Ron Hansen‘s 1991 novel, Mariette In Ecstasy, deals with Catholic girl Mariette Baptiste, who aspires to be a nun in the Sisters of the Crucifixion order in 1906. A devoted, clearly spiritual 17-year-old, she is perceived to be rather peculiar but is not unwelcome as a postulant. It is the emergence of strictly supernatural events concerning Mariette which causes the sisters to doubt and sometimes dislike her, even as the elderly priest, Father Marriott, attempts to champion her. To be precise, he champions her as one who has been given the stigmata. An investigation is inevitable.

A question springs up: Just how much grace exists in some Christians’ lives? To Hansen, Mariette’s being a stigmatic is true, even though the girl is the daughter of a wealthy doctor and may not be a virgin. (Is the stigmata a grace? One would think so.) What becomes certain, I believe, is that Mariette could use not a legalistic system of spiritual living but rather a way of life in which things both natural and manmade—for if they are positive, they are God’s gifts—can be appreciated and, for good measure, both virginity and ordinary sexual feelings are accounted for. Hence it is no mystery why Hansen describes these natural and manmade wonders in his poetic prose. Not always are these descriptions good, but generally they are: “Timbers, sawhorses, and hovering dust in a milky chute of sunlight.”

At length the heroine here would never renounce obedience to Christ, but she learns she need never renounce the apt freedom she has in Christ either. We find out what this freedom means to Hansen in the last sentence of this splendid novel.

Marlon Brando directed and starred in a terrifically entertaining Western, One-Eyed Jacks, in the early Sixties. Brando’s character, Rio, is a bank robber running around with men far more despicable than he is, and one of them betrays him astoundingly. Rio is sent to a cruel prison while his betrayer, Dad Longworth (Karl Malden), gradually becomes a town sheriff and therefore . . . “respectable.” Escaping the prison with a Mexican friend, Rio intends to kill Dad and he tracks him down.

Circumstances alter cases. While Rio craves revenge against Dad, Dad himself want to assuage his guilt and, by and by, vent his fury at Rio for spending the night with Dad’s Latino stepdaughter, Louisa (Pina Pellicer). There is gunfire action in the film but also a lot of conventional romantic feeling. Rio hates Dad but loves Louisa.

Adapted from a novel by Charles Neider, One-Eyed Jacks is a plot-driven work which is nevertheless fascinated with human personality. Rio is not a forgettable figure, and Brando is consistent in his greatness at portraying him. Dad (played in a grounded manner by Malden), Bob Amory (a perfect Ben Johnson), Chico (Larry Duran), Louisa—these are not forgettable either. Piercing dialogue gets spoken (“You better kill me,” says Rio after Sheriff Dad has repeatedly put the bullwhip to him), and even with a not quite impeccable screenplay, the 1961 film triumphs for being so savage and riveting.

The plot of Nancy Drew (2007), which involves a dead movie star’s illegitimate daughter, is not really proper for the demographic for which the movie is intended.  Worse, the plot becomes just this side of stupid.  How, then, does Andrew Fleming’s commercial pic manage to be so entertaining?

To begin with, the Nancy Who Doesn’t Fit In is on center stage (hooray!):  At Hollywood High she’s the new girl with her retro ways and her unusual sleuthing in a world of potential kid killers.  She wears penny loafers, keeps her hair straight, and is a big believer in courtesy.  Laura Elena Harring exits from Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, only to get murdered in Nancy Drew.  She enacts a beloved film star whose mysterious death in the 1970s Nancy investigates.

Curious stuff—sufficiently curious to be rather engaging—but that’s not all:  When the movie tries for humor, it’s witty.  Daniella Monet, as snooty teen Inga, gets some of the top lines, e.g. the one about Nancy’s “podiatrist.”  The cast is fun.  What kind of range she has, or will have later, I don’t know, but toothy Emma Roberts is irresistible as Sleuth Drew.  Monet, Josh Flitter and Barry Bostwick are comically strong as well.  Alexander Gruszynski’s cinematography impresses with its now playful, now sinister color and light.  One could do worse than a non-parodic Emma-as-Nancy franchise.  (This was written in 2007.  No such franchise came about.)

Nancy Drew (2007 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Once again I have not read the source material for a particular film—the 1972 Fat City—taken from a novel by Leonard Gardner. Charles Thomas Samuels did not find the film to be the success that the novel is, and, sure enough, although Gardner wrote the script, the John Huston-directed movie does seem slight and vague and even inartistic.

With force and imagination Stacy Keach plays a damaged ex-boxer, now a boozer, who finally tries to go back to the ring. The inability of a vocation (e.g. professional boxer) to sustain a person psychologically and spiritually is a theme here, but Fat City is a frail deliverer of it. This is despite the headway Keach makes, which headway he shares with actors Nicholas Colasanto, Jeff Bridges and Candy Clark. No “fat city,” meaning “out of condition” (Samuels), from them.

Like the first Atlas Shrugged film, Atlas Shrugged, Part 2 (2013) is flawed but beguiling. I called it terrific in my review, but, no, that’s too strong. It’s good.

Question: Aren’t the politicians in the picture afraid of being voted out of office? They’re REALLY throwing their weight around, and being foolish and deceitful about the public good. Socialistic thinkers are going to extremes that almost all ordinary Americans would refuse to condone, and it’s behavior related to the big-government endeavors of officeholders today.

Trump aims to use a tariff to try to keep business owners from buying Canadian aluminum. Biden hopes to force religious organizations to partly pay for any contraceptive or abortifacient an employee might wish to possess. Probably, also, he would like to increase taxes for corporations. Nancy Pelosi seizes taxpayers’ money in our Medicare coffers and uses it to shore up Obamacare. Granted, these are not extremes, but it doesn’t matter. They issue from those who exercise power in inappropriate ways—putatively for . . . the public good. It makes sense to see them as close cousins of the socialistic thinkers in AS, Part 2.