HOLLYWOOD has spawned, since 1946, a series of ugly melodramas featuring a cruel esthetic, desperate craftsmanship, and a pessimistic outlook. These supertabloid, geeklike films (The Set-up, Act of Violence, Asphalt Jungle, No Way Out) are revolutionary attempts at turning life inside out to find the specks of horrible oddity that make puzzling, faintly marred kaleidoscopes of a street, face, or gesture. Whatever the cause of these depressing films—the television menace, the loss of 24 million customers since the mid-1940’s—it has produced striking changes in film technique. Writers overpack dialogue with hackneyed bitterness, actors perfect a quietly neurotic style, while directors—by flattening the screen, discarding framed and centered action, and looming the importance of actors—have made the movie come out and hit the audience with an almost personal savagery. The few recent films unmarked by the new technique seem naïve and obsolete.
The new scripts are tortured by the “big” statement. All About Eve (story of the bright lights, dim wits, and dark schemes of Broadway) hardly gets inside theater because most of the movie is coming out of somebody’s mouth. The actors are burdened with impossible dialogue abounding in clichés: “Wherever there’s magic and make-believe and an audience—there’s theater”; timely words: “We are the original displaced personalities”; and forced cleverness that turns each stock character into the echo of an eclectic writer. The new trick is to build character and plot with loaded dialogue, using hep talk that has discolored cheap fiction for years. In The Breaking Point, the environment is a “jungle,” the hero a morose skipper “with only guts to peddle,” who decides after a near fatal gun battle that “a man alone hasn’t got a chance.” His spouse comes through with, “You’re more man than anyone I ever knew.”
The stories, parading success-seekers through a jackpot of frustration, are unique in that they pick on outcasts with relentless cruelty that decimates the actor as much as the character. As a colored intern moves through the No Way Out blizzard of anti-Negro curses, everything about him is aggressively spiked so that a malignant force seems to be hacking at him. When the cruel estheticians really click on these sadistic epics, foreboding death lurks over every scene. Cameramen dismember the human body, accenting oddities like Darnell’s toothpick legs or Pat Neal’s sprawling mouth, to make them inanimate; faces are made up to suggest death masks, expanded to an unearthly size, spotlighted in dark, unknown vacuums; metaphorical direction twists a chimp’s burial (Sunset Boulevard) into an uncanny experience by finding a resemblance between monkey and owner. Under the guise of sympathy, these brutally efficient artists are sneaky torturers of the defeated or deranged character.
Directors like Wilder and Mankiewicz mechanically recreate the unharnessed energy and surprise of great silent films with an elegantly controlled use of the inexplicable. In the jitterbugging scene of Asphalt Jungle, Huston delicately undresses the minds of four characters and gauchely creates a sensuous, writhing screen, though his notion of jive is so odiously surrealistic it recalls Russian propaganda against the United States. The first glimpse of the faded star in Sunset, using Bonnard’s suede touch on Charles Addams’s portraiture (a witch surveying her real estate through shutters and dark spectacles) is lightning characterization with a poetic tang. Brando, in The Men, commands a GI troop into battle like a slow, doped traffic cop wagging cars through an intersection, but his affected pantomime electrifies the screen with the hallucinatory terror of an early painting by di Chirico. Movies have seldom if ever been as subtle as these scenes, or as depressing in the use of outrageous elements to expedite ambiguous craftsmanship.
To understand the motives behind the highly charged, dissonant acting employed today, one has to go back to the time-wasting, passive performance of an early talkie. No matter how ingenious the actor—Harlow, Garbo, Lee Tracy—effectiveness and depth were dissipated by the uninterrupted perusal of a character geared to a definite “type” and acted with mannerisms that were always so rhythmically and harmoniously related that the effect was of watching a highly attenuated ballet. Directors today have docked the old notion of unremittingly consistent, riverlike performances, and present what amounts to a confusion of “bits,” the actor seen only intermittently in garish touches that are highly charged with meaning and character, but not actually melted into one clear recognizable person. Darnell’s honestly ugly characterization of a depressed slattern is fed piecemeal into No Way Out, which moves her toward and away from malevolence, confuses her “color,” and even confounds her body. Her job—like the recent ones of Nancy Olson, John MacIntyre, Hayden—shouldn’t be called a “performance,” because it is more like a collage of personality, which varies drastically in every way to create the greatest explosion and “illumination” in each moment.
