The Beast With Five Fingers

Among the many classic Hollywood horror films, The Beast With Five Fingers is somewhat neglected. It was the first time Warner Brothers had ventured into the horror genre, with a script written by Curt Siodmak, who had also written the Universal hits The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), and the highly regarded Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur I Walked With a Zombie (1943). 

Karl Freund's The Mummy is one of the most effective horror films in its creation of an atmosphere of menace without showing the source of the menace to the audience. Instead of revealing the resurrected Imhotep, all Freund shows us is Karloff opening his eyes and the movement of an arm. After that, all we are shown is his right hand taking back the "Scroll of Thoth" and the look of terror on Bramwell Fletcher's' face when he lay eyes on the mummy, then nothing but trailing bandages slipping through a door. We never see the reanimated mummy again. 

The unseen menace of The Beast With Five Fingers is the severed hand of an old pianist named Francis Ingram (played by Victor Francen), who, before his death falling down some stairs, regales his house guests by playing the Brahms arrangement of Bach's 'Chaconne' with his left hand, since his right hand was rendered useless by a stroke. 

With Ingram's body safely entombed in a mausoleum, visitors to the house awaiting the reading of his will hear someone playing the same 'Chaconne' on the downstairs piano one night, but see no one there. A police inspector (J. Carroll Naish) takes fingerprints off of the piano keys, inspects the dead body and discovers its left hand is missing and it has a knife clutched in its right hand. There is a small hole in a nearby window and, on the ground outside, there is a handprint and further prints along the ground leading toward the house. Ingram's eccentric astrologer, named Cummins (Peter Lorre, particularly creepy), wants only to be left alone to work in the old man's library. One night, he watches from his desk as something disturbs books on a shelf from behind. Cummins catches the hand, which crawls around independently, replaces Ingram's ring on its index finger, but then nails it to a board and puts it away in a drawer. He goes upstairs to the room of Ingram's nurse, Julie Holden (Andrea King), and takes her and Conrad, a friend of Ingram's (Robert Alda) to see the hand, but it's no longer there. 

Ingram's will leaves everything to Julie, compelling Ingram's nephew Donald Arlington (John Alvin) to contest the will. Shortly after the reading, the lawyer is strangled, apparently by Ingram's hand. His body is discovered by Arlington, who finds a hidden safe in the library. Before he can open the safe someone plays the Bach Chaconne again on the piano. The inspector looks at the piano and sees no one around. He hides close by when the door of the library begins to open. Arlington looks out and, while the inspector watches, a hand emerges from behind the door and grips Arlington by the throat. 

It becomes clear that Ingram's reanimated hand is Cummins's delusion. It was he who cut it off Ingram's dead body and used it to terrorize everyone else in the house. The ghostly piano playing was a record activated by Cummins from inside the library. Deluded unto death, Cummins hallucinates that the hand, after being thrown into a fire, crawls out of the flames and strangles him. 

Robert Florey, who directed The Beast was by no means a studio hack. After his arrival in Hollywood from France in 1921, he worked in silent films before directing The Marx Brothers in their first film for Paramount, The Cocoanuts (1929). At Universal, he was all set to direct Bela Lugosi as the Monster for Universal's production of Frankenstein, but studio heads didn't like the screen tests and the production was reassigned to James Whale. (12 years later, Lugosi would play the Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man). 

The decor and costumes for The Beast are both refulgent and tacky. All the male actors wear woolen suits. Though set in the Italian Alps, the outdoor architecture looks somehow Mexican.  But the hand itself is what makes the film worth watching. The scenes in which it plays the piano are genuinely macabre. Whomever created the illusion was careful enough to show the wrist bones - the radius and ulna - in cross-section. Since the piano piece in the film was played by a Warner Brothers pianist named Victor Aller, it is his hand that we see, apparently disembodied. 

As fate would have it, given his quite pronounced - and unabashed - fetishes, the Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel was involved, in an advisory capacity, in the film’s production just prior to his relocation to Mexico. As he describes it in his memoir, My Last Sigh :

I also tried working for Robert Florey, who was making The Beast with Five Fingers, starring Peter Lorre. At his suggestion, I thought up a scene that shows the beast, a living hand, moving through a library. Lorre and Florey liked it, but the producer absolutely refused to use it. When I saw the film later in Mexico, there was my scene in all its original purity. I was on the verge of suing them when someone warned me that Warner Brothers had sixty-four lawyers in New York alone. Needless to say, I dropped the whole idea. 

