"F. Scott Fitzgerald was a writer whose work included The Women".

"In Written on the Wind, the Four Aces croon a love theme over a drunken Robert Stack careening his roadster through town, haunted by the conviction he’s sterile, as nymphomaniacal Dorothy Malone sits in a mansion stroking the small gold replica of an oil derrick."

Vikar works on this movie

“John Garfield playing the violin when he walks into the sea in Humoresque, I like that as well.” “Joan Crawford walks into the sea in Humoresque,” says the bound burglar. Vikar says, “Are you sure?” “Course I’m sure.” “I saw it not long ago.” “Well, you didn’t see it very well.” “I believe it was Joan Garfield who walks into the sea. I mean John.” “You can’t even keep your Joans and Johns straight. Why would John Garfield walk into the sea? How is John Garfield going to play the violin if he walks into the sea? You ever seen anybody trying to play the violin while walking into the sea?” “He could. He could play the violin while walking into the sea.”

“Bette didn’t dig it one bit,” he says after a moment. “Gone With the Wind?” “Steiner’s score for Now, Voyager. She actually bitched to Jack Warner it was upstaging her performance.” “Now, Voyager was directed by Irving Rapper after Bette got Michael Curtiz thrown off. Course, next picture Curtiz did was Casablanca, so he didn’t do too badly."

“My Darling Clementine is John Ford’s greatest movie". "My Darling Clementine here, it’s practically noir Western, all moody and shit, Ford’s first after the War and all the concentration camps and maybe he wasn’t in his usual sentimental rollicking drunk-Irish jive-ass mood."

“Stagecoach was a distinct landmark in the genre, no getting around it. But that shit hasn’t aged well—”

"The Searchers is one wicked bad-ass movie whenever my man the Duke is on screen. The Searchers loses it, though, whenever Jeffrey Hunter and Vera Miles come on — Ford, he couldn’t direct the ladies for shit, unlike my man Howard Hawks where all the ladies are fine and kick-ass on top of it, even if they’re all versions of the same fox."

“I mean Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not actually has some of the same exact lines as Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings."

"Vikar sees a black-and-white Japanese gangster movie about a contract killer hired by a mysterious woman to carry out a hit. As the gunman is about to dispatch his target, a butterfly lands on the barrel of the rifle and diverts his aim, resulting in the murder of an innocent bystander. It’s also the first movie Vikar has seen that shows people having sex. “We are beasts,” the woman moans in the Japanese movie. “Beast needs beast.”

“The peak of Hawks’ art,” one is saying the first afternoon. “Hemingwayesque in its understanding of masculinity’s values and rituals.” “Dean Martin is underrated in that movie,” Viking Man agrees. “The opening scene,” points out another, “where he’s digging the coin out of the spittoon? All wordless. A kind of American kabuki.”

"These days you’ve got veteran actresses who once won Academy Awards playing gorillas from the future. "

"story has it she was cast as the woman who vanishes on the island in L’Avventura and then was dropped at the last minute, for mysterious reasons no one ever has understood or explained."

“I would play a gangster’s girlfriend. She gets a soda bottle smashed in her face. It is violent but a good scene.”

"an old forties movie called Criss Cross where Burt Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo drive each other mad across what seems to Vikar a fantastical downtown Los Angeles with trolley cars that glide through the air."

" In Buñuel’s Belle de Jour Vikar imagines Soledad Palladin, as directed by her father, in Catherine Deneuve’s role of the housewife turned prostitute who, in one scene, is splattered with mud. "

"like when Astaire and Rogers dance in Swing Time, a cut would just disrupt things." "Astaire and Rogers—fantastic, even if Stevens did shoot so many takes that poor Ginger’s feet bled. "

"that Elizabeth has no hold on him."

"He’s captivated by Ann-Margret’s sexual malevolence in Kitten With a Whip."

"In a fifties Mob movie called The Big Combo, he’s fascinated by Jean Wallace coolly performing oral sex on Richard Conte below the camera frame."

"the camera pans the length of a nude blonde, next to the Elizabeth Taylor of A Place in the Sun, the most beautiful woman Vikar has seen in the movies. "

"At the end of Strangers When We Meet, a sadness lingers about her both enduring and inevitable."

“Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.” The old man shrugs. “Kids to me. I would have said Janet Gaynor and what’s-his-name from Seventh Heaven.”

"and then there are a few perfect pictures, a few sublime pictures—The Third Man, The Shop Around the Corner, that silent Joan of Arc picture of yours — that exist before they’re made …”

"his big prestige picture about anti-Semitism everyone was talking about"

"Jean Harlow became a star in Red Dust".

