Winter refuses to let go. When I went for my morning walk at 7AM there was a one inch coating on cars, vegetation and awnings. It looked nice. The best thing about it was I knew it would be gone by noon. Areas outside the city got whacked with six to ten inches. Fortunately that, too, will not be around long enough to blacken.
It was cold and lonely during the afternoon shift. No one was crazy enough to stop in the biting wind. Fortunately, it warmed considerably by late afternoon, the breeze dying down. My old Exchange buddy, Adam, was kind enough to buy Jane Smiley's comic novel, Moo. Steve, the poet laureate of Sheepshead Bay, fresh from a ten-day working vacation in Mexico, also stopped by. He had a great time, the temperature in the 80's. He covered a jazz festival for his own web magazine. Needless to say, he is bummed by the weather here.
Last night I enjoyed Dark City (1950), courtesy of Netflix. It introduced Charlton Heston, although it was his second film, his first being a Shakespearean production. The rest of the cast was first rate, familiar to movie buffs: Lizabeth Scott, as a good girl for a change; Viveca Lindfors, Don Defore, Ed Begley, Harry Morgan, Dean Jagger, Mike Mazurky, as a silent psychopath; and Jack Webb, as effective as I've ever seen him, playing a heel. It was interesting to see Webb be mean to Morgan. Of course, the two would eventually team as cops in Dragnet. The film was directed by William Dieterle, most famous for The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), which contains one of my all-time favorite scenes, when Charles Laughton as Quasimodo swings on a rope from the church to the gallows to the rescue the beautiful gypsy, Esmeralda (Maureen O'Hara), falsely accused of murder.. He swings back to the church, holds the fainted Esmeralda above his head and cries: "Sanctuary!" as the crowd cheers. Awesome.
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