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At the Mannequin Factory

At the Mannequin Factory ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

Poppa’s face was dry and lined, like old leather. The red pouches under his eyes made his eyes look half-closed, even when they were open all the way. His mouth was a thin, lipless line in which a Marlboro cigarette was inserted. For sixty of his seventy years, he had smoked Marlboros, an untold and uncalculated number of them.

He reclined in his chair that had molded itself to the shape of his body—or his body had molded itself to the shape of the chair. The room was dark and low, the perpetual cloud of smoke hanging like a pall between Poppa and the ceiling. A small lamp with a little cluster of red flowers painted on the lampshade, the only color in the room, sat on a table between his chair and Momma’s.

Poppa and Momma both puffed on their cigarettes. For them, puffing on a cigarette was part of the act of breathing. A breath wasn’t a breath without a puff to complement it. And while they puffed away they both kept their eyes on the screen a few feet in front of them. The screen was the eye on the world, the only eye, to which they had given their fealty. It didn’t matter what was on—a boxing match, a train wreck, news of the world, cowboys and Indians, romance, dancing, drama, music or laughter—it was all the same: they regarded everything the eye brought to them with the same fish-eyed blankness.

The door opened and Elma entered. Momma and Poppa didn’t look up but instead kept looking at the eye. Elma took off her coat and hat and stood in the middle of the room; she looked expectantly at Momma and Poppa, though the eyes through which she saw them were only slits.

“Beer, beer, beer!” Papa said.

“Popcorn, popcorn!” Momma said. “Peanuts, Peanuts!”

Elma went into the kitchen to get the things they wanted and took them back into the living room. When she set the bottle of beer on the table next to Poppa’s arm, he didn’t look up, but his arm reached out, seemingly of its own accord, and brought the bottle to his lips. He took a long drink and smacked his lips and set the bottle back down.

Elma had mixed the peanuts and popcorn together in one bowl, the way Momma liked them. Momma grabbed the bowl and began eating hungrily, never looking away from the eye. Elma opened a new carton of Marlboros and stacked the packs on the table, five on Poppa’s side and five on Momma’s, and when these things were done she went up the winding stairs to her own people.

The room seemed crowded now with twelve of them. They sat or stood about in different poses. Elma had dressed, wigged and hatted them according to her own whims. There was the society lady with the fox fur, the businessman with a pencil-line mustache, the small boy standing beside the dresser in play togs, ready to catch a ball, the lady with one leg canted out, hands on hips. They all had beautiful, painted-on, perfectly proportioned faces, luminous eyes and pearl-like teeth.

Some had movable arms and legs so they might be posed sitting or reclining. Elma liked these best because they seemed more real. To amuse herself, she would sometimes dress a man in a lady’s dress—including a hat with a veil—or a lady in a man’s work clothes or overalls. She also tried different wigs and hats to get a different look or feel. In this way she amused herself for hours and kept from being lonely.

There was one man in particular she liked to whom she had given the name Frankie. His arms and legs moved and his head swiveled from side to side. His skin was soft and pliable and warm to the touch. Elma dressed him in silk pajamas and put him beside her in the bed and covered him up. On cold nights, with the light off, she would have almost sworn there was a living, breathing man in the bed beside her. It gave her a feeling of well-being unlike anything else.

For twelve of her thirty-nine years, Elma had worked in the office of a mannequin factory. All day long she sat at a desk and typed letters or did small errands for the two bosses. They liked her because she always did what she was told to do without complaint, worked for very little money, never missed work, and didn’t mind working an hour or two over when the work was piling up. She was the very rare woman who had little to say and didn’t believe that her opinions were of any importance. If they could have ordered a dozen more like Elma, they would have.

Anytime a mannequin couldn’t be used or was defective in any way, Elma asked if she might have it to keep for her own. Nobody at the mannequin factory ever asked her why she wanted the mannequins or what she did with them, but they were always willing to comply. These mannequins that Elma rescued from the trash heap she added to her collection. When she carried one of the mannequins home, people stopped to look at her, but nobody ever suggested that she was doing something she shouldn’t do or that she should be stopped. Poppa and Momma, of course, never noticed what she did and never went up the winding stairs to her rooms.

