Reflections in a Golden Eye

The title image, as in a play by Tennessee Williams, recurs uncomfortably often. I guess that’s the way gay Southerners wrote way back then. Williams’ plays were made into films, however bastardized, when he was young and hot.
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Die Dreigroschenoper

I just saw G.W. Pabst’s film of the Brecht-Weill 3 Penny Opera. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera has always been a favorite text; Brecht’s play was based on the Gay; but Gay was handed the original idea by Jonathan Swift. The Reagan/Two Bush Era embodied exactly that operatic kleptocracy. When Polly in the Pabst film buys a bank, it is, as they say, priceless.

Beowulf

Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother, rising from the waters in the movie Beowulf, beautiful and big-chested, reminded me of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. Compilers and historians often quote a similar scene with Sophia Loren. The motif becomes entangled with celebrity.

Violent Spectacle

After a long trip, for no particular reason, I went to 3:10 to Yuma yesterday. Thirty years ago I was in Peru this time in September. Peru was run by Russians. Che posters were everywhere. There were free Russian lessons at the University of Cuzco. There happened to be an International Conference of Third World Nations in Lima while I packing for my return to the U.S. Everybody seemed to speak English, and reside in New York; their next stop was the autumn opening of the United Nations. However, on our way back to New York, rightist tanks rolled in the streets of Lima, and the Russians abruptly departed. Today the mass media is echoing Bush’s anti-Iran ploy. President Ahmadinejad spoke this afternoon at my alma mater, Columbia University, and will speak tomorrow at the U.N. The tabloids call him Mr Evil. First there was Osama, then there was Saddam, and now there’s Ahmadinejad. Are the Republicans preparing us for more war? Like O.J. Simpson they’ll eventually catch the guy who blew up the World Trade Center. Meanwhile the cowboys in 3:10 to Yuma kill just about everybody.

La vie en rose

Edith Piaf’s life is chock-a-block with astonishing events. Raised in whorehouse? Check. Leaves whorehouse for circus? Check. Kicked out of circus with acrobat father and forced to make a living singing in the street? Check. A life with murders that ended with adulation at 44? Check. She was a tiny, pretty woman with an astounding voice. Check her out.

Good Night, Vietnam

Goodnight Moon. Before the Iraqi distraction, I dreamt of Vietnam. I am an American flyer following a Vietnamese rail line, victory in Vietnam remains possible; -- or so I’d dream. In life I protested the war and cursed Johnson and Nixon. But the peace was not then as sweet as I anticipated. American soldiers returned to unhappy or blighted lives. Vietnam and especially Cambodia fell into misery. Maybe I sought to right matters in dreams. In Rescue Dawn, Werner Herzog portrays an American pilot shot down and imprisoned in North Vietnam. At one point we see a U.S. warplane flying high over the camp. It’s thrilling.

Reflections in a Golden Eye

The title image, as in a play by Tennessee Williams, recurs uncomfortably often. I guess that’s how gay Southerners wrote way back then. Williams’ plays were made into films, however bastardized, when he was young and hot. Carson McCullers’ novel was made into a film in 1967, the year she died. And its stars were dimming: the Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor brands meant less and less as Lyndon Johnson sent more and more troops into Vietnam. And who could ever believe again in Maggie the Cat after seeing the untamed Katharina the shrew and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Giant

George Stevens directed such famous films as Gunga Din, A Place in the Sun and Giant. Kids used to love Gunga Din (1939). Have you seen it? Half the cast is in brownface and Sam Jaffe plays Gunga Din. It’s banned in India. Ignorant children in the U.S. and Canada, such as myself, adored it through the ’50s when it was broadcast, for instance, on Saturday afternoon TV. It’s based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling. Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951) is based on the great novel by Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy. Elizabeth Taylor plays a socialite in Place in the Sun opposite Montgomery Clift. In Giant (1956), she plays a socialite opposite Rock Hudson and, more antagonistically, James Dean. Like Gunga Din, Giant has a problem with make-up. The film is a family saga; Taylor, Hudson and Dean, in their real world twenties, age into their sixties. It feels like an amateur theatrical which just happens to be produced by Jack Warner and stars the cream of Hollywood. It’s very hard to accept, particularly when you know how Hudson, Dean and Taylor really aged. Dean died days after filming finished. Nevertheless the film is pretty great. Dean starred in only three films, yet has to this day an enduring cult. Within the film, time and Taylor change Hudson’s character with the acutest psychological verisimilitude. The film is a rousing denunciation of racism.

300

The Spartans were spare with gab and garb.