Music

When You Wish Upon a Star (1940), by Cliff Edwards and Chorus
There is magic in this song.

Some of that magic inheres not in the song, but in me, and perhaps also in you. It’s in the memory of being a child drifting off to sleep to an LP of Disney favorites. There’s a slight hiss, and a sonic compression that an adult listener knows to be signs of old recording technology, but which a child hears only as an enveloping warmth. The harp introduces the sprightly sweep of the orchestra. Then that voice, like nothing you’ve ever heard before. It’s worlds away from other vocals on the album—the brashness of “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo,” the playfulness of “The Bare Necessities.” It’s fey, almost genderless. It sounds nothing like any adult you’ve ever met. It’s the voice of a magical creature. Even before you know who (or what) Jiminy Cricket is, you recognize that.

Adult perspective doesn’t exhaust the song’s magic. What we’re hearing, in 2026, is a song recorded in 1939 built on a vocal style that was already more than a decade out of date, delivered by a singer who found his first success on vaudeville stages in the days before commercially recorded music. Cliff Edwards, nicknamed Ukelele Ike by a club waiter who couldn’t remember his name, was a pioneer of scat singing; a Broadway sensation who, according to Fred Astaire, “stopped the show" when he appeared with the Astaires in the Gershwins’ Lady, Be Good; and a recording artist whom Will Friedwald calls “the most impressive male jazz and pop singer of the twenties, the transitional figure between Jolson and Crosby.”

That last word is key. Après Crosby, everything changes. A voice like Edwards’s—high, delicate, quavering—is instantly out of fashion. Though his recordings from the 1930s retain verve and charm today, when they were new they were hopelessly not the thing. Edwards’s career slid. His personal life (which by 1936 included three ex-wives) presented challenges. He drank. A lot.

Then Disney called, with a song, and, just as important, a role. Jiminy Cricket wasn’t yet the narrator of Pinocchio, but he was nonetheless a fully developed character, and it’s easy to imagine the Disney team hearing this voice—ethereal and gentle, but with a hard-won quality, like a jetty that’s been undercut by the tide but still stands, perhaps even proudly—and realizing that the key to their story was this washed-up alcoholic from vaudeville. He could be the infinitely patient voice of conscience.

He puts it across. The melody is simple, rising and falling scales, an octave jump, over some chromatically descending chords. The bridge is weak musically and lyrically, but it’s handed to the chorus, which gives it a proper mid-century impression of class and musicality. Then Edwards is back, for the effectively poetic “like a bolt out of the blue,” climbing, on the last note of “fate steps in / and sees you through,” to a high A flat, way into falsetto. Then on “Your dreams . . . come . . . true” he hits a B, two full octaves above where he started. It's otherworldly, giving confidence in something beyond the everyday, that wishes have power. There is magic in this song. It pulled a man out of the bottle and into immortality, and it’s accompanied our dreams ever since.

Movie

The Outfit (1973), directed by John Flynn
If Jiminy Cricket is ever patient, Robert Duvall is the opposite. The most common attribute of a Duvall performance is a sense of bristling irritation about everyone around him being so slow on the uptake, so unable to see what needs to be done and unable to simply go do it.

Which makes Duvall perfect to play (under the name Macklin, for complicated IP reasons) Parker, the hyper-competent heister, who starred in twenty-four novels by Donald Westlake (writing under the name Richard Stark, for complicated career reasons).

Parker has been put on screen many times in the more than sixty years since his first appearance. The challenge every time is that Parker is a methodical sociopath who doesn’t speak when he doesn’t have to. In the novels, Westlake can finesse that. We can, to some degree at least, get into Parker’s head. (Not a healthy place to linger.) The movies offer no such access. The most successful version, Point Blank, uses the raw physicality of Lee Marvin to bulldoze past any need for interiority. The worst . . . well, let’s just say that even though Parker definitely has a twisted sort of code, he would never talk about it.

