Remembering the Communist Experience in Romania and Bulgaria, Part Two: Haunts From the Gulag - Elizabeth Kostova’s The Shadow Land

author Elizabeth Kostova

(Part One of Remembering the Communist Experience in Romania and Bulgaria can be read here.)

When Elizabeth Kostova was twelve, she spent a year living and travelling in Eastern Europe, which she later remarked was “a formative experience.” She became enthralled by the Dracula stories that her father, who taught that year at a college in Slovenia, provided for her. Years later in 2006, she published her debut international bestseller novel, The Historian, which likely received its initial genesis from those childhood memories. The Historian is a large, baggy novel that extends over three generations – the 1970s, the 1950s and the 1930s – and involves the search for the fifteenth-century Wallachian tyrant, Vlad Tepes. The eponymous historian decamps to find her father, who has disappeared after discovering a strange book in his library, as did his mentor almost twenty years earlier. They had set out to discover the tomb of Vlad/Dracula, believing he was still alive and responsible, as he later acknowledges, for orchestrating the horrors of the twentieth century.

The Historian is based on the erroneous historical assumption that Vlad the Impaler is the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But this is, of course, a novel and an enjoyable romp to read. One of its pleasures is Kostova’s knowledge of the geographical areas that her characters travel, especially Bulgaria, the setting for the last third of the book. Having embarked on several trips to this country, Kostova now lives there with her Bulgarian husband. Her latest novel, The Shadow Land (Ballantine Books), has a tighter focus with only two timelines that gradually intersect, well-developed characters and a gripping account of a vital historical issue – the destructive power of Communism in Bulgaria – that many contemporary Bulgarians minimize or about which have no awareness. Because of these attributes, The Shadow Land is a more accomplished and a more moving novel than her Gothic thriller.

Beauty of Action, Beauty of Character: The Criterion Collection Release of Only Angels Have Wings

Cary Grant and Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings

The opening twenty minutes of the 1939 Only Angel Have Wings are a marvel – emotionally and tonally double-jointed, with a loose, jocular quality and a spontaneous energy, underscored by the overlapping of Jules Furthman’s expert hard-boiled dialogue, that masks the astonishing control of the director, Howard Hawks. A pair of flyboys, Joe (Noah Beery Jr.) and Les (Allyn Joslyn), who work for a South American airmail service, pick up Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur), a singer with an evening’s layover before she’s to re-embark on the boat to Panama. They buy her drinks and offer her a steak dinner at the bar-restaurant owned by Dutchy (Sig Rumann), whose money provides the operating budget for the mail company. But their boss, Geoff Carter (Cary Grant), interrupts the meal to send Joe out on a mail run, through the rain and fog that stalled Bonnie’s ship here in the tiny town of Barranca. Joe doesn’t make it. When the weather makes his passage impractical and Geoff radios him to come on back, he’s so eager to resume his courtship of Bonnie that he insists on short-shrifting his landing rather than hanging out in the skies long enough for Geoff and his best buddy and employee Kid Dabb (Thomas Mitchell) to wave him in safely. Joe’s plane hits a tree and crashes. Bonnie’s devastated – and appalled at what she sees as a lack of gravity among Carter and the other pilots in the face of this tragedy. What she doesn’t understand at first is that their joking is a form of gallantry and their apparent insensitivity is the only way they can keep going when death is always hovering over them; unspoken grief underlines their raucousness. Eventually she gets it: when she sits down at the piano and leads some of the others in a rendition of “Some of These Days,” she cottons onto the feeling of camaraderie at Barranca Airlines. The miraculously extended episode ends with one of those unconventional depictions of community that Hawks is justly famous for.

On The Cold Side of War – Star Trek: Discovery

Sonequa Martin-Green in Star Trek: Discovery.

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery.

The world needs Star Trek now as much as it ever did.

