In 1970 William Wyler and scriptwriter Jesse Hill Ford purveyed a sturdy film about poisonous race relations in the 1960s South—The Liberation of L.B. Jones. Herein, a rich black undertaker, L.B. Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne), is determined to divorce his floozy wife (Lola Falana) for regularly sleeping with a white policeman (Anthony Zerbe). L.B.’s powerful lawyer, Oman Hedgepath (Lee J. Cobb), is a not-very-demonstrative racist bothered that a trial will destroy the white cop’s reputation in the community and so he warns the man, a demonstrative racist, about it. Horror ensues.

Based on Ford’s novel, the film is about racial pride and its fruit of injustice. Wyler made it as disturbing as The Collector. Certifiably it is not irrelevant to 2022 but, thank Heaven, it ain’t the Jayland Walker story either. Walker was shot to death after leading cops on a high-speed car chase and allegedly firing a gun from the car’s window. What goes on in L.B. Jones is far graver; it is genuine racism.

The movie has minor flaws—example: Browne and Lee Majors are boring actors here—and many virtues. It should be seen. It was, alas, Wyler’s last film.

Venezuela had a lot of poverty before the ascent of Chavez and Maduro. Now it has more. That it is a wreck of a country is patently understood by a writer and former Venezuelan named Alejandro Puyana, whose story “The Hands of Dirty Children” indicts Maduro’s Venezuela for childhood impoverishment.

Another fiction in The Best American Short Stories’ 2020 edition, “Hands” centers on two boys belonging to a vagrant group called the Crazy 9. The youngest boy is practically rejected because he soils his pants and does not have another pair, thus he stinks. Later he gets sick. . . The story is vivid and tough-minded. It is carefully wrought and pulls no punches. It makes me think that Bruce Springsteen should have written “Born in Venezuela,” not “Born in the U.S.A.”—to him, a negative thing. That’s a laugh!

Elizabeth McCracken‘s “It’s Not You” is yet another witty-sad short story about a woman, a young one, cut loose by a man. It’s a particularly scintillating one, though, which deals with the moral effects of rejection (to the “victim”: “You are young to be so unkind”) and people’s easy, unexpected behaviors and reactions. McCracken avoids both moralism and, well, easy or cheap humanism. The result is something almost captivating. “It’s Not You” was added to the Best American Short Stories (2020) anthology, and, yes—come to think of it—American hotels did model “opulence on Versailles.”

Henrik Ibsen was keenly aware that most people are not noble—or heroic. They’re simply ordinary, which is the case with Rahim (Amir Jadidi), the “hero” in the Asghar Farhadi film A Hero (2019, on Prime Video), for Farhadi knows it too. Rahim is the Krogstad, the Hjalmar, etc. of the narrative and is conscientious but heavily in debt to a man with a low opinion of him. The creditor, Bahram, sees Rahim as a ingrate, refusing to honor him, as others honor him, for returning a bag of gold coins to a stranger who lost it. He was merely doing his duty, says Bahram.

A sympathetic figure, Rahim is on a precipice. His mind fiercely resists the idea of going back to debtors’ prison. A socioeconomic reality, this, but of course it is part of the broad canvas of human misery that emerges in Farhadi’s oeuvre. Iran, where the movie is set, produces defeat because life produces defeat. Yet we happen to believe—I do, anyway—that Rahim will endure. Even social media, an important element in this superb film, will not sink him.

(In Farsi with English subtitles)

I can’t remember whether Chic Young’s comic strip Blondie was funny, but it arose at a time of high originality for comic strips—Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner were there too—and managed to be popular. Blondie (1938), the first in a series of movies adapted from the strip, is funny—a curio strictly out for laughs. Everything from the purchase, despite money problems, of furniture to Dagwood’s alleged unfaithfulness to Blondie brings about zany contretemps.

Dagwood (Arthur Lake) is too dumb to be very likable. Blondie (Penny Singleton) can be a nag, but is good-natured. Singleton has more charm than Lake, although neither overplays the assigned character. Not that every joke works, but congrats to screenwriter Richard Flournoy; and, yes, director Frank Strayer.

I saw this lark on Tubi.