Boy, do the people in Cafe Metropole (1937) need—and want—money!  And how careless and devious they can be in trying to acquire it!  Even Tyrone Power‘s Alexis, so young and callow-looking, is a needy louse; he just doesn’t seem like one.  The whole movie doesn’t seem to be about corruption and irresponsibility.  Frothy, it isn’t satirical or mocking, but genial—and with inoffensive Loretta Young.

Teaming up again with Power (who is miscast), this time in a droll non-farce, she is deeply palatable.  Unlike Power, she has charisma and can match the dignity of Adolphe Menjou, who is also in the film.  Congrats to the supporting cast.  CM is moderately entertaining.

The spiritually proud, over-rigorous follower of Christ is a figure too familiar in literature, but her appearance in the 1941 novel, A Woman of the Pharisees, by Francois Mauriac, does the book no harm whatsoever.

The Christ follower in question, Brigitte Pian, complacently butts into other people’s lives and ends up damaging them.  She is not like the gentle, prudent Father Calou, whom she also damages.  Brigitte’s stepson Louis narrates the woman’s story but, by and by, fails to do so without self-righteousness and a certain contempt for Brigitte.  So, inevitably, there is sin and folly everywhere here, but also the idea that God truly values every human being.

Even when they suffer, as the book’s characters—Brigitte among them—do; but the suffering is not senseless.  These people approach, or will approach, “the throne of the Great Compassion” (i.e. God) and, frankly, there springs up in the novel a hint about the universal salvation I believe in.

A Woman of the Pharisees (La Pharisienne in French) is a lucidly, wisely written novel which does not stint on human complexity.  It is a great Christian novel.

A teacher named Rolfe narrates his older brother’s story in the Russell Banks novel, Affliction (1989), and even if he is not likely to be a wholly reliable narrator, he can surely be trusted in pointing out his brother’s deepening affliction.  Wade Whitehouse, the 41-year-old sibling, is divorced from Lillian, the only woman he has ever genuinely loved, and painfully misses having his young daughter in his care.  He struggles against the wrath of his half-mad father and harbors unreasonable suspicions about the men around him, at the risk, it turns out, of losing his job.

Wade’s life starts going down the toilet.  For him to be is not really to live, for he is living with a “dumb helplessness.”  Or he begins to live with it.  Being is all that Wade has.  A helpless man is not free.  A Christian couple, Wade’s sister Lena and her husband Clyde bring to the family a set of traditional religious beliefs that their relatives don’t know what to do with.  Lena and Clyde can be fatuous, but that they live lives distinctly separate from those of Wade and his father is understandable.  The men’s behavior creates a maelstrom increasingly difficult to control.

Affliction is cohesive, thrilling and mature.  It is better than much of Faulkner, and although it is not as profound as the best of Faulkner, to me it is just as powerful as it.

A teacher named Rolfe narrates his older brother’s story in the Russell Banks novel, Affliction (1989), and even if he is not likely to be a wholly reliable narrator, he can surely be trusted in pointing out his brother’s deepening affliction.  Wade Whitehouse, the 41-year-old sibling, is divorced from Lillian, the only woman he has ever genuinely loved, and painfully misses having his young daughter in his care.  He struggles against the wrath of his half-mad father and harbors unreasonable suspicions about the men around him, at the risk, it turns out, of losing his job.

Wade’s life starts going down the toilet.  For him to be is not really to live, for he is living with a “dumb helplessness.”  Or he begins to live with it.  Being is all that Wade has.  A helpless man is not free.  A Christian couple, Wade’s sister Lena and her husband Clyde bring to the family a set of traditional religious beliefs that their relatives don’t know what to do with.  Lena and Clyde can be fatuous, but that they live lives distinctly separate from those of Wade and his father is understandable.  The men’s behavior creates a maelstrom increasingly difficult to control.

Affliction is cohesive, thrilling and mature.  It is better than much of Faulkner, and although it is not as profound as the best of Faulkner, to me it is just as powerful as it.

Girlfriends (1978 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Its nebulous ending is not much of a flaw.  Claudia Weill‘s Girlfriends (1978) is still a pretty good film about a young Jewish woman (Melanie Mayron) who loses her live-in friendship with BFF Anne (Anita Skinner) when the latter moves out to get married.  The arrangement worked, but for Susan, the Jewish girl, very little after that works very well, including a foolish dalliance with a married rabbi.  On her own, Susan painstakingly searches:  for herself no less than for an actual job that will relieve her poverty.

Weill directed and Vicki Polon wrote this trenchant, fundamentally comic (and low-budget) picture.  At 88 minutes long it is soundly interesting with a mild edginess.  Memorably does Mayron play the charming and errant Susan.  Girlfriends is enjoyable, despite some visually ugly nudity.  “Sarna at the Well” (an artistic 1939 photograph by Gotthard Schuh) it ain’t.*

*Susan, by the way, is a budding photographer.

*I have yet to see “Sarna at the Well” on the Internet.  It is displayed in the book, Nude Photography by Peter-Cornell Richter.