(It’s L. A.) : Nicholas Ray – “In a Lonely Place”

Out of Alfred Hitchcock’s canonized classics, I am most skeptical of Suspicion, a great movie betrayed by its ending. All the suspense Hitchcock masterfully conjures dissolves into one of the silliest, most abrupt, audience-appeasing “plot twist” finales ever. It amounts to “it was all a dream," negating the importance of all previous events. Much better …

Comedy Bit 6, 7, 8 : Honore de Balzac – “An Episode Under the Terror,” “Juana,” “A Passion in the Desert.”

The Comedy Goes On. An Episode Under the Terror: "Nouvelle" in which a mysterious, penitent man commissions a priest-in-hiding and two nuns to conduct an (illicit) funeral mass for the decapitated King Louis XVI. In exchange for the mass, he assures their safety. The mysterious, penitent man turns out to be the (real) royal executioner, …

Hands Off! : William Shakespeare- “The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus”

IF Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (I emphasize the ‘If’) then it is by far the most disgustingly, manically violent thing he- or any Elizabethan not lodged at Bedlam- could come up with. Maybe Will had a butcher friend who was trying to discharge extra buckets of pig’s blood to the Queen’s Men, …

Further Adventures : Mark Twain – “Tom Sawyer Abroad” and “Tom Sawyer Detective”

Well, I didn't expect Mark Twain's neglected Tom Sawyer Abroad (from 1894) to have anything even remotely topical to say, but three pages in, and already we have some philosophizing about the Middle East that might as well come from a 2023 thread. Tom is trying to recruit Huck and Jim into a Crusade to …

De Nuevo, Deneuve : Luis Buñuel and Benito Perez Galdos – “Tristana”

As a kid, I had nightmares about “Tristana.” I’d seen a clip that intimated Luis Buñuel’s classic was chiefly about Catherine Deneuve having her leg chopped off. Deneuve was to me (then and now) just about as close to the Platonic idea of beauty as it gets; to have her perversely mutilated as a plot …