Craig McDonald: HEAD GAMES THE GRAPHIC NOVEL: “REAL CHARACTERS” #6 MARELENE DIETRICH

Thursday, October 5, 2017

HEAD GAMES THE GRAPHIC NOVEL: “REAL CHARACTERS” #6 MARELENE DIETRICH

The Hector Lassiter novels (ten of them, including HEAD GAMES) frequently incorporate real people.

All of that carries over into HEAD GAMES, THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, coming Oct. 24, 2017 from First Second Books.

The range of “real characters” is prodigious, from the real-life personalities who dominate some of those books’ action, to those real people who are, well, fleeting, yet still influential.

Some are famous, some are even infamous.

Some are little known to the wider public, yet they affected the course of history and the Lassiter series sometimes aims to give these historical ghosts their proper due.

To give a little bonus context to those “characters” who appear in HEAD GAMES: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, we’re delving into each, here and there, over successive Thursdays…

ORDER HEAD GAMES: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL

Ernest Hemingway lovingly dubbed her “The Kraut.” The stuff of their meeting is Pop Culture legend.

On a cross-Atlantic voyage, they met over dinner. Realizing she was about to become the thirteenth at the table, Marlene Dietrich, German-born actress and chanteuse demurred.

Then a voice interrupted:

“I will happily become the fourteenth,” said Ernest Hemingway.

They were, by virtual mutual disclosure, in love without ever making love.

Call it ships in the night, or what Hem termed, “unsynchronized passion.”

Hem went on: “Those times when I was out of love, the Kraut was deep in some romantic tribulation, and on those occasions when Dietrich was on the surface and swimming about with those marvelously seeking eyes, I was submerged.”

In HEAD GAMES: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL, “The Kraut” is another example of what songwriter Tom Russell termed filmmaker Orson Welle’s “tragic” miscasting of the now revered noir.

In the film TOUCH OF EVIL, whose set our hero Hector Lassiter and his interviewer/poet Bud Fiske visit in HEAD GAMES, Dietrich is mysteriously cast as a Mexican madame.

She doesn’t get much screen-time, but she delivers a killer presence and delivers the film’s devastating closing last line on Police Captain Hank Quinlan as portrayed by Welles: “He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?”

Then she walks off into the distance, just like Welles’ character’s former lover, Anna Schmidt in THE THIRD MAN, a nice and clear premediated call-back.)

Marlene is a hectoring presence in reuniting Hector and Hem in HEAD GAMES: THE NOVEL, and that reunion occurs in TOROS & TORSOS.