The directing of John Ford (using the name of Jack Ford) is interesting and efficient enough to make his silent Western, Straight Shooting (1917), better than it is. E.g., the inner shots of door frames are there. Rather unpalatable is George Hively’s script about a morally conflicted hired killer (Harry Carey) summoned by a big-bully cattleman. I recommend reading such Western novels as L’Amour’s Down the Long Hills or Patten’s A Killing in Kiowa, both fresh and fun, rather than pulling up this Ford item on Tubi. Not that it doesn’t have its virtues, though.
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.