Gotham Diary:
Tee Many Martoonies
6 March 2014
A cousin from Maine wrote the other day to say that she would be in town this weekend. I asked her to come to dinner on Friday night. When she accepted, she asked if she could bring her sister and her daughter, both of whom live here. Of course, I said. Then I wondered what on earth I would make for dinner.
I haven’t had anyone to dinner in months, and there haven’t been more than four people at the table in a very long time. Between my post/pre Remicade sluggishness and Kathleen’s crazy-busy working life, we’ve been ordering in a lot. For variety’s sake, I’ve made simple dinners once or twice a week. It seems that I am never in the mood to cook. So now what was I going to do?
I had lunch with Ray Soleil, that’s what I did. Gradually, a plan of campaign took shape. For starters, we’ll have ravioli from Agata & Valentina, in a sauce from the same place. Then, a lobster soufflé. This might sound daunting to some, but it’s a dish that I’m very comfortable with. I’ve already parboiled the lobster (and set it out on the balcony, where, strangely, things don’t freeze). I’ll shuck some corn tomorrow, sauté it with butter and oregano, and then toss in the lobster meat to finish the cooking. The rule of soufflés is that you can put three-quarters of a pound of anything into the basic veloûté, and I may just add an extra egg white. I’m taking full advantage of the fact that I’ll be the only gent at the table. Also, I’m bearing in mind that it’s a Friday in Lent, a consideration for Kathleen.
I’ll whip up some hollandaise for the soufflé, and serve it with a salad of asparagus, raspberries, and heirloom tomato. The raspberries and the tomato are pickling in sweet vinegar as I write. For dessert: fresh pineapple and little chocolate eclairs. (There will be almond cookies for Kathleen, who gives up chocolate for Lent.)
I also picked some frozen hors d’oeuvre. There’s plenty of champagne, which to my mind lobster always call for.
To be on the safe side, I set up the boombox DVD player in the kitchen. A boatload of movies arrived yesterday, including Celeste and Jesse Forever, and I slipped that into the boombox. I haven’t seen it since it was showing in the theatres, which I guess is a while ago. I love it when the two friends talk in their dry German accents; I wish I’d known somebody to do that sort of thing with when I was young. But I see the downside: Jesse and Celeste are too busy being knowing to understand much of anything properly. That’s what the movie is about.
Another thing that I like about Celeste and Jesse Forever is that it reminds me of the days when I wished that my life were interesting enough to inspire a feature film. Happily, I put away this childish longing decades ago — but I find that it has been resurrected by Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt. Although it was made only a year or so ago, however, Hannah Arendt is set in the Sixties, when people still thought things through with a passion. (They smoked then, too. I’ve begun to wonder if nicotine had any measurable impact upon intellectual life for the fifty-odd years during which intelligent people smoked as much as they drank, and a lot more than they ate.) Today, Eichmann in Jerusalem is no longer seriously controversial. Is anything controversial anymore? In one sense, we’re too polarized for controversy — we tune out adverse views. In a deeper sense, we conduct discourse in such different modes that what stands for intelligent conversation between these two people over here sounds like incoherent yakking to those two over there.
***
Another movie that showed up yesterday was Beat the Devil. Why had this been on my mind? I hadn’t thought about it in years — since the early Eighties, in fact, when then-new VHS tapes provided an unprecedented medium for personal film libraries, and all sorts of “forgotten” titles were “discovered.” Beat the Devil had a lot going for it: Humphrey Bogart, John Huston, Truman Capote. How could a movie written by Huston and Capote, directed by Huston, and starring Bogart fail?
But fail it does — as indeed I recalled. It’s an interesting failure, however, a movie made up entirely of interesting scenes. They simply fail to cohere, fail to tell a single story. The cast falls apart as well. It might have been expected that neither Huston nor Capote would write really good parts for women — meaning, good parts for the women they had to work with. But even the four fraudsters — Robert Morley, Peter Lorre, Ivor Barnard, and Marco Tulli — dfail to constitute a real quartet. Indeed, Peter Lorre seems to have only one line: “I want to be in another picture!”
The heart of the problem, however, is Bogart himself. He, or his character, doesn’t give a damn about anything or anyone, beyond getting through the day in reasonable fighting trim. The two women who dangle themselves in front him, Gina Lollabrigida and Jennifer Jones, fail to make his temperature rise by so much as one degree. Where did anyone get the idea that Bogart could play comedy? The most he can manage is breezy insouciance.
It seems that John Huston wanted to spoof The Maltese Falcon. Why, I can’t imagine, but Beat the Devil could have used a falcon, or anything properly tangible —visible — to fight over. Subterranean lodes of uranium in distant Kenya don’t play well on film. It also seems that Huston, Capote et al wanted to have a gay old time on the Amalfi Coast. The Wikipedia entry for the film states that the script was written “on a day-to-day basis.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing; Roman Polanski has claimed the same to be true of Chinatown. But the night-to-night revelry may have clouded the collegial judgment. Another interesting facet of the disaster is that Beat the Devil often seems on the point of developing into an Ealing comedy, only and invariably to poke off in the direction of a Western.
I must see the movie again before saying anything much about Jennifer Jones. At times, she seems very capable, very good, even, but then you wonder: is she capable of being good in this particular picture? I don’t think so: she turns in a performance that is too “professional” for what is really a very eccentric movie. Her character is forever spouting preferable but fictional alternatives to the reality at hand. These little speeches are delivered with brave conviction. Perhaps Jones was trying to tell us something. As for Gina Lollabrigida, oh dear — she had a reputation for hotness so Venusian that it is still surprising to see her with her clothes on. It was as though “Lollabrigida” were the Italian for “D cup.” I’m not kidding! Some members of the audience must have been disappointed to see her play a nicely-dressed Italian lady with a head for dollars and sense.
Also, although I can’t speak from experience, I believe that it is impossible to row away from a sinking ship so fast that it slips over the horizon before it disappears under the water. I can hear the two Americans cackling, late one night in the bar. “And then we’ll have the Nyanga sail back into port. Won’t that be something!” Well, it’s something, all right. But it’s not good film.