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THIS blog entry is about the film Beach Red, directed by and starring Cornell Wilde. But first, a bit of fun.

Todays' lunch is brought to you by the Number Two, and by the colors Black and Tan. These were the last two entries in a six-pack of Saranac Trail Mix. (The entree is my take on Chicken Salad: a bowl of romaine and radicchio, covered with spicy ranch dressing and a layer of shredded cheese, then a layer of crispy chicken bits, and garnished with a quartered boiled egg. This is what constitutes "health food" in my world.) But the pairing of the beers was relevatory. Saranac's take on Black & Tan is just what you'd expect, assuming that you know what a black & tan is. (It's a libation made by pouring two thirds of a pint of pale ale and topping this with stout, preferrably Guinness.) It tastes like a pale ale and a stout combined. Not as elegant as the real thing, of course, but neat nontheless. The IPA (the green labeled bottle) was nice, crisp, and with that high flowery hops note that a great deal of IPA's seem to have these days. This is something I only get once a year or so. Saranac retails the B&T in a six pack of it's own, but the IPA is only available in the Trail Mix or in a seasonal 12 pack around Christmastime. Which, I guess the best way to explain it is that I cannot always convince myself that it's worth buying six beers for one, even though all of Saranac's products, with perhaps one or two exceptions, I find pleasing to the palate. (When I told all this to Doc Nagel, he said "I'm jealous." He did not add " . . of your ant!" Saranac doesn't distribute out that far west; in fact, I think they just cover the eastern seaboard.)

So. Now: Beach Red. Jerry Lee has seen Beach Red.

No, I take that back. I might, in fact, watch this again, but I don't think I would seek it out. Maybe if there was nothing else on on a slow Wednesday. I thought I hadn't seen it before, but it turns out I had seen at least bits and pices of it. It's a war movie wherin the soldiers are humanized via vignettes detailing their wives, children, and random floozies they've had flings with. These bits were highly stylized, and they worked fairly clunkily as transitional/expository elements when seen apart from the whole. Seen as a part of the whole, they're still fairly creaky. Of course, I put this all down to the notion that this would have been a difficult novel to translate into a movie, but the further I looked into it (after watching the flick) the more it seemed like there was no book. Or barely. The credits credit the thing to the book by Peter Bowman, but an internet search brough back precious little; alibris.com had only library and book of the month club copies dating to 1945. (And Wikipedia, of all places, had no entry at all for Peter Bowman.)

The acting overall isn't bad, although I can't, in good conscience, say it's all good. Some of the younger cast members have some particularly bad takes, but then they were young at the time, and Wilde was going for a kind of humanist style wherein they would seem more beliveable if their performances were a tad on the clunky side. (Apparently I like the word "clunky" today.) I also kept expecting them to all burst into song, specifically George and Ira Gershwin's "They Can't Take That Away From Me," at about a dozen different junctures. (They didn't, of course.) It took a while for me to work out why, but eventually it dawned on me that this was because the incidental music was based on the theme song, called "Beach Red," which was done in a kind of folksie-tin-pan-ally patoit, and the theme of which is repeated in the incidental music throughout the film. (The way you wear your hat . . . RAT-AT-AT-AT-AT-AT-AT-AT! BLAM!) The sole exception to this rule is any of the scenes powered by Rip Torn, who inhabits his hard-bitten soldier with a savage enthusiasm that could only have come from . . . well, Rip Torn. One of the most underestimated actors, not only of his time, but of all time. Also, go back and look at his extended filmography one of these days. Weird, wild stuff. I'd watch this guy shuck peas. And, to his credit, so far I haven't had to do so.

So. Yeah, that's about all I have to say about that. The best part of the film was the opening credits, which consisted of a series of paintings rendered in post-impressionist form, concluding with one depicting an attack on a beach head, which dissolves, figure by painted figure, into a shot of an assault on a beach head. Man. THAT was impressive.

I had decided against plunking down an image of the movie poster. Eh. WHat the hell. Here's one.