One day Elma noticed a man looking at her at the mannequin factory. She discovered his name was Alexander A. Alexander but he went by the name of Shakespeare. She thought at first that he was looking at her because he was new and didn’t know anybody yet, but a week later he was still looking at her, although she didn’t know any reason why he should.

She was delivering a typed report to one of the bosses when she met Shakespeare face to face in an otherwise deserted hallway. Instead of veering away from her and keeping on his side, he stepped in front of her and stopped her in her tracks. He put his hand familiarly on the underside of her wrist and smiled.

“I believe I know you,” he said.

All she could do was shake her head and step around him and walk on. When she got back to her desk, she was breathless and a little confused. No man had ever paid any attention to her before and when she looked at herself in the mirror she knew why. By the kindest and most generous assessment, she was hideously ugly. Her nose was crooked, her hair mouse-brown, her eyes small and ferret-like, her teeth misshapen and brown. She could never remember a time in her life when she had cared much about the way she looked or about the effect that she might have on other people. If Shakespeare spoke to her again, she would ignore him or register a complaint.

On a blustery day in fall when she was walking home in the near-dark, she realized Shakespeare had fallen into step beside her. She hadn’t seen where he came from; he was just there.

“Leave me alone!” she said. “You don’t have any business bothering me!”

She looked at him and when she saw the hurt in his eyes, she knew she had been more unkind than she needed to be.

At home it was always the same. Momma and Poppa never looked at her or spoke to her. They just sat puffing and looking at the eye. She brought their food, which some days was only pretzels, candy, popcorn or beer. When she fixed them a sandwich or a bowl of soup, they hardly ever ate it and she ended up throwing it out.

In the evening after she saw they only wanted to be left alone with their cigarettes and with the eye, she retreated to her rooms and to the people there with whom she felt comfort and peace. She began to ask herself: What kind of life is this I’m living and do I plan on doing these same things every day of my life until I die? The answer, if there was one, did not make itself known.

For the first time in her life, her sleep was disturbed by nightmares, and during the day at the mannequin factory she began to be nervous and tense. She took much longer to do her work than usual and any time one of the bosses sent her on an errand, she usually managed to find a private place, in the ladies’ room or elsewhere, to stand quietly and stare at the wall for a half-hour or so in a trance-like state before returning to her desk.

She didn’t see Shakespeare for several days and wondered what had happened to him. Maybe he wasn’t suited to his job, spray-painting mannequins, and had already been fired. She was more than willing to put him out of her mind.

The next time she saw Shakespeare, it was not at the mannequin factory but on the sidewalk down the street. When she saw him coming toward her in a crowd, she looked away but, again, he stopped her in her tracks and put his hand on her arm.

“I believe we knew each other once,” he said.

She stepped around him and kept going, eyes to the ground.

“Have you ever thought about trying a little makeup?” he said in a loud voice.

“Mind your own business!” she snapped.

Then one day Elma found herself on a tiny elevator with Shakespeare, going up to the fourth floor. For a couple of minutes, at least, she was stuck with him in close quarters and couldn’t walk away.

“We knew each other in school,” he said.

She looked at him with distaste. “I don’t remember,” she said.

“It was a long time ago.”

“I never saw you before,” she insisted.

On a rainy Friday as she was leaving work, Shakespeare was going out the door at the same time she was.

“Would you like to talk?” he asked.

“No!” she said.

He walked along beside her and there was nothing she could do but keep walking with her eyes down and pretend he wasn’t there. When they came to an establishment where liquor was sold, he looked at her and inclined his head to indicate they should enter. Without knowing why, she let herself be led inside.

They sat side by side at a bar. She had never been inside a barroom before and only wanted to leave. When a beer in a glass was set in front of her, she looked at it and didn’t seem to know what she was supposed to do.

“It’s a small world,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

“I don’t know why you’re bothering me,” she said, “but I want it to stop.”

“Do you think whenever a person speaks to you, they’re bothering you?”

“I want to be left alone,” she said. “I have to be getting home.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I have something I want to give you.”

“I don’t want it.”

He gave her a tiny pill that he took out of a little brown envelope in his pocket. She looked at the pill in her palm and started to give it back. “What is it?” she asked.

