Living Room Bijou: Dogs and Scruggs

Along with so much else, the 2018 holidays have taken a strange turn. Even the climate of holiday movies has shifted. For as long as we can remember, starting at Thanksgiving, Hollywood has rolled out its big pictures for the year: If it’s not Star Wars, it’s James Bond; if not Bond, then Peter Jackson or Michael Bay might lumber out with another Hobbits Meet the Transformers epic, or something equally overweight or overwrought.

This blighted season, however, there seems to be no must-see for-everyone movie, nothing to get us out of the house during those afternoon dead spots when the turkey is cooling down. The closest candidate seems to be the katrillionth version of Robin Hood, which, early reviews indicate, is yet another go round that leaves Errol Flynn and Michael Curtiz securely laughing on their heavenly thrones. (Think about it: eighty years and no onehas bettered Mr. Flynn as Robin Hood. On that score, Hollywood should bury the Robin Hood story in a tomb and just re-release the 1939 version forever. Take it from me and a million others: stay home with Errol Flynn.)

In fact, you might as well stay home in front of a warm TV. And, if not for its ferociously mature content, I’d partially recommend The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the latest offering from the remarkable, always interesting, Joel and Ethan Coen, now available on Netflix.

Buster Scruggs combines two movies we see little of nowadays: 1) a Western and (2) a portmanteau movie. Anthology movies are most always a mixed bag and this one is more mixed than most, a weave and jumble of old styles and contemporary attitudes as seen through the Coens’ amused and bleak gaze.

The film frames its six stories by use of a facsimile of a western anthology of the type written in the 1900s by Stuart Edward White, illustrated in the manner of N.C. Wyeth. It’s a pleasing nod to an old Hollywood style of storytelling.

First comes the title story, featuring Tim Blake Nelson as Buster Scruggs, an immaculately white-clad cowpoke, strumming his guitar, singing a song, riding along through John Ford’s Monument Valley and right into bullet-packed trouble. As we learn at slapstick speed, his sugary exterior is a mere shell laid over a hair-trigger pistol-spinning psychopath.

The joke is a bit obvious (or maybe I’m a bit old) and B-movie cowboys, such as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, are fat targets for parody. But thanks to Nelson’s indomitable cheer, along with the Coens’ visual imagination and slapstick flair, the sequence is very funny, involving a swell gag involving a poker table, followed by droll visions of angels.

From there, slapstick turns to farce with “Near Algodones.” James Franco plays a luckless bandit whose brief career runs through one necktie party after another. (We picked up on hints of Hang ‘Em Highamong other references.) There’s a clever line near the end, but the jokes go flat here.

“Meal Ticket” is memorable almost solely for its conceit: Liam Neeson plays a traveling freakshow impresario whose sole attraction is “The Wingless Thrush.” The Thrush is an armless, legless actor (well played by Harry Melling, a Harry Potter alumnus) who recites Coenesque mashups of Shelley’s “Ozymandias”, the Bible, Shakespeare and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to audiences of bored, lonely miners trapped in wintry mountain camps. 

The sequence is mostly a series of dissolves with the camera fixed on Melling’s face as he recites his way through the classics of nineteenth century literature, smoothly edited together to remind us of the Coens’ manner of blending tropes and genres. To the Impresario, the Thrush is but a fancy windup clock. Outside issues of bodily functions—one of them provoking a brief bark of sick laughter— the two men never interact.

The freak show is a success at first as it wanders from camp to camp, but as it goes on—and it does go on—the takings start to dwindle (along with, I admit, my interest). Finally, weary of having to wait um hand and foot on his charge, Neeson resorts to desperate measures to turn his fortunes after an encounter with a calculating chicken. 

For a minute, as my ever-clever wife remarked, it looks as though the sequence would climb the sublime heights of “One Froggy Evening.”  I have little doubt the same idea crossed the Coens’ devilish minds--it sure would mine--but they seemed content to leave it as an anecdotal campfire tale.

The same may be said of the following sequence, “All Gold Valley,” adapted from a Jack London story. Tom Waits channels Gabby Hayes as a gold prospector who lays waste to a pristine mountain paradise. In fact, it’s Tom Waits all by his lonesome until the very end. The underlying environmental message, however, sparks little interest, putting this sequence near the bottom of the pile. But even with the worst westerns, there’s always the scenery to look at. That applies here, too.

