May 1943: The Ox-Bow Incident














Oh! A western! With a name like that I thought this was going to be about an obscure Pacific naval battle or something.

This is from a director, William A. Wellman, who’s done a shit-load of movies, but who’s unknown to me, for some reason or other.

Aaaanyway. This is a kinda odd western. It’s about a posse going after a criminal, but it’s mostly about the moral ramifications of taking the law into your own hands and all that stuff. Which makes me wonder whether this, taking the timing into account, is a pro-Nazi movie in disguise somehow. Is cow-rustling a metaphor for invading Poland?

Oh, oh, I get it! I mean, this is American movie making a passionate case against lynching people. The people being lynched at the time in the US were black people… so is this really an anti-racist movie?

Or is it just generally saying that a judicial system is a nice thing?

Or is it a totally metaphor-less movie just telling a story about the Old West?

Difficult to read.

“I thought there were one white man among you.”

So I don’t know what’s this about, but is it any good? This is Clint Eastwood’s favourite movie, and has a generally positive reception. There’s a lot of very pretty imagery here. The actors are arranged superbly to catch their best angles, and the matte painting is superb.

But I don’t know. I was scratching my head more than I was getting into the characters, really.

The Ox-Bow Incident. William A. Wellman. 1943.

Popular movies in May 1943 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
165298.1The Ox-Bow Incident
42618.0The More the Merrier
51517.8Ossessione
20937.6This Land Is Mine
38217.4Five Graves to Cairo

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

April 1943: Clancy Street Boys

















I am Confused, Bemused and Bemildred.

What is this?!?!

It starts off with a street gang spanking their leader… and then the rival gang spanks him… and I guess my general confusion is due to the video quality is kinda like fourth generation VHS, and the audio is more rumble than voice.

But what’s even more confusing are all these middle-aged looking people who are in these gangs… are they supposed to be teenagers? 12-year-olds? One of the gangs are all-white… is that a sign of something? Are they a metaphor for Nazis? Is this a bit from a serial? Are these all well-known characters? In the Marvel comic Fantastic Four, there’s a Yancy Street Gang… is that a take on this movie (if it is a movie) or something?

Wikipedia to the rescue. It’s a movie in the East Side Boys franchise. href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yancy_Street_Gang”>Yancy doesn’t mention them.

And they’re supposed to be like eighteen.

ANYWAY. This turns into a classic farce plot and they run through all the scenes you’d expect. It’s workmanlike, but it’s kinda amusing. And if I could make out more of the words, it would probably have been actually funny.

Clancy Street Boys. William Beaudine. 1943.

Popular movies in April 1943 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
4377.3Clancy Street Boys
3407.2A Stranger in Town
14277.2Edge of Darkness
81347.2I Walked with a Zombie
2376.9China
10006.8We Dive at Dawn
7036.8Presenting Lily Mars
4226.7Slightly Dangerous
6916.7Fires Were Started
3996.6The Falcon Strikes Back

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

March 1943: Hangmen Also Die






























Huh. A British war movie directed by Fritz Lang from a script co-written with Bertolt Brecht.

I had no idea what to expect here, but they use their not-inconsiderable talents to go all-in on the anti-Nazi propaganda war effort. And it’s great!

The Nazis are evil, eeevil; mincing and brutally sadistic at the same time.

“You know we have means to make you talk!”

But it’s not a total triumph. It aims for Total Paranoid Thriller, and there’s some thrilling scenes in here. But it’s a bit… flabby in the editing? I wonder whether that’s a result of the restoration? The pre-titles said that some scenes had been restored from acetate, which might perhaps mean that this is longer than the theatrical version?

Because, really, there’s way too many character arcs in here. I feel like there’s a classic thriller hidden inside here, but the various sub-plots are smothering it.

But I’m quibbling. This is fab. Those evil Nazis. So eeevil.

And pimply.

Hangmen Also Die. Fritz Lang. 1943.

Popular movies in March 1943 according to IMDB:

PosterVotesRatingMovie
6777.6It Ain’t Hay
32837.5Hangmen Also Die!
20467.3Cabin in the Sky
13637.1The Human Comedy
2707.1The Moon Is Down
5657.0Flesh and Fantasy
28787.0Sherlock Holmes in Washington
3256.9Hello Frisco, Hello
2936.9The Silver Fleet
4446.8They Got Me Covered

This blog post is part of the Decade series.

Useful Consumer Review

I needed a new scanner, and I wanted one that was significantly faster than the one I’ve been using until now. After some Googling, I landed on the Epson DS-50000, which is an A3+ scanner with a promise of being able to scan an A3 300DPI page in four seconds.

The web site I bought it from said that it’s a 4PPM scanner.

THOSE ARE NOT THE SAME THING!

So I was excited when I finally got it, two months after I ordered it. Was it going to be 4PPM or 4SPP?

The latter! From hitting “enter” on my USB-connected laptop to having the scanned page up in my Emacs, it takes 3.5 seconds. Very impressive, I think. It’s only USB2, and I thought that might be a bottleneck, perhaps, but apparently not. It also feels very sturdy and it doesn’t have a fan, so it’s quite silent. It’s very nice. And it makes good-quality scans, too.

But.

Yes, I connected it to a Linux laptop and you all knows what comes next: A tale of woe.

$ scanimage -d epsonds:libusb:001:019 --resolution 300dpi > /tmp/file

Worked perfectly the first time I tried it, so I thought I was in luck for once. But then I tried it again:

$ scanimage -d epsonds:libusb:001:019 --resolution 300dpi > /tmp/file
scanimage: open of device epsonds:libusb:001:019 failed: Error during device I/O

Gah! Basically, nothing helped. And it’s not just when scanning: Any command that talks to the scanner works the first time:

$ scanimage -L
device `epsonds:libusb:001:019' is a Epson DS-50000 ESC/I-2

But the second time:

$ scanimage -L

No scanners were identified. If you were expecting something different,
check that the scanner is plugged in, turned on and detected by the
sane-find-scanner tool (if appropriate). Please read the documentation
which came with this software (README, FAQ, manpages).

If I unplug it and replug it, then it works again.

After googling a bit, it seems that somebody had the same issue some years back with a different scanner, and the way to fix it was to build scanimage and friends from the current source tree, but that didn’t help.

So after some head scratching, I thought of a different approach: Obviously, something scanimage is doing is leaving the scanner in a bad state. What if I just reset the USB interface? Is that something that’s even possible?

Yes!

I added a Makefile and put it on Microsoft Github for your convenience. All the code does is basically:

ioctl(fd, USBDEVFS_RESET, 0);

And this resets just the single USB port, so nothing else wonky happens to the USB sub-subsystem. And the command is extremely fast, so it adds no delay to the scanning process.

You do get a lot of these messages in your kern.log, though:

Oct 28 21:03:06 corrigan kernel: [972003.683893] usb 1-2: reset high-speed USB device number 19 using xhci_hcd

But who cares.

It’s truly the year of Linux on the Laptop.