These Morton Gould piano pieces are charming, and I have already listened to them several times.

We have Obama to thank for Tom Homan, which is only one of MANY reasons why any mild approval (I wouldn’t say “admiration”) that I feel for Obama is very qualified. (Another: the feckless Eric Holder’s utter refusal to pursue financiers.)

Images is a great, highly stylized film which has a strong kinship with other such auteur films of the era: Repulsion, Persona, Secret Ceremony, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Chinese Roulette, Bad Timing, Juliet of the Spirits, Red Desert. The Losey similarity in particular was very deliberate.

In my opinion, both Herzog and Jarmusch were correct to tell Thierry Frémaux to stick it. They are Competition film-makers, and their worst films would honor the Festival. They have nothing to prove, and you don’t treat them like some newbie.

Scorn Mason not as a one-hit wonder; he has been involved in many interesting projects over the years, including a stint as a head writer on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Good friends with pop artist Ed Ruscha. Mason is a legend in his adopted state of Oregon and has been very visible there.

The young Finney was spot-on casting here. The film deserved its success; it captures the spirit of Fielding nicely, if obviously not all the details of a very long novel.

John Huston is a great adapter, but a film of Under the Volcano was not necessary. It lives in the prose and nothing is gained by acting it out / putting it in visual form. Nothing much is even communicated.

Richard Barthelmess (BOTD 1895-1963) was one of the best of the “Arrow Collar actors” of the Twenties and early Thirties; check out The Enchanted Cottage (1924), he is really great in that. Should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Only Angels Have Wings.

My problem with BookTube is the same as with podcasts: I just don’t have these spare hours and half-hours lying around.

I don’t dislike the extended ending that Hitchcock shot for the European release of Vertigo, because it brings Barbara Bel Geddes’ Midge back into the picture.

Algren’s affair with Simone de Beauvoir - they both wrote about it - is truly one of the odder episodes in 20th Century literature.

The Man with the Golden Arm is massively impressive, but emphatically not a happy read. The Otto Preminger film adaptation cleaned it up and cheered it up - he could scarcely have done otherwise in the Fifties - and is skippable.

The unsung Glenda Jackson: Brilliant as an Adlai Stevenson stand-in in Robert Altman’s vastly underrated HealtH. Glenda got on well with Bob and worked with him again in Beyond Therapy. [more]

Roger Corman’s Ski Troop Attack (1960) is a small but archetypal war picture, niftily directed. Corman makes great use of the South Dakota locations and actual winter weather. The visuals have an abstract and minimalist quality, with the men outlined against the snow in long and medium-long shots.

Fun Fact: Roger Corman distributed Cries and Whispers in the US because no other company would do so, despite Bergman’s very high stature.

Andrew Birkin’s J.M. Barrie and the Lost Boys is possibly the saddest book I have ever read. I was a freaking mess.

”The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.”

Mansfield Park is the peak of Jane Austen’s achievement in my view.

On stage, Albert Finney appeared in plays by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Chekhov, Beckett, Shaw, Strindberg, Congreve, Wycherley, Coward, Feydeau, John Osborne (Luther, below), John Arden, Peter Nichols, Brian Friel, Ronald Harwood, Joe Orton, and Peter Shaffer, among others. [more]

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is a perfectly wonderful book. Alas, Clint Eastwood’s film adaptation really did not work at all. One of those projects where all the assembled elements seem right - but they just sit there, they do not fuse.

60 Minutes was a great flagship program, but I have to admit that Mike Wallace always rubbed me the wrong way. In relation to anything that I cared about, he seemed philistine, obtuse, and doltish.

No way I could fit in that to drive it. Maybe one of my dogs could. 🤔

JazzWax: So, did Little Richard kill jazz? Little Richard: Kill jazz? Oh no, no, no. I don’t believe rock ‘n’ roll could kill jazz…Nothing can kill jazz. Jazz is an original…Real rock ‘n’ roll musicians love jazz. A real musician loves all types of music.

In every respect, The Big Country is as satisfying a big-studio, big-budget, big-name-cast Western as ever was made in Hollywood. Incredible score by Jerome Moross.

Lucille Ball and Mark Stevens are simply wonderful together in The Dark Corner. The male/female dynamic here is very appealing.

Next to another such FBI suck-up, Walk East on Beacon! (1952), Down Three Dark Streets is some kind of Hawksian masterpiece. Walk East on Beacon! features an astoundingly uncharismatic lead performance (George Murphy); the most exciting thing in the movie is the exclamation mark in the title.

A truly great film; De Sica’s performance is magnificent. It is best not to know too much about the plot going in.

One of the best pieces of advice ever given.

Elmer Rice made permanent contributions to the American theater with Street Scene and the Expressionistic play The Adding Machine. I have been fortunate to see the latter on stage, and it really plays well.

It is really not THAT hard. You just have to pay attention.

One of the summits of world literature, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education will inevitably be disliked by many Anglo-American and many contemporary readers, because it offers no comfort whatsoever and is resolutely “flat” in its approach.

I am FINALLY reading Decline and Fall, and yes, it’s great.

In noir films such as The Price of Fear and The Girl in Black Stockings, Lex Barker looks as if he could snap all the other males in the casts in two without much effort. He also looks relaxed about the possibility, but still, the dominance is there.

Very somber; this is not the smiling Haydn.

Swedish Wedding Night? New to me, this one; the Times review is intriguing. Based on a Stig Dagerman novel.

March is phenomenal in this. Spencer Tracy, a decade later, was badly miscast.

The Ox-Bow Incident was one of the first “old movies” that I discovered on television, when I was 10 or 11, and it made a lasting impact.

Does anyone remember Pudgy!, the “female Don Rickles”?

Hadn’t seen this one before, holy moly. Meyerowitz is a master.

Cool climax on this one at a great location, I’ll say no more.

It is a damn shame that Saul Bass (BOTD 1920) only got to direct one feature, because Phase IV is brilliant. Born to be a cult movie. Great lead role for Michael Murphy.

Not easy these days

In Progress: Michael Jacobs, The Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America - Since the subject was an easy lure, I am glad that this is so engagingly written! Wonderful illustrations, too. I just finished the chapter on the colony in Skagen, Denmark. [more]

Theater Regensburg revived Beer’s enjoyable operetta Der Prinz von Schiras in 2023. I get to hear most such things through Internet radio.

Salieri was not mediocre at all. I can't stand Amadeus, although I readily admit that F. Murray Abraham was amazing in the film. The libel against Salieri has a long history. I can just about tolerate Rimsky-Korsakov’s one-act opera Mozart and Salieri, but wish RK hadn’t promoted this.

Brahms and Tchaikovsky did NOT like each other’s music, but met a few times and were amiable.

You thought Ulysses was difficult, but I assure you it has NOTHING on Robert Browning’s knotty narrative poem Sordello, about 13th Century Italian politics and troubadouring. I used Arthur J. Whyte’s 1913 annotated edition – very helpful it was and very grateful I was for the help.

My favorite philosopher, and a joy to teach. Le bon David!

The Dutch author Willem Elsschot (BOTD 1882-1960) is one of the greatest satiric novelists in any language, and incomparable on the subject of business.