Peggy Noonan And The Case Of Gutter Punk Ron DeSantis

She had left the Upper East Side behind. It had been an unseasonably warm winter in New York and Peggy Noonan, sister in good standing of the Order of the Triazolam Numbness, felt a need to stretch her legs, to stop staring at the same view out the same windows of her rooms. So she left her pied-à-terre and wandered in the general direction of Lower Manhattan. It was nearly eighty blocks. She was feeling spry.

She noticed things as she walked. Noticing things was her specialty. She noticed the store windows full of dresses and hats and the ladies walking in and out of them. She noticed rundown apartment houses. She noticed what looked to be a ’57 Buick, tailfins angled back just a bit as if bent there under speed. She noticed cafeterias where lonely men took their supper, dawdling over turkey and mashed potatoes and apple pie, in no rush to return to their small and lifeless apartments. There were a lot of ’57 Buicks. A lot of fifties-model cars, come to think of it.


A cloud crossed the sun. She looked up and noticed the sky had gone gray. The next moment, rain poured down in a rush. The strangest storm, she thought. There had been no warning, no drizzling ahead of the main force. The clouds had rolled in on a dime and wasted no time releasing their moisture on the stunned denizens of New York.

Of course she had not brought rain gear. The forecast had called for sun and warmth. Now here she was, caught out, becoming soaked right down to her socks. That was when she noticed the neon sign dully shining behind dirty glass. She hurried for the shelter it promised.

Fortune was with her, for she found herself in a bar. A rundown saloon of the sort one didn’t see much in New York anymore. Battered wooden tables, battered wooden chairs, battered wooden-faced men and women hunched over chipped glasses filled with glorious amber-colored liquids. This was a serious bar, for serious drinkers, people for whom drinking was not for lubricating social outings or celebrating milestones. Here drink was not a means to an end, but the end itself.

She found an empty stool, right near the cigarette machine – a cigarette machine! How quaint! – and the hard-looking gentleman leaning against it. He wore a fedora, a long raincoat, and a suit of an older style and vintage. He had a Lucky in his mouth, which he only removed to take a swallow from the glass of rye in front of him.

He waited until she had ordered a gin and tonic from the surly bartender. Then he spoke.

“Don’t see dames like you in this place much.” The voice was growly, well-cured by alcohol and tobacco. “Not with that fancy outfit. You people stick to uptown. It’s no less of a sewer, but you can go to cocktail parties and tell each other you’re keeping your fingernails clean.”

He stubbed out the cigarette and lit another. “Name’s Hammer. Mike Hammer. I’m a private detective. I got an office, a great secretary with fabulous legs and I spend too much time crawling around in a gutter with the worst scum that ever oozed off the sidewalks of this city. But my forty-five shoots straight. What else can a man want?”

The first GOP presidential debate is five months away, in August. Primaries begin about six months after.

“You go to hell, lady.”

Mr. DeSantis is a big dawg, and it isn’t only Donald Trump trying to take him down. A prospective competitor called recently to share his thoughts: “DeSantis is a cheap imitation of Trump, it’s Fox News soundbites and cowboy boots with 2-inch heels.”

“Sounds like quite the punk. Listen, the only man alive who should be wearing cowboy boots is Lorne Greene. Anyone else is a sharpie running a game on you. Say, is this Trump fella any relation to Fred Trump, guy who owns a bunch of slums out in Queens? The papers don’t say nice things.”

I don’t think he’s running as Trump without the psychopathology, I think he’s running as a serious, forward-leaning, pro-business, antiwoke conservative with populist inflections.

“The hell is antiwoke? Sounds like something those Greenwich Village beatniks would hang their berets on. You think the lushes in here care about something like that? They want a bed to lay down on at night, a little security. If they had those things, they wouldn’t be in here pouring bourbon down their throats day and night.”

“Maybe someone to take care of the communists too,” he said after a moment’s reflection. “If they think about it at all. Does this DeSantis fella hate commies? I’d vote for him, if I voted. Which I don’t. Whole goddamn system’s rotten. You want a smoke?”

His leadership in Florida has been “a rebuke to the entrenched elites who have driven our nation into the ground.” They are a “ruling class” that controls the federal bureaucracy, big business, corporate media, big tech, the universities. “These elites are ‘progressives’ who believe our country should be managed by an exclusive cadre of ‘experts’ who wield authority through an unaccountable and massive administrative state. They tend to view average Americans with contempt.”

