The writer Larry Woiwode knows America to be a land that will never truly renounce Christianity both Catholic and Protestant, and this is glowingly reflected in his fiction about the Neumiller family of North Dakota.

Much of this fiction is in the form of short stories like “The Suitor”, whose protagonist, Martin Neumiller, proposes marriage to Alpha Jones.  Martin is a Catholic Christian who receives bad vibes from Alpha’s feisty, drunken father and shortsighted Protestant mother; but the standard attachment to a major institution—i.e. marriage—brings resolution.  The parents are happy their daughter was proposed to.

The incidents in “Marie” take place many years later, after Alpha has passed on and Martin intends to remarry.  Marie is the youngest child of the couple:  she has grown up without a mother and knows she cannot possibly fill the woman’s shoes for the family (“I can’t do anything right”).  Yet, as Marie points out, she is the one who’s alive, she is here, albeit Woiwode demonstrates his firm belief in God by making it seem that Alpha Neumiller is not really a person of the past.  Somehow she lives too, her death not looked at through a nihilistic lens.

Woiwode is a man of faith whose prose is soothingly subtle and gently penetrating.

“The Suitor” and “Marie” can be found in his book The Neumiller Stories.

http://gty.im/159463818

The Nick Searcy (director)-Andrew Klavan (screenwriter) effort, Gosnell—about the infanticide in Dr. Kermit Gosnell’s Philadelphia abortion clinic—has its flaws.  For one thing, Klavan’s dialogue is not masterly (sarcastically:  “You’re a ray of sunshine”).  But the film is intelligent middlebrow drama all the same, technically conventional but also brave and gripping.  More gripping, I would say, in all its ugly clinic scenes than in the courtroom parts which supply the movie’s subtitle:  The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer.  This is especially true when police officers and an assistant D.A. investigate, hardly believing what they see, said clinic.  Dean Cain enacts one of the cops and is commandingly true.  Sarah Jane Morris as the D.A. and Earl Billings as Gosnell are faultless.

Cover of Nothing Sacred

Was there ever a time when American cities gave great adulation to young women dying of something like radium poisoning?  I don’t know, but in the comic (and funny) Nothing Sacred (1937), the Big Apple does so for Vermont girl Hazel—without knowing that Hazel is shamelessly faking.  It is not even known by the newspaper reporter (Frederic March) who wants the scoop and all the crazy hoopla it leads to.

Pauline Kael wrote that “What are generally sentimentalized as ‘the little people’ are the targets” of this film.  So is Hazel, played by a grounded and never-strident Carole Lombard.  Nothing Sacred is short but filler-free, and peppery.  It’s the Billy Wilder pic that Wilder never made; William Wellman—and writer Ben Hecht—did.