“It’s something that will make you feel better. About the world and about life. Take it and see if it doesn’t.”

“You’re a dope dealer?” she asked.

He laughed, showing his long teeth. “All things are relative,” he said.

“I don’t know what that means,” she said. “I have to be getting home.”

“Put it in your pocket and take it with you. Tomorrow is Saturday and you don’t have to go to work. Take the pill in the morning when you’re alone and see if you don’t have a wonderful day.”

“I won’t take it,” she said. “I’ll flush it down the toilet.”

He laughed again. “Suit yourself!”

When she walked into the house, she was more than usually disgusted by the sight of Momma and Poppa sitting in their chairs staring at the eye and puffing on their cigarettes. She wanted to leave again but the thought of the bleak, wet, lonely streets leading nowhere stopped her. Without acknowledging to Poppa and Momma even that she was home, she went up the winding stairs to her rooms and to the only people in the world who knew and loved her.

(Continued in “The Celestial City”: https://literaryfictions.com/2016/09/16/the-celestial-city/

September 4, 2016September 19, 2016 by allen0997

The Magnificent Ambersons ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Magnificent Ambersons ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

It’s the fin de siècle (end of the nineteenth century) in Midwestern America. The Ambersons are the wealthiest family in a town that is about to become a city, thanks to industrialization. The patriarch of the family, Major Amberson, a veteran of the Battle of Gettysburg in the Civil War, has made a fortune and then sits back and watches as his family spends his money. He has a son, George Amberson, who makes bad business investments while being a gentleman of leisure. Major Amberson’s daughter, Isabel, is the prettiest girl in town. Eugene Morgan, a friend of George Amberson, is interested in Isabel but, for her own complicated reasons, she chooses to marry dull and steady Wilbur Minafer. Wilbur and Isabel have one son, George Amberson Minafer, who is spoiled terribly by his doting mother, his Aunt Fanny (his father’s sister) and the rest of the family. He grows up with an astounding sense of entitlement; he is brash, arrogant, condescending and not very likeable, although he is admired for his good looks and aristocratic bearing.

When Eugene Morgan again comes into the lives of the Ambersons (he left after Isabel jilted him), he is an up-and-coming inventor of automobiles (“horseless carriages”) and a widower, with a pretty post-adolescent daughter named Lucy. When young George Amberson Minafer meets Lucy at a “ball” given at the Amberson mansion on New Year’s Eve, he is drawn to her in a way that he doesn’t quite understand. When he learns that his own mother and Lucy’s father, Eugene Morgan, were once romantically involved, he takes an immediate dislike to Morgan. He believes that “horseless carriages” are only a silly passing fad and will never take the place of the reliable old horse. He never passes up a chance to insult Morgan and his profession.

George’s father dies fairly young (he was never very healthy, anyway, and he worked too hard) and the way seems open for Eugene and Isabel to resume their courtship of old. George is not going to stand for it, however. Despite his interest in (and growing love for) Eugene Morgan’s daughter, Lucy, he will do anything in his power to keep his mother and Eugene Morgan from getting together again. He is appalled at the prospect that they might marry. When he realizes that the “riffraff” of the town is openly gossiping about his mother and Morgan, suggesting that they were “carrying on” while his father was still alive, he takes matters into his own hands and makes a complete fool of himself. As his uncle George tells him afterwards, the worst way to deal with gossip is to acknowledge it or try to set it right.

Despite all that’s happened, Isabel still believes her son Georgie is an “angel”; she worships and adores him unquestioningly. When he insists that he take her on a “tour of the world” for an indefinite period of time to remove her from the grasp of Eugene Morgan and from the gossiping in their home town, she has no other choice but to comply. George believes he is doing the right thing for his mother but, blinded by his own narrow-mindedness and sense of outraged morality, he is doing more harm than good.

While George and Isabel are busy gallivanting around Italy and other foreign places, things are not going well back home for the Ambersons. Their once-lovely little town is growing into a thriving, industrialized—not to mention dirty and grimy—city. All the people they knew are either dead or moved away, replaced by hordes of foreigners and immigrants. Amberson is not such an important or well-recognized name as it once was. The once-pretty vistas of their hometown are replaced by sordidness and squalor, boarding houses and cheap apartment buildings. More importantly for the Ambersons, their great wealth is dwindling, through unwise investments and negligence. (When Major Amberson builds a beautiful mansion for Isabel to live in upon her marriage, he just happens to omit the important detail of providing her with a deed to the property, which nobody realizes they don’t have until it’s too late.) The Ambersons are not able to keep up with the times; they make the mistake of not foreseeing the societal and economic changes that are going on around them. They seem to believe their insular world will last forever.

