Strangers When We Meet (1960)

 I watched this movie on YouTube because I’m a fan of the novelist Evan Hunter. 

The movie is an adaptation of his novel by the same name. Hunter wrote the screenplay. 

This is a really good movie. The two leading actors are Kim Novak, as Margaret (Maggie) and Kirk Douglas, as Larry. Both of them are at the peak of their careers and they, particularly Novak, deliver very effective performances. 

The story is set in middle class suburbia. There are nice homes, lawns, newish cars, sidewalks, and shade trees. This projects everything that we have come to be seen as The American Dream. It’s an early sunny morning. Elementary age children are assembling on the sidewalk. They are being seen off to school by their youthful parents. A man drives up. His son jumps out of the passenger side and we see his father, Larry (Kirk Douglas). Something catches his eye and he stops to look out the passenger side window leaning from the driver’s seat. Reverse angle reveals a beautiful blond young mother in the final moment of delivering her son. She glances at the driver looking at her. He drives off to his day. It’s that “first sight” moment very nicely shown to us. 

 We follow him into his life. He is a successful architect. He drives to the apartment of a successful young novelist played by Ernie Kovaks. He is going to build a home for him. It’s one of the fruits of his first two novels being commercial hits. He is also a footloose playboy.
They talk about the house Larry is to design for him. Along the way they discuss artistic freedom. Larry tells him not to write for the commercial crowd, but what he really feels inside.This is an indicator of what is to come. A breath of Do What thou Wilt no matter what the others think as the path to real success and personal fulfillment in life.
  This 1960 movie represents a departure from the Motion Picture Production Code (1929-1968) in that it deal directly with love and sex and infedelity outside of the institution of marrige and shows it in an unjudgemental way. It is treated for what it is simply a matter of fact and what a certain number of people do.
This is not a free love romp, but a clearer view inside the Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver world that the entertainment of the 1950s presented. Larry and Maggie get together and have a caring love affair out of the view of the spouses of each. There is guilt, but there is also clear justification particularly in Maggie’s character. Her husband is distantly doing what he has been trained to do, job number one for a man. He is caught up in business, working, and excuses himself when Maggie indicates being lonely and wanting to get together. “Not tonight dear”, as he sits in the living room after work, busy with pressing matters in his work papers.

Kim Novak is so great in this. In a very reserved close in performance she clearly shows Maggie’s demure nature that is shaken up by her desire for love, for life. Although the modern viewer might cringe a bit at certain aspects of the mutual physical approach scenes of these two which skirt the edge of the cliche “no means yes” familiar in so many movies as the man makes his move. But in this instance there is some reality. Maggie is really in that edge of the high dive position of wanting but governed and held in check by the culture she is willingly a part of but is not fully serving her. 

   There is a critical scene at a house neighborhood cocktail party that Larry’s wife, Barbara Rush, has. She invites all the neighbors including Maggie and her husband who in fact show up. Late in the evening Maggie and Larry have a moment away from the others in his home studio. They quietly talk and Larry writes I LOVE YOU on a big yellow legal pad. At that moment an obnoxious neighbor, Walter Matthau, enters and sees Larry tear off the sheet, crumple and toss it in the trash. This sets up the climax of the story. 

   A rare honest movie in which many will find it easy to see themselves in one of the roles or feel like they are spying on a couple of friends. One can feel an uneasy compassion toward them even if not directly involved, maybe even left out of their passion. There could even be a sense of relief in not having to go through it all again. 

The Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter

This is the first big selling novel produced by Evan Hunter. It came out in 1955 and reflects his own work as a teacher in such a school for a very brief time. 

It is a well done, plot and character heavy novel, that has some grounding in social concerns. Namely, Are these schools working at all? 

The novel has a lot of common association with the youth culture. The screenplay also by Hunter was directed by Richard Brooks in a movie that came out in 1955. Unfortunately the content of it all was overshadowed by pop music. Legend has it that Rock Around the Clock recorded by Bill Haley and his band was the first rock song used it a movie. The song became a big hit and it is said to have begun the rock and roll change over to this newer type of music being heavily marketed to young white kids. Mass communication and corporate power took care of the rest of it, niche marketing and a few other things less important produced the generation gap. It is interesting that a book that is so thoughtful ended up marketing the generation gap and made the juvenile delinquent appear cool and edgy. 

