Timely Morality Play

One of the benefits of the current quarantine is my access to a wide array of resources on the internet. YouTube has given me hours of music, comedy, and inspiration. And by accident, I found on Amazon prime video a 2015 film from the BBC, "An Inspector Calls."

This play from 1945 is set in 1912 but remains timely in 2020 with its powerful message that we are responsible for each other.  J. B. Priestley's play is an indictment of upper middle class hypocrisy and economic injustice, as he focuses on a smug Edwardian family, each member of which is implicated in the death by suicide of a young woman.

I watched this film mesmerized not only by the strong performances but by the suspense and the morality play-like force of this brilliant production, as a mysterious Inspector questions and judges each member of the family.  Is he really a  police inspector? This remains a minor issue as we watch the self-satisfied characters squirm as they face the issue of their shared guilt in the death of the young woman.

That we have a shared moral obligation for one another, that we are not isolated individuals but part of a community is something many today, anxious and worried about the virus epidemic, are learning the hard way.  Our lives are not merely about us--not merely in biological terms but in moral and social terms, as we see many people today losing jobs and income, being denied unemployment compensation, and lacking adequate health care.

The pain of injustice and the need for communal responsibility are unforgettably portrayed in "An Inspector Calls," which I highly recommend.

Cats and Popes are Trending

With a new movie opening called "The Two Popes," and a new version of the musical "Cats" being reviewed this week,  Simon Goodfellow is very happy.

Who is Simon Goodfellow, you ask? He's the main character in my book THE CAT WHO CONVERTED THE POPE, a wise, well-spoken cat who speaks perfect English and reads; he even advises the fictional American pope in the story, then offers advice on being calm, taking time to meditate, and staying in the present moment.

So if anyone out there is looking for a gift, Simon would agree with me that cat books make great gifts. The book is available on Amazon.     He joins me in wishing my readers a Merry Christmas and good new year.

https://www.amazon.com/Cat-Who-Converted-Pope/dp/0974553115

Hitchcock and Halloween

I have never really liked outdoor decorations celebrating Halloween, but one display in my neighborhood recently caught my eye because it was clever:  Three skeletons with hard hats and shovels in their hands were digging, so to speak; and the display said to me "Skeleton Crew."

This visual pun would have amused Alfred Hitchcock, about whom I've been reading lately.  He was a complicated man with a controversial reputation despite his stellar career as one of our greatest filmmakers.

I have always been attracted to Hitch, as he was called, because of his wry, deadpan, often irreverent humor.  Watching again his TV shows from the 1955-65 period, I am struck by his understated wit and gift for silliness.   His comic introductions to these often masterful short tales of murder and mayhem turn them into original entertainments. It's as if he winds us up with a bit of suspense, then releases us from the tension.

When asked why he never made comedies, he replied, "Why, all of my movies are comedies."

Hitch's best movies--which for me include Psycho, Notorious, North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, and Rear Window (but not Vertigo)--show his talent for combining the macabre with a Halloween-like trick, as if to tell the viewer that the crime and madness is, after all, a bit of a joke--sadistic perhaps but nonetheless an experience akin to riding on a roller coaster, where people enjoy screaming in terror because at some level they know they're at an amusement park.

Hitchcock's combination of romantic comedy with the thriller is a hallmark of his 50-plus movies, or at least the best of them, and highlight his delight in ambivalence, that sense of uncertainty that he instills in his audiences. The worst of his films, like "The Paradine Case," lack the quality that makes his 1946 classic "Notorious" such a pleasure to watch as Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant carry on under the watchful gaze of ex-Nazis in Argentina--and of the viewer, who is, as always, turned into a voyeur of sorts.

But if you want to celebrate Halloween with Hitchcock, why not see "Psycho" again and enjoy being tricked? Or at least watch Mrs. Danvers in "Rebecca."

Understanding Hitchcock

Much of this month has been an enjoyable return for me to the world of Alfred Hitchcock.

What began this phase was seeing the 1946 classic "Notorious" again and listening to a commentary that explained the director's unique style, the way he turns an ordinary thing like a key into a bit of poetic cinema.   Here the combination of Cary Grant--elusive, attractive yet ambivalent--and the sensuous Ingrid Bergman and the way they interact is nothing short of perfection.  These two actors capture much of Hitchcock's own ambivalence toward women and sexuality.

I then ordered from Netflix the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" TV series from the 1950s, which I dimly remember as weird and droll; I now find them little gems of writing, casting and acting, full of irony and that dash of black comedy that makes the work of Hitch so memorable.

