by Peter Cates

Gene Hackman

Gene Hackman won an Oscar for best actor in 1971’s The French Connection yet interestingly was almost the last choice for the role of NYC Detective Popeye Doyle after it was turned down by Paul Newman, Jackie Gleason, Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, Peter Boyle, James Caan, etc.

Based on Robin Moore’s investigative book of the same title, it chronicles the efforts of the New York City Police Department and FBI to confiscate a huge shipment of heroin arriving by ship from French drug dealers and to arrest the ringleader Alain Charnier, nicknamed “Frog One,” who has traveled to the City to meet with American distributors and who is portrayed with suave elegance by Fernando Rey.

The superb cast included Roy Scheider as Doyle’s partner Russo, Marcel Bozzuffi as Charnier’s #2 man “Frog Two” Nicoli, and Eddie Egan, the real life Popeye Doyle, as Doyle’s supervisor.

I have seen the film only once when it first hit the theaters more than 50 years ago but still remember its minute by minute tension and suspense- two scenes in particular. First, Doyle is walking on the street towards a young mother pushing her baby in the carriage. From out of nowhere several deafening sniper rifle shots kill the mother, narrowly missing Doyle. He espies the assassin Frog Two who has decided on his own to kill Doyle against the more cautious Frog One’s orders.

Secondly, Doyle pursues the sniper via a high speed car chase alongside an elevated train which Frog Two has seized control of at gunpoint, shooting a conductor in cold blood. Doyle shoots Frog in the back when he tries to escape .

The cinematography with its shots combining the gritty mean streets, the Brooklyn docks and the elegant five-star restaurant where Frogs One and Two are dining while Doyle and others are conducting surveillance was very compelling.

Hackman’s colleague Roy Scheider (1932-2008) did superb performances in Marathon Man, Scorpion and 52 Pickup. Fernando Rey (1917-1994) was memorable as an honest South American diplomat in 1970’s The Adventurers, itself panned by most reviewers on its release as trashy but which I found a highly entertaining soap opera spectacle while agreeing that it was trashy. Rey also appeared as an Italian anarchist confined in a concentration camp in Director Lina Wertmiller’s 1974 Seven Beauties.

Finally Eddie Egan appeared in 1972’s Prime Cut as an inner circle Mafia businessman who hires a gangland enforcer portrayed by Lee Marvin to go “straighten out” a double-crossing underling who runs a mid-western slaughterhouse for more than just hogs and a sex trafficking business with underage girls, against the orders of the leadership. The underling is portrayed with a certain self-deprecating humor by none other than Gene Hackman.

Evelyn Waugh

English novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) once stated – “The opinions of the young are not necessarily the opinions of the future.”

Kitty Kallen

Kitty Kallen – Star Bright (Mara); Gently Johnny – Decca, 9-30267, recorded 1957, seven-inch vinyl 45.

Kitty Kallen (1921-2016), after scoring the big band hits I’m Beginning to See the Light; and They’re Either Too Young or Too Old, moved on to an ex­qui­sitely rich period in early 1950s pop singing with Little Things Mean a Lot, In the Chapel by the Moonlight and Jerome Kern’s I’m Old Fashioned.

1957’s Star Bright and side 2’s Gently Johnny didn’t hit any top 40 lists but Kitty’s phenomenally and uniquely lovely singing transformed both songs into little gems with her Decca conductor Jack Pleis’s arrangements. Around that time, she suffered a nervous breakdown and withdrew from live appearances for a couple of years, although she continued some recording.

In 1959, Columbia Records legendary Mitch Miller arranged a session for Kitty in which If I Give My Heart to You became a hit.

Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet – Serge Kousse­vitzky conducting the Boston Symphony; Victor Red Seal DM-347, three 12-inch 78s, recorded December 28 and 29, 1936.

After several failed performances resulting in constant revising since 1870, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) finally experienced the world premiere of his tone poem Romeo and Juliet in all its completed perfection at an 1886 concert in Tiflis, now known as Tbilisi, Georgia, under the direction of composer/conductor Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859-1935).

