Brian Moore‘s novel, The Colour of Blood, was published in 1987, before the fall of Communism in the Soviet bloc.  Its engaging action occurs in an unnamed Eastern European country, and the leader of the Catholic church there, Cardinal Bem, is a man honorable and peaceable and not at all fanatically anti-government.

However, as in his novel Black Robe, Moore, clearly lapsed, attempts to present the Catholic church as morally unworthy—unworthy in a way Cardinal Bem is not.  For there exists in this church a politically extremist faction which manages to kidnap Bem with the aim of blaming it on the Communist government.  False blame, then, will fall upon the Reds, but honest blame belongs to the Catholics.

Moore understands the far-reaching complexity in countries where there is tension between totalitarians and religious institutions, but he refuses to side with Catholic institutions.  Indeed, he tacitly deems the Church philosophically suspect since even the silence-of-God idea springs up before the novel’s last sentence—“The silence of God: would it change at the moment of his death?”  To tell the truth, it is no wonder Moore was Graham Greene‘s favorite living novelist.  Both men are unsuitable intellectual guides.

Matthew Weiner, the creator of the series Mad Men, is probably more politically liberal than conservative, and yet a final-season episode of his show acknowledges that Nixon, in 1969, was trying to end the Vietnam War, something leftists all over the country strongly doubted.  It is the Republican politician Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley), not Nixon, who receives a jab for mendaciously saying he supports the President’s objective instead of the war effort, but such dishonesty emanates from pols on both the Right and the Left.  And it emanates from the basically liberal but oversensitive and scurvy Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), involved with a new girlfriend in the final season after his nice wife spurned him for his adultery.

The Mad Ave master, Don Draper (Jon Hamm), makes no political pronouncements but merely adheres to his religion of Coming Out On Top.  What he quietly realizes, however, is that without family he is too often on the bottom.  His physical separation from wife Megan (Jessica Pare), whom he can love (but does he?), parallels his separation from his children and, to be sure, his first wife.  Don cannot afford to let HIS religion trump family love, and an episode persuading us to believe this ends with daughter Sally (Kiernan Shipka) flatly but sincerely telling Don, “Happy Valentine’s Day.  I love you.”  It is one of the many scenes that demonstrate how much Mad Men concentrates on the human heart.

Mad Men (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I wish the creators of Jane the Virgin hadn’t made Luisa a lesbian because, as far as I’m concerned, Yara Martinez, who plays her, is too lovely to be one.  (Lipstick lesbians are too lovely to be lesbians.)  But, well, make her one they did; and so what we have is some curious comic action involving a lively beauty who’s uninterested in men.  What a drag.  At any rate, the comic action is there:  While Jane fusses with the baby, poor Luisa gets kidnapped by men who handle her with kid gloves until they unfeelingly whack her in the leg.  (What’s up with that?)  Luisa is a SOMEWHAT engaging character—she’d be more engaging in the arms of a man—and Martinez portrays her skillfully.  I fear the actress might be boring in serious moments, but in comic ones she can do funny desperation.  Counts for a lot.

Rambling Rose (1991), starring Laura Dern, pretends to be consequential but isn’t.  It’s as trivial as that 1984 flick with Sally Field, Places in the Heart, which at least features a nice slice of Christianity.  Rose has no real interest at all in Christianity and no good reason to exist.  If its nonexistence were a fact, we would be spared Elmer Bernstein‘s saccharine music and a slight adolescent vulgarity.

Cover of Rambling Rose