More than anything else, The Magnificent Ambersons is about change. While the Ambersons are unable or unwilling to adapt to their changing world, Eugene Morgan becomes successful and makes a fortune at manufacturing and improving the automobile. He is the antithesis of the Ambersons. His name, Morgan, becomes as important in its own way as the Amberson name was in their own high-flying time. He possesses the important attribute of adaptability, which the Ambersons lack.

Indiana native Booth Tarkington wrote The Magnificent Ambersons in 1918. It has the distinction of being on the Modern Library’s list of the hundred best books in English of the twentieth century. It’s a readable and accessible American classic, one of my all-time favorite novels. I’ve read it twice in my life, the first time decades ago; the second time I read it I liked it just as much as the first time. The memorable movie version, made in 1942, is one of those rare film adaptations that does justice to the book on which it’s based. Most of the dialogue in the movie is lifted word-for-word from the book.

August 30, 2016September 3, 2016 by allen0997

The Charioteer ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Charioteer ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

English writer Mary Renault (1905-1983) is known mostly for her historical fiction set in ancient Greece. Her 1953 novel The Charioteer, however, is set in a much different time period: World War II. Young British soldier Laurie (Laurence) Odell sustains a severe leg injury (his kneecap is blown off) in the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. While recuperating in an army hospital from a series of operations on his leg, he meets Andrew Raynes, a Quaker and a conscientious objector. (These “COs” are very unpopular with most people.) Andrew doesn’t fight in the war because of his religion, but he’s doing “war work” as a hospital orderly. Andrew and Laurie Odell become friends, they begin to meet secretly every day and, after a time, they become more than friends.

Years earlier, when Laurie was in school, he was drawn to an older boy named Ralph Lanyon. Ralph was a “Head” (sort of a student leader) at the school. After Ralph is “sent down” at school (expelled), Laurie never sees him again but never stops thinking of him. Fast forward years later to the war: Laurie and Ralph meet again; it turns out that Ralph rescued Laurie at Dunkirk, even though Laurie was barely conscious at the time and wasn’t aware of what was going on. Not surprisingly, he still is drawn to Ralph in a sexual way and he discovers that Ralph feels the same way about him. Since Laurie has already committed himself in a way to loving Andrew, he is faced with a dilemma. Who needs him more, Andrew or Ralph?

Meantime, Laurie has family problems. His mother, who has been a widow since Laurie was five, is planning on marrying a vicar named Mr. Straike. Laurie and Mr. Straike don’t like each other very much and are at pains to keep it hidden. Mr. Straike was instrumental in having Laurie’s eleven-year-old dog, Gyp, euthanized while Laurie was away and his mother didn’t bother to tell Laurie about it until he comes home for her wedding. He swallows his grief over losing Gyp and ends up giving his mother away in her wedding to Mr. Straike. Whenever Laurie is alone with his mother, he wants to tell her of his homosexuality and of his feelings for Andrew, but he is never able to get the words out; he knows that Mr. Straike would violently disapprove.

The more Laurie sees Ralph on his leaves from the hospital for treatment, the more he sees him a different light. Ralph is a member of an insular group of gay men, whom Laurie doesn’t like very much. (They’re plenty bitchy and one of them attempts suicide while Laurie is present.) Although Ralph is talking about him and Laurie being together forever, Laurie isn’t sure that’s what he wants, especially since Andrew has come into his life.

The Charioteer is interesting fiction for its time, the early 1950s. If the plot creaks at times (especially for the American reader) in the long, long conversations in the second half and we’re not always sure what the characters are saying, we can overlook the plodding and the occasional flaws. (Who doesn’t have them?) On the whole, it’s a rather conventional wartime love story made unconventional because all the participants are men. Despite its theme, however, it’s easy on the ears and eyes for those who might be offended by descriptions of an “alternative lifestyle.” The sections dealing with any kind of love or sexual activity are very chaste. For all we know, Laurie and Ralph or Laurie and Andrew might be playing chess when they are alone together. We know what’s going on here, but we’re not hammered over the head with it. This is what is known as subtlety and artistry, two qualities sorely lacking in today’s tell-all, anything-goes culture.

