Suspicion, and The Searchers

It's been a while since I've updated because, well, there hasn't been a whole lot going on. Actually things have been very busy at work, but not in an interesting "Oh, I should write about that" sense. They have been busy enough that I did actually go into the office today (I almost never go into work on the weekend).

The only work-related news really worth reporting is that my administrative machine at work (the one where my mail, meeting scheduler, and the like are) seems to be going belly-up. At first I thought it was a hard drive problem, but now it's freezing shortly after it brings up the mouse cursor but before it starts booting Mac OS. (I have System 9 installed.) Zapping the PRAM doesn't help. Holding the SHIFT key down to turn off extensions doesn't help. This first happened shortly after I came back from the holidays, and it would perhaps one time in two decide to freeze like this. Well, now it's happening more than 98 times in 100, by which I mean I spent about 30 minutes constantly rebooting the machine tonight, to no avail.

Okay, one time it did start to boot, but after it displayed the big "Mac OS" screen but before it started loading extensions it gave me a system error with the words "Bus error". "Bus errors" are very common in UNIX apps, but I don't think I've ever seen a Mac give me a bus error (at least, not so that it told me so!). So I rebooted and it started freezing again. Yargh!

So I sent my boss mail to tell him about this. My guess is that I need a new motherboard or something, in which case I might as well junk the machine. We'll see. Anyone out there know anything about this?

On a related note, Apple announced its new employee purchase plan, which has slightly shallower discounts, but new hardware will be available to us more rapidly. I am thinking of buying a G4 and a larger (21") monitor this summer, to replace my 2-year-old G3 and 17" monitor. If I do this, I will probably bring my current home equipment into work to serve as my admin machine, since unless I suddenly get a really spiffy new admin machine (fat chance; spiffy machines get used for real work, and rightly so), it will be a great machine for such purposes.

(By the way, I have three machines in my cubie: One 350 MHz blue-and-white G3 on which I run Mac OS X Server to do WebObjects testing, one 200 MHz Pentium II running NT 4 on which I do WebObjects testing, and my admin machine, which is a Power Mac 8500, probably about 133 MHz or so. I can really suck up the cycles doing WebObjects testing, so it's very convenient to have a dedicated e-mail and bug tracking computer.)

Actually, there is a little more work news: It turns out that the manager of the development part of my team is going to leave Apple sometime next month, having gotten one of those "offers he couldn't refuse" from a startup. I think the developers are all pretty bummed about this. We'll see what happens.

Today I swung by Comics Conspiracy for a sale, where pretty much everything I bought was 30% off. I picked up a number of good titles, including Avengers #61 for a cheap $7.00. (Why is this neat? Because it was published in the mid-to-late 60s!) Subrata met me there, and then we went over to the apartment of a friend of his to watch a couple of movies that he (Subrata) had on tape.

Said friend, Erik, lives in Sunnyvale, in "apartment central", basically a street lined with apartment complexes, in a neighborhood filled with such streets. It was actually a little less glum than I'd expected, but it's not the sort of place I'm hoping to find to move to. The apartment itself was pretty spiffy, though; it even had a fireplace!

The first film was Suspicion (1941), an early Alfred Hitchcock film with Cary Grant and John Fontaine. Fontaine plays Lina McLaidlaw (what a great name!), daughter of a well-to-do English General (Cedric Hardwicke, whose son Edward would later play Dr. Watson opposite Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes) who looks like she's never going to get married. However, on a train she meets Johnnie Aysgarth (Grant), a dashing young man who travels in high society. Against their better judgment, they fall in love and get married. And then the fun begins.

It turns out that Johnnie is a compulsive gambler, and also flat broke, contrary to Lina's expectations. (You'd think she'd have asked about this!) He devises schemes to borrow or swindle money from people to stay afloat, and compulsively lies about it. This puts Lina on an emotional roller coaster, which runs out of control when she starts to think that Johnnie will turn to murder to settle his debts.

It's a fairly clever film, but not one of Hitchcock's best. The dialogue doesn't crackle as in some others, and Grant never seems at his best, either. (In fact, he seems somewhat miscast, although he would play another not-quite-what-he-seems character twenty years later in Charade.) I wouldn't rush out to see this one.

The back end of the twin bill was The Searchers (1956), directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter. (Hunter, ten years later, would play Captain Christopher Pike in the original pilot for Star Trek.) In it, Confederate veteran Ethan Edwards (Wayne) returns home to his brother in the wild west after the Civil War, but is away when his brother's home is sacked by Comanche indians. Only two survivors are known - a young woman and a girl, both captured by the indians. Initially a small posse pursues them, but eventually the others are killed, or have other concerns, and only Edwards and Martin Pawley (Hunter), who had been taken in by Edwards' brother's family, continue the search, which lasts for five or more years.

Filmed mostly in Monument Valley (said Subrata), the visuals are stunning. Wayne does a fine job (this is the first Wayne film I've seen, that I can recall!), although he seems to have exactly one cadence in which he speaks. However, he does get all the best lines, often delivered with deadpan conviction. Hunter is given less material to work with, and sometimes comes off as a little too emphatic, not entirely convincing.

Everyone else watching the film seemed more impressed with it than I was. It's by no means a bad film, but it is a rather slow film, and the characters don't quite seem fully-realized. There's conflict here, but the conflict is entirely situational, and we don't really see much evolution in our heroes over the course of their long journey. So the film is unsatisfying from that standpoint. Again, not a great film; I wouldn't rush out to see it.

(It's easy to see the influence of The Searchers on the Clint Eastwood westerns, notably The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, which is also sumptuously shot and is quite slow. But the latter is a much better and richer film, for my money.)