"He goes to see Treasure of the Sierra Madre at the Vista and is mesmerized by Walter Huston’s demented jig in the swirling dust and gold. "

"It’s the most terrifying performance Vikar has seen since Mlle Falconetti as Joan burning at the stake; he shrinks from the screen."

"He watches a movie on TV about a man who is abused as a boy and becomes an arsonist, and then meets a beautiful blond high-school majorette and tells her he’s a spy working on a top secret operation. When he commands her to have sex with him in order to prove her loyalty, he believes he has her under his power. But it becomes clear that she has him under her power, involving him in a scheme to murder her mother, after she’s already killed several others in an orgasmic rush."

"A hitchhiker gets to L.A. and finds himself at the end of a leash, coiled around the hand of an actress named Ann Savage (… lose my heart on the burning sand / Now I want to be your dog); blond and bland, not a line of character in his baby face, the actor playing the drifter will spend the end of his life in jail for murdering his wife. "

"[Vikar] is enthralled by Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda’s love story of labyrinthine treachery and desire. This is a very good movie, he concludes, disconcerted only by the laughter around him."

“I saw [Natalie Wood] in the film about the two married couples who trade.”

" In The Story of Adele H, the daughter of a famous nineteenth-century author falls in love with a soldier. She follows the soldier from France to Nova Scotia and haunts the streets of Halifax looking for him; everything she believes or has believed has collapsed into his form. She is Joan of Arc but without a god; she becomes so pure in her crusade that, by the end of the movie, the soldier himself means nothing to her and is unrecognizable to her. She’s beyond love, beyond the pettiness of her own heart; she’s beyond God. By the end of the movie, she’s gone somewhere God can’t reach her."

"Dietrich and Von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman is next. As the pirated movie collection grows, the shrine grows; soon it’s filled a wall."

" He goes to the Fox Venice one night to see an Antonioni double bill. In the first film, a group of vacationers visits an island where one of them vanishes; the woman is never found, and by the end of the movie she is all but forgotten. In the second film, the private eye from Chinatown has become a foreign correspondent who changes places with a dead man, leaving in his wake a successful career and an estranged wife. So really the second half of the double bill solves the mystery of the first, and of the vanished woman on the island, who clearly also has exchanged places with someone. Vikar knows she has become Soledad Palladin, who was originally supposed to play the part. By the end of the double bill the foreign correspondent has assumed not only the dead man’s itinerary but his destiny, and a growing hush falls over not just these movies but all movies — the hush of looming cataclysm, the slow pan of the camera across an empty town square outside a hotel room, where a body lies."

“Your head precedes you,” the man laughs. He looks like one of the actors in Carnal Knowledge, who also was half of a singing duo Vikar once saw on television, with the same blond brillo hair except thinning."

"a B-picture about a boxer shot in four weeks for a million bucks, starring and written by somebody whose biggest credit was The Lords of Flatbush"

“Kiss Me Deadly. Sweet Smell of Success. Those are yours?” “Yes.” “Especially The Long Goodbye.” “I’ll see what I can do.”

"a little more than twenty years after the Movies found their sound, there was a wave of movies about the Movies: Sunset Boulevard, Singin’ in the Rain, The Big Knife, The Bad and the Beautiful."

When Vikar returns to his suite that evening, a large stack of film canisters waits for him on the table in the front room. The Long Goodbye, Kiss Me Deadly, Sweet Smell of Success, Body and Soul, Monsieur Verdoux, To Be or Not to Be, A Hard Day’s Night, One Million B.C. (the final movie D. W. Griffith produced, and part of which he may have directed).

“Other U.S. pictures in competition at Cannes this year include An Unmarried Woman, Coming Home, Midnight Express, Pretty Baby and Who’ll Stop the Rain."

"The jury that bestows the Palme d’Or and other prizes is headed by an American, director Alan J. Pakula (All the President’s Men, The Parallax View)."

" The first movie he sees back in Los Angeles is a French gangster film where a beautiful samurai hit man floats through Paris without expression, in white fedora and gloves. Vikar is most taken with a scene involving a huge ring of keys that the hit man uses to steal cars. "

"Two so-called Grand Prizes are presented to a British movie by a Polish director about a man who’s learned from Aborigines a shout that kills people, which people in the movie insist on hearing anyway,"

"and a French movie by an Italian director with Marcello Mastroianni and Gerard Depardieu about a man who finds the body of King Kong washed up on the beach; the title translates as Bye Bye, Monkey. “That sounds like a very good movie,” says Vikar.