August 22, 2016August 23, 2016 by allen0997

Hell or High Water ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Hell or High Water ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

When scruffy Texas brothers Tanner Howard (Ben Foster) and Toby Howard (Chris Pine) begin robbing banks, it’s more a question of seeking vengeance on a particular bank than a desire for money, even though they are poor. As Toby Howard says, he’s been poor all his life; his parents were poor and his grandparents; it’s been like a disease handed down from generation to generation. He’s a divorced father of two sons who would like to see his children have a better chance at life than he ever had.

Tanner Howard, Toby’s brother, is an ex-convict (out of 39 years, he says, he’s spent 10 of them behind bars). He is much more willing to fight, ignore the rules, and cause trouble than Toby is. When he returns from prison, their mother has just died. Both brothers feel they’ve been cheated by a certain bank, with seven branches in different Texas towns. They begin robbing these banks, taking what is considered small amounts, and not going after what’s in the vaults. Droll, about-to-retire Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) methodically tries to figure out what’s going on with the brothers and what they will do next. He reasons that, since the brothers are only robbing the different branches of one bank, they probably have a grudge against that bank and are trying to get enough money for a particular reason.

For a time, the brothers are successful with their robberies. (Toby is able to catch up with his child support payments and pay off the debts on the farm. If anybody asks, he has the excuse of gambling winnings to account for his sudden wealth.) Although not very smart or experienced, the brothers manage to keep one step ahead of the law because they are bold (especially Tanner) and don’t mind taking chances. (They steal cars to commit their robberies and then have the cars buried under sand.) Tanner knows, however, that they won’t be able to go on that way forever. “Did you ever know of anybody to get away with anything?” he asks his brother. Toward the end when the brothers are parting and tell each other they love each other, they know and we know that their time is about up.

Hell or High Water is solid storytelling, a rich film with fully delineated characters. The Texas landscape is bleak and colorless; the Texas accents are at times indistinguishable. There’s nothing pretty or romanticized here, no special effects, no cutesy Butch Cassidy-type touches where we are made to feel the criminals are really good-hearted studs who ought to patted on the back for their crimes because they have such toothy smiles. If the ending (at least one element of it) is surprising, it makes perfect sense and we see, finally, where it has been heading the whole time. And, yes, Marcus Hamilton gets as evidence the baby-voiced, bosomy waitress’s (button your uniform, dear) $200 tip that Toby left her, even though she told him she had to have it for her mortgage. Did she really think he’d care about that? No, poodle, not when catching bank robbers is at stake.

August 21, 2016August 22, 2016 by allen0997

Bal du Moulin de la Galette ~ A Painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876) by Pierre-August Renoir

In the late 19th century, working-class Parisians liked to dress up and spend Sunday afternoons at Moulin de la Galette in the Montmarte district in Paris, dancing, drinking and eating galettes (small cakes). Bal du Moulin de la Galette (or Dance at Moulin de la Galette) is one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s (1841-1919) most celebrated masterpieces, a typically Impressionist rendering of real life.

August 21, 2016August 21, 2016 by allen0997

Florence Foster Jenkins ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Florence Foster Jenkins ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

It’s wartime 1940s and the place is New York City. Meryl Streep is Florence Foster Jenkins: society matron, patroness of the arts (particularly music) and self-deluded singer. She has a smirking husband (Hugh Grant), a fawning vocal coach, a devoted maid, and a piano accompanist named Cosmé McMoon (played by Simon Helberg, who resembles French writer Marcel Proust). Mr. McMoon is chosen over a bunch of other pianists because in his audition he plays “The Swan” by Camille Saint-Saens, which reminds Florence of when she was young. Right away when Mr. McMoon hears Florence sing, he knows that something is not as it should be. She shrieks and screeches and is led to believe by those around her that she is a wonderful singer with perfect technique. What Mr. McMoon eventually comes to realize is that everybody loves the good-natured and well-meaning Florence and that nobody has the heart to tell her she isn’t nearly as good a singer as she thinks she is.