“This guy wants to be president and he talks like a goddamn Columbia professor.” He gestured at the bartender, who brought over a bottle of rye and poured three fingers into Hammer’s glass. “Oh, did you want a clean glass for your second gin and tonic?” Hammer said to Peggy. “Not that kind of place, sister. Bar at the Waldorf’s probably open, though.”

My favorite part had a Mickey Spillane feel. Assigned as a naval officer to Northeast Florida, he sees a beautiful woman on a golf course. “She was dressed in classy golf attire and was generating an impressive amount of clubhead speed.” He thought her a college golfer: “She looked the part and had a great swing.”

“Golf, huh? The mug who hates elites wants to brag about nailing some tomato because she was wearing classy golf attire and could drive a 3-wood. He married her? I expect the coppers down in Florida are going to find him in his yard brained with one of those clubs someday.”

Does he connect with voters on the trail? How does he play it when he gets smacked around in debate?

“Smacked around? Like he’s some wretched scum who thought he could put it to some capo’s daughter without a fuss?” He went to light another cigarette and found the pack empty. A few coins and a handle pull brought him a fresh pack of Luckies from the cigarette machine. He crumpled the old pack and lobbed it onto the floor.

“Let me tell you something,” Hammer snarled as he touched a lit match to the cigarette and pulled on it greedily, like a baby with a milk bottle. “This boots-wearing phony sounds like he’d fold like a bad poker hand if some fairy so much as looked at him crosswise. He’s not impressing you, is he? ‘Cause when you walked in here I thought you looked pretty smart. For a chippy.”

You’re not stooping when you explain your thinking, you’re spreading.

“Something’s spreading around here, anyway.” Hammer finished off his whiskey and threw some coins on the bar. “Sounds like a hell of a guy, this DeSantis. A damned sleazeball if you ask me. Anyway, that’s enough letting you bend my ear. Gotta be a murder being committed somewhere.”

Hammer pulled his fedora low and tightened his raincoat around him. He slunk out of the bar into the street, trailing cigarette smoke and midcentury machismo with equal aplomb. Peggy thought about taking leave herself, about going home to begin her column. Instead, she ordered another gin and tonic. After all, it was still raining.

[WSJ]

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Liam Neeson is back in stylish Hollywood thriller “Marlowe”

Liam Neeson is back in the atmospheric 1930s-set crime caper “Marlowe,” based on the book by John Banville, a screenplay by William Monahan and directed by Neil Jordan (that also stars Colm Meaney).

Talk about an Irish fest – and how refreshing to catch a new movie that reminds us how they used to make them – which “Marlowe” certainly is. 

Set in Tinseltown in the 1930s, the story is based on “The Black-Eyed Blonde: A Philip Marlowe Novel” by celebrated Irish writer Banville, with a screenplay by award-winning Irish American screenwriter (of “The Departed”) Monahan and Jordan himself.

“Marlowe” begins with Irish American heiress Clare Cavendish (“Clare like the county,” she says) who is equal parts ravishing and deadly. 

Played by Diane Kruger, it’s clear from her first appearance there is far more to her than meets the eye, which world-weary gumshoe Marlowe (played by Neeson) intuits during their first consultation.

Cavendish reveals she has a no-good paramour named Nico Peterson (played by Francois Arnaud) who has gone missing. She’ll pay Marlowe handsomely to have him found.

What her real interest in this womanizing, ‘evil-incarnate’ player really is isn’t immediately obvious, but that pulls the audience in, as does Kruger’s all-electric screen presence. 

Film noir detective flicks have been a Hollywood staple since the days of Humphrey Bogart and in “Marlowe,” Neeson is a gumshoe for our own fraught times. Sensitive, smart, and impossible to hoodwink, he plays to his screen strengths in this wisecracking and world-weary role. 

Neeson’s Marlowe is an Irish immigrant and former World War One soldier in the Royal Irish Rifles. A former LAPD cop who’s lost his badge and taken up detective work, he has a reputation for solving the toughest crimes.

Diane Kruger as Clare Cavendish and Liam Neeson as hardbitten Irish Phillip Marlowe in “Marlowe.”