I don’t need to enumerate the problems we’re facing in our communities and society at large, because your eyes and ears are full of them already. Something that’s largely absent from our feeds, though – unless you really dig for it – is a sense of hope, a promise that things could be better. That we, as human beings, could be better. This is the distilled essence of Gene Roddenberry’s original vision for Star Trek, and it often gets lost in new incarnations of the Trek mythos, wrapped up as they so often are in their own zeitgeists and styles and disparate audiences. Star Trek: Discovery, the new Trek for our new zeitgeist, stumbles in its own way towards that lofty ideal – but ultimately, I was left with that feeling of hope that I so desperately crave.

Loyalty, Mastery, Mystery: Nicholas Jennings’s Lightfoot

Gordon Lightfoot in 1976.

I was eager to read Nicholas Jennings’s Lightfoot (Viking; 328 pp.), the first biography of the Canadian singer-songwriter, for what are probably typical reasons. I’ve loved Gordon Lightfoot’s music, much of it, for most of my life; and we tend to want to know more about people who impress us, especially if a certain mystery attaches to them and to the sources of their achievement. Lightfoot has never been self-revealing in obvious ways, in either his lyrics or (to the degree that one has even registered them) his public statements. His best music transfixes partly because it comes across as effortless, contented, and fully formed, with no show of raw nerves or violent ambivalence à la Dylan or Lennon. Placid yet strong, it maintains just the right emotional distance. Surely Lightfoot’s unique gift is driven by at least a few tangible, knowable secrets; surely having a sense of the man will only deepen the music. But having read the Jennings book, I question whether Gordon Lightfoot’s art – his in particular – can benefit in any way from a biographical context. I wonder if even a better book than this would likewise cut against what makes his music alluring. And I suspect that there’s a reason we’ve been able to love that music so well for so long while knowing so little about the man who made it.  

Podcast: Interview with Writer B. W. Powe (1987)

Marshall McLuhan in 1973.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1987, I sat down with Canadian writer and scholar B. W. Powe.

At the time of our conversation Powe's landmark book, The Solitary Outlaw (Lester & Orpen Dennys), had just been published. He was a student of Marshall McLuhan and Northrop Frye at the University of Toronto, and the book explores the role of the intellectual in a post-literate age by profiling Pierre Trudeau, Wyndham Lewis, Glenn Gould, Elias Canetti, and McLuhan. Since 1987, Powe has published books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and philosophy. His latest publication, in 2016, is The Tigers of Perception, a multi-media lyric essay. Powe is currently a professor of English at Toronto's York University, where he has taught since 1984.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with B. W. Powe as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

The Treasurer: Mother and Son

Peter Friedman and Deanna Dunagan in The Treasurer. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Max Posner’s The Treasurer, which is receiving a tip-top production by David Cromer for Playwrights Horizon (at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in New York City), is a lopsided comedy-drama that begins as an exploration of the guilt a middle-aged son (Peter Friedman) feels over his lack of affection for an aging mother (Deanna Dunagan). What I mean by “lopsided” is that Posner’s play doesn’t head at its theme directly; it keeps getting derailed and turned around. It’s absurdist in style, but acknowledging that fact doesn’t resolve its shaggy-dog quality. And by the end of its ninety-five minutes I realized that I didn’t want a resolution – that its meandering is part of its charm and also part of what makes it touching.

Spontaneous Combustion: The Gestural Paintings of Marija Jaukovic

I Don’t Know Anything / I Know Nothing by  Marija Jaukovic (2015, oil on panel 4 x4 ft.)

“What is this life, if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?” – W.H. Davies

If we do force ourselves and take the time to stop and actually stare at reality, we notice right away that the longer we stare the more blurred it becomes around the edges, until eventually the borderline between being awake and being in a dream dissolves entirely. That is ultimately the true purpose of any visual art that does more than merely decorate reality, or even portray it accurately, and instead provides us with a window, not looking outward but looking inside, where every borderline disappears before our extended gaze and thoughts themselves become forms. What great paintings offer us is a balsamic reduction of reality. Whether we actually use it to spice up our daily lives is, of cours,e up to us.