The Coens do finally strike real gold with the fourth tale, “The Girl Who Got Rattled.” Adapted from a story by Stuart Edward White, it’s much the best by a prairie mile.

We meet a young woman (Zoe Kazan) and her bull-stubborn, incompetent brother on a wagon train to Oregon. After her brother dies, she’s drawn into a poignant encounter with the train’s wagon masters, played by Bill Heck and Grainger Hines. 

For once the Coens drop their trademark snigger and chilly post-modern detachment to tell a sad, but thrilling yarn in eloquent but plain style and with heart—something we don’t often see from them. For once, they stop looking down on their characters and try to engage them eye to eye. With simple but excellent compositions by cameraman Bruno Delbonnel and sets and lighting by God, it’s a golden pleasure to watch.

It brings back memories of many a good western of old, including those directed by Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann. Zoe Kazan is excellent, but someone should cast both Bill Heck and Grainger Hines in another western as soon as possible. Both actors bring saddle-weary truth to their roles, proving that Randolph Scott still rides.

Unfortunately, the movie loses a shoe and goes lame at the end with “Mortal Remains.” The pyrite of the lot, it’s a Stagecoach Meets Twilight Zone affair whose ending we saw comin’ ‘round the mountain long before its gabby characters did, in a tale more static than claustrophobic. Death is rarely a surprise in a Coen Brothers film and it’s sure no surprise here.

Grumbling aside, it’s pleasing to see filmmakers like the Coens once again tackle the western, as they did so well in True Grit. At its best, Buster Scruggs is an expression of both deep love for and ambivalence toward this most American of film genres. Even so, it runs hot only once and lukewarm-to-cold for the rest. It’s no holiday movie, but one for late night, after children and more sensitive souls have long gone to bed and into dreams of angels and sunny prairies.

We saw Buster Scruggs before Thanksgiving was even on us. During Thanksgiving, the TV sat like a plain black rectangle as we preferred the state of hypnosis induced by a jigsaw puzzle. It wasn’t until Friday, with almost everyone else gone, that we noticed the TV in the room—not for a jumbled epic, not for some antic thriller, but for a Netflix documentary about . . . dogs.

Dogs (an on-the-wet-nose title to be sure), is a six-part documentary series about the roles that dogs play in the lives of the neediest among us. We’ve only seen two chapters so far and have been enchanted and moved.

The first episode, “The Kid with a Dog,” deals with Corinne, a severely epileptic teenage girl who’s so in the grip of her condition that she can never ever be left alone, not even in sleep. Her family is committed and loving, but even they are cracking under the strain by the situation. Finally, they turn for help to a “labradoodle” named Rory who’s been trained to detect seizures and raise the alarm when they arrive.

“Bravo Zeus,” the second episode, follows Ayham, a refugee from the Syrian Civil War who now lives in lonely exile in Berlin, Germany. With the help of an NGO, Animals Syria, he arranges to smuggle his beloved (and very charming) husky, Zeus, from the horrors of war-torn Damascus. Next to this real-life story, most fictional thrillers look a little pale.

The series theme song is the worst sort of treacle, but feel free to plug your ears. Once we got past that, we found both stories deeply moving and hair-raising in their own fashion (even for this cat lover). While portraying the emotional bonds between people and their pets, it also, without making too much of itself, hints at some of the wider complications lurking about.

Rory’s work, while greatly easing the strain, only goes so far in helping Corinne’s family, as her mother must still sleep in the same room with her. Their future still looks bleak. Dogs can do a lot but they can’t do everything.

As for Ayham and Zeus, a utilitarian ideologue (among other moralists) will reject Ayham’s priorities and ask whether any resources should be spent at all on “mere pets” in the midst of so much human suffering.

It might be better though to save our fury for the war from which man and dog fled. When Zeus comes bounding into the airport and into Ayham’s arms, objections fall away and Love remains standing.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now out! His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark won the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journal and The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

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Living Room Bijou: The Haunting of Hill House, 2018

[BEWARE SPOILERS!]

With the end of The Haunting of Hill House, the new Netflix series, in sight, my wife said to me, “You know what? I bet they’ve been trapped inside the house all along. Their whole lives have been a dream created by the house.”

It would have been a good bet, a fine bet. If only she were right. Because until it collapses in the final episode, Hill House looks like it’s on its way to being a really good, if not great, horror series.

