1. Being outside in this heat makes me nauseous. It's that simple. Fortunately, I have a varied and fascinating indoor life and currently it revolves around watching black and white movies at Vizio University.
Today, I decided to move Vizio University into the living room and be in the same room as Debbie while class was in session.
So, I fired up the Criterion Channel on my MacBook and headed straight to a currently featured Criterion Collection, In the Ring: Boxing on Screen.
My recent studies at VUniv have had me ricocheting around the World Wide Web and somehow I came upon a Richard Brody micro-review of Humphrey Bogart's last movie, the gripping The Harder They Fall.
Today I watched it for the first time.
Bogart plays Eddie Willis, a hard-boiled writer. His career as a boxing reporter and columnist recently ended when the newspaper he worked for folded. Out of work, he accepts a job from a corrupt boxing promoter and organized crime boss, played brilliantly by Rod Steiger, to work as a publicist for a boxer who can't fight.
The Harder They Fall fit perfectly into my current studies at Vizio U. It's a meticulously crafted movie, very much in the film noir style, shot in black and white. Unlike the Westerns I've watched for most of the week, The Harder They Fall is an urban movie. Its cast of corrupt figures make deals over straight whiskey poured in short glasses, occupy hotel suites, crowd themselves into the locker rooms of boxing arenas, sit near ringside at fight after fight. Director Mark Robson does not romanticize the fight game. This movie is a work of realism, its fights carefully and brutally choreographed. I could see how Martin Scorsese had to have been influenced in his making of Raging Bull by this film's grittiness, its harsh portrayal of boxing and the corruption inside and outside the ring.
As the movie's story develops, Bogart's Eddie Willis' conscience awakens. He must decide how long he can continue to work in the corrupt world he has not only hired into, but contributed to significantly.
It's the perfect Humphrey Bogart role. Eddie Willis' resolve to help further the corruption he's a part of begins to crack and it's moving to watch Bogart portray this character's soul searching and how he ultimately resolves to be able to live with himself.
To me, The Harder They Fall critiques not only the corruption of the boxing world, but of any business in which the lives and well-being of human beings are rendered worthless thanks to the callous pursuit of money and wealth undertaken by those who run the business and to the endless efforts of businessmen to preserve their own legacy and reputation with lies, cover-ups, and fake publicity no matter the harm their practices inflict on those under their employ.
Nothing about this movie, released in 1956, seemed dated.
I experienced the corruption it explores as current, contemporary, and ongoing.
2. Once the movie ended, I couldn't get the opening lines of Al Stewart's "The Year of the Cat" out of my mind: "One a morning from a Bogart movie/In a country where they turn back time/You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre/Contemplating a crime . . ."
The song didn't really have anything to do with the movie I just watched except that Bogart's name is in it.
So I played it on YouTube for Debbie and me and enjoyed fond memories of when I bought the album and it brought to mind Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" and I played it, too, and enjoyed more memories of living in Spokane for two and half years after graduating from Whitworth and how much I loved that time in my life.
3. Well, it turns out that Al Stewart recently made an appearance at Daryl Hall's house and I found a YouTube video of Al Stewart playing "The Year of the Cat" with Daryl Hall and the other musicians gathered in Daryl Hall's home studio.
I didn't listen long because I wanted to hear other segments of other episode of Live from Daryl's House and stayed up past midnight listening to Elle King, Joe Walsh, the O'Jays, Billy Gibbons, Coe Lo Green, Cheap Trick, Rob Thomas, and Anderson East all perform either their own songs or Hall and Oates songs with Daryl Hall and the musicians Daryl Hall has in his house.
I love Live from Daryl's House. Not only has watching this show elevated my already high regard for Daryl Hall, it's also helped me understand more fully and deeply popular music I've been listening to for decades.
One last thing: the show works because Daryl Hall is such a generous soul -- not only as a musician, but as a host, a supporter of other musicians, and in the sharing of his home and studio with all these men and women making uplifting and thrilling music together.
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