A melodrama of pain, disaster and love, D.W. Griffith‘s Way Down East (1920), a silent film, is an energetic attack on snobbery and hardheartedness.

Lillian Gish is quietly sensitive and moving as a country girl tricked into a false marriage by a wealthy womanizer, a caricature successfully played by Lowell Sherman.  Griffith wonderfully cinematized a 19th century play by Lottie Blair Parker, with tragic moments involving the Gish character and humorous moments involving minor folks, not Gish, such as Seth and (repelling) Martha, with their farcical faces.  The film has no epic scope, but it is a staggering production all the same.

A melodrama of pain, disaster and love, D.W. Griffith‘s Way Down East (1920), a silent film, is an energetic attack on snobbery and hardheartedness.

Lillian Gish is quietly sensitive and moving as a country girl tricked into a false marriage by a wealthy womanizer, a caricature successfully played by Lowell Sherman.  Griffith wonderfully cinematized a 19th century play by Lottie Blair Parker, with tragic moments involving the Gish character and humorous moments involving minor folks, not Gish, such as Seth and (repelling) Martha, with their farcical faces.  The film has no epic scope, but it is a staggering production all the same.

A deaf married couple, Peter and Nita, resist the idea of providing their deaf little girl, Heather, with the cochlear implant she asks for.  To Peter’s brother Chris and his wife Mari, both of whom can hear but who also have a deaf child, this is a form of abuse.  They intend their baby son to receive an implant regardless of opposition from Mari’s deaf parents (that’s right:  Mari has nonhearing parents AND a nonhearing son).  The reason for Peter’s and Nita’s reluctance is that they don’t want Heather to miss out on the “deaf culture,” erected by the deaf community, they patently prize.  Eventually Heather is affected enough by her parents’ opposition to say she doesn’t want the implant after all.

There are a lot of charming children in this documentary by Josh Aronson—titled Sound and Fury (2000)—but charming children is not what it’s about.  It is about the fear of new technology, in this case fear issuing from those who have perforce understood deafness, not hearing, all their lives.  Yet now they encounter something that may make deafness for the next generation extinct.  Presumably it is also about selfishness, not to say possessiveness toward not only deaf culture but deafness as well.  Sound and Fury is a revealing film.  Aronson has a great subject—families and cochlear implants—about which he is a neutral observer.  Nor does he use a narrator.  Anyone interested at all in this New Millennium development and controversy ought to view this well-done, theatrically released documentary.  You won’t find it uninvolving.

Postscript.  Heather now has a cochlear implant.

Cover of Sound and Fury

A 1962 picture from France, Love on a Pillow is about self-destruction in the blood, and the far-reaching effect of erotic love.  Genevieve (Brigitte Bardot) discovers a man who is attempting suicide and saves his life, later joining him in an amatory relationship.  About this man, Renaud (Robert Hossein), it may be said, “Once a wreck, always a wreck.”  He is a louse too, but Genevieve, a weak, complicated beauty, cannot leave him.

Sometimes rather dreary, the film is also sensual, usually smart, and imaginatively directed by Roger Vadim.  For example, Genevieve and Renaud are arguing with each other as they approach their car, but since the camera is trained on the outside of the car, once the couple get in, the continued argument can no longer be heard.  The audio is lifted.

The movie’s ending is bad—overblown—but the acting isn’t.  Bardot does well enough, although her coldness is okay only up to a point.  She needs to give us what someone like Monica Vitti does.  Hossein, on the other hand, offers some depth and sophistication.  So does Love on a Pillow (a.k.a. Le repos du guerrier), adapted from a novel by Christiane Rochefort.  I’m glad it exists.

If Spike Lee wants to make a film about the not-yet-obliterated racism of past decades, that’s fine, but he needs to do it without utter agitprop.  Agitprop has no place in art.

Except for Kyle Smith, the critics drooled over BlacKkKlansman (2018); but Smith was right that “The movie is a typical Spike Lee joint:  A thin story is told in painfully didactic style and runs on far too long.”  Painfully didactic, yes:  Lee editorializes nearly all his characters, caring not about them but only his message, such as it is.  It’s okay for him to be implicitly anti-Trump, but it is done in a stupid fashion.  In fact, the whole movie is sufficiently stupid, in its assault on bigotry, to veer into a certain skepticism about American Christians and not just disapproval of the misuse of Christianity by Ku Klux Klan types.

BlacKkKlansman is an unholy wreck.