McGehee and Siegel

What Maisie Knew

The response – quite reasonable, I thought – from a friend who hadn’t read Henry James’s What Maisie Knew to the recent movie version was “Shouldn’t those parents have been thrown in jail for child abuse?” Apart from the usual difficulty in adapting James to the screen (or the stage) – that almost none of his novels is inherently dramatic – this particular one, which he wrote in 1897, poses special problems because of the way our culture now perceives the role of parents in the lives of their children. The novel’s narrative trick is that it’s entirely in the point of view of the little girl, Maisie (she’s ten when the book begins, about thirteen when it ends), whose parents, who are splitting up, use her as a pawn to wound and manipulate each other. But the novel is a high comedy, and its central joke (if you want to call it a joke) is that precocious Maisie knows a great deal more than one might imagine – and, of course, acquires more knowledge as the story goes on. She’s the protagonist, and her qualities of character – as well as insight and an astonishing gift for assimilating information in a game in which the rules seem constantly to be shifting, these include boundless optimism, patience, elegance of expression and a deep capacity for love – make her a true heroine. James is less concerned with what is done to her than with how she handles her situation.

Disenchantment: Two Shakespeare Plays at Stratford

Daniel Briere (Romeo) and Sara Topham (Juliet) at the 2013 Stratford Theatre Festival (All Photos by David Hou)

There’s a reason Romeo and Juliet is so popular with teenaged audiences. And with theatre companies hoping to attract teenaged audiences, of course. To begin with, the plot is relatively straightforward, for Shakespeare, anyway; the action is frequent and noisy, and it’s all about young love – tragic, heart-breaking, parentally disapproved-of young love.

In the Stratford Festival’s Romeo and Juliet, British director Tim Carroll has given us a forthright production. This quality is partly a function of his theory of “original concept” Shakespeare, plays done as closely as possible to the way they would have been produced in the Bard’s era: with declaimed texts, plain sets, Renaissance-style costumes and a fair bit of interaction between the cast and the audience. The audience also shares the lighting with the actors, apparently to give the effect of an afternoon performance at the open-air Globe theatre. (Though original practices – in Stratford’s case, at least – do not include boy actors playing the women’s roles and standing room only for the audiences. And there is electrical lighting; you don’t want to go overboard with this stuff.)

Neglected Gem #43: The Tall Guy (1989)

Jeff Goldblum in The Tall Guy (1989)

Mel Smith, who died a couple of weeks ago, was one of those living legends of British comedy who never managed to crack the American market. (He was a youngish legend, felled by a heart attack at just 60 years old.) Smith became a TV star as part of the cast of Not the Nine O’Clock News, an early-‘80s sketch comedy series that also launched the careers of Rowan Atkinson, Chris Langham, Pamela Stephenson, and Griff Rhys Jones. Its humor was assumed to be too British and topical to export; instead, there was an Americanized HBO version, Not Necessarily the News, which is best remembered as the testing ground for Rich Hall’s “Sniglets”. His long-running series with Griff Rhys Jones, Alas Smith and Jones, was broadcast on A&E for a few years, but Smith and Jones’ attempt to take their act to the movies, the 1985 sci-fi comedy Morons from Outer Space, was a washout.

In 1989, Smith began directing movies himself, with The Tall Guy, a romantic comedy starring Jeff Goldblum and a then-unknown Emma Thompson. On the basis of The Tall Guy, George Lucas hired Smith to direct the expensive, sprawling period comedy Radioland Murders, one of those highly touted Lucas dream projects (such as Howard the Duck and Willow) that make it seem impossible that this guy ever had a commercially viable idea in his life, and that pretty much finished Smith in Hollywood. He did have a hit in 1997 with a big-screen spinoff of Rowan Atkinson’s TV character Mr. Bean, but that was a watered-down version of a pre-sold property, and anyway, Mr. Bean is a mostly-mute sweetums played by a comedian who was meant to always be mean-spirited, talkative, hyper-articulate, and snarling (as in the Blackadder shows).

Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith, in Alas Smith and Jones

Though it both pains and confuses me to say it, George Lucas did have one good idea in his life: Smith should have been besieged with offers from people who’d seen The Tall Guy. (It may be remembered that the best idea Lucas ever had that was related to the Star Wars franchise was to hire Irvin Kershner to direct one of them.) The fact that Smith was apparently never besieged with offers to direct big movies may, in fact, be directly connected to the fact that not too many people ever saw The Tall Guy. After the shoot wrapped, it took a few years before the movie was released in England, and then another year for it to come to the U.S. When it opened here in the fall of 1990, it had the aura of a neglected movie that had just missed the bullet of a direct-to-video release, and many of the reviews reflected that. It was the first produced feature film screenplay by Richard Curtis, and it has a mixture of cornball innocence – reflected in the kind of goofy touches (such as a montage of all the characters celebrating the hero and heroine’s coming together by singing along to Madness’ “It Must Be Love”) that only a beginner would include in a movie – that’s made all the more disarming with its sophisticated, satirical take on its theatrical milieu, which is that of a couple of world-weary insiders. (I seem to remember Gary Giddins, who reviewed it in the Village Voice, dismissively brushing it away with the observation that there were silly clips from the movie running alongside the closing credits.)

A Challenging Attraction: Terrence Blanchard's Magnetic

The Terence Blanchard Quintet

Terence Blanchard is a musician who never lets the grass grow under his feet. As a skilled trumpeter and composer on one of the most profoundly difficult instruments in jazz, Blanchard continues to play with a consistent sense of abandon balanced by a love for melody. No less can be said about his new album, Magnetic (Blue Note).

Magnetic is a testament to Blanchard’s musical past, a rich education into the history of jazz shaped by the foundation of his birth, New Orleans. It continued with time in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers as he explored the world of hard bop alongside Donald Harrison, saxophone, whom he later partnered with in the late 1980s. It was an important time for Blanchard as he found his sound and started composing. He later signed a recording contract with Columbia and became the rival stable mate of Wynton Marsalis.

Bordering On the Miraculous: Jennifer Tarver's Waiting for Godot

Stephen Ouimette (Didi) and Tom Rooney (Gogo) in Jennifer Tarver's Waiting for Godot (Photo by Cylla von Tiedemann)

In 1943, Jean-Paul Sartre published an essay entitled Being and Nothingness, an existential exploration of human consciousness that in turn had been heavily influenced by German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s 1927 book, Being in Time. The celebrated French thinker had devoured it while a prisoner of war during 1941 and 1942. Ideas of human existence as a state of free-fall, untethered from God, were clearly a part of the early twentieth century zeitgeist. But giving them vivid expression – and lasting relevance – was Irish-born playwright, Samuel Beckett, whose play Waiting For Godot is being and nothingness made flesh.

Originally written in French as En Attendant Godot (literally, While Waiting for Godot), and given its first performance at a small theatre in Paris in 1953, the play is essentially two acts of interminable waiting for an elusive character named Godot by two clownish tramps named Estragon (Gogo) and Vladimir (Didi). A famous early review described Waiting for Godot as being about “nothing happening, twice.” But as can be seen in the superb production of the play now playing at Canada’s Stratford Festival through to Sept. 20, a lot, in fact, does happen. And happens in a way to make you really think.

Celebrity Lives: Untold Stories and I’ll Eat You Last

In Untold Stories, a pair of reminiscences by Alan Bennett that moved from the National Theatre to the West End in the spring, the actor Alex Jennings does an uncanny job of getting both Bennett’s owlish Oxford don’s look and his distinctive sound, the Yorkshire rhythms and the slightly high, thin tone. The title of the play comes from Bennett’s book of (mostly) autobiographical musings; the latest edition is bulked up to more than 600 pages, almost all of it highly readable. (I admit to skimming the 150 or so pages of diary entries.) Both “Hymn” (directed by Nadia Fall) and “Cocktail Sticks” (directed by Nicholas Hytner) are based on anecdotes in the book, but you have to read around in the volume to find bits and pieces of them, and most of “Cocktail Sticks” was constructed for the theatre. Untold Stories is small-scale – my companion described them aptly as aperitifs – but tremendously winning and affecting. I love Bennett’s style, more descriptive here than in his other work for the theatre, and his tone, which is observant without being detached, allusive but not rambling, emotional without being sentimental. And Jennings (best known on this side of the pond for playing Prince Charles in the movie The Queen) renders that tone with impeccable precision. It’s an impersonation but not merely one: he slips inside Bennett as he burrows into his prose.

