Movies and Books

COUP DE TORCHON (1981) is a French drama in which a 1930s colonial policeman endures slings, arrows and contempt of everyone from the local pimps to his wife before discovering he can kill people and get away with it, ultimately embracing a Punisher-esque conviction that he’s making the world a better place. A movie whose story interested me more than it entertained or held me; it would double-bill well with The Mighty Quinn for Denzel Washington’s turn as another third-world cop who gets no respect. “Better to be the blind man pissing out the window than the joker who told him it was a urinal.”
Woody Allen’s ANOTHER WOMAN (1988) starts off well as professor Gena Rowlands discovers acoustics in the office she’s renting let her overhear the psychiatrist’s sessions next door, leading to her voyeuristic fascination with troubled patient Mia Farrow. Unfortunately, it quickly slides downhill into talky pretension as tedious as September, due to territory as Rowlands entering her flashback booth for implausibly intellectual conversations about what went wrong in her life. Unwatchable (even though I did) despite a cast that includes Ian Holm as Rowland’s husband, Martha Plimpton as her step-daughter, Blythe Danner as her friend, John Houseman as her dad and Gene Hackman as a lost love (Allen is once again a no-show). “She’s been killing herself—she’s been doing it since childhood.”

THE SILVER STALLION was James Branch Cabell’s sequel to Figures of Earth, following up on Manuel of Poictesme’s valorous knights in the wake of their leader’s disappearance. In typical satiric fashion, Cabell has them become demiurges, emperors, devoutly religious, devoutly lecherous (the mocking of heroic quests in one section is particularly fun) while all the while the real Manuel is transformed into the saintly, flawless legend of Manuel the Redeemer (and as the ending shows, his followers’ are undergoing the same transition). If you’ve read more of Cabell, this has lots of continuity references, and also explains why Cabell used “the Biography of Manuel” as the overall title. One of his best, though his stereotypes of marriage seem to me very dated.
COLD WAR CIVIL RIGHTS: Race the Image of American Democracy by Mary L. Dudziak looks at how Jim Crow not only clashed with American ideals but with American foreign policy goals in the Cold War, American leaders and diplomats trying to rally the world against Communism discovered that nonwhite Third World Nations refused to ignore American segregation and related injustices (the story of a black man sentenced to death for stealing $2 became an international case celebre). Unsurprisingly, the initial solutions were propaganda (newsreels and speakers assuring the world that American democracy was the champion of racial equality and Tremendous Strides Were Being Made) and repression (deny passports to Americans who didn’t toe the line, or using influence to kill their speaking or performing gigs overseas). Nevertheless, gradually the government began pushing for at least a moderate level of reform (desegregating the military, where mistreatment of blacks was very visible overseas) and gradually moving faster (though depending on the president, with various levels of enthusiasm). Dudziak also looks at racist resistance, from the insistence that civil rights was all a Commie plot to the argument that preserving Jim Crow in the face of Soviet criticism would be the more heroic course.