The summer wind comes blowing in
Ah, summer. Long time arriving, you’re over all too quickly.
Summer, in brief, is ritual, which suits me just fine, since I’m a creature of habit anyway. (Proof: I’ve eaten the same breakfast for years now. I watch three or four episodes of Seinfeld nearly every day. I sit in the same chair every morning sipping tea.)
As for summer habits, there’s cheering for the Pirates. A trick of imagination rooted in the middle of the last century, it’s given me some high points – three World Series appearances; several wrenching disappointments – the Bob Moose wild pitch in 1972, being one; and more anguish than I care to recall.
Poor me, poor Bucco fans. Loyal to a fault, we wait and wait and wait some more. It’s been 44 years and counting.
There are summer movie blockbusters, but my summer viewing is pretty much confined to old black-and-white prints. I’ve watched the whimsical 1951 film “Angels in the Outfield” at least a dozen times. “Guffy” McGovern seems about as real to me as Danny Murtaugh. I’m a little in love with Janet Leigh. And I can’t get enough of Forbes Field, where the baseball scenes were filmed.
Another summer ritual – summer seems to enhance the experience – is watching “Casablanca.” I love the melodrama, the exotic locale (in truth, it was filmed on a backlot at Warner Brothers), the World War II ambience, and the final scene – the one in which Humphrey Bogart tells Claude Rains, “Louie, I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.”
I love the furtive Peter Lorre character, the rousing rendition of “La Marseillaise” in the face of the arrogant German officers, and the tilt of Ingrid Bergman’s head and the murmur of desire in her lustrous eyes as she’s about to kiss Rick.
There are so many wonderful scenes in “Casablanca.” I might watch it again tonight.
Every July 4th I try to watch “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” marveling each time Jimmy Cagney tap dances down the White House staircase. Afterward he joins a column of soldiers marching down Pennsylvania Avenue just outside the White House gate singing – hey, it’s a movie – the George M. Cohan war-themed “Over There.”
Soon enough Cagney as Cohan joins in but not before a sergeant jabs him, “What’s wrong, old timer, don’t you remember this tune?”
“I seem to remember it from somewhere,” Cagney says, hoisting a walking cane to his shoulder like it was a Springfield Rifle.
It wouldn’t be the 4th of July without “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”
And it wouldn’t be summer without a reread of “The Great Gatsby.” In recent summers I’ve added “The Romance of the Last Tycoon,” or, simply “The Last Tycoon.” Both books are by the incomparable F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The Gatsby mansion shimmering large and lit from top to bottom and with music and laughter swelling from its graceful terraces reminds me of the Uniontown Country Club mansion of my youth – the one destroyed by fire years ago.
I was never inside the old Uniontown Country Club. It was two or three steps beyond my family’s pay grade. I would see it at a distance, and in that viewing on a summer’s twilight, it radiated a certain romantic charm.
For me, every rereading of “Gatsby” yields new facets, new angles of the Gatsby story, a classic American story of success always beyond the grasp of an outstretched hand, a story of both loss and of hope for a better tomorrow.
(My love of “Gatsby” grew when I read, in the Cambridge Edition of the book, a draft scene Fitzgerald eventually discarded – one set at the Polo Grounds, as the Giants, then of New York, played the Cubs on an afternoon so hot that Nick’s “underwear climbed like a damp snake around [his] legs” and “the smell of peanuts and hot butter and cigarettes mingled agreeably in the air,” and “a pitcher with an exquisitely eccentric delivery warmed up near us on the grass.”)
Part of the allure of “Tycoon” owes much to my juvenile fascination with Hollywood – a fascination unaccountably born with episodes of the old “I Love Lucy” TV show, in which Lucy and Ricky leave their drab New York digs for the sparkle of Tinsel Town.
“Tycoon” is not a comedy, however. Monroe Stahr is the brains and heart of studio moviemaking, and his affair with the mysterious Kathleen is tender with passion and eventual heartbreak. From the writers’ bungalow and the director’s chair on set to the studio cafeteria peopled with costumed characters, “The Last Tycoon” offers a fierce, unvarnished escape into the Hollywood of old.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.