Of course this doesn’t happen front reading the book. The JD’s in the book are confused kids trying to live through a time in an institution that doesn’t work and practically forces them to act like jerks to get along with the other kids. But they sure look cool and act cool in the movie. Movies have trouble getting deeper than surface cool. The movies become a battle of the Cools, whoever's image comes off the better, is the most memorable, wins the movie. The Joker will outlast Batman. He is just Don’t-Give-a-shit-COOLER.

The notion of Rock Around The Clock, a really basic dumb lyric diddy, overshadowing impact of the novel’s story is discouraging. 

(I don’t recall if I ever saw the movie all the way through.I know it’s a good movie, a riveting melodrama.)

The plot of the book is basically a new young male teacher gets his first job out of college in a tough all boys vocational high school in The Bronx, NYC. It’s the old hero’s journey with him coming in all idealistic but having that questioned with the disillusioning reality of it. It is far far from easy and physically dangerous. 

He also has a, pregnant with their first, wife at home in their housing project apartment.
 

There is a very interesting scene in the book about youth culture that has its base in the marketing of music. Another new male teacher, Josh, befriends our Rick. Josh is a big pop music fan with a big record collection. He and Rick go out for a drink and Josh tells him excitedly about his plan to connect with the students by bringing in his cherished record collection. 

The class where he brings the records is vividly set out in the novel. He very reverently presents the big band stars from 10 years before. This is met with disrespect and ridicule. The novel is written before the conversion to vinyl LPs.The shellac records back then were stiff brittle and breakable fragile.  

It is in no way explicitly stated as to the meaning and point of this episode, but I have a high level of interest in the effects of art, culture, and mostly popular culture on our lives. I’m on the lookout for stuff like that and the record gap scene appealed to me from that perspective. 

The point of conflict with the teacher and the students is the students’ long standing alienation from a system that they can feel is not at all in their best interests. So any individual teacher vanishes behind the role of being another agent for the enemy system. The same thing works in reverse with the jaded tuned-out teachers seeing the students as all being “garbage” in a dumping ground school. This is all clearly pointed out in the novel.

In the record scene a new teacher still has hope of connecting with the students with something that he takes as indisputably wonderful, something he holds dear and loves. Something connected to when he was like them, only 10 years ago, young, and open. Here another problem beyond to one of the school system surfaces. Culture went from locally based to centralize and attached to the capitalist need for growth, the cultural is artificially split up in service to market profits. Telling a specific demographic, “You are special!, They are old, here is your special music, that crap is old and wasn’t as good as they thought it was to begin with because they were less sophisticated back then”. None of these people have control or even cognizance of this hijacking of whatever human culture once was, not that is was much better in whatever, “Back then”, but surely somewhat different before mass electronic media controlled by remote corporations dominated our common entertainment choices. They/we just go along as conditioned.
This is all illustrated in the record scene. Reading it today the absurdity is amplified by our view of the pop music of 60 and 70 years ago. It’s all old, old fashioned stuff on some level even if it’s “great”. The kids in the scene ridicule the big bands, Glenn Miller, etc while asking for Julius LaRosa. LaRosa was no radical performer, just the latest product in a long line. 

Also perhaps concerning shifting points of view the young female teacher is badly handled. It could have worked a little better if this could have been two characters. She is sexually assaulted, attacked by student in the hall top ripped open, breast exposed, rescued by our hero Rick. But couldn’t some teacher other than her come on to him in an unsubtle way later in the novel? We get how he has to deal with workplace sexual harassment, that is fine and interesting, but it should have been a different character than the one he rescues from being raped.. 

Aside from that this is the type of novel that anyone going into or involved with teaching at an institution, might want to read. It is very sad that sixty years later the same problems continue in the same type of institutions, more or less. It this kind of 19th century home/work/school idea ever going to work out again, if it ever did?