As Clare’s brilliant but untrustworthy mother, Jessica Lange plays former Hollywood it-girl Dorothy Cavendish, who is as familiar with the works of James Joyce as she is with the dubious machinations of Hollywood. 

Lange’s character has a toxic competition with her daughter for the attention of her Hollywood producer husband now about to be ambassador to the Court of King James. A former bootlegger who hit the big time, the Kennedy echoes are unmistakable, as is the suspicion of the rough work that undergirds his fortune. 

What director Jordan delivers is a hugely atmospheric and stylish period drama that pulls you in from the first frame. The skillful use of computer animation to bring to life 30’s Hollywood boulevards, the neons and billboards and passing motors, gives this film an authenticity that evokes its era artfully.

But it’s Neeson’s performance as a hardbitten detective that makes the film sing. He knows he’s getting too old for the kind of rough and tumble the job often demands but without his badge and pension what choice does he have? 

The scenes where he takes on the tough guys are convincing and often surprisingly funny. After he knocks one guy out he picks up a chair and shrugs “f—k it,” then breaks it over his back to keep him out cold. This kind of lived-in character note brings his “Marlowe” to life and makes you root for his good guy in a bad world persona.

The plot of the film has other plots concealed within its lines, of course. It turns out that the pronounced dead Nico Peterson is still very much alive, as Clare Cavendish suspects, and that the spider’s web of intrigue only builds from there.

Crime has always been the dark underside of the American Dream and this film takes a deep dive into the compromised lives and actions that support it. No one is a piece of virtue, but almost no one is entirely composed of, as Alan Cumming’s entertaining character Lou Hendricks calls it, “tarantulas.”

Instead, this L.A. is a fallen Eden, a place where innocence and promise curdle faster than milk in the sun and where wisecracking cops like Bernie Ohls (played by Colm Meaney) and Joe Green (played by Ian Hart) have had a belly full of seeing enough.

Liam Neeson as Hollywood Irish detective Phillip Marlowe in Marlowe

Liam Neeson as Hollywood Irish detective Phillip Marlowe in Marlowe

Jordan keeps things loose and funny – as well as unsettling – as the film unspools, focusing on the palm trees and all the neon-lit glory but reminding us how Tinsel town got made. “Why this is hell nor am I out of it,” says the wily ambassador, quoting Doctor Faustus, as Marlowe circles the dark web of deceit and murder that has helped build his empire.

For all its dark themes, the film is an unexpected romp. Yes, it’s assembled some of the most compromised and compromising people you will ever encounter, but there are exchanges between them that light up the screen.

When Marlowe grills country club impresario Floyd Hanson (played by Danny Huston, who is the image of his famous father, Irish American director John Huston) he says it must have been hard for him to witness Peterson’s mutilated body lying in the road. But Hanson replies, “I’ve seen men in more disarray than that in which Mr. Petersen was discovered,” adding that he’s a World War One veteran like Marlowe and says, “Once, after an artillery strike, I found a friend’s tooth in my whiskey glass. I drank the whiskey.”

“You’re a terrible man,” says Marlowe. “I needed the whiskey,” Hanson replies. This is the kind of noir-ish dialogue that we pay the money for and Monahan doesn’t disappoint.

It’s good to see Colm Meaney and Neeson mix it up onscreen again and they are well-met as two seen it all cops who stand on either side of the law but work together. As Bernie Ohls, Meaney quietly looks out for his former college and reminds us of the danger Marlowe puts himself in for a paycheck.

The story changes track multiple times as Marlowe progresses but it’s clear at all times who the most dangerous protagonists are. Some might grouse that the big reveal is undercut by the secondary characters, but that’s to miss the point here. The lines that aren’t ever crossed belong to the quietly un-buyable Irish detective, the one good man in an ocean of the unjust. 

“You’re a long way from Tipperary,” Marlowe says as he watches Dorothy Cavendish move through her unhappy world of great wealth and privilege. It’s a funny line but it’s also a reminder that Marlowe is very far from Ireland now himself, and the two Irish immigrants have taken very different and contrasting paths that tell the story in miniature.

The roles you play offscreen are as important as the ones you play on, “Marlowe” reminds us. So be careful not to get typecast or worse do it to yourself. In this film, the masks that people wear become their prisons. Only Marlowe himself emerges free in the end.

“Marlowe” is in theaters now.



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