Thomas Mallon

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This is Fresh Air.

I'm David Biancoole.

Living through the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s is the subject of Thomas Mallon's diaries, which were excerpted in The New Yorker a few years ago.

They are now collected in his new book, The Very Heart of It, New York Diaries 1983-1994.

Mallin was in his 30s then and living in Manhattan.

He was watching his boyfriend, friends, and fellow churchgoers get sick and die, leaving him in a constant state of anxiety over if and when he'd get his own death sentence.

Mallon is best known for his historical novels.

His latest, Up With the Sun, ends about where the journal excerpts begin.

The novel is based on the life of a fairly obscure subject, Dick Kalman, a closeted gay actor in the 1950s and 60s who never quite made it.

He was a part of Lucille Ball's Desilo Workshop and co-starred in the Broadway musical 17.

But after starring in a touring production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and in a 1965 sitcom called Hank about the operator of a campus food truck, his roles dried up.

Kalman went into the antiques business with Dolores Gray, who had starred in several movie musicals.

In 1980, Coleman and his boyfriend were murdered in their Manhattan apartment by robbers, a murder that made the tabloids.

Mallon also has written novels about Watergate, Nixon, and the couple who shared Lincoln's box seats at Ford Theater the night he was assassinated.

Terry Gross spoke with Thomas Mallon in 2023.

Thomas Mallon, welcome to Fresh Air.

You're such a good writer.

Thanks.

Why did you want to write about this actor Dick Kalman?

I certainly had never heard of him before.

I imagine most of the people in our audience have never heard of him either.

I used to watch his sitcom in 1965 to 66, which was the one year it was on.

I was 13 years old at the time, and I desperately wanted to go to college.

It was called Hank, by the way, for anyone who wants to know.

Yeah.

The conceit was that he played a college drop-in.

He didn't have the money for tuition, but he was desperate to get an education, and so he would disguise himself as other students, and he was always one step ahead of the registrar who was chasing him.

It was sort of charming and preposterous.

And I used to watch it, and he sort of stuck with me, and the program stuck with me.

And

lo and behold, you know, in 1980, he's murdered, long since out of show business, murdered in Upper Manhattan, the east side of Manhattan.

And

I heard about this, and I began squirreling away clippings many years later.

And

I would set it aside.

I really started to write the book in earnest around 2008, then set it aside for a decade to write this political trilogy set in Washington.

And then went back to it.

And fortunately, in time enough to talk to a number of people who had known him and to be able to reconstruct the story as well as I could.

By the way,

Hank had a theme song.

This would come Hank had a theme song with a lyric written by Johnny Mercer.

I mean, that's pretty classy.

That was about the only really distinguished thing about the program.

Could you sing the lyric?

The first line of it is, he's up with the sun and he's got the college winging as he goes about another swinging day.

And the conceit was that he was constantly doing odd jobs to earn money.

He was raising his little sister because their parents were dead.

I mean, it was kind of a comic tearjerker in some ways.

And

there was a tremendous sweetness to the character as well as a lot of gumption.

Coleman, in real life, had plenty of gumption, but I think very little sweetness.

I think people might have caught that first line of the lyric, he's up with the sun.

That's where the title of your novel, Up With the Sun, comes from.

Yes.

Yeah.

So what kind of research did you do about what it meant to be gay and closeted on Broadway and in Hollywood?

You know, one of the obvious differences is like on Broadway, so many men traditionally, you know, have been gay, including some of the best like songwriters who ever wrote for Broadway musicals.

In Hollywood, I think there was a big gay closeted population, but probably not as big as on Broadway.

Well, you know,

I talked to people who had known Coleman and went through any number of hundreds and hundreds of clippings and reviews and everything.

And, you know, it was the time when

later in the 50s, when he was trying to get a foothold in Hollywood,

he would be set up on dates, you know, by his agent, dates, needless to say, with young women and who were sort of aware or not aware that they were really functioning as beards for this.

The lockdown,

as you say, you would think of all places, Broadway would be a place where to a certain extent you could be yourself.

But I don't think that was

really very true.

I spoke a few years ago to Rita Gardner, who was the original female lead in the Fantastics, which ran for decades and decades off Broadway.