In an essay on Buñuel, Vernon Young mentions his own fascination with the film: 

I recall it rather vividly, for it featured a single dismembered hand which, removed from the body of its owner, a concert pianist, insisted, like a demented crab or the heliotropic segment of a centipede, in remaining "alive" - in this case for the purpose of playing the piano arrangement of Bach's Chaconne! I witnessed this spectacle, with sharply divided emotions; actually the film introduced me to that particular Bach arrangement, which is marvelous, and the hand, if you could contemplate it without a qualm, was in itself beautiful: it was, I believe, the hand of the actor Victor Francen. But normally I know nothing more loathsome, in art as in life, than a member removed from its organic whole to which it should be attached.(1) 

 

A few inadvertently funny moments in the movie are provided by Andrea King's immovable helmet of hair, and John Alvin's girlie scream when the hand attacks him from behind a door. The scene at the very end, when J. Carroll Naish breaks the fourth wall and mocks the housemaid's fear of a "hand" - which is only a white glove, provides us with a little comic relief, but is the worst kind of directorial intrusion. "Who could possibly be afraid of a hand?" is the very question the movie tries to answer. 

(1) "Thoughts After Attending Another Film Society Buñuel Series," 1967, On Film: Unpopular Essays On a Popular Art (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), p. 380.

Off My Rocker

According to Grammarphobia: English has two etymologically distinct words “rock,” both dating from Anglo-Saxon times: a noun derived from rocca, medieval colloquial Latin for a large stone, and a verb of prehistoric Germanic origin meaning to sway from side to side. 

Among my earliest memories is an activity that I engaged in when I was just past my toddler stage and was able to sit on furniture like chairs and sofas or indeed on the side of my bed without falling off. Sometimes, without knowing why but finding comfort in it, I would scoot myself to the edge of wherever it was I was sitting and, putting my tiny hands under my knees, and I would rock myself, back and forth. Sometimes I would even make a rhythmic humming sound as I rocked. 

My mother didn't know why I performed this strange act and assumed that what I needed was a rocking chair. So, eventually, she got me one, and I went through a succession of rocking chairs until, inexplicably, I outgrew my rocking compulsion. But over the following decades, until I was 32, I never figured out why I started rocking myself in that strange way or why I stopped. 

Then, one afternoon in 1990, sitting in a trailer I was renting on the outskirts of a small town in Nevada called Fallon, I watched a documentary on television about Mother Teresa's orphanage in Calcutta. The camera crew were given a tour of the different wards. The children were segregated according to age, and they were filming in the ward reserved for 3 year olds. It was a small room, with tiny cots arranged along the walls. Some of the cots were occupied by children, and I immediately noticed that two or three of them were sitting at the edge of their cots, holding onto the edges with their little hands, and rocking themselves exactly as I had done 29 years before. Someone in the crew, through an interpreter, asked the Indian nun who was guiding the tour to explain what the children were doing. The nun said such behavior was a symptom of "deprivation of affection." The moment I heard the interpreter speak the words, I was overcome. As the old saying goes, a veil had been lifted from my eyes. So that was why, so many years before, I had scooted to the edge of the sofa and, putting my hands under my knees, had rocked myself. 

In the interval of the years since then I have survived two failed marriages and an equal number of relationships that didn't work out. After the failure of my second marriage I went to live with a friend in Des Moines. We had been in the same Army unit together, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, in Fort Carson, Colorado. He knew that I had served in the Navy before joining the Army and one evening in 2001 he noticed me standing in his living room, rocking slightly forward and backward from my heels to my toes and he commented on how, even then, I was still responding to the movement of a ship, even though I was thousands of miles from the sea. I didn't see the need to tell him that it could've been something else, some other compulsion. 

