The 1956 John Ford film, The Searchers, isn’t perfect but it’s riveting. To me it seems longer than two hours and I’m glad of it, since the plot is sturdy and the Monument Valley and San Juan River scenes are gorgeous. John Wayne, even so, tries to make main character Ethan Edwards a hero, but the man is not a hero. It is Ward Bond‘s Reverend/Captain Clayton who is a largely decent soul; Ethan, a narrow-minded monster until the end, isn’t. . . As for the acting, Wayne is simply too limited, and most of the other actors rant and fret excessively. Bond, I think, is fine, but I dislike Jeffrey Hunter.
Author: EarlD Page 1 of 314
In Tom Perrotta‘s short story “Backrub” (from the book, Nine Inches), the teenaged Donald stands up to a middle-aged, homosexual cop who wants to give Donald a backrub. Good. All the same, the young dude is proving to be a moral disappointment—to his parents and, well, even the world. He backs away from a commitment to travel to Uganda and help orphans there. Eventually he gets into big trouble with the police.
Donald senses that he can afford to be an “asshole” or a rebel of sorts. This is a “backrub” he can live with. He’s wrong, though. This seems to be a coming of age story (in an oh-so-liberal world)—a rich and assuredly not-boring one. The “Steinbeck of suburbia,” as Perrotta has been called, has done it again.
In the first-rate Iranian film, The Salesman (2016), by Asghar Farhadi, Emad, the main character, is not a salesman. He is a schoolteacher who plays a salesman—Willy Loman—in a local production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, but this is not the only role he is drawn to assume. A second role is that of vengeful husband after he discovers the man who mistook Emad’s wife Rana for a prostitute and may have impulsively abused her. Although he’s a smart man who surely knows how to leave well enough alone, Emad, failing to do this, acts the dishonored avenger; and it ends badly.
Human weakness and fault are all over this downer of a film, but as well people are trying to adjust to, and stay alive in, urban society in general and Iranian society in particular. The old apartment building where Emad and Rana live begins to collapse due to nearby construction work. The former apartment of a prostitute, the couple’s new home, invites some aggression. That the police are never called to investigate the situation has something to do with the fact that, as Anthony Lane puts it, “The woman [in Iran] is the guilty party until proven innocent.”
Life in The Salesman has people limping along day after day, and even those who charge ahead, as Emad does, are limping. What Farhadi’s men believe themselves justified in doing—and they do gain our sympathy—suddenly pushes them and their wives against the wall. Both sexes demonstrate their vulnerability, in a marriage, alas, which may be in jeopardy. Is there a new role to take on that will salvage this?
(In Farsi with English subtitles)
The Saturday Night Kid, from 1929, is yet another old, old movie based on a play. Dealing with a romantic rivalry between two sisters, its chief interest lies in how well Clara Bow did in owning a part in a talkie. She has a not-bad voice and gives a grounded, energetic performance in a forgettable comedy-drama. Jean Arthur, with her Betty Boop voice, is serviceable. Kid almost sells us charm the way a Rene Clair French film did, but not quite. Still, I recommend it.
Cover of Top Hat
I’m no judge of choreography, but that involving Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in 1935’s Top Hat strikes me as palatable, not silly or clumsy or pretentious. More appealing are the Irving Berlin songs, all of which have decent melodies, one of which (“Cheek to Cheek”) has an outstanding one.
Directed by Mark Sandrich, Top Hat is a delicious musical comedy, as are other Astaire-and-Rogers musical comedies, and one which takes the comedy in its genre seriously, however trivial these nonstop jokes may be. No, they’re not Oscar Wilde but at least they’re funny. As for the actors, they form a rather remarkable comic ensemble, even the two dancing stars: beau-less Ginger, blurting out, “I HATE men!” holds her own. Always, of course, she held her own as a dancer, though with fewer sparks than Astaire, who has among other things the “damn-your-eyes violence of rhythm” (Otis Ferguson).
Top Hat was nominated for an Oscar for best interior decoration, but I’d rather see the damning-your-eyes. The interior decoration is dated now; Astaire’s dancing isn’t.
Related articles
- Gateways To Geekery: Elegance meets feistiness in the Astaire-Rogers musicals (avclub.com)
- Top Hat (myoldaddiction2.wordpress.com)
