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100 Movies of Summer: Adam’s Rib (1949)

Jul6

Director: George Cukor
Writers: Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin
Starring, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy

Brown Bear Daughter says: Good movie. Very feminist, which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, the feminism was sort of undermined in the end when Spencer Tracy fakes tears in order to get Katherine Hepburn back, saying later that he only did what all women do. Ehhh.. I guess I think the wife (the one on trial) was sort of crazy, and I don’t believe that someone of the male sex is actually more likely to be exonerated from such a crime.

Mom says: Not bad, but I think neither the feminists nor the traditional marriage crowd would be completely pleased with this story of husband and wife who are both lawyers litigating against one another in the same court case. She says the woman who shot her adulterous husband should be acquitted because a man who did the same thing to his wife and her lover would be exonerated. He says the law is the law, and people shouldn’t be allowed to go around waving and shooting loaded guns at each other. I’m on his side.

However, when the characters in the film go on to argue about the nature of marriage itself, I’m not so sure I’m with Mr. Tracy/Assistant DA Adam Bonner nor with Ms. Hepburn/Amanda Bonner. He says something to the effect that marriage is not meant to be a competition and implies that defense attorney Bonner isn’t “fighting fair.” She says at the end of the movie that “there’s no difference between the sexes. Men, women, the same.” Nonsense. If it’s legal and the judge allows it, it’s fair in the courtroom. And of course there’s a huge difference between the sexes, thank the Lord.

According to IMDB, the movie screenplay was “inspired by the real-life story of husband-and-wife lawyers William Dwight Whitney and Dorothy Whitney, who represented Raymond Massey and his ex-wife Adrienne Allen in their divorce. After the Massey divorce was over, the Whitneys divorced each other and married the respective Masseys.” Adam’s Rib is comedy, so you can guess that the ending

IMDB link to Adam’s RIb

100 Movies of Summer: Double Indemnity (1944)

Jun24

Director: Billy Wilder
Writers: Screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler from the novel by James M. Cain
Starring: Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson

The entire movie is narrated by insurance salesman, Walter Neff, as he confesses into a dictaphone the terrible crime he has been led to commit. His partner in murder is Phyllis Dietrichson, a blonde bombshell who’s unhappily married to a grouchy and jealous oil executive, Mr. Dietrichson (we never learn his first name). Neff and Phyllis deserve each other, but Phyllis comes across as the more ruthless and cruel of the two. (According to IMDB, Barbara Stanwyck was the first choice to play Phyllis, but she was unnerved when seeing the role was of a ruthless killer. When she expressed her concern to Billy Wilder, he asked her, “Are you a mouse or an actress?” ) It was bit disconcerting at first watching the father of My Three Sons play a cad and a murderer, but Fred MacMurray was quite convincing in the role.

This is one of the few 1940’s movies I’ve seen that could give Hitchcock a run for his money. It’s well-plotted, the dialog is snappy and not too hokey, and the ending is good. I highly recommend this one to fans of Hitchcock and of film noir in general. Wilder plays with the lighting and camera angles with a finesse that made me a believer in his directorial skills. Barbara Stanwyck, by the way, is absolutely beautiful, a lot prettier than most of the other actresses of her day.

My urchins learned from this movie the meaning of the term “double indemnity” and the lesson that crime never pays. At least, I think that’s what they learned.

Walter Neff: Who’d you think I was anyway? The guy that walks into a good looking dame’s front parlour and says, “Good afternoon, I sell accident insurance on husbands… you got one that’s been around too long? One you’d like to turn into a little hard cash?”

Ummm, yeah, that’s who she thought you were, sucker.

The novella by James Cain was based on a “1927 crime in which a married Queens woman, Ruth Brown Snyder, persuaded her lover to kill her husband Albert after Albert had just recently taken out a large insurance policy with a double indemnity clause.” Ms. Snyder was executed at Sing-Sing on January 12, 1928 for the murder of Albert Snyder. Her accomplice, a corset salesman, also received the death sentence.

