Tuesday's Overlooked Films and/or Other A/V: the links and well past High Time

This week, in its piecemeal build, dedicated to the memory of Camilla Mason, my mother, who accompanied me to and sat through the first several minutes of some Hammer? Amicus? Tigon? British vampire film ca. 1971 to make sure it wouldn't be too disturbing, my otherwise first solo outing to the cinema, and whose last trip with me to the cinema was to see only the first fifteen minutes of The Two Towers, which she found utterly unengaging...she left my father and me to go sit in the car outside for the balance of the film, waiting for us to emerge. (We did see entire films together on a number of occasions between times, though the only three I recall us seeing together without any other family members were Airport '75, The China Syndrome and Murder By Death. Well, one out of three managed to be a bit better than competent.) Todd Mason

Martha Marcy May Marlene

A.J. Wright: Bayou

Allan Fish: 150 films directed by women

Anne Billson: 13 Older Films I Saw in Theaters in January; Hammer Horror Film Title Orthography

Anonymous: Royal Wedding (1951 film); Atonement; Galaxy Quest; Days of Heaven; Begin Again; Never Let Me Go

Bhob Stewart: Mississippi Mermaid; Original Sin; "Art of The Man Inside";"Nirvana"

The Big Broadcast: 14 February

Bill Crider: Les Girls [trailer]; Buck and the Preacher [trailer]; Agatha [trailer]; Bob Elliott of Bob and Ray (and the Elliott dynasty); A Simple Twist of Fate [tv ad]

Brian Arnold: Wentworth

B. V. Lawson: Media Murder

Colin: The Unsuspected; The Oklahoman; The Outcast; The Big Heat

Comedy Film Nerds: Kira Soltanovich; Alison Rosen; Marc Guggenheim; Gareth Reynolds; Hail, Caesar!

Cynthia Fuchs: Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story; Four Falls of Buffalo; No Más Bebés

Dan Stumpf: King of Gamblers; More Dead than Alive 

David Vineyard: Green Eyes 

Dorian and Vinnie Bartolucci: The Wicker Man (1973)

Elgin Bleecker: '71; Jackie Gleason promoting the Super Bowl; Out of the Past

Elizabeth Foxwell: Lawbreakers aka The Lee Marvin Show (television); Murder in the Private Car; The Ninth Guest; Cry of the City; The Soul of California: Tom Williams on Raymond Chandler; Fatal Lady

Evan Lewis: The Spider's Web (serial); Li'l Abner (1940 film); Rawhide: Pilot (tv); The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp: Pilot (tv); The Adventures of Kit Carson: "The Devil of Angel's Camp"; Invisible Avenger (a The Shadow tv pilot):


Gary Deane: Jail Bait; Stolen Identity

George Kelley: De-Lovely: The Cole Porter Story; Youth; Pippin (touring version of the 2013 revival)

Gilligan Newton-John: Doctor Jeckyll vs. the Werewolf; The Passion Pit (aka The Ice House)

Harvey F. Chartrand: John Flynn

How Did This Get Made?: Streets of Fire; The Apple

Iba Dawson: Paul Newman

Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.: Everybody Does It

Jack Seabrook: Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "A Little Sleep"; "Martha Mason, Movie Star"

Jack Seabrook, Christine Scoleri, John Scoleri and Peter Enfantino: The Night Walker

Jackie Kashian and Laurie Kilmartin: The Jackie and Laurie Show

Jackie Kashian: Jim Stewart Allen on The Oregon Trail (video game); Meagahn Steele on photography; Dave Waite on Pink Floyd; Troy Conrad on comedy and MMA; Ben and Melissa on Pretty Little Liars

Jacqueline T. Lynch: The Academy Awards ("Oscars") ceremony, 1950; Alexis Smith and Craig Stevens; Helen Twelvetrees; Make Mine Music; Melody Time

Jaimie Grijalba: Top 20 Films of 2015

Jake Hinkson: Orson Welles

James Clark: Youth

James Reasoner: De-Lovely; Sgt. Preston of the Yukon (television); Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (tv); The Mummy's Hand