And she played the part opposite Kenneth Nelson, who figures in this book.

He knew Coleman.

Their careers sort of

dovetailed each other in some ways for a number of years.

And Kenneth Nelson was much beloved by people who worked with him.

And Rita told me that, you know, she says, of course I knew Kenny was gay.

And sometimes I would see him troubled or down about something.

And she says, as amazing as it sounds now, you just couldn't ask.

Even in the world of off-Broadway theater, it was just too hot to handle back in those days.

And she was remembering this in her 80s, and she was just shaking her head over it.

Another thing that closeted actors on Broadway and also in Hollywood had to deal with is the gossip columnists.

Because

they could out you.

I don't know if this is a real quote from Earl Wilson, who was a gossip columnist at the New York Post at the time.

But in one of his columns, he wrote, which restaurant chain has been purging its New York branches of swishes?

That's for real.

That's for real.

That's for real.

Yeah.

And there would be these

obliquely phrased items about people.

The gossip columnists had a tremendously hard edge.

I remember, I was a great reader of the newspaper from the time I was about seven years old, and I remember writers like Dorothy Kilgallen writing about show business, sometimes writing about politics too.

And there was a hard edge, and if they took a dislike to somebody, they made these nasty little crusades against them.

And

this was the shame that could not speak its name, let alone the love that could not speak its name.

But gossip columnists did find a way of getting it into the papers.

For instance, here in Washington, where I live,

the Washington Evening Star, a wonderful old paper.

If you read it in the 1950s, the only time there's ever an overt mention of homosexuality is when somebody gets arrested.

Thomas Mallon, your

novel, Up with the Sun, ends at about the same time that your diary excerpts recently published in The New Yorker begins.

And those are your diaries, excerpts of your diaries, during the AIDS epidemic, the very early days of it when you were living in Manhattan and so many people you knew had AIDS and were dying or had already died.

So let's talk about those diaries.

You were in your 30s in the 1980s when AIDS was first identified and then became an epidemic.

Who were you then?

I was an academic who really wanted to be a writer.

I taught at Vassar

for about a dozen years.

I started there in my late 20s.

And while I was still there, I moved to New York.

I couldn't take living on campus and sort of being part of the college 24-7.

So I rented this ancient little walk-up apartment right near Grand Central and began trying to extract myself from academic life.

And in some ways, I was living my 20s and my 30s.

I even wrote about that somewhere.

I was

getting some traction as a writer.

I was beginning to write a lot of literary journalism.

I was starting to write fiction on my own.

And I was

doing this in a way with very little risk in my life compared to the way most young writers in New York have to operate.

I was a tenured professor at this fancy college and then

saw my way out of that.

But

whereas there was very little risk financially for me, very little risk professionally for me, I was suddenly engulfed in risk that all of my friends were.

I was,

when it came to romance, I was rather a late bloomer, but not late enough that I wasn't worried that one involvement in particular that I had had would likely render me sick at some point.

And we were, my friends and I, we were all beset with anxieties of one kind or another and

had to make decisions and consider contingencies.

I remember coming across something in the diary.

I was writing a book about plagiarism,

but I desperately wanted to write this second novel, and I was trying to think whether I dared to start the novel.

And I thought, no, if I get sick, I'll probably have two years left.

And I don't want to go out of the world with the two books half-written.

I'll stick with the book I'm working on now, the plagiarism book.

And if I have to die, I will then at least have that that book out in the world.

And that was how one thought in those days, even while at the same time, I was in love with New York.

I was in love with the little bit of literary progress I was making.

My friends and I were having lives.

We were having romance and so forth.

What was it like rereading your diaries to edit them and then publish them?

Because, like, you write historical novels, and what was the present to you when you were writing those journals, that's now the past.

That's now history.

That's an artifact of a turning point in history.

So what was it like seeing your life as history?

Strange.

It provoked feelings of embarrassment.

One's diaries always do that if they have any kind of, I think, authenticity to them.

Tremendous feelings of gratitude that I

had never gotten sick and that I was was here to write all the books that came in between those diaries and today.

I was struck though by the immediacy of them.

With editors at the New Yorker there was some discussion at some point about my writing a retrospective essay about the time and simply quoting from the diaries, even quoting liberally from them, but situating them in a sort of retrospective point of view.

