1,217 words
On Christmas of 1996 I was at a crossroads. I had spent seven years in Boston — a life’s goal, and they were seven of the happiest years of my life — but in 1991 I moved to Columbia, Missouri, to live with Mother. I had worked and saved money, ostensibly planning to go to library school at the university, then return to Boston, ready to get hired. But things didn’t turn out that way. (more…)
4,073 words
Bread and Chocolate, a 1974 Italian film written and directed by Franco Brusati and starring Nino Manfredi, came when immigration was heating up in America. It reminded me of my own experience of the 1970s, when I was stationed in Germany and seeing foreign “guest workers” doing scut work everywhere, from restaurant help to loading trucks. In front of my barracks every morning, a doleful squad of Turks hopped off a truck to collect good, clean, municipal German trash while a burly German in a truck waited for them to do the drag and hassle before driving on. (more…)
2,287 words
Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
Burn the land, boil the sea
You cannot take the sky from me
So went the opening theme of Firefly, a boot camp/cowboy song with fiddles and guitars instead of electronic music. In 2002, Firefly was a sci-fi show that led a brief but exciting life, not even completing a full season. (more…)
3,502 words
Virginia Woolf said that a writer needed two essential things: guineas and locks –that is, money and privacy. June Leigh (Naomi Watts), the protagonist of The Wolf Hour, has enough of these, and like Garbo, she wants to be alone. However, her door buzzer keeps ringing and no one answers on the other end. It’s almost a Greek chorus of defiance, a spiritual raspberry to June’s pretensions, for she is the author of The Patriarch, a searing novel that established her career as a writer and has caused a split with her family so bad that they’ve disowned her. (more…)
2,484 words
Dr. Sidney Schafer (James Coburn) is a therapist at the top of his game. He’s clever, probing, a master of his profession, and James Coburn gives his character a smirk of pride while his eyes probe his patients in this 1967 satire. His office is very sixties, abounding in modern art and decor, and set on a table is a Chinese gong. Why a gong? Memories of foreign travel? A way to summon the Emperor or expel demons? Schafer is, after all, an emperor of therapy. (more…)
1,812 words
In 1962, Jetta Carleton’s The Moonflower Vine was published and immediately praised. One critic compared it to To Kill a Mockingbird, which had been published in 1960. Like Harper Lee’s book, The Moonflower Vine was the only work of its author. The novel was loved, revered, then went out of print. To Kill a Mockingbird, as we all know, is probably taught more in schools than the Bible and, to the progressive set, it is a kind of Bible.
3,612 words
Trevor Lynch can wax eloquent over Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge Over the River Kwai, but when I choose a great movie hero from that era, forget Lawrence or Lt. Colonel Nicholson; my man is Jake Holman (Steve McQueen) in Robert Wise’s 1966 The Sand Pebbles, an epic action film examining a common man whose performance by Steve McQueen is an excellent depiction of a true, common, American.
Jake Holman is in the China of 1926, a machinist’s mate assigned to the San Pablo, a gunboat on duty in the backwaters. (more…)
3,304 words
When I was in college, the campus offered a film series called Twice-Told Tales. You would view a film followed by its remake three days later. Films like Dangerous Female (1931), starring the well-known actor Ricardo Cortez. Whatever happened to Ricardo Cortez? For that matter, Dangerous Female? The remake did rather better: The Maltese Falcon (1942), starring Humphrey Bogart. We sure know him. (more…)
2,710 words
Do not believe the poster of this 1952 film. Do not. Wait ‘Till the Sun Shines, Nellie, isn’t the pleasant, bubbly, Technicolor singfest that is promised, although the song with all its nostalgic sentiment is there. Its appearances, however, evoke sadness and regret, much like old family photos tend to.
The action begins in the 1890s aboard a train chugging to Chicago, carrying Ben Harper (David Wayne) and Nellie (Jean Peters). (more…)
Robert Cuccioli as Ben Rumson in Jon Marans’ Paint Your Wagon
2,260 words
The Western dominated American pop culture until the early 1970s, when it suddenly winked out like an aging athlete. TV was infested with Westerns. Jonathan Winters once complained that though he loved Westerns, he didn’t like “fifteen of them in a row.” It sure seemed that way. (more…)
1,394 words
Christian Petzold’s Undine, set in contemporary Berlin, begins with Undine Wibeau (Paula Beer) having coffee with Johannes, her boyfriend. It’s not going well. She has deep, penetrating eyes and red hair that looks ready to blaze. She says to him: “You said you loved me. Forever. If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you. You know that.”
We’ve all had girlfriends like that, haven’t we? (more…)
1,457 words
1970’s Halls of Anger is low-budget, tense, sensational, but real. Calvin Lockhart plays Quincy Davis, an ex-basketball star who’s happy teaching in a suburban high school until integration comes and he’s reassigned to a ghetto school, as are several white students. The principal, Boyd Wilkerson (John McLiam), couldn’t care less about his students; he wants more federal money (from integration) and a chance to get elected to the school board. (more…)