Some paintings are an immediate seduction for the eye. Like dancing in the dark, or dancing with your own shadow on the wall, they invite the mesmerized viewer into a sensual theatre microscopic in scale and yet as large as a galaxy of forms. Removing all limits to our perception as well as our conception, the boldly compelling and subtly captivating paintings of Marija Jaukovic expand or contract depending on the consciousness of the observer. Their paradoxical stance, somewhere in between the domains of a savage abstraction and emotive expressionism, offers us a glimpse of an interior realm where form and feeling are fused in an erotic embrace of practically tantric dimensions. The spirit of a mid-20th century movement known as Art Brut hovers over her recent work like a misty vapor descending from history’s archive of images and ideas, as does the ghost of its principal progenitor, Jean Dubuffet. Like that visionary French painter, the Toronto-based Jaukovic makes a wealth of psychic content from the raw material of apparently povera sources. That is their primary paradox, and their principal appeal: their secretive stagecraft is the ability to manifest a maximum of visual and visceral impact while utilizing a minimum of economical means to do so. As such, they ironically introduce us to a unique zone of maximal minimalism.

One Hell of a Show: NBC’s The Good Place Returns

Ted Danson and Kristen Bell

Warning: This review covers the entire first season of The Good Place, as well as the premiere of Season Two. It contains extensive discussion of plot points from throughout the show’s run thus far.

Setting a television comedy in the afterlife seems like an excellent way to set yourself up for failure. Since there is, by its very nature, a distinct sense of finality about the place, it’s hard to see how you might tell a long-running story that’s set there. Furthermore, since most religious traditions view existence after death as primarily a matter of receiving one’s just reward or punishment for their actions on the mortal plane, it’s not clear how you might develop a sense of character, or achieve any sort of narrative progression or tension. However, that’s just what Michael Schur and the creative team of NBC’s The Good Place achieved on the first season of the show.

As Mark Clamen noted in his initial review of The Good Place’s premiere, Schur’s metaphysical comedy had a rather tentative beginning. I found myself watching the first few episodes primarily out of curiosity as to how – or if – the show’s premise would develop, as well as for the performances by Ted Danson and Kristen Bell. However, as the larger scheme behind Schur’s premise began to reveal itself, and as the characters who inhabit this decidedly off-kilter version of heaven became more fully realized, The Good Place became far more than a pleasant-enough entertainment with a veneer of philosophical sophistication.

Soul Survivors: Interview with Clement Virgo (1995)

Sharon Lewis as the DJ in Rude.

As part of our Canada150 series, where we celebrate the country's birthday, we have been featuring periodic articles and interviews focusing on Canada's artistic accomplishments. Although filmmaker Clement Virgo is originally from Jamaica, he came to this country when he was 11 and would in time become one of our prominent directors. Beginning his adult years as a window-display artist in the fashion industry in the late eighties, he soon became a resident at the Canadian Film Centre's Summer Lab in both 1991 and 1992. While there he produced three short films: A Small Dick Fleshy Ass Thang (1991), Split Second Pullout Technique (1992), and Save My Lost Nigga' Soul (1993), which won the prize for Best Short Film at the Toronto International Film Festival that year. While at the Centre,Virgo also developed a script which in 1995 became the basis for his first feature, Rude.

Rude is a triptych about three characters seeking redemption and survival over an Easter weekend in an expressionistic version of an inner-city neighbourhood. General (Maurice Dean Wint) is a painter and former drug dealer just released from prison who has to fight the transgressions of his past, while his brother, Reece (Clark Johnson), gives in to the temptation of becoming a criminal. Maxine (Rachael Crawford) is a window dresser struggling with depression since she ended a pregnancy and lost her lover, Jordan (Richard Chevolleau), a boxer who has his own inner struggles, which culminate in an act of gay-bashing. This whole triad is tied together by the excoriations of Rude (Sharon Lewis), the DJ of a local pirate radio station. While Rude had its world premiere in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, later that same year it won the Best Canadian Feature Film in Perspective Canada at TIFF, and was nominated for eight Genie Awards, including Best Picture, at the 1996 event. At TIFF 2017, Rude was selected to be screened in the Cinémathèque section.

