The Nancy Mitford novel, The Pursuit of Love (1945), is a winningly written entertainment—indeed, an artistic entertainment—with characters based on Mitford’s family. Alas, it has little to say and yet ’tis an intelligent comedy-drama. For sure, reading Pursuit is not a waste of time.
Author: EarlD Page 65 of 316
Violent scenes in Michael Winner‘s rowdy 1971 Western, Lawman, are quite exciting, and the flick boasts an agreeable cast. It is sometimes—often?—clumsily shot, though, and puts a dull emphasis on the non-heroic. Gerald Wilson’s scripted tale, even so, comes close to being a brutal tragedy. It made me think.
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Although I have no regrets—at all—for sympathizing with Israel, I know little about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I am damn certain the makers of Black Sunday (1977), a political caper film, also know little about it, but by no means is the picture wholly ridiculous. Just frequently ridiculous.
A neurotic Lebanese terrorist, Dahlia, recruits her neurotic American “lover,” Lander, an ex-POW, to kill thousands upon thousands of Americans at the Super Bowl. How does Dahlia manage to make so much headway against Israeli agents in the hospital and sundry U.S. workers? Is Lander’s super-competence with a phone explosive he uses to murder a freighter captain believable?
There is first-rate acting in this John Frankenheimer film by Marthe Keller, Steven Keats, Bruce Dern and Robert Shaw. Frankenheimer directed well, but the writing by Ernest Lehman, though often entertaining, is unmemorable and with bland dialogue. He actually did better with North by Northwest. And it’s more fun.
I rather enjoyed the 1954 A Kiss Before Dying, by Gerd Oswald, except that much of the acting needs to be more grounded and the plot is mediocre. Re the former, for example, Robert Wagner seems to care little about his part. Re the latter, for example, apparently no one saw Wagner (as Bud) and Joanne Woodward (as Dorothy) together as they ambled up to the roof of a tall building where Bud murders Dorothy. Everybody but everybody thinks she committed suicide.
There is sapid suspense, though.
The main character in Bernard Malamud‘s short story “The Jewbird,” a bird that calls himself a Jewbird flies through the open window of a Jewish family’s apartment and never willingly leaves there. He is fleeing certain culprits, enemies, especially anti-Semites. The bird represents the Jewish race.
He cannot pay back the Cohen family for his food and shelter, but can only do them the favor of necessarily helping son Maurie with his schoolwork. The father is suspicious of and then hostile to the bird (“whoever heard of a Jewbird?”) Yes, he is a surreal creature, but the bird brings into relief the family’s failure to really understand the threat of anti-Jewish hate, and of human brutality in general. It is the bird who understands as he begins to live as though he were in a chamber or a prison camp of terror. This is before the story’s horrific ending when it becomes clear how indistinguishable violent anti-Semites are from predatory animals.