Phillips Holmes, an uncommonly beautiful leading man of early talkies, got killed in a plane during WWII and today is largely forgotten. He’s very good in this bit of small-town Americana as Mike Bolton, the freshly graduated son of the town barber. The father (quietly masterful character actor Grant Mitchell) has just been paroled from prison after 18 years for killing a man. “He was right to kill him,” says one of the father’s friends, for the man had killed the barber’s brother in a drunken fight. Be that as it may, the son bursts with confidence and sauvity when nobody knows who he is, but turns bashful and self-conscious in his home town. He’s especially awkward and strained around the father he’s never known. This will be tested during the crisis over two thousand dollars that goes missing from the bank where Mike works.

Early talkies have a reputation for stagey-ness that’s unfair, at least with certain directors. Veteran Allan Dwan and photographer Ira Morgan use what I’d call a sophisticated simplicity, generating visual interest with a variety of angles, traveling shots, and deep compositions, with at least half the movie occurring outdoors in picturesque, even lovely locations. There’s an excellent early moment when Mike is “parking” with his college girl by a railroad bridge and tells her about his father’s murder conviction, the rumor of which is scotching his chance at being class president. Shocked, she pulls away and says of course it won’t make any difference to her, and then Dwan cuts to a longshot of the train rushing above them, visually crushing them. In the next scene, Mike rides inside that train looking out upon the passing image of the girl parked with another boy in another car.

During the 1930s, Tennessee belle Gwen (Carroll Baker) is swept off her feet by the handsome, courtly, yet in many ways alien Terry Terasaki (James Shigeta), a Japanese diplomat on assignment in Washington DC. He too is attracted by her alien-ness as well as her beauty and spirit, and at first tries to remake her into a proper Japanese wife—at which she’s lousy. While they overcome their personal prejudices and misjudgments and negotiate those of others, Terry’s political conscience is tried by his country’s imperial aggressions. After the attack on Pearl Harbor leads to America’s declaration of war in December 1941, this couple faces a new set of trials and the suspicions of all sides.

This remarkable story is true, or as true as a movie can get. Charles Kaufman adapted it from Gwen Terasaki’s autobiographical novel, which made a splash and presumably got optioned early by MGM. That’s the best explanation for why a French company, Cité Films, made this movie as a US co-production shot in Japan. Only 15 years after the war, it seems unlikely that a major Hollywood studio would have initiated a sympathetic project from the Japanese point of view (actually Gwen’s conflicted view) in which love is the only thing preventing this “bridge” of cultures (materialised in their daughter) from tearing apart.

“In both cities where I live—San Francisco and Paris—robust Asian communities have seductive markets offering such enticing ingredients it’s impossible for a curious cook to remain stubbornly, foolishly Western.”
—David Tanis, A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes

Prior to their 2009 divorce, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid collaborated on six cookbooks, glorious combinations of recipes, travelogues, history, and foodways. Both talented photographers, they shot on site, in markets, villages, farms, and side streets, creating exquisitely designed books. Together and apart, they had the ability to befriend total strangers and get invited into homes, where their requests to learn authentic dishes were granted. While the authors and their two sons are a presence in the texts, they opt for a narrative rather than central role. Instead, we see the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean, their homes, their kitchens, their cookware, their food. 

To most people, the Memorial Day weekend is the start of summer so why not explore some new music for your own personal soundtrack. With a mix of recent arrivals and established artists, releases abound for the listening to heat things up. Notes are provided with background info for further discovery.

Twenty-six years ago, in a small municipality named Pripyat in what was then the Soviet Union (now the Ukraine), the local business literally exploded. The village, created for the family and workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, was quickly abandoned with little advance warning. As Reactor #4 ‘became airborne’ and started spreading hazardous fallout, a ghost town was created overnight. Families fled without time to take anything with them. Now, two-plus decades later, the eerie locale with its cinderblock ruins is an extreme tourism destination, the radiation levels low enough to allow outsiders in for brief periods of time - or at least, that’s the premise of the latest from Paranormal Activity creator Oren Peli. He has taken this intriguing backdrop and fashioned it to a sort of urban legend look at what…or who…might have been left behind.

Sadly, the answer is a bunch of nonsense. The software programmer turned fright franchise mastermind did indeed produce and co-author the promising Chernobyl Diaries, bringing newcomer Bradley Parker to aid in the scripting and directing. Avoiding the found footage conceit that made Activity the buzzed about blockbuster of 2007, we get a group of American tourists visiting Eastern Europe. There, they meet up with a mysterious ex-military tour guide named Uri and a couple of British backpackers. The idea - take a quickie tour of Pripyat before heading to Moscow. The problem - the supposed deserted area is apparently thriving with someone…or something…with an insatiable bloodlust and a desire to kill. Naturally, they all end up stuck there for the night.