The 1997 film Ulee’s Gold, by Victor Nunez, is a tough but friendly drama about a beekeeper (Peter Fonda) and his screwed-up family. Mick LaSalle was one of the few critics who understood how inadequate the work is.

In my view Nunez’s direction is barely passable, if it is even that, and his plot (in the Nunez-penned screenplay) is weak and contrived. Crooks look for abundant dough hidden away by a fellow crook (the beekeeper’s son)—a trite idea, this. The son’s drug-addicted wife hangs around with the greedy crooks and just happens to tell them about the dough. Etc. LaSalle points out that Nunez can really blow it with dialogue, citing the following exchange between Ulee and his young granddaughter:

Granddaughter: “I’m sad.”

Ulee: “You like sad?” [A dumb question.]

Granddaughter: “No, but sometimes, inside, it makes

you quiet.”

Words like these confirm for me that Ulee’s Gold has a lot of admiring people fooled.

English: Portrait of American writer Flannery-O’Connor from 1947. Picture is cropped and edited from bigger picture: Robie with Flannery 1947.jpg (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The twelve-year-old child in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” is surrounded by foolishness although she herself is a sinner in the making.  Raised in a Catholic home, she nevertheless has “ugly” thoughts about people and “[h]er prayers . . . were usually perfunctory . . .”  From her frivolous cousins she learns about a half-man, half-woman freak at the county fair, who serenely declares to the spectators that, however appallingly strange his body is, it is “a temple of the Holy Ghost”—a source of fascination to the child.

The freak—a Christian—is living a great mystery.  But in the story’s last sentence, the child sees that the sun going down at twilight is “a huge red ball like an elevated Host [of the Eucharist] drenched in blood.”  It is easier to accept that the poor freak’s body is a temple when one realizes that Jesus Christ himself is a Host, a Savior, who was drenched in blood through the crucifixion.  There is a nexus between the two, although for the child it is the Passion that has the greater meaning.  She is becoming, after all, a fledgling in sin.

“The Loan,” by Bernard Malamud, is one heck of a sobering short story about human need (and more). An unhappy friend, Kobotsky, asks Leib, a Jewish baker, for a loan of two hundred dollars to purchase a headstone for his wife’s grave. Leib’s wife strongly opposes this, mostly due to all the bills imposed on the couple. Kobotsky, to be sure, has had a hard time of it, but Leib’s wife can one-up the man as the subject of the known suffering of the Jews emerges in the story. There has been severe deprivation for the wife (“the Bolsheviki came when she was a little girl and dragged her beloved father into the snowy fields without his shoes”).

This is one of Malamud’s breezy, strikingly luminous stories, like “The Magic Barrel.” More luminous than “In Retirement.” Its breeziness, however, quickly takes us back to the dire matters at hand, to brass tacks.

A novel I have never read is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, made into a 1976 film by the remarkable if often dissatisfying Elia Kazan. My takeaway from the picture, scripted by Harold Pinter, is this: Robert De Niro plays a tycoon of the Hollywood film industry in all its absurdity. The tycoon himself, Monroe Stahr, is absurd: he is building a house on the beach when he already owns a perfectly fine—opulent—house in the suburbs. Moreover love is absurd, leaving Monroe a romantic failure with a woman called Kathleen Moore (Ingrid Boulting), who sleeps with the tycoon but is promised to another man. Foolishness abounds.

However, the dark mood in Tycoon is not justified by the incidents we see, and this makes the movie pretentious. Fitzgerald’s novel is unfinished; Pinter seems unable to make up for it. . . This is Theresa Russell‘s first film and it is good to see her. It is even better to see Kazan’s all-star cast (Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, et al.) In my view, though, Kazan’s last (which is what The Last Tycoon is) is not one of his best. Incidentally, the PG rating here is a joke; it should be R.

Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946) is a serrated Maltese Falcon.  It is a tad uglier and more violent than Falcon.  Rainfall is not uncommon, and the tough-as-nails banter won’t quit.  Further, comely but brittle or semi-brittle dames are everywhere—and out of your league.  But not out of Philip Marlowe’s:  He gets all the breaks, except when two thugs work him over but good.  (Hey, whoever sent the thugs will never live it down.)  There is even a certain aggressiveness in the plot’s being so convoluted.

Chalk that one up to Raymond Chandler, who wrote the book.  William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett (female) and Jules Furthman wrote the shining screenplay, and this may well be the best Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall vehicle.

The Big Sleep (1946 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)