I then found the 850-page biography by Patrick McGilligan a treasure of information on the way each film was made and, here and there, insights into the complex character of the Master of Suspense, who, the author notes, is much more than this: he is a master of style and of romantic comedy who deftly handled the censorship in effect in those days with great panache and a clear sense of control.

I admire Hitchcock the filmmaker for his thorough, detailed preparation of each script, his attention to details, including the hairstyle and costume of his female stars, his tact in dealing with actors and his overall wit and charm, even though his practical jokes could be bizarre and off-putting. 

I remain fascinated by how this shy, fat boy who always considered himself ugly made the most of his outsider status: he became the master observer, obsessed with visual space and film as an art form, even though his mind was on entertaining an audience.  Fear, of course, is what he has projected onto his millions of viewers, a fear that was heightened by a World War I bombing of London when he was 15 (more significant, apparently, than his Jesuit teachers or being sent to jail for a short time as a boy, a story he changed and exaggerated over the years).   Always shy, he came to love gossip and parties, and developed a comic persona that transcended the real loner and outsider.

McGilligan gives a detailed look at the preparation for the filming of "Psycho," which, along with the TV show, made Hitch a world-wide celebrity; he also gives attention to the other classics I love to watch again and again: especially "Rear Window," "Strangers on a Train," and "Rebecca" (because of Mrs. Danvers). I am still not as impressed with "Vertigo" as most critics seem to be, mainly because Kim Novak's character is not convincing.  She had trouble with Hitch, who adored Grace Kelly and never got over her marriage to the prince. He mistreated Tippi Hedren but in general behaved well with women, remaining faithful in his strange way to his beloved partner, Alma.

His psycho-sexual fantasy life, however, is another story, and the films that reflect his inner life are intriguing; maybe that's why "Psycho" remains at the top of my list of Hitchcock favorites.  Of his fifty major motion pictures, none won major awards, but a half-dozen are now recognized as major achievements in style.  I will always be grateful that he was able to overcome his shyness and become a great director, in part by his clever handling of producers and by his insistence on displaying his droll, understated wit while dealing with murder and mayhem.

The more I appreciate his films, the more I doubt if I will ever understand the man who made them. No doubt that would have pleased him.

Brilliant Writing

When would-be authors ask me what great writing is, I usually ask them what they've read and am invariably distressed to see how little reading they do.

A better response might be to ask them, "Do you read Anthony Lane in the New Yorker? You should. You will learn what great writing is."

Lane is the main reason I maintain a subscription to that magazine since his witty and literate film reviews are gems. Not long ago I found on sale his book of reviews (book as well as movie reviews) called "Nobody's Perfect."   As I skim through these brilliant essays on everything from The Godfather to obituaries in the New York Times to T. S. Eliot, whose work he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, I delight in the wide range of his interests and tastes, from high to low-brow. He puts just as much attention on the latest Hollywood non-starter as on Nabokov or Shakespeare on film (the topic of one of his longer essays).  And it is obvious that he has honed and polished his sentences to a high gloss, a great gift to any reader.

I read Anthony Lane with (I must admit) a bit of envy at not being a Brit, the kind of highly literate guy who seems to have read everything and seen nearly everything else and who expresses himself with panache.  American critics and actors rarely seem to have the range and depth that make writers like Lane sparkle without being snobbish.

In his most recent review (August 26, 2019), Lane makes a memorable comment about the importance of listening, about how it is the most "delicate of the dramatic arts."  He cites an anecdote from the life of Alec Guinness, who was told by a senior actor doing Shakespeare, "Don't just look at me. Listen. Listen."   What applies to intelligent actors also applies to everyday life. I spent several hours at a dinner party recently across from a couple who were interesting to talk to but whose faces registered no feeling, no interest in who I was; they were not really paying attention to who I was. We shared opinions and experiences but went away as strangers.  They never asked me any questions in an effort to know me. They heard  what I said but never really listened.

That evening, I watched Ingrid Bergman, in close up shots, in Hitchcock's "Notorious" and I saw a woman I could know, a face that registered fear and love and regret and so much more.  She was really listening.

I am grateful to Anthony Lane for mentioning this topic in his typically thoughtful review, and I am grateful to writers like him who make the ordinary (movie review) into something special, a work of art in itself.

Home Movies: A Manifesto about Subtitles

Like many of our friends, we are fans of Netflix and enjoy watching recent and not-so-recent films at home.

The only problem I have has nothing to do with Netflix but with the DVD producers, who provide subtitles so small that they are mostly useless.