October 28, 1950
IN “Ways of Love” three vignettes directed by three top film makers add up to the year’s best foreign release. Marcel Pagnol’s “Jofroi” is about a senile farmer (Vincent Scotto) who shams suicide thirty times to protect some lovingly nurtured trees. This director feels that there is nothing more delightful than pondering the virtuosity of character actors—earthy types who immobilize the screen with chattered wisdom and time-wasting mannerisms. In Jean Renoir’s “A Day in the Country,” a pretty Parisian (Sylvia Bataille) is seduced while the camera fastens on the countryside in tender mimicry of Papa Renoir’s paintings. As usual Renoir maneuvers his motorless plot into splendid landscape to press home the idea that man is a handsome spot in nature. Rossellini’s controversial “The Miracle” is a powerful, messy slab of life, starring Anna Magnani as a talkative idiot made pregnant by a silent stranger she believes to be St. Joseph. Rossellini, thirsting for brutality, filth, misery, attacks his actors with an innocent technique. His people are always sent out to face uncontrollable crowds, unpredictable weather, or unconquerable terrain—victims of a half-written script and a carefree photographer. The effect of this masterpiece is like walking into a hail storm; Magnani’s intense, sullen jabbering and gesturing paralyze the brain; the chaotic editing of unbalanced images captures existence in its most unrelated, disheveled state.
“Oliver Twist” is a mood-saturated version of Dickens’s novel about slighted childhood, slowed down by a contrived million-dollar reproduction of London’s nineteenth-century slums. Replacing adventure with threatening atmosphere, the movie carries its sparrowish waif (John Howard Davies), starved, beaten, corrupted, from workhouse to the underworld of Fagin (Alec Guinness). The actors can barely grimace under mask-like make-up, but Guinness amuses occasionally with some oily virtuosity. Davies runs and fights with a furious talent, and Francis Sullivan works a lot of subtle discomfort into the role of Bumble. The skill of director David Lean (“Great Expectations”) comes through in spots that have the traumatic feeling and movement of vivid reality—scenes darting between knees, zooming up with someone’s fist as it explodes in Oliver’s face, moving with a murderer’s gaze the morning after his dark, wild deed. However, Lean’s attack on a situation congests and blurs the action by detouring all over the landscape for tricky views. This approach—different from the Hollywood method of gluing the camera to action and getting through it fast—makes an unimportant walk upstairs seem like a detailed report on slum staircasing by an over-zealous building inspector. With unnecessary sadism Lean has built a badly lit film, cluttered and confused with precious effect—filthy dens tattered by expensive arc lighting, Sykes’s brutish mugging, sloshing rain—that makes the plot seem ten hours long and anything but absorbing.
“Manon” is a hard-boiled version of Prévost’s bedridden novelette, with a creaking, improbable script job waylaying director Georges Clouzot. Manon Lescaut (Cecile Aubrey) is now a baby-faced siren, her incredibly faithful lover is a maquis fighter, and their unswerving passion—shared with any willing and wealthy fat man—lights the way from Paris black markets to the sands of Palestine. The cold, frank Clouzot (“The Raven,” “Jenny Lamour”) is a perverse craftsman who casts incongruous creatures (half-pint Aubrey) and contrives unnecessary obstacles. On a jammed train where there is no room for moving-picture apparatus and crowds are unwieldy, he threads his heroine through every aisle for a masterful analysis of life on the level of canned sardines. In an abandoned farmhouse with no constricting conditions for the director, the impassioned teen-agers neck in the dark, search the rooms with a flashlight that digs the past out of the worn-out décor. Clouzot’s best talent is for clawing behind camouflages with a candid camera. He achieves the lonely, unglamorous feeling of a junky movie theater by working only in the basement and manager’s office. His detailed pictures of a high-class bordello, a frenzied jive cave, a dress salon, unearth the provocative nuances of its people—usually from the waist down. “Manon” is halted and conventionalized by its hack plotting, enlivened by its ludicrous pornography, and is, otherwise, a painful study of Parisians at their peculiar worst.
As an anti-climax to the Critics’ Awards, the following are my choice of the best films that didn’t appear on other “Ten Best” lists.
