Cinema
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Feature on Politics and Folk Music
New Left, Old Left, Left-Over Left. Our guest essayist this month is Bob Cohen, a veteran of the 1960s folk group the New World Singers. He discusses the Hollywood movie about folkies—and how things really were. Read “Strumming Along with Dylan and Seeger” by returning to top left, the Pages list.
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Baal-ieve It or Not
Oskar Homolka and David Bowie—not much in common there, right? Guess again. The Viennese actor (I Remember Mama, War and Peace, Funeral in Berlin) played Baal, the frolicsome sociopath in Bertolt Brecht’s play of that name, and so did the British rock star. Homolka, who died in 1978, was Baal during the Weimar Republic, not…
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The Drama of Galileo — and of Losey, Eisler, and Brecht
“I believe in the gentle force of reason; in the long run, no one can resist it. Nobody can watch me drop a pebble and say it doesn’t fall. Nobody can do that. The seduction of truth is too strong.” So says Galileo Galilei in Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo. The staged biography by the…
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He’s Been Streep-Slapped
For reasons having to do with the eccentricity and/or passive-aggressiveness of actress Meryl Streep, people have grown interested in whether Walt Disney harbored nasty views. Disney is portrayed in a new movie costarring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks. Here is the impression that Walt Disney made on Maurice Rapf. Rapf (1914-2003), who grew up in…
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Moe Asch
Try Saying Something. One of the funny side characters in the movie Inside Llewyn Davis is Mel Novikoff, a record producer running a mom-and-pop label in New York. Half musicologist and half fly-by-night businessman, he is shown fussing behind his cluttered desk and evading poor Llewyn Davis’ attempts to be paid for his work. There was…
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Don, Bobby, and the Pact
A Friendship Fractured. For the screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart (see previous post), it was not always easy to toe the Communist Party line. Doing so estranged him from admired friends like Robert Benchley (pictured above, with magazine to which he contributed). The 1939-1941 alliance between the supposedly anti-fascist leader Josef Stalin and the biggest…
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“I’m Not Going to Fight.”
Screwball Comedy’s Ephemeral Joke. The movie That Uncertain Feeling, with screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart, was released by United Artists on April 20, 1941. An insurance man played by Melvyn Douglas (left) finds out that a concert pianist (Burgess Meredith, right) is dallying with his wife. Douglas confronts his rival. The bourgeois-hating, modernist musician declares: “I’m…
Painting the Culture Red 