Monday, July 26, 2021

Cuba si! Yanqui no!


Fred Reed says it.

Thursday, July 22, 2021

Love Crazy


At first glance, 1950's Gun Crazy is a mere re-telling of the 1930s Bonnie and Clyde myth, following up on Nick Ray's They Live by Night from the year before and Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937). At heart though, Gun Crazy is one of the most deliriously romantic films ever made.

A young man and young woman are obsessed with guns, and both can shoot out the eye of an eagle at 100 yards. When they first meet, what else can they do but fall in love? Since everything around them in straight society means to rip them apart and put them in their place, they do all they can across the landscape of post-World War II America to make their love burn ever brighter.

Peggy Cummins is the soul and guts of the film, always stoking the flames, director Joseph Lewis making prominent the delicate silvery cut of her face (while eventually betraying her): that delicate girl face below the blonde hair. Love must murder us unless we possess it altogether, is the look she gives us. And yet she has a fear of the man she is in love with, for she senses that his words and gestures, perhaps those she could possess. But him, his private substance — she would never have it, and so her eyes often shudder.

At the end, she is proved correct.

Thursday, July 15, 2021

Hot!

As stupid and pointless as is summer in New York City. Still. . . a favorite.

Sunday, July 11, 2021

Aching


I'd always thought (after many viewings) that Hitchcock's astonishing shift from James Stewart's POV to Kim Novak's begins with Judy's look into the camera and her writing ~ then tearing up ~ a confession letter to Scottie, almost 100 minutes into the movie. . .

No, Vertigo is pregnant with her tenderness and sorrow from the start. Perhaps the whole work is born from her fatal descent off the bell-tower, looking back. For how could something like this come from a man as hard-headed, humorless, cold, prosaic, and contemptuous of women (Madeleine at first, Midge, Ellen Corby at the McKittrick) as is the ex-detective?

Friday, July 9, 2021

More Chunk...


 

Thursday, July 8, 2021

Chunk Redux

"A liberal is a lackey looking for someone's boots to polish."
-- Dostoevsky
 
 The great Glenn Greenwald.
 

Wednesday, July 7, 2021

Sunday, July 4, 2021

US

Thursday, July 1, 2021

Who Done It?

 
 
Now of course we know (see above), but back then it was not so clear. An historic conference from 1975 including nothing but Hall of Famers.