The Laboratory of the Cutting Room Floor: Anticipating Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait

CBS Records announced this past week the forthcoming August release of Bob Dylan's Another Self Portrait (which contains session material from that original 1970 album as well as its follow-up, New Morning). It's hard to know what to expect. As another instalment in their Dylan Bootleg Series, which takes us again into their vaults to experience unreleased material, CBS is calling Another Self Portrait an opportunity to "give fans a chance to reappraise the pivotal recordings that marked Dylan's artistic transformation as the 1960s ended and the 1970s began." But the record they've chosen is probably the most reviled in Dylan's catalogue. It also shows us the pitfalls of selling goods defined by the iconic name of the artist rather than by the quality of the material within.

When he released Self Portrait, Bob Dylan essentially pulled a fast one on his fans. And the critics largely hated it. In Rolling Stone, critic Greil Marcus opened his epic review by asking, "What is this shit?" What was this shit? Besides the sly joke of the album's title (he performs mostly covers rather than original material), Dylan positioned the two-record set as a riposte aimed at those who wished to hold him to the mantle of being a spokesman of his generation. "I wish these people would just forget about me," Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1984 looking back at Self Portrait. "I wanna do something they can't possibly like, they can't relate to. They'll see it, and they'll listen, and they'll say, 'Well, let's get on to the next person. He ain't sayin' it no more. He ain't given' us what we want,' you know? They'll go on to somebody else." But the record was also aiming to achieve something more. It represented a somewhat daring, yet failed, attempt to conceptually put his music in the context of the American songbook of Tin Pan Alley. So besides including live versions of his own "Like a Rolling Stone" and "The Mighty Quinn" (from the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival), he performed Rodgers and Hart's "Blue Moon", Elmore James's "It Hurts Me Too," plus traditional folk material like "Alberta" and "Little Sadie." Self Portrait doesn't fall apart because the concept is bad. It's that Dylan can't fully commit himself to the concept.

Red Sparrow: The Human Side of Spying

“Even now with the Soviet Union long gone, the monster is right beneath the surface.”

– Jason Matthews, Red Sparrow

In interviews, Jason Matthews has indicated that he believes that the current Russian state is much different than the former Soviet Union, but one would never know that by reading his debut novel Red Sparrow (Scribner, 2013). The Russia that he portrays under the icy “blond scorpion,” Vladimir Putin, who is a minor character in the novel, is repressive and cruel, a throwback to the Soviet Union. The Cold War may be officially over, but that is not the position of the Russian head of state. Putin is determined to retool the Russian Empire in order to reestablish the glory and prestige that the Soviet Union once exercised and he is willing to resort to any means from placing moles inside the American government to authorizing “wet actions” (murder) in order to achieve that goal. Any expression of dissent or disloyalty is mercilessly punished. The real life murder in a Moscow elevator of the investigative journalist Anna Polikovskaya, and the poisoning in London of a former KBG officer, Alexander Litvinenko, by polonium-20, incidents that are mentioned twice over the course of the novel, are merely the tip of the iceberg of the ruthlessness that characterizes contemporary Russia. While reading the novel, I noticed press reports that only seem to confirm the notion that the rule of law operates only at the pleasure of Putin and that the past is much alive in the present. Any serious rival to Putin is arrested, subjected to a show trial and convicted so that he cannot run for public office. In the novel, the brutal interrogation techniques in the Lubyanka prison are reminiscent of conditions that existed in the past. Even the novel’s central conceit, that young women are sent to courtesan schools to learn the art of seduction espionage and become “sparrows” for the purpose of sexual entrapment, is a relic of the Soviet era since the author has stated in interviews that he has no knowledge of the current Russian state operating them, although he concedes that independent contractors may be performing that service in the Putin era.