And I argued against this because I thought if the diaries had any value at all, it was their immediacy, the sense that the person writing this did not know what was going to happen, did not know what it meant yet.

And when I reread them after so many years, what struck me immediately was a kind of manic quality to them.

There are entries where I am just absolutely slap-happy.

You know, I'm having my first author photograph taken, or I'm going to some literary party that I never would have expected to be invited to years before.

And the next day, all of that will come crashing down because there's been some terrible piece of AIDS news, either in the newspapers or in my own world.

Somebody I knew was sick.

And it seemed to me at the time, and the diaries brought this back to me, that I was living in a world where it was always going to be impossible to be happy for very long, that there would be these short bursts, but

this looming, terrible destructiveness was always going to be out there.

Aaron Powell, you know, just a little stray sentence in those diaries was about having a great view of Manhattan when you dined one day at Windows on the World, which was the restaurant on top of the World Trade Center.

And a few years later, that would be totally demolished in the terrorist attack on 9-11.

What was it like for you to reread that sentence and realize this like little factoid tucked away in your journal?

Yes, certain things.

Part of this like national nightmare.

Yes, these little things that jump out at you and that

you never expected to see.

And of course, at the time you're writing it, you don't think that you could ever reread this and have it mean something completely different from what it appeared to mean to you as you actually wrote the sentence.

There are all these things that,

you know, one has forgotten.

Sometimes the smallest things that you write, the smallest incidents, remarks that you heard, overheard, sometimes those are the things I found in a diary that

evoke

bigger things much more powerfully than if you had been writing about the big thing directly.

Yeah.

During the period that your AIDS diaries diaries cover, the period published in The New Yorker, your boyfriend at the time died of AIDS early in the epidemic.

He was 31.

You hadn't been seeing each other that long.

Were you close enough where you felt like you were the one to take care of him?

No,

I mean, I wouldn't say that, but it was a short and very rocky romance.

And

it,

you know, had all of the difficulties that any romance can encounter.

But at the end, when he was very sick throughout 1984 and he died in October of 1984,

at the very end, I

became very close to his mother and close really to the rest of his family.

And I remember the hospital and the harrowing nature of his illness that went on month after month.

This was the time when if you visited somebody with AIDS in the hospital,

they practically put you in a hazmat suit.

You know, you were wearing masks and gloves and so forth.

And

nobody

knew very much.

And this was very early to

have that.

The gift to me was really his whole family, especially his mother, who remained my friends for decades.

And

I wound up having Thanksgiving every year with his mother.

And I would bring my longtime partner, Bill, to New York.

And

again,

all of life really is a novel.

You just live it instead of writing it, but it always has its odd turns and its strange narrative arcs.

But that was a particularly painful

time,

the time that Tom was

still alive and suffering.

And

I have not really even been able to go back to that diary.

The diaries that were excerpted in The New Yorker start in 1985.

They run from 85 to 88.

And I'm sort of living in the aftermath of that.

And I'm probably going to do a book of these diaries for my publisher, Knopf.

And I'm going to have to go back to the diaries when Tom was still alive.

And

that's going to be a hard task for me.

Did you visit him in the hospital?

And were you afraid that if you did, you would contract AIDS?

Because as you've said, people didn't know yet how it was spread.

I don't remember that fear in the hospital.

I remember the fear of a fear that lasted for years that I would

contract it simply because of the things we had done together before he was sick.

But the atmosphere in the hospital was just dreadful, and

there was almost a science fiction aspect to it.

One of the

sort of themes or one of the plots, if you could use that word, to the diaries that were excerpted in The New Yorker, this is around 1986, 87, was

my internal drama.

wondering not just whether I was going to get sick or not, but should I have the test?

The test was new in those days.

Yeah, you were terrified to have the test.

I was very frightened to have the test.

I did not have the test until 1991.

At that point, there was really nothing they could do for you.

So what was the point of knowing?

You already knew how you could protect yourself.

from infection.

You already knew how you could protect others from infection.

And if you happened to have the virus, if you were sick, there was very little that they could do for you.

Eventually, I mean, there there was AZT, was the first significant medication, but the side effects of it were absolutely horrific.

And so

I remember

for years I opted for not knowing.