Janet Varney: Janeane Garofalo; Live from SF SketchFest; Emily Heller; Kathleen Rose Perkins; Savannah Sly

Jeannette de Beauvoir: 10 Heist Movies

Jerry House: Suspense: "The Burning Court"; Haunted Ranch; Barry Craig, Confidential Investigator: "The Imposter"; The Screaming Mimi; TED Talks: "Battling Bad Science"; Candy Matson: "San Juan Bautista"; At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul; Sky High; The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe: "The Case of the Hasty Will"; That Was the Week That Was; Dragnet: "Quick Trigger Gunman"

John Grant: Never Too Late; Midnight's Child; Detective Kitty O'Day; Adventures of Kitty O'Day; Deadly Duo; Le Collectioneur; La chambre ardente (aka The Burning Court); The Case Against Brooklyn; Cape Forlorn; The Calendar; Blood Moon

Jonathan Lewis: The Crimson Blade; Dracula (1979 film); The Woman in Green

Juri Nummelin: Martha Marcy May Marlene; The Young One 

Karen Hannsberry: Wallace Ford

Kate Laity: "Language of the Birds: Occult and Art"; Hannah's Bookshelf

Ken Levine: Mad Daddy

Kliph Nesteroff: Black, Kloke and Dagga

Kristina Dijan: Larceny; Night Must Fall; The Dark Mirror; Theresa Harris

Laura G: Chasing Danger; The Man Trailer; Flight to Hong Kong

Lucy Brown: Life of Crime

Marty McKee: The Brain Eaters

Michael Shonk: Queen of Swords (tv series)

Mildred Perkins: Djinn

Mitchell Hadley: 1970s books adapted for television

Patricia Nolan-Hall: Rio Grande

Patti Abbott: The Rainmaker; favorite tv episodes; comic women; Sense and Sensibility; Alan Rickman; Dear Heart and unconvincing couples; The Letter; I nostri ragazzi (aka The Dinner)

Pop My Culture: Matt Braunger; Fred Willard

Prashant Trikkanad: I am Sam; Top Gun 2

Rick: "The Lottery" (Encyclopedia Brittanica Films/The American Short Story)

THE LOTTERY - 1969 from Gonçalo Brito on Vimeo.

Robert/Television Obscurities: Nielsen Top 10 TV series January 1956

Rod Lott: Confessions of a Police Captain; The Trial of the Incredible Hulk

Ruth Kerr: A Farewell to Arms; Buster Keaton

Sam Juliano: The Final Days of Woolf Tone; Where to Invade Next; In the Shadow of Women; Top Ten Films of 2015

Sergio Angelini: Hard Eight; Sherlock Holmes Faces Death

Scott A. Cupp: Phantom Lady; The President's Analyst; Predestination; Cloud Atlas; Blow Dry

Stacia Jones: Serial (1980 film); Fantômas: The Master Criminal 

Stephen Scarlatta: 2015 film discoveries

Steve Lewis: Legend: "The Birth of a Legend" (pilot); Heroes & Icons (H&I) television network; Millennium

Vienna: Toronto Film Society

FFB: NO LIMITS edited by Joseph Ferman (Ballantine Books 1964); THE BEST OF TRIQUARTERLY edited by Jonathan Brent (Washington Square Press/Pocket Books 1982)

August 1964...aside from your servant, two other and more immediately impressive creations were introduced to a largely indifferent world. From Ballantine Books, an original publication collecting short stories, a novelet or three and a novella from the magazine Venture Science Fiction, which had published nine issues in 1957-58, before being formally merged with its elder sibling, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (which Mills became the editor of, as founding editor Anthony Boucher moved on; Mills had been assisting at F&SF, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and the other Mercury crime-fiction magazines; after publishing Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon" and much else at F&SF as editor, he moved on to become one of the more important literary agents of his time). From Northwestern University, issue #1 of a newly reformulated little magazine, TriQuarterly, which in its initial series, beginning in 1958, had essentially been a campus-bound magazine devoted to student and faculty contributions; Charles Newman, who had come to Northwestern as a professor in '63, wanted to make a more sophisticated and widely-appealing project of the magazine. 