" The fucking Palme d’Or is presented to a three-hour Italian epic about a peasant boy on a long walk home from school who breaks his shoes. "

"Now I am a publicist for Gaumont. We are here at the festival representing the new film by Claude Chabrol with Isabelle Huppert. I believe she won a prize this evening as well.”

"I was certain a scholar of film such as yourself would know of Irving Rapper. Cinema’s great poet of la femme dérangée. As you say, Now, Voyager. Deception. The Glass Menagerie. Marjorie Morningstar."

“There was a second version twenty years later, with a different title, a funny title, also with Gable, twenty years older, playing the same part as in the first. Bien sûr in cinema the men get to remain young even as they are old.”

"Vikar goes to see a new movie by Buñuel. It’s a remake of Von Sternberg’s The Devil is a Woman and takes place near Soledad’s hometown of Seville. At first Vikar believes the movie is about a middle-aged widower in love with two women who share the same name, until he realizes, halfway through, that in fact two different actresses are playing one and the same woman. Buñuel knows about the profiles, Vikar realizes. He has taken it farther than anyone, actually showing each profile as played by an entirely different person. In one incarnation the woman dances flamenco, as Soledad did when she was a small girl."

Making the xerox, the professor examines Vikar’s head again. “What movie did you say again?” “A Place in the Sun.” He nods and rubs his own head. “I’m thinking maybe Dylan in Don’t Look Back.”

"That hermaphrodite cowboy up in Montana ran it all into the ground with his cowboy Gone With the Wind. The hermaphrodite’s movie is really not bad. It’s rather good. Not forty-million-dollars-and-a-hundred-miles-of-film good — a hundred miles, vicar! — but good as a thing unto itself. No one can see that now, of course — all they see is all that money and a director who thought he was Erich Fucking von Stroheim"

"there’s this guy over in Europe who’s shot some of the new pictures coming out of Germany, Kings of the Road, American Friend, you might take a look at what he’s doing, it’s lyrical while still being raw and having some intensity, what do I mean to say—?” “Punk,” says Vikar."

"there’s this one actress coming up now with a name out of a Dickens novel who’s everywhere in everything, she was in Julia and Woody’s new one and was in the Cimino"

“We’ve got a small window in terms of Harvey’s schedule,” says the associate producer. “He’s got a Nic Roeg project on tap and Tony Richardson after that.”

The soundstage on the Columbia lot looks like a punk club as envisioned by somebody who’s never been in one. It glistens, an Asian fantasia like the bordello of Von Sternberg’s Shanghai Gesture, several slabs of wall replaced with mirrors.

"She sleeps to the bells, having plotted murder. She tosses and turns, monstrousness swirling beneath the beauty, monstrousness that is at odds with all the pain and loneliness the audience would come to know of her later. In this scene in this movie — her breakthrough, on her way to becoming the most famous movie star of all time — she knows the bells mean that the man she believed she murdered still lives. Stirred by the bells, she struggles for consciousness. Somewhere between existence and oblivion, Marilyn dreams us as surely as we dreamed her; and now in the dark, watching Niagara, knowing of her what everyone knows, of what she will come to, Vikar can only hope she never wakes."

"Vikar goes to see a mid-sixties movie about an ex-race-car driver who teaches blind children until two hit men come to kill him. The ex-race-car driver/teacher is played by the director who told Vikar the story about hating A Place in the Sun and seeing it eight times in a row before realizing he loved it. In this film, the hit men are sent by a dark crime lord who slaps around his girlfriend; when Vikar leaves the theater, darkness has fallen and he wanders across the street into a paperback store where a television shows the same dark crime lord in another movie — until Vikar realizes it’s not a movie but the news, and that the crime lord has been elected President of the United States. "

"His previous movie was something of a hit and the director was nominated for an Academy Award, along with the star of the movie who’s his wife — but now he’s back to struggling again. His new movie is ostensibly about a strip-club owner trying to protect his establishment and his dancers from gangsters. Really it’s about the director protecting his dreams from Hollywood."