Orange is the New Black: Not Your Father’s Prison Series

Vicky Jeudy, Taylor Schilling (centre) and Dascha Polanco on Netflix's Orange is the New Black

July has been a good month for Netflix. On July 18th, the online streaming service made television history when it received its first ever Emmy nominations, nine for the Kevin Spacey dark political drama House of Cards (including Most Outstanding Drama) and three for its much anticipated reboot of Arrested Development. Much e-Ink has been spilled in recent months on the minor televisual revolution that Netflix has sparked with its recent spate of original programming, but both nominated shows launched with a built-in audience, boasting the Hollywood heft of Spacey and Arrested Development’s longstanding cult following respectively. But with the premiere of Jenji Kohan’s new prison comedy-drama Orange is the New Black, Netflix enters a new era, with a series that seems to have earned its critical (and popular) acclaim entirely on its own terms. Two weeks before its premiere on July 11th, Netflix renewed the series for a second season. With only a few familiar faces, strong writing, and an innovative narrative, Orange is the New Black is simply great television however it comes to our screens.

Adapted by Kohan (the creator of Showtime’s Weeds) from Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison (Spiegel & Grau, 2010), the New York Times bestselling memoir by Piper Kerman, the series is set in the fictional Litchfield Prison, a women’s minimum security federal penitentiary. Taylor Schilling (from NBC’s short-lived medical drama Mercy) stars as Piper Chapman, who finds herself sentenced to 15 months in prison for crimes she committed 10 years earlier. Piper (or Chapman, as she becomes known as in Litchfield) is joined in prison by a remarkable array of female characters, meaty roles for actresses of all ages and backgrounds. The range of female and minority characters alone would single the series out, but there is little that is gimmicky or derivative about the show.

Memories Are Made of This – Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me and A Band Called Death

The original members of Big Star: (from left) Alex Chilton, Jody Stephens, Chris Bell and Andy Hummel

Two imperfect but interesting current documentaries, Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me and Mark Christopher Covino and Jeff Howlett’s A Band Called Death, both available on Video On Demand, offer a chance to savor some of the complications and ironies of the rock music culture of the 1970s. That was the first full decade when bands were being formed by people who had grown up in the shadow of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and had come of age thinking of rock not as a get-rich-quick scheme or the next logical step in the evolution of rhythm and blues and country music and pop in general, but as a form of self-expression that had its own history and tradition and pantheon. It was also the age of the first generation of rock critics – college-educated working journalists like Robert Christgau, academics like Greil Marcus, unclassifiable mavericks like Lester Bangs – who thought that rock was a subject worthy of interest in itself, to be written about without condescension, and – a legacy of having been rock fans during the late ‘60s – that it might be both an art form and a trigger for social revolution. 

Two Faces Have I: The Stepfather, Natural Born Killers & The Controversy Over Rolling Stone Magazine's Cover Photo of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

"That day's Boston Globe has run a story about the nurses at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital who took care of Jahar [Tsarnaev] those first few days after his capture [for the Boston Marathon bombing]. They were ambivalent, to say the least, about spending too much time with him, for fear of, well, liking him. One nurse said she had to stop herself from calling him 'hon'."

- Janet Reitman, "The Bomber: How A Popular, Promising Student Was Failed By His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam And Became a Monster," Rolling Stone, July 2013.

One Friday afternoon, back in 1987, I set off to review a new suspense film called The Stepfather, a skilfully smart thriller that nobody at the time wanted to see. Directed by Joseph Ruben (Dreamscape) and written by crime novelists Donald E. Westlake (God Save the Mark) and Brian Garfield (Death Wish) with assistance from Carolyn Lefcourt, The Stepfather was about a bland suburban family man, Henry Morrison (Terry O'Quinn), who murders his whole family without anyone noticing (except for his brother-in-law who obsessively hunts him down), changes his identity to Jerry Blake, moves away, and marries into another single family. Although the story was largely fictional, it actually had its roots in something quite true. At the time of The Stepfather's release, a New Jersey husband and father, John List, had been a fugitive from justice for over sixteen years for the crime of murder. In November 1971, he had killed his wife, his mother and his three children and then immediately vanished. For nearly a month, after the crime was committed, nobody noticed his disappearance, or were even aware of the carnage he left behind. That whole month, while his neighbours in Westfield went about their business, John List assumed a false identity and moved to Colorado where he soon remarried. (List was finally apprehended in June 1989 when the story of his murders had been broadcast on America's Most Wanted to his new wife's horrified surprise.)

