In minor roles, the actors loom up at a saloon window or sit heavily on horseback, and each anonymous face, carved by terrible food, rotten liquor, and bad sex, makes an overwhelming impression of loneliness and discomfort.
The story of this peculiar building on Madison at 76th Street — 200 feet long but only six stories high — starts with the Carlyle, whose romantic tower crashed through the Madison Avenue skyline in 1931 like a movie cowboy thrown through a stage-glass saloon window.
The bad guys ride into Freedomoftradeburg and rob banks, shoot bystanders, sass the schoolmarm, throw citizens through the saloon windows, rustle cattle and set hay wagons on fire.
The upper chamber comprises a circular saloon with windows, although this is now roofless and in poor condition.
There's a kind of cognitive dissonance to Ford's association with Toronto, long seen as a stylish, cosmopolitan city — sort of like seeing a Tiffany & Co. next to a saloon with boarded-up windows.
The city hums with crammed minibus taxis, land cruisers with darkened windows and saloon cars that have seen better days – a bustle unthinkable amid the bullets and mortars just a year ago.
There's a kind of cognitive dissonance to Ford's association with Toronto, long seen as a stylish, cosmopolitan city—sort of like seeing a Tiffany & Co. next to a saloon with boarded-up windows.
Loosely based on an actual unsolved crime from that period, the story follows the French burlesque dancer Blanche Beunon as she investigates the murder of her friend Jenny Bonnet, who was killed when a bullet sailed through the window of the saloon where they boarded, on the seamy, stifling outskirts of town.
Outside are two vehicles: a yellow saloon taxi with doors and windows and probably air conditioning too, maybe even a meter; and there's a tuk-tuk, which in Cambodia is a moped with a trailer.
When she told him to leave her alone, he became angry, went outside the saloon, and started shooting out the windows with his pistol.
With the help of librarians and Clare Sears, the one scholar who's published an essay on the murder of the frog-catching, cross-dressing Jenny Bonnet, I tracked down — often in online newspaper databases — about sixty newspaper reports about her and Blanche Beunon, who was with Bonnet in the saloon when the bullets came through the window.