What we get in The Outfit is a satisfying middle ground, a film that Westlake said was “the one movie made from a Stark book that got the feeling right.” Duvall’s Macklin talks more than Parker would, but he doesn’t talk too much. He’s a professional doing a job. In this case, it’s a job of retribution, and he’s annoyed that others, less professional, have forced him to have to waste his time (and, seemingly somehow less important, risk his life) doing this. There’s a lot of action, blocked and shot in classic 1970s realist fashion, where we simultaneously get the sense that all fights are awkward because human bodies are awkward, and that our antihero is cool because he wins them.

There are satisfying elements beyond Duvall’s performance. An office that is a front for a mobbed-up money drop is crowded with figurines and toys and dolls, the work of a set dresser gone wild suggesting the character of the ordinary, non-criminal woman who staffs the desk. The location scouting must have been fun, too. This is SoCal sans glamour, offering a lot of evidence for my long-running social media thesis that the secret theme of every 1970s film is the material shittiness of the 1970s. Macklin meets a gun dealer for a buy on one of those LA streets that is loomed over by the massive mechanical horrors of the oil industry. Macklin’s sidekick, Joe Don Baker, owns a run-down diner in the middle of nowhere. (The scene where he defends it without having to do more than suggest violence highlights Baker’s unusual ability to project menace via charm.) A mechanic who deals in hot cars has a spread in a rural part of California that looks like Southern Illinois, all poverty and pride. That scene offers a moment that is pure Westlake: The mechanic explains to Macklin how he’s hidden a hot rod engine in an innocuous body but says he’s still struggling to make the sound of the engine convincingly muted. He’s a craftsman, absorbed in his work. That work is on the other side of the law, but that fact in no way diminishes his pride in it.

Finally, there are the nods to genre classics. When I first saw this movie, in preparation for showing it as part of the Donald Westlake series I co-curated with my friend Eric Hynes at the Museum of the Moving Image in 2017, I didn’t know film noir well enough to recognize them. Seeing it again (for a project I’ll be able to tell you more about later this year) after a pandemic and six years of obsessive movie watching, I now recognize so many familiar faces. It’s not just Robert Ryan, still powerful in his final role, as a mobster realizing his organization has gone soft. (Speaking of special actorly talents: Ryan’s is to play a physically imposing tough guy who’s as surprised as a child at the pain he feels any time he takes a blow. In this case, the blow is realizing he’s overseeing an outfit of time-servers, cowards, and incompetents.) It’s also Elisha Cook, Jr., Richard Jaeckel, and Marie Windsor—smoker’s voice and statuesque beauty still intact—all offering a direct line to the tradition that The Outfit built on. If Chinatown, released a year later, was the era’s most explicit homage to the heyday of film noir, The Outfit is its disreputable, down-at-heel relative. Truer to the genre, in other words.

Book

Falling (1999), by Elizabeth Jane Howard
A dozen years after her death, all of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s works of fiction are still in print in her native England. If you’re willing to visit multiple London bookstores, you can buy them all in a day. Few authors could send their ghost on such a mission with similar success.

At the same time, her position is equivocal. Nearly all of her work is unavailable in print formats in the States. Recent years have seen NYRB Classics and McNally Editions mounting rescue missions on behalf of twentieth-century English women writers, returning to print near-contemporaries of Howard such as Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, and Beryl Bainbridge. Others, like Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Anita Brookner, didn’t even need to be tossed the life ring. No such reclamation effort has been made, thus far, for Howard.

That’s in keeping with Howard’s reception when she was alive. She never made a Booker shortlist (though she was both respected and connected enough to be made a judge). Her books sold reasonably well, though not spectacularly, until she broke through with the first volume of her five-volume roman-fleuve, the Cazalet Chronicles, in 1990, when she was in her late sixties. The sense one gets decades on is that she had a toehold on critical respectability but nothing more. It seems reasonable to think that she was more or less casually dismissed as a women’s writer. That’s certainly how her paperbacks are marketed in the UK now, with covers featuring stylishly dressed mid-century women of means, all looking lightly aspirational.