It very enjoyable and rich read in multiple ways.  There is a lot of plot and story that moves things along and issues to think about. Nicely done.

Happy New Year, Herbie & other stories by Evan Hunter

Uncle Jimbo’s Marbles, takes place in a summer camp for kids. The focus is on a 19 year NYC man who has a job as a camp counselor. There is a lockdown at the camp. They can’t leave and become deeply involved with playing marbles. The story is a commentary on humanity’s obsession on unimportant things like the accumulation of symbolic  wealth. It’s a comic story. Good. 

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The Tourists, is set in Jamaica with a NYC middle class couple on vacation. They encounter a shopkeeper. They are tourists and acquire knowledge as to who they are. Interesting story. 

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On the Sidewalk, Bleeding, is set in an alley in NYC. 

A stabbed young gang member contemplates his life as his life runs down the gutter. The story about getting caught as a symbol of something stupid and frivolous when other things are more important. 

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The Fallen Angel is a story set in a low budget circus. It is in the voice of the circus owner. The content is supernatural which is not the type of thing Hunter usually came up with. It’s kind of getting into Bradbury turf. Not the best of the lot. 

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Alive Again

This one is set in midtown NYC. 

Former lovers meet on the street and go for a drink. 

He wants to start back up again with their affair. She was married and still is. 

Good little story. Deeper than the circus thing above. 

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The Prisoner 

Here we have a cop story. Probably not one that would satisfy the McBain fans, but I don’t know. I never read Ed. 

In this a hard boiled, and corrupted, NYC detective gets a bit of a lesson from a young woman he brings in on a prostitution charge. 

Patriarchal and cop entitlement content. 

Pretty good story. 

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S.P.Q.R

This one feels to be from actual experience or an appearance of that because it involves two writers hired by a Hollywood producer to write a script based of Julius Caesar. This in in first person again, the voice of one of the writers whose only book was a novel Slum Boy (= Blackboard Jungle?) 

It’s an amusing story that pokes fun at Hollywood and it’s ideas of what would be popular while commenting on the hired hack side of the writing business. 

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The Final Yes

This story of to-be-or-not with PTSD content is so far the most powerful of the collection. 

It is sort of the inverse of Melville’s “I prefer not to” in. Bartelby. The man in this story says yes and loses, or so he thinks, and this has become a sort of obsession that is destroying him. 

This one gave me goosebumps. 

Great. 

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The Innocent One 

With a setting amongst Hispanic bean field workers, this one is a bit more of a stretch into the unknown by the author. Not that he doesn’t have any working class experience

At any rate, the setting is for a quick story about suspicion and misunderstandings as one worker mentions the other’s wife in casual conversation setting off an afternoon of jealousy with no basis whatsoever in any evidence or accusations. 

——-

Pretty Eyes

Many of the Hunter stories and books I have read are about NYC people on vacation. 

This is one of those. A woman who is single is on vacation in Florida. 

She doesn’t think she is attractive and doesn’t believe the men who come on to her by telling her how attractive she is. This is a rather sad story about miscommunication after a series of lies. 

How can we know if someone is being truthful if we think they want something from us?

I liked this one

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Million Dollar Maybe 

This is an early comic story that has to do with a trip to the moon. Early, meaning copywriter 1953, like 16 years before people got to the moon. 

A magazine publisher finds he is trapped by a promotion a previous owner had published in 1926. 

Interesting story as preposterous as it is. 

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Happy New Year, Herbie. 

This is a story about class, regional differences and bullying. It is set on an island in the East River in NYC. Hunter spends an unusual amount of time with the details of this setting. After WWII students are housed on an island called South Brother. The young narrator and his wife are living there with other students. They have a young child although only 19 and 21. The woman is distressed that she is a mother younger than she really wanted to be derailing plans for a bohemian artist/study life in Paris after school. 

But the story, the longest in the book, shifts to a new couple who arrive. They are not like the others, older, he is 38 she 36 and from the Midwest with accents that are said to be grating to these NYCers. 