Has any one here read the Cain novel? Better or worse than the movie? Or just different?

IMDB link to Double Indemnity.
Buy Double Indemnity at Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: Red River (1948)

Jun23

Directors: Howard Hawks and Arthur Rosson
Writers: Borden Chase and Charles Schnee
Starring: John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, and Walter Brennan

Karate Kid says: This movie was about some cowboys on a cattle drive. They live next to the Red River, which is the river that makes up the border between Texas and Oklahoma. They owned the Red River Ranch, and decided to take their cattle to somewhere they could sell it. On their way, they will have a stampede, an ambush, and even a mutiny!

Mom says: I liked this one better than I did The Searchers, but the ending was lame. The writers were drawing on the imagery of herd behavior in which dominant males fight for leadership of the group. There are two young “bucks” on the cattle drive, Matt and Cherry. Then, there’s Dunson, the old but strong leader of the drive, who is also conservative and set in his ways and determined to be obeyed and feared, no matter what the cost. The tension between these three, but mostly between Matt and Dunson, who is Matt’s mentor and father figure, makes the movie go. But then, at the end, although Matt’s love interest, Tess Millay, has a great scene in which she tells them both off for acting like idiots, the tension just sort of drains off into anti-climax.

Still, it’s a good movie to watch with your kids if you’re learning about the cattle drive/cowboy era of U.S. history or if you just like cowboy movies. Dunson shoots or threatens to shoot a few men in cold blood basically for just getting in his way or challenging his authority, and that part was rather shocking to my youngest (and to me). The stereotype of savage Native Americans was still there, but not as prominent as it was in The Searchers. In Red RIver, the Indians are not characters, and the Indian attack is just a plot device to place another obstacle in the way of the cattle drive and give the hero a chance to be heroic. The one Native American character who is on the cattle drive with the cowboys is a part of the comic relief, not very believable or interesting.

IMDB link to Red River.
Buy Red River on Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: Ninotchka (1939)

Jun22

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Writers:Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder
Starring: Great Garbo, Melvyn Douglas, Ina Claire

Synopsis: Comrade Ninotchka, a Soviet diplomat, comes to Paris to work out the details of the transfer of some jewels to the “Soviet people.” At first, she is all business, cold ad without human emotion, only interested in being a good apparatchik and serving the people. After she meets Leon, a lawyer representing the Russian princess who also has a claim to the jewels, Ninotchka fals in love and changes into a real woman.

Mom says: According to IMDB, “Greta Garbo did not wear any makeup for her scenes where she is the stern envoy.” She also did not show any emotion or do any acting. Glamorous, yes. But if she can act, I couldn’t tell it from this movie. Then, the script itself was flawed, too. It required her to change from a robotic Communist automaton to a real woman on the strength of one pratfall by her suitor, Leon. I couldn’t see what made Leon show any interest in Ninotchka in the first place, other than physical beauty. Garbo plays the first part of the movie with no feelings whatsoever, and so is completely unbelievable. Then, in the second part where she falls in love the change is so sudden that I couldn’t believe in it either.

All of the urchins found this one boring and somewhat odd.

Just after watching this movie, I read some P.G. Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves, a collection of short stories in which Jeeves as usual saves the day. In one of the stories an adolescent boy (who is staying in the same house with Bertie and Jeeves) is infatuated with Greta Garbo:

I clutched the brow.
“Jeeves! Don’t tell me Thos is in love with Greta Garbo!”
“Yes, sir. Unfortunately such is the case. He gave me to understand that it had been coming on for some time, and her last picture settled the issue. His voice shook with an emotion which it was impossible to misread. I gathered from his observations, sir, that he proposes to spend the remainder of his life trying to make himself worthy of her.”