When I went to live with my sister in Anchorage in 2005, as often happened she reminded me of my boyhood and on one occasion of my strange rocking phase. So I told her about the Mother Teresa documentary that I'd seen in 1990 and how some of the children were rocking themselves just as I had done and the nun said it was a symptom of deprivation of affection. My sister insisted that I had not been deprived of affection and then she told me something I didn't know. During her pregnancy with me my mother suffered a stroke, a "major neurological event," that set her back so far physically that, after I was born, she had to undergo months of physical therapy in which she had to learn how to talk and walk and write all over again. My father brought me home from the hospital and, not making nearly enough pay as a career soldier in 1958, he handed me over to my sister to look after. My sister was 7. She was my substitute mother until our actual mother was released from her physical therapy. When my mother finally came home, she took over caring for me from my sister. I never knew my mother before her stroke, but I was assured by my siblings and even by my mother that she was the very model of a loving mother. "Butter wouldn't melt in my mouth," she told me. But after the stroke she was a different person. If she was subjected to the slightest amount of stress, she would fly into a rage. Emotionally unbalanced, it was her helpless way of dealing with the stress. When I was confronted with this frighteningly unpredictable person, I had to learn how to go unnoticed, how not to attract attention, and how to be invisible. I kept my feelings to myself because going to my mother with them would either be answered with her tenderness or her rage. I desperately needed, as every child needs, the former, but I didn't dare risk arousing the latter. 

Now I'm an old man and I live in the tropics with a woman I care for but whom I do not love. Whenever I'm sitting alone concentrating on something I'm reading or writing, I find myself giving in to the old impulse and I rock back and forth in my chair. My companion has often seen me doing this, but she has never asked me why, and I've never tried to tell her. We aren't always the best custodians of our former selves. There is a tacit understanding that the persons we once were may share with us a name and a certain resemblance, but that they are, in so many ways, separate from us. We are liable for their actions and their words, but it’s foolish to feel proud or sorry for them.

One Night, A Train

André Delvaux, as co-founder of the Belgian film school and institute INSAS (Institut national supérieur des arts du spectacle et des techniques de diffusion) in 1962 and maker of the first Flemish-language feature film in 1966, is now regarded as the father of Belgian cinema. After working in documentaries for television, he adapted the novel The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short by Hermann Thiery, a Belgian modernist poet who had written in Dutch under the nom de plume Johan Daisne. His novels are categorized as "magic realist" and Delvaux's second film, Un Soir, un Train/One Night, A Train, was based on another Daisne novel, De trein der traagheid, or The Train of Inertia, published in 1950. 

Told in the style of magic realism, the story is presented directly and matter-of-factly, even when logic goes off the rails - literally in the case of One Night, A Train. Mathias (Yves Montand) is a middle-aged professor of linguistics who lives and teaches in Leuwen, a city in Flemish Belgium. He has just published, and a local theater is producing, a Flemish translation of the morality play Everyman in which the figure of Death is one of the dramatis personae. Anne (Anouk Aimée) is the designer for the production and she is Mathias's lover. She is having difficulty finding a proper way to present Death in the play. 

Mathias is shown to be a conscientious teacher, willing to spare time for his students, but he is a detached and diffident lover to Anne. The Flemish students at the university go on strike to protest the precedence of French, instead of Flemish, in classrooms, and Mathias claims to support them. To complicate matters, despite considering marriage to Mathias, Anne wants out of their relationship because she is French, is unacquainted with his colleagues and feels like she can only share half of his life in the Flemish town. 

Mathias isn't a sympathetic character. He evidently prizes his lovely mistress, but he won't marry her because a French wife could compromise his career. When they eat a dinner of oysters and good wine (Montrachet '61) at her place, he is more interested in what he is eating than what she is saying. He promises his mother, who is in a nursing home, that he will lay flowers on his father's grave, but when he gets to the cemetery, after having an argument with Anne on the road, he can't locate his father's grave. Not knowing what to do with the flowers, he drops them on bare ground. 

