Cover of Stoner (New York Review Books Classics)

The novel Stoner (1965), by John Williams, chronicles the life of William Stoner, a farm boy sent to college where he falls in love with literature before becoming an adept English professor.  This is in the early part of the 20th century, during which Stoner does not enlist to fight in the First World War.  Drawn to a woman named Edith, he courts and marries her—one of the worst wives in American literature, and not much of a mother either.  The couple have a fragile daughter, Grace.  Gradually Stoner enters an affair with an attractive student, but is also deprived of it before long.  The passage in which he learns of the student’s feelings for him is superbly written.

An unfortunate fact in Stoner is that an academic career is used to support such sordid realities as Stoner’s ugly marriage and the abetment of a deplorable grad student protected by a vindictive colleague.  Human meanness encircles the scholar, although when Grace mentions that things have not been easy for him, he admits, “I suppose I didn’t want them to be.”  He says this before he dies of cancer, a disease which merely becomes Stoner’s last enemy, as Edith and the vindictive colleague are his enemies.  But none of these enemies does he hate.  They create conditions to which he becomes resigned.  Over and above, the novel implies that if a man can be resigned to (non-lethal) human enemies, he can be resigned to inevitable death.

The book’s description of the moments before this death is memorable, set forth in what has been considered a lost classic.

The Great McGinty (1940) is not a great movie but it’s pure Preston Sturges, which means it’s fanciful and personal.  “It has mainly to do with the rise through city politics from soup line to Governor’s mansion of a toughie (Brian Donlevy) who learns very fast” (Otis Ferguson, who describes the premise better than I could).  The film tells us a number of things:  1)  if crooked people in a democracy want political power, they will get it; 2) cynicism is rife enough in American politics to crowd out idealism; and 3) unscrupulous men are frequently tamed by marriage and family.

Written, of course, by Sturges, as well as his first directorial effort, what McGinty is is Ring Lardner with heart and a bit of slapstick.  Not much heart, though, because the film is darkly acerbic.  Yet, too, it is “quite a lot of fun” (Ferguson again).

The Great McGinty (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Joss Whedon filmed, with a contemporary setting, Much Ado About Nothing, a 2013 release.

In writing about a stage production of Shakespeare’s comedy, John Simon averred that “Much Ado is a shrewd play in which comedy and near-tragedy chase each other like a kitten and its tail until they are revealed to be the same organism: the scheme of things as they are.”  This organism is not perfectly created by Whedon; the scheme is not quite communicated.  It would have helped had he refrained from using a good deal of rueful music, although this alone would have been insufficient.

Even so, the movie is meritorious, with a shrewdness of its own (but just not a thorough shrewdness).  Up to a point it’s Shakespeare as a 1960s art film, shot in black and white, and an unforced, unself-conscious Shakespeare it is.  It is frequently funny and, thanks to Whedon, not over-sensual.  Alexis Denisof, dignified without arrogance, is exactly right for Benedick, and Amy Acker is an intelligent Beatrice with some skill in physical comedy.  Both are impeccable, as are Nathan Fillion (Dogberry) and indeed most of the other histrions.  Much Ado is an alloyed, but not sorely alloyed, treat.

To Denys Arcand, the American empire must be a North American empire, which is to say Canada and the United States (not Mexico).  His film, The Fall of the American Empire (2018), after all, is set in Montreal, where there is as much hunger for ill-gotten money as in Chicago or Houston.

This movie doesn’t cut it, though.  For most of its running time it isn’t dull, but Arcand is an unsatisfying writer, The Barbarian Invasions notwithstanding.  It’s politically insignificant and artistically paltry.

(In French with English subtitles)

The Phil Spector in the HBO film, Phil Spector (2013), written and directed by David Mamet, is probably not guilty of even second-degree murder.  Mamet, indeed, has clearly imparted that his film is NOT “based on a true story”—period.  Spector here is a rich, drugged-out freak whom people want to be undisciplined enough to have taken the life of the hapless Lana Clarkson.  Mamet produces the implication that a society in which Ted Kennedy can get away with causing the drowning death of a young woman is just as easily one in which an offensive but innocent-of-murder eccentric can get hanged.

As ever, the artist’s dialogue impresses.  It’s intelligent and so is the direction.  Phil Spector is a good movie and Al Pacino, as Spector, is a great actor.  A remarkable Helen Mirren plays the record producer’s defense attorney, giving the character saltiness and smarts.

David Mamet at the premiere of Red Belt at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)