On Moonlight Bay (1951)

The Hi Lo Country, based on a novel by Max Evans published in 1961, has a weird period flavor to it even though, as directed by Stephen Frears, it is also very much of the nineties. You can see in it elements of Hemingway’s austere sensualism and bedrock conviction that literary art mainly consists of…

[See discussion under “My diary” entry for July 6, 2011] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Here are the good things about Traffic, Steven Soderbergh’s new and ambitious — and, indeed, epic-scale movie treatment of what is still here and there called the “drug war.” It does not glamorize drug taking, or drug supplying, though about a third of it deals with the first and about two- thirds with the second. Nor does it…

Better wear some flowers in your hair

When Shakespeare decided to put a trio of witches into Macbeth he knew that their very presence would suggest to his audience something fearful beyond imagining. They were a kind of algebraic symbol for the unknown quantity of evil which the play, in more realistic fashion, attempted to solve for. Nowadays, the presence of witches…

Corny and over-the-top as Hollywood’s celebrations of the virtues of rural life as compared to urban used to be, at least the filmmakers usually gave the impression of believing in it.