A teacher named Rolfe narrates his older brother’s story in the Russell Banks novel, Affliction (1989), and even if he is not likely to be a wholly reliable narrator, he can surely be trusted in pointing out his brother’s deepening affliction.  Wade Whitehouse, the 41-year-old sibling, is divorced from Lillian, the only woman he has ever genuinely loved, and painfully misses having his young daughter in his care.  He struggles against the wrath of his half-mad father and harbors unreasonable suspicions about the men around him, at the risk, it turns out, of losing his job.

Wade’s life starts going down the toilet.  For him to be is not really to live, for he is living with a “dumb helplessness.”  Or he begins to live with it.  Being is all that Wade has.  A helpless man is not free.  A Christian couple, Wade’s sister Lena and her husband Clyde bring to the family a set of traditional religious beliefs that their relatives don’t know what to do with.  Lena and Clyde can be fatuous, but that they live lives distinctly separate from those of Wade and his father is understandable.  The men’s behavior creates a maelstrom increasingly difficult to control.

Affliction is cohesive, thrilling and mature.  It is better than much of Faulkner, and although it is not as profound as the best of Faulkner, to me it is just as powerful as it.

Boys’ Night Out (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A top-notch comedy, Boys’ Night Out (1962) proffers three corrupt married men who want an out-of-town pad where they can be serviced by a willing girl.  Under protest, a bachelor friend played by James Garner finds for the men both the pad and the girl (Kim Novak), who is not what she seems.  Instead of a floozy, Novak is a sociology student intending to study the suburban gents.  Falling for her and pitching his woo, Garner is confused, for he doesn’t understand the masquerading girl’s personality.  Naturally, after the wives of the corrupt men learn of their husbands’ adultery, there is zany pandemonium.

The film was deftly directed by Michael Gordon, who fashioned Pillow Talk.  Scripted by Ira Wallach (adapting it from a story), it’s mildly charming and moderately funny, which means it’s funnier than most of the old black-and-white screwball comedies, good as they are.  The restrained farcical acting of the cast is proper, although none of it is too restrained.  Kim Novak is more feminine than Doris Day but has less personality, and yet she is credible.  Tony Randall and Fred Clark make a splash.

Boys’ Night Out tells us that the sex drive, though men obey it, is not all that strong, really.  It says this while being decent enough to maintain a respectable attitude toward Novak’s lovely non-sexpot and, more or less, the other women in the film as well.

A sapid romp.  –

True Grit (1969 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1969, the year of True Grit‘s release, critic Stanley Kauffmann found the movie offputtingly conservative.  Mattie, the Kim Darby character, keeps mentioning that her family owns property, you see.

Whatever.  It isn’t offputting to me.  I enjoyed it for showing us the sweaty, economical drama that every intelligent Western is.  It’s an acceptable adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel, neatly directed by Henry Hathaway.  And, unlike Kauffman, I thought Darby filled the bill in her role. 

It is a campaign-enriching axiom that Eisenhower “got us out of Korea and kept us out of Vietnam.”  This is what a movie like Pork Chop Hill (1959), starring Gregory Peck, very much wanted.

Peace talks in the Korean War have gotten underway, but Pork Chop Hill needs to be taken from the Chinese—and everything goes wrong until the end.  The film laments the upending of military strategy, the myopia, that turns soldiers into sitting ducks.  Is it antiwar?  Practically so, but not quite.  As John Simon has explained, a movie is not really antiwar unless it shows that both battling sides, not just one, have more or less lost the conflict, and this is not the case with Pork Chop Hill.

Cover of Pork Chop Hill

Written by JP Miller, Days of Wine and Roses (1958) was a Playhouse 90 TV movie before it was remade as a theatrical film.  Though technically crude, it is a memorably strong drama about the ruination of sought-after social mobility—and of people’s lives—by alcoholism.  Joe and Kirsten are the broken hard drinkers.  Without getting drunk, Kirsten can only see the world as a “dirty” place, and is the more vulnerable and myopic of the two.

JP Miller (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The picture was well directed by John Frankenheimer.  Cliff Robertson is a natural for the part of Joe.  His acting is nigh effortless, whereas with Piper Laurie (Kirsten) we do see the effort.  Laurie is inconsistently convincing, but—interestingly—she does manage to be deep.  A psyche is there. . .

I’m glad I finally saw Days (on DVD) after all these years, and, yep, I’m sticking with the original.