Last night, we watched "The Aftermath," set in post-war (1945) Germany. Though an English-language movie, it of course contains dialogue in German, some of it important but none of it intelligible to us since the small white subtitles were of no use.  The week before, we had an foreign film with white subtitles against snowy scenes and white backgrounds: we had to return the video, unwatched.  This is a common problem with a simple remedy.

There should be an industry standard requiring that all subtitles be done in yellow, in sizeable type. For some reason, most of the credits in contemporary movies are done in what I call an elegantly minimalist style: small and narrow, perhaps fine on the big screen but certainly not created with the home viewer in mind.

I hope that, in putting this issue "out there," someone will know whom to contact to make proper subtitles on DVD movies a reality.

Cats, books and forgiveness

I have neglected my blog lately, mainly because of I am finishing a new book about cats, specifically, a sequel to my "Writing with Cats" (2003). I am picking up the theme of feline spirituality from that earlier production--of the cat as a model of mindfulness--and going a bit further, having fun creating a fictional story as well as an essay that I hope will be entertaining as well as enlightening.

So, as I watched the 2018 movie last night, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" I was glad to see that the main character, an unhappy New York writer down on her luck, has a cat.

What interested me in this film was the way a totally repellent, anti-social character, whose anger, sloppiness and alcoholism make her a totally unpleasant person, nevertheless comes across as a believable, almost sympathetic character.  We can't feel sorry for the abrasive Lee Israel, on whose life the story is based, but because of the intelligent screenplay and the memorable performance by Melissa McCarthy, we tend to care about this lonely woman, who turns to literary forgery to make ends meet. She doesn't turn us off the way she turns most people off. We sense the cause of her grouchiness.

Can we forgive this crooked, abrasive woman?  Well, we can forgive the character McCarthy plays so well: she is lonely and very human and worth our attention.  This is a book lover's movie, a New York movie, a cat lover's movie and a very original piece of work.

Escaping into Films

My wife and I tend to watch a lot of movies--too many, in fact. Perhaps we are tired at the end of the day or, lately, so weary of the horror that is the Trump presidency that we eagerly escape into the alternate reality of film since TV offers so little. Or blame Netflix, which makes it all possible.

So instead of venting my feelings about the latest racist outrage in Virginia, and the response, I savor memories of three striking films we saw this week, none of them mainstream Hollywood offerings.

The most memorable is a 2009 Italian movie with a perplexing title: THE MAN WHO WILL COME, directed and written by Giorgio Diritti. If I had known that his story was based on the massacre of 770 innocent villagers in central Italy in 1944 (the Marzabotto Massacre), I probably would not have ordered it, but the violence is offset and beautifully counterbalanced by the way the film unfolds: quietly, through the eyes of a beautiful little girl who seems fearless as she watches Nazis kill her family members and neighbors. She retains a hope that the baby brother being born will save her from the trauma of having lost an earlier brother, which caused her to become mute.  As a result, the film has a silence enhanced by a lack of soundtrack and by a remarkably understated style as one scene of village life unfolds after another.  The sense we are given is that life is a balance of good and evil, of violence and compassion; above all, of redemptive love, which keeps little Martina going and turns her into a little mother-figure caring for her infant brother. The style of the director, who gives us impressions of life in war-torn Italy, somehow minimizes the impact of the war and death and makes the dialogue almost unnecessary. 

THE PROMISE is a 2016 film of artistry and power about the Armenian genocide a hundred years ago, but the main focus is on the love triangle between an Armenian doctor, his lover, and the American reporter who also loves her. The cast in this long movie is strong, the impact unforgettable, as, once again, the theme of love and war is treated with artistry and originality.

Finally, another tale of wartime Europe but with an upbeat ending.  THE EXCEPTION concerns the exile of the aged German Kaiser (Christopher Plummer) in Holland in 1940, which is given a fanciful treatment and becomes secondary to the love story between a Jewish spy and the SS captain she loves and whom we come to like as a human being.

As someone said, the past is always a work in progress. And art of this type can give us an intelligent escape from present reality.

Two "True Stories" on Film

I watch a lot of movies via Netflix. This week two recent ones, one from 2015, "The Man Who Knew Infinity," is billed as based on a true story; so is the more recent British production of New York publishing, "Genius."

Many viewers might have scant interest in the relation of the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins and the overblown writer Thomas Wolfe. But being a writer curious about both, and about their relationship, I was intrigued to see British actors capture some of the spirit of New York in the Thirties, even if  many of the scenes are needlessly dark and rainy.