Clement Virgo's follow-up feature, The Planet of Junior Brown (1997), would earn him an Emmy nomination, while the controversial, Lie With Me (2005), stirred strong reaction for its explicit sexual content at the 2005 edition of TIFF. Along with directing the popular award-winning boxing drama Poor Boy's Game in 2007, Virgo co-wrote and directed the six-part miniseries adaptation of  Lawrence Hill's best-selling novel, The Book of Negroes, for CBC Television, which went on to further acclaim when it was screened in the United States.

When I first spoke to Virgo, a few days before the TIFF premiere of Rude in 1995, we touched on a number of subjects including Bryan Singer's clever caper drama, The Usual Suspects (which he had seen at Cannes that year), the place of spirituality in black films, and how he felt his pictures differed from the heated dramas on screen at the time (Boyz in the Hood, Menace to Society) about contemporary black culture.

Eyes Up, Guardian: Destiny 2

Destiny 2, developed by Bungie, was released on September 5.

I purchased Destiny 2 under a certain degree of duress. My experiences with the original Destiny, first launched by Bungie in 2014, were strongly mixed; I was often frustrated by its obtuse and player-hostile systems, and many of Bungie's choices in managing the IP prompted a raised eyebrow, and yet I count the shared social experiences I had with my friends throughout the game's multiplayer challenges as some of the best and most memorable in my whole life. I was hardly the only player to feel this way, and though many of the issues the game launched with were eventually patched out in future expansions, Destiny never really felt like the complete online shooter experience we had all expected it to be. The fact that we were being asked this September to purchase a fully-priced sequel, instead of a new expansion on the original game that included improvements and changes, was galling in the extreme.

Destiny 2's reception has been glowing from the jump, which I found surprising (didn’t everyone have the same gripes as me?), but now that I've played it, I understand why. Its changes seem subtle and intuitive on the surface, but actually disguise a bone-deep redesign that streamlines Destiny's systems, excises its unnecessary cruft, and prioritizes player satisfaction. It's far too early to comment on the game's long-term sustainability, but even at launch this is the strongest the IP has ever been, and these things only ever get better as they go.

An Enterprising Venture: Seth McFarlane's The Orville

(from left) Scott Grimes, Mark Jackson, J. Lee, Seth MacFarlane and Adrianne Palicki in The Orville.

This review contains very minor spoilers for the first two episodes of Fox's The Orville.

Cards on the table: until I watched the second episode of The Orville, this review was looking like it was going to be a rant. Last week's premiere episode of Seth McFarlane's much-ballyhooed piss-take on the Star Trek franchise was a frustrating disappointment. Too mild to be a send-up and not original enough to fly on its own steam, the first hour of The Orville presaged a series with no idea what it was. It seemed more rip-off than either satire or homage – and I left feeling that the network was using the "spoof" label as window dressing for brazen creative laziness. But then I tuned into this Sunday's second episode and, with my expectations now suitably re-adjusted, I had a genuine blast. What a difference a week makes.

Podcast: Interview with Author Morley Torgov (1982)

Author Morley Torgov.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1982, I sat down with Canadian author Morley Torgov.

At the time of our conversation Torgov's novel The Outside Chance of Maximilian Glick had just been published. The next year, he was awarded Stephen Leacock Award for Humour for the novel. A well-received film adaptation was released in 1988. His most recent novel is The Mastersinger from Minsk (2012), the second book in his Inspector Hermann Preiss mystery series. In 2015, Morley Torgov received the Order of Canada.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Morley Torgov as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1982.

On the Shore of the Wide World: Still Life

Mary McCann and Leroy McClain in On the Shore of the Wide World.(Photo: Ahron R. Foster)