I either need a different introduction to Garbo, or I need to get inside the mind of a thirteen year old boy. Never mind. Strike the latter idea. The mind of a thirteen year old boy is not a place I could ever want to inhabit.

IMDB link to Ninotchka.
Buy Ninotchka at Amazon.

100 Movies of Summer: The Searchers (1956)

Jun18

Director: John Ford
Writers: Frank Nugent from a novel by Alan LeMay
Starring: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Natalie Wood

Karate Kid says: The movie was about a girl getting captured by Indians, and some guys go out and try to find her. I don’t generally like westerns, but this one was OK. I do like John Wayne; he’s an awesome actor.

Z-baby says: I fell asleep so I don’t remember much about it.

Mom says: I’m with KK: as Westerns go, it was OK. John Wayne’s character, Ethan Edwards is a Confederate soldier, returned to Texas after the Civil War, but unreconstructed and bitter. When his brother’s family is massacred by the Comanches, Edwards is consumed with revenge. He and Marty, an adopted son who escaped the massacre, spend years searching for Debbie, the little girl that the Indians captured and took with them instead of killing.

The representation of Native Americans in the movie was appalling. The Comanches in the movie were bloodthirsty, savage, and completely irredeemable. And if a person was captured by the Indians and not rescued quickly, that person also became “infected” with Indian ways and either ended a savage or a gibbering idiot. Throughout the movie Edwards is not really as interested in rescuing Debbie as much as he is out for revenge. He’s fairly sure Debbie is either dead or unsalvageable. We discussed this bigotry about Native Americans after watching the movie, but it was hard to get across the points that yes, Indian massacres did happen, but no, not all Native Americans were brutal inhuman barbarians.

Anthony Esolen says it may the best Western ever made. I must have missed something.

IMDB link to The Searchers.
Buy The Searchers on Amazon.

Escaping the Tiger by Laura Manivong

Jun9

Ms. Manivong says that this fictional account of a Laotian family trapped in a refugee camp in Thailand after escaping from the Communist Pathet Lao regime in their native country is based on the true story of her husband and his family.

“My husband, Troy Anousone Manivong, spent eight months in Na Pho refugee camp in 1988, when he was eighteen years old. While Vonlai is a fictional character, many of his experiences are a reflection of stories my husband shared with me over the years. But their experiences also differ in far greater ways.”

Escaping the Tiger is about Vonlai, 12 years old at the beginning of the book, his sister Dalah, and his Meh (Mom) and Pah (Dad). As the story opens Vonlai and his family do manage to escape from Laos, but they find much more hardship and suffering to face in a refugee camp in Thailand, Na Pho. In fact the camp is in some ways worse than life Communist Laos, so the book is about the family’s struggle to hold on to hope of a better life. The wait for an interview and papers and approval to emigrate to France or to the United States is interminable and tedious and sometimes dangerous. SOme of the Thai people want the Laotians to disappear or return to Laos. And Vonlai and his family face the constant fear that the world has forgotten about them and that it will never be their turn to find a new life in a free country.

Manivong’s book is not long, only 210 pages, and the protagonist is a boy when the story begins, although he grows to be a young man of sixteen before the book’s end. Perhaps those two aspects of the book as well as the publisher’s imprint, HarperCollins Childrens Books, explain why the book was classified in the juvenile section of my library. I thought it was wonderful book, evoking my sympathy and desire to do something to help, but it’s definitely more than I would want my eleven year old to read. Vonlai’s sister must face the violence of a lecherous Thai camp guard, and although the scene is not graphic or explicit, the threat of rape is definitely obvious —and of course, very sad and probably true-to-life. I would give this one to young adults, especially those who already know the adversity that life can bring or those who need to know how blessed they are in comparison to many young people in the world.

