Radium Girls Vs. the 1%: Eva Green in DARK SHADOWS, Carole Lombard in NOTHING SACRED

 
It's always a good idea to lay massive curses upon the rich --haven't they deserved it since the dawn of time? Haven't they, in a way, already cursed us? Their ancestors robbed ours and left no evidence of the crime, so their ancestors cursed us and now we have to give it back in kind, generation au generation. In two films made in wildly different but eerily similar decades, 1930s and 2010s, two downtrodden women laid down some nice curses on the rich, in cinema: Carole Lombard as Hazel Flagg in 1937's Nothing Sacred and Eva Green in 2012's Dark Shadows remake. Damn, are they twins? Or is it just that I saw them both in the same day?

So the big date 12/21/12 came and went with nary a tremor, nor snowmageddon. Sure I'd hoping some major disaster would wipe out the uncouth and leave we chosen angels with a chance to start again from scratch, everyone equal who still lived. But the greed of the mega-rich is still strangling us too slowly to count as apocalypse: hypocritical politicians leaving our east coast to suffer in the mud after we aided theirs after similar disasters; Australian moguls training our gun nut brothers through fearmongering Fox doctrine; dogs and casts of Cats living to--you know the drill, it's the same damn one, slog swamp, slog...

No wonder I sought solace in the classics: NOTHING SACRED recently released on a sparkling blu-ray reminded me that my bitterness over the loss of the illusion that our half-strangled human culture was about to end makes me like Oliver Stone, furious that Hazel Flagg (Carole Lombard, top) is not really dying of radium poisoning. Nowadays it may be hard to imagine such a un-fact-checked farce playing out in the local papers, but it happened, I think, a lot, or Ben Hecht wouldn't have written this movie, or Capra made MEET JOHN DOE. At any rate, the media circus surrounding young girls dying of radium poisoning was no fantasy, even if old news by '37:

The Radium Girls were female factory workers who contracted radiation poisoning from painting watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint at the United States Radium factory in Orange, New Jersey around 1917. The women, who had been told the paint was harmless, ingested deadly amounts of radium by licking their paintbrushes to sharpen them; some also painted their fingernails and teeth with the glowing substance.

Five of the women challenged their employer in a case that established the right of individual workers who contract occupational diseases to sue their employers. (WIKI)

 But the girls who won America's hearts as they shambled to the stand were hideously deformed (if your stomach be strong, check here) while Lombard comes to the city unmarred and super hot and in robust health so the German specialists called in at great expense are instantly, ow you say, zuss-PISH-iouss?! Still, if Hazel was as sick as a real radium girl she'd be far too tragic to parade around New York City! The hooplah-spinning Morning Star reporter Frederic March falls in love with Hazel, and half in love with his own words praising her and what he reads into her wide blue eyes as courage in the face of death. He's mad but also thrilled to learn she's just faking for a free trip to NYC. And anyway, fake or not, her story is life-affirming just like the apocalypse, my precious, lost apocalypse.

I've always felt that doomsday anticipation makes life post-Scrooge precious. It fills me with gallows' gratitude and Fight Club ("it's only after we've lost everything that we don't fear anything") euphoria. But as I recently learned ("cough") there is a downside: that sense of horrible disappointment when the world keeps turning after the expiration date. In the end you can use up all your pre-death euphoria credits and have nothing left for when they're truly needed. TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934) found Lombard giving a tearful goodbye to her young college boy lover as she boards her train for New York, only to groan in annoyance when he decides to come along. He's not only ruined her big dramatic scene he's forced her to abandon her thespian posture and bust out the yowl: "George, you bore me!" In Lombard's NOTHING SACRED, the power brokers of New York all wince in despair when they learn Flagg's faking her radium poisoning. They've already used Hazel's 'plight' to advance their careers and don't want to give up the gains. Girls have been exposed to radiation poison for real for less (SILKWOOD).

