I seem to be continuing to sleep more than has been my steady norm for months into years, albeit at peculiar and inconvenient hours that leave me feeling like some sort of crepuscular mammal. I have never been able to nap in my life without it making me feel worse than when I conked out and now it just seems to be an irregularly scheduled part of my day. I am operating on the theory that I will eventually evolve a circadian rhythm. I had one in college, I think.

It would never have occurred to me that the house style of 20th Century Fox was historical megaflops, but Wilson (1944) is the third to cross my radar after Cleopatra (1963) and The Big Trail (1930): it lost its $5.2 million shirt at the box office and Darryl F. Zanuck died mad that it didn't win Best Picture. In the first edition of John Gassner and Dudley Nichols' Best Film Plays of 1943–44 (1945) which spatch picked up from the carrel outside the Brattle Book Shop the week before Christmas in 2017, Zanuck is the only producer to have a preface devoted to his published screenplay and it's all on the defensive, primarily against charges of unnecessary expense and boosterism for FDR. It is not majorly concerned with the historical accuracy of the script by Lamar Trotti, which is fine because regardless of whether it has its names and dates in order, it reads like a political fairy tale. How appealing it is to imagine the twenty-eighth President of the United States as a shy dry stick of a boffin animated by an almost supernal honesty and a self-deprecating sense of humor as underestimated as his perseverance, untarnished by failures of civil rights and never so impaired by his stroke that he can't share the joke with his wife of her letting him out of his presidential responsibilities. A kind of sacrificial king of American idealism, broken across a vision that the world is too fallen and fragmented to match him in, classed by the opening titles with the national saints of Washington and Lincoln. Probably it could only have been trounced by the Catholic super-treacle of Going My Way. Hollywood gonif!

Pursuing some details about Wilson with the fervor of a person who really does not want to have to watch the damn movie, I found a profile of Alexander Knox by James Hilton in the February 1945 Photoplay and blew a gasket that I hope registered with Harry Cohn's ass:

Knox belongs to the new generation of Hollywood stars who shape so oddly into the category that they are already on their way to changing both Hollywood and the star system [. . .] Indeed, the only possible thing to say is that he's an actor, and that the fame he has secured in "Wilson" neither enforces nor precludes any particular kind of thing he will do next.

In support of this argument one has only to glance at his previous motion picture roles to gather some notion of the man's range. His first Hollywood film was "The Sea Wolf" with Edward G. Robinson, in which he played the shipwrecked author, a man of physical fear but mental courage. After that there were the memorable moments in "This Above All" as the gentle clergyman and in "None Shall Escape" as the fanatical Nazi leader which in Knox's hands had the sharpness of a steel engraving.

So Knox is a star, but like many of the newer stars, he doesn't fit into the star system; and when enough people don't fit a system it is the system that has to be changed.

I don't disagree with Hilton—about either the actor or the system—but if the latter had changed to accommodate the former in the mid-'40's, I wouldn't have spent these last ten years of my semi-professional life banging my head against the exact intractability of classical Hollywood to know what to do with its actors of whatever gender who couldn't be easily typed or ticky-tackied into marketable components of the dream machine, which are naturally the kind it seems reasonable to me to like best and inclined to be frustrating to follow. In the same way that it fascinates me to encounter criticism of the Production Code at the time of its enforcement, it's useful for me to know that my feelings about the limitations of the traditional star system were shared by its contemporaries, but then it's even more maddening that its operations would not shift meaningfully until the '60's. Justice for Jean Hagen, basically. In other news, I am charmed that Knox was into motorcycles. So was William Wyler around that time; I am glad they never collided.

I forgot to mention when the three robin nestlings fledged and launched, but the current monarch count stands at one chrysalis and four caterpillars. The moon is still wildfire-stained.

Rabbit, rabbit! Thanks to the aftermath of out-of-town relatives, last night's dinner of lobster and brie and crepes was the most decadent meal I had eaten in ages. Seven monarchs which eclosed all in the same afternoon took flight into the late blue sky.



Overnight adventures with ants and asthma notwithstanding, I managed to sleep nine hours. I am informed by my mother that four more monarchs have taken flight. Two more repose in chrysalis and another two are still mowing their way through the milkweed, storing up for their wings.