"Dean Martin has always been completely underrated in this — this was around the time he was doing first-rate work in Some Came Running, The Young Lions … for a guy who cultivated, maybe a little too well, his image as a fuck-up " But then I didn’t care for many of my pictures. The ones with Zinnemann I liked all right … The Young Lions with Marlon, that was maybe my best work. But the others …” he shrugs, “Red River …” “I believe that’s a very good movie as well.” “Nah, I didn’t like it. They watered it down. Wayne was supposed to die at the end, but …”

"Anyway this thing I’m doing now is my Alexander Turgenev, vicar, with a little Genghis Khan tossed in — we’ve got Max Von Sydow and James Earl Jones and a whole Nietzschean slant, and the main character is this barbarian-type in animal furs with horns on his head as played by this preposterous Austrian body-builder so muscle-bound he literally can’t hold the sword, but he is getting blown on a semi-regular basis by one of the Kennedy women, rumor has it.”

" Vikar goes to see a movie by a Polish director, starring the woman who was Victor Hugo’s daughter in the movie where she follows her soldier-love to Nova Scotia. In this movie Victor Hugo’s daughter is in modern-day Berlin giving birth to a monstrous creature who then becomes her lover, and whom she’ll protect against any other lover, husband, soldier or god. As in Nova Scotia, everything she is or has been, everything she believes or has believed, has collapsed for her into the form of her demonlover and child; since Vikar came to Los Angeles, all the children in all the movies are born monsters, born elephants, possessed by the Devil, are the Devil. "

"The first film is a Japanese movie about a young model who arrives one day at an art gallery showing an exhibition of bondage photos for which she’s posed. There she sees a man running his hands over a sculpture of her; feeling as though his hands are on her own body, she flees the gallery. Later she makes an appointment with a blind masseur, whose touch the woman is startled to find she recognizes: “I have eyes in my fingers,” he announces; and before he chloroforms her into unconsciousness, she rips the dark glasses from his face to recognize him as the man from the gallery. When she comes to, she’s in a strange warehouse, cavernous as a cathedral. On the walls are the sculptures of eyes, noses, mouths, torsos, arms and legs, and as she scurries among the shadows to elude her abductor, she scrambles over monumental replications of reclining female bodies, lurking in the valley of monumental breasts, darting in the ravine of monumental thighs. Imprisoned in the blind man’s studio where he sculpts a statue of her, eventually she becomes blinded herself by the endless darkness; seducing her captor, she becomes not just the model of his art but the art itself, the blind sculptor lopping off real arms, real limbs. Over and over he says, I have eyes in my fingers."

" It’s not like any porn film Vikar has seen, or like any other kind of film: a woman in a psychiatric ward is having sexual hallucinations and surreal sexual experiences; in one scene she has sex with two jacks-in-the-box, in another she’s in the Arabian desert at night being taken by two men, one at each end of her, while a low muttering continues unabated as the only soundtrack. In another scene she’s a slave of the Devil in a Hell of smoke and burning coals. Another female slave chained to the rocks exhorts the Devil on as he violates the star of the movie in a number of ways. He has a two-pronged pitchfork, one prong larger than the other, which he can insert in two orifices at the same time. As the Devil has her, in the background is the endless clashing and surging of machinery and people crying out."

"He thinks of Anna Karina as the prostitute in Godard’s Vivre sa Vie, in the scene where she goes to the movies and sees Passion of Joan of Arc and weeps"

" another religious sort of dream last night, a convent? in the middle of the mountains high on a cliff, theres this one crazy nun trying to push another out of a tall tower & winds up falling off herself — down down down"

"in this bordertown this really fat horrible cop in this sleazy hotel stands over this blonde w/ pointed boobs, shes drugged or something, hes pulling gloves onto his fat fingers"

"that Bogart guy from the flick i saw w/ Vik lives in this little cottage in love w/ this chick, hes a writer or something & flies off the handle like he could kill anyone any minute & the cops think maybe he has & the chick begins to wonder because every now & then the writer gets nuts/violent (reminds me of Vik)"

" this beautiful dark woman in sunglasses, so beautiful shes not even real looking sitting in a rowboat on a lake watching w/o emotion this kid drowning in the water just a few feet from her, hes calling out to her to save him but she just watches"

" on a stone bridge crossing a moat outside a castle or maybe its just a big estate, this hot blonde holding this scythe & its got blood on it, shes wearing a black cape & completely nude underneath. she’s pretty hot i must admit"

" is it the middle ages or something? this sadistic prince guy & this fucked-up masquerade ball going on inside the castle walls while everyone outside is dying"

this maze-like apt complex of the future where this private-eye wanders trying to find this dark woman, i don’t understand what language theyre speaking

"It’s the same smile with which he refuses to be bullied by Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity, and then befriends him."