1. Debbie will not return to work this week. She'll continue to rest and hope that the cough and mild congestion that have kicked in subside before long.
I continue to feel fine.
2. I continue to think it's best for Debbie and me to be in separate rooms most of the time during the day while she recovers from Covid.
If we had faced this situation, oh, fifteen years ago, I would be making regular trips to a video rental store and stocking up on movies to watch while in isolation.
It's a good thing I don't need a video store now -- I don't know of any in the Silver Valley!
The alternative is very good, though. With our handful of subscriptions to streaming services, not only do I have tons of movies to choose from, I can also venture into areas of movie viewing I've never explored before.
Not long ago, I watched the British film noir classic Obsession and the character I most enjoyed was the Scotland Yard superintendent, Finsbury, played by Naunton Wayne. I did some further reading about Naunton Wayne and learned that over the years, starting with Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938), he paired up with Basil Radford to form a duo of cricket loving English gentlemen named Caldicott and Charters. I haven't watched this movie yet.
I had seen Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford work as a pair not long ago as two bureaucrats in the movie Passport to Pimilico, but not as Caldicott and Charters.
Intrigued, I decided to look up some titles of movies featuring Caldicott and Charters.
Today, I watched a goofy spy thriller parody/comedy, Crook's Tour (1941). Put simply, Caldicott and Charters fall victim, unbeknownst to them, to a case of mistaken identity and suddenly find themselves embroiled in an international affair of espionage. Throughout it all, dashing from one country to another, they maintain a charming sense of gentlemanly calm as they face one life-threatening situation after another with their primary concern being whether they will arrive back in England in time for crucial cricket matches.
It's a preposterous, madcap, absurd movie, made all the more enjoyable because it doesn't pretend to be anything else.
3. After this movie ended, I took a short break and then went over to the Criterion Channel and watched Spencer Tracy and Robert Ryan in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), a serious movie that brings the traditional Western into the present and instills features of film noir into the Western.
In some ways, Bad Day at Black Rock follows the structure of a traditional western. Spencer Tracy plays a stranger who comes into the isolated town of Black Rock and immediately comes under suspicion and threat by the self-protective, paranoid town people. They don't trust the arrival of an outsider.
But, this movie is not set in the Old West. It takes place soon after the end of WWII and confronts bigotry.
I'll leave it at that.
I did a little reading about the movie after viewing it and one writer said that Spencer Tracy "was his usual Rock of Gibraltar self" in Bad Day at Black Rock.
No doubt.
The supporting cast is solid, too: Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Walter Brennan, Anne Francis, and Dean Jagger, along with Robert Ryan, fill this movie with menace, cowardice, violence, and a collective crisis of conscience.
I had time and energy for one more movie. I scanned the noir offerings on the Criterion Channel and a movie that lasts barely an hour jumped out at me, not only because it's short, but because the descriptions of it helped me see that it's become a historically important movie in world of film noir.
It's a B movie, very low budget, shot in black and white in under two weeks.
I'd never heard of it, but I decided to give Detour (1945) a try.
Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (soon I'll watch the documentary about him on the Criterion Channel), it is a dark movie in which he distills the elements of film noir into a highly concentrated form.
A New York piano player, Al Roberts (Tom Neal), decides he must reunite with the woman he loves. She's gone to Hollywood to seek a career as a singer. Al Roberts is broke. He hitch hikes across the USA and one guy who picks him changes Al Robert's life forever -- you'll have to see the movie to find out how. On the road, Al Roberts becomes entangled with a woman named Vera, at once the epitome of and a subversion of a film noir femme fatale. Unlike so many femme fatale characters, Vera is not glamorous. In fact, Ulmer went to some lengths to make her hair greasy, her appearance at once sexy and grimy, and Vera, played superbly by Ann Savage develops into the other force, along with the guy who picked him up earlier in the movie, that shapes a dark fate for Al Roberts that he cannot escape.
Detour is dark, fatalistic. Its characters are doomed. Its low budget production values enhance the story's tawdry inevitabilities.
I can see why more modern filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich admire this movie so much for its unadorned, unblinking look into a dark region of life in the USA and the dark inward lives of these characters.
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