More fiction set in Laos:
Little Cricket by Jackie Brown. Another story of refugees escaping to a camp in Thailand, and eventually to the U.S. Middle grade fiction.
Tangled Threads: A Hmong Girl’s Story by Pegi Dietz Shea. Middle grade fiction, takes place mostly in the U.S. after this Laotian girl has already immigrated from Laos via Thailand.
The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill. Murder mystery featuring a Laotian coroner in the 1970’s. The series is up to six, the latest published in 2009, The Merry Misogynist. Adult fiction.
Carpe Diem by Autumn Cornwell. A sixteen year old American girl goes backpacking through Southeast Asia, including Laos, with her eccentric grandmother. YA fiction.

Additions?

Countdown by Deborah Wiles

Jun5

Book #1 for Mother Reader’s 48 Hour Book Challenge
Reading TIme: 2.5 hours
Pages: 378

So Countdown is a “documentary novel” taking place in the fall of 1962 near Andrews Air Force Base. Franny Chapman is in fifth grade, and she has a lot going on in her life. Her best friend Margie is suddenly not a friend anymore. Franny’s sister Jo Ellen is hiding something and spending way too much time at college when she should be at home helping Franny. Chris Cavas has just moved back into the house next door, and he’s somehow grown up to resemble Del Shannon instead of Beaver Cleaver. Uncle Otts is trying to build a bomb shelter in the backyard, and everyone is worried about the Russians. What if the air raid siren goes off for real, and the Communists drop the Bomb and end the world as Franny knows it? Will “duck and cover” really be enough to save Franny and her friends and family?

I was born in 1957. In the fall of 1962, I was five years old. Our schools didn’t have kindergarten, so I wasn’t in school yet. I wondered as I was reading if that was why I didn’t remember anything about civil defense shelters or air raid drills or Bert the Turtle or “duck and cover.” So I asked Engineer Husband who’s a few years older than me and would have been about Franny’s age in 1962. He remembers civl defense shelters with the yellow triangle, but he didn’t really know their purpose. And, like me, the only drills he remembers were fire drills and tornado drills (in which you did find an inside wall away from glass and duck and cover your head). I suppose the the powers-that-be in West Texas where we grew up were a lot more worried about fires and tornadoes than atomic bombs. (Engineer Husband does remember being scared silly because his older brother told him that if Kennedy were elected in 1960, he and all his friends would be forced to go to Catholic school.)

Still, even though I don’t remember any bomb scares, I did find a lot of the cultural references in the book familiar. Ms. WIles writes about 45rpm records; I remember those. And I recognized all the songs: Runaway, Moon RIver, Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, and Monster Mash. (I wondered where the Beatles were, but apparently they didn’t “invade” until 1964.) It was fun for me to read about all of the brands and fads and events of my childhood, even if the book does take place a little before my time.

Interspersed between chapters of the fictional story about Franny and her search for peace in a chaotic world are photographs, news reports, excerpts from speeches, documentary-style reports on famous people like Truman and Kennedy and Pete Seeger. Coming from the conservative side of the aisle, I thought the reports were a little biased toward the left, especially making Kennedy into a King Arthur of Camelot. For instance, the Kennedy bio says that Kennedy “had to deal with a problem he inherited from Eisenhower: the Bay of Pigs invasion.” Yes, training for the Bay of Pigs began under Eisenhower, but Kennedy knew all about it and allowed, if not ordered, the invasion to happen under his watch. The biographical piece on Kennedy generally presents an idyllic picture of him and his presidency, saying that he “made hard decisions” and “dreamed of peace” and served for “three glittering years.” It’s not blatantly biased, though, and as an introduction to President Kennedy and the early 1960’s, it will do.

I liked the characters and the story as much I did the newsy informative sections that were sprinkled throughout the book. The fiction and nonfiction portions of the book complemented each other well. I’m planning a twentieth century study for my homeschool students and for me sometime in the next few years in which we study through the twentieth century year by year. I think Countdown would be a great introduction to the year 1962 and to the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War. After reading the book, we could take a look, and a listen, at the primary sources that Ms. Wiles used to inform her fiction. And then it should still be possible to interview some people who lived during 1962 and remember those times. I’m getting excited, and nostalgic, thinking about it.