On the Shore of the Wide World, receiving its American premiere at the Atlantic Theater Company, is the English playwright Simon Stephens’s exploration of the effects of a tragic accident on a family in a Manchester town in 2004. Fifteen-year-old Christopher Holmes (Wesley Zurick) is hit by a motorist and killed. His death drives his father, Peter (C.J. Wilson) and his mother, Alice (Mary McCann) apart and exacerbates the tensions between them and Peter’s parents, Charlie (Peter Maloney) and Ellen (Blair Brown) as well as bringing to light the unsettling qualities in their relationship. Shortly before he was killed, Christopher walked in on his alcoholic grandfather strong-arming his grandmother and, in dismay, confided in his older brother Alex (Ben Rosenfield), whom he adored. The aftermath of the boy’s death and the evident crumbling of his parents’ marriage drive Alex to move to London with his new girlfriend, Sarah (Tedra Millan). Meanwhile both Peter and Sarah, who have so much difficulty communicating with each other, are drawn – not romantically but out of a need for confidants – to other people. Peter, who restores old houses, has been hired by the pregnant Susan (Amelia Workman), and she’s the first person outside the family with whom he shares the story of Christopher’s death. (This conversation also marks the first time the audience hears about it, for reasons I can’t quite work out; this choice doesn’t seem to enhance the drama.) Stranger – and more intriguing – is the friendship that grows up between Alice and John (Leroy McClain), the driver of the car that knocked Christopher down on his bike. John’s attempt to reach out to the mother of the boy he inadvertently killed and her responding to him (reluctantly at first) are reminiscent of part of the plot of David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, though here it develops in a different direction.

Remembering the Communist Experience in Romania and Bulgaria, Part One: Partial Amnesia

Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, centre, in his final address to the people on Dec. 21, 1989.

“The things they do to you (in the camps), the power they have over you. It throws off your sense of right and wrong.” – Olen Steinhauer, The Confession

One of the most remarkable exchanges I encountered this summer during my time in the lower Danube was the personal family story of one of the Romanian guides. His father, a doctor, originally supported the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu until his father was conscripted into the army and one of his odious duties was to accompany the feared security police on missions in which they executed individuals. (His father would subsequently turn against Ceaușescu by supporting his wife who, coming from a humble background, had suffered under the regime.) He also revealed how his mother and her fellow workers were bussed in to cheer Ceaușescu as he appeared on his balcony for the last time. The guide’s uncle was a member of the Army ordered to shoot anyone in the crowd who did not appear to be cheering. Was he to shoot his sister? This was a pivotal point in alienating the army. The despised dictator lost his support and as a result he was finished. Our guide pointed out that balcony where Ceausescu delivered a speech that was interrupted by taunts from the crowd. It was a breathtaking moment, but this guide was an almost solitary voice among the local citizens I have heard over the last two years.

Watching and Worrying – David Thomson's Television: A Biography

Television can’t be an easy thing to write a book about, given its rapid ongoing evolution into new forms – given, too, the sheer unconquerable volume of sound and image, brilliance and nonsense that have coursed from the small screen since it buzzed to something like life in the late 1930s. But David Thomson, one of our best historian-critics, is also one of our most ambitious writers. Among his more than 30 books are two major critical histories of film, one focusing on Hollywood (2004’s The Whole Equation), the other taking a more global vantage (2012’s The Big Screen). His mammoth Biographical Dictionary of Film, first published in 1975, is now in its sixth edition, and he writes a detailed, eccentric, irresistible “personal introduction to 1,000 films” (2008’s “Have You Seen … ?”) with the same bell-ringing ease that Johnny B. Goode brought to playing a guitar. So it’s with a rueful smile and admiring shake of the head that we who know Thomson’s tendencies to great scale and world-encompassing thought, as well as his vast knowledge and masterly ability to combine fact and reverie, regard his latest book and say that yes, of course he has the stuff to write a critical history of television, and he will earn the right, if anyone will, to give it a title as provocatively blunt and accurate as Television: A Biography (Thames & Hudson; 412 pp.). 

See You At The Curtain Call: Twin Peaks – The Return (2017)

Despite my best efforts, there are a few unavoidable spoilers within. 

“'We are like the spider,' said the king. 'We weave our life, and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe. That is why it is said, "Having created the creation, the Creator entered into it.". This is true for us. We create our world, and then enter into that world. We live in the world we have created.'"

– Thomas Egenes & Kamuda Reddy, Eternal Stories from the Upanishads

"We are like the dreamer who dreams and lives inside the dream, but who is the dreamer?” 