Colin Firth as the quiet, hardworking Perkins asks the key literary question: When does the work of an editor become a collaboration? He is concerned about his role in altering and taking responsibility for the fiction of Wolfe.

Apart from the father-son (or bromantic) relationship of the older editor with the younger, hard-drinking and notoriously wordy Wolfe (Jude Law), both Perkins' wife and Wolfe's mistress resent the time and creative energy that Perkins devotes to shaping and changing the huge piles of words Wolfe produces into the huge novel, "Look Homeward, Angel."  So for me the question is, who is the genius is this movie?

I get no clue to Perkins' inner life from the always reticent Firth, whereas Wolfe is larger than life and easy to understand (in Law's great performance).  How did Perkins manage to deal with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, both difficult, while being obsessed with the obsessive and compulsive Wolfe? And what did he see in Wolfe's undisciplined, unreadable work (so different in style from the other two masters)? I also wonder what point the producers of the movie had in mind--especially for non-writers.

I have no such doubts about the other film, with Dev Patel as a young Indian man, a mathematical genius, who leaves his young wife behind in 1913 to work with England's leading mathematician, played memorably by Jeremy Irons. I like the contrast between the older scholar's skeptical atheism and Patel's mystical belief in intuition: he believes that every equation reflects the mind of God. And Irons's character seems almost persuaded that this might be true.

The story is moving, as "Genius" is not, and sad in ways I won't mention. Having spent a summer at Trinity College, Cambridge, where most of the action occurs, and having been an academic who clings to religious belief, I naturally gravitate to this story.

How true (historically accurate) these stories are I have no idea; suffice it to say they are based on biographical reality; one of them ("The Man Who") is true to the human heart, which is what counts in the end.

The addiction of bad language

Great novels, it is often said, produce bad movies whereas weak novels can result in great films.

So it is with reviews of movies, as I can attest from my part-time experience many years ago as a film critic (the first one) for the Orlando Sentinel. I suffered through quite a number of mind-numbing movies but invariably found that I had fun in creating critical reviews of these duds. 

As I reader, I enjoy the work of Anthony Lane in the New Yorker in whose hands a piece of tripe can be skewered with wit and style.  In the most recent issue, in reviewing This is the End, he gives the usual extended coverage to a movie I would not ordinarily want to read about (or certainly to see) except that an expert writer is at work.

One remark in particular stood out (not witty but insightful) in Lane's discussing of the young people in this movie who deal in drugs, alcohol, and "more addictive still, a heap of dirty words."  He is too tasteful to specify what these words are--the ones singled out years ago by George Carlin--but he puts his finger, in that phrase, on a cultural issue that bothers me: the obligatory ugliness in language that fills so many screenplays.

This type of unimaginative verbal trash comes irrespective of what the viewer may want to hear for ninety minutes. Hollywood and its various tributaries, catering to the tastes of teenage boys, feel that it is essential in nearly every movie they make to create a masculinity defined both by violent action and violent, ugly speech.

I know that men, young ones especially, when they are out having fun together, use a certain amount of street language and should not be expected to sound like seminarians or Victorian scholars. But it's the addictive nature of vulgar and obscene words that Lane points to that is worth considering. Once you start, you keep finding more ways to place F-words in various grammatical positions in every sentence as you keep trying, desperately, to demonstrate your manhood (or so the assumption seems to be).

If one guy goes profane, the others follow with re-doubled effort.  It reminds me of the type of masculinity Frank Pittman analyzes in his book, Man Enough: some men never stop trying to prove they are tough and manly in an effort that never ends; often one guy never feels man enough in the eyes of other men.

If masculinity can be addictive, so can language, especially in movies.
That's why when one comes along with opportunities for heaping up dirty words that are not taken, as is the case with Two Brothers and a Bride, I rejoice.  There is not even an obligatory sex scene or nude scene in this off-beat comedy about the search of two U.S. farm boys for a bride in Russia.
How amazing. And original.

The Violet Hour

Much has been written about the various meanings of the color blue, none as memorable as the recent introduction to the book Blue Nights. There Joan Didion has a lyrical two-page reflection on expectation and anticipation, a kind of timeless waiting, during certain evenings of the year when "you think the end of day will never come."

In certain latitudes, she says, there is a span of time in late May when the long twilight turns blue. The French call it 'l'heure bleue,' the name of my mother's favorite perfume. Didion has seen the blue hour in New York; I can't recall experiencing any such intensely blue twilight. I remember the singer Sissel in her video "Northern Lights" referring to the magical blue hour in Norway, but this seemed to describe something quite different, a winter spectacle of the northern lights.