It had some big shrouds to fill. The first was Shirley Jackson’s classic 1959 novel. Then came the still-peerless, 1963 film The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Harris, giving her all in a performance that improves with every viewing. The film ranks high on lists of great supernatural films, including mine.

The series, conceived and directed by Mike Flanagan, re-imagines the story in ambitious fashion while striving to remain true to the spirit of the originals. It expands in both place and time while breaking down and rebuilding its main characters, creating a ghostly family saga. Like all prestige series, it’s a novelistic sprawl that also owes a lot to such classic horror novels as Peter Straub’s Ghost Story.

Instead of the lonely, high-strung, ultra-sensitive, Eleanor “Nell” Vance, we’re presented with a whole family of Eleanors, headed by Hugh and Olivia Crain and their five children: Steven, Shirley, Theo, Luke and Nell. (Fans of the original know the names.

Hugh and Olivia are house flippers. As shown in flashbacks, they purchased Hill House in 1992, planning to move in with their children, remodel it and then sell it and build their “forever house” with the profits. But the project goes terribly wrong: Olivia dies mysteriously and the rest of the family flees in terror (“in the night . . . in the dark” to quote a classic line).

The resulting trauma scatters the surviving Crains across the country, leaving them estranged, broken, vulnerable. Then, twenty-six years later, Nell, the youngest, returns to Hill House, where she too dies. Her death reunites the Crains once again, forcing them to relive and confront the terrors of that night long ago.

Hill House creeps and shudders with promise. It slowly conjures a sense of incident, character and place as it weaves back and forth in time (though sometimes it loses it place.) There are also small pleasures, such as a brief appearance by Russ Tamblyn, the last surviving cast member of the 1963 film.

There are several unnerving moments, some good jolts and, occasionally, that poetic unease that marks the best ghost stories, where the floor on which we all stand crumbles under our feet and reality turns unreal. Impossible things happen and we’re left mute and alone, our poor words no match for the horrors we’ve experienced. The show offers little nuggets of insight into the multiple meanings that lurk behind this most literary of horror’s subgenres. Ghost stories are devilishly hard to get right, but Hill House shows great flashes of promise.

Of the ten episodes, episode five stands out. Set mostly in one location, Shirley Crain’s funeral home, the direction, staging and dialogue reminded me of a chamber drama (or “ghost play”) by Eugene O’Neill or Edward Albee(particularly Tiny Alice,A Delicate Balanceor Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). Both playwrights knew a thing or two about hauntings.

The funeral parlor is a stark barren blue-gray box, cut off from the world with the Crain family the souls lost in its emptiness, talking and raging at one another but unable to connect. The episode ends on a note of superb horror as we learn what’s behind the apparition known as the Bent-Neck Lady, a revelation cruel and disturbing.

But with all its virtues, in details large and small, there’s a sense of things coming up short.

For one, the opening voice over, taken directly from the novel’s unbeatable opening lines, is prosaically handled, read in bland tones.

Refiguring the characters and then scattering them across space and time also diffused both my interest and sympathy. To convince us that the Crains are a real family, the production cast sisters Olivia, Shirl, and Theo with actors who look too much alike for clarity (though Nell and Luke, who are fraternal twins, look quite different.)

The cast certainly works hard, with Carla Gugino (as Olivia), Kate Segal (Theo) and Oliver Jackson-Cohen (Luke) as the standouts. But, by my lights, none of them touch the raw shivering nerve that is Julie Harris.

Ms. Julie Harris

There’s another misstep with the portrayal of the Dudleys, Hill House’s caretakers. Fans of the original will remember the living skeletons from the 1963 film, especially Mrs. Dudley, then played by Rosalie Crutchley as a near-ghost herself. This time, Mrs. Dudley is a Christian fundamentalist who later evolves into an earth mother, while Mr. Dudley becomes a mellow old hippie. Hill House is supposed to shred the soul of all those in its shadow, but somehow it missed the Dudleys. You’d think they’d be mad as hatters, but here they’re a pair of mellow Air BnB hosts.

And then comes the final episode—which is just awful. Whether for commercial considerations, or just plain soft-heartedness, the series clumsily contrives what one commentator described to me as a “Spielbergian” conclusion—a “happy” ending that ties together all its threads in a warm hug, larded with ham-handed dialogue ripped from Oprah and Dr. Phil. Ideas better implied are served up on platters of homily. It’s a big letdown that undercuts both its ambitions and Shirley Jackson, as we find out that the big nasty old house isn’t so big and nasty after all.

