If you’ve never seen Carmen Miranda, you’ll be introduced to her almost immediately in Busby Berkeley‘s 1943 The Gang’s All Here. She takes her charisma beyond the movie’s beginning to the bananas-and-strawberries number and way beyond that to the movie’s finish, and is the best thing here.  But it’s a picture replete with performers, indeed tending happily to give everyone a chance (as it were): to sing or dance or both.

A true success, Alice Faye sings (e.g., the lovely “Journey to a Star”).  Sheila Ryan dances, stylishly.  A fellow named Johnny Duncan jitterbugs.  Benny Goodman is in the film and, notwithstanding he has an acceptable voice, is an indifferent crooner.  His band sounds great, though.

With The Gang’s All Here, Berkeley’s 1930s escapism continued into the Forties during WWII, albeit certainly the flick did its pro-America wartime part.  But it isn’t really this that gives the movie high respectability—this being a musical entertainment, why would it?  It’s Miranda.

Cropped screenshot of Carmen Miranda from the trailer for the film The Gang’s All Here (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cover of The Gang’s All Here

Among the stories in the 1962 volume of The Best American Short Stories, published by Houghton Mifflin, are two whose themes are related to religious faith.  One of them, “The Model Chapel,” was written by Sister Mary Gilbert and has to do with the raising of money to build a new college chapel.  It begins with the use of plastic pigs (from a savings and loan company) as receptacles for donated cash—the convent nuns like the idea—but it isn’t long before an examining priest mandates that the pigs be removed.  This is one of the narrative details in a story focused, with mild comedy, on the dangers to spirituality:  The assiduous work of chapel-financing undermines the nuns’ spiritual devotion. . . Sister Mary writes (or wrote) poetry, and although her prose here is not poetic, it is plainly admirable.

In John Updike’s remarkable “Pigeon Feathers,” 15-year-old David Kern is worried over the question of God and the boy’s future beyond the grave.  His mother knows something is wrong, but at last all he gets from her are words of philosophical absurdity.  She tells David she believes in God, only to subsequently state that God was made by Man!  What’s more, what he hears from his minister is no better.  Finally, David eyes the colors on the dead bodies of pigeons he has had to shoot, and there is an epiphany—a surprising, universalist epiphany about immortality and the Deity’s creation.

Published in 1961, these fine fictions are worth seeking out.  Remember: The Best American Short Stories (1962).   

Among the stories in the 1962 volume of The Best American Short Stories, published by Houghton Mifflin, are two whose themes are related to religious faith.  One of them, “The Model Chapel,” was written by Sister Mary Gilbert and has to do with the raising of money to build a new college chapel.  It begins with the use of plastic pigs (from a savings and loan company) as receptacles for donated cash—the convent nuns like the idea—but it isn’t long before an examining priest mandates that the pigs be removed.  This is one of the narrative details in a story focused, with mild comedy, on the dangers to spirituality:  The assiduous work of chapel-financing undermines the nuns’ spiritual devotion. . . Sister Mary writes (or wrote) poetry, and although her prose here is not poetic, it is plainly admirable.

In John Updike’s remarkable “Pigeon Feathers,” 15-year-old David Kern is worried over the question of God and the boy’s future beyond the grave.  His mother knows something is wrong, but at last all he gets from her are words of philosophical absurdity.  She tells David she believes in God, only to subsequently state that God was made by Man!  What’s more, what he hears from his minister is no better.  Finally, David eyes the colors on the dead bodies of pigeons he has had to shoot, and there is an epiphany—a surprising, universalist epiphany about immortality and the Deity’s creation.

Published in 1961, these fine fictions are worth seeking out.  Remember: The Best American Short Stories (1962).   

The only good thing about this poorly written remake of a 2009 Argentine film is most of the acting.  Chiwetel Ejiofor overplays his part, but Alfred Molina is still a delight to watch, even in a small role.  Julia Roberts is trenchant, moving, and convincingly tomboyish, while Nicole Kidman supplies her assistant-DA character with all the smarts and gravity—and proper voice—she needs.  The only problem is you have to watch this asinine movie to observe all this.

Children of Paradise (1945) is the classic 190-minute film by director Marcel Carne and scenarist Jacques Prevert.  The paradise of the title is not 19th century Paris, the movie’s setting, but rather the personal paradise in some of the characters’ minds.  The “children” are mostly theatre actors; one who is not is an aristocratic, misanthropic criminal (Marcel Herrand)—often a fumbler of his crimes.  People with paradise in their minds want what they want, and invariably it involves the self more than other people.  Significantly, there is a sequence in which a man named Baptiste (Jean-Louis Barrault), as he tries to catch up with the elegant woman Garance (Arletty), disappears in a big crowd of merrymakers in the street.  A self now made anonymous seems to exist here.

(In French with English subtitles)

Children of Paradise (Photo credit: Wikipedia)