In the antepenultimate stanza of “Lady Clara Vere de Vere”, published with an anthology of his work in 1842, Alfred, Lord Tennyson writes that “Howe’er it be, it seems to me, / ’Tis only noble to be good. / Kind hearts are more than coronets, / And simple faith than Norman blood,” commemorating the humanity of its author as much as the honorable sentiments of civility and altruism. The protagonist of Kind Hearts and Coronets,…
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The Kid is an unerring film of the Chaplin oeuvre from 1921, when the freshness of his appeal was still to meet its apex in masterworks such as City Lights, and his genius as a silent comedian of the cinema, as capable of evoking pathos as hearty laughter, had yet to overtake humankind. Though the runtime of the film barely exceeds sixty minutes, a density of feeling and action in so brief a time is…
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The apex of the Janiculum and the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola constitute the backdrop of the sacred and the profane, which in The Great Beauty concern those inhabitants of the city of Rome. This location of the opening scene has as its precedent the Trevi Fountain, to which the film La Dolce Vita brought not only renown but notoriety. While the latter film brought to the world the vision of Fellini and of Roman squalor, The…
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Under the French administration at Vichy during the Second World War, the French Resistance formed in order to combat a regime collaborating with the Germans. Others resisting collaboration with Vichy, unwilling to become bystanders, also contributed to the Resistance, many being Christian rescuers harboring Jewish civilians or otherwise affording safe passage to the persecuted. Francis J. Murphy writes of these Christian rescuers that they “contributed to the fact that 75 percent of French Jews survived…
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Approaching death himself and conceiving an excellent metaphor for the disillusions of his own happiness, Edgar Allan Poe published in 1849 a poem by the name of Eldorado, whose last stanza alludes to the folly of those men of centuries earlier venturing into the Amazon, searching for an imaginary city: “‘Over the Mountains / Of the moon, / Down the Valley of the Shadow, / Ride, boldly ride,’ / The shade replied,– / If you…
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Joe Franklin writes in Classics of the Silent Screen that “along with Griffith, Stroheim, Keaton and Fairbanks, Chaplin remains one of the half-dozen immortals of the American screen,” delimiting a pantheon that has since grown while retaining its primary figures, of whom Chaplin is one of the greatest.[1] By 1936 Chaplin had established an oeuvre that universalized the Tramp, the duck-footed vagrant with floppy shoes and a cane, so that as he approached the creation…
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As the congregants of a wedding walk to the riverside, accompanying newlyweds leaving by barge, a woman exclaims, “couldn’t she marry a local boy?” to which another quickly responds that “she always has to be different.” But the poignant difference is to be one of love. The marriage of Jean to Juliette, irrelevant to the world at large, is an event of gravity and import indicating not only the upset of the village, but the…
