by Dean | Oct 31, 2014 | General
Tom is a college boy who is not very virile, and because of the ridicule and suspicion he elicits, the college headmaster’s wife, Laura, is kind and helpful to him. Laura herself could use some kindness, though, since she is married to a man who, though manly, resists her and is a repressed homosexual. He is seemingly jealous of Tom—a heterosexual, by the way—who knows how to receive and appreciate Laura’s sympathetic care.
The agony associated with what the human heart demands and needs is what Tea and Sympathy (1956)—film by Vincent Minnelli, play and screenplay by Robert Anderson—is about. Properly and knowingly, Minnelli put the play on the screen, and the top-notch cast from the Broadway production (Deborah Kerr, et al.) was used. The result is a truly adult film, i.e. one for an adult sensibility, presented with appreciable power. Kenneth Tynan rightly thought the play a good middlebrow work; no less so is the movie.
Tea and Sympathy (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Oct 29, 2014 | General
The 1972 film Dirty Little Billy tries to be honest about the Old West and about life. Here, Billy the Kid (Michael J. Pollard) is mistreated by certain people, such as his tyrannical stepfather, before he ever becomes a violent ne’er-do-well. Several wastrels, primarily a prostitute (Lee Purcell) and her beau (Richard Evans), accept him, however, and force him to engage in gunfire against scurvy adversaries. No small amount of loss and debacle breaks out for the drifting boy.
The movie was made by two ad men, Stan Dragoti (who directed) and Charles Moss, and although it is plainly a fledgling’s achievement, it can be gripping and even fascinating. The writing is sometimes a letdown, but very little of the drama is predictable: the violent reactions, for example. And there is a nice touch whereby an American flag waving over Billy and the dingy new town he walks through bespeaks something about the country’s future: that many ignorant young ne’er-do-wells will be a fixture in the U.S. population.
(Available on YouTube)
Dirty Little Billy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
by Dean | Oct 27, 2014 | General
I picked up a nonfiction book from 2011 called Sex, Mom & God by Frank Schaeffer, a liberal Christian or . . . something; I don’t know what he is.
Compelled to comment on Sarah Palin’s role as defender of traditional values such as marriage and the family, Schaeffer has written that “Palin was the least ‘submissive’ female imaginable [submissive to her husband, that is]. She misused her children as stage props and reduced her husband to the role of ‘helpmeet’; indeed, he became the perfect example of a good biblical wife.” (This during the 2008 presidential campaign.)
I am prompted to wonder why a goodly number of my fellow Christians—or whoever—feel they have to write books. We’d be better off if they didn’t. That Sarah Palin has failed at submissiveness is probably something God alone should determine, is it not? The idea that she “misused her children as stage props” (“used” and not misused is the proper word here) is simply absurd, and who would believe there was any such “reduction” of Tod Palin?
For a man to criticize Palin as late as 2011 was sadly ungallant.
by Dean | Oct 24, 2014 | General
Capriciousness can become cruelty. It does with Carmen in Charles Vidor’s The Loves of Carmen (1948) based, like the opera, on the Prosper Merimee story.
The gypsies in the film, of whom beautiful Carmen is one, are truly thieves. Carmen’s Spanish lover, who finds out too late that Carmen is married, becomes one too, after the husband’s death. Will Carmen stay with the man?
This pretty-looking but often cornball and obvious period piece is rescued by the charisma and fire and gorgeousness of Rita Hayworth (Carmen). Glenn Ford is miscast as the Spanish lover, Don Jose, but Hayworth makes doggone sure she isn’t miscast. She’s even good in a fight scene with another woman, and her general energy complements the suitably staged physical conflicts between men. Artificial as it is, the movie confirms what it means for an actress to be a star in a way Jane Fonda or Debra Winger or Michelle Pfeiffer never was.
Carmen itself is flawed if rather entertaining. In any case, it offers something better than the fake spirituality of another Hayworth film, Salome.
Cover of The Loves of Carmen
by Dean | Oct 21, 2014 | General
The second episode of Jane the Virgin (on Monday, Oct. 20) was as well-written as the first. This CW series is the new Desperate Housewives—i.e. the new plebeian, seriocomic soap—but so far it’s better than Housewives. It’s livelier and more amusing and, well, somehow a little less plebeian. Too, it’s moving (in the second episode), notwithstanding the gimmicky tear falling in slow-mo from the eye of Yael Grobglas’s Petra.
Gina Rodriguez is appealingly fine as Jane, resourceful and not as conventional as she could be. Yara Martinez also impresses as a doctor named Luisa, strikingly subdued in pain and fear. Among the men, Jaime Camil never overdoes his comic vigor as a telenovela star.
The ratings for Jane have been decent. Let’s hope the show remains decent.
by Dean | Oct 14, 2014 | General
Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River (1952) is a rugged, natural beauty-loving Western, but much about the narrative doesn’t hold up.
Surely a pack of hostile men would not ride their horses into an unoccupied area with a burning campfire and thus risk an ambush from their enemies. Surely Jimmy Stewart’s cowboy would refuse the further services of scalawags who try to overturn his plans to deliver food to a settlement. And a few other befuddling things go on as well. Adapting someone’s novel, scenarist Borden Deal should have known better: The plotting makes this movie impure in a way that a Western flick like Shane is not.
Bend is a rich movie, yes, but that’s only owing to what the director, Mann, has done.
Cover of Bend of the River
