Hollywood Directors’ WWII Mission

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Leni Riefenstahl, Nazi Party

1934 Nazi Party Congress, Nuremberg (photo: wikimedia.org)

The wartime experiences of five major film directors are recounted in the Mark Harris book, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, which has garnered impressive reviews. The book describes the military contributions of five directors near the top of their careers: Frank Capra, John Ford, William Wyler, George Stevens, and John Huston. David Denby gives a nice summary of Harris’s book in the March 17 New Yorker.

(The pre-war activities of Tinseltown’s studios were pretty bad, according to two widely discussed books last year. The studios held back on films attacking fascism or condemning persecution of the Jews, in order to continue doing business in Germany, according to Ben Urwand in The Collaboration. As a result, “Nazis were all but invisible in American movies at the time when depicting their savagery might have done the most good,” said Dave Kehr in a NYT review of  Thomas Doherty’s Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939.)

Capra was put in charge of Why We Fight, a series of training films for U.S. recruits, at the request of Gen. George C. Marshall. Capra saw this assignment as a democratic response to Leni Riefenstahl’s inspiring propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, depicting the 1934 Nazi party congress and the aims and ideals of the Third Reich.

The five directors approached their assignments differently, but in every case with impressive results. George Stevens’s documentary approach to recording the post-war liberation of Dachau became two films used at the first Nuremberg Trial.

What the directors produced upon their return home was irrevocably colored and deepened by these experiences, including Ford’s They Were Expendable, as Denby says, “a film suffused with an elegiac melancholy that is unique in American movies”; William Wyler’s The Best Years of our Lives; and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, in its way, the answer to Marshall’s challenge: a vision of a way of life “for which Americans would have gone to war,” says Denby.

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Lay on, Macduff!

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Macbeth, Sargent

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth by John Singer Sargent (photo: farm2.staticflickr.com)

Word is out that Norwegian thriller writer Jo Nesbø, who writes a mystery series featuring brilliant and unorthodox Oslo police detective Harry Hole, is developing a crime noir, prose retelling of Macbeth. It’s part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project in which noted writers—including Pulitzer-winner Anne Tyler, noted Canadian author Margaret Atwood, and Man Booker prize-winner Howard Jacobson–are reinventing Shakespeare plays “for modern readers.”

It will be hard for Nesbø to top mystery writer David Hewson and Shakespeare scholar A.J. Hartley’s Macbeth: A Novel, which I have endlessly encouraged my friends and readers to immerse themselves in—especially the initial, audiobook version narrated by Alan Cumming. As a person who has listened to several hundred audio books, I can attest that this is one of the Very Best. You’ll never feel the same about Macbeth or those three witches, hereafter.

(The painting of actor Ellen Terry portraying Lady Macbeth is by one of my most revered artists, John Singer Sargent, who painted my favorite painting of all time, at London’s Tate Gallery.)

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Finding Vivian Maier

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Vivian Maier, street photography, Rolleiflex, camera

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Another Netflix possibility, if it’s not playing in your local theater, Finding Vivian Maier, (trailer) is the story of the prolific photo-documentarian whose work came within a hair’s breadth of being lost forever.

According to a Wired story by Doug Bierend, the dedication of the filmmaker, John Maloof, in bringing her story to the public is a tale of equal parts dogged detection and appreciation of the joys of street photography.

A five-star rating from Rotten Tomatoes: 97% of critics liked it! If it’s as good as the documentary of legendary street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, it will be a gem!

Many of Maier’s works can be seen on the Artsy website’s Vivian Maier page.

UPDATE 10-22-14: Good rundown of the increasingly complex copyright claims and counterclaims swirling around Maier’s work in this Jillian Steinhauer article. I wonder how many of the men now vying for rights to her work would have given a nanny with the photography bug the time of day when she was alive?

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Suzanne

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Sara Forestier, Adele Haenel, Suzanne, film

Sara Forestier and Adele Haenel in Suzanne (France, 2013) (photo:i2.wp.com)

For your Netflix list – Suzanne (trailer), a 2013 French film directed by Katell Quillévéré (review here). Shown at the Trenton International Film Festival last weekend, Suzanne is an unsentimental character study of a young woman who makes all the wrong choices. The performances by all four main characters, and the young actors who play Suzanne’s son at different ages are all remarkable. The award-winning actors Sara Forestier and Adèle Haenel play the title character and her sister Maria. “And you know that she’s half crazy, but that’s why you want to be there.”  Rotten Tomatoes rating: 90%.

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AMC’s “Turn”

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George Washington

General George Washington at Trenton by John Trumbull

AMC’s espionage series Turn (review) is based on the exploits of the Culper Ring, a loose network of Revolutionary War spies–including one woman–from whom George Washington learned of the movements and plans of the British in and around New York, then in the redcoats’ hands. It was the era of the martyr Nathan Hale,  the dashing British spy, Major Andre, and the dastardly Benedict Arnold. And this quiet group of brave patriots. Episodes will air  numerous times over the next month, and if the series succeeds, may continue next season. It’s based on the book Washington’s Spies by historian Alexander Rose. A book on the same topic, George Washington’s Secret Six was  recently reviewed here.