“Union Station.” A famous depot kidnapping reenacted by Rudy Mate for all the remembered thrills of a game of hide-and-seek; Mate revives an all but lost film style in which excitement springs from the crisp, moving patterns made by players on a carefully controlled surface.
“Mystery Street.” Its scientific crime detection makes better use of documentary technique than any other fiction film; an intelligent, unsentimental rendering of American citizenry by Betsy Blair and Bruce Bennett.
“Crisis.” Director Richard Brooks’s clever, explosive blend of documentary and melodrama casts a revealing light on the inside of a dictator’s brain: elegantly acted by Cary Grant.
“Broken Arrow.” A preachy western; it shows Director Delmar Daves’s unique talent for moving lone figures through dangerous terrain and gaining the suspense of an early Hitchcock without using gimmicks.
“Winchester 73.” Anthony Mann’s arty western; a striking example of how to humanize an overworked genre with natural dialogue, acting, and a director’s original “film eye.”
“The Winslow Boy.” The best adaptation from the stage. Roughly equal to sitting in a library of thick carpets and padded chairs, reading a familiar, beloved English classic.
“Captain China.” The second-best thing for landlubbers who have a desire to experience the sights, skills, and smells of life on a tanker.
“Macbeth.” Orson Welles’s orgiastic rendering of Shakespeare, co-starring my nephew, Jerry Farber.
January 13, 1951
THE current Hollywood releases are mostly virtuoso pieces tailored to show off the florid craftsmanship of some expensive actors. The recent turn to slow, close-up presentation has brought about a measured, theatrical type of acting in which daring, often anomalous touches supply the interest that once came from large-scale action, environmental situation. The total effect of the films mentioned below makes me yearn for the tough, plain, understated acting that appeared in “The Set-up” a few years back, and before that in films like “The Ox-Bow Incident” and “The Clock.” With the exception of a few underrated players (Ann Sheridan, Robert Ryan, Grable), actors today give the impression of social workers improving movie characters with a liberal-minded, educated attitude and an elegant, flamboyant acting technique.
For instance, Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday.” Satirizing a ritzy graduate of the Bronx who moves into Washington circles on the arm of an unprincipled roughneck (Crawford), the begirdled blonde provides a noisy, overlong farce with all its speed and fun. But her performance is always too trained and intellectualized for a delicatessen type with the toughness, vulgarity, and garrulousness one encounters on the New York subway. Her Mae West walk is the mechanical maneuver of a university-educated mimic; her statuesque bearing in tight, gaudy gowns produces a ludicrous effect but also a feeling that the actress has never really liked tasteless clothes. Holliday’s rescue from illiteracy and sin by a gallant bookworm (Holden) in shiny spectacles is a predictable event in a film that squeaks with a do-good spirit and brainy, democratic-looking actors. The success of the picture is due to direction (Cukor) that makes one hyperconscious of visual gags and wastes little time authenticating the brassy Kanin play.
The story of the Supreme Court’s Holmes (Louis Calhern) starts in his sixty-first year and so caricatures old age that I advise sensitive old folks to forgo “The Magnificent Yankee.” The theatrical Calhern mauls the process of growing old into a picturesque joke of rheumatism, fatigue, diminishing powers. The script periodically cues Calhern to pluck a flower from a small fenced garden, and each time Calhern loads the screen with creaking motion and strained humor. Endless scenes show a silly fascination with rickety physique: Holmes’s feebly bent posture before the Lincoln Memorial, his bouncy-kneed strolls with Brandeis in Rock Creek Park, the laborious attempt to straighten his spine for a meeting with Roosevelt. For crafty virtuosity Calhern is a bag of admirable tricks—he greets each of thirty birthday well-wishers with a different grimace of affection—but because he loves to flaunt urbanity and skill, he turns “the great dissenter” into a gay old dog.
“Branded” is a wordy but tightly edited western; among Hollywood cowboys Glenn Ford is the trickiest horseman, Randy Scott has a lonely, weatherworn façade, Cooper is the handiest with six-shooters, but the star of this film, Alan Ladd, is an anachronism, from his crisp, pavement glide to his well-bred sneer. Ladd, seldom forfeiting a character for comic showboating and fancy style, is sold out by direction (Mate) that pins his deceptive, slight build under tablecloth shirts, loses his impenetrable face in the shade of ten-gallon hats, and takes little advantage of his quick, efficient movements. When he isn’t flexing or bending over backward to see his biceps, he is wandering up and down the Rio Grande—“like a ferry-boat”—verbally unfolding the complicated plot.