John List

The length of time it took for the investigators to find List was due to the fact that no one could positively identify him. Most witnesses informed detectives that List was 'too ordinary' in both his looks and his behaviour for them to make a clear identification. Not only was he not what many in the neighbourhood would suspect as a mass murderer, List was also a devout Lutheran, who taught Sunday school, and had once served in the U.S. army during World War II. (List had also been given an ROTC commission as a Second Lieutenant.) While attending university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, List had earned his Bachelor's Degree in business administration with a Master's Degree in accounting to follow. He met his wife in 1951 and then quietly blended into suburban American culture for over twenty years before he went on his bloody rampage. For a nation raised on the idea that killers are only recognizable as the slobbering and stubble-faced monsters of B-suspense dramas, the bland and colourless face of a suburban accountant didn't ring any alarm bells in his neighbourhood.

Showing its Age: Soulpepper's Production of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane

Stuart Hughes, David Beazely & Fiona Reid in Soulpepper's Entertaining Mr. Sloane (All photos by Cylla von Tiedemann)

When it made its première in 1964, Joe Orton’s first play Entertaining Mr. Sloane was a smash hit in London. The debut put Orton on the map, as both a playwright and as one of the radical new voices in British literature. (Terence Rattigan had seen the play at the New Arts Theatre and rated it so highly that he put up £3,000 in sponsorship.) The play was mixture of farce, black comedy and social commentary that, with the advent of The Beatles and the beginning of a new wave of avant-garde artists moving into the limelight, arrived at the start of London’s burst of creativity in music, art, literature and theatre. It was a great time to be young, adventurous and to move from the world of black and white into Technicolor. And had he lived longer (Orton was murdered by his partner in 1967), he may have become as good as Tom Stoppard. But all that ended for him at the age of 34, so we’ll never really know.

In recent years, Soulpepper has revived several of Orton’s plays, Loot (2009) and What The Butler Saw (2010) to great success and full houses. Those two plays were written after Sloane as the playwright began to find a creative groove in which to work. So I suppose it made sense for the company to revive Orton’s first play as part of a “cycle.” But it may not have been the right choice: artistically speaking, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, directed here by Brendan Healy, is showing its age.

New York Musicals: On the Town and Hello, Dolly!

On the Town at the Barrington Stage

Though they’re best known for writing Singin’ in the Rain, the funniest movie musical ever made, the book and lyric writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green were the most notable proponents – perhaps even the inventors – of the New York musical. During their long-term and prolific collaboration they worked together on On the Town, Wonderful Town, Bells Are Ringing, Do Re Mi and, on screen, It’s Always Fair Weather, all of which unfold against the backdrop of a bustling Manhattan peopled with colorful caricatures of New York types. There’s an exuberance in the way Comden and Green employ specific New York settings: the Greenwich Village of the 1930s in Wonderful Town, the subway in the “Hello, Hello There” number in Bells are Ringing, Stillman’s Gym in It’s Always Fair Weather. Their first Broadway show, On the Town, which just closed in a marvelous production at Barrington Stage in the Berkshires, begins and ends in the Navy dockyard, and in between takes us to Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Natural History, Coney Island and the interior of a taxi driven by a boisterous female cabbie named Hildy. It’s a valentine to the city, seen through the eyes of three young sailors who encounter it for the first time during a twenty-four-hour furlough.

Off the Shelf: Bring it On (2000)

Who would have thought that a film about competing cheerleading squads could be so much fun? Certainly not me. But Bring it On springs plenty of surprises. For one thing, it's not just another hormonal teen comedy about sex. It's also not another self-congratulatory jolt of testosterone about winning the big game. And even if the romantic parts of the story follow in the footsteps of already familiar formula, the picture has a tickling spirit that tweaks you on the nose. Director Peyton Reed and screenwriter Jessica Bendinger have put together an affectionate and cheerful look at what is often a catty and competitive sport without turning snide about it. The cheerleaders aren't bubble-headed conformists who fear losing status at the high school. Reed and Bendinger create instead a comic tapestry that dispenses with pom-pom-waving clichés. Bring it On shows the relationship the sport has to interpretive dance, swing, martial arts and even Busby Berkeley choreography. We can see how the standard cheerleading routines at school football and basketball games are only warmups for national competitions that are every bit as difficult as gymnastic events.