The tone shifts to the narrator seeing that a local young mover and shaker is bullying Herbie the new man who is learning to be a TV repairman. He is also open and kindly, but different which leaves him vulnerable to the bullying. The narrator sees the injustice and attempts to set it right 

Anti-bullying in a theme in the writings of Evan Hunter. It is what both Last Summer and Come Winter. The major theme of those novels.

Interesting and elaborate story that ultimately left me with a warm feeling. 

Side note on the material about the 19 year old mother in the story who would rather have waited. My mother was 19 was I was born. I don’t think that was a good thing for her, my father or me.

Don’t Crowd Me by Evan Hunter

Having just read and enjoyed Last Summer, I thought I would try another of his books. 

This one had an old school pulp fiction cover painting and runs only 175 pages. It is also an early work which, compared to Last Summer, from 15 years later is a product of the writer learning a craft. 

I don’t claim to have much knowledge about this mid-20th Century pulp fiction. I read some of the hits of the genre, such as Horace McCoy’s noir masterpiece They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, but not so much of the less revered stuff like this one. 

Don’t Crowd Me is about a NYC advertising executive in his late 20s on a solo vacation in a camping situation on an island upstate in Lake George. It’s a rather complicated plot involving greed and lust. It’s all very manly. Reading it made me think of the 1950s men’s magazines that my dad got occasionally. They always had these lurid cover paintings depicting some dramatic moment of physical struggle. A solo man battling elements, savage animals and/or humans. He is usually stressed to the limit with bleeding wounds, but struggling on. The painting always depicts the moment of physical battle where it all will be decided, the cliff hanger, “Will he make it!?!” Most likely he usually does. I don’t really know since I never read any of the stories in those magazines. 

Don’t Crowd Me feels like this type of manly fiction. It also feels like something written rapidly for fast sale in an already established genre market. All that is fine. Evan Hunter is young and finding his way here, maybe the rent was due. This is a sort of outlandish B movie type quickie project. 

The main character, Steve Richmond, comes off as a bit of a provincial New Yorker at a time when a holiday out of town meant upstate, the Catskills, or as in the novel, Lake George. This is 1950s NYC destination. Now with heavy promotion by the airline industry and the tourist promo commercials they fly off somewhere far.
There is a certain townie element in the novel. The town people in Lake George are seen at the very beginning to be deeply interested in getting as much money as possible from the vacationers. The camp described is rather crude, with no showers. They jump in the chilly lake to freshen up. It’s seems kind of old USA democratic in a way. There is a wealthy couple who owns a jewelry company. I say “democratic” because they are the type of people who would be flying off somewhere more exclusive rather than hanging out with just anyone at this upstate camp. They are also at the center of the plot. 

There is a lot of manly stuff going on. Little of it really believable. After all this guy is up there for a two week vacation during which he has sex with two attractive sisters, but not at the same time. Toward the end he gets very badly beaten up, with a rock, is left for dead. After awakening and stumbling back to camp he gets seduced by a seemingly irresistible woman. Yes he has been beaten and when he gets to a mirror sees that his beating was so bad on his face that bone is exposed, but fortunately his lips were spared by the beating so he can still kiss, etc. 

(Funny how they trained us 50s and 60s boys to think we are getting away with something as a way of keeping us interested in sexual activity for the furtherance of the tribe and keeping the species going. Get in fights, win, and fuck. It seems simple and it is really just keeps us tied to family and work. Its too bad sex isn’t fullfilling enough on its own without some kind of nasty persuit and capture story attached to it to, I guess, make it more interesting.)

Don’t Crowd Me is not really very good. But it clips along rather nicely. It’s not badly written. Just fast commercial product that is only interesting because of the writer, the old time vacation setting, and it’s odd peek into the manly entertainment in a bygone era. 