And what changed your mind in 1991 when you got tested?

Well, I was partnered by that point, and

I felt that the likelihood that I was sick was pretty small by that point.

It would have manifested itself already in one way or another.

So I was

able to do that.

But even in those days, in the early 90s, you would get tested and you would wait for two weeks for the result.

as opposed to having a pinprick of blood taken from you today and getting the results within less than a minute.

Thomas Mallon, speaking to Terry Gross in 2023.

After a break, we'll continue their conversation.

We'll also remember jazz singer Sheila Jordan, who died this week at age 96.

And Justin Chang reviews the new Spike Lee film, Highest to Lowest.

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How did I change your life when you knew that you were negative?

It made me feel that I could keep

living and

keep enjoying my life.

There were so many things I loved about my life,

even during the worst days of

the epidemic in New York when there was nothing to be done for anybody like Tom or

so many of my friends.

I absolutely loved my life.

I was very driven.

I was very hardworking.

I was ambitious.

I wanted to be a writer.

I felt I was getting a late start as a writer.

And suddenly things were happening.

And

I just remember the feeling that I'm not going to have to, maybe until I'm, you know, much older, I'm not going to have to sit down with that diary again and tote up the pros and cons of trying to write a second book while I'm writing a first one because I might not be around to finish them within a couple of years.

So you were so relieved to know that your death was not imminent.

You're 71 now.

Have your thoughts about aging been affected by

how

afraid you were that you were going to die in your 30s?

I think it would be impossible for

those thoughts and feelings not to have been affected.

I am

so aware of how lucky I was.

And

I mean, I've enjoyed rude good health for almost my whole life.

I'd like that to continue for a while.

But I like to think that,

you know, when things fall apart, that I'll be able to accept that with a certain amount of greater grace because I know that it could so easily,

all of those intervening decades, could so easily have been denied to me by life.

And

I don't know.

That'll be a test of my character, I guess, when it comes.

Yeah.

In your latest novel, Up with the Sun, one of the characters says, all my life I've loved the past as a place that can keep you safe from the present, an inert world sleeping and finished that can't push you around, a place that your imagination can make as pretty as the two-dimensional flats on a Broadway set.

Is that a sentiment you share, and is that one of the reasons why you write historical fiction?

Yes, I think so.

I think that's me speaking through Matt, my fictional pianist in Up With the Sun.

I think that's always been a theme in my books.

I wrote a novel many years ago called Dewey Defeats Truman, which was all set during the summer and fall of 1948 in a little town in Michigan that had been Thomas E.

Dewey's hometown.

And there's an old man in that book named Horace Sinclair.

And he expresses a lot of my preference for the past, the idea that the past is the present perfected, somehow put in amber, somehow an easier place to live in.

He's the one who says, you know,

some people, when they pass a house, when they're walking on the street, they wonder who lives there.

And he, when he walks past the house, always wonder, always wonders who used to live there.

Thomas Mallon, a pleasure speaking with you.

Thank you so much.

Same here.

Thank you, Terry.

Thomas Mallon, speaking to Terry Gross in 2023.

His new book is called The Very Heart of It, New York Diaries 1983 to 1994.

Coming up, we remember jazz singer Sheila Jordan, who died this week at age 96.

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We're going to remember jazz singer Sheila Jordan, who had a devoted following among jazz fans, though she was less well-known to wider audiences.

She died Monday at the age of 96 and was recording and performing nearly until her death.

Jazz critic Bob Blumenthal once wrote, quote, Jordan unmistakably conceives of her voice as an instrument, and she is a great musician, unquote.

Jordan grew up in a coal mining town in Pennsylvania.

When she was 14, she moved to Detroit.

And after listening to a jukebox recording by saxophonist Charlie Parker, she decided instantly she had found her music, the music she wanted to sing.

Not too many years later, she met Parker, who after hearing her sing one of his songs, said, you have million-dollar ears, kid.

Eventually, she sat in with his band and became part of the jazz scene in Detroit in the 1940s.

In the 1950s, she moved to New York, where she was part of a club and jazz session scene that included Thelonius Monk, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and Max Roach.

She also married Duke Jordan, the pianist in Parker's original quartet, and they had a daughter.

