Monthly Archives: January 2026

Research is an everyday thing

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Back in the olden days of the 1950s, a detective named Sgt. Joe Friday showed up each week in a police procedural TV show called Dragnet. “Just the facts,” Sgt. Joe often quizzed a witness to a crime. It was his mantra. He was doing what cops always do. Asking questions, following the answers wherever they lead. But first he had to make sure he had the facts. As we see in many a CSI episode. The police are doing what we simply call research.

Research is an everyday thing. Not just for the cops but for all of us. Before we spend our hard earned cash, we definitely want the facts. We’re not going to buy that game we want until we read the reviews, ask our friends, watch the You Tube trailers, check out the rep of the company that developed it.

How many of us have gone out to buy a car without doing our homework? Homework is just a down home way of saying that word “research”. Without it, we could end up with a vehicle smoking up the wazoo, the tires falling off. Then we realize this thing we thought of as “our little darling” must have been a pontoon. Just listen to the squishing of the carpet. All cause the salesman could have sold refrigerators to Eskimos. If we had only checked the car’s rating with Consumer Reports or googled that dealership for reviews. We might have read that the dealer whom we thought of as a long lost relative was actually Snidely Whiplash. (Don’t know who Snidely Whiplash is. Research the name.) After all, ten thousand smackerooskis is a big chunk of change to invest in an automobile that ends up running on its rims.

When it comes to screenwriters and writers of every ilk, research is essential. There are writers I won’t read because they can’t seem to get the facts right.

Don’t you just love it when you’re watching a movie. Suddenly you see something and you go, “Hey, you can’t do that.” That movie, that book has lost all its cred. The screenwriter or the director or the novelist did not do his research. It stands out like Janet Leigh in a shower.

Let’s say you have a great idea for a business. There’s no way investors will bank on that idea unless you have done your research. They want to know that you know, they want to know demographics, they want to know long range, they want to know costs, they want to know appeal. In other words, “no Buck Rogers no bucks.”

But the most critical research is that which may mean life and death. Like they used to say, “Research, it’s good for what ails you.” It truly is. Just ask a doctor. Part of a doctor’s job is to keep up on the literature in their area of expertise. They read peer reviewed articles about the latest research of diseases with long names you’ve never heard of. “Peer reviewed” means that the research in the article was reviewed and evaluated by others in the same field. You might say that it is Docs reading what Docs are saying about what other Docs are finding out. If they don’t read up, the patients who place their lives in the doctor’s hands will suffer. They may even die because their surgeon does not know the latest, and greatest, technique with the knife. So will it be to cut or not to cut? That is the question.

And we had best do our research before we go under the knife. We don’t want to end up with a doc who flunked anatomy. He may be in the operating room, ready to sew our gut up. Then he realizes he has a spare part and asks the nurses, “Does anybody know what this is?” He throws out our stomach, saying, “Oh well, there’s always leftover stuff.” Then he sews us back together again. We could very well end up with a craving for food that has no place to go.

You definitely do not want the surgeon in your room later, saying “Oops.” And the nurses singing a chorus of “Oops, there goes another rubber tree plant.” You absolutely do not want to hear that.

A suspense movie you won’t forget

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Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) is a dangerous man. He is one of the all-time great villains, filling the screen with his menace, his rage, his violence. And yes, he is scarier than Hannibal Lector. He is determined to destroy decent guy Sam Bowden’s (Gregory Peck) family. This is “Cape Fear”, a place you don’t want to go to. It is late film noir and it is one of the best.

Dark and suspenseful, this could very well have been Hitchcock’s follow-up to “Psycho”. Several of Hitchcock’s regular crew worked on it: Bernard Herrman (music), George Tomasini (editing) and Robert F. Boyle (production design).

Eight years, four months and thirteen days of prison and now Cady is out to pour terror onto the man whose testimony sent him to prison “Give my love to the family,” he says to Sam after their initial meeting. He is not wishing Sam well. It is a threat. Cady watches Sam and his wife and daughter bowling. As he does, he propositions a waitress. Something in that proposition scares her. It is a foreshadowing of the evil to come.

At the bowling alley, Sam sees Cady. He is stalking Sam and he wants Sam to know it. He wants his victim to know what fear is. Sam then calls his policeman friend and asks for help. The cops pick Cady up and try to get him on a vagrancy charge. That doesn’t work. Cady has worked out the details that make him a law-abiding citizen. He has inherited money so he can’t be jailed for vagrancy. This is the first of the many scenes where the villain twists the law in his favor and against decent man Sam.

Next Sam’s family dog is poisoned. What began as only a threat turns into terror, drip by drip by drip. Sam isn’t going down without a fight. His friends in the police department help out too. But nothing is stopping Max Cady from his revenge. Slowly Sam realizes that Cady isn’t after him. He is after his wife and his sixteen-year-old daughter, knowing this will destroy Sam in the worst kind of way.

It’s becoming a war of nerves. Cady then gives Sam a picture of what is in store for his family. He violently rapes and beats a woman he picks up in a bar. She won’t testify. “Max Cady isn’t a man who makes idle threats,” the woman says when Sam begs her to be a witness. She picks up her things and leaves town in a hurry, trying desperately to wash what has happened to her from her memory.

What can stop this mad man who is demanding his revenge, “a Chinese death of a thousand cuts?” Every time Sam takes action, Cady is one step ahead of him.

