The directing of John Ford (using the name of Jack Ford) is interesting and efficient enough to make his silent Western, Straight Shooting (1917), better than it is. E.g., the inner shots of door frames are there. Rather unpalatable is George Hively’s script about a morally conflicted hired killer (Harry Carey) summoned by a big-bully cattleman. I recommend reading such Western novels as L’Amour’s Down the Long Hills or Patten’s A Killing in Kiowa, both fresh and fun, rather than pulling up this Ford item on Tubi. Not that it doesn’t have its virtues, though.

Both Ake Gronberg and Harriet Andersson are excellent in Ingmar Bergman‘s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), but the Andersson vehicle, Summer with Monika (also by Bergman), is a better film. What would improve Sawdust is if the picture were less blatant and flamboyant, and offered characters less irritating and tiresome than Frost and Frans. Granted, there is cinematic poetry here, but it amounts to little next to Andersson’s sexiness.

(In Swedish with English subtitles)

David Bentley Hart‘s That All Shall Be Saved is a brilliant book of religious thinking, of universalist thought (and usually not perplexing). I too subscribe to the belief that all people will finally be saved through faith in Jesus Christ.

Hart nails it that most Christians do not really believe in hell. Rather they believe in their believing in hell: not the same thing. And in a predestination system, if hell exists, to saved people (Hart argues) God is love. To the damned he is hate. Yet the Bible doesn’t teach this. Nobody will see God as hate. Consider the inspiring translation of First Timothy 2:3-4 with which Hart opens his book—“Our savior God . . .intends that all human beings shall be saved and come to a full knowledge of the truth.” God-as-love intends this.