A similar exploitation of a scheming harridan by the elite occurs in the Tim Burton DARK SHADOWS (2012), wherein the haute bourgeois Barnabas (Johnny Depp) sleeps with and then coldly spurns the housekeeper's daughter, Angelique (Eva Green). A spurn is bad enough in itself, but to spurn a woman who was born into the same house as you around the same time and yet is expected to live a life of servitude while you live it up, that's pretty piggish, Barnabas! For all we know, his dad might be Angelique's father, too, like with the Schwarzenegger family. So I couldn't really muster much sympathy for him even when Angelique kills his parents via her witchy spells, confines him to a coffin for 200 years, and reduces his estate to a crumbling relic for future generations to waft through. Hey, some of my great great great great great great great aunts were New England witches so naturally I'm on her side. And say what you like about the Robert Stack in WRITTEN ON THE WIND, at least he knew he was a shit, you could see it in his desperate, rolling eyes. Depp doesn't even shift his arch posture a whit.

One scene is very telling early on concerning the dirty class inequality lurking underneath the soapy gloss of Burton's film: after spurning Angelique's professed love, Barnabas starts showing up at the house with a doe-eyed Gothic Windswept Barbie (Bella Heathcote), pledging love to her while Angelique is scrubbing the floor down on her knees, in the same damned room. Even while alive Barnabas doesn't imagine her feelings might be hurt. Once he's dead he's even more oblivious.

Two hundred years pass and Victoria, the big-eyed waif reincarnation of his old love (also Heathcote) returns as if to sour the situation even more. For a 'true love' she very one dimensional, passive, a Valium Jane Eyre. No wonder Angelique, pulsing with fire and froth, dislikes her! No mortal woman can compare when Green's voice gets deep and throaty in a Hawks heroine-esque chain-smoker purr (the way she did a little in CASINO ROYALE when fondling Bond's watch on the train). As she noted in an interview:

"Angelique is a woman who has changed with the times. During the 18th century, Angelique was a dark-haired servant girl. As Angie, the CEO of Angel Bay, she’s a successful blonde businesswoman. “Tim wanted her to look like the American dream,” says Green. “Everything about her is perfect. Too perfect. Perfect makeup, red lips, platinum hair. She’s very glamorous yet sophisticated." (Inquirer)

Damn right. And Barnabas and Angelique even get in on again in their new incarnations as monsters, trashing her office in a fit of demon craziness set to some 70s hard rock song we all remember, or better since it surely cost a pretty farthing. This scheming witch and murderous vamp clearly belong to one another and so it's hard, very hard, to root for Barnabas in his endeavors to drive her from his ancestral town in favor of a doe-eyed doormat, especially when she's initially so thrilled to see him and races to his mansion for a reunion tryst, all grudges forgotten, his debt  paid, in her mind.

In better films that's more or less what happens, the beast and the other beast find or settle for each other and eschew the beauties, ala SHREK or KLONDIKE ANNIE. But this is more of a film like KISSING JESSICA STEIN or BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS or even STEPMOM or STEEL MAGNOLIAS, wherein the conventions of pro-dogma Christina conservatism are served on the sly. Man, 200 years of being locked in a coffin is a stiff price to pay just to preserve your social conservative trust fund dickheadedness.

How is Barnabas conservative? He holds a grudge and he takes the moral high ground no matter what sordid things he does on the sly, just like the Republicans. Barnabas can't help himself, you see, she cursed him by draining his precious... bodily fluids. Even though she doesn't kill anywhere near the amount of innocent people that he does (those construction workers he killed probably had children! families!), it is she who must be burnt at the stake for this to be a proper happening. The true neo-conservative doesn't care about the dead workers, after all, unless they're in his direct family. Drinking the lifeblood of labor and youth (he also devours a whole band of innocent hippies) while presuming we'll root for him anyway since he has such good family values is sooooo 1%. This kind of belief system, if left unfucked with, inevitably leads to a people's revolution! Barnabas shouldn't be reading her Erich Segal's Love Story but rather Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States!

Me, I'd take the lusty strong, slightly crazy fallen woman, be she fair in looks and enterprising in drive, over some waif who look like a Nina Friday or Jasmine Becket-Griffith painting come to life but has nothing else really to offer. Rejecting a badass babe with the power to destroy him and his loved ones is not only short-sighted, its why, when push comes to shove, this film never quite becomes an enduring classic like GHOSTBUSTERS or THE ADDAMS FAMILY (Wednesday!) or BEETLEJUICE. At least those films had the courage to ride to the end of the subversive road they started on. DARK SHADOWS makes a hard U-turn and heads to a different world, one where Mitt Romney won and women are still expected to faint at the sight of blood.