And, that at last, brings us to my biggest problem with Hill House. And that’s Hill House. And for that we turn back again to the first adaptation, The Haunting.

From the 1963 film, the real star of the show.

From the very first frame of The Haunting, we know Hill House is bad, no question, full stop. Thanks to Robert Wise (who apprenticed with Orson Welles and Val Lewton) and his team, there is no doubt that Hill House is alive, hungry and deadly. It breatheswith foul life, perfectly captured in the opening sequence that tells the ghastly history of the place with unnerving brio. Everything about the House is slightly off, reflecting Shirley Jackson’s powerful prose. Even the daylight scenes feel wrong, with that hideous statue of Hugh Crain and family looming at the edges, where the film’s direction always keeps us looking. Ghosts, angry and alone, follow us everywhere. As Eleanor Vance and the house become one, there’s no doubt that Hill House is the real star of The Haunting.

Unfortunately, the new rebuild recasts Hill House as a supporting character. It seems like a perfectly nice bourgie pile, plush, elegant and harmless. It never feels like a bad place. There may be ghosts, but they don’t live in its bones. The spirits in it walls are absent. With all the time-shifts, there were even moments when I couldn’t tell if we were there or not and the occasional M.C. Escher tricks of perspective amount to little.

In the end, The Haunting of Hill House fails to haunt despite its fine intentions. Clearly, they should have listened to my wife.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now available. His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Thoughts on "Brighton Rock" by Graham Greene

Brighton Rock  by Graham Greene, first published in 1938, is both a dense, exquisitely written suspense novel and an unusual book for our more explicit age. In elusive, poetic style, it tells the story of a cold-blooded young murderer, his sordid milieu, and the passions and events from within his world and without that finally do him in.

We first experience the bleak underworld hiding behind the hectic, colorful façade of Brighton, the famed English resort, through the eyes of Fred Hale. Fred is a small-time crook who’s returned to Brighton for a legit gig as a wandering mark for a newspaper competition.

But Fred’s return home turns out to be a bad idea. Before he left the first time, he’d grassed a local gang leader to the law. Fred tells himself all has been forgotten, but, as he learns, memories die hard—especially for Brighton’s new underworld boss, someone far outside both law and decency.

“Pinkie,” as the new boss is called, is but a boy of seventeen, but what a boy! Raised in a pious Catholic household, he rebelled and signed up with the devil, full stop. A pure sociopath, he seethes with cold rage and disdain for all forms of decency. Ironically, his severe Catholic upbringing has left him with a prissy revulsion toward booze and sex, making into him a perverse monstrous ascetic.

Pinky cuts through it all like his treasured razor and with which he rules his gang. They’re a grubby lot who, considering they’re all older, should be his mentors, but are too dissolute and half-witted to resist Pinkie’s ambition.

“He wasn’t made for peace,” Greene writes in his exquisite prose. “he couldn’t believe in it. Heaven was a word. Hell was something he could trust.”

But once poor Fred falls under Pinky’s knife, the boy finds he can’t put much trust in Hell either, as his actions have consequences far beyond his control.

For one, the alibi Pinky’s constructed to cover the murder starts to crumble, thanks to the innocent actions of Rose, a naïve young waitress who crosses paths with both victim and killer in the hours before the murder.

Desperate to cover his tracks, Pinkie concocts a daft scheme to seduce and marry Rose to keep her from testifying against him. Hopeless, on the one hand, because both of them were raised Catholic; on the other hand, Pinky, despite his hard heart, can’t keep Rose’s blind dedication from prying open his soul and letting the light in.

Pinky faces yet another threat from Colleoni, a big-time London gangster who’s moving in on Brighton. To him, Pinkie and his gang are mere grubs.

As for the good guy, Greene pulls a neat surprise by offering up an inverted Miss Marple. Her name is Ida, a classic free-spirited prostitute with a heart of gold and driving sense of justice and decency. (In Greene’s world, she’s as good a Catholic as any and certainly better than some.) She befriended Fred and saw both him and his killer together just moments before the murder and now burns with a desire to find justice for the victim, with the help of the other knockabout denizens of her world.

With Ida on his trail, Pinkie doesn’t stand a chance.

