Too Hot to Handle
I'm all for summer but can we tone it down a bit?
It is too hot to be sat indoors but I guess you lot have come to expect recommendations every week…what is this?! A recommendations newsletter or something?! Oh.
This week I’m keeping it short and sweet with a quartet of tense tales set in hot climes or heatwaves that may serve to offset some of the heat we’re all feeling right now.
And before we crack on, a little note of housekeeping: the newsletter will be fortnightly for the foreseeable as I’m working on another project (to be revealed soon, sorry to be one of those people) at the moment and I just can’t get to everything every week with a toddler in tow. But the mystery project is one that is very much linked to the newsletter so I’ll share all once it’s ready.
Anyway, that’s enough admin, let’s get to it…
TL;DR
Watch A Streetcar Named Desire and Rear Window; read Hot Milk; and watch Cruel Summer.
WATCH
This week I’ve plumped for two old school Hollywood classics: first up, from 1951: A Streetcar Named Desire. Based on the Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name, the movie was a hit from the moment of release. If you’re wondering why, may I direct your attention to the photo below:
It tells the story of Blanche DuBois (played Vivien Leigh who you may remember as the winner of the Best Actress Oscar in 1939 for her turn as Scarlett O’Hara in that not-insignificant little flick known as Gone with the Wind) who, following a spell of misfortunes in life, comes to stay with her sister Stella and brooding brute of a brother-in-law, Stanley.
They’re all wedged into a tiny apartment in New Orleans. It’s hot, it’s sweaty, tempers flare all over the place and madness beckons. If you haven’t seen it and you think you can tell what’s going to happen a mile off (Blanche and Stanley realise they are made for each other & fall madly in love): dear God, you are wrong. It has all the usual Southern charm (i.e. rage, anguish, alcoholism and heat-fuelled madness - I do wonder if a lot of them were simply dehydrated) one would expect from a Tennessee Williams tale.
And a young Marlon Brando’s torso, desperate to freed from the bounds of that t-shirt…
This film was truly epic - not in a big budget blockbuster way, but rather through simply its existence as it is: directed by the hugely controversial yet wildly talented Elia Kazan (he didn’t cover himself in glory when he named several theatre colleagues as Communists during the McCarthyite search for Reds in Hollywood), it introduced the world to Marlon Brando (as Stanley) in his breakout role and was nominated for twelve Oscars -winning four, including a second Best Actress for Vivien Leigh. But I really cannot stress enough how hot Marlon Brando is in this. Because of the humidity, of course. Ahem.
A completely different style of unbearable tension now with the 1954 classic: Rear Window. I have to say, I love this movie: Alfred Hitchcock (a right bastard by all accounts but made great films and was so lovely about his wife here), Grace Kelly (GRACE KELLY!) and Jimmy Stewart? Oh and Kelly’s wardrobe? Yes please!
Stewart plays Jeff, a photojournalist who is confined to a wheelchair in his flat after breaking his leg. He is tended to by a nurse - yet another Stella - and his extremely beautiful, model girlfriend Lisa (Kelly). To while away the hours of boredom during a heatwave (remember: it’s the Fifties; the man barely has TV to amuse him never mind a smartphone or the whole internet) he starts spying on his neighbours. In the course of this pretty creepy behaviour he becomes convinced that his neighbour Perry Mason (pre-wheelchair) has killed his wife.
Because Jeff is a well-to-do white guy with apparently unimpeachable credentials (let’s forget that he’s basically a peeping Tom, shall we?), when he contacts a cop he knows to accuse his neighbour, the detective only goes & investigates…!
Obviously, nothing is proved with this initial investigation but it’s only just the beginning. Jeff eventually drags his nurse and his girlfriend in to be his eyes & ears (and legs, frankly) and a hugely enjoyable and at times quite stressful tale unfolds. Did Perry do it? Is there a body buried in the garden?! Who knows?!
An excellent example of a Hitchcockian thriller for a warm summer’s evening.
READ
Hot Milk is a 2016 novel from the enormously prolific Deborah Levy - she has written numerous novels, even more plays as well as short stories and poetry. And she’s been nominated for the Booker Prize no fewer than three times. So she knows her way around a story.
Hot Milk marked Levy’s second Booker nomination and, I must admit, the only title of hers thus far that I have read. It’s stayed with me all these years later - it focuses on Sofia who has travelled to Spain with her ailing mother, Rose.
Rose is confined to a wheelchair and has remortgaged her home in the UK to seek a remedy from the seeming quack Gomez at his clinic in the scorching Spanish sunshine. But her (honestly questionable) illness does not prevent her from overwhelming Sofia’s life which has shrunk back and been subsumed by her mother’s needs.
The setting for the novel - the unforgiving high heat of southern Spain - is as much a physical oppressor of Sofia as her mother’s demands are a psychological one. At one point she escapes to a financially ruined Athens to reconnect with her estranged wealthy father. But let’s just say: that doesn’t go well either.
This couldn’t be labelled a feel-good holiday read but is an incredible and excruciating portrayal of inside a young woman’s mind as she scrabbles around trying to find her place in the world and a way to independence & hopefully happiness.
WATCH
When I first read about Cruel Summer, honestly my thought was “You had me ‘set in the ‘90s’” - what is it about nostalgia for the dog days of summers in your youth? I think back to weeks on end in the Irish countryside and it is invariably always sunny and we were always playing outside. (The latter was likely true whether it was sunny or not; it was Ireland. If you didn’t go outside when it was raining, you often just didn’t go outside. The former must be rose-tinted madness)
Back to the matter at hand, Cruel Summer is only two seasons long & easily binged. The first season is set from 1993 to 1995 and tells the story of Kate and Jeanette - Kate is the popular girl that everyone loves and wants to be / be friends with. Jeanette is the nerd. When Kate goes missing, Jeanette just seemingly…takes over her life. But then Kate shows up again claiming Jeanette knew exactly what happened to her as she saw Kate being abducted: cue Jeanette becoming the most hated person in the United States.
The second season is completely different and about totally different characters - this time set in 1999-2000. It involves a foreign exchange student, a love triangle and a murder! It gripped me a little less than the first to be honest but if you like teen dramas like Pretty Little Liars and Riverdale or even more grown up thrillers like The Sinner and Big Little Lies, then this hot Texan tale is definitely an entertaining way to pass a few hours.