If I was a kindly Mr. Belvedere type and had money to burn during the early years of the Eisenhower administration, I would want to do what I could to improve two marriages that are hobbled by husbands who think small and need to have their horizons broadened.

I’m speaking of Stanley and Stella Kowalski of New Orleans. married in 1947 but struggling with Stanley’s primitive grease-monkey mentality as well as the traumatic after-effects of a prolonged visit to their French Quarter apartment by Stella’s mentally unstable older sister, Blanche.

I’m also speaking of Terry and Edie Malloy, a Hoboken couple who happily tied the knot in the fall of 1954 but are facing a limited future, in no small part due to Terry’s lack of education and his resultant inability to live or think beyond any place other than Hoboken, despite some terribly brutal experiences that they both endured at the hand of gangster Johnny Friendly.

Edie and Stella are good, caring, deeply spiritual women and basically fine but Terry and Stanley need a certain kind of education that might open them up and perhaps even set their souls free.

My response would be to befriend the Kowalskis and the Malloys and separately take them to Europe and show them around as best I could. Trust me, their lives would be immeasurably enriched by visits to London, the English countryside, Paris, Tuscany, Rome and the Amalfi Coast.

I would start the Malloy adventure in Dublin and Southern Ireland so Terry could appreciate his Irish heritage.

Likewise for Stanley’s benefit I would make a point of taking the Kowalskis to Poland (Warsaw, Gdańsk, Krakow).

The Malloys and the Kowalskis may or may not find domestic harmony and fulfillment after their European travels. But they would at least have felt and seen and tasted a greater, richer world, and you can bet that Terry and Stanley would emerge as men of deeper reflection and greater consequence.

And you know what? If these European jaunts work out I would arrange for the couples to meet in Manhattan in the early fall of ‘55 (suites at the Waldorf Astoria, dinner at Minetta Tavern, tickets to see a B’way musical or perhaps an Arthur Miller play).

Imagine Stanley and Terry meeting for the first time! And you know Edie and Stella would get along famously.

Did Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave (’13), which was filled with brutality and sadism, qualify as black misery porn?

No, it didn’t. Not once did I think to myself, “This is a real downer.” Partly because Chiwetel Ejiofor‘s “Solomon Northup” was and is a great character, and because McQueen’s film amounted to much more than subject matter — it was and is a masterful, deeply affecting human drama.

That said, read this Wikipedia page about Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys” (2019) and explain to me how RaMell Ross’s film adaptation (Amazon/MGM., 10.25), due to screen at Telluride and open the New York Film Festival a few weeks later…tell me how this doesn’t feel (from a distance at least) like Black Misery Porn in bold caps.

And who are the sons of Lee Marvin?

Kamala Harris‘s history with Willie Brown in the ’90s is, of course, a so-whatter.

Within the quiet corridors of power it is totally par-for-the-course for attractive women to climb the ladder by way of a relationship with a powerful dude. The film industry has long been rife with such arrangements — Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, Monica Vitti and Michelangelo Antonioni, Guiletta Masina and Federico Fellini, etc. Not to mention Caesar and Cleopatra, Napoleon and Josephine, Evita and Juan Peron, etc.

There is no one, no one at all
Never has been, and never will be a lover, male or female
Who hasn’t an eye on, in fact they rely on
Tricks they can try on their partner
They’re hoping their lover will help them or keep them
Support them, promote them
Don’t blame them, you’re the same

Has life ever been fair? I am shocked….shocked!…that people use each other for this or that gain.

…died three months ago at age 80, and few noticed until yesterday. Here’s my November 2013 piece about visiting the My Lai massacre museum in central Vietnam.

…due to “concerns over his workload.” What a gentle reed! Pussycat! Real men don’t turn down professional opportunities because they’re hard…Jesus. Send Mulaney to Lee Marvin boot camp.