But the marriage didn't last.

In 1962, Sheila Jordan made her first recording with the George Russell Sextet, an avant-garde rearrangement of the ballad You Are My Sunshine, a song Jordan had learned as a child.

are

my

sun shin

My

only

sunshine

You

make

me

happy

when

skies

are grey

The next year, Jordan became the first vocalist to record on the famous Blue Note label.

Her album, Portrait of Sheila Jordan, was critically acclaimed.

But she was a single mother, and it was difficult to support herself and her daughter with her music.

She took a day job as a secretary in an advertising agency, where she worked until 1988.

Jordan was influential on younger singers through her records, performances, and workshops.

And in 2012, she was named a jazz master by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Before we listen to Terry's 1981 interview with Sheila Jordan, let's listen to Sheila's singing on the song If You Could See Me Now from her debut album.

If you could see

me now,

you'd know how blue I've been.

One look is all you'd need

to know the mood I'm in.

Perhaps then you'd realize

I'm still in love

with you.

If you could see me now,

you'd find me being brave

and trying awfully hard

to make my tears behave.

But that's quite impossible.

I'm still in love

with you.

Pretty early on in your singing, I think you got turned on to Charlie Parker's music and got to meet him and sing with him too, I believe.

Yes, I did.

I sat in a lot with Bird.

I met Bird in Detroit when I was a teenager.

I moved from Pennsylvania with my grandmother and went to live with my mother

for the three years or four years of high school.

But at that time they had a fantastic jukebox downstairs and it had all of these great, great records, you know, press.

But Bird was the one that did it for me.

I heard this thing.

I said, oh, who is this man?

What is this music?

I mean, I really felt that it was just there for me.

It was just...

planned that way, that I was going to hear this music and I just got right into it.

Well, of course, I couldn't move after that into anything else except jazz, Even though I'd been singing, never gave up singing and always had to sing.

This was it for me.

So after hearing these bird records and

finding out where music like this was heard, I had to be there even if it was a matter of life and death, which in Detroit at that time it was.

What do you mean?

Well it was very prejudiced and here I am a young white girl trying to get to this music.

So in order to get to that music it was in black neighborhoods and the police were very very rough.

I mean we had the race rides there which didn't help matters and so I was sort of torn between this terrible racial tension and wanting to be near these people who did this music and not even thinking in terms of black, white, purple, green.

Hey, I just wanted to be where this music was.

So I suffered a lot from constantly being taken down to police stations, quizzed about what I was doing with these black people.

And of course that's not what they called them.

And having to defend my relationship and my friendship with these wonderful people who taught me the art of jazz singing.

I mean they were my roots, all of these

wonderful musicians and just people who were learning like myself, like Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, I mean Kenny Burrell.

We all grew up together.

We were kids and we were growing up and we were, we would have died for one another.

What was your way of interpreting what Parker was doing with his horn into a vocal style?

Well I started out singing with two young black guys who wrote a lot of words to bird heads and I wanted to be part of their trio.

I wanted to sing with them and they accepted me and we used to rehearse all the time and that turned me on to

to more listening to to what bird was doing but of course I had done that before I met them.

I don't know, I just, as I said, I felt very drawn to bird's music and I could hear it.

I could hear, hey, that's Embraceable You,

or that's I Got Rhythm, but what does he do with a bridge?

Or that's Honeysuckle Rose, but he plays another thing in the middle.

I mean, I had very good ears, and I could hear all that.

I really

didn't deliberately set out to learn Bird.

I was drawn to it.

I really felt that there was a stronger force than myself pushing me into this need to learn this man's music, to know all I could.

You came to New York 31 years ago, about 30, 31 years ago.

In 1952.

52.

Uh-huh.

What are some of the differences in the jazz scene in New York when you came and now?

Well, when I first came here, naturally, Bird was on the scene, and Monk, and Bud Powell, and Miles, and Sonny was just coming up, and Jackie McLean, and I sort of hung out with them.

It was...

exciting to go into

these clubs, these 52nd Street clubs, and hang out there and hear this, you know, you could go across the street and hear Bud, you could go across the street and hear Bird.

I mean, Max.

They were all on the scene.

Oh,

it was thrilling.

