Category: movies
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The Ghosts of Movies Past–Manhattan Melodrama
I first saw “Manhattan Melodrama” years ago, how many years I’m uncertain, but it’s been a long time. I remembered it as a good film. I was right about that, to the extent that I was right about the movie but it is more than just good. It strives for being a great film and…
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The Ghosts of Movies Past–An Elegiac Wrapped in an Elegiac–“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence”
I thought I knew what “elegiac” meant, but nonetheless looked it up before settling on my title. Roughly speaking, it means a poem or song about the past; more loosely interpreted it could be a story, a novel, etc–or a movie. It usually , literally or by implication, bids farewell to someone or something and…
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The Ghosts of Movies Past–Becket
Somehow, I don’t feel like doing more on politics right now, though I did have opinions of the State of the Union, and, as I sit here now, CNN is telling us about yet another object of some kind that showed up near Alaska and was dispatched by the Air Force. Well, maybe more on…
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Movies, Books and Innocence–or Perhaps Something Like It
The title notwithstanding, this is not intended as serious literary criticism. It is my criticism, partly of myself, and a commentary on a past time in USA History; this includes a couple of its leading cultural contributors, and the way we may relate to such works in different times and at different ages. I began…
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The Ghosts of Movies Past-the Two Edges of the Razor
In my third Hays code effort I referred to the two different times(1946, 1984)when Hollywood tacked Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge.” I got so enthusiastic about it that I found myself with more than two pages of MS which should have been about two paragraphs in that article. With some somewhat heavy handed editing I got…
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The Movies, the Hays Code and the censorship issue–Part III
I have been slow to get to this part of my Hays code obsession, for more than one reason. An important one is that the current US political scene grabbed my attention and distracted me(and might so do again); but the main one is that it seems a difficult part of my, uh, study(!!)and I…
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The Hays Office, the movies and the censorship issue-Part 1
/ The first thing is to discuss the word “censorship.” What does it mean? We all know it has to do with the suppression of ideas, pictures, writing, etc. We all know that some people are concerned by too much censorship restricting what the public may write, read, see, etc. Others think there should be…
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