By Stuart Mitchner
During my last year in college, I discovered that I was picking up the mannerisms of Akim Tamiroff, the only useful thing, in fact, that I learned in the entire four years.
—from The Moviegoer
Walker Percy’s National Book Award-winning novel begins with an epigraph from Søren Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death: “the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.” Early in The Moviegoer (1961), the narrator Binx Bolling refers to the message on the marquee of his neighborhood theater in New Orleans (“Where Happiness Costs So Little”), claiming to be “quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie.” While other people “treasure memorable moments in their lives,” what he remembers is “the time JohnWayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”
I felt the same way about the kitten finding Orson Welles, a “dead man” who isn’t dead named Harry Lime. I was 11. Eight years later I would be in Vienna looking for the equivalent of the doorway where my life in the world of movies began. Film as a text or commodity can be equated with existentialism, it’s mortal; movies are Akim Tamiroff, who played Sancho Panza in Welles’s unfinished Don Quixote — which suggests why The Moviegoer opens with some existential name-dropping about “despair” when the most “useful” lesson Binx Bolling learned in college was taught by that characteristically wily rogue Tamiroff, whose “mannerisms” come memorably to life in J.D. Salinger’s story “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” when one character tells another, “He’s in the movies. He always says, ‘You make beeg joke — hah?’ I love him.”
Indeed, she loves him. The happy-making aspect of movies revolves around that four-letter word and the idea that this suburban woman in a Salinger story (and by association Salinger himself) loves Akim Tamiroff.
“Shedding Light”
Although Binx Bolling may not love William Holden, he’s delighted (“Today I am in luck!”) when he spots the Academy-Award-winning star walking through The French Quarter, unnoticed at first by tourists busy browsing shops or snapping pictures. An exception is a couple Binx imagines as newlyweds from out of town, the boy worried their honeymoon is “too conventional,” the girl upset because she doesn’t know why he’s worried. When they recognize Holden, the husband “perks up” even as he registers the contrast between the star’s “resplendent reality” and his own “shadowy and precarious existence.” But then he gives Holden a light for his cigarette and they walk along together, talking briefly, until the star “moves on ahead,” leaving the couple changed for the better: the husband having “won title to his own existence” while his wife feels “that what was wrong” has been “righted.”
As Holden walks on “shedding light as he goes,” an “aura of heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it. Now everyone is aware of him.” And now’s the time to point out the novel’s curious variation on the standard “no resemblance to anyone living or dead” disclaimer, making sure the reader knows that every character in the book “except movie stars” is “fictitious,” and that when movie stars are mentioned, it’s “not the person of the actor which is meant but the character he projects upon the screen.” Crafted in 1961 and read in 2025, the disclaimer draws attention to some existential realities: that the actor walking through New Orleans will die almost 20 years later after an accidental stumble “under the influence” while the character he’s best known for “projecting” is remembered by most moviegoers for Sunset Boulevard, which begins with a shot of his body floating face down in Gloria Swanson’s swimming pool. Percy puts Kierkegaard in play when he observes that the moviegoers’ search for a refuge from the “everydayness” of life “always ends in despair,” even as he hears “a far-off rumble, the first thunderstorm of the year,” which creates “a fog of uneasiness, a thin gas of malaise” and the thought, “Ah William Holden, we already need you again. Already the fabric is wearing thin without you.”
Salinger’s Projector
In her memoir Dream Catcher (2000), J.D. Salinger’s daughter Margaret recalls that “our shared world was not books, but, rather, my father’s collection of reel-to-reel movies,” which he showed on a 16mm sound projector.
Salinger’s sizeable collection included Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields and Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, a family favorite that gave them what Margaret calls “a secret language.”
A Special Screening
Although Salinger has little in common with collectors and restorers like those featured in Peter Flynn’s documentary Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! (2024), I couldn’t help thinking of him during last week’s special screening at Princeton’s Garden Theatre, which began with Operations Director Jesse Crooks demonstrating an 1898 Edison Projecting Kinetoscope with some shorts from the 1890s. Of the clips shown before the main feature, I had a “heightened reality” moment during the one showing Edison himself at work in his lab, which brought to mind W.C. Fields, with the Wizard of Menlo Park flailing Fieldishly about in his white lab coat; at the same time, I saw a hint of Edison’s resemblance to Spencer Tracy, who played him in the 1940 biopic Edison, the Man.
Late August 1945
Speaking of Tracy, he has a moment in a movie I never saw the beginning or end of, only the scene I discovered by chance one night on The Late Late Show. He walks into a darkened room in his bathrobe, opens the curtains on a tall moonlit window, sits down at a piano and begins to play, beautifully, Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” (actually played by the Ukrainian-American pianist Jakob Gimpel). You’re already in a special place when MGM’s resident priest and former tough guy is playing Debussy with Katherine Hepburn at the dimly lit top of an elegant stairway, also in a bathrobe, listening.
American audiences saw Without Love in late August 1945, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. I revisited the moment on Memorial Day 2025 on YouTube, as the musical framework of a tribute to the real-life offscreen romance of Tracy and Hepburn. I’m mentioning Spencer Tracy’s luminous moment in the context of Peter Flynn’s documentary because as sympathetic as I am to a celebration of film preservation and the people devoted to the cause, my instinct is to block out anything that impinges on my devotion to the intimacy of the movie moment. For me, it all comes down to love, life, and the part movies play in our lives. I love Summer Nights at the Garden and am excited to learn that there are currently two 35mm Kinotone projectors stored in the Garden’s projection booth, “patiently waiting to get back to work,” according to the theatre’s recent press release. The Garden “is looking to reinstall these machines so that the community can once again appreciate and enjoy film on film.”
Percy on Hatred
Taking off with a boost from Akim Tamiroff and movies, love, and life, I’ve only given hints of the depth of Walker Percy’s novel, for instance when Binx Bolling says, “Whenever I feel bad, I go to the library and read controversial periodicals. Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world.”
Percy’s thoughts on hatred have an eerie resonance on May 28, 2025, which also happens to be his birthday. Meanwhile, I’ve just come up from my grown son’s room after hearing Celine Dion’s transcendent rendition of “The Power of Love,” followed by Styx’s “Show Me The Way,” sung by its composer Dennis DeYoung. I was too busy being a father in the 1990s to appreciate either Dion or DeYoung. Maybe because I’ve just now been writing about Spencer Tracy’s moonlit moment with Debussy, I’m still feeling energized by both songs, especially when DeYoung sings of drifting to sleep when “for a moment dreams are sacred, and there’s peace in a world so filled with hatred,” only to wake up and find “we’ve so far to go.”
The Director’s Masterpiece
I was tempted to run the cover of my father-in-law Herbert L. Strock’s book Picture Perfect (Scarecrow Press 2000) with this article. The photograph shows a small (5’4) bespectacled man holding on to a gigantic camera that seems on the verge of devouring him, as well it might since he’s best known for directing creature features like Gog, Donovan’s Brain, and How To Make A Monster. When he was breaking in as a film editor at MGM, around the time Spencer Tracy was working there, he would sometimes stow his infant daughter Leslie in a canvas film bin in the cutting room. Eventually my wife and her two sisters grew up playing on the lot at Hal Roach studios, where Laurel and Hardy made the films J.D. Salinger liked to screen on his home projector.