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📽️ Watched a post–Cold War episode to the Harry Palmer films, “Bullet to Beijing” (1995). Michael Caine, the lead in the 1960s films, plays an agent pushed into early retirement who freelances for a Russian oligarch-mobster. It was interesting to revisit the period’s pop cultural images of Russia.
📽️ This evening I saw “Secret Agent,” dir. Alfred Hitchcock (UK, 1936). It was a box office hit in its time, but for me it’s less compelling than “The Thirty-Nine Steps” (1936) and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934). The cinematography and moments of suspense were nonetheless entertaining and characteristically Hitchcock.
Unlike the protagonists in the other two movies, who become involved in espionage by chance and are clearly the good guys, the protagonists in this film play morally ambiguous roles. Their mission is to locate an enemy agent in Switzerland and assassinate him before he can carry British military secrets to the Ottomans. Only the playful, but dark character played by Peter Lorre enjoys the necessary close-up work of killing.
Silhouettes of hanged spies out a train window on the way through enemy territory underline the ultimate personal price during war, if caught. A Swiss hotel and casino serves as a glamorous counterpoint, with social banter, dress, and flirting more in line with the 1930s than 1916. That means viewers are treated to Madeleine Carroll’s bare shoulders while she is wrapped in a towel that covers the rest of her body in a scene with two men in full dress.
Distributor advertisement targeting cinema owners in The Film Daily, June 23, 1936, p. 3, via Internet Archive.
Local clergy and faith leaders posted A Call to Justice, Mercy, and Peace (PDF) in our local newspaper yesterday. Its themes have been prominent in the sermons at my mother’s church this year.
This is the kind of messaging that I, an otherwise nonobservant, unbelieving Christian can get behind. I sometimes think that I should get over my own church issues and seek out community there. We certainly share many of the same values and concerns.
📽️ I watched “The King’s Speech” (2010) for the first time. It certainly lives up to all the praise it received 15 years ago.
My sign is hiding a lot of the crowd. I haven't heard an official number, but preliminary counts suggest at least 500 for my small town.
Here’s a concise overview (in German) of the so-called economic arguments behind the orange narcissist’s tariffs: Patrick Welter, “Die kruden Ideen hinter Trumps Zöllen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine, April 4, 2025: https://archive.ph/7J6lc.
📽️ Just watched “Berlin Correspondent,” dir. Eugene Forde (20th Century Fox, 1942). It’s not so much about a reporter as it is about the Gestapo’s efforts to uncover his spying and then beat his escapes. Interesting to me were the overt references to euthanasia or “mercy killings” in the film.
Here, though, the commander of such a facility jokes about Germany soon being “100% insanity free”—nice irony for a wartime U.S. audience, but maybe less funny to 21st-century ears. In any case, the quick-thinking American journalist outwits the Gestapo. The tone doesn’t feel too far removed from the 1960s TV sitcom, “Hogan’s Heroes” (1965–71).
📽️ For thievery and spying escapades set in the Blitz, “Counter-Espionage” (aka “The Lone Wolf in Scotland Yard”) dir. Edward Dmytryk (Columbia Pictures, 1942), isn’t bad. If its light tone, despite its air raids and bombs, seems out of place, it was produced for a wartime public in need of good tales.
By the way, the film has an odd science fiction component to it, though I have no idea how believable it would have been to the audience. First, there were plans for a lethal blue ray contraption (military figures in Berlin spoke of directional rays). Second, the spy ring transmitted information to Berlin with a large device that more or less functioned like a wireless fax. Finally, these people communicated between London and Berlin over the radio by voice.
📽️ I enjoyed “Diplomatic Courier,” dir. Henry Hathaway (20th Century Fox, 1952) this evening, available at archive.org… and youtu.be…. There were airplanes, trains, and cars from Washington to Salzburg to Trieste. One interesting twist for me: One of the leads was Hildegard Knef, who starred in the 1946 DEFA film “Die Mörder sind unter uns” (The Murderers Are Among Us).
💰 I’m old enough to have experienced both stagflation and recession, but never depression. I guess that 🤬🍊💩 is going to give me the opportunity to experience that too. 📉
If Congress doesn’t resurrect itself as a coequal, independent branch of government that doesn’t delegate crucial decisions to the presidency and the judiciary, there will always be another demagogue to tear it all down. This is not a time for legislators who are easily intimidated.
Congress needs to revoke Trump’s tariff authorities NOW.
My son sent me a picture of a blurry coywolf running in front of his house this afternoon. This evening he had my young granddaughter say “April Fools!” during our video chat. The photo was a product of AI.
Our fascination with such fakes doesn’t just go back to Photoshop and before that photocopiers. There were plenty of joke postcards in the early twentieth century, many of them agricultural. There were ears of corn as long as hay wagons, onions that took two men to roll up a ramp into a truck or wagon, a Maine potato that filled a whole flatbed rail car, and so on. The jackalope was also popular.
Image via Bill Lende collection of tall tale postcards, The Newberry Digital Collections, id NL12843G.
I’ve been watching a lot of Cory Booker on the Senate floor since yesterday evening (but getting some sleep myself). Good to see the fire in him. I needed this. 🇺🇸🗽
📽️ After watching Roberto Rossellini’s 1945 “Rome Open City” (Roma città aperta) this weekend, I’ve started on his “Paisan” (1946). This is only the second time I’ve seen this remarkable collection of six stories about soldiers and civilians during the Allied liberation of Italy, and it feels raw.
Andrea: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!…
Galileo: No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.
– Bertolt Brecht, “Life of Galileo,” in Collected Plays: Five, trans. John Willet (Bloomsbury, 1995), scene 13.