Countdown website.
Deborah Wiles’ website.
Scroll down to the previous post for a link to the a book trailer and an excerpt form chapter 1 of Countdown.

Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

May15

I decided to go ahead and join the Books of the Century Challenge since I read three books from the first year of the century, 1900, while I was reading during Lent. Sister Carrie was published in 1900, but it wasn’t a best seller. In fact it almost didn’t get published at all. The novel was “excoriated by censors” who complained that the the title character, Carrie, was a sinner who seemed to benefit as a result of her fall from moral purity. “Why do the wicked prosper?” And, at least in fiction, according to the mores of the time, they shouldn’t.

At the beginning of the novel Carrie is “eighteen years of age, bright, timid, and full of the illusions of ignorance and youth.” She’s also poor, having only a few clothes and four dollars to her name.

“When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.”

By the end of the novel, Carrie is rich, celebrated, famous, and unhappy—but neverthless filled with dreams and longing for beauty and delight.

In between, she stumbles from bad decision to another and wreaks havoc wherever she goes. In particular, Carrie is the ruin of one man who seduces her, and I suppose that the critics complained that for once the man is ruined by an illicit relationship rather than the woman. But Carrie isn’t really a scheming, designing gold digger. She’s a lamb, sort of, pushed into an illicit relationship by poverty, laziness, pride, and vanity. This essential weakness doesn’t justify her actions, but it does explain them.

Some of the situations in the novel were so well described: the slow descent into destitution of an unemployed man, the dissolution by degrees of a loveless marriage, the seduction of a young, vain girl, the enticement of life in the fast lane, and the emptiness of such a life. I thought this aspect of Dreiser’s novel, the realistic depiction of human weakness, was was quite well written. The jacket notes in my book say that critics disagree about the merits of Dreiser’s work. Some think him “the most important realist since Zola.” Others find him unskilled as a writer and his fatalistic view of man, depressing.

Sister Carrie reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates’ them (Semicolon review here), partly because of the Chicago setting, but also because of the cheap, degraded lives of both Oates’s and Dreiser’s characters. However, I found Carrie and her suitors and lovers much more believable and interesting than Oates’s “them”. Carrie may be a drifter and irredeemable by the end of the novel, but Dreiser nails the whole progression of sin and ruination, while Oates’s novel just felt like a rich/middle class girl going slumming. On the other hand, sin does make you stupid, but no one stays quite as innocently obtuse as Carrie does in this book. Maybe we just don’t get to read about the part where Carrie actually wakes up in the pigpen.

Trustee from the Toolroom by Nevil Shute

May13

I discovered Nevil Shute when I was reading books about and set in Australia a couple of years ago. Shute’s A Town Called Alice is justly well-known as an example of Australian flavor.
I also read the most famous of Shute’s books, the apocalyptic On the Beach, which gives a chilling picture of the world slowly dying as a result of a nuclear explosion and the resulting fallout.

I then began to look for more books by Mr. Shute, a popular and prolific author who lived from 1899-1960 and wrote over twenty novels. Shute’s full name was Nevil Shute Norway, and he was a successful aeronautical engineer as well as an author. His novels tend to feature mechanically inclined or engineer-types who are ordinary people sometimes placed in extraordinary circumstances. I would like to read all of the books that Shute wrote, but many of his novels are somewhat difficult to find. On the Beach and A Town Called Alice, maybe because both were made into movies, are readily available, but the others are not to be found in my library system. I looked and you can buy a used paperback copy of Trustee from the Toolroom on Amazon for $30.00. That’s a little rich for my blood. Some of his other novels are a bit more reasonably priced.

