By Elizabeth Kropf Gary Swaim’s book A Perhaps Line asks readers to not only wrestle with the division between the material and immaterial, but with the placement of the poems themselves. The poems are divided into two sections, “Poetry of the Material…
Blog Archives
Little Drummer Girl, a Review
When I was seventeen, just out of high school and still in deep grief for my best friend, dead from riding shotgun while a careless fellow drove, I picked up Feodor Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment. For the next several days,…
Posted in Reviews
Red River
Red River (1948), directed by Howard Hawks, relates the story of Tom Dunson (John Wayne) and the enormous cattle ranch he has built up in Texas. Unfortunately, there is no market left for cattle in Texas, so he decides to…
Tagged with: classic films, Howard Hawkes, John Wayne, Red River, Rio Bravo, westerns
Posted in Reviews
Posted in Reviews
The Great Dictator
Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) satirizes Adolf Hitler and the growth of National Socialism in Germany with Chaplin in a dual role as dictator Adenoid Hynkel and a persecuted Jewish barber. Hynkel implements policies of strict control on the…
Marty
In director Delbert Mann’s 1955 drama Marty, the title character (played by Ernest Borgnine) is an overweight 34 year-old Bronx butcher, unpopular with women, who lives with his mother. One night at the Stardust Ballroom, he meets plain, shy schoolteacher…
The Innocents
Director Jack Clayton’s 1961 adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (with a screenplay co-written by Truman Capote), The Innocents stars Deborah Kerr as Miss Giddens, a newly-hired governess of an English playboy’s country estate, watching over two…
Tagged with: classic films, Deborah Kerr, ghosts, Henry James, Jack Clayton, The Innocents, The Turn of the Screw, Truman Capote
Posted in Reviews
Posted in Reviews
Gold Diggers of 1933
Reviewed by James Garfield A 1933 musical comedy directed by Mervyn LeRoy and set during the then-raging Great Depression, Gold Diggers of 1933 stars Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler, Aline MacMahon, and Ginger Rogers as starving actresses looking for a break…