from top: Bella Heathcote; Jasmine Beckett-Griffith; Lombard

Barnabas Collins' attitude of mystified old world entitlement perfectly resembles Mitt Romney's, and Romney lost. There's a new kid in town, the minority collective, and the blonde sorceress Hillary Clinton aims to to straighten things out. Victoria's passive dullness meanwhile is reminscent of past Victorian (get it?) heroines who study how to be completely vacant so as to not alienate their man, and stand straight up to hide the fact they've become addicted to morphine. Preferring her to a real 3-D hussy like Angelique would be like if March preferred a dead but honest Hazel Flagg to a live, lying, laughing, punching, slugging Carole Lombard.

The ending of NOTHING SACRED though has no intention of pussying out. Instead of Hazel granting New York the grand tragedy of her funeral she leaves a note saying she's off to die alone, and the end finds her incognito on a boat with March. Isn't that just what all the doomsday soothsayers are doing right now, myself included? Instead of a raging Eva Green Kali whirlwind solar storm apocalypse of human sacrifice on the altar of populist journalism we face yet another 200 years or more of the same damn bloodsuckers we've always had. Oh Tyler Durden Oh Kurt Oh Erich Von Daniken did you strive for naught?

SHADOWS is still pretty entertaining, fast-moving, and there's slew of beautiful women in hot 70s clothes and pale white skin to ease your suffering over Barnabas' unrepentant tea /douche baggery. The ubiquitous Danny Elfman's score is, for once, inspired (though once more Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" shows up - see "WATCHMEN Dig my Earth").  But fun as it is to watch, DARK SHADOWS leaves one very dissatisfied. I don't mind rooting for the villain if he knows he's the villain. But here Barnabas is the most entitled, snobby psychopath who thinks he's the good guy since Dustin Hoffman in the original STRAW DOGS.  He's like those slimy male scientists who wore lead aprons and goggles while bringing uncovered buckets of radium paint to the girls even while insisting the stuff was completely harmless. Compared to this kind of unconscious villainy even Angelique and Hazel Flagg are bastions of white, blonde decency --at least they know they're evil. The real tragedy is that 200 years of entombment did nothing whatever to wise Barnabas up to others' suffering.  Ah well, the apocalypse may not have happened but at least the revolution is still available onscreen. if you care to blast for it.

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TCM Diary: LURED, THE MALE ANIMAL, THIS COULD BE THE NIGHT, NOTHING SACRED

For some of us, the name Lucille Ball produces shudders. Her long-running TV show was in constant late night reruns, and when nothing else was on TV we'd watch it, and so began to associate it in our minds with a feeling of trapped isolation. Yet LURED (1947) shows Ball as a tough, sassy distinct individual far more resonant than the the proto-Cathy "waaaa" housewife married to Cuban's greatest export. LURED is directed by Douglas Sirk, and the script seems tailored for her wit, and there's none of her broad comedy, only a wizened causticism. If Hitchcock made LURED, and he could have, it would be a classic oft writ about. But hey, Sirk is none to shabby and the film is full of A-list bits: George Sanders is semi-miscast as a cavalier playboy; Boris Karloff mugs deliciously as a deranged fashion designer; Alan Mowbray and Joseph Calea relish their evil as white slavers pretending to be a maid service; Charles Coburn (Piggy!) is the head of Scotland Yard, employing taxi dancer Ball as a deputy agent when it's discerned the killer digs dancers. And George Zucco is the crossword-puzzling detective who shadows Ball on her assignments --his getting his crossword clues from random things Ball says is the dumbest thing about the film, but it's great to see him playing an easy-going cop under a watchful eye like Sirk's, instead of his usual Z-list mad scientists under sleepy William "One Shot" Beaudine's.

As fast moving and fun as a London fog murder movie can get, there's great red herring bits like Karloff spying the camera in the mirror and breaking the fourth wall to tell us in the audience "I'll be with you in a moment!" in that full creepy/wink voice of his. (The Kino Video cover to the DVD makes it seem like the film's a Victorian thriller with Karloff as the main villain, but neither is true).  She might be as English as baseball, but it's fun the way she pretends to be suckered by Mowbray's offer of a trip to South America, or the way she intentionally fools us as well as the suspects into thinking she's dumb, then springing the trap.  

