Author: Steven Clark

797 words

A Haunting in Venice is a Halloween movie and also sees the return of the detective Hercule Poirot to the screen, as most recently played by Kenneth Branagh, who directed this film. The story is lifted from Hallowe’en Party, a 1969 Christie novel set in Britain, although here it is moved to 1949 Venice. Little of the original story remains, although bobbing for apples is retained as the staging of an attempted murder. Since this is Venice, floods rage outside, and a past drowning adds to the haunted setting. It all fits. (more…)

1,525 words

If Holden Caulfield did battle with the phonies, Howie Carr does it with hacks. Howie is a Boston journalist whose mischievous face is a combination of Jimmy Cagney and Mephistopheles, offering Irish bravado and tempting the reader, listener, or viewer — he’s done his act for all three — to see the facts and get angry. In Paper Boy, Howie’s memoir, there’s a lot to get angry about, but almost every page bristles with laugh-out-loud moments. (more…)

2,841 words

Now that we are wallowing in a major war in Ukraine and are caught in the throes of a cultural and political revolution in the United States, I recall an interesting arthouse film I discovered some years ago when I lived in Boston at one of the queens of arthouse theaters: Memorias del Subdesarrollo, or Memories of Underdevelopment, (more…)

2,674 words

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

Harold had planned to quit after A Mighty Fortress, but there was another story to be told, and a few months later, in late 2005, I found a manuscript in my mail. I opened it, smelling the heavy aroma of tobacco and old paper as I set my eyes upon a draft of The Brigade, Harold’s fourth Northwest novel. I agreed to be one of the proofreaders, and got to work. (more…)

Harold Covington with the flag of his proposed Northwest American Republic.

2,570 words

Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

Harold Covington’s life and work centered on a determination some might call fanaticism. He clearly defined what his life was about:

There were as well several low ebbs in the past thirty-three years, when I could have slid off the stage into obscurity and into some shitjob, and the world would have forgotten about me. By choice, I never availed myself of those chances to get out of the life, and I have no reason to wail that “I never got a break.” I declined to take the breaks offered because to do so entailed making my peace with a world that is putrid, poisonous, and evil to its very wellsprings. One does not make peace with a loathsome disease. One does not come to accept evil as “Just one of those things.” (more…)

4,030 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

Harold Armstead Covington (1953-2018), to paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt’s mellifluous rhetoric regarding Pearl Harbor, is a man of infamy. (more…)

1,765 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Frank Norris (1870-1902) was best known for MacTeague, a rough, unvarnished view of American life, although The Octopus (1900) demands attention as well. While Steinbeck wrote a memoir/paean to life in Salinas, The Octopus deals with ranchers in the San Joaquin Valley.

Norris’s work, unlike Steinbeck’s careful imitation of Tolstoy, is exciting and more immediate than ever, concerned as it is with land and power. (more…)

1,873 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

California is a garden of Eden,
A paradise to live in or see,
But believe it or not,
You won’t find it so hot,
If you ain’t got the do re mi.
— Woody Guthrie (more…)

1,528 words

Since I am avoiding Oppenheimer and Barbie, I went back into the archives. While reading Arthur Miller’s The Price, I conjured YouTube and watched 1948’s All My Sons, where Edward G. Robinson and Burt Lancaster brought a tragedy by Henrik Ibsen to Middle America. I continued my sortie into post-war American cinema with Clash by Night, a 1952 Fritz Lang film based on a 1941 play by Clifford Odets. Considered a strong melodrama, it is a very watchable film dealing with emotions and relationships in post-war America in a semi-noir setting. (more…)

1,473 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Harlan’s film, unlike Mendes’, was an enormous box office success,[1] and it is said that concentration camp guards and the SS were shown this film to remind them of their duties. It is fast-paced, and Harlan shows things: the oppression of Süß’s decrees, Theodora’s corpse, the angry mob, and the people fighting for their rights. Sturm’s calm, civil demeanor is contrasted with Süß’s slick manipulation and George’s overbearing yet sensual Karl. (more…)

2,943 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

I’ve reviewed Munchhausen and Grosse Freiheit Nummer 7, films produced in the Third Reich that avoided discussing National Socialist philosophy regarding Jews. Which films from that era did? There was Der ewige Jude, Hitler’s favorite film on this subject given its depictions of Jews in caftans and beards, visually compared with rats scurrying down a drain. “That’s what I want to see,” Hitler said to Goebbels. “That’s what we need.” (more…)

2,298 words

Randolph D. Calverhall
Serpent’s Walk
Hillsboro, W. Va.:  National Vanguard Books, 1991

After I read The Turner Diaries in the early 1990s, I looked for other examples of White Nationalist literature. At around this time I also began listening to American Dissident Voices, Dr. William Pierce’s series of weekly radio broadcasts for the National Alliance. When I received their catalog, I was immediately taken by the beautiful, defiant cover of Serpent’s Walk and immediately ordered a copy. (more…)

2,401 words

1943 was not a happy year for the Third Reich. After the disaster of Stalingrad came the catastrophe of Kursk, then the loss of North Africa. The Wehrmacht was on the defensive. America was beginning to enter the European theater in earnest.  But it was a great one for German cinema due to the release of Munchhausen . Based on the exploits of Baron von Munchhausen, one of the literary world’s most famous yarn-spinners, it was a very high-prestige production made in full color, directed by Josef von Baky and starring Hans Albers as the Baron. (more…)