capsule reviews

claudette colbert, james

Cleopatra (Cecil B. DeMille, 1934)
Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (Ernst Lubitsch, 1938)
Midnight (Mitchell Leisen, 1939)

Last year, Tinashe put out a song called “Nasty” whose chorus (“Is somebody gonna match my freak?”) went quasi-viral on TikTok or wherever it is pieces of songs go viral.¹ I have a personal soft spot for songs like “Nasty” that are both super horny and very romantic at the same time. Are we not all searching for somebody to match our freak in this crazy world, and so on.…

From my sampling of her movies,² Claudette Colbert seems to play, exclusively, a woman on a quest to find somebody to match her freak. In Midnight, she succeeds so resoundingly and unexpectedly at finding somebody as insane as her—twice, once platonically and once romantically—that the line basically popped up unbidden in my mind. In the (extremely uneven) Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, the movie ends with her beloved in a straitjacket and seemingly at her mercy. Freak matched, but at what cost?

As somebody with a great love of screwballs, my single complaint is that the men are often uninteresting. Sometimes the movie incorporates their uninteresting qualities into the movie—The Lady Eve does this pretty well—but other times these women are doing their backflips and plotting for men who are, at heart, untoasted Wonderbread (I Married A Witch, Remember the Night, Ball of Fire). But Colbert’s women generally end up paired with men as volatile as they are.

There are exceptions. As Cleopatra, she does not, I am sad to say, succeed in finding a man to match her freak. How could she? She’s seducing Romans.³ If you want to watch a movie which seems like it could have single-handedly brought about the Hays Code (though technically post-dating it), however, I highly recommend Cleopatra if only for the fact that it opens with what certainly seems to be a fully naked woman.⁴

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James (Percival Everett, 2024)⁵
If you care about “spoilers” there’s a “spoiler” below.

Even though Percival Everett is a widely beloved “critical darling” / “writer’s writer,” I have in fact read no Everett except for… this book. I have purchased many Everett books people have told me are excellent in order to read them at some later date. But I read James, his retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, because, basically, it kept making people kind of irritated. Like I’d log onto Substack and there would be some new post along the lines of “James isn’t all that,” and eventually friend of the newsletter

Naomi Kanakia

wrote one so I was like… fine! Fine! I’ll get an opinion! I’ll read the book! Another data point for the longstanding BDM Industries tenet that haters are as / more valuable as / than fans, I guess.

James is not what I’d call a “more realistic” Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but rather an attempt to imaginatively live within and around it. James is like a character trapped in a play whose only mode of self-expression comes in the form of asides to the audience. In his role as “Jim,” he acts out a role he has to play convincingly—the stakes of not doing so are deadly serious—but which is an unsatisfying role for any kind of adult human being. As James continues, though, it starts to diverge from Huck Finn, in ways that begin to allow its central character the possibility of acting differently. Which he does, in an extremely satisfying series of violent actions.

Huck Finn is certainly in the running for “great American novel” and in the way it is both (courageously) antiracist while also (inevitably) racist it certainly represents something about America itself almost too well. Occasionally, James gets sick and has hallucinatory conversations with Enlightenment figures—Voltaire, John Locke—who can never quite admit him to be human like themselves, even as the tenor of their actual ideas would seem to push them in that direction.⁶ Like Huck Finn, they contain within themselves the language with which to condemn their own failures.⁷ (These conversations are also extremely funny and probably my favorite parts of the book.)

As is probably plain, I liked James quite a bit, but I did have one big problem with it. That is, the book’s big reveal that James is Huck’s real father is a dodge. Right up until that point, Huck is a thorny and frustrating character for James and for us. He’s a child and in some sense innocent of the slave system, and that oblivious innocence leads him and James into danger and trouble. He’s on James’s side but he can’t be relied on to stay there, because the lure of white America will always be calling to him, always wheedling at him to assert his ill-gotten authority over James.

The parentage reveal ultimately does away with all of this, simplifying their relationship in a frustrating way. But as a loving tribute to and critique of Twain’s book, James is a success. Much like Mark Twain at his best, it is disarmingly funny, then horrifying. Its final touch, its own contribution, is to be bloodily liberatory.

1. The whole album is good, btw.

2. I’ve also seen It Happened One Night, naturally.

3. Classic mistake, one might say.

4. “This isn’t a capsule review! You barely talked about the movies!” There are no laws in capsule reviews….

5. Affiliate link.

6. It is probably for the best that Everett did not push this series of encounters to their most absurd conclusion (James talks with Mark Twain).

7. Significantly, James’s final dream interlocutor is not a person at all—it’s another fictional character, Candide’s Cunégonde. She tells him:

“You’re mortgaged, Jim. Like a farm, like a house. Really, the bank owns you. Miss Watson gets a bond, a piece of paper that say what you’re worth, and you just keep living in this condition. Living. You’re a part of the bank’s assets and so people all over the world are making money off your scarred black hide. Make sense? Nobody wants you free.”

“Somebody does. There’s a war.”

She nodded. “Maybe you won’t be a slave, but you won’t be free.”

It’s not too long after this conversation that James begins to act in ways that the reader of Twain could not have anticipated. Somebody does want James free, but it’s not Union soldiers. It’s James.