Mathias is going by train to lecture at a nearby university. Though they fought before his departure, Anne enters the train compartment where he is sitting and asks him for his copy of Le Monde. It's an odd, uncomfortable moment between them. There are four other passengers in the compartment. With Anne sitting opposite him, stunningly out of place, and the other passengers trying not to notice one another, Mathias recalls (in flashback) when he and Anne were on a guided tour of Rotherhithe, the old docklands in London given by an Englishman (Michael Gough). Just as they sit opposite each other on the train while barely acknowledging each other, their tour of London shows them together but very much apart. Looking at her sitting across from him, Mathias shakes his head, knowing that it is somehow impossible between them. But why? We are shown another flashback, this one to autumnal woods. Mathias and Anne are together, admiring their surroundings, while a man in the distance is chopping wood. Mathias turns but Anne isn't there. He looks around, calling out her name, and then he sees her at the edge of the wood. They embrace, but Mathias has his eye on the man chopping wood. Suddenly there are glimpses of a flashing siren and the wreckage of a train. Mathias has fallen asleep in the train compartment, as has everyone else. Mathias wakes to find Anne is no longer there. He leaves his compartment to look for her. From this halfway point on, the film proceeds nimbly into quite strange territory, until it reaches a foreshadowed conclusion. 

How refreshing to watch a film whose meaning isn't immediately forthcoming, that draws one into a mystery that initially seems impenetrable, a narrative that takes us deeper into a surreal locale in which actuality and fantasy are indistinguishable. The personal nightmare of a linguist is one in which everyone speaks a language that he doesn't understand. Mathias finds himself in just such a place near the end of the film, before we are jolted back to reality, in which we learn the cause of Mathias's dreamlike sojourn. 

One Night, A Train opens with images of a wintry landscape passing from the window of a train while, under the credits, a woman sings "La fleur de l'été" with words written by Delvaux: 

The flower of summer 

lasts until autumn 

is pruned in the winter 

and reborn in spring. 

Love that blossoms 

from summer to autumn 

fades and stiffens 

in the white winter frosts. 

Yves Montand is utterly convincing as Mathias, a linguist, successful and celebrated in his field, who cannot find the words to dissuade Anne from leaving him. He is especially affecting in the wordless interplay with Anne in the train compartment, his hangdog face running the gamut of emotions from tenderness to hopelessness. Anouk Aimée, sphinx-like as always, is at least given a substantial role. Her striking looks (her luxe wardrobe supplied by VOG) always suggested depths, even as her roles grew steadily superficial. One wonders what a not-so stunning actress would've made of Anne. (Incidentally, the photo used in the movie poster is the film's final shot, but shows Aimée with her eyes open.)

André Delvaux managed a career with difficulty through the 1970s, in French-language co-productions shot in Belgium, assembling around him an impressive group of collaborators, from the excellent cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet to the classical composer Frédèric Devreese. He followed One Night, A Train with Rendez vous à Bray in 1971, and the film I regard as his masterpiece, Belle, in 1973. 

I should add that, as I watched the end credits crawl in my living room where I watched One Night, a Train, rising from a chair I had placed in front of my flat screen TV so that I could appreciate the film without putting on my glasses, I felt something of what I once felt when I watched a film in a theater, pulling myself together at the end, coming back to the present after being transported to another realm. How I miss that feeling. 

False Dawn

[Sunrise] is Murnau’s most powerful and advanced film, far surpassing The Last Laugh. (Lotte Eisner, Murnau) 

Sunrise is a great film; slow and classical. Photographically, it is a work of genius. Its European flavor is very strong, even though it was made in California. But however brilliant the European cameramen may have been, no one could have infused the visuals with such a combination of delicacy and richness as the great Charles Rosher. (Kevin Brownlow, The Parade's Gone By) 

What did Eisner mean by "advanced?" And what did Brownlow mean by "classical?" 

F. W. Murnau had been making films in Germany for a decade when in 1926, due to the sensation caused by his film The Last Laugh (Der Letzte Mann), he was perduaded by William Fox, then head of his own studio, to move to California and make films there. The cinematographer Charles Rosher had already gone to Germany to observe Murnau’s working methods. William Fox was anxious to produce a film that had European qualities, and Murnau’s films exhibited these qualities most abundantly. Along with Nosferatu, his unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's gothic novel Dracula in 1920, Murnau made films brimming with atmosphere and sophisticated narratives. Phantom was a kind of hetero Death in Venice, with a young artist in desperate pursuit of a woman who has become his ideal of Beauty. The Last Laugh was about a Gogolesque hotel doorman who is demoted to washroom attendant, Tartuffe and Faust were plays without words, but with recognizable themes and characters. 

