Flirting with Disaster (2010) is a likable Christian novel for young people written by Sandra Byrd, the author of The Secret Keeper, which I reviewed on this site.  Keeper is mainly for adults, Disaster can be enjoyed by adults as it chronicles the actions of Savvy Smith, an American girl in London who is 15 years old and fits right in among her English peers.

Ordinary in many ways, Savvy is also devoted to Christ, facing the challenge of paying no mind to what others believe about luck and horoscopes, even when something good happens after a chain-text message is passed on.  Sending such a message is “flirting with disaster”—a hackneyed title for this book—since God is forever sovereign over “fortune.”  Savvy need not believe in an impersonal force like fortune when she is always surrounded by personal ones, of whom God, the object of her faith, is the most prominent.

Hackneyed title or not, Byrd’s novel is clever and genial.  It belongs to a series called London Confidential and, although I likely will not read the other three books in the series, that in no way means the reader of this review should not.

English: mobile phone text message (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Kudos to Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond for an engaging if imperfect screenplay for The Apartment (1960), which was also, by Wilder, exquisitely directed.  Consider that nothing is under- or overemphasized. . . The film shows us a tug-of-war between the overturning of traditional values such as marriage and respect for women, and the attempt to be decent.  (This while the traditional institution of big business keeps humming along.)

Sure, I don’t like the sentimental romanticism in The Apartment but, all things considered, it’s a worthy film.

Cover of The Apartment (Collector’s Edition)

Suspend disbelief here and there, and you’ll enjoy the Francois Truffaut flick The Woman Next Door (1981) which, though it isn’t saying much, was seen by more Americans than any other foreign film in ’81.

Again, as in other Truffaut movies, there is amatory passion.  Adele H. never quite committed adultery, however; Gerard Depardieu and Fanny Ardant do.  Woman is about the monstrousness of temptation.  Depardieu’s first mistake is not informing his nice wife that before he married he once had a love affair with new neighbor Ardant; he keeps it a secret.  Naturally he soon learns that he and Ardant can’t be just friends.  The tragedy which ensues is especially jarring in a movie this typically lyrical and basically simple, plainly lacking in gravity.  Film buff  Truffaut insisted on his achievements being serious but not grave, which is why there is something of Hitchcock in this tragedy.  But whereas I am not convinced the estimable Hitchcock was an artist, I believe Truffaut was.

(In French with English subtitles)

Cover of Fanny Ardant

Intruder in the Dust (1949 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A brave old lady (Elizabeth Patterson) initiates the digging up of a dead body after nightfall to see what kind of bullet was used to kill the person.  The boys who assist her are brave too.  What prompts this action—a plot device in Clarence Brown‘s Intruder in the Dust (1949)—is the swift arrest of a black man, Lucas Beauchamp (Juano Hernandez), for the murder of a white man.

The film, based on a William Faulkner novel, is set in the South and was shot in Faulkner’s home town of Oxford, Mississippi.  A finely directed piece, it concerns the perennial struggle for the rule of law, for just procedures for every accused individual (a lesson needed in today’s America).  Lucas has a friendly relationship with a white boy called Chick (Claude Jarman, Jr.) and, in fact, with money, for he is a well-off farmer in a slowly changing America.  But the townspeople disdain his pride, and desire a lynching, and yet scriptwriter Ben Maddow does supply a few essentially good people.  In the case of the murdered man’s father (a strong Porter Hall), this seems to be due to the gent’s having been seasoned by harsh life—the very thing Faulkner never ignored.