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“I’ve just got a new record of Civil War music,” my brother recently bragged over the telephone.
He wanted some snappy tunes to listen to, and mentioned that the Nazi marches he is so fond of have been banned from YouTube. “I’ve discovered Italian Fascist marches,” he said. “They’re very melodic and . . . so operatic.” He referred to a long-ago record cover. “They’re so warm.” (more…)
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It seems ironic that Tom George’s 2022 film See How They Run was released in England a day before Queen Elizabeth’s death. The film, a whodunit that follows the genre’s steps like following footprints in the snow, wants to be funny and breathe life into the old form. But, like recent events with the monarchy, this film is a kind of death watch on England and English culture, especially that middlebrow artifact known as the murder mystery. (more…)
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Jesse James was a man
He was known throughout the land
He was bold, he was bad, but he was brave;
But that dirty little coward
That shot down Mr. Howard
Has gone and laid poor Jesse in his grave . . .
T. J. Stiles
Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War
New York: Chelsea House, 1993 (more…)
3,266 words
I first saw Decision Before Dawn on TV in the mid-sixties on Saturday Night at the Movies, seemingly banal filler that offered a surprisingly good row of early fifties movies such as The Big Carnival (previously reviewed by me), The Desert Fox, and others that were gritty, blunt, and full of Cinéma vérité. This one always stuck with me, and I recently saw it again on YouTube.
What sticks? The realistic setting of this 1951 film in a battered Germany during the Second World War holding off the inevitable, and the strong performance of Oskar Werner as Corporal Mauer, a POW who is convinced by the Americans to go back into Germany on a mission that could supposedly end the war (don’t they all?). (more…)
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This is an excerpt from my memoir The Xena Years, about life in the nineties. It seems relevant today.
I had just climbed out of the pool when the woman bowed towards Mecca. (more…)
4,403 words
Mark Mazower
Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe
New York: Penguin, 2008
The image of Nazi Germany as a well-oiled, unconquerable machine is hard to forget, but so many books in recent years have given a more honest evaluation of the Third Reich. Mark Mazower’s 2008 book Hitler’s Empire, while not really breaking any new ground, is a strong compendium of the flaws, inner turmoil, and seething disputes among the Nazi hierarchy over how to run and strengthen their empire. (more…)
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“A splendid little war” was how Secretary of State John Hay described the Spanish-American War of 1898. Since Hay had served in Abraham Lincoln’s administration, he had had a lot of experience with more jaundiced wars like the one in the 1860s. The Spanish-American War was little, and its splendor depended upon where you were when it occurred. In DC’s clubrooms and in Congress, it was quite alluring, and was to most of the country. But if you were on the front line taking rounds from Spanish Mausers or suffering agony from malaria or dysentery — which a good part of the army was — it was not so splendid. (more…)
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The Vice President of the United States: It’s a lousy job, but someone’s got to do it. So why not cut to the chase and get a lousy person?
This was the premise of the comedy series Veep, which ran from 2012-2019 on HBO, chronicling the rise and fall and semi-rise of Selena Meyer, who schemes, rules, dominates, cowers, and obfuscates her way to power. Selena, aided (and generally hindered) by her staff, carries the water for President Hughes, and is almost totally ignored except when he orders her out to show the flag, take the heat, or be his pit bull, although Selena winds up as a Chihuahua more often than not, especially when a last-minute bit of political expediency by the unseen President leaves Selene as the fall guy . . . or gal, less a pit bull than sacrificial lamb. (more…)
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Unlike many moviegoers, I was never that enthusiastic about Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s response to the arms race. I remember that back in the 1980s, a girlfriend and I saw the film and she thought it made light of a serious issue. This was at the height of President Reagan’s sending more missiles to Europe, his Star Wars missile defense plan, and everyone’s lugubrious viewing of The Day After. (more…)
2,101 words
Mildred Walker (1905-1998) wrote a series of books considered Western regional, and was compared to Willa Cather. Walker, however, has a sensibility all her own, and Winter Wheat (1944) was a book that impressed me from the first page. In it, people are tied to the land and the wheat it produces.
It begins in an office by the storage silo in Gotham, a village of 75 that hardly lives up to its pretentious name. (more…)