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Write a Poette, a Poeet?

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National Poetry Month, poetry, calligraphy

(art: kalen-bloodstone.deviantart.com)

We have the rest of the weekend to come up with a tweet-sized poem for New York City’s “Poem in Your Pocket Day.” Here are the rules. Connect on Facebook, where you find this encouraging verse:

If all week, you find it hard
To connect with your inner bard
It’s just fine, it’s okay!
#NYCPoetweet runs through Tuesday.

This fifth annual contest is held in conjunction with National Poetry Month. A full calendar of NYC events is here, and 30 ways to celebrate—wherever you are—is here.

Celebrate some poets, too, including William Shakespeare at the Fourth Annual Shakespeare’s Birthday Sonnet Slam, April 25.

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There Are No Children Here

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By Alex Kotlowitz – This is an award-winning, almost 25-year-old book that I’ve wanted to read for a long time (thank you West Windsor Library book sale!), documenting living conditions in the Henry Horner Homes a now-demolished housing project of the notorious Chicago Housing Authority. It is credited with making a substantial contribution to reforms in public housing that have attempted to reduce the isolation of the poor, combat violence and drug abuse, and improve building maintenance and living conditions for those who remain in public housing. Chicago-based media impresario Oprah Winfrey produced a made-for-tv movie version in 1993.

The book focuses on one large family, particularly two young brothers, Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers, ages 10 and seven at the outset, and follows their lives for three years. While Kotlowitz says he didn’t start out with the goal of public housing reform, no one who read the book—then or now—can fail to be affected by how public systems have failed so many American children. A 2011 interview with Kotlowitz revisted his experience writing this book and the subsequent fates of Pharoah and Lafeyette.

This year’s Peabody Awards recognized coverage of the continued neglect of low-income teens in WBEZ (This American Life) radio documentaries about Chicago’s Harper High School (Part 1 and Part 2) and the PBS documentary about a Washington, D.C., high school, 180 Days: A Year Inside an American High School. But, as Chicago Public Radio’s Linda Lutton said, “I would trade every prize in the world for them to live in a different reality.”

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The Bletchley Circle

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Bletchley Park, Bletchley CircleFans of the PBS program The Bletchley Circle—I’m one!—who have been waiting for the return of the series, mark your calendars! The second season (which will consist of two, two-episode stories) begins Sunday night, April 13, after Masterpiece Theater. This smart series, harnesses the brain power of a group of women who worked as codebreakers at fabled Bletchley Park during World War II.

In Season 1, the patronizing attitude of the males (husbands, police, etc.) toward these women who were thinking rings around them was delightful. Their skills in pattern recognition, especially, to analyze massive amounts of seemingly random data stood them in good stead. And, the show apparently, despite minor quibbles, reaches standards of factual correctness about Bletchley Park itself. (One can only imagine how Hollywood’s funhouse mirrors would have distorted reality.) Can’t wait.

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Robot Language

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 robots, communication, Luc SteelsA meditation by Visual Thesaurus’s Orin Hargraves on how robots might develop language. He includes an enlightening TED talk with Luc Steels (Vrje Universiteit Brussels, Artificial Intelligence Lab) on experiments with robots’ learning to speak on their own through networks and the complex connections between ideas, rather than through a programmed language provided by humans. Descriptions of some of Steels’s work are embodied in this review.

When researchers allow two robots, who see the world from their own unique vantage points, to invent a way to communicate, they must come up with their own concepts and vocabulary (video). (This sounds depressingly like humans, the “unique vantage point” part and malleable vocabulary.) How will they self-organize language? Will it develop in ways we can understand, that relate to the way humans experience the world? Fascinating.

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The Lunch Box

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Irrfan Khan in The Lunch Box (photo: artsatl.com)

Irrfan Khan in The Lunch Box (photo: artsatl.com)

Like an April Fool’s joke, only one in a million Mumbai lunch boxes goes astray, and yet, the unexpected happens . . . Much to like in the new Indian movie, The Lunch Box, (trailer) and I guarantee that if you like Indian food at all, you’ll be ready to go out to dinner afterwards! There’s a clever premise, depending on the accuracy of the Mumbai dabba wallahs to deliver thousands of home-cooked lunches to office workers, on time and still hot.

When a lonely widower receives an unusually delicious meal, a correspondence ensues, that thaws his heart and steels the young woman for what she must do. Truthfully, it dragged somewhat about two-thirds through, but picked up again. Fascinating glimpses into culture and daily life, too. Nice performances by the three leads: familiar actor Irrfan Khan, Nimrat Kaur, and Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Rotten Tomatoes ratings: 95% (critics) and 87% (audiences).

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