Serge Koussevitzky conducted a typically high quality interpretation in which powerful dramatic outbursts were blended with rich instrumental sonorities, lyrical details and responsive playing from his 105 Boston Symphony musicians whom he cajoled, brow beat, pleaded with and screamed at for most of his 25 years as music director from 1924 to 1949.

A one side bonus in this album is Sibelius’s Maiden with the Roses from his Swan White incidental Music.

 

 

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by Peter Cates

Poet Lee Sharkey

Poet Lee Sharkey (1945-2020) moved to Maine in 1971 and taught writing for several years at the University of Maine’s Farmington campus. She was also a social and peace activist, mentored aspiring writers from many walks of life, particularly those in prison and psychiatric hospitals, and protested the Iraq War as a member of the Women in Black which frequently held rallies in the state capital.

Her poem exercise in the Maine Speaks anthology evokes the need for empathy on the deepest emotional level towards those who are suffering for whatever reason :

“focus on someone you love as much as you love your breath.
imagine yourself abruptly deprived of that relationship. imagine your breathing.
imagine a world where everyone’s lost their most precious possession,
and wanders helplessly. now watch them disappear: each was someone’s beloved
if only their own. imagine mourning without mourners, voiceless dirges
stampeding across grasslands like bison before Massacring Buffalo Bill,
the tremors of earth, image and after image, settling into the absence of language.”

Anyone who’s familiar with 20th century American poetry might notice a similarity between Sharkey’s use of lower case letters at the beginning of a sentence or phrase and that of e.e. cummings. The similarity pretty much ends there.

For me, Sharkey’s compassionate depiction of the human condition parallels on a spiritual level that of the 19th century English poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) whose pious Anglican faith extended to reaching out to women in prison, unwed mothers and prostitutes in friendship and whose own poems evoked the terrifying gap between those who live the easy life of selfish luxury and those who are suffering.

An example is her poem Pastime:

“A boat amid the ripples, drifting, rocking,
Two idle people, without pause or aim;
While in the ominous west there gathers darkness
Flushed with flame.

“A haycock in a hayfield backing, lapping,
Two drowsy people pillowed round about;
While in the ominous west across the darkness
Flame leaps out.
“Better a wrecked life than a life so aimless,
Better a wrecked life than a life so soft;
The ominous west glooms thundering, with its fire
Lit aloft.”

Paul Whiteman

Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra – Rhapsody in Blue; Reader’s Digest RDK-5965, cassette, 1989 reissue of various 1920s Victor 78s.

Bandleader Paul Whiteman (1890-1967) conducted the 1924 world premiere at Carnegie Hall of Rhapsody in Blue (among those in the audience was Sergei Rachmaninoff ) .

Whiteman had an incredibly successful and musically accomplished dance band which recorded for Victor, sold several million discs and acquired so much wealth that he bought his own train for nationwide tours and fitted it with comfortable accommodations for band members, the caboose being his own luxurious suite.

He hired a few African American musicians during the horrible years of racial segregation and employed Bing Crosby and Johnny Mercer at the beginning of their careers.

The tape contains ten selections that include the first recording of Rhapsody in Blue with George Gershwin at the piano and a number of Great American Songbook standards – Old Man River, Linger Awhile, When It’s Sleepytime Down South, Stairway to the Stars and the Japanese Sandman. The transfers from the old 78s were done well.

In 1948, Whiteman wrote a fascinating book of anecdotes, Records for the Millions, via which he mentions two of his hobbies, collecting records and photographs.

Gene Hackman

Among the many fine films of recently deceased actor Gene Hackman is the 1986 Hoosiers. It’s a very evocative period piece taking place in 1951 in rural Indiana in which a high school basketball coach portrayed by Hackman is trying to motivate his players to win the state championship but is struggling with his own private issues and those of some of the players. The cinematography conveying the landscape of the small town Midwest, the vintage cars and the unspoiled countryside is sublime. Hackman’s fellow cast members include Dennis Hopper and Barbara Hersey.