Tag: Steven Clark

3,012 words

Kolberg, like Jud Suss (reviewed here) is directed by Veit Harlan, is a period film that stars Harlan’s wife Kristina Soederbaum, and is accused of being clouded with “Nazi” themes. It was one of the last films distributed by the Third Reich, and always shown as an example of Nazi fanaticism and resistance to the end. When one sees Kolberg, it has usually been in documentaries about the Hitler era, always in snippets that remind the viewer how it was shot at the end of the war, wasted whole divisions of German soldiers as extras when they could have better been at the front. It is Nazi and therefore a pointless waste of cinematic resources.

My viewing of the film offers a different impression. (more…)

2,602 words

The Russians are Coming/The Russians are Coming is a splendid 1966 comedy where director Norman Jewison asked a vital question: What happens when they come?

It was asked at the right time, because by the mid-sixties the Russophobia pumped up when the Cold War was in its 1950s deep freeze was being tempered, especially after the dangers of the Cuban Missile Crisis. (more…)

3,010 words

Emile Zola’s 1892 novel Le  Débâcle is almost familiar reading these days, for when I recall this book, while set in the supposedly serene and ordered nineteenth century, has a horror of déjà vu that shrouds America, Iran, and the Donald.

The novel, part of a series Zola wrote to capture France in the nineteenth century and especially the Second Empire, deals with the collapse of Napoleon III’s empire from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 as told through the eyes of French soldiers Jean Macquart and Maurice Levasseur; the first a peasant and former soldier and the second, a bourgeois. (more…)

5,504 words

The novelist Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) wrote that patriotism essentially means killing whomever your government tells you it is fashionable to kill.

Right now, killing Iranians is very much a la mode, but it’s a been simmering for a long time. Aside from the canards about Iran being the center of world terrorism, there is also an unforgiving feud from 1979.

A few days after the recent attack on Iran, my brother and I discussed the situation; I somewhat reluctantly, because I knew we’d be at loggerheads. I considered our undeclared attack criminal and illegal and, going by UN dictates, a war crime. He saw it differently. (more…)

5,179 words

Omnibus Productions was founded in the sixties because it was felt there was a need for classical films. It made four films with predominantly English casts and production and released on American television. Heidi (1968), David Copperfield (1970), Jane Eyre (1971). Heidi was the most famous because in 1968, as the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders game was still continuing, NBC immediately pre-empted the last quarter to begin Heidi, and the field of gridiron battle switched to a blonde, cheerful Heidi. (more…)

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Jim Kunstler, journalist and writer, is best known for his podcast Clusterf— Nation, where he questions Western society coping with lessening amounts of civil and societal order when technology and bureaucracy no longer offer magical solutions to problems of scarcity and mismanagement. (As he remarked in a recent panel show, “prepare for less Superman movies and more puppet shows”). (more…)

2,276 words

Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet, adapted from the novel by Maggie O’Farrell, is a stunning and introspective story about passages, transfiguration, and the tug of war between male and female spirituality. It begins in a forest, where Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) curls up at the base of a huge, primeval tree with a dark tunnel leading to the underworld, or so it seems. (more…)

2,881 words

James Howard Kunstler, whose blog Clusterfuck Nation covers both political and cultural events, published Young Man Blues last year, a fast-paced and enthralling memoir about his troubled adolescence. When he was released from a mental institution he called The Laughing Academy, he judged “My childhood was over and the statute of limitations on my childhood grievances was over, too.” (more…)

3,430 words

My first Jodi Picoult novel, Wish You Were Here, didn’t exactly whet my appetite for her, but her style is enjoyable, so I picked up By Any Other Name, curious and ready for another Picoult joyride.  

“Picoult is the master of wading through the darkness to find the light,” exulted one back cover blurb. By Any Other Name is a dark novel, its light more dappled than effusive. (more…)

4,727 words

When I was in the army in the mid-70s, I was posted to Frankfurt, Germany and spent a lot of time catching up on my reading. Some guys in my company devoured books, the vast majority westerns, sci-fi, and the occasional odd jobs like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Repair. (more…)

2,716 words

Theodor Fontane

Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) is widely regarded in Europe as the major example of German realist writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, although Americans have barely heard of him, obsessed as we are (or at least our German Lit. departments and New York arbiters of taste) with Thomas Mann. (more…)

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While Trump’s style continues to dazzle and seemingly lay waste the leftists, both in America and abroad, a recent film has captivated the critics and the box office, dealing, as it does, with political repression.

But is it that one-sided? As Monica Wood said in her novel My Only Story, people are more than just one thing. (more…)

2,771 words

I’ve often said that to most Americans history begins with Elvis Presley. TV especially is the land of the magic kingdom; not of Disney, but ephemera. It’s noteworthy that in 2022 HBO presented The Gilded Age, a series set in 1880 when America, having been massively industrialized during the Civil War, now projected that technological and economic power in both politics and culture. (more…)