The antidote to all this baroque acting is offered in “Operation Disaster,” a submarine documentary anchored by a theatrical script but made seaworthy by its underplaying cast. The sailors were obviously recruited from Rank, Inc.: a grimy face always bears the tell-tale smudge on the cheekbone; the forthright, confident eyes are those of battle-hardened actors; Captain Armstrong’s (Mills) tapping of signals to a diver is the cool, crisp action of an officer who knows his listener has read the script. But these British players live inside their characters as though they owed a debt to real life; their fiddling with pen-knife, dice, or soiled cards amounts to more than just a move against a static script. Few moments are squandered on clichés like the sight of seagulls ascending heavenward as the submarine Trojan submerges. The movie sticks to its business of educating the audience on the week-long business of salvaging sub and crew, despite the tiny message at the beginning which announces that the British use a different salvaging technique from the one disclosed in the film.
February 3, 1951
THE crisp journalistic technique introduced in “Home of the Brave,” which transformed a low-priced movie into a box-office hit, has become an official style for radical young crusaders. Specializing in candid emotions and views with the steely photography used in OWI films, this new approach differs from old-time journalism like “They Won’t Forget” in its incessant emphasis on preaching and florid use of documentary ideas. Like a machine, the precision and intricacy of the recent “Teresa,” “The Steel Helmet,” “The Sound of Fury” put so much spin, phrenetic editing, and unending misery into life that the spectator can never relax.
“The Sound of Fury,” an indignant, twisted parody of the 1933 San José, California, lynchings, leaves the audience as limp as its two strangled kidnappers. With a zest for pointing out the worst aspects of average folks, the script studies an unemployed worker (Lovejoy) who tries to provide for a poverty-scarred wife and child by chauffeuring a vain hoodlum (Bridges). An amateurish abduction goes wrong and the captive’s skull is bashed in; the last movie hour pounds through the crackup of the piteous Lovejoy, the mob-siege of the county jail, incited by a sensationalist reporter, with a housewife yelling, “We’re going to save the taxpayers’ money!”
The case of the Brooke Harte kidnappers and “those fine patriotic San José citizens”—Governor Rolph’s description of the lynchers—warrants a less contrived reconstruction. It is commendable as a thoroughly angry work—no cute or chucklesome bit players, no inevitable rescue from evil—but in its determination to wreak havoc, tension effects are cruelly piled on by an ingeniously tricky mind.
Even before the listing of film credits, the theme is stated—“The world is going to the devil”—in a tempestuous prologue of Main Streeters fleeing a mysterious danger, while a blind sidewalk evangelist exhorts and the sound track makes like a bombing raid. Sound, camera, and actors settle down to an ominous snarl at American life. As Lovejoy careens home with a truck-driver, there is talk about burdensome wives in that loquacious vein that has gripped truck-drivers ever since talkies came in. Their headlights suddenly pick out an eerie image—the “inflammable” sign on the truck head, an unknown hitchhiker at the roadside. On the street a murmur of the grocer’s wife—“Did you ask him about his bill?”—hits the sound track with a thud. At home Lovejoy’s son nastily makes ratchet-like noises with a butcher knife. When the two murderers are seated in a cafe, heckling data—a raw steak being pounded, a girl too pretty to sling hash, the tedious ritual of deciding what to eat—emphasize the trying job of simply existing. The views mix figures and terrain in a tortuous bond where the décor obtrudes, slows down, and evaluates the characters so that they seem to carry a civilization on their shoulders.
Mercilessly lunging at small-townisms, the film finds the motive for the lynching everywhere, in everyone. Emulating the mad-dog journalism that it denounces, “Fury” raises audience emotion with shame-ridden maneuvers, twisted freakish sounds, relentless crowds, the murderers’ frenzied terror, and wrings sentiment from farewell letters, pitiful kinfolk. However, in searching out odd tidbits of reality, the director (Endfield) deserves a TV set for trying valiantly. Like a slow ferret he hunts out human beings in private places, trysting sheds, a wallflower’s bedroom, and fastens on them while they are hiding girdles, sparring with mirrors, buying sexy shoes for the wife. Although movies seldom stick with inane, irrelevant, everyday talk that reveals personality, Bridges tells Lovejoy about everything, from his girl friends in Germany to his collar size.
