Believer Recommends VI

Film

Christopher Strong

Dorothy Arzner

When The Criterion Collection launched their streaming channel last April, I became ambitious about my own cinéaste sensibilities, adding arthouse films to my queue with abandon, firmly believing that yes, I am the type of person who will make it through all fifteen-plus hours of Berlin Alexanderplatz this weekend. I soon became overwhelmed by the tyranny of choice, watching the first fifteen minutes of every available Bergman or Fellini film, wondering if I was even in the right mindset for Akerman right now, before giving up to watch old episodes of Arrested Development on Netflix.

And then there’s director Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933), a film for when you don’t have the bandwidth for a capital-f Film, subtly smart in its densely packed seventy-eight minutes. Written by Zoë Akins, it is looser than a screwball, a drama with the beats of a comedy, and it features a twenty-six-year-old Katherine Hepburn in her second onscreen role. Hepburn plays Lady Cynthia Darrington, a pilot and, despite the misleading title, the film’s true star. (The movie got its name from the 1932 novel by Gilbert Frankau upon which it was based, and perhaps having a female director, screenwriter, star, and title was a little too much at that time, even for a pre-code film.) Hepburn sets world records; she falls in love with a married man; and, most memorably, she wears a shimmery silver lamé moth costume for a party that is mentioned but never actually depicted. She can’t quite pull off the optimistic naiveté that the first two-thirds of the film calls for—Hepburn’s face betrays too much of the savviness that will come to define her later roles—but as a groundbreaking aviator she’s right at home, seductive and bewitching. 

—Anna Fitzpatrick, Social Media Editor

Album

UMLA (Don Dada)

Alpha Wann

My heaviest-rotation album so far this month is UMLA, a record released last September by the Paris rapper Alpha Wann, which is his real name. (It was preceded by a triad of EPs called Alph Lauren; if it’s not eventually followed by a project called Du côte de chez Wann, maybe the planet’s not worth saving.)UMLA stands for une main lave l’autre (“one hand washes the other”): a pretty good encapsulation of the corner-to-cosmos span of its preoccupations, from petty drug trafficking to squad loyalty to the use of prayer against perdition, all of which Wann considers with a bemused fatalism worthy of whoever your preferred stateside source is for anhedonic, shit-talking turn-up. Indeed, UMLA is at once impeccably French and ideally delocalized, conjuring by turns moody Brooklyn murder music, post-Atlantan trap 2.0, and that vaporous thing called cloud rap that the French...