Archives for October 2003

Dear OGIC:

The Gender Genie thinks I’m female when I write for The Wall Street Journal and male when I write for Commentary.

Discuss.

Courtesy of DVD Journal:

We don’t have firm any street dates just yet, but our good friends at Criterion have confirmed that their January slate will include Jean Renoir’s 1939 The Rules of the Game, one of the greatest films in history and a long-time MIA title. The digital transfer will be taken from a recently discovered master print with restored audio and new English subtitles, and the feature-set is deep — on board will be an introduction by Renoir, a commentary written by film scholar Alexander Sesonske (read by Peter Bogdanovich), a second track from Renoir historian Christopher Faulkner, the 1966 French television program “Jean Renoir le Patron: La R

Don’t ask me how (I’m not entirely sure), but I managed to pry a 2,600-word essay on Paul Whiteman out of myself yesterday using only nine fingers. Actually, I can strike keys more or less accurately with my mutilated digit, but not with the Astaire-like precision of my normal typing, so bear that in mind when you stumble across the occasional typo in days to come.

I also went to a play last night, where I saw something astonishing: a playgoer in the front row of the theater had a heart attack in the middle of the next-to-last scene. The ambulance crew was on the scene within minutes, and as they charged down the aisle, I heard a critic sitting behind me mutter, “Well, it wasn’t that bad.”

Today I write my Washington Post column for Sunday and go to another play tonight, but I did want to poke my head in and check on how you were. I see Our Girl is tempting you with two of her most flagrant enthusiasms, both of which I share. When I visited her in Chicago a couple of years ago, we spent most of my stay watching selected videotaped episodes of Buffy, a marathon that left me persuaded of everything she says below about that excellent show.

As for Jamesian movies, I put my money on The Heiress, which isn’t on DVD but can be rented on videocassette at well-stocked stores. Great cast (Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson), great direction (by William Wyler), and an Oscar-winning score by Aaron Copland whose awesome virtues I think I’ve mentioned before. It’s the real reason why The Heiress is so Jamesian. Do seek it out, OGIC.

And now I have to get back to my nine-fingered writing life. Y’all have fun now, you hear?

P.S. Is it just me, or has that Dale Peck interview vanished from Gawker?

If you’re just tuning in, we’ve been talking about James on film today (cue the Duran Duran, somebody). Terry’s words on behalf of The Heiress this morning (scroll down just a bit) have triggered a small flood of emailed harumphs. Casey Abell writes to steer me toward it and away from The Innocents, which he says “yanks the interpretation toward the governess-is-nuts viewpoint by showing her looking at a picture of Quint before her exact description to Mrs. Grose. This spoils the key ambiguity about whether the ghosts exist outside her active imagination.”

Cinetrix also stamps The Heiress with her approval, citing only one caveat: “Montgomery Clift is as dreamy and sleazy/weak-willed as you want, and de Havilland is heartbreaking as Catherine. But Aunt Penniman–oh dear….The movie completely defangs her. She’s rendered dithery rather than menacing the way she is in the novel, where her manner of speaking and thinking infects everyone’s language.”

Casey goes on to ask why all the animus from my corner toward the Wings of the Dove film. It’s a good question. A very, very good question. Could it be that I have always felt unreasonably possessive of this novel and jealous of others’ appropriations? Am I simply that petty? Yeah, that’s part of it. I’ve been searching my memory, and the only specific criticism I can remember having is of how explicitly and unimaginatively the film represents the bargain struck between Kate Croy and Merton Densher. By showing their liaison in all its immediacy, director Iain Softley theoretically can let the viewer better understand and sympathize with Densher’s desire and his choice.

But if the sex scene comes off as just another ho-hum sex scene, despite the transparent and shameless employment of Helena Bonham Carter’s naked rear end, as I recall, in the manner of a flashing neon sign advertising “HOT sex”–well, you risk making Densher seem like just some pathetic bounder, altogether unworthy of Milly, and tipping the delicate balance of imperatives that gives James’s moral drama its life. And this is what happens. Densher sacrifices Milly for the promise of a night with Kate, that night turns out to consist of bland movie sex, and the whole story becomes hard to take seriously, the d

“Your description of the impudent Cambridge winter, however, is vivid–with the earth like a stone and the sky like a feather. Here the earth is like a Persian rug–a hearth-rug, well besprinkled with soot.”

Henry James, letter to W. D. Howells (London, December 5, 1880)

“Besides, anything sad that happens to you always seems to me sadder than the same thing happening to anyone else.”

Henry James, letter to Grace Norton (February 23, 1884)

I love Casey Abell’s selection of the best six-step introduction to the work of Henry James (his favorite novelist and mine). His list rang at least five bells for me; it’s been long enough since I read Roderick Hudson that I can’t say for certain whether it would make my own list. The beauty of Casey’s list is that it gives you tastes of all the important phases of James, from the discovery of many of his career’s most resonant, abiding themes in Roderick Hudson to the still-Victorian high realism of The Portrait of a Lady, the attempt at a great social novel in The Princess Casamassima, the heady, virtuosic point-of-view innovations (following nearly a decade away from long fiction) of What Maisie Knew, and then full-flowering late James in The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove, novels of the Major Phase that manage to reconcile the psychological embeddedness of Maisie with the keen social observation of Portrait and Princess. This list will get you far.

There’s much more on Casey’s James page, as you’ll see for yourself if you simply scroll down. His commentary on the harder-to-find among James’s published letters is both a fun read and a useful resource for anyone doing research on James. It has inspired tonight’s double dose of fortune cookies (above).

One little point of dissent: more than most filmed versions of James, I loathed Iain Softley’s Wings of the Dove. Casey by no means loves it, but he’s kinder about it than I could be. I thought that Agnieszka Holland’s Washington Square was worthwhile, with its achingly restrained Jennifer Jason Leigh performance. For some unfathomable reason I haven’t seen William Wyler’s The Heiress nor The Innocents, the 1961 adaptation of “The Turn of the Screw” that is said to be so chilling.

But the best Jamesian cinematic experience I know is Jacques Rivette’s new wave film C

The great fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be available soon on DVD. You can make a case for any of the seasons between the second and the fifth being best. Put me on the spot and I’ll squirm and equivocate, and in the end take the fifth.

I just sliced a chunk out of one of my right-hand fingers on a soup-can lid. It’s now wrapped tight and I’ve mopped up the blood (there was quite a bit of it!). The finger in question, amusingly enough, is the one with which I type “I.”