Brighton Rockis gorgeously written, with Greene’s precise prose brilliantly capturing Brighton’s underworld and its sun-splashed funhouse facade.  The novel may be slow for modern tastes. The violence is handled with British restraint: Some of it takes place off the page, while other incidents are captured in elusive, impressionistic fashion. There are some muddled moments: The official inquest brushes away Fred’s murder as a heart attack while the police seem remarkably absent until the stormy windswept climax (all the more to keep our eyes on Ida).

Richard Attenborough before he was "Sir"

Greene called Brighton Rock one of his “entertainments” as opposed to his dramatic interior-set novels, such as The End of the Affair. It's been adapted for the stage once and twice for the screen: once with noirish flair in 1948, starring Richard Attenborough, who makes Pinkie into a most chilling cherub. (I've not seen the adaptation from 2010.)

Nowadays, that notion has been flipped, with Greene’s “entertainments” drawing much more attention. Brighton Rock  is a serious work with a strong sense of emotional and moral claustrophobia, of a world hermetic, seemingly remote, but as close to the everyday as a window pane.

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Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now out! His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Lost Letters and Poisoned Soil: The Long Lost Love letters of Doc Holliday and Broken Ground

David Corbett has been writing literary thrillers ripe with evocative style, acute drama and fierce commitment for many years. With The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday he turns his hand to comparatively lighter fare, resulting in a colorful exciting yarn that whips together both the Old and the New West, a blend of modern intrigue and old-fashioned shoot-‘em-up.

There’s a clever idea at the core of this action-packed tale. Legendary Old West gunslinger Doc Holliday was a more complex man than myth, legend and Hollywood would have him. Weaving through his tumultuous life was a gold thread of passion that bonded him and his cousin, Martha (“Mattie”) Anne Holliday. For several years, they exchanged love letters, letters that were eventually lost, apparently destroyed by Mattie following her entry into a convent and Doc’s death in 1887 at age 36, from tuberculosis.

But, this novel asks, what if these letters, shining with the grand passions of the 19^thcentury, turned out to be still extant? To paraphrase one classic Western film, there’s a lot of money to made in a scenario like this.

Into this thicket comes Lisa Balamoro, a partner in a San Francisco law firm that usually represents artists. Lisa is something of a character in the Eric Ambler mold—ambitious, talented, perhaps well-meaning but, even though scarred by trauma, not exactly worldly wise.

Suitably blinded by ambition and not a little greedy, she’s also got a hankering for the man who brought her the Holliday letters: Tuck Mercer, ex-rodeo cowboy, ex-con and infamous forger of Old West Masters, such as Fredric Remington. Tuck now works as an art detective, helping art buyers distinguish between the fake and the real. When Lisa looks at Tuck, she not only sees a rough and tumble, good-lookin’ cowboy, but also reflections of her own trauma.

As Tuck tells it, he was brought the Holliday letters by Sophie, an alleged descendant of a Holliday family servant. Sophie asked Tuck to authenticate the letters with the intent of willing them to her granddaughter, Rayella. But before that could happen, Sophie died. 

Rayella, now in possession of the letters (and backed by her own, rather unusual posse), is desperate for money. Tuck agrees to help her find a buyer, whether the letters are authentic or not. (Interestingly, there is an actual market for “genuine” fakes.) Given his criminal history, though, Tuck needs to stay in the brush, leaving Lisa to represent Rayella in the sale.

Soon we meet the buyer: a wealthy and retired Arizona state judge named Littman—gleaming on the outside, rotten and vile on the inside, a greedy committed racist who lives in remote desert compound from where he terrorizes illegal migrants. Lisa and Rayella journey to Tucson to sell the letters to Littman, only to walk into a trap that involves much more than the provenance of some old letters that may or may not be genuine.

It’s a tantalizing situation with a terrific payoff, thanks not only to Corbett’s fine writing and pacing, but in his portrayals of Lisa, a woman who finds herself a pawn in a game  of deceit and danger where no one can be trusted, not even her clients; and especially not the colorful charming bad boy who roped her into this mess.

The novel is interspersed with the purported letters between Doc and Mattie, written in fine and elegant 19^th-century style, when even a desperado might express himself in high style. Suffused with a golden aura, they make for a poignant contrast between a seemingly more romantic era and our shrunken money-minded time. Back then, it seems, many men and women strove to find their better angels, while our age seems to value money, power and dominance above all. Even though the novel closes on a note of high romance, it leaves an undertone of bittersweet loss.

