Claude Chabrol has repudiated his first film, because of its Roman Catholic themes and imagery, and one must admit it is rough-hewn, schematic, and uncertain as to tone; but Le beau Serge is among Chabrol’s most deeply affecting works. Shot on location in black and white in Chabrol’s hometown of Sardent, mixing locals and as-yet […]
Daily Archives: September 3, 2007
Solemn, slow, intelligent though in no way inspired version of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Grigori Kozintsev’s Soviet Korol Lir, based (like his Gamlet) on a Boris Pasternak translation, is a terrible disappointment. Jüri Järvet, the Estonian actor who plays Lear, does a so-so job. Lots of lovely black-and-white shots, but scarcely a single interesting one. A better […]
Some years it is especially hard to be a United States American in terms of the national heartbreak one is called upon to endure. One such year was 1998. In the summer, in Jasper, Texas, James Byrd, Jr., an African-American man, was chained to the back of a truck by whites and dragged to his […]
The financier Merdle is a secular God in Charles Dickens’ excoriating Little Dorrit, a richly detailed novel that marked the author’s second step, after Hard Times, toward more baleful fiction. It was fully accepted and expected that Merdle would buy up the whole of England to extraordinarily beneficial effect so highly he was seen as […]
How does one explain it? The superficiality of much of the action and virtually all the characters; historical inaccuracies; the minimal Jewishness in evidence, whether in terms of religious observance or the casting of Gentiles in nearly all the younger Jewish roles; the schematic quality of the film’s portrayal of the conflict between Jewish factions, […]
Dennis Grunes 