

I'm rereading Here at The New Yorker (Brendan Gill) and About Town (Ben Yagoda), in between something else, so I'll be quoting now and then. Since I believe in book clubs of only two people, I hope that not too many other people start reading them at the same time—we'll have to take turns. Or buy them (which I wholeheartedly endorse) and just don't tell me about it.

Crossing Delancey [Normblog]
[I'd hoped to find a Vonnegut link from The New Yorker, but Google can be trying no matter how much I love it. Oh newyorker.com, why isn't your archive searchable?]

Categories: Benchley, Movies, Criterion, Sragow, NYer, Books