Florence isn’t well, we find, and probably won’t live much longer. She contracted syphilis from her first husband on their wedding night when she was eighteen and, in these days before penicillin, has had it ever since, almost fifty years. The doctor says he has never seen anybody live so long with the disease. Her second husband, for his part, loves her and is devoted to her but has a much-younger girlfriend on the side; he reveals to the doctor that he and Florence have always had a sort of platonic, non-sexual partnership, so he never contracted the disease.

When Florence gives a concert at Carnegie Hall, her husband goes to great lengths to buy up all the newspapers in the neighborhood so she won’t see the scathing (true, so, therefore, unkind) reviews. She gets a copy of one of the newspapers anyway and discovers that people consider her the “worst singer ever” and are only laughing at her. She has a moment of self-realization that, up to this moment, has eluded her.

Florence Foster Jenkins is, we are told at the beginning, based on true events, meaning, I suppose, that part of it is true and part of it made up. Simon Helberg, who plays Florence’s accompanist, is, in reality, a pianist himself and plays all the piano parts, which is truly impressive. Meryl Streep does her own singing and is, as always, superb in the title role. Now, if she will only leave politics alone and stick to acting, everything will be fine.

August 14, 2016August 14, 2016 by allen0997

Dracula ~ A Capsule Book Review

Dracula ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Irish author Bram Stoker lived from 1847 to 1912. He is known today for his famous Gothic novel Dracula, published in 1897. It’s a story of good versus evil that has inspired countless stage plays, books, movies and TV shows. It popularized the ancient legend of vampires and made it part of mainstream culture. Who doesn’t know that vampires are repelled by garlic, cast no reflection in a mirror, and can only be killed by a stake driven through the heart and the cutting off of the head?

From the first page we are immersed in atmosphere. Englishman Jonathan Harker is a solicitor working for a London real estate agent. Count Dracula, living in a crumbling, isolated castle in the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania, has purchased a piece of property in London known as Carfax Abbey. (Why anybody would want to buy the creepy old Carfax Abbey is never questioned.) Harker travels to Castle Dracula in Transylvania to handle the business end of the sale. Right away he sees that Count Dracula is beyond eccentric. He is never seen during daylight hours, he doesn’t eat food or drink wine, and his eyes and mouth are red and his teeth are sharp. (“Listen to them!” Dracula says about the wolves howling in the hills. “Children of the Night! What music they make!”) When Harker is confined to his room and not allowed to go home when expected, he begins to wonder if he will ever make it out alive. When he looks out the window, there is a thousand-foot drop-off, offering no means of escape. At night he witnesses Dracula leaving the castle by climbing down the wall like a fly. To make matters worse, some of Dracula’s “brides” are awfully interested in getting their hooks into Harker. (“He’s young and strong!” they coo.) “Leave him alone!” Count Dracula says. “He is mine!” No matter what evil he is engaged in, he is always suave and courteous.

When Dracula departs his home in Transylvania to take up residence in England, he goes aboard a ship call the Demeter. He’s not your ordinary commercial traveler, though. He has fifty coffin-sized boxes of dirt containing soil from his native Transylvania in the ship’s hold. When the Demeter docks in England, all the crew are dead, mysteriously drained of blood. Nobody can figure out exactly what happened during the trip. We, the reader, have a pretty good idea, however.

Jonathan returns to England, physically and emotionally ill. (Either he escaped, or Count Dracula released him.) Once back home, he finds that all is not well with his fiancée (later his wife), named Mina, and his circle of friends. Mina’s best friend, named Lucy Westenra, has a mysterious illness and nobody can figure out what is wrong with her. Enter Dr. Van Helsing of Amsterdam to try to solve the riddle. He knows right away that what is wrong with Lucy isn’t in the usual run of illnesses.

Dr. Seward is also interested in the case. He was romantically interested in Lucy Westenra (as was American Quincey Morris), but she rejected him in favor of Arthur Holmwood. (When Arthur’s father dies, he becomes Lord Godalming.) Lucy and Arthur are in love and plan to be married. Lucy, however, becomes increasingly ill. Dr. Seward and Quincey Morris, even though Lucy rejected them (politely), seem to hang around to see if they might be of assistance. As these characters gradually realize the type of foe they face in Count Dracula, they vow to band together to fight evil and do all they can to defend English womanhood.