Lore: Breaking Down the Ideological Barrier

“The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue.”

― Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, 1976.

“A vast army of ghosts, cripples and monsters inhabited my dream landscapes, where cities were burned and forests were mowed down by a hail of bombs.”
―Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on my Former Self, 1964.

In 1933 when Melita Maschmann was fifteen years old, she secretly joined the girls’division of the Hitler Youth in a protest against her wealthy conservative parents. Her goal was to escape from her “childish narrow life,” and attach herself “to something that was great and fundamental.” For almost twenty years, she remained a committed, avowed Nazi supporter experiencing at times “overwhelming joy” as she worked in the press and propaganda sections during the 1930s and supervised the evictions of Polish farmers and the resettlement of ethnic Germans on their farms during the war years. By the end of the war, she exposed herself to danger expecting to die since she was unable to imagine “an existence robbed of the possibility an inner life.” Even after she spent three years in prison and underwent the compulsory de-Nazification program, she remained an unrepentant Nazi. Then over the next twelve years she underwent a profound transformation that culminated in her mea culpa memoir, Account Rendered, which attempted to understand not excuse “the wrong and even the evil steps I took.” It was the first time a former National Socialist publicly acknowledged that she had served “an inhuman political system” and admitted that she had not thought for herself. The vast majority, like the parents in the novella and film adaptation Lore, burned any incriminating documents. They regarded Maschmann’s memoir as a form of betrayal and never forgave her.

Cate Shortland's Lore (2012)

Lore (short for Hannelore), the central character of Rachel Seiffert’s “Lore,” one of three interlocking novellas in the 2001 The Dark Room, and Cate Shortland’s 2012 film, Lore, is about the same age as Maschmann was in 1933. The setting for the novella and the film is Bavaria in the spring of 1945. The girl of the title shepherds her four younger siblings that range from about twelve to a baby on a perilous trek through a ruined country under foreign occupation to reach the grandmother’s home outside of Hamburg several hundred kilometres away. The film might be understood as a latter-day Grimm tale: the mother warns Lore to stay from soldiers because they kill all the children. Like Maschmann, she too undergoes a psychological odyssey from Hitlerian delirium to the beginning of awareness about the truth of the Nazi horror, a process in which she is forced to confront the demons of Nazi indoctrination and its consequences. As a result of her harrowing ordeal, Maschmann was permanently scarred. We do not know of course the future of Lore but the evidence from other sources suggests that the offspring and descendants of powerful Nazi officials did experience lives fraught with guilt and shame. Some sought reparation by converting to Judaism.

Strike Three: Brian Helgeland's 42

It’s curious that most American films about baseball, arguably the country’s national sport, have little to do with baseball. It doesn't matter whether you're watching Pride of the Yankees (1942) or The Natural (1984). You never get to fully comprehend what makes the game such a clear mirror of the culture that created it because the movies never want it to be one. Instead, baseball ends up as an inspirational tool to tell tired moral dramas of personal triumph. In The Natural, for instance, based on the 1952 novel by Bernard Malamud, Robert Redford gets to hit a ninth-inning home run to save his troubled team as well as his own corrupted soul. (The original novel, on the other hand, had quite the opposite conclusion.) It’s as though baseball heroes need to undergo their own secular Stations of the Cross in order to reach individual redemption. In Field of Dreams (1989), Kevin Costner gets to heal the emotional and generational rift between him and his dead father by having his dad's spirit come back to play catch with him. In dealing with the scandal of the 1919 Chicago White Sox players fixing the World Series, Field of Dreams (based on WP Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe) airbrushes out of its story the more troubled, uncomfortable aspects of baseball’s past by portraying the participants of the scandal as innocent victims. (The picture even shamelessly features a black journalist talking worshipfully about baseball being the one constant in American life when, in fact, his race was kept out of the major leagues for half the century.) 

