“We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Archives for October 2009
HOLLYWOOD JUSTICE
“The unseemly rapidity with which Roman Polanski’s friends lined up to support him is a demonstration of the extent to which Hollywood is isolated from the rest of the world. It’s a company town, a place where the powerful can go for months at a time without hearing anyone disagree with them about anything…”
CD
Jascha Heifetz Plays Korngold, Rózsa, and Waxman (RCA Victor Gold Seal). I keep telling people that Miklós Rózsa, who is best known for having scored such Hollywood films as Double Indemnity and Ben-Hur, was also a first-rate classical composer, but somehow the message never seems to seep through. Instead of preaching yet another a sermon, allow me instead to direct you to Jascha Heifetz’s 1956 premiere recording of Rózsa’s Violin Concerto. I once described Rózsa’s music as “user-friendly Bartók,” and that’s not a bad way to sum up this masterly piece, whose musical language recalls the pungently folk-like modal coloration of Bartók but has an astringent romanticism all its own. Not surprisingly, Heifetz played it to the hilt, and this performance, handsomely accompanied by Walter Hendl and the Dallas Symphony, would be worth hearing even if the piece weren’t so good. It’s coupled, logically enough, with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Heifetz-commissioned violin concerto and Franz Waxman’s “Carmen” Fantasy. Absolutely not for music-movie buffs only! (TT).
DVD
Breach. Is Chris Cooper our best character actor? That thought has occurred to me on more than one occasion, most recently after seeing him in Billy Ray’s 2007 docudrama about Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spent two decades peddling government secrets to the KGB. Except for the soppy score, Breach is a tremendously involving film whose makers get everything right–but in the end it is Cooper’s performance that turns a piece of well-crafted entertainment into something not unlike high art. Cooper’s Hanssen is a study in self-loathing arrogance, a fanatical zealot with something unknowably wrong at the core. Somehow I doubt that the real-life Robert Hanssen was half so interesting as the one we meet in Breach. So much the worse for real life (TT).
CD
Nellie McKay, Normal as Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day (Verve). Nellie McKay, of all people, has recorded an album of pop standards–and it’s a beaut. Her delicate alto-flute voice and tiptoe enunciation turn out to be ideally suited to the repertoire of Doris Day, who was a popular big-band singer before she moved to Hollywood and became a perky icon of Eisenhower-era American innocence. The fare ranges from light-footed swingers like “Dig It” to lyrical cameos like “I Remember You,” and the instrumental arrangements, most of them by McKay herself, are engagingly quirky. Glints of irony twinkle here and there, but there’s nothing sour or backhanded about Normal as Blueberry Pie (TT).
FOLIO
Jane Wilson: Horizons (Merrell, $60). The first full-length study of Wilson’s life and work, Horizons contains a penetrating biographical essay by Elizabeth Sussman, a wide-ranging interview by Justin Spring, and handsome reproductions of some ninety-odd paintings and works on paper. In recent years Wilson has specialized in all-but-abstract skyscapes whose canvas-filling bands of color and looming storm clouds are precisely poised between loose representation and abstract expressionism. Horizons puts these later paintings in perspective, illustrating the debt that Wilson owes not only to Mark Rothko but to Fairfield Porter. A long-overdue tribute to a superior artist greatly deserving of wider recognition (TT).
DVD
On the Road with Charles Kuralt, Set 1 (three discs, out Oct. 27). Cynics should steer clear of this collection of “On the Road” pieces in which Kuralt, who spent thirteen years driving around America in a motor home, reported for The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite on whatever caught his eye along the way: a circus bandleader, a cymbal factory, a professional blower of soap bubbles. “I have attempted to keep ‘relevance’ and ‘significance’ entirely out of all the stories I send back,” Kuralt wrote in A Life on the Road, his 1990 autobiography. He succeeded, much to the delight of a generation of TV viewers who loved the uncondescending sweetness with which he portrayed the quiet delights of life off the beaten path. I saw many of these pieces when they first aired in the Seventies, and I find it hard to watch them now without growing misty-eyed (TT).
BOOK
David Kynaston, Austerity Britain: 1945-51 (Bloomsbury, $15.95 paper). What was England like in the chilly, near-penniless days after World War II? Most of us only know “austerity Britain” from its wry, distanced portrayals in the Ealing comedies, but David Kynaston has now given us a complex and persuasive portrait of life under postwar British socialism, a masterly piece of social history that succeeds in giving the American reader a clear understanding of how the English people responded to the daunting challenge of getting by on not nearly enough. Wholly engrossing, no matter what your political point of view may be (TT).