Insights

Revisited with pleasureF for Fake (1973) Orson Welles’ non pariel personal essay. The Social Network (2010) Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s take on the birth of Facebook. This is something she knows, but does not share with her children, … The Night of the Following Day (1969) One of many late-1960s Brando pictures that helped make him box-office poison, this adaptation of a Lionel White thriller boasts an impeccably arranged kidnapping, a very fine performance by Brando, a good one by Pamela Franklin as the victim, and an unequivocally great one by Richard Boone as the most terrifying of the felons. It has to stop. I don’t know whether today’s children, weaned on CGI and iPhones before they’re out of preschool, have the capacity to respond to the show’s gentle humors, but I would be willing to bet that if you sat a relatively unspoiled five-year-old down in front of these 30-minute charmers, he or she might be hooked for life. More notably Sparkian, in the movie, are Smith’s coevals: Pamela Franklin, blankly astute as Sandy; Gordon Jackson, whose Mr. Lowther somehow makes cowardice seem endearing; and, supremely, Celia Johnson as Brodie’s bête noire Miss Mackay. Brodie, perhaps appropriately for a novel whose center is not so much eccentricity but sexual jealousy, is in a curious way represented by two sets of women: One literary, the other histrionic. * I once saw the Brodie movie in tandem with Paul Newman’s Rachel, Rachel, a pointed double-bill. What we know of ourselves New (non-documentary) movies viewed on a big theatre screen:None. New to Me: Meh…Not With My Wife You Don’t! Child, I count ten dripping into buckets, the mold a wild finally, and rushes in. The insidious corresponding Jesuit maxim (“Give me the child for the first seven years and I’ll give you the man”) may have originated with Aristotle and not, as has been attributed, Loyola, but in any case it is difficult to imagine that Spark was unaware of it. The Seven-Ups (1973) A sort of unofficial sequel to The French Connection, directed by that picture’s producer, this tense New York police procedural boasts a splendid central performance by Roy Scheider, a very fine supporting turn by Tony Lo Bianco, and a car chase sequence that, in its grittiness and excitement rivals those in Connection and Bullitt. Selected Short SubjectReturn to Glennascaul (aka, Orson Welles’ Ghost Story, 1953) Despite that second title, it’s not really his; Welles appended cinematic bookends to an atmospheric short picture made by Hilton Edwards. and Woody Allen flaunts his repulsive look and persona. Bob Newhart is the thorn in their side, the deliciously-monickered Mr. Natpole, and Karl Malden, both nervous and bellicose, is very funny as the ulcer-ridden executive. It colors the space blue (2016) Lovely, affecting movie about the street cats of Istanbul. But we had no idea then that, 15 years later, a Democrat would, with his 1996 Telecommunications Act, usher out the flawed but vitally important American free press and replace it, eventually, with a completely corporate, wholly right-wing, one. in some absurd blessing. (1971) Still interesting and entertaining but… what was it with Sidney Lumet and stereotyped “fag” characters? Know its characters, and its slight, impressionistic plot as well as you might from a previous reading, or from either the play or the famous movie (or indeed the seven-part British miniseries) made from it and this slim, slightly autobiographical tapestry continues to delight from inauspicious beginning to unforgettable end, each successive reading over time revealing more of its perfectly pitched tone, its striking manipulation of the temporal, its ironic (but never bitter) detachment, and the mellifluous, biting (but never savage) dialogue of which Spark was long a past-mistress. Old Favorites re-viewed on a big theatre screenSpectre (2015) I don’t quite know why there’s been so little love for the 24th Bond. If I show it to someone and he or she doesn’t love it too, all bets are off. slosh and thrash against the glass. : “Oklahoma!” (Todd-AO and CinemaScope versions) 1955, Hell and high water: “The Towering Inferno” (1974), Galloping tintypes: “Nickelodeon” (Director’s Cut and Original Theatrical Version, 1976), Canvas sky and muslin tree: “Paper Moon” (1973), So, what’s the story? (1943) What’s good of Orson Welles’ direction is overwhelmed by what’s bad of Norman Foster’s. The Great Race (1965) Another favorite of long-standing. But then, at 12 I was much less critical. I had the Jungle Book comic (I wore the over off that one through obsessive re-reading), Jungle Book Disneykins figurines from Royal Pudding, Jungle Book temporary tattoos, Jungle Book books, and, of course, the Jungle Book soundtrack album, which I wore to a veritable hockey-puck. Typically strong photography by William C. Mellor, a good central performance from Robert Taylor and an exceptionally vivid one by Hope Emerson make this, if not wholly successful, diverting and markedly original. The character, as Behn wrote him, is an attractive young man, which makes his position within a group of spectacularly selfish mercenaries eminently explicable. Where Were You Went the Lights Were Out? (2004) A timely reminder of a true progressive groundbreaker… who was ultimately screwed by the Democratic Party. True, it’s no Skyfall — what is? But what if Mr Simon doesn’t like Heaven? pitching through the porthole. (1949) Graham Greene wrote it. First of course, Muriel Spark, who bequeathed Miss Brodie to the world (and who based her to a large degree on a certain Miss Kay, her own teacher at, as Jean Brodie would note, “an impressionable age.”) Next, Jay Presson Allen, who adapted the book for the stage and who would later transmogrify her own adaptation into film. Brodie, uncharacteristically up against it, in one of the movie’s forceful encounters with Teddy Lloyd (Robert Stephens.). The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell (1982) Robert B. Weide again. but it rains and rains, too busy raining Wag the Dog. And you can really see what in it inspired Bob Fosse when he made Cabaret. Roman Polanksi’s screenplay (almost reverently faithful to the Ira Levin novel) and direction, the gorgeous cinematography by William A. Fraker and the effective score by Krzysztof Komeda (dead, sadly, within months of its release, this depriving us of a distinctive new compositional voice in movies), combined with the performances by its largely elderly cast and a notably plangent one by the often-insufferable Mia Farrow, make this exercise in stylish, low-key horror among the finest in the genre. Surely the sharply observational ironist in Spark, who famously converted to Roman Catholicism, knew what she was about when Brodie says, repeatedly, “Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life.” Substitute “child” for “girl” and you have the very essence of Catholic (indeed, every religion’s) indoctrinal teaching. Eliot is one of the sanest, most politically astute people I know, and his recommendations are not to be taken lightly. Ask me instead which novels I’ve read most often —  that’s a much easier one. Act of Violence (1949)A nicely-observed thriller starring Van Heflin, the young Janet Leigh and a typically stellar Robert Ryan that gets at some dark aspects of World War II mythology and contains one sequence, in which a stalking, menacing Ryan is heard but never seen, that is unlike anything I’ve ever encountered before.

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