Tuesday, March 7, 2017

"somebody's always giving me guns"



"Repeal and replace the House Republicans" read one Reader Comment today, on N.Y. Times story headlined, "House Republicans Unveil Plan to Replace Health Law."


Cambridge, Massachusetts Reader asked, "Where are the efforts to negotiate drug prices?  It would reduce costs and ... free market principles would be invoked.  What a hypocrite Ryan, his crew and their 'think tanks' are."


On January 17th of this year The New Yorker published an editorial that can be read Online, headlined:


"On Health Care, We'll Have What Congress Is Having" -- Jeffrey Frank describes the health-care and health-insurance options and packages members of Congress legislate for themselves, paid for with tax dollars from America's working people.


______________________________


Health care -- yikes.  Instead of having to study that, I would rather go to live in a Humphrey Bogart movie.  Except for when the shooting starts.  "My, my, so many guns and so few brains," he says, at one point in The Big Sleep.


There's a scene in that film where Bogart's character, Philip Marlowe, leaves one book store and walks across a street to another. 


He walks away from the camera.  The scene reminds me of one in Body Heat, where Ned Racine (William Hurt) is seen walking across a street, away from Camera -- looking both ways to time the oncoming traffic.




I couldn't find photographs of these "crossing-the-street" scenes ('Why did the film noir character cross the road?'  'To get to the [inevitable] trouble on the other side'...) but I did find these:








Those slatted blinds on the window behind the desk, organizing or disorganizing the light...a classic component of film noir's visual style.





The Big Sleep = 1946


Body Heat = 1981


Both noir.  The Big Sleep was part of the original Noir movement which was named by the French.  Body Heat was a film inspired by the 1944 - 1954 original Noir style.   





-30-

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