 Things get suspenseful, and then they get looser in that vein similar to Hitchcock's, where suspense doesn't slacken even as the wit and winks fly. Sanders' presence even makes it connected to REBECCA in its tale of an ordinary girl destined for bigger things due to her surplus of character and intellect. Ball can be charming as needed, well who can't? But she can also relax like a real woman right there onscreen, smoking and knocking back cakes with her big feet up. It's such a rare thing that when it's done right,  like a whole new version of striptease, where fake personae come off as easily as nightgowns. Yeah, but anyone can take off their clothes, who can take off their mask all the way, to the hairy human animal beneath-- with a whole film crew and blazing hot lights breathing down your neck? Lucy, Babs, Bette, and Clara Bow, that's all. Boop Boop de Boop!

THE MALE ANIMAL
dir. Elliot Nugent 1942 - ***1/2
With deep shadows from a roaring bonfire, the camera low, his shadow large and Wellesian sinister, Eugene Pallette shouts "Fight! Fight!" while Henry Fonda and his acolyte look on aghast through round Leninish spectacles at the horror of mob mentality in action. No, it's not TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, it's homecoming week at Beardsley College! The always durable and ready Jack Carson is the All-American football hero who dated English professor Fonda's wife before Fonda, and if you as a cinema blog-reading smartypants ever sneered at the sporting events of your college, city, or state, you'll enjoy THE MALE ANIMAL. It has a kind of Capra-ish ending with Fonda reading a letter from anarchist Vinzetti against massive public outcry, but it's hard to take such clear-cut fascism seriously when it comes from Eugene Palette, the wondrous bullfrog who played Fonda's dad in THE LADY EVE. He even get's the film's last and best line as they march in a parade in honor of Fonda and Palette notices a troublemaking lefty student isn't cheering, "What's the matter with you?" he barks. "You a fascist or something?" 

THIS COULD BE THE NIGHT
1957 - **1/2
Jean Simmons is a virgin secretary-teacher who helps kids cheat at geometry and sexy bespectacled dancer (Neile Adams) cheat at baking contests. So she must be okay. Wait, what? Well, the club environment is cozy and cute, with everyone more or less nice to each other, a rarity for these types of things, and occasionally the club floor is lit in an almost Sternbergianly chthonic nest of curvy shadows. Tony Franciosa's at his sweaty, grinning best as a taut nightclub manager struggling to stay free in the face of marriage's inescapable vortex (to Simmons), the other reason to see this Nellie Adams, who is like a sexier smarter black-haired Shirly McLaine, with cute glasses, a short black haired bob, and, shortly thereafter, the power to lure Steve McQueen into marriage. Hubba Hubba! Alas, she didn't do much other than some TV shows after this, having two kids to keep her busy. Steve McQueen, you dick! You stole a gal who could have won the heart of a heartless, cynical world.

NOTHING SACRED
1937
Dir. William Wellman ****
If you're a screwball fan, or Ben Hecht fan, or both, you probably saw NOTHING SACRED first as a crummy public domain dupe, with its primitive three-strip color washed near to mud. It's still hard to see a good copy today, for this and other reasons. On TCM it looks okay, but the colors still make everything seem kind of muddy/ Plus, I don't think Frederic March is ideal for Ben Hecht's dialogue; he just tosses it off when it could use some John Barrymore-style ballyhoo. All that said, this film only improves on repeat viewings, with great bit players like Max Rosenbloom as a slugger from circulation ("It's me, Moe! Yer brudda!"), Sig Rumann as Dr. Emil Egglehoffer; John Qualen as a Swedish fire chief ("Yumpin' Yimminy..."); the music of Raymond Scott's bouncy quintet; Owlin Howlin (baggage), Margaret Hamilton (matron), and Troy Brown Sr. as a rotund phony maharaja.

Credit William Wellman with his keen eye for earthy detail and Hecht for his flash-frozen cynicism, which stains even the most seemingly mundane of dialogue a frosty black, and Carole Lombard as Hazel Flagg, paraded around the city like a Joan of Arc on slow-glam burn, the way Frederic March falls in love with the sound of his own sorrow. As a kid who often faked illnesses to avoid sports and school, I can relate with the horrible guilt Flagg experiences, writhing in her first class suite as maids fret over her (including Hattie McDaniel, uncredited). Good old Hecht, you come away basking in the warmth of the evening star, the spectre of death--momentary or eventual--still hanging over everything, the lure of fascism, sentimentality, phony morals, sensationalism, and tawdry exploitation dangling like a anglerfish's lantern luring, luring Steve McQueen into marriage, and us all into our cold Stygian seats.