All of this suggests something a bit mysterious and romantic, a state of mind as much as an actual light. I recall the "violet hour" of T. S. Eliot, which to me means
a time of anxiety, anticipation, even suffering as night brings its terrors to those in the Wasteland of modern civilization. It's the dying of the light and the arrival, finally, of dreaded darkness.

Didion often analyzes anxiety and finds the blue night a useful metaphor for her memoir about the "dwindling of the days" and other recollections of sad beauty.

I was reminded of the blue hour again last night when watching a fine sleeper of a movie by Terence Davies, The Deep Blue Sea, set in foggy London town in 1950when literal blue nights would be impossible. But the somber atmosphere and slow pace of this film capture a sense of dread and depression that is turned into art. It unfolds in soft-focus episodes like impressionist paintings.

Rachel Weisz is the superbly rendered main character in this adaptation of a Terence Rattigan play on an old theme, older than Anna Karenina: a beautiful married woman finds doomed love with a younger man; but in this case, he is immature and incapable of giving her the full love she longs for. Her intense feelings, restricted by social custom in 1950s England, and by her class, take us almost into the realm of melodrama except that the emotions are convincingly real.

The film moves slowly backward and forward in time, aided by the intense violin concerto of Samuel Barber, as an otherwise predictable story becomes an original look at romantic despair. Like the blue hour that almost never seems to end, leading finally to the dying of the light, we watch the drama unfold, knowing that the darkness will eventually descend, the couple must part, and her life will somehow go on even as we are reluctant to have the movie end.

Such works of art interest me because in them we seem to experience moments "in and out of time," in Eliot's words. In reading or watching such fiction, we are aware of the unreality of the artifice but become totally engaged with the story, as our own intense feelings become one with those of the characters. In such cases, we as readers or viewers can enter a timeless present that lasts briefly, then vanishes as soon as the story ends. This, for me, is a spiritual dimension in art that is hard to articulate, and we have to be grateful to gifted filmmakers like Davies for allowing us to experience it.

Religion and the Media

Is it my imagination, or is the portrayal of religion in fiction and film distorted?
The fact that it is included at all in a secular age wary of religion is itself noteworthy, but it is unfortunate to see that what gives people meaning and hope depicted as fanatical or absurd.

This is especially true of movies produced in Britain, yet I have a hard time remembering any realistic portrayal of clergy in an American movie since the priest made a brief (meaningful) appearance in Kenneth Lonergan's "You Can Count on Me" some years ago.

In the murder mysteries my wife and I enjoy, from "Morse" to "Midsommer Murders," the church (mostly Anglican) is sensationalized. People visit priests not in quiet offices but in fully lit churches with lighted candles and crucifixes filmed at odd angles, and what the priests say is either hypocritically pious, given what we later learn about them, or silly.

Hypocrisy is the running theme of many of these portrayals, and Christianity is the religion of choice: and why not? The material is so rich for parody, its history so rife with intrigue and abuse. Yet the daily experience of prayer and church going for most of the faithful is overlooked in these depictions of fantaticism.

It's no wonder religion in the conventional, organized sense is a turn-off for so many. Nuns, who do the real work of the church despite what some in the Vatican may think, are often portrayed as comic figures, hopelessly naive or out of touch with reality. And priests are not real people but thwarted individuals caught up in bizarre, incense-filled rituals that look spooky rather than inspiring.

Intelligent script writers who create good characters like Inspector Morse and Lewis do not seem to know how to handle religion. Lewis's sidekick Hathaway is an ex-seminarian and an intellectual and therefore odd, even when he explains things that dull Lewis cannot fathom about Oxford or history. Yet even Hathaway was not surprised, as I was, to find in one episode a Jesuit living alone in a private chapel on an aristocrat's estate and prostrating himself daily in prayer. This is not what Jesuits (or other normal clergy) do!

I almost expected self-flagellation as well. The more sensational the better. Morse found churches creepy and couldn't wait to get out of them. Barnaby in Midsommer finds them odd, places to find hypocrites or child molesters.

The writers of these shows ignore the important value that religion has always played in human culture as a bridge to the unknowable yet mysterious reality that gives meaning to life. That non-logical myths and religious truths affect our so-called rational choices in ways we can only surmise is beyond the scope of most writers. I wish I could recall a recent movie in any language that depicts faith in a positive light or churchgoing as a fulfilling experience.

I have given up looking for honest religion (Christianity) as part of the fictional reality of contemporary novels. Maybe I should give up looking at so many movies from the U.K., where the clergy seem to exist only to be lampooned as fools or hypocrites.