– David Lynch

I think it's safe to say that there hasn't been anything on television close to what director David Lynch and co-writer Mark Frost unleashed the last few months in their 18-part serial Twin Peaks – The Return. More than being simply a sequel to the original 1990 ABC series, Twin Peaks, which focused on the murder investigation of the high school senior Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) by FBI agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), or a mere continuation of the follow-up 1992 film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, which examined the circumstances leading to that murder, Showtime's Twin Peaks – The Return was an abstract murder mystery that resisted solutions and begged even more questions. It was like finding yourself seeped in a David Lynch compendium where you experienced the full body of his work – including Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive – as one long amorphous trance as plot lines vanished, dramatic moments imploded, and nightmarish visions suddenly erupted and took hold. Twin Peaks – The Return was the source of much frustration because within that Lynchian theme park of devious delight were also hours of flattened-out kitschy comedy that not only tested your patience, but drew some of his worst instincts, those that had already been on display in Wild at Heart, and parts of Lost Highway. Yet the baggy unevenness of Twin Peaks – The Return wasn't simply a case of the director's intuition taking a holiday and intermittently going wrong. Lynch, who works almost entirely from his unconscious, seemed to be refusing to make any kind of conscious judgement over the material. It was as if he'd decided instead to run the table with whatever came into his mind (bad or startlingly good) to see where it might lead him – and also, of course, the viewer. Knowing that there was an audience out there both nostalgic and fiendishly curious to return to Twin Peaks after such a long hiatus, Lynch turned this epic tale into something more than a conclusion and resolution to the story. Twin Peaks – The Return was a turbulent meditation on the past, on the nature of nostalgia, on the tropes of television serial drama, and on death itself.      

You'll Float Too: Andy Muschietti’s IT

Jeremy Ray Taylor, Jaeden Lieberher, Finn Wolfhard, and Jack Dylan Grazer in IT.

I’m neither a Stephen King devotee nor a person who grew up with the 1990 TV movie based on his landmark novel It, so unlike many filmgoers who are bleating their nostalgic bias into any internet forum they can find, a new feature length film version appealed to me greatly. I love the creepy premise of a picturesque town in Maine that is besieged by an ancient evil that poses as a ghoulish clown in order to kidnap children. I generally admire the creativity and weirdness of King’s work, despite its inconsistency in quality. And as summer slowly transitions into autumn – the season of Halloween, the season of horror, my favourite season – my appetite for an entertaining horror film grows ever more fierce.

IT, I’m pleased to say, satiated that hunger. Director Andy Muschietti has made a handsome and efficient horror flick from King’s original material, adapting the long-winded 1986 novel into a solidly-structured two-hour spookfest. IT, I’m pleased to say, satiated that hunger. Director Andy Muschietti has made a handsome and efficient horror flick from King’s original material, adapting the long-winded 1986 novel into a solidly-structured two-hour spookfest. The story of IT, about a group of young teens who call themselves “The Losers Club” discovering the presence of Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgård) and fighting against It, only represents the first half of the novel. The second half portrays the same group of kids almost three decades later, as the evil force in their hometown of Derry re-emerges to feed once again. Muschietti made a conscious choice to split the story into two films, with the closing credits of IT listing the film as “Chapter One”. Since the 1990 film is criticized for attempting (and failing) to cram both halves of the novel into one made-for-TV movie, Muschietti has clearly made the right decision – especially since the pacing and structure of his adaptation feel spot-on. 

Faith and Fury: The Strange Saga of Al Green

Soul Survivor: A Biography of Al Green by Jimmy McDonough was published by Da Capo Press on August 29th.

“Beware of men who speak well of you, my brother.” – Al Green

Music critic Jimmy McDonough seems to have taken that sage advice from Green to heart. Few people who personally encountered the great soul singer Al Green would be in danger of speaking very well of either him or their meeting. For the rest of us, safely at a distance and accessing his soul strictly through the remarkable records he created, he remains a towering figure in music for over the last five decades. From his first album, Back Up Train, in 1967 to his twenty-ninth release, Lay It Down, in 2008, he has traveled far from his gospel roots through the soul vibe, then suddenly back to gospel in the late '70s, and then just as suddenly back to soul again. All along the way, he’s been feverishly running away from something and passionately running towards something, and often those two were the same something.