So I borrowed Trustee from the Toolroom from a local college library, and it’s unusual enough to be worth tracking down, if you’re looking for a clean, nineteen-fifties, adventure with a common middle class hero. Keith Stewart lives in West Ealing, a suburb of London, and he makes miniature mechanical models–clocks, steamboats, gas engines, locomotives and such– for a living. He also writes about his models for the Miniature Mechanic magazine.

I think my dad would have enjoyed this book. Daddy wasn’t much of a reader, but the details in the book about miniature engineering and about sailing and sailboats would have fascinated him. Mr. Stewart does end up in the midst of an adventure, even though he would seem to be the least likely suspect to become involved in any dangerous exploit. The themes of the book were courage, honor, the influence of steady heroism and everyday reliability, and the importance of the common man. But these themes are not emphasized in a heavy-handed way, just demonstrated as quietly as the fictional Mr. Stewart lives his life.

I suppose to some extent Trustee From the Toolroom is a guy-book, but I enjoyed it. I will admit to skimming some of the technical details of engineering and sailing, but I didn’t miss much. I’m definitely going to keep looking for more books by Nevil Shute Norway. He reminds me of some of my other favorite writers of the mid-twentieth century: Helen MacInnes, Alistair Maclean, even a touch of Rex Stout.

Vittoria Cottage by D.E. Stevenson

May1

I’ve had several reading bloggers recommend the books of author D.E. Stevenson, an author I’d never heard of until I began reading blog reviews. So, when I was at the library the other day and happened upon a shelf of books by Ms. Stevenson, I decided to try one out. (Note: this is how publicity-via-blog works with me. A title or an author sits in the back of my mind until I decide one day to check it out of the library or buy it at the bookstore. This process may take a while.)

Anyway, Vittoria Cottage was first published in 1949, and it’s set in about that time period, post-WW II, in rural/village England. The setting and characters remind me a lot of Angela Thirkell’s (Semicolon mini-reviews of Private Enterprise and County Chonicle by Thirkell). In this particular book, Caroline Dering, a widow, lives in the village of Ashbridge in a cottage she inherited from her husband’s family. As the story progresses, various romantic entanglements come and go for Caroline’s children, James, Leda, and Bobbi, and for Caroline herself. The novel revolves around the characters rather than plot. The plot is fairly predictable, but the characters’ actions, feelings, and reactions are not so much so.

The fun part is that I know people just like those in the book. Leda is the chronic grumbler who thinks she will pleased and happy if this or that relationship works out or if she can just attend this or that event or travel or stay home or something. But everyone around her knows that nothing will really make her happy or make her stop complaining; it’s become a habit. Caroline is the peace-making mother who knows deep down inside that she doesn’t have the right words to make everything right for her grown children, but she wants so much to see them happy that she keeps on trying anyway. And although I identify with Caroline’s time of life (I, too, have adult children whom I would like to see make good decisions), I am more like Caroline’s sister, Harriet, an actress who says what she thinks and d–n the consequences. And everybody else in the family had better be ready to hear the truth as Harriet sees it!

Nevertheless, Vittoria Cottage is a gentle story. Even Harriet never becomes too painfully forthright. The family in the story love one another in spite of all their faults, and the ending is a model of sacrificial love between two sisters. Vitoria Cottage takes the reader back to a time in which daily life was hard in some ways, what with rationing and post-war regulations and a general shortage of almost everything, but in which life was also simpler and more, well, agreeable and gentle and village-like. It’s a time we can never return to really, but it’s nice to visit in a book.

If you read D.E. Stevenson and enjoy her books, you may want to visit the following blogs that project the same sense of community and simple living in a bygone era:

Coffee, Tea Books and Me by Brenda: A sojourner who desires to walk in the path God leads each day… who loves her family, books, coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon. (I think Brenda is one of the people who recommended Ms. Stevenson’s books.)

As I See It Now by Debra: I am the annoying happy homemaker type (and proud of it) who enjoys writing about her adventures with a husband and two cats in the empty nest phase of life.