 

It’s a little harder to address Joe Clifford’s Broken Ground, mainly because it’s the first novel of his I’ve read while also being the fourth in his Jay Porter series. The series tells of the struggles of a recovering addict and his efforts to stay afloat and sane in wild rural New Hampshire and away from the violent intrigue that keeps washing around his feet.

Among his many issues, Jay is dealing with the death of his brother Chris some years before, after police killed him during a psychotic episode. Chris had uncovered some crucial evidence concerning criminal actions by the Lombardi family, construction magnates, whose empire rests on poisoned ground (based, it’s said, on the family of Paul Manafort).

Readers of the first three novels will be ahead of the rest of us as I occasionally got lost trying to tie in the threads from the previous books. I also found the sex scenes to be overblown (a common problem in contemporary fiction),  Broken Ground is a good tight rural thriller in the manner of Winter Bone. 

Best of all is the character of Jay Porter, an enjoyably rowdy, difficult and even dislikable fellow. Like so many who struggle with addiction and its related problems, he’s deeply self-centered, prone to inappropriate outbursts, and unable to fully relate to anyone. He even ruins his professions of love with such lame outbursts as “It was the best sex I ever had!”

Some may demand fictional characters you can take home to your Veggie Feminist Mom. But Jay Porter, I’m glad to say, is not one of them. You may actually want to pop him one from time to time, but you may also want to stick with such a refreshingly difficult troublemaker in his often clumsy search for justice and truth in the wintry violent side of rural America.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now available. His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil and Dracula: Endless Night(e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Gordon Lightfoot: The Music of the Song

You can blame him, you can thank him, but Johnny Cash is the one who led me to being a Gordon Lightfoot fan.

As a boy in upstate New York’s Hudson River Valley, in the 1960s, I spent countless hours listening to Cash’s music from an older brother’s record collection.

Come 1972, I’d been living in the middle of Wisconsin for six years, with much of my childhood sent to the attic, when I bought my first Gordon Lightfoot album, Don Quixote. (Johnny must have been lurking somewhere.) Then I started telling people about Lightfoot and made a sad discovery: I seemed to be the only one in town, in the entire state, and, as I came to believe, the world, who found Lightfoot’s music absorbing and enchanting.

As it was with Ennio Morricone, with Lightfoot, I was a bit ahead of the curve.

It may have been his name that caused resistance—“Lightfoot” easily translates to “Lightweight” to boozy barroom wags. It sounds like something cooked up by Henry Willson, the Hollywood agent who coined “Tab Hunter,”  “Rock Hudson,” “Troy Donahue” and other 1950s beefcake monikers.

Worse, he was a Canadian who wrote “silly love songs.” His bold baritone voice could soar like a hawk or bounce along on high mountain streams of melody, but it may have sounded too much like the crooners despised by my generation as a tribal duty—Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr among others.

To those people, Lightfoot seemed as square as the 101 Strings. He couldn’t be taken seriously. And neither could his fans. “Burchfield knows shit about music,” they whispered. “Keep him away from the turntable before he plays the Tijuana Brass.”

But that was fifty years ago. Gordon is still kicking about and now there’s a major biography: Lightfoot by Canadian journalist Nicholas Jennings demonstrates that not only were the naysayers around me wrong, but so was I.

Lightfoot is workmanlike journalism, at times becoming a buzz of travel and tour dates. Lightfoot’s life follows the familiar track of other showbiz bios: years of hard—really hard—work, then fame, then problems with wives, other women, temper, addiction (in his case, the demon rum), followed by recovery, eclipse, then in his “Sundown” years, a revival as the world softens its scowl and even the grouches embrace him.

Most of this is interesting in a variety of ways. Lightfoot provides his own written accounts throughout and he writes very well.  However, the book seems more for serious Lightfoot fans than general readers. What I found most interesting is how, even though he remains loyal to his Canadian roots, Lightfoot has traveled the world and hobnobbed with a remarkable range of people. 

My outsider’s sense turns out to be false, as Jennings reveals the extent of the admiration and acclaim Lightfoot’s music received from his peers, ranging from Paul Simon through Harry Belafonte (who recorded four Lightfoot songs), onto Streisand and Elvis, Robbie Robertson, Neil Young, Paul Weller (of the punk band The Jam) and, finally, Nobel-winner Bob Dylan, who’s said,  "I can't think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don't like. Every time I hear a song of his, it's like I wish it would last forever."