Dracula is told in “journal” entries and correspondence of the various characters, giving it a first-person sense of drama and immediacy. There is also the occasional newspaper article (as with the account of the docking in England of the Demeter), further lending verisimilitude to the story. It is fleet in its 326 pages and is never ponderous or wordy. Though it may be considered a “pulp” novel not on a literary scale with Poe, Oscar Wilde or other purveyors of the “Gothic” genre, it’s well-written and engaging. It won’t give you a headache and it will keep you turning the pages, even though it’s a story that is familiar to almost everybody by now.

August 9, 2016August 9, 2016 by allen0997

Cafe Society ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Café Society ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

Now in his eighties, Woody Allen is still writing and directing movies. His latest is Café Society, a bittersweet romance set in the late 1930s, among the snobs and elitists in the movie industry in Hollywood and, later in the movie, in New York among the “café society,” which means people who can stay up all night drinking liquor and dancing and socializing because they have plenty of money and don’t have to get up early and go to work the next day.

Young Bobby Dorfman of New York (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is dazzled by the glamour of Hollywood when he first arrives. Luckily he has an uncle named Phil Stern (Steve Carell), who just happens to be a high-powered agent in one of Hollywood’s dream factories. Phil Stern sets Bobby up in a job that is essentially that of errand boy, but Bobby doesn’t mind as long as it means he can be near Phil’s secretary, Veronica (Kristen Stewart). Veronica (“Vonny”) shows Bobby around Hollywood and soon he decides he is in love with her. She seems a little aloof, though. After a while she confides to Bobby that she has been having an unhappy love affair with a married man for over a year. Bobby learns by degrees that this married man is his uncle, Phil Stern. So, Bobby and his uncle are both in love with Vonny. Doesn’t that mean that somebody is going to end up disappointed?

Meanwhile, Bobby has an interesting and colorful family. His gravel-voiced mother (Jeannie Berlin) has all the clichés at her command of a Jewish mother. (When she discovers near the end of the movie that her older son is a murderer and has converted to Christianity before going to the electric chair, she says she doesn’t know which is worse.) Bobby’s older brother, Ben (Corey Stoll), is a gangster. If you have somebody you want taken care of, all you have to do is tell him. Ben and Bobby’s sister Evelyn is married to a left-wing intellectual named Leonard with communist sympathies. When Evelyn and her family are bothered by a bullying neighbor, Evelyn gets brother Ben to take care of the neighbor, but not quite in the way she anticipated.

When Vonny tells Bobby that Phil Stern is leaving his wife of twenty-five years and marrying her, Bobby goes back to New York in a disillusioned state. He decides he is a true New Yorker and that Hollywood isn’t for him.

In need of a job, he goes into the nightclub business with brother Ben, the gangster. The nightclub is a huge success and he meets and marries a pretty, blonde socialite who, ironically enough, is also named Veronica. He believes he is happy until Vonny from Hollywood shows up with her husband Phil Stern. It seems she wants to pick up with Bobby where they left off. Is he still enough in love with her to cheat on his wife?

Woody Allen provides off-screen narration in Café Society, as he did in Radio Days (my favorite Woody movie) in 1987. He is still writing some of the best dialogue in movies (you’d know it was his just by listening to the rhythms) and still touching on some of the familiar themes of family, romance, infidelity, disillusionment, punishment (or lack of it in a godless universe) and existentialism. And, as always, he finds a romanticism in the past that just doesn’t exist in the present.

July 31, 2016August 2, 2016 by allen0997

Since Yesterday ~ A Capsule Book Review

Since Yesterday ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The 1920s were a time of economic prosperity and optimism in America. Ordinary people—factory workers, store clerks, school teachers—were able to turn a profit in the stock market. Everybody seemed to think the good times would last forever, but they didn’t. Too many people were investing in the markets “on margin,” meaning they were borrowing the money they were investing and didn’t necessarily have a way to pay it back if their investments didn’t turn out well for them. The big bubble burst in 1929 and the economic structure in America and just about every other country in the world came crashing down, ushering in the Big D: the Depression. No matter what else happened in the 1930s, the entire decade was marked by depression and a painful realignment of the economies of the world. In retrospect, people saw that things just couldn’t go on the way they had been since the end of the First World War.