And of course, for a kid, you know, at that time, especially if you were into jazz like I, totally into jazz and dedicated to it,

it was very exciting.

Sheila Jordan speaking with Terry Gross in 1981.

Seven years later, Jordan returned to Fresh Air to perform with bassist Harvey S.

Here they are in the studio performing the song Body and Soul.

My heart is sad

and lonely

For you I pine

For you, dear only

Why haven't you seen

it?

I'm all for you,

body and soul.

I spend my days

longing

and I'm wondering why

it's me, you're wronging

I tell you, I'm meaning.

I'm all for you, body and soul.

When you were in Detroit and you were listening to Parker,

he would invite you, and in New York too, he would frequently invite you to sit in

with the band.

It occurs to me that really a lot of the beboppers didn't have nearly as much respect for singers as they did for instrumentalists.

Was that not the case with Parker?

With Bird it wasn't the case.

No, he was very, very open.

And, you know, sometimes

saying that I sat in with him sometimes turns into worked with him, which has never been true.

It turns into what?

Worked with him.

Oh, I know.

Oh, yeah, they get that, you know, that sort of thing all turned around, which is not true.

No, he was very, very supportive to me.

But did you feel you were up against that, the idea that a lot of the musicians didn't take singers as seriously as they took people who could play piano or bass or tenor?

I think maybe a little bit in Detroit at first because everybody was out there trying to do his thing and it got a little bit like that.

But I must say that the jazz musicians have been wonderful with me and have always supported what I've done and always encouraged what I've been doing.

But

I know it was there, but it just didn't get too much to me.

I remember

when I first found out that you had been working day job for years in an advertising age,

yeah, I thought like, how could this be possible?

How could this singer possibly be spending her days typing?

But for years, up until earlier this year, that's how you primarily made a living.

Why did you have to do that?

Well, because I couldn't sing the music that I wanted to sing.

And I really wanted to keep the music the way I sing pure, and I didn't want to have to go out and

hassle gigs that were weddings and

bar mitzvahs and different things, club dates, top 40s, because I can't do that.

I don't do it well.

There's people that do it so much better.

So I didn't really mind that, and I couldn't take a chance on when I was going to work next, because I didn't want to bring my daughter up the way I had been brought up.

I wanted that financial security of

food and rent being there.

Well, a funny thing happened earlier this year.

You were laid off.

I was laid off.

I was devastated.

But I'd prayed that I would, hey, now that I'm almost 60, please let me sing more.

And then one day I was called in after 21 years at this particular place and told, well, we're merging and we're getting rid of the department.

Do you know, I really, I really was devastated.

And then I thought, well, be careful what you pray for.

You might get it.

And I, and I've been working ever since in music.

Well, this has freed up time for you to do.

Oh, concern.

This is fantastic.

I don't know how I ever did it before.

Sang and work the day job.

Sheila Jordan visited the studio with bassist Harvey S.

during an interview with Terry Gross in 1988.

The influential jazz singer died Monday.

She was 96 years old.

This fall, the Blue Note label plans to reissue her debut album, Portrait of Sheila.

Coming up, Justin Chang reviews the new Spike Lee film, Highest to Lowest.

This is Fresh Air.

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In Spike Lee's new crime drama, Highest to Lowest, Denzel Washington plays a New York City music mogul whose teenage son becomes the target of a kidnapping plot.

The movie is a remake of the 1963 Akira Kurosawa classic, High and Low.

Highest to Lowest opens in theaters this week and begins streaming on Apple TV Plus, September 5th.

Our film critic, Justin Chang, has this review.

Back in 2013, Spike Lee directed a disappointing American remake of the cult-beloved Korean thriller Old Boy.

He later all but disowned the movie, claiming it had been edited down against his wishes.

To date, Old Boy is the only one of his films that doesn't bear the signature words, a spike lee joint.

Now, more than a decade later, Lee has taken on a far greater Asian classic, Akira Kotasawa's masterful 1963 film, High and Low.

The remake is called Highest to Lowest, and it's a spike Lee joint through and through, a dazzling crime drama that boldly confronts issues of race and class, art and commerce, all set in a modern-day New York that pulses with music, color, and life.

It's blunt, a little messy, and altogether glorious, and it couldn't be mistaken for the work of any other filmmaker.