The dichotomies that link gospel, blues, soul and funk are never-ending. They are the living proof that coal becomes crystal under pressure. They are also, in their cores, different names for the same thing: a head-on collision course between faith and fury. And no one ever exemplified the paradox at the heart of these great African-American musical traditions quite as forcefully as the Reverend, revered and feared Al Green. He was both a gifted genius and a tortured psychopath who personified both the heights and depths of what it means to be a human being. Brilliant and besotted, he was, in the end, almost beyond the ability to grasp it with any real sense of clarity, since his mercurial personality shifted in and out of focus from moment to moment. And few books can qualify for the term “warts and all” quite as much as Jimmy McDonough’s new, breathtaking life of Green.

Neglected Gem # 107: They Made Me a Fugitive (1947)

Sally Gray and Trevor Howard in They Made Me a Fugitive (1947).

Sometimes serendipity allows you to come across a movie you might otherwise never have known about. That was what happened earlier this year when I was doing some research for a class I was teaching on American film noir. One article I read mentioned significant noirs from other countries, including a 1947 British film I was utterly unfamiliar with entitled They Made Me a Fugitive. I didn’t use that movie for my lecture but shortly afterwards I came across a DVD of it at my local library and snapped it up, believing I was meant to see it. Good thing I did, because even among the generally high quality of the genre, They Made Me a Fugitive stands out.

Master Acting Classes: The Fisher King (1991)

Few would remember now, but the 1991 summer movie season was dominated by movies about thoughtless, self-absorbed yuppies who find redemption: Harrison Ford in Regarding Henry, William Hurt in The Doctor. The only one of the these pictures that wasn’t fatuous, trite and infuriating was The Fisher King. In it, Jeff Bridges plays Jack Lucas, a smug, cynical New York talk-radio host with a habit of mocking his callers. When he lectures one of his regulars (Christian Clemenson) on the worthlessness of the yuppie scum who frequent a watering hole called Babbitt’s – the name is an allusion to Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel, a satirical portrait of a Yankee bourgeois – proclaiming that they deserve to be wiped out, the caller takes him at his word and unloads a rifle on the crowd at the bar before shooting himself. One of his victims is the wife of a Hunter College humanities prof named Henry Sagan (Robin Williams), who dies in his arms. The tragedy triggers a psychotic break in Sagan: after a year of catatonia, he holes up in a boiler room in his old apartment building, calling himself Parry and identifying himself as a knight in search of the Holy Grail (“Parry” for “Parsifal”). When Jack, whose role in the Babbitt’s slaughter shook him up so badly that he has been hiding out at his girl friend’s and mostly inside a bottle of Jack Daniels, is set upon by violent youths in Central Park on what used to be called a wilding spree, it’s Parry who rescues him. Jack finds out Parry’s history from the super in his building and decides that it can’t be a coincidence – that trying to help Parry is the only way he can get his own life back, “pay the fine and go home,” as he puts it to his girl friend Anne (Mercedes Ruehl). At first he thinks a few bucks will do the trick, but all Parry does with the money he proffers is to hand it off to another homeless man. Then, with Anne’s help, Jack arranges for Parry to have a date with Lydia (Amanda Plummer), a publishing-company employee whom Parry worships from afar. Bizarrely, the evening is a triumph: Parry and Lydia, a peerlessly awkward waif who inhabits her own universe, turn out to be a match made in romantic-comedy heaven. But the thought that he might find love again stirs up Parry’s repressed memories of the night he lost his wife, and his old enemy, the Red Knight, a personification of all his demons of guilt and grief that only he can see, intervenes. Parry winds up in a psychiatric ward, once again imprisoned in a catatonic state – and Jack still hasn’t earned his own redemption. So he does the only thing remaining to him: dressing up in Parry’s ragtag-knight outfit, he carries out the task Parry set him earlier in their acquaintance. He scales the wall of the Medieval castle-like Fifth Avenue residence of a wealthy recluse, swings through the window like a parody of Errol Flynn as Robin Hood, and lifts a trophy Parry saw in a photo that he’s convinced is the Holy Grail.