Life After Death: What is Heaven?

A number of movies have been made, usually comic, about spouses whose dead partners return to the land of the living. "Ghost" comes to mind and the 1940 classic "My Favorite Wife," not to mention "Blithe Spirit" and "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir."

The best of the bunch has to be "Truly, Madly, Deeply," by writer-director Anthony Minghella, who died prematurely in 2008 after creating several sensitive, award-winning films, including this 1990 movie, which is moving, hilarious, and serious at the same time. Like so many other movies, it makes the possibility of life hereafter believable.

Juliet Stevenson is memorable as the grieving partner of a man (Alan Rickman) who returns to the London flat they shared, but he brings along a collection of other dead people who watch videos and take over the poor woman's life until she realizes she must let go of the past and start a new life.

This barebones summary sounds trite, but the movie, which begins on a somber note of deep grief, moves with sensitivity and intelligence toward delicious humor, without the usual crudity of language heard in most of today's movies. This is a couple in a totally credible relationship in which the living partner sees that she must learn to live in the present.

The implication here is that the afterlife is real, as it was to me growing up in my parochial school. There I learned about saints and angels and enjoyed serving at funeral Masses because I could ride in the limo with the priest (and get a tip from the undertaker). So I think I grew up with a sense that death is part of life and that the dead are present all around us. And I have always believed in some sort of existence with God when my earthly live ends.

Whether I should call this heaven is unknown. The Gospels speak of the kingdom of heaven being within us, and Thomas Merton wrote that the door to the heaven is everywhere. I have written of the timeless present (found in contemplation of various kinds) as the presence of God.

I was intrigued by what Jon Meacham of Time magazine wrote last month about heaven being God's love entering the present. That is, heaven is less an ethereal region beyond us than what happens on earth when "love and light achieve dominion over darkness and envy." For Christians, this will not be fully realized until the Second Coming of Christ.

For Meacham, heaven is the reality one creates in the service of the poor, the sick, the enslaved and oppressed. We may imagine and anticipate a fuller experience of God, of course, in the "undiscovered country" beyond death (as Shakespeare called it), but I like Meacham's idea that acts of love and selflessness bring God's grace to a broken world and so bring heaven to earth.

This is a far cry from seeing our life here as merely a prelude to a heavenly existence beyond our world. And it suggests that living fully in the here and now, as Juliet Stevenson's character gradually learns to do, has nothing to do with "eat, drink and be merry" but with seeing earthly life as full of sacred potential.

Religion and the Movies

I am not alone in observing that, over the past 40 years and more, movies and other popular media have done a poor job of portraying religion in the lives of their characters. In a country where vast numbers of people still attend some church or temple or mosque, where religion and politics remain a hot topic, the films produced in Hollywood (and elsewhere) are often silent on the topic of faith. If the story includes a clergyman, it is invariably in a perfunctory role at a wedding or funeral service; and if this clergy person is allowed to speak, he is likely to sound harsh, negative, or foolish.

It's as if the filmmakers are embarrassed to bring up anything to do with the genuine role Christianity (the usual faith) plays in people's lives, as if it is too private, whereas scenes of sexual intimacy can be shown in graphic detail.

Productions from the U.K. tend to be worse, of course, reflecting that country's abandonment of a great deal of traditional belief. Consider a recent PBS Masterpiece Mystery production of "Inspector Lewis" in which a young Jesuit priest was seen flagellating himself, then lying prostrate on the floor of a chapel on the grounds of a stately home. We learn that he was there "on retreat." This is laughable and not what Jesuit priests do on retreats. It's as if the screenwriter has no way to portray this character except by sensationalizing him.

In the next episode of the same series, which is otherwise well done, a young man wears a rosary over his Sacred Heart of Mary t-shirt, as if to say, "I'm one of those fanatic Catholics." Everyone was shocked to learn that the dead man, an Oxford don, had secretly been active at the local St. Ann's Church; but, then, he had a brain tumor and was a bit deranged. That would explain it. Faith and science just don't mix in most Oxford circles.

So the message here is that to be a Catholic or openly religious is a bizarre thing to be in a thoroughly secularized, Hobbesian universe, where material values are the only rational option. The Anglican preachers in these programs tend to be gloomy, trite, twisted, or piously irrelevant.

I have been trying to recall a film in which a priest or other clergyman was important, taken seriously, and not mocked. The list is very short.

"You Can Count on Me" (2000) includes a key scene in which the priest (played by the writer-director Kenneth Lonergan) asks the Mark Ruffalo character if he sees his life as important--in the big scheme of things. This, for me, became the major question of the movie and the most memorable scene.