Kurosawa's High and Low was itself adapted from Ed McBain's 1959 novel, King's Ransom, and so there's a full-circle logic to bringing the story back to the U.S.

Denzel Washington gives one of his best recent performances as David King, a music executive known for having the best ears in the business.

David lives in a swanky Manhattan penthouse with his wife Pam, played by Ilfinesh Hedera, and their teenage son Trey, played by Aubrey Joseph.

One day, David gets a call from someone who says he's kidnapped Trey and demands a ransom of $17.5 million.

As a police investigation gets underway, it's soon revealed that Trey is actually safe.

His best friend Kyle was snatched by mistake.

Nonetheless, the kidnapper demands the same amount for Kyle's safe return, placing David in a tricky position.

If he pays the ransom, it will ruin him.

jeopardizing a major business deal involving the company he founded, Stackenhitz Records.

If he doesn't pay, he has to live with his guilt forever, especially since Kyle's father, Paul, an excellent Jeffrey Wright, is his driver and his oldest friend.

In this scene, Paul begs David to pay the ransom and save his son's life.

That's right, that's right.

You gave to me freely.

I love you for that.

Right now,

I'm asking you for everything.

I'm asking you for my life.

Now you ain't asking me for life.

Right now, you're asking me for $17.5 million.

That's all people do is ask me for stuff.

Can you ask me?

Give me my son.

Can you give me something?

They just want me to pay.

Stack hits.

Pay for this.

Give me that.

Give me this.

Put this on top of that.

On top of this.

On top of that.

On top of this.

On top of that.

And this and that.

As a crime saga, highest to lowest is solid, but the genre mechanics are less interesting than the underlying ideas.

And if the dialogue in Alan Fox's script hits a few clunky notes early on, that's because it takes time to set up those ideas and maneuver them into position.

As in all his best work, Lee gives the drama a rich personal dimension.

At 68, he's made a film about the struggle to stay relevant with age, and to go on making meaningful art in a world that's often hostile to it.

Even before the kidnapping, David feels uncertain about his place in an entertainment industry where talent and creativity have taken a back seat to the whims of AI and social media.

Race, too, is a factor, as it often is in Lee's movies.

Fame and fortune represent something of a double-edged sword for a black man in the music biz, where commercial success can become shorthand for the establishment or sellout.

One of the movie's best performances comes from the charismatic hip-hop artist Asap Rocky, who, as an up-and-coming rapper named Young Felony, is the ferocious voice of a new generation of black musicians, eager to work with, and perhaps dethrone, the David kings of the world.

As with Kurosawa's high and low, the title of highest to lowest is a clear metaphor for class difference, and Lee, as always, delights in pointing out and amping up tensions between his characters.

You can't help but notice how politely the cops treat the rich and famous David, versus how shabbily they treat Paul, who's poor, Muslim, and a nobody by comparison.

But the film's class critique runs deeper still.

It's built into the very structure of the story.

In order to pay the ransom and hopefully catch the kidnapper, David must leave behind his life of high-altitude luxury and descend to street level.

And what he rediscovers, in the process, is the glory of New York, a city that Lee knows and loves as deeply as any filmmaker working today.

The ransom scene is one of the most exuberant set-pieces in any recent Lee movie, and it pays homage not just to the city, but to the thrilling and irrepressible cultural richness of America itself.

Lee stages the sequence brilliantly, aboard an elevated train on a hot summer day, specifically Puerto Rican Day.

And so when the action spills out into the traffic below, the plot collides with a massive parade, complete with a joyous performance by the Eddie Palmieri Salsa Orchestra.

Palmieri himself died earlier this month, at the age of 88.

And it's nice to see his great legacy saluted in this wonderfully entertaining movie.

Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker.

He reviewed Spike Lee's new film, Highest to Lowest.

On Monday's Fresh Air, Bowen Yang.

He's nominated for an Emmy for his performances on Saturday Night Live.

He'll talk about working on the show, his obsession with pop culture, which is why he co-hosts the podcast Las Culturistas, and the contrast between his life and the lives of his parents who emigrated from China.

I hope you can join us.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

Sam Brigger is our managing producer.

Our senior producer today is Roberta Shurak.

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