Despite all of this European sophistication, Murnau chose for his first American film, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, an unbelievably threadbare story, based on a novella by Hermann Sundermann (who also supplied the story for the Garbo vehicle Flesh and the Devil). In a village on the shore of a lake a man and a woman live on a farm with their baby son. A woman of the city (that's how the film's titles identify her - in other words, the Vamp) seduces the man and tells him to go with her to the city. When he reminds her that he's married, she suggests that his wife could "get drowned" in the lake and he could make it look like an accident. He resists her suggestion violently but she somehow (use your imagination) convinces him. Back home he talks his wife into a trip to the city across the lake. Having rowed the boat some distance from the shore, the man releases the oars and approaches his wife menacingly - but he can't go through with it and returns to rowing. In the city (once again, neither the village nor the lake nor the city is otherwise identified), the man and woman wander the streets in amazement. After various encounters - a wedding in a church, a photographer's studio, a restaurant and dance hall - the two are reconciled. Returning to their village across the lake, however, their boat is caught in a storm and capsizes. The man makes it to shore but, believing his wife has drowned, he tries to murder the city woman. The wife is rescued and resuscitated. 

Fans of Sunrise will insist that the story is irrelevant, that it's Murnau's manner of telling it that makes the film great. This is where Lotte Eisner's choice of the word "advanced" and Brownlow's "classical" comes in. The photographic effects used in Sunrise were a kind of summation of silent film effects, rather as Gregg Toland's were in Citizen Kane. It's why so many critics call Sunrise the last great silent film. For example, there is a long process shot, using rear-screen projection, when the man and woman leave the church and, gazing at each other, they cross a busy street oblivious of all the passing automobiles. It is a perfect illustration, albeit unintentional, of the fantasy world the two are occupying, while everyone else in the crowded city is behaving, not exactly naturally but much closer to reality. But "classical" is definitely not the word I would use for Sunrise - not even compared to the puerile films being made 95 years later. It's as much an example of German expressionism as Dupont's Variety or Murnau's own Phantom. Expressionism was once defined as "stranger than life," and the visual effects of Sunrise bear only a tenuous resemblance to life. Early in the film, the city woman is telling the man about the attractions to be found in the city and Murnau shows us, superimposed on the nocturnal "sky," resplendent images of flashing signs and trolley cars and a brass band moving rhythmically to couples dancing until finally the city woman leaps to her feet like she's got a snake in her pants. In a later scene, after drinking some wine, the man and woman lean back in their chairs as shadowy figures dance in the air above them. The actor who plays the man (George O'Brien), a hulking figure, looks and moves like Boris Karloff through the first third of the film. But later, when he stops rowing the boat on the lake and advances toward his wife cowering at the rudder, he looks like John Barrymore as Dr. Jekyll. No wonder she became terrified. 

All of these effects and performances possess a technical sophistication but they are completely devoid of dramatic subtlety. And this is where I disagree with everything I've read about Sunrise. All of the "delicacy and richness" of the film that Brownlow identified is at the service of a quite silly and hackneyed story. It's like watching Glenn Gould approach a Steinway piano only to have him sit down and play "chopsticks." 

Murnau's style seems antiquated today (I can't believe that some critics call it "difficult" or "cerebral"). It's because, especially after the introduction of sound, cinema moved away from rigorous stylization like German expressionism toward simplicity and naturalism. Even when a filmmaker used artificial devices in his work, it was invariably there to heighten its verisimilitude - its resemblance to the truth. By now the word realism is so overused as to render it meaningless, but no matter what form was employed in the 1920s, '30s, or '40s, whether surrealism or poetic realism, neo-realism or fantastic realism, the intent has always been the revelation of truth. 

Sunrise was a disappointment at the box office, but Murnau enjoyed the technical supremacy that Hollywood offered and, despite the interference of producers, made three more films there. William Fox lost most of his fortune in the 1929 Wall Street crash, and his studio was merged with 20th Century Pictures to form 20th Century-Fox. On March 11, 1931, just days before his last film Tabu was premiered, Murnau was killed in a car crash. The negative of Sunrise was destroyed in a fire at a New Jersey film vault in 1937, and thereafter only mentioned by scholars like Eisner and Brownlow. (Hundreds more film negatives on nitrate stock were lost, including D. W. Griffith's Way Down East.) But a new negative of Sunrise was struck from a positive print and released by the British Film Institute in 2004. Critics, most of whom had never seen it before, were so amazed by its photographic qualities that Sunrise was ranked #7 on Sight and Sound's 2012 poll of the Greatest Films of All Time. The same phenomenon - the release of a new print - got Hitchcock's Vertigo all the way to #1 on the same poll. If you ask me, the wrong movies are being restored.