Then Sam gets one chance, and one chance only. Sam is caged in. Cady has driven Sam to do something he thought he would never do. Break the law and become as savage as the menace. He must act, and he has come with a plan, a plan that will mean a battle for life or death.

Over the years I have seen few movies that provide a seat-of-the-pants suspense that the original “Cape Fear” gives the viewer. From the moment Mitchum appears on the screen during the opening credits till the very end, the audience gets a major dose of fear. We see a great actor, Robert Mitchum, inhabit a role. As the closing credits roll by, we know that we have been treated to one heck of a roller coaster ride. With a supporting cast of Polly Bergen, Martin Balsam, Telly Savalas, Barrie Chase and Lori Martin, director J. Lee Thompson and screenwriter James R. Webb give us a film noir masterpiece. So see it and enjoy the ride.

The Girl With the Tattoo

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They kept asking about her tattoo. What the hell did it mean? Why did it have to mean anything? Terri liked it. Wasn’t that enough? Not for a lot of other folks. They were trying to figure out if she belonged to some secret cult or something. Of course not. But they didn’t take no for an answer. So she started inventing. First she raised her finger to her lips and gave them the shush. She whispered some obscure phrase she learned in her Latin class. Then she gave them the stare which made them melt like butter. That would teach them. The thing was that they did start melting like butter.

A Moment of Grace

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ImageHave you ever fallen in love with a short story? I have. “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen, “A&P” by John Updike, “The Dead” by James Joyce, “A Temporary Matter” by Jhumpa Lahiri, and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” by Ernest Hemingway are just a few I love. “After Rain” is another. It’s a real charmer.

“After Rain” is the title story of a William Trevor short story collection. In the story, Trevor returns to one of his on-going themes, the exploration of a woman’s inner life, her alienation from her environment, her loneliness, and her dignity in the face of that loneliness.

If ever there was a woman in purgatory, it is Harriet. Harriet, a thirty-year-old English woman, had plans. For vacation, she was going to an island spa with her lover. Until he dumped her.

Pensione Cesarina is the consolation prize she gives herself. She chose the Italian hotel because her parents vacationed there when she was a child. Not only is she faced with her own failures at love, her parents were failures as well, both having committed adultery, then divorced.

The story begins in the dining room of the hotel. From her table for one, she orders the same wine she’s ordered all the other nights of her stay. All she has done for the past eleven days is read and stroll through the town and visit the church, not as an act of faith but rather as something to do to pass the time.

Trevor gives us sentence upon sentence, detail upon detail, of the life of the room. He contrasts the four solitary diners with the gregariousness of the other parties, detailing each with their own individuality.

As Harriet sits and dines, moments with her former lover flood back into her thoughts, intensifying her loss. She questions why she made this return visit to the place her parents chose to bring her. She wonders not why her affair had to end, but why did it end before the holiday and not after. It seems like her life has been made up of endings. Unlike the beginnings of young love in the room. Two young Englishmen are hooking up with two Belgian girls. One a stylist, one studying the law.

One of the other solitaries, an older man, joins her at her table. This is the only time in the story when Harriet carries on a conversation. And it’s a conversation with someone she sees as an intruder. Instead of listening to his words, she finds herself daydreaming of what might have been if only her lover had not dumped her. After the older man leaves, she realizes that he was lonely just like her. It is becoming obvious that she is oblivious to her surroundings.

And to what should have been obvious to her. She was unable to see her parents’ divorce coming. She has been unable to see that she has fallen in with lovers who aren’t up to her desire for more in a relationship.

The next morning, a stroll through the town and a seat on a park bench and a rehashing of a conversation between herself and her former lover. She missed all the signs. She was convinced she was happy. Then she’s on for more of the town and then, to get out of the rain, a cappucino and the memories of her parents taking delight in this place.

In the center of the town is the Church of Santa Fabiola. Harriet wanders inside and sees a painting of the Annunciation. Then Trevor describes this painting that will change Harriet’s life in as much detail as any other single thing in the story.

The Annunciation in the church of Santa Fabiola is by an unknown artist, perhaps of the school of Filippo, no one is certain. The angel kneels, grey wings protruding, his lily hidden by a pillar. The floor is marble, white and green and ochre. The Virgin looks alarmed, right hand arresting her visitor’s advance. Beyond—background to the encounter—there are gracious arches, a balustrade and then the sky and hills. There is a soundlessness about the picture, the silence of a mystery: no words are spoken in this captured moment, what’s said between the two has been said already.

Harriet’s eye records the details: the green folds of the angel’s dress, the red beneath it, the mark in the sky that is a dove, the Virgin’s book, the stately pillars and the empty vase, the Virgin’s slipper, the bare feet of the angel. The distant landscape is soft, as if no heat has ever touched it. It isn’t alarm in the Virgin’s eyes, it’s wonderment. In another moment, there’ll be serenity.

When she leaves the church, Harriet notices a change in herself. The rain has cleared things out. The heat has been replaced by a coolness emanating on the road. A bird sings. It seems like the world around her has been invaded by softness.

She returns to the Pensione and walks in the garden. She struggles to make “a connection to that she knows is there.” Then it comes to her. “The Annunciations was painted after rain.” And so the story continues for a few pages more, revealing that change of hers to her. She has been given the grace to continue her life but not in the isolation and alienation she once felt. She is now connected to the world around her.

This is not the only story in the collection where the supernatural impacts the mortal. In “Lost Ground”, a Catholic saint appears to a Protestant teenager. As the stories reveal, sometimes the supernatural can bring grace, sometimes not. It all depends on our response.