"Tree of Wooden Clogs," a 1978 film we saw on video last year, is an Italian gem in which a sensible village priest is part of the quiet village life somewhere in Lombardy, where families pray together at night and where happiness comes from simple songs and stories. There religion is not a big deal, just a central part of life.

It is so easy to stereotype priests and other clergy as out of touch with ordinary life. Perhaps it's better to leave them out altogether from the movies (I don't watch enough TV to comment) since the temptation to ridicule by going over the top (and offending some viewers) is just too great. It is a pity since the type of comfort, love, and meaning people get in their practice of their faith is enormous.

Cat People

I recently saw the 1942 horror classic, Cat People, expecting it to be laughable in a campy way but instead was impressed by its acting and style. It is full of shadows and the moody atmosphere that only a black-and-white movie can suggest as it works on the imagination with its understated tensions and fears.

The story, based on producer Val Lewton's story, stemmed from his fear of cats (and perhaps of females who prey on men). As much as I admired the skill of this low-budget production, I could not help think that it is part of that unfortunate chapter of anti-feline history, in which cats (black, preferably) are associated with witches and evil and are blamed for the evil that men do. They are typically associated, at least in the West, with the feminine.

The ambivalent appeal of the cat is something that intrigued me in the research I did for a little book, published in 2003: Writing with Cats,
a mostly whimsical look at the influence of cats on writers, suggesting that cats may be the secret source of inspiration writers need. Why else did Hemingway, Mark Twain, Colette and countless other authors praise cats and want to be surrounded by them?

For all the praise heaped on these sensitive little creatures, for all the attention we lavish on our house cats, there remains a minority of the population that hates cats, a hatred often born of fear. What is it that people fear about the feline?

For many men (Napoleon, e.g.), I suspect it is the inability to control these highly independent animals; for others, it is their unpredictability, or their often mysterious, penetrating gazes, or their odd, wild behavior, as when our cat will suddenly race down the hall as if the demons of hell are attacking her. I can see why people in the past would sometimes think cats were possessed and treat them in terrible ways.

This dark history came as a revelation to me after observing our first and only cat, Lizzie, and discovering how sensitive, gentle, intelligent, highly affectionate and playful a feline can be. This was the basis of my conclusion that cats, as quiet, contemplative creatures, make ideal companions for writers since they set a mood of reflection and interiority that writers need. Those who bought and praised my book were true cat people--great cat fanciers--and I was invited to join the Cat Writers' Association, which promises to fight any defamation of the cat in print.

So in watching the movie Cat People I faced yet again the other side of feline history, the side I had ignored in my book, involving the cat's power to frighten people. What's intriguing is the ambiguity of cats: mysterious yet lovable, cunning at times while also charming and usually hilarious. And of course, we are intrigued by the more interesting ambiguity of human behavior, motivated by irrational fears of the unknown, torn by sexual tensions that we are often unconscious of. Beyond this is the mystery of evil, which can be alluring as well as alarming, more interesting to explore than the good (as the great writers have consistently shown).

What better material to build a story around, as Val Lewton saw: the cute pussycat can also be the nocturnal, sneaky, half-wild, potentially dangerous symbol of the female as she confronts the male. No wonder many men have hated (i.e., feared) cats with the type of hatred that can lead to violence.

Of course, if you are, like me, a cat person in the usual sense who simply wants to enjoy a classic movie like Cat People, don't let my commentary deter you. Enjoy!

Choices

Not feeling in top form yesterday after a minor accident and visit to a doctor, followed by a look at the news with its economic and political horrors, I needed to relax with an uplifting movie. Instead, we opened our cheerful red envelope from Netflix and watched Mike Leigh's Another Year.

I guess it sounded promising when we ordered it, and it was well acted and intelligently conceived. But this close-up of a group of Londoners, most of them in despair over their lives, is almost unendurable, especially the non-stop talk of Mary (Leslie Manville), a lush who visits the main characters, played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen, who have more patience with such people than I would have. And Ruth, playing a mental health counselor, should know how to deal with friends like Mary instead of pouring more drinks for them.

She could also tell Leigh that his film should be edited--unless you like to watch four seasons pass with nothing but talk, all going nowhere, with little to uplift the spirit. He seems to want to give us portraits of suffering souls, as if channeling the Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" ("Ah, look at all the lonely people") and applying it to contemporary British life, with its many disappointments, especially to the late middle-aged failures.

