The Big Goodbye

A behind-the-scenes look at the lives and times that brought us the 70s film noir classic Chinatown. Well-researched and compelling, Wasson’s book dives into the many influences on and vagaries plaguing the film’s creative process and screenplay. It was hard to put down. Wasson focused on Roman Polanski, screenwriter Robert Towne, producer Robert Evans, Jack Nicholson, and Faye Dunaway, along with Sharon Tate, Anjelica Huston, John Huston and more, all connected to the project in some way or another, and at a time when Hollywood was becoming more corporate, less freewheeling and inventive. Ben Affleck recently signed a deal to direct an adaptation of this one, not surprisingly for Paramount. C'mon, Jack, how about a return to the big screen? Who else could pull off John Huston?

Snow Country

“The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” The famous first line of Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country (1948) captures an experience I know well, having travelled many times through this unending passage en route to Niigata’s Naoetsu from Tokyo. I remember the first time, twenty years ago, the blinding daylight as the train reappeared, and out the windows the snow deeper than the average person is tall. In the novel, written in 1935 and later reworked for publication, Shimamura gets off at Echigo-Yuzawa Station; Yuzawa was then a small town where visitors went to enjoy onsen and respite from the capital. He’s a ballet critic (or so he says), and is married, but idles most days away and, after the tunnel, in this world of snow he escapes to, calls upon the services of geisha. To a slight extent he becomes involved in a love triangle with two women who live there, both somewhat provincial and equally mysterious to our protagonist narrator. One is Komako, a geisha who dwells in other people’s hovels and is bent on drinking herself to infirmity, and the other is Yoko, who's nursing a dying man and lives with a shamisen teacher. Just as Shimamura is idle with his time, he’s idle in the sense of doing little to support or encourage those around him. He, the narrator, comes across as almost devoid of empathy, choosing to give us an unsympathetic report on Komako’s gradual spiral and Yoko’s grief. This “snow country” for him is a fantasy world. The women, however much he needs them, are playthings that shine then fall like the diaphanous moths he describes dropping off door screens and other surfaces made to separate. What I particularly liked about the novel was how it challenges the reader. There's an uneasy contrast between Shimamura’s unfeeling nature, revealed through his own narrative, and Kawabata’s poetic prose layered therein. And I found myself trying to draw lines between the author and the protagonist. Shimamura is unlikeable in his idleness but also perceptive, and he recognizes beauty. Or is he? And does he really? Perhaps in this snow country, despite his keen sense of the true world around him, he'd rather wander blind in self-gratifying unreality.

This is one of three novels that landed Kawabata the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968—according to the Nobel website “for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind.” The other two are The Old Capital and Thousand Cranes.

The geisha Matsuei, who Kawabata based Komako on.

The Lady from Shanghai

“Some people can smell danger. Not me.” Says Irish-born boatswain Michael O'Hara (Welles) to Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth), in the dark of New York's Central Park. Directed and screenplay-written by Orson Welles, The Lady from Shanghai (1948) is vintage femme-fatale noir that's as silly as it is classic. O'Hara's hired by Elsa's husband Sloane to work aboard their yacht from San Fran to Acapulco and back, then becomes entangled in a sham murder plot involving the miserable couple and Sloane’s pestiferous law partner. Next... well, who knows what happens—the plot's as convoluted as a ball of frayed fishing line in a muddle of weeds. It doesn't matter. It's film noir. Disarray reigns. And the picture has enough style to keep you wanting nothing more. The hall of mirrors scene in the funhouse is fun. Chinatown, the Chinese, and the entrancing Hayworth talking Chinese are all sinologically delightful. Welles' lilty (it's in the OED) accent is caricature off the tongue. The tight editing and overlapping lines are deliciously unsettling and bizarre. This was a Welles experiment you either like or don't. A box office bomb that's tagged either "weird" or "strange." I like. Out of five: ★★★★.