Vince moves on to what is described by Eddie Muller as an exciting (albeit still secretive) new phase in his career; and this development brings Imogen Smith--brought into the NC fold by yours truly during the phase of the e-zine that no one talks about--into the editor's chair.
It will be interesting to see if she is able to put some kind of stamp on a publication that still has tangible puppet strings from its publisher, and that was streamlined into a cookie-cutter operation that has relentlessly reduced word count to the point where the essays sometimes appear to have been written around the pictures.
The contents of Keenan's swan song are, on the whole, the most disconnected collection of material in the e-zine's history. As such it's highly appropriate that Eddie Muller so breezily distorts the history of the publication in his publisher's letter: his recent bout of illness seems to have engendered a form of confusion that goes beyond his ongoing desire to erase the memory of the publication's first editor from the history books. (Inaccuracies begin with the origin date of the original newsletter, and continue via a series of ellipses permitting him to dismiss the mountain of content that permitted the e-zine to generate an annual, which provided his FNF a windfall of cash that continues to this day.)
Any edition of the e-zine that does not feature material from Smith, Jake Hinkson, and/or Vince (who contributed a number of excellent articles before he became editor-in-chief) is going to be problematic--and this issue is missing all of them, save for Vince's book review of a volume that's not even about film noir.
The cover essay is a lackluster chronicle of Veronica Lake that is careful to namecheck Eddie (and his lackluster introduction to the reissue of Lake's autobiography). It also is careful to align itself to the "Me Too" overtone that has become rampant in the publication over the past 3-4 years by portraying Lake as a victim (even Lake herself recognized how much of her difficulties stemmed from her own attitude). It also caters to the publisher's fondness for SLATTERY'S HURRICANE, professing with a straight face that her problematic performance in the film is somehow a brilliant encapsulation of victimhood.
As was noted here a couple of years ago, there is a much better introduction to Veronica Lake available on the internet that deserved to be reprinted for the e-zine's larger audience. It is called THE OUTSIDER, by another guy named Eddie--Eddie Selover--and it has all the grit and the pace that an essay about Veronica Lake deserves, and the appropriate amount of sympathy and truth-telling about the very beautiful and exceptionally enigmatic Connie Ockelman. If you didn't read it when we linked to it back in 2020, you can do so now:
https://eddieselover.com/2014/12/03/the-outsider/
We could go on anatomizing the deficiencies of this new issue, but to do so in too much detail would only seem more mean-spirited. There are several engaging articles in the mix, one of which harkens back to that first editor's ongoing interest in offbeat typologies: Brent Calderwood's look at massage artists and steam rooms in noir would have fit nicely into that reviled regime. And the reliable Steve Kronenberg delivers a solid look at another distinctive but marginal noir figure: actress Gale Sondergaard.
But these flounder in the wake of Farran Nehme's blustery, hastily dashed off paean to the latter career of Claude Chabrol--a figure who, despite (or perhaps because of) his own contradictions, warrants an article beyond the e-zine's current word count limit. (Nehme is also well down the road of the "I" fallacy of film criticism, where compulsive references to oneself become oppressive.)
We do need to note that the new Kino sets that begin what might be a more aggressive infusion of the "lost continent" noirs featured at the Roxie since 2014 are covered here. Sean Axmaker does his usual good job with these reviews, but (of course) he fails to note that three of the four films he's covering have been premiered in America by that PNG former editor-in-chief. (We leave you to determine what that acronym stands for, but we encourage you to buy the sets--for those who've not been able to join us at the Roxie, you'll at last get at least a little sense of what we've been going on about.)
The final article in the e-zine reveals a shocking amount of "mood swing" from the publisher, who'd been positively giddy in his opening letter. Here, in his heartfelt but helplessly overwrought tribute to recently deceased "literary pulp" novelist Jim Nisbet, the emotional roller-coaster is sped up to an almost alarming velocity. The effect of this is to make the reader recoil from his/her own sympathy for the plight of the author, whose grief is writ so large that it risks drowning out the voice of the friend he is attempting to eulogize. And the choice of closure (an overly insular poem that wanders far afield from the corpus of Nisbet's work that is attempting to be honored) is an unfortunate anti-climax that will simply leave most readers baffled. It's the type of piece that would have been perfectly acceptable for distribution to a coterie of inner circle colleagues, but whose tone seems jarringly out of place in the e-zine.
We wish Ms. Smith good night and good luck--let's hope that the famous line from the Divine Comedy does not prove to be relevant or prophetic: "Through me is the way to the city of woe." Time will tell.
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