How seldom in this world do we get to “tell our stories!” (I of course have been telling mine for decades)…
Here’s part of the story of my friend Patrick, who has been a working actor all his life. I’ve seen him perform many times over the years, the first time being when I attended an episode of “Frasier” being filmed live in LA…
There’s more about him in the YouTube commentary beneath the video. So if you’re a fan of his, or just curious about the life of a performing artist, have a listen!
Based on the 1949 novel by Jack Schaefer, and directed by George Stevens, the Western Technicolor Shane (1953) is considered a masterpiece by many.
Seventy years on the movie is still written about, analyzed, and taught in film courses.
Shane (Alan Ladd) is the quintessential outsider: no family, no history, a man of action and very few words.
He appears at the top of a hill in the wide, wide West, silhouetted against the purple mountains of Wyoming. Loyal Griggs’ cinematography won him an Oscar, while Victor Young’s score speaks of the pioneer spirit, our longing for home, our love for the land.
Into the valley Shane rides, on his white horse, through the chaparral, across a stream, in a buff-colored suede fringed shirt.
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A slightly updated re-post from 2015:
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was an Italian film-maker, writer, and poet.
Part intellectual, part peasant; part Marxist, part broken-hearted Catholic, as a youth, he sold his novels and poetry on the streets of Rome. He knew that power always tends to the right. He was gay without making a campaign out of it.
He was once arrested for lewd public acts, he was a constant target for the tabloid press, and his work became increasingly darker and controversial as he aged (Salò, his last film, is considered by many to be unwatchable).
He was murdered in 1975, brutally beaten and run over multiple times by his own Alfa Romeo in a late-night pick-up gone wrong.
And he made at least one movie for which alone he should be awarded the crown of stars: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (2 hr. 15 min.,1964).
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A new book, out this month from Foster Hirsch, is called “Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties: The Collapse of the Studio System, the Thrill of Cinerama, and the Invasion of the Ultimate Body Snatcher — Television” (Knopf, $38.68).
Finally, finally: I’m ahead of the curve.
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I am flying into LAX Saturday, renting a car, driving up to the Central Coast for a couple of nights to visit dear friends, and then heading for St. Andrews’ Abbey in Valyermo for a first-week-of-Advent retreat.
I’m nervous and excited!
Meanwhile, my thoughts have turned to one of my all-time favorite saints or soon-to-be saints: Servant of God Walter Ciszek. I wrote about him in Magnificat years ago:
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Here’s a little of what’s been going on in my world.
As mentioned, I’ve also been obsessed by the movie Shane (1953) with Alan Ladd. You can watch it for free on Kanopy.
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Sir Alec Guinness (1914-2000), renowned British actor, converted to Catholicism after playing a priest in the 1954 film “The Detective,” aka Father Brown.
Perhaps best known for his role as the bearded sage Obi-Wan Kenobi in the “Star Wars” films, Guinness was born into a broken family. His mother, Agnes Cuffe, was unmarried. He never knew his father. Abused by a brutal stepfather, as an adolescent Guinness discovered the solace of the theater. Confirmed into the Anglican church at 16, as a youth he dabbled in various religions while secretly considering himself an atheist.
Religion, he believed, was “so much rubbish, a wicked scheme of the Establishment to keep the working man in his place.”
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“He Who Dances on Wood” (2016) is a documentary short, under six-minutes long, produced and directed by Brooklyn-based, Mexican-Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir.
You can watch it for free on YouTube.
The backstory is that many years ago Fred Nelson was on the New York City subway with his young son, when the son disappeared. Turned out the kid had become mesmerized by some tap dancers who were performing on the train and stayed behind.
So Fred bought his son a pair of tap shoes, and while he was at it, he bought himself a pair, too. The son never followed through. Fred’s own shoes remained in the closet until quite some time later when he was moving and came upon them again.
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“Each of us is in some way or another, and in succession, a criminal and a saint.“
— Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos (1888-1948)
My tastes range wide in movies, but top place goes to film noir, described by the Oxford Languages Dictionary as “a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace.”
“The term was originally applied (by a group of French critics) to American thriller or detective films made in the period 1944–54 and to the work of directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder.”
In “Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir” (Running Press Adult, $20.99), San Francisco-based Eddie Muller (the “Czar of noir”) explores several tropes of the genre: Vixenville (the femme fatale), the City Desk (newspaper grift), the Psych Ward, Thieves’ Highway (crime on the road), The Big House (prison movies).
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I’m a sucker for classic British films: black-and-white dramas from the ’40s and ’50s, with top-notch actors, sharp directors, and often a thorny moral dilemma.
One such gem, “An Inspector Calls” (1954), is based on the play by J.B. Priestley, and stars Alastair Sim (of Scrooge fame) as an otherworldly examiner of conscience.
You can stream it for free on Internet Archive or the Kanopy feature of your LA Public Library card.
The credits roll over a sumptuously laid dinner table. The Birling family is celebrating the engagement of their daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, an upper-crust scion who is marrying ever-so-slightly down. Not to worry: Arthur Birling, the insufferably smug factory-owning patriarch, is up for a knighthood.
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Alex Lee Moyer’s 2020 documentary TFW No GF — shorthand for “That feel when no girlfriend” — profiles several disaffected young men desperately searching to connect on the dark corners of the internet.
Though the film has its share of crude language, and a couple of violent images, its real subject is the souls of a generation of males who have been nursed, weaned, and raised in cyberspace.
What happens to young men when there are no role models, no authority figures, and no meaningful, flesh-and-blood human contact? And when at their fingertips they have a dopamine-hit-producing alternate reality that rewards the outrageous, the violent, the unhinged?
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National Bird, a 2016 documentary by investigative journalist Sonia Kennebeck, profiles three former military—Heather, Lisa, and Daniel—who participated in the U.S. Drone Program.
(Though the three are identified by first name only, Heather subsequently published a widely-read piece in The Guardian revealing her last name to be Linebaugh, and Daniel, likewise through news media, is now known to be Daniel Hale).
The film focuses on the effect on men and women aged 18-24 who made decisions over whether someone else should live or die, and then sat and watched the destruction.
Heather, a Drone Imagery Analyst and screener, was tasked with examining grainy footage of people in Afghanistan, determining as best she could from thousands of miles away the ages and genders of potential targets, and making the call as to whether the strike should take place.
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At last, LA is poised to have the museum it has long deserved: the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, opening Sept. 30.
I love that they’ve named it the Museum of Motion Pictures: not the Museum of Film, which would have skewed hoity-toity and auteurish; not the Museum of Movies, which would have gone too far in the other direction.
No, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is just right: a nod to the art form’s august history; an evocation of Hollywood’s rightful place as the heart of it; the reminder that this isn’t just an industry. It’s a craft that requires study, apprenticeship, and dedication.
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Francis Poulenc’s “Dialogues of the Carmélites” is a 1957 opera based on the true story of the Martyrs of Compiègne, a community of 16 Carmelite nuns who were guillotined during the French Revolution’s virulently anti-Catholic Reign of Terror.
The libretto is by Georges Bernanos (1881-1948), Catholic novelist best known for “Diary of a Country Priest.”
I confess that opera (favorite arias aside) is not my first love. Enter “Dialogues of the Carmélites,” which I came across in the form of a high definition Metropolitan Opera broadcast, a series that brings opera performances live into movie theaters throughout the world, and then archives them.
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