Nouvelle Blague

Diligently digging through 60-year-old Film Quarterly issues (digital copies, of course), I came across a few tidbits that I thought would be a nice addition to my notice of Godard's passing (q.v.).

The first was Stanley Kauffmann's otherwise perfect assessment of Godard's first film, Breathless: "Godard's Breathless may be a happy accident, but it certainly is happy." (Vol. 15, No. 2 Winter 1961-62) 

But the following summer Dwight Macdonald chimed in with his dim view of the politique des auteurs: 

Truffaut is a great director but a bad critic - there may be a connection - and his politique des auteurs is a foolish notion, especially when it gets into the hands of Anglo-American enthusiasts, as Pauline Kael demonstrated in your last issue. I offer the above as supporting evidence to her thesis; the p.d.a. boys doubtless have their rationalizations ready but I think they will be put on their mettle by this past season's crop. 

Finally it occurs to me. as an ironic afterthought, that one of the few directors today for whom M. Truffaut's theory works is himself: everything of his I've seen up to now has been on a consistently high level. Could it be that, in 1957, before he had made any films, he was far-sighted enough (second-sighted would be more accurate) to have devised a theory which he alone could later live up to? (Vol. 16, No. 4 Summer 1963) 

In the early 1960s, Macdonald had been a contributor to Film Quarterly's "Films of the Quarter" along with Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Gavin Lambert, and Jonas Mekas. By the Summer 1963 issue, however, Macdonald found his own remarks placed side by side with a column by Andrew Sarris - the American critic who took up the auteur theory and ran with it - that opened with the sentence "The Birds finds Hitchcock at the summit of his artistic powers." This prompted Macdonald to opt out of further contributions to "Films of the Quarter." 

I've been wondering, for various reasons, whether to keep on contributing to "Films of the Quarter," but now that Andrew Sarris has been addd to the stable, I feel the decision has been made for me. I am not willing to appear under the same iubric as a "critic" who thinks The Birds "finds Hitchcock at the summit of his artistic powers," not to mention similar recent ukases by the Mad Tsarris of Greenwich Village. Nor am I willing to pretend that it's just a matter of taste, a difference of opinion, etc. For I don't consider Sarris a critic; a propagandist, a high-priest, even an archivist; but not a critic. His simplistic coarsening of Truffaut's auteur theory has produced a dogma so alien to the forms of reasoning and sensibility I respect as to eliminate any basis of discussion. Even if I chance to agree with him on some specific movie, as has happened, it is irrelevant. Sometimes a Chinese fortune cookie will hit the mark, too. 

Jonas Mekas was not my ideal of a critic, but, since he is a poet and anarchist by temperament, his vagaries are unsystematic and so gleams of perception sometimes shine fitfully through the mist. But Sarris, like certain Marxist sectarians I used to know, is a systematic fool. His judgments have nothing to do with criticism, since he merely applies the party line to each movie, as they did to each event; the actual, concrete film he sees (or rather does not see) is just one more brick to be fitted into his System. That Film Quarterly sees Sarris as a bona fide critic like Pauline Kael, Stanley Kauffmann, Gavin Lambert, and myself, to name the four other contributors to the current "Films of the Quarter" - this is one more symptom of that mush-headed confusion and lack of standards I have long observed in most "serious" writing about the movies. (Why, for instance, is the level of "little" movie magazines invariably lower than that of their literary and political counterparts?) Knowing this fact of life, I have made allowances for Film Quarterly. I put up with Mekas, I forgave that entire issue recently devoted to Ian Cameron's stolidly uncritical blurb for Antonioni (those auteur pundits are most depressing when they praise a director one admires), and I might even have been willing to try co-existence with the increasingly auteur orientation of recent issues. But I draw the line at Sarris as a fellow-critic. Include me out. 

Yours more in anger than in sorrow, 

DWIGHT MACDONALD. (Vol. 17, No. 4 Summer 1963)

(In case you've forgotten - as I had - an ukase is an edict of the Russian Government.)