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Momentum Mori: TWENTIETH CENTURY (1934)

"I never thought I would sink so low as to become an actor."

A zany screwball masterpiece where for once all three of those words are stunningly apt, Howard Hawks' TWENTIETH CENTURY is a must-see regardless of its flaws and PS - it's called that cause it's on the train, the 20th Century Limited, that runs from New York to Chicago; it's not one of those historical odes to a simpler more morally repressive time that make you sleepy with all the trotted-out old frilly clothes and quaint old aunt spinsters. Man I hate period pieces (pre-1920s) but this aint that: this has John Barrymore as more or less himself, born under the sign of Sagittarius ("That's the Archer!!") harassing Carole Lombard, all night long!

I mention the frilly old clothes because TWENTIETH CENTURY is one of the more self-reflexively psychedelic of all the old pre-code comedies, not because of any surreal montages (has Hawks ever used a montage?) but because of the way it explores the nature of persona, of mask-wearing, of "Who am I this Time?"-style thespian identity melt-down. Consider Barrymore's co-star, a young girl named Jane Alice Peters who changed her name to Carole Lombard, here playing a girl named Mildred Plotka who is redubbed Lilly Garland so she can play Mary Jo in Jaffe's latest southern Gothic melodrama. "You're not Lilly Garland anymore," Jaffe coaches his terrified new protege, still under the delusion her name is Milred Plotka. "You're little Mary Joe. The scene is pure purple!"

Director is Howard Hawks working with a Ben Hecht-Charles McArthur script, adapted from Charles Millholand's play, Napoleon of Broadway, of which I profess to know little. I do know something of Hecht, who wrote SCARFACE (1933), a seasoned reporter with a rare ability to stare death and dysfunction straight in the face and laugh, wryly. Hecht liberates the Broadway-centric aspect Millholland's theatrical farce, blowing it out into the void the way Ahab might lob a harpoon at the vast white canvas of Moby Dick.

Death is all around in TWENTIETH CENTURY, as Oscar Jaffe threatens suicide (with sublime melodramatic flair) every time he starts to lose control of his actress or budget and the dialogue is choked with hilarious threats and insults, like "If he were dead and in his grave, I'd throw a rope around his neck and drag him on a Cook's tour!" But like some crazy shaman, Jaffe treads the lip between life and death in split second ham doses; in just one example he's contorted like his old silent version of Mr. Hyde, hands curled in pre-strangling mode -- only to lower them gently at his sides in the manner of a priest when said manager comes in and tells him a hick backer wants to finance his play "from a religious angle." In a split second Barrymore's whole countenance conforms to a benevolent sincerity. It's ham-shamanistic alchemy, and the  great, dark self-reflexive material brings out a full-on dose of Barrymore mania...kind of like what Robin Williams pulls off sporadically as the voice of the genie in ALADDIN or the TERMINATOR 2000 model dying in a molten pool of steel. A tale, ultimately, of a doomed impresario hurtling ever forward into the void, we wouldn't see a better locomotive-character/fearlessly self-depth-plumbing actor combo until Jon Voight's crazed escaped convict in RUNAWAY TRAIN.

It may be hard to believe for modern audiences, but Barrymore played romantic leads in silent films (he was known as the "Great Profile"), but with the coming of sound--though his was a most mellifluous voice (he was stunning onstage, and apparently did the best Hamlet ever)--he was already "washed up," an alcoholic for whom coherence was a matter of some effort and little regard. CENTURY was amongst his post-code last gasps, proving he could definitely be counted on to play himself, a gentlemanly but hopeless drunk with sporadic moments of genius clarity peppered through his UNDER THE VOLCANO-like staring contests with the Lovecraftian blackness of his impending mortality.