Across the past two years, I’ve read most of Howard’s work. I’ll read the rest. As I’ve done so, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about why she’s not better known, more respected. Last week I found a succinct answer in an essay by Virginia Woolf on Victorian writer Mrs. Gaskell. Attempting to explain some of what set the Victorians apart from Woolf’s own contemporaries, she wrote:

Yet it may be a merit that personality, the effect not of depth of thought but of the manner of it, should be absent. The tuft of heather that Charlotte Brontë saw was her tuft; Mrs Gaskell’s world was a large place, but it was everybody’s world.

Howard wrote of and for (narrowly defined) everyone: the upper middle (and upper-lower-upper) classes. She did so in a straightforward way. Her prose didn’t break ground, or break with psychological realism. She wasn’t, like Spark, a weirdo. She wasn’t, like Pym, focused on the forgotten. She didn’t, like Fitzgerald, write about lost souls she thought were “sadly mistaken.” Her subjects were wholly middle of the road. Her techniques were those of the twentieth-century realist novelist. She was interested in the individual and relationships, in larger issues only as they affected those. She was bourgeois.

She was also very good at it. Her stepson Martin Amis called her “an instinctivist,” with a “freakish but poetic eye, and a penetrating sanity.” He praised her as, along with Iris Murdoch “the most interesting woman writer of her generation.” Hilary Mantel said she was “from the first . . . a craftswoman.” In her introduction to the Picador edition of The Long View, Mantel gets to the heart of it all: “She describes with creative precision the infinite number of trivial things that make up the texture of [her characters’] lives.”

This is overstating things a bit, but stay with me: She’s Trollope. Trollope had bigger targets sometimes—the Palliser novels are about movers and shakers, big doings in important places—and was concerned enough with the Way We Live Now to title a novel The Way We Live Now. But his heart was with the heart of English society. His prose was effective but had none of Dickens’s verve or Thackeray’s venom. He was the establishment, even as he was smarter and more perceptive (especially about women) than it could ever be. His confidence in the power of fiction, of an omniscient narrator telling a story about the things people do, was matched only by his confidence that his readers would care. Howard, like few serious twentieth-century novelists I have read, shares that confidence. She knows we want to hear a story, and she knows she’s good at telling one. She has no fear of plot. But she’s also psychologically acute and particularly attuned to the experiences of women, and her prose reliably offers aphorisms that sit comfortably in context while being ripe for the plucking.

Which brings me to the book in question, Falling, her last non-Cazalet novel. This newsletter is built on recommendations. Read this, not that. And I have no hesitation in suggesting you read Falling. But it’s here more as an exemplar, an excuse to talk about Howard, because it’s the most recent of hers I’ve read. If this is the first you’ve heard of her, seek out The Long View or After Julius or Love All (which, Amis having linked her with Iris Murdoch earlier, I’ll say is a little like an Iris Murdoch novel if you could imagine Murdoch’s characters not being half so up themselves), or the first Cazalet, The Light Years.

But from Falling, which tells of an older woman seduced by a sociopathic, gold-digging opportunist (a story that, in her memoir, Slipstream, Howard admits was drawn from the later years of her own life), I can give this harvest of quotes to convey a sense of what even a mid-tier Howard novel offers:

If I were you, as people say when they’re so glad that they aren’t . . .

I can criticize with the best of them. Criticism saves one from trust, and that, I think, is the hardest thing to have.

A kind of greed that demanded of anything good that it should persist before it could be appreciated.

A shock isn’t always something that you weren’t expecting. It’s often more a secret dread coming out.

The trouble about betrayal was partly the terrible difficulty of knowing when it had begun.

She’s worth your time, friends. Let’s read her, then tell others.