Rather than examine how the game has both ignored and led the political and cultural changes in America, most movies about baseball resist the ties that bind the game to the nation's character in an effort to win over the mass audience with stories about heroism. Baseball has certainly had its iconic heroes, from Babe Ruth to Ted Williams to Cal Ripkin (just as it has had its tainted ones, from Ty Cobb to Pete Rose to Barry Bonds), but, in movies, we rarely get to see what sets those individuals apart from the rest of us. There's a desire to make them seem ordinary, as though this contrived egalitarianism would make us identify with them more strongly. One baseball movie that did truly confront the complexity of our celebrity worship, Ron Shelton's bracing Cobb (1994), about the violent and racist clutch hitter Ty Cobb, was ignored by audiences and critics alike (just before, ironically, O.J. Simpson's trial would capture national attention).

The Male Gaze: The Fall

Gillian Anderson as SDI Gibson in The Fall

When Gillian Anderson was on The X-Files in 1990s, she was often overshadowed – in the media, if not on the show itself – by her co-star, David Duchovny. It was Duchovny who was constantly being singled out in the press for being unusually intelligent – you know, for an actor – and who stepped away from the series to pursue a movie career. (It was also Duchovny who seemed to go out of his way to select movie roles that seemed to call attention to his lack of range and who, in recent years, has raised the question of just how intelligent someone who can stay interested in his Showtime series Californication can possibly be.) After starring in Terence Davies’ The House of Mirth in 2000, Anderson seemed to step away from the spotlight; she worked on the stage in Britain, took sizable roles in a few small films and small roles in a few higher-profile films (The Last King of Scotland, Tristram Shandy), and played Lady Dedlock in the superb 2005 BBC production of Bleak House. She’s been more active, or at least easier for Americans to catch sight of, in the last year or so than at any time since The X-Files went off the air in 2002. Last year, she gave brief but strong, compellingly weird performances in TV versions of Great Expectations (as a spectral, wounded-bird Miss Haversham) and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (as a madam with aspirations to haughtiness), and in the last few months she’s had a recurring role on NBC’s Hannibal and played the lead – a police detective investigating a serial murder case – in the five-hour Irish TV series The Fall.

Repairing the World, One Case at a Time: Howard Shrier’s Miss Montreal

Crime novelist Howard Shrier (Photo credit: www.jewishtribune.ca)

Jonah Geller is back in Howard Shrier’s Miss Montreal (Random House Canada), the fourth book in his series chronicling the adventures of the determined Toronto private eye. Over four novels, including Buffalo Jump (2008), High Chicago (2009), Boston Cream (2012) and now Miss Montreal (2013), Jonah has gone from working for a security agency as a PI to running his own private investigative business, World Repairs, with partner Jenn Raudsepp. (World Repairs is the English term for the Hebrew phrase Tikkun Olam, a Jewish mandate to repair the world and make it a better place by doing good deeds.Or as Shrier puts it, "Jonah Geller: repairing the world, one asshole at a time.") Unlike other Jewish detectives, such as fellow Torontonian Howard Engel’s Benny Cooperman, in a series set in small town Ontario and a bit lighter in tone or Harry Kemelman's low key Rabbi David Small books, Jonah is a tough guy: ex-Israeli army, with an exterior that doesn’t countenance any belligerence, including dealing effectively with anti-Semitism, evident in Buffalo Jump when he dispatched a bigot aboard a Toronto streetcar. He’s also something of a tragic figure, saddened by what he witnesses around him and more and more forced into situations where he has had to use violence, something he would rather have put behind him after a calamitous army experience in Israel.