Here everyone is unhappy in his or her own way. Soon, one of the characters says, we will be history, part of the past. Death is the inevitable end, and we must endure day by day.

I wish one of the clever English screen adapters like Andrew Davies would adapt one of David Lodge's novels. I've just finished "Therapy," his whimsical study of a middle-aged man in search of fulfillment; it would make a great movie. It would help us laugh at ourselves instead of reach for another drink.

I know that my life is circumscribed by problems, most of them beyond my control, but I make an effort to make each day, however hum-drum it may be, unique and special. Today, I enjoyed seeing the smiles of the clerks at the local supermarket, many of whom recognize me, one of whom tells me jokes (even though she is crippled and has a lot to complain about but never does).

I enjoyed the music I heard during my lunch, enjoyed watching the cat do nothing with her usual grace and with rapt attention to every sound.

Watching her is invariably amusing and can be one of the little things I do to make a quiet day spent at home recuperating filled with moments I can enjoy and be grateful for. I don't know how many more days I will have on earth, but I am determined to make each one mindful and rich and worth living.

I can choose this prayerful approach, or I can be pulled down by my problems and by the state of the economy, by the injustice of the world. I can also choose my evening's entertainment more carefully.

Yet even Mike Leigh's movie may not have been a disastrous choice after all; it has prompted a few thoughts about happiness and why our lives are often so bereft of meaning. And it has given me something to write about, stimulating my brain and perhaps prompting a thought or two in one of my readers. (I remain surprised, and grateful, to learn how many there are!)

Of sundry things

My mind is filled with ideas and facts from the various movies I have recently seen and the things I have read, so the best way to make sense of them is to record them and see what they mean, if anything. Writing is, after all, a way of ordering and making things clear to ourselves.

First, I was struck by the fact that while we in the U.S. were celebrating our independence day on July 4, in Bavaria, the former crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire died at 98, a member of the oldest and grandest of the European royal families, going back to the 6th century: Otto von Habsburg.

Actually, he had seventeen first names (Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Ludwig, etc., enough to put the British royals to shame--they have only four names). But if I had all those first names, why would I choose to be called Otto? I guess choice had nothing to do with it.

Despite the breakup of his father's empire in 1918, considerable dislocation and danger as the old world gave birth to the 20th century, Otto seemed to have had a good and happy life, making a notable contribution to the world, working for the birth of the European Union and, as a faithful Catholic, for ecumencial dialogue with non-Christians. His son Karl inherits his father's superannuated titles.

The European past reminds me of Woody Allen's tribute to Paris in the twenties, Midnight in Paris, a totally enjoyable movie involving a writer who so desperately wants to go back in time that he is able to do so. The movie assumes that we know something about the many expatriates he meets, writers and artists who then worked in Paris, like Gertude Stein, the Fitzgeralds, and of course, Hemingway, who here is parodied rather crudely (compared to the clever immpersonation of Dali by Adrian Brody).

The movie we saw last night was a much darker product: from Britain in 1949, based on a D. H. Lawrence story, "The Rocking-Horse Winner," a superb production in black and white. Not knowing the story, but knowing something of Lawrence, I was not surprised to find that the young boy who develops a knack for winning at the races does so to please his mother, in a version of the Oedipus complex. It's a shame she does not deserve his devotion.

The cold, materialistic mother, who has been spending money with abandon, whose husband does not satisfy her emotionally or financially, is chilling, as is the tragic conclusion, which came as a shock. As a result, I went to bed so full of the film's images in my head that I woke up thinking about them. This is one of several post-war British films, little known to me, that we are discovering thanks to Netflix and Turner Classic Movies.

I didn't finish the recent memoir by Stephen Fry (The Fry Chronicles), whom I admire as an actor (he was Jeeves in "Jeeves and Wooster"). He uses as his epigraph: "Work is more fun than fun," a quote by Noel Coward. I suppose Coward and Fry with their various talents and careers in show business (writing, acting) embody the truth of this axiom, but Fry is brutally candid about the various demons he has battled, as only a 21st century author would be.

In a noteworthy comment on the first page, Fry says, "Wanting to be liked is a very unlikeable characteristic." He doesn't like it in himself and goes into great detail to show why. Since he writes in a style that only a witty Brit could pull off, Fry is able to make his confessions interesting and entertaining--at least in the chapters I actually read.

If there is anything common in these random comments, I guess it is my interest in the past. Even Fry, though younger than I, conjures up an earlier era because of the roles he has played. As Eliot (T. S., who also makes a cameo "appearance" in Woody's Allen's flick) said, humankind cannot bear too much reality.