He brought plenty of tragedy as the debauched, broke count wooing Greta Garbo in GRAND HOTEL (1932); was a believably mentally ill father returned from the asylum to re-connect with daughter Kate Hepburn in A BILL OF DIVORCEMENT (1932);  brokenhearted that Trilby doesn't love him as a hammy SVENGALI (1931); and like a gut-crushing portrait of me in the early 90s as a suicidal alcoholic movie star dealing with his much younger paramour named Paula in DINNER AT EIGHT (1933 - left). In all these he's alternately brilliant and unfocused, but also very cordial. In DINNER AT EIGHT in particular he's amazing, preparing his suicide (a recurring theme!) with great formality only to emit this pained choked back cry, only for a second or two, before choking it back, as if still acting for some unseen camera and determined to be stoic to the end for whatever ghost cameras happen to be around.

As Oscar Jaffe in TWENTIETH CENTURY however, he is transcendent, as if arising from the grave of EIGHT for one final phoenix expenditure. Imagine an alternative ending for SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), wherein Norma Desmond convinces DeMille to make Salome, bending reality to accommodate her grandiose self-image by, say, playing both herself, Von Stroheim, William Holden, the dead chimp and even Billy Wilder in a frenzied audition, channeling the spirits of every Broadway and Hollywood has-been and vindicating their endless struggles against death, disease, age, and--worst of all--obscurity. Good as that might be, Barrymore is better.

Lastly, there's the coolness of the train itself. Why are train movies so cool? What is it about hurtling through time and space aboard a giant locomotive (hopefully in a first class sleeper) that's so awesome? Something about the soothing rhythm of the rails, a sense of freedom from the illusion of control and permanence, maybe. It makes no sense to be walking around, sleeping and eating dinner in comfort while hurtling through the dark on complete faith that there are tracks ahead... or steep mountainous caverns, tunnels, and other dangers, whipping by at incredible speeds. No sense unless of course you're already hurdling through the cosmos on a spinning rock revolving around a star, then somehow it makes sense, somehow the two sets of motion cancel each other out to create a rare space of perfect stillness.

Then there's the light and shadow aspect of the film, deep shadows Hawks absorbed back in SCARFACE that allows the relatively cramped train sets to appear deeper than they are. At the end, after Jaffe's been shot and lies "dying" in the middle of his compartment the lights are dimmed for perfect mood and suddenly we too are swept up in the drama of it all. With everyone crying over the fallen Jaffe as he reaches into the approaching darkness for one last contract to get Lily to sign, you get the feeling that everyone is moving into a place of perfect freedom. In dramatizing death, we defeat it. With opened eyes you can see right into the frame, like they've conjured a rip in the screen via this self-reflexive celebration of ham acting and the power of pretend death to grant eternal life. The darkness of an empty theater becomes reflected now in every depth-filled shadow. As the stickers the crazy backer spreads around the train read: Repent, for the time is at hand!


It may be the healthiest choice of all to live in a state of constant morbid obsession, keeping reality forever at bay through constant play-acting, a kind of forward momentum mori. Or maybe it's just that TWENTIETH CENTURY was my first post-modern art wake up call, the Joycean slap in the face of aesthetic arrest, the first time the curtain pulled back for me and I realized that not only is all the world a stage and all the men and women in it merely players, but every action and reaction is properly blocked (with chalk) by some unseen guiding hand. Are we our own Oscar Jaffes, coming from a place far in our future, bedeviling our present time/space-anchored coils with outrageous stage directions from a place on high? Get free of your superego's incessant whining, open your mind and grab hold of Barrymore's coattails as he rides into the valley of the shadow of death at a mad gallop!

The tragedy is, don't go looking for anything else as good in the J. Barrymore canon, though you will want to later. Perhaps the only thing close is when Frederic March hams it up as John in THE ROYAL FAMILY OF BROADWAY, a filmed version of the play based on the Barrymore family which is, irritatingly, unavailable on DVD. True to the reckless juggernaut character of Oscar Jaffe, Barrymore continued for a few years longer than pop culture could bear him. He found temporary shelter as a foil for tiresomely wholesome crooner Rudy Valee on the radio, and played woebegone deans in squeaky clean college football/romance films. Don't bother with those, just value the madness of the film wherein he and Lombard broke the illusory difference between sincerity and manipulation, persona and self, character and living creature, to reveal the dark ghost in the moving machine, the momentum of a huge tube of iron hurling through mountains and over rivers like an unstoppable plummet into the abyss.

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