Yeah, they laughed at me . . . but the guy on the right . . . .

Jennings also makes a good case for Lightfoot being a better lyricist than I even thought. I still smile at his witty turns of phrase in his very early songs, such as “Rich Man’s Spiritual,” “I’ll Be Alright,” and “(That’s What You Get) For Lovin’ Me.” Lightfoot now disdains the latter for its vile misogyny, but this cad’s absurd ode to his bad self remains a wickedly funny song, one you sing with a bad-guy sneer and a “BWA-HA-HA!” In these songs, Lightfoot shows a sharp eye for human hypocrisy and self-delusion.

Gordon and Johnny

As he moved along, though, the wit seems roll out as other themes rolled in (though it still peeks through in the classic “Sundown” line “Sometimes I think it’s a sin/ when I feel like I’m winnin’/ when I’m losin’ agin.”) 

He wrote numerous protest and topical songs. Of these, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” “Circle of Steel” and “The Canadian Railroad Trilogy” (the unofficial Canadian national anthem) still sound gorgeous, as does “Too Late for Prayin’”, a tune now more relevant than ever. There are great sailing songs (“Christian Island”), road songs (“Somewhere U.S.A”), and of course, love tunes. (“Beautiful” now seems to be a standard at weddings all over.)

Lightfoot’s best lyrics deal with the torments and tangles of romance and marriage—(“cheatin’ songs” they call ‘em.) There is, of course, “If You Could Read My Mind,” the anguished cry of dying passion spun like a tragic fairy tale, a song torn from Lightfoot’s failing first marriage. By Jennings’ account, Frank Sinatra may have found it too much—he walked away from the podium in mid-phrase as Lightfoot looked on in the recording studio.

“Sundown” of course, is a classic in erotic paranoia. Digging down deep into Lightfoot’s large catalog, there glitter many other gems of romantic despair and domestic travail: “The Circle is Small”; “Talking in Your Sleep”; “My Pony Won’t Go”; “Can’t Depend on Love” and, especially, “Cold on the Shoulder” a growling bluesy folk piece about a guy accusing his girl of cheating while his own muttering suggests he’s no pillar of virtue either. All these songs—and others—are a delight to the ears.

Still, I believe song lyrics exist to serve the music, and therefore, they often fail to stand on their own as pure poetry does. It’s always about the music: the melody, the chords, the bass, the rhythm, how it’s all brought together, the feelings more than the thoughts. Any songwriter can stand for and against all the right stuff, but if their music isn’t all there, a career in electoral politics is a better way to move the world.

Jennings’s book lets Lightfoot’s musical side slide, maybe because the subject is hard to tackle without sounding like a pedant. I’m uncomfortable writing about music but stick with me while I give it a shot.

Because Gordon Lightfoot wrote beautiful songs, wrote them by the carload.

With Lightfoot songs, the music is all there. At a time when musicians seemed to be running out of melodies, Lightfoot poured them out in a near-endless stream of buoyant, catchy tunes that leap along like a fast river, before bouncing and soaring to the mountaintops. He’s a hell of a crafty fisherman when it comes to hooking the ear. You can hum his songs all day long and not reach the end. For my low tenor voice—untrained and unskilled--his songs are accessible and great fun to sing. A couple of times I’ve been caught humming his back catalog and asked, “That’s a Lightfoot song, isn’t it?”

(I once sang a pleasing rendition of “Rainy Day People” to an appreciative crowd, but since then have found next to nothing in other karaoke catalogs. Lightfoot is protective of his work, so you never hear it in commercials, either.)

These melodies ride along on Lightfoot’s golden baritone, rich, masculine without overloading on testosterone. He could sing the contents of a sock drawer so it sounds like “Masters of War.” (One fair criticism is that his voice may be a little too good, the burnish painting over the anguish underlying many of his songs.) 

Past those two well-known points, Gordon Lightfoot had another advantage over many of his contemporaries—he went to music school.

Lightfoot started as a choir boy, singing Franz Schubert, among other classical songwriters. In the late 1950s, he spent two semesters at Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles (a famous jazz school, now closed) then returned to his hometown of Orillia, outside Toronto, with a firm understanding of composition, arranging and sight-reading. He got a lot out of his two semesters.

Two classical musicians perform Lightfoot, creating beauty.