Much of the acting, which underlines pantomime with exaggerated psychology, should have cracked the camera lens. But midway in the film Katherine Locke sneaks in as a leaden manicurist on a blind date and by compressed understatement creates a new type of movie caricature. Packing silent, vacant, colorless qualities into a character who is sophisticatedly kept within the unsophisticated Bronx middle class, Miss Locke creates a feeling of hopelessness that overpowers the sloppy animation around her.
February 24, 1951
HOLLYWOOD, which once poured hope and happiness into studio-built stories about poor devils in tenements, now sends its crews to mingle in common life and embroider it with more troubles than a psychiatrist hears about in a month.
“Teresa,” a rather warm love story about a war bride (Angeli) orienting herself in a new country, busily poses more problems than its tyro scenarist (Stern) and speedy director (Zinnemann) can cope with. The two-part script details the war experiences of a panicky G. I. as he quickly woos and wins a pretty Italian, a sparrow version of Ingrid Bergman, and cracks up on his first combat patrol. Back home, in an East Side tenement, a dominating mom tries to maladjust the marriage, and the ex-G. I. runs away from so many things—jobs, picnics, rehabilitation clinics—that he literally suggests a heavy-gaited fullback getting into condition on New York sidewalks. This rather simple story of a son snarled in his mother’s apron strings and a smart girl-wife trying to untangle him is hopelessly complicated by a writer who seems to know about every uncomfortable thing that is bothering mankind, and spells it out in neon lights. Fortunately the mishmash has some refreshing talent working for it in the way of uninhibited non-actors and a poetic director; so the result is as perversely enjoyable as a Third Avenue El excursion with stops in derelict rooms and sauerkraut-odored hallways to show you what terrifies the average New York visitor.
Sometimes the director forgoes his documentary tricks to assist the writer in squeezing a morbid fact until it shrieks. The opening scene in a state unemployment office tingles with the bald accuracy of unhurried, depressed faces, a stark gymnasium-like room, an incredibly mean-faced clerk pounding out questions to the roar of a drum beat—and the conscious lining up of clients like a neatly spaced chain-gang takes all the dejected straggle out of the scene. When the cavernous-eyed hero bolts in fear from his line and start hoofing through a jittery Bowery, caught wonderfully by a hidden camera, a mysterious narrator pops into the picture for a single deathless announcement: “His occupation is—running away!” Just in case this hasn’t been nailed home, the hero keeps running into and out of various places. In a mental clinic his neurosis is glibly tied with a Freudian knot: “My father, he’s nowhere, that guy. He never made me feel safe.” This over-explaining is less objectionable than the clutter these fractional scenes contribute to a script that gets lost in an unending flashback.
However, no M-G-M crew in years has been so inventive in making non-actors behave naturally as they flounder about in existence. Much of the film’s intricacy and intimacy comes from Angeli, who is given mannerisms and speech so cloying that she is literally forced into cunning impetuousness to bring them off. Ericson gets as close to the oafish insecurity of a perennial adolescent as a movie lead ever managed, partly as a result of the trying situations Zinnemann arranges in order to play on his very lack of acting experience. Out of this extended hodgepodge Zinnemann gets the traumatic accidents he wants, and a brutal study of that pet New York game of harassing the unsophisticated underdog.
The Italian sequence in Scasoli, a town in the Apennines that M-G-M redestroyed to film its war-torn look, shows the handiwork of some G. I. advisers and two new explosive personalities, Bill Mauldin and Ralph Meeker; the soldiers are good realistic versions of the Mauldin cartoons. There is also the kind of fight between G. I.’s, with its tiny heartbreaking evidences of cowardice and surprising accidents, that hairy-chested directors like Huston have been mismanaging for years. On the other hand, the makers of this film might well have studied Huston’s superior “San Pietro” before they got around to pretentiously sentimentalizing war waifs, printing a war scene on glossy stock, and using a fearless camera man cool enough to make a poetic study of a sparkling stream in mid-battle.
Other new releases include “The Magnet,” which will draw inaudible chuckles from people who never tire of psychiatrist jokes and invented childish antics. Save for some exciting, unpredictable, gravel-voiced slum kids, the British actors are as easily read as the carefully wrought production, which makes skilful use of editing and photography in the questionable project of kidding a ten-year-old’s conscience.
