Vera

Wednesday night, Sleep capriciously refused to abscond with my conscious thought to the land of peaceful dreams. I rose from that bed of unrelenting wakefulness, and reserved tickets for a special event; I also added some hotel reservations. Sleep still maintained her discrete distance. What choice did I have? I turned to film noir.

Detour - Edward G. Ulmer 1945 - staring Tom Neal and Ann Savage. Neal plays a man who is hitchhiking across the country to see his sweetheart; he finds misery packaged in a pale sweater and a dark skirt. (That's misery in the skirt, not Neal's character).

Tom Neal makes a sympathetic character, but it's Ann Savage's performance as Vera that holds this otherwise forgettable film above of the waters of obscurity. As Vera, Ann is at her most savage. Nearly every time she opens her mouth, it's like having the jagged end of a broken bottle shoved into your guts; every phrase gives the bottle another painful twist. Vera is not just abrasive, she is terminally caustic.

I won't give away the ending; I will say that Vera's problems were finally resolved via lines of communication. 

As for my own little noir work, I had to go back and add some things to the cemetery scene. I look at it like Calypso's island of Ogygia in Homer's Odyssey; my reasons for thinking that are, of course, all my own, and are partially based on an explanation given about the island in a college class on the hero in literature. 

That was one of the least useful, and most interesting classes that I ever took. Classes like that made college fun...and we can all see where that got me.