Young Stephen Glass was a “journalist” for the left-leaning The New Republic magazine. Intelligent but unprincipled, he fabricated a lot of his stories—the subject of the Billy Ray film Shattered Glass (2003), starring Hayden Christenson as Stephen.

How the man managed to get away with this for years I don’t know, but it is almost small potatoes since hardly anyone has ever read The New Republic or even most conservative publications. Still, I am curious whether the mag has always been duly concerned about the truth.

Ray’s movie is rather too grave and it does not properly track Glass’s complexity. Too, I think the critic Anthony Quinn is correct in asking, “what is the point of this movie?”

I wish I could see a stage production of Shelagh Delaney‘s play, A Taste of Honey, since it makes for a very small if successful motion picture. Yet the use of a great actor—young Rita Tushingham—helps to turn this 1961 British product to curious gold. Tushingham plays Jo, who feels little loved by her mother (flawless Dora Bryan) and is impudent. Making what is perhaps the worst mistake of her life, she gets sufficiently intimate with a young black sailor to become pregnant with his child. Departing, he doesn’t know about it. Jo gains a friend in a competent homosexual boy, Geoffrey, but he too feels he must leave her.

The film deals with abandonment, even by and of the disrespected of society. Tony Richardson‘s directing is graceful and felt, the extreme closeups well-chosen. The screenplay, which he co-wrote with Delaney, works. He got winning performances from Paul Danquah as the sailor and Robert Stephens (Peter Smith) as well.

Vanessa Redgrave is nigh plain-looking in Charles Jarrott‘s Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), as she is not in Blow-Up, but she is a superb Mary Stuart. Though not without some historical inaccuracies, the film chronicles Mary’s adult life, especially in Scotland, and is too episodic, too crammed with striking incidents. It is riveting, even so, particularly when the commanding Glenda Jackson (Elizabeth I) is on screen and the duel between the two queens proceeds apace.

Timothy Dalton (Mary’s heinous husband, Lord Darnley) and especially Ian Holm are impressive as arrant losers. The film’s costumes and sets contribute much. Is Mary about anything in particular? Well, it’s about ambition in a domain of death. And it’s about fine acting.