Both magazines were consciously and rather successfully attempting to advance the art of literature. Robert P. Mills, as editor of Venture (Joseph Ferman was its publisher, as head of Mercury Press), was hoping to feature sophisticated adventure fiction (hence in part the title), but also, as the contents took shape, sexual themes and somewhat greater attention to bringing emotional resonance to satirical sf became common factors of Venture's fiction...not least in the several contributions from Theodore Sturgeon, but also in the work of Avram Davidson, Algis Budrys, Leigh Brackett, Judith Merril, Poul Anderson, Walter Miller and C. M. Kornbluth, among others. If the magazine might not have had No Limits, there were certainly fewer in several ways than other magazines had imposed. Newman for his part wanted to make TQ a home for post-modernist fiction and poetry, and attendant nonfiction. It would, through the next decade and a half and a bit more, take on innovations in format and offer special theme issues devoted to specific writers (such as Sylvia Plath, Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges) and international literature and genres of fictional form and beyond (such as the visual issue 32, "Anti-Object Art" [1975], which was Newman's last as editor, and with guest editors Lawrene Levy and John Perreault; the cardboard covers featured a pocket containing five cards of photographs of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty"); another issue was devoted to a narrative told in photographs.  

Venture had a UK edition (and an otherwise identical, two-months delayed Australian edition) from 1963-65, which published more issues than the two US editions combined, reprinted a different mix of stories from the US edition, and immediately added stories from F&SF, under the editorship of Ronald Wickers. The Fermans (Joseph's son Edward started editing F&SF and other Mercury Press magazines in the mid-'60s, including probably ghost-editing No Limits) relaunched Venture for another short run in 1969. TriQuarterly continued under the editorship of Elliott Anderson, eventually co-editing with Robert Onopa and Jonathan Brent, for the balance of the '70s. Then, in the wake of too many issues of interesting work (apparently the science fiction issue was the Last Straw, for a university which also cancelled its English department sf course reportedly for being too popular, following a western issue and one devoted to Love/Hate that featured some elegant but straightforward-seeming feminist adventure fiction), first Onopa, then Anderson, then Brent (who was formally editor of one issue only) were fired from the magazine and replaced by one Reginald Gibbons, who was very careful to minimize the achievements of the previous editors at every opportunity over his decade as editor, which resulted immediately in the magazine becoming much less innovative and much less widely-admired--more conventional and less important, and eventually in TQ becoming a grad-student-staffed webzine. The 20th anniversary issue/anthology, edited by Gibbons and Susan Hahn, doesn't at any point acknowledge this book. 

There are at least mildly classic stories in these anthologies, and at least several others in the case of each author that might've been opted for instead...Kornbluth's "The Education of Tigress Macardle" is the more humorous side of the same coin that inspired his unfinished story, completed by Frederik Pohl as "The Meeting" ("Two Dooms" might've been included

instead);  the stories by Davidson and Miller are among their best-remembered work, but others of theirs for the magazine are impressive, and the Sturgeon here could easily have been "Affair with a Green Monkey"...and so on. The at least near-classics in the TQ book include the Oates story, the Brautigan duo, and the Sayles; Elkin (in relation toward Nabokov) and Singer are elegantly represented; Baumbach's metafiction is clever; though Borges, Carol Emshwiller and many others had major stories in the magazine as well. MacMillan amounts to a key TriQuarterly "discovery", with the seeds of his first two novels as well as stories in his only collection gathered from the magazine; in the other, Asimov was happy enough with his story collected in the best-of to name a retrospective collection for it, and it probably should be noted that not only did Sturgeon's Educated Estimate (aka Law: 90% of everything is mediocre or worse) first get widespread audience in his (first recurring magazine) books

the 1969-70 US revival

column, but Asimov began a regular science column first in Venture, which moved over to F&SF upon the merger of the two, and that column helped spur Asimov's pop-science career, in many ways the primary work of his life till his last years, when fiction finally was paying even better. Sturgeon, for his part, would later have continuing book-review columns in Galaxy, National Review (!), and Hustler (!--though during Paul Krassner's editorship). Sturgeon was the kind of writer who could and did sell a short sf story to Sports Illustrated.