Shrier’s books are consistent in tone and depth, smartly written mysteries that rarely telegraph where they’re going and offer up some interesting regular characters, including openly gay Raudsepp and Dante Ryan, a hit man with a conscience. (I know Dante sounds like a cliché but in Shrier’s skilled hands, he’s not.) Shrier, who is a two-time winner of the prestigious Arthur Ellis award for excellence in crime fiction (Buffalo Jump won for Best First Novel of 2008; High Chicago for Best Novel of 2009), also brings his book’s settings, the cities where their stories largely unfold, to vivid life, as well. They range from a down-at-its-heels Buffalo, whose glory days, if they ever existed, are behind it, to confident and corrupt Chicago to gentler Boston, riven by racial and religious currents as well as differing police jurisdictions. Miss Montreal, which begins with Jonah investigating the death of a Montreal newspaper columnist whom he knew from summer camp when they were both twelve, deftly focuses on Canada’s most unique city, dealing with its perpetual nationalistic French-English divide, current immigration concerns including integrating a sometimes hostile Muslim population as well as hearkening back to the city’s storied past, which was both wide open, in terms of illicit entertainment, and conservative in its social mores. (Shrier, now 56 years-old, began his writing career in 1979 as a crime reporter for the sadly defunct Montreal Star so he knows whereof he writes.) It’s another ambitious but successful book, proof positive that Shrier is one of the finest mystery writers extant. Critics at Large recently interviewed him by e mail in his Toronto hometown.

Neglected Gem #42: Weeds (1987)

Weeds, written by Dorothy Tristan and John Hancock and directed by Hancock in 1987, is clumsy, and it has an irregular, unwieldy shape, but it’s brimming with life. You may be excited and touched by it in a way that you aren't by technically much better pictures; it may be awkward and messy but it’s rarely trite. And perhaps the film’s structural problems even work in its favor – you never know what’s coming next. The towering actor Nick Nolte plays Lee Umstetter (a character suggested by the real-life ex-con Rick Cluchey). Lee’s in San Quentin for life, with no possibility for parole, on an aggravated armed robbery charge; he keeps trying to off himself and failing, so, resigned to his life, he decides to find something else to fill up his time besides suicide attempts. Presenting himself at the prison library desk, he asks for a thick book and gets War and Peace; when he’s done, he returns it to the librarian and demands, “Thicker.” Umstetter’s got a quick mind, and before long he’s sampled Sartre, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Solzhenitsyn, and turned himself into a genuine, unpretentious intellectual. (It’s hard to imagine anyone more appropriate for this role than Nolte, Hollywood’s peerless combination of masculine instinct and intelligence, in his prime. Someone should have cast him as Ernest Hemingway.) When the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop (which John Hancock helmed for a while) brings its famous jail-tour production of Waiting for Godot to San Quentin, Lee, turned on by the play, decides to write his own, an existential/expressionist drama with music about prison life called Weeds. (The metaphor refers to the inmates.) Then he and his buddies, his wry cellmate Claude (Lane Smith) and the grinning, effusive black entrepreneur Navarro (John Toles-Bey), get the permission of the authorities to produce it. A local journalist, Lillian Binghamton (Rita Taggart), catches the performance and campaigns for Lee’s release. It takes a while – by the time the governor agrees to spring him, all his friends are long gone. Once out on the street, Lee rehabilitates himself by gathering them all together and starting a company, The Barbed Wire Theatre, to produce a revised version of Weeds.

The Four Feathers: The Novel and the Films

Shekhar Kapur's The Four Feathers (2002)

The British Empire was not only the playground for boys’ adventure stories; it provided the backdrop for the A.E.W. Mason novel The Four Feathers, a nuanced exploration of male redemption, one that remained immensely popular from its 1902 publication through to the Second World War. Set during a three-year period, 1882-85, Four Feathers charts the risks and the dangers to which a young man exposes himself in order to atone for his loss of honour. Unlike the adolescent adventure novels of George Henty, among others, Mason’s heroes define themselves less by acts of derring-do than through their quiet, anonymous, patient endurance in the service of others. The novel has spawned seven films – two made during the Great War spoke to current concerns – but the most memorable were the 1939 version produced by Alexander Korda on the eve of another war, reviewed in these pages by Shlomo Schwartzberg, and a 2002 version by Shekhar Kapur. The acclaimed Korda film is more in keeping with the jingoism of the time in which it was made rather than the spirit of Mason’s tale, while Kapur’s adaptation is more faithful to the spirit and intent of the novel.