Temperamentally conservative, Lightfoot was no avant-gardist, remaining a fierce craftsman rooted in folk and country traditions, as inspired by Bob Gibson, and, most especially, Dylan. His songs are rigorously structured but somehow leap the fences of country-folk into the wider savannah of popular music. As he moved along, the music behind his songs grew more complex and sophisticated. (He once aptly called himself a “cosmopolitan hick.”)

Recently, I watched YouTube films and videos of his early live concerts (of which there are only a few).  I noted how his lead guitarists (Red Shea and, later, Terry Clements), sets the capo far down the neck of the guitar, sprinkling high notes through the songs like raindrops. Meanwhile, from down below, the bass players (John Stockfish; and later, Rick Haynes, still with Lightfoot after fifty years), rumble easily along occasionally leaping up into the song like a trout before diving back down below.

Meanwhile, striding up the middle, pulling it all together, comes Gordon Lightfoot’s wonderful baritone accompanied by his own authoritative picking style, making songs that sound like honeyed sunlight.

You can hear this in Lightfoot!, his first album (with Bill Lee, Spike Lee’s father, playing bass), and his last for the United Artists label, Back Here on Earth, For the two albums in between, he took a spare approach with The Way I Feel (which Dylan claims as an influence on John Wesley Harding)and Did She Mention My Name? (my least favorite, in part because of an echo effect that works against his voice. The album sounds distant and thin, as though recorded in a large empty gym). 

In 1969, he signed with Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label and producer Lenny Waronker. The style grew richer, more luxurious, through three albums until 1972, when he released one of my favorites, Old Dan’s Records.

At first hearing, Old Dan’s Records sounds like covers of Hank Williams, George Jones, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette, plus a nod to Joan Baez. Except they’re all Lightfoot originals and they’re all terrific toe-tappers and hummers.

On this album, Lightfoot and Waronker layered in more musicians than ever before, weaving an intricate and rich warm bed of guitars and other instruments. It’s like Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound,” but without the muddy sound.

The album closes with one of Lightfoot’s best road songs, “Hi-way Songs.” His next album struts out of the gate with another swell traveling tune, a folk-rock waltz called “Somewhere USA.” The album is Sundown, a classic of the 1970s that still glows with expressive melodies, musicianship, and a rich sound like a honey-colored dusk. 

While I like Old Dan’s Records more, this one is an absolute high point, reaching number one on the Billboard charts. (Side note: Sundown is the first time I ever heard a pop singer actually sang “shit”—twice, no less. For weeks after, I ran all over campus crying “Gordon Lightfoot said ‘shit!’” but no one cared.)

His subsequent albums became a little more electric and pared down. He never had a number one again but in 1976, he had a real surprise hit with “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” a nearly seven-minute story song about the infamous Great Lakes tragedy. Recorded in one take, it feels a bit long, but thanks to Terry Clements’ spearing electric guitar and Pee Wee Charles’s sweeping steel guitar it evokes real terror and bitter tragedy. It may be one of most unusual top-ten hits ever.

By 1980, Lightfoot’s songs were still good to great and his dedication to music remained undimmed, but, as it does, the marketplace had moved on. Still, he had one more terrific album in him. That would be Shadows(1981) a gorgeous concoction that brings back that “wall of guitars” sound with one good song following on another. I’d pick the title tune as my favorite love song of all time, as, apparently, does Bob Dylan).

With nothing left to prove, Lightfoot has retired from songwriting and—it really hurts to say this—age has dimmed his voice, but he’s still with us, performing for a fan base that seems as intense as ever.

Fifty years on, the snickers have faded while I still say Gordon Lightfoot is a great popular songwriter. He’s as much a part of a tradition starting with Tin Pan Alley, running through Cole Porter and onto the Brill Building and Lennon-McCartney. There may not be a whole lot of deep-dish thinking, but so what? When you’re humming in the shower, or looking for a balm for your sorrowing soul in bad times, what really matters but the music of a song? It may not cure the world’s pain, but it can cast a light against despair.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown,a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up  novel is now out! His contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Arkwon the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book Festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, Now Speaks the Devil andDracula: Endless Night (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, all are available at Amazon,Barnes and Noble, Powell's Books, and other retailers. His reviews have appeared in Bright Lights Film Journaland The Strand and he recently published a two-part look at the life and career of the great film villain (and spaghetti western star) Lee Van Cleef in Filmfax. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.