“I’d Climb the Highest Mountain” missed the path when script-writer Trotti decided to exploit the folksy charm of a young backwoods preacher. Susan Hayward’s robins’-nest coiffeur, not quite realistic impressions of deep country mustaches, attractive children, and red-clay roads may make the picture worth seeing—on a double bill in the 50-to-85-cent price range.
March 10, 1951
“Fourteen Hours,” based on Joel Sayre’s story of a hesitant young suicide (Basehart) whom a persuasive cop (Douglas) tries to talk in from a Fifth Avenue ledge, teeters between life and death before falling flat on its celluloid face. The least of the film’s faults are flaws of authenticity, many having to do with New York cops, who call each other “flatfoot,” wear the same shiny uniform whether on emergency or traffic patrol, and locate stray citizens all over Long Island with weird technological methods. The “poor loony’s” last act (reconstruction of John Warde’s leap from the Gotham Hotel in 1938) is padded with so much contrived wit, mush, camera gymnastics, and self-conscious “natural” acting that it seems to be a hapless toying with facts by semi-documentarists building a case against suicide.
To start with, the film was not directed by an artistic genius but by Henry Hathaway, usually a sound journeyman on not quite factual suspense films (“The House on 92d Street”). He believes in gleaning characterization from pantomime, visual detail, realistic décor, so that his scenes seem to pull at one’s eyeball; these are like a huge kaleidoscope made of splintered bits of New York. The views are beautifully varied to give the effect of a thousand eyes watching the ledge incident from all levels of a skyscraper scene. Part of the fun happens because he dares things with a camera that are considered frivolous by soul-searching directors—like the prolonged shot of the jumper’s cigarette floating down to the crowd.
Hathaway has removed some of Barbara Bel Geddes’s custardy sweetness, pushed Agnes Moorehead so fast she hardly has time to mug, rid Robert Keith of some flexibility, so that he is just about right as the dull, ineffectual Middle European father. However, the director is not nearly good enough with actors—in conveying the boy’s abnormalities, or showing some degree of the “stinking life . . . rat-race” that drives Basehart out the window.
Of all the people who reason with him, the boy’s mother (Moorehead) projects the most credible ugliness, but she has done her type of morbid hysteria so often before that it is hard to associate her with this particular trouble. Basehart seems totally confused by his role, either over-acting pathologically or simply standing in his nook like a neat, misplaced actor waiting for direction. After two hours he is no more convincing than in the first moment with the hotel waiter (Frank Faylen), in which Faylen tries to act a bit part into the Academy Award league and Basehart twitches out messages from his subconscious.
This spellbinder script by John Paxton is crammed with tricks and messages the size of dinosaur bones. The seven-point story is cleverly composed to put legs on a one-locale movie. While Douglas coaxes Basehart with conversation—baseball, fishing, picnics—dear to every “human” script, the camera dallies among hotel and sidewalk spectators and adjacent buildings, picking up six subplots that explain why the guy is contemplating suicide. Somehow these distracting vignettes only indicate the studio’s realization that the morbid subject is mighty hard to tilt into a plea for better living. The patchwork continuity first pounces on a sidewalk romance played on the level of “the flowers, how sweetly they bloom.” Then a cabbies’ betting pool on the hour Basehart will jump tries to define cynical existence, but gives way to twinges of conscience almost before it is under way. A woman in the throes of a divorce suit sees the would-be suicide and changes her mind. Finally, the psychiatrist’s explanation of the family’s destructive role in Basehart’s life pushes the suicide even farther out of the film.
The man on the ledge appears to be there for the visual image he offers to movie cameras; he is pinpointed dramatically against gray city-scape with the teetering, wall-hugging, tic-like movements that lead to a pre-climactic fall. His ordeal, made to order for the Special Photographic Effects department, is glimpsed with every lens maneuver and camera gimmick, and cast from every reflection known to trick cinema. The petulant blonde struggles with divorce attorneys and the window pane reflects the ledge incident; a TV room shows Basehart on six small screens; the final shot is seen in a bedroom mirror. These precious compositions produce the effect of a guy already wounded by existence being cornered by an indomitable camera man. After a few reels his actual situation is so confused by the machine-gun volleys of still-life compositions that one feels he has been inclosed in a coffin by the photography long before he decides whether or not to jump.
March 31, 1951