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“I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror” said Carson McCullers of Columbus, Georgia—but I am afraid that I actually rather enjoy returning to Cincinnati, Ohio.
I am particularly fond of the late summer, when the Mill Creek valley becomes a bowl of soupy humidity, and the omnipresent whirr of the cicadas ensorcells susceptible souls in a voluptuous ennui (and, apparently, induces flights of purple prose.)
This afternoon I met an old friend for lunch at the highly recommended Pleasant Ridge Chili, one of the city’s hundreds of purveyors of Cincinnati-style chili, which is a thin, messy concoction prepared with finely-ground beef that looks and tastes nothing like what the rest of the Western world thinks of as chili. (Pleasant Ridge also specializes in gravy fries heaped with Cincinnati-style chili’s signature grated cheddar cheese, which is for some reason the color of a traffic barrel.) Afterwards, we decamped to a local watering hole, where the bartendress apparently misunderstood the wisecrack I made about my “Supple complexion” when asking our ages, responding amiably that “Well, we’re mostly a white bar.” (She also said she’d thought that my orange New York State license plates were “Party plates”—restricted DUI plates in Ohio are the same color.)
O, Cincinnati! Most southern northern city? Most northern southern city? Cheap cracks at my hometown’s quaintly retro racism aside, I have always been a firm believer in taking pride in one’s own, and under the administration of Chris Tucker-esque Mayor Mark Mallory, there is more reason for that pride than in any time in memory. The reopened Washington Park, faced with the soon-to-be-renovated Music Hall tabernacle, is an unqualified triumph! Vine Street above Central Parkway is shoulder-to-shoulder with merry-makers on a Saturday night! The Reds are in first place! Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill!
Can a downtown movie palace be far off? How can we do without? A stroll through Cincinnati film history suggests the Athens of the West might also go by the name Hollywood on the Ohio:
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The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Ostensibly set in fictional “Boone City,” William Wyler’s film, like the Samuel Goldwyn-commissioned McKinley Kantor novel on which it was based, takes place in a thinly disguised Cincinnati…or so apocrypha has it. McKantor’s hometown of Des Moines has, insofar as I can tell, as good a claim on being the secret identity of Boone City as any place, while a 2006 article by one James I. Deutsch in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television sets out to debunk Cincinnati’s right to any especial pride in Best Years. My buddy, however, swears that the city itself is visible via aerial footage in the scene where Dana Andrews, Frederic March, and Harold Russell look over their native country through the nose cone of a transport plane, and I have it on some authority that the “Jackson High” football field pointed out by Homer is in fact Corcoran Field, near Victory Parkway, where the Xavier University Musketeers played until 1973. So, there’s that.
A side note on the persuasive power of criticism: When I saw Best Years in college, I was deeply emotionally impressed by it. Not long afterwards, I got my first copy of Manny Farber’s Negative Space on my first trip to the west coast, at Moe’s Books in Berkeley, and was so impressed by the censorious phrase “a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz,” which Mr. Farber applied to Best Years, that I would never be able to even think about the movie seriously ever again.
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The Apartment (1960)
You are correct if you recall that The Apartment actually takes place in New York City, but it is worth noting that Jack Lemmon’s C.C. Baxter was transferred from Consolidated Life’s branch office in Cincinnati before arriving in the corrupting Big Apple, and at one point he recounts to Shirley MacLaine’s Fran an abortive suicide attempt in the city’s Eden Park. For whatever reason, either Wilder (or co-scriptwriters Charles Brackett and/or I.A.L. Diamond) seemed to have a weakness for the Buckeye State: Joe Gillis in 1950’s Sunset Blvd cut his teeth as a cub reporter for The Dayton Daily News, while 1966’s The Fortune Cookie is as near a thing that exists to the great Cleveland movie.
Other noteworthy name-alone appearances of “Cincinnati”: 1972’s The King of Marvin Gardens (Bruce Dern: “I was in jail one time in Cincinnati. I don’t know if you heard about that”) and 1974’s The Phantom of the Paradise (“Where do you think you’re going, Tinkerbell?” “Cincinnati, to see my mother!”).
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Homebodies (1974)
The one certifiable Cincinnati masterpiece. This is the second feature by Larry Yust, who’d made his name on a series of literary adaptations for 16mm classroom projection made under the auspices of Encyclopedia Brittanica films—works that continue to haunt many a weak-kneed Boomer. I wrote about the sadly-neglected Homebodies once—a film that I have it on good authority that Mayor Mallory is also a fan of—for a since-defunct magazine, and find that my observations on it hold up:
“More than merely scenic, Homebodies is one of the better films to frontally approach the self-inflicted mutilation that occurred in postwar American cities under the code name of “urban redevelopment” (This is, of course, the secret subtext of every blighted-city film; Robert Moses practically deserves a co-director credit on Fort Apache, the Bronx). The landscapes that backdrop Homebodies look like Dresden, but the damage is from redevelopment, not bombs; the film’s tenements, another century’s touching idea of middle-class elegance, were actually being razed as Homebodies was shooting for interstate expansion and low-income (read: sub-standard) housing… There is no spilled blood in the most excruciating scene in Homebodies, which comes when as the wrecking ball starts to work on the block of apartments where Mattie and her irregulars have made their stand, folding in wallsand crumbling cornice stones. It feels like a vivisection, progress murdering a thing of still-functional, everyday beauty. Earlier, one of the vigilantes proposes a toast to the bricks-and-mortar of their imperiled tenement, then to the flesh-and-blood of its residents. Understanding how profoundly foundations run, this is a rare film to understand the lives of buildings.”
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Airborne (1993)
Released in a strange teen movie lull between the high John Hughes era and the Freddie Prinze, Jr./ Jennifer Love Hewitt late-‘90s, Airborne starred Shane McDermott as Mitchell Goosen, a surf-loving California teenager whose parents banish him to the gulag of his aunt and uncle’s house in Cincinnati while they go on a research trip. The film’s view of the city is predicated on the idea that a) it snows all the time in Cincinnati and b) the city is absolutely mad for hockey, neither of which thing is true. I noted recently that Culver City’s Cinefamily were hosting a screening of Airborne, which I guess means that it’s attained some degree of cult cache, possibly due to early appearances by Seth Green and Jack Black. At one point, after a successful meet-cute with Brittney Powell at the Botanical Gardens, McDermott literally says “I think I’m starting to like Cincinnati” to the camera, an unabashedly corndog line-reading which I cite almost every time I am lighting out of the 275 loop for New York as though I have Apaches on my tail.
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Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.