Numbers & Folks
Here’s a sad though unsurprising, given the pandemic, snippet from an article at newsmax.com: A study “determined that the suicide incidence among nurses was 17.1 per 100,000, compared to 8.6 per 100,000 among women in the general public.”
Kudos to Stewart Cink, who at 47 went wire to wire at the weekend’s stop on the PGA tour, his eighth win, second this year. Oh, and he took home more than a million bucks.
Slow weekend in Chicago — 26 shot, five dead.
Last night Movies!, channel 5–2 on ota in NYC, ran yet another flick I’d never seen, part of its Sunday Night Noir series. Crack Up (1946) stars Pat O’Brien as a genial art critic who begins having hallucinations. Is there something sinister behind it? Given the genre, the answer is obvious. It’s so so. His co-star is The Queen of Film Noir, Claire Trevor. Surprisingly, she is not on the dark side in this film. I was certain I’d researched her work history before, but would I have forgotten that she was born in Bensonhurst? I grudgingly concede that it’s possible at this stage of my life. Birth name Wemlinger, she began on the stage in the late 1920’s in stock companies and made her Broadway debut in 1932. In Hollywood she did shorts and B movies before moving up. Her breakout role is probably in Dead End (1938), for which she received a supporting actor Oscar nomination. Stagecoach (1939), John Wayne’s breakout film, elevated her further. She is awesome as the femme fatale in Murder, My Sweet (1944), which stars Dick Powell as the iconic PI Phillip Marlowe, and unforgettable as Edward G. Robinson’s alcoholic moll in Key Largo (1949), which won her an Academy Award. Her last nomination came in The High and the Mighty (1954). She was nominated for two Emmys, winning Best Single Performance by an Actress, Producers’ Showcase (1954) for Dodsworth, opposite the great Frederic March, based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis. Her most amusing credit is as the murderous Ma Barker in an episode of The Untouchables. She starred in two of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and one of Murder, She Wrote. Her final performance came in a TV movie, Breaking Home Ties (1987). In retirement she and her third husband became patrons of the University of California-Irvine’s School of Arts, which the school eventually named after her. She passed away at 90 in 2000. Here she is in character in her Oscar-winning performance. Who among those who have seen it will ever forget the scene where she was forced to sing for a drink?
Sighted in NYC:
Someone on my floor is moving and piling stuff in the trash room. There were about ten laptops the other day and an immense hard drive. The next morning there was a tripod in a dusty vinyl case. The device seemed never to have been used. I sold it today for five bucks, a steal. It’s listed at Amazon for $28. My thanks to the gentleman who bought it, and to the woman who purchased five kids books; and to lovely Tatiana, who chose three books in Russian; and to the woman who took home I Was Stalin’s Prisoner by Robert Vogeler.
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