Both Ake Gronberg and Harriet Andersson are excellent in Ingmar Bergman‘s Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), but the Andersson vehicle, Summer with Monika (also by Bergman), is a better film. What would improve Sawdust is if the picture were less blatant and flamboyant, and offered characters less irritating and tiresome than Frost and Frans. Granted, there is cinematic poetry here, but it amounts to little next to Andersson’s sexiness.
(In Swedish with English subtitles)
The Magnificent Ambersons (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
George, the young man played by Tim Holt in The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), is not only a cad but a fool as well. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll learn not to be callous to the father of the girl he desires to marry.
This Orson Welles picture is quite unlikely—and quite thin too. Unlike other Old Hollywood films, however, it has a strong tragic dimension (similar to that in Citizen Kane) and its visual artistry still pleases. The best thing about it is that uncommon air of mystery mentioned in 1963 by William Pechter. It’s a classic, but needed to be far better.
David Bentley Hart‘s That All Shall Be Saved is a brilliant book of religious thinking, of universalist thought (and usually not perplexing). I too subscribe to the belief that all people will finally be saved through faith in Jesus Christ.
Hart nails it that most Christians do not really believe in hell. Rather they believe in their believing in hell: not the same thing. And in a predestination system, if hell exists, to saved people (Hart argues) God is love. To the damned he is hate. Yet the Bible doesn’t teach this. Nobody will see God as hate. Consider the inspiring translation of First Timothy 2:3-4 with which Hart opens his book—“Our savior God . . .intends that all human beings shall be saved and come to a full knowledge of the truth.” God-as-love intends this.
The 1971 film Such Good Friends, by Otto Preminger, is like a comic An Unmarried Woman with a sick and dying husband. The wife of this husband, Julie (Dyan Cannon), firmly and understandably sees her marriage to Richard (Laurence Luckinbill) as a good one. But then his health starts failing badly before Julie’s obsession with his welfare is supplanted by anguish over the relationship per se. At first—and at later moments too—the film is a sex comedy, presently turning into a comedy plain and simple: one with pathos.
The script is by Elaine May (using the pseudonym of Esther Dale), adapting a novel by Lois Gould, and there are trenchant, witty lines. Occasionally, however, the flick is distasteful: I don’t want to see James Coco in his underwear waiting to be fellated. Friends, further, can be preposterous. . . Dyan Cannon does not flesh out her character memorably, as do Coco and Ken Howard. The music, too, sometimes fails to cut it. I disagree with the internet reviewer who found the film dull, but it is my opinion that, in spite of its several pleasures, Such Good Friends is forgettable.
Almost nothing the British colonists of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1979) say and do apropos of the Australian aboriginal natives is morally right, and this goes for the minister, the Rev. Neville, too. (An exception is a schoolmaster called McCready.) Among the natives, who are black, is Jimmie Blacksmith, half-white, a cheerful, sometimes coarse but intelligent young man guided by Neville. Jimmie is cruelly mistreated by white employers, given to withholding wages, references, etc. Things get worse after the self-improving fellow marries a white girl who unexpectedly gives birth to a white baby, a child of fornication. With three mouths to feed, including his own, Jimmie still encounters stinginess and exploitation until he snaps. He begins to murder with a gun the unfeeling whites.
The film, by Fred Schepisi, lacks a wholly satisfying plot, as when Jimmie hires on as a police officer. Its honesty sometimes slips. Usually having a brutal honesty, however, Chant rightly asks us to muster compassion for the desperate Jimmie. We do so, appreciating what is tragic and bloody art (based on a novel by Thomas Keneally). But the film is also “modern” enough to libel Christianity, for one character mentions that Jimmie has been buggered by the faith. I don’t see this as being the truth.
The picture stars Tommy Lewis, Ray Barrett and a magnificent Peter Carroll as McCready.
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