A French woman, “Mellie”, kills the man who rapes her (he’s still in the house) and tells no one about it. An investigating American colonel demands to know the truth. Mellie lies to him, all the while being thrust into a world of bullying and profound moral decay.

This is Rider on the Rain, a 1970 French-American production directed by Rene Clement. Despite absurdity in the plot, it is a unique and piercing potboiler—starring Charles Bronson yet! Ah, but the capital actor here is Marlene Jobert, who is magnificent as the consistently worried, often gutsy Mellie. She appears in nearly every scene. Most of the film’s virtue is hers, though it is also nice that spiky Rider has a happy ending.

Two hours of Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) as an arrogant Smartest Person In The Room, with little drama seeping in, is not my idea of worthwhile cinema. Being the Ricardos (2012) is a disaster.

Apropos of his trip to Hell, Bill Wiese wrote, “I was horrified as I heard the screams of an untold multitude of people crying out in torment.”

Wow.  The Lord must hate the wretched people He has to damn—instead of loving His enemies.  And never mind that Wiese also declares there is absolute silence in Hell (a contradiction).

I might as well broach the subject of Carlton Pearson explaining to people that years ago God spoke to him and said the afflicted Rwandans whom Pearson saw on TV, though non-Christian, “don’t need to get saved,” that “they’re already saved.”  Although it’s possible Pearson never heard any such message, why should any Christian be expected to believe that the preacher’s experience was illusory while the Hell experience Wiese reports was flat-out authentic?

The founding fathers put in a good word for Christianity, knowing it is a civilizing force. Even so, they usually preferred Unitarianism and deism (and secular living) to Christian fervor and traditionalism. Did Jefferson and Adams believe in the Incarnation? No. It paved the way for all kinds of heretical and secular thought. Small wonder that Republican Party thinkers of the late 1800s warmed to Darwinism and German philosophy. Christianity, however, was hardly ignored. Think of Dwight Moody. . .

Cover of Lolita

I have read only a chunk of Nabokov’s novel, Lolita, and thus cannot comment on it.  If it’s perverse, which I doubt, the 1962 Stanley Kubrick movie is not.  Sue Lyon‘s Lolita is fifteen or sixteen, not twelve, hence Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is not really a pedophile.  He is a debonair fool with whom we seldom sympathize, and it’s even slightly odd that he murders the abominable Clare Quilty (Peter Sellers).

The movie has nothing to say, whether the book does or not, although it is a human-condition tale.  And it holds our attention.  Sequences such as that in which Charlotte (Shelley Winters) perforce turns on Humbert are very sturdy.  Lolita is visually attractive and the acting is absorbing.  Mason, Winters and comically grotesque Sellers are genuine interpretive artists, and Sue Lyon is convincing as a rebellious lass willing to “love.”

Kubrick’s film is fine by me.