Last Summer: A novel by Evan Hunter

  

I cat sit in the apartments of friends in the summer and this one in East Harlem, maybe not far from the author’s childhood home, has a few Evan Hunter/EdMcBain novels on the bookshelf. One of which is an old Signet paperback of Last Summer. I needed something to read and since I had positive feelings about the old movie and the novel is only 206 pages, I thought, “Why not?” Sometimes it is good to follow an impulse. 

I had remembered the movie as being good and the first time in saw both Barbara Hershey, and Richard Thomas. Also that it was not a happy movie, it involved bullying and worse. The movie script was written by Eleanor Perry and directed by Frank Perry. As a pair, they made some fine movies in the 1960s-70s. They made David and Lisa, another intimate human drama. After reading the brief Last Summer novel, I’d like to see the old movie again although it seems out of distribution currently. 

Last Summer is about four high school aged white children of economic and social privilege from Manhattan private schools dealing with life at their parent’s summer places on an island somewhere outside the city presumably a brief ferry ride off Long Island somewhere. 

The boys know one another from summers past. They bond in sort of a moderate triad with a brash attractive bikini clad girl, Sandy. She has found an injured seagull. These three hang out, acquire beer, do stuff with the seagull, none of which is heartwarming, and take Peter’s dad’s sailboat out. All the while we are becoming familiar with their characters and their relationship with one another. Dan (was that even his name?) is the sketchiest character even through his suggestions propel some of the plot. He is mainly focused on Sandy. Not so much in love with her but seeing her as a vehicle for his urges to act out sexuality. He is not motivated by need for intimate human connection, but sensational pleasure that is selfish and greedy and heightened by getting away with something natural and beautiful turned nasty naughty. He is a consumer. There must be a core of attempted connection in showing other boys/men how one has scored. 

They meet Rhonda. She is the opposite of Sandy. She’s injured by something horrible that happened in her family and socially awkward. 

Sandy is the dominant force in the triad. Through a series of encounters Rhonda is granted a type of provisional acceptance by Sandy into the group. The boys just follow. Ultimately it would have been better had Rhonda stayed away from them. 

The novel is written from the point of view and in the voice of Peter. This character is the nicer of the two boys, the nicer of all three really. Perhaps it is that he is the only one who gets to tell his side of the story. His description of the characters and their actions are all we have. We have to take him on his word, unreliable narrator that he no doubt is. There is the sort of weakness in him, an insecurity that compels him to stay with the group and its power. His is a self-protective chameleon nature. He blends in to hide, thrive, and consume. He develops sympathy and ultimately affection toward Rhonda.  But can he follow through? 

Peter is the story. He is the one who represents maybe all of us when we are on the fence, know what is right action, but must drift along with power. When we are given the choice of the uncertainty of loving, and take the alternative route with the others into fleeting sensation and a type of gang mentality. 

Evan Hunter presents a wonderfully constructed scene with the entrance of the Anibal character. Having read the brief online biography of Salvatore A. Lombino and his East Harlem roots it appears Anibal from Puerto Rico, with learner’s level but carefully accurate English, and living in East Harlem, is a sort of stand-in for the author or based on men he once might have known as a youth. Even Anibal is not immune to the allure of the young white rich pleasure seekers. Heartlessly they call him “Annabelle”, ignoring his repeated prompting that the accent is on the middle syllable, after all he is not a real white man. He’s just another disposable toy to bored consumer kids. The sequence is also of retro interest because it has a modern element of ancient computer dating. In the way familiar, not remote, from 21st Century hookup apps, as well as reflecting current “Build a wall” mentality incubating in kids. 

  50 years after this book came out, it is easy to see that the people in it are in their late 60s now and perhaps still holding on to that kind of gang power thing that seemed to work for them back then. They are the elite in business and politics still running things. Getting ready to pass it on to their survivors. Sophisticated yet ruthless they went through whatever it took to please their spouses,  children, and their good old American narcissistic personal needs. 

The rest of us? Maybe we are all Rhonda hanging on the fringes trying to fulfill our own narcissistic needs, by attracting high profile miserable jerks in control. We would probably be better off wandering away from them and playing alone or among ourselves.

Evan Hunter presents a sunburned noir. 

It still holds up.