In colonized South Africa, Sonia lives with her husband Jannie on a farm until Jannie is packed off to prison. The man shot to death a 12-year-old black boy for watching Sonia, through a half-open curtain, suckle the couple’s baby. Narrated by an unnamed nurse who befriends Sonia, the Muriel Spark short story, “The Curtain Blown by the Breeze,” then informs us of the inheritance money that renders Sonia rich and of the guidance she receives from the nurse and others. Guidance, that is, for living up to certain social standards. A changed woman now, Sonia, though still married to Jannie, is en route to taking a lover named Frank.

There is in this tale social climbing and relationship folly on the one hand, and brutal behavior on the other. Sonia never grasps the seriousness of Jannie’s murder of a child; what matters is advancement for the nouveau riche. The narrating nurse, however, is convinced there is in the colony a “savage territory beyond the absurd drawing-room.” A critic of the territory and of the times with their “encroaching slackness”—partly because she has been wronged by boyfriend Frank—the nurse finally longs to leave the place “for dear life.” The curtain blown by the breeze symbolizes sudden changes both agreeable and awful.

Spark’s story is moral but un-moralistic as well as piercing and droll. Typical Muriel Spark, which is good.

L.P. Hartley’s novel “The Go-Between,” unread by me, might be successful, but I deem the 1971 film version an interesting failure. Directed by Joseph Losey and scripted by Harold Pinter, it is set in turn-of-the-century England and tells of a boy, Leo, who is enlisted to be the go-between for two lovers—Marian and Ted—from different social classes. He delivers letters for them and the affair is clandestine. Much to Leo’s consternation, however, Marian is soon engaged to be married to prosperous Hugh Trimingham but remains involved with Ted. A story of innocence and experience, it is nicely cinematically crafted in several ways.

What exactly does Marian see in Ted, though? What kind of person is she? We do not know. And I sense that Julie Christie is not quite the actress to play her. She has charm but that’s all. Further, I disesteem Edward Fox as Trimingham, whereas Alan Bates is manfully persuasive as Ted. Dominic Guard is okay as Leo. By no means can they save “The Go-Between,” however, which is not even dramatically meaty at all. There is nothing gripping about Marian’s anxious mother (Margaret Leighton) rushing in the rain with Leo to try to catch her daughter with Ted. Still, as I said, the film is interesting.

Needless to say, Stanley Kubrick‘s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) is loaded with brilliant scenes and images. A lone astronaut, Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea), floats in the zero-gravity inner compartment of the HAL computer as he listens to an on-screen scientist report the news about extraterrestrial life. There is something chilling about it. The upside-down flight attendant on the space shuttle becomes right-side-up in the pilots’ cockpit. The frequent “virtual” contact with people on the earth, as much as, say, 300 million miles away. A very elderly Bowman lying on a bed before a later shot reveals him to be wrapped in striking light and, in fact, a new being.

Except for “Dr. Strangelove,” Kubrick’s best films were made in the Fifties and Sixties. Some of the meaning in “2001” is too private, but the film is wonderfully mysterious. All the same, I must say I don’t believe that human beings evolved from animals.

For director Stanley Kubrick, “Paths of Glory” (1957) is a more important signature film than, say, the silly “Dr. Strangelove.” Based on a novel by Humphrey Cobb, the piece deals with a self-serving French general (George Macready) who tries to beget treasonable violence in the midst of the First World War, as if the war wasn’t violent enough. Then he sees to it that three French soldiers are arrested for refusing to take the Germans’ so-called Ant Hill, an impossible task. Their commander, Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), asks to defend the men in court.

Military officers, the movie seems to be saying, can be depraved (although, in fairness, Macready and Adolph Menjou play caricatures here). Military authority is protective of soldiers only to the extent it is virtuous and wise. Self-aggrandizement makes war worse. Kubrick’s concern about violence has its advent in “Paths of Glory,” a mildly faulty but appreciably sturdy effort. The directing grips; indoor depth of field is in, tight shots are usually out. Unavoidably for Old Hollywood, the French characters are played by Americans with American accents, but the acting is excellent.

“A Bear Came Over the Mountain,” by Alice Munro, is an admirable story about a person’s dementia and what it means in the life of a relative. Fiona, the dementia-ridden wife of Grant, enters a nursing home and, as her condition worsens, grows emotionally close to Aubrey, another patient. Coinciding with this is a near indifference to Grant—rather a comeuppance for a once adulterous husband. The bear in the title is doubtless dementia, but it must also be for Grant the presence of Aubrey.

The story has all the gravity such a fiction should possess—it has a lot to do with contingency—and Munro writes well about men and not just women. Near the end, Fiona is said to have a “sweetly shaped skull,” which suggests that someday, before very long, she will die. But she is not forsaken; Munro sympathetically spotlights marital love.

Reviews by Dean