Sadly, these anthologies were by no means pushed hard by their publishers... Ballantine was at one of its lower ebbs in '64, and while 50c for a slim, nine-story paperback wasn't extremely expensive, it wasn't cheap; $4.95 for a mass-market paperback, even with 20 stories ranging from vignettes to novellas, in 1982 was ridiculous (and earlier Washington Square Press releases at least had been published on heavier, perhaps acid-free paper and otherwise looked like their production value might begin to justify their inflated price, as with the similar Doubleday Anchor line of rack-sized paperbacks). A handsome-enough generic over on the Venture book (and no mention of the source magazine anywhere), and an even more generic cover (which has not been previously online) on the TQ. And while women contributors are underrepresented in both volumes (and didn't achieve parity in the magazines, either), at least neither volume is the completely stag affair too many anthologies of this sort had been in their years.

No Limits ed. Joseph W. Ferman (Ballantine, Aug ’64, pb, 192 pp)
• The Education of Tigress Macardle · C. M. Kornbluth · ss Venture Jul 1957
• All the Colors of the Rainbow · Leigh Brackett · nv Venture Nov 1957
• Now Let Us Sleep · Avram Davidson · ss Venture Sep 1957
• Vengeance for Nikolai · Walter M. Miller, Jr. · nv Venture Mar 1957
• The Seat of Judgment · Lester del Rey · ss Venture Jul 1957
• Buy Jupiter! · Isaac Asimov · ss Venture May 1958
• And Then She Found Him... · Algis Budrys · ss Venture Jul 1957
• Before the Talent Dies · Henry Slesar · nv Venture Sep 1957
• The Comedian’s Children · Theodore Sturgeon · nv Venture May 1958
• (courtesy the Contento/Stephensen-Payne indices)

(courtesy WorldCat)
The Best of TriQuarterly
Editor: Jonathan Brent
Publisher: New York : Washington Square Press publication of Pocket Books, 1982, pb, 310 pp
Introduction / Jonathan Brent
Two stories: Revenge of the lawn; A short history of religion in California / Richard Brautigan -- #5, Winter 1966
How I contemplated the world from the Detroit House of Correction and began my life over again / Joyce Carol Oates -- #15, Spring 1969
Notes on the present configuration of the Red-Blue conflict / Robert Chatain -- #16, Fall 1969
Three meetings with Vladimir Nabokov / Stanley Elkin -- #17, Winter 1970
Altele / Isaac Bashevis Singer -- #18, Spring 1970 (translated by Mirra Ginsberg)
From The Tunnel : why windows are important to me / William H. Gass -- #20, Winter 1971
The traditional story returns / Jonathan Baumbach -- #26, Winter 1973
The warden / John Gardner -- #29, Winter 1974
From Lookout Cartridge / Joseph McElroy -- #29, Winter 1974
Sacrifice / Ian MacMillan -- #40, Fall 1977
Autoclysms / Michael Anania -- #40, Fall 1977
The missing person / Maxine Kumin -- #42, Spring 1978
Caye / T. Coraghessan Boyle -- #42, Spring 1978
Blue day / Arnost Lustig -- #45, Spring 1979
The first clean fact / Larry Heinemann -- #45, Spring 1979
Two shoes for one foot / John Hawkes -- #46, Fall 1979
In the town of Ballymuck / Victor Power -- #47, Winter 1980
Walking out / David Quammen -- #48, Spring, 1980
Dillinger in Hollywood / John Sayles -- #48, Spring, 1980
Amarillo / Jonathan Penner -- #50, Winter 1981
Notes on Authors / Anon. (presumably Brent).

Index to Venture Science Fiction's US and UK iterations
Index to Triquarterly through 1997 and issue #100

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Issue 20, Winter 1971

Speculators are wishing hard on this one now because of the Cormac McCarthy...

Issued as a two-volume set...Winter 1976...

 

Complementary covers (and issues!), above and below (the first issue of Venture)

Sturgeon's seemingly awkward title is masterfully employed in the story...

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