Herbert Hoover of Iowa occupied the White House at the time of the stock market crash of 1929. He was more of an administrator than a politician and, no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t able to stop the economic decline or do much of anything to improve it. He was defeated for re-election in 1932 by Franklin Roosevelt, former governor of New York. Roosevelt had a very big job on his hands going forward. One of the things he did right away was to repeal Prohibition (the Volstead Act), which, by almost any standard, was a failure and had led to a rise in crime.

Repealing Prohibition, though, was easy compared to solving the country’s economic problems. Roosevelt instituted what was called the New Deal, which turned out to be a huge expansion of the power of the federal government. Millions of unemployed people were put to work as essentially employees of the government in “public works” projects. And, for the first time, the United States government became an enormous distributor of assistance to the needy.

Of course, during the 1930s, there were other things that happened besides the Depression, the repeal of Prohibition and the New Deal. In the plains states, millions of acres of topsoil blew away in epic dust storms caused by over-cultivation of the land. The region became known as the “dust bowl” and tens of thousands of farmers and their families were displaced and forced out of their homes. The Ohio River flooded, laying waste to Louisville and Cincinnati and destroying thousands of acres of crop lands. A freak tropical hurricane blew through New England, creating much destruction and killing 647 people. (I think there’s a pattern here.) “Lighter than air” transatlantic transport received its deathblow when the Hindenburg caught fire and crashed in Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1937. In the “crime of the decade,” aviation hero Charles Lindbergh’s infant son was kidnapped from his New Jersey home and later found dead. One Bruno Richard Hauptman, a German immigrant, was convicted of the crime and executed, proclaiming his innocence to his final breath. The 1930s also saw the rise of labor unions and sometimes bitter strikes between labor and management. To ease the pain of all the terrible things that were happening, Americans flocked to the movies. There were Mickey Mouse, Mae West, the Marx brothers, Shirley Temple, Clark Gable in It Happened One Night and Mutiny on the Bounty, Greta Garbo making a triumphant transition to talking pictures in Anna Christie, Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express and The Garden of Allah, Ronald Colman in Lost Horizon, and countless others to help people relieve the pain of living during such difficult times. There were tremendous strides also being made in the arts: music, painting, theatre, and literature. Unemployed painters were being put to work by the government painting murals in post offices and other public buildings. Classical music became popularized on the radio with regular programs by famed conductor Arturo Toscanini and other concert artists. “Swing” music with performers like Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and the Dorsey brothers became all the rage. In 1939, the New York World’s Fair opened. Called “The World of Tomorrow,” it called on people to look forward to the future with hope and optimism and set aside, as least for a time, the troubled past.

The 1930s were not to end on a very happy note, though. Whereas the beginning of the decade arrived with great economic uncertainty, it would end with fear of another war and foreign dictators: Mussolini but most particularly Hitler. He seemed to be gobbling up all the countries around him. What would the United States do if Hitler invaded its allies Britain and France? Most Americans were against getting involved in another European war. It was a time of great unease in the country.

Since Yesterday: The 1930s in America is an informal (meaning easy to read, not academic and not scientific) account of the 1930s—from September 3, 1929 to September 3, 1939—by a person who lived through it and was there, historian Frederick Lewis Allen. He writes on nearly every aspect of American life during the 1930s. If you remember the 1930s, and even if you don’t, this is a very entertaining and informative journey down memory lane. Now it’s on the 1940s. If you lived in the 1930s, you were probably better off not knowing what awaited you just around the corner.

July 30, 2016August 1, 2016 by allen0997

Anita Page

Anita Page (1910-2008), successful Hollywood film star of the silent era and early sound films, retired at the pinnacle of her success. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was an ardent admirer of Anita’s and wrote her dozens of fan letters. She turned him down when he proposed marriage, though, which was probably the right decision, considering all that happened later.

July 24, 2016July 24, 2016 by allen0997

Literary Fictions

Author: allen0997