Blog
These stories have been around a long time. Some of them I have updated. Many of them I haven’t. This started out when blogs were like, new!
Spiritual Truth In “The Loved and the Unloved”
In the French novel The Loved and the Unloved (1952), or Galigai, by Francois Mauriac, Madame Agathe (or Galigai) hopes that by exerting her will she will cause a young man, Nicholas Plassac, to enter a romantic liaison with her. But Agathe is physically repelling...
Books and stories.
Entertaining Treasure: The 1934 “Treasure Island”
Robert Louis Stevenson wanted Treasure Island to be a fun book. Victor Fleming's adaptation (1934) is a fun movie. Without mugging, Wallace Beery carries the production as Long John Silver. The love of loftiness and the wise shots prove that Fleming was the right...
A Painful Labyrinth In “A Separation” (A Second Review)
The chief character in Asghar Farhadi's A Separation (2011), Nader (Peyman Maadi) refuses to admit to his wrongdoing. Frustrated, he will not pay a disappointing caretaker of his sick father her proper wage and pushes her out the door of his apartment to get her to...
Corinna, The Actress (The Film, “Die Schauspielerin”)
A German film from 1988, The Actress (Die Schauspielerin), directed by Siegfried Kuhn, is about an emotionally vulnerable but also strong-minded theatre actress (Corinna Harfouche) who discards her career in Nazi Germany in order to be with her relocated Jewish beau...
Hang It All! “The Hanging Tree”
I hope the novel The Hanging Tree, by Dorothy M. Johnson, is better than the Delmer Daves movie adapted from it, for the flick, a Western, is frequently quite dumb. For example, the Montana townspeople here are willing to execute their only doctor (Gary Cooper) for a...
American Lafayettes In The Movie, “Lafayette Escadrille”
In the 1957 Lafayette Escadrille, a punk kid (Tab Hunter) at the time of the Great War travels to France to join (with other Americans) an elite air force corp---the Lafayette Escadrille. The corp is training to fight before the U.S. has entered the war. In Paris,...
Talking It Out: “The Aviator’s Wife”
The 20-year-old college student, Francois, in Eric Rohmer's French film, The Aviator's Wife (1981), needs to find himself a woman other than Anne, the one he is obsessed with. Anne is generally indifferent and rude to him, even after her married lover (an aviator)...
Jubal & Pinky & Shep & So Forth: The Movie, “Jubal”
Western time again. In the beautiful Jubal (1956), properly in color and directed by Delmore Daves, Glenn Ford stars as a cow hand made near-aimless and solitary by life. Hired to work at Shep Horgan's ranch, he---Jubal Troop by name---is the Joseph to the...
